Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

So, who will you vote for?

Continuing the topic of elections, here’s a ２くらべ (nikurabe) for the 2008 US elections:

p.s. you’re vote won’t be anonymous :)

Overseas Vote Foundation

If you’re a U.S. Citizen living overseas, the Overseas Vote Foundation may be of interest to you. You can vote online, print your ballot out and send your vote home. Apparently Fedex sends all ballots from Japan to the states for FREE!

5 nights and 5 splendid dinners in San Francisco

Evening 1: Millennium – all vegan, all the time
Evening 2: Morton’s – steak, steak, steak
Evening 3: Kokkari – nothing but Greek
Evening 4: The Slanted Door – Asian Fusion like no other
Evening 5: The Cheesecake Factory – something for everyone!

what is it with people’s negativity?

Two and half months after MiiStation’s release, this kind of drivel was submitted through our contact form:
“you guys are a cheap money making scheme. anybody who comes to you is either blind and cant make a mii, or slightly retarded. its extremely easy to make a mii, i made one in 10 minutes flat. why [...]

Web 2.0 in Japan

I was going to write a post on the state of Web 2.0 in Japan for CenterNetworks, but after poking around the web I found two fairly decent entries already out there, so I will briefly summarize and integrate a few words of my own. First, some background on the two sites: PingMap is a [...]

Earth to US: Mixi, Mixi, Mixi IPO

I’m finding it remarkable that almost nobody in Silicon Valley followed the Mixi IPO, let alone knew who or what Mixi is. Here’s an SNS at $2B that makes MySpace look like it sold too early and Facebook actually seem reasonable. Okay, so Japan may be in its own little internet bubble, but as [...]

EGG in the WSJ

The Tuesday, September 25th US edition of the WSJ has an article on one of the most successful academic-institution chancellors – the one and only E. Gordon Gee, who once presided as Brown University’s chancellor for a mere two years and miraculously burned through $3 million fixing up the president’s mansion before being whisked away [...]

A taste of culture on American TV?

Two years ago ABC’s Lost made a significant bet by introducing subtitles for an extended period throughout its episodes. For a good part of the beginning of the season, two Korean characters communicated only in Korean, and God forbid if couch-potatoe viewers couldn’t keep up with reading the English – here was a chance [...]

(a few) sources of reason

JesusLand
Rove’s re-election strategy was elegantly simple: Scare the bejesus out of Jesusland. Faggots are headed your way! Satanic Muslims are hiding everywhere! That’s all it took to get Jesusland to do the job. Intellectual conservatives like the National Review staff are flattering themselves if they honestly believe Jesusland cares about conservative thought. The “reality-based” folks [...]

Bible Belt Ain’t Livin’ it up

Walking the walk on family values.
For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry’s home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values. Indeed, it is the “blue” states, led led by Massachusetts and Connecticut, that have been willing to invest more money over [...]