Rich Seymour's stochastic statements.

Editing iptables config. That’s something I haven’t done in years. Yup.

Had an American style dinner last night. Pretty good. The French fries were pretty authentic. The pizza was tasty very little sauce and a good amount of cheese. We drank a fair amount. I played a Clark 8 song (never said) for the folks and they liked it. I think it would go over better if I played covers, but I really don’t commit other people’s songs to memory much.

Then speaking of covers, we went to the karaoke room of this compound… (if I ever have a compound it will have a karaoke room) and then true Japanese karaoke madness began. If you have Facebook you can see various pics of me singing Livin on a Prayer, some aerosmith, some Simon and Garfunkel. Japanese karaoke is usually done with two people, which kind of takes the pressure off a bit. I have done two singer karaoke in the US just far less often. Also the sound system was rad with a couple crazy clear plastic sphere speakers hanging from the ceiling, in addition to the big monitor size speakers.

So yeah, getting a good slice of Japanese culture here in this small town of Izu. Can’t wait to see Yokohama and Tokyo tho!

Also there is one analogy I would like to make:

coffee flavor:Japanese coffee::vermouth:dry martini

It’s strange to me. Japanese coffee kind of tastes like watered down and filtered Turkish coffee. Like the beans have been lightly roasted and ground into a powder and somehow in that process lose the oily tasty parts. Leaving a sort of afterimage of coffee, like a picture of coffee or a scratch n sniff coffee bubble sticker. You get what I’m saying?

That said there was that starbucks in the narita airport. I don’t know if I want to drink starbucks in Japan. If it tastes like American starbucks I will bemoan the Americanization of Japan, and if it tastes like crazy weak Japanese coffee I will be sad that I can’t get a real cup of joe. But then what is a good cup of coffee? I enjoy everything from Folgers crystals to sunset junction’s intelligentsia coffee to brooklyn’s gorilla coffee. Gorilla coffee would be my overall fave. Followed by LA’s groundwork and Urth Caffes.

I have time to pontificate on coffee because in spite of being here a few days, I still don’t understand Japanese.

Went out to walk around Izu, by around I mean like a block and a half. I came across a bunch of spiders, the same spider species, but huge. Red, black and yellow. I took some pics and I have been assured that these are peaceful spiders. That’s cool.

As I mentioned previously there is a guitar here. I have played it now. People were diggin it. The guitar is somewhere between ten and thirty years old by the looks of it and oddly made in Korea not Japan.

Now we are in the workshop and we are installing the CentOS linux distro. I could pretty much do this at 4am while drunk driving the length of the 110 with a laptop on my dashboard but it’s still fun to do it with a guy telling you how to in a language you don’t understand. Their presentation is very detailed so I can follow it mainly. That and English pops up every now and then such as ‘root password’ and ‘time zone’.

The bento lunch was awesome. Breaded pork cutlet with some worchestershire sauce. That w word is simply pronounced uster in Japanese. Not to be confused with oyster sauce.

In closing Izu iz rad. There’s a jacuzzi, hot indoor pool thing, pool tables, a karaoke room and as mentioned a guitar and crazy spiders (outside). You can see the ocean or bay or whatnot and it looks gorgeous. This is the most vacation I think I’ve ever had. And mainly I’m not running around playing tourist. Yay!