Thursday February 26
 
18:07
 
Oden Fondue And Brown Sugar Lemon Pancakes

Shrove Tuesday dinner.

Oden fondue to start.

Brown sugar lemon pancakes to finish.

Tuesday February 24
 
16:33
 
Feb Break

I went to Hawaii for the weekend. Initial impressions upon landing:

- Hawaiians really do wear Hawaiian shirts
- Where are all the sexy Japanese? All I see is fat/old Americans!

Hawaii wasn’t what I expected. I thought it would be loud, noisy, full of Costa-del-sol style nightclubs and beach bars. But it was none of those things. Good bars, microbreweries and local beers, clean beaches, and I could buy (UK) size 12 shoes (woo hoo!).

Would have liked to have seen a few more hot babes on the beach, but I do like whale spotting and Hawaii was most satisfying for that (even away from the beach!). Only real negative was the lack of public transport – I’d hate to be waiting for a Hanalua beach bus during the high season; and it was impossible to see the volcanoes on the “big island” without renting a car or going on a tour which visits nut factories, flower fields, and several other pointless cash earning sites (so I ended up skipping the volcanoes this time).

I don’t usually like beach holidays but I liked Hawaii so much that I’m thinking to go back later this year – visit the big island and rent a car to see the volcanoes. That would be cool.

Tuesday February 24
 
13:42
 
Japanese Public Decency Fail

What is Japan like?! From failblog.

Monday February 23
 
16:34
 
Interior Design Jargon Fail

For some mad reason which I can’t quite fathom at the moment, I failed to look at failblog even once this year until reminded of it today. A whole 7 weeks to whisk through, literally ROTFL. Praise be.

Sunday February 22
 
21:07
 
Language B*tch

My Vista is set to English. My web browsers are set for English as the default language. Despite that, when I go to google.com, it brings me Japanese Google.

Yeah, my OS is English and my web browser encoding is set to English, but pah! What does that matter? I really want my websites to display in Japanese. I was just playing silly buggers when I selected English. Didn’t know what I was doing. Wouldn’t know me arse from me elbow if I didn’t have “arse” and “elbow” tattoo’d on them. Perhaps Google would prefer I changed those tattoos to the Japanese for arse and elbow? (That would be a-roo-soo and e-roo-bo.)

Skype is even worse. I go to skype.com and it brings me the Japanese site. I find the option to switch to English and download Skype. The installer runs in English, then Skype runs… in Korean. WTF? Because I set the “Language for non-Unicode programs” to Korean in control panel? That’s because Windows wont read a disk with Korean files unless I have this setting (which makes no sense, because it’s not a “program”). And no recent program should be looking at this setting – it’s there for badly written hacked together old software.

Grrr….

(Oh, and the experience on the Mac isn’t much better – it can’t even read Korean from my NAS.)

Rant over.