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My body is still a good 12 hours off from where it should be, since I've gotten back, I've not had a day yet where I've been able to wake up before 1pm, or go to bed before 5am.

I've got about a month of catching up to do, but here's some interesting links I've come across:

• Coke Commercial in the style of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
• Colleges Prepare for Tech-Saavy Students
• Papercraft WoW Gnomes... because there's not enough Gnomes to leave your beer on.
• Peter Moore (Xbox 360 Chief) on the Seven Rules of Long Tail Game Development
• Q & A with Peter Molyneaux
• Interview with Ron Gilbert
• Robot Chicken: Halo Meets Donkey Kong
• Batman Begins sequel to be titled The Dark Knight, with the Joker being played by Heath Ledger.
• John Woo asks: "Our fascination with comic superheroes is time-tested. Why do we continue to relate to them?"
• Firefly will return to TV in HD
  Unfortunately, these are the original episodes, it's not a new set of episodes.
• Snakes on a Plane No. 1 at the Box Office
• Drawspace: Learn to Draw Online, massive amounts of tutorials and tips.
• Programmer Meet Designer: A plce to find partners for projects.

Posted by Michael Huang at 06:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I was in Japan this summer, I was surprised to see crows in Tokyo. Not only were they plentiful, but they were big too, and they weren't afraid of people. Crows are acknowledged as being at the top of avian IQ (capable of making tools and communication. It should probably come as no surprise then that crows like high-speed internet as much as humans do. They like it for any entirely different reason (the fiber optic cable is great for building nests), but as a result of this nest building, crows have managed to disconnect portions of Tokyo.

I used to have to do fiber optic cabling at work -- not only was the fiber optic cable expensive, but it was fragile to the point where broken fiber optic had to be entirely replaced, so I'm sure it must be frustrating to have to replace what was taken by the birds.

Posted by Michael Huang at 04:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whenever I return from Japan, I always feel like a time traveller. Part of this has to do with how hi-tech everything in Japan feels, and the other part has to do with how crossing over the international date line lets you arrive in America before you leave Japan which results in you repeating a day (for those of you who despise Mondays, this Monday for me will be approximately 40 hours long).

The flight back was relatively uneventful -- the plane was very empty, so while the boarding agent hassled me about bringing as much carry-on luggage as I did, they let me board with more items than I should have been allowed to (I ended up checking in one of the four bags I attempted to carry-on, partially out of guilt of bringing so much stuff, and partially because I was tired of dragging four bags everywhere). The result of this late check in was that this bag was the very first bag to pop out of the conveyor belt in the luggage carousel. This makes me wonder if the next time what I ought to do is check baggage in at the gate rather than the counter.

My keep awake material on this trip was my 3 year old GameBoy Advance SP, which still seems to hold an extraordinarily long charge -- 8+ hours, even with the screen lit. I'm a quarter of the way through Advance Wars 2's Hard Campaign now (I started the Hard Campaign at the beginning of the flight).

Coming back from San Jose was an interesting trip -- I mistakenly hopped on the airport shuttle that takes you to the VTA Light Rail Station rather than the one destined for CalTrain -- but VTA runs to downtown Mountain View anyways, so the trip ended up being a little cheaper, but a little longer. Dragging five bags of stuff down through Castro Street was definitely not the highlight of the return journey home.

I'll be doing a complete writeup with the events and photos of my Japan trip as soon as I organize all the material. Quick trivia:

• Over 3,000 photos were taken over the 2 weeks worth of travel.
• I covered 410 kilometers in one day going from Hakodate to Sapporo to Wakkanai over the course of 9 hours.
• Shinkansen are the fastest way to travel by land in Tokyo, going over 250 km/h.
• Japan gets more varieties of everything including KitKats, colors for electronics, and Pocky.
• The abundance of vending machines makes dehydration nearly impossible.

Posted by Michael Huang at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The last time I was in Japan, I stayed in the Shinjuju area next to the Metropolitan Government Building. But because it was the first trip to Japan, the only time we spent in Shinjuku was basically going to and from the train station. Shinjuku is one of the shopping districts in Japan, and department stores line the streets. Because the weather was quite wet,it was decided to make the day one for shopping.

Afterwards, Harajuku was revisted for the Omotesando Hills building, which sadly in photos somes out looking like any other mall. Because the guidebook had noted a second Tadao Ando building, we trekked to the other side of Omotesando and encountered other architectural marvels, such as the Cartier building and the Prada building.

Posted by Michael Huang at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, we went to Akihabara, the geek capital of Tokyo. Akihabara is divided into two sections -- the new corporate UDX side and the old eclectic "Electric Town" side. The new UDX side is tall skyscraper buildings --superstore electronics stores, while the older Electric Town is smaller specialty shops, and smaller, narrower buildings. It's a dangerous place, as every hobby one has is likely serviced by this section of Tokyo. Into computers? There's a whole section of town filled with bins and shelves of computer parts. Camera shops, as well as toy stores are abundant here, and there is no lack of shops selling video game stuff. For Ken and I, Akihabara is our greatest expenditure of cash on this trip so far. I was enslaved by the gachapon capsule toy machines (I completed a set of the Evangelion toys) and bought a Ice Climber peg toy (it's really cool -- photos when I get back to the U.S.). Akihabara is also a haven for American anime and video game fans -- there was no lack of Westerners perusing the shops and stores in the area.

The Nintendo DS is huge here -- they have advertisements for it on the subway lines, as well as many unique software packages that I hope will see conversion to the U.S. market. The DS Lite is sold out everywhere and the normal DS is rare to find.

Posted by Michael Huang at 05:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)