Aug 16, 20080
Where Chooch has lived
Jun 1, 20082
Hat-tip to Kiwiology
Shouts to the team at Kiwiology for adding this blog to their directory of New Zealand blogs. Ka pai!
Kiwiology is…
Kiwiology is a directory of kiwi blogs – the stuff that makes up the New Zealand blogosphere.
Blog topics include, but are not limited to:
New Zealand blogs, Kiwis blogging overseas, blogs about New Zealand politics, the environment and sustainability in New Zealand (or by people based in New Zealand), New Zealand’s economy, Kiwi businesses and business topics, New Zealand issues and current events and kiwis’ personal blogs.
Recent blogs (as of this posting) added to kiwiology include:
Also, if you have a New Zealand related blog, or would like to suggest one, you can add it here.
Apr 21, 20080
Hiroshige’s Kage’e – Shadow Prints
Above is a print by the Edo period printmaker Hiroshige depicting a hawk. It is in the style of Kage’e or shadow print, something I hadn’t seen before I stumbled on the post Kage-e: Shadow pictures over at the Pink Tentacle blog. You can see more shadow prints at that page.
I love the way it is so delicately clever.
Apr 4, 20083
Barcodes the Japanese Way
We have all seen barcode tattoos, and have probably heard about evil satanic barcode conspiracies (they mean 666 and represent the end of the world of course!) but Japanese company Design Barcode KK (デザインãƒãƒ¼ã‚³ãƒ¼ãƒ‰æ ªå¼ä¼šç¤¾) has taken things a step further by taking the barcode and reworking it into the package design as a whole.
I found these while looking at Dark Roasted Blend – a collection of weird and wonderful things. They have some very fascinating photos:)
Mar 9, 20080
Chinpo Stick and the Virgin Mary
Ah Pink Tentacle. One of Japan’s more interesting blogs. Hot pink on black like a racy 80’s Cyndi Lauper video hacked up by a Harajuku fashion freak. All good. Just having a read of that blog, and saw a couple of posts about Akita. There was once a crying Virgin Mary statue in Akita City. Carved from a Judas tree. Is that ironic or just a coincidence? It stopped crying in 1981. Metallica was formed in 1981. Is there a connection? Just another conspiracy theory… And they say Jesus is buried in Aomori.
And also Kirichimpo: Phallic promotional mascot. I remember kiritanpo was a regional delicacy from Akita, I only tried it once because it normally has chicken stock in it. But I never saw anything like Kirichimpo when I was there.
Nice to see Akita news getting out there.
Feb 9, 20081
Japan Keibai.com: Foreclosed Japanese Property
Found this site: Japankeibai.com whilst surfing the intrawebs today. The website has a good number of foreclosed property listings, mostly in Tokyo as well as in Osaka and other parts of Japan. Still not quite sure how the service works, but the properties seem to be very cheap. I know a number of foreigners here in Japan who bought property here during Japan’s bubble period, and who paid some very high prices for those properties, and as a result are still paying off home loans from that period. Today things are a bit easier, and if these properties are as cheap as they appear to be then there are some really good deals on the japankeibai.com site.
As a little aside, when we were in Akita late last year we saw some properties being advertised for sale there. The cheapest houses were 1,200,000 yen – and that is for a house! In the middle of nowhere, and pretty run down, but insanely cheap! More normal and livable house started at around 3 times that.
Here is a list of the latest properties listed on the Japan Keibai website:
Jan 31, 20082
A new theme
Well, working on a new look for this site… still tidying it up at the moment, as time allows. It felt like time for a change! Hope you enjoy.
Jan 26, 20081
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!
Dec 23, 20070
No Possible Soundz Vol. 3 – New Release!
Just finished an update of the 6 Dimension Soundz website. Included in the update are mp3’s you can download for the upcoming New Years release of No Possible Soundz Vol. 3. A cracking collection of the finest Finland has to offer, this album rocks the socks off crocks of jocks!
Also Mandalvandalz popular Poison Machine has been re-released, so if you missed out, now you can grab a copy.
Also up are mp3s from Sci Forest’s classic Fetish Box, as well as crunchy Finland psyke ninjas Puoskari from the Open the Forest release.
Enjoy!
Sep 8, 200710
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.