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Christopher Nolan’s tribute to Heath Ledger

Charisma as Natural as Gravity

Started having this issue since early January, right click in FF, “Send link…” opens up new tab, window says loading and nothing else, and it’d be stuck there. Same goes for IE (right click, “Email this page to Friend”. Reinstalled Gmail Notifier, same thing. Changed default Gmail browser to IE, same thing. Finally found this workaround in Google Groups: Change language settings in Gmail to English (UK), and that fixed it. Same problem happened late last year, and same solution fixed it. Google people actually did fix it at one point, and I guess something happened and broke it again. I guess for the meantime I’ll be a Brit in Gmail.

7 more days!

Double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius was DQ’d from competing in the Olympics for allegedly having unfair advantage for running on carbon fiber prosthetics

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/amputee-sprinte.html

It was our second time staying at an Onsen Ryokan in Hakone, after some research on Japanese travel websites, reading reviews and looking at amenities, we decided to make our reservation here at Yaeikan 結いの宿 – 弥栄館. It turned out to be a great decision as we had an excellent time there, highly recommended.

We made the reservation using the Japanese travel site Rakuten, total was around ¥23,000 a night for 2 people. In-Room breakfast and dinner included, as well as taxes and service charges. It’s a short 10-15min walk from Hakone-Yumoto station, and there are souvenir shops for Hakone omiyage along the way.

↑ Dinner spread. Typical traditional styled Ryokan dinner. All the dishes were very good, the staff asks you to choose a time slot for both breakfast and dinner when you check-in, and they come in and set it all up right in the room.

↑ After dinner, they cleaned up and laid out the futons for the night.

↑ … and breakfast. Again, it’s traditional style, no ham and eggs here! It’s not as much food as dinner, and I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t any natto. We enjoyed all the dishes just as we did at dinner.

↑ room was spacious, not as big as another Hakone Ryokan we stayed at, but definitely enough for 2-4 people.

↑ Lobby/Reception area. The staff first greets you here when you arrive, offering slippers (no shoes allowed in the building). They then carry all the luggage to the room while you check-in.

↑ Inside the “first come first serve” private bathroom. Apart from the separate male and female baths, each group of guests gets a free 30-min time slot to use the private “family” bathroom. But besides that, there’s another room that’s “first come first serve” with no time limit. We liked this one more since the private one was open to the outdoor, and it was a little too cold for that. Since we stay there on a weekday night, this room was available most of the time we were there.

I found this youtube video that helps show how to get to the ryokan from the Hakone Yumoto station. It basically starts where the station is, it’s the structure you see on the right, and if you pause at 00:41, Yaeikan is the dark building on the right. It looks like it was under exterior renovation when this video was shot.

The colorwheel of my DLP TV has been making funny noises, so I scheduled for a service visit to get it fixed. The repair guy came and tried to replace it, after installing the new wheel from his truck, it was still making the same noise, plus this time the colors seemed worse than my old one. He then said he had to order the whole engine assembly, after a few minutes in his truck getting approval from the office, he came and said the part’s been on backorder for a long time, and they’d have to replace my TV. NICE! I’ll be going to Bestbuy tonight. I’m glad I got the extended protection plan!

I’ve been meaning to add statcounter code to the wordpress pages, finally got around to look into it today. Then, I just found out StatCounter just released a Plugin for WordPress just yesterday! What a pleasant surprise. Install was nice and easy too! Nice!

http://blog.statcounter.com/

Update:

The Statcounter Plugin was throwing all kinds of error code, and even kept me from logging in to deactivate the damn plugin. I ended up ftp’ing in to delete all that stuff. I’m now using Google Analytics plugin, so far so good now.

http://www.semiologic.com/software/marketing/google-analytics/

Update 2:

So there was some character issues in the StatCounter code, several other people also posted similar errors in their blog. With very speedy response time, the SC team released another version, and it’s all good so far for me. So now SC plugin is back to being plugged-in!