Sunday afternoon Junko and I attended Anthony’s school track meet. The event was no small deal, with approximately twelve different schools participating in the events. Some of the schools were just around the corner while others were hours away. What made this particular track meet so special is that it was the first track meet that Anthony competed in an event. Anthony has been to many track meets throughout his first year in Junior High school, but up until this point he never had an opportunity to complete.
Until now.
Anthony is obviously smaller than his school counterparts but he was still able to compete quite well nonetheless. He ran in the 100 meter and 200 meter races, finishing second to last in both events. No matter how he placed, Junko and I are very proud of his accomplishments and all the hard work he has put in to track and field. Those long days at school appear to be paying dividends so to speak.
It was a lot of fun watching Anthony compete. We were both pretty jazzed to watch our son compete in the events even though he did not place well. In fact, winning was not really the point or what excited us the most: what got us jazzed was just watching our own son compete, to see the determination and fire in his eyes.
If only he were more excited about education! Yeah, I know how that goes. All too well in fact.
Hopefully Anthony will have a much more prosperous track meet the next time around. In the meantime, Anthony has a lot of work to do before the next competition if he intends to place well in his events. Methinks it is time to get his legs muscled up and to turn him in to a lean, mean running machine!
The main objective is to ensure content is added on a more regular basis, and to turn the site more tumblelog-like in nature. I do not want to have stale content on the site any longer, though at the same time I do not want to inundate everyone with pointless and frequent content which nobody intends to read or find particularly useful. The latter being a natural side effect one might consider when attempting to continuously add content to the site.
My goal is really actually quite simple. I contribute quite a bit of content to a variety of sites on a daily basis. One day I may post a bunch of photos to Flickr, while the next I may add some links to del.icio.us and digg, all the while tweeting here and there.
Why not use the content I post on these other social sites right here as well? After all, if I have taken the time to contribute to these various social circles then surely I consider my additions particularly useful. Seems only logical to share this content with my loyal visitors in some capacity other than forcing everyone to visit these other sites.
I am, by no means, attempting to completely automate what information I post to the site, a la tumblr, but I do want fresh content added on a regular basis. Posting a link to del.icio.us or digg and then turning around and adding that very same data to the site by hand right here seems both tedious and repetitive.
Why not make use of some automated tools which pull the data from the various sites I post content to, and then have that very data added as a new post here on the site? Post once and syndicate the data when and where necessary is the mantra.
With all that said, I would like to introduce you to the beta site I am working on, currently called fuck jark. I made a number of style and design changes to accommodate my business process and flow modifications. I am aware some of the additions do not display correctly in Internet Explorer and will work to fix those in due time.
Please give the preview site a look and offer up any constructive criticism you may have to offer. Whether negative or positive, I am interested in what everyone has to say about the changes.
Pop Life is a massive six-floor department store located in the heart of Tokyo’s Akihabara "Electric Town" that sells every imaginable sexual souvenir. Along with sex shop standards, there is an entire section solely devoted to Hello Kitty vibrators!
I have been in a couple sex shops in Tokyo and surrounding suburbs and have never been really impressed. Most shops have this underground, almost garage-like feel to them, leaving one to feel extremely uncomfortable about doing business in such an establishment. It was almost like I needed a shower immediately after entering the shop because I could feel the grunge in the air!
In most of the places I have ventured the selections left a lot to be desired. Sex shops are always entertaining because of the sheer amount of odd products sex companies dream up. I imagine this particular shop to be quite interesting, especially since there is an entire Hello Kitty section. For the love of all-things-sexual, why would anyone want Hello Kitty inside them?
Based on what I read at gridskipper, this shop sounds like it may be a lot of fun to walk around. Hopefully the next time I visit Akihabara I’ll get an opportunity to visit Pop Life.
Have you ever visited a sex shop? If so, what was the experience like?
Dave Watanabe has decided to make NewsFire completely free. No longer will potential NewsFire customers have to pay for a license which unlocks the software and removes restrictions.
NewsFire is now fully-functional, with no restrictions, advertisements or feature limitations. Watanabe has made the software completely free, presumably to compete with NetNewsWire after NewsGator opted to eradicate licensing charges on all their desktop clients.
Why this particular decision at this particular junction? Dave feels in his gut this decision is the right one. Intriguing move!
The real question in my mind is this: with the freeing of NewsFire, and the fact that it will no longer be bringing in revenue, will Watanabe continue to fix bugs and add features? Watanabe basically stated in an earlier blog post NewsFire was not generating a considerable amount of revenue. Incidentally, that post has since been deleted for whatever reason.
Couple the revenue issue with the freeware move, does anyone really expect Watanabe to place any emphasis on NewsFire in the future? For all intents and purposes, is NewsFire a dead-end? I have my doubts.
Photonic is Flickr client for OSX designed for easy uploading of photographs to Flickr, all in a simple and easy Mac-like fashion. In addition to uploading, Photonic is also a capable of performing many Flickr specific functions. Use Photonic to browse photos on Flickr, keep track of your contacts, groups and even take a gander at the past several days in Explore.
What is really striking about Photonic is the design of the application. Photonic resembles iPhoto in just about every way, making it dead simple for just about anyone to use. Since the interface is so familiar, moving around in Photonic takes no time at all to get used to. Not that it would be difficult otherwise, but the familiarity certainly lowers the barrier to entry.
I did not play around too extensively with Photonic, only mucking about here and there so I could get a decent feel for the functionality of the application. In my short time using Photonic I could see the attraction for a desktop Flickr client. I felt as if I was able to browse my contacts photographs exponentially easier, thanks to the various lists in the left-hand pane of Photonic. I enjoyed the experience, though since I consider myself a power user I can not see myself using Photonic daily.
If you upload a lot of photos to Flickr, or if you are looking for an easier mechanism for browsing Flickr, Photonic might just be what the doctor ordered. A Photonic license will set you back $20 through March 15th.
