In Defense of Blogging: Lifestreams are Lifeless

A few days back Om Malik published a blog post called ‘The Evolution of Blogging,’ which (among other things) asserted that:
Blogging needs to be social. There are many reasons for this, but the most important one — in my mind — is the changing nature of content. “We will all be streaming life moments as [...]

On Transparency

The other day I received a China-related newsletter update. For the purposes of this post there’s no need to mention which company it came from. But I do want to point out one little detail that irked me just enough to make me unsubscribe. It’s not a mortal sin, but one that deserves attention I [...]

Memetics & Accessibility

This is the third update about my OldNewfoundland.com Project. Here are the others:

Do Something
Maps, Drupal, and OldNewfoundland.com

Drupal Modules installed this time: Content Construction Kit (cck) & Embedded Media Field (emfield), Voting API & Vote Up/Down, Views
Previously installed modules: Gmap, Location, Poormanscron
Also changed to White Jazz theme.

Memetics
The other day I met with @jcayzaq, @karamoon, and the [...]

Maps, Drupal, and OldNewfoundland.com

This is the second update about my OldNewfoundland.com Project. Here are the others:

Do Something
Maps, Drupal, and OldNewfoundland.com
Memetics & Accessibility

Modules installed this time: Gmap, Location
Previously installed modules: Poormanscron
I blogged a few months back about my collaborative Japan map experiment, which is essentially an open Google map of Japan that anyone can edit much like a [...]

Are we rewarding good behavior, or just any behavior?

Thanks to Chris for the link to this bokardo article, which by itself I wasn’t so interested in but rather the question at the end got my attention.
Are we rewarding good behavior, or just any behavior?
The internet is a strange place to be right now. Anyone can become a relatively well-known personality online just by [...]

Tracking the Urumqi Riots on Drop.io

Over the past few days we’ve seen some pretty startling events go down in Urumqi. The riots there have left 156 people dead (both Han and Uighur) and more than 800 injured so far. Like any breaking event in China, the early hours are pretty critical in making sure that photos and videos that leak [...]

Pop-up Translations in Safari with Apple’s Japanese Dictionary

I’ve never really thought that OSX’s dictionary app was very useful. I mean, I’m not going to open up that application whenever I want to check a word. I’ve always preferred mouse hover screen-tips like Firefox’s Rikai plugin.   But even that isn’t a perfect solution. I don’t really like having to toggle it on [...]

Learn Programming from Scratch

Finding programming study resources is tough. I mean, there’s no shortage of material out there on the internet, but from a total beginner’s perspective I’ve always found it hard to know where to start. So many tutorials assume some prior knowledge which I just didn’t have.
Here are a few links that I’ve found which stand [...]

Do Something

This is the first post about my OldNewfoundland.com Project. Here are the others:

Do Something
Maps, Drupal, and OldNewfoundland.com
Memetics & Accessibility

If I deleted my website, would anybody really care? I think everybody should ask themselves this question. In fact, lets go a step further. If you were somehow thrown from the planet by a sudden [...]

On My 6 Month Japanniversary

I came to Japan on November 28 of last year, and that makes tomorrow the 6 month mark. Here are a few random observations from my brief stay in Tokyo so far. Any suggestions on how to proceed during my next 6 months are most welcome:

Tokyo will never get old: There’s always some corner of [...]

Musical Tesla Coils in Japan: Nicola would be shocked…

There was an abundance of NicoNico Tech at the Make Tokyo Meeting this past weekend. Among all of the Hatsune Miku projects, the musical tesla coil had to be the best. I managed to shoot a little video so you can see – and more importantly hear – what’s going on.
The project was created by [...]

April’s Blog Posts

Here’s a quick summary of stuff I’ve written over the past month. Let it never be said that I ain’t keepin’ busy.

A Day of Sumo

The other day I got a chance to check out some sumo for the first time since arriving in Japan. Besides having to wake up at 4:30am in the morning to head out to the stadium to stand in line with hundreds of wrinkled Japanese senior citizens, it was a pretty cool experience.
We had awesome [...]

Tokyo CGM Night 4

The latest Choo/Shuttleworth CGM event was held at Super Deluxe last night. As always it was a great chance to catch up with old friends and meet some new ones too. It was especially fun catching up with Shane Sakata, the writer behind The Nihon Sun. Her blog is one of my favorite Japan blogs [...]