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Prix de l'Arc Tomorrow

Hello France,

Tomorrow you'll have Pric de l'Arc and there will be a horse from Japan: Deep Impact. He is thought to be one of the greatest and fastest horse in Japanese race horce history, and we believe his win. The race will take place 0:00 am our time Sunday night (our time). I can't wait!

Dicespam

Dice

I like how Dice fills up my dashboard.

Photo retouching with Picasa2

I usually upload photos from digital camera directly, by inserting SD card to the laptop. Today I have looked around some of the photos I've taken this year in Picasa 2 and played around with the very basic retouch feature that it has: brightness, highlight and shadows. It also has other effects like sharpness, but I haven't use most of them. Anyway, It's pretty simple but to to me it gives a great improvement.

So I saved some of them and uploaded to Flickr tagged retouched. How do you find the difference?

30boxes.pl: how I can end up living in the shell

Even in the web 2.0 world, geeks like me still tend to do lots of tasks on the UNIX shell. Recently Best Pracital released their command line tool todo.pl for their awesome task management service Hiveminder. Jesse gave me a preview release for it a couple of weeks before the public announcement and I've been finding it practically useful.

So I created a similar command line tool for my favorite calendar service 30boxes. There you go, 30boxes.pl. The usage of the command is quite similar to todo.pl (or the original todo.sh):

30boxes.pl list

List all events in your calendar starting from today to 3 months later

30boxes.pl --from "2 weeks ago" -to today

List all events in your calendar starting from 2 weeks ago to today

30boxes.pl --month "October 2006"

List all events in your calendar scheduled on October 2006

30boxes.pl --date tomorrow

List all events scheduled tomorrow.

30boxes.pl add meeting with Brad tomorrow 3pm

Add new event title "meeting with Brad" on 3pm tomorrow, using 30boxes One box input.

30boxes.pl del 100

Delete the event with id 100.

That's it. Pretty simple and usable. You need some Perl modules installed from CPAN, and most of them are quite popular and easy to install.

I like to add 'update' command to this shell, to add the ability to change title or starting date from command line also, but looks like 30boxes events.Update API is kind of borked, or just unfriendly to use. When you call method=events.Update&summary=foo, it'll clear out all the fields other than summary, which to me is very intuitive.

I'll update the code to retrieve the original data and send back if there're popular demands for it. But for now you can just use web interface to update.

Enjoy!

Plagger

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Plagger is on the mag now.

Metallica Rulez

Live Shit: Binge & Purge

Yesterday I watched MTV's "Summer Sonic 2006 Highlight" program. Summer Sonic is one of the most popular outside music festival in Japan and this year we had Metallica and Linkin Park as headliners, along with lots of great artists. I didn't make it to the venue even though I went there twice in the past and had a great times.

Anyway I was looking forward to seeing the program since on my friends' blogs I saw people mentioning Metallica's performance was awesome. And it actually was. They played as the 20 years old anniversary, the whole album of "Master of Puppets." And they didn't play any of the songs in the albums later than "Load", which is a nifty decision. On the intro of Battery I got goose pimples literally.

The program only played 4 songs "Battery", "Fuel", "Nothing Else Matters" and "Enter Sandman" but other songs are available as a download on LiveMetallicA.com and you can find some vids on YouTube.

New Found Glory - Coming Home

Coming Home

New Found Glory

I just downloaded the New Found Glory's newest album "Coming Home" from iTunes music store. I already repeated the whole album 3 times and my first impression is "Wow." NFG is back, with really good melodies. Apparently they'll come to Japan this fall and I wonder if I can make it. Even if I can't, there would be chances to see them in their gigs on the West coast.

Photos from Thailand

Photos from Koh Samui and Bangkok are now online at the Flickr set.

Back in Japan!

Safely arrived at Narita. So tired. Long journey still continues..

Safe in Bangkok

20060920 Koh Samui 262

We just arrived Bangkok 7pm and walked around the town. We saw some soldiers in the corner but other than that it looks pretty normal, and the night market was full of people with energies. The picture here is that of a great sunset I had in the last evening of Koh Samui.

QotD: Let's Go There

What's your favorite vacation destination?

  Now I'm in Koh Samui, Thailand. This place is very relaxing and I like being here. 2 more days to go ...

In BKK

Now I'm writing this in the Bangkok International Airport lounge. There's a huge Dutry Free Shop area and I found a JAL's unsecured Wi-Fi. Waiting for a transit to fly to Ko Samui on 7pm, which is 2.5 hours away. I'm very excited to be here.

Tesla

IMG_8636

She's now in SAKK office. So adorable.

QotD: Speak To Me In...

How many languages can you speak?  Which languages can you read or understand?

Japanese, English and a little bit of Spanish, which I learned at the university for 2 years. Muy bien.

Barca

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Football season has come

Now I'm watching Arsenal - M'Brough. It's 26 mins on the 1st half but M'Brough already got 1 goal to lead. Go arsenal!

This midnight 4:45am I'll watch the 2nd week of Liga Espanola as well. Love football ...

QotD: Middle Name

What's your middle name?  Is there a story or history behind it?

We Japanese usually don't have any middle name, and I'm not an exception :)

Shure e2c is gone

My fave earphone Shure's e2c has retired from its job, on the flight from Heathrow to Narita. Its left ear pad broke from its root, and is not usable anymore. Sigh.

Today I'm using iPod's "default" earphone, which never fits well to my ear. Actually I cannot imagine anyone with ears which fits well with this badly designed one.

Online check-in is a win

I checked in the flight from Heathrow to Narita this morning and found a seat 1) which is on aisle and 2) seats next to the seat were all vacant.

Actually when I'm on board and found that I'm the only one on the row. I enjoyed the movie Mission Impossilbe III and ALWAYS (the Japanese one), then slept away taking those three seats as flat. So good.

UK Diary #3

Today was clkao's birthday and we had a Hackerkitchen party. He cooked very nice Duck and some vegetables which we bought in Notting Hill's market. Quite yummy.

I'd like to upload photos from Hackerkitchen but the network here is a little sucky. It's just 128kbps downstream and 64kbps upstream. Crazy. I just can't believe how clkao can be with this slow network connection. Maybe his svk offline commit helps a lot, but still it's stil ... Basically during this UK trip, the network has been always unfriendly to me everywherre. I miss the real "high speed internet" in Japan.

Anyway I'll fly back to Tokyo tomorrow evening. Thanks to the people I met in UK. It's been a really good stay.

Fabulous!

I guess "Fabulous" is my favorite British English term, among others like "keep clear of the door."

Fabulous sounds like basically the replacement of "awesome" in United States, but it sounds more, um, fabulous.