9 January, 2006

Happy New Year 2006

Happy New Year!
The year 2006 has begun. I guess you enjoyed the New Year holiday. I stayed at my parent's place and had a relaxing time. It's a bit late, but I want to write down my resolutions for 2006.

Resolusions 2006
1. Be professional, keep calm even in difficulities and be more sharp-witted. I'm not new anymore in the office. Keyword is "professionalism".
2. Have more stress-free life.
3. Brush up my rusty English.
4. Keep fit and keep jogging.
5. Write more quality blogs. (This entry is an exception...)
6. Learn JavaScript.

Best wishes for this coming year.

24 August, 2005

Sleep and love

I'm not in Oslo, neither in Cardiff. I'm here in Tokyo, yes working. I've been too busy to write anything here for the last two weeks. As a result, I kept someone, who are kind enough to regularly check my humble blog waiting - I don't know anyone who read my blog, except for Sharon, one of the few loyal readers.

Anyway, I'd like to round up my latest news.
First of all, my intern at FICC inc. finished. And I became a permanent member this month, which is very good news for me. What three months! Time flies.

But if I talk about what has changed, being a proper member hasn't changed my life, because I'm constantly being given loads of stuff. Whether I'm an intern or proper member doesn't matter at the office.

Well, since I started working at the office, I've done many websites. And my latest work is a blog of an English school in Japan. And now I'm doing doctor's website and another blog for my company. Also coding some html for a Japanese-style hotel.

In addition, I'm studying CSS to get to the next stage. I'm planning to redesign this blog with CSS. In fact, I did my Japanese blog with CSS layout. If you haven't heard of CSS, just ignore this part.

Well well well, not much news except for my job. Am I sad? Am I one of the typical Japanese salaried workers? Shut up. I'm pretty satisfied. But I need sleep and love.

23 June, 2005

Bloggaholic

Since I started working at the current company, it's been difficult for me to have my own private time. Being followed by upcoming various projects, it's getting more difficult to do what I want, which is to blog. However, I've been trying to find time and scrabble something, somehow. That's because blogging is something that satisfies myself and functions as a refreshment to my mind.

There are so many things I want to talk about here. Every morning in the office, I switch on my PC and start Firefox, which is a default internet browser in my PC. Firefox is set to starts up with the BBC News page. Then, check some latest news. Most of the days there're some articles which provoke my journalistic interests. Although I want to keep reading articles, my boss comes to me and I close a Firefox window.

Well, blogging is fun to me, anyway. That's why I can write something like this meaningless entry this late at night. It's 1am.

Oh my got, BBC World on TV just now reports the EU sugar subsidy issue... But I am facing the fact that it's high time to go to bet. Give me more time to blog.

14 May, 2005

Business card

My business card has arrived.

28 March, 2005

Sping brings a new start

After spending three months to recharge my batteries, finally I'm starting a new stage of my life. I've got a job at a web design office in Tokyo and will start in mid April. That's very very very good news.

At the same time, however, that means I have to move to expensive, suffocating, lonely city, Tokyo. Yes, I like Tokyo itself and find it very exciting. But too expensive and too many people and buildings to live there. In the last few days, I went to Tokyo to find a place to live. Each of the rooms I was given from house agents was very tiny and too expensive and didn't satisfy me. It took a few days to find a good one.

Now I've found a nice room in the bay area (Actually this area isn't by the sea any longer because of ongoing reclamation projects of the waterfront, but used to be.) of Tokyo where my uncle and aunt live. The room, situated on the top floor of a five-story flat, is not that expensive and not that small. From a window of the kitchen, I can see down to a row of cherry blossom trees by a canal. It will be beautiful next mont. Moreover, I can use the rooftop of the building for drying the washing and for parties (not officially allowed).

I say I don't want to move to Tokyo, but cannot help getting excited about the new start, of course, including moving and living there. I'll write more soon.

9 March, 2005

Lucky T-shirt

As to Eboy's special T-shirt competition, here is good news. Guess what. I've won it!!!

The T-shirt designed by Paul Smith, British fashion designer, and Eboy, Berlin-based art group, was offered by Japanese fashion magazine, Popeye as a prize. Very cool T-shirt.

9 March, 2005

I bought a mobile, finally...

Yes, finally. I bought a mobile phone. In fact, in the last few months, I could live without it, even in this information society. And I got used to the state which was a non-mobile-phone life.

But it's time to get it and finish being an archaic human. Trying to be employed, I'll start my new life with this new mobile phone. Hahahahaha.

My new phone is Sony Ericsson's SO501i, aka, premini-II. Very very small, but it has a digital camera. Since I left Japan, Japanese mobile technology seems to have advanced further. So I don't know some complicated systems and not sure if I can use half of them.

3 March, 2005

Messing up with css on Thursday night

I really don't know. What the hell is this? I'm talking about this css.

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets, which enables us to design and lay out a web page more freely in conjunction with HTML.

I'm not sure whether this is enough explanation. HTML is a basis of web pages, and css is, let's say, a design helper or something. However, this helper makes me crazy, indeed...

There is a reason why I'm challenging this css. That's because of the rise of css style, as well as its extensibility and potentiality. I often hear it's not professional to rely on "table" for web design. When I was a beginner, I used to rely on the layout using "table" and a magic spacer(1 pixel transparent gif, which can control space width and height). But I got fed up with designs made from "table" and spacers, because they were boring. There was a limitation of "table/spacer" design and I couldn't go any further. But css made pages vivid and colourful. Tricky things like mouse-over actions and image swaping are related to this css. Therefore, I want to master css design.

However, there is a risk which css code isn't compatible with all browser. So too many tricky things happen and make me angry. Now I'm not using Internet Explorer, which most of you are using now, but Mozilla Firefox, which is a newcomer browser. So when I check a completed page with Firefox, sometimes the browser doesn't read css code and breaks design. Then I check the same page with Internet Explorer. But it looks fine. And I start freaking out, as a result. Then come back to Dreamweaver (homepage building software) and repair the page. But, in nine cases out of ten, the result is other way around - Firefox is ok, but IE is no good, this time.

In fact, I'm being trapped in it. That's why I'm writing. This blog has become a hard-core PC topic. Anyway this is nothing but the release of my anger. Back to work.

2 February, 2005

Upside down

In these days, I stay up late. Last night I was working on Steafán Hanvey's website. There were still unfinished parts to be done and I went to bed this morning. I woke up afternoon and was dizzy all the day. And still dizzy. Lately my day starts when people return home. This reminds me of the days when I was doing a dissertation in Cardiff.

I'm going to New York next week and stay there for two weeks. Not enough time, really. But, thanks to having this kind of my sick daily rhythm, I can see the end of the website hopefully. However, I have my own website waiting for being updated. That's gonna be a lot of work. Two main sections are still under construction - Portfolio and Photographs, which are I want to show the most as a web designer. I guess, this daily rhythm will continue till the day before the New York trip.

29 January, 2005

Dad with a big fish

My father got a big fish from a customer who likes fishing yesterday. "Supergiant, isn't it" he said at the camera. The fish was served to yesterday's guests at Kiccho.

13 January, 2005

My mother getting equipped with Microsoft

My mother doesn't know I'm writing this. She doesn't know about a computer, Internet and the Apple logo. But, she's been interested in learning a PC.

When I was studying in the UK, I often imagined how great if my mum could use a PC. It'd have been definitely easier to communicate, especially when I have to explain something too complicated or advanced for a middle-aged lady. But anyway, I'm back where every single morning I face her. No need to communicate via e-mails.

On the contrary, she thinks it's a good chance for herself to start a PC, because she can ask me how to use it. As soon as I came back, she grabbed me and then her computer lesson began. She uses my old notebook PC.

I realised it's not easy to explain something that I take for granted. Sit in front of a laptop, open it, switch it on, open IE, jump to hotmail, type my ID and password, check an e-mail from my friend, and ... These are far too advanced for her. First of all, she didn't know how to switch on. And she was about to break her nail to open up the notebook.

Even though she knows much about negative aspects of PCs and Internet. Like Internet crimes, computer viruses and so on. I suppose, each of them is just what she happened to overhear from TV. She doesn't know the true meaning of them...

Now her long winding journey has just begun. She's practicing typing. Yes, she can't type. I think she's opened a pandra's box. Wish she will have mastered a PC, when I go somewhere abroad again.