Recently in Personal Category

Just a quick note to mention that I will be attending the GLOCOM Forum 2009 event, as Kevin Werbach (who I know via Jerry Michalski) is speaking.

The fashion designer, Issey Miyake, who is a good friend of my family, has an anti-nuclear weapons op-ed in the New York Times.

If Mr. Obama could walk across the Peace Bridge in Hiroshima — whose balustrades were designed by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi as a reminder both of his ties to East and West and of what humans do to one another out of hatred — it would be both a real and a symbolic step toward creating a world that knows no fear of nuclear threat. Every step taken is another step closer to world peace.

My father's good friend, Yamada Hisashi sensei of the Urasenke Chanoyu Center of New York City has passed.

The NY Times did a nice profile of Hisashi-san in 2008.

"There is no politics," Mr. Yamada said. "No talk about who will be president in America or prime minister in Japan."

While a tea ceremony might seem out of step with the pace of modern life, the Urasenke school has a waiting list for students.

"Once you begin the study of tea, it becomes a lifetime thing," he said. As for those who think they are too busy to make time for tea, "You discover that you are not as busy as you think you are."

First African-American president of the US.

First mixed-race president of the US.

The road ahead for everyone, not just in the US, will be very challenging. But we have the better of the two candidates to lead the US forward.

My sister, who has been in the Sartorialist in 2007, is in the Sartorialist again this year. She's photo #5 from the top (wearing sunglasses.)

At Thakoon: The Sartorialist at the Ready-to-Wear Fashion Shows on Style.com

I've been using Parallels.com to run Windows XP and Ubuntu virtually on my Mac for a while and it's been pretty good, albeit slow as I haven't been able to give the VMs more than 512MB RAM due to my older MBP's RAM limitations.

Recently I needed to upgrade to the newest Parallels, which was an extra charge.

I went to the Parallels.com website and was sent to element5.com, which is the ecommerce vendor Parallels uses. I purchased the upgrade and waited for my new key. I was told 12 hrs max.

4 days goes by. No word from element5 or Parallels.

Finally I contact Parallels support and the support person,tells me that my order was declined. I was not notified of this. Why was I not notified? Then support tells me that I have to contact Element 5 for support. Why Element 5? I purchased the software from Parallels, not Element 5.

The worst part of all of this is the Element 5 website, which is run by Digital River, who is in the business of selling software online, does not use SSL for any of the username/passwords that they are requesting that users input on their site.

If this is the real state of affairs with Parallels, I'm moving to VMWare.

As you can see, I've finally fully upgraded to MT 4.01 with a new design. My old weblog design was many years old and with the help of a good friend (thank you BA!) I'm finally in 2008.

My comments should be working as well (although I'm still getting a lot of comment spam and I may need to turn off anonymous comments if I can't fix this) so please test my comments.

I've finally gotten a moment to upgrade my blog to MT 4.01. It was actually very easy and painless. Let's hope the comments are now working? Please help me test by leaving a comment.

My hosting provider (Dreamhost, who I recommend) has informed me that my mt-comments.cgi script is taking up too many resources on my hosted server so they had to turn it off. That means no one can comment to my blog until I fix that.

I like MT but I'm not sure I want to upgrade to 4.0 and it's not clear to me that moving to 4.0 will fix this issue. In any case, please give me a bit of time to fix my blog comment software.

W. David Marx, proprietor of many interesting websites including Néomarxisme and Néojaponisme, and I will be speaking with Prof. Jennifer Urban of USC at the USC Global Conference this weekend on Saturday the 27th on the topic of user-generated content in Japan. If you'll be attending, please be sure to say hello.