w00kie’s ramblings

Tomorrow I'm leaving for the US we're I'll conduct some training sessions and will discuss implementation of new systems with people from the North American division of my company. Here's the flight plan:

One weekend in NYC to see a friend
2.5 days in Dallas
2.5 days in Detroit
15470 miles
32 hours 35 minutes in a plane

And sometimes it ends up being pretty freakin' good... Gotta satisfy my french food craves.

I had the worst dream ever yesterday night. To put it back in context, the rainy season just started here and it's becoming unbearably hot and humid, 蒸し暑い as they say it here, but I hadn't turn on my aircon in hope of pushing back the inevitable surge in my electricity spendings.

So the dream started with me killing a colleague of mine around 6 months ago and repressing the memory. But as people around me start asking questions: "Where did he go? No-one heard of him for months?". Memories begin to rush back. That's when I woke up tossing and turning in my sweaty sheets.

But the problem when you wake up in the middle of the night because it's too hot is that you're still half-asleep. So I couldn't shake off the dream and as much as I tried telling myself none of it was true, I kept asking myself what if it was real? The police would come sniffing around. Did I hide the body well enough? I should go back to check the grave. But no! The police might already be following me! I'm gonna end up in jail and get the noose!!! (they hang killers in Japan)

I barely slept 2 hours that night. Now I don't care about the bills, I'm turning on my aircon tonight...

I've got a new hobby. One of my friends with whom I went snowboarding in Hokkaido this winter lives in 湘南 in a cool house 300m from the beach, right in front of 江ノ島.

Since the last month I go surfing there almost every weekend. I can check the weather / wave size on Yahoo! Weather and hop on a train. I got my mother to send me my wetsuit from France by mail, so all I have to pay is the ¥3,150 daily rental fee for a longboard and off I go riding the Pacific's waves.

You never see a photo taken with the flash on in my flickr photostream. That's because I hate flashes, and my GR Digital's flash in particular: it burns everything.

So yesterday, as I was on a day-off and had nothing else to do than watching season 2 of House M.D. and browsing flickr, I got to contemplating buying an external flash like the ones you pt on big SLRs. My camera has a shoe for it and it would let me swivel the flash up to bounce on the roof for a softer effect.

I got my eyes set on a SIGMA EF-500 DG ST as is recommended by my camera's manual. It goes for ¥16,000 on kakaku. I've talked with a friend of mine though, he pointed out that the flash with batteries would weigh around 500g, considerably more than the 200g of my GR.

I can't really visualize like that what it would feel like to have such a bulky contraption sitting on top of my slim camera. I'll try to drop by a shop in Akihabara or Shinjuku and find a nice salesperson to let me have a try...

Last week I received a flickr mail from a woman of Nokia Japan who wanted to have me come over to their headquarters to talk about my usage of flickr, my keitai and other web2.0 apps. I wanted to take a day-off from work anyway so I said "why not" and accepted the invitation.

Friday I headed for the Arco Tower in Meguro in early afternoon and had a 1h30 chat with the Nokia girl who happened to come from Hiroshima and be married to a french guy... What a coincidence!

She asked me a lot of questions about my usage of flickr, twitter, wordpress and how I use them to stay in touch with my friends. She took videos of how I use my keitai, and she also showed me some Nokia prototypes which I'm not at liberty to describe, having signed an NDA.

All in all, it was a fun experience.