Bakafish West

Journey's start

Bakafish — 2007-09-04T06:34:35-08:00

My ship, the Peking Senator was harbored at the Hanjin terminal Berth 53. This is the last terminal facing the Alameda esuary, just across from the now abandoned Naval air station’s main runway. The ship was scheduled to depart at around 6PM, but I asked my parents to get me there early in hopes I could stow my belongings. I tried to take as little with me as I could, but even so, I ended up with two large suitcases, a laptop bag and 4 office style moving boxes bungied to a sturdy folding hand-truck purchased for this trip. I was concerned that there might be a problem with the amount of stuff I was taking, my goal was to be able to transport all my stuff via the train and subway system if I had to as my friends don’t have a car, and they would be unable to meet me anyway. When I was doing some last minute Google mapping of my destination area in Odaiba searching for the nearest train stations and package shipping location, I realized that some of the territory looked familiar, and then discovered that my new home was within a couple of miles of the landing area. This meant I wouldn’t need to ship my stuff at all and that a cab ride wouldn’t be astronomically expensive.

The Internet is here!

Bakafish — 2007-05-18T03:18:48-08:00

I finally have Internet access in my apartment. It took quite some time, both because I didn't get on it right away and because I opted for 100Mbps fiber connectivity. I haven't actually done any bandwidth testing, and I expect that it will be far slower than claimed, but it sounds really impressive right?

Moving sucks

Bakafish — 2007-03-18T20:44:18-08:00

Just a quick note before I go. Tomorrow I will get on the freighter Peking Senator and be offline for the next ten or so days. I was able to get al my stuff packed and moved but it was just as big of a cluster f**k as I expected. My pop rallied the troops and even the neighbor showed up to lend a hand, but I really should have put my foot down and insisted on using a moving company instead of my step brother hope that food poisoning gets better :-/ I still have lots of cleaning and various details to take care of, but the major obstacles got overcome, so it could have been worse. I need to really buy less stuff, moving sucks, things tie you down...

日本へ行きます

Bakafish — 2007-02-23T12:17:30-08:00

やっと日本に住むことになります。三月二十九日東京に到着します。アパートもうあるけど、まだ携帯がありません。もちろん皆さんに会いたいです。

Alzheimer's Lights

Bakafish — 2006-12-03T21:41:12-08:00

My Uncle always called them Idiot Lights, the warning lamps in your car's dashboard. Due to the age and failing health of my car Alzheimer's Lights seems more appropriate. The poor wreck has been lighting up like a Christmas tree. The antilock brake light was the first to go on some years ago. They wanted $3000 to replace all the various master cylinders and control modules to fix it, but I figured I could live without them.

Bullying

Bakafish — 2006-11-06T20:11:12-08:00

I often keep my eye on the news in Japan and there is always the same story. Child, boy or girl, aged 13 to 16, commits suicide due to 'bullying.' It makes an American's mind reel, what kind of horrific bullying could possibly be so severe that a child would take their own life? The Japanese news is always understated, lacking any details but the little that they disclose would probably confuse you.

New Office

Bakafish — 2006-10-03T19:40:57-08:00

I know, it's been a while since I posted. It's been pretty hectic lately, one bit of good news is that I've finally switched offices back to San Francisco. My company announced about 6 months ago that they would be opening a branch office in SF for us folks that had to drive all the way over to Palo Alto. As much as I enjoyed the trip, an hour a day on the freeway at 85mph (135kph) in my stalwart but battered little car wasn't doing much to prolong my life-span. The new commute is one that I'm familiar with...

When produce goes bad

Bakafish — 2006-07-25T18:26:35-08:00

On my daily commute to work every afternoon, I travel through the brackish wetlands surrounding the bay. In front of one of Sun Microsystems's campuses is a marsh reclamation project stocked with native California plant-life. Over a period of months a strange plant caught my eye, as it looked like some kind of giant Thistle that I had never seen growing in the wild before.

Ultimate Shochu

Bakafish — 2006-07-17T17:39:19-08:00

Shochu is a traditional Japanese liquor that is derived from fermented Rice, Sweet Potato, or grain which is then distilled. It is typically quite a bit stronger than Sake, which is (usually) filtered and not distilled. The flavor is heavily influenced by the ingredients, with the rice versions having a purer flavor. On my last trip to Japan I received a very high quality bottle of Shochu from my friend's family, which I chose to save for my birthday.

As is typical of Japanese merchandizing, the packaging was as exquisite and detailed as the product itself. The bottle was made from hand glazed stoneware with silk tassels and a pure cork stopper. This variety was rice based and charcoal filtered to give it an extremely mild and subtle flavor. I shared it with friends at my favorite local Sushi restaurant. When I go to Japan, I make a point of going to a large liquor store that specializes in Japanese alcohol called Shochu Authority. I usually get a kind of fairly cheap Shochu that is flavored with Shiso leaves that I'm unable to find in the US.

MT and SQLite

Bakafish — 2006-07-10T19:28:59-08:00

Several months ago I switched the back end database of my MT installation from a collection of Berkeley database files to a single SQLite repository. The impetus was that one of my symbiotes had been running their own separate installation of MT on my server despite the fact the MT is designed for multi-user support. We were also intent on integrating some of the other sites into the main system.

The SQLite database allowed me to take two separate installations of MT and trivially merge them into the main system. It also allowed Farlops to mangle all his page URI's into the format he had used with an older piece of Blogging software using standard SQL. So to sum up, SQLite good! It's fast becoming one of my favorite new tools.

Photo Dump

Bakafish — 2006-06-02T17:45:29-08:00

This is a page of all the photos me and Yoko took during my vacation in Japan. They were taken using a Canon PowerShot S50 (Japanese Version) in RAW mode and converted to JPEG with Adobe's DNG converter and RAW import plugin for Photoshop CS 2. I did basic hand correction of white-balance, exposure and the occasional red eye effect, but otherwise they are un-cropped or retouched. A gzipped archive of all high resolution images is available here.

Tokyo '06 - Week 2

Bakafish — 2006-06-02T00:39:17-08:00

If you haven't read week one of this travel journal recently, please check to make sure I haven't updated it since the last time you looked. For the pedantic, this is far more than a week's worth of days, but the whole trip was too long for one post. I didn't take as many photos as I should have, next time I will have to be even more disciplined.

Writing out all of this was really challenging. My original plan was to document my trip day by day, but, after spending more than an hour the first day, decided my vacation was better spent vacationing. When I got home I had the challenge of trying to remember what I did for every day of the trip. It wasn't as easy as I would have hoped, and I needed to do a lot of research to get everything lined up. I relied heavily on Google maps which allowed me to find the names of places that I visited and the satellite photos helped me track down a wayward stadium in the middle of nowhere. I helped make sure my recollections where in chronological order by associating weather events, local festivals, and at one point an earthquake, to things I did on that day. Not that anyone particularly cares, I'm just a bit obsessive that way, and it was kind of a puzzle.

My heartfelt thanks goes out to Dai and Yoko, who helped me put this together, planned all of our excursions and always took great care of me in Japan.

Site Updates

Bakafish — 2006-05-30T12:01:17-08:00

I fixed the broken search and TypeKey login bugs. I had moved the admin CGI's to be behind HTTPS and it was using the secure path for all CGI's. I found the correct configuration command to direct MT to use the standard CGI directory for non-administrative tools. I also cleaned up the style sheet a little, but there is a lot more that I need to tweak.

Tokyo '06 - Week 1

Bakafish — 2006-04-20T02:19:12-08:00

I was packed and fairly well prepared bringing $100 worth of Scharffen Berger Chocolate and an iPod full of 24 episodes for Dai. I didn't get all my work completed to the stage I had hoped, but luckily it was close enough to not piss off my boss. I got a good nights sleep on the flight so that I was half way sentient once I got there. My plan to do daily updates was frustrated by a busy schedule, infrequent internet access and a realization that my time was better spent enjoying my vacation :-) read about my first week after the fold...

Favorite movies

Bakafish — 2006-02-26T22:17:34-08:00

I was trying to migrate some of my old website information to the new blog format and decided to start with my favorite movies. I realized that it was impossible to try and list them in order of my preference, I also thought about how out of date some of them were and how my taste has changed over time. I'll have to revisit some of these myself soon, I'll try and find some way to make them available to my friends.