Thoughts
While that little blurb about the nature of this page says quite a bit. I thought I would expand upon it and talk about why the web log. The biggest reason is that I felt I should be journaling my experiences and thoughts while in Japan. You may now be asking, "Couldn't you just get a journal and do that?"
If you are asking that question then I am answering, "Yes, but the computer is a more natural way of communicating for me. My handwriting is terrible and I was never a good speller, so, with a computer, I can write my thoughts down and read them without having to decipher my own penmanship."

If you didn't ask that question but asked, "Why don't you journal on your computer and not share it?" Then I answered, "I had other things I needed to share with friends, such as nerd things. I know there is a large section of websites devoted solely to nerd things, but I felt that they were only a part of my life and I would feel bad taking up precious web space with just them. Instead, I felt I should take up more space, but make it more meaningful, hopefully."

If you didn't ask any of those questions then you wrote them in the comments section so I could address them later and I moved on to say, "The journal is mostly for Me and The Wife, but also for the people that I'm finding it difficult to keep constantly updated through e-mail, for various reasons. It is more than a recounting of days events, and people that know me may be surprised by some of them, but I think of it as allowing my friends and family an insight into who I have been and who I am becoming. If people outside that group come along for the ride, I have no qualms. I'm also hoping to use it to work on my own web design skills, which are slim to none. I had a brief stint with web design back in the heyday of HTML 1.0, but that was a long time ago."

I'm going to move this discussion into a different paragraph since it has more to do with Me, than with why I'm writing the log. You see, I've never been one of those PC vs Mac vs UNIX people, or even one of the emacs vs vi people. In fact, I view all of these items as tools, and you should use the tools you are familiar with to get the job done. Sure, some tools are better than others for certain tasks, but in many cases it is more difficult to retrain than continuing to use adequate tools. For example, I think vi is an amazing text editor, but if you don't know it, trying to learn it to the level that it makes things easier takes a while. In those cases, you might as well use emacs. Latex is wicked for writing papers and such, but once again, learning it is a bit tough. Certainly, if you have the time and resources, learning to use a good tool for a task is better than using an adequate tool, but most of the time it isn't feasible, so any way, the EPR (Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen) or Bell state places a two quantum bit system in a state such that there is a 50% likelihood of the first bit being a 1 and 50% a 0. What this means is, if the first bit is either a 1 or a 0, the second bit is the opposite, thus the bits become entangled. Which means you can separate them and if you operate on the first bit, the second bit responds, hence quantum information teleportation. This is pretty common knowledge though, and has appeared in numerous journals, but here is a NMR implementation of it. Wicked!

Okay, I'm off to get some razors to shave, then do dishes. We have no more knives. Oh, and I also bought 4 CDs for 1050 yen, 250 yen a piece, go Book Off!