Elf Yourself is a cute little holiday thing kindly made available by OfficeMax, where you upload a picture of yourself, mark where in the picture your face is, and then you see yourself as an elf doing a silly dance to some Christmas music. For example, here's a link to my brother and his family (pictured above) dancing like drunken elves.

It's all quite silly, and it's really nice of OfficeMax to have made it.

But their "Terms of Use", which were egregiously ridiculous last year, have crossed into.... well... I'm simply left speechless. "Absurd" doesn't even begin to cover [...]

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One of the tallest buildings around here is the 38-story "Otsu Mary" building in Otsu City, Japan, over the small mountains to Kyoto's east. Zak lives near there, so I've seen it from outside many times, but got a chance to go inside today while accompanying him and his family to a small dinner gathering.

Here's a picture I happened to have taken earlier in the fall from the aforementioned mountains that shows the six-year-old building...

The dinner was on the 27th floor, so I thought we'd be treated to some nice views, but the big surprise was to find [...]

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From The Elements of Typographic Style (third edition):

" In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn." -- page 17

For the four-and-a-half hours in the bullet train on my trip to see a friend the other day, I brought with me this excellent book by Robert Bringhurst.

When most people read a book (or a sign or the classifieds or a menu or...) they don't give even the slightest thought to the typography – [...]

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I was thrilled to get a call yesterday from my best friend, Ramchandra Kulkarni, whom I had not seen in years (perhaps since he was Best Man at my wedding 10 years ago!?). He happened to be in Tokyo for a few days, so I zipped up on a shinkansen (bullet train) to visit with him during a few hours he carved out of his schedule.

Ram and I both entered the University of New Hampshire at the same time, for a Masters in Computer Science. For the duration, we studied along side each-other in Kingsbury Hall, and lived on [...]

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Last week was not a good week for me. The cold I got Monday evening was the least of my problems, because earlier that same afternoon, something happened to my back that left me, for the most part, unable to walk for several days. Whatever it was, it was unlike any condition I could find discussed on the Internet (it's not related to a pinched nerve, slipped disk, etc.). As one might expect from a sudden and severe back pain, the pain was utterly excruciating.

I was mostly okay so long as I didn't move, so that bode well for [...]
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