TheLeong.com

I’ll be back up to posting blogs and pictures, especially from the adventures over the past few weeks, very soon. There’s the Y’s party, Penis Festival 2008, sakura, Namja Town, etc., all waiting in my cluttered mind and digital camera, waiting for their time to shine on this terrible, terrible blog. In the meantime, the plan is to decide on my job ASAP. Pretty much by this following Monday the 21st. I have a few offers, and I need to figure out exactly which I want to do out of them. The jobs I’ve been offered are very different in terms of responsibility and duties, but salary and all that so far seem pretty close. Either way I’ll be working at an office somewhere in Tokyo, which will be a big change. So I guess I just have to decide what kind of work I want to do.

You’d think that having offers and all that makes the job decision process easier. No. It makes things about a thousand times more difficult, since you aren’t just imagining things – you have real decisions and real deadlines telling you to hurry up and get off the can.

All good now. Turns out I had one of my h4 tags in the wrong place, so if there was no entry title it would make the entire blog entry bold. I’m going to leave these notes here, although I should probably delete them. Expect a real post pretty soon about the torture known as the JLPT.

Test continued.

I noticed that on some of my old posts, everything is showing up as bold. I think this has something to do with the post header/template, since it only seems to be happening on entries with no post titles. I’ll mess around with it and see if I can get it all fixed.

During my internet drought period, I was at the nearby Popeye internet cafe one night checking e-mail and Facebook, drinking Qoo, and eating free ice cream. At one point I decided to check out my own blog to see if there were any new comments, etc. I typed the URL in and was then greeted by this heart-stopping message: (click to see bigger version)

Oops. I remembered getting a message from GoDaddy saying my domain name was expiring and it had auto-renewed, but I forgot that I had to renew my web host. Luckily all I had to do was renew it online and my site was back up and running in a few hours. So for maybe 4 or 5 days, from around September 20-24, my site was down. Sorry to any of you who were desperate to see pictures of me and giant mascot characters and were unable to for those few days. It’s not like I was blogging or adding any new content during that time anyway.

Nick was at the internet cafe that night as well during his trip up to Kanto, so he can vouch for how freaked out I was at my site being down, as he sat there laughing as I rushed to renew my web host from an internet cafe at around midnight.

I finally got around to encoding and uploading the instructional video I made for IES back in the summer of 2005 when I was interning there. It’s a basic guide on how to use and ride the trains here in Japan. I think they still show this at the orientations, or at least they did for a year or so.

It was quite a rush job, and if memory serves me right I went out and filmed it with Blanchard all in one morning/afternoon. After pulling an all-nighter to finish editing it on Blanchard’s Mac with Final Cut Pro before he left for the airport (yes, I was cutting it that close), I finished it somehow. It’s actually not too bad now that I watch it again. Not my best work, but not horrible either. Of course there are no graphics or titles since I didn’t have time to bother, but overall I suppose it’s a decent way to introduce trains to IES kids. My favorite shot is the station attendant scratching himself.

Oh and some more random behind-the-scenes stuff about this video. I had a very rough script outline, but no cue cards or prompter, so most of the lines were me and Brian reviewing my outline before each shot, and him memorizing/improvising with each take. No one would be able to notice, but every station or train included in the video and b-roll was along my usual commute path from Myoden to Kaihim-Makuhari, passing through Nishi and Minami Funabashi along the way. Do you like the snazzy music? All from FreePlay. Also, I’m sorry there are so many handheld shots; I know someone will yell at me for that.

It’s here on YouTube for easy viewing, or I’ve uploaded a higher-res version in MPG format on the Videos page.