Category Archives: Travel

Geek, Personal, Travel

Splunk .conf 2024

I’m back in Las Vegas to experience CriblCon & Splunk .conf 2024. I wanted to get a good picture of the Sphere, but couldn’t find a good enough angle from the convention center, or Uber. There was a One Piece promotion going on at the time & wasn’t able to get a good video of it. :-/

Since Cisco bought Splunk, the conference felt a little different this year… Or I’m just getting old. The vendor area seemed smaller. The excitement didn’t seem a grand as before. Should be interesting if Cisco continues the conference, or if it gets folded into the bigger Cisco conference.

This was the view from in front of the hotel.

Personal, Travel

Japan

We finally made it to Tokyo, Japan. The flight was exhausting, but not terrible. We got checked into our hotel — The Blossom Hibiya. We loved it — the rooms weren’t too small, the bed was comfortable, the location was not far from a train station, the morning meal was delicious, the view from the lobby was just spectacular. We will definitely stay here again, if we find ourselves back in Tokyo.

Our fist full day in Tokyo, we went to Shibuya Scramble Crossing & the Tokyo Skytree.

Our second full day in Tokyo, we visited the Sensō-ji temple.

Otaku, Personal, Travel

Japan Bound?

We are coming up on the end of May. I haven’t had much to write, between the changes at work, planning off/on for our trip to Japan & dealing with things as they crop up… First it was issues with boarding our dogs at our vet… then moving dad into a VA nursing home… being backed into when trying to pull out of a parking spot after putting in a money exchange order (no one was hurt or much damage to the car, but annoying)… then dealing with a new boarding place wanting a “certificate of completion” from a trainer… It’s literally been one thing after another either making my wife want to postpone the trip and me stressed out.

This seems to happen whenever I plan a vacation… I was making plans to do a European LEGO event months before Covid-19 spread across the world. I had booked hotel & flights… planned out our activities… Was researching somethings (local towns to explore) that I thought my wife would enjoy doing that wasn’t 100% LEGO related… But all in all, I think I’m just having flashbacks to 2020, where it was bad news on top of bad news…But to keep things in perspective, what happened with Covid was way worse/sad/world-changing/heart-wrenching than a few personal set-backs and a selfish desire to travel.

Our track-record hasn’t been good… We had to change up what we had planned to do for our honeymoon, and even after postponing it, we traveled a few days after 9/11 for it…

The silver lining for this trip; we’ve had friends that spent 2 week in Japan before we fly out… Sending us tips and warnings — the touristy spots are very crowded, buses and trains are packed like sardines.. plan to do a lot of walking… pack light, hauling suitcases are a pain — as well a sharing fun things try/do — bullet trains are cool… spend time on “kitchen street”… had the best sushi of my life… Makes me more upset/sad/jealous if we have to postpone.

Anyway, back to the 2,000 things we need to take care of before the trip… And if you can’t figure it out from the pictures, the HOA sent us an email saying we needed to power wash our drive way… Because wasting water is fun and helps with stress!

Personal, Travel

Update: Japanese

Leave a comment

I am on day 259 in the Duolingo app; meaning I have used the app for 259 straight days to learn Japanese, but my progress isn’t very far… I’ve mostly been doing my 2 lessons a day, and for the most part, it’s been maintaining my progress…

Recently, they’ve added a “dark mode”, and about a month back, they expanded the Hiragana/Katakana section. I did make the leader board a few time while I finished those off! But now it’s taking effort to learn more/improve. And you’d think with self-isolation and the crap going on, I’d fine more time it… Just need to prioritize it.

I started my journey by listening to a podcast about learning Japanese prior to starting Duoling… It started with the basics, and led me to downloading apps to help learn Hiragana/Katakana — that helped a lot! I have downloaded one for Kanji, but haven’t been working on it as hard… After that, I realized the need to start a vocabulary spreadsheet (seen above)… I’ve spent a few hours here and there to curate the list, but haven’t created flashcards or spent hours of memorization on it yet… And I’ve avoided tackling verbs… something I know I just need to buckle down and do!

Stepping back, I think I’ve got a lot of good resources, including the internet. Between the quizzes and flashcards in the apps, the repetition, the spoken lessons, the spreadsheet, etc. some things are sinking in. I catch myself picking up words spoken in some Anime… feel like I’ve gone from a 0.1 – 1% word recognition to about a 3 – 5% word recognition. Sounding out words in Hiragana/Katakana is still slow, and I still doubt myself, but some small improvement…

What still freaks me out, when I watch a really good art-detailed Anime, with lots of street signs, train/bus time tables, or close-up views of things you’d use for navigation, I’m still like, WTH? Just watched a scene in Love Hina where two of the main characters buy a high-speed train ticket to Osaka — there was a few shots of the tickets used to find their seats… very quick scenes, but I’m wondering if (when we travel) will I be able to understand enough to find our car/row/seat to find our seats? We screwed this up once in France, figure need to make a better effort next time we travel anywhere by train…

One of the things I know I’m going to fail on is pronunciation… I should probably be repeating the spoken Japanese. But a lot of times, I find myself parsing the spoken Japanese for context, and find myself tripping up on spoken contractions… I’ll catch the first few words, then something that doesn’t sound quite right, then ends with a verb… Just like English with contractions and spoken shortcuts, I’ve noticed that in the app with some of the spoken sentences… and slowing it down doesn’t all ways clear it up. it’s taken a little more time to recognize the contractions, especially around how the particles flow from/into the next word… something I think I’d pick up a little better with learning from an actual teacher.

LEGO, Travel

San Francisco/Bricks by the Bay 2019, pt. 1

Leave a comment

This year, the wife and I decided to try a different LEGO fan event (Bricks by the Bay) in Santa Clara, CA. This was our first time to the bay-area. We were excited — a new city to explore, prefect weather, plans to meet up with family we hadn’t seen in a long time, a new LEGO fan venue, etc. We had almost a week, with a few days built into the trip for sight-seeing… Thinking about this, I’ll probably break this post up into a few individual post, based on how I’ve arranged the albums on Flickr. 🙂 This one will be on San Francisco the city itself…

With the convention being in Santa Clara, it’s pretty far from San Francisco proper. We ended up doing public transportation and Uber — I don’t like to drive in large cities where I not familiar with, figuring it’s cheaper than renting a car & paying parking in the long run. I also figured public transportation in a larger city would have been easier to get around.

The VTA light rail was fun; we had to take it a bus stop, to take the express bus to a BART station, to take the subway into the city… I think our total time was about 1-1.5 hours to get into the city. I think at some point, if I calculated the cost & time, don’t know if it would have been any cheaper to do Uber. The bus system wasn’t bad, but we missed a bus or two (not understanding where the bus actually picked up people), and we got turned around once (didn’t understand we were on the wrong side of the street where we should have picked up the bus). I think I was more frustrated with the bus system out of all of the public transport we took.

Needless to say, it was hard to get around. With hindsight, I think we’d break the trip into two stays, one part where we’d stay by the convention center and the second part where we’d stay in/near downtown San Francisco. For our last day, we did stay near the airport, so Ubering to/from downtown wasn’t too bad.

The other thing we decided to do was take the Hop-on/Hop-off tours. Now mind you, we had done this in San Antonio a few years back and didn’t have a problem — the bus stops were clearly marked, the A/C worked, the buses weren’t too terribly crowded… Well, you see where I’m going with this. Our goal was stop #10 the Golden-Gate Park by the bridge, we ended up catching the bus at stop #4… about an hour later on a crowded bus with no A/C, already spending nearly 2 hours to get into the city and the need for lunch, our first day was exhausting and frustrating.

High-lights: Santa Clara is nice. The different areas were the VTA took us into were were a mix of old/new architecture, recognized a lot of big tech names along the way. The lunch we had on the pier (high end restaurant) was great — crab in/on everything. The view from Golden Gate Park was wonderful. Enjoyed the farmer’s market like atmosphere by the Ferry Building.

The full Flickr Album: 2019.07 – San Francisco

Anime, Otaku, Personal, Travel

犬を飼っています

Leave a comment

So earlier this year, my wife showed me that tickets to Hong Kong were less than $1,000/person round trip. This got me thinking that I wanted us to take a trip to Asia within the next few years… And with both of us being Disney fans, we talked about maybe doing Hong Kong or Tokyo or Shang-hi…

And with being a little disappointed in our trip to San Francisco, we talked about doing a LEGO event outside the US, maybe in Asia… There’s been a LEGO fan event in Japan I’ve been following via Facebook for awhile, and a new fan event in Korea. I’ve always been impressed with the LEGO builders in Hong Kong (HKLUG) since the 2008 Olympics, so that gives us a few possible dates for travel (after Golden Week, before the hottest time of the year) and possible people to try to meet up with…

I can almost read what’s written in hiragana!

I’ve been a bit of a Japanophile/Otaku. Wrote a high school thesis paper on the Japanese educational system. I took a Japanese culture class in college. Dropped out of a Japanese language class — too much on my plate at the time. Probably watch too much anime. So it’s no surprise that I’d like to go to Japan first.

With that in mind, I’ve been listening to a podcast about learning Japanese; I started with the 30 day challenge from 2 years ago… Each episode is about 4-5 minutes long, covering a variety of topics. After about the 4th or 5th episode, it reminded me of why I dropped out of the class; and reminded me of the horrors of taking 3 years of Spanish — with verb conjugation, vocabulary words, etc. It reminded me that some 20ish years ago, I meet with a tutor, a gentleman from Japan to learn Japanese for a brief time; and talks of making flash cards, and advice that I should get a Japanese girlfriend if I really wanted to learn Japanese… But this time, I ended up sticking with it with a new determination, continuing listening to the lessons, with a plan to go back over the 30 days once I learned hiragana/katakana and some kanji. I would try to soak in some of the context, with out stressing out over memorization… I think I’m up to episode 57, some 20ish episodes past the 30 day challenge.

Given that I tried this before the advent of podcasts and smart phones, I feel like I’m a little further along than I expected. I haven’t started with vocabulary words, or sentence construction, I’m just focusing on learning hiragana. I’ve found 3 apps that have been very useful, the first one teaches me how to draw the kana/symbol properly with the correct brush stroke order and say it, then it shows me a romanji version of the kana, and I have to pick out the correct kana from a list of 4. Finally, it shows me a blank screen to draw on, with the romanji version of the kana (and sound), and I’m to draw it with the correct brush strokes. Multiple times a day, I review what I learned, until I get it right — it’s a little frustrating when (especially with ‘ね’) where my brush strokes are slightly off. The 2nd app is just a simple quiz/flashcard app. It either shows me the romanji version of the kana, and I have to pick out the right now, or it says the kana or a word in Japanese, and I have to pick it out from a list. The final app is more of a speed quiz, same as the second app, but I can choose what kana I’ve learned and it will drill me on those only… the goal is to get 100% each time, in the 20ish seconds I get to pick the correct symbol… the 3rd app is a little more nerve-racking, but by not being able to adjust the guessing time, I’ve gotten quicker.

… I don’t know where this will take me. I’m hoping by a year or two of study, I might be able to read signs and maybe have a basic grasp of conversation — maybe end up being JLPT 4 with a stretch goal of JLPT 3.

LEGO, Travel

Legoland Billund

Leave a comment

We got an opportunity to visit Legoland Billund in Denmark — the original Legoland park — this past summer.  The park is very old school.  I have LEGO magazines from the late 80’s with pictures highlighting new rides at Legoland Billund… Honestly, not much had changed.

19490946160_bff64cdcd4_zNeedless to say, to a fan of LEGO, this was really fun to experience.  My only complaint would have been the cold weather — it still felt like early spring with temps in the low 50’s.  And my only regret is not getting in contact with local AFOLs for a meet up.

The prices were expensive, because of the exchange rate, so we only picked up a few LEGO items.

The room was amazing!  It overlooked the theme park.  Compared to our room in Copenhagen, it was spacious.  The floors in the bathroom were heated (which I totally get), the towel rack was heated.  The beds were very Scandinavian both in design and comfort.  We really enjoyed watching Big Bang Theory in English, with Danish subtitles.  The internet was free in the hotel.  And the food (although expensive) was enjoyable — we ended up discovering a new cheese that we like from breakfast.  And I wish we could get the whole grain breads here in the US, that we did at breakfast in the hotel.