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Showing posts from May 8, 2005

Honshu and Okinawa

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I am back. I spent 10 days in Japan, 5 days for work on the main island of Honshu and 5 days of solo adventure in Okinawa. Travel is so invigorating dispite the uncomfortableness. Jetlag, anxiety, crowds, and other discomforts aside, it is mind-expanding and rewarding. Work went well. I flew a new airline (Skymark) from Tokyo to Naha. I am always wary of strange discount airlines and all the traps they set. However, I had a great expereince with "Sky". I was actually shocked. Super easy checkin at the airport, no extra fees even with extra luggage. The primary mission in Okinawa was to visit the Peace Park and the suicide cliffs of Okinawa. From what I understand, at the end of WW2 the inhabitants were encouraged to commit suicide rather than surrender to the Americans and get tortured and eaten. Besides other types of suicide, they jumped off the cliffs at the Southern end of the main island. If you have seen the original color footage taken at the time, I am sure you ...
Falafel My class is over! I passed. It looks like I got B-. That was a life changing event for me. I learned about myself more than I may have learned about the class material. It was challenging. I may not go back to school. Seattle was good. The conference sessions were good. It was great to see our manual out there in front of Microsoft, IBM and Cisco Systems. People were impressed. The big thing at the conference is DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). There is a lot of hype about DITA and we are contemplating using DITA as our DTD or a derivitive. IBM is strongly backing the freely available DTD. That always makes me suspicious. I went out to dinner with some sales guys and had a good time. One night I went out for Egyptian food. That was great. I need to make falafel at home. Pete is coming down to borrow my bobcat for a week. I need to work on my truck this weekend. It needs brakes bad. I will start catching up on all the work around here that has not been getting...