Testing from my Neohawk.org Account

I am testing the email posting capability  of blogger from my neohawk.org email account.

This weekend I am looking around at some of the changes related to the Google Apps infrastructure change that I took advantage of for the Neohawk.Org domain.

For example, I logged into my Google Sites site that I use to play around and see what's up with sites this morning.   It has been a really long time since I have logged into a google sites.  One of the first things I notice is that the "announcement" content type now provides an RSS feed.  The lack of an rss feed was one of the major reasons I never seriously considered Google Sites a serious solution to anything.  It was simply a toy.   Now that it has rss feeds at least for the announcements content type that may change.

I can certainly think of possiblities for using sites now.  Since one use case I have certainly doesn't require any serious effort to provide a nice look and feel (sites ability to customize look and feel still sucks, but I guess that's the price you pay for an easy-to-use, highly google apps integrated site).   Unfortunately, that use case requires that we get JANO re-classified as a 501c3.

Oberlin Hosts Kenny Endo Taiko Concert

Kenny Endo, a world-renowned taiko player, along with four other equally talented musicians in a concert that focuses on Traditional Japanese instruments, like fue, shamisen, and koto, as well as contemporary jazz influences, like the vibraphone will have a concert sponsored by a taiko group at Oberlin University.

Sorry for the Noise - Transferring Posts

My apologies if you got a rash of posts via my rss feed.

I try to keep neohawk.org/blog and this blog in sync, but I had let it go for a while.   I need to make a more concerted effort to do this as I think that at the end of the year, I will be completely migrating to this blog for the neohawk.org website.  I have been using byteflow on a virtual host for a few years now and am certainly more than satisfied with it.  But the virtual host does cost money, minimal though it is, which I'd rather not pay if I don't have to.  

Additionally, blogger added the capability to add up to 10 static web pages to a blog which is more than sufficient to handle the minimal amount of pages I have at neohawk.  Moreover, with the transition to the new google infrastructure this fall, I'll be able to use my neohawk.org account to manage the blog.  So that's part of it even though, as I point out in this post, that at least for the time being, it will not be possible to manage blogger from the google apps dashboard.

But in the end, it's one less payment and one less thing I need to manage.   With blogger, I'm just a user I don't need to worry about managing the infrastructure behind it.  It just is.

Actually, this is a pretty big decision.  I have been "blogging" since 1999 though the vast majority of those posts are sitting on DVD.  I started with a simple html web site, but quickly realized it's limitations.  I moved to Zope, and then the CMF (Content Management Framework) for Zope.  I then switched to Plone.  Upon moving to the U.S. I realized that Plone was way more than I needed and it's resource requirements was not something for which I was willing to play.  So for the last 4 years or so, I have been using Django, and in particular Byteflow, a blog system built on it.

I've always like running my own servers, and playing around with new open source software.  These days, however, I simply do not have the time.  And so, in combination of being able to use my neohawk.org domain not only for google apps, but the most of the rest of Google's services, I will make the transition.  

But I won't make it until Google force transitions my google apps domain to the new infrastructure.  So we still have a couple of months before this blog becomes www.neohawk.org.

Thoughts on Today's Diadiun Post

Ted Diadiun, the reader representative for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, posted a piece on Cleveland.com today (9/26) that could be characterized as a scare tactic to keep people away from blogging, or as he suggests a “public service” to make people aware of the dangers of publishing online.

He starts the article/opinion piece off by providing three lawsuits involving what he calls in quotes, “citizen journalists” (notice the pejorative use of quotes). I am unaware of two of the three cases he cites, nor does he actually link to anything that would provide information on these lawsuits. I am aware of one of them thanks to Groklaw. In particular this post regarding a concept called “implied license”.

Browns Lose Again

The Cleveland Browns lose again. It's hard to fathom this year's edition of the Browns. They remind me of the Cavs of a few years ago that once they hit the locker room at half time they lose all sense of pace, focus, intensity, or anything resembling a will to win.

No Dual Citizenship for You

Yesterday, a friend posted on her blog (Japanese) about an article in the New York Times about the famous Japanese conductor, Seiji Ozawa. She pointed out that he has dual citizenship, U.S. and Japanese. My children who were born and raised for most of their young lives in Japan (the older two's first language was Japanese) have dual citizenship. However, due to Japanese law, they must choose one or the other by the age of 22.

This choice is still a few years away for them. However, I looked at the link to the Ministry of Justice that Clara had in her post. And sure enough the Japanese Government is asking to choose your citizenship by age 22. They even have a PDF pamphlet you can download! (and what's with the blurry PDF? Is it just me, or do others see the PDF as blurry? ) The consequences of not voluntarily choosing is to possibly lose your Japanese citizenship.

Oooo, now that's a real threat. That'll get us to make sure we pick.

If my kids have to choose, they'll choose U.S. citizenship. The only possible negative impact to them is if they are already in Japan when they lose their Japanese citizenship - they may get deported for not having a proper Visa(clearly not a good thing). Other than that, there is zero motivation for them to go through the time and effort to let the Japanese government know that they are choosing U.S. citizenship since by not doing so that choice is "automatically" made for them.

You really have to wonder what the Japanese Government is thinking. As parents we both love both countries and want to have our kids feel pride about both their countries and cultures. The Japanese Government is pretty much guaranteeing that kids will have a bad taste in their mouths left over from having to choose. They will certainly like Japan a little less for it. And to what end? What's the purpose? Keeping the race pure? But that doesn't make sense either since anyone born in the U.S. is automatically a U.S. citizen, it is possible that a "pure" Japanese also has dual citizenship.

In the grand scheme of things it is zero impact on my kids' lives. No I may be overly proud of my kids, but the only losers is Japan. Of course, they may not thinks so. I am absolutely baffled as to the purpose of this. What are they trying to achieve?

Gauging New Google Apps New Infrastructure

So I have a domain registered with Google Apps that I use for testing and development. It's a Standard Edition with only a few users, all of which use English. So basically, this domain met the criteria for becoming an early adopter of the transition to the new Google Apps infrastructure. The infrastructure that basically makes a google apps account operate just like a regular Google Account.

So I transitioned this domain. And sure enough I get the "Organization" tab in the dashboard that allows me to turn services on and off for accounts in an organization of the domain. Unfortunately, at least for my purposes, since a Standard Edition account can only have one organization, I cannot test creating multiple organizations and creating access privileges to certain users based on their organization.

 

Since the Standard Edition only allows one organization, while the dashboard is certainly "cleaner" and more intuitive to turn services on and off, from a functionality perspective there is zero change. It's on or off for the whole domain. Hence the infrastructure change is pretty much irrelevant - though again the interface is much, much better. (It would be nice if Google would allow the creation of one organization with Standard Edition rather than just on/off for the whole domain. )

The other thing you may notice is that the services you can turn on and off are the same core services from prior to transitioning to the new infrastructure. I was hoping to be able to control which Google Services, now that accounts from my domain can register for a whole host of google services. I was hoping that this lack was just part of being an "early adopter". But no, apparently this is all there is and all that is planned although Google has left the door ajar for adding other services later.

"Any other Google services (not listed above) can't be restricted at this time. Note: Other Google services might be added to this list in a later release. Please refer to this article for updates.'

Here's the list of services currently available under the dashboard:

• Email
• Chat
• Calendar
• Docs
• Groups (all except standard?)
• Sites
• Video(all except standard?)
• Mobile

So what this says to me is that Google is going to open the flood gates to their services without providing me the control of that for accounts I issue. Even if they add services later that's an administrative nightmare to start denying services to users that have already signed up/registered for a service. I have to qualify that for now as I'm an early adopter so those services may be in place by the time google apps users will unilaterally be transitioned. But I also have to assume that, and this is partially based on my experience with Google services up until this point, that in fact other services won't be ready for control on the dashboard. And if that's the case, and if I were anything but a Standard Edition user I would not be a happy camper.

Granted the infrastructure change makes it easier to register for other Google services with my Google Apps account, and that for Neohawk.org this is a great thing! However, this typical Google tendency not to think things through makes my life much harder. For example, the reality is that prior to the infrastructure change you could "associate" a google account with a google apps account making for pretty much seamless integration with other google services. So the transition means that I need to go to the effort of dismantling all of that. Again, for neohawk.org, not a big deal. For JANO though, that becomes problematic. And if I were a Premier Edition user I'd not be a happy camper.

Luckily, I've had enough experience with Google that I never had the rest of the folks that use the JANO domain and Google Apps to "associate" their accounts. Moreover, I'm not sure I'll tell them that they can use their Google Apps account to register for other services. It's all useless if I can't control what they can and cannot use with MY domain. Typical Google, though, where everything is in motion and not perfected to start with but improved over time regardless of the impact to users and administrators. So as an administrator of a google apps domain, while the change in infrastructure opens up a lot of possibilities and opportunities, it is still only half-steps at this point. Not enough for me to go all googly eyed over it. (Sorry, couldn't resist)

However, one of the main reasons I did not have my JANO users associate their JANO google apps account with a Google account was that if you logged into a service that required a Google Account, the Google navigation menu changed to Google account menu. What that meant is that when you clicked on "Calendar" you would be sent to the Google Account calendar, not the Google App account calendar. Talk about end-user confusion!

I am happy to report that the navigation upon transitioning to the new infrastructure works as I would expect. The navigation menu sends you to your Google Apps calendar. This is clearly an upgrade and makes the transition highly welcome if I'm not being a stickler about being able to control which Google services my domain users can use outside of the core listed above. For the Neohawk.org domain, I'm a happy camper.

For the JANO domain, I'm still not convinced that the migration to the new platform helps me in any significant way. I won't really know that until the transition is forced upon me whether I like it or not. The JANO web team will be able to use their JANO accounts for logging in and posting to the blog, but they already have that capability with the Google accounts they had to set up to begin with in the first place. I should mention that JANO is also a Standard Edition until we can, if we can, change the status of JANO from a 501c4 to 501c3 to take advantage of the Not-for-profit Edition.

So I'd have to say I'm glad for the change as it relates to Neohawk, completely ambivalent as it relates to JANO (disappointed really since I had higher expectations), and I would be pissed if I were a paying customer due to the lack of control over other Google Services. Again, with the caveat that I'm basing it on my test, standard edition Google Domain and I'm an "early adopter". Things may change over the next month or two as they gear up for the real transition.

 

Cleveland Browns Beat Themselves

Today, the Cleveland Browns had their season opener in Tampa Bay, and after looking really good for the most part in the first half, last year's high school team returned.

Okay this is my breakdown of the Cleveland - Tampa Bay game. If you want real breakdowns by people that understand the game better than I do, go see WFNY. This is my take, and I'm just a fan that's never played nor really understands the nuances of the game. WFNY and others do.

ガーリックフェスティバル

ツィッターで知りましたが、来週末にシェーカースクウェアで行うクリーブランドの第一回ガーリックフェスティバル（ニンニク祭り？）があります。なんか、面白そうです。得にカーリックが好き僕にとってクックオフが楽しみなんですよ。

大まかなスケジュールは以下のとおりです

9月11日　13:00～22:00
9月12日　12:00～20:00

今週はまたロスへの出張ですが、これに行けると思います。土曜日にケンとジョージの試合があるかもしれませんけど、このガーリックフェスティバルに行きたいです。

 

Google Priority Inbox, Google Apps, and Random Thoughts

So I can't really talk about Buzz. But I can talk about other items of interest about Google products and services.

As most GMail users and Gapp (Google Apps) users are aware, Google recently deployed Priority Inbox. Nifty little filter and I like the idea that it gets smarter, much like the spam filters get smarter with more data. So I think its a great feature. Just a tad bit late.

ハイランドハイツホームデーでの資金繰り

昨日、ハイランドハイツのホームデーがありました。ホームデーというのは夏祭りみたいなことです。8月になるとそれぞれの町でホームデーが毎週末に行われます。我々の周辺では、各町のホームデーが重ねないように調整しているらしいです。メイフィルド学区はハイランド・ハイツ、メイフィルド・ハイツ、メイフィルドビレッジとゲーツミルズという町を含んでいることで、ハイラインド・ハイツのホームデーでメイフィルド高校男子サーかーチームが資金繰りの活動をしました。

日本への出張か？

前にツィッターでツバヤイタことがありますけど、日本国内案件があって今年日本にいける可能性があるという噂が春からありました。ただ、この交渉が既に2年ほどかかっているわけで自分があんまり意識していませんでした。今週、一気に急なピッチで話が進んでいることが分かりました。

JACL&CJAF 奨学金ランチ

久しぶりに日本語で投稿させていただきます。日本語あんまり使っていないんで忘れています。　これからもう少し日本語でブログに記事を投稿しようと思っています。日本語が間違ってもやはり使わないとドンドンと忘れてしまいます。ということで、今日はJACLとCJAFの賞学金奨学金ランチについて日本語で述べさせていただきます。

ご存知のようにエリーがアメリカン大学に来月に入学する予定です。５つの大学に申し込んで、４校に受かったんですが、提示されたファイナンシャルエイド額及びその内訳構成よりアメリカン大学を入学すると決めました。金銭的な観点だけでなく、やはりエリーがクリーブランドから離れたいという気持ちも強かったわけで親としてやはり大事な娘の希望に答えたくています。エリーがやはりボストンかワシントンDCに行きたい希望でした。

Lake Erie Crushers' Japanese Night

This last Thursday night was Japanese Night at the Lake Erie Crushers game. Since the Crushers' stadium is on Avon about 15 minutes from work, I went straight from work. Well, I took a detour to pick up a friend since his wife and kid was coming later to meet up with Arisa and another couple, also good friends. In each of our cases, the husband is American and the wife is Japanese. So it's cool to hook up with them every when we can.

And it was even better on this night since the Crushers were putting on Japanese night. Ken Hill, an American Japanese, or Japanese American, not sure which, is on a summer internship at the Crushers and this was his brainchild apparently. He did a great job getting participation from a variety of groups including JANO, the Cleveland Chapter of the Japanese American Citizen League including Mame Daiko and the Sho-jo-ji Dancers, a Japanese restaurant and a women who teaches shodou, and couple of folks from the Cleveland Japanese Meetup.com group. There were a couple of Japanese folks who are currently working at the Cleveland Clinic. I grabbed some pictures with my cell phone hence they are not that great. Arisa had the camera but she didn't arrive in time for the drumming or dance.

 

 

Arisa was going to volunteer at a ongiri contest and some other things, but unfortunately the rest of the evening got rained out. Just as they were about to start, the rain came down and reports of Tornado warnings/watches a county to the west. We waited for about 20 minutes then left for the evening. While we're disappointed that it didn't work out for a longer evening, it was certainly a lot of fun. I really wanted to wear my jimbei but its stored away somewhere and we couldn't find it in time. Next time though!

Peppermint ICE - Dell Mini 10

So Elly received her new Dell Inspirion 15 last Friday. She got it in preparation for going to American University. I spent my day off Friday making sure that she could dual boot into Windows7 and Ubuntu. The only problem I have so far is that the wireless doesn't work in Ubuntu. It seems like Broadcom hasn't released a driver for Linux. Or at least, none of the packaged (B43 or Linux SAT) worked. So until that driver comes out, it'll be one big MP3 player.

Japanese Night at Lake Erie Crushers

From the Cleveland Chapter of the Japanese American Citizen League and the Lake Erie Crushers, a Japanese Night on July 22nd.

 

Cleveland Chapter

Japanese American Citizens League (JACL)

2783 Lancashire #15

Cleveland Heights, Ohio  44106

216-320-9468

Email: cleveland@jacl.org

Bulletin Newsletter: clevelandjaclbulletin@sbcglobal.net

The Cleveland Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League ongoing mission is to be a charitable, benevolent, and educational organization relating to the promotion, support, development and furtherance the welfare of all Americans, particularly those of Japanese ancestry and to secure and maintain the civil rights of all who are victimized by injustice and prejudice.

Super Mario Beat Box - Video

I saw on facebook where Elly's boyfriend sent her a video. I went to check it out and loved it.

Check it out!

Super Mario Beatbox @ Yahoo! Video

 

Thanks for the link Eric.

Mayfield Fine Foods

Arisa and I went shopping today to get some extra things for our family bbq tonight. After shopping at Giant Eagle for our stuff, we went to Micro Center at East Gate and then to Best Buy to do some comparison shopping on laptops. Elly is going to get herself a laptop to replace her Dell netbook which she doesn't feel is sufficient for when she starts college at American University in August. In particular, I was looking at laptop pricing and system specs so I could compare them to the employee purchase program prices.

Anyway, on our way out of the Best Buy parking lot my wife notices a sign for "Mayfield Fine Foods". She asks me, "What's that?". Since I have zero idea as to what it was, I said "no clue, wanna go find out?"

Yakiniku in San Diego

For work, I've been traveling quite a bit to San Diego to work on a client project. By coincidence, the client's office is located right along San Diego's "Asian" strip. Along Convoy Street there are a host of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese restaurants. Probably some others like Vietnam as well.

The first time I went I remember seeing a Japanese BBQ restaurant on the way to the client in the morning. But in the evening I could never find it again, not sure why. Well, on this last trip I was finally able to see it.

Did I Mention Cherries?

Did I mention the cherries from our tree are ready? Oh, right, this morning I posted about picking cherries. Yesterday, Elly, Ken, George and I were out for about an hour maybe less. As I mentioned in this mornings post, the cherries we harvested yesterday were way more than we could eat so we were taking them to the JANO Sakura Picnic.

 

 

We did exactly that and we came home empty handed. Those that weren't eaten at the picnic, people stuffed them in ziplock bags and took them home. Not a single cherry left. Sigh. We came home cherry-less. (Which was the idea!)

Picking Cherries

Over the last week or so, we've been watching the cherry tree in our backyard. It seems the time is finally here to pick them. It's a balance of waiting to just the right moment and saving the cherries from the birds.

 

 

So Elly, Ken, George and I headed out at about 11:30 yesterday morning to start picking what seemed to be the ripest cherries.

 

 

 

An hour later we had barely made a dent in the cherries on our tree. Still I think we gathered something like 500 cherries. The picture below are the cherries we gathered sitting on our stove. From this picture, you really can't get a sense of how many cherries there are, but trust me there is alot.

 

 

This is way more cherries than we can eat before they spoil. Plus, the tree is still full of 'em. We'll bring most of those we gathered to the JANO Picnic today for people to snack on. The rest we'll probably make some preserves, or jam. We might try a cherry pie.

cherries are ready!

Garden 2010

So I have just about finished planting my garden for this year. This Memorial Day weekend, I took Friday off so I could have a four day weekend. I'm glad I did as we expanded the size of this years garden in the back yard. It' probably 25' by 15' or there abouts.

Friday I spend pretty much all day tilling. I rented a roto tiller from Home Depot and started in at about 9:45. I didn't finish until about 6PM. I only rented it for 24 hours so I had to return it by 9:15 on Saturday. I wouldn't have minded going through one last time of turning the garden. But it was sufficient. It was a long day made better by my daughter's boyfriend and my youngest son chipping in to help with the tilling.

 

JANO Sakura Picnic

On June 6, 2010, JANO will be holding it's annual Sakura Picnic. This potluck picnic is to celebrate the nearly 140 Cherry Trees JANO has donated to the Brookside Reservation (map) of the Cleveland Metroparks. I am posting information here in English on the Picnic. The picnic is open to anyone as long as you bring food for 5-6 people.

The picnic starts at 11:30 with a quick talk by the Japanese Consulate General from the Detroit Consulate. Yume Daiko will be performing for us as well. Afterwards we'll have pick up soccer games, volleyball, tug-a-war, and other small games. And of course will have our Janken Taikai (Rock, Paper, Scissors competition) which Arisa walked off as winner last year.

2009 Sakura Picnic Pictures

The picnic will last until 3pm.

Please feel free to attend as long as you bring food for 5-6 people. Hope to see you there!

Wall

If you've got a few minutes, check this video out of my niece presenting on what she learned during her gap year.

Enjoy it while you can

As much as I find facebook useful for keeping in touch with folks and friends of yesteryear, I've decided I'm going to stop using facebook. It's too difficult to manage the ever changing security and privacy settings. And reading that it's fairly simple for people to figure out my IP address via facebook, just made me realize that I don't really trust this company.

So enjoy my posts and stuff while you can, I'l be dumping it at the end of this month, and severely reducing my current footprint on it starting immediately.

If you are really that desperate to follow me, I'm still on twitter, friend feed, buzz, orkut, linkedin, mixi, amongst others. And you can subscribe to this blogs feed too.

Google Trusted Tester

I signed up to become a Google Trusted Tester after seeing this post on Buzz. Much to my surprise, I was actually chosen as a tester.

Mayfield City Schools Artfest

Today, Arisa and I went to see the Mayfield City School's Artfest at Hillcrest Hospital in Mayfield Heights. As you would expect with student artists, there are some that are pretty darn good, and others not so much. Couple of the artists were kids we know from soccer or something else.

Most importantly, though, Elly's boyfriend had a painting on display.

Didn't realize he was into self-portraits! Of course I'm kidding.

Astounding Ignorance

Today, the Cavs posted an advertisement to follow them on Twitter for a prize pack to be given away during the Cavs - Bulls game. They tweeted it first, but it also made it to facebook. On the facebook version, a Toyota add was posted along with it.

And sure enough, some of the ignorance that is killing Cleveland rears its ugly head.

Social Wok

I posted a tweet today that suggest that Social Wok had problems. Social Wok replied to my tweet asking for more information. Now that's the way to follow up! Take note of that folks. Responding to complaints is a good thing as I went the extra mile to grab some screenshots(see below) and am creating this post. If they hadn't responded I probably would have removed Social Wok and just moved on.

update: And they wouldn't have fixed it already making their product better, this user happy with them, and all that before I could even finish this post (granted there's a lot of fluff in this post).

Korean BBQ in CA

A month or so back, I was in Orange County, CA on business. On a previous visit, our waitress at the California Pizza Kitchen was kind enough to give us a list of restaurants to try out in the area, mostly Asian, though one was Cuban.

We found a Korean BBQ she recommended and it was really, really good.

I won't lie, I like the Japanized version of Korean BBQ but it was still really, really good. I want to order the beef tongue, but my colleague wasn't interested and it would have been too much to eat by myself. As it was, we barely finished everything.

See the reviews of the place we went on Yelp. I think the reviews on it are lower than I would have given as I thought it was good, service was friendly etc. Next time around, I think I'll try some of the other ones in the area too.

Seed Catalog Arrived

Just noticed that my seed catalog arrived today. I believe that I asked them to send me on via the web. Considering the fact that the weather is clearly getting warmer - it was gorgeous today here in Cleveland - it's time to start planning for the garden.

Google Fiber for Communities

So Lev Gonick has started an effort to get Google to choose Cleveland and/or Northeast Ohio for its Google Fiber for Communities. I of course followed the twitter account Lev created for this purpose - Google1Gig4CLE. Lev has been very active in bringing broadband and it's benefits to Cleveland, with OneCommunity and the effort around University Circle and Case University.

My question for Lev is this - what's the plan?

Excell Tecc and Malley's Chocolate's Partnership

I got this from Ken today.


Hello,
Ken Hawkins is a member of Excel Tecc and their group is conducting a fundraising activity with Malley's Chocolates of Cleveland, Ohio.
A website has been setup specifically for the Excel Tecc fundraising campaign.
All purchases made on that site will be credited toward Ken Hawkins and will directly benefit Excel Tecc.
To connect to this site, please click on this link.

Thank you very much,
Excel Tecc

If you are interested in supporting Excell Tecc or just want some chocolate, give Malley's a try.  It's good stuff.

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Edward Jackson Hawkins - Memorial Site

As some of you know, my Dad died on January 15, 2010. He had been sick for a while and we were expecting it, but that expectation doesn't reduce the shock and sense of loss when, inevitably, the news comes.

To all the folks that have expressed their condolences via Facebook, email, and other ways thank you. They mean more than you know and are greatly appreciated.

We have created a temporary memorial site. The site has a longer obituary that probably won't run in newspapers, information on the Funeral, and will have information on a Memorial Service in Cleveland. Please check it out.

Memorial Website URL: http://www.edhawkins.info

The site has a page to leave messages that we'll be collating. The current web site is temporary and for immediate use. However, my siblings and I have decided to build a more permanent memorial website to honor my Dad. We'll be collecting and organizing his writings, photos, movies as well as wider family histories into the site. Just based on what I have, it will be a pretty impressive site from a volume of content perspective.

In fact, the effort to categorize and convert the content for web use will be fairly intense. We are fully aware that we'll not be able to do this in one fell swoop, but will have to do it over an extended period of time. The good thing about that is that it's a great way for us to keep Dad in our thoughts and remember all the good things he meant to us, and to the world.

The current design is okay, but certainly nothing to write home about. That's not surprising since I did it. I hope to engage a real web designer for the permanent memorial site. Dad deserves a better looking site than I can do.

It'll also be a collaborative effort amongst us siblings at least, but I hope to get some of my Dad's siblings to contribute stories, information, etc. They know a whole side of my Dad of which we, his kids, are completely ignorant.

Of course, we are spread out across the country and each have our own lives to live. So we'll be using some online services like Google sites to help reduce duplication of effort, share information and tasks. I must say I am looking forward to working with my siblings to make this happen. My Dad deserves a nice memorial site, and I am honored to be a part of building it.

Official Google Blog: A new approach to China

Official Google Blog: A new approach to China

Wow

Umami Asian Kitchen

Last night, Mom took us out to celebrate Arisa's birthday.  We went to Umami Asian Kitchen in Chagrin Falls.

The menu says that Umami is the "fifth taste", as in sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami.  Umami is a Japanese word.  See the wikipedia article for a description.  Also see the "basic tastes" article too.

I see why they call it Asian Kitchen as it's not really a Japanese restaurant.  They take some Japanese foods and make it all their own.  For example, they have an Udon Noodle dish, but it's not what one would expect from a Japanese restaurant.  It was really very good.  We had Seared Red Tuna, Spicy Tuna Rolls, and Calamari.  I had the halibut with sweet potatoes and ginger, Arisa had one of the specials which was scallops (hotate) on Jasmine rice.  Ken had the Seared Salmon, and George had the curry chicken entree.  Elly had Calamari and Assorted Sushi appetizers as her entree.  Mom had crabcakes.  I tried everything except the crabcakes and it all was very, very good.

Oh, and Chagrin Falls looks great at night.  The whole town is decorated in Christmas Lights.  If you get a chance, I'd check it out.

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Neohawk.Org Down

www.neohawk.org is currently down.

@grokthis: The SAN filer crash appears to be non-trivial. Recovery efforts are underway. Service is not expected to be restored in fewer than 12 hrs

It'll be up when it's up. That was from 5-6 hours ago.

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even*cleveland: the snowman

Thanks to this post, even*cleveland: the snowman, a small trip down memory lane.

While I wasn't 6 or 7 like Stephanie over at even cleveland, I did watch it with my kids, and it quickly became a favorite of mine. We bought the book and had the dvd. Neither of which made it with us when we moved to the U.S.

Thanks for the reminder, Stephanie

technorati new claim

U5AA7KUEJQ7U

Damn You Byteflow!

U5AA7KUEJQ7U

As many of you know, I've been using Byteflow for this site and blog. Byteflow is a blog system built in Django. The glorious design(sarcasm) is mine. I should also add that the News and Links are little modules that I created. Which I'm pretty proud of as I'm not a programmer/coder, and even though they are real simple and pretty featureless (no RSS for example).

That's one of the things I like Byteflow, which is really a blog system, is that I can build other "apps" and include it into the blog to make it a "cms". And Django is fairly easy to get your head around to do so, at least for the easy stuff.

Anyway, as I posted in "New URL", I was planning to move everything over to Google, particularly the blog over to blogger - this one in particular: robataka.neohawk.org. For one reason, it's free. Free as in no charge, not the FLOSS free. It was a cost saving measure as I run this site one a vps, from VPS Village. Now it's not terribly expensive, in fact it's inexpensive. I'm sure I might find even cheaper ones. But if I'm going to move my site for cost reasons, it'll be to free rather than for just less money.

More importantly though, I was going to switch simply because it was easier to post to blogger than it was to a Byteflow blog. My number one "complaint" or dissatisfaction with Byteflow was simply the inability to post to my blog via ScribeFire (what I'm using now) or other blog editor/tool. I always had to go in via the web admin interface. Where as with Google's blogger, I could use a blog tool like ScribeFire to post to it. It just makes it easier to post which means I'll post more often. Or that's the idea anyway.

So here I was getting ready to move. I updated my dns so that you could see robataka.neohawk.org, and I posted all of the entries from here to my blogger blog. I was playing around with Google Sites (useless for my current needs), App Engine Site Creator (cool, and usable, but just not quite right for this - I do use it elsewhere). But I was going to bite the bullet since every decision involves trade offs. I'd be getting a blog that's easier to post to, but a weaker solution for non-blog stuff. And less control, or more work really, to control the look and feel of the site.

So what do the developers of Byteflow do? They fix Byteflow so it now can handle the MetaWeblog API, and therefore using blog editing tools like ScribeFire(apparently Echto works too). Damn you! Stop making Byteflow so usable!

So now I'm back to using Byteflow at least for the foreseeable future. I may end up posting in both blogs until I finally make up my mind. But for now, Byteflow wins again.

Damn you Byteflow!

Technorati Tags: byteflow, django, blogger, google

What is ECM?

As many of you know, I work for Hyland Software here in Cleveland. I don't post much about work or work related items because that's not my role in the company. I'm a project manager and am focused on specific client projects, not touting the company.

But every now and then, there are things I just can't pass up. It's not something like Hyland winning Crain's Company with the Best Perks Award, or software product under category of "impact" by NEOSA. Hyland wins those alot.

One of the things I get asked alot is what does Hyland do? Well we're a software company that provides Enterprise Content Management, ECM, solutions. That answer, particularly amongst family members, gets me a glazed over eye "huh?" response.

The following video "What Is ECM? The Laundry Analogy" answers it much better than I ever could in just 60 seconds.

I'm not the only one that found this highly informative as well as entertaining. I actually found this on the AIIM page announcing the winners of the ECM Video Contest. Not surprisingly, this video was selected as the winner. If you're interested AIIM is:

For over 60 years, AIIM has been the leading non-profit organization focused on helping users to understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes. AIIM was founded in 1943 as the National Microfilm Association and later became the Association for Information and Image Management. AIIM is also known as the enterprise content management (ECM) association.

Anyway, the two folks that made this video work at Hyland. Seeing something like this video this morning just reminded me of how good it is to work at Hyland with intelligent, creative people dedicated to their jobs and serving markets and clients.

Yes, its a small thing, but it reminds me as to why I'm proud to call myself a Hylander.(and if you go back far enough as Scottish Highlander too)

旅行の帰り

昨日、兄貴のとこから帰宅した。でも、最悪。　トランスミッションが飛んじゃって、ペンシルベニア州から牽引してもらう必要があった。　
先日、トリプルAを紹介したが、今回発見したのはターンパイクを利用するとトリプルAを利用することが出来ないそうだ。　PAターンパイクは独自のシステムで＊１１（オハイオ州なら *990 だと思う）を携帯で電話するとターンパイクが牽引車など呼んでくれるわけです。　一応、トリプルAに入会して「プラス」になっているので１００マイル牽引無料だが、ターンパイクの業者さんがこれを認めるなので家の近くのガレージに運んでもらったんだ。

これから調べるが、多分ワランティーが切れているので修理全額を払う必要があると思う。最悪。きっと＄３０００ぐらいかかると思うのだ。　このお金がどこから歳出出来るか悩む。

ということで今朝はワランティーの有効期限を調べるのだ。

Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  Yes, it's a day late but that's okay.  I was busy eatin', and pulling my hammy.  Aaargh, age sucks.

But the eats were excellent!

Update: Check out the pics below. I'm still trying to get some more so we have the whole slew of pictures.

トリプルAに入ってよかった

一週間前ぐらいにトリプルA（AAA=American　Automobile　Association)に入会しました。　我が家の愛車２台とも中古車であり、いつ壊れるのが不安です。　僕は結構出張があるのでいないときにありさやエリーが何かあった時にトリプルAに電話するだけでバッテリチャージとか無料で牽引してもらえると思って入会したわけです。

ケンとジョージが予定がある場合に、向かいに行ったり、送ってあげたりしてもらう代わりにエリーは割と自由に車を使わせています。　昨夜はそうでした。ケン君が友達と映画を見に行く予定だったのでエリーが車で送ってあげていて、その後出かける予定でした。　そうしたら、映画館の駐車場で車を止めていたら、再度エンジンがかからなくなったことになりました。　エリーはバッテリーの問題かと思って、友達に電話してチャージしてまらったのですが、やはりエンジンがスタートしませんでした。

そうすると、仕方がなく僕を電話しました。　すぐにとまったところで行って状況確認しました。　そして、AAAを電話しました。 会員番号や住所を教えて、４５分以内に牽引車が来て、ガレージまで牽引してもらいました。　今はガレージからの連絡を待っていますが、昨夜はAAAを電話できると知っていたのでだいぶ安心しました。

トリプルAに入ってよかった

Case University Intiative: Gigabit to the Home

Hattip to George Nemeth.  Case announces a project to provide 1000mb/sec internet service to the community surrounding it.

The details are over at Lev Gonick's blog. They'll start with 100 households but hope to grow to 25,000.

Note, this is just the announcment of the initiative not announcement of service.  It appears that they have some review hurdles to overcome.

Regardless, this is a great initiative!  Kudos to Case.

Google Apps Account as Google Account

Wow. I discovered this morning that I can use my google app private domain account as a google account. Perhaps I am slow, but what I had been doing is associating my gmail google account with my google app account. However, today I received a google wave invite to my private domain. In the process of muddling around I discovered the ability to create a google account using the google app domain. So for example, now that my rbh at neohawk.org account is also a google account, I have a google profile, picasa account, etc. Until today, I need to use my gmail account to login, but now I can use my neohawk.org account. See below:

You can see my profile below:

This is huge. One of may largest complaints with google has been the two different logins I needed. One for my google apps, one for google accounts. Now that they are the same, I'm a happy camper. I did have to remove my neohawk.org account from my gmail google account to make this work.

Did I just not know this or is this new?

Be Afraid

Hat tip to Cleveland Scene.

I've always wondered how an something like the Roman Empire could fall. Now I know.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Blog It Forward

Like this idea. I don't think I'll be in town for it, but if you have time this a great thought to help a complete stranger.

http://www.chefswidow.com/2009/11/23/2827/

Blog it forward.

Candy and Carmel Apples

Turns out Arisa has never had candy or carmel apples. So we decided to give them a go. Pictures taken with my blackberry, hence they're not very good.

We haven't eaten them yet, but I'll update this post when we do.

Browns Lose A Thriller

The Cleveland Browns found a way to lose, 38-37, after being up 24-3 in the first quarter.  But what a game.  It was a lot of fun to watch, the first one since what, 2007? It's fun when to comparable teams play each other.  I was originally worried that it was going to be a sleeper but after the ups and downs of a football game and 75 points later that worry was unfounded.

I have to be honest, I cheered and was laughing with delight when Detroit Lions scored with zero seconds left.  And I'll tell you why.  It's not because I'm not a Browns fan, it's because I am a Browns fan.  There are multiple reasons I was cheering.  Probably the first and foremost being, as I said many moons ago, I want Mangini, and by extension Daboll, fired.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  All you football gurus out there say no, give him time.  Nevertheless, I called it back in September and I'm staying with the call to fire Mangini.

I am also aware that Randy Lerner has said he won't fire Mangini.  I understand that.  I also understand he intends to hire a "credible" football voice.  What I want to happen is that the first thing that person does is to fire Mangini. 

The game was lost due to coaching.  First off, they went conservative way too early and stayed conservative even when it became apparent that Detroit was going to keep on coming.  Run, Run, Pass, Punt.  That's Mangini's "process".  Granted, they opened up the offense much, much more this week than in any previous week, but where in the world does it come into a coach of this team to go conservative?  Idiocy.

And to add an exclamation point, we fake a field goal and get a first down just so we can....kick a field goal.  Baffling. 

Idiocy and Baffling.

After the interception to stop a Detroit drive with 3 minutes left one would think you'd want to get a first down.  Why does this coaching staff continue to turn to Jamal Lewis.  He's lucky if he gets 4 yard, mostly 2, sometimes 3 yards.  And yet when it was critical to run the clock out we go to him.  Result was a punt, setting up Detroit's stunning come from behind victory.  Where was Jennings?  In really his first game he was averaged 3.6 yards per carry (Jamal averaged 3.1), with which you get a first down (3.6 x 3 = ???).

Another reason: Poteat was in the game on the final play.  Why?  What has he done to show he should see any time inside the white lines?  Inexplicable pass interference with zero seconds on the clock, giving the Lions one last opportunity from what, the 5 yard line.  At a minimum, player selection is questionable. 

Then we see Mangini arguing the timeout call.  I questioned it too.  I thought teams only got three timeouts per half, and subsequently thought the Lions had inadvertently gotten an extra time out.  I was straightened out by some guy on twitter and confirmed on that oh so infallible wikipedia:  After the 2 minute warning a team gets one injury timeout with no penalty, but 10 seconds run off the clock.  All subsequent injury timeouts incur the 10 second run off the clock and a 5 yard penalty.  So I didn't know this.  My Bad.

But the Head Coach of the Cleveland Browns also didn't know it and argued quite vociferously with the referee.  Meaning he didn't know the 2 minute injury timeout rule.

Idiocy, Baffling, Ignorant

To add insult to injury, he then calls timeout allowing the Lions to re-insert Stafford, the rookie quarterback that had already burned our defense for 4 touchdowns.  The result?  The Cleveland Browns allowed Stafford to become the first rookie quarterback in the history of the NFL to throw for 5 touchdowns in a game.

Idiocy, Baffling, Ignorant, Stupid

And overall, where did the defense go?  The Lions first play from the line of scrimmage went 64 yards or some such.  How can that happen?  It appears the Browns D was completely unprepared for the Lions.  Where was all the progress we thought we were seeing?

Idiocy, Baffling, Ignorant, Stupid, and Inconsistent.

Overall, just poor, poor coaching.  Why on earth would you leave this team in Mangini's hands.  So my hope is that whomever Lerner hires  that individual sees that we lost to arguably the worst team in football over the last two years.  And the quickly fires Magini, since these last couple of months have been wasted when we could have really been rebuilding and preparing for the future.

Granted some of the blame needs to fall squarely on the shoulders of the Browns players.  You can't drop passes that hit you on the hands.  You just can't.  You can't cause pass interference  with no time on the clock left.  But overall, this loss falls more on the coaches than the players in my mind.  I got the sense the better coached team won.

It was  fun game to watch though.    It really was.  What I realized at that point is that at this point I'm more interested in a fun, competitive game, win or loss for the Browns, with a great game ending comeback game than anything else this football season.  And that's a sad state of affairs. 

New URL

You may or may not have noticed but this blog is now available at a new url: http://robataka.neohawk.org.  Please note that if you are seeing this post, you are at the new url.
If your not seeing this post, well there's really nothing to say since you're not reading this.  In other words, the dns is still updating.

This is part of getting ready to move everything off of my current server to something else.  The neohawk.org blog will come here, though it is still currently live.
So if you following along with an RSS reader, you'll need to update it.  I'll post again when I take the other one down.

Bonenkai

I realized this year that I hadn't been to a bonenkai in ages. Of course here in the U.S. December is a month filled with "Holiday" parties. Well in Japan they're called bonenkai. Literally "forget the year gathering". Either way, it generally involves drinking, conversation, and general fun with friends, colleagues and clients.

So I'm happy to report that JANO is supporting a spontaneous "Bonenkai". It'll be on Saturday, December 19th from 6PM to 9PM.  And what good bonenkai wouldn't have Karaoke?
So the 1st Annual Bonenkai will be held at Karaoke Station

Please RSVP by 12/10/2009

Below is the map to Karaoke Station:

View Larger Map

I must say that I'm looking forward to it.

Pet Peeves

One of my favorite sites was pet peeves, but unfortunately I lost the link to it.  It was just a list of pet peeves submitted by various people, that you could vote on.

I really enjoyed reading some of them.  Well recently, my sister posted on her blog, and at the end of it she asked the question

P.S. Oh and...is it really that hard to turn on one's turn signal when changing lanes? :)

This reminded me driving pet peeves of mine that I wanted to post on that site.  

1. People who tailgate me
2. People who force me to tailgate them

Arrrggghhh

Test: Motherhood as Ministry: a 40 Day Revelation: Vision

Elly and Ken Inducted into National Honor Society

Today, Arisa, Grandma Barbara, and I attended the Mayfield High School's National Honor Society Induction Ceremony. Both Elly and Ken were inducted. The pictures aren't great, but here they are.

One of Ken's friends asked me how Ken got in. I answered truthfullly....we had to pay.

checking out seed funding in NEO

Cavs - Warriors...

I'm missing the Cavs - Warriors game, but from the box score it looks like neither team understands what the word "defense" means.

Highlights from NBA.com

In Process

I have migrated all my posts from www.neohawk.org/blog to blogger.  Still a few more things to do before I make the change.
Yes, I have decided to go with Google, bad validation and all.  It's just to easy to post to it compared to byteflow.  Yes, I could figure out how to enhance Byteflow, but I don't really want to spend the time doing that.  So I've made the switch.

The real question left for me is how to handle static pages.  Unfortunately, the GAE application I used for JANO isn't really being developed any further so I don't really want to do that.  I'll need to look around. 

What I need to finish is

1. The stylesheet and customization of this layout
2. domain switch
• this will become robataka.neohawk.org
• i'll set one up for arisa if she ever decides to blog

Probably missing a few things, but it's still early in the morning

damn, shouldn't have had that coffee at 6

this sis started a blog! http://ping.fm/6QGuE

robataka sent you a video: "tokyo bicycle parking tower"

	help center | e-mail options | report spam
robataka has shared a video with you on YouTube: This technology was just hitting Tokyo when we left Japan. When I was in Tokyo, bicycles were always a problem around the train stations. This technology solves that problem in spectacular fashion at least behind the scenes tokyo bicycle parking tower 東京都江戸川区葛西駅前にできた自転車地下駐輪場です。収容台数は9,400台、総工費は70億円です。 It can accommodate 9400 bicycles here.
© 2009 YouTube, LLC 901 Cherry Ave, San Bruno, CA 94066

Japanese American Fair

This last Saturday, Arisa and I headed out to St. Ignaitus High School to attend the JACL's 40th Japanese American Holiday Fair. I had a errand to run at Micro Center and so we were running a little bit late. We got there probably about 2PM.

By the time we got there, it was packed. I'd say close to a hundred folks or so were there. The Mame Taiko Drummers were already in action. At the entrance to what I assume is the cafeteria, there were booths with a silent auction, origami, and other things like soap sales.

It was our first "Japanese-American" event, as opposed to JANO, but I'm glad we went.

Ubuntu Upgrade

Yesterday and today, I 've spent a lot of time installing Ubuntu 9.10.

First off, my son George's PC died. Well, I probably could have struggled to fix it, replacing the hard drive but that would have been a lot of effort. So we headed over to Micro Center and got a refurbished PC for $250. This refurbished PC is now the most powerful one in the house; 320G hdd, 3Gb RAM, dual core amd64, Nvidia, blah, blah, blah. No other PC in the house comes close to it.

It came with windows on it but uninstalled, or not set up. So powering it on and getting windows set up took about an hour I would guess. Maybe a litt le less. Of course, the Neohawk household doesn't use windows, so I downloaded Ubuntu. Not Kubuntu this time. Popped in the cd and installed Ubuntu. All I can say is wow. It was dead easy and took an hour, but like windows probably less. In both cases, I wasn't really paying attention to how long it took and was pleasantly surprised how quick it was.

I had only two real issues. The first issue was I wanted to place the /home directory on a separate partition, and also wanted to resize the windows partition. With the GUI I couldn't tell how to do that and didn't want to screw anything up so I just installed it. The second issue was getting the wireless configuration to work. This probably had less to do with Ubuntu itself than the fact that I was using Ubuntu's wireless interface for the first time and the fact that the wireless signal is weak in my son's room.

Other than that though, the Ubuntu install was flawless and easy.

Interestingly enough, my son took a look at it and said, "Where's KDE?" . So I did a "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop". Now this took quite a while. Mosty because of the weak wireless signal it took forever to download the necessary files. Once that was done, though, it went off with out a hitch. My son is ecstatic now that he can get back to creating his game maps.

Laptop Leap

So based on that really pleasant experience, I decided to take the plunge with my laptop. I have yet successfully "upgrade" with Kubuntu, but thought I'd give it a chance. #FAIL. Yet again, the upgrade did not work. Then again I did not try very hard either. Once I hit problems, I just decided to do a clean install. Luckily for me, my laptop already has the windows partition size the way I want it, and my /home directory is on a separate partition. So all I had to do was install Ubuntu 9.10 to the right partition and away we went. I got up late this morning, about 7:45. It's only 9:30 and I've been done with the upgrade for about an hour.

Similar to my son, I'm a KDE person, so I ran 'apt-get install kubuntu-desktop' as well in that time frame. It is also how I know that it was the wireless connection in my son's room that was slow. My laptop is hardwired and the download of Kubuntu files was relatively fast.

I read somewhere that somebody recommended to the Ubuntu/Kubuntu folks to make the /home directory a separate partition the default setting. +1. I wholeheartedly concur with this. My experience is that the upgrades never go well, and that a clean install is always smooth. (note, that's my experience). The only painful part if the /home directory is not separate is backing it up, moving it somewhere, and returning it when the install is done.

Other than that though, I was really impressed with the ease of the install. Particularly on my son's pc which went really fast. Nice hardware helps I guess. ;-)

40th Annual Japanese American Holiday Fair

40^th Annual Japanese American HOLIDAY FAIR

Saturday, November 7, 2009 at St. Ignatius High School from 1pm to 5pm

FOOD, ARTS AND CRAFTS BOOTHS AND ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM

1:30-2:10 2:15-2:45

JACL Sho Jo Ji Billy "The Kid"

Japanese Dancers Matsumoto Juggler

3:00-3:45 4:00-4:30

JACL Mame Daiko Mentor Karate

Taiko Drumming Institute Martial Arts

Also see the Japanese Holiday Fair 2009 PDF

Cleveland Browns - Not Much More to Say

I was going to write a long post about the Browns and the fact that Randy Lerner actually watched a game and was disgusted as the rest of us have been for the 7 weeks prior to that. I had some sage advice for him. I'm glad I waited because I ran across a blog post, Coming Out Of The Closet by Gary Benz, that expressed the same idea but much more articulately. It's a must read.

His basic point and my unwritten one is the same - the only way for the Browns organization to turn itself around is for Mr. Lerner to take ownership of it. I don't mean property law ownership, but deep down emotional, spirtual, intellectual ownership of the team and the organization. I don't know where I read it but it was basically that what he thought he was doing with Manigini was cleaning out the organization and hoping to bring in a new philosophy.

update family budget spreadsheet

catching up on my "starred items" in google reader. "starred" = read later. For some of these it's definitely later

okay, ping.fm posts to my blog, but do I want it to?

so will ping.fm updates link to my blogger blog http://ping.fm/2aFOj ?

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween everybody.

I was looking at my google analytics and thought this piece of data was appropriate for Halloween.

Creepy, huh?

What Mayfield Hts City Council Race

Okay, so the other day I did a review of the Mayfield Heights Mayoral Candidates, based solely off their websites. A comment by Jill Miller Zimon that as far as she knew she was the only council candidate in Pepper Pike that had a web presence, I decided to see what was the case for Mayfield Heights.

After a fairly strenuous search, the only candidate with a web site I could find was David Sasak. Well that's not actually true, as Donna Finney has a page on Howard Sonenstein's site.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that one of the other candidates has a site since I received some campaign pamphlet that had the site listed on it. Unfortunately, the pamphlet went where the rest of the junk mail goes. I'm now wishing that I had noted down the url before tossing it. But that's the extent of the attention it got, and it got more than the others only because it actually had a url on it. If it hadn't it would have been gone in 1 second rather than 3 seconds. Which brings me to another point.

Folks, if you want me to vote for you, you have to get in front of me. Junk mail is not getting in front of me since it almost hits the wastebasket the millisecond I touch it. In order to get in my face you have to get on something that comes across my pc screen. I don't get newspaper, haven't for years and years. You need to have a website, an rss feed, a facebook fan page or account, a twitter account. Something. Any one of those will do. Otherwise, you don't get my vote.

(If anybody is aware of a site for one of the other candidates, please let me know.)

And riding someone else's site doesn't cut it either. Reality is that while I could complain that Mr. Sasak's site is pretty weak, it exists. And my bet is he hasn't spend more than $4.99 per month on the hosting fees (GoDaddy) and not much on the actual design either (not a criticism!). If you can't afford that to get your message out, you can't get my vote.

So, be default, Mr. Sasak gets my vote. And for what it is worth, here, cut and pasted from his site, is what he's committed to;

I am committed to:
• Further improving our Senior services and activities
• Continuing improvement of our Parks and Recreation programs
• Maintaining a balanced budget, with No New Taxes
• Striving to continue fiscal responsibility in our City government
• Continuing to protect the integrity of our Zoning and Planning processes (and NO retail in Cedar/Lander areas)
• Work toward re-establishing local control over urban gas well drilling (and NO gas wells in our City Parks)

Not sure why retail is a problem in the Cedar/Lander area. Nor does the "no new taxes" mantra strike a chord without context. I don't want to pay higher taxes more than anyone else, but the amount taxed is less important than for what those tax revenues are used. However, maintaining a balanced budget is also a good thing, so a +1 for that bullet point.

Mr Sasek suggests that he's not a politician and that he doesn't lie. Well, of course you are a politician. You're running for City Council to represent us. By definition that makes you a politician. And what is so bad about being a politician? Politicians are by definition necessary to make this great republic of ours work. And you are participating, so don't duck it. And don't cast aspersions on every other individual representing us whether its local, state, or national. I'm not naive enough to believe that by definition politicians lie, cheat and steal to make their lives comfy. Or their friends. Though it certainly does happen, as we are witnessing at the Cuyahoga County level.

You paint yourself with same broad brush, Mr. Sasek.

Donna Finney's has two reasons we're supposed to vote for her. The first being:

Finney has served on the Building Committee for four years and was Chairman of the Legislative Committee and is currently Chairman of the Safety and Transportation Committee on Mayfield Heights City Council.

So far so good. The only other thing is that she voted against a pay raise for the Mayor. Is she going to make a motion to retract that pay raise if her sponsor Howard Sonenstein is elected? Other than the economy, are there no other reasons for voting against the pay raise? What were the arguments for the pay raise with which you disagree?

For what it is worth, the News-Herald has a comments from each candidate in an article. The Sun Messenger had an article back in August.

One Down, One To Go

So I've been thinking about what to do with this site. Simply put, I'm thinking of moving it to google in some form or fashion. The main motivation is money. I don't get enough access to warrant paying any money for "hosting". I currently pay a small fee to GrokThis, VPS Village actually, for a xen virtual host. But anything at this point is too much.

I have had a test blog up on Blogger for quite a while now. It's been mostly for testing things like email posting, blog editors, gadgets, etc. So last night I finally broke down and tried to see if I could get blogger to look something like this site. While not exact, I'm close enough. Check it out.

Actually it was fairly easy to modify to make it look like this site. It's not done, nor perfect but was close enough for me to figure out what else was necessary. It also helped me figure out what I did and did not like about blogger. At least partially anyway.

What's to Like

Okay, so here's an incomplete list of what's to like:

1. It's free
2. It's linked to my google account
3. You can easily add gadgets
4. It's fairly easy to customize design
5. You can email posts to the blog
6. You can use blog editors, like ecto, scribefire, or google's Sidewiki
7. I can use my neohawk.org domain if I wish
8. Blogger itself generates traffic to my site
9. I can create a multi-author blog (me and arisa, if arisa ever posts
10. Posting in Japanese is no problem
11. Can use feedburner
12. Easy to implement Google Analytics

So that's a fairly good list of things it does for you. Here's the list of things I don't like about it

What's Not to Like

1. Miserable on html validation: the template I used had 636 errors on it. That's not even close.
2. I can not use my google apps account to use it
3. To really customize it, you have to be very careful with the built in widgets and code built in or I'll probably break the site
4. No concept of "static" pages, so it is only a blog
5. Fairly convoluted process to add Disqus which I like as a commenting system
6. CSS and some javascript is in the template -> I'd prefer them separate
7. Does not provide a way to show posts for a given author(that I can find

Based on that, you would think it's a no brainer to move to blogger. Actually thought, I'm not feeling the love for blogger. The fact that I cannot use my google apps domain (neohawk.org) to login to the site is huge, as is the effort to customize it to the point where the html, etc., is valid - and I'm still not sure I could get there because of code that Blogger needs.

In general, I'm quite annoyed with the shortcomings of google apps and it's integration with other google products and services. Picasa, blogger, google reader, openid provider, friend connect, google analytics, etc., require use of a google account. I don't want to use a google account, I want to use my google apps domain.

Granted, I can not complain too much since it is all for free. No, that's not right. I can complain because it's not "free". I'm providing information to Google as their stated goal is to index everything, I'm making it easy for them. So I may not be paying money, but I'm paying.

One of these days I'll do a serious post about Google's ineffectiveness. But for now, I've checked out using blogger. I now need to check out Nick's posts on creating a blog with google app engine.

One down, one to go.

Too Bad I Can't Afford Verizon

I saw this post : "Verizon Droid: First Impressions | Technologizer".http://technologizer.com/2009/10/29/verizon-droid-first-impressions/

I so want a 'droid., but I can't afford to re-subscribe to Verizon. I'll probably go with the same provider that my kids have

in reference to: Verizon Droid: First Impressions | Technologizer (view on Google Sidewiki)

Started Editing Template

As you can tell (if you are reading the blog and not the RSS feed) as I mentioned in this post, I have updated the theme to this blog.  I am working to see how close I can get it to imitate my blog at Neohawk.Org
So far, I've gotten it pretty close.  I know there are somethings still left to fix, but I got pretty far this evening.  

One thing I *really* don't like about blogger, or at least the template I'm using to recreate the look and feel is that it's invalid.  Makes me weally upset.  Particularly since I always complain when other sites to use w3c validator approved code.  I'll get there partially, but some of it seems to be completely out of my control as its the blogger system.

Elly and Ken Achieve Honors

Both Elly and Ken were recognized for achieving Honors at Mayfield High School.. Below is a cell pic of Elly's certificate.

Note that Elly has six straight semesters of achieving better than a 3.5 GPA. She's only been there for six semesters. Alot better than their Daddy could ever do!

Going to Start Testing Templage

I am looking at moving my whole domain to Google.  I already have google apps for mail, shared family documents, calendars, etc.

I'd prefer to set up a blog on google app engine and am following this series on creating a blog on gae.   But I'm also going to see if I can tweak the blogger template to match my Neohawk.Org design.  Neohawk is currently using byteflow which I really like, but one thing I like about blogger is the ability to email in posts.  I have yet to find a django-based blog that pretty much works out of the box and has that and xlmrpc.  Blogger has both.

On the other hand, what I don't like about Google products in general is that they are never finished.  And what I mean by that is not the ever present "beta" on their products/services, but rather the functionality.  One example would be shared contacts in a google apps domain.  The only contacts that are shared are other domain users.  I *already* know my domain users as one's my wife and the other three are my kids.  What I wanted was to share address books between domain users so that if my wife adds somebody to her contacts, that person also shows up in mine.  

Another example is the inability to use picasa, google reader and other google products and services using my google apps domain.  Probably the most annoying of all.  Wouldn't it be brillant if Google would set up your google app domain as an openid provider like they do with your google account.

But I can't complain about the cost, and it's fun to try the various things they got so I keep beating my head against the wall hoping the eventually get this stuff right.  

Maybe google wave will fix it....