Instead of typing the URL directly in the browser they’ll go to Google or Yahoo and type the site name, or sometimes even the URL, into the search box. This is understandable for obscure sites of course, but I see people doing this all the time for sites like Hotmail or CNN or Amazon. What’s wrong with these people? This is almost as bad as people who write emails in Microsoft Word and then attach it to the email instead of writing it directly in the body. Believe it or not, I know people who do that. Drives me nuts.

Unrelated, did you anyone see that news about the Monkey in Shibuya Station? Too funny…

Hey, I got an iPhone 3G!! That’s probably not so surprising to you if you read Danny or Hector’s blogs cause they posting my photo on friday when Brad and I were standing in line to get our coveted gadget of the year. I was also on CNN. Well, I appeared very briefly amongst a crowd of people near the end of this video.

The truth is, and it really is the truth, I was not planning to get an iPhone on day one, I was going to wait until next year. But I woke up last thursday morning with a sudden urge to get me one. Don’t know where that came from but probably the fact that I’ve been reading every bit of info on the Softbank release and discussing it constantly might have something to do with it. I guess I was in denial thinking I would be able to resist the urge.

So thursday night (the iphone went on sale on friday, my manager at work is also a Mac fanboy so he was very sympathetic and let me take the day off) after discussing our game plan, Brad and I decided to line up at the Omotesando Softbank Shop. In hindsight, this was probably not the best choice but it seemed like where the most action would be happening. We got there around 10:30pm and the line was already half way to Shibuya. It was a long night and even before the first train began, there were more than 1400 people lined up so they closed the line for the day. All the people arriving in the morning had to line up in the line for the NEXT day. There was some disagreement about our placement in line but I think we were somewhere between 800-900. At any rate, we had secured our place in line and would be guaranteed to get a unit. We just had to do the time. Luckily, it was fairly cool that evening and most people in line were quietly sleeping or playing some kind of PSP/DS game.

The night went by rather quickly but when the iPhone finally went on sale at 7am and it began to get hot, that’s when standing in line became unbearable. Watching all the pretty girls in Harajuku/Omotesando was the only thing to do to pass the time. When we finally got inside the shop around 3pm they had run out of 16GB Black models, so I had to settle for a white one. The white one is very pretty, but it’s not me. I already have plans to swap it with someone for a black one though.

So far, the iPhone has exceeded my expectations and is definitely going to make a major impact in Japan. I was skeptical about whether it would succeed here or not, but after seeing the huge line and showing it to a lot of non-mac-geek people who have all instantly said they are going to get one, I’m fairly certain that the iPhone is going to have some significant influence on the mobile landscape here.

A few impressions so far:

GOOD

• SMS which no one ever uses in Japan is implemented like iChat and is very handy
• App Store is awesome, I downloaded so much stuff already. Mobile Flickr is sweet
• This is the best mobile I’ve ever used for typing in English
• 3G data speed is pretty good, I have no complaints
• The new Japanese input method is excellent
• All the other stuff

BAD

• Push mail is only available with yahoo.com and me.com, the i.softbank.jp mail is not really push mail. It’s the same as any IMAP mail account except that it alerts you when you get a mail and then you have to go and get it. This is necessarily a bad thing but when you are used to push mail on all mobile in Japan it’s seems like a negative. Being a gmail users it’s nuisance to always have to fetch mail.
• There’s no indicator light so you have to check if you have a mail or missed call
• The battery life doesn’t seem that great
• Sometimes it seems to hang or get stuck especially using my contact list and inputing Japanese. Rebooting it fixes this problem

Some of you may remember that I did the Master Cleanse aka Lemonade Diet 2 years ago. Well, I’m doing it again and am currently on day 6. I would actually be on day 7 today if I hadn’t eaten half a pizza on day 1. So I had to start over. Anyways, it’s a lot easier this time around and I am planning to go 14 days. Unless I break down and decide to go to Brozer’s to get a burger! I’ve heard they are the best hamburgers in Tokyo. The girl sitting beside me at work keeps telling me how pale I look so if it gets any worse I may have to stop before 14 days. But that means I’ll be able to eat that burger sooner!! Yay! In November, I will do it again and target 21 days which is the ideal length for the cleanse, so they say.

You may also have noticed that I’ve not updated this blog for some time. I’ve realized that I have too many things I want to do but never seem to complete any of them. Then I read somewhere, I think on Lifehack.org, that the most effective way to get something done is to do nothing else but that one thing. This is common sense, but I’ve always been a multitasker so I thought I would try focusing all my energy into one thing at a time. The unfortunate consequence is that I haven’t been spending time wandering the streets looking for blog fodder, hence the lack of updates. Hopefully, this will change soon.

This week my company moved to a brand new office building in central Tokyo which is why I’ve been a bit busier than usually. Our new office has a fantastic view of Tokyo and even Mt. Fuji on a good day. This afternoon between meetings I took a few photos. They’re not that good so I’ll have to take my SLR to work some day and get better shots. The one above is looking towards Roppongi. At the right, you can see Tokyo Midtown and Roppongi Hills just behind it. At the far left is Izumi Gardens.

The view east from one of the meeting rooms. That cluster of buildings on the other side of the park is Otemachi. You can also see the Diet which is that pyramid shaped building near the centre.

And this shot is facing north-west. That’s Shinjuku in the background.

While walking around in Jimbocho the other night I spotted a dim light in a shop window. It turned out to be this retro Hello Kitty night light. I don’t know which I found more interesting, the Hello Kitty lamp or the fact that the shop was a brush shop. I mean, when was the last time you went to a brush shop?
 
I was tempted to go in and ask if I could by the lamp.

 
Throw those crappy white iPod earbuds into the trash and get yourself a pair these cute Ear Drops. Well, if you’re a girl that is. Audio gear has been pretty much unisex, but now there’s a market for headphones designed for women. Recently, while riding the train I’ve been noticing some girls’ ears sparkling thinking it must be an earring, but upon closer inspection I notice it’s a diamond on their headphone.
 
There are many different styles, diamond heart shaped, rose shaped, candy shaped and of course PINK PINK PINK.

The packaging was designed to look like a box for cosmetics and made by different companies, but actually they’re all made by Elecom. These photos taken with my cellphone at Biccamera in Shinjuku

Let me take this opportunity to remind everyone never to websurf or save any kind of personal data on your corporate PC or on a PC you use to make presentations. At work, like many of you I sit through many meetings and most of the time someone has their laptop connected to the projector with everyone watching. Often, when they type a URL in the browser the auto complete displays their browsing history and you can see what websites they’ve been visiting. There’s always some surprises hidden in that browser history and while I don’t surf any kind of non work related sites on my corporate PC at work, I still set it to never save history.

Also I never keep any kind of personal image file on the hard drive no matter how benign. You know how in windows if you open up an image attached to a mail and then hit the next button in the image viewer, you get to see what images are in that temporary folder with contains all those mysterious attachments people forget about until they appear on screen for everyone to see. I’ve heard stories about people giving presentations and accidentally pulling up their sex photos and videos and what not. Be careful, else you may end up knowing how Edison Chen feels. Poor Guy..

Unrelated, I’m still looking for an alternative way of displaying images on the blog. I don’t think that Flickr is going to work cause I just don’t like the sizes that I’m limited too. If anyone knows of a good wordpress plugin that will let me batch upload a bunch of photos and specify the thumbnail size differently every time, please let me know what it is.

I made a turn out of Roppongi Hills parking lot this evening and found myself behind a brand new Nissan GT-R. It’s my first time to see this supercar in person. I missed seeing it at the Tokyo Motor Show last year cause I was sick with the flu and recovering from lasik. The GT-R is not the kind of car that I would buy but boy is it sweet. And sooo shiny too. I couldn’t get any decent photos of it except for this one before he turned onto Aoyama-dori and sped away from me. Now I gotta go to the dealer and see it up close.

Went to see Jumper at a special premiere today. That’s the film where Anakin teleports around the world. It doesn’t start until March in Japan but a guy at work gave me the tickets cause he couldn’t go. I have to buy him lunch or something in exchange. But I told him that would depend on whether the movie was crap or not. Usually, these special premieres, or 試写会 shishakai as they call them, are held in auditoriums where the sound is really bad and the seats are falling apart, rather than in the regular theatres. Today’s viewing was at Kudanshita kaidan (the sound was bad and the seats were falling apart) which is not far from work but near one of those “not at all convenient to get to stations” where you have to change trains 3 or 4 times. Tickets to shishakai are often raffled off on the Internet and the people who come usually couldn’t care about the film, they just get to see something for free. The theatre was packed 100% with people who appeared to be more low brow and more obnoxious than the usual crowd. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood and everyone got on my nerves. But as an example there was this young dufus who had one of those open-mouthed clued out expressions on his face. He was wearing a big fuzzy hat which he took off, but then put it on again right before the film began. Like, duh? The guy behind him politely asked him to take it off and he was like “Ooooh I didn’t know!! Sorry” Some people are just amazing. And then there was a couple who came in early and started playing Tetris on their mobile phones as soon as they sat down. Not talking to each other, just completely focused on Tetris. For 30 minutes that’s all they did. I was watching them to see if they would continue their game after the movie began but they put them away once the lights went down. I wonder if they play their keitai games during sex too?

Anyways, the movie. It was not as bad as I thought it would be. I’m not going to go into any details and spoil the film for you, but there is one part where Hayden Christensen and the other guy, the kid who played Billy Elliot who’s all grown up now, are walking around in Tokyo talking to each other. They are in Shibuya and Hayden Christensen says something, cut to the other guy who’s suddenly in Ginza and then back to Hayden in Shibuya and so on. They’re literally jumping all over Tokyo even though they aren’t teleporting in the movie. I guess filmmakers think that all Tokyo streets look the same and it doesn’t make a difference but don’t they realize that this film is going to be seen by millions of Japanese people who are gonna know exactly where each shot was taken? This is so typical of hollywood. There’s another scene where they steal a Mercedes from the dealer in Shinbashi and then suddenly they’re driving thru Shinjuku, Akiba and over the Rainbow Bridge. Go figure. Well, it is a film about teleporting so I guess they can get away with it. The film is short, around 78 minutes, probably because they went overbudget filming all over the world. See it on DVD.

I’m sure everyone has seen that new building they’re building on the west side of Shinjuku. In case you didn’t know, that’s the Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower. Mode Gakuen モード学園 is a school for design. What kind of design I’m not sure exactly but from the looks of it they must have a lot of money to be able to build such a building in the middle of Shinjuku. No doubt they’re probably like other trade schools in Japan (called 専門学校 senmon gakko) where the school acts like a quasi-sweatshop, work gets outsourced to the schools which the students do for little to zero pay. The school reaps the profits from the work the students are doing AND also collects tuition from them which is usually some ridiculous amount on par with private universities. The students gain experience working on “real work” which can help them get started professional once they graduate. So it’s kind of a win-win situation. As for the building, well I think on paper these kinds of designs seem kind of cool but design tastes change quickly and this building already looks dated to me.

As some of you may know I got intra-lasik done on my eyeballs about 3 months ago and I’m one of the unfortunate 0.1% of the people who have some kind of post operative complication. It’s not really that big a deal so I won’t go into it here. I’ll save all the gory details for another post. Anyways, my right eye still has some induced stigmatism which fluctuates by the hour. It’s more of a nuisance than handicap and I still see better now than before without glasses but I wish it would hurry up and get better already!

So last night I had this dream where I took my eyeballs out of my head and held them in my hand. I watched Minority Report again on Sunday so maybe that scene where Tom Cruise is chasing his rolling eyeballs down the corridor was lingering in my subsconscious. Even though I took my eyes out of my head I could still see perfectly. I looked at my eyes as they were leaking liquid and quickly becoming deflated like squashed grapes. Then when they finally dried out they looked like a pile of macaroni salad. Go figure. I couldn’t put them into my head anymore. Since I could still see perfectly I thought I didn’t need them but when I looked into the mirror I could see that without eyes I would not look attractive to the opposite sex. This was my first thought in the dream and probably what I would think if this happened in real life ;-)

Finally I found some small light bulbs and stuck them into my eye sockets. They fit perfectly but I didn’t have any pupils so it was very spooky. Thank god I woke up at that moment to find that I still had eyes and not a handful of macaroni salad. I will never be able to enjoy macaroni salad again.

Recently, I’ve been smelling the smell of poo while sitting at my computer at home. It comes suddenly in an intense burst that is quite noticeable. And then disappears. The smell is that of poo, not flatulates, the solid stuff. But sometimes there will be a variant like stinky feet smell or body odor. It’s not a good smell like the smell of coconuts or apple pie or tatami mats. When it comes, I check my hands, armpits, feet, clothes, keyboard, keitai, under my desk etc in a effort to isolate the smell but there’s nothing. The doors and windows are closed so it can’t be coming from outside. It appears to be coming from directly in front of me, like from my keyboard or computer monitor.

This has been happening once or twice a day for the past 2 weeks and is driving me absolutely crazy. I’ve been trying to figure out this mystery but haven’t been able to come to any conclusions, however I do have some theories. Here they are:

1. Someone hid some poo in my computer case. An ex-girlfriend of mine once hid a really strong airfreshener behind a bookshelf in my apartment. It smelled like citrus constantly and it took me a while before I discovered I was sabotaged. I think she was giving me a subtle hint that she didn’t like the smell of my place. Anyways, citrus is better than poo.
2. There’s some kind of animal living and pooing in my office. Like a rat or beaver.
3. There’s some kind of sewage leak that’s seeping into the walls of my house near where my computer is located.
4. The smell is coming from some other-worldly source. You know how the devil is supposed to smell like fire and brimstone, like that except a poo demon, or something.
5. My brain is short-circuiting and sending me sensations from past experiences. Perhaps they are my first smell experiences as a baby? If so, why couldn’t they be more pleasant smells like a new car smell or first kiss smell?

I have reason to believe that it could very well be number 5 since today at work I experienced another wave of poo smell while sitting in front of my PC at the office. Very strange this is. At any rate, I’m sorry for throwing around the “p” word so liberally in this post. Hope I didn’t ruin your lunch or dinner.