So what I really wanted to do here is let Gregg Smith know how good the sushi is here.  We shot a video of me tonight eating some squid I believe.  It was yummy.  So Gregg, next time I’m bringing you with me.

This Sunday was much easier than last Sunday, as we are completely adjusted to the time and well rested… even after last night.  Our wonderful hosts first took us bowling, which being one of the three losers had to buy drinks for the better three.  Our team almost came back on game three after they seemed to have found the gutter to beat Starkey, Yasu and Shinya, but came up 10 pins short in the end.

Aftewards we went on a tour of the local brewery in Kanazawa callled Kirin.  They have been brewing beer since 1870.  The first factory of the current company was built in 1907 in Yokohama and at one time after WWII, Kirin was 2nd to only Anheuser-Busch, and in the 1990′s even had a joint venture with the St. Louis brewery.  I never quite found out when the facility we visited was built, but it was very modern, so I imagine is was not too old.

The best part was eating at the restaraunt afterwards as we got to eat, drink and be merry.  Our wonderful hosts knew how much we liked the Japanese BBQ, so they let us go at it again.  This time we had the Kirin factory on our side to supply us with plenty of fresh brewed lager.  You can check out the entire picture gallery here… it’s good humor, so you should have a look.

The rest of the day was spent just chilling, doing some shopping, going to what was called “Japanese Best Buy”.  Chris Starkey was in heaven after he found his long lost Mountain Dew vending machine there.  It was sort of a cross between Fry’s and Best Buy.  We finished the evening off eating at a Japanese-Italian place.  It was tasty, but nothing like The Hill in St. Louis.

Have a good day,

Chris

After a nice rest, we decided to go out shopping for a while.  We shopped for a while but ended up finding a saki machine…

After a round we decided to spend the evening American style, watching fireworks, eating McDonalds and having a few local beers.

It was the best fireworks show I’ve ever seen it lasted for one hour and 20 minutes.  Our hotel rooms at the Nikko Hotel faced west so we had a great view.  Starkey put his camera to snap photos about every 4 second and filled up his 1 GB flash drive with pictures.

Afterwards it was time to crash and get a very good night sleep.  Tomorrow will be just as fun…

Chris

I’m pretty sure I’m losing weight over here as the food is obviously much healthier.  Even with large dinners with plenty to drink it’s hard to pile on any pounds.  I never dreamed I’d like the food so much but I can say now that low fish (Sushi) doesn’t bother me at all, and no soy sauce is required.  I’ve even taken a liking to Japanese vegatables as you can see…

The worst thing that has happened is that I’ve run out of cash and can’t seem to figure out how to get anymore.  My ATM card doesn’t work and banks are hardly ever open.  The term “bankers hours” is definatley a Japanese expression.  Here are all the pictures from Friday.

I’ll write more a little later.  It’s actually Saturday here and I just finsihed playing golf, so I’ll talk about it a little later.

Chris

The first intersting thing this week was the train.  Being from St. Louis I drive everwhere and now I’m on my fourth day I haven’t been in a car since Saturday, which is odd.  This morning we were supposed to meet someone to help us to another town, and somehow we missed him and while he was running around Kanazawa trying to find us, we just jumped on the train and headed to our destination, which was Unoke.  Not sure what in the world happened but I imagine we went to the wrong place to meet him.   Stupid Americans.

Enough on that.  So as many of you know I’m not a very adventurous food person, but I can tell you, around here you just eat what you’re given or look dumb and go hungry.  I decided to eat.  Last night, we ate a very famous Japanese restaurant called… well I don’t know because I don’t know Japanese, but here’s a picture, so let me know if you figure out the name in English.

I had never experienced anything close to what we ate here.  It’s hard to explain, so I’ll use pictures, thanks to Chris S….

Some type of Sushi….

Some other small chewy fish (gorei or something like that).

Next was Eel… and the remainders of some seaweed type soup we started off with…

Around that time the Saki started flowing and things got a little fuzzy…

I know we also had some type of chicken liver pasty type stuff (not so good), duck (yummy) followed by beer and more saki.  There was much more, but it’s tough to remember, so here is the order that was taken by our waitress, which I’d love for someone to translate…

Again, our hosts were most gracious and I can’t express enough gratitude towards them.  We had a wonderful time and the last couple pictures show us having a great time and truely enjoying our time here…

I’m actually writing this Tuesday night after another great meal, but I need to go to bed sometime.  I’ll just quickly mention that we ate at a Japanese-Chinese restaraunt tonight and enjoyed some more exotic foods, such as jellyfish, shark fin soup and a lot of different tofu.  We also got to enjoy more Asahi and a Chinese liquor similar to saki.  Okay, I’m tired and want to run in the morning, so I’m signing off.

Chris

Aferwards, a quick tour around the Kanazawa train station was great, as the architecture was amazing.  It featured a good design, some amazing woodwork and finally a clock that showed it’s time as a fountain. (need to take a good picture of this).

Afterwards we chilled and tried to adjust some more to the time difference and spent the evening drinking Ashahi beer, by far our favorite so far.  First at where else, but the ”Beer Restaurant”…

After that we hit the lounge in the lobby…

Then we finsihed off by eating amazing Tepenyaki at a restaraunt called Icho, at the top of the Hotel Nikko, where we are staying.  Of course we had more Asahi…

Monday, day 4 coming soon…

Chris

See all my pictures for Day 2.

After landing in Tokyo around 3pm (1am Central time) on Friday and getting settled into a hotel, we (I’m traveling with one of the developers here at KnowledgeLake) grabbed some dinner at a place that was a cross between Asian and American food.  Unfortunately they didn’t do either very well.  Afterwards I tried to get to sleep around 9pm, but ended up being wide awake at 1am (my body thought is was 11am the day before) I called home and chatted with my wife for a bit.

(Atrium water garden at the Narita Hilton)

After waking up again at 4 and 5am, I finally fell into a deep sleep around 6, one hour before my alarm went off in order to catch a bus into downtown Tokyo, for our flight to Komatsu.  Driving through Tokyo, I couldn’t believe how industrial and crowded (and huge) it was.  Although green and clean for an industrial city it had a little too much Saturday traffic for me.  The airport in downtown (Heneda) was like a sterile room.  I can’t believe an airport could be this clean… St. Louis please take note.

Landing in Komatsu, our hosts picked us up and took us too lunch at what they called Japanese BBQ.  I can tell you it was not BBQ by a long shot, but oh my, it may have been some of the best food I’d ever had.  A little like teppanyaki although you cooked it yourself.  Pork, beef, squid, and some octopus mixed with a bunch of other stuff, made a feast for a king.

After a great lunch (thanks guys!) we were taken for a tour of Kanazawa, first going to a place called Myoryuji (Ninja Temple).  This is a place of worship and also served as protection for the Kawazana Castle.  It was full of trap doors and pits to elude and trap enemies, as well as many convenient secret doorways for fast escapes.

Next was a visit to the famous Kenrokuen Garden, one of the best Japanese gardens in the country.  Hard to describe with words, but pictures sure help.  The first picture is the famous Kenrokuen Latern, the second is me in front of a statue of Prince Yamato Takeru, the third is just a great scene, and the last is a the oldest fountain in Japan.  It uses the pressure from a pond higher up the hill to work and when you consider it’s hundreds of years old, it’s very impressive.

After that we strolled over to Kanazawa castle, which is about four hundred years old.  These days it’s just for site seeing, but it’s worth the visit as it sits high on top a hill and actually has a mote!  Yep, what’s a castle without a mote.

The bottom two pictures should be explained.  The one on the left is a view outside the castle, looking at the giant stone walls on the hillside.  The one on the right are small holes they used to shoot guns out of when defending the castle.

Our gracious hosts dropped us off for the evening in our hotel, and probably the funniest thing that happened all day was seeing Chris Starkey order what he thought was a cheeseburger and getting this:

I do want to say thank you to our wonderful tour guides today, without them, it would have been a very dull afternoon in deed.  I hope the rest of our stay is this nice.

こんばんは

Chris

Users will simply pick the Office Live site and document library and they will be presented with the Meta (column) data that goes along with the library.  Hit Accept and your document is now in Office Live.

Okay I also mentioned desktop integration, so you need to do more than just add documents to Office Live.  With KnowledgeLake Connect you can go to to Office Live and open files such as PDFs and edit them.  When you are finished editing you simply press the save button and Connect knows the document came from Office Live and it will send the edited version back, overwriting the previous document.

Combining the functionality of a Microsoft Office Live and Connect seems to us like the perfect document mangement system for the small office or business that does not want to worry about their ECM infrastructure but simply use the technology.  The Office Live capable version of Connect should be available in September of 2007, but you can download, try and buy the SharePoint only version of Connect today at http://www.knowledgelake.com.  You can also give Office Live a test drive at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office_live/FX101754491033.aspx?pid=CL101750181033.

If you give the software a try, let me know what you think.

Chris

… and also had a kiosk at the Fujitsu booth and our software was being used to scan business cards and save them to Office Live at the Office Live kiosks.

No time to really write much, but I can make a few announcements about some upcoming products:

1) x64 Imaging Server will be available on July 31st.

2) Office Live Support for KnowledgeLake Connect will be availalbe around September.

3) Native Image+Text PDF support is coming for both Capture and Capture Server.

Have a good weekend,

Chris