2008-09

9/15 will be?remembered?as bank bust day. Lehman out, Merril sold, one more day left for AIG. Bad Bad Good? Maybe this was needed and intentional. I can see various conservative economics professor advisors seated in a room with the President, telling him to kill some so the market will collapse. Collapse it did, but?remember?who’s money they were all courting, India, China, Russia and the Arabs. They took a heavier beating than anybody else, so this seems like a [RESET] time to put all those that made too much in speculation or suppling raw material for speculation poor in a day, comparable to [GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL, DO NOT COLLECT 200] while the western economies prepare {GET OUT OF JAIL FREE / PASS GO COLLECT 200] card for themselves in the aftermath. Lehman, collateral damage, sucks being number 4, you gotta be the top 2 and eventually merge to a monopoly. Of course antitrust laws make this impossible now, but what if it had to happen??

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Finally got some pictures up from Yamada Chikara restaurant. Captions are underneath the enlarged photos.

A dynamo in your iPhone, no cables or attachment needed to you car, it uses the accelerometer in your iPhone to measure things.

Introducing: Dynolicious

Dynolicious is the first automotive performance meter available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Dynolicious uses the hardware built-in to your iPhone to measure the performance characteristics of your vehicle. No external wires or equipment is necessary, simply slip the iPhone into a cradle or cupholder and go!

Some of the performance metrics Dynolicious can measure:

-0-60 Acceleration

-1/4 Mile Elapsed Time

-Lateral G’s

-Horsepower

Unlike other accelerometer-based performance meters, Dynolicious uses the advanced data-handling and display capabilities of the iPhone to make the most of your performance testing. Dynolicious maintains a history of test runs, showing you averages and trends in your results. Dynolicious also allows you to enter modifications performed to your vehicle, and will instantly show before-and-after results to easily identify gains or losses.

I was invited to go to Yamada Chiakara, a restaurant founded by the chef with same name. Mr. Yamada and his wife offer a Kaiseki course Japanese food, but with the Ferran touch. Ferran’s restaurant elBulli in the Spanish Catalonia region is best well known for it’s science lab type methods of cooking. Powdering liquids with liquid hydrogen, foamy aired liquids and more. Mr. Chikara has studied under Ferran. What makes this restaurant so interesting is Yamada’s use of Japanese elements and Ferran’s methods.

From Wikipedia

El Bulli is a three Michelin starred restaurant run by chef Ferran Adrian in Roses on the Costa Brava in Catalonia, Spain. The small restaurant overlooks the Cala Monjoi bay, and has been described as “the most imaginative generator of haute cuisine on the planet”.[1], with a great deal of work done on molecular gastronomy. Restaurant has judged El Bulli the best restaurant in the world a record four times in 2002, 2006, 2007 and 2008.[2]

The restaurant has a limited season from April to September; bookings are taken on a single day in the previous October. It accommodates only 8,000 diners a season, with 800,000 people calling to try and book places around 400 requests for every table. The average cost of a meal is 250; the restaurant itself has operated at a loss since 2000, with operating profit coming from El Bulli-related books, and lectures from Adrian.[3][1] As of April 2008, the restaurant employed 42 chefs.[2]

Roger M. Buergel, Director of the Kassel Documenta 12 art show in 2007, designated El Bulli as Pavilion G of Documenta.[4]

My friend Robert celebrated his 60th big one. All his classmates from St. Mary’s and ASIJ joined in to have fun time at JJ in Midtown. After the wonderful food, we hit Roppongi Bau Haus, after a bottle of Tequila we were all dancing, singing and jamming with the house band.

The iPhone in Japan is not working so well. You could not get a decent signal so I have 2 iPhone, the second one is an iPhone I got in Hong Kong which is SIM FREE, so I stick in my NTT Docomo into it, and make the Softbank iPhone transfer the calls to it. Even then, my NTT iPhone was dropping calls. I need phones to function to get work done, so I was considering buying a new non-iPhone phone. It was that bad.

So yesterday I downloaded the iPhone 2.1 update and here are my results.

* Decrease in call set-up failures and dropped calls - a little better
* Significantly better battery life for most users - then I am not a member of MOST users
* Dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes - yes, this is so quick.
* Improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts - not quantifiable yet
* Faster installation of 3rd party applications - yes
* Fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes for users with lots of third party applications - not tested
* Improved performance in text messaging - yes
* Faster loading and searching of contacts - yes
* Improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display - yes
* Repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages - yes
* Option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts - this is really good.

Overall the software update seems to fix crucial flaws and proves that Apple can modify vast parameters of the chip functions in their product. Other phone manufacturers are not so lucky as their product is made by components of 2 ore more different companies, an OS and the Unit etc.., giving them less chance, accuracy of getting firmware and application and hardware in tune at the same time. So Apple has an advantage.

September 15th is Keiroukanshano hi, or a national Japanese holiday to give respects to the elderly. Many families take their Grandpa and Grandma to dinner or an outing, we took our grand grand mother to dinner at Sushi Kanesaka. She is 95 years old and still alive and well.