anoisette.com

more fish eye fun.

a fish eye lens. purchased today. oops. (maybe).

a couple of days ago the blog got a makeover with this new layout. i used a theme from ndesign studio and customized it with the bamboo header. i made the bamboo graphic in illustrator by following the tutorial at ndesign studio. the guy has a lot of amazing stuff on his site, definitely worth checking out if you are at all interested in graphic design.

i was pretty happy to finally sit down and dabble in illustrator. recently i’d been feeling frustrated at my lack of ability to do anything for this website.  i used to make layouts for fun all the time and be able to spend hours mucking around in photoshop! anyway i guess all i needed to do was to seriously sit down and let myself enjoy the process.

now to get inspired to make a matching favicon.

i just added a page to my site featuring my trippermap. it grabs my geotagged photos from flickr and puts them on a map of the world. i love being able to look at a map of the world and seeing some of the places i’ve been (and all the places i have yet to go!). i geotag my photos in a couple of ways. one way is to do it directly in flickr using the map function. the other way is a little more involved. i make sure that my garmin geko 201 is on and tracking when i take a photo. once home, i download the tracklog to a computer using gps utility. next i import the tracklog into wwmx location stamper as well as the photos i want to tag. the location stamper software matches the time stamp of the tracks in the tracklog to the time stamps on the photos and writes the location to the photos exif data. once that’s done i upload them to flickr and the geotags are automatically read. it sounds like a long process but it’s really quite simple. the geko is also fun to take hiking since it can track the distance you have traveled and your average moving speed. having all that (possibly useless information) appeals to geek in me. it also works as a compass if you get lost while hiking! and you can use to participate in geocaching. when i bought it over a year ago i seriously debated whether i should spend the money to get it, but i’ve been very happy with it. no regrets.

last week i got this book out from the library to find out information about yakushima, which i hope to visit this summer. the boy ended up finding a nearby hike in ashiya that enticed us with reported sightings of boars in the mountains. i was a bit intimidated by the hike being 4 hours going up and down mt. rokko and was rather reluctant to go. but eventually, i was convinced. and i’m glad i went, we saw feral cats, a crazy 8 inch long centipede, boars, a lovely view of ashiya and osaka, and had an interesting encounter with a group of 20 senior citizen hikers. we were at a part where we had to scale up some steep rocks, there was a chain bolted to the rocks to help people go up. we saw a couple of people at the top ready to come down, so we figured we would wait for them to come down first. we stepped off to the side of the trail in anticipation of letting them pass. the first man came down and apologized, and then stood nearby waiting for the next two ladies to make their way down. as the second lady came down, she also apologized. the man apologized again. and then he said in english “20 people coming”. the boy and i looked at each other. 20 people! alright, we were going to be waiting for a while. surely enough people kept trickling on down, and as each one passed us, they each said “sumimasen” or “arigato”. as they all filed passed us, decked out in hiking gear (hiking boots, hiking pants with cargo pockets, hats, backpacks, and towels around their necks) i started feeling very self conscious about my own lack of gear, i was just wearing sneakers and a skirt, hardly appropriate hiking gear. in fact, one man waiting for the rest of the group pointed in surprise at my sneakers and said something in japanese to the person next to him. anyway, i’m glad i did the hike yesterday. sure my legs felt like jelly by the end but i survived. i have to say that living in kobe is great. in the morning i went for a run down by the sea, and in the afternoon, hiked up mt. rokko. there aren’t many places in the world where you’ve got such easy access to both sea and mountains.

yesterday morning i got a little into blog surfing, where i just end up finding a whole bunch of new blogs and sites by clicking links and clicking links and just enjoying finding new things. lately i’ve been reading a lot of personal finance blogs and that’s how this link clicking started yesterday. but i ended up getting really disenchanted, the blogs became more and more money oriented and how to make money blogging. it just got to be too much. so i made an important realization. i’m not interested in having a lot of money (despite what my interest in reading books about millionaires might seem to indicate). i’m just interested in being financially independent so i don’t have to work at a job i hate.

that is maybe one of my life pursuits.

why do i feel the need to throw in the maybe? maybe it’s because i’ve been in japan too long. maybe is one of the favourite words of the japanese. in fact, i’ve been told that if you use maybe a lot, it’s a sure sign that you’ve been in japan too long.

so this morning while making my usual rounds of blogs i went to check get rich slowly, one of my daily reads. unfortunately for some reason i got a 404 error for the usual url of getrichslowly.org/blog, so i directed my browser to go to the domain root of getrichslowly.org, which i basically never go to. but today i was surprised to notice a link for the authors personal blog at foldedspace.org so of course i checked it out, and was rewarded by finding some thoughtful entries that struck a chord with me considering my recent bout of reflecting on what to do with my life.

it’s hard getting back in the swing of writing and trying to keep a blog. yesterday i found myself thinking that maybe i should just stop and figure that blogging just isn’t for me, and i’m more of a blog reader than a blog writer.  i guess the reason i won’t let myself give up on keeping a blog is because i’ve done it for so long that obviously it’s something that i can do and enjoy. i just need to find my voice right now. tap tap tap. testing, testing, one two three.

the first blog or online journal i can remember keeping was at scribble.nu in 2000. the site died and i lost all my writings with it. i then started writing at livejournal, a fair bit of my stuff is still there although it’s mostly late adolescent angst that i’m actually kind of embarrassed about. i jumped back and forth between livejournal and experimenting with blogs hosted on my personal domain using first greymatter, then moveable type, and then blogger and wordpress. then i moved over to diary-x. and then it died and i lost all my writing. i tried to find a new home but was unsuccessful and stopped writing. and here i am today with wordpress again. writing is like anything else, the more you do it, the easier it is. so i should just do it. because everyone has something to say.

Yesterday I finished reading The Millionaire Next Door after coming across a copy at the foreign books library here in Kobe. The Millionaire Next Door is one of those books that always gets mentioned when reading about personal finance or wealth building, so I decided to read it. It was different from other books I’ve read about personal finance because it was more research based, and more about providing data profiling millionaires rather than telling the reader what they should do to build wealth. The information contained in this book was really interesting, and sometimes surprising. It was also a quick and easy read, and I definitely recommend it if you are at all curious about what characteristics people who build wealth share.

the soft drink market in japan is an interesting one… this cucumber flavoured pepsi is just the latest addition. it didn’t sound as whacked out as the fizzy alcoholic yogurt flavoured drink which i’ve seen at my local grocery store that goes by the name yogurito (i don’t have the stomach to buy it and try it, as much as i would like to for novelty’s sake). however the cucumber pepsi, i could try. who doesn’t like cucumber? it doesn’t have an offensive flavour, how bad could it be? in fact, it wasn’t bad at all. it wasn’t particularly great either though. the color is pretty. but not in a color i’d like to be drinking kind of way.

the knitting on the hat is done, i think. i just have to close up the top. but instead of doing that this morning i spent the morning trying to work through chapter 5 of ruby on rails for dummies and pondering my life and life goals and thinking about maybe starting a personal finance blog? and reading fashion designer blogs and then about the state of generation x/y.

i know. i am all over the place. maybe what i should blog about is how to find my place in this world! but i was thinking that blogging about how i can’t find my place in the world will just make the problem worse. the answer hasn’t come to me, and i can’t count on it coming to me anytime soon. in the meantime i gotta get my act together and just pick something and go with it already. life is passing me by while i spend all my time thinking about what to do with it.

on a more hopeful note, i found pfash.com, a fashion site built with ruby on rails. maybe seemingly unrelated things can make sense together after all.