Mister Donuts x MOS Burger = MOSDO!
Starting May 12, MOS Burger and Mister Donut will start a joint marketing operation mixing their respective products:
At first I thought they were doing a horrible frankenstein-esque combination of donut buns and meat patties... Gross...
Last Tuesday I went karting with some friends in Tokyo, around 北千住. The place is called City Kart, you can rent the course for ¥36.000/hour on weekdays with 5 200cc karts which I think is a pretty awesome pricetag considering the location.
It is right next to the 京成関屋 train station or 10min walk from 北千住. More photos in the flickr set.
Still on the same line of thought as my previous post, I was designing my 名刺 - well, more of outsourcing the design to my brother - and had a hard time with QRcodes that might be interesting to some people.
So I wanted my business card to have the classic human readable info on one side, and machine readable on the other. Not so impressive in Japan where QRcodes are everywhere but I like it.
So I did a little reasearch and hit a pot-hole: there is no universal QRcode vCard equivalent standard. As explained here, DoCoMo and SoftBank/au each have their format which are not cross-compatible. So you have 2 solutions:
I've looked into the second solutions and found out by testing that you can combine the 2 formats in one QRcode but only if you put the Softbank/au type first. I guess it cannot have any characters (even a linefeed) before the MEMORY: tag. Then you can use a line of dashes to separate the 2 and make it more easily readable. The end result should look like that:
MEMORY: NAME1:Doe John MAIL1:john.doe@softbank.ne.jp MAIL2:john@doe.com TEL1:+818036542234 ------------------ MECARD:N:Doe John;TEL:+818036542234;EMAIL:john.doe@softbank.ne.jp;EMAIL:john@doe.com;;
Paste that into a QRcode generator and you will get a nice PNG image like this:
I've tested it in 3-4 keitais and it worked nicely. Try it with your phone and tell me the results.
Expanding on my previous tweet, this is of course from a Japanese "business practices and manners" point of view...
When arriving at a job interview, as with any business meeting, your interviewer will usually give you his 名刺. It is considered polite in Japan to accept it with 2 hands, bow, place it neatly on the table and answer by giving out your own 名刺.
Note: to anyone about to work with Japanese people: always have at least 2 dozens business cards with you at all times!
But in the case of a job interview, should you present your business card if it is from your current employer? In a way, you are betraying your company by looking for a new job. Moreover, the guy already knows you, he has your resume on the table already…
I’ve always been confused with this and am not sure of the appropriate behavior. Maybe I should make myself a batch of personal business cards for such occasions where it is not acceptable to present yourself as your business-self:
Superman - associate @ SuperFriends
As opposed to:
Clark Kent - reporter @ DailyPlanet
I'm going back home to Paris with the girlfriend for a week after Golden Week so of course the usual shopping lists start dropping in my mailbox. They are mainly filled with tech related stuff and gadgets that are quite a bit cheaper than in France (with a VAT at 20%, it's hard not to be competitive...) - like digital cameras, or just not available anywhere but in whacky Japan - like USB humping dogs.
But this time I got something really original. My brother asked me to bring him back a special chewtoy for dogs that he wants to offer to a friend of his. I found the design so cool and original I wanted to share it with you guys.
There are 4 different types and they go for ¥238 on Rakuten. Pretty awesome.
Last week my company, Valeo, made the frontpage of all the big newspapers (at least in Europe) as our CEO stepped down and was given a 3.2M€ "golden parachute" farewell bonus in spite of the company needing governmental aid to stay afloat. The French government promptly started working on a new law to ban such bonuses in companies receiving financial aids.
His replacement was nominated at the same time as the ex-CEO of Saint Gobain, a high-tech materials manufacturer mostly known for its glass products (your car's windshield and windows have a good chance of coming from them). The interesting thing being that he had to step down last December when Saint Gobain was indicted for price-fixing cartel by the European Union and fined for 900M€.
The interesting part is the reactions I observed on my French and Japanese colleagues as they heard the news:
Funny how the points of view differ on the subject.
Japan is not only Tokyo with its crowded street crossings and neon lights. It's also the old countryside, small traditional (and not so traditional) houses with rice paddies or vegetable farm in the backyard.
I live in Tokyo (technically not but almost in the city limit) but I work in a factory way out in the countryside of Saitama prefecture, 50km north of Tokyo. This is what I see every morning from the window of my train.
Took a photo of a sign for a pachinko in front of my train station:
It says:
Official Declaration - YES WE CAN WEEK
Obama comes to New Daiei!? (that's the name of the pachinko)
The token black dude posing as a fake Obama in the photo reminds of Eddie Murphy's sidekick in "Coming to America".
Random shots I took lately while walking around Tokyo on the weekend with my trusty Nikon D60 50mm f/1.4.
A skull chariot sculpture in Marunouchi.
An abandoned ice-cream stand-sign in Koenji.
A friend of mine received his new car last weekend and we went driving around town all saturday night and sunday afternoon.
Fun thing to do with a car in Tokyo: drive to Yokohama's 中華街 to eat chinese food for lunch a Sunday afternoon after partying.
It really got me into thinking I need to get off my lazy ass and finally get my license. I never bothered getting it while a student living in Paris and now that I'm 27 years old living in Japan, I realize my mistake.
So I've been looking at driving schools around my place and found a nice one not to far. Prices are ¥291.000 for manual, ¥278.000 for automatic. I should have no problem taking the driving courses and test in Japanese and the written test is available in English in Saitama prefecture, but studying for the written test in Japanese might be a bit out of my league.
I'm going to see with the school if they can waiver the fees for the non-driving classes and let me study at home on my own with whatever english materials I can find.
Internet is almost void of any accounts of foreigners passing their driving license from scratch in Japan so I have no real idea of what I'm in for...
For all the hundreds of people waiting for their JLPT results to arrive and coming to my blog via google searches, know that this year's score slip has arrived yesterday in Japan. As I was expecting, I failed level 2 again for lack of studying...
JLPT 2008 score: 217/400
- Vocabulary/Kanji: 58/100
- Listening: 81/100
- Grammar/Reading: 78/200
Yep, 23 points short... I guess I'm up again for the June session...
I took the test last Sunday at Surugadai University in Hanno, way out at the feet of the mountains west of Tokyo. Usually I'm assigned to Saitama Daigaku which is 10min of taxi from my new place, but I guess this year they thought I was too close and needed to suffer a bit more than usual... So I took my 1h+ train ride in the freezing cold of this Sunday morning of December a 7:30am to meet my doom: the grammar test...
As usual these past couple of years, the whole test with solutions were out on chinese websites a mere hours after the end of the examination. People in the USA have it easy with the jetlag.
I don't want to check the answers. I'm pretty sure I did the same thing as last year: 60~65% on kanji, 85~90% on listening and utterly failed the reading/grammar part...
See you next time archnemesis!!!
This morning, on my way to work, my train stopped one express station after mine. Some accident had happened on the line and the traffic was stopped for 2-3 hours. No way I could get to work, and once the train would start running again there'd be no bus left to bring me from the station to my office (it sucks working in a factory out in the middle of nowhere).
So I startend to head back home. Trains were out, I decided to give the bus a try: no bus connection from this station back to my home. Taxis? The line in front of the taxi stop climbed back up the stairs all the way to the ticket gates... All that's left was to hoof it up along the tracks.
It took me 45 minutes to get back home for a 5 minutes ride of express train. On my way I passed by the place of the accident and caught some shots of the train's broken windshield. There were 5 or 6 TV helicopters circling above.
UPDATE: Jeff, over at JapanProbe.com, fished out the news article related to this accident along with a picture of the K-car that was crushed and the throngs of salarymen walking along the tracks like I did.
I don't know if we will see any real difference here with Democrats instead of Republicans at the helm over there. All I know is this made me laugh right after lunch.
A friend of mine who works in a cargo ship brokering firm forwarded me a market report written by another broker:
Following the American erections last week, it is expected that Mr. Obama will decrease the Japanese car import ratios starting next year.
[...]
Thankfully, most Japanese cars exported to America sport an automatic transmission as most Americans are not comfortable holding a stick, according to a poll conducted few hours after the erections.
