A Week in Tokyo 26
Starting this weeks in installment of A Week in Tokyo with a blurry pic of one of my comrade bloggers Yumiking who I caught up with at the Japanese Bloggers Dinner in Gotanda yesterday night.
The chap on the right is another popular blogger Modern Syntax.
One for Nogizaka Haruka fans - the station closest to the Widen and Kennedy offices.
Quick look around the office. My new pet foxkeh in the corner.
Hmmm. Suddenly acquired goodies on the desk...
I spy huge oppai.
A closer look at this amazing sculpture soon.
Asakura says hi - closer look at her over at Good Smile.
For those who don't know, foxkeh is Mozilla Japan's official mascot for the Japanese market. If you use Firefox long enough then one may materialize on your desk - SAF (Suddenly Acquired Fox).
Anybody here switched to Firefox lately? Anybody switching from Firefox lately?
Switched the DNS for the Good Smile Japanese site which is now fully armed, operational and migrated to Mirai Gaia. More features coming soon after studying user behavior. You can now see a schedule of when products are shipped from GSC - available from the header under "products."
The site is running on Amazons EC2 cloud and has been stable so far.
Bought a pair of Sony wireless headphones to use in the lounge - specifically for watching anime. But I should have known better...
Turns out these headphones don't work when the TV is on - feedback from the TV causes an incredible amount of noise - returned the piece of turd.
Do you have recommendations for decent wireless headphones?
On the third floor in the old office reading my current craze of the moment - Kemeko Deluxe.
Bowl of Wonton Ramen - 880 yen.
Wifey fetches some Korean snacks from Shinjuku - there is a large population of Koreans there. You can find a load of Korean restaurants and foodstuffs.
The zillionth time I've opened the MBP to change HD's. Quite a difference between the 7200 RPM and the 5400 RPM.
Cant remember if I talked this before but before I used to increase the HD space on my local machine and keep everything on it.
Now what I prefer to do is archive stuff I don't need on a network drive which is backed up using Time Machine. I used to have 60GBs of photos on my local machine which I never used. After archiving a load of junk, my main machine is down to about 67GB's.
Do you prefer to keep everything on your local machine or rather have a light machine?
Kagamin joins me for some BLT at Johnathan's.
Some pasta at the new Italian place round the corner - 1,000 yen.
Some Google and iKnow.co.jp goodies acquired at the Blogger event I organized - Kagamin was acquired there too.
Another new ramen place around the corner.
Lived here for nearly 10 years and I think this is the first time I've had Tsukemen. Tsukemen is a bowl of soup filled with egg and other goodies.
You get a plate of noodles on the side which you dip (tsukeru) in the noodles. This place offers up to 750gms of noodles per serving - folks choose depending on how hungry they are for one price.
There are two blogger events that I know of - the one which I started recently for gaijin bloggers and the swblog which has traditionally been for Japanese bloggers. Attended the swblog yesterday night to find that they renovated the restaurant that we use as the venue.
The organizer of this event is Drikin who has gathered famous Japanese bloggers, media and IT folks together to share ideas and synergies. Many Japanese speaking gajin who are in the industry also attend this event. It was through the swblog where I first made contact with Good Smile through a friend of a friend.
We gave out some Good Smile goodies yesterday too.
If I personally know you and you speak Japanese and either blog or are in media or IT industry then drop me a line and I will bring you along to the next one.
In each gathering I always meet a ton of new people - the Bomberman tin is my business card holder/collector for events like these.
When most of the members have arrived, the projector is set up and we go around the room to talk about each of our sites and latest activities.
This time drink refills are free - me had 5 glasses of Mango Lassi and managed not to get the runs.
Nearly all the bloggers in the room are mac users.
Some of the members are developers for the PSP and PS3 - do you have any requests for them? My request is to enable updates automatically. The Japanese PS3 gets a new update every 3 weeks or so which you have to sit through - very annoying desu.
Quite a few female bloggers too.
Many comrades from Amazon and Microsoft read my ramblings - this photo is for folks at Microsoft ^^;
Another power blogger Mitaimon. Where I get SAFS (Suddenly Acquired FigureS), Mitaimon gets SACS (Suddenly Acquired CameraS) from all the popular makers.
You would rather receive SAFS or SACS?
Unfortunately we didn't bring enough Nendoroid Puchi to go around so its Junken Battle time.
And the folks who got a Nendoroid quickly open hoping they didn't end up with Kyon.
Yuko from Weiden and Kennedy drops by to talk about their latest Google Campaign.
Yuko showing off some Google goodies - bloggers whip out their camera.
Networking is not just about meeting people but also introducing people you know to others.
Am I the only one who thinks the Japanese delivery bikes look cool?
Meeting today at Digital Garage with Internet celeb Joi Ito (wikipedia) and Net Price.
The meetings that I have these days are ones which are productive - which may sound odd but many meetings that I had at Amazon and Microsoft were just unproductive gatherings of people - my presence was requested but I didn't have to be there.
For a while I would just sit there but it got to me because I knew it wasn't productive use of my time.
Walking out of a meeting in Japan is not really good either so I used the "call me technique."
If I was headed for a dead end meeting, I would get my staff to call my mobile number and tell me that the site was in a Severity 2 state. I would be in the meeting and say "good lord, Sev 2 did you say? I'll be right there."
At Amazon, we had 3 different severities.
Sev1 meaning that customers cant buy stuff, Sev2 meaning that something was preventing customers from navigating the site effectively and Sev3 was used for everything else (low priority).
Back to the topic - how much time do you waste in meetings that you don't need to be in per week? How about lessons at school/college/uni? Any of them a complete waste of your time?
Am I the last to hear of John Woo's Red Cliff?
Out n about on the subway.
I've always wanted to organize a gathering for the gaijin bloggers in Tokyo and we had the kick off event at Weiden and Kennedy earlier this week.
Among the attendees were many popular bloggers, media production folks, IT folks from Google, Mozilla, iKnow.co.jp and a load of other talented bods - will talk about this event in a separate article and list up the attendees.
You can see some coverage at WK, Neil Dukett and Ken Lee who provided this photo.
