Tomorrow night I leave Tokyo for a day-trip to Niigata. My wife is giving a presentation at a symposium (regarding Chinese politics/history), so we’re making a day-trip out of it. We take a night bus from Ikebukuro (where I live) that leaves Friday night at 11:30, and we should get there early Saturday morning around 5. We’ll return by night bus that same night at 11. Although we’re saving some money by taking the bus instead of the Shinkansen (the Japanese rapid train), the shitty thing is that I won’t get to see the great scenery that we’ll be travelling through since it’ll be at night. I’ve yet to see the Japanese alps, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to see anything from Niigata city, but here’s hoping. I’m definitely bringing my digital stills camera with me, as well as my digital video camera, so I’ll have lots of pics from there for the next week or so of daily pics.

Starting tomorrow, my TOKYO BOY weblog will start appearing at the main OPi8 site instead of in the forum. I’ll now be able to leave a permanent link on this site to lead you to it. I’ll make an annoucement (as usual) as soon as it’s up.

So I’m back with Moveable Type, and back to the original page design as well. I think everything with MT should work fine now, but if ever it screws up again, I’ll be able to quickly switch over to Blogger. I think it was just a stupid little spacing problem in the code, but I still don’t know why it popped up. But anyway, hopefully things will go smoothly from now on. As for the return to the original page design (with the daily pic presented on the front page), well, as someone commented, it works better that way.

I really enjoy the photography at the Suction site. I like the way the pics are presented in a series. I think I may have to steal this idea for some future issues of GEISHA.

This is just not my week for Web stuff. After transfering to the MT system, something happened and all the styles I had configured (to make it look a certain way) totally disappeared, and I can’t figure out how to get things back to normal. In the meantime, I’m going back with Blogger, which is also giving me problems. I had to change some settings to export all my entries to the MT system, and now I can’t change them back because Blogger seems to be having server problems, which is why all my entries are appearing, and not just the ones from the past few days. Hopefully this will be fixed soon. Sorry for all the confusion.

For those wondering, I’m still putting up daily pics on the site, it’s just that they won’t be on the front page anymore. To view the pic, click on the “daily pics” icon to the right. The picture should appear in a separate window, just like my GEISHA e-zine does. I was thinking of making it automatically pop up when the front page is loaded, but that could be annoying for some, so I’ll leave it like this for now.

As you’ll also notice, I’ve been playing around a bit with the positioning of the weblog on the page, in order to better take advantage of the new Moveable Type features. The biggest difference you’ll notice is the fact that the daily pic is no longer on the main page as you arrive, but rather a seperate window you need to pop up now. This means that I’ll be better able to play around with the size of the pictures, as I’ve been thinking of making them a bit larger. I’ll still be experimenting in the coming days and weeks, but hopefully things will turn up nicely.

Welcome to this, the restart of the jeansnow.net weblog using the Moveable Type System. The advantage with this system is that it gives you the chance to give feedback on the various posts, and it gives me more control over the look of everything, including the archives (which gave me problems in Blogger). Everything is going to be automated, so I don’t have to worry so much about stuff. Also, I’ll probably be adding a notification feature, meaning that you’ll be able to submit your email and I’ll update you when I make new entries (or at least major ones). Feel free to let me know what you think of the new system.

Last night I spent a lot time looking into the Movable Type system. Similar to what Blogger does, the nice thing about MT is that it’s openware, meaning it’s not a big company controlling everything (and that ultimately has the option to shut you down anytime it wants). With MT, you install all the cgi scripts on your server, so you’re doing everything. There are also a lot of nice features that aren’t in Blogger, like letting people comment on all the posts, email update notices, and a lot more. It also gives you more power over customizing everything. I’ve got it up and running right now, and I’m still playing around with it to adjust to my needs, and to customize the style sheet into what I want to use (basically, I want something similar to what you see now, as I want to keep the same basic design for my homepage). If everything goes well, I could switch over to MT sometime this week.

Today is my wife’s birthday, as well as our 3rd year wedding anniversary. Oh, how time flies. It was in 1997 that I went to China as a student, where I met her. A year later we were both moving to Tokyo, and a year after that, married. Yuko, I love you, and here’s to many, many more years together.

I just posted TB.26 at The OPi8 Forum. This is probably one of the last logs that will be posted at the forum, since the “transmitters” have now graduated to the main site. I think the switch will probably take place next week. I’ll post more info, and direct links, as it happens.

Japan’s anything-goes mentality
“As she wondered what to wear to a recent outdoor festival featuring rock, funk, reggae and rave artists, Ami Ishimatsu found something appropriate, for contemporary Japan at least. She matched funky Converse basketball shoes, blue jeans, and a Thai hill tribe jacket and handbag with her lip ring and a tattoo of a Buddhist lotus flower under her navel, all topped by clip-on dreadlocks imported from someone’s head in Jamaica and scrubbed clean for 8,000 yen, or about $65.”

The artist Tim Biskup has a wonderful site with lots of fun illustrations. I really want the Lucky Stack card set he has for sale, as well as some of the t-shirts at the Gama-Go store. Do check out the “Kaiju” section for his depictions of classic Japanese monsters (of which you see an example on top here).

The Tokyo Record Hunting Service is probably the best damn place on the Net to find amazing deals on used Japanese CDs. Started by my friend Patrick, who is one of the kings of used CD shopping in Tokyo, the site has just seen a huge redesign and now includes an automated shopping cart. You really can find good deals, and he also takes requests. Check often as he’s always adding new stuff.

It’s the big 25 for today’s TB, which is now up at The OPi8 Forum.