Rand Wacker

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Found this looking for Kua’Aina Burger

I’ve started putting up some photos from this excursion. Yesterday, our coworkers took us on a little field trip to a mountainous area outside of Tokyo call Takao-san (Takao Mountain). It’s actually still inside the borders of this city of 20 million people. We wandered the hills then had a very traditional and very amazing dinner. Before the meal, we rode a little chair lift up the side of a rather tall mountain for some amazing views looking back on the city and over the mountains of the interior.



Other photos include some of the more humorous signs we’ve seen around town including the “Jesus Is My Homeboy” store and the traditional bacon flavored burrito. I’ve got some work to do today, then probably a little more exploring before the rest of my team arrives tonight.

Whenever Sendmail’s Professional Services folks come over to Tokyo for extended periods, they stay at one of the Tokyu Stay hotels, usually the one in Yotsuya.

On this trip, when I first arrived, our team had booked me in to a place closer to our office in Ginza. My friend Sandy came over to meet me for dinner and started laughing at the room. He had assumed that since I was staying in a “business hotel” it would be much nicer than his room over at the Stay (or as we call it, “Sendmail Office, Yotsuya”). After seeing his place, I immediately moved.



The Tokyu Stay is fantastic! It’s designed as an extended-stay kind of place, with very clean and well laid out rooms which are more like mini-apartments. There is a micro kitchen and a combined washer/dryer (yes, combined!). They skip some of the usual overheads of regular hotels: housecleaning only comes once a week, there’s no room service, etc. But the building and rooms are really very nice, there are some nice open spaces for lounging around, and it’s cheaper than any hotel I’ve stayed at in Tokyo! Whether you’re coming to Tokyo for work or fun, I highly highly recommend this place (can’t vouch for the other properties in the chain…yet…)

Oh yeah, and be sure to request a non-smoking room!

Squeezbox Wireless MP3 Player

I’m heading to Tokyo today for about a week and a half of business fun. Since a couple of my good friends from work are already there doing a different project, and a couple of other fun people from my team are joining us next week, it should be a blast.

Great, in the age of number portability I’ve had to switch my cell phone number the old way; by mailing everyone a new number to use.

I’ve got 1 month left on my contract with AT&T. I got a T610 w/ T-Mobile service (I’m always buying cell phones through Amazon, they gave me an additional $100 off and a Jabra Bluetooth headset for $20, the same deal is currently avail through them for $0 grand total…). To take a number with you, the new provider needs to initiate the transaction, and since I still am under contract with AT&T, that would cancel my AT&T account and incur a penalty. They have no way of changing my old number and keeping it “in reserve” until it gets transferred. Oh well.

If someone finds a way around this, I’d be curious, but at this point it’s only an academic exercise for me.