a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Here are pictures from the time I spent in the Ginza district and in Akihabara. I spent way too much time in the Yodobashi electronics store – some of it drooling over a beautiful $430 Seiko titanium watch (no! go and think about it first is what I told myself).
We had a late start, one hour delay out of Seattle, but made it in to Tokyo 9 hrs 20 mins later, just as the sun was setting in the Far East at 4.30 pm. Everything went well, but it took time to get through passport control and customs, and then another hour on the Narita Express to get to the city. It was three hours later when I checked into the hotel here in the Ginza district.
I completed my work on the project today, filed my time sheets and expense reports, sent a last few e-mails, and set up my out-of-office messages on my e-mail. ‘Away from work for an extended time, and not checking e-mail’. My bags are packed, my devices are charged, and my check-in with All Nippon Airways for the flight to Tokyo at mid-day tomorrow, is complete.
Here’s a map that I generated with Great Circle Mapper for my upcoming trip to Perth, Australia, with stops in Tokyo and in Hong Kong. The route looks a lot different than one plotted on a flat, projected map of Earth’s surface !
I’m still getting better at using my iPhone for preparing for upcoming trips. (Later this week I will travel to Perth, Australia for Christmas, with a stop in Tokyo on the way there).
I’m also trying to rely less on getting a local cell phone signal, to pull up the information that I need. So I have made sure I see my flights and hotel stays in airplane mode on my Google calendar, and made a calendar-view paper print-out to boot. I have also put the apps I will use in one place, and even created flight reservation and hotel details as ‘pictures’, and put those in an off-line photo album folder.
It was raining all day yesterday, and today in San Francisco. Our flight out was a little late, since Portland and Seattle is getting an inch or two of snow. It was still dry when I arrived at Seattle-Tacoma airport, but almost as soon as I stepped into the house, the snowflakes started to drift down.
There was no sign of snow as I left my house this morning at 5 am, but then as we boarded the plane at Seattle-Tacoma airport a few snowflakes mixed in with the light rain, came down. The pilot said he could still get us out there without needing to call for a de-icing of the wings of the plane. I work in the city office for my final week on the project (yay!), and is cold here in San Francisco as well.
Two more trips to the Bay Area remain for me, one this week and one next. My Uber driver to Seattle airport this morning was a Leonard Cohen look-alike, fedora hat and all. ‘Sit back and relax and I will talk to you at the airport’, he said. He even had Android phone and iPhone charge cable hookups available for his passengers: a nice touch. Seattle airport was busy, with lots of Thanksgiving weekend passengers heading back home.
It happened again on the flight tonight: the airplane door closes, and phones and electronic devices are to be turned off, or at least switched to airplane mode. But NO: my seat neighbor blithely continues to text away (the one last week scrolled up and down through Facebook, or Twitter. Really? You cannot just let it go for an hour or two?). Finally, as we started to taxi, and passenger 9B was still at it, I could not hold it in anymore. ‘Shouldn’t your phone be turned off?’, I said. ‘Yes’ came the reply (no apology or explanation), and finally she turned it off.
Our project’s final testing 
sessions (with the business users), were scheduled to start early Monday morning. It’s a choreographed affair, and part sales talk (this is what is great about your new solution) and part technical talk (this is what you need to test and try to break). So I took a Sunday night flight out, picked up a rental car at SFO and drove out to the east side of the Bay. My regular hotel in Walnut Creek was sold out, and so I had to use Google Maps to find my hotel in Pleasanton (which reminds me of the fictitious 1950s town called Pleasantville from the 1998 move with the same name).
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reopened in May of this year after a major three-year-long expansion project. And so when I miraculously found a two-hour break in my workday meeting schedule on Monday, I walked down to 3rd Avenue and Mission, and took a quick romp through the museum. 1 ½ hrs of time is not nearly enough for seven floors of art – but there is only so much one can take in at any one time, then one has to call it a visit and come back later (which does not apply only to museums, right?).
I have a few more weeks of traveling out to San Francisco for my project there, and so off I went this morning. Here are pictures that I took today.
It was raining lightly this morning as the Uber driver pulled up in front of my house, dry at my arrival in San Francisco throughout the day, with rain starting here tonight, as well. There were several people dressed up to the nines in Halloween garb on the street, and on the subway. I saw a Spiderman, a bunch of grapes (purple balloons), a teddy bear and a witch.
Another Thursday has rolled by, and I got to go home and sleep in my own bed. The year we call 2016 is rapidly running out on us, all of us. It’s crunch time on our short project with the holiday season approaching, and with even the very end of the year now in sight.
It was a long and busy day, but it is over. I got to watch the last half of the third and final US Presidential debate. (Can we dispense of all these silly formalities and all go vote now and get the 2016 US Presidential Election over with, once and for all?).
Here are today’s pictures of the city. The weather was a perfect 70.
Another week in San Francisco has started for me. I took a nice walk around a block or four during my lunch break, and ‘discovered’ the beautiful Buich Building with the Tadich Grill restaurant inside, on California Street. (It’s been there since 1909).
It’s wet in Seattle .. a 
very large system has moved in that will bring rains for Friday and the weekend, and high winds (up to 60 mph) later tonight.
Our pilot explained that there may be some turbulence on our flight, but he would fly at 24,000 ft all the way up to Seattle (usually it’s 40,000 ft). It was wet at our arrival, but the flight was not bad at all. I even took the train and the bus in home, got a little wet from walking the two blocks from the bus stop – but probably got in earlier than I would have, with a taxi that would have had to deal with a lot of wet weather rush hour traffic.
Here are some interesting sights from Mission Street in downtown San Francisco.
Another week started in San Francisco for me. I went for a nice walkabout during lunch time. Sunny but mild outside (57° F/ 13° C), so light jacket weather – to ward off the wind chill from the breeze from the ocean.
