Ippoippo

There was quite an interesting story over at the BBC, about the Japanese political system.

I noticed he had five pieces of paper with densely typed briefings on his lap, one for each question I was expected to ask.
I started asking them but in the wrong order.
That prompted much harrumphing and agitated shuffling of papers from the audience of advisers clustered around us, but the prime minister, to his credit, soldiered gamely on.
The poor man looked like a puppet though, and the fact that he was clearly an intelligent, talented politician made the whole experience feel that much more depressing.

An amusing story, not sure how much has been embellished though. Actually, probably not much!

I have been mostly listening to…

… a bit of 宇多田 ヒカル (Utada Hikaru).
This time around, it was me who brought her latest album, but Yuko likes her stuff too.

Having said that, Yuko seems to like the more pop type stuff on the album, whereas I like listening to the more ballad type stuff (old fart that I am). Chills me out in the office I find.

Well, it’s only September 20th-ish… and we’ve been having good weather for the last week. Hell, Friday, Saturday and Sunday were really nice sunny days.

Ah well, never mind, make the most of it while we can.

This Saturday we headed up to Abergavenny on the train for the Food Festival. It was alright, and we picked up some good stuff (some English wine, duck hearts (which we cooked that night and were very tasty… much better than chicken hearts which I’m not particularly keen on), some smoked fish). It was very busy though, and to be honest, the £5.50 entry charge was not worth it. Never mind.

Talking of food… I see yet ANOTHER Japanese Minister of Agriculture has resigned. That department is a complete joke , to be honest.

Before I started writing this post, I started reading through some of the usual Japanese blogs I like to read… and then I came across this. Absolutely bizzare. Since when was that film a comedy!?

… and the weather has been just as crap!! In fact, as I type this, its pissing down outside.

Doesn’t seem to have harmed the veggies though, and we’ve managed to crow some courgettes which were very tasty. Next year, once the big green house is assembled, hopefully our attempt at Japanese pumpkins will go a lot better.
Our home cabbages seem to have grown more, and one of them proved to be rather good when we had some お好み焼き (Okonomiyaki).

Anyway, the news…

Just who is running Japan at the moment

Well, nobody it seems, or all the bods in the back, smoke filled rooms. After the relative stability of the Koizumi years, it seems like Japan is back to normal with yet another PM resigning in short succession.
Taro Aso looks like a favourite to take over, and indeed he may well have been waiting patiently for his chance thinking he wouldn’t have lasted long if he’d been the immediate successor after Koizumi. Who knows.

Chrome

Hmm, a rather interesting development in the internet browser space… with Google launching Chrome. HTML content is rendered using WebKit, which is same as Safari (the web browser that comes with Mac OS X, and can be installed on Windows too (I personally don’t like it running on Windows, I normally use Firefox on that platform).
At the moment, Chrome only runs on Windows, but it will be built for Linux and Mac OS X as well.

There’s a set of cartoons (Very ‘Heroes’ style if you ask me), going into some of the techy details.

It’s an interesting move, and has already caused a lot of chat and speculation on various message boards and websites I read.
Initial thoughts are that it is VERY quick at rendering content and running ‘Web 2.0′ type sites. Some people report that running Chrome using VMWare Fusion or Parallels, as Windows Virtual Machines inside Mac OS X, still results in a faster web browser than the native Safari!
Other people though are getting concerned about Google turning in the next ‘big brother’, and displacing Microsoft as the next big nasty corporation. Some people have pointed out this particular clause in the End User License Agreement when you install…

“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.”

One thing though, the Chrome project is open source, which means any really dodgy looking code, attempting to do anything sinister would be pretty much spotted by plenty of geeks who would then rant about it pretty damn quickly.

Google Update

Well, it looks like Google has changed it’s EULA now. Good!
Links here, here and here.

… in other words. The theme from The Good Life.

That’s what keeps popping into my head at the moment with us starting to crop some of our home grown grub.

You can now see it here too…

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Talking of music getting stuck in my head.
Yuko seems to have got rather addicted to this bit of Japanese pop.

Yeah… cheese-tastic Japanese Electro-pop… yet strangely addictive. Also, the videos aren’t exactly unpleasant for us to chaps to look at, ahem!