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Easy sunday surfing

Still waiting for that girl's car to crash into something - heck, she`s not looking at the street, but she´s looking at - me! Good J-Pop.

Fastech 360

Nice video + nice music.

Impression vom Kirschenhainfest

Heute fand auf der Donauinsel das Kirschenhainfest 2008 statt - ein klein wenig Japan in Wien.

Anlässlich des 1000-Jahr-Jubiläums Österreichs 1996 haben japanische Partnergemeinden von Wiener Bezirken der Stadt Wien 1000 Kirschbäume als Symbol der österreichisch-japanischen Freundschaft gestiftet. In Erinnerung an die Pflanzung der letzten Bäume am 30. April 2002 findet nun zum 7. Mal das Kirschenhainfest auf der Donauinsel statt.

Ich bin relativ spät gekommen, konnte aber noch japanisches Bogenschiessen, japanische Schwertkunst, die Cosplay Show und die diversen leckeren Sachen geniessen.

 

 

Japan Link dump

I enjoy reading other people´s stories about their trips to Japan and viewing their photos. Here are a few interesting links:

• Eiko Griegers resources about telecommunications (and much more) in Japan
• Gunda + Thomas 2 years in Japan with pictures (lots of photos)
• snow monkeys live cam (although, currently the snow is gone)
• So, Du willst Japanisch lernen (not to be taken serious)

Asian link list

Today I visited the NYT website for some of it´s asia related articles:

• Two days in Tokyo with frugal traveller on US$ 500
• Bejing choking on growth: environmental pollution may put the 2008 olympics at danger
• Winter fashion in Japan: a nice way to combine fashion with the view of japanese spa´s
• Hidden Tokyo: clubs you´ll never visit
• Losing an edge, Japanese envy India´s Schools

An interesting quote (from the frugal traveller) - after all, the NYT is a US newspaper:

But given today's strong euro, Tokyo can actually be less expensive than some major European cities (and even cheaper than New York)

anmoku の ryokai

Wired has a great article about mangas and the industries around them in Japan. The concept of "anmoku no ryokai", or "unspoken, implicit agreement" is very interesting - from the artistic point of view and both the business and intellectual property point of view. The same view is applied to fansubs of doramas, btw. It´s the view that limited copyright violation do not take away something, but rather let the product grow and serve it fans. Now let´s take that in contrast to Prince sueing his fans for certain copyright violations or the mix scene aka creative Sonic Foundry ACID 3 mixes (like The Beastles).

Japanese + Black

Link list

Sometimes I provide a link list of stuff I´ve read on the web. More often, I don´t. The reason is simply that there might be not so much value in providing those lists for the readers. It´s simply repeating content that was posted elsewhere. Sure, it´s kind of a filter, similar to the filter your newspaper does when presenting the daily printed news for you. But with online media, this is just repeating what you might have read anyway elsewhere.
So, anyway, here´s today´s list:

• Interview by Eric Enge with Matt Cutts from the Google Webspam team about robots.txt, NOINDEX and more. Interesting for understand the various options for optimizing web content inclusion in the Google index.
• Jeremiah Owyang´s Japan 2006 photo set. Exciting - reserve some time for watching over 400 photos.

Linda Linda Linda

Yesterday I watched the japanese movie Linda, Linda, Linda over at Kino unter Sternen, Vienna´s best open air film festival. A really very good movie, and very funny. The absolute star of the movie is korean actress Donna Bae (or Du-na Bae according to IMDB). She really has an interesting appearance. In the video below, she´s the lead singer of the band. Recently Bu-na Bae was also starring in the korean horror movie / thriller The host.

Below´s the title song from Linda, Linda, Linda - there´s more and more (The blue hearts original) and more (the soundtrack recording) at YouTube!

Update: Here´s the video of the blue hearts.

Link block Japan

Japanese links:

• First Kiss
• Gokusen
• Mao Inoue
• Nishihara Aki | Aki´s room

Link block

To reboot this blog, I may include regularly a list of sites I visited recently, maybe even daily or close to daily, mostly without or only a few comments. Here´s the list for the past few days. However, the problem with writing such a list is that not everythink qualifies for this list:

• this has great music: Video Nouveau temps au circuit de Tokyo, although it doesn´t really look like Tokyo.
• pretend-social-scientists tell you how to improve your life at the petri project
• if you are a banker, but would like to be a farmer, you can test be a farmer in your vacation (I guess the other way ´round it´s not so easy): VocationVacations
• information architects Web 2.0 infomap - quite similar to the Tokyo map (PDF)

Dirty old men and young j-pop girls

Last summer in Japan I have seen promotions for Dirty old man new hit single "Saraba Natsu Yo" - the CD cover featuring a naked man with a watermelon as a head and a hat covering his “privates”. Great!

Now I found the video and dozens of other j-pop videos. J-pop musicians and singers are mostly young gorgeous looking girls, sometimes boys, and sometime also dirty old men - but I prefer videos like Nami Tamiki´s Cross Season. More on j-pop, japanese videos, doramas and japanese culture coming soon! It´s just more tempting to watch the stuff than blog about it. :-)

Coffee lounge

Just found this great widget for learning Japanese. (Yes, the green background that´s my desktop. At home!)

Wow! And imagine - I nearly given up on those widgets. I use the Yahoo! widgets aka Konfabulator engine. It´s a fine application, but quite resource hungry. Also some of the 4.000 something widgets are quite similar - seperate widgets for traffic cams for several metropolitan areas, seperate rss feed widgets for pre-defined feeds and more.

For more on these and other widgets, check out this article comparing various widget platforms.

Sushi