Takumi's Blog

Google released their long talked about payment system, Checkout. They claim it’s not a PayPal killer, and that it’s a very different type of product. CNet has an article here describing it a bit.

Now, PayPal is great, I love what eBay has done with it, and I think people will prefer to use PayPal because of the brand recognition it has created for itself.

Google will have a harder time (I think) getting consumers to use Checkout. Most of the stores out there will probably offer PayPal, Checkout, and another form of payment. For the sellers, some will already be AdWords users, and will use Checkout, but getting consumers to switch is harder.

There’s also the privacy issue that I am sure some people will bring up. I trust Google with nearly all my data. Email, Hosted email, Personalized Search, Calendar, Notebook, etc. and I will definately be getting friends and family to use Checkout also. But some stubborn person out there will say Google knows too much about it’s users… Well, they probably do, but I trust they won’t use it in a bad way.

There’s some open-source projects I always keep my eye on, or at least try to. Now, you have to remember, open-source doesn’t mean freeware. Those are two very different things. Open-source means what it says, you can view the source for the project, and edit it as you want. However, depending on the project, the developers have their own licensing and terms of use. Some may say you can edit it, but you can’t redistribute it, others may say you can edit it and redistribute it, etc.

Here’s my main ones that I keep my eye on:

• Joomla!
• MyBB
• Vanilla
• WordPress
• Drupal

Joomla and Drupal are both CMS systems, WordPress is blogging software, and Vanilla and MyBB are both forum software. I think all of these have have great potential.

Vanilla is the very backbone of a forum software, Mark the developer started it in hopes of creating a fast, lean, and extensible forum system. I used to keep up with the development a lot last year, but haven’t been able to lately.

MyBB is a lot like vBulletin, but I personally like the open development and free usage better. Though, it still could see a lot of performance improvements, and some extensions (like a Gallery, and a CMS add-on).

Joomla! I have mixed feelings for. I LOVE the administrator’s end. Very user friendly, easy to use, and looks great. But for the end user, I found it was a little hard to understand the URL structure, and the way the CSS is setup is really hard to create your own styles. (Not all the modules use the main stylesheets for layout, they have their own that is hard to change).

Drupal… It’s a great piece of software, but more for a developer who likes to get down into things. I don’t find it that easy to setup, and customize. But it does have great extensions.

WordPress… well, I think I’ve said this before, but it’s the best blogging software available for download. (Blogger is good for a hosted service, and software like iWeb I think are in a different category). One feature I really want for WordPress is a bridge system so users can bridge the software with other software (ie. WP + Joomla! + Vanilla)

The other day (sunday night), I was working on this REALLY long post for my blog. And, well, Firefox quit on me. Now, if I was writing the thing in Gmail, at least most of it would have been automatically saved as a draft. But good old WP offered to me to write a new one instead…

Thus the reason for no post that day, I was really tired that night.

I enjoy doing my blog, and writing posts, but I have NO idea whatsoever what to write for the copy on websites. For example, my company’s homepage copy is inadequate. There’s just no excuses for it. After reading up on some more design blogs, I came across this article by Good Copywriting.

Now, after reading that, I thought, “damn, I have a long way to go… wait, no, there’s no way I can write copy that good, I’ll need to email my dad’s friend to see if someone from his design company can help write copy for me free of charge”. Because really, the copyrighter at that company is good, and she writes copy for a living. Me, meh, you can tell what my level is by reading this.

My new quest: to find someone in Portland who can manage billing and secreterial work for a part-time job. And to find a copywriter who can also do work for Amarimono under a sub-contract, or actually working for amarimono (which would be even cooler!)!

If you know anyone who’s interested, hit me up and lets talk! takshimada [at] gmail [dot] com

I read up and caught up on a lot of things today. One of them was, 9rules is another great network that really has great authors. I wish I knew some of them!

Another was, for setting up my own network, pN (the Philotic Network), I needed to figure out a way to easily setup blogs for new authors and manage them. WordPress, which is the greatest blogging software, is a little limited in that area. The WordPress MU version only works under sub-domains or sub-directories, and it doesn’t offer the main author as much control over the blog as an author of a MovableType installation would.

MovableType’s only two feature I like, is it’s permissions settings, and it’s ability to host multiple blogs on different domains (including sub-domains and sub-directories).

Unlike WP where there’s different levels, MT lets you check and un-check different permissions per an author. This is great where you want someonet to be able to manage the template and create posts, but not be able to change the settings of the site.

Paul Scrivens from 9rules has written a pretty good MT vs. WP comparison, but he leans more towards MT.

Right now I’m going to stick with WP, and I’m looking forward to a much better release of WP-MU. And I’ll be setting up other blogs with two admins (the author being the main one, and me being the 2nd one). Any suggestions on this are welcome!

So, I have the default homepage set for firefox (you know, the Firefox search powered by google one), and today it had a link to something called Joga. At first I thought it was just a small add-on module to keep up to date with the World Cup, but it’s actually quite different.

It works pretty similarly to Orkut, but instead of social relationships as the main theme, it’s soccer (or known to the rest of the world as: football).

It’s actually pretty cool, and you don’t need an invite like you do for Orkut to get in. Here’s a link to my profile. Add me if you join Joga!

Wired News has an article that talks about Second Life users being dissappointed with Flickr’s photo policy. They were complaining about Flickr’s policy to stop showing images from accounts with over half of them being non-photographic images on public searches.

I think Flickr is definately a site for users who are serious about photography. (Err… at least who take real pictures and put them up). It’s a beautiful place to go looking for pictures and finding actual photographs. Instead of looking for pictures and finding a mix of photographs, CG, etc.

Oh, and by the way, I’d LOVE a gift Pro account!

So, Aki posted something I thought was pretty interesting…

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” (We all were asked this some point in our childhood):

When I was a kid I was obsessed with space (outer space). I loved space shuttles, and I was facinated by rockets. I dreamed of becoming an astronaut.

One of my relatives worked at the Florida launch site (cape canaveral? i forgot how to spell it), and I got tons of free stuff from there. Though, I think all of it has been thrown away by now, and I don’t really remember what it was.

Over time my dreams changed, and I thought it was too dangerous to be an astronaut. I considered being the engineer creating the shuttle is safter than being the astronaut flying it…

We had like 4 games today. 3 of them were with International Christian University High School (ICU High School…. i guess is what it’s called). We either won the games or tied…
1 was with some other school i don’t know. We tied against this team.

I got tired after the 2nd game, so I didn’t really pay attention to the other ones, but everyone has improved a lot (teamwork wise also) since soccer started this year.

Some people left early to study for the english exams tomorrow. It’s called Eiken here, and there’s different levels. I guess it’s like taking Japanese proficiency levels in America (lol, like my short explenation of it?).

Back when I was at Grant, someone from ICU came to show us what the University offered, and scholarships, etc. It seemed like some preppy christian school with christ things everywhere. But it really didn’t, in fact if it didn’t say ICU you would have never guessed it was a christian university.

The campus is actually wayyy too big. All the students have bicycles just to get from class to class! And like the Tokyo Gakugei University, ICU also has an attached elementary, middle, and high school. (I’m in the TGU High School, and we were against the ICU High School today).

This past month or so we’ve been doing volleyball in P.E. Never really liked it, but it’s pretty “big” in high schools here. Every year the school has a volleyball tournament, and these past two days have been it. Yesterday (I’m not really sure what yesterday was for) we had matches all day. My team lost all of them.

Today was the actual tournament. We went to a different GYM (the place we went to could fit 4 courts instead of 2!). And instead of ending a bit before 3pm, we ended at around 4:30pm!

The way it works is, the guys and girls are in seperate leagues. And then within that, there are two different ‘level’ leagues. If your team wins in the first match, you go to the 1st league, but if you loose in the first match, you go to the 2nd league. After that you just keep going up the ladder till there’s only one leader.

My team, unfortunately, lost our first match. But with an awesome me comeback, we became the #1 team in the 2nd league!!! Hurray! XD

All of the teams had also made their own uniforms (which could be anything, coloring faces, makeup, skirts, etc.) Our team put on random ties and colored our faces. My tie was yellow with blue stripes and my face was half white half blue with red lips and eyes… unfortunately no picture, sorry!