Doctor808 Plastic Surgeon Honolulu Hawaii

Cynthia, Kiyoko, me and Rire

Well its been a while since I have been writing on my blog because I have been insanely busy! With plastic surgery–unfortunately NO –February is the worse month for Plastic Surgeons in Hawaii. For plastic surgery its a slow month !

Maybe elsewhere I do not know. I have been busy with my web company. I have received more request for work than I thought possible for web sites and the like. Looks like AiMiYo LTd will be a success. In fact its overwhelming as we get our staff built up. As for me,  I over see the company and make sure its on the right track, that people are doing their jobs and every customer is happy.  Its creative and we try to maintain the highest standards, believe me when I say there are some shadowy companies out there. We are preparing report to place on our company web site  comparing what we have found.

Well enough about business for now, its my birthday, I am in my  mid fifties  , I did not think I would ever be this old. Yet here I am old guy–except I don’t feel like an old guy. Then I compare my self to other “old guys” my age and I don’t feel so bad. This may be due to a life time of surfing and my kick boxing to some degree. Well what should I do,  re evaluate my life and give a reflection to the past and vision to the future. Ok that took a full 24 seconds to review, now its time for action. I guess I could say there is nothing I would change.

Well what happens in my life today on birthday?  Part of my staff is here around me and they gave me a nice birthday cake , a cheesecake. I had a lot of people on face book wish me a happy birthday from around the world. I was surprised at the number of emails I received from close friends and colleagues. I even received one of those e-cards which are easy to do and require little effort,  but at least it was nice thought.  I enjoy the emails from old friends. I received an email from  a lady I have not spoken to in well over twenty five years. She called me my child hood nickname. She wrote about stories from her memory of those days. Interesting story there were 5 of us who all hung around in high school,  all boys, all surfers and all somewhat trouble makers. Not really bad boys, but borderline. Well this lady was dating one of the gang of 5 and  then married another of the gang of 5 not the original one. It was not a steal your girlfriend thing at all,  it just happened that way  Although stealing girlfriends was a fun sport at one time this was not the case.  I was just suprised and delighted to hear from her and cannot wait  to hear how more than 25 years has passed for her and people we knew then. She has the inside scoop.

My good friends on face book like Guillaume, Nancy Law, Latrenta Barrett, Hyenwon Kang and others all had to weigh in wish me a happy birthday ….or remind me how old I am. It was nice to hear from them and I even received a tweet or two, which is what wired people like me get–tweets as in twitter land, no phone calls –geeks don’t use the phone except for text messages and tweets. This is the law of geeks or otaku’s like myself.

Speaking of birthdays I feel lucky today. In that I did not die last night. My friends next door to where we live had a famous Japanese sushi chef fly in from Tokyo the day before my birthday. He brought with him off the plane a famous delicacy in Japan which many know as the puffer fish and they call” Fugu”. This fish reportedly kills many Japanese each year ( up to 30 some years) when they eat the wrong part which is poison. ” I want to eat Fugu but I dont want to die” is what I say. So the night before my birthday I ate it and did not die so I think this is good sign of my year??

Fugu Poisonous Fish from Japan

The fish plate shown to left is filled with Fugu made by the sushi chef. He has a special license to cut this up and serve it.

We ate this fish and the only American there beside myself first declined,  then he saw that I ate it and he said “Well I will try it’” . He told me since I was a doctor he felt safe eating it. What a joke…if he only knew the things I have eaten in the past and I honestly must say I have no idea what I was doing or who this “famous sushi chef ” was. With my limited knowledge this chef might as well been Jack The Ripper Japanese Version and he was ready to poison us all just for fun.

The other famous guy there was a famous “Japanese Elvis Presely” he was in his later years,  but from what I understood he was very famous in his twenties for his elvis.  He is shown below eating fugu too. Well Elvis lives !! Well he actually in his early years dressed as Elvis and was very famous in Japan apparently.

Elvis Lives After Fugu !!

Pianist/Opera Singer a Fugu Death Party

Well even though I did not die from Fugu poisoning the night before my birthday,  I still could face some bad luck I suppose. Yet the good luck is that my staff remembered my birthday. I am not sure if they did so because they are kind or it was because they want to make me more miserable?

Interesting there was a Japanese Singer and Pianist for entertainment as well. So we ate the death fish and listen to music while sipping saki , not  bad way to go for a neigborhood party ne.

Today I will go surfing as all things start in the water for Pisces such as myself so I will renew my spirit there as I have been overworked lately and then enjoy a nice dinner with my wife who asked me earlier today. I think I will eat some  Italian food which is my favorite. The most deadly thing about Italian food is choking on  a meatball I suppose.

Below is some assorted photos of me and I my staff on my birthday which was we enjoyed and excellent cheese cake !!

What me have Jet Lag?

When you travel as much as I do you soon learn to over come jet lag as quickly as possible. Living in Hawaii there is no such thing as a three hour plane ride to somewhere. There is a twenty minute, a forty minute and ninty minute plane ride to the other Hawaiian Islands , but the next closest place is 5 hours plus I think.

Jet lag for most of trips is problem. China, Amsterdam, Bangkok Thailand, Tokyo Japan are the places I have been in the last 6 months several times to some of them. Amsterdam is twenty hours away, Tokyo is seven hours and Bangkok is twelve hours of flight time away. This is a lot of time and the air and plenty of time to develop jet lag.

Jet lag scientist define as the disturbance of circadian rhythm due to time zone changes from jet travel. Yes that about sums it up but I think of it as more of “dead man walking” for a few days after a trip. That means it feels like 8am when its actually midnite or you wake up at 4 am and you cant sleep again until noon when you feel like you will pass out.

So I thought of ten thinks one can do which I tried this trip from my condo in Bangkok.

1. Watch movies , the same one 47 times. In this case I was in Japan Airline and I watched GI-Joes over and over. This will make you go into a trance and you will actually feel rested although you will recite lines from the movie over and over again instead of orginal speech.

2. When your in a town like Tokyo make sure you stay on the same time zone that is from the town you left from. So when its 2 pm in one place make sure you are up in the other place even though it may be 3 am. Act like everyone in the new town is off not you.

3.  Dont sleep the entire time and when you get back sleep for 3 days straight and you will not feel abnormal.

4.  Sleep the entire time you are gone and you feel well rested when you get back.

5. Dont travel and stay home !

Well these are the best ways I can come up with to over come jet lag. Number 5 is a great way, unfortunately I cannot do that and will be traveling more this  year with two business ventures launched which will take some time away from Hawaii.  The Bangkok condo business takes some time and the Hong Kong based web company AiMiYo International takes a bit as well. With AiMiYo even though my web team works across the internet from home I get to go to meetings with clients etc. So ….who is more lucky I dont know.

doctor808

Dr. Michael Pasquale CEO AiMIYO LTD

Well I have been exceptionally busy over these holidays with some business issues other than Plastic Surgery. The office has been closed which has given me some time to put into my web development business personally rather than delegate. As many of you know and as my title of this blog states I am web designer and Internet geek. The team I have assembled and our web company is very unique. From the start we decided one of our area of expertise would be multilingual web sites. I would also add another important point which is that we believe that multilingual is not enough. A translation of a web page is not enough   because what is a web site  but a sales and marketing doorway. Even if the company we represent is not a classical sales of products type company,  it is still about sales. This means any company wants the web site we build to represent them in a most positive light. So in that sense it is selling an image to the viewer.

As I mentioned, multicultural- not simply translation of language. So what I mean by that is when we put a companies words into another language we do not just translate the words , but make the cultural message adjust to our audience as well. This is very important because the sensibilities of the Chinese for example , may not be the same as the French so the way material is presented may change , not just the words.

When we design a web site for different languages  our company AiMiYo LTD has the translation staff and the design staff from the culture (country ) on board with us  as a team approach. This multilingual, multicultural team is what makes our web sites different I believe. Please follow us as this grows. We are now building our new company web site at www.aimiyo.com for english, and in Japanese at www.aimiyo.jp. We will be adding languages over the next year such as Chinese , Korean , French and other  European languages as well.

Until next time

doctor808

Well ……I am sorry my dear and loyal readers I did not keep my blog up during my travels,  as time was so limited. So, I will briefly go over things here to catch my millions of readers up  (I think I have only  two readers ). I will probably have less readers after this post.

First as previously stated, I was going to Amsterdam which is one of my favorite haunts. The reasons are many. First are the people , I love the dutch as they are always friendly like the Thai people. They are straight forward and get along well. The other Europeans are so…. shall I say snobby (over nothing)  that I dont care for them as a whole. Of course many are quite nice and good descent people , but the Dutch it seems as whole are the way I like people.  Lets take the Swiss in Geneva which are a French speaking people. Some are very friendly,  but overall I would rate that town as a small town with small minded people pretending to be important. If it were not for the bankers hiding the worlds money the place would be just another dying European city in my view. No new life. As the first President Bush would say “old Europe”. They tell me that you have to live there to appreciate Geneva and perhaps,  as I only visited but…..not my cup of tea.  That is my simple minded dumb American view. In this blog I dont review the great history ( like Nazi Germans influence ?) but that’s my basic feeling.  What I do like about Geneva is the kick boxing which is why I went and I will tell you more about that later.

Part one Amsterdam

Well we arrive in Amsterdam and  get there at our usual time of 7 am in the morning from a flight from Seattle. We have to wait for the hotel as check in is at 11 am. This is no problem becuase we can get a great breakfast at the usual spot.  This time we also wanted to look at property for a possible retreat so we scout around. This place is easy to scout as there is one way to see Amsterdam –Bycycle. We rent a couple at 15 euros a day and start to scout around. If you go please rent a bike.

As you can see there is no shortage of bicycles in Amsterdam. In fact they number over 5 times the population but no one knows for sure. There are  so many and they are everywhere. Anyone and everyone old, young , crippled , athletic and entire families use them as their main source of transportation’s. The bike roads are great and easy to use. Don’t wast your time with any other means of transportation.

This is one thing I love about this place everything is so easy to do. No traffic jams, no crazy people or homeless that you can see in the central part of the city. Its clean, organized and easy to navigate around on foot or bike.

I like it because of the people I meet and the kick boxing. Rose likes it because of the Art and Museums and Food. There are great restaurants and since Rose is Malaysian Chinese she has a chance to get real Malaysian food and eats there almost every day. Below is a picture of that restaurant located next to the Red light District. That’s the famous place with hooker on display in the windows. Sort of a another type of take out menu.

The food at the Malaysian restaurant is authentic and quite good. Here you can study Malaysian Chinese, in their natural habitat eating good Malay food. This I believe  is their normal “in the wild ” behavior to eat eat eat.  Such are the Chinese…did you know that when you go into a Chinese persons home they don’t ask how are you,  but the first thing they ask is “Did you eat yet?”. If you find a Chinese person in the wild some day just ask them.  They will tell you its true. The couple at the Top are the owners by the way- her name is “Candy and his is Buddha” , I am not kidding.

Amsterdam is famous for legal drugs ( not hard ones) and everywhere you go are the “coffee houses” where you can buy either hash or marijuana cigarettes and smoke it right there while you drink coffee. Not that I would know,  but I was able to observe this. It appeared fun and seemed harmless enough. Yet I think it must appeal to a different crowd as I am a doctor. Everyone knows doctors don’t smoke pot. In case you want to know what these places look like I have several pictures below. They tell me that its cheap to buy and is high quality.

These establishments are everywhere scattered among the sex shops. I have a picture of one sex shop and of some of the evil weed that people smoke. Why people make such a big deal about a silly plant I can still cannot figure out. Its like anything else in my view–abuse it and it may cause problems. So I remind my readers that as I am a libertarian I am against government regulation of such. Amsterdam has no crime attributable to rampant drug use like we do in The States. The criminalization of this plant and other such drugs is why in my view we waste so much money. Libertarians believe if you want to kill yourself who are we to stop you, as a freedom loving bunch. We believe in a freedom to self destruct.

Well the above is only a very small part of Amsterdam,  there is something for everyone there. Art , Museums , food , drugs, sex, business deals, Muslim and Buddhist temples, churches and and a wide variety of everything. That sums up Amsterdam ,  which is a city of extreme diversity and more important— tolerance for diversity. I watched one night at 5 am the practicality of the place as the party goers were in one square when some drunken hell raisers started a fight. The police cleared them out in less than ten minutes with Horse Riding police they were there in seconds appearing from nowhere. They were professional,  efficient and cleared the crowd with out any evidence of brutality nor disrespect. They did their job quickly and the party on the street continued. I was impressed.

Bicycling around I looked over many properties and potential places to live. Signs were posted as shown :

Ideally one would not need a large place,  but some place to call home in Europe so you could have a home base. A base camp if you will.

Yet there are catches in the Amsterdam’s real estate market. Interestingly, one must be careful about what are some unusual laws.

If you buy a place and leave it empty , squatters may take over and inhabit there and you may have a ridiculous time trying to get them out. They in some case have more rights then the owners who they are not paying rent too. Crazy?  Well yes, but that is Amsterdam. I never saw such a bad deal for property owners. The original idea was that the city did not want empty buildings around by absentee land holders or something like that. Well it seems to work and the properties are all well kept. Yet maybe its been taken to far. I have more research to do in these laws.

Geneva

Well I went to a kick boxing place in Geneva where my old instructor from Thailand recommended as he was recruited in his younger years as a Swiss Muay Thai fighter. There he went on to be a Swiss national champion before returning to his home in Thailand where I first met him.

This gym was quite busy with over twenty fighter level members and huge intermediate level trainees in Muay Thai. They take their fighters to Thailand once a year for training. This gym is run by a Swiss fellow and his Thai wife. Very nice place I recommend to anyone. Unfortunately back in Amsterdam I could not find the Merijo Gym which is the famous gym there I trained at before a few times. This gym apparently moved location and due to time limitations I could spend too much time looking. So I trained on my own while in Amsterdam jumping rope , weights and shadow boxing and of course cycling hours a day.

That’s about it for Geneva to me that’s all the two itself offers. I did meet a few people and had brief conversations shall I say. The Swiss don’t speak much english There main languages are German and french. They also have that attitude of your stupid if you only speak french. As example I asked a cab driver to take me to the Hotel Savoy. He looked at me like I was nuts. I pronounce Savoy as most Americans would like rhymes with “JOY”. So he finally figured out what I was saying as he pronounced as Sav-0-aaa a definite french accent. But what I found most ridiculous was the scolding he gave me. “I have been driving a cab for 15 years and never once have I heard that way to say Savoy” he said in a most condescending manner. I could not help but tell him back—” I believe that you have not in your limited life experience of driving a cab in Geneva heard any other variation”  as I chuckled to myself. Score one for the American verses the Geneva Red neck cab driver with a “limited ” small mind. So it goes. I left Geneva vowing never to come back…well maybe I will for the Muay Thai.

Other than these issues of looking for property , relaxing and Muay Thai the most memorable issues was the Bicycling. I truly loved that around Amsterdam and I will do it again and again its a bike paradise. I also thought I will take a motorcycle trip around the country and maybe to others next time I go.  That will be fun. As far as business goes , well I did see some plastic surgeons in Geneva and was impressed but the Swiss are known for a long History of cosmetic plastic surgery. I also spoke with some Web Designers and found out about the local community in terms of Web design and marketing as well as in Amsterdam. There will be some of the best Internet and media conferences coming up these next few years like next fall which I will plan for.

Well my dear readers I don’t want to bore you with too much, so I will go over some other details in later blogs as I am still suffering from jet lag. As always enjoy.

Doctor 808

Recently,  I hijacked my cosmetic surgery friend’s ( in Tokyo)  –Mixi.jp  account. I did this for various reasons , one being that since I have a web development firm that works in all cultures and languages I wanted to gain an understanding of this. Secondly,  its very hard to get your own mixi.jp account unless you have a Japanese cell phone so I just stole his. Sorry Taka.

Mixi by the way is a Facebook on steroids , for those of you who want some understanding of this. It has a login page which list , your profile , friends and what your friends are saying in their blogs. The blog summary  is a very popular item. If you see something interesting you can click and follow that persons journal. There is one the big differences I noticed between the myspace type things and the facebooks of the world and Mixi. The Japanese take their blogs very seriously and there are millions of them. Many Japanese house wives entire world seem to be blog-o-centric.

One other thing I noted is that “everyone is paranoid” which means that not only are the internal security controls very tight,  but most people unlike Face book or Myspace will not put their own picture up. Its Iconic images or many men for example will have woman’s pictures as theirs probably of some models. Also of course there are  the Japanese Pokeman type images seen,  as well as flowers , fruits vegetables etc. This makes it difficult to tell who you are clicking on. In my case its even more difficult because I do not read Hiragana, Katakana or Kanji,  as of this date. So I spend half my time with translation software trying to guess what they are saying. This can be most difficult. Take for example the case of a place called First Kitchen which is a food store in Japan. The Japanese have a funny habit of abbreviating many things so they shorten the words– like Family Mart becomes Fami-ma. Well according to some sources First Kitchen becomes ” fukkin” when they speak abbreviated format. So as you are reading someone’s blog it is feasible that they say ” My friend and I went fukkin”. Sorry for that,  but it illustrates my point of possible miscommunication very well. So when I translate I do not get the full meaning of the blogs.

最初の台所  or  パイズリ I apologize to those offended,  but I think I have this right.

I am also informing you that unless you know Japanese well you probally will not make any friends. I have two friends, my  Japanese web designer and someone who I have no idea or what they are.

The other interesting thing is you can see who visited your page unlike facebook or myspace. I for example was like an elephant in a china shop clicked around not even know what I was clicking and someone told me their friend asked them why I left my footprint? Perhaps they thought I was a trouble maker?  At any rate I suppose one must be senistive to these issues.

Overall I like this mixi. From a web development point of view I did see some advertisments from some cosmetic surgeons and other things. I dont know if viral type marketing like one can see in Youtube or Myspace is possible. Yet I think is see some value but not like in American Social Media.

I have not discussed with my Japanese associate yet but at some point we will find an answer with regard to using Mixi.jp as a marketing tool for our clients. As far as plastic surgery marketing–well like I said I did see two Japanese cosmetic surgeons advertise. I will keep you updated in any significant issues of Mixi but dont expect much until I can learn more Japanese language.

Doctor 808