ALL ART BURNS

So, the short retaining wall by our driveway appears to have also been built by the incompetent brother-in-law of the previous owners. It's 5' at the tallest and about 15-20 feet long, made of piled stone with no mortar, reenforcement or drainage to speak of.

And now it's toppling over.

I can do the demo (we want to save the stones for another project), but we need to find someone who can:

- put in a proper wall using Versa-Lok, including footer, drainage, etc.
- replace the gutter drain that runs out to the street (or that should run out to the street)
- deal with any possible code/permit issues. Borough says anything under 4' doesn't need a permit,
this wall is 5' tall for about 2-3' of the run.

I'm pretty certain the box store or the Versa-Lok dealer has a list of people who could do this, but I'd like to start with someone who has done work for one of my friends and is legit.

FROSTBURN!

You know you want to go:

<http://frostburnpgh.com>

but this made me laugh



actually, I don't know her, so I can't say I hate her. She's probably a very nice person, I just loathe the emperor's new clothes she parades around in.

I'm scrounging a few things for the shop to use in making circuits and small metalwork. If you're looking to get rid of any of the following I'll come pick it up, failing that, I'm off to goodwill and target.

- hot-air popcorn maker. I only need the heater/blower, so missing top/lid is fine
- working toaster oven, will not be used for food
- working electric skillet, will not be used for food
- small SVGA display, monitor or LCD, but not bigger than 13" or so.

thx

We need our gutters cleaned and some light repair/adjusting done, and we'd rather not go with the friend-of-a-friend who messed things up last time they were here.

Any suggestions for a licensed/insured firm on the east side or near Forest Hills?

This is the cookbook I was blathering on about: "DERRYDALE COOKBOOK OF FISH & GAME, VOLUME 1"

I only have Vol 1, which covers game. Vol 2 covers fish and is on my to-buy list.

Update 2:

For some reason that ended up picking up stray | characters at a specific eol condition. Maybe a bug in boost, I'm not sure.

Update: Judy suggested

(?![\{\}\|)[:print:]

which is close -- I forgot to mention that those three characters terminate the match, so I rewrote it for boost as

\\|([[:print:]]*)(?=[\\{\\}\\|])

and (most of) the self-tests pass so it's at least matching what I was using before, which was this monstrosity:
([\\w\\d\\@\\'\\/\\-\\?\\_\\:\\$\\=\\+\\&\\%\\.\\!\\~\\s]*)

where I added a new \\c for every c I discovered people were using in strings.


------------
I bet there's a simple solution to this and I'm just not seeing it.

I'm using boost regex, and it uses perlre syntax. Not my favorite, but I've been using it since, um, a long time ago, so I thought I was pretty good at it up until now.

What I'd like to do is match [[:print:]] *except* for three characters: "{", "}", and "|".

I thought I could do this:

"([[[:print:]]^\\{^\\}^\\|]*)"

but it looks like ^ in a class only works at the start of the class.

What's the catch here? I thought I did this sort of thing in the past, "this class except for these characters" but maybe I just imagined it, or I used a different regex engine..

Hoping there are a few GIS weenies reading...

A friend of mine is a grad student in Architecture working on a public policy project that involves mapping. I'm hoping there's some sort of automated solution or useful tool that will do what she is currently doing by hand on Google maps.

Given an arbitrary location, L1, on a map, determine how many other locations on that map can be reached along navigational routes within a certain distance based on a "cost" of using various streets and sidewalks and constraints on what sort of buildings one can pass.

The model is pretty complicated, but here's a simple example with many fewer constraints and rules.

How many locations can I reach from Margaret Morrison within a cost of 100, where:
10 feet walking on a sidewalk = 10
crossing a sidewalk = 0
crossing a street at a crosswalk with a light = 10
crossing a street at a crosswalk with only a stop sign = 20
crossing train tracks at a marked crossing = 50
walking on a sidewalk in front of a liquor store = 50

Any suggestions? I'm convinced this sort of software already exists, but I have no idea why or what it would be called.

Occasionally, wikipedia has a relatively decent entry:

Tour de France


My preference is to record the live coverage in the morning on my TiVo DVR (be sure and pad an hour) then fast-forward through it while I'm working. I've heard that the evening coverage is almost entirely interviews and commentary with very little of the gorgeous helicopter footage of the European countryside.

Finally getting around to posting stuff to Flickr.

Bicycles

Motorcycles

From the afternoon on, it was all travel. Last minute shopping in Shinjuku in the morning, then the Narita Express to an airport hotel, a late night at the bar and an early morning shuttle to Narita. For 12 some-odd hours, ANA treated us wonderfully (as expected), and we hit ORD ready for a trivial transfer to PGH and to our beds.

It was at ORD that we were first reminded of the difference between service in the US and in Japan. Over in Narita, they politely asked us to check our umbrellas, which we happily did. <$20 in umbrellas, free to check, who cares if they are lost, right?

We got to ORD, moved our luggage through customs, then realized that we had forgotten to wait for the umbrellas that ANA had checked. We had time to kill, so I wandered down to a United counter and told them the situation. UA rep was sad to inform us that nothing could be done, then I played the "but we just showed up on ANA" card. She grabbed an ANA guy from the other side of the booth -- he whipped out the keitai, hit someone on speed-dial, and assured us that our umbrellas would show up with our luggage.

Since we got there with time to spare, United tried to get us on an earlier flight out of O'Hare: "Your bags will definitely be on the next flight out, but you might not go out until your ticketed flight. Either way, your bags will be there."

Standby was a miserable failure, ~20 people on the list by the time our plane showed up, and the our United flight was a smaller plane than expected so lots of people (not us) got bumped.

At Pittsburgh (PIT), we discover one of our four bags showed up on the early flight. Two more (and our umbrellas) showed up on our flight. But one bag was missing, so we filed a claim and went home.

The next day, some 24 hours later, after multiple calls to UA and the bag delivery service, the missing bag shows up.

Remember our cheap umbrellas? ANA made sure they were on our connecting flight. They didn't simply retag a parcel, they MOVED THEM THROUGH CUSTOMS FOR US as well. Meanwhile, UA can't get four bags to follow two people on a short commuter flight, much less get the missing one delivered withing 24 hours.

We're home, still a bit jetlagged, and I think we have something like 2500 photos and 4 hours of video to filter. Japan was fun, we'll definitely go back, but it's nice to sleep in our own bed for a change.

Our last day at ryokan Tachibana and we didn't even try to eat everything put in front of us at breakfast, which turns out to have been wise. We left a couple of Carnegie Mellon t-shirts for the staff who were learning English and I wrote a note thanking them for their help and wishing them good luck on their studies. As always, my Japanese impresses Americans and confuses native Japanese speakers.

We caught an early limited express back to Shinjuku, then spent awhile wandering around Aoyama cemetery before checking in to our hotel. Aoyama cemetery is huge an ancient -- some of the tombs are old and neglected, others are old and well-kept, and a few are modern and sleek. Apparently the locals are somewhat superstitious about the place, the only other living creatures we saw there were semi-stray cats and the there-are-no-homeless-people-in-Japan who take care of them. (Yes, we have pictures that we will post!)

We wandered and shopped some more, then ended up having Mexican food at Fonda de la Madrugada, one of the better Mexican places in Tokyo, according to the locals. The mariachi band was from the Dominican Republic and our waiter was from Sri Lanka, my mole poblano was chicken katsu under mole sauce, and the margaritas could have been better. However, the tortillas were locally made and the mole wasn't half bad. Unlike Mexican restaurants in the west, dishes do not come with beans and rice, and the "service" chips/salsa is a token of gratitude. If you want an American-style basket of chips and bowl of salsa, it will set you back Y900 or so.

On a personal note, we hit it off with the mariachi band, as we spoke more spanglish than they japanglish, and were treated to some classic Santana. When we challenged them to play the theme from Sabado Gigante, we got an excellent latin cover of "My Way", so we bought the CD.

After that, back to the hotel in Aoyama for an early night.

Wrote up the last few days on the plane, will post them once my laptop is safely backed up. Two weeks of no backups makes me very, very nervous....

scene: decent Narita hotel room, pinkitypinkpink is exiting the bathroom.

me: "uh, I'll put the fridge back tomorrow before we check out"
pinkitypinkpink: "uh, what?"
me: "I needed real power, and I had to pull out the 'fridge to get to a real outlet"
pinkitypinkpink: "okay...."

due to my not having an insanely cool japanese phone, updating stuff here has become a bit difficult. we'll be home "tomorrow", and it will be "yesterday" (or "day after tomorrow") for us so there will be updates shortly.

First day in the ryokan in Hakone, and a bit of an environmental shift.

We opted for the "late" breakfast at 8:30am, which was another massive feast of traditional japanese foods. After breakfast we were chatting with our server and discovered that most Japanese people can't finish their meals, especially the huge meals served at ryokan.

After coffee, we took a local train two stops down to visit the kamaboko museum. (This is all pinkitypinkpink's doing.) Yes, there is a mini-museum dedicated to kamaboko, next to a store selling all manner of kamaboko ranging from simple foods to complex kamaboko intended for giftgiving. On Wednesdays, you can even learn to make kamaboko for 1500Y or so. Not only were we the only gaijin on the train, when we got off the conductors were very concerned that we were getting off at the wrong place. Once we explained we were looking for the kamaboko museum they laughed and gave us directions. Not only were we younger than all the customers, I think we were younger than most of the staff.

Next was a long bus ride to start off the grand tour of Hakone. It turns out the bus everyone takes to the lake goes the long, scenic route, not the direct route. As a result, I thought we'd gotten on the wrong bus and decided we should get off and figure things out. We happened to get off at a stop with a view of an impressive-looking hill and after broken conversation with a friendly Japanese senior citizen discovered it was the site for the Daimonji Yaki. This is a famous site -- there's a huge "dai" written on the side of the hill, the stroke width is around 7m and the longest stroke is something like 170m long.

It was at this point we figured out that the bus was taking the scenic route, so we got back on the bus and headed for moto hakone ko. We stuck to the suggested route and started with the cedar-lined street dating back to the 17th century. A local daimyo decided that travelers needed shade, and ordered the planting of cedar trees on both sides of a major trade route, some of which still stands today. After that we got on a (western) pirate ship, took a picture with the Worst Pirate Captain Ever, and had a short tour of the lake. From the lake we took cablecars over some hot springs and a sulfuric vent, but it was so cloudy we didn't get a chance to see Mt. Fuji. An hour ride on a clanky train with three switchbacks later, and we were back at the ryokan.

One thing we discovered is how friendly Japanese tourists are, especially senior citizens. Their English is often better than my Japanese, so we were still able to have a chat about where we'd been and what we liked and where we should go. We chatted with a guy about his travels to America, took photos together, and traded omiyage after we discovered he liked baseball -- a Pittsburgh Pirates pen got us some ume-flavored chewing gum!

At the ryokan we had another huge dinner, but were better about not trying to eat everything they put in front of us. If you're considering a visit to a ryokan, especially one that doesn't cater to westerners, be prepared for a lot of foods that would probably upset the average American diner. Over the course of two days we had not just raw fish but ise ebi, a variety of cooked whole fish (gutted first, of course), local vegetables that don't have direct English translations, table-cooked meats and vegetables, fish-head soup (with the fish-head still in the bowl) and horse bacon. On the down side we managed to destroy two perfectly good abalone by overcooking them but on the up side we had a huge range of food we'd never see in the states.

I didn't keep track of how much time we spent in the tub in our room, but it was enough that we started talking about how we'd build one at home.

[edit: added the menu from the first night at Tachibana.]

I haven't written about how advanced Japanese phones are, but their phone infrastructure is so good and their phones so advanced that there was zero wireless anywhere we could find in Hakone. Nothing at the hotel, nothing in public places, but plenty of Japanese people using their phones for email and browsing web sites. Today was the first day of several without Internet access, so I'm posting things days after they were written.

Today was the first day of a short excursion to Hakone. Let me start by singing the praises of "takkyubin", as the delivery services are called. If you board a train in Japan that goes any distance, you'll notice that none of the Japanese people have any luggage other than a tiny carryon, and that the western people are hauling around huge suitcases. The reason is that before they got on the train, the Japanese people gave their luggage to a delivery service and paid a small fee -- often less than what US airlines charge you to check a bag on a flight. Their luggage will either be waiting for them at their destination or show up some time the next morning.

In our case, we gave our bags to the hotel's front desk, paid them the takkyubin fee ($15 per bag, based on size) for the famous "Black Cat" delivery service, and headed off for the "romance car" to Hakone. (The "romance car" takes its name from the fact that two people can sit side-by-side on a bench seat instead of in individual seats.) I'm pretty certain we were the only gaijin on our train, and quite possibly the youngest people as well. Hakone is a town of hotsprings, scenic views, and golf. The vast majority of visitors seem to be here to soak in tubs and enjoy the local foods, including kamaboko and a variety of root vegetables that I can't find in any dictionary.

As for us, we were here to be pampered, soak in hot tubs, and see the local sights. So for this part of the trip we splurged and decided to stay at a mid-level ryokan in Hakone, Ryokan Aura Tachibana. It wasn't cheap, but when you factor in the cost of two high-end kaiseki dinners and two high-end traditional breakfasts and an in-room hot-tub with an amazing view, it seemed rather reasonably priced.

This is also the first time we experienced "good" service in Japan. To begin with, the shuttle bus to the train station is on demand during normal business hours. When we arrived at the ryokan, the first thing they did was take our bags, serve us tea, and ask when we wanted breakfast and dinner. The service only got better from there.

Tachibana is a contemporary ryokan, so meals are served in the restaurant where we discovered just how rarely they get western visitors. We had a dedicated waitress who spoke enough English to tell us about some of the local foods we were being served and help us figure out how to eat a couple of things we'd never had before.

As we were getting settled in our rooms, they brough up our luggage and a couple of gaijin-sized kimono to wear. The rooms came with slippers, socks, haori, a hot-water dispenser for tea (already on), and the most amazing washlet we've seen so far, complete with motion sensors to auto open, auto flush, and auto close. Oh, and multiple drying temperatures and wash settings.

We showered, took a quick soak in our room's tub, then headed upstairs for "late" dinner at 7pm, early dinner being 6pm. Dinner was beyond all our expectations, a 12+ course kaiseki dinner. They were kind enough to make an English menu for us and print it out on the same schmancy paper they used for the Japanese menus.

So, here's what we had. Keep in mind that many of these things are a single bite of food or a smaller serving unless I note otherwise. So yes, there were six things in the appetizer course, but each was basically bite-sized. Also, some of the courses were served together, for example the rice and pickle courses at the end of dinner.

Appetizer: Bayberry liqueur, deep fried Japanese basil tofu, Carrot mousse resembled like a hydrangea with broccoli jelly, baked fig with uncured ham and kiwi fruit sauce, Collagen extracted from tuna with vinegar, Yam boiled with orange broad bean.

Soup: Common Japanese conger, Nemacystus decipiens, Dried tofu, Dried laver seaweed.

Sashimi on a glass plate: Tuna, Whitefish, Grain shellfish, cucumber, Daikon radish etc... [Note: this was several generous portions of some of the best sushi I've ever had. I can imagine this and half of the soup course being a dinner for a light eater.]

Baked dish: Baked flatfish with potato salad, Green pea sauce; Saffron risotto and Iberico pork with tomato sauce, corn, deep fried almond; Sweetfish sushi (Lotus root, Carrot and Egg in it)

Steamed dish: Our chef's original steamed fish paste. There are two kinds of them. Pine nuts and walnuts, Horse mackerel and sardine. [Note: they forgot I don't eat walnuts, then after I'd traded with pinkitypinkpink, they brought out another plate of just the fish ones. These are basically homemade kamoboko and rather sizable portions at that.]

Cook in a pot: Please cook by yourself in the pot. Flour dumpling, Abalone, Eel, Rice cracker, Leek, Potherb, Winter melon

Western style Dish: Beef stew pie, Baked corn, Pea, Dried cherry tomato

Boiled dish: Egg plant mousse, Burdock mochi (Rice cake), bamboo shoot

Miso soup: Nameko mushroom, Honewort, Seaweed. Japanese pepper. 2 kinds of wheat gluten (millet and curled)

Rice: "Kinuhikari" rice which is raised around here.

Pickles: Four kind of Japanese pickles.

Dessert: Grand Marrnier ice cream in a cookie cup with caramel sauce.

After dinner, we took advantage of the "family tubs" that can be reserved for an hour for a small fee. Unlike the communal, segregated tubs available for guests, the family tubs are on the roof, open-air, and have a view of the hills over Hakone station. And yes, I took many photos.

Saturday we took it easy and got out of the hotel a bit late. We met up with a local friend for a quick lunch at a gyudon place. I think there's something we in the states could learn from the vending-machine-ticket system for ordering food. The staff doesn't have to touch money, there's no question about what you ordered, and the food preparation process seems really simplified.

Then it was off to Nakano Broadway, which is where otaku go when they die. Multiple stories of toys, games, music, fashion, and more than one store devoted entirely to cosplay outfits. We also stumbled upon a store that specializes in early industrial and techno music and DVDs. I resisted the Kraftwerk boxed set (~$200) and the $300 translation machine similar to what Kraftwerk used on their albums but broke down and bought the Senior Coconut remix disk and a Maywa Denki DVD.

We wandered back to Shibuya and got yakitori at a locally famous joint. It was also our first proper tatami experience, crammed into a tiny basement with ~20 japanese people who were slamming down fried meat and beer faster than we could order ours.

Tomorrow we leave for a couple of quiet days in Hakone, a local resort town.

there are no photos yet, I'm waiting to post all those when I get home and have a decent screen to look at. The posts are all friends-only until the photos are ready, my friends get a pre-release look at the log for our trip...