cat /proc/claus

I have recently fell in gastronomical love with this fungus:

It is called Eringi in Japanese, or “King Oister Mushroom” in english — wikipedia tells me it is originally a mediterranean fungi, so I’m a bit surprised that the Japanese name is simpler. It is deadly simple to prepare - just slice it, fry it in a pan with a bit of oil, adding salt and black pepper, and it develops a rich taste not unlike that of white meat. Very little work, and I can get big chunks of it in the 24h 100 yen store near my apartment, which means that at least for a while it will successfully replace sweets (and maybe even ice cream?) as a midnight snack.

After a surprisingly punk week, I took the Friday to do some much cleaning in my apartment. While moving stuff around in my room, I found a incense set that I bought ages ago (perhaps when I still lived in the other apartment? I don’t quite remember). A set of aromatic candles, an oil holder, and some sandalwood oil. After finishing cleaning, I decided to try to use them - the sandalwood oil gives off some wonderful aromas when burning, and the oil holder looks really lovely when the candle under it is on.

I don’t know why I forgot about those for so long. I have this memory of trying to use this oil holder, to very catastrophic results, but I can’t remember right now what went wrong about it… If you don’t hear from me in a day or two, it is because I managed to burn my house down ;-).

The thing about aromas, the guard who stays at the Yaoi gate at Tokyo University always uses this absolutely wonderful incense in his work place. Now that I have found my incense burning stuff, I might go and ask him what it is. And just to end this post on a geek note, sandal wood will always remind me of the sandalwood box, one of the items from Lord British which is needed to finish Ultima V (The only Ultima I have never finished).

PS: Tomorrow is a Geocacher’s meeting in Tokyo (or, more accurately, in the Showa Memorial Park). The price is a bit expensive, but I’m really curious about meeting many people I only knew from usernames and log book signatures!

After about three weeks of pretty good weather, it is raining again in Tokyo. I have a love-hate relationship with the rain, which includes much more hate than love, actually :-/. Walking out on the rain, with an umbrella over my head, makes all those blue, depressing feelings and thoughts assault me. I can’t really go by bike, so I have to take the train (and spend money), or walk all the way to school, and get my feed wet and my socks ruined. The only time I like the rain, and at those times I really like it, is when I can afford to stay at home, reading a book, enjoying the sound and smell of the rain outside from the safety of my roof.

By the way, yesterday I finished reading “Salt: A World History”. It is a good book, full of interesting information. But even as a non-fiction book, I felt it could have used a “conclusion”, “summary” or something - the end of the book just came really abruptly.

Anyway, today I cannot afford to stay at home and read. I have to go to the university to help fixing the study space of the new Post Doc student. Which is about the only thing that I really need to be at uni to do - most everything else I can download to my laptop and do here, but I’m not really feeling like studying at home today - maybe because of the rain, or because my home is a mess.

Of the stuff I could download and do here at home, I have the translation of the Robotic Science survey paper - the person I’m collaborating with asked me again today when I’m gonna finish it, and in fact, it has stopped for at least three weeks now I’m kinda losing my hopes with this one - maybe I’ll have to pull the plug on it. I also have to port my recently submitted paper to a smaller format to a japanese conference. I have a bunch of experiments to start for the next leg of my research. My professor asked me also to find a new application for my methodology. I have two journal papers to review. And last but not least, my mid-term thesis defense is still sitting in its corner in my desk, eyeing me hungrily.

Gah.

Recently I have become much more familiar with Tokyo’s electronic neighborhood Akihabara. A few months ago I would have problems finding the Star Kebab I liked so much (a small turkish shop for kebab based sandwiches), and I would have to run around the place three or four times whenever I wanted to find some used game or particular computer piece. But now I can orient myself much better around there.

This is probably because on the past week I have been to Akiba 3 or 4 times - each different guest from Hospitality Club of course wanted to go there, and since I can get there by bike, I would usually follow them and show them around. Then I went a few extra times when Anna and Bonnie were here - Bonnie wanted to hunt for junk shops to try and assemble new ideas for her design products, which I found really cool, and Anna had a broken notebook which took many visits to different shops before we could finally fix it.

Today I was there again, this time to buy this Wireless Headphone I had seen a few days ago for a very cheap price. This dodgy shop in a back street had this stall with 10 or 20 units, and I thought I could come the next day to pick one up. Turns out that if I see something really cheap in Akiba I should buy it right away, because when I went to check it today it was already gone. But while around, I found this cool model shop where they had a rather big section on Ghibli models - and they were pretty cool ones, large mechanical clocks with the characters of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies doing different things. The shop was in the underpass behind the Glass shop near the JR Denkigai entrance.

And then we get closer to the post-a-day goal

I was talking to a friend who was couchsurfing in my place these days. She said she doesn’t like Skype, because since it is mostly free for the caller/callee, there is this semi-obligation to talk to the other party, all the time, for a long time. According to her, phone calls and letters cost money and effort, and so the communication becomes less forced, and more important. She has similar dislikes for e-mail.

I don’t think I fully agree with her regarding Skype and E-mail, but for some points I see where she is coming from. Myself, I have been noticing something similar in the social network Facebook. I started my account on facebook a few months ago, and my inicial idea was to have it as an outlet to messages to my day to day flesh friends here in Japan. While at first I resisted a little bit, eventually though, many people whom I have only a passing acquitance to made it to my contact list. While there are positive points of having a wide variety of people in your social network, it does change the way I see the network, and how I interact with it.

Mixi has adressed this issue a bit - you can set “levels” of friends, and set up certain information to only show up to certain levels of people in your network. But thanks to social engineering, I wonder how effective this would actually be. All you need is one “friend”, who is closer to someone you don’t really want hearing your rants than she is to you, for her to quickly spill the beans to your “friend”, and hell break loose again.

I know, there is no expectation of privacy in the internet, but that does not prevent me from lamenting it.

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On another, and lighter note, today I saw “Whisper from the heart” “Mimi wo sumaseba” again. That is a small and simple movie that always strike a deep chord into me. Every time I see it, I find out new things, like a good old book, and I also feel myself reflecting about what I want in my life, and how can I get to it. This seems an appropriate moment to do so.