Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Psymeg & Chooch

Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan is the blog of Simon Gibson, a New Zealander living in Tokyo, Japan. Focused on New Zealand, Japan, web design and other shiny things.

Tokyo’s Penguin House

A nice video from National Geographic showcasing Tokyo architect Yasuhiroi Yamashita’s Penguin House. It is quite fascinating to watch this and to see how he utilises the height of rooms to give a greater feeling of spaciousness to the houses he works on.

What interests me with Japanese architecture is how they manipulate space and light to create some beautiful living environments. Little in the way of traditional building techniques and materials are evident – for me, I would rather go all the way – completely traditional, or on the other hand something like the penguin house.

Japan’s Big Rigs – Beautiful Beasts

Japanese Deco-truck

If people anywhere in the world are likely to go overboard when doing things then the Japanese would have to be right there at the top, and deco-tora or deco-trucks are a rockingly great example of this.

Taking the decoration of the vehicles to almost unimaginable heights, the owners of these trucks add all sorts of magical lighting, paneling and decoration to make their trucks works of art. The photo above is from pingmag, who have an interesting article about an exhibition of photographs of these pop culture icons by Japanese photographer Masaru Tatsuki. From their post:

This pretty colourful aspect of Japanese pop culture has been extensively explored by photographer Masaru Tatsuki who spent ten years with the truckers of Japan’s highways. Today PingMag walks over to Masaru’s current exhibition at Harajuku‘s Little More Chika gallery to catch up with him about his new photo book.

You can read the full interview here in English: Masaru Tatsuki’s Decotora Photo Op

And it isn’t just cars and trucks that get decorated – I once saw a deco-chari, a decorated bicycle, done up to look like the rider was in the cab of a big rig! Now that was something special!

Colour Chooser Tool for Website Design

This is quite a handy tool if you are designing a page or doing some graphic work. It allows you to check out a range of colours.
Sadly the original page is gone – but you can find another useful color palette chooser here:

http://websitetips.com/colortools/sitepro/

I have used this color chooser to get base ideas for designing quite a few sites and it really is a very useful web design tool. Well worth bookmarking!

Humanaught – Great Blog Design!

Just been having a bit of browse around the internets and I stumbled acorss a blog by the name of The Humanaught: A China Blog On Suzhou Expat Life. Wow it is pretty! Wordpress is an amazingly versatile thing.

Humanaught - Great Blog Design!

Check it out – one of the best blog designs I have ever seen: The Humanaught: A China Blog On Suzhou Expat Life.

China vs. Germany

Found these great representations comparing China and Germany through design up at China Digital Times. The designer Liu Yang, is a Chinese born German designer who uses the simplicity of good graphic design to communicate the cultural and social differences between the two countries.

This first one shows the differing attitudes to lining up to buy tickets. If you have been to China you will know that those scrummaging skills developed on the rugby field are highly valuable:

Queing by Liu Yang

The second image is more interesting, being a depiction of the self:

Self by Lui Yang

The blue sections of the images refer of course to German culture, with those in red denoting the Chinese equivalent. Interestingly, Japan would be German in the image of the people lining up, and Chinese in the image depicting the self.
It is difficult of course, to pare down cultures as diverse as German or Chinese into simple images, but these I think are very effective.

We went to Germany for one night a few years ago and I remember being quite surprised as to how relaxed everyone was. When we went through immigration there were two immigration officers having what must have been to them quite a fascinating discussion. They didn’t even look at us as they stamped our passports!

On our way back out it was much the same, except we saw them round up a person of middle eastern descent. Ah, the joys of being white. I guess some stereotypes are true after all.

joblet.jp: Japan’s Distributed Job Network

joblet.jp japan’s distributed job networkAs you may (or may not) know, I am currently looking for work in Tokyo. Now, this isn’t the best time of year to be doing so, especially with the problems Nova has been having – if they go under then there will be an extra several thousand starving and homeless foreigners rampaging throughout Japan, and some of those may well be looking for a new job. But with a city the size of Tokyo there are always opportunities and I have my nose hard to the job hunting grind stone!

On that note, Upstairs for thinking pointed out a nice new site: joblet.jp. Joblet: Japan Jobs Network is run by the people who bring us piqniq – Japan’s family networking site, asoboo and seekjapan.jp

Update: Joseph from Joblet.jp sent me this update about the projects they have been involved in:

As a side-note, we developed Piqniq.jp but it’s run by GOL, and Seekjapan.jp is run by the Japanzine folks, though the designer there helped out with Joblet a bit.

Still obviously in its early days, the site is a great example of the power of ruby on rails, although to my mind it looks a bit too much like ruby on rails sites always do. Once they have a few more jobs up there I imagine this will give sites like daijob and gaijinpot a real run for their money (at least joblet is a much nicer name than either daijob -dai means big – or gaijinpot). And I imagine that as they were using ruby on rails they had a lot more fun getting the site up and running.

If you are running a website focused on Japan then you may be interested to know that they are offering widgets with a pretty good compensation package – 60% (average Â¥2,000) for each unique,qualified applicant you refer. Check out their website for more details.

Fingers crossed for the job search. If you know anyone who needs a foreigner with great Japanese skills, the ability to get down and funky with computer systems and a passion for writing then send me a message via the contact page.

Mixi vs. Facebook

Facebook vs. Mixi

Having used the Japanese social networking site mixi.jp for a number of years now, and recently (3 months ago?) started using facebook, I thought I would post my thoughts on the two. I imagine most of the western readers of this site will be familiar with facebook, but less so with its oriental counterpart.

The mixi experience is quite different from the facebook experience. It is a nice orange for starters. Overall the focus of the mixi site is more on communicating about ones life than with facebook. Most people who use mixi keep a diary, and it functions as a kind of blogging system for a lot of users. Commenting is common for most posters, so in a way it combines the best of sites like blogger or wordpress with a social networking platform. on the other hand, features such as galleries in facebook seem much more ‘added on’ and not part of the base design.

Facebook’s design isn’t great, it is stolid, something we would expect a middle manager somewhere, anywhere to give the green light on. Functional and reasonably easy to navigate around, facebook is effective enough at connecting people. This for me has been the thing that entices me with facebook, finding friends from high school and further back in time. Living here in Japan one doesn’t, for example, run into Damien from primary school at the supermarket as one might back in ones home country so it is quite a special feeling to browse through other peoples contact lists and to suddenly have a name that one hasn’t thought about in a very long time pop out.

To give you some idea of mixi usage, mid week there was a TV programme which featured a minor Japanese celebrity, a rakugo performer, whose “job” was to learn how to rap “8 Mile” style. Rap and African American culture is big in Japan so there are a lot of rap groups, most of which aren’t quite as full on as their counterparts across the pacific. However the producers of the show did a great job in finding a pretty hardcore group in Nerima Ward of Tokyo.

The celebrity spent time with them and picked up some of their lingo. As well as learning to use ‘dis’ (as in disrespect), he also picked up the phrase ‘man’ as in ‘whats up man?’ This did the rounds in a lot of workplaces the next day, and was also written about on a lot of people’s diaries on mixi. Over 6000 people wrote about it which is a pretty large number for a reference from a TV programme.

Mixi, as well as having gallery options, has also recently added a video uploader much akin to youtube. Compared with facebook, features such as galleries in mixi seem much less ‘added on’ and more part of the base design. Another feature which i like with mixi is the ‘ashiato’ or footprints feature. This enables one to see who has looked at your page, and to then trace the connections back to them. Narcissistically, it also records the number of visitors to ones page.

In terms of system architecture, mixi was written in Perl, and facebook is in php. I am not sure if this is the cause, but mixi is noticeably faster than facebook. Network speed could be a factor – we all know how much better Japan’s network infrastructure is.

Facebook seems more public, whilst mixi is more private – I think this reflects the two cultures in that Japanese people in general are much more concerned about their privacy, about what is public, and what is private. Mixi also seems more keyboard based whereas Facebook, with its vampires and its bar, pokes and walls (third party applications which allow you to interact with other people) seems to be more mouse based.

Mixi has communities whereas Facebook has networks. On Mixi, one can belong to multiple communities – if you are interested in Mandrake Linux you can join that community, and there are some very obscure communities such as people running Apple OS 7 and below. I myself run the tenkasu community (tenkasu is the rice bubble like by product of making tempura) which has over 40 members – believe it or not.

The Facebook networks are limited to places, workplaces and schools as far as I have been able to work out. Also, as far as I know, one cannot create networks, only suggest them, which isn’t terribly useful if one lives in a country the size of Japan, but fine if you live in Tampa, Florida.

I also used myspace for about 2 days. Myspace was great in that i was able to find a lot of the musicians i was into when i was at university, but i just found the site too slow, the interface badly thought out and the overall design too unattractive to spend much time with it.

Overall I think mixi is a much more successful site than facebook, although the language barrier that exists between Japan and the west means that its popularity will never spread beyond the shores of the land of the rising sun. Perhaps it doesn’t need to.

Website Update

Well, you may have noticed the sites design has changed. It felt like an update of the design was in order – and there was a new release of wordpress (the software that powers this site) so I thought I would combine the two.

It has broken a few things – the youtube plugin I was using doesn’t seem to work properly, but then I should be writing posts and not just slacking off and posting videos;)

I didn’t post for a while, many reasons of course. One was that firefox got a bit bogged down – running too many extensions. Firefox extensions can be useful but they do impact on performance. Removing them has made using firefox much faster. I also thought that the youtube videos were slowing down the site, but it turned out that removing the extensions fixed the problem.

BTW, the skin I am using at the moment on this site is based on Fluid Solution.

One of these days I will have to get a windows machine so I can test what things look like for most people. But I think I will wait until they opensource Vista…

Blizzardboy New Design

Bird!If you are reading this blog with a browser then you probably have noticed that the look of the site has changed a bit. If you read this blog through RSS then you might want to pop up a browser and have a look.

I updated the software – wordpress – that powers the blog to the current version – 2.1. The upgrade was really easy, all I had to do was to ftp the new files on to the server. It took about half an hour to get the files up and then about 20 seconds to run the install script. Have to hand it to the people who put together wordpress. They sure have things set up smoothly.

That done I thought it was time to update the look of the site. Apologies if things look strange, but I promise that I wont changes things once I get everything tidied up. Well at least for a couple of months. In my experience changing a web sites design is quite a dangerous thing to do, there are a number of sites I have stopped viewing as much, gaijinpot and the press being a couple of examples. Of course there aren’t that many people who read this blog, so I am not so worried about that.

Pink October Wordpress Skin

The previous blog template was a slight modification on the Pink October Wordpress theme kindly put together by Derek Punsalan at 5ThirtyOne.com. I put that one up as Bitshifter pointed out the comments weren’t working properly, and even though Upstairsforthinking liked the triangles it never really felt like “me” so hence we have a new skin. (btw comments have been tested this time, and they seem to be working! they haven’t been tested on windows though).

I wanted to go for a more traditional blog look with a number of posts on the main page, rather than one full post and then excerpts from another five. I think if people drop by occasionally then it is easier for them to read through the posts. I still have to fix up the link blog, and a few other little things.

Hope you like it!

Rent My Flat in Feodosia website redesign up

Rent My Flat in Feodosia LogoAbout a week ago we released the updated Rentmyflatinfeodosia.com website on the world. The website is a very simple site, introducing a rental apartment in the Crimean city of Feodosia.

Feodosia is in the Crimea which is a part of the Ukraine. I must say that when I started working on the site I knew nothing about the area. Of the Ukraine, my image was of heavily moustached ex-Soviet weight lifting women (I may be confusing Bulgaria there though) and the Chernobyl tragedy.

Regarding the Crimea my image was of a playground for Russian intelligentsia and nobility on the Black Sea and the exchange of poems between the lawnpoet Tennyson who wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Rudyard Kipling’s Baxteresque response The Last of the Light Brigade.

As I found out while working on the site, the region has a very long and fascinating history. Feodosia, where the apartment is located, was founded back in the 6th century B.C. under the name of Theodosia, by Greek settlers from Miletus. This settlement was destroyed by the Huns in the 4th century AD and then again by the Mongols in the 1230’s. Around this time it was controlled by the Venetians and then by the rival doge state of Genoa. At this point it was known as Caffa.

In 1475 the city was seized by the Turks and renamed Kefe. As part of the Ottoman empire Kefe became one of the most important Turkish ports on the Black Sea. Turkish control lasted until 1783 when the expanding Russian empire conquered the Crimea. The city was renamed Feodosiya in 1802 – a Slavic interpretation of the ancient Greek name.

The city remained part of Russia until World War II when it was twice captured by Nazi Germany forces. In 1954 it came under the administrative control of the Ukrainian SSR along with the rest of Crimea.

Aivazovsky PaintingToday Feodosia is a popular resort town on the Black Sea. Highlights include museums to the painter Ivan Aivazovsky, the poet, painter and philosopher Maximillian Voloshin, as well as the Soviet Social Realism writer Alexander Green. Feodosia is also close to the town of Koktebel – location of the largest nudist beach in the former Soviet Union!

I met the owner of the apartment when we were staying in Istanbul. He was asking around for who knew about search engine optimisation for his website. We had a bit of spare time so I said sure, I know a bit about that. Did a bit of tinkering around and he was quite happy with that. He got the top position on google for the keyword Feodosia.

I didn’t like the design he had for the site. So it was quite enjoyable to work on the redesign. He has very good content – the most important thing for search engines, but the design was somewhat lacking. I wanted to make a very simple site, that was fast to load and easy to navigate. It didn’t need any funky web 2.0 bells and whistles as it is an information site. Besides, creating some sort of interactive web system would have created more work for him than was really necessary.

For the design I incorporated a lot of the principles expounded by Information Architects. I am sure the site is not as nice as Information Architects, but the ideas they expressed were very helpful. For the image galleries I used the javascript css image gallery thumbnail script solution from dynamic drive. This allowed me to keep away from using flash – I think using flash is one of the biggest mistakes a person can make when designing a web site. Flash does have its uses – Eyezmaze being a great example, but for ordinary websites it is overkill, making sites sluggish and frustrating as well as being incomprehensible to screen readers and almost as bad for search engines.

All in all a very rewarding experience. Check out the Rent my flat in Feodosia website. Some images are not safe for work (NSFW) – thanks largely to that nudist beach near Koktebel. I haven’t been able to check the site on Internet Explorer so any feedback about that, or feedback about the site in general would be greatly appreciated.

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