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Pre-October 2006 entries are listed over here.

  • The list of topics about Swiss Life

    The topics just about every expat living in Switzerland writes about on their blogs, or at least rants and raves about to the folks in the home country, eventually:

    • The trials of getting 'them' to pick up your garbage. 'They' won't do it unless you do it correctly. This can often be an epic saga.
    • The Laundry Room Nazi (usually the oldest female resident of the apartment building)
    • What do you mean the stores close at 4 pm on Saturday and are closed all day Sunday?? I'm being deprived of my God Given Right to shop all weekend!
  • Men taking their wives' last names is not uncommon in Japan

    I find this story in USA Today about more American men taking their wives' last names (via kottke) rather interesting as a snapshot of gender attitudes. My impression of the American Male is that a lot of them are awfully defensive about their masculinity, much more so than men elsewhere, which explains the "sissy juice" comments received by Sam Van Hallgren (who, incidentally, is co-host of the one podcast besides This American Life that I listen to religiously, Filmspotting.)

    In Japan, men have been taking their wives' last names for a long time. This may seem surprising in light of the view of Japanese society as being very male dominant. In fact, it's done for practical, usually business, purposes. If the woman's family has a well known business which is run as a family concern, and the man marrying the woman is going to enter, and eventually take over, that business, he is legally adopted by the woman's family and thus takes her surname along with it. This is called becoming a yo-shi. The word and concept is the same as for a child being adopted.

  • Twitter experiment ended

    My Twitter experiment is over. It was sort of useful in tracking what I was doing when I was at a computer. It wasn't that good at tracking away from the computer

    But I don't think I can continue to use it. It is so distracting, even if I turn off other twitters. But if I turn off other twitters it is just a little black box sitting there and feels lonely. So, I turn on other twitters...and so on and on.

  • Starting a Twitter experiment

    I am one of the fairly large and vocal minority of people who are skeptical about the usefulness of Twitter. I don't see how it's better at communication with people I know than the phone, email, Skype (Skype IM is a very useful tool for people you are frequently on the phone with), IM, IRC channels, snailmail letters, what have you. And I am not that interested in what people I don't know are eating for dinner. Heck I'm not that interested in what people I do know are having for dinner, unless they can write it up and photograph it beautifully and give me the recipes (yay for food blogs).

  • My food blog as a blog lab, part 2: Advertising, monetization, ethics and such

    Back in early November, I wrote about using my food blog, Just Hungry, as a lab or experimental platform for operating a monetized, sort-of-commercial, blog.

    Since then I have put some more effort into deriving an income from Just Hungry. Here are some of my observations and such.

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