We bought brand new speakers today. We went to Akihabara, and spent the day there, trying to find the best ones.
Strangely, we agreed on Yamaha NS-8HX model; I did not know that Yamaha was a good speaker maker. I knew Cabasse, JBL, and Bose, but Yamaha was really the best, especially on vocals (we made our decision on Mozart's Requiem).
These speakers are really good!

We also bought a new CD player, the Sony SA30ES model. Very good, too!

My visa was wrong, and I could not take the plane yesterday: The Chinese Embassy made a mistake 2 weeks ago when we asked for it.
They said: "look at the date, you can go to China until beginning of February".
Of course, the visa was fine until that date, but it was for one entry only! And I already used that entry in November :-(
The airport staff tried to join both Embassy in Tokyo, and Dalian airport, but they could do nothing.
So I went back home, I got Boudicca back, and I am waiting for my wife to come back end of next week...

We go to Dalian tomorrow morning, for one week. We will have fresh air, as the temperature will be somewhere between -2 and -10°C.

The other funny part of this trip is that I will need to try my first Chinese dentist, as I broke a tooth a few minutes ago...
In fact, it is not really funny, as Chinese dentists are known (according to Li) to take no care at all about people's pain :-(

Update on evening: I was too afraid of the dentist, and I managed to find one in Tokyo this afternoon. He made a temporary quick & dirty fix on my broken tooth, which "should be ok for 1-2 weeks", he said. I am safe!!

Li and me will go on holidays in Dalian (North China) from Jan 31st, for Chinese New Year (which is Feb 1st). Dalian is my wife's hometown.

One month and a half later (week of March 23rd), we also will have one week off and will sail for one week in Phuket (Thailand) with Philippe and Nam (a colleague and his Thai wife).

This was a sad Christmas in my family in France this year. My mother was in hospital, my sister's mother-in-law passed away the day before, my father was alone at home, and of course I was not there, being on the other side of the Earth...
Could not be worse, I guess...

Still lazy...

We decided to receive a karaoke machine for Christmas. This will be funny (in fact we already have one, that we got for free, but it only reads VCD, and we can find only DVD in Japan).

I made a page for our Diablo II Gamers'Group. Feel free to join us! For timezone reasons, you should probably live in Asia if you want to have some games!
I will probably try to do something with Movable Type (or equivalent system) on this site. This permits to completely separate the design from the contents (with xml-based data). Looks cool...

Finally, and more sad, my mother just entered hospital a few days ago. I really hope she will be out for Christmas...

Ooops... This page was not updated for so long! So, here is a quick reminder:

I went to France in June, for 1 month: 2 weeks for business purpose, and 2 weeks holidays.

Do you know Oze? This is a very scenic place, 200km from Tokyo, where I went for 2 days (we came back yesterday) with Li and Eddie - an office friend and Diablo II player :-)

By the way, trying to make some panorama pictures with my 6-months old (expensive) Olympus digital camera, I found that this option was disabled in the menu. Do you guess why? The camera simply checks if the memory card (SmartMedia) is an Olympus-branded one!!
Incredible. The only difference is a string in the header of the card. This is an unacceptable behavior from this company (of course this is not clearly explained when you buy the camera!!). More funny, SmartMedia is a trademark of Toshiba, and only 2 or 3 companies manufacture them.
This makes this attempt to sell their own (overpriced) cards simply pathetic and ridiculous (as well as disturbing for consumers, of course)...

Chirac was elected again as President in France yesterday, after the surprise two weeks ago (Le Pen, far-right candidate, being second after the first round). Although I was not really sure to be registered on the lists, I went to vote yesterday in Tokyo French Embassy. I had no problem.

I bought also a wireless network: The Apple AirMac Station (as it is called in Japan - I think the name is AirPort everywhere else), and a card for Li's iBook. I chose the Apple Station because I was not able to find the model I wanted in Japan (a Lucent Orinoco RG-1000). Only these two can be configured from Linux, AFAIK. I had a lot of trouble configuring the PCMCIA card, until I realized there was a new version of the AirMac software in the package. Shy on me :-)

We went with Boudicca on holidays in Okinawa. Weather was nice: We had rain nearly every day!! I understand now why we were the only customers in the hotel!! Next time, I will check the weather, and at least the good season :-)

One week later, I went to Sydney, for a business trip. As usually, there was rain. This is funny, as it happens every time I go. People there told me I bring the rain. My opinion is totally different: There is a conspiration in Australia, which tends to make the World believe the weather is nice there. This is obviously not true, as my experience shows ;-)

I bought a bi-processor PC this week... 2x1.4Gh. It rocks!! Then, adding some mirrors for some partitions, and it really goes fast...

More important, we decided to go on holidays to Okinawa soon... I never went there, but Boudicca will have her first plane trip ;-)