Today: Yellow Coconut Curry!

To my surprise, last week’s first edition of Recipe Mondays was met with unmitigated success among the blogging crowds. And because we thrive to please our public, here at Dr Dave Logs Inc., I shall do my best at keeping up with the now firmly established tradition of Recipe Mondays!

What? It’s not Monday anymore? Well, I’m sure it’s Monday somewhere else in the world right this moment. Internet time, all that…

By the by, talking about Monday…

Part 1: The Rant

I guess saying I despise Valentine’s Day and its commercial faux-fluffiness would make me sound like some kind of bitter dateless hater, or at the very least like an unromantic grinch who can’t enjoy an honest-to-goodness holiday when he’s handed one on a heart-shaped silver platter.

First let me clear that out: if I didn’t thoroughly enjoy being single on Valentine’s Day, then why on Earth would I manage to break up every single year without fail just a few days before it. Surely there must be some sort of subconscious fear that, come that fateful day, any lingering relationship, would require me to attend some kind of official Valentine’s celebration, likely out of common decency and possibly at gunpoint.

In fact, I don’t really hate Valentine’s that much. I am not this person who spend their day hissing at whatever looks like a mating attempt between two humans… It’s just that I don’t get it. I don’t get what’s so “romantic” about buying cheap industrial crap and/or overpriced luxury items as the yearly token of your undying love. If anything, it just goes to show that sexism hasn’t made much of a significant progress ever since the dark ages, except you no longer pay your bride’s father with a herd of goats, but give the payment to your loved one directly, and preferably in expensive shiny stones.

But truth be told, I don’t really care, one way or the other, about the materialism of it all (hey, after all, ’tis Japan: over here, I am the one who receives chocolates for Valentine’s). I could live with it, if not for that freaking herd mentality.

Hear me now: I haven’t completely lost touch, I am well aware that any celebration is all about herd mentality.

But take, for example, that exercise in futility that is Superbowl Sunday: We all know Superbowl Sunday has little to do with watching the terminally boring encounter of two dozen gorillas on a green field… it’s all a very blatant excuse to get absolutely shitfaced with your friends on a Sunday afternoon and pass out in bed at 7:30pm. For you and me, it might not sound so exciting, especially seeing how that’s what we do every Sunday to begin with (well, I know that’s what I do anyway), but for some married folks, it does make a difference.

Problem is: while it might add to the fun to wedge yourself between 50 of your fellow beer-swilling football fans at your local watering hole, it adds very little to the romantic frame to be competing against every other couple in the city for mediocre seating at some not-so-great restaurant on Valentine’s Day. You might enjoy a communal atmosphere on your intimate dates, I don’t.

What? A recipe? oh yea… the recipe…

Part 2: The Recipe

What better way to celebrate the Day of Love than by cooking a delicious Yellow Coconut Curry to share with your roommate and your very-much-ex special someone (yea, no hard feeling, at least as long as I cook).

Yellow Coconut Curry is so laughably easy to make that even I hesitated to use it for this week’s recipe. But then I remembered that if you are the kind of person who gets his cooking advice from a website that usually draws people searching for “japanese upskirt pictures” (according to Google), you are not looking into becoming the chef at Pierre Gagnaire’s (well, might have to get rid of Mr. Pierre Gagnaire, to begin with). Talk about the paraplegic leading the blinds…

Okay, ready?

(more…)

The good thing about being up and coding at 5 in the morning, is that you don’t have to wake up in sweat to run for the nearest table, when some underground traffic jam comes up.

Brief, but definitely one of the strongest shake I have ever felt in Tokyo.

This kinda makes up for last month’s tectonic joyride where I was passed out in my bed.

Oh, and one small piece of advice: never leave an open box of sugar on the edge of a shelf in a country prone to earthquakes. Actually, cross that, never have any piece of furniture rising over 3 feet.

Update: According to the news report, it went up to a 5 (Japanese scale) in the Ibaraki area. Not quite sure how that measures up in Richter scale, but that’s quite big (level 7 being total annihilation)…

I know this might sound hard to believe, but if you know me personally, you know I am quite a good-natured person. I can get irritated at things, but hardly ever go any farther than that.

In fact, provided my meds do not run out, it is awfully hard to really piss me off for good. And to get on my permanent unexpiring shit-list, you have to really overdo it.

One easy way to do it, though, is to successfully DDoS my host on a Sunday morning, resulting in the suspension of my whole account, mail server included.

The debate is still open on whether that was an actual DDoS attempt (I do have many friends out there, and they have been trying similar tricks in the past) or just one the most braindead of that already rather stupid sub-species known as referrer spammers. Granted, my own host hardly showed much efficiency in the matter, since, upon seeing a few IPs querying my blog index.php file upward of 200 times in 50 seconds, they merely took offense of the fact that it was overloading the mySQL server (thanks WordPress and its 70 queries per pageload) and pulled the plug without any further consideration.

A quick look at my logs eventually showed that these hits were pushing some second-grade junk website in their referrer field.

And just like that, unbeknownst to him, that spamming wanker made himself one very decided enemy.

(more…)

What do we blog about when we have nothing interesting to say and we have already posted so many pictures of the cat in the keitai log that we are feeling a bit nauseated ourself?

Why, but we skim our log stats, of course! Digging that endless fodder of cheap entertainment that are search engine referrer keyphrases!

You know what they say about the correlation between the size of a crowd and its collective IQ? Well that should be a good clue as to what to expect from the Web-using community at large.

Let’s have a look, shall we:
[all italicized search strings below taken verbatim from my February server stats]

• a guide to better living through alcohol. Easy: Pour. Drink. Refill. Go back to step 1.
• japanese schoolgirl panties: As we already pointed out, you stand better chances over there.
• padawan definition: isn’t that Klingon for “acneic virgin”?
• posted by xanax: No. sponsored by Xanax
• hunting beavers: just bait them with white birch…

(more…)

But, my, it is already time for… Recipe Monday!

Ok, don’t look in the archives, the Recipe Monday series is not yet an established tradition, merely the first instalment of a tentative culinary concept. And if experience is any indicator, it probably won’t even make it to the second episode, since I’ll likely have all but forgotten about it by then, or found a new cooler concept to toy with.

But as for today, we have decided, here at Dr Dave Logs Inc., to cave in to the increasing pressure of the domestic housewife portion of our readership, who accounts for a hefty 3% of total search referrers to this log. The remaining 97% equally split between those who came looking for “people who dislike la nouvelle vague” (you got that right fellow: enough with the snubby French bastards already), “18 year old lesbian milfs” (mmmn, somebody doesn’t have the concept of milf completely down or need to get out of Kentucky) and, of course, the perennial “japanese schoolgirl panties” (oops, I did it again… sorry fellow Google users: we ain’t got none here, but I hear they do).

Oh yea, the recipe?

Today, we are making Mango Chutney Curry Chicken Salad, otherwise knows as MC³S in serious cooking circles.

(more…)

Found this awesomely dorky time-waster through Cosmic Buddha and here is what it’s got to say about Spam Karma:

This new pizzle is destined ta become tha permanent news repository fo’ all th’n Spam Karma
[...]
Spizzay Karma in tha dogg pound.
[...]
Spam Karma cuz this is how we do it.
[...]
Spizzam Karma . Ya fuck with us, we gots to fuck you up.
[...]
You can leave a response, or trackback fizzy yo own site fo gettin yo pimp on.
[...]
S-P-to-tha-izzam Karma has gizzle nuts . Relax, cus I’m bout to take my respect!
Chosen excerpts from search results

Now I ask all the spammer beeatch out there, you sure you wanna fuck with my homies?

Because we all need an entry filled with pointless acronyms and meaningless technical gibberish every once in a while…

As you may remember, and despite my recent vow never to trust technology again, I recently purchased a brand new keitai.

For those of you without a geeky masochistic streak who do not intend on reading the whole tedious entry, let me give you a quick sum-up: this in-depth report on the merits and shortcomings of AU’s W21T model is split into three main sections: 1) All the features that makes it so great 2) Why you can’t do crap with all these features and that sucks 3) How I intend to break my way through these silly limitations.

(more…)

Now… Since you are reading this, and probably other blogs too, I think we can safely infer that you belong to that category of people who get their secret kick out of hearing how miserable other people’s lives are.

Don’t pull that innocent face: you know who you are.

And I don’t blame you.

I’m with you on that one: sure, fuzzy pictures of playful kittens might bring some warmth to even the most hardened seaman’s heart… But only the news that some stranger at the other end of the world is having a really shitty day can bring true, lasting, peace of mind. Why do you think I have my PubSub keyword watchlist set to include “I cut because my life sucks” and “suicidal thoughts”: you never know when somebody’s unhappiness is gonna come handy to reinforce your own precarious sense of happiness…

With that knowledge, allow me to humbly feed your shadenfreude with this little story of tragi-comical woes in the land of technology…

We are talking movie material here.

(more…)

Sunday, I took my roommate Eriko on a record-shopping spree in Shibuya.

The principal goal of our expedition was not for me to pack up on yet more records that I will probably have to leave behind when I move, but rather to help her get started with her career as a world-renowned DJ.

People coming over and asking you to “teach them how to DJ”, is pretty much par for the course whenever you start playing outside of your bedroom. This is how everybody get started, this is how I got started… You pick a DJ you know or that you particularly like and humbly go asking for advice and guidance.

DJ’ing, in that respect, still holds much of that old “master-apprentice” tradition that you get, both in western and Japanese craftsmanship.

But enough with the Mr. Miyagi bullcrap: Eriko didn’t turn to me because she was blinded by my turntablism wizzardry and had a striking revelation in the middle of a dancefloor. Rather because we live under the same roof and she couldn’t help but become increasingly curious about the pleasure I seemed to draw from playing with all these colorful knobs in my bedroom.

Note: If you didn’t grin stupidly upon reading that last sentence, you are way too pure to be reading this blog and have probably lived a very sheltered life so far.

Anyway, after explaining that she probably didn’t need to get the full Midi keyboard and TB-303 kit just right now, I gave her the usual drill. In a nutshell: “Sure, go for it, but not with my records, please”.

Hence the trip to the store, hence the last two days spent enduring the same continuous soundtrack of mismatched beats from the same two records for hours on end…

(more…)

A few very random observations prompted by the music in my life these days:

• Keith Jarrett is a bloody genius (dug the Köln Concert’s vinyl boxset last week-end in Koenji.)
• Sometime during the late 90’s, there was a point where it seemed House was about to break into the mainstream: radios started playing House tracks, cross-over successes appeared, major venues featured House acts.
  Eventually, the trend fizzled out and, instead, Hip Hop became the music of choice for the average dance-impaired suburban white kid…

  I take a deep hard look at any random Hip Hop producer on TV nowadays and thank the gods that House never made it to that level of buffoonery…

• My personal theory regarding Drum’n'Bass is that it is a project gone out-of-hand, developed in the Secret Research Labs of the British Dentistry Association aimed at removing patients’ fillings without anesthesia.

  An alternative theory would be that somebody once decided to make a music so caricatural that it begs to be used for one of these 60 Minutes special on The Youth of Today and the barbaric music they are into nowadays.

  Note: My current appreciation of that thankfully near-extinct musical genre is possibly biased by the fact I was just handed such a massively retarded piece of washing-machine rhythm with mission to make the sound “Phat” and to compress the bass more (you stupid tweakhead: if I throw one more inch of compression into that track, it’ll pretty much become one single pulsating bass sound with a few signature d’n'b, motorcycle-on-the-highway, sound effects here and there).

• Also among the insanely cool picks of that last vinyl hunt to Koenji: Cymande, probably one of the best funk band of all times.

A while back, Jeremy, at Antipixel, commented on the deceitfully symmetrical appearance of the human body after stumbling upon the frightening realization that he was a freak of nature whose eyes and ears were both uneven.

His findings on feet sizes are perfectly accurate too: as any shoe store clerk will gladly confirm, it is no secret that practically everyone has got one foot a tad bigger than the other. It took me many years to finally remember how crucial it is that I try both shoes before buying, no matter how great the right side fits. My left foot’s big toe, permanently traumatized by years of dancing in undersized sneakers, is a sore reminder of the dangers of impulsive shopping.

Jeremy is too much of a gentleman to allude to another famous occurrence of body asymmetry. One that only members of the feminine gent usually worry about (although they certainly shouldn’t: I think it’s awfully cute).

(more…)

One evening during my stay with Miss Kate in Vancouver last week, the topic of discussion had veered toward my, err, rather memorable twenty-first birthday party…

Yea, that’s the one where I ended up getting married the morning I turned 21, thus topping a week-end that would make any Hunter S. Thompson’s story sound like a Nancy Reagan biopic in comparison…

(more…)

Among the many horrific experiments conducted by the nazis on their prisoners during WWII, a whole set of them focused on hypothermia: hapless Russian POW were put into icy water baths until they collapsed, then attempts to reanimate them using more or less scientific means were made.

Unlike most of their other pseudo-scientific experiments, this one actually had some kind of vaguely reachable goal: improve the life expectancy of the average Luftwaffe pilot forced into a sudden scuba-diving trip in the English Channel. Quite a problem at the time, especially among German tourists returning home from a leisure flight over London.

(more…)

Damn, I was hoping to get out of the damn topic for a while, but my baldness-induced striking cold precluding most other activities worth narrating here, I might as well, give my two cents about the no follow “anti-spam” tag…

In a nutshell: it’s very cute, but it won’t do much to help major existing platforms (might help smaller ones, but they weren’t really concerned with the spam problem in the first place).

(more…)

Not been back for a week and they are already announcing snow for tomorrow…

I guess I could launch into my usual bitching about cold temperatures, poor standards of insulation in Japanese architecture and the fact that I can feel the wind blowing from one side of my appartment to the other, through closed windows…

See, that’s what I would have done a month ago.

But today I won’t.

Not only because I’ve just spent two weeks in Montreal, where -15° C is considered a warm day. But also because I have heard of Nunavut.

(more…)