Archive for September 2004
Flickr
When Flickr.com first launched, I didn't pay much attention. But as it happened, Austin voiced his enthusiasm for the service just when I had a batch of photos I wanted to share, so instead of posting them to Tawawa, I opened a Flickr account and posted them there, just to see what it was all about.
It's a lot more than I thought. First of all, the site is very well made; crisp, clear, friendly, quite unlike some of the other photo sharing sites I've seen.
But it's also more than a grab-bag of images. A a free account allows you to upload 10 megabyte's worth of images per month, and the one-hundred most recent images are stored and displayed in an "image stream." The images are either "public" or only accessible to people marked as "friends" or "family." Each image can be commented on individually, and users can freely band together in groups that share a bulletin board and an "image pool". So, whith all this easy-to-use functionality in place, Flickr does what the Internet was probably made for: it organises conversations around content.
It occurred to me that images might be a more evocative starting point for conversations than text and that I could use Flickr in one of my classes next term: I will probably ask my students to upload images -- either from their cell phones or from other sources -- and discuss them.
To make sure things will run smoothly, I need a volunteer with a camera phone -- or, better yet: several volunteers with camera phones -- who will help me test the service and anticipate difficulties.
Anyone?
If you want to help out, please contact me and I'll send you an invitation.
Oh, and Bill has something disgusting but intriguing in his yard. Yuck!
Tokyo, September 2004
I spent the weekend in Tokyo and took a couple of pictures. Today I created a Flickr.com account and uploaded a selection.
Also on Flickr: Becky, Vincent, and Ironing Board by Austin Moody, which is one of the funnier things I've seen in a while.
Whaling in Japan
When I went to Nachi-Katsuura, the southern part of Wakayama Prefecture, I found a restaurant which served whale dishes in front of the station. I saw many kinds of whale products at souvenir shops and I tried some of them. This was the first time for me to eat whale meat. The idea of eating whale meat is a little bit shocking to me because I'm not used to the custom. I don't think, however, whaling is bad or should be banned.
I learned from this web site that whaling in Japan started in Taiji, near Nachi-Katsuura, in the early Edo period, and people in Taiji presented whale meat to the emperor at that time. They depended on the income gained by whaling and so, the tradition of whaling still remains.
Now they can't catch whales for commercial purposes, and the conflict between those who support whaling and those who are against it doesn't seem to have an end. As far as I knew from the exchanges between the Japan Whaling Association and the Iruka & Kujira (Dolphin & Whale) Action Network, they are clashing with each other in every point. For example, the former says that there are enough whales and a limited, carefully determined number of them should be caught. Then the latter protests, "How do you know how many whales there are, and are you really sure the number you determine is appropriate?"
Some people who oppose whaling assert that it is cruel to kill and eat such a "cute" animal as whales. I understand them, but they miss the point. Whether an animal is cute or not doesn't matter. What matters is the difference of culture. Every country has a unique culture and a tradition of eating certain foods; we should respect other cultures as well as our own culture. My idea is that the tradition of catching and eating certain animals should be protected as long as it doesn't do damage to the natural environment.
Learner weblog
If you've followed Kevin Cameron's Bastish.net for any length of time, you know that here's a man who asks big questions. One of the big questions he's been asking is what we as a species -- or more specifically: as citizens and as consumers -- do to the environment, or what we allow to happen to the environment.
Unlike most people, he's always felt urged to act on these questions and do something about them. After examining his options for a long time, he decided to enrol in an M.A. programme on environemental sustainability in Sweden. He moved from Tokyo to Karlskrona, Sweden, a couple of weeks ago.
Now that he's settled in, he has started sustainability.bastish.net, a Bastish.net section which he plans to use as a learner weblog:
I will be following my studies, as well as trying to cover some of the fundamental scientific points of sustainability, both reviewing and further researching what led me here in the first place.
And... it gets even better than that. In a little conversation we're having in the Tawawa Tutorials, he says he "will use it for the other people in the class".
Dig this: students setting up their own weblogs to discuss their studies. That looks like a whole lot of collaborative, autonomous learning.
Rock on, Kevin!
Del.icio.us
This is a follow-up on yesterday's Bookmarks and Furl entry.
A while ago, I created del.icio.us/Tawawa, an online collection of bookmarks. I never got around to stocking it with links, and currently there are only a few of them in two sections: Friends/Neighbours and Media. More links and sections will be added as we go along.
Meanwhile, here's an example. Bill Clifford is a graphic designer, musician, photographer, and creator of wildly funny Web comics. He also maintains a del.icio.us account: del.icio.us/williac. Have a look at the links in his comics section.
Bookmarks and Furl
Mosaic, the first Web browser that supported images, came out in November 1993. It had a feature that allowed users to create a hotlist -- a repository of "cool" links chosen by the user and maintained within the browser. Netscape, whose Navigator 1.0 was based on Mosaic code, appeared in December 1994 and dominated the browser market for the next few years. It adopted the hotlist feature and called it bookmarks; the idea remained the same. Microsoft, which didn't have a browser of its own (in fact it had completely ignored the Web up to that point), brought out Internet Explorer 1.0 in August 1995, including the hotlist feature, now called favorites.
Mozilla, the open-source branch of Netscape Navigator, finally appeared as version 1.0 in May 2002. It, and its stand-alone version Firefox, sticks to the Netscape terminology: bookmarks.
Bookmarks (or favorites if you use Internet Explorer), are nice and useful things; they make it easy to find your way back to Web pages you've visited before. However, they also have their limitations; they're hard to manage. If, for example, you regularly use different machines, or different browsers on the same machine, or even different operating systems on the same machine, bookmarks tend to become scattered all over the place and increasingly hard to use.
This is where a free Web-based bookmark manager such as del.icio.us comes handy: you open an account, then you add and organise your links, and if you feel like doing it, you can share them with other people. Keeping your links online makes them more accessible since you can use them wherever you happen to be. Very nice.
However, Web-based bookmark managers do not even begin to address a problem that afflicts all hyperlink lists: linkrot, the annoying tendency of URLs to disappear. Sites may vanish and take all their content offline. Webmasters may decide to reorganise their sites and present all their content under different URLs. Or you may find an interesting article on the New York Times; the Times offers free registration, but after a couple of days all articles disappear into the archives, and you have to pay to access the archives. So a link to the Times -- whether on a Web page or as a bookmark -- is always a tricky thing since you'll be charged if you want to read it the week after next.
Furl solves these problems.
Furl is a free Web-based service that describes itself as a "web page filing cabinet," and that's exactly what it does: it doesn't only save URLs, it copies whole pages and stores them for safekeeping, thus sidestepping any linkrot that may (and will) occur. It also offers a search feature, which makes it easy to find things among the filed pages and turns the the service into a valuable research tool.
To use Furl, you only need to sign up for an account and drag the Furl it! link to your browser's toolbar. Once this is done, you can store pages within seconds simply by clicking on the Furl it! link in your browser.
While writing this piece, I furled the following two pages:
Browser timelines by Brian Wilson
A history of browsers by Peter-Paul Koch
Tutorial
Sometimes I need to explain things that should neither clutter up this weblog nor disappear too quickly into the dusty and badly lit archives of the mailing list. That's why I've just created a Tutorial section on Tawawa.
The first piece is on using Textile, the Humane Web Text Generator.
Tonankai Earthquake
Two strong earthquakes have just hit western Japan, especially Kii peninsula, Wakayama, Mie, and Nara, as you can see in this news report. I live in Misono, Mie prefecture, and here the earthquakes registered an intensity of 3 and 4, respectively. Also, other small earthquakes often occured in the Tonankai Area. On the map, the blue area is Tokai, the green one is Tonankai, and the red one is Nankai area (sorry, in Japanese).
Then:
Tonankai area is a place that has been struck by an earthquake roughly every century for the past 500 years. The last one occued in 1944, and it killed 1000 people. The committee said the next Tonankai earthquake could measure around 8.1 on the Richter scale and that there was a 60 percent chance of it hitting in the next 30 years, up from the 50 percent estimate it made in September 2001. (Reuters)
So, I've been very, very scared recently.
As for my family, we had never prepared against the next earthquake. However, now we decided to prepare useful requirement for an emergency. I made a emergency list as below:
Neccesities
- water (3 liters a day per person)
- radio
- flashlight
- battery
- valuables (money, bank booklet, seal, driver's licence, health book)
- fire extinguisher
- food (hardtack, rice cake, retort pouch, instant food, cans, rock candy, umeboshi)
Useful equipment
- medicine
- helmet
- clothes
- blanket
- glove
- tissue
- rope
- plastic wrap...
It's endless....
Have you made any preparations for earthquakes? What did you do?
Family Trip to Tohoku
I took a trip to Tohoku area with my family for three days from the 2nd to the 4th. We visited Aomori, Akita, Iwate and Miyagi prefecture with a rental car.
On the first day, we visited nebuta-no-sato in Aomori, where very big paper dolls used in the Nebuta festival are displayed. The pictures give you an idea of just how big the paper dolls are.
Then we drove along the Oirase mountain stream, which runs from Lake Towada. It was cold when we were walking along the stream, but the view was so beautiful.
There's a big waterfall:
And we arrived at Lake Towada:
On the beach of Lake Towada, there is a statue named Otome-no-zou. Otome is a maiden in Japanese. This was made by Koutaro Takamura, a famous Japanese poet and sculptor who lived in the 19th century. The statue looks the same when wiewed from its front or its back:
On the next day, we visited at Goshogake Nature Trail in Akita. As we walked along the path, we observed volcanic phenomena, such as vapor steaming out of holes in the ground, boiling water and mud, and mud volcanoes. Goshogake is famous for its spa.
We walked along the path:
The water was boiling with a big noise, and it stank of sulphur.
This is Oyu-numa:
The guide to Oyu-numa says:
It was here that Yu-numa pond was originally formed. However, the deposits from the natural steam have made it shallow and intermittent steam pressure has created volcanic swells, called the Yu-numa type of mud volcano. The Odoro-kazan volcano, formed in 1917-18, has grown to become the largest volcano of this type in Japan. The depth of the mud is about 8m and its temperature is about 94,5°C.
This is Odoro-kazan:
The guide says:
Oyu-numa Pond, is a collection of many ponds, such as Konya-jigoku Hell. Natural steam created the composition of the sand, and has formed mud volcanos and small mud craters. At present there is no activity in the eastern sector, although many mud volcanos and mud craters can be seen under the water, indicating past activity. The west side, however, is very active, The water temperature is over 83°C, and the pond is extending rapidly to the west.
Then, we visited Koiwai Farm in Iwate. This farm has been making dairy products since the Meiji period. Here, we watched a show of sheep dogs and sheep.
The following is a fake sheep ;-)
On the final day, we visited a memorial museum of Kenji Miyazawa. I read some of his books when I was in elementary school. He is also famous for his poems.
Then we visited Chusonji Temple. It is famous for its golden pavillion, which may not be photographed. Most Japanese students learn about the temple in history classes.
At last, we visited one of the most beautiful sceneries in Japan, Matsushima.
We went on a cruise on a pleasure boat. Many seagulls were flying alongside the boat, waiting to be fed.
I also fed the seagulls:
I hope you like the photos.
A katakana font
In the Swiss capital of Bern, down in the Old Town's Matte Quartier, close by the Aare river, there's a warehouse that has been converted into office space. An internationally renowned graphic design collective operates from there: Büro Destruct.
Büro Destruct was founded in 1992 by a small group of young designers who are rooted in the tradition of no-frills Swiss graphic design yet blend their work with an avant-garde techno sensibility, create innovative typography and often display a quirky playfulness. Their work has been collected in two books.
Lopetz is a founding member of the collective. He is also great lover of all things Japanese, which led him to co-edit Narita Inspected, an illustrated introduction to the work of a few select contemporary Japanese designers. While he has been collaborating with Japanese designers for a long time and used Japanese type in his work every once in a while, it is only now that he released his first Japanese type design, a katakana font named Wakarimasu. The font can be downloaded for free from TypeDifferent.com.
The logo we use here at Tawawa is based on another Büro Destruct typeface, BD Eject, so I wonder if we should use Wakarimasu for the logo over at Tsure-zure.net Let's see:.
Hmmmmm...
A few other sources of free Japanese fonts, just in case anyone's interested:
Easing Stress
There are many ways to relax and get rid of stress, and I think they can be divided into two types: active and passive. The former type is, for example, playing sports, driving, going to karaoke with friends, and shopping. Listening to music, watching videos and sleeping are examples of the passive type.
I usually try to relax by burning incense and aroma candles, and I think this is the passive way because I don't actually do anything while the incense is burning. After taking a bath, I burn incense in my room with the light kept dim and muted music coming from the stereo. Lying still in the sweet-scented room for several minutes refreshes me! While some active ways require a certain level of technique (we may get frustrated because we lack technique), passive ways don't.
The preferred way of easing stress is different from person to person, and any means is OK. What is important is that everyone does have some ways to get rid of stress.