The signs are unmistakable: the End of Days is approaching.
Not only has my garden turned into a lovely little pond outpouring into a nearby river that, upon closer examination, would seem to be the road…
But simultaneously — and despite the distance I haven’t ruled out any correlation — Duran Duran has just noisily resurfaced: crushing ten years of dwindling hope that they might never be heard ever again outside of late night VH1 and supermarket PA.
Update:: latest WPPM news are here (doesn’t affect wp-plugins.net)
A new version of WP Plugins Manager with many, many new features…
Been happily back home for two days now.
Just got around to cleaning the last few pics I took while walking around in Paris last week. Unfortunately not much to save: too bad they haven’t figured how to add a special DrunkUser™ feature into these digital thingies yet.
Now I ask you: are your luggage hand-delivered at home for free, every time you fly on your favorite airline?
Ha. Suckers.
Some people are quick to bash Aeroflot for the most insignificant details (you know, like when two drunk flight attendants start beating up a passenger…), but they always fail to point out the positive.
For example, how many companies are so truly dedicated to the well-being of their long-distance flights passengers that they insure all luggage are directly dispatched at home by qualified airport personnel, free of charge.
In the US, when dealing with customer service reps, it is of utmost importance to be authoritative: show them who’s the boss and ask to speak to a manager every time something doesn’t go your way. Customer is King, even when customer is an asshole, even when he’s wrong. Especially if he’s wrong.
At least, that’s what any wise American will teach you, with a conspiratorial look that’d make you think he is letting you on the secret masonic handshake of the customer support guild. Equipped with these conceptions, he will then proceed to use them abroad, wherever he goes, perpetuating the accepted worldwide standard for Ugly Americanness…
Last Update: The WordPress Plugin manager is no longer available for download and support has been discontinued. More info here.
10/20/04 Update: Check out the new version…
If you are a WordPress user, go check out the shiny new WordPress Plugin Database!
If you have written plugins for WordPress, go add them already!
If you do not use WordPress, then, well… you should.
But I’ll still talk to you if you don’t…
There is only one thing on which I really stock up while in Europe: Books.
Everything else, albeit at ludicrous prices, can be found in Tokyo.
All right, maybe not exactly everything else, but I keep a wild ferret and two gerbils on crack sitting by my computer, specially trained to go straight for the groin and bite off my nuts in a split second, were I ever to stoop low enough to make a single joke on the size of Japanese prophylactics on this blog, so we’ll leave it at that.
In fact, even foreign languages books are easy to come by in Tokyo. Some for less that Japanese ones; as German, French, Italian and Spanish books can all be borrowed freely at their respective cultural embassies. Ironically, most of the books I buy here are by Japanese authors.
If you think about it, it’s easy to see why: my current level of written Japanese barely allows me to decrypt my emails (painfully so, when the witch sending them has drawn some evil glee from purposely using utterly rare kanji forms wherever english katakanas would have done just fine). On the other hand, attempting to read Mishima and his astronomical kanji vocabulary would be as entertaining as taking on the dictionary in alphabetical order.
Will I come out as an insensitive cold-hearted bastard if I publicly lament here the fact that all things interesting and exciting only happen in Japan when I’m not there, stuck six thousands miles away, in a city where major earthquakes, flood and other cool natural disasters are about as likely as a shred of human soul mistakenly finding its way into Dick Cheney’s corpse…
On that count, Paris is quite boring.
I am told the floods of yore, when the as-of-then-undomesticated Seine river expanded its bank to all surrounding neighbourhoods, were a vision of surrealistic awe. What with the people, bank clerks and congressmen alike, having to swim their way back from work, French baguette in one hand, cigarette in the other and beret on top.
OK, perhaps the congressmen didn’t have to go freestyle swimming, but surely there couldn’t be enough boats for everybody…
As a kid, sport wasn’t really represented in the realm of family activities. My dad not really the sport guy (must be genetic), except for Judo, which is not exactly your ideal father-son bonding sport. The occasional quality time was therefore spent mostly on two things: lego and train models.
Lego was the passion of my life, my only career inspiration at the time, still would be, if not for these damn high school orientation counselors.
Train models and all these cute little house models that go around, were my dad’s real interest, in true british fireplace&slippers fashion…
Unfortunately, far too frequent travels and moves always stood in the way of his grand project to turn one of the room in the decrepit family manor into a morsel of bucolic alpine landscape, complete with countryside train stations, small river flowing in the middle and of course, the perfunctory tunnel through the mountain.
