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 con[...]

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 meet[...]

Me and a number of people are starting a new hackerspace in Tokyo. From the http://www.hackerspaces.org homepage: Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects. 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 t[...]

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 esp[...]

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[...]

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[...]

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 mon[...]