sorbetto in inverno

Mmmmm... My wife got me just a small sample pint of passion fruit sorbet from Ciao Bella.

Wow... It sure is cold out there, and it sure is winter, and I'm still eating this. I can't believe how awesome it is. If you do find a Ciao Bella location near you, I highly recommend you check them out. So unbelievably good, I can't wait to have more.

You know, I talk a lot (especially here) about how fascinated (read: obsessed) I am with Japan and all things Japanese, but my wife mentions that she'd love to see Venice. I think I'd really like it too.

• for the past three nights in a row, we've eaten Italian.
  
• Since I saw an offer for it in the last issue of Departures magazine, I've been really thinking about an 8-day vacation package to Rome, Florence, and Venice.
  
• I'm rigorously studying the Fodor's See It Venice guide
  

ciao!

the cost of zipping....

Figure 1: The Cost of Zipping (actual monetary cost removed for privacy reasons)

I've been a religious Zipcar member since circa 2002. For urban dwellers like me, it's just a really great concept. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Zipcar is basically in the business of commoditizing car usage. What's the big deal? Haven't rental car agencies been doing this for years? Zipcar does it with a twist - they focus specifically on highly urban areas (San Francisco, Boston, Toronto, DC, and of course, New York).
Here's how it works:

• You, the zipcar member, get a magnetic zipcard
  
• Get on the web at zipcar.com, and reserve one of their cars that are strategically parked at locations throughout the city - a few of which are bound to be near your place of residence or work.
  
• Go to the parking facility where your zipcar is parked when your reservation is scheduled to start
  
• Swipe your zipcard at the magnetic detector on the other side of the windshield of your reserved zipcar
  
• Drive.
  
• (And return the car back to where you picked it up before your reservation ends).
  

Unbelievably convenient, not to mention, they will also pay for:

• insurance (bundled into the rental cost)
  
• parking (they pay for the costs at the parking facilities where the zipcars live)
  
• gas (yep, they pay for gas too)
  

Pretty cool, and actually very economical since those costs alone are exorbitant enough to make owning and maintaining a car in a major metropolis prohibitive.

... Or is it? The chart in Figure 1 above is a chart I whipped up in Excel with the monthly Zipcar bill (monthly) used as data points - and the black trendline being a 12-month moving average. (The actual monetary cost has been removed for privacy reasons), but you get the general idea from the data points and lines of the chart.

The average monthly cost, especially with the latest apparent trend of not driving so much, is still actually less than the costs of insurance, parking, and gas associated with owning a car where I live. The moving average is still a bit high, but I guess we'll see if the trend of not spending so much on the car continues in 2007. One point to consider regarding the (very) high usage in the first quarter of 2006 is that it was completely associated with wedding preparations during that time.

Every time I start daydreaming and hit websites for BMW, Audi, Porsche, Infiniti.... I just stare at this chart. And think. And breathe.
Sigh...

Fuurin Kazan!

Most of you who keep up with my TV-watching habits probably already know that I'm obsessed with the NHK Taiga drama. Most notably, I've been religiously watching Komyo ga Tsuji (subtitled, of course, on TVJapan, my Japanese just isn't that good...)

Fuurin Kazan, NHK's taiga drama for 2007, has started up for the new year. Needless to say, I'm really really eager to find out what it's all about - but I guess I just have to wait until Komyo ga Tsuji (the subtitled version on TVJapan) finishes, and just hope and hope and hope that Fuurin Kazan will then be broadcast subtitled afterwards.

I really like Komyo ga Tsuji a lot, and I'm very eager to see how the series ends (there's only about 9 episodes left?). From the description, it sounds like Fuurin Kazan will be a much darker series. I've already treated myself to seeing just the opening, just as a brief taste. (a few more links all about it below)...

• Fuurin Kazan opening (with episode 1 preview) on youtube
  
• Komyo ga Tsuji opening on youtube
  
• NHK's official Taiga drama website (all about Fuurin Kazan)
  
• NHK's official site for Komyo ga Tsuji
  

the shinai bag

It finally came.
(featured in the left photo, my blue Fudoshin bag from the e-bogu online catalog here).

Now I don't have to take a cab to and from work while carrying my shinai for the evening kendo lessons.... No more fear of being mistaken for being a crazy Chinese hobo with a stick on the train.

But... it feels like I've got quite a way to go to "proving that I'm worthy" of having such a nice shinai bag....

Last night's session was probably the roughest one yet.
I was reminded during the practice of each technique that there are a few persistent mistakes I keep making:

• not fully extending my arms during my strikes
  
• not using my left arm properly as the main pivot/fulcrum for holding and swinging the shinai
  
• my footwork really sucks
  
• arms and shoulders keep tensing up when they should be relaxed (which relates to the first two)
  

And when I finally got home, I found a nice big blister on my left foot and a nice skin tear under my big toe (also on my left foot), I guess to show just how bad my footwork is. I've got to train harder, though I know it's just going to get tougher before it gets better....

technolust

I'm generally pretty good in terms of not feeling the need to buy things for myself most of the time. I think I'm generally more about treating my wife and I to good food, great places to travel, spa treatments, etc. much more than actual specific material things.

But.... I can now thank Steve Jobs for inspiring me to visit the Apple Store to pick a few things up for myself...

• iPhone: I want it. It's just so absolutely cool and is probably the first mobile device of its kind to do everything I'd want on-the-go, and to do it really well. Can't wait.
  
• Airport Extreme: I've got a good old Airport Express, but with the USB-disk sharing capability of this new base station, I'm very tempted to pick up an external RAID (why not RAID 5 for ultimate speed/redundancy?) USB drive array to hook up (along with my printer) to this base station. I was initially a little concerned from the security perspective about having a hard drive out on a wireless network, but I guess it should be fine. I don't think the Airport Extreme will have a digital optical audio line out for playing music using iTunes to my stereo, but that would be solved with an....
  
• AppleTV: I like the idea of being able to stream content to my TV, and use the digital optical audio line out for the video and audio content from iTunes. This seems useful to me because I spend a lot of my time grabbing content off my DVR (using a Canopus ADVC-100), capturing it as DV on the Mac, and finishing it to DVD, iPod, and PSP formats - now I'll have the ability to keep the content on my hard drive and stream it to the TV whenever I want, which seems pretty cool. The one thing that would be missing would be the ability to save HD content off my DVR since my Canopus only supports SD (it only has an s-video input).
  

Cool stuff. Anyway, back to work tomorrow after a relaxing MLK weekend.
And.... back to kendo tomorrow night!

Kendo!

I just finished my first kendo lesson tonight.

For those of you who don't know what kendo is, take full advantage of the web browser in front of you and research it - it's a form of Japanese fencing that seeks to continue the traditions and methods of swordsmanship as it was defined by the samurai.

It's absolutely great. Even before starting my first lesson, I knew it would be intense. It is intense, rewarding, fascinating, and extremely challenging. I really enjoy it and even at home I find that I'm constantly practicing swinging with the shinai.

Now I'm feeling both exhausted and fulfilled.