Category: general

Pics from today’s lunch are up. I went to the little trail stretching between Buena Vista and the golf course end of the Greeneway. I’m not sure if that’s technically part of the Greeneway or not. Either way, it’s pretty there.

Tomorrow I get my first paycheck. In celebration, I’ll be taking myself out to lunch, so I probably won’t take any pictures.

I’m thinking of starting a separate photoblog (I already have a name for it) in which I feature a single photo every day. I’d process the photo and make it all purty and stuff. I’m thinking that maybe that would gain more attention than spewing a whole bunch of mediocre photos all at once. Quality over quantity, plus a guaranteed photo every day.

Of course I would be dipping into the photos I already have up on smugmug, but I’d be making them better, you see.

I’ll have to think more about this, especially about how I want to actually do it. A lot of people use pixelpost, which is definitely an option, but there is something very comforting about having my photos stored on smugmug. Maybe I could do both somehow.

I’ve got the blinds and curtains open and the lights off in the bedroom so I can see across the street where, despite numerous warnings from weathermen and the fire marshal, some idiot is burning something.

He’s got the stuff in an oil can, but the fire keeps sparking and shooting out the top.

Today there was a fire in Aiken County that flared up out of nowhere to cover an acre in minutes. Officials say it could have been a cigarette or even someone’s car exhaust that started it, because conditions lately have been very fire-friendly: dry with hard gusts of wind. Needless to say, people have been told they should hold off burning until the weather conditions change.

I’m waiting for the fire in the oil can to jump out and spread to something else–the car in front of it, or maybe the house behind it. Then I’ll call 911 and hope I don’t lose all my possessions yet again.

Look, another reason to go back!

Not everybody in Savannah saw Safdie’s design as romantic, nor did they celebrate, when the Telfair Museum pitched his 64,000-square-foot annex to city leaders in 1999.

The Historic Review Board, guardians of the 2.5-mile National Historic Landmark District where Savannah was founded in 1733, saw the glass-and-stone structure as a jarring intrusion on the city’s Old South landscape.

This reminds me of Kyoto’s train station, and the controversy thereof. (Although now I think more people are annoyed by Kyoto Tower than they are by the beautiful Kyoto Station.)

I dropped my lens cap into the Savannah River today.

When I told Sean, he didn’t even blink. Without hesitation he responded, “That was coming.”

Isn’t he sweet?

I’d been working my way up the Riverwalk from St. Paul’s, taking pictures.

I stopped to get some shots of the river and that’s when my lens cap sprang out of my hand and fell into the water.

Unruffled (though I will admit to a curse word), I simply climbed down the rocks to the beach, took off my shoes and socks, waded into the river and snagged the floating bit of plastic.

Then I stayed and had lunch on the rocks while I waited for the lens cap and my feet to dry. I shared half my sandwich bread with the seagulls and little black ducks, and spent the remainder of my memory card snapping pictures of them as they converged on the crumbs.

Had lunch at Riverwalk today. Beautiful day out.

We’ll have more coverage on Heather Meadows Action News at 10.

Immediately after work yesterday I went to Brooke’s, stopping at Bi-Lo to grab a dinner of sushi (some sort of crab roll) and fruit. We sat around online for several hours; I read news and chatted with a few people (including Vertigo, who I haven’t seen in awhile, so that was nice), and Brooke occasionally sent me links to bridesmaid dresses. (We’re liking this one at the moment, but ultimately all the bridesmaids will help pick the final dress, on March 16. Brooke originally picked this one, but I don’t know if it would look good on me. I guess we’ll find out…)

At around 10 pm we got around to watching some Kyou Kara Maou. I watched Taizen Shuu episode 6 by myself, and then Brooke joined me for the regular series episodes 52-54. Cool standalone plot episode, silly standalone Gunter episode (ah, the Wild West exists in other dimensions!), and awesome beginning-of-the-end plot episode. As usual we ended on a cliffhanger :>

By the way, Brooke can now read this megapost, and the addendum.

In any event, the purpose of relating all that was to demonstrate that I had a long day yesterday. Last night as I fought to get to sleep I suddenly remembered that Uncle Lewis’ wallet with all his foreign money he’d picked up while he was in Europe during World War II was lost in the fire. I started to feel sick over it, because that was truly a treasure. Then I forced myself to think of other things.

And now I’m up early doing some contract work. Whee!

All the abortion news lately has got me thinking.

While I am opposed to abortion in general and absolutely believe that a baby that hasn’t been born should have the same rights as a baby who has, I am not completely blind to, or hardened towards, the point of view of mothers who don’t want to be mothers.

I can sit around all day and say that if a woman is raped, that doesn’t make it the baby’s fault, and the baby shouldn’t have to die because of it. And I do believe that. But that doesn’t negate the fact that the woman has been violated and may very well not want a reminder of that violation growing within her. She may want nothing to do with the baby whatsoever.

So I was thinking today, surely there is a solution to that sort of problem that doesn’t require the death of the baby. Would it be possible to “harvest” a child from an unwilling mother, and either grow it in a test tube or implant it in a surrogate? Is anyone doing research into this?

Today, my supervisor praised me for an email explanation I sent her of how part of our site works. She said it was the best explanation of the feature she’d seen.

Go me!

I am really enjoying the production meetings. It’s so fun to watch the producers throw out and discuss story ideas. I almost feel like I might have something to contribute someday, which would rule.

Today I ate my lunch while I worked, then drove around trying to find flowers to photograph on my actual break. I didn’t get anything particularly good, unfortunately. And there’s supposed to be a freeze tonight, so probably all the flowers will be gone tomorrow.

Oh well. They’ll come back, I suppose.

I totally fucked up last week at work. Let’s just say I was overzealous in cleaning house. Something very important was lost.

Fortunately, there were backups, from which I was able to restore everything today. My employers seem to be taking the position of “no harm, no foul”.

I felt like a moron for most of my workday, but by the end of everything I was cheerfully humming as I wrapped up the last few articles.

I am very lucky there were backups. I’m sure my mood wouldn’t have bounced back if there hadn’t been.

A lesson learned!

If, like me, you are amused by attempts to render languages in the character sets of other languages, you might like this article!

To help spell road signs in Roman characters, the government uses a handbook issued by an affiliate of the transport ministry, the Japan Contractors Association of Traffic Signs and Lane Markings.

The handbook goes with the Hepburn rules, James Hepburn’s widely used system for Japanese-Roman character transcription.

The Hepburn system eschews the use of macrons when indicating long vowels, like that tricky “o” in “Muroji.” And it advocates that place names be spelled phonetically; the handbook uses the example of “Kyoto.”

Based on the handbook, Masayuki Matsuhira, the temple’s financial officer, says it is clear that the name should be spelled “Muroji.”

Not everyone is on the same page.

Akihiko Yonekawa, a Japanese language professor at Baika Women’s University, says that “Muroji” is not a proper phonetic spelling, so if that is the goal it should be spelled “Murooji.” According to the direct transcription of kana characters, it would be “Murouji,” but that does not comply with Hepburn’s principles. The professor notes that prohibiting macrons made the whole process more difficult.

West Japan Railway Co. agrees. Forgoing the Hepburn system, the railway firm uses macrons for names with long vowel sounds, like Kyoto.

Macrons were used in romanization for decades after World War II, but in 1986 the transport ministry prohibited them.

“We don’t know the details as to the change,” says a transport ministry official.

“But we presume that Roman characters with macrons were not used for many of the road signs in the past, and those officials in charge of the changes might have thought it would be difficult for foreigners to understand the Roman alphabet with added macrons, since there are no macrons in English.”

The textbooks I first studied used Yonekawa’s method, but then almost immediately switched to using Japanese characters so it didn’t really matter. Knowing what I know now about Japanese, I prefer to transcribe the sounds as they are represented in Japanese (rather than how they are pronounced), because that helps me remember how to “spell” them. (Sometimes there actually is a double お; a system that uses two ‘o’s for every long /o/ sound does not reflect this.)

I decided to burn the candle at both ends this week and do a little web work for a couple of hours before work every morning. I may rethink this if today doesn’t go so well.

So far in my web design “career” I have managed to avoid learning much of anything about ASP. Here lately I’ve had to mess with it some, and I haven’t had a very good experience.

I don’t really understand how it works. I can look at the code and think I get it intellectually, but there are things going on that I am unaware of, meaning that when I go to edit, I end up breaking the page. It is really irritating.

In the case of the particular project I’m working on this morning, there must be some special settings on the server, because I can’t get the page to work on my own machine. That makes it a little hard to test, doesn’t it?

So now I’m paranoid that I’m going to completely destroy the page I’m working on. I guess I’ll spend this morning working through some ASP tutorials and studying the existing page code…

I spent the day reading Michael Gruber’s The Witch’s Boy.

It was very good.

Mari lent it to me, so I knew it would be, but I wanted to be clear on the point ;>

I am, as you well know, the type of person who likes to try to figure out where a story is going, so this book was perfect. Gruber threw in all sorts of fairy tales, such that I kept saying, “Oh! Hansel and Gretel! Oh! Rumplestiltskin!” And I was typically pleased when I was right, though I was also a little trepidacious, because I cared about Lump, even as I hated him.

There were a few things that I felt had to be references, but I wasn’t quite able to identify. One of them came as the woman and her little family were fleeing the cottage. She stops and goes back in to get a rose. I felt like that was a reference to some fairy tale, a very oblique one–maybe to Beauty and the Beast, maybe to Snow White and Rose Red–but I don’t think anything more came of it, unless it was something subtle that I missed.

The other part I am almost positive is a reference to something occurred at the very end of the book, so I won’t spoil it. It’s in the last paragraph, for those who’ve read it. Feel free to enlighten me in the comments, or engage in speculation.

It’s a very good book. Reimagining old stories is interesting in and of itself, but this book also presents a new story, and weaves everything together expertly. Well done.

Happy News: Smithsonian shows artwork by Hokusai

A show opening Saturday at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery includes Hokusai’s original color print – a tsunami-like breaker threatening a small boat, with Mount Fuji in the background. Japan’s sacred mountain was a favorite subject and this scene comes from one of his most famous books, “36 Views of Mount Fuji.”

[…]

The exhibit ranges from a 47-foot scroll, too long to be completely unrolled in the show, to samples from his 15 volumes of random sketches called “manga.” It’s the same word used for the comic books that are now favorite reading on Tokyo subways. On the scroll, one of the many scenes shows a cat gazing at a butterfly.

I was lucky enough to see “Great Wave” in the Tokyo National Museum in 2001.

I was looking forward to seeing it again in 2003, but it wasn’t there. (The Smithsonian’s site lists it as belonging to “The Mann Collection, Highland Park, Illinois”. Being as famous as it is, I’m sure it gets around.)

“Great Wave” is an ukiyo-e, or “woodblock print”. Hokusai created it by carving the image into a piece of wood, then applying the proper colors to the wood, and finally pressing the block to paper.

The Tokyo National Museum gift shop sells “reprints” made using the original block. I wanted to buy one both times I was there, but both times I was dissuaded by money. Maybe next time :)

In the meantime, the Smithsonian’s show is looking mighty appealing.

Smithsonian: Hokusai Exhibition: March 4-May 14, 2006

The exhibition of more than 180 paintings, prints, drawings and printed books brings together for the first time 41 paintings from the Freer Gallery of Art, the largest and most important collection of paintings by Hokusai, with masterpieces from museum, library and private collections throughout the world. Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919), founder of the Freer Gallery, collected most of the Gallery’s Hokusai paintings, drawings, and prints between 1898 and 1907. “Hokusai” celebrates the 100th anniversary of the official gift by Freer of his art collection and museum to the United States.

(I love that “largest and most important” bit. Arrogant much? ;>)

Kobayashi Shinobu is “one of Japan’s foremost writers on bento“, and she has an article in the Mainichi today about the kind of ekiben she likes to get for hanami in Kyoto.

On my way to cherry blossom viewing in Kyoto, I usually pick up a Takekago Bento, an ekiben sold in a bamboo basket. Takekago Bento, a widely loved and top-selling ekiben since its 1997 release, is one of the ancient capital’s most popular bento.

The loosely woven bamboo basket, with a red and white paper suitable for a red-letter day at the bottom, is packed neatly with a colorful combination of rice bale-shaped rice balls, norimaki and homemade Obanzai.

A pair of dishes made with namahu — a green yomogifu and a chestnut-colored awafu — are dressed with rich miso paste. Popular obanzai dishes, yakiyuba, koimo and dashimaki tamago are also included. Sawara, selected to represent the spring, and tori no sasami age, are also in the ekiben. Tori no sasami age is chicken breast coated with brown rice and deep-fried until crispy. The perfectly fried aroma goes really well with wine.

The elaborate bamboo basket can be thrown away, but that would be a shame. It could be used as a candy box or a seasonings holder at home. And it even looks nice when used as a flower holder.

I have to try it!

Well, I’ve made it through my first week.

I’m hesitant to say this because I might jinx it, but what the hell:

I love my job.

It is really exciting to be a part of disseminating the news, and fascinating to hear all the stuff that doesn’t get on the air. I love the editorial control I have over the website, and I love the responsibility of my position. I’m getting into a groove already with the work, so I’m able to pace myself and make time for side projects, like adding features to the site or making custom graphics. It is really great to have a set schedule of things that absolutely have to be done, but yet have so many things different day to day. (For example: there are recurring segments on some days, but reporter packages are always different.)

It’s fast-paced and I have a lot of responsibility. I feel important, and it’s obvious that what I do matters very much.

Yesterday someone in the newsroom said to me, “You’re doing a great job!”

I’m really excited about this. Not just because I finally have a decent-paying job, but because this is something I can actually see myself doing long-term. I am far too old to keep bouncing around from job to job looking for something I like. I need to get settled in and start planning for the future. Up until I got this job, I couldn’t imagine really doing that. I didn’t think I would ever find a job I could stand for years and years.

Happily, I stand corrected.

It’s possible that the newness might fade after awhile and I might get to the point that I’m bored or dissatisfied, but I’m optimistic that those effects will be lower than they’ve been at other jobs due to the fact that so much is new every day. There’s always something different going on. And being responsible for the whole website means I can always be tweaking something, which really satisfies my OCD.

In all, I’m very happy, and I look forward to a long career with this TV station.