May 3rd, 2008Two Weeks Without!

The Scream | No Internet | Internet Service is DownThe wedding is done, and we’re now starting to get our new house in order.  Yesterday morning we were fortunate enough to have NTT activate our phone line, Joshin deliver our TV and washing machine, and Apita deliver our (slightly damaged) dining room table.  However, there is something still missing …

Internet.

It seems that Yahoo!BB just can’t get anything right.  They were given a month’s notice about our need, and when it came time to deliver, they completely dropped the ball.  Now we’ll be without internet until May 13th … which means that this site is going to have  a very small amount of content written to it over the next little bit.   Of course, this isn’t stopping me from writing posts on the new HP iPaq 211, which will later be uploaded and back-dated accordingly.

Over the next few weeks I also plan on uploading about 500 pictures from the wedding, 100+ pictures from our trip to Kyoto, upgrading to the most current version of WordPress (2.5.1, as of this writing), and writing a nice little how-to on how to get your English Windows Mobile device to display and use Japanese characters.

Luckily, the blogosphere is still in the midst of The Lull, which means that only the most dedicated of bloggers are keeping their sites up to date, but I’ll still have quite a bit to catch up on when Reiko and I have internet at home again.

Good thing there’s Egress for Windows Mobile :P

May 1st, 2008Today’s the Big Day!

The Best Is Yet To Be

On our joyful wedding day,
We begin a brand new life.
Friends and family give their gifts
To joyful husband, blissful wife.

But the greatest gift we’ll ever get,
A gift from heaven above,
Is love forever, ending never,
Everlasting love.

We’ll share life’s joy and pleasure;
We’ll have plenty of that, it’s true.
But love is the real treasure
For Reiko and I anew.

And if life hands us challenges,
As it does to one and all,
Our love will hold you steady
And never let us fall.

Our wedding day is full of joy;
Tomorrow we cannot see.
But one thing’s sure for the two of us:
The best is yet to be.

Wedding RingsIt’s not quite life-blogging, nor live-blogging, but this post is being published at the very moment that Reiko and I are exchanging vows at Nagoya-ko, in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. If you would have told me five years ago that I’d be marrying someone like my Reiko, in Japan, with some of my friends and family here to witness the event, I would have laughed and asked you what drugs you were on. However, here we are today, Reiko and I are (officially, not just legally) husband and wife.

Now that the wedding preparations are done, and the ceremony and reception are underway, I’ll have the opportunity to share some of the things that has happened over the last two years as Reiko and I planned, saved, re-planned, and rebounded from the various ups and downs that come with planning an international wedding. That said … I’ll save those topics for specific posts at some time in the future.

Thank you to everyone that pitched in with a donation to the wedding. The amount collected was enough to hire a shuttle bus to bring my friends and family from Nagoya Station to the Arc en Ciel wedding house, which means it’s less money taken out of our already strained budget. I’d also like to thank everyone that has helped Reiko and I over the last few months, as none of this would have been possible without so much support.

A special thank you goes to Reiko’s parents, though, who have been the best in-laws a foreigner could have ever asked for in Japan. They’ve allowed me to stay in their home for the nine months leading up to the wedding. They’ve helped me get to work. They’ve helped me with learning the Japanese language. They’ve made me feel like part of the family. And, most of all, they let me marry Reiko, their youngest daughter. There are some people who cannot stand their in-laws, but I’m not one of them. Because of everything Reiko’s family has done to help me acclimate to Japan, I’d be willing to move Heaven and Earth to help them with a problem.

I just hope that I can one day return the favor.

Thank You.

– Jason F. Irwin J2fi

Yuni at Nagoya International Airport (NGO)An interesting thing happened today. My long-time friend from Norway arrived in Japan for my upcoming wedding and, despite knowing this person for over seven years, we’ve never actually met in person. That is … until today. While some might find it odd that someone I’ve only spoken to online would be invited to my wedding, and others might think it just as odd for this same person to make the long flight from Norway to Japan, the fact that she’s done it only goes to show that friendship is not something that needs to be nurtured through real-life activities.

Yuni (which is not her real name), and I have been talking on IRC since 2001. Over the years we’ve shared triumphs, defeats, miserable moments and incredible highs. Despite the distances between us, ranging from just over 100 km when we were both living in Ontario, to over 10,000 km when we were living on two different contienents, we’ve always been close friends. So it should come as no surprise that she and I could get along just great in person, just as we could online … but it does.

Are We Wired More for Communication Than Reality?

It would have been unthinkable to consider someone whom we’ve only corresponded with in a disconnected fashion a close friend more than half a century ago, so why has it changed? Pen pals have existed as long as written language and some type of postal service, but somehow I doubt that these distant people would have been invited to a wedding, much less come from half-a-world away to attend. Yet with the advent of the internet, this is happening more and more all the time.

Reiko and I had a long-distance relationship for almost two years before I made the trek from Canada to Japan. At first, we actually found it more difficult to communicate in person than online, even though we had met in our countries quite often over the years we were “seeing each other” online. This, of course, became less of a problem as the weeks went on, but it nonetheless makes me wonder if the human brain is more wired for ethereal communication than it is real communication.

Or perhaps it’s just me.

I often joke and say that I live on the internet. This was certainly an apt thing to say during my bachelor years in Canada. I would often spend at least six hours a day on the internet, communicating through IRC, MSN (if I had to) or through a game such as Age of Empires. Over time, I learned to immerse myself into the online realm and see online persona’s as though they were real people. Sure, there would often be fake people … guys pretending to be girls for attention, people complaining about some tragic event that never actually happened … but we see this just as often in real life situations. Just like reality, we learn to spot these fake people from afar and keep our distance. Like the old mantra says: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

But with so many people slipping into their own little online worlds, becoming the very person they want to be seen as, are we seeing the emergence of a society where our geographical locations no longer matter? Are we seeing the emergence of a very real global society, where we can make real friends (and foes) from afar, and trust them just as much as the person who we grew up with?

The Fading Line

The Digital HumanIn my mind, there is no difference between a person I talk to online and a person I talk to at work. Sure, the communication medium is a little different, but aside from this, we’re still sharing information and receiving lots of subtext.

With face to face communication, we receive cues from a person’s facial expressions and body language. Online, we can see these same cues in the type of language used, the number or type of emoticons, and the general structure of the sentences. Regardless of whether we’re across the planet, or across the table, these little signals are things that we learn and identify the more we talk to someone. On top of this, most of us are sharing our pictures online, so we have a face to attach to a nickname or internet handle.

Regardless of whether this picture is real or not, it goes a long way to making someone a little more human in our mind’s eye … which is all that really matters when we’re seeking out a conversation or sense of belonging.

But is this a good thing?

This is a subject I’ve tried writing about on several occasions and have often failed miserably. Heck, this post here isn’t even worth hitting the “Publish” button over, but I’d like to get some opinions.

Yuni and I met at the Nagoya Airport, and it felt like I hadn’t seen her in 2 days … which is accurate because I was talking to her online only two days before. My other friends had landed 36 hours before her and, despite not seeing them since July of last year, I hadn’t realized the amount of time because I had spoken to them before they boarded the plane. The same is said for any one of my friends and family. I can literally go years without seeing them, thanks to the ease of the internet.

People all over the world are now using internet on cell phones … communicating with others while en route to school, work, or wherever they need to go that day. Social networks are still booming, with many people under 25 belonging to several networks and building incredibly rich and interconnected personal networks (which could do wonders for a person entering the work force, or looking for opportunities in other parts of the world). Every aspect of our lives is becoming far more connected, and far more shared. It’s reached the point where many of us could be exiled on that island Tom Hanks was stuck on in Castaway and, so long as we had a stable internet connection, we wouldn’t even realize that we’re no longer living in a populated part of the world.

In the next ten years, we’ll have technologies that will enable us to remain connected throughout the day, with micro-displays embedded into our glasses, or manufactured into contact lenses. We’ll be able to transmit our thoughts to portable machines that will then transmit those same ideas to the ever-growing mesh that is the internet. As we continue to adapt and leverage these tools, many of us will stop working individually and start working cooperatively. A company could hire one human, and gain the knowledge and experience of seven, eight, or tens of thousands!

An exciting time indeed.

What are your thoughts on this ever-blurring line between the online world and reality? Should clear separations continue to remain? Do distinctions no longer matter?

It’ll be interesting to see what the future has in store for the ever-communicative human race.

My New iPaq 211What a lucky day!  Yesterday, three good friends of mine came to Japan from Vancouver for my wedding, and tomorrow another will arrive from Norway.  It’s always good to share one of the happiest days of our lives with close friends, and I’m really glad that these four could make the trek from such a long distance.

On top of these good times, though, I had a new HP iPaq 211 delivered to me all the way from Canada!

I love this little device!  It has everything I could ever hope for in a PDA.  From WiFi, to decent internal storage, to a nice happy battery, to a screen that actually accepts the characters that I write on it.  This little tool is going to save me an awful lot of time in the near future as I start writing more posts, and uploading them throughout the day (on various sites, of course).

That said … I’m in need of a good application that will let me write blog posts and upload them to a WordPress-based site.  There are quite a few out there, and I’ve talked about them in the past, but none of them give me the full range of features that I’m looking for.  What I would really like is an application that does all of the following:

  • stores every post I’ve ever written, published and draft (offline editing and creation is a must)
  • integrates easily with some of the plugins that I use regularily, like the All-in-One SEO tool
  • allows me to schedule posts
  • allows me to download updated information from FireStats
  • allows me to quickly search and link past articles
  • allows me easy drag and drop image handling functionality
  • uses a miniscule amount of resources (however, the database might require a few megabytes of storage space)
  • allows non-Roman characters, such as Hirigana, Katakana, Kanji, Hebrew or whatever other language people might use
  • is easily translated for non-English users (localization gone wild, so to speak)
  • handles PDAs with QVGA and VGA resolutions … maybe even SVGA for people using larger devices
  • integrated spell check and, potentially, an open-source grammar check tool

There might be a few other functions that I’m forgetting about … but these are just some of the things I’m considering.  Because the iPaq 210-series PDAs all run Windows Mobile 6, I already know what software tools I can use to code up an application to suit my needs.  I’ve also done a bit of ground-work on writing applications that can upload to a WordPress-based site, which doesn’t seem to be too difficult at all.  So that leaves me with just one last question: what would other people want to see in an application like this.

I know that there are a few other software tools out there that will let people write and upload content to their sites from a PDA, and I also understand that PDAs are not too popular (which means that I should probably get a Nokia phone and write something that would work on Symbian), but I’ll still ask for a little input from you about what features you would want to see in an application like this before using it yourself.

I’ll be sure to let you know in the next few days how the upgrade from a 5 year-old iPaq 2210 to a sleek new iPaq 210-series PDA has worked out for me.  The two will be compared in a side-by-side, and will be written from a usability standpoint, rather than a technical one.  Anyone can throw around specs and shoulda-coulda-woulda’s, but is it worth the upgrade?

I’ll be sure to let you know.

Feel free to comment or send me an email about what features you’d like to see in a mobile WordPress-based blog editor.

April 27th, 2008Only A Few Days To Go

Time Flies When You’re Having FunIt’s hard to believe how fast time flies.  It seems like just the other day when I was sitting at my desk in Vancouver, looking out the window, and wondering what the next year would bring.  Now, here it is, already the end of April.

Reiko and I will have our wedding ceremony this Thursday, and the first of our foreign guests arrive today.  Because of all the preparations that we’ll have between then and now, I will not be able to tend to this site very much.  That said, there are a few scheduled posts that are complete which will slowly trickle online.  One of them even deals with the newest version of WordPress (2.5.1), which seems to like my webserver quite a bit more than the previous release.  I’ve been working with it quite a bit on one of my test sites and, despite losing most of my tags and needing to do quite a bit of cross-database data exchange through MySQL Query Browser, it’s starting to look like a solid improvement over the initial 2.5 release.

Hopefully my next upgrade attempt won’t explode in my face, though.

So, on that note, I need to drop some things off at the new house and run off to the airport to receive some guests.  I’ll be sure to take lots and lots of pictures over the next few days and, once the wedding is over and things have settled down, I’ll be posting a few hundred pics to the image gallery (which is about to be drastically upgraded).


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