Shack in Japan

Fruit is an Experience

If I were to take a bite out of a Japanese peach and one from a US farmer's market, my guess is it would be hard to taste a difference. That's never going to happen, though, because you don't bag a random peach at a supermarket, take it home, and bite into it. Rather, your peach comes lovingly cocooned in its own styrofoam case, painstakingly peeled and cut by your host mom (or wifey, where applicable), and presented with a bowl and fork perfectly sized for the fruit.

I wrote about luxury fruit in Japan before, but I think I missed something- fruit here is about an experience more than a food, and the experience is pretty darn tasty. It's just a peach at its core, but on the inside, an Apple computer isn't too different from a Dell. It's the experiences we have with products, from the purchase to the packaging to the consumption, that define our relationships with brands.

415-75-HELLA

I got my Google Voice invite this morning, and it kind of rocks my world. I hate voicemail, because you can't save, sort, reference, or read it, and Voice solves that by automatically transcribing and emailing it to you. On top of that, it lets me keep one number for all my phones, which will come in handy in what's likely to be a pretty mobile, if not international, next few years.

Gmail changed my email world, and it looks like Voice will do the same thing for the way I call people. What Microsoft doesn't get about this whole Bing thing is that we don't use Google because it nails every query, we use it because everything else Google does rocks our world, and their search engine tends to be one click away from whatever service you're using. This video I posted on Naked's blog last week sums it all up:

One last note for lucky invite recipients outside of America: when you first get your invite, DO NOT click it right away. Google won't let people with IP addresses outside of the US activate, so you need to proxy stateside before you sign up. I used Hotspot Shield, a dummyproof one-click solution, and it worked without a hitch.

And yes, that number in the title is my new official contact number. There was one instance of "hella" available in the 415 area code, and I snatched it up with a quickness (the more boring version is (415) 754-3552.

Marching Swiftly to a Close

My time left in Japan is growing shorter and shorter. One month and change from today, I'll be on a way-too-expensive flight back to San Francisco, touching down for a week before I head back up to Portland. Life in bullets:

• Final exams are more an annoyance than a source of fear. I'll probably barely pass Econometrics, due to a teacher good for nothing but hilarious quotations, but the rest of my classes aren't going to require test performance so much as buckling down and cranking some work out.

• My too-short internship at Naked is half over, and my challenge of the moment is to prove I'm an invaluable guy within the next thirty days, the sort of guy you'd like to bring back in six months or a year. Being able to do English-language creative work in Tokyo is a rare opportunity, and the awesome caliber and personality of the people there is just frosting on top. Six Apart is another option for the future, but my Japanese isn't good enough to work as a full-time employee in an all-nihongo environment.

• I am twenty-one years old. WTF? I think I've grown more in this year than the several preceding it, but I haven't had the time to sort through this second mental pubescence yet. I celebrated with a birthday picnic in Yoyogi park, but I think a proper coming-of-age bar crawl is in order when I get back to the states.

• Somebody brought an Olympus EP-1 to my picnic. Slow autofocus (but no shutter lag when you shoot manually) and no glass viewfinder means it's not quite the hobbyist's holy camera grail, but it's the closest digital has come to the folding Minox my dad holds up as the greatest pocketable camera of all time. Develop it one more generation, toss in a viewfinder, and we'll have arrived. Its beautiful retro body and ability to mount any lens ever made by anybody are just bonuses.

• My last Tokyo 2.0 for the forseeable future is coming up, and it's coincidentally the one I volunteered to take the reins of. Next Monday, SuperDeluxe, 6:30pm. See you there! Saying goodbye to all my geek buddies is going to suck, but I heard something called the 'internet' can be used to stay in touch over distances of several miles. I'll have to check that out.

• I sold my bike for about what I bought it for, within one day of posting it. Thanks, craigslist!

• I'm going to be homeless next year unless I find a place quick. Know anyone with a three-bedroom house in Southwest Portland?

The next few weeks are going to be filled with work, parties, packing up, last-minute shopping, and all the other errands that come with moving your life from one country to another. Transition is lame, but I haven't seen my American friends (or little sisters in a while, and I'm looking forward to getting the whole 'college graduation' thing out of the way, too.