A Present

Well, the above is a present from my daughter's gramma.
A pair of shoes by Dior. :o

Bought at Shinjuku Isetan.

I'm wondering if my daughter also loves shopping very much like her mother...
Sigh... :(

36th Week

This is a video snapshot of Skype.
Hum... it's difficult to find out what it is. :o
But, anyway my daughter is in her 36 week without any troubles.

BTW, it's my birthday today, and the good news is the biggest present actually. :)

A SEGV Storm Generator

Again, I wrote a stupid program mainly for trouble reproducing. :)

Recently, I've been working on a crash dump of an application server
taken under a heavy CPU load, especially high system activity
(i.e., %system of sar, mpstat or vmstat etc.)

After looking into the crash dump several days (as my after-5 activity :o),
I found that about 10 Java threads out of 3000 under 1 process were waiting for CPU with pending SIGSEGVs.
I'm not sure yet, but after reading source of the Linux exception handler routines,
now I'm feeling we would see a high system activity load like the above
if we had a situation like a segmentation fault storm.

Thus, I tried to write a small program touching invalid addresses repeatedly to reproduce the phenomenon like I saw.

The after-5 activity is still ongoing, and I'm facing with a more strange behaviour of SIGNALs. :(
But anyway, the SEGV storm generator would be public here soon.

Menya Tenho

Menya Tenho (麺や 天好) is another Ramen shop along Shin-Koganei Kaido avenue.

• http://tokyo.gourmet.livedoor.com/restaurant/info/305077.html
  

Tonight dinner was a very standard style half soy source and pork bones soup with sliced roasted pork. In Japanese, "しょうゆとんこつチャーシュー麺."

It's true that there are many good ramen shops along Shin-Koganei Kaido avenue that offer various kinds of characteristic ramens. Even Tenho does. But, the above ramen is with very simple and standard, and thus it fits for almost everyone.
Anyway, worth trying. :)

Taiwan Ramen, Tsurukameya

I had today's lunch at Tsuru-kame-ya (鶴亀屋) located very close to JR Musashi-Koganei station, Tokyo.



The above left ramen is Taiwan Ramen.
It's a very spicy one, and with a lot of chili.
I recommend that you would get into good trim before trying that...

BTW, Taiwan Ramen seems to be a specialty of Nagoya.
Strange! Isn't it?

Wikipedia taught me that it comes from a Taiwan cuisine restaurant in Nagoya in '70s.
You can find some literature at Wikipedia. The article says that Nagoya people like very spicy foods. But, I'm not sure if they really do. At least, a colleague of mine from Nagoya does not.

NOBEL DREAMS

NOBEL DREAMS --- Power, Deceit, and the Ultimate Experiment
Gary Taubes
ISBN 4-02-255929-2 (Japanese translation)

I majored in elementary particle physics theory in my graduate school days, and thus I naturally took this book when I found it in the bookshelf of my father-in-law.

After reading several chapters of the book, what I thought was not about Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, as is mentioned in the text, but about Dave Cutler, the father of WindowsNT and VMS.
That could be because I have lived in the IT industry too long.

Komeda Coffee

Komeda Coffee is a famous coffee shop chain in Nagoya and central Japan area.



I took the above photo at Komeda Coffee Toyohashi Fujisawa (map).
The left cake-like thing is called "Shiro-Noir."
Here, "Shiro" means "White" in Japanese, and obviously "Noir" means "Black" in French (I think). Yes, it's almost meaningless, but anyway, that tastes very good. :)

As you can see, it's a sweet Danish pastry with soft cream.
The above one is a small size version, but be careful. The standard size seems to be about 15cm in diameter and sometime too big for a woman. :o

You can find out some literature about "Shiro-Noir" here and here.
(Unfortunately, only in Japanese)

Baykal

Baykal is an Russian restaurant in Toyohashi city, Aichi, Japan.

Today, I had a lunch there and had a happy time waiting for the forthcoming baby with my wife and her mother. :)

My choice was Lena Course:

• Borscht
• Piroshki
• Russian Pot
• Salad
• Ice Cream

I like their dishes. :)

Almost 34 Weeks

Today is the last day of the 33rd week of my baby.

My wife is going to have our baby at her home town, and yesterday I took her to the city with a lot of baby goods by car. It's about 5 hours drive from Tokyo and at least for me a bit tough drive. I know that some colleagues of mine drive more than 12 hours to go back to their home towns. But, indeed I was nervous because there were two more people there in the car. :)

Well, today I took my wife to the hospital where she is having the baby to get a medical checkup, and the baby seems to be more than 2500 grams now. :o

She is due in this late October, but I guess she will come into the world at least two weeks ahead.
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing her next month. :)

Deluxe Miso Ramen, Menya Kotaro

I will leave Tokyo about a week from Tomorrow, and here is the last supper. :o



Deluxe Miso (Beans Paste) Ramen at Menya Kotaro. :)
Standard thickness noodle, Miso (Beans paste) soup with sliced roasted pork and a boiled egg.

That could be a bit too salty for some people, but I guess it depends on one's physical condition if one feels so or not. I recommend that you would try the Ramen once. :)

Karuizawa Manpei Hotel

We made a trip to Karuizawa and stayed at Manpei Hotel in Karuizawa, Nagano where is very famous for also foreign people.

This is a part of our travel series visiting classic hotels in Japan, and Manpei Hotel is the third one. The first one was Nikko Kanaya Hotel, and the second one was Fujiya Hotel.

My wife seems to love Manpei Hotel best because there is a big outlet mall close to the Hotel. Of course, this time she enjoyed shopping. For example, getting shoes of Prada etc... :o
In this October, our baby will be born, and I guess we cannot have time visiting other classic hotels for years. Thus, I wanted my wife to enjoy this trip, and I believe she did a lot. :)

Mr. Chen's Tanmen Shop

Mr. Chen's Tanmen Shop is unique even among many good ramen restaurants along Shin-Koganei-Kaido avenue.

• http://ramendb.supleks.jp/shop/8791
• http://www.hyorori.net/ramen/shop.asp?shop=1786

In Japanese, it's "陳さんのタンメン亭", and Tanmen is written as 湯麺 in kanji and seems to be different from Chinese Tanmen.
It also looks like Tantanmen (担担麺 (タンタンメン) which is very spicy and came from Shuan of the continental China but a different one.

Tanmen (タンメン) is a salty soup ramen served with a lot of vegetables.
In case of Mr. Chen's, it's served with some pieces of sliced roasted pork, and that tastes very good at any time.
Here, I mean we feel tastes of the same ramen differently depending on one's
physical condition or mood. But, their Tanmen has natural taste and we can enjoy it in various times. For example, a hot day, a cold day, when we feel exhausted or so.

I believe definitely it's a three stars ramen restaurant. :)



BTW, you can learn about ramen in the following Wikipedia pages. :)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramen (English)
• http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A9%E3%83%BC%E3%83%A1%E3%83%B (Japanese)