Bandwagons

I’ve finally jumped on the ipod bandwagon with my silvery blue ipod mini. Don’t know why it took me so long, but it usually takes me a long time to jump on to trends, mostly because I’m overly skeptical. I always think, oh, the next generation will be perfect, but in the end its never […]

A dud?

After all this glowing praise for the smartboard, I have seem to come a cross a deal breaking flaw? Sometimes I get random x’s and c’s and v’s. I can reproduce it reliably by holding a certain pair of keys down and the hitting another while those are down. Order seems to matter two, and […]

Setting the emacs font

This always was a pain. The traditional way to do it was to write it in your ~/.Xdefaults as Emacs*font: [some XLFD font name or alias] So it turns out there’s a much easier way. In your .emacs, just say (set-default-font “somefont”) Where somefont can even be an alias. Its much easier, and you can […]

Datadesktech Smartboard

Finally got my smartboard today. Initial impressions are that it feels better than the Maxim, but is a little bit harder to use like the concave kinesis. The key layout is actually quite similar to that one, and requires you to hit the ‘c’ with the middle finger of your left hand. I had gotten […]

Frozen Sandwiches

A trick for bringing sandwiches to work: Normally, if you buy a loaf of bread at the beginning of the week, peel off two pieces each day to make a sandwich, and otherwise just leave it sitting out, it’ll get moldy by the end of the week, wasting a good part of the loaf. Putting […]

Tokto/Takeshima

What a mess. Unfortunately, the blame for this diplomatic conflict falls on both sides. It seems totally inappropriate to me, that a small prefecture in Japan usurp the voice of the nation and unilaterally declare a claim to the islands. In light of the increasing number of social exchanges between Japan and Korea, it seems […]

Democracy in Japan

What does democracy really mean? And to what extent is it alive in Japan? To me it seems there are several aspects to democracy: – Freedom and diversity of ideas: In this regard, I would say Japan is as open and free as any other ‘democtratic’ nation. That isn’t to say that there aren’t taboos […]

Japanese Media

Some disturbing information about the Japanese media. What’s really frustrating is that it seems as there are people in Japan who have the right attitude about things, but they often get quashed by the nationalists, and the rest of the people who follow them because they’re just uninformed and it feels good to be patriotic […]