Well, I fell for the hype, I added tags to the site – or rather, the usability of the site will hopefully increase by introducing them. I didn’t want to litter the site with lots of categories, especially for subjects I might not write so much about. Further, there might be some posts which are totally off-subject too. Just putting them into the “General” Category and relying on the keywords that might be in the actual text, it will be pretty hard for people to find the post through search engines etc.
For this purpose, I installed Ultimate Tag Warrior by Christine Davis which this far seems to be doing an OK job. Next task is for me tol add tags to all archived posts, which I will do when I have some spare time.
[EDIT] Ok, call me a hypocrite if you want (see my old post about tags in cloud format) but I added a tag archive displaying the tags in, you knew it, cloud format. It’s just that there isn’t a better format that I can think of right now. Sure you can have a plain old list, but it wouldn’t be as interested. Reach the tag archive here: http://lostinjapan.groth.hm/taglist/
GOLD
Finally Japan got a medal in the Torino olympics! Shizuka Arakawa blew away the competition (Sasha Cohen, and Irina Slutskaya aomng others) to finish on top.
Oh and by the way, we Swedes are getting a bit spoiled with our own athletes. The Swedish women’s Curling team took the gold, beating Switzerland in a very even and exciting match (or so I hear).
The latest “cool thing” on the Internet seems to be collections of Tilt-Shift photos – especially the trick used when taking photos from a very high point (tall building or helicopter) and focusing on a small area down on the ground, creating an illusion that makes the scenery in the picture look like a model city. It’s pretty cool stuff, and I think the latest Internet craze of this technique, which is not a new one, started with Andy Baio linking to this: The City as an Avatar of itself. Then a flood of information followed; there’s a Flickr group here.
And here is good resource for information and links to nice photos: http://hame.ca/tiltshift.htm (Set up by the guy who took the brilliant photo above.)
The latest I found is a Japanese page featuring photos from Tokyo using this technique, there are some very nice pictures here at the “Bitter Girls” Blog. (via Del.icio.us)
Well, after a month of not doing especially much at my new job, part OTJ, part everyone-is-too-busy-to-give-me-work, January has been a huge improvement. Slowly I have been handed over some of my main responsibilities, and slowly I have been getting into the new job and the new company.
It hit me today, wandering through the office, that I finally am starting to like it here. It’s always tough in the beginning at a new job, and you think “why did I come here?”, “I don’t know anything, how can I be of use?”, “boy, this company is different from my previous workplaces” etc. But recently, the place has been bustling with activity, a sort of activity I have never ever seen at any of my previous jobs. There are people having meetings, talking, running around, customers coming and going, consultants en masse brought in, and tons of people from corporate HQ. It just gives the air around here a certain feel of energy and excitement. It makes me want to work, even though some of the individual tasks I do are not that exciting, you get a feeling that you are part of something huge, something that is moving forward, quickly, and that so great.
Two announcements today:
FIrst of all, a few days ago I stealthily launched the Lost in Japan store where I sell T-shirts with useful (hmmm?) Japanese text printed on them. For now, there is only one basic T-Shirt (in three variants) for sale, a shirt that says “日本語で大丈夫ですよ” which means “I do speak Japanese” or “I’m OK with Japanese” or something similar. The idea came to me before Christmas, so I quickly created three prototypes and gave one to my dad and one to my brother, and kept one for myself. It got a big laugh out of my gym instructor, that’s for sure!
Well, I shall try to conjure up more useful T-shirts in the future, so be sure to check back.
Second thing is, I fixed my CSS (see previous post about that here) with some more IE hacking. Now everyone (I hope) can view this site without problems, even in IE using other resolutions that 1024×768!
