Well it’s time to rail against Slate again for their coverage of technology. The latest piece to catch my ire is ‘YouTube’s dark side.’ by Nick Douglas. In it Douglas suggests that because YouTube is the mass-market video site on the web it’s, well, filled with derivative, boring crap that do nothing to push the [...]
I’m really into the death throes here. Sorry. I’m feeling a little morbid at the moment. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m coming to the end of my time at the school or what but whatever it is I’m feeling a little darker. My mood was not improved when I discovered today that I [...]
I wrote almost a month ago about a service called coComment. At the time I found it almost a great service, my main complaint being that there was no way to set blacklists for certain domains (eg. LiveJournal) so that it wouldn’t bother tracking those comments. Well I wrote two posts about this on the [...]
Well it didn’t take me long. I’m not yet out of a job with JET and I think I’ve got myself another full-time teaching gig. It’s not definite yet but the two interviews I’ve had so far have been really positive and they’re even willing to work around my College of Law schedule (which surprised [...]
One thing I feel I always should be doing more of in this blog is pointing out the myriad curiosities of life in Japan. And yet try as I might I can never seem to find anything strange enough to warrant your attention. I’ve never found a vending machine dispense anything more interesting than an [...]
I know I promised a review of Dogs and Demons but I think that’ll take a little longer to put together so instead I’ll focus on another book I finished recently, Amin Maalouf’s In the Name of Identity. This is the first book I’ve read by Maalouf, better known in the English-speaking world as a [...]
One of the things that’s great about the book club is that it’s encouraging me to read more. I’ve finished the next book for the club, Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Big Country, and have almost finished a second, Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons. Kerr’s book is really incredible. I’m thinking of writing a fuller [...]
So there’s an article by Tim Wu over at Slate about how the iPhone isn’t as revolutionary as Apple makes it out to be. John Gruber has done a pretty good job in the past few days deconstructing some of the anti-iPhone articles out there but he seems to have missed Wu’s so I thought [...]