Weaver

I went on an excursion to the nearby town of Kut Lang on a social development training course for our students. This consisted of locals gathering at a temple, Wat Nong Saen Nuea, and showing off their handmade product crafting skills while students watched and asked questions, with the intention of offering improvement strategies at a future date.

For me, however, this meant a chance to do a side quest and add a new skill, so I embraced it and sat on the concrete floor and learned to weave dried bamboo strips and reeds for five hours.

The old ladies were surprised that a foreigner was so interested in their craft and taught me how to weave a sticky rice steaming basket step by step. I was pitifully slow compared to them, but I kept at it through lunch (the chicken rice looked delicious but is no bueno for keto me), and they put the finishing touches on it just before we left for the day.

Overall, it was a great day for learning.

and/or

Andor made Star Wars relevant to me again, after ignoring everything that came out the past years. It was really good, especially because I followed it up with Rogue One (and almost A New Hope as well, but I prefer to keep that one in my mind’s Pee-Chee folders/bubble memory). Anil Dash has a great run down of all the extras.

When Yahoo was King

I was recently asked about beta testing I did for Google’s cHTML site for NTT DoCoMo i-mode 20+ years ago on a clamshell keitai. Most of it was done between shots of Cuervo at Tramps (pout one out for Tramps, y’all!) in Kyobashi with my pal and Movable Type mentor, Bill.

I actually corrected the color on the Google logo for i-mode (for which I received payment in the form of two black XL tees with the old school Baskerville Google logo that elicited many a “what is Google” at the company hanami on the banks of the O River in Sakuranomiya).

I haven’t really felt that kind of freedom or hope that we got from being online in those days for quite a while… the corpos and sellouts all but ensured that. Fuckin’ people, man. Maybe that’s why I kept this blog up the whole time. I just want it to be there in the end to say it lasted a lot longer than some of this other crap.

In other news, this is what passes for a logo these days:

I switched back to Firefox again.

I’ve switched between using FF and Chromium-based browsers (mainly Opera and Brave) several times over the years. They both had times when they were so good! Now it seems like we’re forced to use the one that sucks the least… Chrome’s most recent transgression was making uBlock Origin unusable, but I was leaning this way for a long time. I just kept putting it off by building PCs with more and more RAM.