Alas, there will not be an new issue of Ant-Boy posted today. I was stuck working out of my company’s home office for most of the week and didn’t get a chance to work on cleaning up the scan of the next issue. Tonight, I’ll be heading off to AnimeIowa and won’t have time to get the next issue ready. Hopefully, I’ll have time to get it posted by next Tuesday.
Tag: office
This morning was another sweltering day and after a short hop on the train; we walked up to Osamu Tezuka Productions. When you first step off the street towards their door; there’s a marble (maybe granite) status of Astro Boy. Then you walk inside and immediately you’re surrounded by merchandise, mostly from Astro Boy but also from some of Tezuka’s other series, such as Princess Knight. Then it was up the stairs and we split up with half of us touring of the offices while the other half watched a video. I went on the tour and the wonderful people there let me video tape it; so I won’t talk about it here. Then we went back to the waiting area and watched some of Tezuka’s animation work while the other group go the tour. It was a very nice environmental work with no words set to one of Tchaikovsky’s operas. Then they brought in one of Tezuka’s former assistants and he gave a short presentation about what it was like to be an assistant. I was still suffering from the heat, so my fried brains couldn’t think of a question before the presentation was over. On the other hand, at least I wasn’t sleeping with my head on the table through the presentation.
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It was obvious that I hadn’t adjusted to Tokyo time yet, because while I didn’t have to be up and ready to go to class until 9:45am; I was awake by 5:30. My room-mate (L) and I got up and went out for a look around. Being really early, there weren’t many people around yet, but a few business-men and office-ladies were hurrying off to work. I think it was when we were about a block away from the hotel when it really hit me that I was in a foreign country. Something about there only being one another white guy around and no English to be heard or seen anywhere around. It was just a small but impressive moment for me.
Anyway, L wanted to find the McDonald’s; so we wandered around for a while and found the train station & a KFC but not the McDonald’s. We headed back to the hotel because the heat was starting to get to us and now the hotel’s cafe was serving the free breakfast. We ate and then AWelkin-sensai, A & Bryon came in for breakfast. After we all finished eating AWelkin-sensai took us out to show us around the area a bit and help L find the McDonald’s. She also pointed out some banks for us (useful for exchanging traveler’s checks) and showed us the interior of the train station.
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You’ve been here since the dawn of time itself, old timer, and you’ve been biding your time with your eye on the boss’s job.
You deserved to have a promotion. You’ve been here longer than anyone else. Your fingers have become craggy, and you see Excel spreadsheets when you go to sleep at night. More than half your life has been spent at budget meetings, advertising liason sessions, team-building seminars and pub lunches with people you hate. Yet for some reason you’ve been passed over every time in favour of younger, less competent workers.
No more. You’re at the end of your tether. Where’s your gold watch? Where’s your acknowledgement? Your raises? When does your time come around?
Your time is now, hombre.
Which Office Moron Are You?
Rum and Monkey: jamming your photocopier one tray at a time.
As you might imagine, I’m bored at work1 and I’m trying to come up with something to keep my brain alive. So here’s another QotD2 for you; what are your favorite web development tools?
My response is slightly complicated because I use both Linux & Windows and use different tools under each. Note that these lists are presented in no particular order.
Linux Web Development Tools
- Quanta for editing HTML, CSS & PHP.
- Bluefish is another good tool for editing HTML, CSS & PHP but its interface just feels a lot more clutured.
- GIMP for editing images, though to be perfectly honest I hate using it because the interface is just wretched. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of another image editor that I can use under Linux which has the functionality that I need.
Windows Web Development Tools
- UltraEdit is the best text editor for Windows. Period. It’s not free but there is a time-limited demo. You can edit pretty much anything with UltraEdit and there are additional wordlists & dictionaries for it to make it even easier to use. Though as I recall CSS is not included with the default word list –this means UltraEdit won’t do syntax highlighting for CSS by default– but an additional wordlist can be downloaded to take care of that.
- Fireworks MX is the best image editing program, particularly for web work. It’s interface feels very well laid out, hiding options you don’t immediately need and grouping similar options together. Plus, it uses Adobe Photoshop’s plugin architecture allowing you to easily expand the functionality of the software. Again, this isn’t free software but there is a time-limited demo. Unfortunately, the Crossweavers version of Wine lists this program as Known Not to Run; so I won’t be running this under Linux any time soon. *sigh*
1 For the record, I am working right now. I’m trying to get the program I test to generate some errors so I can test some new functionality that the programmers added to the error handling. Naturally now that I want the program to break; it’s not. *sigh*
2 QotD (acronym): There are 2 generally accecpted meanings for this acronym,
- Quote of the Day
- Question of the Day
Unless otherwise noted, this site uses the 2nd definition.