A day of something resembling work

One of Bryan’s requirements (really, just about the only one) for us staying in his office was that we be out of the office during working hours. So we had to clear out by 9:00 AM every day, and this was the first day to do so. Gwen headed out with me

Another one of my clients, Aki of Digitized Information, has its offices very close to Bryan’s. I had been there before, but not in a long time, and I was unsure of the way there. But I had (I thought) the address, and should have been able to figure it out from that.

Well, no. As it turns out, I had his address slightly wrong. I navigated to where my mistaken address should have been–between the Brazilian and Bulgarian embassies–and discovered it wasn’t there. On a lark, I opened up the laptop I had borrowed from Drew, and discovered there were two open wifi nodes. I hit the diginfo web page, got the correct address, found a neighborhood map, and navigated to the office. I spent the rest of the day working on a job I had brought with me.

After stopping by the office and meeting the people there, Gwen made her way to 清水観音堂 in 上野. That evening, we all got together at a nearby 居酒屋 called 亘. For the 二次会, Aki dragged us to some microscopic カラオケ pub in 下北沢. This joint could maybe accommodate 12 people, and the six of us in our party were crammed into one corner. Aki, it turns out, is quite a good singer, at least with all the reverb and effects that the karaoke machines lay on. Gwen and I declined to sing, but were fascinated by the enormous selection of songs available (four pages of Beatles selections), the little wireless pad that song requests are punched into, and the porn-flick production values in the karaoke videos. We escaped around 11:30 and made our way home. Didn’t manage to get back to Shimokita (as it’s known to its friends) for the rest of the trip, which I kind of regret, as I enjoy that neighborhood.