I noticed two things while having a nice steaming bowl of miso ramen today; waribashi used as sort of a meishi, and a counting method.

Waribashi:
I don’t think this is uniquely Japanese, but restaurants here usually have their business info on the chopstick wrapper. Most establishments use waribashi, which are wooden disposeable chopsticks. The waribashi are covered in a paper sleeve, and some places use custom designed ones.
I haven’t really noticed this until today, but if I had a nice time at the restaurant I would put the waribashi wrapper into my pocket.

Counting Method:
There’s a kanji character with five strokes that’s commonly used to count things. It’s similar to using four sticks with a slash to represent five, except use 正 instead. The photo of our bill shows how many beers we had with our meal. A google I’m Feeling Lucky search for “正 counting” (without the quotes) resulted in a Wikibooks entry.

The iPod is the goto thingy to shut out any outside noise. I don’t want to hear the drunk guy next to me complaining about his job for thirty minutes.
The next thing I need is something to read so I don’t have to look at the ads or try to avoid eye contact (or make eye contact and nod, hi, hi, how ya doin and then avoid eye contact). If I’ve got email on my cell that’ll be my priority. No mail, I’ll goto a recent personal discovery, reading RSS feeds on my iPod. A side note here for bloggers: please have a feed that includes your full post. It’s irritating to load up your feed to find out after the first x-number of words it ends with ‘…’.
If I’ve read through that or can’t find anything that interests me, I’ll use my keitai to load up Mogi to grab items at each station, browse through saved photos, or use an online RSS reader.

For me, the journey to/from work one-way is around 45 min door-to-door. So the above routine is fine. What do the folks w/ longer routes do?

The tool is not a mere translation engine, but a system that allows us gaijins to read kanjis with the meaning of the character or character combination. Most web based systems out there will translate the text, but the quality is terrible and doesn’t show the yomigana (phonetic readin, basically allows us to pronounce the kanji using hiragana/katakana). I would rather manually try to figure out what the Japanese text translates to. Personally, i think it’s due to grammatical issues.

It’s such a goto tool for me that I’ve got it as a startup tab in my browser, and have mirrors setup. If it’s down and all mirrors down, my Japanese abilities are kaput.