The door here is not using it today for a strong wind. please give the surroundings to the front.

One of Tokyo's newest attractions is the recently opened Roppongi Hills complex, complete with office and residential space (second in price only to the Marunouchi building), boutiques, upscale stores (even convenience stores seem more exclusive than usual), restaurants, a Grand Hyatt, bars, coffee shops (including three Starbucks), a small park, an art museum, a TV studio, an open-air stage, guided tours and Japan's largest silver screen (which was of course reserved for Matrix Reloaded, rather than Cidade de Deus). While all is new and nice and shiney, I have to see that navigating around Roppongi Hills is more than confusing. There are a lot of information counters, signposts (a little too unobtrusive to be really helpful) and maps, and they are needed indeed. In addition to that, it is of course a rather expensive place to spend an afternoon.

Pulp Fiction meets Goodfellas meets Buena Vista Social Club meets Kids in this Brazilian drama that recounts the stories of the lives (and deaths) of a bunch of teen (and pre-teen) criminals in a notorious Rio de Janeiro slum. The movie draws a shocking picture of a totally defunct and dramatically violent society, in which even the youngest children are involved in drugs (distribution and consumption) and murder. That it is based on a true story is not comforting either. Cidade de Deus tells its depressing tale in a brilliantly entertaining way, with some great camerawork, music, transitions and a non-linear timeline.

8 points

No, this is an entry in the tech category and not about kids. But choosing a domain name is almost as difficult. Probably even more so since those names need to be unique and a lot of them (like www.thilo.de) are already gone. But now that I have a website (and Marek has just become the Flying Czechman) I need a nice URL for it. And I want a real DNS entry, not some lame HTTP redirecting.

23.4714%. Turns out I am just a regular geek.

Let us know if you can make it.

Japanese banks are famous for being extremely inefficient and slow. There is really not much favorable to be said here. The opening hours are short, which seems even more ridiculous than in other countries considering that anything else is almost always open for business, and they apply even to ATM: At night and weekends ATM are either shut down, locked away, or offer only limited services for additional after-hours charges. Is there a special reason why you cannot update your bank book after 5 pm? I have a rather strained relationship with ATM anyway, and even broke a couple of them (once two within ten minutes) trying to deposit coins. Depositing coins, by the way, is limited to a hundred coins at my bank. The user interface (colorful touchscreen, animated digital employee, bilingual in speech and writing) should be a little less flashy for me, too. I do not need a machine shouting at me in a banking lobby, and entering a PIN on a touchscreen seems strange as well. When a bank happens to be open, there are always two or three employees whose only task seems to be to greet your entrance. Cannot they use all this man-power to keep the door open a while longer? Changing money is a difficult task as well, you need to show some identification and they need to call the branch manager to check the foreign notes. I had some US dollar bills handed back to me once because they did not like the look of them. I am not sure if interest rates here are funny or sad.

There is just no better way to spend a rainy Sunday evening than at the movies. I cannot believe I let the previous six Sundays (and the other 42 days in between) just slip by. It felt good to be back in front of the silver screen, and with a serious movie at that (rather than a reloaded matrix). Nicole Kidman's performance won an Academy Award, but her nose deserves one as well.

6 points

Baseball is probably the most popular sport in Japan. We had free tickets to support the away team at Tokyo Dome today, and they lost miserably. But I unexpectedly met an old friend in the crowd, which once again proves how small a world it really is.

Nick Hornby's autobiography of his life as an obsessed Arsenal London and soccer fan is an interesting read even for someone without more than a casual interest in soccer and no knowledge whatsoever about English club football of the seventies and eighties. Most impressive for me is how much details Hornby remembers of matches more than twenty years in the past. I have visited less than ten soccer games, and do not remember much. I remember seeing Frankfurt lose 1:0 to Meppen in its first second division season, the only goal in the second minute of the otherwise horrible game, before we even entered the stadium. I remember a fabulous 3:0 cup victory against Bremen in the same season. More recently, I have seen Manchester United win the club world championship against Palmeiras and Real Madrid lose it to Boca Juniors a year later. I am also painfully aware of some games I should and could have attended, but did not, most importantly Frankfurt's incredible last minute 5:1 home victory against Kaiserslautern, which narrowly saved them from going down in 1999, and the 2002 World Cup final between Germany and Brazil.

Working hours in Japan are not for wimps, and this is less glorious than it sounds. There even is a word in Japanese for working oneself to death, and we are not talking coal mine explosions here. We are talking working 9 to 5, as in 5 a.m.

I have not witnessed a case of karoshi myself, but I know people who have. I see people sleeping in office every day, not going home for weeks. I have heard co-workers talk of serious stress-related health issues. I have recently seen two colleagues in their twenties collapse at their desks and being wheeled of in an ambulance. I would rather see companies die than their employees, but sometimes I think I am the only one.

From the Asahi Shimbun:

Tokyo could be facing a power shortage this summer if most of the 17 reactors stay off-line. Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s last operating nuclear reactor will shut down today [April, 15], leaving all 17 of the firm's reactors - generating about 40 percent of the Tokyo metropolitan area's power requirements - off-line for safety inspections and repairs. A TEPCO source said if most of the reactors remain idle, Tokyo could see a severe power crunch, including the possibility of blackouts, this summer. The source said the company needs to get at least 10 of the reactors up and running before summer's peak demand for electricity. However, only one reactor is expected to resume operating soon.

Now this could get interesting....

I do not know who came up with the idea behind ASP, JSP and PHP, but I believe they should be flogged. The whole concept of mixing HTML and program code in such a tight manner is a big step back in time. Whatever happened to the well-established principle of separation of presentation, logic and data? I am aware that the software engineering elite have recognized this mistake and that there are new approaches being promoted (such as the much-hyped Apache Struts project, or the more consequent and less-hyped Apache Tapestry project) and that JSP's flaws are constantly being fixed (resulting in a completely different version every year), but this will take ages to reach the mainstream. I will be left to struggle with ASP, JSP and PHP at work for years to come. Thanks a lot.

Some TV critics complained that nothing ever happened to Jerry, Elaine, Kramer and George, and that it was a show was about nothing. If so, this book is even worse, as it does not even include Elaine, Kramer and George. It is just a collection of Jerry Seinfeld monologues, like the ones in the show's opening sequences. While I found the book funny at times, it does not size up against either the show or a Dilbert book.

Both convenience stores and super markets play background music, but whereas the former manage to delight me, I cannot stand the latter. Convenience stores play J-Pop, which is easy, fun and pleasant to listen to. Supermarkets, on the other hand, are apparently too cheap to pay for the licenses to offer proper music. I can understand that J-Pop is maybe not appropriate for an elderly audience, but then why not traditional Japanese music, Western classical music or nothing at all? Why play ill-paced instrumental (and weird instruments at that) versions of popular songs (from across the board)? Does not Michael Jackson need to approve slowed-down, pan flute versions of Beat it?

In the most bourgeois act since paying the monthly television fee, Cissy and me got married this morning. Registration of a marriage is a completely unspectacular procedure in Japan: We just went (without prior appointment) to the ward office, handed in our documents (including signatures of two witnesses who did not even have to be present), and that was it. The lady clerk made certain all the papers were in order (in fact, we had to correct some of them quite a bit), but if we had not asked for some proof to show to our embassies, we would not even have gotten a receipt. We both went back to work immediately afterwards.

The lack of glamour is probably a good thing, because we still have our engagement party in Germany coming up and I do not want its thunder stolen. The real wedding event will be in Shanghai in November.

I am going to keep my maiden name.

Apartment prices in Japan (or at least in Tokyo) are not for the faint of heart. It takes a lot of getting used to, and I am not quite there yet. Especially the initial cost of moving in is staggering. You will have to put up with a deposit worth two or three months (refundable only in theory), one month agency fee, one month key money and one month gift money (to show your gratitude to the owner for letting you live in his house).

An alternative are government-owned apartments. Erected with tax money, these apartments are assigned to people who apply for them in a kind of lottery (with some social considerations modifying the odds). This eliminates the expensive agency system. In addition to that, the government calculates a more moderate profit margin.

Yesterday, we visited a couple of model rooms at the brand new Shinagawa Seaside View Tower. The building is very modern, very close to the station (almost on top of it actually), and offers a great view not only from the gorgeous 30th floor apartments. Although a bit more pricey than the current Nippori place, the rates are not quite out of reach and seem reasonable (the previous statement proves a lot of getting used to on my part, I would not have thought such a thing a year ago).

So are we planning to move in the near future? Not really. But we will most likely not renew our current contract (which expires next year and would require an additional one month rent to extend). The current strategy is to apply and lose ten times, which results in a special bonus chance for the eleventh draw. Accordingly, we applied for one apartment at the Seaside View Tower and one more at the nearby J-Tower Nishi-Ohi.

One more thing: You have to take off your shoes when visiting private residences (and some restaurants) in Japan. It is therefore a good idea to go laceless when hopping from model room to model room. Saves a lot of time. Or rather, it would have ...