It’s been seven years since the last time I had the opportunity to see an annular eclipse. That time it was in Calpe (my hometown); this time, in Tokyo, I didn’t have my friend Albert here with his telescope and his astronomy knowledge, so I was not so well prepared; but with some Mizar glasses I had the chance to see it when the clouds let me around 7:35am.
One of the most popular photos of the eclipse is this photo by @ryuki_guilty15. He took it just before the eclipse became annular and a plane was passing by.
Yesterday I visited Hikarie, the new building, department store, self-contained microcity in Shibuya. I don’t really like how this big crystal cube, 183 meters tall, looks like on the east side of the station. It is not a structure that you see from the street and say “Wow!”.
But, from the inside the experience is different. Entering the building from the Fukutoushin line station designed by Takao Ando made me “Wow!”. I also liked the feeling of being in a wide space in the 11th floor and enjoyed the beautiful sunset views.
A Mixi engineer recently bought a HMZ-T1 (Sony), possibly the best Head-mounted Display in the market. But instead of using it to play video games or watch movies he is trying to use it to work. One of the advantages is that you can work in any position!
Morimoto working. One of the things he does it to edit code with Emacs.
Morimoto uses glasses, so in order to be able to use them with the HMZ-T1 he had to do this little hack.
The problem is how heavy the gadget is, it seems that after working for a while horizontally your forehead will look like this:
This time the solution was more complicated than solving the glasses problem. He decided to work again in a vertical position and set up a device that supported the head-mounted display so that the head didn’t have to hold all the weight:
I feel like I want to try this Sony gadget to see how it is, it reminds me of the Nikon up300 and I guess it is much better. The Nikon head mount display had only one display and when I tried it I remember that it made me sick.
I didn’t have much idea about aikido but after watching this 45 minutes documentary I have become quite interested in it. It is fascinating how master Shioda knocks down Robert Kennedy’s bodyguard in a second when he visited Japan in 1966, it seems like he uses a magical technique. In the documentary some of the basic techniques and foundations of aikido are explained: not attacking, concentrating strength in a point and using the energy of the enemy in our favour.
Tokyo Sky Tree will open up to visitors on May 22nd, to go up to the observation platform will cost 3,000 yen. Tokyo Sky Tree is 634 meters tall and is the second tallest structure in the world after Burj Khalifa in Dubai. To celebrate the hotaru (firefly) festival during last weekend 100,000 balls with LED lights were released to Sumida river and the Tokyo Sky Tree lighted up using LED technology provided by Panasonic.
Ooyama 大山 is a 1,250 meter tall mountain ideal to spend a day trip out of Tokyo. It reminded me a lot of of Mount Takao, as there is also a couple of temples half way during the climb, a Shinto temple and a Buddhist temple, and from the top you can see all the Kanto plain. If you are lucky you can also see Mount Fuji. We were not
To get there you have to go to Isehara station (Odakyu line) and from there take a 20 minutes bus until the head of the trail. It will take around three hours taking it easy to climb to the top.
Berserk is a manga by Kentaro Miura that has been being published since 1989. The art is impressive and the story gets you completely hooked, specially during the first 5-10 volumes. In addition to the art, the fantasy-horror feel and the atmosphere of a particular medieval Europe, the best is the collision of the personalities of the main two characters Guts and Griffith. I like a lot how Kentaro Miura plays with the feelings of the reader as the story is unveiled and you start feeling attached to one character or the other but at the same time you like both of them. I liked it until volumes 12 or 13, after that the story started to lose interest for me.
During this year a trilogy of Berserk movies called Golden Age Arc are being released on Japanese movie theaters. We were able to enjoy the first movie last February and the second movie will be released next month. In the movie theater I went to see the movie the cafeteria was decorated with Berserk stuff!
These are photos of a shop in Shibuya that only sells seaweed. All kinds of seaweed!
One of the most well-known seaweed is nori, which is used to wrap maki-sushi. It is also eaten as a snack or along with steamed rice. When I arrived to Japan I didn’t like it that much but after some years here I am now an addict to nori.
Another seaweed that is very popular in Japan is kombu, used to flavor soups in Japan as well as in China and Korea. It is also used to make a kind of tea called kombucha.
Wakame is another seaweed usually used in soups (as for example in miso soup) and also in salads.
Mozuku is maybe the least known seaweed for foreigners and the one that people dislike the most. Most likely because it doesn’t look really tasty:
Mozaku seaweed doesn’t look really good but it doesn’t taste that bad as an appetizer along with a refreshing drink.
The kinds of seaweed I have mentioned are the most used and well-known in Japan, however depending on the region you can find other kinds of seaweed which are used in regional cuisines, for example, in Okinawa one of the most used kinds of seaweed are sea grapes. Japanese people say that eating seaweed is healthy and it is specially good to keep your sking young.
