Invictus

by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of Circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of Chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Wordnano to learn a vocabulary

I actually forgot to update my own blog to talk about a website I recently created with my friend Paul, called Wordnano. This website was a follow-up on my previous project posted before.

As I mentioned before, I am interested in learning languages, and I hope other people are also interested in languages, and even further other cultures as well. And as a small step, we made a flashcard website that helps people learn vocabularies, http://wordnano.com.

We are still working on adding features that will make the website more interesting and different from any other flashcard websites on the web.

Applications/Services

So far TODO list has been the app that I have been consistently using with my iPhone.. I should try more apps in iPhone, especially those location-based.

It seems there are a lot of efforts on translation between languages with human intelligence. However, so far there is no single app that satisfies my translation needs.

Happy 2010

Happy New Year.

Old Idea, Different World

There are many web services that are mostly the same idea, but targeted at different cultures. For example, Google for western world, Baidu for China. Facebook for western world, Cyworld for Korea, Mixi for Japan. It is hard for a single web service to dominate the entire global market because every culture has different taste. Sometimes I think localization is more important than an innovative idea.

New type of Social Networking Site

These days I have been using a twitter quite a lot. I've used facebook, CyWorld(A Korean social networking site), and Mixi (A Japanese social networking site), but none of them solve the problems I have: Privacy and Simplicity. Once being a friend, somehow I know where friends have been, they know what's going on me by looking at pictures, walls, etc. If I block them or apply restricted permission to them, they'd notice it because they know they cannot access some parts that they used to access before. Also they are not simple to use. If I go to Facebook, my profile looks very disorganized and very complicated in a look.

I don't know about privacy on twitter; but I think I like twitter's simplicity. Moreover, what I really like is the fact that I don't need to spend my time to do something on twitter. Whenever I want to write something on twitter, I can just open the twitter by "toggling" on the computer and write it. Or I can tweet anywhere using my phone. I don't need to spend my time in front of computer to "organize" my wall and my contacts. I think that's the strength of it. I don't need to open a browser to do something complicated.

Nov 23 2007, Yudanaka Onsen (湯田中温泉)

I am now writing a blog post about my trip that happened more than one and half a year ago.. I know it's already late, but it's still better than never, so I decided to post it before it fades away from my memory.


Me staring at monkeys

Randy, Junko and I went to Yudanaka Onsen (湯田中温泉) on November 23, 2007. Yudanaka Onsen is famous for monkey bath - there you can see monkeys taking bath in hot springs. So hot springs are not human-dominated resorts; monkeys also enjoy them. :) When I was young I always saw Japanese monkeys taking baths as if humans are taking baths, in TV, and this was something I really wanted to see in Japan. So, I went to Yudanaka onsen located near Nagano, with Randy and Junko.



We went to Nagano by Shinkansen first, looked around the city a bit.


Then we went to our first destination, Yudanaka Onsen, the monkey bath resort.



There were tons of monkeys..



Even more monkeys...


...and they are making more monkeys...


Shit..! Don't take pictures..!

After monkey onsen, we went to an actual onsen, called Kusatsu onsen (草津温泉). Throughout the entire year of my stay in Japan, I've never seen any better onsen than this. If you want to experience the authentic outdoor Japanese onsen, this is the place to go.



Then on the way, we stopped by a lava place to enjoy sightseeing.



Then we came back to Tokyo.


Night of Tokyo, from Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (東京都庁舎).

It was a good trip, and I am very glad I finally wrote a blog post about this trip..!