Conveyor Belt Sushi

I wasn’t going to put this one out because the battery died before I could finish it, but what the heck. It’s not like this is Neilson ratings week or anything.

Tony provides the Japanese Phrase of the Day:

早くしてくれない?
はやくしてくれない?
Hayaku-shite kure nai?
“Would you please hurry the #$%! up?”

The “#$%!” part isn’t actually expressed in a specific word. It’s in the tone. He certainly didn’t learn that attitude from me.

Were you hoping for a podcast instead of a video? Actually, I’ve been practicing, but I haven’t recorded anything I feel like releasing. But if you really want to hear something and you don’t care if it’s not that great, you can download the file “EXMIC057.MP3” from this directory:

https://herroflomjapan.com/podcasts/

I haven’t listened to it. If you don’t like it, trash it and listen to something else. On the plus side, it has lots of subway noises because I didn’t hit the stop button while I was on the subway.

And about the contest: I’m not about to ask anyone to vote for me every day for two weeks. That’s plain absurd. I’m just happy I was nomiated.

VIDEO

Meal Ticket

I know I promised that my next work of art would be a podcast. Hey, I lied. I can’t help it — videos are just so frikkin’ easy to make! Post-production is simply connecting the Clie to my PC via USB and doing a cut & past job in QuickTime Pro. I save it as a self-contained hinted movie with MP4 video and audio encoding.

Well, I was in Shibuya a few nights ago after work to buy a wide angle lens so I can shoot panoramas. I didn’t have my mics, but I did have my Sony Clie PEG-NX70V, which as you can see I’m really starting to enjoy using as a video camera. Even with plenty of other data on the 128MB Memory Stick (text articles off the web, e-books, WAV files from the voice recorder, Atok for handwriting recognition in Japanese, etc.) I still have enough room for about 40 minutes of video. Granted, it’s only 160 X 112 pixels big, but it doesn’t look bad at all when viewed at double size, does it?

So I decided to do a wee little videocast of a Japanese style fast food restaurant. This is really mundane stuff to me, but I know there will be lots of people diggin’ it because it’s different and it’s a glimpse into the daily life here. I like that I can whip out my mics or camera practically anywhere and just start talking. It took a while to build up the guts, but I’m completely over the self-consciousness now!

OK, the next one will be a podcast, I promise.

VIDEO (10.3 MB)