Fujiko Suda: Worklife

Dear Fujiko,

Lately I have been think­ing much the same thing, how much time the com­puter has taken up in our lives and how,

in many ways, the com­puter makes life more com­pli­cated, wastes a lot of pre­cious time, sep­a­rates us from the peo­ple we should be spend­ing our time with, and often requires us to do tasks in an over­loaded way that, as you described, could be much bet­ter done sim­ply by speak­ing or using a pen and paper. As an illus­tra­tor I find that I can draw a con­cep­tual sketch by hand in about 2 min­utes, whereas it will take 3 or 4 hours on my computer’s draw­ing program.

I’m also find­ing that, though I can instantly con­tact all my friends by e-mail, the sheer num­ber of peo­ple to con­tact and the rapid­ity of their responses makes it impos­si­ble for me to keep up with every­one. In the past I stayed in much more con­tact with friends when I wrote let­ters by hand. The writ­ing forced me to think care­fully about what I was say­ing. Since e-mail became pop­u­lar I rarely receive let­ters any more and friends have con­tacted me far less than in the past. Every­one is overwhelmed.

Besides, i just love hold­ing a let­ter in my hand. There is some­thing reas­sur­ing about it.

—-

I wanted to ask a ques­tion: I am a German/Filipino liv­ing here in Tokyo and as I speak Japan­ese and do some read­ing and writ­ing, I’d like to be able to write occa­sion­ally in Japan­ese in my blog. May I ask how you set up the Japan­ese writ­ing in your blog? Do I need to down­load any spe­cial cod­ing for Move­able Type or can I already just write in Japanese?

Miguel

Gaseous Clouds

The win­dow is open and through the screen drifts the music of var­i­ous crick­ets all rehears­ing for the Autumn Gala. The rep­e­ti­tious strokes of the Com­mon Cricket, the melo­di­ous. liquid-like war­ble of Teleogryl­lus yemma, the slow-sawing buzz of Loxeblemm…

Hi Miguel!

I am very happy to have your com­ment. Thank you! I vis­ited your blog site, and enjoyed it very much. Hope you won’t mind me list­ing your blog on my link section.

As for mak­ing entries in Japan­ese… Have you tried mak­ing entries in Japan­ese yet? I am not well versed on the tech­ni­cal side of blog, so I will ask my friend who is a wiz at this kind of thing, and get back to you.

You prob­a­bly did not know about the blogger’s gath­er­ing last Thurs­day at my company’s office. If you are inter­ested in maybe attend­ing the next one, please see http://metamemos.typepad.com/ for reference.

Hello Fujiko,

Please, do feel free to list my site on yours. I’ve taken the lib­erty of list­ing yours on mine. I’ve been want­ing to include blogs and pages made by Japan­ese peo­ple, rather than just non-Japanese liv­ing in Japan. My expe­ri­ence liv­ing in Japan since 1969 is that most of my con­tacts here and most of my friends and activ­i­ties are with Japan­ese, not non-Japanese, so it is a lit­tle strange that most of my blog links are to non-Japanese sites. Per­haps it is that find­ing the Japan­ese blogs is a lit­tle dif­fi­cult for me. But I would cer­tainly like to be in more con­tact with Japan­ese blog­gers. It might be nice to meet the peo­ple you men­tioned. Please let me know when you will be meet­ing again. (I will hon­estly try to go, but as I’m quite busy often– I do a lot of moun­tain walk­ing on the week­ends– I’m not sure I can guar­an­tee that I can make it reguarly)

It was very nice to hear from you. I hope we can cor­re­spond more occasionally.

cheers,
miguel

Hi there,

Re: Japan­ese sup­port for Mov­able­Type, please visit http://weblog.uva.ne.jp/ (Hirata-san’s blog), in which a patch to let MT sup­port Japan­ese lan­guage (basi­cally MT can han­dle Japan­ese when you set the lan­guage encod­ing as UTF-8, which is the uni­code. But there are four major Japan­ese encod­ing so that comments/trackabacks from oth­ers may be encoded incorrectly…)

Hirata-san also wrote a book re: MT instal­la­tion.
I think this is the eas­i­est way, since you read and write Japan­ese, Miguel.

Feel free to ask me if you have dif­fi­cul­ties installing Japan­ese patches.

Enjoy,
Nob

Nob: Great!! Thank you for your help!!

Miguel: Best of luck with turn­ing your blog into one with Japan­ese lan­guage capa­bil­ity. Walk­ing in moun­tains.…. Sounds like time to med­i­tate and to find inspi­ra­tion, like pho­tographs on your blog. No worry about mak­ing promise to attend our events. I’ll e-mail you with friendly invi­ta­tions, and if the sub­ject inter­ests you and the tim­ing is right, please come. No oblig­a­tion at all.

Nice page!!!