A Geek in Japan

CP+ Camera & Photo Imaging Show 2012

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date February 16, 2012
2 Comments on CP+ Camera & Photo Imaging Show 2012

Last Saturday my friends CaDs, Lapastillaroja and I decided to go to the CP+ Camera & Photo Imaging Show 2012 to be able to have the privilege to see for the first time, as a world exclusive, the Nikon D800. When we arrived we went directly to the Nikon booth and after almost one hour lining up….

Yes! we also visited Canon’s booth! It was the largest booth at the show along with Nikon’s booth. The main Canon novelty were the LEGRIA video cameras that showed the visitors a girl dressed in a miniskirt playing tennis.

A new inkjet printer by Canon!

Canon and Nikon had the largest booths, however Sony and Olympus also had a large presence at the show.

Sony’s booth was full of beautiful models

Olympus’ star product!

We walked around the rest of the show. Tamron, Sigma, Casio and Fujifilm booths were also quite big. There were also many other companies, from tripod manufacturers to complex lab equipment brands that for example were showing products to test the proper operation of cameras (image stabilizing testing, etc)

I wanted to try it, but after seeing the huge line I bailed out!

According to this… 5 times faster!

This Casio camera has a function to help you correct your swing!

A seminar to learn how to use the Nikon 1… you can clearly see the target user of this camera

Casio girls had an iPad hanging on their neck

Antonio trying a Hasselblad with a zillion megapixels

Carlos checking Tamron lenses.

Snipers equipped with Sigma!

And where there are cameras and geeks… there’s also lots of models to photograph!

Funny Internet

Covering your body in clothespins to obtain 1,000 retweets

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date February 15, 2012
3 Comments on Covering your body in clothespins to obtain 1,000 retweets

The president of the small Japanese web development company Omocoro challenged one of his employees Mr. Sebuyama to obtain more than 1,000 retweets with his personal Twitter account of 2,000 followers. He just put two conditions: he couldn’t tell his followers that it was an experiment and he couldn’t go home until he obtained 1,000 retweets. The purpose of the experiment was to try to understand better the Twitter ecosystem and to know what kind of tweets are able to obtain more retweets.

Sebuyama on Twitter
Sebuyama starting the experiment.

Sebuyama spent the night at the office experimenting with different tweets and seeing how his followers reacted. One of the tweets that had more retweets (around 50) simply asked his followers to retweet it. After several hours he even uploaded some photos of him naked that barely obtained two or three retweets… it seems like nobody wants to retweet pictures of naked men.

The tweet that changed everything was this one:

For each retweet I will stick a clothespin to my body and I will post a picture.

He felt asleep and after some hours he had 1,815 retweets!

Sebuyama Twitter clothespins

Everybody wanted to see @sebuyama covered in clothespins! More than Twitter, the Internet, new technologies and so on, what he really had to understand was the human psychology. Nobody wanted to see Sebuyama naked, but people wanted to see him naked and covered in clothespins! Why? Are we naturally attracted to see people humilliated in a funny way?

Sebuyama

Sebuyama could finally go home and wrote a report explaining to his boss how he had been able to obtain so many retweets (in Japanese, includes pictures of Sebuyama naked).

Food

Ginnan – 銀杏

Shortly after arriving to Japan for the first time I went one day to Shibuya to have dinner and I ate this:

Ginnan

My Japanese friends told me that they were Ginnan, a fruit of the Ichou 銀杏 tree, known in the west as ginkgo biloba. I had never heard anything about this, so I was curious to know more. They explained me that the first kanji means “Silver” and the second “Apricot”. The tree is originary from China and it is very special because it doesn’t have any close living relatives. In Japan and China you can usually see ginkgos in parks and streets.

In Europe it’s not easy to find ginnan in supermarkets. However many products and medicines have gingko extract as an ingredient. It turns out it has many interesting properties, for example it is good for blood circulation and it has a lot of antioxidants. If you look at the ingredients of energy drinks or vitamin supplements you might find it contains some kind of ginkgo extract.

In addition to eating raw ginnan, there are also many recipes that use it, for example chawanmushi which is made mainly of egg and ginnan.

Ginnan
Chawanmushi, one of the main ingredients are ginnan (ginkgo seeds).