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Hey, it's me pre-coffee. Why am I posting this? I'm testing an iPad app called Blogsy that should let me post here while I am traveling.

In addition to blogging here and on Spin Matsuri, I will tweet as spinmatsuri, update Facebook, post photos to Flickr, and have access to Skype while I travel. My iPad is going to get a good workout.

Does the iPad keyboard have a non-destructive backspace? My fingers don't target precisely enough when I want to fix an error. Also, I really don't understand how to use predictive/autocorrect text. I'm turning that offf. Hmmmmmm. I may be too old skool for my device.

Ten years ago today, I wrote my first post on this site:

Today’s Weather in Tokyo: hot and humid. (It is summer after all!)

Thus began a decade of online diary entries, essays, rants, whinges, and celebrations. I am so very glad that I created a record of so much of my life.

You've received 2,999 entries including 237 recipes, 27 audio recordings, 37 tutorials, a 3-year series on creativity, a one-year series of forty word portraits, and hundreds upon hundreds of other bits and bobs in the ever-changing landscape of my existence.

From my perspective, some of the best parts are unwritten: all the thoughts rattling in my head, the emotions I did not pour onto the page, the associated memories of times and places described. I can relive them any time I read through the mediatinker archives. You know a lot about me, but those unwritten memories layered over the entries are my own special secrets.

Now let me mark this anniversary entry by sharing one little interior vignette with you. At the time of the very first entry, I sat on the floor facing the air conditioner in the upstairs back room of the Marble House in Sendagi. My pasty white legs were glued with sweat to the scratchy tatami and I had a glass of water at hand. The sun beat down on the veranda; the metal steps to the playharbour were too hot to climb. I sat on the floor because my computer was propped up on a box; I had no desk then. I felt sticky and cranky and quite uncertain that Blogger was going to work for me. I wondered if blogs might just be a fad that everyone was going through and maybe I'd be better off keeping up my mailing list and regular website. But I wrote the first entry anyway, laughing to myself that someday I'd regret having written something so banal for the premiere entry to my new website.

And that's the story behind the first post. I'll bet you didn't realise one dull sentence could hold so much information. If you don't keep a journal of some sort, I hope this encourages you to do so because even the mundane can trigger special memories to the author.

Lots of things have changed since 2000: the technology, my passions, my goals and certainly my hair color. And as it turns out, some things haven't changed. It's hot and humid ten years later; I'm still sticky, pasty white, and have water at hand. And I'm still a little cranky.

"Hi, Kristen. Nice to see you here again."

With that warm welcome from myself, I return to a life of regular weblog updates.

I've fallen out of the habit of sitting down and writing about my life and surroundings. I've still observed the world around me, but only long enough to upload a keitai snap to my Flickr account. This year, I will make time to reflect more thoroughly, or at least to dash off a quick missive every day.

Although it is a New Year's Resolution of a sort, I hope to keep this one without too much trouble.

To celebrate my 40th year, I've joined in Dan's x365 project. Today and for the next 364 days, I'll be writing 40 words about someone I know. There's a link in the sidebar to 40 x 365, so you can go visit whenever you like. You never know when you might turn up there...

Today's entry is, of course, my mother.

Cheers to Tod and a big thanks to MJ for today's upgrade to the most current version of Movable Type, the weblog software that underlies this site and eight others.

Though I believe that you won't see anything different from this vantage point, under the hood we have lots of new bits to play with--including the ability to automatically junk comment spam. So I hope that from here forward you'll stumble into fewer comments touting the latest trends in alchemical wonders and the world's oldest profession.

If you do have any trouble with the site, or discover an oddity, please mail me.

This will be terribly dull for most of you, but Tod needs to prune the site's access logs, and I'd like to have some record of the statistics for mediatinker. So forgive me, but here's a lot of boring detail.

2002 (jun-dec): 12,223 visitors (19,912 visits)
2003 (jan-dec): 100,650 visitors (177,214 visits)
2004 (jan-dec): 244,393 visitors (430,647 visits)
2005 (jan-date): 200,929 visitors (462,593 visits)

The most popular pages on the site are:

Gingerbread CPU 137,216 views
Illustrated MT Templates 65,651
Thai Fisherman's Pants 24,389
History of Zero 20,209

The most popular videos are:

Hello Tokyo Intro 1,555 views
Hello Tokyo Title Sequence 1,516
Let's Make Umeshu 796

Excruciating monthly detail below:

Is it appropriate to apologize to an unknown, unseen, and (frankly) only assumed, audience for my recent lack of daily posts? I'm not sure. And yet I feel I ought to.

So I'm sorry. I just haven't felt like writing much. Recipe Thursdays and Creative Perspectives have taken a hit. When's the last time I posted more than three days running? It feels like weeks. After my existential meltdown, I had not much to say. 130 hours of video editing in less that two weeks, topped by my father's sudden illness, kept me distracted from the observations of daily life.

But I leave for the States tomorrow and I am sure that I will have plenty of culture shock to write about. Stay tuned. I'll try to post recipes, too. American food...

It's the 3rd Wednesday of the month and the Japan Bloggers meetup. Always fun to catch up with everyone, even though we read one another's weblogs. `A big crowd tonight but people are starting to pack up and leave to make their trains home. It's an early night in Tokyo, as usual.

I'm trying my first ever bluetooth file transfer with Andy even as I write this. I will have some nice jazz for my collection in just a few minutes.

I brought my iSight, but nobody else has theirs, so we can't videoconference around the table. Maybe next month...

It's the time of year I feel compelled to tidy my computer world. I really ought to be scrubbing the apartment, but my online house is pretty scruffy.

One big project: I'm simplifying the website. Features have been removed, slashed away like old boots off a fishing line. I've instituted a monochromatic color scheme. Everything's pared down. I'm working towards XHTML compliance.

For the next couple of days I will continue tweaking the layout, and more importantly the content, to get things where I want them. In the meantime, pardon the stray pages and any oddities you might discover.

(P.S. If you are still using Internet Explorer, may I suggest you try Firefox instead? It's free, easy to use, a breeze to switch to, and won't make my nice website look all bizarre.)