Today we had to get up and check out of the hotel by 6:00 AM (or 5:45 AM if you had phone charges to pay for like I did). Then we ran to catch the early morning train and made some exchanges to get over to Takarazuka, where we visited the Osamu Tezuka Museum. The walk to the museum from the train station would not have been so bad; if we weren’t carrying our luggage for the next 3 days with us1. The museum wasn’t as big as say the Ghibli museum had been but it was packed with stuff about Tezuka and his work. Also in the basement level, they ran an hour long “animation course”2. The course ran off a set of computer built into little desks with built-in lightboxes. You were supposed to follow along with what they were saying via your computer, but we didn’t speak enough Japanese and none of us read any Japanese, so that part was hard. Fortunately, some of the museum employees spoke enough English that we were able to participate and make our own little 2 frame animation. Mine was of my CoffeeBear character waving and it received the Astro Boy Seal of Approval3 *grin* Oh and one of the other nice things about the museum was that they allowed you to take pictures inside. So, I’ll see about posting some of those later.
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Again I woke up before our alarm phone1 went off. I got up, dressed and enjoyed a breakfast of mizo soup and rice cakes with some strong Japanese coffee. I love the soup, the rice is okay but I’ve gotten used to it.
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Before this horrid bit of legislation got passed; I was against it because I knew it was only a matter of time until the government was going to abuse it. Then like many people, I got distracted by my own life and forgot about it for a while because nothing was happening with it that affected me. Today, I happened across a link to Ian Spiers’ Brown Equal Terrorist website. The crap that Mr. Spiers had to go through is unfortunately all too believable and to me just proves that the USA PATRIOT Act should have never been passed.

The USA PATRIOT Act is an abusive law that gives the government excessive powers and as should have been expected by our representatives it was abused to harass an innocent U.S. citizen. Why was he harassed? Because there are still petty & shallow minded [insert explictive of your choice here] out there that think if you’re not a good, clean white-boy then you must be up to no-good.

Oh and for the record:

  • I am a white guy (part Scottish even).
  • I like to think of myself as an amatuer photographer and have taken courses at my local community college.
  • I carry a camera with me everywhere I go, but don’t take as many pictures as I’d like because I have nasty suspicions that somebody’s going to get the wrong idea of what I’m doing.

I’m sitting here waiting for the program I’m testing to finish processing some data that I threw at it. I take a moment to stop over at the Terrapin‘s website to try finding out more info on some of their comopolitan drinks. You see they’ve changed their menu in the store several times and while they still make all the old drinks; you have to know what they are as they aren’t listed anywhere in the store1. So I’m browsing the site and I find myself thinking; gee, I read blogs regularly that are better looking than this site. I wonder how the site is built. You can image my horror when I looked at the source and discovered that it was made in Micro$haft Frontpuke. *shudder*

Okay, I’ll admit that more current versions of Frontpuke write code that isn’t as bad as what older copies of it spit out, but the Terrapin’s site appears to have been written in an older version. So not only are tables being used when they’re not really needed; the code is full of crap that doesn’t need to be in there. And if that’s not bad enough; the website hasn’t been updated in some time as it’s my understanding from the mother of the owners that their 2nd location has closed but the website still shows it as being open for business. Now given how easy WP is to work with; I’m thinking that I might try building a custom site for the Terrapin using it2. Come to think of it; I might want to try redoing that template for AWelkin using WP as well. Hmm… It’s a thought anyway.

1 Yes, I agree that’s a bad idea but what can one do about it?
2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I still need to build a custom theme for my own site; but like the title of this post says, I’m bored at work and that’s where I get some of my better/dumber ideas for things like this.

Hi, I’m Mark (aka Manzabar1). If you want to know more about me; well, you’ll just have to keep reading this blog and see what you can learn as I go along.

I’ve had this domain for a short time now and finally plunked down the moolah to get a proper host for it (thank you Digital Sense Hosting).

I imagine if you’ve probably got some questions about the who/what/why of CoffeeBear.net, so here are some of the answers. If you have a question that’s not answered in this post; contact me and I’ll reply. Though if your question is too personal, then the reply might be no more than “I’m not going to answer that.”
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