journal.nullschool.net

Yes, meat furniture.

When you really need to get away, there’s the island of Tristan da Cunha:

Tristan da Cunha is an active volcanic island with rare wildlife & home to 270 British Citizens living in the world’s most isolated settlement of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, in the often hostile South Atlantic Ocean.
…
Trips to the most isolated community in the world need to be well planned… There are no package tours for independent travellers, no hotels, no airport, no holiday reps., no night clubs no restaurants, no jet skis nor safe sea swimming. Visitors are severaly limited due to lack of available shipping berths. Nevertheless, Tristan da Cunha is one of the world’s most sought after destinations for travellers determined to find a special place.

Japan has some pretty interesting and complex roads. Browsing around with Google Earth, you might find, for example, the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line (東京湾アクアライン):

The Trans-Tokyo Bay Highway, also known as the Tokyo Bay Aqualine, is a 15.1 km marine crossing through the middle of Tokyo Bay… With the journey from Kawasaki [川崎] to Kisarazu [木更津] now taking just 15 minutes, the highway plays a vital economic role in integrating these two areas of prime industrial importance. The areas are otherwise separated by a 100-km journey through the heart of metropolitan Tokyo, so the Aqualine also eases traffic congestion in the broader metropolitan road network.

Apparently, the 31-year, $11.2 Billion project is sinking further into debt:

Traffic across the bridge (around 10000-15000 daily) is only about 1/3 of that originally planned. The toll was 4000 yen originally, but was lowered to 3000 yen in 2000 to increase traffic. Together with the high construction cost and high maintenance costs, the project is reportedly going further into debt each year.

See it for yourself:

Tokyo Aqua-Line, Kisaruazu side

Tokyo Aqua-Line, Kawasaki side

Following a tunnel a short distance north from here, you’ll find Haneda Airport (羽田空港), where the access roads seem unnecessarily complicated:

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I walk past the main Ichien Ramen (一圓) shop in Kichijoji pretty often. Although the ramen is nothing special, the nikuman and gyoza they sell outside are ridiculously huge. A set of five gyoza are 400 yen and enough to make a meal of. Unfortunately, like the ramen, quantity is emphasized over quality. See here for more pictures and info (Japanese).

Spray-painted on the storage box behind the corner banner are the words “Solve Tron”. Yeah.

2－17－2 Honcho, Kichijoji, Musashino-shi, Tokyo-to. Closed on Wednesdays.

If you can read this, the DNS update has propagated and the site is live on A Small Orange, my new web hosting company. I’ve also upgraded to Wordpress 2, so excuse the bugs as I get the kinks worked out.

Update 2006-11-14 14:27 JST: Fun with DNS! So far, the “journal.nullschool.net” subdomain has propagated correctly, but “nullschool.net” still points to my old server.