Japan's airport once again looms large in my mind - we'll be arriving in plenty of time to stand between the hot gates and the cold noodles. Goodbye, good food. On our way in, a white masked white jacketed man stood with his hands behind his back facing a steady stream of incoming international travellers. Before him stood a camera, attached to a laptop. Don't worry, you are being shot and scanned and filtered for temperature. As we passed I whirled around to see his monitor: gray forms, a human parade, no one in the red.

Jane and I are leaving Japan today. We came with a camera and spent most of our time taping interviews and footage of video game players and game developers. Now she sleeps, since 9pm, I slept with her but since 3am I have been online. Our circumstances are fantastic; I leave them behind and log in to justify my expense and existence. Tap tap tap - hello world!

Gen Kanai wrote to invite us to cover a Tokyo conference on publishing to the web from mobile phones - moblogging. My editors at TheFeature confirmed the assignment, and Gen followed up with an invitation to moderate a panel. Is that a conflict of interest? Participating in a conference you're covering? I didn't include that information in my article. My journalist beat is technology aided human expression. When I visit conferences on those topics, I am occasionally among the more studied persons in the room. In two or three weekends, I hope to attend the Christian Computer Game Developer's Conference; I've been developing a talk in my head on "Ideological Persuasion and Electronic Entertainment," if they will accept talks from people who don't have any particular lord and personal savior.

My coverage of a conference dedicated to a topic that was first given a name in November of last year: Rehearsing the Future: Report from the First International Moblogging Conference for TheFeature.com.

Larry with Wireless Watch Japan has published a video roundup of the conference that I haven't watched since I only have 33,000 synapses pulsing connected to the global brain, instead of the millions I'm used to. Carsten says I'm in it, probably saying nice things quickly.

Also, posted today, some musings on the state of mobile phone entertainment, for Wireless Gaming Review: No Candle to Console, thanks to kind insistence and reminders from Matthew Bellows, an eager young publisher.

Nice to be in Japan, but with work and worry large in my mind I don't hesitate to return to my desk. I'm always having good conversation, but I haven't had time to crunch and contextualize all that was said around my head. So I was holding the camera as Jane kept her wits about her in my third tongue - she asked questions and maybe translated here and there. I did my best to keep up with media analysis in Japanese and to anticipate the questions that would have me smacking my leg later wishing I'd bothered Masaya-san with the conception of Japanese melody W. David Marx had shared with Jane and I in English was it just two nights before?