Tag: writing

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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My study group all made it to Japan safe & sound. We did nearly lose some people along various stages of the way here, but in the end we arrived with our lives and health in tact. I don’t know these people well enough to say whether or not their sanity is in tact after the trip or if they’re always this crazy.

As this was the first time in my memory that I’ve flown; I think I should make a note of the following:

  • Flying is not as bad an experience as I had been fearing it might be.
  • Puddle-jumper planes suck for people over 5 foot 8 inches, due to low ceilings and no headroom when going down the aisle.
  • International flights are too damn long and my ears are still somewhat numb from the constant roar of the engines.
  • Turbulance sucks! Particularly when you’re watching the wing bounce.
  • Landings are not evil, but only because that means you can get off the plane soon.

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While browsing the WP support forums, I ran across this little annoucement:

I would like to announce the grand opening of AustenBlog, a compendium of news about Jane Austen in popular culture. This weblog probably will only be interesting to those who like Jane Austen, of course, but I’d like to announce it here and publicly thank some folks who were helpful to me while I was putting it together

I normally wouldn’t make a post on my blog for somebody annoucing their new site, but the design is pretty good and based on Root’s Gemini template for WP (which means I should seriously look at that template for help with designing CoffeeBear’s look). Also, a good friend of mine (AWelkin) is a fan of Pride & Prejudice and I figure she’ll eventually see the link & might want to check it out.

AWelkin,

I’ve made some more changes to that template which is posted on my site for your review. You can use the same information that I’ve already e-mailed you in order to access it and see the changes. If you look at it now; you’ll see that I’ve restructured the nav menu. I did this because when you mentioned you wanted a section for Bryon and I quickly hacked one page to show how it could look. Well, it looked bloody odd as it had so few items under it compared to the rest of the menu. Please take a look at it and let me know what you think.

I’ve been working on a project designing a personal website for AWelkin. Last Friday, I gave her the templates I’d constructed for her. She seemed pretty excited & happy with them, but then I tried to start showing her how to edit them; only to find that she doesn’t have any good tools for doing such a thing. The only real editor she had was TextEdit (I think it just comes with OS X) and it doesn’t do syntax highlighting; which would make life hard for her. Since I don’t have a Mac1; I couldn’t really offer recommendations to her.

The only editor for Macs that I’d heard of is BBEdit but I had heard that was a rather complex program and I really thought it was more than she’d need. Then I talked to my local Mac geek and found out that BBEdit is really expensive! So I asked if he could recommend any other cheaper/simpler editors. He did a bit of searching and said PageSpinner would be a good option. I looked at the PageSpinner website and it uses valid HTML; which is a good sign. The screenshots also looked promising, but were kind of small and there doesn’t appear to be any larger versions available2. On the plus side, the feature list for PageSpinner does appear to cover everything that I think AWelkin would need (e.g. syntax highlighting and a preview function).

Anyhoo, I’m posting this note in hopes that AWelkin might read it and let me know if this PageSpinner program will work for her.

1 I’m not a PC evangelist or a Mac-Hater. I just don’t have the money to buy a Mac right now and I’m not likely to any time soon. Oh and for the record, those 15 inch G4 Powerbooks look like the sweetest laptops on this planet!
2 Guys, you really need to get some larger screenshots up. Some of us are nearly blind as it is and trying to look at your product from tiny shots like these really doesn’t help our eyesight. So please, please, please post some larger images for us to look at. Remember, not everybody visiting your site will be willing to download your app just to see if it will work for them; they may be stuck using WinBlows and trying to find something suitable for their Mac using friends.