The Shibuya Hachiko exit at night.

Shot taken with the A5403CA mobile phone.

In a recent post, Robert takes through a nice tour of the Kanda/Jinbocho area. He’s got me wanting to go there now, especially to the Tokyo Random Walk design bookstore! And that Saboru cafe looks excellent (I think he’s mentioned once wanting to bring me there). In his words, “a great place to go and forget about the ebb and flow of time.”

This looks like it’s going to be really nice.

“The exhibition, Sound x Vision features more than 20 leading creators in the realms of both sound and visuals. Developed from the theme, ‘Media Harmony’, the exhibition will be held at cultural institutions in 4 major cities of Japan.

Date: 9/11 – 12/12 2004
Site: Sendai Mediatheque (Sendai), YCAM (Yamaguchi), Laforet Harajuku
(Tokyo), Grafmediagm (Osaka) and more.

Participating artists:
Cornelius(JPN)/Buffalo Daughter(JPN)/Funkstorung(GER)
Rechenzentrum(GER)/Alva Noto a.k.a. Carsten Nicolai(GER)
Snd (UK) / Jan Jelinek (GER) / So (GER)
Patrick Pulsinger (Vienna) / Enlightenment (JPN)
Motohiko Odani (JPN) / Naohiro Ukawa (JPN)
Groovisions (JPN) / Marok [Lodown] (GER) / Meso (GER)
Dextro (Vienna) / TRICO DESIGN LOVE ! (JPN) and more.”

Link via LDK.

I forget to mention it, but I recently got a Gmail beta account (thanks again, KS). The big features are that you get 1GB of space for your stuff, and that since it’s from Google there are advanced search features. Haven’t played around with it that much, but I was mostly happy to get one because it’ll be nice for Yuko, who tends to use her webmail accounts (that are always full) to transfer her reports. Looks like it’s got Hotmail beat.

This made me laugh. My mom gets a mention in this TIMES & TRANSCRIPT article on hair stylists.

“High-profile women like MP Claudette Bradshaw, MLA and Tourism Minister Joan MacAlpine, former Lieutenant Governor Marilyn Trenholme-Counsell, Assumption Life executive Odette Snow, Atlantic Lottery’s president Michelle Carinci, and Royal LePage owner Carla Bouchard, just to name a few, all go to men to get their hair done.”

The Neo Sitting Room cafe in Hongo, near Todai.

I’m thinking of finally implementing categories in the site. Might make it easier for those of you who are only interested in certain aspects of what I cover here. Also, each category would have it’s own RSS feed, so you could just subscribe to the feeds you like (and there’s also a possibility that some of these feeds will be syndicated somewhere, but more on that later). Here is a list of categories I quickly thought up. Any comments or suggestions are very much welcome.

• Design – Anything to do with design.
• City – Happenings in the city.
• Magazines – New magazine releases.
• Music – Album reviews and such
• Ramen – Goes without saying.
• Events – Gallery shows and the like
• Meta – To do with this site.
• Life – Personal raves/rants.
• Anime – About the shows I’m watching.
• Art – This might often end up being with Design or Events.
• Architecture – Mostly from my TB.Grafico pictures.
• TB.Grafico – The daily pics I post on the site.
• Books – What I’m reading, or want to read.
• Film – What I’ve watched, or want to see.
• Technology – For the geek in me.
• Cafe – Places to recommend.

Waste away the hours by having a look at Japanese designer Yoshimaru Shin’s superbly titled YOSHIRUMACHINE site. Seems like he’s involved in the organization of quite a few events, like a recent one for the band Tennis Coats (and their label Majikick), and an upcoming one (July 18) at Uplink Gallery for 360records’ Miroque. Credit for the info goes to Hanada Kinya.

That title alone is probably going to kill my bandwidth allowance, if the top 10 searches leading to my site this month are any indication:

1. samurai champloo
2. samurai champloo torrent
3. russian sex
4. samurai champloo torrents
5. lolitas
6. samurai champloo download
7. big lips
8. porno
9. champloo
10. samurai champloo wallpapers

I should probably change the name of the site to Champloo something or other, and start hosting all the episodes here. Give the folks what they want! As for “russian sex,” that’s probably because of the comment spam (they did a real job recently on poor Patrick’s site). “Big lips” and “porno,” well, it must mean something… I’m surprised our dear BoA hasn’t made the list, as her thread is still alive and well (and again, sorry to disappoint you guys, but I’m not her).

But let me not disappoint all you SAMURAI CHAMPLOO addicts. As I initially wrote, I love the show, and also hope that the torrents keep on coming. With the recent death/disappearance of one of the major anime torrent sites, it seems like things have been a bit quiet lately. As far as I know, although the show is still airing weekly on TV, there are only 2 episodes with fan subs that have been released. In the meantime, I need to get to that new episode of PARANOIA AGENT that Paul found for me.

Oh, and a bit of trivia for ya: champloo is a word from Okinawa that means stir-fry. This actually makes quite a bit of sense, when you see what director Watanabe Shinichiro is trying to do with the series by mixing hip-hop elements within the traditional samurai environments. Also, the main character is from Okinawa.

Update: Scratch that, I’ve just watched a fan subbed version of episode 4.

A while back I moblogged and blogged about going to the Danish Posters exhibit at the Ginza Graphic Gallery. It was quite nice, as you can tell by some of the pics here.

Shots taken with the A5403CA mobile phone.

Seems like the site has been switching back and forth between MT and WP because I didn’t really delete my MT installation, thinking I’d keep it there so that I can revert to it in case of any problems that I might encounter. Problem is, as a lot of people probably get to my site through Google and such (and because of some browsers’ cache), they were getting to the old site, and when they posted comments, it would create the index page again, but in MT. I’ve deleted the old site now, so if you happen to try posting now and it gives you an error message, just refresh your page. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: I’ve also cleaned things up, and for the first time this page validates for XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The geek in me is getting a kick out of this.

One of the newer Nihon University buildings in Suidobashi.

Shot taken with the A5403CA mobile phone.

Yuko lost her mobile phone the other day. Well, she didn’t exactly lose it, she dropped it in the huge fountain in front of her library at Todai. It was impossible to retrieve (it’s quite deep), and so we had to get her a replacement. After some visits to Bic Camera and Sakuraya, we ended up getting the same model as mine (it’s now selling for half the price), in white, at an AU shop. The fun part about this is that she can show me how to do things, now that she’s completely read the manual (she’s got a thing for instruction manuals, loves them actually). She’s been showing me a few tricks I never knew about. Also, as I got bored with Arkanoid, I’ve now developed an addiction to Tetris, which I hadn’t played in years.

Just a quick note to announce that the site will be switching from using Movable Type to WordPress either tonight or tomorrow. This won’t affect readers of the web version of the site, but I’m posting this here now while still on MT for you RSS feed users, as those will change. The following are the new feeds, including a new Atom feed, that will only become active when the site makes the switch: RSS, RSS (Excerpts), RDF, and Atom.

And for those wondering, I did get the blog by email working by using the following plugin.

Update: The move is done. The site is now powered by WP. I haven’t moved the moblog and TB.Selecao yet (they’re still running on MT), as I want to wait and make sure everything is fine with the main feed. If you encounter any problems, please let me know.

We were about to go to this ramen shop in Suidobashi, but as we got there we found out that it was a fish-based soup, a taste I don’t really care for. Ended up going to a Freshness Burger across the street. We decided to walk to Ochanomizu to come home, and I spotted a couple of nice cafes that I’d like to visit sometime (can’t remember their names though).

Shot taken with the A5403CA mobile phone.