I like Japan.

Well, I say I like Japan when what I really mean is that I think I’d like Japan, if I ever went. I mean, sure, I wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone, or understand roads signs, or know where I am because I wouldn’t be able to read the street names. And OK, I’d probably hate the food because I’ve had a life of only eating a decidedly western diet; eating what I like, and in the quantities I like it. But none of this matters because Japan is cool.

Japan is cool, and they make all this cool stuff. Sony are Japanese, and they make the best-selling console in the world. Nintendo are Japanese, so are Sega. They all make cool games.

Anime too. Anime’s cool, and anime’s from Japan. So Japan is cool, and I like cool things, so I like Japan.

And so OK, I could wander around, not speaking to anyone, and not really know where I was going, but I’d see stuff, and that would be cool. I mean, I wouldn’t really know what I was seeing because I wouldn’t be able to read the signs, and I couldn’t ask anyone what the signs say because I still wouldn’t be able to speak the language, but that would be OK, because I’d be in Japan, and I like Japan.

So not knowing where I am, and not being able to speak the language means I might get lost once or twice as I’m wandering around staring at buildings I don’t know the name of, but that won’t matter because everything I see will be a new and exciting Japanese experience, and I might stumble across some weird old shop selling cute little furry animals that don’t like sunlight.

Not that I’d be able to buy one because I won’t be able to speak the language.

So you want to learn Japanese?

It’s interesting to note the slow but inexorable march of blog-content on the BBC website. First of all there was the Scotblog and then more famously the reporters’ log during the Iraq war. Now (and since who knows when) there’s the Gamesblog which is just what you think it is. 🙂

In addition, more and more viewer-written pieces are appearing in blog form such as the Blog of a non-smoker.

When you couple this with the fact that you can run your own weblog on the BBC Collective site, I think it’s fair to conclude that the BBC has gone utterly weblog-crazy. 🙂

Does this mean anything in a social networking, cutting-edge weblogging, lowering-the-boundaries-to-personal-publishing, acceptance of blogging-as-a-form-of-legitimate-journalism kind of way?

Probably not.

I recently started a new job at Zoo Digital Group, employed as a Java and Web developer. There are a few other Java developers here (although the main trade-in-stock is C++), but I’m now the web development department. Me.

This is actually quite good, and I’ve enjoyed the work I’ve had to do so far, but now a couple of others have had to start putting web pages together, and without my expert guidance (read: slap to the back of the head), there are tables-for-layout, font tags and all sorts lying around. How am I supposed to teach, quickly, how to do layouts with CSS? Well, Colored boxes an article from MaxDesign (whom I linked to recently for their all-round top-notch tutorials) does just that. Eleven easy steps and even includes print style sheets! What more could a man ask for? Oh, apart from his girlfriend/wife/dog wearing the HTTP 200 – OK knickers of course (via Charles).

Developing XUL-Applications with Mozilla is looking to be an excellent and practical look at constructing a functional XUL application with Mozilla. Genius stuff. I know that whenever I try to get something even mildly complex going, I keep running into problems, as I’ve voiced previously.

In fact, Gerald Bauer was so keen on that previous post of mine that he saw fit to copy and paste the entire lot to a mailing list without telling me, which I actually found quite rude. The only reason I even found out was because I happened to look at my recent referrers for November. Is it that hard to find out my contact details?

I don’t think so, I publish contact details in both my FOAF file and my RSS feed (although not my Atom feed, which is auto-generated by Blogger), both of which are auto-detectable, and this was certainly enough for Ian Hickson to get in touch with me via Jabber. Interestingly Ian and Gerald have had several run-ins, perhaps most famously on the same mailing-list as above where Gerald tries to say that XUL can mean any old XUL whilst Ian defends Mozilla’s registered trademark.

I’m trying hard not to get too carried away with bile, but it’s always hard to hold it back when Gerald gets mentioned – he always seems to be full of sound and fury (on mailing lists, java.blogs, theserverside.com, comments in people’s blogs and just about anywhere else you can think of), but consistently fails to back up any of his arguments with anything solid, which in my eyes at least, makes everything he says completely meaningless. Anyone associated with Java at all will know him at least vicariously, and if especially unlucky will have read his FUD first-hand.

Blogging on the breakfast news, not often that happens, but it happened today when Dominic Holland (stand-up comedian, writer and part-time host of HIGNFY) was talking about his new book, which apparently has something to do with football, which of course, everyone loves. And some geek *cough* ardent fan offered to set up some kind of blog about it. Dominic was very excited and started getting very animated about this new-fangled interweb thing.

Maybe this means he might one day object to his own website being absolutely atrocious.