Category: Me, myself and I

Web2.0 interview

nokia, connecting peopleLast 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.

Sumo beer cup

I went to see Sumo 2 weeks ago for the second time since I’m in Japan. This time around, I was sitting in the boxes on 1st floor (really just a tatami with 4 thin cushions) instead of far out in the poor people’s late gaijins’ cheaper seats on 2nd floor.

sumo beer cup on flickr

Of course, I had to take some stupid photos while I was there. Later we went to eat ちゃんこ鍋 close to the sumo stadium. This is the traditional food of sumo wrestlers, specifically designed to maximize protein intake, i.e. make you fat! I have to say it was quite good but eating this everyday is basically long-term suicide…

Recruiting

Today I had my first interview from the recruiting side of the table. My contract will end in less than 6 months so we’re looking for someone to replace me in job. Right now I’m working 50% on technical administration and 50% on functional administration. My replacement would take 100% of the technical stuff and if I were to stay after my contract, I’d take 100% of functional responsibilities.

Anyways, this was a really interesting experience. First it’s much harder than I thought: trying to steer the conversation with meaningful questions, helping the candidate to get out of tough spots, etc. All the while I noticed lots of errors that I also do when interviewing for a job and seeing it from the other side I learned a lot.

For example, some questions that I used to think are hard to answer and don’t look so relevant reveal themselves as being the turning point of the interview:

  • What do you want to do in 3 years?
  • What is your career plan?

Having an answer that makes sense to these questions really marks a lot more points than I thought when I was looking for a job 2 years ago, fresh out of school.

Shibuya at 4am

A friend of mine is leaving Japan tomorrow, coming back to his girlfriend in France after 1 year here. So we had a little sayonara pub crawl for his last weekend in Tokyo.

construction in Shibuya at 4am

We started out in 高田馬場 and took one of the last trains to 渋谷. Hopped around 5 different bars and izakayas until the early morning light told us it was time to say goodbye and go back home. Even at 4am, Shibuya never sleeps…

Shiodome 42nd floor

This weekend, a good friend of mine invited me and his girlfriend to dinner for celebrating his yearly bonus. We went to the Oregon Bar & Grill, on the 42nd floor of the Shiodome City Center.

good. meat.

The dry-aged charcoal-grilled steaks were extremely good, but came with just a small piece of mashed potatoes, nothing else. I wished there was a little more fantasy in the plate (vegetables anyone?). But anyway, we were there for the view, we had a table facing Roppongi Hills and the Tokyo Tower.

tokyo tower view

One weird fact: all the tables around us were birthday parties, and when I say all, I mean all 5 of them in our corner of the restaurant. Maybe they had a birthday discount or something…

Kani-shabu

What’s better than the snow in Hokkaido? The food of course! Every time we’ve hit the restaurants over there, it was like we were discovering a whole new level of Japanese food.

the crab on the plate

Say to a Japanese person you ate 蟹しゃぶ (crab legs splashed in boiling soup) in Hokkaido and you will see them shed a tear of jealousy every time, I guarantee it.

cooking it shabu-shabu style

Who can blame them, it really was the best crab I ever had in my life…

Definitely cursed

image copyright of Ars TechnicaAfter the Wii near miss and the lost sunglasses episodes, the events of this weekend do not come as a shock to me anymore…

I came to Japan with my trusty 15″ Powerbook and an external 250GB Firewire 800 drive. I never found the time to set up the hard-drive around the house, so since I wasn’t using it at the time, I lent it to a friend for a couple of weeks to use as a vessel for transferring his data from his old PC to his new MacBook. He ended up keeping it 4-5 months and gave it back to me 2 weeks ago.

So this Sunday, I decided on a whim to plug it in and finally use it to store all the TV shows I download. Once setup, first thing I did was launch a backup of my data since I was wary of a drive failure like the one that happened to me 2 years ago (where I miraculously save my data by putting the drive in the freezer).

… That’s when it happened… 5 minutes in the backup, the OS freezed, the little whine of the internal 3.5″ 100GB drive disappearing. My HD had just died on me.

So thanks to my friend Jon who provided me with an OSX Tiger DVD, I’m now running from a system installed on the external drive. It looks like I should be able to rescue most of my data but I’ll have to wait 2 weeks until I can go to a friend’s house with all the tools I need to change the drive.

Hiroshima Report

I’m back home, in good old Saitama. As usual, the trip went like a breeze, I arrived 20 minutes before my flight, checked in, passed security and boarded my flight all in one stride. Not the shadow of a line anywhere, a wonder for french guy used to american and european airports. Then once I got to Haneda, I still had 2 hours of train to reach the hell-hole of Saitama where I live… まあね、しょうがない！

a-bomb dome in hiroshima

In the 4 days I had left, having lost 3 to the flu, here’s what I managed to accomplish:

  • Visited 平和公園 and the Peace museum, as seen in the attached photo of the A-bomb dome.
  • Went to 宮島 and got to see all the sights. However I missed the monkeys at the top of the island since the ropeway was not open yet and the fast road by foot had been destroyed by a typhoon and they were rebuilding it.
  • Checked out the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art.
  • Shopping in 本通, the little Shinjuku of Hiroshima.

You might say “It ain’t much!” but the purpose of the trip was to spend time with my girlfriend who moved out 2 months ago, not sight-seeing. That mission was accomplished. I’ll post more photos of stuff I saw in the coming week.

Almost dead

So I arrived saturday afternoon in Hiroshima, it’s now wednesday evening and I’ve only started visiting today… Why? would you ask me. Well as soon as I got here I fell sick with influenza type A as they told me at the hospital on my 2nd coming…

tamiflu is my friend

I peaked somewhere at 39.5°C and was litteraly stuck in bed (people who know me know I’m rarely sick and take my word seriously here) for 3 days until a nice doctor finally gave me that wondrous drug: Tamiflu.

They say here on TV that Tamiflu gives you hallucinations. My girlfriend even locked the windows of our bedroom to prevent me from jumping out if ever I were to believe I could fly, like a japanese woman did last week. Well I can’t say I saw any hallucinations but I had really weird dreams that night…

She wants to suck me dry

I read via Thomas’ blog that Segolene Royal, the leftist candidate to the french presidential election in April, plans to tax French citizens living abroad.

Retrouver une citoyenneté fiscale
Il n’est plus acceptable que des citoyens français parviennent à échapper à l’impôt en s’installant hors de France. Nous proposons de définir une contribution citoyenne qui sera payée en fonction de ses capacités contributives par tout Français établi à l’étranger et ne payant pas d’impôt en France. C’est une voie analogue qu’ont notamment empruntée la Suisse et les Etats-Unis.

For those of you who don’t read French, it means that even though I live in Japan, pay Japanese taxes and have nothing that ties me to France except my passport and a weekly phonecall to my parents, I’d be considered as an evil capitatlist trying to escape from my citizen’s duties and would have to pay taxes as a solidarity gesture to my fellow compatriots.

Now I’m really pissed off that through their incompetence, the French consulate in Tokyo marked me as “votes in Paris” even though I replied to all their mails that I wanted to vote in Tokyo. Now I won’t be able to make my voice heard against this infamy…

JLPT results

I received my 日本語能力試験 (otherwise known as JLPT or Japanese Language Proficiency Test) results today after more than 2 months.

JLPT result sheet

No surprises, I passed. Actually I got a nice 87% but it was only level 3 which is not that hard. I probably could have made level 2 with a lot of work and dedication, but I didn’t feel like investing so much in that last year.

Here is the official description for level 3:

The examinee has mastered grammar to a limited level, knows around 300 kanji and 1,500 words, and has ability to take part in everyday conversation and to read and write simple sentences. This level is normally reached after studying Japanese for around 300 hours and after completion of an elementary course.

I can barely move

This saturday I went to Naeba in Niigata-ken for my second snowboarding trip of the season and I had a horrible day.

Through a combination of sleep deprivation, bad physical condition and poor equipment, I could barely make a turn 3 hours in the session. That and I went there with two of my friends who dragged me offtrail in a really nice slope of deep deep powder. That was great but it literraly finished me…

Net result of the day:

  • I could barely move out of my futon to my sofa the next day…
  • … and when I got to my sofa, I could barely sit on it. I fell on a little mound of ice in the middle of the powder run, right in my tailbone. I have a huge bruise the shape of New Zealand right in the crack of my ass.
  • My sunglasses somehow fell out of my jacket’s inside pocket, probably in that same powder run. I had just bought them 2 weeks before, they were prescription lenses and cost me a fortune, I’m really pissed about it.

they were such cool sunglasses

I think I’m going to pass on the weekly ski trips for a while…

Got me a new TV

Tonight, most of my favorite shows come out of christmas recess:

  • 24 (after the first 4 episodes were shown 2 weeks ago 2 days in a row)
  • Prison Break
  • Heroes

And this makes me happy. Why? Because last week I bought a new TV, being fed up of playing the Wii’s Zelda on the old piece of shit I bought from a fake sayonara sale. It always took 3 tries to turn on and the colors were totally washed out.

my new tv

I got myself a SHARP LC-32BD2 for the ridiculous price of ￥109,000, that’s 630€ with the current exchange rate. It’s a 32″ that does 720p (I don’t think full 1080p HD warrants the 100% price increase), with all the HDMI, DVI, Component and D-端子 plugging goodness.

Next in line for the home theater buying frenzy is a Mac mini to stow under the TV and play all the HD content that I couldn’t not appreciate until now. However, I’m low on cash so it’ll have to wait until the new versions come out and I’m finished paying back my student loan. In the meanwhile, I’ll get a DVI cable and plugin my Powerbook to the TV…