On the Net

Today nearly 2000 people are writing about an influential woman in technology, thanks to Suw Charman-Anderson inviting all and sundry to do so through pledge bank.

I did not start out to have a career in technology. I wanted to be a doctor or a writer. I ended up with a degree in Elementary Education, but before I graduated I met my future husband and he turned me onto a facet of technology that really interested me, communication via computers. Back in those days, any interest in computers also had to involve hardware and understanding much more arcana than today, so when I got my first jobs as an office temp, I was quickly the go-to-girl for printers that didn't work, writing macros for (now extinct) word processors, and generally sorting out the confusion that was pre-Windows office life.

But this post isn't about me or my life in IT. It is about one of the mentors I had along the way.

I was very lucky to land a job in the IT department of Duquesne University in the early 1990s. Lynda Barner-West headed up the group. She was blind to any limitations that others might have placed on women in IT. Our department seemed nearly evenly split between men and women, with us ladies programming, managing, training and tinkering on an equal footing with the men. It seemed slightly revolutionary then, and comparing to IT organizations I know today, I am sure it was.

Lynda was revolutionary in technology, too. She brought our campus computing to the cutting edge, wiring Ethernet in every dorm room well before that was common, and creating not only up-to-date student computing labs, but pioneering computerised classrooms with kiosks, projection systems and a centralised media server. Duquesne was an early adopter of the NeXT platform, too.

Lynda was not only technically astute, but she had a knack for helping her staff to reach their potential. She coached, challenged and sometimes cajoled each of us to top form. We were loyal, hardworking and constantly exploring new ideas. I started out training faculty and staff on using the Internet (remember telnet, ftp, Gopher, and pine?) and later moved into integrating technology into education by developing custom courseware and online classes. I've never worked with a better team of people than the IT department at Duquesne and I know that it was Lynda's influence, even after she had left for another academic computing challenge, that made us all strive to exceed expectations of the administration, faculty and students.

So thank you, Lynda, for giving me an interesting and educational workplace free of gender bias and filled with so many smart and savvy women in IT. Maybe I will write about some of my colleagues for the next Ada Lovelace Day.

Having spent a many hours making necklaces in binary over the past couple of week, I am becoming interested in encoding messages in everyday objects.

Can I knit a binary message? How can I sneak a message into a drawing? What words can I cipher into my meals? I want to add more layers of meaning to my daily life. And I want to see what other people can do, too, so I started a swap just for that over on Swap-Bot.

Secret Message Crafting

Do you like codes and ciphers? Puzzles? Secrets?

For this swap you will encipher a message and send it to your partner, along with the plaintext message sealed in a separate envelope. If your partner needs a tool, key, or hint to decode the message, please include that, too.

The Message

A friendly greeting, sage advice, favorite quote, a personal secret, or whatever you like. It should be long enough to decipher but not so long it will be tedious. A sentence or two? Maybe more, maybe less depending upon the medium.

The Code

Your choice! ROT-13, alphabetic substitution, QR code, Morse code, ASCII binary...there are many to choose from.

The Medium

Here is where the crafting comes in. No scribbling your coded message onto a sheet of paper and calling it done. Be creative in presenting your message. You might create coded embroidery, weaving, beading, or knitting. Maybe a painting or collage. Perhaps a jigsaw, acrostic or crossword puzzle.

Signups are until April 14th, so if you'd like to craft a message, send it off to a stranger and get a coded gift in exchange, then please come play at Swap-Bot

PUNDO 3000 in Germany did an expose on processed foods that compares the package to the product inside. It should be enough to put anyone off commercially prepared foods forever but I am sure that it isn't.

Is there fish swimming in that creamy sauce? I can't tell. The spinach on the package looks crisp and leafy, but in reality it seems to be soup.

Does this wrapper say "artist's concept" somewhere? The meat in the real thing looks like regurgitated cafeteria fare, not the bright and shiny red cuts that entice us.

How exactly did they create the package image? Definitely not from the food as prepared. Holy wishful thinking and food styling.

Earlier this month my mother had 3 1/2 minutes of her fame when she was featured in a short piece on NPR's All Things Considered. She told the story of her "obsolete skill" - folding a nurse's cap. Have a listen. I think she left out the best part: how they teased one another when one of the Ten Pins didn't stay in.

Tod's photo of balloons on Chowpatty Beach is scheduled to be published in the June issue of the Sunday Times Travel magazine.

I heard that Sachiko was in FRAU magazine this month, but I haven't seen the article yet.

I have a Facebook account and sometimes it sends me mail. Today I received a doozy of an ego-buster.

Subject: Kristen, you are more desired than less than 20% of all people.

In total, you were reviewed for dating 11 times and no people expressed interest in you.
You are more desirable than less than 20% of 23,330,840 people.

Last week you were viewed 6 times and no people expressed interested in you

I guess I already knew that. Thanks a bunch, Facebook, for reminding me.

It's been 4 months since I started making fabric shopping totes as part of the Morsbags project. Together with about a dozen other friends, we've sewn up 192 bags so far and given most of them away to strangers, friends and family.

I've been using my Morsbag every time I go shopping, so I'm sure I've refused at least 2 dozen bags. That's not going to reverse global warming or eliminate plastic bag litter, but it makes a small difference. There are more than 6,000 Morsbags in circulation worldwide and if everyone uses their bag consistently, that's a reduction of anywhere from 150,000 to 3 million bags.

You can do your part, too. It's really so painless. If you'd like to get involved, there are many ways to start:

1. Make a bag (or a few) for yourself & friends. They make gifts, and great gift bags, too! Here's a simple Morsbag pattern to use.
2. If you're in Tokyo
• Join TokyoBags for a sewing session. Our next one is Sunday, October 21st.
• Help pass out bags at an upcoming distribution.
• Donate materials - old duvet covers, cotton curtains & table cloths are ideal. Sewing machines, irons, thread...we're happy to have them!
• Host a workshop: I can teach kids or adults how to make Morsbags.
• Start a new pod in Tokyo; TokyoBags doesn't want to hog all the fun! Register your pod with Morsbags so you can add to the tally.
3. If you're not in Tokyo
• Join a local pod or form a group of your own. Register your pod with Morsbags so you can add to the tally.
• Get your school or community group involved.
• Donate money to help keep morsbags running

More about Morsbags:
Website: http://www.morsbags.com
Forums: http://www.morsbags.com/phpBB/
Morsmap: http://www.morsbags.com/html/morsmap.html
Photos: http://www.flickr.com/groups/morsbags/pool/
TokyoBags: http://groups.google.com/group/tokyobags

P.S. Check out Tracey's related post on plastic bags in Yokohama harbour. We're both posting environmental topics today as part of Blog Action Day.

It's been a long time since I'd recorded anything for LibriVox, but after receiving a message about Jumping July, their latest push for completion, I had the urge to spend some time in front of the microphone. I've churned out 4 chapters of Howards End and two sections of Stops, or How to Punctuate this week and last. Now, I really ought to work on the duet of Isabella Bird's Adventures in Japan which has been languishing for half a year. I'm not sure I'm that jumpy, though.

If you want to record a chapter yourself, have a look at the list of books in the Readers Wanted:Books section of the forums. Unclaimed chapters are noted in blue inside the Magic Box in the first post of the book's discussion thread. All the instructions are in that first post, in fact.

If you want to listen to me reading about footnotes from Stops, or How to Punctuate, download this WAV file: https://mt.mediatinker.com/librivox/stops_15_allerdyce.wav It is certain to cure your insomnia in 3 minutes, 2 seconds flat.

I've been having so much fun with Swap-bot that I started my own swap to test the waters and see how things work behind the scenes.

Beauty Secrets "Beauty is as beauty does," my mother always used to say. What do you do to make yourself beautiful? Highlight your cheekbones with glitter? Moisturise? Meditate daily?

We all have our beauty secrets. For this swap, you'll share your two most important beauty tips: one for inner beauty and one for the skin-deep kind.

If you're interested in swapping your beauty tips, read the swap details and sign up before March 9th.

Olive Riley was born on October 20, 1899 at Broken Hill, Australia. This month, she started a blog to share her stories. How wonderful is that? I hope I'm blogging an interesting day's experiences at 107.

Life of Riley

Tagged by Mark Lindeman at DumLuk, I've been given a few questions to answer. So while I'm still away at the rice harvest, here's something to distract you from the important work you should be doing.

Why do you blog?
Bad habits are hard to break.

How long have you been blogging?
Since July 2000, and I have maintained a personal website since 1994.

Self Portrait?
Middle-aged woman
Wonders what she's doing here;
Tries to savor life.

Why do readers read your blog?
Bad habits are hard to break.

What was the last search phrase someone used to get to your site?
"kristen" but I'll bet they were looking for the Kristen Archives.

Which of your entries unjustly gets too little attention?
I think the opposite is more appropriate - what unjustly gets too much attention? The gingerbread computer got me /.ed but it wasn't my own creation, just something I reported.

Your current favorite blog?
I love it when my friends post to their weblogs; they are all my favorites.

What blog did you read most recently?
Tea Leaves

Which feeds do you subscribe to?
In addition to friends, flickr and news, I subscribe LibriVox, Whip Up, Time Goes By, Marginal Revolution, Boing Boing and Astronomy Picture of the Day.

What four blogs are you tagging with this meme and why?
Cerebral Soup, Threads of Gold, Keitai Goddess and UltraMom from Dynamic Duo all get tagged because they are busy women with exciting lives who don't really post often enough.

Mapion, my favorite online Japanese map program, launched a nifty new tool called Kyorisoku. It lets you draw out your route, then calculates all sorts of handy info about time, distance and calories.

Kyorisoku Distance Calculator (click for larger view)

I marked out the walk from my house to the boat launch at Ueno Koen. It is just over 3 km, and will take me 3569 steps (not even half of my daily 10,000). I can walk there in 33 minutes if I keep a brisk pace of 5.6 km. At my current weight and age, I will burn 166 calories on the way there.

If I care less about calories and more about the amount of beer, cookies or ramen I can consume as a result of my exercise, that's customisable, too.

Kyorisoku Area Calculator (click for larger view)

In its other mode, which I think is somewhat less useful, you can calculate the area of anything you draw around. Not only does it give you the usual units like square meters and jo , but you'll see how many Tokyo Domes, sheets of A4 paper or tatami mats it is, as well.

Fun Fun Fun! All in all, I think this is a very handy addition to Mapion's other offerings. Way to go, Mapion.

Hanashi Station started its second season today with a special podcast I did with some of the artists and participants at the Echigo Tsumari Art Triennial in Matsudai.

The show is 13 minutes long and features interviews with artists Hanako Murakami & Emi Suzuki, a chat with Andrea Kleist from the City of Melboune public art program, and lots of interesting atmospheric sounds from the town and villagers.

You can see the show notes for additional details,
or download the MP3. Hanashi Station is also one of the podcasts in Collectik, so go ahead and add it to your playlist there.

My next show for Hanashi Station will be in the Japanese Kitchen series.

The latest buzzword among Web 2.0 folks is screencasting."*cue excited, breathy voice* "You know, like podcasting but of your screen." This amounts to making a movie of your monitor while you narrate the action.

Um...sure. I did this in 1996, though it was minor torture back then--multiple programs, extra cables, hardware, scripting and overdubbed audio edited in after the visual were recorded. Now a single piece of software does the screen capture and audio recording. I've been trying out Snapz Pro which took a bit of getting used to, but gives good results. I'm improving with practice.

I've done four screencasts for Collectik with more to come. It is a good tool for training people who are visual or aural learners.

I am pleased to announce the beta launch of Collectik - the project I've been working on for past few months. The following letter & animation explain our baby.

Collectik highlights, animated (Quicktime)

Meet Collectik.net – a website for organizing podcasts and online media. It's like mixtapes for podcasts.

1. build a Collection of podcasts & online radio programs
2. mix a Playlist of episodes you want to hear
3. listen via iTunes, XML, or streaming m3u

Collectik.net has tons of great features that will help you manage, mix, listen to and share all the best audio (and video!) on the net.

• Search to find the stuff you want and
• Build custom Mixlists (for the gym, for your politics class, or for your hip hop-loving aunt)
• Make Friends to help you find great audio
• Tag podcasts and episodes to make them easier to find
• Use our Firefox plug-in to collect media files or feeds from anywhere on the net
• Put a “Collectik This!” button on your own podcast page, so others can easily collect your podcast
• Import and export OPML lists of RSS feeds
• Coming soon: Comment on episodes you loved (or hated)

Collectik.net is a free web tool for anyone to use and it's also a community of podcast fans. It's run by Chris Goringe, Kristen McQuillin, and Hugh McGuire, who are also founding members of LibriVox.org, the all-volunteer, all-public domain, audio literature podcast project.

Mix it up at Collectik: http://collectik.net

Feedback, questions, comments, and criticisms are all welcome: contact@collectik.net.

Chris, Kristen & Hugh.
http://collectik.net

Tod found this funny Japanese website. Put in your name and it tells you what you are made of. You can try it here, though the results will be in Japanese.

If you don't read Japanese, copy the text into Babelfish or Excite translatorfor a rough/poor translation, but I suggest you put periods at the end of each line to help it out.

Here's what it said about me.

Results of a Composition Analysis of Kristen
85% adult circumstance - Kristenの85%は大人の都合で出来ています
8% bewilderment - Kristenの8%は気の迷いで出来ています
5% negative ions - Kristenの5%はマイナスイオンで出来ています
2% concentrated sulphuric acid - Kristenの2%は濃硫酸で出来ています

(It told me my computer was a mix of strictness, sulphuric acid, words, candy and bewilderment...that seems about right so I guess it has me pegged, too.)

What's hot on the 'Net today? Anagramming transit maps. I thought "No way could Tokyo's subway map be anagrammed, " but I tried today while waiting for Hello Tokyo renders. And I was surprised at the good anagrams I got. Yotsuya = You Stay!

Here's the Marunouchi line from Ikebukuro out to the branches past Shinjuku:

• Our UK Bike
• I Toss A Hunk
• I Dam Agony
• Korean UK
• Change Homo Son
• Inca Hum Zoo
• Oh CIA Jaw
• Omit Each
• OK Toy
• A Zing
• I Game a Uk Kiss
• Jim Kodak Agio Ike
• Make Saki Ask Tau
• You Stay
• Mushy Ocean Toys
• Gymnasium Hue Joke
• Haunches Join Musk
• Hi U.S. Junk
• Juicy Sushi Ink, Huh?
• Hush, I Injun Ski
• Kane Oak Sauna
• Enough Jacksonian Hookum
• Banish Omaha Skin
• Hijack Foam Union
• Ann Hooch
• Hosannah Kin
• Hiking Shoe JAI
• She Join Kin
• Gamy Asia Mania
• Go UK Bio

Do you want to do the Ginza, Hibiya, Tozai, Chiyoda, Yurakucho, Hanzomon, Namboku, Askausa, Mita, Shinjuku or Oedo lines?

The reference map is rosen_eng.pdf and you'll find the Anagram Server is a big help. If you put your anagrams in the comments, I'll change the text on the map and publish it here.

My friend Dan, mentioned before re 40x365 and altered books, is collecting words that can't be easily translated from one language to another for a project called untranslatable/

He's put out a call for submissions that I want to pass along:

I would like collect examples of words that are untranslatable and provide a web-based publishing outlet for them to be found.

I am most interested in single words (lacuna) which require phrases, paragraphs, or pages of explanation to try and give a reasonable approximation of their full meaning, but am open to considering anything at all (really, try me) that fits (or answers to, or responds to) the notion of untranslatability.

When submitting, please include:

1. the native language the word (or phrase) appears in
2. the target language(s) into which it is known to be untranslatable
3. as much explanation as you feel is necessary to communicate the full meaning of the word, possibly using a standard dictionary attempt which fails miserably as a starting point (or not, as you see fit)

or, for submissions that don't fit this idealized set of guidelines, a brief note explaining your submission's connection to the concept of untranslatability.

Submissions can be as casual or scholarly as your experience dictates, the format I'm planning will allow multiple approaches to the same translation challenge.

Please address submissions to your favorite word, whatever that may be, at logolalia.com.

The URL is http://www.logolalia.com/untranslatable/

Please circulate this call as widely as possible, to anyone in any country or field of endeavor who might have examples to share. This is an open an ongoing call. I will attempt to accommodate all native and target languages to the best of my abilities.

I submitted a few words today. If you can think of some, Dan would be happy to have them.

Earlier this month, Paula Berinstein interviewed Hugh, Kara, Chris & me about LibriVox for her podcast, The Writing Show. We spent an hour on a Skype conference call talking about books, the challenges of reading and recording, how knitters, ggeks and 30-somethings seem to be interestedin LibriVox (often all in the same person!). And we each read a short selection. We laughed a good deal as we answered questions and overcame minor technical challenges, like Hugh dropping offline and a hard drive filling up.

The show's due out today (the 26th in the US) so you should be able to go there now and have a listen.

http://www.writingshow.com/

A while back, I and some of the other LibriVoxers (LibriVoxians, LibriVoxites?) were interviewed for a piece in Wired News. It was a great interview via iChat with Cyrus Farivar in the states, but check out the part where I'm mentioned and quoted:

For some volunteers, LibriVox is a way to combine their love of literature with their passion for the spoken word.

Kristen McQuillen, 39, has recorded 21 different chapters across nine different books from her home in Tokyo. For her, reading a book aloud to someone can make the work more understandable.

"I'm giving people who wouldn't have exposure to some of these classics in a way that's not so intimidating," she said.

Hmmmm. Misspelled name and a quote that makes no sense. I'm pretty sure I said another word in between 'classics' and 'in' -- perhaps 'exposure' or 'access.' Ah, well. The article gave LibriVox good exposure.

The Web Will Read You a Story

The new, improved LibriVox page

I just completed a web redesign project for LibriVox and I've never been more pleased with a collaborative effort before. It was nearly effortless, in fact.

I pitched in with the design and CSS coding, Chris in Sydney handled the SQL and server bits, and a bevy of helpful LibriVoxers in Canada and the US tested and critiqued. With everyone's input we made a huge improvement to the site in less than 48 hours. Nary a meeting, not a single phone call and no bruised egos.

The best thing is that the new design makes it easier for visitors to read our free audiobooks. And those with a desire to record chapters with us should have no trouble figuring out how.

And now that we have 10 books completed and another seventeen in the pipe, we should be seeing more traffic.

If you want to join in and read a chapter or two, visit the site, claim a chapter and record!

You may recall my September 26th report that someone was selling my Thai pants pattern on eBay. I contacted the seller, but never heard a word from her. I ratted her out to eBay and got a reply less than a month later:

We received your Notice of Claimed Infringement and have removed the identified listings. You can now search our site to look for potentially infringing items and report these to us.

Then they go on to enumerate the several ways I can report future transgressions.

Thank you eBay.

I received this e-mail from a stranger this weekend:

Hi - I don't often visit your website - but I remember it because of your thai pants pattern. I was wondering if you were selling it now on ebay? I saw this just before and I knew I had seen it before:

(link to the eBay Australia auction)

I hope it is you selling it! Good luck with your selling!

No, I don't sell things on eBay. My pants pattern is free for anyone to use but I have not granted rights for anyone to sell it. It's one of my all-time most viewed pages--it's been looked at over 22,000 times since I published it last February.

So I wrote to Kathy the seller on Friday night to tell her that despite her claim in the item's listing, she did not "own full rights" to the content in her 3 page e-book. I wished her well but asked her to stop selling my pattern.

I haven't heard from Kathy yet, but someone bought the pattern for five Australian dollars on Saturday and it hasn't been relisted.

I've mailed off the official paperwork to eBay's VeRO program to assert my right of ownership. I don't know what will come of it, but we will see.

What other of my works are out there being ripped off?

It seems to have launched without fanfare on July 13th, so when Tod stumbled across it this morning, we were excited. Google Maps now covers Japan in street maps based on the Zenrin maps.

We've amused ourselves testing the features and finding the bits that still need some work.

Google Maps finds addresses in Japan

Good Points

• Subway exits & bus stops are marked


• Every road, alley and driveway


• Blocks are numbered & buildings outlined


• Convenience stores, supermarkets and gas stations noted


• Local Search feature works

Local Search works if you search in Japanese

Still To Go

• Labelling of subway stations in the fully zoomed-in view is inconsistent


• 'Link to this Page' & 'Email' in Local Search sends you to the wrong map (but they work OK in regular map view)


• Driving directions don't work but maybe that's OK since everyone who drives has car navi.

UltraBob is forcing me to play this game with him; he says I'll die a horrible death if I don't. But MJ says UltraBob is a dead man anyway for passing the Baton to her, too. So either a die a horrible death now or wait til one of the people I pass along to kills me...hmmm.

You answer the questions, then pass them along to five people. It's a chain letter for weblogs. I've always hated chain letters, but at least this one gives me something to do for content on a work-filled Saturday.

Total volume of music files on my computer:

4.67 GB and much of it is royalty free stuff I use in film projects. The bulk of our music collection is stored on Tod's server.

Song playing right now:

Well, nothing is playing at the moment. The last song played (at 17:24 last night according to iTunes) was "Chittlin Ball" by King Porter Orchestra

The last CD I bought:

I buy them in batches. The last batch was contemporary female jazz vocalists: Holly Cole, Jane Monheit, & Stacey Kent.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

I listen to these because I am trying to learn them. So not only am I listening, I'm singing along, too. Must make the neighbors crazy.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Nice Girls Don't Stay for Breakfast
Embraceable You
Too Darn Hot
The Coffee Song

Five people to whom I�m passing the baton:

Collectively, the Zous (that's 4) and my sister, Jennifer.

My latest page for Altered Books

Altered Books is a poetry project run by my friend and poet extraordinaire, Dan Waber. The idea is simple:

Cut the bindings off of books found at a used book store. Find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration. Put pages in the mail and send them all around the world. Lather, rinse, repeat.

A quote from an unknown IRC channel, via bash.org

Egger: Heres the history of our medicine.
"I have a sore throat."
2000 BC : "eat this root"
1200 AD : "That root is heathen, say this prayer."
1500 AD : "That prayer is superstition, drink this elixir."
1800 AD : "That elixir is snake oil, Take this pill."
1900 AD : "That pill is ineffective, Take this antibiotic."
2000 AD : "That antibiotic is artificial, Here why dont you eat this root."

Fits hand in glove with the Health, United States, 2004 CDC report that Americans are overmedicated. Why does it always takes a study to discover the obvious?

When I was back in the States last month, I was shocked at the ubiquitous advertisements for medicines--not only OTC drugs like aspirin and new, improved "24 hour heartburn relief"--but also prescription medications for chronic and acute ailments apparently suffered by many Americans.

The advertising works, JAMA reports that doctors are prescribing advertised medicine--particularly when their patients request them by brand name.

Sad. A healthier lifestyle is so much better than medicine.

But that's not going to happen any time soon. This week, Archives of Internal Medicine reported that only 3% of American adults lead healthy lives based on four factors: not smoking; eating five daily servings of fruit & vegetables; exercising regularly; and maintaining a healthy weight.

How hard is this to understand? Eat better, move around a bit and you'll live longer and healthier without drugs.

Podcaster Scott Lockman features "Hello Tokyo" in his latest episode of Tokyo Calling:

Episode 14

This 19 minute podcast features a couple of news stories with a short discussion of some of the various websites for news from Japan in English, an excerpt from The Mediatinker's Hello Tokyo DVD, and a couple of emails from the listener letter bag.

Scott suggests I start a podcast--maybe a cooking show! What do you think. Shuld Mediatinker do online radio?

I'm starting to dislike the search-enabled, easy-access-to-information lifestyle. I'm putting the blame on Google, but it's all searchable databases that are doing this to me. Here are three reasons why:

Googling changes opinions.
I wonder if having such ready access to facts changes our opinions. If I think X, but then check and everyone else is saying X-prime, maybe I'll shift my idea to X-prime. Does Googling direct people into the mainstream of accepted thought?

Googling limits creativity.
Writing a blog entry that is factually correct is informative and important but what about creative invention? Don't new ideas require mistakes and false starts? Perhaps some people feel that those ought to be private, unpublished musings and notes but I don't think so. Incorrect ideas, suppositions, brainstorming--or even a question--invite people to participate. If you look up the answer online, you lose that chance to spark a new idea.

Googling is time consuming.
Googling and fact checking eat up a disproportionate amount of my day. It's not the searching itself that takes so long, it's the incessant need to know. Some of it is justifiable research for projects, but much of it is not. as an example, I spent ten minutes double checking an idea that I have no intention of ever implementing. Followed by a quick check of the name of that movie with that guy in it that I was trying to remember yesterday. And then a search to find out if I can buy a pair of gloves at Haneda Airport. Surely I have better things to do with my time...

Last week's Gingerbread CPU post was noticed by popgadget, then engadget then Boing Boing. It's funny how these things get passed around. I even made the Daypop Top 40:

Then it got translated by a number of non-English website in Japan, Iceland, Hungary and Sweden. The number of visits increased to more than 5 times my usual daily rate. I was having a lot of fun looking at my stats, though a bit disappointed that I wasn't being recognized for something I'd done myself. Such is the trouble with reporting on things.

By Day 3, [H]ard|OCP and Blue's News picked it up and traffic went up further. I was seeing more than 10 times my usual traffic.

On December 23rd, five days into this increase in popularity, Slashdot noticed what was going on. Tod & I had just returned from stocking up on cookie-making ingredients. While the butter was softening, I checked my mail to discover a comment from the blog: "Haha! You're getting Slashdotted!"

Hahahah! Wow!

Oh, hell! This was going to be trouble. We host my website on a server here at home.

Our server was doing OK. Tod's built a robust machine�it was found in the trash and sits at the end of a home-use 8 megabit DSL line. At the time of the slashdotting, the server had been up for 54 days continuously and it had no trouble keeping up on the CPU and memory side of things.

But our bandwidth was another story entirely. Pegged for a little while, then so flooded it was dropping packets or something because traffic was reduced to about a third of our usual 1.5 megabit upstream pipe. Uh-oh.

Tod used our little remaining bandwidth to chat with his friends on IRC's perl channel.

"Holy shit, my home webserver is slashdotted!" he wrote.
"Why?"
"EXPLAIN"
"Devin, what�s the URL?" came the instant, insistent, and not entirely useful replies.

But on a more helpful note, Mugwump saved the day by mirroring the gingerbread image for us. Thank you very much, you kind stranger from New Zealand and your council-sponsored fibre optic LAN.

About 20 minutes later, Mugwump asked if we could split the mirroring between his server and another one. It was a lot more than he expected--about 10 requests/second. So I tinkered the post and the header on my website and it make a huge difference for everyone.

Things calmed down quickly after we moved the images offsite and it wasn't long before I was able to surf for cookie recipes even while we were being slashdotted.

At about 6:30 pm, Jim called. He'd just seen it; did we know we were slashdotted? It's nice to have friend who are paying attention. He had a brilliant suggestion--I video�d a bit of the action.

The Slashdot Effect 1'06" 1.8 MB MP4

"You're famous now, what will it be like when America wakes up in 6 hours?" cautioned MoSH, one of Tod's colleagues in Switzerland. I bit my nails a bit.

Sure enough, after dinner as we started baking the cookies we'd mixed up, traffic started to increase. America was waking up. It was 11:30 pm in Tokyo. I expected a long night of watching and waiting.

"I have never seen an access logfile scroll so fast," Tod declared. "�in all my years staring at log files, which is a lot."

We were back up to 10 requests/second. The bandwidth was getting strained again. The traffic was only getting heavier. The east coast of the US was awake. And Chicago. But we seemed to ride the crest of it and by the time we woke up the next morning, things had settled down and the peak was over.

We're so lucky we don't pay by bandwidth used.

Over at iPod My Photo you can send in a digital picture and they'll turn it into an iPod style ad for you. It costs $20. If you have Photoshop and a little bit of time, you can do it yourself with respectable results.

The instructions that follow are for Photoshop CS on OS X. If you have a different version, ymmv.

How to iPod Your Photo
FIGURES

1. Open the photo you want to use.
2. Set your background color to a bright color ala the iPod ads. (According to Jennifer Apple, the real ad colors are: blue #1379F9, purple #9369BF, orange #F59110, green #9FCC39, pink #EB5297)
3. Copy your original image into a new layer
4. On the Background layer, Cmd-A then delete to remove the photo, leaving the colored background.
5. On the photo layer, use the eraser, magic wand, and lasso selection tools to remove the background of your original photo, leaving only the people.
• If you have several disconnected figures in the photo, copy the original image onto new layers for each figure, then remove the background cruft so that each layer has only one figure on it. In the example below I made one layer for me, one for mom and one for my mother-in-law. When you've completed erasing the background, link the layers with the people and merge them back together.
6. Image > Adjustments > Auto Contrast
7. Image > Adjustments > Desaturate
8. Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast
• Contrast -50
• Brightness -50
• then adjust as desired

SHADOWS

1. Duplicate the layer with the figures.
2. Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical
3. Position the shadow so it falls under the figure's feet, on the ground if the figure is jumping. If you have multiple disconnected figures, you may need to break the shadows apart to position them correctly.
4. Image >Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast
• Contrast -50
5. Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options
• Opacity 10%
6. Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur
• Radius pixels depends on your original image size...good and blurry!
7. Now you need to remove most of the shadow.
• Set the Elliptical Marquee tool to a 20 pixel feather (you may need to adjust upwards fro downwards according to your photo size)
• Select a small area around the feet of the figure.
• Repeat for each separate figure.
• Select > Inverse
• Press Delete

iPOD

1. Go to Apple's iPOD Gallery site.
2. Arrange the iPod approximately how the figure will hold it.
3. Cmd-shift-4 to take a screen shot
4. Open the screen shot in Photoshop
5. Use the Magic Wand to (set tolerance to 0) to select the white background, then Select > Inverse
6. Copy the iPod and paste into your photo.
7. Clean up any messy fringing with the Polygonal Lasso tool.
8. Image > Adjustments > Desaturate
9. Position and resize.
10. Erase (or draw) fingers on the figure so it is holding the iPod.
11. Repeat for additional iPods.
12. Create a new layer for the earbuds and wires.
13. Use the paintbrush tool (set to white) to draw in the wires and earbuds.
14. Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options
• Opacity 90%

TEXT

1. The font in the Apple ads is Myriad.
2. A fair substitute is Helvetica.
3. White, of course!

click for larger view

This is the most clever use of holiday gingerbread ever. I love the details done in licorice and chocolates.

It was posted by "Pab" on 4channel.org. Also found on that site, a Geek-mas tree and a gingerbread laptop, though I think maybe Santa needs to consider a new OS.

UPDATE - This gingerbread computer was created in Sweden. An entire folder of photos featuring Benny, Monica, Anna-Maria and Erik and their gingerbread building party is at monixa.se. They even made a gingerbread violin.

UPDATE - The tree decorations are by Joe, aka JavaMoose. He mailed me an updated image which is now linked above. Thanks, Joe.

UPDATE - Hello, Slashdotters! We're doing our best to keep up with you. Merry Christmas. love, Kristen

I've been playing with a few nifty things lately that I thought might be worth sharing. Two of them are cool tools for my iSight.

Delicious Library ($40) turns the iSight into a bar code scanner, allowing you to inventory your collection of books, CDs, games and videos. It looks up the details in Amazon's database and shows you cover art. A related tool, DeliciousExporter (free), allows you to generate web pages from the information.

Here's my library in progress--I need to rework those ugly templates and finish scanning the books. We have a lot of old books, too, so I need to do something about the cover art for them. If you hold your mouse over the blank covers, you can find out what the books are. Tod's offered to do the CDs.

iGlasses ($8)is very super handy for controlling the iSight. It gives you access to the video adjustments of you camera in iChatAV. There are a few presets for dark conditions, including a freaky green "night vision" mode. Some options are just plain silly, like upside down and a rotation through the spectrum that makes you look like you're in the disco. I use the sepia and black/white presets.

The best thing about iGlasses is you can make your own adjustments and save them. So now I don't look quite so magenta when I'm chatting with friends.

43 Things invites you to build a list of things you want to do with your life, either by clicking on one of the random items you see listed, or by typing in one of your own (it will be added to the pool). It is strangely compelling to read all the things people want to do--from "buy curtains" to "travel to all 7 continents" This is my list: 2164

My friends will back me up on this: I'd rather type than talk. I can count on one hand (minus the thumb) the number of people I will willingly and gladly phone. Everyone else gets me in e-mail or chat. I've been using real-time chat for so many years that I no longer see much difference between typing and talking. It's all communication to me.

This short film shows what too much IM can lead to. I wish I'd made this one, but I was beaten to the punch by three clever guys in Winnetka, Illinois--Picture Show Films.

Instant Mess (streaming Quicktime)

I'm used to seeing spam for unpronounceable pharmaceuticals, low interest rate loans, and housewife dating clubs, but this message took me by surprise:

SUBJECT: How one can become a terrorist?

You're invited to shop for large selection of bombs and different kinds of rockets such as surface-to-air, surface-to-surface and weaponry available at reduced price. With the following types of rockets you will be able to commit terrorist attacks, destroy buildings, electric power stations, bridges, factories and anything else that comes your mind.

Most items are in stock and available for next day freight delivery in the USA. Worldwide delivery is available at additional cost. Prices are negotiable.

[...]

Today special:

******* AIR BOMBS *******
OFAB-500U HE fragmentation air bomb
Fuel-air explosive air bombs -Not in stock
BETAB-500U concrete-piercing air bomb
ZB-500RT incendiary tank
500-KG SIZE RBK-500U unified cluster bomb

[...]

Our clients are well known Al-Qaida, Hizballah, Al-Jihad, HAMAS, Abu Sayyaf Group and many other terrorist groups. We are well known supplier in the market and looking forward to expand our clientage with assistance of Internet.

Tod tells me that this isn't spam, but a joe job, aimed to get online revenge on the contact person mentioned in the e-mail.

Still, it would be refreshing to see spammers branching out into this entirely untapped niche. Haven't you ever, in a fit of pique at the neighbors, wondered where to buy rocket launchers and missiles? From a disreputable spammer, by all means.

SUPER l00000w co$t m!ss!les and b0mbs 4U!!!! $ave up to 50% on all your t3rr0ri$t n33ds! Buy 2day & get a FR33 6-pack of pineapple gr3n4des. Perfect for home or office use.

Every once in a while Japan Today's RSS feed includes an internal memo. This one appeared this morning under "National Headlines"

MESSAGE TO JANE

Hi Jane, I moderated until 12:00am (0:00) on the message boards. There are some not so nice things going on so be careful on the people who are posting especially on Jenkins and the gay marrige issues. After you are done moderating for the day,...

Oops. I've also noticed partly-edited articles in their feed that turn up fully edited under a different headline later.

This glimpse inside the inner workings of JT isn't too compromising. But imagine a major news agency or corporation feeding something before it was ready: scoops, scandals, and all sorts of informational mayhem.

Any bets on when and where it will happen first?

A friend commented the other night, "Ah, that'd be a good domain name" in the exact same tone I reserve for "That would be a great band name."

Whoa. What a paradigm shift.

When my brain stopped spinning, I paused to think about it and, of course, it makes sense in the present day and in a practical way, too. It sure is easier to register a domain than it is to get a band together or cut an album. I wonder how many domains will be based on precocious notions over gin and tonics.

On a related note, Tod's just renewed our domains, so mediatinker.com and zousan.com are secure for another five years. I identify a little too much with my domain name--mediatinker isn't just my website, it's my domain.

Like just about everyone with e-mail, I've received a lot of messages in the last 24 hours regarding the Mydoom (aka Novarg) e-mail worm. Not only infected messages, but also bounce messages saying that mail I sent couldn't be delivered because it contained a virus. Of course, I didn't send the mail; the virus was running on someone else's computer and pretended it was me because my e-mail address was in someone's address book.

So here's the Worm Game: figure out who I know that was infected with Mydoom, by looking at the addresses the worm used to send mail from "me." In other words, whose addressbook has my name and the name of the intended recipient?

Probably it's more than one person. I can't think of anyone who might have my address plus addresses at

• legis.state.pa.us
• yahoo.it
• guardian.co.uk
• watchovia.com
• fractalfreak.com
• marlinbroadcasting.com

But if it's you, please update and run your virus scanner and stop clicking on attachments in your e-mail!

(If you don't use Windows, then it's not you. This worm, like most computer viruses, only runs on Windows.)

For the past few weeks, I've been trying to think of something clever to write about the spam email I receive. How it forms spontaneous, found poetry in my Trash folder, or how the From addresses are getting to be familiar like the names of long-forgotten friends.

But I am unable to say anything amusing or witty about this plague. I receive between 250 and 300 spams every 24 hours. My filters sometimes make mistakes, so I have to scroll through looking for real mail that's been marked as spam. This is extremely irritating.

A few years ago, one of my Tech Know columns was on stopping spam (Kill Spam in Metropolis issue 376). It was a good article, but plenty of what I wrote no longer applies. Those [insert expletive here] [insert additional expletive for good measure] spammers know a million ways to trick the system. I thought I had a pretty good arsenal, but in reality I know no ways to defeat them.

Tod gestures as he describes the Unix family tree with a very long diagram during a talk on FreeBSD for the Tokyo Linux Users' Group earlier today.

We followed up the technical talk with a nomikai where we discussed a wide range of non-tech topics, including kanji dissection and debate over whether Kansai or Tokyo style foods are better. Kitano-san made me call his pregnant wife to tell her he would be just a little bit late...

And then we all went off for a nijikai and enjoyed a rousing session of karaoke. Yuki is singing "Sk8tr Boi" while Baba tries to drown her out with "Linux Boi."

Tod, UltraBob and I managed a sanjikai at Corazon, our local pool hall. We discovered, to our dismay, that Corazon will close on the 23rd as their building is being torn down. More luxury apartments in the works, I suppose.

Yamanote29 is officially online today.

I've been busy this morning promoting it to various rail clubs and websites around the world. If you know of an organization that might like ( or link) Yamanote29, let me know.

As of today, we have 40 entries illustrating scenes from the Yamanote line in photos, video, and words. Four people and one Zou have contributed so far...

Please consider sharing your favorite story or photo to the site. Submitting is easy and you can do it in English or Japanese. Right now, everything's in English but pictures speak in every language.

One outstanding task is translation. I'd like to do the submission guidelines in Japanese, but I need some help. Anyone willing to give me a hand?

Today (oops, a day late!) I posted my entry for 26 Things, the international photography scavenger hunt. You might want look through my entry, 26 Things Around Tokyo, but it's equally fun to randomly choose another entry and see who did it and how it was made.

There's a huge variety of images for each of the 26 topics--each reflecting the photographer's personality and skill. What do my images say about me? I don't want to think about that too hard right now.

To celebrate three years of blogging at Media Tinker, today I'm announcing a new project. You are invited to take a peek at this pre-release of this "celebration of the Yamanote Line."

Yamanote29

You are cordially encouraged to contribute photos, stories, video, or audio relating to the Yamanote line, its stations, rolling stock, people and neighborhoods. (See the Submission Guidelines for details.)

Your feedback on improvements is also welcome. I'll be seeding the site with more video and photos so that there will be a representative entry for each station before the official launch on August 15th.

Hope you enjoy what's there now...

For the past couple of days I've been playing a photography scavenger hunt called 26 Things. The idea is to take one creative photo of each of 26 themes then make a web gallery and mail the URL to the organizers on August 1st.

So far, I've captured six themes: food, water, colour, little things, and time.

But there are some tricky ones. A creative depiction of love? Footwear? A sunset? I'm not even sure where to begin getting creative with a sunset.

Sometimes I'm not sure which theme to assign to a photo. Take this one, for instance. Is it authority, transport, construction, or signage?

Maybe it's just badly spelled.

You were born in the year of the Mockingbird. Mockingbirds are impatient but willing to wait when necessary. Strong willed and talkative, you believe that you can be beautiful or smart but not both.

Special color: chartreuse.
Lucky number: 11,357.
Best mate: Turtles or Hornets

Today you will find yourself thinking about the future but don't let that stop you from living in the moment. Wiggle your toes in the sands of time!

If you don't like this summary of your personality and forecast of your future, try one of these other horoscopes:
Astrology.com
Horoscope.com
Yahoo! Astrology
Horoscope Universe
Astrocenter

When the Zous decided to put on a play, I was all for it. And Hamlet is a favorite, so I was really happy that Zoupi had selected it. But I had no idea what a huge production it would become. Costumes, set, endless rehearsals.

The real work started when we decided to put it on the web. There were many options for presenting it--Flash, video with subtitles or dubs, stop-motion animation, still photography, and animated gifs. I tried and abandoned at least half the options before settling on a simple still gallery.

Even that took hours of work to get finished; the photography was spotty and everything had to be double checked for continuity. The Zous were very impatient and I was sorry that it took so long. But as of today, you can enjoy Hamlet, Act II scene 2 as presented by The Zous.

This is the photo I didn't submit to the Mirror Project. The one I sent in was added yesterday as number 16,449.

According to their website, "The Mirror Project is a growing community of like-minded individuals who have photographed themselves in all manner of reflective surfaces."

In blunt words, a bunch of narcissists and exhibitionists. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I've been reflecting lately about the nature of people with personal websites. Why do they have them? Why do they choose to reveal themselves (or not)? Why do they keep up the effort?

All I can do is answer for myself.

Why do I have a website? My first website was an experiment in 1994, when the web was new and we were still inventing Telerama. My site incorporated my resume, some recipes, and a reading list. It's morphed into this site over the years, but I've always aimed to use my site to educate. For now, that includes Hello Tokyo, course materials I've developed (like the DW4 workshop), and recipes.

Why do I reveal myself? My goal in life is to express an experience so that the audience understands it and relates to it. Perhaps this site remains an experiment because I find it interesting to see which posts resonate with comments--usually the ones where I reveal something about myself or ask questions. I have a thick skin, so people saying my site sucks or they think I'm useless really doesn't hurt (anymore).

Why keep up the effort? Because you can't build a body of work without expending effort and you don't earn a good reputation in your field without a body of work. I spend from 10 minutes to an hour every day writing, photographing and preparing entries. Maybe it's a compulsion or perhaps just a habit. Judging from my site stats, it's an effort my audience approves and from time to time an e-mail saying thanks buoys my spirit.

I'm taking a break today. Today's words courtesy of Jennifer; art by Helen.

"Ah, summer is here and free time for Helen is expansive. Remember the last day of school? How you slipped the covers off books and played hangman with your best friend, all excited for that last bell to ring? Then you went home to the daily rhythms and schedule of your parents that had been in place all year without you really knowing it.

"From a kid's perspective, the best way to dovetail into that schedule is to whine. Whine a lot and loudly about how bored you are. Eating ice cream for lunch is good too, and don't forget hours of cartoons.

"Yesterday, Helen and I put our creative forces together to create a website that features some of her paperpunch art on various merchandise. The actual art will be available on the wordpainting site soon.(*) Until then, why not shop at Helen's Craft Shop http://www.cafepress.com/wordpainting and support a summer-slogged kid?

"Please spread the word! Helen's saving for something special for her guinea pigs."

(*) Helen's paperpunch art's for sale online at the Wordpainting Bookshop now; I got that done this morning. :-)

An interesting conversation is going on over at the DigitalEve Japan discussion list about searching in Japanese vs English. One poster commented that searching for red Pajero at images.google.com and images.google.co.jp doesn't bring up the same results. Later she revealed that she was searching for it in Japanese on the Japanese Google, and in English on the English Google.

Which is not the same search at all. Why not?

Well, as I explained on the list, if you search for aka pajero and for akai pajero (with aka/akai in kanji and pajero in katakana) you get different results: 11 for aka pajero and 3 for akai pajero. If you spell out aka or akai in hiragana you get 0 results.

Yet all four variations are definitely the same idea of "red Pajero" that any Japanese reader would understand.

This must give Japanese search engine developers nightmares. I didn't even start on the variations of spaces between words or not. Generally, there are not spaces between words in Japanese. I usually search with spaces between words, though.

If you search for red Pajero in English on either images.google.co.jp or images.google.com you get 49 hits. Quite a few more than searching in Japanese.

So there are two issues involved:

1. There's more than one way to write "red Pajero" in Japanese.
2. There are more results in English than in Japanese.

Regarding 1, you must try all variations to find all results. No way around it.

As for 2, I'm not sure whether there are more hits on this search in English than in Japanese becasue there are simply more pages on the web in English, or whether Japanese webmasters tend to name their images and pages in English or romaji even on otherwise Japanese pages.

Does anyone know the breakdown of English pages to Japanese pages? I assume a whole lot more English than Japanese, but I don't know where to dredge up the actual numbers.

It's good to have geeky friends.

Dave and I have been playing with SquidCam a video conferencing program. It's a kissing cousin to the webcam tools I used back in the mid 90s.

Is it any better? Well, I can connect my real video camera to it, so the adjustments are a bit easier to make, and in these days of high bandwidth, we can send pretty decent video resolution at an acceptable framerate but at the expense of audio. If we want to hear one another clearly, we have to drop the video quality down, as pictured above.

So it's far from perfect. But it does let me hang out with Dave while he eats dinner and watches DVDs. And that's pretty fun. Launch squid!

Jean's got herself a new iBook (do you think there was any influence from me and Tod? Nah...) and Tod is giving her some tutoring. She's really happy to have wireless 'Net access in the living room. :-)

It still doesn't quite work--every time I quit Entourage, or if the IMAP server is jostled, I lose all of my filters. So every day or so, I have to reset all of my filtering rules. I've cut them down to a bare minimum so it only take a few minutes, but I really shoudln'thave to reset the filters everytime I launch the program.

But other than that, it's doing pretty well.

Tod spent hours today sorting out the firewall rules and Exim details so that I can send and receive mail using Entourage instead of webmail while I'm away. What a sweetheart.

I thought I'd take advantage of a lull during the holiday break to reconfigure the way my mail works. Tod's been wanting to do this for months and since I'll be travelling for almost a month starting in the next few weeks, it makes sense to use IMAP--where all the mail is stored on the server, giving me access to the exact same set up from my desktop or laptop or any other computer I care to use.

Except that I use Entourage as my mail client. It's a Microsoft product that I've really been satisfied with--up until now. Entourage and IMPA do not play nicely. It took hours to figure out simple things like moving my folders over to the server. I currently have 1327 messages in my "work" folder. I should have about 800. And to add insult to injury, it's really, really lsow. The I in IMAP stands for Instant but not if you're using Entourage.

Argh!!!

Since we switched to Zoot ADSL months and months ago, I haven't been able to send mail to anyone at GOL.com, a popular Tokyo ISP. GOL blocks all mail from our provider as spam. It's really irritating, as I have a half-dozen correspondents and clients with addresses at GOL. Everytime I need to contact them, I have to do it through a web interface with an account I don't use much anymore.

Tod's been promising for months to look into it; he got as far as getting some information and advice from a knowledgable friend about a month ago. But he hasn't yet contacted Zoot to ask them to fix the problem. I've complained about this often enough now that he has spent almost 3 hours this evening looking for the perfect words to express the problem and its solution in Japanese because Zoot doesn't have English support.

For some reason, this insistence on perfection is really irritating me. I would (and actually offered to) bang out the mail in 30 minutes, looking up a few words and using a lot of katakana for the technical terms. Mine might not be perfect and it would certainly lack nuance and politeness, but it would get the job done.

But that's not Tod's style. So he's meticulously looking up words and phrases while I've been reading a book waiting for him to finish. Only I'm almost finished with the book and he isn't anywhere near done with the e-mail....

So much for a pleasant Saturday night.

Argh, I really hate online tools that claim to help you shop for gifts. "Pick the perfect present!" "Take the worry out of gift giving." Buy bullshit gifts for people you don't know well enough to shop for.

If you don't know what to get someone, it's probably because they are not in the category of friend, family or social circle that needs a gift. You'd be better off not buying them anything at all.

If you want to amuse yourself, go see what these tools suggest for you. Plug in your own age/status/style, and see what they suggest. I've noted their ridiculous suggestions for me after each.

CNN Holiday Shopping (fluffy slippers or diamond earrings)
Amazon Gift Wizard (martini shaker set)
Yahoo Gift Center (Zagat Restaurant expansion card for Palm Pilot)
Epicurious (martini gift set)
MySimon (Glamourous by Ralph Lauren)
Home Shopping Network Holiday Gift Guide (10 silverplate picture frames)
Style.com Holiday Gift Guide (suspended fireplace)
Sharper Image Guift Guides (corkscrew/foil cutter set)
Neiman Marcus (Burberry novacheck serape)

It's fun and addicting. Bookworm is a solitaire word game using Scrabble tiles--like Boggle but not as noisy. :-)

It's very hard to stop playing. Good thing this is a long weekend.

My life is public. I write here daily and I've been contributing my ideas, words and images to newsgroups, Internet bulletin boards, publications and websites for more than ten years. So when you do a web search for "Kristen McQuillin" you'll find a lot of references.

But today I found one that surprised me. I was playing with KartOO, a search engine that draws relational diagrams and I clicked through to this article at Scientific American. They borrowed images I'd drawn for a 1997 grad school project on the history of zero. What a surprise--they never even asked. I took the original project off the web a while back, but my images lived on. I discovered my History of Zero project cited in two other places so I've just dug out the files, updated them and put them back on my site.

I have a video editing project with no particular deadline, though I've put it off long enough that now I want it over so I can spend time procrastinating on other projects. For the past two months, I've been working on it, getting frustrated with my preferred software which is not OS X ready, and putting it aside. So when it turned up on my To Do list today, I thought I'd try out iMovie, Apple's consumer-level DV software. My project doesn't require too much fancy stuff and iMovie should deliver the basic titling and cross dissolves I need.

Well, it does all that, but not very smoothly on my machine. About three hours into my work, it decided it didn't have enough memory and quit. Now my 450 MHz G4 computer is kitted out with 512 MB of RAM, enough for every other application I've ever run. Either iMovie is bad at memory management or I need to add RAM. Of course, since the average lifespan of computers is 3 years and my computer is 2.5 years old, perhaps it's time to start thinking about a future purchase.

Maybe there will be a 1 GHz dual-processor G4 for my birthday 8 months from now... (Do you think that's enough of an advance hint?)

I've always been fascinated by things in the night sky; when I was a little girl I wanted to be an astronaut. I memorized sky charts and read all the classic science fiction epics.

Living in a city, I don't get to see the night sky, so I content myself with NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day and take delight in reports like today's about an image of the universe (pictured here) just 300,000 years after the Big Bang (that's about 15 billion years ago) from the Cosmic Background Imager.

Maybe someday I'll be a space tourist. Until then, I've heard that there's good stargazing along some of Japan's coasts.

Our February phone bill arrived (26,121 yen). I must stay offline more. Right after I do some research on ADSL providers.

When we moved we had to switch our Internet connection over to the new apartment. Only it wasn't as simple as that. We had to reapply for ADSL service which meant a 4-8 week wait. When the company finally contacted us to arrange installation, we discovered they'd changed their policy and no longer offered the service we needed.

So now we're back to searching for a provider that will sell us what we want--24x7 high-speed 'Net connection that allows us to telnet into our machine at home. Ideally, not at a corporate rate which is about 10 times higher than residential rates. I'm sure there must be a service like this, but the trick is wading through the Japanese sites to find it.

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26 Things
Mirror Project
Pinhole Day 2003
Neighborhood Project
SiTO
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Being Webgrrl of the Week is probably more about whether you fill in the interview form at all, than how well you complete it. Still, I managed to be given the honor this week.

If they knew back at the New York HQ how much time I've given over to Japan Webgrrls this week, I might say they'd selected wisely. In addition to teaching an HTML for Webgrrls seminar on Web Publishing, I'm organizing the Japan chapter's 4th anniverary event, e-Lifestyles. Lucky for me, it's lots of fun.

But I wonder why my book proposal doesn't get finished...

Making travel plans is always a bit of a pain, but using the Internet for research and contact makes it a little bit less difficult.

I have managed to get our trip to Italy sorted out almost completely online. Flights from my favorite travel agent here in Japan were booked via e-mail. I've got the train information I need for land transfers; hotels are sending me information and confirmations. I even found a fascinating walking tour in Rome.

Sure I could have gone to a travel agent directly and had them book all my accomodations and things, but using the Internet allowed me to choose among very interesting small hotels. And since I contact the hotels I've selected directly, I have a personal contact when I arrive in Italy, not just a confirmation slip.