I have a serious backlog of interesting things I need to dump somewhere, so here ya go. This is a pic of Mount Fuji during sunset today. The best part about my work really is the view.
Let's get started with some cool web galleries:
This gallery about urban exploration is just wonderfully creepy. Here's another urbex gallery of some building in Yokohama.
The best urbex spot has to be this one though: the Kanagawa SLAUGHTER HOUSE >_<' ... Looks wonderful and close to my home too. I'll see if I can find it some time in the future. I might not return.
Here's a very cool one Junko sent me. Those are really ancient color pictures made in the USA in the 1930s-40s. I love those and I wish I had time to view all of them :(
We were thinking of visiting a really cool Japanese sewer system north of Tokyo. Here's a gallery with some pictures. Unfortunately we need to reserve about 2 months in advance because it's so popular... Here's the official website.
So that's it for pictures. Here's some cool tech stuff I found on wikipedia on one of my quests: Electromagnetic theories of conciousness, which somehow led me through Super-Kamiokande, though I don't quite remember how...
I want to take this opportunity to seriously bitch about Java. The programming language, not the drink. Or the island. I don't care about the island. Or the drink.
It sucks! First of all, Java is by far my favorite programming language and I'm quite acquainted with it's quirks and tricks. Overall it's just such a nice clean programming language. Except when it comes to three-letter acronyms, specifically (and unrelated to each other) XML and USB.
I'll start by defending Java here, saying that, because it's designed to be platform-independent it doesn't support any OS-specific implementations. Like USB. I would liken this to a rubber knife. Sure, it's a knife, but you can't use it for anything. What is the purpose of a programming language if not for the communication with the user, through various devices. USB is ancient. It's hard to believe that Sun cannot design their JREs to just support USB natively and create a nice Java package to wrap the native stuff. Even if they had to do it for several operating systems, it's still better than the complete mess it is now. There's freeware APIs on the internet that vary from not function at all to almost functioning. This needs to be implemented NOW, Sun. You're way behind.
If it's kind of easy to understand why USB is not supported, it's a complete mystery why XML should be a problem in Java. After all, XML has been an accepted format for many years now. In fact, the problem is quite the opposite of USB: XML has too much support in Java. There must be three or four implementations for handling XML files or text in the JRE, and countless third-party implementations as well. I won't talk about the third-part implementations, because I haven't tried them. I'm really hoping some of those can be good, because the included implementations suck ass. They're either too simple or overly complex. The SAX API was made in the middle ages, and there's several DOM APIs included in the JRE, varying from useless to needlessly complex. Guys, please take a look at other programming languages. Even Perl (for gods sake!) has some cool third-party XML stuff. I really hope for the next Java version will provide us with something new and easy to use.