Michael John Grist

My old gym shoes were pretty much rotten, so I decided to buy some new ones. I wandered the streets of Ikebukuro for some time trying to find a decent priced decent looking shoe. I was on the cusp of giving up when I saw the Climacool Adiprene:

It only cost about 8,000 yen, and though that was higher than I wanted to pay, the cool white and silver of the shoe won me over. Plus it has great aeration abilities and is really light. For style as well as substance it’s the perfect gym shoe.

Watch out though, these shoes make me a furious bad-ass.

What with all the blogging I’ve been doing recently, and posting photos and icons with every post, and recently buying a headset mic for doing podcasts and just generally gearing up, I figured it was about time I bought a half-decent camera.

I’ve been shooting so far with a Sharp 910 camera phone. For a phone, it’s a pretty good camera. 4x optical zoom, 5 mega pixel. But because it’s so compact, the lens is tiny and junk, little light gets in, and it performs abysmally in anything less than bright day-light.

Recently my buddy Canadian Mike got married (post on Japanese wedding ceremony coming soon!), but I felt too embarrassed by my crappy camera phone to pull it out and take many photos. Then at the more relaxed after-party, of course there were many photos I wanted to take, but I knew the Sharp couldn’t handle the light conditions.

So, I present to you my new Canon Powershot A650 IS!

Choosing new tech gear is always a challenge, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. So, I bought my trusty tech savante Jason along with me to advise. I knew I wanted something in the 30-40,000 yen range (150-200 pounds), because I understand that you pay for quality, and that’s what it costs to get out of the really compact cameras. Of course, I already have a very compact camera- the Sharp.

So we looked at several. The A650 stood out for its weight (300ish grams), high pixel count(12 mega pixel), Canon’s good name (lots of cool focussing tech), a x6 optical zoom, a nice overall design (two-tone, good grip), and a super-handy flip-out viewer:

The viewer rotates round so I can hold the camera above or below normal eye level, and angle the viewer so I can still see the shot. Plus it really plays into my love of anything that can transform. Like pants with zips at the knee that can transform between full-length pants and shorts. Awesome.

So- expect a bump in image quality around here. Plus (gulp) film! I’ve no knowledge of how to edit film yet, but I’ll get on it, and surely will put up some footage in the next few days.

Last weekend I finally bought, after months and months of deliberation, a new bike. Part of the problem was having a similar bike back in the UK- but the cost of shipping it was prohibitive. A tricky situation, since I have a hard time spending money.

Why is that? Is it the Puritan ethic I was raised with? Is it me trying to save the world by minimizing my carbon footprint? Is it that I don’t want to consume any goods as that encourages little kids in Asia to work in sweat shops? Who knows.

Anyway- here it is:

She’s a beauty. I name her- Talulah!

It’s a Trek (Talulah the Trek) 7.3 FX, which means it has 7.3 different types of special effects- like cross-fade, fade-out, and bullet-time like in the Matrix. I can control them from a handset mounted on the handlebars.

It cost a pretty penny- 72,000 yen for the bike, then gear cost another 50,000, which adds up to about $1,200, or 800 pounds. It’s expensive, but I think it’s a solid buy.

Jason and I went for a 66km ride the day that I picked it up. We basically did a loop all round the city, up towards Saitama, round to the East and a park in Chiba by Tokyo Bay, then up through Ginza and Tokyo.

It was good. Exhausting though. The ride down the Arakawa river was against a severe headwind. Very hard work- never getting any momentum. All the joy sucked out of going down hills, as the wind stole our inertia.

We made it home around 6pm. 3 hours 10 minutes actual riding time. Maybe 5 hours for the whole journey. We didn’t stay in the park long- it was freezing down there with the wind off the ocean.