I don't know whether it was flu or a common cold or SARS or what, but whatever it was lay waste to me and my family this week. In my case, Thursday was the first day since Sunday that my temperature didn't rise above 40C (104F), and today (Saturday) is the first day that I have no fever at all (well, so far).
It started a week ago (Saturday) with Anthony having a mild cough. On Sunday he had a temperature up to 40C, and Fumie was feeling bad too. It hit me on Monday with a force I've never been hit before. It's been [...]
View full post »

I'm still sluggish from my cold, but nevertheless, tomorrow we're all leaving for George Town, on Penang Island in Malaysia, to visit Fumie's Dad who is there on a long-term work assignment. (You can see George Town on the far left of this map)
Five of us (Fumie and Anthony and I, Fumie's mom, and Fumie's brother Shogo) take a shuttle to Kansai International, then fly to Kuala Lumpur (about 7 hours) and on to Penang (another hour). Shogo is staying only three days; the rest of us stay ten days.
It's at about 5 degrees north latitude and hot and humid and forecast to rain every single day [...]
View full post »

The Kuala Lumpur airport (KLIA) seems as modern as any I've ever seen. Just as when flying into the international wing of Chicago or LAX, you must go down a long hallway after exiting the gate. Unlike Chicago and LAX, yesterday we had long “peoplemovers” to do the walking for us. They dumped us into what turned out to be a remote terminal hub, a beautifully architected multi-story open atrium area of shops (yes, including a Starbucks) overflowing with green. The elevator enclosures were clear tubes of glass that had people flowing on all sides -- really, quite impressive.
We then road the automated [...]
View full post »

I've been in Malaysia for a bit over a week. We stayed the first three nights at a hotel on Penang Island (a large island about the size of Silicon Valley and just about as well developed) and then moved two miles away to Fumie's dad's place, also on Penang. He's here on a long-term work assignment.
For the weekend we went to Langkawi island, a somewhat smaller and vastly less-developed island a 20-minute flight north of Penang, just off the southern border of Thailand. Our hotel, the Andaman, was a thirty-minute drive from the airport and exactly at the edge of nowhere.
The Andaman is [...]
View full post »

We're back in Kyoto after 10 days in Malaysia.
Fumie and I had left Penang earlier in the day to head to Kuala Lumpur for some shopping. We had been originally scheduled to make the flight in the evening, to connect with the midnight departure of our flight to Japan, but we went in the early afternoon so Fumie could visit some shops. Fumie's mom and Anthony took the original 9pm flight, and we met them in the Kuala Lumpur airport.
For our shopping trip, we first went to “Suria KLCC” (KLCC is “Kuala Lumpur City Center”), a huge ultra-modern shopping center at the foot of [...]
View full post »

We took a total of six Malaysia Airlines flights during our recent trip, and in every respect but one, Malaysia Airlines was a first-rate airline. The staff (reservation and ground and air) were very nice, service was prompt and good, the planes and gates and terminals were all clean and bright. Flights generally left and arrived on time without fuss or problem.
But I need to rant about one issue: the airline's collective lack of common sense when it comes to night flights and the basic human need for sleep.
Our flight from Kuala Lumpur to Kansai International left at midnight, and lasted about six hours. [...]
View full post »

I went to the gym yesterday for the first time in four weeks, having been away so long at first due to a nasty cold, and then a trip to Malaysia.
I track my weight at the gym, and as mentioned before, I've been losing weight steadily. Yesterday, I found that I'd lost another 1.4 kg (3 pounds) in the intervening month since my last visit, and now am at a many-year low of 92.4kg (204lb). At 6'4" (192cm), my target is 200 lb (91kg), so I'm almost there.
Anyway, I'm trying to guess what it was that allowed me to lose three pounds [...]
View full post »

As I've said before, Spring and Fall are Kyoto's glorious seasons, and this spring seems to be no exception.
(click to see map)
These times bring out photographers like flys to honey, and in that regard I am obviously no exception. Yesterday on the way to the gym, Katsunori Shimada and I stopped by the outside grounds of a small temple in the Yamashina ward of Kyoto (the Zuishin-in Temple) to see their plum blossoms.
Plum blossoms bloom a bit earlier than the cherry blossoms. Cherry blossoms are brilliantly fluffy and white, while plum blossoms are more pink (sometimes a very deep pink), and less [...]
View full post »

Every so often I look at my webserver logs to see by what means people happen to find pages on my web server. It's particularly interesting to look at the web searches that bring people to random blog pages and the like, and it can sometimes be quite amusing just to see the variety.
As one might expect, many of the searches that bring people here are related to my book (since the book's web site is also on this server). There are also a fair number of searches on my name, which are probably book-related as well.
The amusing ones, though, are generally related [...]
View full post »

In my previous post I talked about looking at my server log files to see what kind of search-engine queries brought people to my pages. One such query that I noticed in the log this morning brought a smile to my face: “Question Jeffrey Friedl asked at the May 2003 shareholder meeting”
I don't know who did the search or why they were looking for it, but they certainly found what they were after. It brought them to a set of pages I'd made years ago and had largely forgot about, and didn't know were even indexed by the search engines: Gluttony at the Top — Executive [...]
View full post »

My sister Marcina Kreta just delivered Joshua James Kreta (the evening of the 28th, Southern-California time). I'd been checking email every minute for the last three weeks waiting for word -- little Joshua was quite tardy in his debut.
It remains to be seen if he'll go by “Joshua”, “Josh”, “JJ”, or what. In fact, he remains to be seen at all -- I got a text message from Marty (his daddy) and have no info other than “8 lbs 13 oz” and “both doing fine”. I notice he does not comment as to how he's doing

Anthony is not old enough to really [...]
View full post »

Okay, I'm not all that sure what that title really means, but the gist of it is that while there was gloriously sunny and short-sleeve-warm weather the other day, and the cherry trees were thick with buds and juuuust starting to blossom, a raging spring storm blew through on Tuesday with wind and rain and even hail(!), and then the temperatures plummeted resulting in even a bit of snow, and since then it's been cold, with even more snow just outside my window right now, leaving the dreary impression that this year's cherry-blossom season will be as short and unglorious as this sentence is [...]
View full post »

Fumie took this shot of three-year-old Anthony at the Krystal Suites hotel pool (Penang Island, Malaysia). I'm sure he was just looking down at a bug or something, but in the photo he looks like something out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, or a Calvin Klein Jeans billboard. I love the shot.
(for comparison, see this Abercrombie & Fitch image
View full post »