Tag Archives: travel

Trip to Japan

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I took one week off early this month to fly back to Japan for my vacation. This was my first time in 4 years that I visited my family in Japan, and I spent most of my time in my hometown Niigata. It is so weird that, while certain things were just the way I remembered, other things looked so different from what I had in my mind in all these years of being away from the country.

The thing I really enjoyed there was the food! There are many kinds of food I had missed for all these years, but what I missed most was the Mos Burger, a national fast food chain known for its finest quality burgers. While you can find fine quality burgers in other parts of the world (and certainly in the US), Mos Burger has such a distinct and sophisticated taste that in my mind it ranks one of the highest among all the burger stores I’ve tried. So, if you have a chance to travel to Japan, I would certainly recommend you give Mos a try. My personal favorite is the Mos Cheese Burger. Of course, there are other kinds of good foods in Japan such as Ramen noodles and Sushi.

My only regret is that, because I only had one week to spare, I didn’t have time to stop by Tokyo to see folks there. One week was way too short for this. For my next trip back to Japan, I’d like to take at least two weeks off so that I can spend some days in Tokyo.

Anyway, I took a bunch of pictures while I was there, and these are just some of them. I hope you enjoy.


Keisei Rapid Liner from Narita Airport to Tokyo station. While the fastest way to get to Tokyo from Narita is via Narita Express, Keisei Liner is probably a good economical alternative and reasonably convenient. It takes roughly 1.5 hours to get to Tokyo station from the airport without transfer.		 Kendo tournament was taking place in my home town while I was there.
A magnificent view of the sunset at Sea of Japan. The place I stayed at is only 10 minutes walk from the beach. This is one of many infamous vending machines that you see all over Japan. You can think of this as something equivalent of water fountains in the US in terms of its distribution density, though there are certainly more vending machines in Japan per unit area than water fountains in the US.

On the platform for Shinkansen (the Bullet Train) at Niigata station.		 A view from Shinkansen overlooking the outlines of local mountains.

A somewhat busy street in Yokohama. Luckily you don’t need to drive as much in the metropolitan areas thanks to the large train network available throughout the areas.

One thing I’ve noticed is the large number of light-weight vehicles (aka Kei cars) with the engine size less than 660 cc. Since owning a car in Japan is pretty expensive, lots of drivers opt to own a Kei car for its lower cost of ownership.

 A platform at a local station in Yokohama, waiting for my train.

A view of airplane from Terminal 1 at the Narita Airport. I was stranded there for 6 hours since my return flight to Newark was delayed. Continental airline provided a meal coupon to compensate for the delay, though it was a JAL employee who was manning the check-in counter for Continental and gave me the coupon.

Back from OOoCon 2007

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I just came back from OOoCon 2007. It’s great to see those folks whom I had only interacted with on mailing lists and IRCs. And I have to say talking face-to-face is way, way, way different from talking with text only. I was particularly delighted to finally meet with Niklas Nebel of the Calc team. We’d been interacting in various places for ages, but had never met in person. Now we have. :-) It was a real shame to not see Eike Rathke and Daniel Rentz, but I’m sure we’ll have our chance some day.

Also pleased to meet and chat with Ricardo Cruz (IRC nick: blacksheep), who is a Google Summer of Code student working on VCL layout support mentored by Michael Meeks. It was such a joy to talk with him on various topics. His demo on VCL dialog resizing was mind-blowing!

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Mac port team (led by Eric Bachard et. al.) using the src-to-xml converter that I wrote during Novell’s Hack Week (which they referred to as the “Novell parser” during their talk). Glad to know it’s being useful to you all.

Of course, it’s always great to see my fellow Novell hackers, whom I don’t see on a daily basis because of our geographical constraint. The trip to the beach in Saturday afternoon, with Florian, Noel and Hubert was particularly fun. Water in the Mediterranean Sea was very cold, and the wines were fantastic. BTW, I’m always amazed by Fridrich’s language skill: you speak how many languages in total!? So far I’ve seen him speak in Czech, German, Catalan, French, and English.

Aside from meeting with various people, I was also able to hack during my stay in Barcelona on one data pilot feature I’d been working on. The hack continued from my flight to Barcelona, back from Barcelona, and I was finally able to make my cut while being stranded at the Philadelphia airport because of my flight delay. Isn’t modern technology great? You can be stranded at an airport and still being able to hack. :-)

Some pictures from the conference:

Mingling at breakfast on 1st day
Mingling at breakfast on 1st day

(from left) Back of Tor, Fong Lin, Michael, and Hubert (front)
(from left) Back of Tor, Fong Lin, Michael, and Hubert (front)

(from left) Michael, Noel, and Tor
(from left) Michael, Noel, and Tor

Eric Bachard giving talk on native Mac OS X port
Eric Bachard giving talk on native Mac OS X port

Petr Mladek talking about splitting OO.o source code into pieces
Petr talking about splitting OO.o source code into pieces

Kendy (Jan Holesovsky) on git
Kendy (Jan Holesovsky) on git (there is Jon’s follow-up to this talk).

Fong Lin and Tor posing for photo
Fong Lin and Tor posing for photo

I’ve uploaded all of my photos here.

Trip to Prague

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I just came back from a week-long trip to the City of Prague – the capital and largest city of the Chech Republic – to participate in Novell developer’s team summit. Just saying that I had such a good time is an understatement. It was a blast! The weird thing is that this was the first time I ever met with anybody who is involved in the OO.o project face-to-face, and instead of text-only communication that we normally conduct, talking with actual voice and seeing their physical face brings such a warm, pleasant feeling to the conversation.

Aside from the meetings we had in the office, we spent the evenings and the Saturday exploring the city. The most memorable moment of course is the “blackout” incident on Thursday.

Here is the story. We went by train to a small town outside of Prague on Thursday evening. The plan was to find a restaurant in that town to sit down, relax, eat and chat (the usual stuff). We got off the train, and headed for the first restaurant closest from the train station, but unfortunately it was closed. But hey, accidents happen all the time, so we immediately regrouped and headed for the second restaurant in town, thinking that the odds of two restaurants being closed were very low.

And guess what, the second restaurant was also closed! Jan, our trusted local guide, sensed that something was wrong, so he found someone local and asked him what was going on. We then found out that there was a power outage in that town, and as a result of that all their local restaurants were forced to close for the evening.

At that point, our only choices were either to wait one hour for the next train, or walk 6 kilometers to the next town and hope that the power outage didn’t reach there. We chose the latter.

Long story short, we ended up walking that long 6-kilometer trail through the woods to the next town, to finally find a restaurant! In retrospect, though, it was probably the best team-building exercise anyone could have come up with (plus a good exercise physically). :-) But I’d rather not go through that again. ;-)

This trip was actually my first visit to Europe, and I’m sure I’ll be back again. It’s sad that we don’t know when we will meet each other again the next time, but hopefully not too distant future.