After having wrestled with MovableType (and Typepad), skirted around WordPress, and dipped my toe in, and out of, ExpressionEngine, I am now quite happily esconced in the land of Drupal for most of my sites, including this one. The busiest one of those administered and published by me is Just Hungry. I spent the weekend tweaking it under the hood, as well as giving it a visual facelift.
Pre-October 2006 entries are listed over here.
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No dating cats.
I'm more than a bit confused, as to why this site seems to be confusing people.
Case no. 1: on StumbleUpon, the site is classified under, of all things, Dating-Tips. WTF? I don't ever remember offering a dating tip. If you want to find anyone more clueless about the Dating Game than I, I want to meet that person. (Not for a date. I'd be too shy.)
Case no. 2: I got this dubious email today:
posted on 23 Nov 2007 :: Read more -
Omakase, Yojimbo....Bento?? Makes sense, little sense, no sense at all.
I have stated here quite a few times (most recently) about my feelings of awkwardness (the perfect Japanese word for it would be kusuguttasa (くすぐったさ)) about the inclusion of Japanese culture into Western and/or American culture in recent years. One aspect that I don't think I've touched on is the use of Japanese phrases for American/western products. Some of these make sense, others are laughably off.
posted on 18 Nov 2007 :: Read more -
Tonsilitis
I am grateful to my parents for many things, and resent them for a few others. I think that's fairly average. But if there is one thing for which I will harbor a grudge against them until I die, it's that they didn't have my tonsils taken out when I was younger.
Every year, often several times a year, I get tonsilitis. Most of my colds come via my tonsils. I woke up this morning, unrested and tired, because my tonsils felt like two burning rocks of pain.
posted on 15 Nov 2007 :: 3 comments :: Read more -
A tale of unbelievable customer service by Nintendo Japan
This Japanese blog post ran across the virtual desktop of my life today. (It was on the del.icio.us/popular list.) It tells a tale of unbelievable service by Nintendo. Here's a rough and somewhat abbreviated translation:
posted on 14 Nov 2007 :: 3 comments :: Read more -
Though on the other hand...
I'm more and more inclined to Julie's way of thinking about this whole thing.
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StumbleUpon, late to the party
My online life has evolved quite a bit, but I started out on the interweb blogging- and writing-wise being primarily a techie type, writing about web design, JavaScript and stuff of that nature. I don't do that much any more for various reasons, and I don't follow those types of sites much any more either except for a handful. But I do get my information about what is supposed to be new, hot and awesome from the few of those techie-person blogs that I do follow. That's how I found out about things like del.icio.us, flickr, Twitter, Vox, Myspace (way back when), Facebook, Joost, and so on and on and on. Of those I only still regularly use the first two (where I secured the username maki, as I like to do on any new site if possible).None of those cool hip techie type blogs has ever really talked much about StumbleUpon, and I don't know why. Because, StumbleUpon is awesome. It is the best way to surf the interweb waves, through thousands of sites that have been pre-selected for you (aka Stumbled Upon) by other people, and filtered according to your interests.
posted on 8 Nov 2007 :: Read more -
The Japanese culture boom, from the outside looking in
Last week I tentatively opened up a new site dedicated to bento, the Japanese meal in a box. I have been kicking around the idea of such a site for quite some time now but I was not sure if I should open a new site, or just fold more bento-related content into my existing, more general food site, Just Hungry. While there are already several bento blogs out there, I was not sure if there would be enough interest in a whole site dedicated to Japanese-style lunch boxes, so I procrastinated, before decided that I wanted to organize all that information in one, separate location.
In less than a week, the traffic to Just Bento, discounting the lack of search engine generated visits, has almost equalled that of the almost 4 year old Just Hungry. I'm simply astonished.
But then it's not the first time that I've been surprised at just how much interest there is in things Japanese, from non-Japanese people, in recent years. Whether it's anime or manga, gadgets or toys, fashion or sushi, amigurumi or Hello Kitty, each time I see how 'hot' and 'cool' something Japanese is it throws me for a loop. The funny thing is that all of this interest seems to have come after the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy in the late '80s to early '90s.
posted on 5 Nov 2007 :: 6 comments :: Read more