I said, wouldn’t it have been great if that were true, and flipped on the television.

A voice on the TV talked about the destruction of The Great and Beautiful Things. Horton, who heard a Who, had been crushed to death under one hundred fifty firetrucks. (It had only taken one to do in Morris the Cat.) In retribution, so-and-so filled a house with Jeff Koons art and Velvet Elvis paintings, went out to sea, and brought back a chain of dolphins one hundred fifty miles long to destroy it.

From: Jon Lasser
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2007 1:37 PM
To: [Redacted]
Subject: Japan tourist details

Eating:

• Kaffe Essen, about a block past TCAT on the same side of the street. The morning service is perfect coffee, toast, egg, and salad for 450 yen.
• Kanda Yabu Soba is listed in the Lonely Planet book. Fabulous buckwheat noodles, hot or cold (cold is traditional), in a lovely old building where the waitresses sing the orders to the kitchen.
• Sakata is also listed in the Lonely Planet book. They do Udon noodles that are pretty incredible. It’s near Ginza, and I recommend sitting at the bar and chatting with people.
• The Ginza Lion is also, not surprisingly, near Ginza. They’re a German-style beer hall — sit downstairs, order food, most of which you can recognize, and look at the lovely mosaics on the wall. http://www.ginzalion.jp/
• I also mentioned Gyoza Stadium, part of Namjatown, a theme park in the Sunshine City office complex. It’s a bit far away, but if you’re in that part of town for some other reason, it’s fun. Lots of little stalls with a zillion kinds of dumplings. It costs a little to get in.

Except for Kaffe Essen (where they do understand “morning service” and “coffee”) and Gyoza Stadium (where pointing is sufficient), the places above all have English menus. In general, it’s perfectly acceptable to take the server out to the window and point at the plastic models of food, if you can’t otherwise communicate. I do recommend trying that once at someplace that doesn’t speak English; you’ll get more interesting food that way. Make sure you have lots of little pickles — the Japanese have an incredible array of delicious pickles, from salted plums to cucumbers to cabbage to squash.

Of course, relying on [Redacted]-san for lunch selection is always recommended. I don’t think I had more than a couple of disappointing meals in Japan, but none of them were with him.

Sightseeing:

• Senso-Ji, in Asakusa, is a large complex with a Buddhist temple and a whole bunch of Shinto shrines. Out front is a market with lots of little stalls good for picking up touristy things (or umbrellas if it suddenly started raining), and there are often food stalls with tasty treats. I had a tasty okonomiyaki — basically a pancake full of bonito flakes, pork, ginger, scallions and other bits — from one of the vendors off to the side of the temple. You’re also likely to find Takoyaki there, a tasty deep-fried ball of dough with octopus bits, doused in bonito flakes. They’re frequently almost too hot to eat when you get them, and highly recommended. Near Senso-ji is Kappabashi-dori, the restaurant supply street. It’s a good place to pick up inexpensive chopsticks, and to check out the (not at all cheap) plastic food models you see in restaurant windows.
• Meiji-jingu is the shrine to the Meiji emperor. It’s a huge, forested park in the middle of Tokyo. Check out the shrine itself, wander around, and maybe check out the treasure museum, too. Outside of Meiji-jingu is Harajuku bridge, over the train tracks to Harajuku station. Harajuku bridge is where all of the cosplay kids hang out — best time to check it out is weekend afternoons, but after school probably works too.
• The Japan Traditional Craft Center is off near Namjatown, and has lots of neat handcrafts. Often there are demonstrations of traditional techniques — I saw them working on kimono fabric on looms, when I was there. Like Gyoza stadium, it’s more something to do if you’re already in that part of town than a destination on its own.
• Ginza, the shopping district, at night. Just go out and see the lights turning dark into day. Especially in Ginza, go into the larger department stores. They’re exquisite — almost more like museums than shops. Mitsukoshi and Matsuya seemed to me particularly worth seeing.
• Hakuhinkan Toy Park is also in the Ginza area, and is where I picked up the iFish. It’s about five stories of toy shopping, and fun. They do have a no-tax counter if you’re buying more than $100 of stuff — be sure to bring your passport for that!
• Don’t discount the area around the hotel. The Royal Park has a “Seven Shrines of Nihonbashi” pamphlet containing a nice walk around the neighborhood where you can see many of the shrines. This will put you in the actual neighborhood, which is a great place to look around and see a less touristy part of Tokyo than any of the above.

Getting Around / Etiquette / Etc.

• The recommendations from the Lonely Planet guide were pretty good overall. I mostly stuck to the subway rather than the JR lines, though after navigating to Kyoto and back I would be more comfortable taking the JR in the future.
• The hotel room will have the subway map like the one Jerry has on the wall, with Romanized stop names and numbers. The subway is ridiculously easy if you have this map and know the name of your destination: the lines have colors, and the stations are numbered sequentially, so it’s easy to figure out which way to go. I only made one mistake with this between two trips.
• People are unbelievably helpful. If you’re lost, don’t hesitate to ask passers-by for help — you’ll receive it, almost certainly.
• Never leave a train station without looking at the map, figuring out what exit to leave by. Also, read and study the section in the Lonely Planet book on decoding the three-part street addresses used in Tokyo.
• I didn’t really have any major etiquette faux pas that anybody let me know about. Try to be polite, do a lot of half-bowing, and you’ll probably be all right.
• As we’ve discussed, at least in work situations people are very unlikely to tell you that they don’t understand. The body language is fairly different around this as well. You’ll probably want to ask people many very specific questions in order to ascertain whether or not they understand not only your words but the meanings.

I’d assumed that we would, in fact, be eating several whole beasts. In fact, we ate small bits of many different beasts. Also, while we did have pig ears, beef kidneys, and sheep sweetbreads, most of the beast parts were fairly innocuous: guincale, pork cheeks, and so on.

Which isn’t to say that the food wasn’t marvelous. I particularly loved the winterier preparations, the braised pork cheeks, the pork tongue dolce forte, and the guincale wrapped, gorgonzola-stuffed dates. The (pickled?) sheep tongue salad was also superb. But last year’s menu looks tastier, and a bit more daring, as well.

The table we sat with was great fun: Michael Hood and a bunch of other folks whose names now escape me (that’s what they get for not having blogs!) were all generous enough to share their wine with us (next year we’ll bring some to share too), and talk ranged from food to politics to more politics.

I don’t want to sell the event short — I quite enjoyed it, and I plan to attend next year — but I was definitely hoping for more. I’d have been nearly as happy (though somewhat less educated, and less likely to meet new people) by any other night at the restaurant.

Right now, I have chocolate custard baking in the oven. This is an experiment: I’ve never made any kind of pudding or custard before. But we needed some milk tonight (for a very risotto-like orzo and broccoli dish), and I had about two cups left. The New York Times had an article on chocolate pudding and while none of their recipes matched the ingredients I had on hand, one from Bittman’s How to Cook Everything did. We’ll see, in five minutes or so, if I have a tasty dessert tonight…

The first article, Wayne Curtis’s Weni, Widi, Wiki, told the story of a visit to Seattle using only Internet guides, specifically those with user-generated content. It seemed to highlight for me the reason I’m no longer so interested in Yelp, Amazon Reviews, or most of the crowdsourced Internet. My first thought after reading this article was that I was simply tired of opinions.

Several years ago, I enjoyed being a fire-breathing opinion columnist with the primary mission of thinking provocative thoughts and the secondary mission of generating page views, with only a tertiary mission of being right. If I was wrong in a way that made people stop and think about the problem, I’d won.

I don’t think I’d enjoy that job much today. By and large, I just don’t care whether people like my opinions, or agree with them. If people ask me what I think, I’m more than happy to share my opinions, but I’m not all that likely to volunteer what I think. (This has made it harder for me to blog, since I feel so reluctant to say anything without prompting.)

Then I read the very next article, Corby Kummer’s Beyond the McIntosh, about John Bunker, a man who has dedicated his career to preserving heirloom varieties of apples. At the Capitol Hill farmer’s market, I buy most of my apples from one guy, who grows a mix of things people have heard of, and things that most people haven’t. I discovered my favorite variety of apple there, and was tickled pink to discover that it’s the same as John Bunker’s favorite: the Black Oxford, native to Maine, and the apple that launched Mr. Bunker on his career.

If I didn’t care about opinions, why would I be so excited by the information that John Bunker’s favorite apple was the same as my own?

The answer, I think, is the difference between solo and aggregated opinions. Crowdsourced reviews have the same grey, mushy feel of meals at The Cheesecake Factory. When I first paged through the copy of Zagat’s restaurant guide for Seattle I’d been sent, I couldn’t believe that people were as likely to praise the Cheesecake Factory as to dis Lark, my favorite Seattle restaurant.

But of course, Zagat’s guide polls hundreds or thousands of people (myself included), and averages out their opinions. On average, people will prefer an unchallenging place, with giant portions of bland food, to a restaurant specializing in small plates of often strange or exotic food - and that’s true even if each individual’s preferences are otherwise.

I suspect that almost everyone who reviewed The Cheesecake Factory has an interesting, even unique, set of food preferences, and that I could talk for a good long while with most of them and find their individual opinions fascinating, even when I disagreed with them. But, taken together, these individual opinions cancel each other out and leave you with an uninflected average opinion.

I remember some science fiction story I read as a teenager, in which one character posited that the Venus of Willendorf represented an averaged-out map of what men desired in women, which puts me in mind of Jason Salavon’s work.

In other words, preferences are more interesting individually than when they’re aggregated. This is the lesson of Apple versus Microsoft, where the former is a distillation of one man’s particular aesthetic and the other is the product of endless usability tests. I’d go so far as to assume that Microsoft’s software would be more interesting, and more pleasing to myself, if it were the product of Bill Gates’s personal vision, or even that of a single usability research subject. But such software would likely be less successful overall, if we define success as marketplace success, the definition by which The Cheesecake Factory succeeds.

I never pick up my Zagat, and I’m not much more likely to rely on Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisors, or its myriad crowdsourced descendants. I’d rather go up to a stranger, as my boss did one night in New York City, and ask the name of his favorite bar. In fact, one recommendation was the first bar I ever remember going to in order to see a band, The Continental. I was surprised, and more than a little pleased, to find that they were still there. But most of the recommendations were places I hadn’t heard of, or would have found on my own.

Sometimes aggregated opinions are toxic. I had a particularly bad experience when I tried to find reliable information on picking out a Blu-Ray player. HD-DVD partisans had so poisoned the pages on Amazon and other sites that I was unable to tell who had really used the player in question, and who was merely trying to sow uncertainty and push people to HD-DVD instead. Claims and counter-claims proliferated, with no end in sight.

In the end, I bought a low-end Sony player, upgraded the firmware to the latest before trying anything else, and have had not a single one of the myriad reported problems. Was I just lucky, or was all of the concern overblown? The plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, even if it’s my anecdote. What, exactly, do we call the plural of “opinion?”

I wasn’t thinking anything too strenuous: perhaps looking for the Octopus down at 86 feet at Redondo, or checking out a supposedly very easy dive near Steilacoom.

Mail me if you’re interested.

On creepy, my Mac:
2 ~$ uname -a
Darwin 10-8-13-196.isilon.com 9.2.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.0: Tue Feb 5 16:13:22 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.3.13~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 i386
3 ~$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
122 ls
89 cd
43 sudo
19 ssh
18 df
16 man
14 rm
11 mv
11 less
10 ifconfig
4 ~$
And on spooky, my Ubuntu box:
jlasser@spooky:~$ uname -a
Linux spooky 2.6.24-16-generic #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 12:47:45 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux
jlasser@spooky:~$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
139 ls
121 cd
37 less
32 cat
23 ssh
23 grep
20 sudo
19 find
10 telnet
9 rm
jlasser@spooky:~$

Much of what I do on these boxes is reviewing logs from various Isilon clusters, which doesn’t result in a lot of interesting stuff. The rest of what I do is largely launched via GUI (e-mail, Web browsing, instant messaging, and work tracking with VoodooPad) or local workstation administration.

The thing that took the longest were the potatoes, which spent maybe twenty minutes in the oven, and which needed to be sliced into wedges. The beet salad took maybe fifteen minutes to prepare the previous evening; I’ve discovered that it’s far better the second day.

While the oven heated, I seasoned the steak, and I started cooking the steak a little after the potatoes, so that it had time to rest once it was done. While the potatoes finished, I prepped the plates with their quarters of beet salad and microgreens. Finally, the potatoes were done, and we plated them and the steak.

It was delicious, it was beautiful, and it was easily fast enough to cook on a weeknight.

Poor Laura had swimmer’s ear and, in the name of health and good sense, we took the weekend off of diving.

It feels like a step backwards; last weekend we did our first dive together without an instructor/divemaster, using our own tanks. It was a very good dive. I liked it.

Next weekend, if Laura’s feeling better by then, maybe we’ll go down to 86 feet at Redondo, and go looking for the octopus. Or maybe we’ll go down near Steilacoom, to a site in our big book of local dives. Or maybe, if we’re feeling up to it, both.

The compulsion I feel to dive again, and soon, is amazing. I forgot that I felt this way coming back from Bonaire, but I didn’t keep it up and I let the fire gutter out. Well, it’s back. I’m not sure how much diving we’ll be doing in Hawaii — at least four days, possibly up to six days, at least two dives per day — but it doesn’t seem like enough.

I’m sure that someone else at Apple had this bright idea independently, and whoever you are, thank you!

This weekend, Laura and I planned to not scuba dive. Last weekend, the five Advanced Open Water dives wore us the heck out. Somehow, though, it doesn’t feel right to not dive this weekend. Plus, we just bought high-pressure steel tanks today: two 80 cubic foot tanks for Laura, two 100 cubic foot tanks for me. It’d be a sin not to try them out, wouldn’t it? And since we’re moving from aluminum to steel, we need to adjust our weights for buoyancy, and why wait to do that?

We were waffling on the tanks, but the fellow at Underwater Sports up on Aurora gave us a very fair price for them — as good as anything we were finding on the Internet. And so seeing as Craigslist just wasn’t turning up used high-pressure steel tanks, we decided to spring for it.

We’ve never been diving before, just the two of us without a divemaster or instructor. Assuming that we can figure everything out, we’ll probably just go to Redondo, where we’ve been a fair number of times. That’ll give us an experience we’re somewhat familiar with, to transition more easily.

So, it looks like we will be diving tomorrow, at Redondo, after doing the farmer’s market in Ballard. (With any luck we’ll put something in the crockpot to have ready when we get back.)

We’ve spent a bloody fortune on dive gear this year, but almost all of it should last us for many years to come. Over the number of dives we’re hoping to do, it’ll amortize out quite nicely.

We really only need one last piece of dive gear. I’m still trying to talk myself out of it, and hopefully I’ll succeed. But the car’s developed a ripe funk in the last week, and those rubberized floor mats are beginning to sound really attractive. If the Lysol doesn’t kill the dead-sea-creature smell emanating from the trunk, we may be forced to take drastic measures.

I settled on 64-bit Gutsy Gibbon Server, as it was the latest and greatest. I built my generic image, which worked great. But then I built my clone.

The clone’s ethernet card never showed up. I used every tool; I could see it on the PCI bus, and I could examine it to my hearts’ content, but ifconfig just wouldn’t see eth0.

Finally, today, I found the culprit. I’d rebuilt the image again, cloned it, told the clone to create a new ID, and immediately the Ethernet interface disappeared.

The culprit? /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules, which relies on the MAC address of the network card to assign ethernet devices. Changing the ID changes the MAC address, which breaks the existing rule.

Solution? Delete the rule for the old card, on eth0, and change the eth1 in the rule for the new MAC to eth0.

That’s it. Wish it hadn’t taken me days of messing around to figure that out. Makes me feel old and not very bright.