Busy Autumn (Hiplog)

Posted on 2006-09-20 by dpkworldwide

Sorry for no recent posts. I’m both too busy and too lazy lately. On the work front, I’m right in the middle of a big training and design push with lots of deadlines. I don’t have any business trips on the books yet, but who knows.

On the personal front, I have been attempting to get going with a big eBay selloff push. I’d also like to plan a garage sale for this fall to unload some of the bigger stuff that’s too much of a pain to ship. All part of my cunning plan…

But even with the best intentions of unloading, I still continue purchasing: always more anime and manga and I’ve also just bought the new 24″ iMac (I need the huge HD space and it will become my true media hub). I’ll be selling my MacBook Pro and going without a laptop for a while.

I went to the Anime Vegas con over Labor Day weekend (read about that on my regular blog), and am probably going to take some other driving trips on the next few weekends to use up some of the miles on my car before the lease ends and I turn it in next month. I also found an incredible deal through Virgin Atlantic, so I’ll be taking a few days and winging to London in November. This should all serve to assuage my travel hunger for the rest of the year.

Finally, the new semester has started, and It’s strange because I don’t have a Japanese class. I’m trying to keep studying on my own (with varying degrees of success) with the goal of this year’s JLPT Level 3 in December. I’m not sure what else to do, but might try to find friends/tutors or try attending Japan Club events or maybe occasionally the Saturday culture & conversation class. Officially, I’m taking a Linguistics 1 class on Tuesday nights just to keep my foot in the academic door. It’s also a chance to get a little theory under my belt. –dpk

Deskside Entry (Hiplog)

Posted on 2006-08-11 by dpkworldwide

One of the things that you can also do with hiplog is send mail from any computer using the t-mobile Sidekick Desktop Interface. I’m doing this right now as a test from my desk–and since I can’t actually get a signal from my office.

My photo experiment from yesterday resulted in me deciding on the medium-sized setting for mobile photos. I’ve also got to get a bigger memory card so I can take more pictures and hold more music (though just why I’d need music with a video iPod and a new iPod Nano I can’t fathom…).

Oh and here’s a test photo from my computer. It’s a picture of Kyoto Station, but I didn’t take it myself–I found it on the internet.

(NOTE: Apparently you cannot attach photos from the desktop interface unless they’re in a Sidekick photo album. Oh well…)

–dpk

Hollywood Bowl Evening

Posted on 2006-08-04 by dpkworldwide

After spending a relatively OK final day of the week at work (WOW—yet another week gone by already since returning home from Japan), I drove to the Chatsworth Metrolink station to meet my family and ride the shuttle bus to the Hollywood Bowl. It’s been a long time, and it was a lot of fun.The program was an extravaganza of Celtic music—which I think is what I saw on my last trip to the bowl. They even had the Kennelly Irish Dancers perform.

The guest conductor of the L.A. Phil was one Bramwell Tovey, an Englishman and wonderful conductor. More than that, he was hysterically funny and really made the audience have a good time. I’ve always enjoyed that dry, wicked English sense of humor, and he didn’t disappoint. The Orchestra was superb as usual, and you couldn’t have hoped for a more beautiful evening, especially after our recent heat waves. It was really lovely having a picnic out under the stars with cool breezes and beautiful music wafting through the air. This is the way it should be living in So. Cal. in the summertime…

Places like this really are special and I’m lucky to have the opportunity of enjoying them once in a while in my very own home town.

End of the Work Week

Posted on 2006-07-29 by dpkworldwide

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve come to the end of my first work week. I know it was only three days, but it seemed longer, probably because of the quantity of stuff that I’ve got to do now. I’m already teaching on Monday morning, have a lot of voiceover work to do for eLearning and a rather heavy load of stuff to do for the impending EDM Quality system update. I’ve already had a pile of meetings and it seems like I never left. I can’t believe how busy it is right now for everyone.

One of my favorite things was getting to place new dots on my world map. I have the map hanging on the wall in my office, and each time I go somewhere new for the first time, I add a dot. I got to place 5 on Japan, and have now finally gone to Asia. Of course, now I look at the map and realize that I’ve never been to the southern hemisphere. If Amgen would send me to the Australia office, that would take care of that, otherwise I’m looking at Brazil and East Africa as potential vacation destinations. It’s the problem with travel: once you’ve got it in your blood, there’s no turning back. I find it best summed up in one of my all-time favorite quotes:

Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere; for wherever one is, some part of oneself remains on another continent. — Margot Fonteyn

To tell the truth, I’d already started thinking about my next trip before I even left for Japan. I started thinking about how—now that i’ve gained enough seniority and vacation days at work—I should be able to take two, two-week vacations each year. That’s a pretty lucky place to be in. That means things like “April in Paris, October in Kyoto”; it means one familiar favorite and one new adventure. I’m pretty excited at the prospects, to tell the truth. Add business travel to that, and I should be pretty well setup. Of course it will all cost money too, and that could become problematic…

So another thing I think I need to do is beef up my website. Shortly before my trip, I ran into two problems: first, I bought my new MacBook Pro and due to some unfortunate data transfer accidents, I lost some of my website data. Second, I was planning on doing some reorg and restructuring and took stuff down but then didn’t have time to put it all back up again. I’m especially in need of re-doing my photo albums. I took down all my special interest pages, so now it looks like I never do anything. I’ll start adding stuff, so stay tuned.

Back to my Regularly Scheduled Life…

Posted on 2006-07-27 by dpkworldwide

Well, I’m back from my 6-week trip to Japan. It’s hard to believe that a) I was actually gone for that long, and b) that it’s all over and I’m home again. Of course, there’s now a ton of stuff I need to do both at home and the office, I still have jet-lag, it’s incredibly hot here right now and I’m suffering from “post-vacation depression”.

I went back to the office yesterday and started trying to get my bearings once again. BTW, I had a total of 367 emails in my mailbox (and Mike Kubit won the pool), so I spent most of the day dealing with that mess. Then trying to catch up on all the happenings in the office and with the projects I’d left behind—everything just moved on without me. I’ll be pretty busy for the next couple of weeks digging out from under.

The depression especially began when I went to lunch at one of my usual spots, California Pizza Kitchen. As I was sitting there eating one of my regular favorites and thinking about my usual office-related concerns, it started feeling almost like my whole Japan experience never happened. That really started to make me sad. I had such a wonderful time and met such wonderful people, that I didn’t really want it to end—thought it would continue on. But then, “regularly-scheduled life” sets in, and all of a sudden, I’m back in my usual rut. So you can see how that might be depressing…

You can, however, look forward to many, many more musings from me here on this blog since I’ve now sort of gotten in the habit. I also want my new Japanese friends to have an easy way of seeing what I’m up to if they’re so inclined. I have a lot of things to say about just how much my Japan trip changed my life and how happy I am that I went.

But in the meantime, I’ve got lots of work to do…

End of semester – already?

Posted on 2006-05-27 by dpkworldwide

I cannot believe that the Spring semester is already at its end. We just had our last day of Japanese 27 today—with our oral finals and a big feast provided by Yamaguchi sensei. Life just seems to go by so fast. And, of course, despite all my best intentions, I just never seem to get around to updating pages, adding blog entries, etc. I could have been wiriting and contributing so much.

BUT, that should be changing soon…

You’ll notice a new link on the navigation bar just under my blog called “JAPAN 2006!” This is going to be the place I will update furiously—hopefully at least daily—during my impending month-and-a-half stay in Japan this summer. I depart June 14 for Kyoto Sangyo University for a month-long INTENSIVE Japanese course. I will the follow that with a week and a half vacation—I already have my railpass and even rented an apartment in Tokyo.

This blog will therefore fall “silent” during that time (not that it was ever very chatty in the first place). I urge you to check out my Japan pages regularly!

Anime LA 2 convention

Posted on 2006-01-28 by dpkworldwide

I spent my day at the Anime L.A. 2 convention at the Airtel Plaza Hotel near the Van Nuys (CA) airport. Considering that heretofore all my anime convention experience has been at the San Diego Comic Con International (which fills an entire convention center and hosts 100,000+ visitors), this was very different.

This event I would certainly class as “cheap and cheerful”—though it wasn’t all that cheap at $30.00. I must admit that I felt kind of out of place there too—it seems like I was virtually the only person who wasn’t a teenage cosplayer. It was still fun and interesting and I spent most of my time buying from the few vendors selling there or getting sketches in my book.

There were 2 charming young ladies sitting at a table in the main hallway, and they both did lovely work. I have to scare up their websites and post them here, but here are photos of some of their work: