otaku 2 Comments

Nice Engrish

I just submitted a reservation for a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) in Asakusa, Tokyo. Turns out there’s a festival going on while we’ll be in Japan! How cool. However, it makes our goal of staying in a ryokan a little more challenging, as the good ones in Tokyo all appear to be in Asakusa, and they’re probably all booked because of the HUGE festival.

Anyway, I just got the greatest confirmation message ever:

Thank you for an application.
I do the telephone of affirmation by return.
In addition, since there is also a case of a transmitting trouble, 2 and when you will carry out for three days and there is no reply, please ask by E-mail, telephone, etc.

o.O

I’d imagine the Japanese are probably too polite to nickname the hack-job that we gaijin do to THEIR language.

webdesign 1 Comment

One Week Till Relaunch?

Stayed up a little too late last night after getting home from Easter festivities in Cleveland. Woke up this morning, way late and bleary-eyed, and decided to use one of my personal days. After all, I need to get my freelance project done this week, and there are a few important parts that aren’t done yet. So, I stayed home, slept in a little, and worked for about four hours total on that.

I’m realizing that creating my own content management system (CMS) from a flat-file database is a little more challenging than I’d thought it would be. I thought it would be ridiculously simple, but it’s really not. I’d really rather use SQL, but enabling SQL on my client’s webhosting would cost them extra from their webhost. I’m highly tempted to just tell my client to edit the file themselves as needed, and upload it via FTP… but I know I should really afford them a way to edit their news and such in the browser itself.

I spent long enough figuring out how to check a username and password against a flat-file db, and remembering how to get PHP to remember that the user has logged in, via session variables. I finally had some ideas about how to edit and delete records after being flummoxed for quite some time… but I got sidetracked by Japan trip stuff, and never got back to coding, and now my brain’s winding down enough that I’m not going to attempt it now. Maybe tomorrow after work. I’m thinking about feeding the db into an array to display it, then editing the array and spitting the whole array back out into a new file, overwriting the old. Should work, right…?

Back to work tomorrow. Meh. I’m looking forward to finishing this freelance job so I can a.) invoice the client, and b.) finish up my resume and portfolio redux in preparation for the pre-Japan job-hunting blitz.

weight loss

Plateau? Smashie, Smashie!

Heck, yeah! Eat that, you damn one-month plateau! Ungh! *bitchslap*

*ahem* Sorry.

This week, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been watching my carbohydrate intake more diligently. I’ve been shooting for 125g of carbs and at least 25g of fiber, for a total of 100g of net carbs (since fiber isn’t digestible, y’know). I’ve been going a little over, but it’s apparently the intent that counts. I’ve continued to track my food on SparkPeople, but I’ve been manually tabulating my sugar, as SparkPeople has issue with letting people see how much sugar they’ve eaten. Can’t have people avoiding fruit, after all, since fruit has sugar in it.

At any rate, I’ve kept my protein above 140g daily, my total carbohydrates below 160g, and my fiber above 23g (except yesterday, which only made it to 18g). My sugar intake has been pretty decent, too, staying in the 20g-30g range. Now, most hard-core low-carbers would scoff at these numbers, since Atkins Induction limits you to 20g of carbohydrate per day total, and NO sugar, period. All my sugars have been… let’s see… OK, one day I had some low-cal ice cream that had 16g of sugar, but the rest is mostly my organic breakfast cereal, South Beach Diet snack bars, Splenda Brown Sugar Blend, stuff like that. I feel pretty positive about my food intake, considering this week’s results.

Remember how I said I’d try this for a couple weeks, and see if I lost three pounds in two weeks?

I just lost four and a half pounds in one week.

I weigh 197.5 lbs this morning, in contrast to the 202 I weighed this past Sunday.

Tomorrow’s Easter in Westlake, with Aaron’s family, so I expect I won’t be monitoring my carbs quite as well as I have been. I’ll still make a concerted effort to be good, stock up on the meat, go easy on the starchy goodness, and only eat one small dessert. (Believe me, at Uncle Pete’s, dessert is a course unto itself. We’re responsible for bringing a cake, and I know Pete’s wife Dee will likely be making something scrumptious, too.) I may gain back a little weight, stabilize at a slightly higher number — and I’m OK with that.

I have no intention of getting back up to 200, though.

house 1 Comment

IKEA

And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.

—Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 5

Is it so wrong to want nice things? Stylish things?

It’s tough to justify spending over $150 on what is basically a large bookshelf, though. It’s tough to move from the mismatched, second-hand furniture you acquired in your young adult years to actually paying for something stylish. And heaven forbid you don’t actually have a defined style yet.

When I was in high school, my dream decor was black and white. Now, it’s more black and earth tones. Dark woods, light tans, black and rust accents. Our current decor is definitely nothing like that. It’s more of post-collegiate, free-is-good mix-n-match. Someday, I’d like to work on establishing a real interior decorating style/sense. And actually spending the money to do it.

Today’s distraction at work was an all-day e-mail volley with Sheryl, in which we moved from talking fitness to talking about her new house to talking about home improvement and interior decorating in general. Much was said about the IKEA website and the store that is really quite close to where Sheryl will be living.

Now, I’d already looked at the website and found some picture frames I want to stock up on; unfortunately, they’re only available at the IKEA store, about an hour north of here — not online. There are also some large bookshelves which would serve as some keen DVD storage; however, since they’re not marketed as such, and don’t have a specific DVD capacity listed, Aaron isn’t entirely keen on them. I am, though. I’m willing to put out the money for them, and Aaron is willing to put his DVDs in them as long as he isn’t paying for them. And I’m OK with that.

The shelf I want is six feet on a side by 15″ deep, with square compartments. It costs $180, but I bet it’ll hold a shitload of DVDs and anime figurines and plants and other stylish accoutrements. I thought about buying it online, but then thought that maybe I should try something smaller and less expensive first, to see how the shipping and customer service goes.

So, I looked at a smaller shelf of the same design, about five feet tall by 2½ feet wide. I measured the spot in our living room I had in mind for it, and it would be an absolutely *perfect* fit. Well, except for having to drill an access hole for the electrical outlet in the right side of the shelf. I wouldn’t have a problem with that, though, even on an $80 shelf. Hell, we can keep the piece we drill out of it and patch it back in if we ever move the damn thing. It would so be worth it, because it’s so *us* (OK, maybe it’s so *me*) and it fits that spot so *perfectly*.

But I digress. I looked at this smaller shelf online, and saw that it’s also not available for online ordering. You have to go to the IKEA store to buy it. *sigh* So, I looked at the big shelf again, and decided to put it in my shopping cart and see how much shipping would be.

Are you ready?

Shipping literally costs as much as the shelf. Yep, $180 for the shelf and another $180 or so for shipping.

Not worth it.

I’ll have to wait until we can a.) go up to the IKEA store, and b.) convince someone with a truck to take us up there. I’ll want to buy both shelving units, plus my picture frames, plus whatever else I see that strikes my fancy.

Whenever this happens, it’s going to be a very dangerous trip. For one of my credit cards.