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Anybody in charge of that Web 2.0 thing?

I feel it’s time I tell you about my business plan for http://p.et/s.

This time around, we’ll be using AJAX and RSS technologies. You won’t have to reload a single page to order your dog food. Just. Brilliant.

Please send your contributions to the first round of funding via Paypal.

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I rarely (read: never) bore you with the minutiae of my daytime occupations; and for good reasons: they aren’t all that fascinating.

Actually, some of them are, but I’m too much of a sissy to risk getting dooced just to bring you tasty anecdotes of the life of an aspiring genius salaryman gaijin in Tokyo, so these will have to wait until I’m out of sight from Japanese shores.

In the meantime, I thought I’d point you to a few of the small side-projects I’ve been involved in, over the past year or so. If only because I couldn’t skip such a perfect occasion to reinforce my public image as a tree-hugger pinko commie with a taste for artsy schmaltzy stuff.

Neither one of these sites I consider the pinnacle of my coding skills (some of the HTML markup isn’t even mine), but I thought they deserved a little mention here:

ForestAlert.org:

The first website is for a non-profit organization called ForestAlert.org, that deals with the problem of illegal logging and timber trade. The ruthless exploitation of non-renewable timber resources in third-world countries threatens to annihilate entire regions: destroying millenia-old primary forests, their ecosystems and the indigenous tribes that depend on them… Usually to end up as construction material in Japan or copy paper in about every other corporate office in the world.

ForestAlert.org is aimed at drawing attention to this problem, by continuously reporting on ongoing illegal activities condoned by public companies, exposing the global trade mechanisms that allow this traffic and tippin you on some easy steps you can take in your everyday-life to help prevent this ecological disaster.

Currently, the focus is on trade currents between Asian countries (Indonesia, New Guinea, Japan) and content is bilingual (English and Japanese), but the site is slowly extending its reach to cover every area of the globe.

Note that ForestAlert.org doesn’t ask for any money, just a bit of your time and some help spreading the word.

Pinx Photo:

In a much lighter tone, I also gave a hand to our very own Samurai Atsushi‘s management agency: you can now see the work of a few talented Tokyo photographers and stylists on Pinx Tokyo‘s official website. That includes Mr. Atsushi Nishikiori himself, on his way to become the Helmut Newton of the East.

Don’t be frightened by the few kanjis here and there: one doesn’t need to speak a word of Japanese to browse and appreciate the pretty pictures in all their glossy photographic CSS glory.

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This one dedicated to Jeff:

I was enjoying a peaceful late lunch and tea break at the small eatery next-door with E., somewhere between lovemaking session #5 and arguing session #253, when a noisy discussion, one table over, draw our attention:

Three obatarians were seated, twice as many teapots in front of them, loudly and excitingly commenting over what looked like exercise sheets scattered on the table. From the style of the exercises and the tone of their comments, it seemed like at least one of them was learning how to write kanjis: a peculiar explanation, seeing how they all sounded positively natives, with little chance of belonging to the 1% illiterate people in Japan.

But then, listening more carefully to their attempt at pronouncing strange guttural tchaw‘s and yow‘s and taking a closer look at their papers, we realized they weren’t working their Japanese kanjis: these little old women were indeed feverishly teaching each other Korean. At that point, I could clearly see the ghost of Bae Yong Joon hovering above the table and reflecting into their glistening pupils.

I suppose until that moment, I had woefully underestimated the spread of Yong-sama-mania among the greying Japanese masses, but E. confirmed that even her aging slightly xenophobic grandma had all but started to learn Korean, secondary to that mop-head single-handedly bringing Korea to the forefront of sappy insipid drama production for the Asian market.

And I naively thought that peace and understanding between countries would have to be slowly built over mutual respect and appreciation for millennia-old cultures.

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Let Z be a euclidean space of dimension equal to or less than your house, let X be the finite set of all razor handles you can extract from Z.

We can postulate there exists an infinite number of mountable razor blades within Z and not a single one of them will fit your fucking handles.

Extension of Z to the bathroom aisle of your local supermarket is left as a trivial exercise to the reader.

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Found my entire tie rack behind the couch where it had fallen two months ago.

Never quite bought this whole “necktie-eating monster” explanation anyway…