Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

19:54 JST

Just in case people are reading the Planets more than the conference websites, I thought I'd spam this here. :-)

If you are interested in taking the BSD Certification exam at AsiaBSDCon 2009 in Tokyo this Saturday (14 March 2009), please sign up for it on the website. I still have five exams "too many" if people want to sit them.

It would be silly to make empty exams travel 10 000km... :-)

Sign up now.

18:28 JST

More sightseeing with Massimiliano today. Attilio, the other half of the Italian invasion decided to stay in his hotel with jetlag and writing slides.

This morning, we went skyscraper-gazing in Shinjuku. Like last year, finding the way out of the station proved to be somewhat interesting. I have no problem believing that it is the busiest station in the world (> 3 million people per day). It is also a very large station with more than 200 ways to get in and out. Pick the wrong one, and you're completely lost.

After we saw the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which is also enormous, we went back into the station for some ekiben to munch on. Trying to map the hundreds of different boxes to the descriptions of the boxes made my head hurt. This was not helped by the fact that de descriptions were all encrypted too. Picked a random orangish box.

We then went to Meiji Shrine to eat the bento and discovered that it was quite tasty. Random food has never let me down in Japan. Turns out we were not supposed to eat at the shrine as some uniformed gentleman told us just as we were finishing up. Oh well...

Following a stroll through the hopelessly packed Takeshita street, the inner geek took over and we raided Akihabara. I bought two Happy Hacking Keyboards, a USB-powered 10/100 Ethernet switch and some more of the flat cat. 6 cables I'm in love with. One of the HHKB is for Tommy. I had the feeling that someone else asked me to bring them one, but I can't remember who it was. If you think it was you, please drop me an email. Otherwise, I'm sure I can find a home for it!

In Akihabara, we discovered the extremely dangerous Network Pro shop where they sell Cisco gear without asking the difficult questions most "real" Cisco dealers like to ask (like: "how much money have you got?" so they can tailor support contracts to every budget) and a host of other cool network toys. Just upstairs from them is a similar little shop selling Sun and IBM (and Fujitsu and others) Unix gear. You give them cash, they give you a high-powered workstation or server. Or rack of servers, if that's what you want. Dangerous. Very very dangerous.

We need to get the locals to show us around to the really good geek-stores in Akihabara later this week. It's a bit bewildering for non-Japanese to try to remember their way among the totally-encrypted maze of geek goodness.

Tonight, I think I'll let the Italians decide where we want to eat. With a bit of luck, we won't need to hunt quite as much as yesterday!

09:38 JST

The Italian invasion landed last night. They flew Air France, so of course they landed without luggage. I wonder when that will show up? Good day of sightseeing. I was reminded that much of Tokyo happens underground. You can spend many hours walking towards metro stations.

Food last night was interesting. I Googled up some place which had tasty sake and we then spent over an hour looking for it, making good use of the local police box along the way. When we finally found it, it turned out to be quite worth the walk. At least I thought so.

More sightseeing today, I think. Perhaps another shopping spree in Akihabara.