PolarLava::Blog

I used to do a lot of international travel for one of my previous jobs.  One place I spent a lot of time was in Japan.  Every time I would go there I always came home with lots of little gifts ("We have small gift for you.") from the facilities I would visit.    I was doing some cleaning up around my house a few weeks ago when I stumbled upon one of these.  A small rubber-stamp like all of the office workers would use to "sign" their paperwork in Kanji.  My coworker and I became sort of infatuated with these little stamps so they made a couple of them up for us.  This was mine:



The small note that they gave me with it had been stamped with "my signature".  Obviously my name can't be translated to Kanji, so they made my stamp with two Kanji symbols, "Multiply" and "Smart".  Thus implying that they viewed me as being intelligent…obviously a mistake on their part, but that's another story!  Then again, for all I know it could say "henna gaijing" (crazy foreigner)…or worse.

Anyhow, here it is and now I can be happy that I've finally gotten some use out of it!  Wait until you see my desk vacuum!

01/03/05
Earlier today I found this blog entry.  It was of interest to me because I learned that these name stamps are called "hanko", thus I've added this to the title of this entry.  Also, it was of interest because this one incorporates a (meager) 32MB USB flash drive.  Ordinarily I would have likely found that to be "neat", but it's a bit more today, as I acquired a 256MB PNY Attachê just this past Friday.