I haven’t posted recently, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on my blog.
I’ve completed a first-cut version of a plugin for displaying Picasa photos in Wordpress. I just tested it with my post earlier this month on Lew’s wedding if you want to see. I named it Shashin (pronounced sha-sheen), which is Japanese for photograph. I started working on it while I was in Japan, so I thought it deserved a Japanese name, and shashin sounds cool.
The mPicasaIntegration plugin I’ve been using so far has some real drawbacks. One is that it copies down the pictures from Picasa to your web server, so you’re eating up disk space (to be fair, the author did this because he was concerned at the time about what was allowed under the Picasa user agreement, but it’s pretty clear now Google is happy to let folks re-display their Picasa images). You also can’t adjust the size - every image is 640×480. In contrast, my plugin displays the images directly from Picasa, which means once I move all my pictures from my old Coppermine installation to Picasa, I can get an account for my site with a lower disk quota, and a smaller monthly bill ;-). Also, Shashin can display images in any of the 17 sizes supported by the Picasa API. Picasa’s on the fly scaling is pretty good - much better than the browser scaling I had to use with mPicasaIntegration.
I’ve also given it some nice display options - you can choose to have the photo link to the Picasa image, and optionally display the photo description as a caption (I eventually gave up on finding the “correct” way to caption an image in xhtml and just went with a div set to block display). Getting the xhtml to work the way I want has been driving me crazy though, due to WordPress’ autoformatting. For example, Wordpress sticks a line feed and a break tag between nested divs, even if there’s no line break in my code. I set the priority of my content filter to the maximum level, to try overriding the autoformatter, which helped with some problems, but not all of them.
I’m not quite ready to share it yet, mainly because I don’t have an admin page done yet for the photo table (I’m parsing the Picasa RSS feed on demand and then syncing it to local tables). I’d also like to offer some options beyond just displaying single images…I hope to be able to invite folks to beta test in a couple weeks.
I spent a fair amount of time on the architecture of the code. It’s all OO, and I went a bit over the top with the abstraction. That made the setup time longer but is now paying off, as I can add features without having to do a whole lot more coding. I also now have a good foundation of generic functionality for building other plugins (I have another in the works for managing real estate listings, for my dad).
[tags]Wordpress, plugin, Picasa[/tags]
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It’s been a long time since I’ve written a pho review. I have a backlog of a few I’ve been meaning to write (two more in Philly and one in San Mateo), and hopefully I’ll get to those soon. But for now I’ll weave my talk of pho with my ongoing talk of Tokyo. Pho is not easy to find in Japan. While the Vietnamese diaspora in Tokyo is big enough to sustain at least a few Vietnamese restaurants, you usually need to go to a specialty shop to get good pho. Thanks to the dazzling pho-king site, I was aware of at least one pho restaurant in Tokyo. Unfortunately, I never made it there - it would have been an excursion to get there from where we lived, and it just never made it to the top of the list. But I did stumble across the Com Pho stand in the basement of the Marunouchi Oazo shopping center, located across the street from Tokyo station. Com Pho is a chain with four locations in Tokyo, but I haven’t been to the others.
I was visiting the shopping center with the family, but couldn’t persuade them to join me for pho. So I sat with them while they ate Chinese food next door, and then I got pho take out afterwards. Like many inexpensive restaurants in Japan, you order at Com Pho by putting your money in a vending machine and pushing the button for the food you want, and then the machine gives you a ticket that you take to the counter. It saves the restaurant staff from spending time behind a cash register. If you want a drink, they have free water, or you can get your own drink from one of the ubiquitous soda machines that are on every block in Tokyo.
When I go to a pho restaurant, I have certain expectations. One of them is that they serve pho. I found myself baffled by the Com Pho menu: it had four choices, and none of them resembled any kind of pho I was familiar with. The staff was not Vietnamese, none of the broths appeared similar to traditional pho broth, and the soups were filled with vegetables like asparagus and broccoli. So, it turned out to be a typical Japanese bastardization of foreign food. Another example is pizza: if you’ve ever had pizza in Japan, you know that they typically put things like mayonnaise, corn, nori (dried seaweed), and tabasco sauce on it.
I decided to go for the green curry pho. It was actually much more like a Thai soup, with a coconut milk-based broth, ground meat, and lots of basil. For that reason I’m not giving it a rating, since it simply was not pho. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying it. It was quite tasty, and I hadn’t had any Vietnamese or Thai food in the 5 months we had lived in Tokyo, so it was a nice change of pace.
Location: The Marunouchi Oazo shopping center site’s access page has a couple PDFs that show you how to find the shopping center. Com Pho is on the basement floor. The phone number is 03-3216-0564, but be ready to speak Japanese!
[tags]Japan, Tokyo, pho, Vietnamese food[/tags]
My apologies to the late Richard Scarry for stealing this post’s title from one of his stories in the wonderful book Busy, Busy World.
For an authentic 19th century experience in the US, all you have to do is hop on a train or subway anywhere in the Northeast or mid-Atlantic states. Although the train cars and stations have become quite run down since then ;-). My end of the “El” in Philadelphia is shut down for over a week this month, and for over 2 weeks next month, as part of a renovation project that’s been going for about 10 years, with 2 years to go. The El is the subway I take to work everyday, and it’s the primary public transportation line for moving east-west across Philly, and on into New Jersey. SEPTA has been substituting shuttle buses during the shutdown. They picked the same time to raise fares, to make sure that if the inconvenience of the buses doesn’t drive you away, the higher fares will, thus maximizing the traffic the buses have to slog through. It all adds up to doubling my commute time from 45 minutes to an hour and a half (another reason for my recent dearth of blog posts). It’s only 7 miles from my house to my office, which means if I were in better shape, and it weren’t so blazingly hot, I could jog home in the same amount of time. It boggles my mind how much time - and therefore money - is wasted across the US every day, with people sitting in traffic for hours (not to mention the gas expense and pollution).
[mpiphoto=366,left,scale,200]My extended commute gives me plenty of time to sit and pine for the Tokyo trains, revisiting pleasant memories of riding modern, clean, quiet, comfortable trains that go absolutely everywhere, and are almost always exactly on time. The Tokyo rail system is a marvel of urban planning and engineering. No matter where you are in the city, you’re rarely more than a few minutes walk from a bus stop or a 10 minute walk from a train stop. During rush hour, you might have to stand instead of sit on the train, or at worst, wait 2.5 minutes for the next train. The days of train workers having to push people onto the trains because they were so crowded are mostly gone (but it does still happen for brief periods at the busiest stations at peak hours).
If any of the major lines in Tokyo shuts down for more than a few minutes during peak hours, it can quickly cascade into massive delays and confusion, as the vast majority of Tokyo’s population gets around on the trains. But the rail companies are extremely efficient, and such delays are rare. They even perform rapid cleanup after someone kills himself by jumping in front of train - less than 30 minutes to get the trains moving again! Grisly but true. And unlike SEPTA, if a station is being renovated they don’t shut it down - instead they find ways to keep people moving through it, and even add an artistic touch.
The Philadelphia metropolitan area (i.e. Philly plus its closest suburbs) has a population of about 6.2 million. The population of Tokyo is about 12.5 million. The main subway line through Philly is the El and the main line through Tokyo is the Yamanote. The El carries about 132,000 passengers on a typical weekday. The Yamanote carries over 3.5 million. Even if you adjust for population, that’s a staggering difference. Just picking two lines like this is probably not a really fair comparison, but it gives a rough sense of the difference in reliance on mass transit.
[mpiphoto=360,right,scale,200]Watching the Yamanote drivers at work is amazing. If there’s such a thing as an elite among train drivers, these guys and gals must be it. I think they are monitored by video camera, as they are constantly gesturing with their white gloved hands towards their speedometers, and towards the specially mounted analog pocket watches that are on the dashboard of every train. The pocket watches are a great touch - all the other systems are computerized and digital, but the most important time piece - the driver’s clock - is still old fashioned. A popular video game in Japan is a Yamanote line simulator, where you can experience what it’s like trying to keep on time, and always stopping at the exact right spot so the car doors open precisely on the platform’s marked spots.
[mpiphoto=365,left,scale,200]Your average US train is an antique compared to the Japanese trains. In Tokyo, you can ride the fully automated (i.e. no driver or conductors) Yurikamone line, or ride the Shinkansen at almost 200 mph to other cities in about the same time it would take to fly (depending on how far you’re going). The Yamanote line sports TV screens in every car that constantly update you on your current location, the number of minutes to reach upcoming stations, and news on any delays on other lines (in Japanese and English). And, as I mentioned before, I’m in love with the woman who does the recorded English announcements on the Yamanote line.
Another thing I’ve mentioned before is Japan’s low crime rate, but one crime that the Japanese have had a difficult time stamping out is women being groped on crowded trains. When I first visited Japan in 2000, there was a publicity campaign going on, with posters in the stations showing a high school girl raising her hand in the air and shouting “chikan!” The intent was for her to quickly grab the man’s hand and pull it up in the air to humiliate him, turning the shame aspect of Japanese culture back on the perpetrator instead of the victim. I didn’t see these posters anymore while I was in Japan this time, but I did see new signs indicating certain train cars were reserved for women only during peak travel hours, which is probably the most straightforward solution.
Tokyo has a dense network of subway and train lines, all of which are privately run, although the majority of the system was publicly owned and operated until 1987 (when the Japanese National Railways was privatized into Japan Railway). Something I always appreciated in Tokyo was that different lines that cross or come near each other share stations - even if they’re run by different companies - making it easy to switch between them. In contrast, in San Francisco, if you want to switch from Caltrain to BART, you need to walk about a mile or catch a bus. Here in Philly, the 100 line and the R5 have probably half a dozen stops within a half mile of each other, but somehow they couldn’t get even one shared stop between them.
[mpiphoto=364,right,scale,150]One challenge with switching lines, even with shared stations, is buying additional tickets or dealing with transfers. In March of this year, that all went away in Tokyo, as almost all the trains and buses started honoring Suica and Pasmo cards. With either card, you’re simply charged when you come out of your last station, regardless of how many lines you switched between along the way. The cards have also become general purpose charge cards - you can use them for purchases at many stores. You can set your card to get automatic refills from your bank account if your balance gets low, and you can download it to a FeLiCa-enabled mobile phone if you don’t want to bother carrying the card around.
[mpiphoto=362,left,scale,200]The buses are equally high tech. Many bus stops in Tokyo have a data matrix, which is essentially a next generation bar code, that you can scan with your cell phone. You can then get an alert on your phone when the bus is nearing your stop (you can specify how many minutes of advance warning you want). Before I knew about this system, I would stand all by myself, waiting in the rain at the bus stop near our apartment, and marvel at how people would just appear from nowhere a minute before the bus arrived, even when it was running late. Also, I’m fairly sure all the newer Toei “non step” buses are hybrids. Their engines turn off whenever they stop, just like our Prius (”non step” means they’re wheelchair and elderly friendly - another interesting Japanese turn of English phrase).
Like I said, I’ve had time to reminisce about all this while sitting endlessly on the SEPTA buses this past week. And with a two week El shutdown scheduled for next month, I’ll have plenty more time to keep thinking about it while enduring more interminable bus rides.
[tags]Tokyo, Philadelphia, SEPTA, subway, trains, buses, Suica, Pasmo, Yamanote[/tags]
Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I’m back at work full-time, and we’re rearranging rooms in the house right now. Kai is sleeping in the same room with my computer while I get his new room painted, so I haven’t had a time or place for blogging. I’ll probably be posting only about once a week for the next few weeks or so :-(.
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[mpiphoto=359,leftclear,scale,300]Minato-ku, Tokyo |
If you spend a little time in Tokyo, sooner or later you’ll look down at the sidewalk and see one of the fire hydrant manhole covers with anime firemen on them (in Japan the fire hydrants are under manhole covers). Then, if you’re like me, you’ll notice the firefighting scenes on the manhole covers vary in different parts of town. Then you’ll notice that each of the major parks in Tokyo has its own unique, artistic design for the covers of otherwise ordinary manholes. Then you’ll notice almost every Japanese city has unique designs for its manhole covers. And then, before you know it, people are looking quizzically at you, the crazy gaijin with his camera out, stopping in the middle of the street to take pictures of the ground.
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I discovered the Japan Visitor blog has several sets of manhole pics that are really great: here, here, and here. It turns out there are drainspotting enthusiasts around the world.
Now that I’m back in the US, I’ve been checking out the manhole covers in Philly. They’re utterly uninteresting. That’s probably why I never paid any attention to them in the first place ;-).
[tags]Japan, Tokyo, drainspotting, manhole covers[/tags]
The bride and groom (Lew and Cheryl), Lew’s siblings, and their families (minus my family, and one sister and her family)
The bride and groom (Lew and Cheryl), Lew’s siblings, and their families (minus my family, and one sister and her family)
My trip to Newport last weekend was a feverish whirlwind. Feverish because I had a cold, and a whirlwind because I covered a lot of ground in the 36 hours I was there. I arrived Saturday evening, just in time for a night-before-the-wedding party. It was at the Newport Yacht Club - I hadn’t been in there in almost 25 years, and was amazed to see that it had hardly changed at all. And they still have their bizarre ritual of shooting off a miniature - but extraordinarily loud - cannon when they lower the flag at sunset. My step-brother Lew has been living in LA for at least 10 years now, and we’ve seen each other only a handful of times since he moved there. So the party was my first opportunity to get to know some of his friends and bride to be. I had a cold and wasn’t feeling well, but I looked good, which is all that really matters 
(Maria had a nice suit made for me when she was in Vietnam).
On Sunday I still wasn’t feeling great, but I drove up to Boston with my nephew Alexander, brother John, and his girlfriend Miss to visit my grandfather. He’ll turn 94 next month. His health is not good these days, so I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to see him. It was a good visit, but unfortunately the trip there took almost 3 hours in each direction because of horrific traffic (it usually takes less than 2). So I made it back to Newport feeling worn out, and just in time for the start of the wedding at 6pm.
The wedding ceremony was held in the sand at 1st beach (aka Easton’s Beach). It was nicely done, with a great mix of traditions - Lew and Cheryl had a Scottish bagpiper, a friend read an Irish poem, and Lew broke a glass underfoot after the ceremony was complete, which is a Jewish tradition. My step-nephew (if there is such a term) was the ringbearer, and I had one piece of advise for him: don’t drop the ring in the sand!
The reception was also at the beach, in the Rotunda. We also had use of the carousel, which my sister was excited about - I think she rode it half a dozen times.
Then I was back on a plane early Monday morning, and after arriving in Philly, took the train straight to work, to start my first full-time day since I came back from Japan (I had been working part-time while I had the boys and Maria was still in Japan). I enjoyed seeing everyone and was very glad to be there for the wedding - I just wish I had been feeling better.
