Twitter vs FriendFeed

After using Twitter and FriendFeed for a while, here are my observations:

• I love the auto-refresh on FriendFeed, realtime becomes visible
• I love the simplicity of Twitter
• I especially love the simplicity of both the Twitter and FriendFeed mobile modes (why is efficiency only for mobiles?)
  
• Twitter is just a broadcast platform
• FriendFeed is just a meta-bulletin board, not unlike phpBB or the like (sans admins)
  
• Twitter will need a radical paradigm-shift to get beyond the "broadcast only" mode
• FriendFeed needs to find a way for users to downgrade unwanted "commenters"

I still prefer Google Reader and RSS.

Kankoku aka Korea

I spent a couple days in Seoul, mostly just to see what Korea is like. Here are a few notes from my trip.

Korea is the closest country to Tokyo, the flight is about $200 and takes two hours.

It was pretty hazy, so good photo opportunities were rare. I saw the US base area, the Korean War Memorial and lots of urban sprawl. There was a vast mix of foreigners in Itaewon, but I did manage to find some excellent Korean food and a few hours of sunlight to go swimming.

I picked up a few Korean words and a few bits of Hangul. It wasn't really necessary, Seoul is full of English speakers. Between gestures, English, and Japanese there were no problems.

Obviously one needs more than two days to really appreciate Korea, next time I'll take some time to see the coast and get out of the Seoul megalopolis.

A couple of pics here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lotor/

Twenty Six Days in Japan

A few quick observations:

Language:

• Spoken Japanese is probably easier to learn for English speakers because about 10% of the modern Japanese words are English loan words. Nouns, verbs, the whole array.
  
• Chinese folks can read a lot of the old/basic Japanese words and vice versa. Yay Chinese symbols?
  

Western Influence:

• Westernization in Japan is a complex issue.
  
• Nowadays, more of an augmentation to their own style than wanting to be or see westerners. The presence of gaijin actually cramps their style, I think.

New and curious things for me:

• Deep, low, prolonged bowing in the elevator area. (not in my company, btw). Slows things down.
• Japanese jam bands. They exist. I sense a strong Pat Metheny influence.
• Prevalence of curry in Japan. It's everywhere. Better than Indian curry according to my Japanese colleagues. I like both.
  
• I'll skip commenting on the obvious differences from NYC like being polite, courteous to a fault. Waiting for traffic signals vs walking into traffic at will (I think NYC is somewhat unique in pedestrian hegemony).
  

Overall, so far so good. Nihongo benkyo shimas. Ja mata ne...

Tako Belle

I've gone for some long roaming walks to get familiar with the area and rode the train to the Meiji park/shrine yesterday. A.k.a Harajuku, where the girls do cosplay on certain days. It's new to be a foreigner and instantly recognizable as such. I tend to watch and learn a lot. My mediocre kana skills are already coming in handy. Things will flow much more smoothly once I'm able to speak and read better.

History

Aping the shell historians...

mallred@balzac:mallred$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
 117   screen
  71   cd
  59   ls
  43   sudo
  37   floods
  25   ifconfig
  22   vi
  15   alsamixer
   9   grep
   8   man

sudo is for aptitude, I can't remember why I ran ifconfig, alsamixer keeps the neighbors from getting irate and floods toggles the floodlights in my living room via x10.

Shoes

The new rules from my upcoming digs in Shibuya, Tokyo:

In order to minimize the disturbance to other tenants, we respectfully request that noise be kept to a minimum after 8pm.
When you enter your room, please kindly take your shoes off at the entrance due to Japanese custom and to maintain the room in a good condition.

They're going to wish my shoes were kept in a WMD contamination chamber. I'll put them in the hall if they want, though.

Katy Horan's Annabelle

Just arrived today.

http://katyart.com/