I am a few days into my first week of research now. I have completed basic orientation and still have some international student orientation to do tomorrow. I am waiting on my driver’s licence translation, class schedule, student card, health check-up, and first scholarship payment to come through, but otherwise everything is in order. As all readers have probably already heard directly or indirectly, everything is going really well here and I’m really loving the lab, and least because of the amazing library of books or the Aibo robot sitting behind me.
I re-wrote the Twitter widget that goes on the sidebar of the blog yesterday. The one I was using (“Twitter for WordPress”) wasn’t ignoring irrelevant tweets, was slowing down page loads, and was mucking up text encoding. The one I wrote uses AJAX to query my server for recent tweets, and the server caches tweets to improve speed and make sure I don’t get throttled by Twitter for overusing their API. It also correctly handles non-English text and does not display user-to-user tweets.
I read a really great article on Kotaku today by Brian Ashcraft about why he lives in Japan. It’s really long, but he makes some really great points and it’s a very entertaining read. I recommend scanning through the headings and reading the ones that sound interesting if it’s just too long to read straight through. I recommend the sections “Japan is Visually Dense” and “In Japan, You Don’t Wear Shoes At Home”.
