HOORAY!

A new child is born.

I got tired of writing this blog, but I like writing, so I've gone and updated, reverberated, reiterated, and made something new.

Basically, I've gone and blogged again.

The Countdown

I've been completely inundatated now.  Something like 3 people, I lost count actually!

So I cant keep it a secret anymore.  I'm starting a new blog!

It's gonna have more swear words.  'Cos swearing is FUCKING cool.  Innit?

Also it' gonna be a bit more different like.  More general.  Less "here is my holiday/life, in Japan etc."

It promises, like a mission statement, to be the home of good shit.

Like a bullet.  To the point.  Like a massive disease.  It's gonna spread.

More?



Yes, I'm thinking of finishing up.  Or continuing.  New blog is potentially called Tokyo 2.
I am pretty sure everyone is hanging on these words!!!

New Spectrum

Since I announced I was finishing up my blog, I was literally inundated by two requests to continue.

In light of the pain that I am clearly inflicting by not sharing my thoughts any more, I'm considering starting a new blog.  If I get similar levels of interest, and inundation, I may soon announce a new, improved, far more hard core blog.  One with swear words, good ideas, stuff like that all mixed togerther.  You name it.

Organ Donor

Yet another "what I had for dinner last night post".  Yawn.

Was not sure where to go when a friend suggested this Shochu bar.  Shochu is like Sake, but stronger.  A spirit rather than a wine.  Normally 25%, dangerous but not deadly.  The bottles look the same, the liquid looks the same.  This particular bar (little place where you sit at the counter and behind is a guy with a charcoal grill) has over 120 types of Shochu.  It's made from either potato, wheat, or rice.  It tastes good, although you may not think so.  Just drink it with ice, or maybe soda water.  Bit like a vodka soda.

Shochu top fact:
In Okinawa people drink Shochu a lot with water, and people in Okinawa are the longest living community on earth, 110 years old is not uncommon.  So it must be good for you.

Anyway, here is what I had for dinner.

That on the right is raw (yes, RAW) chicken liver. At the top you can see some crushed garlic. Put a little garlic on the liver, dip it in the sauce and eat. It tasted pretty good. But I had to drink a lot more shochu to keep my mind off what I was doing.

The other items going clockwise are chicken intestines (thankfully cooked), some kind of stomach muscles as best I could understand (raw), and chicken thigh (raw also)..
 
Followed by:
 

This is garlic cloves (boiled with some sauce, and raw squid (kind of smelly), my least favourite.
 
Afterwards went to a sports bar for the Spain match.  They did not win, I think they're a bit like England when it comes to the big occasions.

Went home and tried to watch the late match (3.30am local time).  Completely missed it and woke up on the sofa this morning.  Had an 8 hour meeting with an interpreter today.  Just finished work now, it's 8pm.  Time to watch some more football!

Tsuyu

Japan rainy season (Tsuyu) has started.

Warm, humid, wet.  Everyone seems lethargic all of a sudden.  Or it could be lack of sleep from the world cup.

This weekend I am getting out of town.  Far out to a place called Aomori,it's the northernmost part of this Island, should be completely remote, very different pace of life, language, scenery, economy, food, you name it.  3 hours by bullet train!

Shibuya

Annabel sent me this.  I dont shop in Zara, but the video is worth a look if you are interested in Tokyo style, the camerawork is amazing.

Nicely captures a slice of life walking around Shibuya (near where I live).  I should know, I've spent enough time gawking at Japanese girls there!  :)

New Zara Store promo vid on Youtube

In other news... an eruption of blogging!

This is a post of some semi-random musings on the volcano Eyjafjallajokull.

"Hah!  Easy for you to say...."

Twitter:

Am following a number of Twitter sites including @Eurocontrol, who are very open about replying to information of what is going on in European airspace.  Also the mildly amusing @Eyjafjallajokull, who may or may not be the official Twitter account of the volcano itself.  (Bio: "I'm a lava not a fighter")

Conspiracy nuts:

NATO conducting one of the largest exercises in Northern Europe, combination of operations including Operation Brilliant Mariner, using air sea and ground forces in UK, Netherlands, France, and Germany, started 12 April and scheduled to finish 22 April.  The same day the airspace over the exact same countries is due to reopen.

Other stuff:

Here is a link of a bunch of people trying to pronounce the name of the volcano.

The name Eyjafjallajokull scores 47 points in Scrabble!

My NZ passport has flown from Heathrow to Germany and then to Hong Kong!!

DHL Airwaybill # - xxxxxxxxxx - Detailed Report



April 16, 2010 15:35 Lambeth - UK Shipment picked up
April 16, 2010 18:57 Lambeth - UK Departing origin
April 16, 2010 18:59 Lambeth - UK Processed at Lambeth - UK
April 16, 2010 20:50 Lambeth - UK Departed from DHL facility in Lambeth - UK
April 16, 2010 20:59 London-Heathrow - UK Arrived at DHL facility in London-Heathrow - UK
April 16, 2010 22:25 London-Heathrow - UK Departed from DHL facility in London-Heathrow - UK
April 18, 2010 12:38 Leipzig - Germany Processed at Leipzig - Germany
April 19, 2010 02:59 Leipzig - Germany Shipment on hold
April 19, 2010 12:53 Leipzig - Germany Departed from DHL facility in Leipzig - Germany
April 20, 2010 10:20 Hong Kong Hub - Hong Kong Arrived at DHL facility in Hong Kong Hub - Hong Kong


How?? Presumably not by sea....  Wont try to explain why I simultaneously sent my NZ passport to be renewed in London and my British one in Tokyo.  Both done and returned inside of 2 weeks, including volcano...

Finally.......

The last wish of the Icelandic economy was to have its ashes scattered over Europe.

So, what`s it like? (2)

I am getting a bit bored of this blog.  Which is probably natural.

It was originally set up to avoid the annoying group/spam/distribution e-mails which inevitably follow when you go overseas, drawn out updates clogging up mailboxes worldwide.  This way I put my thoughts (supported by a formidable cross section of technology: 3 Twitter accounts, 7 e-mail accounts, Skype, 2 mobile phones, 3 laptops, camera, Facebook, Linkedin, my own Youtube channel, lots of pen and paper) as they are relevant to me, without too much worry about audience impact, people can browse if they wish.

My guess, is that my audience (you) are probably at a similar, yawn, kind of stage... so soon I will wrap this little baby up.  Maybe a few more posts, a brief summation of the meaning of life, that kind of thing.

I have to think about whether to start a more public blog after that or leave it.  I have contemporaries, you know, inspiring business related stuff.  Profile building.  I dont think I will.

To relieve the boredom, here are some things that have happened to me in the last month....

• My 17th visitor has stayed (my mum) since I've been here
• I walked smack into the glass door of McDonalds at 3am, cut nose, black eye, chipped tooth (nice)
• Stopped going to the local McDonalds out of embarrassment
• Made some cute Japanese friends
• Wished I had been more able to meet more Japanese friends
• Went to Hanami party (cherry blossom viewing) where I discovered that the Hanami party is more about drinking alcohol than viewing cherry blossom
• Went to some more Hanami parties
• Worked a 16 hour day, a 60 hour week, worked a Saturday and a Sunday, had conference calls at 10pm, had 35 meetings in a week.
• Took a chill pill and didnt work so crazily, for a day or two...
• Restructured my sales team and started the process to hire 3 more people including one to poach from UK
• Ate sushi in the Tsukiji fish market, the biggest fish market in the world, and possibly the best sushi I have ever eaten (and I have eaten a lot)
• Changed my Japanese teacher and I am learning twice as fast as before
• Started reading as well as speaking
• Went to Sydney and gave my niece a mini-Kimono and the little shoe things that go with it
• Went to new restaurants - Indonesian, Italian, American, French, English, and... um, Japanese
• Drank lots of beer, sake, and wine...
• Ate amazing food every day
• Got lesson off my mum on how to read music and planned to buy second hand electric piano
• Had my apartment loo changed to an electric one with sounds and gadgets
• Started bowing out of courtesy to people I dont even know
• Went to the gym a lot because the weather was a bit crap for running

..... Found myself more incumbent, involved, and interested to the point that I dont feel like an observer anymore....

:)

Poker Face

Tasks for today:

Delete all my friend connections off Facebook

Create new FB profile

Buy bike pump

The air feels good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You Got the Dirty Love

Missed the Brits.  Must get a proxy set up so I can watch this stuff on line.

I think this looks wicked... Florence vs. Dizzee...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDCy7iKc_nw

That link is now broken thanks to a copyright claim by British Phonographic Industry Ltd..

Try here - nice mashup, same audio....!  still think it rocks. cant decide who I like better..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjVuMX7GSSk#

Come to think of it maybe they have a point you can download the mp3 all profits go to charity...

I still have his single Bonkers in my head and I haven't listend to it for months and months.  But that could be just me!

Been a good week for Rasu music, Rage Against The Machine annouced a free gig, ballot happens today, Kings of Leon in Hyde Park 30 June, that would be nice, I could do Glasto and that in one hit!

Still not decided on a summer festival.... Soundwave would be nice.  Even found a studio and someone to take me to learn keyboard (and maybe singing??).

And took possession of new Hot Chip finally.  Stuck in my head.... My Brothers!
One Life Stand

Oh and - let's not forget We Are the World 25 for Haiti!

National Foundation Day (建国記念日)

Today is a public holiday in Japan.  Yay!  We get a total of 18 public holidays, and many of the fall on really nice days like a Thursday, so it takes the sting out of the weekend.

Except I am at work.  How did this happen?  Japanese lesson this morning (learnt to read food wrappers, now I remember why I never ate pot noodles. 450 calories and 21 grams of fat, my god...)  So I also had to go for a run.

Now I'm in the office.  Anyway, not the point, at all.  This will be quick.

Video - Japanese Right Wing Nationalists at Work

Filmed these guys on my iPhone on the way in, they are a typical sight, but today it seems, being National Foundation Day, they are all over the place!  I thought it was just because it was a holiday and they are out having fun making noise but it's also the significance of the day.  They are Japan's answer to the BNP.

Tokyo Rasu's Unscientific Guide to Right Wing Nationalists in Japan:

• Are called in Uyoku dantai
• Get money from some dodgy politicians, who may also be affiliated with the Yakuza
• NB- Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) have been in the social and politcal fabric since the end of the war. Construction is where they get a lot of their money from. One reason why there are so many contruction projects all the time!
• Go around the streets in these noisy vans with skinny undernourished looking guys yelling into megaphones
• Promote a return to pre-war values, e.g. pretend we didnt lose
• Support Japan's conduct in WW2
• Dont like foreigners (oops!!) especially Koreans (bad Koreans!) and Chinese etc
• Are very right wing and anti-left

There are around 1,000 of these groups in Japan.  Crazy

Have a nice day... I hear another one coming past the office now, and we're on the 20th floor.

Here's the video again....

We Are The World

Winter Olympics starts this weekend.

Should be a few good events, curling is up there, and the snowboarding.  I wont be competing this year.

Opening ceremony includes a new version of We Are the World, for Haiti.  It promises to be a cheese ridden extravaganza of warmth and huggyness rolled into a sweet pop culture bun.  I'm looking forward to it.

Here are the performers in a funky pic you can drag your mouse over.  Download it, watch it, get into it.  And if you haven't (and I know I am not supposed to start a sentence with "and") you can maybe donate some money for those children and their families.

On a different note, last night I watched a documentary with A band called Gallows, called "Lives of The Artists".  He reckons music should not be acceptable, it should evoke emotion by any means to break the pop-by-numbers hold on the industry.

So if Celene Dion singing we are the children is not your thing then check that out.

Controlling Risk (or "Skynet Becomes Self Aware")

I was reading this blog which is quite funny, and realized that my blog is not so funny. I am not sure why this is, as I am clearly a very funny person. I saw some statistics the other day about how people describe their blogs and the highest rating was for people who describe their blogs as “sincere”. Not: “funny”. At least I am not alone.

I bought a new laptop finally.  Sony Vaio, 6Gb RAM, Solid State Drive, wide screen, HD.  Most important it looks cool, which is a key determining factor in long term enjoyment ... of so many things!

Which links to an article this morning by the Federal Reserve on Algorithmic Trading and "High Frequency Trading", which is where banks use computers (like the one above, which incidentally is not an algorithmic trading computer but a Japanese receptionist robot for firms that dont want to pay for a human, but it is an example of a com-pu-ter) to track miniscule (or large) abberations in the global stockmarkets and then trade heavily and at lightning speed to arbitrage a tiny window of opportunity on that delta before it closes.  This can all happen in less than the time a human could touch their keypad.  The 2% of firms engaged in High Frequency trading could be contributing up to 70% of the worlds stock market liquidity.  They need a lot of very fast fibre optic networks and very clever computers (and very very clever highly paid people to operate the computers) to do this.

Any case, the part I liked was the below (when the Federal Reserve talking about risks and how quickly these could spiral to a very large scale problem):

For example, in 2003 a U.S. trading firm became insolvent in 16 seconds when an employee who had no involvement with algorithms switched one on. It took the company 47 minutes to realize it had gone bust and to call its clearing bank, which was unaware of the situation.


Can you imagine, the cleaner, in the communications room, looking for the switch to turn the vacuum clearner on...........  oops!

Helmet Cam Experiment

Shauno gave me this helmet-cam for xmas. Tried it out the other day.

It's better than holding a handi-cam but still needs a bit of work (to put it mildly), so apologies for the image quality and please turn the sound down before playing.

We'll get some more footage and try and edit a decent clip, preferably with me tweaking an inverted 540 off a monster kicker double hand grab landing fakie.

Tokyo Rasu's Day Off

Monday was a public holiday.

Thanks to some tips from the crazy park rats at the Burton shop, I had a plan.

First problem, 05.30 - who is gonna win, the plan, or the mattress?

06.01 - rolling - the plan wins!

Tokyo central station. Looks like we need the 06.32 to Gala...

Yep, bullet train, or in Nihongo; Shinkansen... fast!

09.03 - Gala station, Yuzawa prefecture. The gondola up the mountain comes right out of the train station. It's like living in the future.

Video 1 - Train leaving Tokyo station (22 sec)
Video 2 - Train arriving Gala Yuzawa (33 sec)

This is taken from top of the gondola looking at the first chairlift.

Nice views!




I clearly got a lot more AIR than this guy....



Nice weather, not too busy, nice people, nice slopes...

Some good options for lunch. I went for hamburger patty with curry sauce on rice and a beer.

Good times.

Spongebob snow camp, all rights reserved, copyright Viacom, cheers dudes!

And home by 6pm! how nice is that. Sore feet, bit of a rest, no worries.

Facebook Kamakaze

I have written about this before.

Something interesting happened this week. To save you reading the BBC article if you haven’t, basically, a tiny not-for-profit organization of programmers from the Netherlands (they always are aren’t they, or Sweden or something), with a SINGLE BLOODY LINUX SERVER have seriously upset the most powerful force in social marketing on the planet.

The only web page to get MORE hits than Google, one day of last year (Christmas day).

That’s right, the internet behemoth that is the friendly Facebook. Stalkbook. The FB.

You know Facebook has 350 million users. Half of those roughly are active every single day. They spend an average, average, or 55 minutes on the site each time. Holy shit.

That’s like 100 x times the population of New Zealand on the site.

That’s like the viewing figures of 9x finals of Strictly Come Dancing EVERY SINGLE DAY on your website. Every one of those viewers provide all their demographic information in advance, age, marital status, location. Come on guys, smell the pizza.

It should come as no surprise that advertising on this medium, when TV is in decline, is of a lot of commercial interest. Big companies are the customers of Facebook, not us. The site is expressly set up to exploit our private and personal networks for others’ financial gain. If that sounds like a conspiracy theory, it’s just a fact.

So why do we participate? Same reason we eat takeaways and watch telly. We like it. I think Web2.0 is the new great time waster. TV is old hat. Early web was kind of fun but this social networking, presence aware, augmented reality shit, it is right up there. And it’s only just getting started.

Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, these guys are all building infrastructure now like what BT and AT&T do. I have seen it. And those old school companies are shitting themselves. Because they cant do the web thing.

So the point of the blog was, Web2.0SuicideMachine, has looked at the structure of Facebook, and realized that parts of a relational database can’t just be deleted. You can go and deactivate and “delete” your account, but the connections and everything you’ve ever said to everyone will still be there. In the shadows, but still there, recorded in a relational database and connected to everything else. If they started to delete your bits, it would screw everything else up. So they actually can’t!

So they have a better plan. Log on SuicideMachine, it will go onto Facebook, and in 1/10 of the time it would take you, it will delete every friend connection you ever had, change your name and password, and then forget your password! You’ll be left there, a zombie on the site with no friends. But because your connections are gone, in time the caching should, should, make it very hard for someone to unpick what you said about so-and-so in 15 years time.

Facebook have come down on these guys like a tonne of bricks. The kind of suing they usually reserve for paedophiles, tyrannical dictators and Bernie Madoff. You will find them gone from search engines, caches deleted, their site restricted, news articles gone.

Ah yes but I have nothing to hide I hear you say. Come on, it’s just a bit of fun, right? True, that’s the other viewpoint, nothing is secret anyway, so better yet, live by your principles, and try not to say anything too stupid in public. The internet is PUBLIC.

And no, I don’t want to join your mafia war, I’m not interested in an old TV ad from 1987 (ooh look its so funny), or making a collage of my freaking Facebook statuses from 2009! Like, WTF?

Here's a funny video on the subject.