I snapped these images on my phone this morning; heading to Busan this afternoon.
This is a typical scene on the side of a Japanese street - vending machines, and lots of them, even on less-populated streets. Not only can you get stuff like Coke and water (or the charmingly-named Pocari Sweat), but you get buy coffee in a can (heated), Kirin or Asahi beer for around a euro, and cigarettes galore. Oh, and some sake if you like it!
In a nation where the normal hair colour is black, hair dye is big business. Here’s a picture from a pharmacy showing a few of the options you can choose from (this is the men’s selection BTW).
I was looking for a depato (department store) and accidentally wandered into a full-blown pachinko zone. Pachinko is a Japanese game where you put little metal balls into a machine in the hope of getting more balls out, which you can then re-exchange for cash. (Actually, we had a less-interesting game not unlike that in Ireland where you’d put 2 pence coins into a machine in the hope of knocking one of an ever-growing piles of 2 pences off the edge into the out slot - I don’t think it had a name so I hereby christen it “topplepence”.) In this huge gambling building, there was row after row of people happily connected to their pachinko machines like cigarette-smoking Borgs. Maybe I’ll give it a go if I’m feeling brave next time…
And if a break is needed from pachinko, the same establishment has a relaxation area with massage chairs and a library of manga to read!
…in a photo via Leo Sauermann.
Now that things are returning to normality again, I have some time to work on SIOC again…
Here’s the scribbles on my whiteboard as to how it aligns with FOAF and what has to be done in the future.
Thanks to Hee-Chul Choi for the photograph.
On Tuesday evening, I met up with the meetup.com San Francisco weblogger group, where we talked about blogging for business and profitability (lots of topics related to our it@cork Blogging for Business event). Had some interesting discussions with Paul, Chris, and Gavin.
Afterwards, I went along to this month’s Tag Tuesday event, featuring the podcast cataloguers (sp.) Odeo. The photo shows a shot of the tags from their website demonstration, and that decapitated head belongs to Niall who I met at the event. Dia dhuit, Niall! Also talked to Ryan (again), Eran (discussed microformats corresponding to SIOC) and Tantek from Technorati, Amber, Rabble and Blaine from Odeo (chatted about YARS), Evo and Mark from Jedi, Ashton (sp.), and David from USF.
Found this useful tutorial on how Firefox users can print Flickr photos via the Shutterfly service (using a Greasemonkey script). Thanks Quasistoic!
http://www.quasistoic.org/ts/archives/2005/06/22/flickr-shutterfly/
3rd prize singles - World Press Photo
Joe O’Shaughnessy from the Connacht Tribune has won a World Press Photo prize for his picture of Strange Fruit at the Galway Arts Festival last year. Strange Fruit are a visual and physical theatre company from Australia who perform on flexible, four-meter-high poles. It was a spectacular (and free!) performance given beside the Spanish Arch. I must dig out some more photos I have of the event…
I was at the Junko Mizuno “Pure Trance” manga book signing at the Super 7 Store in Japantown this afternoon.
There was a sizeable crowd in line with their copies of “Pure Trance” in hand. Mizuno-san evolved the manga from art she had created for techno album covers. A few pictures are available from my Flickr set.
So after the MetaFilter event, a bunch of us headed on to the Flickr meetup at the Crossroads cafe. A nice relaxed venue for a meetup, and I can attest to their great hot chocolates and tasty meatloaf with onion marmalade baps!
Met lots of Flickr enthusiasts too, and I’ve made a list of who I met as a reminder to my future selves: striatic, missmobtown, High Fidelity, Kodama, Courtney, Jason, Eddy, Nicole, Kai, Eddie and Nadia. Also met one of the founders, Stewart (co-founder Caterina was also at the meetup). Again, I didn’t really realise who Stewart was, but I remember we were talking about pulling the worst faces for photographs, and I was explaining how my buddy amp turned this into this.
Had a brief but interesting discussion with Ryan King from Technorati about microformats (which is related to my research work on SIOC), and also chatted with Will Luo from Applied Minds about RDF stores. Illustrating the small world phenomenon (in tech circles at least), I met Scott Beale from Laughing Squid who was talking about an employee they had from Galway, who turned out to be none other than someone I knew, John McDonnell!
Edit: There are some photos from the event at the Flickr tags for sflickr and sflickr0707.
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