Would you like to build your own 3MP digital camera with Lego?

Forgot the price, but from analyzing the photo taken on my iPhone, I think it is ¥8925. You can pick it up from your nearby hobby/lifestyle department store Loft. ^^.

If you’re living overseas and want it real bad, try asking my friends over at Rinkya.

Danny has a new employee! Elly is his new Infrastructure Strategist. The Mirai family is certainly growing!

Before landing the job, every potential Mirai employee has to be personally interviewed by the boss.

Elly’s looking to buy a new digital camera. She said her old Lumix was giving up on her. She mentioned she was interested in getting a Ricoh GR – just like the one I have. ^^.

Danny was recommending his Lumix GF1 and LX3. Do you use Lumix?

I always go with Ricoh for digital cameras. I just feel that they seem to understand the essence of what makes a great camera. The GR for one is full of soul!

What camera would you recommend to Elly?

I told her that the GR is a great camera to have fun with. It doesn’t take HD videos, but it’s a photographer’s camera.

Photo shot by Elly when she was trying out my GR.

She looks so comfortable sitting there in Danny’s chair don’t you think? ^^. First met Elly at lunch in Signs Cafe at Daikanyama. I was a very happy man then. ^^.

“Dear Ken ♥”

Also a happy man tonight. ^^.

Who would you like Danny to hire next?

Here in Japan we practice "White Day".

White Day is an annual event held a month after Valentine’s Day on March 14th.

On Valentine’s Day in Japan, girls give boys chocolates. There’s no exchange of presents. The male of the species gets to take time off hunting and enjoy deliciously expensive chocolate hand-picked by their female counterparts.

Good things never last.

March 14th is payback time.

Have you prepared anything for your girlfriends? ^^.

Clear blue skies. Perfect weather for looking out the office window!

Lo and behold, Tokyo Sky Tree and Tokyo Tower!

To date, Tokyo Sky Tree has surpassed the 300m mark. She still has a long way to go before reaching her towering height of 634m!

At 634m, she will be 634-333=301m taller than ol’ red and white Tokyo Tower.

Kyle has some wonderful shots of Tokyo Sky Tree taken from up close too.

Can’t wait till she’s finished. ^^.

This is something I found recently at the university bookshop. Manga textbooks!

マンガでわかる (manga de wakaru) loosely translates to “You’ll understand with Manga”.

These textbooks are about pretty advanced subjects. There’s 電子回路 (でんしかいろ) electronic circuitry, 量子力学 (りょうしりきがく) quantum mechanics and 熱力学　(ねつりきがく) thermodynamics!

I think it’s a novel way of introducing difficult subjects. You learn as you read through the story. You like reading Manga?

Might not be particularly useful for people already knowledgeable in the subject (probably definitely not), though it could give ideas on how to go around explaining difficult topics.

At last, a non-manga page! Yummy. ^^.

Any electrical engineers here?

Although grad school for me was all about mechanics, I did mechatronics in my undergrad. Back then, I found my electrical engineering subjects challenging because I had a hard time visualizing the physics behind it. Maybe if I had this… ^^.

The textbooks seem to be pretty popular with the students. ^^.

Watch out. Otaku’s coming to school!

Couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day after meeting Eri Otoguro (乙黒えり) – Elly for short. ^^. I was pretty much on cloud 9.

I’ve been a quiet fan ever since I saw her in the Onechanbara (お姉チャンバラ) movie.

For a time, I had this Onechanbara poster as my iPhone wallpaper. ^^.

Although Eri was born in Bangkok, she grew up in the Kanagawa back in Japan. Wikipedia says she’s half Thai, English and Japanese. I didn’t get to ask her about her background, but I guess Danny did?

You can follow Eri at her blog.

Eri, Mai, Danny and I had lunch at Daikanyama’s Sign cafe. It’s right outside the station. Feel free to stop by and sit at our table. ^^.

Mai is a cultural attache, promoter, event producer and english teacher. But even more, she’s Tokyo’s Party Girl!

You can keep up with her via her party reports and blog. She even DJs!

Mai and Eri are the best of girlfriends who had a fateful meeting… pretty much like how Danny and I first met.

It’s amazing how people meet. You have any fateful encounters of your own?

Eri made her debut appearance in 2001 in a Hong Kong movie called “The Stewardess”. Have you seen it? Since then, besides onechanbara, she’s been in commercials and other films including Shaolin Shojo (少林少女).

And not forgetting being in this one happy group!

I’m looking forward to a little project which we might be starting together.

All fingers and toes crossed. ^^.

Made 2 new friends today.

I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship. ^^.

Eri’s trilingual like me. She speaks Japanese, English and Mandarin.

Was told that she’s going to Taiwan to further her acting career. Taiwan is so lucky… Please treat her well. ^^.

Meanwhile, I’m going to go watch Onechanbara again!

It’s been too long since I last wrote a post about ramen. Doesn’t mean I haven’t had any though.

Met a good buddy of mine over the weekend and decided to try out the new Taisyouken (大勝軒) shop near Keio University.

The shop is at Hiyoshi Station right opposite Keio University’s Hiyoshi Campus. Any one planning to further your studies in Japan? The Graduate School of Science and Technology do offer international courses for graduate studies.

Very compact inside. This place used to be a tonkatsu restaurant which I occasionally frequent. Now it’s a ramen place.

The standard “chinese noodle” (中華麺) goes for ¥800. And for ¥800, the serving is humongous!

I had the “chinese noodles with vegetables” (野菜盛り中華麺). A hearty ¥850 meal. I had doubts about finishing the entire bowl of ramen. But I sticked with the “jiro strategy”. A painful lesson learnt from a visit to the Jiro Ramen main shop.

If you have a big bowl of ramen, attack the noodles first. Forget everything else and attack the noodles first. Once the noodles are in, it’s smooth sailing from there on.

When we were done, we was so stuffed that we decided to skip beer and go straight to cocktails for after-dinner drinks.

大勝軒 is famous for its tsukemen (つけ麺). That will be on my table the next time around.

I was undecided at first, between the Canon G11 and this Ricoh GR Digital III.

Both are excellent cameras, but when I asked myself,

“Which camera would I have more fun with?”

The answer was pretty obvious.

I’ve been a Ricoh fan ever since I bought the R8 almost 3 years ago.

But now I’ve gone hardcore. The GR has a cult following in Japan and I’m now an initiate in the cult of GR. (As if being in the cult of Apple wasn’t enough.)

I’m not going to talk specs and profess of what a technically impossible marvel the camera is or is not. Instead, what I’m going to talk about is how much fun I’ve been having with this camera.

First off, I really like how it feels in my hand.

Although it’s pocketable, I like to hold it. Holding it isn’t such a bad thing too.

A camera in your hand is worth 2 in your pockets. ^^.

I’m not clumsy, so the odds of me dropping (?!?) aren’t very high – haven’t dropped it once… yet.

I do have a modified shoulder strap. I don’t like shoulder straps that takes forever to remove and to put back on.

So I went to Tokyu Hands and looked for some hook-clips. What are there called? I even had a hard time describing it to the store clerk. When he eventually found what I was looking for, I asked him and he said “plastic clip”.

I was looking for something smaller. But these were the smallest I could find.

Do you have a strap on your camera?

I like how the controls are organized on the GR. If you’re in manual, adjusting aperture or shutter speed is just a turn of the dial. Really easy to play around in the respective priority modes. Loosely translates to more room to experiment.

In my opinion, programmed mode is sufficient for most shots. Let the camera churn out the optimum parameters while you just adjust exposure.

The F1.9 28mm prime lens is a thing of beauty. It’s really fast!

Thanks to the wide aperture, this camera works wonders in low light.

It’s a prime lens, so there’s no optical zoom.

If you’re interested in the differences between a prime and a zoom lens, here is a good read. Here is another!

Prime lens are known to teach you how to frame your shots. Because you can’t zoom, you’re made to move closer to or further away from your subject.

From my experience, this is not always a bad thing. Depending on what you’re shooting, moving the camera around will change the angle from which the shot will be taken. This change in angle will show you things that standing still and zooming in/out doesn’t.

If you own a slr or dslr, you simply can’t do without a prime lens. It’s so much fun to shoot with.

Being able to shoot 1cm away from the subject in macro mode is just amazing.

Furthermore, prior to this camera, I never thought that shooting in black and white was so much fun!

There are so much more features on the GR that I’ve yet to explore and experiment with.

It will take time, but I think this is the beginning of a long affair. ^^.

Fun might be subjective – you might not agree with what I see as fun.

But don’t you think camera reviews should included an afterword that talks about whether the camera is fun to use?

Falling in love with this camera was something that I did not expect.

Visited a good friend of mine in the morning to see his newborn baby girl. She’s so cute! I volunteered my babysitting services – pretty sure I can do everything except breastfeed and clean shit up. Somehow, I never picked up those 2 skills. ^^.

Isn’t she cute?!

子供欲しいね。

Love this isotonic drink. I drank my fill when I was in Malaysia for the lunar new year.

Drink 100 plus and all your grades will be 100 plus! ^^.

A pity they don’t sell this in Japan…

Took this photo with my Ricoh GR Digital III. Been shooting alot of black and white photos ever since this camera fell into my hands. ^^.