19:15 JST
Last weekend was AsiaBSDCon. Great stuff as usual. It's always good to see friends from the BSD community again. Again, I focussed more on the hallway track than on the actual conference, but I did catch some good talks. Ana's talk about secure neighbour discovery in particular caught my attention, as did Peter's talk about DNSSEC. Unfortunately, I fear my brain may be too small to understand DNSSEC.
During the conference, Max helped me set up SIP so I can theoretically experience less expensive phone calls when I'm somewhere in the world with wifi. I don't want to think about roaming costs.
Over the weekend, "Neville-Neil Travel Translation Services" helped Brooks, Kristof and me get contiguous seat reservations on a Shinkansen to Kyoto (and beyond). Tasty food in a box on the train, but I snoozed most of the way. Conferences are exhausting.
Sadly, the weather in Kyoto is not cooperating this time round. Rain, rain, rain. Good for culinary tourism, rather less so for sight-seeing. Zen dry gardens are best experienced--well, dry.
Dinner last night followed my usual "get lost first, then hop into the nearest place that smells nice" and was immensely tasty. A combination of teppanyaki and okonomiyaki. I think we confused the staff by getting their "special" as a starter and then continuing with smaller dishes until full. Also sampled a very tasty "unfiltered" sake (bit like sparkling water, lemony) and an entirely (to me) new kind of meat: "hoso". From the sign-language discussion with the waitress, I learned that it's some internal structure of a mammal, but not much more than that. Quite tasty, if somewhat fatty and tendonny.
Sadly, part of the meal was spoiled a bit by a group of annoying tourists complaining about not liking one of the things they ordered and refusing to pay for it. I wanted to switch off my comprehension of English at that point. Or quite possibly hit them with a cluebat. If there's something you don't like, and it's not obviously rotten or "bad", just deal with it and be careful not to order it again next time. I have a (very) short list of things I steer clear from too and I'm practically omnivorous.
This afternoon, we fled back to the city when it started pouring down on our way to a temple. On a whim, we decided that the international manga museum would be an interesting thing to do (it would be dry). Unfortunately, as a museum, the place seems mostly to focus on the building it's in rather than the subject it treats. Also, most of the contents are encrypted in Japanese, which makes me wonder a bit about the "international" part in the name.
There were some interesting English (translations) manga in one room though, and I read Gyo by Junji Ito. If you think H.P. Lovecraft is weird, you haven't seen anything yet. "Weird" doesn't begin to describe it.
If only it would stop raining.
Out for tasty tempura dinner now, I think.
