Who doesn’t like good service? But more often than not, whenever you want to return something or have a defective item replaced at a store […] there’s more! »

I recently bought some Neutrogena skin-care products and on each item the text “dermatologist tested” is printed. So, the dermatologist has been tested, but what about the product? Not that claiming that a product has been dermatologically tested has any real meaning, but saying “dermatologist tested” is just silly. Aah, I feel so much better now

I’ve been listening to the Japanese singer YUI for a while now. One song I like is Spiral & Escape. Until recently I hadn’t reflected on the title of the song. Then suddenly I heard that she’s actually singing “Spiral escape”. I thought it was something in Japanese followed by “escape”. Now I hear that it’s “supairaru esuke-pu” and I don’t know if I’m just damaged from my years of listening to Japanese music or not, but I think it sounds cool!

I’ve never been annoyed with the use of Engrish in J-Pop songs. I’ve always thought it to be cute or at least acceptable. It’s interesting when the words have been warped in such a way that they have many more syllables than the original ones, so if you try to sing the song using the real English words you realize that it cannot be done. Spiral & Escape is an example of that. There are plenty of other examples, but I just can’t think of one at the moment. Ah, wait, in Ai Otsuka’s Smily, for example, she sings “rabuu rabu day”. I don’t know about you, but I actually like it

Last week I attended a series of lectures/presentations that were a part of a “kick off” for the company where I work. It gave me some serious flashbacks from my days at the university sitting there in rows staring at a projection with charts and bullet lists. As I was sitting there I started doodling […] there’s more! »

There are certain phrases that appear more and more frequently for each season of the TV series 24. Why not make watching 24 with your friends a little more interesting?

Here is how the 24 Drinking Game works: Every time a character utters the words “within the hour” you take a shot of alcohol. These words are only used in the beginning of the episode, so unless you are watching multiple episodes in one go you’ll need some more rules. As the episode goes on the use of “in approximately 10 minutes”, “in 10 to 15 minutes” and similar becomes more frequent. Take a shot for each time you hear anything like that. To make it interesting you can challenge your friends to find other repeated patterns in the dialogue (which shouldn’t be that hard ). Also, take a double shot each time Jack Bauer tortures someone.

Random thought of the day: “We’ll rendezvous at 16 hundred hours”. I haven’t thought about it before, but today it hit me that it’s wrong on so many levels. It’s sort of like saying that $12.00 is 12 hundred dollars. In that case it would be correct if we said 12 hundred cents, but in the case of time it’s even more wrong to say 16 hundred minutes. In Sweden we use the 24 hour format, but we don’t say “hundred”.

During the night between Friday and Saturday we finally got some snow! There was some snow in the end of October and then nothing (except a little just before xmas - getting my hopes up - that rained away the same day) until now. I was hoping for snow for xmas when my niece was here. Now I don’t care as much, but it’s been strange with a winter without any snow. We usually have lots this far north.

Here are a couple of pictures taken from my apartment today:

I’d just like to wish you all a merry X-mas!

I bought a Polar F6 pulse watch (you know, one of those things that checks your heart rate that you can use when you work out) today. I went to my regular Body Balance practice expecting it to be in my “moderate” heart rate zone. OK, I’ve been ill, but during most exercises I was in my “hard” zone and in “moderate” when relaxing or stretching between the exercises. It’ll be interesting to see if this changes as my cardio gets better.

The thing that impressed me the most about this watch was a very small detail. You can download your own logos! You download a wav-file and play it with the watch next to the speaker. *chirp-chirp-chirp* and then you have a Hello Kitty logo on your watch

If you have the watch then you can get it at Polar’s site, but here it is anyway (if you have another watch model, then check Polar’s site):

• Hello Kitty.wav
  

(You go go to the settings menu and when it says “Settings” you play the wav-file with the watch next to your speaker. It will say uplink failed or uplink OK. If OK, hold “back” and then hold up arrow to show the logo.)

You can also download a program to make your own logos, but I haven’t tried that yet.

It’s actually been a while since I last ordered anything online. Well, unless you count the iRobot Roomba robovac I ordered a few weeks ago (review coming up). At least it’s been a while since I bought anything J-Pop related.

I’ve always wanted a nice Ai Otsuka poster to put somewhere in my apartment. And now they finally have one for sale at YesAsia. It’s a very nice Renai Shashin promo poster with many small polaroid photos of Ai. I just ordered it. I was about to order some more stuff, but I restrained myself . I’m not sure where I’ll place it yet. It all depends on wheter or not I find a nice 2007 calendar (i.e. if Ayu’s is nice). Perhaps my Aya Ueto poster will have to go. I’m even thinking about framing it to make it look a bit more sophisticated.

I’ve also been looking into getting some nice art (either a painting or a poster/reproduction). I love one painting in the movie Daisy, as I’ve written earlier, which is sort of impressionist style, so I’ve been looking at Monet’s work to see if there’s something fitting. It’s the correct style, but I haven’t found the motive (or rather, feeling) I’m looking for.

As I’ve started writing I might as well continue a little more

I bought a skipping rope the other day as an impulse buy after a character on Battlestar Galactica was going to skip rope. I’ve never been good at skipping rope, but I gave it a try and quickly realized that a skipping rope has quite a range when it went *smack* *rrritch* and it ripped one of my posters. I have to be more careful when I get the Ai poster, I suppose.

I have no idea how I ended up there, but I found a page describing the Combat Conditioning method used and promoted by Matt Furey. I remember downloading his videos once upon a time, but I deleted them before I had watched them (this was back when I had a lot less harddrive space than today). I tried some of his exercises tonight just to get a feeling for them. I did a few “hindu squats” (I don’t know, perhaps 20-30) and thought “hey, this isn’t too bad”, but then when I started walking around I felt how much it had taken out of my thighs. I’m going to give this method a try.