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Medicine New-Shojin Eatstation

We went to the Shojin food restaurant in San Francisco Downtown the last night: Medicine new-shojin eatstation.

I know it's so weird to have shojin food (精進料理) as a dinner, but it looks like it's getting a trend to have these kinds of healthy food, for hipsters and probably vegans in cities like New York, LA or San Francisco.

We usually have shojin food at temples, and sometimes at someone's funerals. And the taste and the way it is cooked is way simple.

I was afraid of the taste or the quality, but the food there was actually quite nice. And they served Beer, Sake and Dessert, which sounds like a quite against the spirit of shojin food anyway.

Dice apparently couldn't get why the restaurant has the name Medicine for the food, but I guess it's something related to the word 薬膳 (medical meals). It's sometimes used in conjuction with 精進 food.

Xmas light up

Here's a picture of a good Xmas decoration that we found at the office of JPMorgan Stanley.

Plagger upgrades your feeds ... but it degrades too.

Plagger tries real hard to upgrade and normalize your feeds data. For example if you have a feed without a content (title or summary only), Filter::EntryFullText module does auto-fetch the content of the page and extracts fulltext body from there.

Sometimes we need to degrade the content, though. One example is embedded YouTube video in the feeds. When you use Publish::Gmail to read feed updates on Gmail, Thunderbird or whatever Email clients, YouTube embedded videos are not playable, due to the security reason. (Thunderbird has an option to enable scripting in the HTML emails, but then you'll have a security risk reading phishing emails.)

So tokuhirom suggested a filter to strip the embed tag and replace that with a simple A link with IMG tag to the thumbnail image on YouTube server. We named it Filter::DegradeYouTube and now I committed it to the trunk. If you provide your YouTube dev_id, which is highly recommended, it calls YouTube API to figure out the thumbnail image location.

This works really great. I'd like to create a more general, Filter::DegradeHTML framework, so other sites similar to YouTube can be degraded like this.

My fave restaurants in S.F.

Here's a list of my favorite restaurants in San Francisco. The point of the selection is, either of them provide a good food (of course), reasonably cheap, you can come in alone, and they're in walkable distance from SOMA neighborhood.

The fact you can come in alone is really important to me, since I, most of the time, have a dinner at weekdays and meals at weekend alone.

• Dojima Ann (Japanese)
• 219 O'Farrel St.
• They provide a really good Japanese food. They do Sushi, but I'd recommend Soba, Udon and Katsu-don (rice bowls).
• King of Thai Noodle (Thai)
• 184 O'Farrel St.
• Good Thai food restaurant, and you can watch European football over the TV. My favorite is Pineapple Fried Rice. They don't accept credit cards.
• Chaat Cafe (Indian)
• 320 3rd St.
• When I lived in St.Francis I got takeout box from Chaat cafe since it's right in front of the apartment. My favorite is Chicken Tikka Masala.
• Koh Samui & the monkey (Thai)
• 415 Brannan St.
• Good for both lunch and dinner. They're always full. My favorite is Gai Grapaw, or whatever it is -- Boiled Chicken and Spicy green bazil. They serve good Singha Beer.
• Katanaya Ramen (Japanese)
• 430 Geary St.
• Sushi and Ramen shop. My favorite is Soy sauce Ramen + Sushi nigiri combo, with Sapporo beer small.
• House of Hunan (Chinese)
• 2 Townsend St.
• It's a small Chinese restaurant close to the Bayside village. If you live in the Bayside village and are lazy like me, it can be a good candidate for weekend meals. My faves are Chicken curry and Seafood Chow Mein.
• Shan Restaurant (Indian)
• 474 3rd St.
• Good for lunch since it's very close to the Six Apart office.

I think I have a couple more in Chinatown but currently don't know the address. I'm a type of person who goes to the same restaurants again and again, rather than exploring new one, since it's easier and comfortable.

You might have noticed the list is biased in favor of Asian food. Yes, I like Asian and not European/American food. I would like to add some Mexican/Italian restaurants to this, to add more variety to my food life. If you have a recommendation, let me know.

Bossa n' Roses

Bossa N' Roses

Various Artists

I just got this album from iTMS Japan ... it's a freaking awesome album. It covers Guns N' Roses songs in Bossa Nova way, and most songs make me smile at the beginning and at the same time makes very comfortable mood. Highly recommended if you were once into heavy metal music.

Deception Point

Deception Point

Dan Brown

I woke up pretty late like 3pm and gave up going to SSA since it'll close on 4. So I finished the last half of Dan Brown's Deception Point.

It was a fun reading again, after Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. At the same time it's pretty funny to see "Who's the mastermind?" story path again and again: "The master said in an uni-sexual voice ..."

I noticed who's the mastermind just before it's actually revaled, but enjoyed it anyway. The story itself is much more interesting than the other two, especially for Japanese readers, I think.

Note that I read them in Japanese paperbacks edition, which was released pretty recently.

Plagger talk video

Here's a video of my talk yesterday. Looks pretty nice.

Now I'm done!

IMG_9971

and am having chips and Budwiser to be a fake American.

Preparing for the talk

Even though it's a Thanksgiving, I'm working on the slides. I'm going to talk about Plagger in a tech conference "XML developers' day" in Tokyo over Breeze. 12 hours left and no slides yet, as always.

Scooba

Artur's Scooba

Here's how Scooba at Artur's cleans the floor.

Katanaya Ramen

 

Yesterday I went to the party at Kondo-san's place in Mountain View. We had a pretty good conversation over there and among them the most interesting one was about "Katanaya-Ramen" in San Francisco Downown. Umeda--san adviced to me to go there in the downtown of San Francisco and I knew it was there but disappeared because they got replaced by some Pakistan/Indian restaurant.

I said "No it disappeared!" and he said "Yes it's there!" We looked them up on MSN Live Search and others and found that there's a new Katanaya Ramen launched pretty recently and it's way close to the one I knew: It's just one block away.

Anyway I went to the Katanaya Raman and tried しょうゆラーメン (Soy Sauce Ramen), which tasted very nice. 

Cloudberry Jam still rocks

Right Here Right Now

I wandered iTunes music store and found Cloudberry Jam's new album. I was like "Wow, are they still alive?" but after listening to the preview of some songs I quickly liked it, because the sound and melody touch has never changed since 90's. If you like or liked Swedish Pop once, this album is highly recommended.

New music

I went down to the Apple store and purchased $50 iTMS gift card. I need to buy this until I get a credit card that has U.S. billing address.

Anyway I purchased Foo Fighters' new accoustic live album which is really good, and Copeland new one too. Copeland is going to play in Slim's on Monday. I wonder if I should go see there...

Sushi

so I made it.

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waiting for a bus

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Books to bring for S.F.

Here are books I got to bring for San Francisco. This is another reason I like flights: 8 or 9 hours of nothing else to do, so I can easily turn myself into reading books.

These are probably enough for the flight and first 2 weeks. Later on I need to get more in Kinokuniya, but it costs almost double if I need to buy books imported from Japan, which sucks.

So now, the problem is they're all packed in the cardboard boxes because of the moving and I don't know which one contains 'em.

DS Lite

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壮行にSAKKの皆様からいただきました。ありがたく使わせていただきます！

iCal for Slim's schedule

Thanks to PantsParty, now I found my favorite venue in San Fransico: Slim's. They have many rocking shows of my favorites artists like MFATGG, NOFX, Copeland or The Living End. Now I created a simple Plagger plugin script to produce an iCal file for the schedule, so you can subscribe via iCal or Google Calendar. Enjoy!.

P.S. dammit Vox javascript doesn't allow me to put a webcal:// link!

六本木のあおい書店

よく利用する六本木あおい書店ですが、いついってもおなじＢＧＭなのが若干気になる。

クラシックなので聞き飽きるということはないですが、店員さんとかはどう感じているのだろうか。。

Alice in chains

Alice in Chains at The Warfield, SF, CA. November 26th 2006 8pm.

Are they still live? Do they still rock? Is it worth going to see?

夜のピクニック

夜のピクニック

恩田 陸

いま毎晩読んでる。ちょっとずつ。胸キュン系。