Jan 17, 2007
Despite being introduced late in the nineteenth century by the British in Yokohama, cricket has never been a big thing in Japan. Baseball has always been more popular – probably as a result of the lower cerebral threshold required to play and watch the game.
I know the Japan Cricket Association (日本語）has been doing an excellent job to develop the game throughout Japan, but I didn’t realise it had spread as far as my little neck of the woods. So I was quite happy to discover that Tsukuba has a cricket team. There is a quite a large international population in the area so it isn’t that surprising.
They have a website up – you can check out the Tsukuba Cricket page here. A quick look at the wicket and it suggests plenty of bounce and movement off the seam early on, with prodigious spin by days four and five – depending on the amount of tape on the tennis ball.
Who knows – if any kiwis out there make double figures in a couple of games they should be a shoe-in for a prestigious place in the much vaunted Black Caps top order.
Jan 15, 2007
It has been about a year and a half since I bought this powerbook and made the change to using a mac. From a design point of view Apple have done a wonderful job and overall I think OS X is an excellent operating system. Coming from a linux background I am used to using open source software and tools, and that is probably the biggest limitation to using Apple computers.
One of the main tools that is missing is a free ftp client. I grew up using gFTP, which is about as solid as a piece of 2 by 4. The most popular FTP clients for OS X are Fetch (off topic, but in Japanese that means fetish), and Transmit – both have 15 day trial policies, after that you have to pay to use them.
I did a bit of a search around last year for an open source ftp client and couldn’t find much of a solution. The answer came when I updated firefox. Now I know a lot of Mac users are reticent to use anything other than safari, but if you install a firefox plugin called FireFTP then you have an FTP client.
FireFTP doesn’t support some things like sFTP or SSH or unicode character filenames. But I haven’t had any problems with using it. When it installs it takes you to a page asking for donations for orphans in the Balkans which is a nice idea – you don’t have to pay, but you can if you appreciate the hard work the developer put into creating the software.
If you need a copy of firefox you can download one here,
and the FireFTP client can be downloaded from the FireFTP site.
Nov 16, 2006
Found this neat little tool that allows you to look up words from the definition.
So I put in small furry mouse catcher as a kind of test. And look at the results – pretty cool eh!
A search for “New Zealand flower arrangement” came up with Mike Moore which was amusing. A more normal search for “Japanese flower arrangement” gave us ikebana – the correct result.
The reverse dictionary site is at onlook.com. Perfect if you just can’t remember “that” word. And we all know how often that happens.
Good too if you are learning English and want to increase your word power.
