Trip to Miyazaki, Japan. June 2006, Post 1

I went to Miyazaki, Japan in June 2006 for a meeting. Miyazaki is a small coastal town on Kyushu Island in South Japan. This was my second trip to Japan, the first one being to Tokyo/Kyoto/Yokohama in July 2003. Photos of the first trip will probably get scanned after retirement :)

We went to a great Chinese restaurant, very cheap and great food. For about $80, we could order enough great food to feed 6 people. Of course, there were only three of us, and half the food went uneaten. This is a photo of the food after we finished.

 

At this place, we ordered an interesting type of egg, Peking duck egg. The “white” of this egg is a transparent dark brown, like stained glass. And it was quite tasty too.

 

Miyazaki has one famous attraction, an indoor swimming pool at Seagaia. When I visited, the tourist season was low, so the place was almost empty. It’s one of those only-in-Japan kind of things. This place has a giant surf making machine too.

 

And finally, a nice sunset that I caught from my hotel .

 

Test post from Word 2007

This is a test post using Word 2007.

BTW, Wikipedia has a good summary of Office 12.

Office 12

Just installed Office 12, beta 2. It was a free download.

Finally, ten years too late, Word 2007 has a good Equation Editor. Type \Delta, and it automatically becomes Δ. And the equation editor has many other improvements too. Going from floating menu to ribbons UI has really helped.

Office 12 seems to be a positive step for Microsoft.

Showing off where you have been, enhanced

Okay, so tagzania lets me add a list of places instead of countries/states. Excellent use of the Google Maps API.

Man, Web 2.0 rocks or what. And there is also a bigger map



Tagzania: Items by this user

Showing off where you have been

This site allows people to tag countries and US/Canadian states they have visited. It's a nice start, but what I would like more is to be able to put flags at all places visited. That way, one trip to canada/russia will not make you look like a Marco Polo competitor :)

Update: Another site 43places allows a list of countries/states. It has a slightly better map than the one above.



create your own visited country map with world66.com.

Recyled computer

Dropped off my old desktop at the Miramar Recycling facility. The process was quite painless, and took only 10 minutes. Going to a recycling facility is a better idea than leaving possibly toxic refuse in the apartment dumpster, from where it will probably go straight to a landfill. Let's hope the recycling facility does something better with the computer.

CA has an entire program devoted to electronic waste, but it seems more concerned about displays. Probably displays have more toxic material.

A fun chemistry video

Best free videos accross the net.

Okay, now I am going overboard with the video posts, but it is irresistable

Robin Williams

This is awesome. Creating a blog-post right from YouTube. See-video, like-video, blog-video. So simple.

Took just a minute to add my blogger account to YouTube.

Digg Videos

Another great Web 2.0 site I discovered today (yes, I am late to the game) is digg

The video site is particulalrly cool. I like the UI where with one click a user can vote for a particular link. Excellent use of Ajax.

A good thing about this site is that it brings together the best of googile video, youtube etc. I used to spend some time looking for funny videos on google's list of popular videos, but the digg method easily beats that.