I am feeling busier and busier as we approach the year end. I am hoping that life slows down over the holidays and gives me a chance to catch up at home with my family. Today's configuration: Leica M Monochrom with various Leica lenses

My Audi sales guy has been trying to seduce me into getting a new car. I swung by for a few test drives...

The Audi RS4... I test drop this a few years ago. This car is so unbelievably fast. I would kill myself if I drove this car in Tokyo. That said, it is a beautiful car and I love admiring it. I love the front grill on this car. I think Audi is the absolute best car. The styling is fantastic!

The Audi R8... My Audi sales guy is so good. He loaned this to me a few years back. This car is amazing! It is so unbelievable to drive...but not very practical with a young family. Stay tuned to see if he was able to up grade my A5 to something relatively 'practical'.

After Audi I went to meet up with my friend Pieter Franken. I have a pretty interesting group of friends mostly resolving around cameras, business, and people that are fairly international in their work, family, experience and life. Pieter probably tops the list in terms of being interesting. Pieter is the CTO of Monex Securities but in his 'spare time' he is equally impressive. Immediately after the Earthquake/Tsunami/Nuclear Disaster Pieter swung into action with a group of people building out a crowd sourced radiation detection network to make sure people had the information they needed to make informed decisions.

[vimeo width="920" height="517"]http://vimeo.com/61352329[/vimeo]

Since I am from Boston I'll put it this way... "My friends are wicked smart". Think about what it takes and the scale to pull together a sophisticated team like what they have built at Safecast. All of it 100% volunteer and achieving what they achieved in days.

I would highly recommend downloading the Saftcast App. It is fascinating to see this data in action on maps of the world.

I had to go to work with my advanced fabrication, electrical engineering and soldering skills to build my own...

OK, maybe Pieter built it for me but they are actually pretty easy to build. They run workshops on how to do it. I might do a ShootTokyo one in future. Leave a comment if that is interesting to you...

Mine is done and in my briefcase ready to Safecast my trip to Singapore and Sydney...

After a great time at Safecast with Pieter we headed out to grab a drink. We stumbled onto what I can only call a massacre. How many more cones does this need to happen to? How long can this continue?

See he's a mad scientist...

The people at the table next to us were wondering what was going on. Two gaijin sit down next to them and pull geiger counters out of their bags.

I think Pieter quickly impressed them...

How many more? #stopconebullying

We switched places for one last beer...

...and it starts again!

I dropped another small batch of ShootTokyo T-Shirt Orders in the mail. I am getting in a fresh shipment of shirts this week. I have a few back orders shirts to mail out this weekend. I am very grateful for all of the kind mails from people that got their shirts telling me how much they like them and the quality of the T-shirts. I personally like thick high quality t-shirts so I tried to make sure that is what I have here. Nothing is worse than ordering a T-Shirt and then being instantly disappointed when you open the bag.