The spoils of Good Luck Bags - Fukubukuro. We went to Uni (a local department store) to buy Fukubukuro, and got some good "hits" this time. You buy the bag but cannot see inside it - however you know basically what you are getting, say "girl's clothing size 7" for example. Sometimes you get stuff you don't want, but this year we were lucky; it was mostly needed.

Kylie and Julie got new "Jerseys" - gym outfits - and some back-to-school goods.

First Shrine Visit - Hatsumoude

We did our "hatsumoude" first shrine visit today, at the usual place - Gorei Jinja in Gumisawa, Totsuka. Here's the entrance, but the fire is BEHIND the lady, not ON the lady -

Here's the bottom of the stairs, to the main worship area. You pass through this big "O" in a figure-eight pattern, for good luck and to cure your ills.

Here's a look at the area where you pray, with festive decorations -

And, after you pull your "takekuji" lot, and get your fortune, you make a wish and tie the paper onto this apparatus -

Now we can have a prosperous new year!! (I hope.)

Japan New Year Good Luck Decoration

This year, Kylie made the "shimekazari" decoration for our door. Good luck!

Japan New Year Crab!

Akiko having some delicious New Years Crab, part of our "osechi" feast.

Cogley Osechi

For our osechi this New Years, we had amongst other things roast beef, really delicious datemaki (the yellow roll-looking things), Peking Duck, home made sweet beans, and Crab. Mmmm!

New Years Girls

Happy New Year 2003!
Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu!

Read a new article about Japanese New Years Culture.

If you have a multilingual website, here's a very simple Javascript to switch languages on your site. Assume I have two websites with the same structure, same filenames and so on, but the paths are either /en/ or /jp/ - for English or Japanese respectively. I want a button on the page that switches languages, to the other equivalent page.

Here is one way - the code below between the HTML p tags is all on one line. Ugly but it works. I imagine there is a better way to write the regexp since this one makes assumptions that there is only one "-en" substring in the URL. This code would be placed on the English site, and could be used to switch to Japanese.

<p>Change to <a href="javascript:var thisurl = unescape(document.URL);var targurl = thisurl.replace(/-en/gi,'-jp');location.href=targurl;">Japanese</a></p>

Beautiful. David Davies' assetManager allows me to make a post, and specify an email address when I create the post. It then sends perfectly-formatted HTML mail to the address I entered.

I set up a group for this weblog on Yahoo! groups, to serve as a(n) (admittedly bastardized) listserv type of system, so that when I post in Radio the email gets sent to Yahoo, and then from there onto the members of the list.

Your mileage may vary, but my SMTP server and/or firewall does not allow this type of redirect, so I cannot just enter the Yahoo group email address directly. To work around this, I have set up a recognized email address in my SMTP server to catch and redirect the post from RU to the Yahoo group mail address.

The caveat is that the Yahoo group must that redirector mail's address as a registered "member".

This works for me - thank you David!

Even though Gore says he won't run for Prez, he'd rather join Saturday Night Live as a regular. All this after having invented the Internet, the guy's going to be knackered out.  

Gore 'will not stand for president'. Former US Vice President Al Gore decides not to run for the White House in 2004, ruling out the possibility of a rematch against George Bush. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edition]

Wonderful stuff - this new anime cited on Boing Boing Blog is one which I have never seen in Japan. The food-referencing names that they mention reminded me of another show:

"The Sushi Seals" is an adult-oriented Japanimation TV show structured around a bunch of characters with raw-fish cuisine names. The episode descriptions sound so not-funny, they're kinda funny. "Ikura" means "salmon eggs," btw.

There's a wholesome show that's been running every Sunday evening for, oh, 60 years or something in Japan, called "Sazae san", that talks about the adventures of a family with fish names. Big sis is "Sazae" (turbo), then there's "Ikura" (salmon roe) and other intriguing names. Maybe it's a trend, or somethin'.

The Japan Page has a review, and here's a pic of her.

I just had another IM chat with Matt Mower, the developer of the excellent liveTopics tool, and he kindly helped me through a problem with the outlines in liveTopics not being rendered to HTML with links.

The problem was:

• There was no #prefs file in the wwwoutlinestopics folder.
• The copied #prefs file had #flDisplayHTMLWedge true in it.

Here's what worked -

• The wwwoutlines #prefs was copied to wwwoutlinestopics.
• wwwoutlinestopics#prefs was edited, and its #flDisplayHTMLWedge value was changed to false.
• The wwwoutlinestopics opml files were deleted.
• In the Radio GUI, Tools menu, the liveTopic's debug menu was used to delete caches and recreate the indexes, then, the admin menu was used to recreate the Table of Contents.

Now, when you click on a topic, the webpage that comes up is rendered correctly, with links. Thanks Matt!

Seems to work just fine - here's what I got...

A new weblog post has been posted to Rick Cogley

"<P>Let's see if David Davies' assetManager's <STRONG>new email notification</STRONG> system works. I setup a separate POP account, and added that to the new feature's settings. </P>"

http://radio.weblogs.com/0116821/

Maybe it's my Exchange server that adds in the HTML tags like you see above, without actually rendering them in HTML, or, maybe it's just a bug. We'll see...

Let's see if David Davies' assetManager's new email notification system works. I setup a separate POP account, and added that to the new feature's settings.

I just had an IM chat with Matt Mower, the developer of the excellent liveTopics tool, and he kindly helped me - the Radio Userland and blog newbie - through getting setup with the topics you see on this blog. If you are on Radio, visit Matt's page and get his tool.

I was getting an error after having installed the tool, and the google macro was not working. Matt said:

Yes I think the error is likely because you do not have a Google API key
installed in Radio.  Assuming that you are comfortable with Radio (or
Frontier) Please follow the instructions at
http://radio.userland.com/googleApi and everything will probably start
working once you have finished step 4.

Then I asked about if liveTopics indexes the stories on the blog, rather than just the entries. His thoughts -

...my advice would be to create a post as a summary of the story and attach the topics to it. ... It's likely that, if they're interested enough to see the summary, they'll click through.

Thanks Matt!

Unagi! Here's a good picture from a Japanese website. By the way, see my story on Pronouncing Japanese. It's oo-nah-gy (gy as in muggy.)

This post was brought to you by mail-to-blog, and David Davies' excellent assetManager tool, which allows you to link your categories to "secret subjects" in mails you send to an extra POP mail account you set up. I set up the account in my mail server, added the secret subject in the mail-to-blog tool, sent a mail and voila -

Drumcorps test

... came right in. If you are a Radio Userland user, get assetManager and add it to your arsenal. http://radio.weblogs.com/0001161/

Not good. I think the world should take Japan's cue on this one, and just outlaw personal firearms. The militia is a thing of a by-gone era, if you ask me.

Convicted? Need a Gun? No Problem. Thousands of individuals who aren't legally permitted to buy firearms are purchasing them with little effort, despite a system of background checks that's supposed to stop them. By Lia Steakley. [Wired News]

The Radio OUTLINER is a cool tool, which lets you organize your lists in an OPML file. Short, to the point, and subscribable, this is great for collaboration.

I know it is still a beta, but I'd like to see the ability to put the cursor mid line, and "break" the line by pressing enter. This does not work now.

What I like about it is the ability to subscribe to it. Radio users can subscribe to mine by clicking on the OPML coffee icon on the home page of this weblog. Once you subscribe, view its contents by right-clicking on the RU tray icon, choosing "open radio", and then going to Radio, Outliner.

Enjoy!

Using mail-to-blog, I tested sending a RICH text message from Outlook, via Exchange, to another Exchange-based POP mailbox, which receives OK and goes into the weblog just fine. But, none of the rich text attributes are preserved. See below. In fact, the cr/lf's between the "adsf"'s are not there either.

===
Test post - RICH. * asdf * asdf * asdf This is a TEST.

Using mail-to-blog, I tested sending a HTML text message from Outlook, via Exchange, to another Exchange-based POP mailbox, which receives OK and goes into the weblog just fine. However HTML is not preserved. See below.

===
Test post - HTML. Aqua back. _____ * asdf * asdf * asdf This is a TEST

Athletic Artistry in Rhythm is one way to describe it, but if you or your kids are up to the challenge, check out the Drum and Bugle Corps activity. Read a little about my own experiences in the 27th Lancers Drum and Bugle Corps. Drum Corps is a worthwhile challenge.

I tried adding Radio categories in Japanese, and the long and short is - it does not work. More here.

See Tom Cogley Headshots for some headshots of my brother Tom - an actor in Los Angeles.

I just spent 3 weeks on United, going around the US for business after about, oh, 5 years straight in Japan. Now that United's looking shaky, what's a man to do about his frequent flyer miles! Hope they pull through and can put together a convincing enough business plan to arrange for financing.

On a lighter note, on my trip it seems like I was "chosen for a random security check" at EACH and EVERY airport. Am I that shifty-eyed?

United Rejected, Dejected.  [The Motley Fool]

-RC

Hey drummers - any stuff you swear by for building chops or skills?  Read Chop-o-rama for some of my ideas, that came in handy when I marched snare in the 27th Lancers in '83 to '85.

-Rick Cogley