It was fun watching her play, and her eyes just melted my heart.

For lunch that day we went to a restaurant that is specifically aimed at children named Slvannia の森in LaLaPort. I highly recommend it. Here are two pictures at the restaurant with the bunny mascot.

Now, she’s (きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ) released her second single + video. This one is not quite as random as the last one, but there are a few parts that make me wonder “wth?”

But I recently needed to setup Ruby 1.9.3 and rails 3 on a WHM / cPanel VPS server (cPanel doesn’t officially support Rails 3 and is slooooow at adding support) and found this excellent blog post with step by step instructions. My only warning is the part where it tells you to “chmod” stuff to make it readable, be sure you are not under the “root” username when you run that… the instructions directly preceding that step tell you to log in as root and make some changes but it fails to tell you to log out and back in as the regular user account you intalled RVM under.

Rails 3 with Ruby 1.9.x on a cPanel WHM server

When he drives he has to put these special decals on the car. One decal goes in the back window and one on the hood. These decals are for student drivers, they also have decals for elderly drivers.

Monday was the national holiday celebrating the birth of the Showa emperor Hirohito (probably the most famous emperor in Western history books), but the date of this holiday has changed recently — the previous celebrated date is also a holiday on Friday now called Greenery Day : Showa’s birthday / Greenery Day.

Thursday, another national holiday, is known as Constitution Memorial Day, while Saturday is known as Kids Day. You can read more about Golden Week here.

I’m enjoying the nearly complete disconnect from the outside world (my only connection being this iphone on a slow 3G network) and especially enjoying food (i just finished making an awesome looking pie that my in-laws will help me taste tonight after a suki-yaki dinner!) and family time — I can’t believe how much Mia changed in just 2 weeks!

This one caught me by surprise. On the flight to the US the last meal that they provided us was a Yoshinoya gyudon (beef and onions with rice in a bowl)! It also came with a little card showing how to eat a gyudon, and about the 100+ year history of the restaurant chain.

It kinda made me think “how long til Burger King or Taco Bell start getting their food served on flights?”

Not long after landing in Chicago, I enjoyed a little Wendy’s. The size of fries in the US is not the same as in Japan. A medium in Japan is like a small in the US, and there is no such thing as a super-size or biggie-size (no biggie-size because there is no Wendy’s in Japan).

Next stop was Nashville and the following morning I didn’t hesitate to devour a Chick-fil-a chicken-egg-n-cheese biscuit. In another life, maybe a couple years ago, I could’ve swallowed two of these pills in a rage of hunger, but this time 1 alone put my stomach in place. So good.

I ate BBQ at least 3 or 4 times in Austin. Beef, pulled pork, sausage… nothing escaped me (well, except the ribs *sigh*). My coworkers and I ate at Iron Works and Stubbs in Austin. Both are worthy of praise and photos, but I only managed to grab one photo before devouring the food in front of me.

I also ate at a little place called Taco Shack. It appeared to be a popular breakfast stop for a lot of people in Austin, and the breakfast burritos did not disappoint. As for real Mexican style (or tex-mex) food, I did eat at a place called The Iron Cactus on 6th street — while there I thoroughly enjoyed some enchiladas and corn tortillas — good stuff.

And, if you know me, what trip to the US is complete without Taco Bell? I ate Taco Bell on the first and last day of my trip, both a welcome greeting and a fond farewell. I was lucky enough to find a Taco Bell right across from the gate I arrived at Dallas Ft. Worth before I ran across the airport to catch my flight back to Japan (I only had 20 minutes to change gates and DFW is huge… but 20 mins is enough time to grab a couple Dorito Tacos!!!). I sure do miss Taco Bell…

Oh, slides you say?

RoRoRoomba Ruby on Rails on Roomba RailsConf 2012 slides

Click the link to see the slides. I’ll post more here about my talk as soon as I get settled in (just got back to Japan, need some time to get unlagged).

Omiyamaeri is a special milestone for newborns marking when they have reached their 100th day. The parents and grandparents take the young baby to a temple to present the baby before their gods. The omiamaeri tradition is quite old, and the ceremony is full of Japanese religious customs. Here is essentially what happened:

We arrived at the temple a little early and waited inside a separate building with two other families and their infants. When it was time to start all three families proceeded to the small open-air temple in single file with grand parents walking first and specifically with the infant’s grandmother on the father’s side leading the way with baby in her arms. In our case, that means my mom, a great experience for her

We all removed our shoes before entering the tatami floored temple room, and once inside we sat in three rows with grandma and baby up front, parents next, and other grandparents and family members behind. Facing forward was a small tatami room a bit smaller than the one we were in, but joined without any wall between us (just some half-height curtain separated us). On the far side of that room was another doorway leading to an open air inner-yard and, a few yards away, a small temple building for the gods.

The priest said a prayer and blessed the babies, then carried some special platter of mochi (rice cake) out through the far doorway to offer at the foot of the other building. While there, we could here him chanting a prayer, and after listening for a few moments I realized his rhythmic chant was our address and names and the birthdates of the babies. Essentially, the ceremony is designed as an introduction to the gods (as if they don’t know our names and addresses).

After returning, he blessed the babies by waving somes green leafed tree branch and some small bells over the grandmother and baby. He also had us fathers go to the front and bow in prayer after ceremoniously picking up a similar leafed branch, turning it, and placing it with the stem facing the other temple. Shortly after, everything was finished, and we all departed after another quick prayer.

On an unrelated note, I have in my hand some good reading material for my 12hour flight. I asked Ayako to order this book for me from Amazon Japan on Monday. She placed the order right before lunch and sent me the purchase confirmation. When I got home that very same evening, the book was already there waiting on me… I was amazed.

I’ll try to post some images while on my way to the airport, to make a proper Friday blog post