Does anyone use IE on Mac OS anymore? When I bought my PowerMac a year ago IE came pre-installed on OS X 10.2 but my PowerBook with 10.3 only had Safari installed. Now I know why this is, because IE on Mac is a steaming pile of doggie pooh-pooh. It's the only browser I have found that can't even display the photo on the front page of my site.

Notified by a friend of this issue I've been wondering if I should even bother taking apart my code piece by piece so that like 2 users can keep using IE to view my photoblog, or should I just fuggetaboutit?

On the way back from Shinjuku on sunday I stopped in at Sundown Towntempo Session in Shimokitazawa. It was also opening night for Andrew Beveridge's photo exhibition, which made it a great excuse for attending. Here's a few photos I took, and should see a few more I took on Andrew's Canon 10D dSLR up on Sundown's site soon.

I spent the weekend getting accustomed to a Macintosh, again. I bought my first Mac, a PowerMac G4 MDD, over a year and a half now but only touched it a few times since Frankie was born. Reason being, it's too damn noisy. We had to keep it in our spare room making it difficult to watch Frankie or have a normal conversation during our time together in the evening.

We spend a large portion of our time on a computer, like most, so going with a wireless notebook was the only option. We bought a wireless card and access point for our existing PC notebook and never looked back at the desktop world. A year and a half of heavy use took its' toll so we ponied up for a new 12" Apple PowerBook with a built in wireless and DVD burner last week, and also slipped in a 20 GB iPod to replace my ailing MD player.

Having the option to switch user without logging out and seamlessly changing from an English OS, programs and menus to Japanese is simply amazing and exactly what we needed. And I'm anxious to start cataloging our growing collection of miniDV tapes onto DVD.

After I lugged the massive PowerMac out from under my desk and backed up our mp3 and photo library I wondered why I ever bothered with a desktop in the first place. The ease and convenience of a wireless notebook is just too great to ever give up.

NPR has an interesting interview with Jad Adams, author of Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle, about the cultural role the potent green liquor played among artistic circles in 1890s France. According to Adams Absinthe was to the painters and writers of the 1890's as marijuana was to the artist of the 1960's. Absinthe is still freely available in Japan.

News from Miami case dismissed!

A few interesting comments in an article in the nytimes regarding reaction to Michael Moore's new film premiering at the Cannes Film Festival.


I hear this a lot as one of the main criticisms of Moore's films almost making himself the center of attention instead of the issue he is trying to shed light on. But sounds like he's listened to the critics and taken a different road with his new one.

and this

Every day I write an average of 20-30 work related emails. I set up my signature including the usual Name, Title, Company/Dept. Name and Address using lotus notes but I always add the closing according to the person the mail is to be sent to. Today though, I made an ever so slight typo in an email to VERY important person in my company, typing "t" instead of "g" in my closing of Regards. You can see my pickle.

I'm wondering why the spell checker didn't pick up on that? Notes (R5) spell checker doesn't understand hypertext links "http://" and email addresses "@domain.com" but let's retards right on through.

last night as I was lying on the floor watching Frankie play with her blocks and half watching JNN (24h Japanese news channel) she turned to me and gave me a little peck on the cheek! She immediately turned to Masako and smiled. She kept giving me these cute little kisses over and over again. Too cute for words.

Today at lunch I made my usual call home to see how everything was and it seems Frankie has gone on an all out kiss-fest with her toys smooching anything within her little reach.

My personal observation is that parents kissing their children and vice versa is very uncommon here. Compared to my own childhood memories "Oh come on, you’re never too old to give your Grandma/Nana a kiss!" When Frankie was born I was amazed to see that no family in Japan wanted to give her a kiss but after witnessing me giving her 100 little pecks a day they slowly changed their ways. Now she can do all the kissing.

As a supporter of Greenpeace, I'm going on trial on Monday for protecting the rainforest in the Amazon.
view the animation "Administration's Most Wanted" and Take Action.

Read more, NYTimes: "Typical Greenpeace Protest Leads to an Unusual Prosecution "

a hilarious photo essay chronicling the opening moments of the new Blogger launch.

I've been watching the testimony live on CNN and was really shocked by the opening remarks by Sen. "Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" James Inhofe. I don't have a transcript now but he basically went down a list of atrocities committed Saddam's government, of course leaving out the magic 3 words "with American support", as if to say, If Saddam's thugs could torture, rape and kill why can't we?

My letter to the editor of the Japan Times was published on the web and should be in print this Sunday (May 9th). (UPDATE: My letter was published in the May 5th edition) Luckily their circulation dept keeps 3 months of back issues. Here's the scanned page.


Sure, the web's a great place to publish your ideas and opinions, but you still can't beat the coverage that writing to the editor of a newspaper with 50,000 plus readers gives you!

Drop whatever you're doing this instant and check out Fred's newly designed fredshead.org. I'd be lying through my teeth if I said his site wasn't inspirational for me in creating my own photolog before Fran was born.

The first single Ch-Check it out from the Beastie's new album To The 5 Boroughs has been realeased. You can get a little listen via the iTunes Music Store and Ch-Check out the video on their official site. From what I understand, the album will be in true Beastie fashion very critical of Bush and Co.
Here's a thread from the NYC weblog Gothamist.