During a trip this morning to Nanzenji (the Nanzen Temple, in Kyoto), I came across this sight:

The sign says “To all dog lovers: we humbly refuse dog poop and pee.”

There were some nice photos as well:

You can see the mini-story on my A Visit to Nanzen Temple page.

This afternoon we all went to the Kintetsu Department Store at Kyoto Station to get some winter clothes for Anthony at Baby Gap, do some book shopping, and have dinner (the top-floor “Mirano-Tei”, a pseudo-Italian restaurant which looks fairly dubious, had excellent spaghetti at a reasonable price).

We had a wonderful time, but I was dismayed to hear Christmas music already. Sigh. I was even more dismayed to find that I sort of enjoyed it. (The problem, of course, is that within a week I'll be totally sick of it, thereby turning me into a sourpuss Scrooge by the time Christmas actually rolls around.)

There should be some kind of world-court law which prohibits Christmas music outside of the month of December. The penalty for a first offense would be death, and for a second offense they'd be forced to listen to Christmas music while shopping.

I had a cold when Anthony turned three years old (two weeks ago), which may explain why this picture turned out so blurry. Or, it could be because I was holding the camera with one hand (holding a video camera in the other). Or, it could be that my camera isn't spectacular in low light, and needed a long exposure.

[ UPDATE: the picture from when he turned four years old was much better ]

In any case, I think that the overall effect is quite nice. Happy Birthday my little stinkpot.

Just a day after 1.02, I've released version 1.03 of my “file-based posts” plugin for WordPress. It still allows you to compose/edit posts with your favorite editor instead of the tiny textarea box in a browser, but there are several new goodies with this version.

I added many of the goodies while figuring out how to incorporate Y!Q into my blog. Y!Q is a service by Yahoo! which allows me to include contextual “search for more about this” links into my prose.

As an example of Y!Q, consider that I'm talking about Anthony's favorite stuffed friend, Curious George. Notice how the phrase “Curious George” has been highlighted? If you click on it, you should see a popup with Yahoo! search results for more info about the little monkey. (Use the [ESC] key to remove the popup.) I think I'll add this “quick link to more info” feature to my future posts, from time to time, when I think it will make the reading experience better.

Anyway, back to my plugin, after taking advantage of some of the new things in v1.03, I've been able to set up an include file YQ.html which allows me to create a Y!Q link as simply as:

  <fbp_include set text='Curious George': YQ.html>

or more complex, such as the

  <fbp_include set text='Curious George'
               set focus='books'
               set context='Curious George is a curious little monkey': YQ.html>

which that I actually used above.

Here's a look at the contents of the YQ.html file:

<fbp_var fallback=terms: text>

You can see the reference to many set-at-include-time variables, such as the text we used in the first example above. These many variables reflect the many ways Yahoo! allows the developer to customize and target the results (see “Step 4” of the Y!Q Developer Docs). You can also see some interesting attributes to the <fbp_var> calls, such as fallback and doublequoted. (See the plugin's home page for details on what these mean.)

For completeness in case you'd like to use this yourself, here's the YQ_head file referenced from the first line of YQ.html:

<script language="javascript"
        type="text/javascript"
        src="http://yq.search.yahoo.com/javascript/yq.js"></script>

Finally, here's something cool. I've included the above files in this post with the following:

   <pre style="...">
   <fbp_include uncounted cooked: YQ.html>
   </pre>

This shows the new uncounted and cooked attributes to <fbp_include>.

I've released version 1.02 of my “file-based posts” plugin for WordPress. It allows you to compose/edit posts with your favorite editor instead of the tiny textarea box in a browser. New with this new version is support for nested file includes.

I use the new include feature in this very post to include the ads you see to the right (unless this is not the first post to appear on the page; if ads were already included in a post that appears higher up on the page, the “include only once” feature stops a second ad box from appearing, and hence there may well be no ads to the right.)

See the plugin's home page for details and to download.