blog

As we get close to wrapping up Ubiquity 0.5 (currently planned to ship—fingers crossed—on Monday) one remaining issue is how to incorporate our cute new Cocoia-designed and community-produced icon, the Ubiquibot. The difficult decision is how to take this finely detailed icon and produce a 16 x 16 favicon.

I came up with three different options:

1. 2. 3.

Seeing them on my blog doesn’t quite compare to how they will be used, so here are some screenshots of them in context:[^1]

(more…)

By now many of you have probably seen this new Microsoft Australia campaign, “Ten Grand Is Buried Here.com,”¹ which calls Firefox “old” and Safari “boring”:

I’m not sure what this is saying about me, but my immediate reaction was to go check whether tengrandisburiedthere.com was available. To my surprise, Microsoft had yet to snatch it up! A few hours later, here’s the result:

Go ahead, visit the site and give it a try!

Note: Not being a marketing guy, I just threw some text together to introduce Firefox. If someone has some better copy for this display, please let me know.

桜 (sakura) is Japanese for cherry blossom, an important symbol of spring time in Japan and, with it, a symbol of renewal. The cherry blossom is a beautiful fluffy and light flower which falls quickly off the tree with wind and rain, making it also an important representation of 物の哀れ (mono no aware).

Last weekend my family (including my aunt Mikako and Bailey) took a short trip to Yugawara (湯河原) at the base of the Izu peninsula. Last weekend was possibly the peak of the cherry blossoms this year, making it a very picturesque trip. It’s quite rare for the four of us to all be in the same place at the same time, so these photos are definite keepers:

One of my personal highlights was going down a slide at Azumayama Park in Ninomiya right through a grove of cherry trees in full bloom—it was so beautiful that I had to go back down it again and take a video! Unfortunately the Flash video encoding (or my camera) doesn’t do it justice, but I hope you can fill in the gaps with your imagination.

Cherry blossom slide - 桜のすべりだい（二宮吾妻山公園） from mitcho on Vimeo.