They’re a very cool, and I really appreciate the chance to sink my teeth into more of the Front-End web work these days. Also, they’re in Los Angeles.

The next big bit of news is that I’ll be moving in with my LadyFriend™, the lovely miss Becky, by the end of the year, to parts unknown in the west side of LA.

So, if you happen to know a web developer looking for work, there’s a definite opening over at On the Edge, and if you happen to know any cool apartment complexes in west LA, give me a yell!

Fortunately, I had my nifty N800 with me. Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s layout sucks for a cramped device like the N800. Compounding that wonderfully cramped feeling, Kiwi, a Wikipedia client for the iPhone was released today, making it dead easy to surf your favourite bastion of Power Rangers cannon, or Argentinean Government Holidays.

Rather than shell out the cash for an iPhone, I figured I could probably make my Wiki-ing a fair bit easier, which is how I stumbled across User Stylesheets. Sure, I’ve heard about these forever, and supposedly GreaseMonkey has made support for them trivially easy, but I’ve never really dipped my toes into using CSS to edit other people’s websites.

So, over lunch, I sat down, and quickly cobbled together this stylesheet, which strips out the Wikipedia header, footer, and sidebar, and then re-jiggers the text. The net result is a much easier page to read on tiny devices like the N800:

Photo courtesy of my not-iPhone

And here it is mocked up in Firefox, because my phone takes miserable photos:

In Firefox, not on a tiny computer

For anyone who has an N800 and wants to try this out, you just need to load your user specific CSS into

/home/user/.mozilla/microb/chrome/userContent.css

and use Mozilla’s at-rule for domain selectors, so you don’t end up breaking the internet.

This is a mistake: I’m a web dev, and we tend to have very strong opinions about our browsers. Anyways, here are my thoughts on what Google’s doing here.

To start with, Chrome is different from most browsers in two ways:

1. It isolates each tab. Effectively, instead of opening 4 tabs in Firefox, you’re opening 4 browser instances in Chrome. The difference here is that if one tab explodes, the rest of the browser stays stable.
2. It has a shit-hot Javascript optimisation/compilation engine (V8), meaning Javascript goes way faster.

So, the big thing here is that they’re going to an OS model for browsing. Most modern OSes have protected memory, meaning that if Word crashes, the whole OS stays stable. OS8 on the Mac side and Win95/98/ME lacked this, meaning that any application crashing would hose your whole OS and force you to restart.

Nowadays this seems silly, but back in the 90’s, most of us were restarting our systems on a daily basis out of habit, presuming the OS didn’t pre-empt us. Understandably this is a modern OS feature and something sorely lacking from our current crop of browsers; if YouTube crashes or slows to a crawl, you may lose an email you’re composing in gMail or Google Docs.

Also, they’re including a “Task Manager”, so you can see which tabs are acting up, using a tonne of memory, or otherwise being pricks. Currently if a site is slowing your browser to a crawl, there’s no way to tell which one’s responsible, leaving you scratching your head when you get yet another “A script on this page is acting up” type message pops up. This is another OS standard OS feature, which gives users the ability to force quit, or otherwise kill any offending tasks.

So as for how this changes my life? It doesn’t. Sadly IE6 is still the lowest common denominator, so we can’t do anything new that would exclude that. And hell, apart from the two points above, it’s the same rendering engine as Safari, so there’s not the greatest shift in how pages render.

Once this browser makes its way into the mainstream, however, we’ll get good feedback about how fast/sluggish our pages are, and be able to optimise them. At the moment, traditional browsers lump all resource allocation together, so I can see that Firefox is bogging down, but not which tab in Firefox is bogging down.

Oh, and Javascript based Apps like Google Reader, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Spreadsheet will be much faster and desktop-like.

And that’s the big point of this. Instead of downloading Word, you can use Google Docs, and with all the optimisations here, using Google Docs on Google Chrome is almost as fast as Word. Hell, look at all the OS features here. Any ideas spring to mind?

Google can’t unseat Microsoft in the OS space, but they’re building an application platform that doesn’t care about the underlying OS. Apple, Linux, Windows… Google’s trying to make those distinctions irrelevant for 90% of the programs out there.

Combine some of the cool things going on in the plugin space, like the ubiquitous Flash or the up-and-coming InstantAction.com plugins which enable advanced interaction outside of a specific OS, and soon we’ll be able to party like it’s 1999. That’s right, after decades of hype, the era of the Thin Client is fast approaching… again.

If you’re not in “the know”, Carmel is this gorgeous (and very shi-shi) little seaside village, just outside of Monterey, which is itself right across the bay from Santa Cruz. So, now that you’ve got that little bit of mental geography tucked away, the trip.

Carmel, is absolutely beautiful, and if you’re not careful, you could easily mistake it for any town in Italy or France, with cute little restaurants, galleries, and coffee shops. The town itself is tiny, and you can walk tho whole thing is a few hours. We stayed well-fed on pizza and pastries, downed in coffee, and did a wee bit of shopping (I picked up one of these things, and I absolutely love it), and when we got bored, we stopped by Monterey, to check out the aquarium there. 

Good times all around, and you can check out the photos on Flickr!

So, since everyone’s been asking, here’s the photo of the capsule hotel, specifically Reynolds demonstrating how tall these things are. So, you have approximately 10 of these capsules in a row, with two rows stacked on each wall and sumbarine-style ladders between them.

All in all, not horrible digs. You do have a lounge upstairs to relax, watch TV, or drink a beer in (there is a limited bar/diner as well). A spiffy Japanese-style public bath and a dorm-style shared bathroom are available for you to clean up in. You don’t spend all your time in the coffin as some people think and it’s just a crash-pad, not a proper hotel, so you book your pod nightly and gotta take all your just with you on the way out at 9AM prompt.

So yeah, enjoy the photos, and feel free to leave all sorts of scandalous comments.

I still catch myself missing snippets of the country here and there, when driving past clubs and bars, or even something as daft as noticing the blank posterless sections of the wall in our apartment. The space is jarring, and quite possible the first thing you notice upon returning if not the last thing you forget.

Anyways, while it’s still in my mind, let me jot down a few of our experiences in Nagano.

The city itself is no more than a train station, two malls, and a main drag. Past that, the city peters out into suburbs which stretch off in to farms, and then out to the villiages, like Toyota, where we stayed. 

Reynolds’ place is about 30 minutes from Nagano proper, outside of Nakano, a small town in the region. Specifically, he lives in Toyota-mura, which consists of apple farms, and about a dozen houses. This, of course, was in stark contrast to Tokyo and Kyoto, and only after the first few cautious glances and the odd stare from passers-by, did we realise that four Americans (*) walking down the street in Toyota probably isn’t a common occurance. 

Despite the initial… confusion, just about everyone we ran into in Toyota was very welcoming. On our first full day there, we hiked up into the nearby hills, looking for fresh snow, left over from the weekend, and ended up stopping to chat with the local traffic guard, one of the nearby farmers, and the odd student of our dear Reynolds. It never ceases to surprise me to see how much of our communication with each other people goes unsaid. We were able to bolster our meagre Japanese skills with pantomiming, bad translation, snippets of English, facial expressions, and laughter at times.

Speaking of the hills, quite possibly, the most beautiful moment in our trip through Japan had to be that first night in Nagano. After days of non-stop hiking through Tokyo and Kyoto, Reynolds suggested we end our first night in Nagano at one of their famous hot springs. So, at 9, we all pile in the car, shivering and freezing (only 2° centigrade!) and drive up to the nearby town, Iiyama. We drove until we reached the hot spring, sitting on a mountain overlooking Nagano.

So, we hop through the pre-onsen ritual (strip down for a quick, public shower) and stepped outside. Into the snow and the cold with only a 36 square inch towel to protect all dangly bits from sight and the elements.

And then we stepped into the spring: It was 42º centigrade in the cold end! So, here we are, sitting naked, in the hottest natural jacuzzi I’ve ever seen, outside, at night, overlooking the entirety of Nagano, while pinpricks of snow are melting against my face. Looking up, all you could see was the velvet black night, behind the roiling steam from the onsen, and the falling snow.

I can think of few moments in my life that have been that peaceful. The thought of an American-raised, Scottish son stewing in a Japanese hot spring on the other side of the world just seemed so daft right then and there. This world seems so full of surprises at times.

…or do they?

That’s right folks, now that I’m stateside again, I’ve been able to hammer out the odd CSS issues which were causing the comments to not work. Meaning, that new they do work!

So, that’s right, mum, now you can tell me what the cats are doing in a whole new public forum!

It’s like high-school all over again.

Oh, and this post was brought to you by the letter “em”. A beer to the first man to understand this cryptic joke.

Outside of that, I honestly don’t have too much to say about it, with my travel guide out of reach, as it is. We basically arrived from the Shinkansen late on Sunday, and promptly purchased a wide selection of beers, and spent the night drunkenly watching Japanese game shows.

Monday had us doing our variant of Pub-crawling, “Temple Crawling”. We hit four temples before dinner, and honestly, I can’t add anything that you wouldn’t read in a Lonely Planet or Eyewitness guide book. That, and I can’t spell any of the names off-hand.

I definitely feel that each of those temples requires more time to experience than the hour we spent in each, but as a way to flesh out our understanding of the city, they’re marvelous.

Kyoto is a city that hasn’t just made peace with it’s past, but lives happily alongside it. 500 year old shrines co-exist with modern suburbs and high-rises. It’s also far more open and welcoming than Tokyo, which can be an intimidating sight at first. The place is also lousy with gaijin; we were tripping over tourists on the regular. Then again, that could be due to us arriving just in time to see the cherry blossoms blooming.

Overall, if you want to draw an SAT-test worthy parallel, Kyoto is like England’s Bath, a smaller, quieter, city with a rich history. Absolutely gorgeous, and full of small little suprises off of side-roads, and behind temples.

Now, my favourite part has to be the walk we took before dinner, through the city park, which can best be described as Japan’s answer to Montemarte, and then through the main street towards city hall. The interesting there here, is that the most people in Japan tend be quiet in public, keeping cellphone conversations to a minimum.

Here, in Kyoto, on a Monday night, we found quite the opposite. Around us were laughing, joking crowds of people, fresh from work and the bar, and having a good time. Hell, a few passing groups even teased us a bit about our Japanese pronunciation while we were trying to find our way around. From what I’ve seen, Japan is a country where the people all agree that there’s a place and a time for everything.

We capped the night off to a trip to some reggae bar that Reynolds’ bartender recommended, and after a drunken stumble, more Japanese game shows. Not too shabby for our day in Kyoto!

Anyways, we’re currently somewhere over the pacific, two hours from home, and I’m lucky to be experiencing my second Sunday. You see, we boarded our plane at 3:45PM Tokyo time, and as of this writing it’s now it’s 7:00AM LA time. Sunday was so good, I get to do it all over again! (Yay!).

Leaving Japan is a bittersweet experience. I really did fall in love with the country, and it cities, each with their own personality. Beyond that, we certainly met new friends among Matt’s crew of teachers, and the many locals we met along the way, many of whom we may never see again.

All in all, it’ll be good to be back home, though. I doubt I’m going to love rolling back into work with 16 hours of jetlag, or having to face taxes, bills, and the thousand other little irritations of modern life, but at least I’ll be doing it all in a language I understand.

Being in Japan has been great for learning the language, and in the last week, I’ve forgotten more Japanese than I learned in two years of college. However, being in a country where you have, at best, a functional grasp of the language and are effectively illiterate is a bit like being under water. You always seem to be floating through the experience, clumsily interacting with the world around you, and holding your breath for the next oasis of English.

But I will miss it.

Reynolds is talking about staying an extra year, and if that happens, I think me and Quinn will start drafting our plans for next year’s trip to the land of the rising sun.

I’m on the train right now from Nagoya to Nagano, the heart of Nagano Prefecture (something between a state and a county).

We’re currently winding our way through mountains and cities, and the beauty of the Japanese countryside is absolutely breathtaking. To think that there are farms, forests, and mountain communities outside of the neon glow of Tokyo is surprising, but then again, that’s why we’re here.

The further we get from the cities, the more we’re seeing of the real Japan. The tourist density in Kyoto was a bit depressing, and thus far we’ve been relatively coddled by some two of Japan’s more international cities. Here we’re in the heart of the land, and well away from the typical tourist stops.

Let’s see how this goes.