I’m a procedural programmer at heart. I’m quite competent with C and C++, can cobble together something in Perl or Python, and dimly remember Pascal. However, I’ve only dabbled at a bare minimum in HTML over the years since running a trivial web site on my Mac IIsi in college. So here I am now, futzing with the php and css pages for the WordPress theme I’m using. I wanted to get the XML feed icon on the sidebar, instead of using text in the footer. Looks like I got it to work, but it took me a while. Thank goodness for Transmit and TextWrangler, which let me edit files transparently over FTP.
Month: May 2006
I’m going to use this blog to ramble about a variety of stuff, be it whatever I’m thinking about at 1am, or what I did today, or perhaps even about work. I’m too lazy to keep a work and a home blog separate, and I’m sure that if I tried I’d end up dropping one or the other eventually.
So last night my wife and I were watching Memoirs of a Geisha. Decent movie, followed the book about as well as any movie adaptation ever does. The cool thing was that as we were watching near the end, my wife and I both said roughly simultaneously “Hey, we’ve been there!” as the screen showed a quick shot of a small street in the Gion area of Kyoto. My wife and I got engaged in Kyoto back in April 1999. That was a fun trip — she understands Japanese better than I do, but I’m a little more comfortable speaking it and we had some great round-robin conversations with people.
I’ve been to Japan a few times. I lived in Okinawa for a summer between my junior and senior years in high school, and have been to Tokyo in 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2004. Okinawa was a lot of fun, and it whetted my appetite for the Japanese culture. (Although Okinawa’s history and culture itself is quite distinctly different than that of the main part of Japan…) I studied the language and history in college, and then spent 3 years studying the language out here in Seattle. I’m not at all fluent, but I can manage to get myself around reasonably well enough. I’ve visited Tokyo for fun and for business each a few times and always had a great time. I’d love to see more than just the megapolis sometime, though. Perhaps travel to Hakone, or the Hokkaido winter festival, or down to Shikoku or Kyushu even. Someday…