Lotusblog

I am in Geneva.

What a great city. It’s like Japan; safe, clean, kind people. It’s also like Europe; quaint, cultured and elegant.

I like it.

Unfortunately though, we leave the hotel in the early morning before any shops are open. We finish late when only bars are open. So from where I am standing, it’s a pretty dead city. I am sure it must be bustling during the day.

Anyway, I took a few pictures today with my new phone. I am surprised at how good the quality is. Anyway, take a look for yourself. The pictures are of one of the more peculiar cars on exhibit today. The Toyota “Aygo”. A car that Toyota are aggressively pushing to “young urban hipsters”. Their bean-counters must have calculated that this was where the money is. Anyway, good luck to them. The car below is (of course) a concept. But it’s interesting to see that Toyota think that putting a DJ booth into a car makes it hip. But first, a picture of the inside of the motor show:

The Geneva Motorshow

And here is the Toyota Aygo;

The extendible Aygo

Not much room for humans

Always on standby for a party

It’s been a week of high drama, high stress and high hopes. Way too much to write in this puny blog. I have only 2 days left before I head to Geneva for the Motor Show. I desperately need to get out of Osaka for a few days- so in that sense I am really looking forward to it. I just wish international motor shows weren’t held in places like Detroit and Geneva; why can’t they be held in the Caribbean, South-Western Australia or Hawaii? Detroit, being the default birthplace of the modern motorcar I can understand. But Geneva? Does Switzerland even produce car parts? (let alone cars)
Something to ponder on my long flight.

My long, iPod-less flight. However am I going to survive? Am I doomed to listening to crappy inflight radio, reading the Economist, Time, Business Week, The IHT, and then falling asleep after 2 beers? Maybe I should take a novel. It’s about time I read the latest Nicholson Baker novel, “Checkpoint” again.

Anyway, I have another 3 sleeps to get through before I can start thinking about relaxing on aeroplanes.

I am sitting in a cramped, stuff Honda wagon, speeding towards Tokyo with 5 colleagues. Well, speeding is not technically correct given the state of Japan’s highways, but to be honest the traffic isn’t too bad. We’re almost half way. But we still have a good 4 or 5 hours to go. My iBook’s battery has only 2 hours remaining. This is a worrying development.

I will be in Tokyo as we’re launching a new series of products; audio components, furniture and tableware. And we’re having a party.

I will be in Tokyo Thursday, then half of Friday. I have to be back in Osaka for Friday night for another party- the opening reception for an exhibition at our gallery. If any of my Tokyo friends are reading this, I am sorry but I am not going to be able to meet you. It’s just too tight a schedule. Breakfast is about the best I can do. Call me if you’re interested.

And then, when I get back to Osaka, I have a weekend off! At last! I am so relieved that I don’t have to fly to London on Saturday- for those of you who haven’t heard directly from me, this has been postponed until March. I still have to go to Geneva at the end of the month though, but, heck, that’s still more than 10 days away. 10 days in my life is an incomprehensibly long time during which countless inconceivable events will undoubtedly manifest themselves.

I think we have finally outrun the rain. Will post this later when I have network access.

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a week later: for some reason this post was never uploaded. Perhaps it will now. Perhaps.

Over the last year or so Mixi has become an unbelievable underground phenomenon. It’s Blog 2.0. It takes blogging to an entirely new level.

It would be wrong to just call it a call blog, for it’s a viral social networking mechanism that takes on a life of it’s own. If you look at my page you’ll see there’s an introduction of who I am, a picture, and then a pictures of (and links to) the people with whom I am connected. They’re my friends in the Mixi-sphere. There’s also a list of the communities of which I am a member and by cross-referencing all of this information you find yourself with a tool that connects you to hundreds of thousands of people all over Japan (and even the world) with amazing precision. Say I want to meet (in either the virtual or real sense) a fellow early-thirties, MTB freak who likes jazz and who is either blood type A or type O and female (or any combination of factors) then this can be accomplished in seconds. This is how the communities are built in Mixi-land.

“Do you Mixi?” has entered the vernacular and is as common and innocent as “What’s your email address?”.

Mixi also has built in diaries (but it integrates well with RSS-based blogs) a message-system, and so much more. And it’s all free.

If you can understand Japanese then you definitely owe it to yourself to sign up, and be part of the revolution.

Information wants to be free.

They certainly got the knack

I was at Black Panther tonight and as always the drinks, the music and the people were up to the high BP standards. Bunshiro played the “Get The Knack” album (both sides) and it was great. “My Sharona” needs no further explanation, but the rest on the stuff on the album was also pretty good. Bunshiro took a picture of the album for me, but I have a feeling this is different from the regular cover.

Just can’t pin it down…

There are so many inevitable things in life. Somehow, we deal with the majority of them without any fuss.

Given that I ride (my bicycle) everyday; to work, to play, everywhere, I guess I have to face the fact that my having a crash from time to time is going to be inevitable. So far I have had several- none terrible, but all quite annoying and unnecessary. Slipping on a road wet from heavy rain. Sliding out on a corner due to excessive speed. HItting a pedestrian who jumped out of a bus without looking.
But last week (on Thursday morning) was the worst. A fool (although at the time I had a much more vivid term at hand to describe him) on a bike thought that since there was no possibility that another bicycle could ever be behind him, rationalised the fact that spontaneously turning right and going onto a pedestrian crossing would be a wise thing to do.

Anyway, you don’t need to know the details- I did the slow-motion “fuck, I have come off my bike and I am upside down” thing, landed on my backpack (containing my iBook) and rolled. My bike was OK. My iBook was OK. My knee was not- but since I was wearing tights it ended up just being a graze that looked worse than it was. It is however still bruised, and I am still out of the saddle- and if anything, that hurts the most. He seemed to be OK. I have a feeling his bike may have been slightly damaged- he deserved a hell of a lot more than that though.

But I guess he didn’t deliberately do it. I suppose we can cut him some slack for that. I just hope we don’t cross paths again.

It’s a cold, windy day today. The afternoon was lovely- well, as lovely as a sunny, cold and windy winter’s afternoon can be, I guess. The geek in me decided about an hour ago to put my Casio Pro-Trek outside to measure the temperature. I can say with confidence that the air temperature on my balcony is now 3.4 degrees Celsius. The temperature inside my apartment is 25 degrees.

I saw a great movie last night thanks to Simon’s recommendation. It was Gattaca. Over at the IMDB website , I found this very interesting trivia:

Trivia for Gattaca
• The name “Gattaca” is composed entirely of the letters used to label the nucleotide bases of DNA. The four nucleotode bases of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) are adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine.
• Public address announcements in the Gattaca Corporation headquarters building are in Esperanto, an artifical language invented in the 19th century.
• The winding stairs in Jerome’s apartment have a helical structure, like DNA.
• Uma Thurman’s character is named Irene Cassini. Cassini is the surname of the 17th century French-Italian astronomer, Jean Dominique Cassini, who discovered the prominent gap in Saturn’s main rings, as well as the icy moons, Iapetus, Dione, Rhea, and Tethys. The space mission in Gattaca is destined for Saturn.
• Jude Law’s character asks to be called by his middle name, Eugene. “Eugene” comes from the Greek for “well born,” which Jerome is. “Eugenics” (the science of improving the hereditary qualities of a race or breed) is the central theme of the film.
• The Gattaca building (interiors and exteriors) is, in reality, the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, CA. It was designed by American star architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1957. The largest Wright design ever constructed, it was largely built after his death in 1959. The central dome (prominent in the roof-cleaning scene) contains the county library.
• The Marin County Civic Center, filming location of the Gattaca Corporation, was also used in George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971).
• The FBI agents are called “Hoovers,” a reference to legendary top-G-man J. Edgar Hoover, but also a clever reference to a vacuum cleaner brand. There are numerous shots of vacuums being used to gather DNA evidence.
• When Gattaca was first released, as part of a marketing campaign there were adverts for people to call up and have their children genetically engineered. Thousands of people called, wanting to have their offspring genetically engineered
• The film’s working title was “The Eighth Day”, a reference to the Biblical creation story, which states that the earth was created in six days and on the seventh day, God rested. The original title implies the tampering of man with what God has already made, and “The Eighth Day” is still the name of the center in the movie where the children are engineered, as noted on the DVD deleted scenes.
• The piece played by the six-fingered pianist is based on Impromptu in G Flat Major, Op. 90, No. 3. by Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828). However, the creators did a beautiful job embellishing the piece with additional notes/harmonies so that it “can only be played with twelve[fingers],” as the Uma Thurman character notes.
• Vincent’s car is a 1963 Studebaker Avanti.
• The exterior shots of Ethan Hawke and Jude Law’s apartment is actually the CLA (Classrooms, Laboratories, and Administration) Building of Cal Poly Pomona by architect Antoine Predock.
• The cars driven by the “Hoovers” are Rover P6’s (sometimes called the Rover 2000) built in Britain from 1963 until 1976. They were extremely popular with the police force in Britain where the 3.5 litre V8 engined model was used as a high speed interceptor.

It’s so quiet. Sunday night (well, Monday morning if you’re being pedantic about it) and it’s just before three am. I am winding down for the night. I have been sitting in front of this computer since I woke up at eleven thirty-four this morning. I have eaten four mandarins, taken two showers, one bath (with ten drops of tea tree essential oil) eaten two hot meals (one with pasta, one with brown rice) and spoken on the ‘phone to three people, text chatted to two people, and had a voice chat (via iChat) with one person. I created two spreadsheets, sent more than a dozen emails and coordinated three of my jobs. Part of it involved my overseas schedule for the rest of the year, and I realised I am probably going to be away for about a fifth of the year.

And now I am really hungry again. I think it’s time for bed.

Another Saturday night, but this time I am at home working. Pretty dull really, when you think about it. It’s another icy night (no surprise, it is winter after all) and I was just day- dreaming whilst listening to the Buena Vista Social Club Soundtrack about where I would like to be right now.

The beach

I think the answer is here, on this beach near my house in Perth. With my family and my dog. Oh, I can just feel the momentary shock as you dive through the waves, the salt water stings your eyes, and the feeling of the sun piercing your skin. This is a picture from my last trip home in 2002. If any Perth people are reading this, then “hello! I’ll be back soon”.

I think I might go and put some sunscreen on just to get in the mood.