February 2005
Valentine's Day
I have never been a big fan of Valentine's Day, it brings back nostalgic, often painful memories of loves gone by. I met a very Important girl to me on Valentine's day, but that's a story for another time. Today I wanted to talk about Valentine's day in Japan. Japan has an interesting way of taking the best things from other cultures, and putting the right spin on them to get them to fit in to their own (a Tetris analogy is in there somewhere.) Valentine's day in Japan is as popular there as it is in the United States, with one significant difference...
You see, in Japan women give all the presents, the men don't really do anything. I'm told that this is the only way it was ever going to work over there, although it seems to me to leave the guys totally off the hook. Women will go out and buy gifts (usually chocolates or something they made a scarf or that kind of thing) for the guy's they have a crush on. The guys don't need to do anything, sort of a Sady Hawkin's day.
I, being totally oblivious to this strange twist of convention, and caught up in the glow of the marketing and festivities that surrounded the event in Japan, decided to buy the girls I knew little boxes of Godiva chocolates. As it happened, Valentine's Day fell on our weekly meeting at "The Bar" in Machida and I was so excited to give them out as a surprise gift. Sitting with my guy friends, I was told how things work over there. There was no way the girls would come, as a girl being seen alone on Valentine's Day was embarrassing.
They guy's were feeling sorry for themselves and checking scores... Who got the most chocolates, did the girl they liked get them something, it was chilling. I could see what it must be like to be a woman in the Western world on Valentine's day, but it was pretty pathetic to hear grown men whine over chocolates. They said it was fair, since if -- and the if is significant here -- if they liked a girl who gave them a gift they would get them something for White Day.
White Day (March 14th) is the day the guys, after the girls have stuck their necks out, decide to reciprocate to the girl of their choice. So the girls have to wait a month to see if their overtures bear fruit. That must be a sucky four weeks.
I hear in Korea, they do a very similar thing, they added a Black Day (April 14th) for those who struck out. They all go out together and commiserate over Jajang noodles, which are appropriately black. I wonder where I can find a nice Korean restaurant around here that serves them.
Posted by Bakafish at 2:55 PM | Comments (0)
Alameda Airport
After staying up all night last night getting the new site launched I slept in until noon. I was out of Half & Half for my coffee, and since I needed to go pay my rent, I couldn't use the Irish Cream like I did yesterday (yum.) I was going to get a haircut, but my barber was closed. So I went to Starbuck's for a tall mocha and Trader Joe's to get some beer, frozen pizza's, sandwich meat and Half and Half. I wanted to find a good spot to take some pictures of San Francisco so I headed north.
As many of you should know, I live on the small Island of Alameda in the San Francisco bay. The northern part of the island used to be a large Naval air station. There is an abandoned airport, with giant hangars that have been repurposed for business use. They are now used by special effects houses (the Matrix movies were done here.) Aviation facilities, nautical construction firms and even a large winery. There is also still a small fleet and naval museum situated there. This is the permanent port for the USS Hornet Aircraft carrier (I'll leave it to the humble reader to discover the significance of that specific ship.)
The Island is much closer to the East bay and Oakland. We are joined to the mainland by two underwater tunnels and several draw bridges. My apartment has a great view of the Oakland hills, but the city can only be seen from the roof, and they get mad when I go up there. Anyway, I was scouting for a sutable place to take some snaps when I discovered the old Air traffic control tower. It was covered with No Trespassing signs so I decided to return in the evening to take some night shots.
Unfortunately, I didn't have a tripod handy, and taking long exposure pictures from a distance is just about impossible. But with a little photoshop loving and a little luck this shot came out okay.
I will try to go there again better prepared (tripod), and perhaps on the weekend for some daylight snaps. It's such a beautiful Island and place to live, it's hard to understand sometimes why I feel so compelled to be in Japan.
Posted by Bakafish at 9:35 PM | Comments (4)
My stay in Japan
Several years ago I was lucky enough to spend a couple months in Japan. My ex-girlfriend let me stay at her parents house for a little while and they helped me get an apartment.
I made lot's of friends while I was there. Most of my days were spent walking around the area, I got lot's of exercise and lost weight. That was despite eating and drinking a ton of food. And there is so much good food in Japan, between the box lunches that my ex's mom made me every morning and the izakaya (drinking restaurant) that I went to most evenings I was well fed. The beer in Japan is cold and crisp, it is so nice to drink cold beer with friends after a long day of exploring.
I visited some nice places, I went to Yokohama a couple times, famous for it's China town (no real competition to SF despite it's age or proximity) and a rather nice bridge. The owner of the izakaya took me to Hakkone and Odawara. Hakkone is a resort area famous for it's hot spring resorts (on'sen) and steep hill side Cedar forests. Odawara has a reproduction Castle filled with ancient weaponry and artifacts.
Posted by Bakafish at 2:31 AM | Comments (2)
The new layout
I made the new design for my site a long time ago. It's quite dated already, and I still need to do a good deal of tweaking and adding usability and navigational improvements. I have a lot to learn about Movable Type's layout system and how to get everything formatted exactly how I want it. Originally I used a very complex set of nested tables in order to get the site to lay out correctly, and by correctly, I mean under perfect conditions. If you looked at it with the right browser and it had the right amount of content and the window was the right size and solar activity was low. So at some point I decided to adapt the design to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to simplify things.
Well CSS is an interesting system meant to help abstract the information from the presentation. It's a pretty good system, but it conforms very much with the idea that HTML is not paper. What I mean is that HTML was never intended to be used to make sites that look the way you may have intended, it give the client (your browser) the power to render the site in any fashion that suits it, as long as it presents that information. It's easier to run with an arm full of angry eel's than it is to make a website look the way you may want it too. You need to make lot's of compromises, spend frustrating nights getting different browsers to work with the design only to have it all break once you start putting content into the templates.
After spending a great deal of time studying the work at the CSS Zen Garden and trying to forget all of my experience with ridiculous table manipulation, I finally got the results you see here. Actually that's not true, as I had to create templates with lot's of embedded Movable Type code in order to make it work with this new Blog software.
What have I learned? Well, one thing is that the use of high speed connections have made the use of large images far more palatable. In my old table designs I used images as efficiently as posable, stretching 2 pixel X 1 pixel images over large areas, using table background colors, anything to save a couple bytes of bandwidth. These days you use a couple large images, and CSS positioning to get the same effect. CSS doesn't do miracles, HTML blocks still like to grow and shrink and do all kinds of random and inexplicable nonsense. But tables suck really bad too.
The other benefit of CSS is that it is more accessible, in that Web browsers designed for the blind have a much easier time of rendering the content. I'm sure that's a comfort to all of the people who lost their vision from browsing my last site design...
Posted by Bakafish at 1:54 AM | Comments (1)
