Useful tidbits of Physics we’ve learned the hard way this week-end:

• Leave a bottle of bubbly rosé exposed to Tokyo’s Summer temperatures for long enough before opening, and add some ambiance to your party with a lovely geyser fountain. And I do mean a geyser, not a bit of overflow and bubbles… The ceiling just got a nice new finish coat with that one.
• The combustion point of alleged “deep-frying oil”, as sold by local supermarkets, is way lower than you’d expect.
• The melting point of the plasticky faux-woodfloor is also lower than the temperature of that bare 150W lightbulb I always keep at foot-tripping level in my bedroom.
• The only great thing about the Third Law of BBQ Thermodynamics, is that the guarantee of the heaviest rain of the month on the night of your BBQ, is also the assurance that your garden won’t catch on fire, no matter who’s handling the BBQ.
• Powerbook keyboards like to remain sober. One glass of wine, and they get f4c2ed 4* f6r g66d.
• The life expectancy of your average shower door is roughly until the next time you stand butt naked, blinded by shampoo and turning your back to the door when it decides to unhinge and fall on you.

Still wondering why I decided to go back to bed and not move until this week-end is over?

I finally caved in and got myself a Mixi account.

I am not exactly a big fan of so-called “Social Networking” software. Overall, services like Friendster, Orkut et al. have always seemed more of an attempt to make up for years of high school unpopularity, than actually trying to establish meaningful connections between people.

Well, that’s a whole other debate altogether, but frankly, the mere idea of “Social Networking” kinda irks me. That pragmatism of friendships that contend to be mixing mutual feelings of appreciation with some sort of social ladder climbing scheme. You no longer have “friends” on miscellaneous degrees of closeness, you have “contacts”, rated on their ability to help you reach your own social goals. Back when I experimented with Friendster, shortly after it was hailed as the dawn of a new digital age of human interactions, things went a bit like:
Step 1: create a semi-anonymous profile with hobbies, likes and dislikes. Mention that you like to play with electronic music production. Watch the level of activity hovering close to zero outside of the friends you already knew before joining.
Step 2: add a mention in passing that you actually release records, organize parties in SF, and mix for some of them. Watch as over a hundred “friends” suddenly pop-in, add you to their contact list, quickly start trying to sell you their own demo mix or grab guest list comps.

If anything, this laughably caricatural episode taught me one thing: never mention in too much of a positive light any of my professional activities outside of purely professional discussions. If we are having a friendly chat in a social context and it turns out I may be able to help you or we may enter in a mutually beneficial partnership, I’ll be the judge of that, but please save me the fucking faux-friendly courtship that wastes everybody’s time and does nothing to convince me of your professional qualities. Yea, I guess I’m not exactly much of a schmoozing PR guy.

This post-dotcom brand of opportunism, along with the equally ridiculous concept that the friends of your friends ought to be cool people (let me tell you something about the friends of my friends: to an overwhelming majority, they are drug-addled, self-centered, alcoholic pricks. I certainly don’t want anything to do with them) is why I can’t wait for this braindead concept to go down the dot.com drain.

Why have I joined Mixi then?

A few reasons:
1) I need to practice my Japanese more, and Mixi being 100% Japanese is a good way to force me to read and write regularly.
2) The communities and calendar functions make it an infinitely more useful tool than the “You have 3 millions friends-of-friends” traditional Friendster feature.
3) It’s pretty fucking well done altogether.

And here is my account if you wanna be my friend.

I used to hate weddings; all the Grandmas would poke me and say, “You’re next sonny!”
They stopped doing that when i started to do it to them at funerals.

My friend Nordine is getting married this Friday.

As you can see in the photo beside, tradition has been duly respected, pre-wedding pictures in traditional outfits included (you should see the one with the katana). Can you sense a certain Watanabe Ken complex? yea, me too…

Anyway, the photo studio probably thought Nordine was sufficiently ridiculous cute manly in his hakama to feature the shot on their portfolio website. Although maybe Masako’s smile may have helped a bit too.

Considering the bride is a flight attendant on JAL, half the wedding guests will consist of Japanese air hostesses. Which makes an invitation to the reception worth at least a couple hundred thousand yens on Tokyo’s black market. But I don’t think I’ll sell mine: much more to be made with hush money paid not to tell a single of the groom’s stories, back in his Roppongi days.

Today is Cinco de Mayo…

Or, as Lori once explained to her superstar DJ of a husband: “This is when my people kicked your people’s ass, Frenchy”…

Happy Cinco de Mayo to Lori, Ricardo, Gustavo and every other cool Mexicans out there… Have a dozen margaritas for me…

The sharpest among you, dear readers, may have noticed a surge in guest moblogging in recent days.

Indeed, Tracey has joined the powerful ranks of our secret organization, with the established mission to bring a dearly missing element of femininity to these testosterone-drenched pages.

In sticking with the stakhanovist ideals that power this blog, and because no reward shall go undeserved, we promised her a formal introduction as soon as she’d reach the magical threshold of ten posts. Immediately prompting her to deliver, no hold barred, shocking accounts of:

• what she sees from her office window
• what she sees from her office chair…

As you can see, the girl means business…

As long as she leaves gardening up to me, we should be able to find our marks…

OK, she didn’t solely post photos of stacks of paper and urban street parking: she also posted a mug shot of her charming personal sex-slave assistant.

But well before the fascinating insights into the merciless world of a Tokyo power-exec, or even her interesting tidbits on colourful local customs, there is one major reason you should keep an eye open for her contributions: the off-chance of drunken posting featuring nudity and/or behaviours outlawed in at least 15 US states (and punishable by death in 4 of them).

Giving Tracey a cameraphone and moblogging access is a bit like these tv spots for lavish shower products, featuring people lasciviously soaping themselves while the camera always manage to keep the naughty bits tastefully off-frame: there’s that improbable chance the cameraman might one-day trip and show a nipple… a towel fall off unexpectedly… who knows…

Except here, the chances are much higher and the cameraman more likely to be drunk.

But please let that not distract you in any way from the quality of her more traditional contributions to these pages…

N.B: She also has her own dedicated page, where she might one day tell you more about herself. It’s here. At the moment, it only contains the official press kit excerpts, but will no doubt soon be updated with more personable tidbits.

When doing any academic work requiring a bit more than casual concentration, my choice for musical background invariably veers toward jazz.

House or techno is great coding music, but just takes too much of my attention off; and the kind of classical I can study to, also tends to get on my nerves quickly whenever the studying doesn’t go as smoothly as it should…

On the other hand, old jazz tracks, first half of the century, New-Orleans, Dixie, later French stuff… they just got the perfect mix of bouncy instrumental and subdued beat that helps keeping you in a working groove without turning your nerves into a knot. My playlist currently rotates lots of old no-names Charleston big-bands and swing tracks, along with everything I got by Stephan Grappelli, Django Reinhardt or Sidney Bechet…

As a high-school student in Paris, my buddy Pierre and I used to hang out quite often with local jazz musicians. Pierre’s younger cousin, despite being barely pubescent, was an incredible jazz piano player. Last in a lineage of music nuts, he had been enrolled very early on in the family affair, a band that had once, in typical jazz fashion, spanned over three generations and was now composed of the son-father duo completed by a couple other professional players. Among them was Daniel Bechet, son of Sidney and all around talented drummer.

Of the numerous episodes of strangely anachronistic fun I remember from these days, one particularly stands out:

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Hanami Parties Update

or “Welcome to My weekend, my life.com”

If reading the semi-coherent recollection of a drunken stranger’s week-end is not part of your Monday schedule, feel free to just gawk at photographic evidences, conveniently gathered here and there, including the perfunctory tits shot, courtesy of our dear Tracey…

In a scene telling of the spirit of this week-end, yours truly and three of his drunken groupies were seen yesterday night, fiercely decided to rock out the last train out of Harajuku, the same way they’d been rocking out Yoyogi park all afternoon: with lots of drunken debauchery and deep house beats blaring on a portable sound system.

If that’s not yet doing it for you, picture, if you will: the whitest, skinniest guy this side of Brooklyn, manning the most improbable Japanese ghetto blaster ever seen on the Tokyo metro, while the ladies managed to send the poor few salarymen present into abyss of despair: if even the ever-reliable subservient Japanese female could be spotted pole-dancing in a subway car, who was to tell what would be next. But the most awesome part was definitely the widespread toe-tapping around the car: people seemed to, in fact, kinda like it.

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Problem with making your New Year’s Card on homemade pre-alpha software is that, if there’s a bug, all your friends will know it…

Well, two days after I had uploaded that last work of art, I realized I had screwed up monumentally somewhere: despite what I thought, the software hadn’t included all the pictures and nearly half my library was omitted. Meaning that many a friend that should have been there, wasn’t. Turns out the algorithm to do all that mosaic computation was a tiny bit more complicated than I originally thought. Which is great, since it’s always fun solving these problems, but also fell on a rather bad timing, since you are usually not expected to spend your days in front of a computer between Christmas and New Year… I will probably write a separate post full of geekerish about the solution, later on.

But nonetheless, we made it: it’s 5:30pm here, still 6 hours to go with this year, and I am proud to introduce the newer, better, bug-free version of my New Year’s Card… this time, you’re all on it (provided I had your picture in the first place).

Happy New Year Everybody!

Update Jan. 2^nd 2005: OK, I lied… it was still buggy and missing half the pics… this time it’s for real, go ahead, check the full-size version (huge file warning), you’re there, I promise…

It would appear they have very different standards for ski level in Japan and Canada (not to mention Europe).
That or E. slightly overestimated her skiing skills when she told me she was an ace and would enjoy humiliating me publicly on the slopes.

I guess I should have mentioned the part about learning to ski before I could walk and spending quite a few winters in mountain schools as a kid.

All pictures were automatically harvested from the keitai sideblog archives, the huge majority taken with my cellphone during the year 2004.

If I have met you (long enough to take a picture) in the past 12 months or so, then chances are your mug is somewhere in there (full size here if you wanna print your own poster at home).

Hence, the kanji: 友, which means ‘friend’…
For, if a few here are a bit more than friends (and a rare few are, well, complete strangers to me right now), most of these faces are the friends who made that last revolution around the Sun somewhat bearable overall. Enjoyable, even, at times.

So, thanks everybody for being you: You rock.

And have a wonderful holiday season… may you find many a bottle of high quality, triple-filtered vodka in your Christmas stocking.

For those not easily bored: Gory technical details below
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My friends Kristy and Tara have resumed their traveling around the world and are traipsing around South-East Asia and India at the moment.

Kristy has been regularly sending emails accounts of their (mis)adventures, and I thought it’d be nice to get her to start blogging these for a wider public.

So I made her a blog account and gave it a start by importing her past emails. Hopefully, she will be able to regularly add to it, net access permitting.
Eventually, she should also be able to upload pictures (as soon as I have time to finish the setup).

These girls are definitely not following your average chartered touristic path and their tribulations are filled with lots of weird and comical moments…

Anyway, if you are curious to know how two slightly crazy girls, yet seasoned travelers, are managing the bumming-around-Asia experience so far, go check out: http://WhereIsKristy.com !

1. a pair of good dancing sneakers
2. a small park outside of Tokyo, overlooking the sea
3. a couple good DJs
4. a crowd of happy people
5. and above all: the most awesome group of friends in the world

If you have any interest in recent Japanese movies in general and Takeshi Kitano’s in particular, then you might already know that Japanese for fireworks is Hana-bi (花火)…
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had a few bottles of champagne today (Dom Ruinart: no less) on Pierre’s roof…

Scott is apparently alive and bumming around the west coast of Mexico to see if having a degree in electrical engineering really improves your surfing skills.
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