Some intersections in Seattle have this new style of crosswalk button. It’s an astoundingly good UI, especially among all the awful ones people have to use every day. It’s got a nice little chart to explain what the signals mean, a button that gives a little *click* and turns on a light to let you know that your press registered, and a pleasant chirp to alert you to the walk signal. I get excited when we come to a crosswalk that has one of these instead of the old, hostile silver dome buttons.

In Tokyo, we do a lot of shopping at Daiso. It’s a 100-yen store, something of an equivalent to American dollar stores, except that some of the products are not garbage. Part of this seems to come from the way Daiso buys up big remaining stocks from failed companies, which is a bit depressing. But at least the stuff isn’t going to waste. Now there’s a Daiso right in downtown Seattle, for some reason. I’m certainly not complaining; cute, affordable, decent-quality products like the stuff they sell here are something I really missed from Japan. Now I have some cute Japanese-style lunch boxes for bringing food home to Piroko. Also, “Stationary”.

Now that Piroko is back with me, we do a lot of shopping. I think I got out of the house more in these few months than in the two years she was gone. At this Tully’s (where I won’t go back, because I got pretty bad service and because I have my own French press now anyway) they have this big sign of coffee statistics. The weird thing is that most of these strike me as a sign of the coffee excess we indulge in here in the USA, and kind of discourages me from wanting to drink coffee at all. **One Billion Cups Of Coffee!! Don’t you want to make it one billion and one!?** Also, whenever I see the Tully’s “T” logo floating somewhere, I think it’s the teleporter from Quake and I want to grab it.