Beats the heck out of that US dsl crap...

I'm getting ~1Mb/s from my desktop to to the dsl modem in my room in a $46 a night japanese style guest house.... I don't even have a private bathroom but the bits are flowing... rtt is 147ms which would be sort of borderline for halflife or ut2004, for a few movies I didn't have time to watch on the otherhand...

Anyway just a plug for the previously linked to sawanoya ryokan. now that I'm here it's a little spartan and you'll have book fairly fair in advance to get one of the two rooms with a private bath. but it has real ofuro, the ip connectivity is good and it's in a quiet funky residential neighborhood. The place I stayed in Tokyo on the last two trips is around 20 blocks away.

silly metal phone.

No, not the razor, which might be fine phone not withstanding motorola's inability to build a decent user interface, Makoto Saito's penk phone for kddi's au network, I first saw it maybe on gizmodo; anyway it's as nice in your hand as it looks...









The shape has a fairly organic feel in you hand, and the device has a certain heft to it, without being terribly heavy. It's trivially pocketable.

Now that we've gotten to the point with this whole phone thing, where we having a few fairly mature general purpose phone platforms it would be nice to see more design driven handsets that actually feel good while adhering to regular user inface conventions. instead what we get are sort of bizarre experiments in usability...

Some urls

banana bunker
http://bananabunker.com/

v-girl
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/24/v_girl/

I suppose it fits in the long tradition of japanese dating simulations, princess raising games, sister buggering games and so forth, excepting for the distincit lack of a payout in the form of pr0n, and the fact that your virtual girlfriend demands gifts that cost real money. A marriage been the quasi legal currency and stuff markets for online games like Everquest and Ultima Online and legitmate business enterprise that turns currency into fake stuff you can give to your fake girlfriend. Does she put on the pounds when you take her to fake Wendy's for a Fake cheeseburger that you have buy with real money or would that be just to realistic.

Pretty soon you'll be renting this software by the hour, I'm betting, at which point v-girl better put out.

I'm a big fan of what might be called lifestyle reality simulation software. As someone who spent way to much time playing with muds in the distant past, and for a brief but intense while, the sims, I see much possiblity in this area. When you phone is able to be more effective portal between the real and the virtual world, gps type location, input through the camera, and exchange of info with other gamers through the network of some local area adhoc network like bluetooth, wifi, and zigbee are areas where the games haven't really explored... If there's one the for certain though, a rich interoperable platform needs to exist for this to escape beyond a niche and I'm not sure existing phone handsets have one yet...

some thoughts on the economy...

One has to consider if US or possibly the world is headed for another
recession. We have:

rising basic materials costs:
Steel http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9072-1496762,00.html
Oil is back over $50 a barrel http://www.turkishpress.com/business/news.asp?id=050223220832.fr1z4ejr.xml

Both and many other are demand driven rather than uncertantly driven. not-withstanding what happens in the US demand for oil in China is expanding at rates of about 15% per year.

We have automakers seeing serious pressure from commidity prices:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000085&sid=alQp.vx8KBAE&refer=europe

We have other automakers who have finally tapped out the market for oversized fuel consuming SUV's and are begining to resort to the most desperate incentive tactic yet (actually lowering prices) having exhausted the possibilities of 0% financing offers, masssive incentivized options packages, cash back offers, free computers and so forth.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7012773/

It may be that everyone who want an SUV already has one, or that the
hangover from all the recession era 0% finced suv purchases has already
take hold but the US automakers are headed for some kind of collision
between higher materials costs, oversupply of vehicles and not enough
buyers.

Japan's economy is likely to rebound in the short term from their brief
recession.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000080&sid=arEcdjGM7by4&refer=asia

But in the absence of the Japanese consumers spanking the plastic which they still seem loath to do, it's exports that are going to hurt particulary if the value of the dollars falls more and us consumers stop buying toyotas...

One supporter of the dollar (probably the 4th largest holder of) in the world currency markets appears to be drying up, or maybe not.

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200502/200502230024.html

This is all sort of a narrow view which needs more supporting research
obviously.

Some URLS

origin of the word asshat

voip wiki


For now I've given up on the ip 500 voip phone, will take the thing home and work on it some more. I'd like to use it with inoc dba, among other things since it's a lot smaller then a normal deskpohone and appears to accept multiple configurations.

Places and things in Tokyo

tdr tokyo

maproom tokyo

tokyo degin and pop culture

inexpensive ryokan in shitamachi neighborhood near ugly ueno park sofitel.

japan today's tokyo and yokohama guide

Tiny Japanese cars

honda life awd 5 door subcompact



honda fit subcompact



honda minivan

HST

Found this:

Hitchi cable 5000 sip wifi telephone

Ok so now that I have this thing I have to figure out how to use it.
The thing to the right for scale is the nokia ass phone, also known as
the nokia 6650, the bizarrely primitive 3g handset (nokia series 40
UI) that tmobile rents to stupid gaijin who have the gall to want
their phones to work in japan.

travel

apricot 2005 koyoto through 25th
26th - am train to tokyo
26th - 2nd in tokyo
2nd - train back to osaka, fly to sf then eugene arrive couple hours
before departure time.
3rd to 4th - Eugene
5th - leave for Minneapolis (IETF)
12th - return to eugene

Indications that the ramen you have purchased may be hot