It’s been a strange experience using the Internet while watching the Olympic Games. I’m used to watching events by myself and was really shocked at the live Twitter and Facebook feeds. I am a figure skating fan and I would love Takahashi Daisuke of Japan win the gold medal. I’ve been yelling and clapping at the T.V. but I do this for other skaters too. I want to see them all perform perfectly. I don’t want anyone to fall or mess up and it’s amazing when a skater manages a new personal best.

But the live streams are full of comments about people being rubbish, how they want people to fail, and how country x should just go home. It’s really horrible. There are no rubbish athletes at the Olympics and while I can understand national pride the hatred towards Asians and Russia is shocking. I have tried to limit how much of this I read but the main Olympic web-site has a live feed of Facebook right beside the live stats feed. I was aware that the Internet was full of idiots but usually I do a better job of shielding myself from them.

In Japan Valentine’s Day is a day when women buy gifts for men. For the past few years we have ignored this tradition and bought gifts for each other but  this year we decided not to bother with gifts or cards. Instead, we stayed at home and cooked together, though Marty did buy me a piece of my favourite chocolate cake.

I’ve had enough of the business lounge.  Obviously I’m some sort of novelty as people keep staring at me.  I’m tired from hours of travel and it’s making me uncomfortable.  And the final straw?  I got up to walk to the ladies room and a man actually stopped mid-eating to stare.  He looked at me, with his mouth wide open, and the bread roll that he had been eating forgotten in his hand.  He just leered with food in his mouth!

Who knew that a YAPC::Asia T-shirt would cause such a stir?

It’s just turned 5am and I’m sitting by myself in the Asiana Business Lounge at Incheon Airport.  I’ve lost all sense of time so I find myself glancing at the clock every 5 minutes, which will be a dull way to pass the 5 hours between flights.

The flight from New York took nearly 15 hours.  It was mostly uneventful.  A couple of hours before landing there was announcement asking if there was a doctor on-board.  The passenger two seats away from me had taken ill.  I had noticed her during the night but merely to wonder why she had been given a quilt as well as a blanket.

We had two medical professionals on the plane who fussed around and asked questions in English and Korean.  I was impressed by the level of care given by the air stewards.  The lady was too ill to get to a bathroom and the air stewards not only held the sick bags but rubbed her back whilst she was sick.  They also pressed cold towels against her head and held her hand.  They were kind and I’m not convinced that this level of kindness would be displayed by every airline I travel with.

I worry sometimes about travelling through unknown airports but transferring through this airport is quite easy.  They claim to have the best transfer system in the world and an airport that has rest areas, play areas, museums, restaurants, shops, and massage rooms.  The transfer wasn’t difficult just a bit annoying.  The people in front of me were carrying four pieces of hand-luggage each and it got a bit chaotic when they tried to get all this x-rayed.  But it only required patience on my part.

Now I just need to find a way to stay awake.

I’m not back in Tokyo yet but I have already started to arrange my summer travel.  It needs to be done, because I want to travel using airline miles, but at this point I feel like I never want to travel again.  I’m out of luck though since at the minute I’m sitting at the airport waiting to board a 15 hour flight.

Registration has opened for YAPC::NA and I do plan to attend.  I have also been trying to work YAPC::EU into my travel plans.  That’s proving a lot harder as I have visitors this summer.  I’m trying to decide if it will be worth attending even if I only make the last day.  I really do want an opportunity to meet up with the European Perl Mongers.

I’ve just looked out the window and there are two people using cross-country skies to make their way up the street.  Apparently there is 2 and a half feet of snow outside.  I say “apparently” as there is no way I’m going out there to find out.

The worry though is that I do need to go out tomorrow morning.  I have a flight to catch to New York and I’m hoping that the weather improves so that the airport can open again.  I really don’t want to miss my flight home on Monday as it will be such hassle finding another flight.

When I first arranged this trip I had planned to go to the Perl conference that is on at the minute in Minneapolis.  A few weeks ago I changed my  mind because I was worried that the weather would be too bad…

The new edition of $foo magazine has been released and it contains an interview on the current state of The Perl Foundation.

“Nach 2008, 2009 gibt es jetzt zum dritten Mal ein Interview zum Thema “State of TPF”. Für diese Ausgabe stand neben Richard Dice auch Karen Pauley für das Gespräch zur Verfügung.”

An English version of the original interview has been published on the $foo site.

This was the first time I have ever been interviewed and I found it difficult. I worry if answers are too short or too long, too glib or too detailed, or just too boring.   I probably worry too much.

Yesterday morning I went for a walk through the snow in Manhattan.  It really was postcard perfect, especially along the river front.

This afternoon I decided to brave the Century 21 department store.  I had a pleasant morning and an enjoyable lunch with Marty and Nozaki-san, so today was a good day to try it.  I would love shopping to be a pleasant experience, but with a slogan of “fashion worth fighting for”, Century 21 is not the place to go if you are looking for calm.

The horror started as soon as I entered the store. I tried to find some new socks for Marty but got fed up really quickly of getting pushed out of the way by the men shopping there.  Maybe they didn’t see me, but it seems that good manners are left outside the shop.

I moved to the handbag section and tried to find a new bag.  There were some lovely things and they were certainly inexpensive but I didn’t see anything I liked enough to fight my way through the crowds.  I did overhear an argument between a member of staff and a customer.  The customer was asking the sales assistant to please not kick the baskets at her. The sales assistant was standing with her hands on her hips saying “I didn’t kick anything”, sounding horrifying like a defiant child.  I moved quickly away from that fight and went to look at ladies clothes.

It was chaotic and disorganised and I was disgusted by how much damage had been done to some of the dresses.  Beautiful dresses made from high quality fabric with plucks and tears.  I did manage to find some clothes and went to try them on.  Well, wasn’t that an experience.  Someone took the clothes from me to make sure that I wasn’t hiding items.  They don’t trust the customers to be truthful about the number of items they have.  They also take everything from you when you leave so they can count the clothes again, and then hand back the items you wish to purchase.  But the strangest thing for me was hearing the sales assistants talk about the customers stealing things, and the big signs up about shop lifters.  There are ways of checking clothes that don’t make your customers feel like suspected criminals.

My final stop was at the shoe department.  I haven’t quite worked out how you are supposed to try on shoes that are joined together with cable tags and I yelped the first time I didn’t notice the security tag at the back of one shoe I tried on.  I only managed to put shoes on my right foot, but even if I had managed to put on both it’s not like there was room to walk around.

When I went to buy the shoes the sales assistant didn’t actually speak to me or even look at me.  She continued a conversation with two other assistants about one of the customers in the store.  The words old and fat were used.  Truly delightful.

And why did I put up with this?  I’m now the proud owner of a beautiful Calvin Klein suit that cost me about 25% of the original price and a pair of Stuart Weitzman evening shoes that cost $21 instead of the retail price of $340.

Eating in America often seems to be about quantity.  I have been told that people expect large portions but if there is too much food on my plate I lose my appetite.  I think part of the problem comes from my childhood where I was told that I needed to eat everything that was put on my plate.  Knowing before I start eating that I’m never going to finish makes me reluctant to start.

Last night we went to the Palm Restaurant in TriBeCa.  The quality of the food was really good and I did order the smallest steak – though at 9oz it was still a bit big for me.  But it was the size of the dessert that horrified me.  Thankfully they brought it on a separate plate with a large knife making it look as if they didn’t really expect me to eat it all.  It tasted amazing but I brought most of it back to the hotel with me in a box.

I still have at least half of the cake.  I did eat some of it after lunch but I probably won’t be able to finish it all.  I hate the waste and I have wasted so much food in the past week.  I left half of my lunch today and we are now trying to work out what to do with the remains of the our carry-out dinner.  We got one meal between the two of us but Marty ordered soup as a starter and ended up with about a litre of it.   We don’t have a fridge in our room so most of it will end up down the sink.  And the phrase “waste not, want not” keeps running through my head.