May 20, 2009
Wednesday 2009-05-20
USS Arizona Memorial

Dave and Risa at the USS Bowfin (we didn't go in though)

Alana and Jana in a conning tower

USS Arizona

USS Arizona

USS Arizona
After the normal morning work and coffee routine, we finally got moving and headed out to see Alana, Jana, and Dad. The plan: to go to Pearl Harbor and visit the USS Arizona memorial. We got there a bit before noon, waiting in line for about five minutes, and got free tickets to the 12:30pm visit to the memorial. It was really great that everything there was free: parking, and the Arizona memorial and museum. If you had the time and the money, you could pay extra to visit a restored destroyer and a submarine, but we didn't think we had the time. I would like to go back and do that some day though - it looked really interesting. I got Risa a Japanese guided tour and we hit the museum up for the introductory movie and boat ride over. The memorial is really nice, although it is a bit hard to tell what you are looking at. There is a diagram in the museum that makes it really clear, but we didn't see that until we got back. I'm really glad that we did it - it is a really interesting piece of living history.
I wonder how Risa felt, we talked about it a bit, but not in too much depth. It was very strange for me when I visited Hiroshima, but I definitely think it was worth it and am glad that I did it. I hope that Risa feels that same way.
Hotel Viewing

Hotel hopper group at the Royal Hawaiian

Relaxing at the Moana Surfrider. We kept coming back to this centrally-located bar. :)

Ron and Dave

My drinks don't normally have umbrellas in them, but we are entering into the rainy season in Japan now...
After the USS Arizona, we headed back to Alana's hotel and then took care of some business: I played tech support to Dad, and also made reservations for dinner the next night. We also ate the PB&J sandwiches that Alana had prepared in the morning. They were Risa's first PB&J sandwiches, and Alana was bit disappointed that she had to have somewhat stale sandwiches for her first ones, but it all worked out in the end.
A few hours later our friends Ron and Michelle arrived. They had just flown in, and were staying at the same hotel. Since Ron is the architectural superstar, he had some hotels on his hitlist that he wanted to see. We commenced with a hotel lobby viewing party. We ended up at the Moana Surfrider, a hotel that is right on the beach and has a real history attached to it. We got some light snacks and drinks, then split out.
Risa was interested in getting a bit more to eat so we stopped by at The Big Kahuna (some sort of bar / restaurant) and got a drink and some onion rings there on the walk back. It wasn't nearly as interesting as the sports bar (Legend's) that we had visited before, but it did have a kind of commercialized Tiki-bar atmosphere. I really should find a Tiki-bar while I'm here, since I like the Tiki-bar TV podcast, despite not really "getting it".
Then back home and some sleep.
May 19, 2009
Tuesday 2009-05-19
Did some work in the morning, and in the afternoon my family arrived. Dad and both sisters. We met up with them at their hotel and then went to get something to eat. The closest place that I saw on the way in was an IHOP, and since we were all hungry and didn't want to have to make a big production of finding a place, we went there. I also happen to really like pancakes, and haven't had many since moving to Japan, so IHOP it was. On the way in we were accosted by a big pancake ("Charlie") and he gave us some coupons that we used on the way in. Charlie was pretty cool as far as pancakes go.We had some time making sense of the menu, and I went for a Rooti Tooti Fresh and Fruity (strawberries.) A while later we saw Charlie trying to get into some door. He was having a tough time because he was about 4x wider than the door. He eventually turned sideways and slid in that way. Surprisingly, he came back out bearing our pancakes! I didn't actually get a shot, but it was very funny. It looked like pancake cannibalism.
Not sure what else happened that night, but we made it home and got some sleep. The rest of the week people start showing up and things start to get busier.
May 18, 2009
Monday 2009-05-18
Up early, I did a bit more work. I got some coding done and got a build off an running before rushing out the door - I'm a bit curious to see if it worked, so I hope I can spend a bit of time looking at that tonight.
Anyway, we made it out the door at about 7am. We had to be at the place at 8:45am for the check-in, and it is about an hour or an hour and a half to the ranch, so we should have been ok. I punched everything into the GPS and we looked good, but it was putting us there at about 9:15am. Shoot. So I tried to go a bit quick. It took me about an hour to realize that the GPS unit was reading the time an hour fast - probably something to do with daylight saving's time. Well, we didn't get pulled over, so all's well that ends well. We even had a bit of time to stop at 7-11 and get a coffee. Risa got a Spam Musubi. Cool. She said it was good.
Up at the ranch we were about twenty minutes early. So pretty good, all told. The horse ride was very nice. I'll write a bit more about that later.
1.1 Horse riding at Happy Trails in Hawaii
So I set us up with a ride at Happy Trails on Oahu, a nice little ranch up on the North Shore. I think Risa has done one of these horse riding things once before, and I've done one out in Texas. It is generally really nice: get on a horse, and ride around for an hour or two. Enjoy the view, enjoy riding on a horse, and have a nice time. Maybe your butt gets sore.
I don't really have much else to say: I really liked the company, we had a great time, and it was a lot of fun. There is at least one other place on Oahu that does horse rides, but it sounds to me like they are a more touristy place. This place was small, and the people were very friendly.
1.2 Shrimp (lots of) at Romy's Shrimp

Romy's Shrimp Shack

Garlic Butter Shrimp

Peeling shrimp: what a mess!

Fugu on the beach. Whoah. This can't be safe.
We stopped for lunch at Romy's Shrimp. We had shrimp. Lots and lots of shrimp. It was very good, but a lot of work: we had to peel it ourselves. Our hands were just a mess by the time we were done. It was very nice though. I don't think I'll need shrimp for a while though.
After that we drove along, and stopped at a random beach. Really nice, great waves. The north shore looks like it has some great beaches. I found a Fugu washed up on the shore. Crazy.
We then headed to the closest shopping center to try to find some swimsuits. Risa doesn't like the one that I brought so I need to get one that meets her approval. We didn't find anything at Ross (did get some cheap shorts and beach towels though) and now I am writing up the events of the past few days at a Starbucks. We'll head out in a bit to look for more swimsuits.
We eventually found a nice suit for Risa at the Hip Up store on Waikiki, and then went home for a relaxing evening for sleep.
May 17, 2009
Sunday 2009-05-17
At any rate, we headed out for lunch. Risa was being difficult, so (because of that?) we ended up at McDonal's where I got to try a Big N' Tasty, a burger that I always liked. Interestingly, they came with pineapple slices also. Neat. I thought we could get pineapple instead of french fries, but not so: you get both! It would probably be a lot healthier if they just let you do the swap right up. It feels kind of stupid to pay extra to have them not give you the fries though.
After lunch Risa was feeling a bit better. We bought some cheap flip-flops at ABC and walked down around on the beach. After a bunch of walking we went back to the hotel, and took a break. I ended up dumping sand all over the place. I should have checked out my rolled-up pants before laying down for a nap.
For dinner I had noticed a Chili's not too far from our hotel, and Risa wanted some Americana flavor, so we headed that way. A bowl of chili and their "make your own dinner" was enough to stuff the both of us. We wanted to check out a "local bar" so I spied a sports bar down a side street. I was interested in catching the end of the Lakers-Rockets series, so we tried that place. It was a small little place, but the people were having a lot of fun. According to the owner (I assume) that day was the place's 15th Anniversary party, and for that reason the beers were only $3 each. Very cheap! But also because of that the crowd, which had been there drinking since about 5pm, was totally nuts. Seemed like a nice group though. I chatted with a guy, Ike, for a bit. He apparently does something with Harley's. I've got his card around here somewhere…
We made it home by about 11pm or so, and to bed by about midnight. By now I had almost completely recovered from my cold, so I finally got a bit of a break there. Earlier in the afternoon I had looked into options, and not wanting a repeat performance of the morning's inexplicable animosity shot at me, I made an appointment to go horseback riding up on the north shore. That means we needed to hit the road at about 7am, and get up at around 6am. But, I made plans so hopefully that means a less hostile day.
May 16, 2009
(Another) Saturday 2009-05-16

Two beds for the newlyweds

Awesome view from our balcony

Big Wave Beer for Risa. Good stuff.

When I had to work, I did a lot of it from the balcony, like this. It was great.
I had arranged for a rental car, not a great deal, but a good enough one through National. We got our choice of about eight cars, none of which Risa really liked, but in the end she took a Chevy HHR. It is a pretty nice SUV-style PT Cruiser knock-off. I probably should have just sprung for more and gotten a convertible, which is what Risa was after.
We drove over to our hotel, the Aston Waikiki Banyan, but we were renting for two weeks from a Japanese-oriented company so the check in was on the 3rd floor instead of the normal place. We sorted all that out and headed up to our room on the 36th floor. It has an amazing ocean view. The place is a bit old - the building was built in the 70s sometime - and it looks a bit old. Most of the electrical fixtures in our place for example are loose. I get the feeling that it isn't the kind of place that Japanese people would like. Usually even older places are better kept than this place. It isn't bad though; just a bit on the older side. For what we are paying - which isn't really all that much, especially given the amazing view - I'm quite happy. Risa doesn't want to use the kitchen though because the pots & pans & plates are a bit dirty. They look fine to me though.
The strange thing is that we have two beds. Separated. Which is a little strange for a newlywed couple I think, but whatever. Turns out it wasn't much of a problem because usually we were exhausted when we got back and just fell asleep anyway. Also, the beds were pretty average, not really so great. And only two pillows. And small ones. There were some more up in the closet, but I didn't even bother to pull one or two down. Too tired.
I was pretty tired, but went out and did some shopping, and arranged to get the broadband option: a broadband over powerlines (a Motorola Clear Wire modem) solution. It wasn't wireless though, just one wired connection. Good thing I had bought an Apple Airport Express the other day. Set all that up and we were good to go. Well, I had to change to a different outlet than the one I originally chose because the outlet was loose and the internet connection was bad. Not surprising. It isn't the best connection, but works well enough.
I also picked up some local beer (Big Wave) for Risa.
In the evening we went out for a walk, checked out the beach, and got some dinner at a Korean BBQ place. It was very good, but not cheap. (Although, now on the second and third days I've noticed that as a theme: things are not cheap here!) I have some pictures of the food around here somewhere (Risa likes taking pictures of food) but it was just regular old good Korean BBQ, so I won't bother to put those up.
We headed home, and I fell asleep immediately. Risa took her time, but I have no idea what she was up to.
Saturday 2009-05-16 Going to Hawaii
These are my notes from our Wedding trip to Hawaii. I plan to post up a blog post for each day and backdate them so they are on the correct date in the calendar. I also notice that I don't really write interesting posts, and stick mostly with just a "what we did, what we ate" kind of approach. That's too bad; I would love to write more interesting, introspective, and emotional entries, but it turns out that I just naturally do a more simple and boring documentation.
We left for Hawaii on Saturday evening, 2009-05-16. Sadly, the day before I started to get sick. At about 3pm in the afternoon I came down with a splitting headache, after having a sore throat all morning. This was bad because I don't like being sick, airplanes usually dry my throat out as it is, and worse, the first two cases of H1N1 Influenza spread by person-to-person contact between people who had not been out of the country had just been confirmed on the news. I was worried that they would not let me out of the country. Or back. Or something.
That evening was pretty tough, but at least we didn't have to leave early. Our flight out wasn't until about 9pm. We did some pre-travel shopping, packed up, and just barely made it to Shinagawa in time to catch our Narita Express. In the end though we made it. The trip through the airport was as usual, but nobody pulled me out or accused me of being sick (even though I was.) We made it on the plane though, no problem.
We flew ANA, which was nice. Very good service. The flight was about 8 hours. I couldn't sleep, but I did watch Gran Turino, a very good movie. They were running a whole Clint Eastwood marathon, with a bunch of his movies. I spent a lot of time playing "Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth" - I only made it through the first two missions. It seems like a pretty good game, but I don't really like real time strategy games. I want to take my time and plan out moves. Basically, I like turn based games. Still, I guess I have to get dragged into the 20th century at some point or another, so I might as well try to get used to the real time strategy paradigm.
The landing was really tough: because of my cold I was congested, so changing altitude was really tough on me. I thought my head was about to explode, or at least my eardrums. I did manage to get through it, although my nose did start bleeding a bit. Great. When we landed in Hawaii, happily, nobody pulled me over for being sick. Maybe I didn't look as bad as I felt.
May 14, 2009
Awesome Three Wolf Moon Tshirt review at Amazon
I totally need to improve my reviewing skills. These great reviews (the positive and the negative one) and lots of fun. And what a cool shirt.May 6, 2009
Shamus Young's PixelCity Screensaver

Pixel Ctiy: a procedurally generated city screensaver

Wireframe mode

Colored Block Buildings See all the screenshots of PixelCity that I took.
Get the screensaver from Shamus Young's site.
May 5, 2009
Review of the BBC Series Survivors (2008)
I recently watched the BBC Series "Survivors", which is apparently a remake of a 1975 - 1978 British TV show. It came out in 2008 an concerns a virulent flu outbreak that kills off all but about 1% of the population. Put this on the TV and see if you can convince people that it is a documentary on the current state of the H1N1 "Swine Flu" epidemic going on in Britain. You probably won't get too far with it, but it really is a pretty scary presage of what could happen. I enjoyed the series quite a bit. It has a lot of the flavor of 2006 TV Series Jericho, itself an end-of-the-world descent into de-civilization via not disease but nuclear war. Both deal with similar issues and are a lot of fun. They also both remind me of J. Michael Straczynski's Jeremiah, a TV series about a post-nuclear world where ... Hm, I get the feeling that this could go on a for a while. So I'll cut it out now. Anyway, I enjoyed Survivors a lot. It has apparently been renewed for a 2009 season, so that is something to look forward to (along with the BBC standby of Doctor Who.) I usually try to put in a few pictures because I know that people won't read blog posts without them, but I didn't manage to get any pictures this time. Bummer. Just imagine a very empty Britain, like something out of Children of Men, or 28 Days Later or ... wait, I started doing it again.May 2, 2009
Setting up an AFP (Apple Filesharing Protocol) on Ubuntu and a Firefly iTunes Media Server
One of the things I've been meaning to do for a while is set up my Ubuntu machine to share out the music I have on it. I run Amarok on the machine and love it, but that doesn't help when I'm super lazy and don't want to reach over for the linux machine keyboard when I have a perfectly good laptop in my lap*. (* Of course, I do have a VNC server set up on the machine so I could VNC in and start up Amarok that way, but it somehow feels like cheating.) First step in getting the machine to share out music: set up an AFP server do the other machines in the house (mostly Macs) can see it. That was a lot easier than I expected: just follow the instructions on this post. Great! That seemed to work well. I think. I already had samba up and running on the machine and I am guessing that is what is currently showing up in the Finder. I'll check it out on R.'s machine when I can pry her away from it. The one thing that I did do was to change ATALK_MAC_CHARSET to 'MAC_JAPANESE' and ATALK_UNIX_CHARSET to 'UTF8'. It was pointed out over on this Japanese blog entry that that would be a good idea. I also set up a share for my data folder. I was impressed that this went so smoothly because you need to compile the service from source in order to enable encrypted passwords on the server. It went really smoothly though. Once you have AFP set up, you need to set up Avahi to broadcast the server. This guide is a really nice explanation of how to set up Avahi. So once that is done, you can move on to the next step in the process: and set up Firefly on the system. That setup was also really smooth, with the exception that for some reason, if you change the default password the service does not seem to work. I have no idea why that would be the case, but do have a vague memory of the same thing happening a few months ago when I set it up. Annoying, but not such a big deal. Once I hit up the webpage for the service, set up the proper directory for the music, and did the scan, the share showed up in iTunes just fine. Nice.April 30, 2009
My first, and last, Kart Racing Experience
So last Sunday the guys at work set up a Kart racing outing. If you drive from Tokyo to Chiba, about an hour and a half from where R. and live, out in the boondocks, you can find a small Kart Racing track. I have never been Kart racing before, but R. has, and when we were randomly in Italy for 24 hours (bad -- or good -- planning on my part, don't ask) we saw a Kart race and R. was just enthralled. So I thought we should join the group and give it a go. It would be a fun way to spend an Sunday evening. We drove out there, taking the really amazing Tokyo Aqualine Tunnel and got there a bit early. I didn't know until then, but R.'s Mini Cooper's GPS unit has a TV tuner. So we watched some TV. Also, it has a remote control. Seriously? It is very hard to get any farther than an arm's length away from the GPS unit in that car even if you tried. But still, a remote control. Wow, we are lazy. Anyway, we had a total of 19 people. That means we had to split into two groups. The fast group, and the slow group. We determined who was in which group by a time trial. Before that we had a 15 minute practice period. I have never ridden in these little carts before, and I'm bad with motion in general. I get car sick easily, I hate landing on airplanes, basically everything at Disney Land or any of those amusement parks makes me throw up, most elevators make me a bit quesy... So sitting a few inches off the ground, zooming around and making hard turns is probably not something that would be good for me. So on the practice laps I was very slow. I wasn't sure if what would happen on the turns. I was worried that taking one at high speed would mean I would flip over. Scary. By about the tenth time I got passed on a corner though, I began to figure out that maybe I wouldn't flip over if I was going a bit quicker through the corners. So on the time trial I gave it more gas, and promptly spun out. My best lap time in the time trial was the second worst time in the whole group, so I was solidly in the second, slow, group. R. made it into the first, fast group. The slow group was first. I finally decided that I might as well try to gun it as much as possible. The race was set up for 22 laps. By the third lap I actually figured out that I basically only had to let up on the gas on two corners. I started actually passing people. I went from second to last to first. With five laps to go, I thought I had it won. Then I spun out and fell back to 3rd place. I was just barely able to make it to first place with 3 laps to go. I am honestly really impressed that I managed to do that. Unfortunately, the last five laps or so I was starting to feel pretty ill what with all the cornering and skidding and fast moving and whatnot. So basically after I finished, took the picture with the flag, I got out and felt like throwing up. I didn't though, and I managed to get some water, and about two days later I was feeling find again. R. did well for her group, came in 4th. As the winner of the slower group, my best lap time was only better than about half of the best lap times of the people in the first group. All told though, it was a lot of fun. Except for the sick part. I'm glad I was in the second group and not the first, but I know that is not something I will be doing again.Esther M. Friesner's The Sword of Mary: A Sequel
April 26, 2009
iPhoto 09's Faces Feature
I recently bought iLife 09 and have been using the Faces feature in iPhoto a lot. The Faces feature will look through all your pictures and identify people's faces. Then you can put a name to the face, and gradually iPhoto learns to spot pictures of that person. It is an amazing feature. Facial recognition has been a promised feature from Artificial Intelligence since the 80s, and this (along with Picasa's Name Tags) is the first really commercial product that I have seen facial recognition in. Since I'm a computer scientist by trade, I'm well aware of how these kinds of things work beneath the covers, and while there has been some press coverage saying that this feature isn't ready for mass release, I disagree. I think it does a good job, has a great interface, and more than that, is really fun to use. I find that once I put a name to a face, I want to go through and see what other pictures I can find that the person is in. I also have been adding metadata to my pictures in some way (going back to file name for really old pictures) that show who is in a picture, so it is interesting to see how well iPhoto compares to my tags. Once you have added a bunch of names to faces, iPhoto has a nice cork-board of faces that you can click on to find all pictures they are in, or have iPhoto show you more pictures that it thinks they might be in. Adding names to faces is very easy. When you see a picture, you hit the "Name" button and then get a picture like the one to the left. People who have a known name have their name below their face, and for people whose name isn't known you see either "unnamed" or iPhoto asking "Is this X?" where X is someone you have already named. It is really impressive. iPhoto does a very good job of noticing faces - it doesn't always notice all faces, but it gets most of them - and it does a good job of suggesting names when it thinks it might know who someone is.
It is also easy to scan through a lot of pictures and quickly confirm or refute iPhoto's guesses
It knows faces, but not necessarily human faces
iPhoto is also wrong sometimes, and guess that strange things might be faces. In the middle picture on the right, names have been blurred to protect the innocent and stomach-face-bearing people. Also, iPhoto doesn't know when a face is a human, or whether it is just a face-like object to sometimes hilarious results.
Things that disappoint me about this feature in iPhoto: there should be better intergration with the Address Book. After a software update, iPhoto will suggest people from your address book, which is great. It does this based mostly on email addresses to keep track of people, so you can add someone's email address from address book and you won't get duplicate name suggestions. I wish that in address book though that it would know about the faces in iPhoto and you could get the faces gallery on the Address Book entry. As it is now, you have to go into iPhoto yourself, pic a picture, then drag it over to Address Book. You also lose the nice face cropping that iPhoto does for you. That's too bad. I hope that in future updates that put that kind of functionality into Address Book.
Another issue is that iPhoto 09 adds Flickr and Facebook support, but at least in Flickr it doesn't look like they send the extra faces meta-data. They should make a Flickr "note" around the face with the name, or at least put a list of the recognized people into the photo. As it is now I feel like I have to go in and manually type the names into the description field, which is exactly what I was trying to automate out of the picutre. (uh, no pun intended.) I haven't checked if they do that for Facebook yet. Also the upload interface isn't as nice as what I have been using, Connected Flow's Flickr Export. That has a lot more options and gives you a much better update on upload progress. I'll probably keep using it since I prefer it - you can create new sets with a description and it just generally is more powerful.
Otherwise I am really happy with Faces. It is a fun way to spend time going through your old pictures. I'm afraid that now I'm addicted to trying to name everybody that has ever been in one of my digital photos...
April 15, 2009
OSX Password generator script
http://www.codepoetry.net/products/passwordassistantFound a nice script to open up the OSX password generator window. Might come in handy if you need to generate a bunch of passwords. I'm still looking for a good replacement password safe for OSX / linux / windows (preferably one that works on all three.) I have been using Keyring (an open source Palm application) for ages, and still have my Treo 600 as basically a portable password store (but I don't have it with me at right this moment, so this script will come in handy.)
April 14, 2009
Sakuracon 2009
By pure chance our hotel was next to the Seattle Convention Center. The week before was the big comic book convention, ComiCon. The day we left Seattle was the first day of the Sakura-con, an anime-themed convention in Seattle. Apparently. R. and I had a few minutes before leaving, so we popped into the convention center and took some pictures. She was too shy to take the pictures, but really got a kick out of seeing everyone dress up. I took all the pictures, and I asked every person if it was ok. Everybody was super excited to get their picture taken, and they almost always posed in some way appropriate to their character.Click to see pictures and ... read more (747 words)
Psalms of Herod and Architects of Emortality
Psalms of Herod
This flight out I didn't read many books. I only started one, Esther Freisner's "Psalms of Herod", but I didn't even finish it on the plane. I ended up finishing it on the road sometime. I didn't really like the book. It is set in some unspecified point of time in the future of a very heavily Christian-influenced world, perhaps somewhere in America based on how the language is written. The main character is a woman, Becca, who starts to question the social order that she lives in. The roles of women are strictly defined, and highly controlled by the paternal authority figure. There isn't much that a woman can do on her own in the world of the book. Something peculiar has also happened to women biologically so that they are only fertile twice a year, which comes into play with some of the rituals that are set up for them. The book starts slowly. Very slowly. I wasn't sure I would finish it because I was having a lot of trouble getting into it. Once things started going a bit quicker I was drawn in enough to finish off the last half of the book fairly quickly, but it was a close call. I don't like the society described in the book, and while it is very reminiscent of "A Handmaid's Tale" and is trying to warn against a strong role of religion in society it just isn't something I'm interested in reading in fiction for fun. You don't have to go far in our world today to find religion and oppressed women in non-fiction, which is what I would prefer to read if I wanted to take up the subject. Still, there is an interesting science fiction story here, and using science fiction to explore areas of the human condition is one of the things that can be done well in the genre. The book itself doesn't have an ending. Very disappointing. It is continued in the sequel, "The Sword of Mary", and the way things end in this book is just terribly disappointing. Do not pick it up unless you have the second volume on hand if you intend to actually finish it. It also has some very adult themes (sexuality, oppression, rape, child abandonment, etc.) so you might to give it pass based on content also. I do have the second book myself, since I had the series recommended to me from somewhere (a thread over on tor.com I think?) and am interested in finishing it, but I can't really recommend the book. Here is a review that seemed to like it though.Architects of Emortality
From SFO to Seattle
R. and I were in Seattle. Click "read more" to see a bunch of pictures and words about it. read more (1775 words)March 26, 2009
Bishop Allen at the Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco
The first band was the Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band, who were ok. Next up was the Miniature Tigers who I really enjoyed. I will try to pick up some of their music when I get a chance. They had one song, "Japanese Woman Living in my Closet", about the incident that made the news a while back about a Japanese woman that was caught living in a man's closet for more than a year. I thought that was kind of funny. They have a nice melodius song, a bit of humor, and are perhaps a bit sarcastic, or at least twist convention around a bit for matching lyrics and song.
I really enjoyed paying $15 and seeing three bands. That is a real bargain compared to Japan, where I usually have to pay $50 and I see only one band. Michael was saying that he thought $15 was a bit steep, and I was just super excited about how cheap it was! I guess you really get used to the local market.
Bishop Allen was really good. I hadn't had a chance to pick up there new album, Grrr..., until the concert so I didn't know all the songs they played, but they also had some great songs off of their debut album Charm School (a great album) and The Broken String
(another good album.) I recommend going to the Bishop Allen website itself and ordering from there - you will probably get the same price but more of the money will go to the band than if you buy from other places. They also sell the one-EP-a-month albums there, which are pretty fun. I think they are all generally of very high quality.
The music was great. They had a lot of energy, and were tight. There was a nice sound system, and the crowd was great. They were really into it. The people near me were actually really into (well, one girl in particular) and was dancing around like mad. I was doing a fair bit of dancing, jumping, and screaming myself. I hadn't seen these guys since they played my PhD thesis defense party (well, it was actually the closing show for the Tank in NYC, but that isn't how I remember that day) three years ago, and I've really missed the music scene I used to be pretty connected to when I was in NYC. The girl who was next to me even tried to get me to do some swing dancing type stuff (and I was awful at that when I was trying to take a few lessons back in Dallas) and (since this is San Fran., and she was pretty butch, probably of the feminist persuasion) forced me into a few spins. It was lots of fun. Apparently Bishop Allen has gotten pretty big when I wasn't looking because they really packed the place and people were really going nuts. I worked up a pretty good sweat myself. Two encores. The second was a spur-of-the-moment "Ghosts are Good Company" with Christian and Darby. Very nice.
After the show, I stopped by to chat with Christian and buy the latest album (gotta support the bands you love!) and then caught a cab back to the Caltrain station. I didn't make it back to the hotel until 1:30am, but it was totally worth it. I only wish that R. would have been able to make it. I'm sure we'll have a chance to see some of the bands that I love in the future too, but I haven't been able to convince BA to come to Tokyo yet. Well, that isn't true - Justin and Christian are really receptive to the idea, but they haven't been able to get any of the touring and booking stuff to happen. I'm starting to think that I should talk to some of my friends that have connections in the industry to see if I can get someone to invite them out. I would love to see them at Summer Sonic or Fuji Rock...
So if you don't know about Bishop Allen, you clearly haven't been hanging around with me for too long. Go hit up their website and buy Charm School - it is a great place to start and an absolutely amazing album.
Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen's Wheelers
A visit to the National Art Center in Tokyo

National Art Center Tokyo

National Art Center Tokyo Sign

National Art Center Tokyo with plates in trees

National Art Center Tokyo interior
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