Photos

We will all be wearing something like this in no more than 5 years. Seriously, it’s positively awesome, just look how silly happy I look.

Your brain is uncannily good at patching your vision so you can eerily “see thru” the screen—soon enough the feeling of obstruction disappears and it just floats magically along. The tiny screen is good enough for text to read and you can apparently browse the web too. You control it through some controls at the headphones. It’s already for sale at some very reasonable $700 here in Japan (online only). So Mannfred Macx!
Oh and I just uploaded a massive 200 photo batch to Flickr, at the end of this set, starting with this picture. If you wonder why this blog has seen so little love lately, it’s because most of my online efforts have been directed to photoblogging—these aren’t just pictures, I title each one with a brief summary of what I was thinking when I shot it or what it makes me think. It’s a strange style but it suits me and I hope you like it (you’ll probably like it, just as for this blog, if you’re more into ideas and stuff than people). There will be much less photoblogging coming though, since I’m focusing all my energies on learning Japanese!

Loved it! Far more than I expected, and almost as much as I love Japan, which is surprising because I’ve long been infatuated with Japan. Truth is I knew next to nothing about the whole country when I arrived.

Being tired from sightseeing we, my sister and I, decided to stay in Seoul the whole week and just try to get the feel of it. Well, it can feel even more urban, media drenched, faddish and dynamic than Tokyo at parts, and yet it is noticeably less wealthy and developed, and most of the city is, while new, astonishingly drab and nondescript.

First, the country’s cheap, all the more so with the exchange rate at that time (exchange rates are changing all the time these days). It’s quite more developed than Mexico yet somewhat cheaper. Compared to Japan is consistently half as cheap. (Though some girl in the hostel, returning from China, complained about how expensive everything was.)

People bump with you, like, all the time and pretty deliberately. While individually they are very friendly, out and about they can be quite rude. Coming from uber polite Japan, it’s pretty shocking. Also, people are far taller than in Japan and while girls are not so prim I think they’re generally cuter. Though plastic surgery is BIG in Korea, particularly one to make your eyes Western looking (“double eyelids” they call them) which, to be honest, does make Asian faces more Western-ly attractive.

I was worried about the food because one previous experience in San Francisco was quite atrocious. It turns out it just takes some getting used to and some introducing. At its best, say, Korean BBQ, it is absolutely delicious. Very agressive tastes, sweet, sour, salty and spicy jumbled all together. There are street stalls everywhere, very Mexico city like, and many of them sell cheap, awesome snacks.

As for technology, flat TVs are indeed everpresent and so are PC bangs (web cafes), full of surprisingly decent machines and cheap as dirt (less than a buck an hour). The mythical 100mb web was fast when you downloaded but quite unimpressive when you were browsing. Cell phones, like in Japan, are not that impressive, though the average cell phone is indeed high above America’s, the best of the Canadian/American crop, full-keyboard BlackBerries and the iPhone, seems in my opinion better than anything I’ve seen here on the streets and playing at phone showcases.

Most interesting of all was all the history and analysis I read. It was exhilarating arriving at a country and not knowing even how to say yes or no, thank you or please. Even more disconcerting was not knowing anything about the country other than that the south was a rising economic power while the north was on the Axis of Evil. So I plunged into several history and analysis books, The Koreans one of the best, and emerged a newly minted Korean buff. It was surprisingly enlightening, there’s nothing like being in the place to pique your curiosity and there’s nothing like being internally motivated for so much history and facts to start to make sense.

Photo set:

Tokyo suits me. It’s just as enthralling, crazy, frenzied, urban and media-saturated as I expected. But it’s also a marvelously liveable city. Public transport is excellent. The streets are safe to a degree I didn’t think humanly possible (with millennia of uninterrupted experience, Asia far outclasses the West at organizing huddled millions). The skirts are short (by anatomical necessity thighs are the Japanese cleavage). The people really are unfailingly polite and graceful. The food’s amazing and there’s a little cheap restaurant at every corner. On top of it all, I find it surprisingly cheap (some disagree though and my only experience spending my own money is from SF, which is as expensive as it gets).

To be sure, I still miss San Francisco, the feeling at ease in a language and culture I own and love, the tangibility of the web, startups, the singularity. Never before had I been so clueless of the language or felt so markedly foreign. On the other hand, I’ve found a language and a culture I’m just as intrigued by and EAGER to own and love. And as for feeling foreign, you need the help of so many people and infrastructure to get by every day, and it all works so smoothly and organically most of the time, that soon enough, in an unsettling way I hadn’t experienced before, you just feel a part of the city, a cell in a huge organism.   

I haven’t yet tried the mythical 100mbps broadband speeds (it’ll probably have to wait till I get my own place), but even my hostel has far faster and more reliable web than at Mexico so I’m content for now. Neither have I tried a local keitai (cellphone), though to be honest, what I’ve seen has been quite underwhelming. I’m sure they’ll have incredibly fast data speeds and you can indeed watch TV or pay the subway with’em, but far as I can tell the iPhone’s still head and shoulders above them in terms of usability, design, elegance, interface and screen. That common refrain that cellphones here are 10 years ahead of the States is (or has become) quite misleading.

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve realized coming here though is that Asia is for real. I had never entirely believed the reports of its boom and bloom but if Japan’s any indication, Asia will indeed be the driving force behind the 21st century. Everyday something new makes me think of all the BILLIONS of lives that are going out from subsistence farming to this—and I’m happy, it really is one of humanity’s most breathtaking successes, inconceivable in its scale. There’s energy in the air in a way I had never felt before, the oldest world becoming the newest one as it reinvents the West. And this is comparatively staid Japan, I can only imagine what China or India or South Korea might be like at places.

I was frustratingly sidetracked with my hard drive collapsing and then with the incredibly time consuming, stressful but mercifully successful process of recovering my data, but I’m back on my digital feet again with barely a hiccup. There’s still some prior commitments to attend to (family websites…) but soon enough I shall do nothing but learn Japanese and craft up web experiments!

In the meanwhile, new pics on Flickr with lots of captions!

One day in Tokyo and I already know the answer to one of the main questions that set me around the world. The answer is yes, THERE IS at least one city I like at least as much as San Francisco. I’m in love.

(Unfortunately, the prospects of being a free agent here even slimmer.)

Pictures of it all in my Flickr Japan set.

Ah, these are going to be some exciting 5 months!

...with only a broom stick, a wire hanger, and a roll of toilet paper—fear not!

(MAKErs are a bunch of 1st-world pampered playing at 3rd-world make-do ;)

I still remember how impressive Lehman Brothers’ New York headquarters were…

I went to Adaptive Path’s 7th birthday party last week and was completely at a loss at what to do. What does one do at a crowded party when the music’s too loud to talk and you don’t know anyone? How do you approach people? I’m new at this being social stuff and this was definitely above level—I couldn’t even start one conversation. Anyway, there were free tacos and the paintings in the gallery where quite cool—I loved the one above (which reminds me a lot of Permutation City).

I live in Foster City, in a two-bedroom apartment that I share with Mauro, a friend from high school who moved here a month before me, and Felipe, a Peruvian personal chef. Mauro and I rent from Felipe, whose wife and kid just left to Peru. We got this place just a week after I came and we’ve liked it a lot. It’s right next to a beautiful lake, it has a balcony, a gym, a laundry, a pool (though it’s way too cold), tennis and volleyball courts, and lots of grass all around (with ducks!).

Foster city is also one of the nice, affluent parts of the bay so we definitely got lucky. Best of all, we’re very well located on a micro and macro level. Micro, the library, the beach, Safeway, Costco, and all sorts of malls (ethnic, fancy, and bland) are no more than 5-7 minutes away. Macro, we live close to the center of the Bay Area: Stanford & Palo Alto are very close, San Francisco is a half hour away, and even San Jose is some 45 minutes away. Parking is not a problem nor is it security.

On the negative side, though it’s worth it, it is somewhat expensive (we each pay nigh 600 dollars per month, utilities included) and so we’re moving the next 15th to a new place that’s very close but for which I’ll pay 500 dollars per month and I get to have my own room (while Mauro will get to live in the living room and enjoy the cheapskate life he craves :). Virginia Woolf famously talked about the importance of a room of one’s own for female writers but it applies just as well to programmers (as Joel Spolsky once argued to my then disbelief).

So things will be even better (and cheaper). The one thing I wonder is whether I shouldn’t be rather living inside the throbbing, bustling City itself instead of the bland yet convenient and charming suburbia. My chief concerns are cost and how to have a car in the parking-less city (I don’t want to end up isolated in San Francisco itself, many interesting things happen outside it). Any suggestions? Should I take the plunge into the overpriced, rough city or enjoy my cheap, gentle suburban life?

These days I barely even think on religion but yesterday I was skimming Dawkins’s wonderfully readable book, The God Delusion, when I found this quote and laughed out loud. It has nothing to do with physical abuse and all to do with psychological abuse. And the saddest thing about it is that it is true in its parody—the main shackles that bound us, the main horrors that prey on us, are the ones within.