Hit the clubs last night, with my sister and her girl friend, the French baker.

It rained the entire evening, and Shibuya was a sea of transparent plastic umbrellas. I’m not much of a clubber, but Gaspanic was a nice place to hang out, in spite of (or perhaps, due to) the fact that they had somehow managed to cram 80 people into a space the size of my apartment back home. I learned some things about how the Japanese males move in these places, mostly from observing the 2 dozen or so propositions my two companions thumbed their noses at throughout our stay there. (Unfortunately, the Japanese females are nowhere near that forward.)

300 decibels later and it’s Saturday noon. Time to visit the Apple Store in Ginza, hooray! Didn’t matter if I already had every Apple-related product I needed for the foreseeable future; this was a visit of obligation. (Interesting tidbit about the building itself: the elevators in this 4-storey Mac monolith don’t have any buttons. You just step inside and let Apple take you where it wants you to go.)

Two blocks down the road was the Sony Building, which showcased some of the bleeding-edge gear from Japan’s biggest consumer electronics manufacturer. It didn’t seem particularly interesting until I rounded a corner on the 4th level and saw a crowd of people packed around a small glass case. It was the Rolly, an egg-shaped music device foretold by the wise men. I watched it flash and spin and sparkle, and came to realize that that was what I was in Japan to buy.

The Sony reps gave us the expected perfunctory warnings about how the device wasn’t meant for sale outside of Japan, and as such had no English manual or software. Of course, by the time the dude had finished talking my money was already in his hands, so it was a moot point. The Rolly cost JPY37,900, a little more than you would pay for an 8gb iPod Touch. It’s neither the best music player or portable speaker I’ve ever used, but it’s certainly the cutest. One could make the argument that it was the Pamela Anderson of music devices, but that ignores the fact that the Rolly is actually quite brilliant. I’ll write a more detailed entry about this later on, but suffice to say that I managed to get it working with no manual and software that wasn’t even Mac-compatible.

For dinner, we went to Alcatraz+ER, a theme restaurant in Shibuya. The whole place is decorated in the style of a prison-hospital, complete with handcuffs for the guests and jail cells instead of tables or booths. The “hospital” part of the theme was mainly just so they could dress their waitresses up as hot nurses, I guess.

Single best feature: after our first hour there, all the lights go out and a menacing face appears in the various TV screens mounted on the walls. After growling some (unfortunately for me) unintelligible threats at his dumbstruck audience, the lights come back up in discotheque mode, and the prison is transformed into the set of the Munsters. One of the male nurses runs around the restaurant singing in what I can only describe as a J-Pop rendition of Rocky Horror Picture Show. He’s followed by an escaped inmate who tries to scare the guests, who is in turn pursued by a female nurse with a gun. Then, just to make sure you get the idea, Michael Myers comes along armed with two decidedly anachronistic six-shooters and starts blowing everyone away. If you can think of a more bizarre dinner venue, I’d love to hear about it.

Went to Tokyo Dome yesterday. It was so exciting that I’m still up at 4am thinking about it.

… Ok, not really. I just get hit by random bouts of insomnia some times, and I’m sure the tiny-ass bed and the single, index-card-sized pillow I’ve been wrestling with have something to do with it. Thankfully, there is the blog to tend to.

Tokyo Dome had a very cool horror house called 13 Doors that I absolutely loved. Although it was essentially just a walking tour like our own carnival horror houses back at home, it had an additional interesting mechanic involving a key and the aforementioned doors. Each group of guests enters the house armed with a key and must navigate the interiors until they find the door to the next section. In typical Japanese fashion, the gore and frights were totally over-the-top; there was a very distinct lean towards mutilated women and children.

Single best gimmick: in one of the final rooms, there’s a dark corridor where you can see next to nothing, but all around you there’s a sound of little girls weeping. Tiny candles come alight, and you see that there’s a huge mirror at the end of the hallway, so you can see yourself walking towards it. Then the weeping sounds turn into terrific screaming and in the mirror’s reflection you see two girl ghosts rushing towards you from behind. The timing was absolutely brilliant; I cannot imagine how any visitor could stop themselves from galloping towards the exit post-haste.

Some quick observations and general progress updates.

Tokyo-to is a big place. Even Shinjuku, which is the particular district that I’m living in, is ridiculously busy. My apartelle is about 5 minutes walk from the JR East station, which is the locus for all 37 (!) train lines that crisscross the city. So far, I’ve taken the train by myself twice, and consequently got lost and overshot my destination by several dozen kilometers during my first attempt.

Yesterday, I went to Akihabara Electric Town, which is constantly covered by blogs like Gizmodo due to its propensity for generating tech-weirdness as only the Japanese can muster. “Electric Town” isn’t a euphemism either; it really is several city blocks of nothing but four- to seven-storey buildings selling nothing but nerdware. I spent about 3 hours walking around aimlessly (I could only read about 10% of the signages, so many of the buildings I entered were totally random choices) before my back started to complain.

Interestingly, although Tokyo-to itself is a smokers’ city (nearly every resto has a smoking section, and shared areas in residential buildings like my apartelle always have ashtrays), Akihabara itself is sprinkled with No Smoking signs. Being a responsible gaijin, I decided to walk around until I found an appropriate place. Took about 15 minutes to locate a small room appropriately labelled Smokers Style in a corner of the public square. There were a good 15 people inside it when I entered, although they didn’t look particularly uncomfortable. There were plenty of ashtrays and vendo machines inside, and the ventilation was such that there wasn’t the thick haze of smoke that you usually expect in places like this. The room was nicely heated too, and was much better than standing outside in the single-digit temperature.

Beside the Smokers Style was a pay toilet, which looked rather welcoming. The pay toilets in Manila are generally very pleasant places to hang out if you want to be away from the mall-noise for a few minutes, and the Japanese implementation was positively majestic. For JPY100, you enter a washroom decorated in the style of a fancy hotel, lock yourself in to a spacious, fully-automated water closet, and spend as long as you want on the heated toilet seats. (Favorite feature: the auto-bidet has a rotor which washes your ass in circular, linear or standard motions, depending on what gets you off. It also blasts you with hot air so you’re nice and toasty before you get up. Thoughtful technology is bloody fantastic.)

After that brief interlude, I crossed the square over to Yodabashi-Akiba, which is one of the largest electronics chains in Japan. The store in Akihabara was about the size of Landmark, seven floors of every electronic device you could think of, and other crap that you probably didn’t know existed (or needed to, for that matter). I happily found the Thanko USB oddities of lore, although they were a bit too expensive to give as gifts (and I certainly didn’t want any of them).

As expected, nearly every device I found had a Japanese interface and manual so comparison-shopping was a bit challenging. (You could read the specifications by looking at the units – GB, MB, MP, etc. – but the nuances of unfamiliar products were literally lost in translation.) Nintendo Wiis were going for JPY25,000 (ridiculous!), and 8gb iPod Touches were JPY36,800 (no way!). Didn’t buy anything though, except for an overpriced fruit shake at a Juicer Bar. Will definitely be back before I leave Japan.

Nothing but self-indulgent capsule entries over the next week or so, I’m afraid. Fairly uneventful first hour at NAIA, so nothing to report other than I fear I may have wasted my good underwear in anticipation of the fabled post-immigration strip-search. Oh wells.

Completely lucked out finding the Sampaguita Lounge, which I’m writing this entry at. Honestly, any place with wi-fi, electrical sockets, a smoking area and limitless coffee is worth gold to me right now, and this has all of the above. (PhP400 to get in, but considering how relaxing it is not to have to sit on the hard plastic chairs in the noisy-ass terminals downstairs, that’s a small price to pay. It has free food too, but I have a hard time digesting anything this early in the AM.)

Best part about this whole trip is that I have next to no idea what I’m doing when I get to Narita. Totally winging it all the way through; the screwups and inevitable hijinx will no doubt be fabulous.

I was listening to an interesting CrankyGeeks episode earlier today on the drive to work — the whole show was a rather lively discussion on the current mindset regarding the dreaded Office Romance, and how to handle it, both from an employee-perspective and a management-perspective.

I actually have some very strong feelings about office romances, and essentially they boil down to: "Don’t do it." This is more of a personal rule though, and not something I enforce as a matter of company policy. There are obvious reasons why. The first (and possibly most important) is that you lose your objectivity when the person you are working with is also the person you happen to be sharing a bed with. I consider myself to be a pretty rational person, but I cannot bring myself to openly criticize the work of someone I am intimately involved with.

The second is that you lose flexibility in both professional and romantic capacities; you cannot fire that person without inevitably breaking up with him/her, and vice versa. Similarly, rewarding that person in the workplace becomes an act loaded with symbolism, regardless of whether that was your intention.

And lastly, my personal relationships are the only remaining part of my life that I can still separate from work. Even my hobbies (blogging, watching movies, listening to music) are work-related to some degree. I’d like to keep it that way, if at all possible.

… This isn’t a rant btw (or even a mild complaint), it’s just me being truthy.

A lot of old-school CEOs have much the same thoughts on this, and for the same reasons. However, one of the things I’ve been realizing over the past year or so is that it’s impossible to enforce a "no-dating" policy because of the way people tend to look at their jobs these days. We’re spending larger and larger chunks of our lives in the workplace. If you can’t date someone in your office, then who can you date? You don’t have the time to meet anyone else. This is especially true in large companies, where the dating pool is bigger and thus more likely to yield a potential match. Thus, office-dating becomes both the reason to stay at work longer, and a consequence of staying at work longer.

At syndeo::media, the solution was a bit simpler. Instead of trying to create an atmosphere in the workplace where the team can feel comfortable to interact socially (which may or may not backfire; hell I’m no a party liaison), we’ve chosen to decouple the "work" from the "workplace." Because you’re only required to be in the office 20 hours a week, you’re a lot more flexible with the relationships you develop outside of the work environment. That’s not to say that we don’t all work 40+ hours a week; we still do of course. The difference is that we don’t limit the time and place where those 40-hours worth of work are supposed to occur.

Whether or not this will turn out to be a good solution is largely dependent on the members of the team. What I tend to look for in new hires is a kind of passion that is wholly internal; meaning, you care about the work first and foremost. This is especially important in our particular line because you are often working by yourself for long stretches (say, a day or two at a time) with very little supervision. How you manage your time during that stretch should be completely up to you. 

I was reading about an interesting economic theory last night which we’ll refer to as “probable disappointment,” although the author himself never really labeled it as such. Abbreviated and paraphrased, the theory states that you are more likely to be disappointed by the various things you encounter in life, than pleasantly surprised. Not the most insightful of ideas, but what was interesting to me was how the author went about proving it.

Consider the theory when applied to movies:

If you were to watch a random movie tonight (and your choices were truly random), the chances that you would enjoy it are roughly the same as the chances you would hate it. This is a statistical truth, and yet why do we all generally believe that there are a lot more movies that suck than are decent these days? Well, that’s where the theory comes in.

At the crux of the matter is the fact that our movie-watching habits aren’t truly random. We try to figure out which movies are good based on trailers, reviews or friends’ opinions, but we can never truly know whether we’ll enjoy a movie or not until we’ve actually seen it. In other words, even after all that decision-making, the chances that a movie will be enjoyable is still roughly equal to it being bad. What has changed, however, are our expectations. When we buy that movie ticket or pirate that DVD, we are banking on the fact that the trailers, reviews or opinions we compared were on the money. And so, because our expectations have increased (and the actual likelihood of enjoyment has remained the same), the chances are better than even that we will leave that theater feeling disappointed that things didn’t work out as planned.

There’s this erudite line out of Bill Watterson’s immortal “Calvin & Hobbes” strip, that goes: “I find that the lower I keep people’s expectations of me, the easier it is to surprise them.” (Not verbatim; I couldn’t find the original snippet.) It encapsulates the probable disappointment theory really handily, and even illustrates how to exploit it. If disappointment truly is a consequence of having higher-than-average expectations, then clearly the way to control people feeling disappointed about various things is to control their expectations of those things.

Another illustration, this time more specific:

When I went about pitching syndeo::media’s new toy to friends and early-testers, I made it a point to frame the conversation properly. This is an early-alpha proof-of-concept. It’s buggy, it’s rough in a lot of areas, and it needs your feedback to make it better. No marketing hoopla, no hard-sell, and not even a hint of linkbait-friendly mock-controversy.

I wasn’t being modest, I was being practical.

That said, disappointment can be a good thing for early-stage products. Feeling emotional in a negative way emphasizes what needs to be fixed or changed, so setting a certain level of expectation does serve a purpose. (I do find, though, that people are optimistic by nature, especially when they are being offered a spot in an invitation-only alpha-testing, so you don’t have to do a lot of fluffing to get those expectations high enough to be useful.)

Speaking of expectations/disappointments, moomai’s alpha test is moving along slowly and we’ve managed to find a lot of interesting little bugs and things as our first round of testers begin using it. I’ll write a short piece sometime over the next few days to properly introduce the product and the theories behind it.

But try not to expect too much, ok?