Themeless Randoms

My friend Masanori Nakayama just recently opened up a restaurant right in the heart of Tokyo, called Kassai. The restaurant features a variety of vegetable centric dishes, and a wide selection of Japanese Sake and Shochu. The restaurant has only been open for a few weeks now, and it has already been quite popular with both the locals, and also the foreign crowd as there have been a few visitors from Australia slide by! For those of you that want to hit up a unique Japanese restaurant, and be greeted by English and Japanese speaking staff, this is the place to go.

The restaurant is located right in the heart of Tokyo in the Akasaka district, which isn’t far from sights such as the Tokyo Tower, Roppongi Hills, Imperial Palace, and popular places such as Ark Hills, The Akasaka Ana Hotel, and Shiba and Hibiya Parks. Whatever the reason for your Tokyo visit, you should be within close proximity to Kassai! If not, here are some simple directions as to how to get there:

How to get there

Depending on where you are staying you may be able to walk, but first I’ll cover off access by train:

1. If you take the Tokyo Metro Chiyoda Line to Akasaka Station, and exit from the #2 exit, its only a two minute walk to Kassai (marked off by the red pointer “A”).
2. If you take the Tokyo Metro Ginza Line or the Namboku Line to Tameikesanno Station, take the #11 exit and its a 6 minute walk to Kassai (marked off by the red pointer “A”).

If you are walking, you can hit up google maps and get your directions from there. Here is a Google map with Kassai already highlighted for you:

View Larger Map

And lastly, if you are walking around Tokyo with a hand held GPS unit, here are the coordinates for the restaurant: North: 35.672812 East: 139.738605

If you decide to check out Kassai, be sure to find Masanori and say hi to him!

Japanese Restaurant Kanshaba Kassai

Basement Level 1
2-13-3 Akasaka
Minato-ku
Tokyo Japan

Phone: 03-5114-6044

Today was spent on Okanagan Lake on a Party Barge and a couple of sea-doos. It wasn’t quite as hot as yesterday, but still checked in at an overcast 30. Perfect for me as its warm, and not having to worry about getting a massive sunburn.

Anyway, when I first heard about and saw this Party Barge, I thought that it was going to be a joke, and basically a few planks attached to a few pontoons, but it turned out to be quite a beauty. The thing had enough power to pull a few tubes, and we smashed around on the thing from 10:30 am till about 7pm when it started getting a little rocky out there on the lake.

So today = no new sunburn, and a good day on the lake. I also got an early birthday present in a bottle of Merlot from a local winery (the name escapes me now). Tomorrow its time for some golf… Okanagan Springs I think.

Oh its a hot one out here… Yesterday as we drove down to Kelowna we roasted in the heat as temperatures rose to 38 during some parts of the drive. The air conditioner in my car was overheating or something though as it would occasionally crap out, and I’d have to open the windows until it came back to life… I thought the whole idea of an air conditioner was to cool you down when its hot, not crap out and force you to go 70s style and open the windows.

The 900+ kilometer drive down to Kelowna wasn’t that bad, except for a few traffic snafus along the way. The first being a truck that decided that he had to slow down to 30 to go throug the tunnels near Rogers Pass, but I was soon able to blow past that clown. The second was a guy teaching his woman how to drive a motorcycle through the windy parts just south of Sicamous. Of course she was very uncomfortable riding her little bike through the curves, and in turn slowed down to about 40km/h on every turn… As I went out to pass, I had to slide back in between the two bikes, and had the male ride right up onto my ass and greet me in my rearview mirror with numerous swears… Funny how he could disrupt traffic for the other 30 cars stuck behind him, but when someone got in HIS way, oh look out. I was able to pass her after the next bend, and from that point we didn’t see a single car behind us for about 45 minutes. Teaching someone to ride is a good idea, but pick a better spot!

Anyway, Kelowna is awesome, and it is absolutely beautiful here today. Had a great time lounging by the pool at a nice 36 degrees. Tonight we’re off to a winery for a family dinner on the outlaw (inlaws) side, and then tomorrow we’re heading out on some kind of party barge from early morning to late evening. Just about blew all my sunscrean today at the pool, but luckily I brought another can of the spray stuff (which I like WAY better than that glue that I’ve had to use since I was a kid).

Oh yeah, I also had a beer down by the pool today so there goes the no more drinking thing. I think that its really going to be hard this month as we are down here for 6 days, and then I’m off to Las Vegas for my birthday in a few weeks… Maybe I’ll have to wait till September before I take on such a task..?

Anyone else ever felt this way? Hahaha

Thankfully the Tilted Twister lego robot has been invented to help advert this phenomenon. Man… I wish technology like this existed back when I first started dealing with the rubik’s cube

Its definately been a while since I’ve encountered this phenominon but still its something that makes me laugh.

After going away camping for the second time this summer (this time only for 2 nights), and coming home to 895 new items waiting for me in Google Reader, I’ve started wondering if I really need to give a flying one about all these important things that have been going on since I last sat in front of the computer.

It also makes me think about the time that I’ve probably wasted wading through all of these on a daily basis. I think that I’ve probably not noticed that I have that many posts fly by me on a daily basis because I take them on numerous times a day, and don’t get a realistic count of the time I’m wasting and the clutter that I’m causing.

My downfall in the past was coming across a site that had a post or theme that was interesting to me. If I saw the familiar little RSS icon in my firefox bar, I’d subscribe to it, and file it into my categorized folder system and then just read away. This snowballed and now I’m seeing that I’m a slave to RSS feeds and need to cut the crap.

My plan of attack is to evaluate my feeds as the posts come in. I thought about just hacking away right now, but instead I’ll take the time to actually read every single thing that comes in for a while, and make an educated choice in what gets cut and what stays in my list. Two that I know will stay are Lifehacker and the local news updates for my local paper. Other than that its fair game on the other hundred or so feeds that are dragging my productivity down. In about a weeks time I’ll post an update to discuss my methods and results in my assault on my RSS list.

The girlfriend thought that I was crazy for wanting to go camping by myself, but I couldn’t think of a better way to get away from everyone and everything for 5 days, and no better place than Banff, Alberta. I originally wanted to go to Bow Valley Campground, but it was full, so I continued into Banff. I’m glad I did as the convenience of a town less than 5km from the campsite was definately nice.

Tunnel Mountain campground is definately a nice place, where you aren’t side by side with other campers. Thats one advantage of being a tent camper in Banff is that the campground is much nicer… I rode my bike through the part that allows trailers, and its like parking along the highway. WAY nicer in a tent. Also, someone must of told the mosquitos to beat it this year as there was nothing but squirrels, birds, deer, and bears in the park. Saw 3/4, but no bears…

I went on a few sweet bike rides while in Banff, and the above map shows my favourite one. I started out in tunnel mountain, down into the townsite, around Bow Falls, out to the Trans Canada Highway, and then back up the other side of tunnel mountain. The ride back up that hill was absolute murder, but it still made for an awesome 19k bike ride. This was also the first time that I’d been on a bike in the mountains, and due to the obvious altitude difference I got wasted much quicker than I would at home. I can now see why athletes train at those elevations to better prepare their bodies for competition.

Anyway, here are some of the pics that I snapped while out in Banff:

So aparently when you go away from Thursday morning at 8am to Monday afternoon at 3pm, 919 interesting things happen in the world? I don’t believe it, but thats what Google Reader told me when I opened it up a few seconds ago.

I can take a guess that there are going to be heaps of posts about the new iPhone 3G in there, and I’m wondering if there is a way to filter them out somehow. I know that its probably the biggest cell phone launch ever, but do I really need to see a picture of the first guy at every store around the world? Not at all…

On an average day if I have to plow through 50-60 new posts I kind of breeze through them, but I really dont know what to do with this 919 that is staring me in the face… I’m tempted to just click “mark all as read” for all feeds, and pretend that this whole weekend, other than my awesome camping trip, didn’t exist (at least in the RSS universe).

This is kind of a neat feeling. Today I paid off my 2006 VW Jetta, almost exactly one year after I bought it. Kind of a neat feeling to have paid off my first brand new car in such a short amount of time, and also to know that I made the right decision to switch from a gas guzzling truck with a 350 in it to a smaller car that seems to run forever on 55 liters of diesel.

To celebrate I attached the bike rack that I bought almost 2 months ago, and threw my bike on it. Didn’t go for a ride on the bike, but instead just drove up and down the highway a few times to see if the rack would actually work with my car and bike without blowing off or scratching the car. Now that I know that everything is fine, I’m gonna take my bike camping with me this coming weekend to do a little mountain trail riding… in my 100% paid off car! woooooooo!

I headed down to Mountain Equipment Co-op today and got absolutely hosed on some new camping equipment. Not hosed in that I was buying garbage, but hosed in that I spent way more than I planned. I guess that’ll happen when you head into a cool store like that with all kinds of gear and gadgets that you need.

The one thing that I did head into the store knowing that I’d buy is the tent on the right called the MEC Funhouse 4 Tent. I chose this tent not based on its looks or usefullness, but rather for the endless pun possibilities based on its name. Why the hell is it called a funhouse? Is Pee-Wee Herman going to come screaming and yelling when someone says the magic word? God I hope not.

Anyway, I left MEC with a new tent, tent footer, sleeping bag, sleeping mat, pot set, camping pillow, and a bunch more stuff that I can’t remember right now, all to a tune of just under $800. Holy sheep shit! When I originally thought I was going to get a tent I was expecting somewhere in the $200 range… Funny how things went sideways once I got there, but whatever I got some good stuff, and it’ll make for a fun camping season.

Scott over at the Photoshop Insider has recently put together a series of photo calendars from his recent trip to Italy. Of course he teased us at first with just giving us the photos, but then today he was nice enough to provide us instructions on how to create your own photo calendars.

I think that I’m going to give this a rip. Maybe I’ll make the next calendar that will be on fridges all over the world, or maybe it will just be a series of desktop wallpaper for me to use, who knows. Either way, I’m glad that someone laid this out for me and you in a simple step by step fashion.