Don't Be Greedy - A Computer Geek's Blog: July 14

It had to happen. I mean, I am a computer geek in Japan. I love robotics. It's not hard to imagine what happens when you show me a map of Fukuoka where it says "Robosquare"...

We had to get up early to get to Fukuoka, since we're only staying one day here. We took the shinkansen and arrived here at 11 am. On the shinkansen, I put on some Japan-inspired music and watched the landscape pass before my eyes. The only word that can explain how that felt is: awesome. By the way, the band I was listening to was "The Kyoto Connection". They release their songs under a CC license, and offer them for free on Jamendo and on their own website.

In Fukuoka, after leaving our heavy bags at the hostel, we got a map and Pia marked the points where we should go. Our hostel is located a bit further away from most of those points, so we bought some day tickets for the loop line bus and headed for our first destination, the beach in the northern part of the city. Due to the fact that the last bus left at 17:00, we only have an hour to stay there. Technically, that's enough time to have some drinks at the beach and relax. The only problem was the marker on the map right next to the bus stop at the beach: "Robosquare". Of course, I went in there, and simply couln't get out. It was really inspiring to see all those different robots. They had "musical robots", which were basically loudspeakers and iPod-holders mounted on robots. Then they had aibos, those nice robotic dogs that have face and voice recognition, and react to voice and touch. You can have them play with a ball, dance, etc. Even though I can't really find the usefulness of these robots, it was really cool. They also had a robotic mini-t-rex with an AI more suited for a huggybear. It reacted when you stroke it and started acting like a cat, lifing it's head and it's tail. Another really original idea was a robotic sea lion with (with white furr) that was apparently being used in retirement homes to make the stay there more enjoyable.
But what really caught my attention was the electronics. They were selling parts for robots at an extremely low price. I bought the Tamiya Dual Motor GearBox (yeah, the one you find on sparkfun) for 800 yen, two pairs of small tires along with their shafts for 300 yen and some universal boards (used as the base for the whole robot) for 250 yen. I would have bought a lot more, but my excel-sheet was already complainig about me paying a lot more than I should ("should" as in "at this rate there won't be enough money for the whole trip").
Of course, when we got out of there, we had no time left to go to the beach. We took the bus to our next stop, the Fukuoka Castle ruins. Actually we didn't reach the actual castle ruins, but visited the ruins of another building used in the past as a diplomatic and trade center. The brochure was only in japanese, but we could get the general idea by reading the few signs written in english we found. After that, we set off for Canal City, a huge shopping center where you can find all sorts of different things, from clothing to food, books, videogames, etc. We found a Jump shop, where I finally bought a Jump Magazine. I haven't looked through it yet, but on the cover there was a picture of "Dragon Quest IX", a new game for DS that seems to be really popular here.

We got back to the hostel just in time to join the birthday party of one of the guys that run this place. He had bough lots of stuff to make sushi rolls, and was preparing everything with the help of some other people who were around. We helped them finish the preparations, and started eating right away. This was definately the best dinner I've had since the start of this trip! Yeah, I know, this blog is called "Don't be greedy", but hey, he was inviting everyone...

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The entrance to Robosquare