I went to see "The Last Samurai" on Saturday. Despite the critics' reviews, I thought it was a great movie although it could have used some judicious editing. It's a long movie and sometimes not much happens, but I liked it anyway.

I loved all the samurai philosophy, the scenes of Japan and all those great samurai costumes. And of course being a kung fu cinema girl, all that great sword fighting and blood going everywhere battle scenes. I love watching squirting blood flying out all over the place.

They had fabulous shots of Mount Fuji and for the first time, I thought I might have had an incarnation there. I've been around japanese culture my whole life, and never once did I ever think I might have been japanese in another life.

But seeing Mount Fuji and the village life in the mountains gave me a dejavu feeling, like it was somehow home or something. Maybe I was like a japanese girl living in a village at the steps of Mount Fuji.

I've never been that keen on going to Japan but now I want to visit and see the buddhist and shinto temples, especially the giant buddha at Kamakura.

The Last Sumarai takes during the time of the Meiji period in Japan, which was fun for me because of the woodblock prints art exhibition from the Meiji era that I saw a few years ago. That exhibition was on the best art exhibitions I'd seen in a long time, and it made me want to own and collect japanese woodblock prints.

Tom Cruise's performance was good, but not as great as his performances in "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Magnolia". He can do bitter guy really, really well.

Poor Carly Fiorina. I feel sorry for her. Look at what SFGATE.com is saying about her; Economists back tech industry's overseas hiring Workers deny U.S. lacks qualified staff.

I think I mentioned this awhile ago, but at my last job in San Francisco, I drafted a plan at the request of my boss to move my company's IT programming staff and work to Singapore. Singapore gives companies willing to train and move programming jobs to their country, huge tax credits and all kinds of breaks and incentives.

Besides cutting IT staffing costs in half, my company would have saved more money with the Singapore government tax credits and breaks. Compaq has their operations there.

The presentation I put together was for the Singapore EDB (economic development board), which has an office in Redwood City. My boss gave the presentation to the Singapore EDB in Singapore in the fall of 1999, and the SEDB loved it.

The economic incentive to move our IT operations to Singapore were huge, and I had a Carly Fiorina type rationale going through my head when I was drafting the presentation. It was all about the money though, and I knew it. But I so relate to Carly Fiorina right now.

Red Herring was good.

The price fixed three course menu was:

1. Ceasar salad
2. Seared Pepper Tuna (raw inside) - smoked bacon, arugula, white beans + salsa verde or Jonah Blue Crab Risotto - grilled asparagus + marscapone cheese. Waiter told us there wasn't much crab in the risotto, so we got the tuna. White beans were a little underdone, but otherwise it was good. Loved that smoked bacon.
3. For dessert, mascarpone brulee with strawberries covered in a brown sauce which was either a burnt sugar sauce or balsalmic vinegar.

For wine we ordered a bottle of Cakebread 2002 sauvignon blanc. A good lite white wine, if you need one. And for cocktails, sauza margaritas on the rocks with salt, which was the drink of the day. Wished the drink was made with fresh squeezed lime juice, but very few places do that.

This is fun. I'm going to the Red Herring Restaurant for dinner tonight as part of Dine About Down San Francisco.

Before Red Herring that space was occupied by a restaurant called Roti, which had good food but went out of business or as the website says, evolved into Red Herring. Roti used to make the best onion rings in San Francisco, only they called them "onion strings".