Category: Lifestyle Activities

Let me just summarise the various things that I found interesting about Akihabara. Every geek friend of mine, both guys and girls, have encouraged me to go visit Akihabara. Since I was in Japan, I decided to take my own side-trip there by public transport.

Let’s start with adult videos.

While I was trying to find my bearings in Akihabara, I came across a multi-storey video store that sold nothing but adult videos. It was just like any other video store. It had shelves and shelves of AV, posters of AV stars, life-sized ads of AV stars and screens showing various AV trailers and demos. Some of the DVDs even came with collectible cards of the AV stars.

Now, finding an adult video store is nothing interesting. Almost every other civilised place has one, except in countries with holy attitude like ours, but there was one thing very interesting – pre-owned adult video stores! A brand-new AV DVD costs about 500 yen and the second hand one costs about 300 yen. This just shows that the market is large enough to support a secondary market for such items!

There are many things that can be said about such a society. However, that is tangential.

In addition, almost every DVD store had a small room at the back dedicated to AV. What is more interesting is that these rooms were usually grouped together with the Anime section. I guess that there must be a statistically significant correlation between otaku and the AV consumers. Talking about this, while I was sweating myself off on the streets of Ginza and Harajuku, nobody gave me any free tissue paper.

However, while on the streets of Akihabara, lots of sweet girls dressed up in various costumes would offer me free tissue paper and brochures. While I cannot read Japanese, I got the gist of some of these offers. One of it was of a massage service provided by people dressed in schoolgirl uniforms. Curious. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time in Akihabara to explore these other options.

Speaking of uniforms, while I was in one store browsing, I came across some maid’s uniforms. While there is nothing particularly interesting about finding a store selling maid’s uniforms, I got a surprise when I saw that these were uniforms for men! There was also a 7-storey main-street store specialising in all kinds of kinky toys and equipment.

Okay, as for the stuff that have nothing to do with sex.

There were tons of stores selling regular electronic gadgets and electric items. These were not really worth buying because their prices were similar to those in Malaysia. However, I finally came across a section of Akihabara specialising in small stores selling electronic components and equipment – that puts our own Jalan Pasar to shame. It dawned on me why Japan has a Sony – I have to attribute much of it to places like Akihabara.

There were also stores selling models and hobby collectibles – multi-storey buildings. In most cases, each floor would specialise in certain types of models or collectibles from certain anime series. There were even stores that specialised in selling only female characters while others specialised in mecha and other stuff. I managed to buy some mecha for myself and felt that my visit to Akiba was a success!

I think that no trip to Japan would be complete without a trip to Akihabara and I would have regretted it if I did not explore it on my own.

Tokyo girls look different from the Osaka girls. I would say that they are generally ‘dressier’ than the Osaka girls. I have to say that this impression was formed entirely from observations on the main streets of Ginza and Harajuku. So, it may be biased towards a specific class or set of local Japanese people.

That said, we went for dinner in Shinjuku and had to cross Kabuki-Cho to get to the restaurant. Our tour guide was very careful in exposing us to some of the local delicacies and warned us of the dangers lurking around this area of Tokyo. It was an interesting place to be as a tourist. I actually got to see a few ducks selling their services to some of the local women passing by. I also saw one getting into an on-site negotiation. It was all interesting.

Tomorrow, I will be going to Akihabara on my own, while the rest of my family are in Disneyland. I hope that nothing untoward happens. I will need to rest well tonight after such an exhausting day of shopping today!

Sometimes, it is important for us to put some effort into helping others build something useful. I thought that this was an interesting idea and decided to help them out to build their site. It gave me an opportunity to flex my muscles in preparation for an even bigger onslaught of work. Plus, it allowed me to experiment with two dominant web platforms – CakePHP and CodeIgniter. Finally, it allowed me to build something significant in PHP, which I have never done before.

I put it together in just over a month and it is now in beta. Please feel free to test it out and if you find some problems, please click on the feedback button above or email it to info@inorout.org and it will be looked into.

For now, please do not use IE as it is buggy. Use firefox or chrome instead.

Landed in Kansai airport and went straight to Universal Studios, Japan!

As a first impression of Japanese people, I was seriously impressed. Their staff are so perky and professional. I got really impressed with the amount of pride and care that the Japanese people put into the most mundane thing that they do – like measuring the height of a child for a ride. They would stand my niece and nephew up, place their feet together, straighten their bodies, and then measure the height at the right angle. I could imagine exactly such a thing happening in Malaysia, where the local staff would just go, “ah, boleh la!”

Then at our Jaws ride, the entire ride was carried off by the extremely animated and impressive acting given by the person in charge of our ride. Her voice acting was just so anime-ish and she looked just like how one would imagine an anime character would look in such a situation, with all the encompassing facial expressions. I loved it so much that I congratulated her at the end. Back home, everything would probably have been pulled off by a video instead of live action.

One may think that such professionalism and energy is impressed upon them by the USJ management, but turns out that it is quite the same almost everywhere else. According to our guide, we should experience the opening of a departmental store in Japan to see just how dedicated their staff can be to their work.

Now, to get to the topic of this blog, Osaka girls – nice!

Finally, after all this time, it is here! I don’t really have much to say about it at the moment. I’m still playing around with it. Will update this post soon.

Update@2010-09-04:
I have played with it for about an hour. I had some fun fiddling around with character customisation and playing dress-up. I even had some fun redecorating my home and moving furniture around. Then, I decided to explore a bit. I went out to the theatre and found it totally empty. I plan to visit the main square tomorrow and hope that I’ll meet some interesting people.

I recently thought that I might dabble in a little bit of comics. That’s when I found out that it isn’t easy at all. This little comic that I did, took me a few hours to do. I had a simulation running at the time. So, I was technically “working” on my research project. Anyway, I think that I will try to make a little comic to supplement my entries. I hope to get better at it as I go along.

I was never very good at drawing on a computer. So, most of the graphics used are public domain clip-art that I got from Open Clip Art. I used the free (as in speech) software, InkScape, to create the illustrations. I then exported the illustrations into a PNG format, which is an open graphics format. See a pattern developing here? Lots of freedom and openness involved.

As a result, I am also releasing the comics using a free (as in speech) license. I have decided to release them under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. I hope that you’ll all enjoy the comics!

Several friends have been asking me if I’ve seen the new online reality show, Malaysian Dreamgirl, which aims to find the next top fashion model or host in Malaysia. It piqued my interest at first because I am a heterosexual male but when I found out that Kenny Sia was going to be one of the judges, I got the sinking feeling that it would not be worth watching.

The show is a purely online reality show that airs every Thursday and Saturday. There are 12 contestants and 3 of them are eliminated every 5 episodes. This show reminds me of the Next Top Model series except for the judges. I just cannot take any show that features Kenny, in the role of a judge, as a serious show. Granted, his blog is extremely popular, but it is also extremely brainless. So, my personal opinion is that he is sitting on the panel for the out-of-the-box element.

Moreover, there isn’t any real reason to watch these kind of ‘reality’ shows unless the contestants are worth looking at. Call me shallow but that’s the main marketing point for such a show. So, whenever a friend asked me to watch the series, I’d just ask them if the girls were good looking. None of my friends have told me that any of the girls were, which was fairly surprising. Nonetheless, since they have asked me about it, I thought that I’d give the website a visit. I went to the website and looked through the profile of all the 12 finalists. That’s when I got a few surprises.

Firstly, some of them were openly exposing their ‘aurat’ as part of the competition. This was fairly surprising because the last time that we had a muslim girl in our Miss Malaysia competitions was more than a decade ago. There is an unspoken rule that this was a problem because of the swimsuit category in the competitions. So, to me, this was a fairly surprising development. I just hope that the religious authorities to not get wind of this show and the girls involved do not get into any trouble.

Secondly, some of them could not even speak properly in their introductory videos. But when I looked at their porfolio photographs, the photographs do look good but I attribute this to the skills of the photographer. I guess that the producers of the show did manage to assemble a good team of make over artists and photographers. Thankfully, this competition isn’t about their oratory skills. So, that should not be too much of a problem.

Thirdly, I found it surprising that voting was still being done by SMS even when every other aspect of the show was being delivered online. There is no technical reason why this had to be the case, except for the fact that it allows the show to make money. Since the show is being given away freely online, I would think that their business model would be based on income from the SMS profits.

However, from my initial impression of the competition, I would think that it will succeed in Malaysia. It appeals directly to our ‘kaypoh’-ness. The show will also earn a decent amount of money because we’d happily vote with our money. The girl who wins would also get an opportunity to change her career. So, it’s a win-win-win situation for everyone involved.