by ·2 Comments

Picture keitai_w21t.jpg
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…

Continue reading

by ·2 Comments

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…

Continue reading

by ·Comments Off on Scientific Experiment

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.

Continue reading

by ·1 Comment

Picture dogsled.jpg
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.

Continue reading

by ·5 Comments

Picture montreal_street.jpg
The Japanese language has no future.

Literally.

It has got a present tense, a past tense, many inflections for each, but absolutely nothing to accentuate a verb in a way that shows it is taking place in the future.

This is not as inconvenient as one might think at first: present tense is used instead, and, when the lack of context calls for it, precisions such as “tomorrow”, “later”, “after” clear up ambiguities.

Sometimes, though, it gives strange results.

in Japanese, “I will miss you” becomes “I miss you”.

In fact, because the closest equivalent in Japanese is 寂しい (samishii: lonely, desolate), instead of saying “I will miss you” or even “I will be lonely”, you say “I am lonely”…

In other news, arguing all day long while walking aimlessly in a city taken over by muddy snow and icy wind chills is about as fun as it sounds.

by ·1 Comment
New Year 2005

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. 2nd 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…

New Year 2005

皆さん開けましておめでとう。今年もよろしくね！

去年にケイタイで撮った写真でこのNew Year’s Cardを作ったから、あなたの写真はあるんでしょう。探して頑張ってね！
こちらもっと大き見て
こちずっと大き見て

New Year 2005

Après quelques petites difficultés techniques (et une version jolie mais incomplète), voici enfin la version 2.0 GM de mes voeux pour l’année 2005.
Pratiquement toutes les photos ont été prises avec mon keitai durant l’année 2004 et, si je vous ai rencontré suffisamment longtemps pour prendre une photo, vous pourrez retrouver votre visage de star en cherchant bien.

Bonne Année 2005 à tous!

by ·1 Comment

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.

by ·4 Comments

Hope you’re all enjoying your hangover-nursing time in between holiday celebrations.

Things are still cold around here, thanks for asking. Nut-freezingly so, I may add…

One of the interesting difference between regular snowball fights and snowball fights in a negative double-digit temperature environment, is that the later involves heavy blocks of icy snow, instead of that usual powdery sissy stuff they use elsewhere. Battles haven’t been any less fierce for that. Serious efforts were put into reducing the inheritance pool, but only succeeded so far in a slightly bruised nose and ego. Not mine in both cases, mind you.

Continue reading

by ·9 Comments
New Year 2005

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
Continue reading

by ·5 Comments

Two top reasons I should not be here:

  1. I hate cold weather
  2. My definition of cold weather starts just below 20 degrees Celsius

I mean, I was already freezing on the plane, despite turtleneck sweater and airline blanket, while stewards were strolling gaily along the aisle in short sleeves. Obviously I don’t have the genes.

Perhaps if I drink enough vodka it’ll be a painless death by hypothermia…

On the upside, they have lotsa free sockets for your laptop and reasonably priced wifi in Vancouver airport, whence I’m writing this piece on my ongoing 3 week rant about temperatures…