Reiko and her dog Lala came over and we had a pretty relaxing weekend. On Saturday we went to Kita no maru park which is very close to the Emporer's palace in Tokyo. I like Kita no Maru because it's fairly open and generally doesn't have a lot of people around.

There were a number of people there making bubbles. They used two long plastic rods with string attached to the ends. The string connected the ends of the two rods formed a loop. When you hold the rods together the string hangs together but when you move the rods away from each other the string forms a loop so you can dip the string in soap, lift the string in the air and open it. The breeze fills the loop and creates a large half bubble. If you open and close the loop properly you can create very large bubbles.

After going home I made some spicy chicken and chicken/gobou salad. Gobou is a type of root which in English is called Taproot. When boiled and eaten it has a very nutty flavor, and goes very well with sesame seeds.

On Sunday, Reiko cooked and made saba. The Japanese form is "Chub mackerel" in English. The way she cooked it is called Miso nikomi (味噌煮込み) which means boiled in miso. Miso which is a fermented paste. It's unbelievably good and versatile and my favorite Japanese food/seasoning. You can make soup out of it, boil things in it, make noodles using it, and even just use it as dip for vegetables or crackers.

Reiko also made meatball soup from iwashi. Iwashi are a type of Sardine called South American Pilchard in English.

Yesterday I attended the second Tokyo Hackerspace meeting. It was the first time I attended such the meetings which are being held weekly now. I have a feeling that more was talked about and decided last week but it was good to get an update on how things were going and what people were interested in with the hackerspace. I was told that more artists and creative folks attended the first meeting but this meeting seemed to have mostly web and hardware folks who were interested in joining the two worlds.

Another development was that Chris Wang (in red below) is working on a prototyping board made exclusively for the hackerspace. He wrote about the meeting on his blog. He also wrote about the boards themselves.

Me and a number of people are starting a new hackerspace in Tokyo. From the http://www.hackerspaces.org homepage:

Me and miwaza came up with the idea (well mostly miwaza) for starting up a hackerspace in Tokyo and miwaza took it upon herself to tell give a 2 minute talk and tell everyone that she thought we should create one. Many people thought it was a great idea and have started moving to get it created. Most hackerspaces have to do with hacking hardware but I thought that a hackerspace could pretty much be used for any kind of hacking. My personal thought was to make it kind of a place where artistic folks could come and make artwork as well. Art hacking if you will. Of course software also falls in this category. Anything having to do with "making things".

There is already a hackerspace in Tokyo called 4ncho5la6 (AnchorLab) which is fairly famous but it isn't an open communal space. It's currently run by 4 guys who run their own companies, but they do have events and create all kinds of nifty stuff which they open up to the public. They event wrote a blog about us. Here are some of 4ncho5la6's creations.

There will be a short lightning talk at the next Tokyo 2.0 on July 13th. so anyone interested is encouraged to attend and listen to the talk. We are also currently accepting members and trying to assess how to get started. Anyone interested should sign up for the mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/tokyohackerspace/ and also put your name at the bottom at http://www.tokyohackerspace.com/.

We are also having weekly meetings. The info about the next meeting can be found here. Look forward to seeing you at the next meeting!

Today I participated in Tokyo Barcamp 2009. From the Tokyo Barcamp website:

Tokyo BarCamp 2009 will be a day of workshops, presentations and discussions on a wide variety of topics related to technology and how it affects our lives.

I was a little skeptical about how organized barcamp would be when I decided to participate but it became very cool and conductive to discussing ideas. It especially gave people a good opportunity to think about the future of the web and the internet and various other topics such as "music in virtual worlds" and "eco living".

Discussions I participated in were as follows:

Mobile Browsers

Mobile browsers and their history and where they may be headed in the future. Discussion headed up by LonelyBob

Natural Language Parsing

A presentation and discussion about parsing language and getting a data in a unified format regardless of language (English, Japanese etc.) and regardless of language parsing method. The presentation was by Kim Ahlström from Smart.fm. He introduced Cereling which is a language parsing unifier/engine he is working on at Smart.fm and they are planning to Open Source. Unfortunately it's also apparently written in Ruby.

Hacker Space

By far the most interesting idea that came out of barcamp was the idea of hacker spaces where folks can get together and share ideas as well as have a space to try new things and experiment. There was a lot of interest in the Hacker Space concept and creating one in Tokyo. We even created a website already at Tokyo Hacker Space.

We also learned that there exists a Hacker Space in Tokyo already called 4ncho5la6 (Anchorlab). Some folks from the barcamp are planning to go out there and check it out. We want to see what they did and what we can learn from them and perhaps collaborate on membership and events. Interestingly, the lab is headed by Daito Manabe who is famous for his "Face Visualizer" video on Youtube.

I know it doesn't look like much but it's the first snow since I came to Japan. I took the photo above on my way to work but it snowed more during the day. I guess it really is about once every two years or so you get a snowfall in Tokyo. It was also a first for my colleague from Okinawa and another from the Phillipines who have never seen snow in their whole lives. They were asking all kinds of questions like, do you use an umbrella when it's snowing? I never have but apparently Japanese people do.

This past Saturday Reiko and I went to the Awaodori Festival in Kouenji with our friends at the Japanese-English Language and Culture Meetup. Awaodori is a type of dance that originated in the Shikoku island of Japan (One of Japan's four main islands) but has become a staple of summer festivals all around Japan.

It's kind of a silly kind of dance with lots of different variations but in it's basic form involves a kind of walking where you put your right arm forward when stepping with your right foot and the same with your left. The patters emerge from that, some involving somewhat elaborate dances with lanterns.

The dancers are followed by drummers, flautists, and small gong like bell ringers. Essentially the beat of the processing dancers is kept up by the percussionists that follow them. I uploaded some movies so you can get the idea.

Anyway, Reiko and I really enjoyed it. It seems to be a Japanese staple summer festival along with fireworks and Obon dancing. Though, being a staple event in the most populated metropolitan area in the world means that the event was horrendously crowded. There was a never ending line of people coming out of the station which gave the police the rather unforgiving task of crowd control and security (in this day and age a large crowd of people is a terrorist bullseye). There were so many people that they had to set up a route for which the people could walk as to not jam up while meeting friends. But there are always those who don't want to follow the rules and go wherever they please without obeying the wishes of festival organizers.

However, managed to keep at least a semblance of a complete group, and found ourselves a nice spot to watch the parading dancers. Japan in the summertime is humid, stuffy and hot, but fun you have drinking and hanging out with friends at the summer festivals makes up for it.

This weekend Reiko and I went to the Ueno Zoo since I had never been there before. And also because I wanted to take her to the Hard Rock cafe since there is one in Ueno and she likes it so much.

First we had lunch at the Hard Rock and Reiko bought me a hat at the gift shop After the Hard Rock we headed over to the Zoo. The Ueno zoo is broken into two parts which are connected by a small monorail system. In the first half we made the usual rounds of the animals there. Reiko particularly likes the Lions. I'm partial to Bats, Elephants, and other less agressive animals. Right after we arrived we were able to see the zoo keepers feeding the elephants fruit and other goodies attached to some bamboo and listen to information about elephants in Japanese.

In the second half there were Giraffes and Alligators but by that time they were starting to bring the animals indoors so our time in the second half of the park was muted.

After leaving the zoo it was hot so we stopped for a bit in a local cafe for some frozen drinks. I took that time to show Reiko the city I was building in the Sim City game on my DS. But, unfortunately, I apparently forgot to put it back in my bag leaving it at the cafe, and have yet to recover it. It's really disappointing that after so many years of forgetting important things that I would still forget something so expensive and important in a public place Given that I bought a matching DS along with Reiko and had many games and saved files inside it's really a physically and emotionally irreplaceable item, and thus puts a damper on the whole weekends activities.