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梅はその日の何を逃す

Remember that. Similar to "An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away", a Plum a Day wards you from the dangers of the day.

Kagome Shokudo

Last night, R. and I sat down to a nice evening movie. We rented a few things at the start of the weekend, and I was actually pretty excited to watch a Japanese-only movie with her, one of her choosing. She chose Kamome Shokudo, a Japanese comedy set in Helsinki.

The big surprise for me was that it had English subtitles. While I really wanted to listen only in Japanese, when the subtitles are there it is just too easy to read. I was glad for them too; some portions of the dialogue are in Finnish.

The movie is really nice; a slow-paced, dialogue-based ambiance-drama. It explores questions about living in a foreign land, which is of course very interesting to me, as a foreigner in a foreign land. A critical claim of the movie is that Japanese people prefer Japanese food (and possibly that Japanese food is the best kind of food.) That actually comes up a lot here, and I am sure that R. would back it up. Since I like Japanese food, this isn't really a problem, but it is always a little surprising to me when the idea of having say, Italian food for lunch and then also dinner is shot down. I don't actually consider pizza Italian food, or spaghetti for that matter, but that's ok. I'm pretty used to eating Japanese food twice in a day by now, so I guess I've become used to things here. I do sometimes want to have American food once or twice a day. Guess I have to start cooking more.

There is also a character in there that is the typical Japan-obsessed kid who studies the language a bit and tries to speak Japanese whenever possible. It is interesting seeing that character portrayed from the Japanese point of view.

An interesting parallel they draw is between the Japanese and Finnish cultures, portraying Japan as busy and stressful while Finland is laid-back and easy-going. The discussion around that concept, and why the characters thought they would be better off in Finland is interesting.

It was a fun movie; I recommend it.

A relaxing evening on the balcony

Yesterday, for the first time in a long while, the weather cooled down enough in the evening to go outside on our balcony. R. and I live in a small Tokyo condo in a large highrise. We are about halfway up on the 14th floor. One of the really nice things about our place, I think anyway, is the view we get.

So sitting out on our balcony, sipping a beer, we played a game: "What can you see?" I had to answer in Japanese, and R. had to answer in English. It was a very fun and relaxing way to pass the hour (we clearly are not going rapid-fire with this thing.)

So, what can we see?

The Monorail. Coming and going. I love watching the monorail roll past our place. We look down on it, but you can surprisingly see very clearly into the cars, and have just about enough time to wonder what is going on in the lives of the people as they commute from one place to another on the past's impression of the mass-transit-system-of-the-future. Also, about every one in five trains is the "Pokemon" train with cool pockemon paint schemes. The swooshing sound the monorail makes as it goes by is strangely soothing. Monorail is the same in English as in Japanese.

A four-lane highway, two coming, two going. This is kind of annoying because it can be loud. We are far enough away that it isn't too bad, but we don't have our windows open generally because of the noise. Late at night people zoom by in loud cars playing the real-life version of "Tokyo Drift". A surprising number of the popular-in-Japan motorcycle-sized scooters have ground effect lighting. They are fooling nobody. Highway / kousoku dourou 高速道路.

A canal. Just beyond the highway and monorail we have a canal. It is a nice canal. Fairly wide, calm looking. I get lost staring into it watching the motions of the ripples on the surface, and the reflections at night can also be mesmerizing. Sunset and Sunrise are also nice. R. called it a river, which you can do, but I usually go with Canal. In Japanese kawa 川 (river) or more correctly unga 運河 (canal.)

Bridges. Crossing over above-mentioned canal. 3 over our canal that we can see, and then one massive bridge off in the distance, the Rainbow Bridge. I once did a run through Odaiba with a leg over and back on the bridge. It is a nice bridge, and big. World-class sized.

Boats. More specifically, party boats known as Yakata Bune. Not too far from where we live, these things cast off for a night of drinking, food, and fun cruising around Tokyo Bay. They are particularly fun to watch as they slowly float by because they have lots of lanterns and lights that make nice reflections in the water. English: Party boat, Japanese Yukata boonay.

A big park. Across the canal there is a large park. Lots of trees and a nice jogging path. I usually run 3-6km weekday mornings there. Park / Koen (公園).

Traffic lights. About 4 of them. Shingo (信号).

Cranes, the boat-unloading variety. Many of them. Right beyond the park is Tokyo Bay. Lots of boats come in and unload their cargo there. So we have a kind of industrial view that I waffle over. I really like the industrial wasteland Bladerunner-esque vision of the future (from the past) but also would like to have a better view of the bay. If only we were 10 more floors higher. I kind of like the cranes though. In Japanese and English: crane.

Tokyo bay. As above, we don't have the best view of it, but it is there. Tokyo Bay / Tokyo Wan (東京湾).

Buildings. Skyscrapers. Highrise towers. Lots of them. Mainly from Odaiba. In Japanese: bi-ru. We don't have a view of the main part of Tokyo, but we do see a lot of city lights and stuff. It is nice. Lots of blinking red lights.

A Ferris Wheel. It is very hard to see, because we are looking at it side-on, and it is behind some other cranes and lighted things, but there is a large ferris wheel on Odaiba that lights up in different colors. When it does its colorful flower impersonation you can tell that it isn't a normal crane or tower, but is something more festive. In Japanese: Kanran-shya (観覧車).

Airplanes. We live pretty close to Haneda, the Tokyo domestic airport. So they swing a bit low a few miles out. We can't hear them, but they are fun to watch. In Japanese: hikouki (飛行機).

A giant Gundam statue that was built over on Odaiba for a limited time. There is lots of coverage of this over the web, and you actually can see it from our place if your eyes are very good or you have some binoculars or something. It just looks like a big blur of light at night. The same in English as Japanese: Gundam.

There is also a lot of construction going on, so we have some of those things to watch as well. Construction in Japan is pretty interesting. They create lots of jobs for people. For example, right out in front of our building they were working on the power system - laying new wires under the road or something. There were about two people doing the work, but five people directing traffic for them. Also, one or two robot sign-waver guys. In the US, they would have just set up the cones and stuff, and not worried about people to direct other people around. Over near where I work, there are two people who just stand at the start of the construction site and say "Sorry for the inconvenience" every day. All day. That is all they do.

Best wishes to Sasha and his family

I was shocked to hear today that my ex-officemate and friend, Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, was hit by a falling tree branch in a freak accident in Central Park yesterday. I hope for a full recovery.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/man-hit-by-falling-tree-limb-shows-signs-of-recovery/?scp=1&sq=sasha%20blair-goldensohn&st=cse

Sigh... But hooray for rimuhosting.com's backups!

So this morning Mail.app on my Mac started to do strange things, like say "Can't delete message server does not allow operation (moving to folder "null")" or something like that. I don't really remember. Things looked strange too - for some reason my trash can icon for my main email account had turned into a world icon, and all the folders were duplicated under that. Strange. So, I did what any under-caffeinated, not-thinking person would do at 6:30am, I deleted the folders.

Then my entire mail server disappeared. After I clicked the "this will delete files on the server and is a non-recoverable operation, and are you really sure you want to do this? Like, seriously? McFly?" button. Maybe that wasn't exactly what it said, but it was close.

So it looks like for some reason Mail.app got confused, thought my entire mail hierarchy was supposed to go under the trash can (I vaguely remember this happening once before and I know that I needed to set the trash can up using the "Use this folder as..." function) and aliased things there. It also was syncing and re-downloaded everything to be under the trash can, which was what clued me in. Along with not being able to delete email.

So I don't know what happened there. But I did wipe out my entire email account. Which goes back to maybe 1999 or so. That is bad.

I run my mailserver on a virtual private linux box from Rimuhosting.com, with whom I've been very happy.

Anyway, they take weekly snapshots of the disk image, and have an easy process to restore to a backup image (they keep two it looks like.) So I restored to the backup image. I probably lost a blog post or two (maybe not though, I haven't been writing much lately) but anyway, I regained my many years worth of email. So hooray for rimuhosting! And boo for me.

Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Series

Over the past few weeks, I have been using my OLPC as an ebook reader again. I really like the OLPC as an ebook reader. I did already post a review of Bradon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Final Empire, which I really liked. I received it as part of the Tor.com free ebook giveaway which was great. This was the first time I had ever heard of Brandon Sanderson, and I really enjoyed the book. Since then I have heard a bit about him, mostly because he has been tapped to write the final book in the (unending) Wheel of Time series now that Robert Jordan has left us. I actually read the first few books, and then started to lose patience with them.

I really enjoyed the Magic system in Mistborn, and wanted to read the follow up books. I don't think it is possible to read the first book and not want to continue on to read the next two. So I decided to buy the books in my preferred format (digital) and see if I could get them to work on my OLPC.

Why do I prefer digital books now? The main reason is space. I live in Tokyo with my wife, and we have a small apartment that we bought. It costs a ridiculous amount of money, and has very little shelf space. So I am trying to get digital versions of all my books, except for a few that I have nice leather-bound versions of (Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Feynman Lectures on Physics.)

So I wanted to get digital versions of the second and third Mistborn books. I picked up the second book, The Well of Ascension, from Fictionwise.com. It cost $14, which is annoying because it costs $7.99 on Amazon.com, which includes a physical real book made out of dead trees. I got the final book, The Hero of Ages, from mobipocket for $14 because the fictionwise version was $23 or something like that. Of course, the real physical version of the book is $7.99, so in both cases I paid more to get what absolutely positively has lower creation and distribution costs from the physical versions. I hope that Brandon Sanderson saw a higher percentage of royalties from the ebooks versions, but I am pretty sure that isn't the case.

Anyway, both ebooks came in .mobi versions, and have DRM on them. That is bad because I can't read files with DRM on my OLPC. In general, DRM is used to lock a book to one reading device. That is a problem also because you need special software to read the DRM'd files, and in twenty years I do not have confidence that the proper software will be around. So I removed the DRM from the books. I was really happy that worked. It looks like I might have lost some data in the conversion process, (a few line breaks, one of the books lost italics) but they both still read very well.

And now, on to my very short review of the second and third books: they were great! I am sad now that I have finished reading the books because there is no more for me to read in that world. I do plan on reading the other books that Brandon Sanderson has written, and also have been checking his website, which has deleted scenes, and commentary for the chapters. It is very interesting!

The characters in the book are very interesting, and the magic system is really great. I love a nice system that is logical and makes sense, where you get a feeling that the world is logically consistent. Brandon Sanderson has thought a lot about those issues, and it really shows up in the books. Highly recomended!

Perl on Mac OSX does not like ~

This caused me to lose about thirty minutes of my precious "not working, not sleeping" time (currently at about two hours a day.)

I was trying to run some file test operations on some files in OSX using Perl (one of the newer ones, 5.10 maybe) that have spaces in their names. In general, I absolute hate how processing files with spaces is so difficult. One thing I like to do is change the IFS (internal file separator) in bash while doing things with files. This blog post shows a really nice example of doing that.

Anyway, I was doing something basically like:

if (-e $file && -f $file) { ... }

for $file where $file was something like "~/tmpLibrary/covers/Sanderson, Brandon - Mistborn.jpg". It was failing all the time. I was also getting mystifying "failed trying to stat file with newline in it" error messages when I knew the file name had no newlines. I still don't know what that was about. Unfortunately, for files that I knew existed and were regular, the above test was failing.

Why?

After much experimentation, lots of googling (there was nothing on this) I figured it out. And remembered that I knew this was a problem at some point, and must have forgotten. Perl barf on "~/tmpLibrary/bar.jpg". It will work fine with absolute file paths: "/Users/devans/tmpLibrary/bar.jpg". Oh. That is strange, but I guess I can understand that. There isn't any real reason that Perl should expand the path with the user home location. I wouldn't be surprised if it, and would be (was!) surprised when it didn't, but whatever.

So, remember that kids. Don't count on home directory expansion. Not that I could find anything about that (or spaces in filenames, which work just fine) for perl file operator tests, but there you go.

And I spend my free time doing stuff like this for fun. I am a sad, sad man.

OLPC Screen, Mary Lou Jepson keynote

I have a OLPC, and I really love it. I have been using it a lot lately for ebook reading. The most remarkable feature of the computer is the screen. It is a normal LCD display (a bit lower resolution than the ones that are popular on most computers now) but if you press a button, it jumps up into a high resolution black and white only display.

Even better, if you turn off the backlight, it becomes a reflective only high quality black and white display.

It looks beautiful for text, and is sunlight readable. The Kindle screen is better, but the OLPC screen is still very, very good. I really want to buy a netbook with one of these. The only thing that is lacking on the OLPC is the keyboard. So a normal factor (10" or so) netbook with a good keyboard and this screen (still with the tablet style function so we can do ebook reading) would be completely killer for me.

Go watch this video which has an interesting keynote by Mary Lou Jepson on the OLPC. Interesting. Nice. The comments are crazy though. Really you need to see the screen (and perhaps use it, try to read on it) to believe. It is very nice though. Maybe not a revolution, but something I would really like to be see become commercially available. (Keep watching Pixel Qi I guess?

Stripping DRM from Ebooks

I found a good post on how to remove DRM from ebooks at http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-strip-mobi-and-prc-ebooks-of-encryption/. They have a link to some python scripts that can remove DRM from some forms of ebooks as long as you know the PID for the book that you bought.

This morning I purchased Brandon Sanderson's "The Well of Ascension", the second book in the Mistborn series. I found the first book during Tor.com's launch ebook giveaway, (you can get it too!) and really enjoyed the book. I wanted to read the rest. (Apparently, I might not be the only one.) So I checked online, and I could get the second book for about $14 from Fictionwise. Sounds great. The only problem is that the books they sell there have DRM, Digital Restrictions Management. I am not able to read books that are encrypted with DRM on my preferred ebook reading platform: FBReader on my OLPC with Ubuntu installed on it. So I decided to try to remove the DRM. That would restore my rights as the owner of the book to archive it, so that I can read it in a month, six months, five years, or twenty years. As long as I ensure that I have the regular unencrypted file and software to read it, I should be fine.

If I did nothing about the DRM I would only be able to read the book on the computer that I used to download it. A 15" notebook. It isn't really all that portable.

I was able to strip the DRM as outlined in the link above, but the resulting mobipocket file came up empty when I tried to load it on FBReader. Bummer. So I tried another approach. I took the unencrypted mobipocket file, and loaded it up into the OSX Stanza ebook reading software. Then I saved it again as an ePub file, a more open format. That did open ok in FBReader, and now I can read the book that I purchased on any hardware that I like.

I am a bit disappointedthat I needed to pay $14 for the book. I would have preferred $7 or so since I do not get a physical copy, but ebooks are actually more convenient for me. On Amazon.com the book is actually $7.99 for a new, physical copy (or the Kindle copy, which I am not able to buy, but could use if I could after stripping the DRM) that includes lots of costs for printing, shipping to warehouses, distribution, whatever. Ebooks are a lot simpler when it comes to distribution: you ship them over the internet, with perhaps some up-front computation to encrypt the book using some sort of DRM scheme. Costs would be lower without the DRM. Customers would be happier because things are easier to use. People who want to buy books probably are not the people that are going to go and upload the files to the internet. People who just want to get the book for free can already do that. I can't see how DRM is really helping the industry, but that is the standard for books right now.

Thankfully, it is now possible to get non-DRM'd music files, from Amazon or Apple's iTunes store (but you need to make sure the stuff is iTunes plus still I think?) Hopefully video will go the same way.

I would really like to get a Kindle but I won't do that until I can get one that works in Japan. Until then I will make do with what I have. Even once I get a Kindle though, I would like to make sure that my books do not have DRM on them so that I have control of my files, and what I can do with them is not dictated by a third party (regardless of whether or not I think that the system is reasonable enough, and non-intrusive enough to use.)

BTW, you can use the MobiDeDRM if you get the Kindle PID (type '411' from the Setting menu, according to this blog post.)

Review of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Final Empire

I got Mistborn: The Final Empire in Tor.com's ebook giveaway. I hadn't heard of Brandon Sanderson before, but I really liked this first book. I read through it in about three or four days, which is pretty good for me because I have not had the time to just read for fun lately. I usually grab reading time on the subway and whenever else I had a few spare minutes during the day.

So, what did I enjoy about the novel? It is a fantasy novel, which is on my list of fun genres. The characters were very memorable. Most importantly it has a self-consistent view of magic, that seems to have a logical and sensible set of rules. The story also does not seem to be set up to be saved by a bunch of kids who have unexplained powers; there are smart people behind the plans to save the world that know what they are doing. There is also a young kid in there, but it seems reasonable enough.

Also interesting is the set-up of the story and the "big evil", which is not just a bad guy doing bad things for the sake of it. Read the book. It is both fun and interesting.

So much so that I've gone and bought the second book in the series. And plan to buy the third.

Tokyo Giants vs Yakult Swallows and Cosplayers

On Sunday, Risa and I met with my friends T. and M. for a Tokyo Giants vs. Yakult Swallows baseball game. T. is a huge Giant's fan, and I've gone with him once a year to see a game. I was excited to go this year because I hadn't seem him and his wife in quite a while, and it was the first time I would go to a baseball game with my wife.

We got to the stadium pretty early. Strangely, there were lots and lots of people dressed up in anime costumes. So-called "Cosplayers". Risa and I ran into the American Version in Seattle where I commented that I thought that American anime nerds were pretty low, lower than the Japanese ones because it isn't even their culture. But Risa countered today with her appraisal that the American nerds are at least learning something about the Japanese culture (outside of their own) while the Japanese nerds were just nerds. She's got me there. (Of course, I have to confess that I myself am a huge nerd, and probably incurable.)

Anyway, I snapped a few shots, but I didn't really feel like trying to do the full question and shoot treatment. I did talk to one group, who didn't seem all that happy to talk to me, and found out that there was a … "thing" for "people" that "dressed up" like "that", and it was not related to the baseball game. I was pretty clearly not in the target audience (you were either someone in a costume, or an overweight balding man with an awesome DSLR taking pictures of the cute girls in costumes, and I didn't fit either of those categories.)

Anyway, on to the game.

The Tokyo Giants are my favorite Japanese Baseball team. I don't really like baseball. I'm a huge basketball fan, but don't really care too much about baseball. I enjoy a game with friends though. I'm a Giant's fan not by default, but because I have a good reason: I hate the Hanshin Tigers with a fierce passion, and that means I am by necessity of Tokyo Giant's supporter. I definitely have to see a Giants - Tigers game sometime soon. Anyway, I have enjoyed all the games I've seen live.

This game was no exception. Before I knew it, it was the 7th inning. The Giants demolished their cross-town Tokyo Jinguu rivals, who have an open-air stadium right near where I work. I prefer Tokyo Dome though because it is a dome and as humanity has developed better and better technology I am all for using it to keep us out of the rain and humidity, which Tokyo has in abundance, especially in the rainy season, which it is now.

In the end, the Giants won 7-2 (wow!) and we went to dinner, and drank a lot, and then went to a bar and drank more.

The next day at work was difficult.

Kindle DRM Complaints

I am really interested in a kindle. I plan to get one as soon as they release a version for Japan. That might be a while, but that is ok, I can wait. The wireless feature is just killer and I would hate to import one and be without it.

I am a bit worried about the Digital Restrictions Management on it - you should read Stallman's prescient The Right to Read if you haven't - but generally think the Kindle offers a reasonable tradeoff. I would vastly prefer no DRM, but Amazon's approach is good enough for me.

Still, I am glad to see other people complain about the issue. See, in particular, this post about DRM on the kindle, the followup, and an open letter to Jeff Bezos on DRM.

In the meantime, I have upgraded my OLPC to a newer firmware and version of Ubuntu. It can sleep now so it should be more useful for me for reading ebooks, but I haven't finished the setup (getting Japanese to work) and testing FBReader. I'll post on that once I get all that set up.

I hate Fujitsu (AKA upgrading the hard drive on an artificially limited Fujitsu Machine)

My mother-in-law's laptop is "broken". The laptop is a Fujitsu FMV-Biblo MG50S, if you check the page there you will see there are a few others with similar specs. I took a look at it last week. A quick check of the hard drive (first on list of things to check because "I can't put any more pictures on it") and that is the problem: 30GB on a 30GB drive. Nice.

Summary: I hate you Fujitsu. Marketing droids added a hidden something somewhere (looks like it was hiding on the MBR) that made Windows see only 30GB of an 80GB drive, and when I did a clone to a new hard drive (160GB) it showed up as 30GB. So to be clear: when cloning a drive using CloneZilla, PNG, or Acronis True Image and the like, if you copied the hidden MBR your new 160GB drive would show up in Windows as only 30GB, even though the Disk Utilities management program would show the full disk size.

Absolutely crazy. Click the "Read More" link to read more about this insanity. For the impatient: do not copy the hidden MBR and you will be fine. Also, I now prefer Clonezilla to PNG. And the GParted boot CD rocks. Also, I hate Fujitsu. If you need to buy a new laptop you really should only consider Apple (coupled with a TimeCapsule) or ThinkPads. For netbooks, do whatever you want but back them up somehow.

read more (1450 words)

Emacs longlines-mode

I have been a fan of auto-fill-mode (and flyspell-mode for that matter) for a long time. Unfortunately, when I think about it I much prefer free-flowing text. The problem with auto-fill-mode is that it will throw \n characters into your text file when you need to wrap lines. Most email clients will automatically wrap text, and will do it at the size that is best for the user. Or at least, that is the theory.

Anyway, I just discovered longlines-mode. This mode in Emacs will wrap long lines (hence the name) but does not insert \n characters into your text file. Also, when you copy text, it copies as long unbroken lines. So this is really nice. I wonder why it took me so long to find this mode?

It makes me wonder what other marvelous mysteries emacs is hiding from me.

Using NTT DoCoMo's P906i as a tethered bluetooth modem for internet access with Mac OSX 10.5.7

Friday 2009-05-29

The plan is to leave at 6:30am to get to the airport by 7:30am to catch our 10:30am flight back to Japan.

We were about ten minutes late leaving. Not bad! We got gas, returned the car (which took extra long due to my rental car exchange / return mixup previously) and got to the airport. We did a bit of shopping, and then headed to the gate.

Things went pretty well. The flight back to Japan went a lot faster than I anticipated. I spent some time reading, watched "Robots", played some of the Battle for Middle Earth, and napped a bit. It really went much quicker than I expected though.

On the flight back Risa was feeling pretty bad, and had had a cough for the past few days. We filled out our H1N1 mandatory health questionnaires and when we got to Narita were pulled out of the line to consult with a doctor. He gave Risa the OK because apparently Hawaii is on a list of places that isn't problematic for them, and they made her put on a mask. I don't really think that is going to help too much, but whatever. They tried to put a mask on me, but I declined.

We made it home via the usual (longer and arduous) route, and started some unpacking. Risa went to her parent's place to get dinner, but I stayed home because I still wasn't feeling too well from the flight myself. That happens a lot lately; I don't feel like eating after flying. I was able to watch three more episodes of Battlestar Galactica while she was gone though, which was great, and then I went to sleep.

Trip complete!

Thursday 2009-05-28

Wednesday 2009-05-27: Big Island

Tuesday, 2009-05-26

Today we had one major thing on the schedule: go snorkeling.

I don't remember what happened in the morning, but I think I slept in a bit. We eventually got on the road though before noon headed up to the North Shore. I had wanted to drive up the Pali highway, so we headed that way. It was really nice. We were driving in the Mustang with the top down. About halfway up the mountain, the rain started. Ooops. We pulled over and I put the top up. Lesson learned. Then we stopped and checked out the pali highway scenic overlook which is really pretty cool. And headed on our way around to the North Shore. My goal: the Turtle Bay Resort which had a pretty nice bay for snorkeling and is open to the public.

Before getting there though, we ran across Giovanni's Shrimp Truck, which Risa had wanted to try since we got here. We tried to find it the previous week, but missed it. It was about 200 meters further down from where we turned around the first time (when we went horseback riding.) It was really good. We got a half-plate, which was perfect for us since I feel like I've only been eating all the time since I got here and I am positive that I am going to explode even if I only have something that is wafer-thin (when nothing here is.)

After that, we headed out and hit the Turtle Bay beach. We rented scuba gear, and Risa went nuts. I didn't really do too well with the scuba gear. I had trouble when my nose and ears were at different pressure differentials, and I also kind of panicked when floating around (seems unnatural) and then when I got salt in my mouth I freaked out. So I went and read, Risa went swimming for a long time. It was good. I finished my book ( Light) and it was a good book.

Then we headed back to Waikiki and got dinner at Legend Seafood in Chinatown. It was good, and now we have a whole bunch of food in the fridge. We won't be able to eat it all… :(

Monday 2009-05-25