Posts from March 2003
March 31, 2003
Judy has a bad hair day
How about this for a horrible situation? My friend Judy was doing a typical Monday night girl thing, conditioning her hair. She apparently bought some kind of professional hair conditioning kit, and had put all this gunk in her hair and was watching TV when her scalp starts to burn. She figures she left it in too long, and starts to wash the conditioner out, but when the water hits her hair, it starts falling out in big clumps. Frantic, she calls her English speaking friend over to tell her what exactly the conditioning tube says. David comes over and reads the tube which says "Hair Remover." Apparently Judy grabbed the wrong tube of goo from her medicine cabinet, and managed to sit through 40 minutes of TV while all her hair burned away. Geez...
March 28, 2003
Broke up with the old server
That was a tragic experience. I've been running several sites on an old 200MMX platform which has been the most stable relationship I've ever been in with a computer. She's gone now. I hope my most recent IBM lady will be able to cook up cgi-scripts and mysql just as well.
March 16, 2003
Hakone
After finishing up our meetings in Tokyo, Irene and I looked at each other, "So where we going next?" We were both kind of burned out on Tokyo and wanted to see something outside the city. Our Taiwan friends loved Hakone for it's hot springs and rope cars, and it was only a 75 min train ride from Shinjuku, so we decided to go straight to the station and try to find a hotel.
We arrived at Hakone, which immediately reminded us of a larger cleaner Peitou in Taiwan. Japanese style hotels, hot springs, a main street, and a sulpher spring river running next to the train station. We had our Odakyu tourist map, and the next day we did the "Recommended Day-Pass Tour" connecting the dots between bus to boat to rope car to cable car to train. It was nice being cold and seeing snow again.
Good break, though I think the hot spring baths in Taiwan are hotter and more interesting. Only 5 min from my house and you see some interesting gangster tattoos.
Walking around the deserted streets of Hakone at night, surrounded by old grey and brown buildings, Irene summed it up best. "This is the kind of place you go to if you're a writer and you are writing a looooooonnnng book about people who are dying." We were on the 8:39 train the next morning back to the airport.
I realized after 15 years that Japan is just not the place for me.
March 15, 2003
New Sony Studios
Today was a great catch up visit and lunch with my old friend Yasohachi Itoh. Most friends call Itoh "88" because that's what his name means in Japanese. It's also relevant because "88" happens to be the number of keys on a piano, and "88" happens to be one of the most respected jazz producers in Japan. He now has his own jazz label under the name Eighty-Eight's showcasing Sony's new 1-bit recording process called Super Audio CD. The sound quality is breathtakingly amazing.
"88" also oversaw the building of the new multi-million dollar Sony Studios in Akasaka. I remember looking over the blue prints with him 4 years ago, and today he showed me around the complex, which is stunning. For every piece of equipment I bumped into or leaned against, he'd kindly remind me, "Hey, that cost over a million dollars..."
After some nice sushi and updated Sony gossip...guess whose son bought up an entire mountain in Japan's northern alps to turn into a Telluride of Japan, which is now losing money like crazy, and even imported German bulldozers to push the dirt around, but no one knows how to operate them??...we set off for Hakone which is a couple hours outside of Tokyo on the Odakyu line, and where people are serious about their hot baths.
March 14, 2003
Catching up with Mikio
It's been a couple of years since I spent any decent time in Shibuya, and this time was to catch up with Mikio Aoki, a decade old friend, and a 25 yr Sony Music veteran. Same amount of tenure as "that second Morita kid" but with a different namestake of course. Morita will take over the entire Sony Music helm in April, but Aoki runs two of Sony Music's many companies, and we released a nice recording together under his village-A label a few years back. Now it was time to decide what to do for our next project. Several dry sakes later, we hit on some good ideas, and I'm looking forward to opening up some new ground musically.
March 13, 2003
Welcome to Meguro
Sitting here in Tokyo at the Taiwan visa office waiting on Irene's visa. Definitely the nicest visa office I've seen. Free internet access, wide screen TV in the waiting room, magazines....oh oh, lady just told me that I can only view, not do anything that resembles sending of information...email, chatting, blog update?? What is that about? oh I hate these Japanese keyboards...gotta go, creating a major security breach here...secrets will be shared...take away those hand cuffs...I was just blogging...stop....
March 11, 2003
Unusual Tantric Experience
So I was at my usual neighborhood hot spring place the other night, doing the routine 45c hot soak, over to the 16c frigid plunge, then into the steam room. Three rounds of this and you are dead. Typically when you jump into freezing water, you immediately tense up and all body parts shrivel into a black hole. This time when I jumped in I felt relaxed, and could feel the odd thumping sensation of blood pumping up from my feet, through the center of my body, up to my brain. So being the mystic disbeliever that I am, I decided to take this a step further to see if I could really "channel" my yogic energy, focusing my concentration on a certain body part that doesn't do well in freezing cold water. To my astonishment, I managed to channel myself into a major John Holmes hard-on in about 2 minutes. That was the simple part. Problem was how to get out of the pool before I froze to death. After about 10 minutes I was finally relieved of my tantric embarassment, and brrrrrrred my way onto the steam room to thaw out and ponder whether this would work again, just without the freezing water part.
March 10, 2003
Let's make a million on the net...
"When it comes to the Net, a lot of us suffer from Repetitive Mistake Syndrome. This is especially true for magazine and newspaper publishing, broadcasting, cable television, the record industry, the movie industry, and the telephone industry, to name just six."
March 06, 2003
When your 80 yr old father visits...
...and you haven't seen him in 16 years, what do you do? Of course you take him to have a Chinese foot massage after some delicious Ding Tai Fong dumplings.
Do we need a new word for "consumer"?
Dan Gillmor is right. "Consumer" is a pretty outdated and useless term for the person who is involved in the Internet Age transaction. I mean we're doing more than consuming. We provide the ping in the pong, we are the demand to the supply, we are the propensity to the buy, we are the Adam to the Smith. We also fuel the wheels of commerce with stats, opinions, immediate feedback, CRM, word of mouth, and auctioning. I think we are more like an "audience" in a show. The whole transaction event is driven by media, buying is a process of receiving, and we are all paying to receive, so "audience" seems like a decent interim word for "consumer" until someone comes up with a new word. What do you think?
Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Reclassifying the 'Consumer'
March 04, 2003
A fantastic new leap for wireless technology!
This is amazing. Never lose your cat again! Or your car keys! Who needs Bluetooth or WiFi? This is serious hi-tech.
The travels of Ivan the meme...
This is an awesome little story illustrating how quickly ideas and information is spread through the internet. If you are interested in the social life of information, this will help you learn how to speak the party talk.
Go to: Ivan's adventures in weblog space
I need to learn from Warren Buffet
You really need to admire a man whose holdings are worth some 26 billion, has been right about everything for the past 40 years, whose wife is a board member, who lives with his girlfriend, and still manages to keep it all together...and happily. Here's a clip from Fortune.
"As for Buffett's family, they are connected to Berkshire today and Berkshire tomorrow in various ways. Buffett's wife, Susie, is a board member of Berkshire and lives in San Francisco--but frequently travels with Buffett. (For more than 20 years Buffett has lived in Omaha with a woman named Astrid Menks. It's a unique arrangement, but one that seems to suit all parties.)"
You definitely the man, Warren.
Long lost Dad
This should be a very interesting week. My father will be visiting me for a while. For most people this is quite a normal event in life. "Hey Dad, why don't you come over for a visit?" But for me it's a little different. This'll be the third time in my life I've seen my father. First when I was 15, again at 21, and now when I'm 37. Past meetings lasted for a week or so, and included table conversations, a few beers, and a lot of piecing together his 80 years with my 37. I have an odd feeling of excitement and apprehension, and most of the things I wanted desperately to talk about when I was a kid have lost their urgency. All that matters now is to see my old man again and spend some time with him. Tell him I'm ok about the cards I was dealt. That family can get together after all these years. It's been a long time.
March 03, 2003
Voice behind the blog
I found this post/link to be an interesting exploration of the voice behind the blog. Plus he's got a nice site. Exploding Fist - Adventures in white space
Who are we writing to anyway? At least for me, I'm just writing quips about my life that may or may not interest others. To no one in particular, but with a possible conversation with a stranger in mind.
March 02, 2003
My trip to Oz
Spent the week in Oz, checked out the funny boys on Oxford St., went up to Port Stevens for some dune jumping, then over to Hunter Valley for some wine tasting and a balloon ride. Not a bad trip even though I couldn't understand a word spoken to me.
Had some delicious chook with my plonk. Felt like perking after a bit too many middys. Found that the dunnys were mostly clean, and that the sheilas liked low duds. Even though I was a total bushie, I managed to order some decent cackle berries and snag for brekkie, and nearly got into a blew with a bloke over a bingle if you can believe that. If you're a total nong, and find this blog to be some chainwag from my cake hole, don't be narked. Just use the Oz dictionary ya wacker!
I've never figured out whether it's pronounced "Moe's (like owned by one of three stooges) or Moss (like that guy out of Bonanza), but the one down the hill from me is open until 2am most days, which means that if I get out of the club early enough, I can catch the best burger in town, the muo si la bao or the Spicy Mos Burger. They have lots of jalapenos and 
