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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

Wedding

We got married on Sunday. It was great.

My thanks go out to Eric Han, Ron DeVilla, my family, the Tanaka family, Yuzuna (because she is so super cute), Eric Tschetter, Sayuri, Eric Han, and Tomoko for their translation help, Carl Sable, Jon Evans and Lilly, and everyone that came.

Our cameraman, Kenrick, was great.

Risa loved her makeup artist (Mariko) and our wedding coordinator from Issei company, Sayuri. Otherwise, I have nothing but good things to say about the Kahala hotel. I was amazed that so many friends came from the US. It was great to see everyone. Even those late people (I'm looking at you, Andy! But I love you anyway. I think it would have been strange had you been on time!)

We had a strange mix of Japanese and American ceremony. I know Risa and I ate more than say, my best bud Ron and Michelle at their wedding. So I think that means we are bad hosts. I loved how people gave impromptu speeches, and I knew my sister would cry. I wasn't sure which one it would be, but it was Alana.

I really should have given Carl more time for his palindrome.

We ended up with waay too much cake. But the dinner was delicious.

Did you know that we got married at the Magnum PI Bar? We did.

We were both exhausted by the time it was over.

Saturday 2009-05-23

1.1 Pick up Aiko and Satoko from the airport

I was supposed to drive us to the airport to pick up Risa's bridesmaids, Satoko and Aiko, but instead I spent the morning throwing up, feeling amazingly sick, not being able to sleep, and trying to stop the room from alternating from spinning to punching to my head.

Risa was a bit dubious about going out to drive on her own, but when we visited California a half year back she did some driving and didn't have much trouble, so I figured she should be able to make it to the airport and back. And she did! She did warn me on the way out that she might crash and die, but in the state I was in that sounded safer than me trying to get out of bed.

1.2 Move to Kahala

A few hours later I was feeling somewhat human again (with faint zombie-undertones) and got up and showered. I had a bunch of IMs from people, and managed to even get dressed by the time Risa returned. I think we had a bit of time to recover, and maybe we went out an ate something. I know that we eventually got back into the car, and I took up the wheel. We headed to the Hyatt, where Risa's friends were staying, and picked them up, then went to the Kahala, checked in there, and wandered around for a bit.

The Kahala Hotel is pretty crazy. It is a very nice place (they had pictures of both Shawn Bradley and Kareem Abdul Jabber from when they visited there!) and they have a kind of artificial lagoon in the middle of the property. With dolphins. And Sea Turtles. And other things. It is really crazy. There is also a nice beach and places to eat, a pool, etc. We were only there for two nights but it looks like we have to go back for a bit longer next time. I've been told.

We wandered around the grounds and someone there gave us free Pineapple Popsicles. Score! Also, Risa and her friends hadn't seen a hammock before, and were pretty amazed at them. So we spent some time playing with hammocks.

By 3:30pm our bus had come and picked us up for the Paradise Cove Luau. Lena decided to go there, then we ended up getting a bunch of other people to go.

1.3 Paradise Cove Luau

The bus that came to pick us up was huge - a regular tour bus. There were only the four of us on it. We then drove to the next pick up point, met another bus, and filled this one up. Wow. Also, I called my favorite brother Jon and found out that he was totally waiting at some other hotel. I got him headed in the right direction and he and Lily eventually made it on the bus.

The trip out to the Luau place was about 45 minutes. Most of my friends made it, except for Carl and Cha-Eun, who went to the competing (supposedly much better, but Mormon-run and alcohol-less) Polynesian Cultural Center Luau. That's cool with me: I wanted to go to that one too, but on general principles think people should have the choice of destroying brain cells with alcohol if that is what they want (and what I often do, but didn't this evening since I had to drive.) I also am not sure what the Mormons are doing running that thing; I guess they didn't have enough of an imperial native-dominating experience back in the Missionary era? I hear that the pork is excellent though.

The Paradise Cove Luau is pretty cool. I was glad to see that cousin Doug made it, despite having been to this very Luau multiple times (I think.) He had some good advice on what do to. Generally I think the place was pretty cool.

I really liked Dave's Ice Cream. Surprisingly I have only had ice cream three times in Hawaii. One of them was here, where I got a nice Chocolate and Macadamia nut ice cream. It was good. Then Risa went and made a nice flower bracelet and a really cool headband with her bridesmaids. I tried really hard to translate and keep everyone involved, but I get the feeling that I'm not really a very gregarious guy. I need to work on that more.

We then headed over to the water and watched the tree climbing thing, where a dude totally just climbed up this tree like it was nothing. Then he threw flowers at people. Pretty rude if you ask me. ;) After that we watched a traditional fishing thing with nets. It was pretty cool.

Then I had the bright idea to get some drinks. I got in line. About an hour later I got our drinks and brought them back to Risa and her bridesmaids. The Luau had already started. It was a buffet, and it was good. The pork was amazing. It was very tender (a whole pig, probably more than one) and delicious. The other stuff was ok. The fried chicken was pretty good. I can't believe the pork though - it was great. Lena made me say into her video camera that it was the best pork I had ever had. I said that while eating chocolate cake though, so I am not sure how convincing it was. It was really good though.

Then we had the entertainment portion of the Luau. They had lots of dancing - hula and otherwise. The fire dancer was really amazing. I kept on saying "Sugoi" (Japanese for amazing.) I then noticed that I was speaking Japanese and started to feel self-conscious about it. It was just coming out naturally though. Have I turned into one of those people that thinks they are Japanese? Having Eric sit next to me can make me feel self-conscious.

Anyway, after the revue ended (did I mention that the fire dancer was amazing?) we headed home. Risa fell asleep on the bus. After that I had to drop off Eric, give Ron his pants and Best Man shirt, and pick up my bag from the, uh, … club … where I accidentally left bag back on Friday night. Then I came home and slept the sleep of the exhausted. But not without first noticing that the showers at the kahala are amazing. Also the bed is amazing. And the TV was amazing. Not that I got to watch it. Compare the TV in the Kahala to the one in our Waikiki Banyan condo. Their TV: large, LCD, wall mounting with an awesome swivel mount. Our Banyan TV: maybe a 24" electron tube (I can't believe I forgot what these are called) non-flatscreen TV where the colors are off (the Orlando Magic are green instead of blue) with no remote control.

Friday 2009-05-22

On Friday we had a meeting in the morning with Sayuri A., our wedding organizer from Issei Corporation. They did a really great job. The planning and wedding itself went very smoothly, and we didn't have to fret over many of the details. I highly recommend them if you are looking for a wedding in Hawaii, particularly if you have English and Japanese speaking people in the party. The meeting took about an hour and a half, we wrapped up some final details and went over scheduling. After that we had a bit of time, then Risa's makeup person (Mariko) came over and they did the test-run makeup and hair session.

After that we had a pretty good chunk of time. Risa's family had arrived earlier in the morning and made their way to the Kahala hotel. They had forgotten to buy diapers, so they asked if we could do that. We had a bit of an experience finding diapers, but finally did find them, and headed over to the Kahala hotel. It was my first time to see the place, and it is really nice. They have an actual lagoon type thing with dolphins in it. Also large turtles. And a variety of fish. It has a very nice property, private beach, the works.

After spending some time with Risa's family, we all headed downtown to Chinatown where we met everyone for drinks and dinner at Bar 35. Actually, most people were about an hour late, but we did eventually get everyone together and had some of the great pizza there. It would have been if it wasn't so loud though - I had a sore throat the next day from all the shouting.

After drinks the girls and guys split up for more traditional activities. I made it home sometime past 2am, but had had way too much drink.