“Imagine how much more fun we would be having if we plugged it in!”

MSX Magazine (Japan), November 1984 issue

Shopping street near Oyama station

It’s a very, very beautiful day today with a very clear sky.

It’s also very, very hot with very high humidity. It’s comfortable at home with the air conditioner, but going outside means being hit in the face with a heatwave. Same thing as when you’re walking on the street and a huge bus goes past you and the hot air exhaust from the air conditioner hits you in the face. Except the bus stays there until you go back inside.

No, silly woman! You will not get a melanoma in the 5-minute walk from the station to your home!

Many Japanese women use umbrellas on sunny days to protect their skin from the Sun. They actually prefer their skin to be as white as possible (deathbed-white).

This woman takes it a bit too far. She opens her umbrella on a very cloudy day, for a 5-minute walk from the station, at almost 6pm in the afternoon.

Don’t tell anyone, but I think we’ve found a vampire!

As of today, this server (the one hosting this website you’re reading now) is now part of the NTP Pool Project. NTP is the Network Time Protocol. Your computer uses it to retrieve time information from time servers automatically adjust the time in its internal clock.

I was surprised there were so few NTP servers in the Japanese pool. Apparently there are only 21 active machines (counting mine).

You can see the server stats here.

Last year I started developing this blog from zero, both the presentation layer (HTML and CSS) and the server-side logic (PHP and a PostgreSQL database). My intention was to get back up to speed in systems administration and PHP development, because for the last several years I hadn’t been doing any real development.

Well, it looks like I achieved that. I’m (more or less) up to date again, so there’s no point in spending more time developing the content management software, when I can instead set up a WordPress blog in the server and start using it right away.

So that’s what I did. You’ll notice that I removed the photo galleries. This is because I couldn’t find any photography plugin or application that integrates nicely with WordPress in order to present a decent-looking gallery. I will have to develop that part on my own. Until then, I’ll keep posting my photos on Flickr.

So welcome (again) to my blog.