For reasons I’ll put aside, a good friend recently reminded that it’s a good security practice to filter in what you know what you want, rather than filtering out what you know is bad.
This comes up a lot in web apps, as you need to make sure data passed in by the user isn’t doing anything nasty. Rather than saying “let’s remove quotes, ampersands, etc. and leave the rest”, you should say “let’s keep in letters, numbers, commas, periods, etc. and filter out the rest.” That way, if you didn’t know something like semicolons can do a bad thing, the latter covers you, but not the former.
This morning, setting up a new playlist in iTunes, I realized the same principle could be applied. And not only that, but help you find music you already own and may even like, just you’ve never listened to it.
My typical playlist is of the pattern “Play me songs from Artist X whose rating I’ve given 3 stars or more.”
This certainly gets me the music I know I like, but it keeps hidden songs I might.
So this morning, I started to flip it: “Play me songs from Arist X, but leave out songs I’ve rated 1 or 2 stars.”
I always knew Green Day was awesome, but, man, I didn’t realize so many other songs were so good as well.
After the Olympic onsale, Rick & I decided to hit Tokyo for a few days instead of heading straight back. Before I started traveling more, I used to think I like living in America. After traveling, I know I like living in America and there are few exceptions on anyplace else I’d rather live. Rome was the first. Tokyo is now this second.
I don’t know how to put this into context other than if I wasn’t walking wookie, I would suspect that my parents had stolen a Japanese baby at birth & raised him as their own. It’s like a special city was made just for me.
You can see all my photos from the trip, or Rick’s, but I thought I’d pull out some highlights.
It’s funny — when I asked a few friends about their travels to Tokyo via email, days went by & none responded. When I pinged each one again, all came back with the same response: There’s just so much to write, we haven’t finished yet! Not only do I now understand, but a similar phenomenon happened with this blog entry. But, without further delay, let’s get started…
Shibuya
My hat’s off to Rick for selecting an excellent hotel location. We stayed at the Shibuya Excel Tokyo, right in the middle of Shibuya. You may recognize its famous intersection, allegedly one of the busiest in the world.
I also made a small movie of the scramble crossing in action, as viewed from my hotel room, and uploaded it to YouTube:
Akihabara
On our first full day, we decided to start off by visiting Akihabara, aka “Electric Town.” AMAZING. Aside from storefronts reminiscent of a puking Radio Shack, it was also home to the wonderful, wonderful Yodobashi Akiba. I’m not sure, but if you live a good life, I think when you die you get to live in Akiba. For CA residents, the closest I could compare it to would be Fry’s. Only imagine nine Fry’s staked vertically on top of each other. And with no suck. (Okay, well, sense I can’t speak Japanese, I don’t know if Akiba sales folks are more helpful than useless dolts at Fry’s, but it sure looked like they were helping people.)
Sadly, I was too busy shitting myself to take any pictures. Sadly for you that is.
One the other hand, I did get a picture of a kid playing the original Super Mario Brothers, with his cosplay girlfriend dutifully watching.
Video Games!
Eventually we wandered into the first of many Sega & Taito Stations, home of multi-floor arcade splendor.
Each floor had a theme of sorts — e.g., crane games were often on the first, fighters on the 2nd, and so on.
It was really interesting to see gaming in Japan. Group-play & social interaction seem to be much more prevalent. It wasn’t uncommon to see a young couple on a date. Each station had at least a few machines that 8-12 people could all play at once. I also saw some crazy game that involved moving trading cards (a la Magic) around a horizontal screen while the game played out on a 2nd vertical one. It looked like some variation of an RTS, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it & players didn’t seem to like observers.
Sumo
On Sunday, we headed over to the Ryōgoku Kokugikan arena, for the first day of the Summer Grand Sumo Tournament. It was cute watching little japanese kids run into the aisle to get a good view & cheer on their favorite wrestler.
Apparently the final match was a bit of an upset, after which the crowd went crazy, flinging their seat mats towards the center arena.
I captured another video of one of the earlier matches.
Sushi
So far the million question question everyone has asked me was “Did you eat Sushi!?” First off, I’m not as picky an eater as a lot of you think. Second, I’ve already tried sushi a million times. I already know it sucks. Third, for the love of God, YES, I tried sushi in Tokyo. And not just once but twice. On the final night, we visited what quickly became Rick’s favorite restaurant, the Standing Sushi Bar, close to our hotel. I’ve included the menu just to make all you sushi lovers jealous. Rick basically emptied a fish tank for $10.
I still prefer a good steak, but fresh salmon sushi ain’t bad.
Goodbye, Tokyo
On the final night of the trip, I went over to the rub the head of Hachiko. Hachiko was a real life dog, the pet of a Tokyo professor. Hachiko would accompany the master on his commute, walking with him to the train station in the morning and awaiting his return in the evening. Even after the professor passed, Hachiko continued to show up each evening to wait for his master. He followed this pattern for 11 years, until Hachiko himself passed on. There’s a bronze statue dedicated to him by the train station, a popular meeting place today, and rubbing his head is supposed to bring good luck.
Tokyo must have sensed it was our last day as well, and decided to hug us.
In late April, a small cadre of LA tech folks traveled to Beijing, to be on-hand for the start of real-time Olympic ticket sales.
On prior trips, terminal 3 of Beijing International was still under construction. Now complete, we got a chance to see it first day. It’s a night & day difference; impressive by any standard, especially in size. (It’s now the world’s largest.)
Game day was May 5th, and we headed into the Gehua-Ticketmaster office bright & early.
If you travel to China, one of the cultural differences you’ll likely first encounter is the temperature of your drink. Ask for a glass of water in the US & it’ll be cold, likely even with with ice. Ask for the same in China, and it’ll be warm, likely hot enough for a glass of tea. (After a prior trip, I mentioned it to a Chinese-American coworker & she remarked her Grandmother had always yelled at her for drinking cold drinks, telling her it would shock her system & make her sick.)
Now anyone in tech can tell you it’s not really electricity that powers technology, but caffeine. In particular cold soda. So one of the locals in the office was kind enough to get us a few bags of ice. Somehow, however, a “few bags” translated into a small army of men showing up with about 18 bags.
Fully caffeinated, the team was ready.
We suspected demand would be high. This was confirmed when another local employee of the office showed up. He’d passed by his local Bank of China (BOCs are acting as outlets for Olympics ticket sales) on his way in. Folks had been lining up since midnight & numbered into the hundreds. It’s not the best quality, but tried to snap a few photos with his camera phone.
