Last week Fumie and I visited a picturesque temple called Ryouanji. I've put together a little photo collection from the trip.
After recently performing a Windows Update on my WinXP box, my Firefox no longer worked. It would start up and some of the button bars would render, but most of the screen would be blank. It was odd.
After much wailing and grinding of teeth, I found a way to solve it, although I'm not exactly sure what “it” really was, or even if it was related to Windows Update.
After shutting down Firefox, I renamed my extensions directory, which for most people is within
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\random.default\
I renamed it to extensions-X, the started Firefox successfully. I then shut Firefox down, and moved the contents of the extensions-X directory to the new extensions directory which Firefox had just created. Then, when I restarted Firefox again and looked at my list of extensions (Tools > Extensions), I found that two, Tabbrowser Preferences and Allow Right-Click, don't work with Firefox 1.0.6, to which I upgraded several days ago.
It's almost certainly Tabbrowser Preferences that caused the troubles, but I have no explanation for why it stopped working days after I made the upgrade. The most likely reason is that I didn't actually restart Firefox after installing the upgrade, and only after the Windows Update and computer reboot did I try the new Firefox 1.0.6. Anyway, I thought I'd write about this in the hopes that it helps others who run into the same thing.
Technology is wonderful, but I'm fairly used to it, and it's rare these days that I'm surprised by it. Today, I was surprised by something.
My wife has her Yahoo! Mail Japan account set to alert her via cell-phone text messaging when she receives a new email message. Thus, when she gets a new email, her cell phone eventually chimes. This is pretty standard stuff.
So, when I sent her a message about a friend's blog with some spectacular photos, I wasn't surprised to hear her phone chime. I wasn't surprised that my keystrokes on my Mac laptop in my living room in Kyoto went via WiFi to my home network, then up the fiber link to my provider, across the Pacific to my server in California, and then as an email message back off across the Pacific to Yahoo! Japan, which then sent an email to my wife's cell provider, which then traveled the cell-phone system (I have no clue about that) to a cell near us, then to her phone, and voila, the chime.
What surprised me is that it took three seconds from my hitting “send” to the chime. Wow.
(Today is a day full of surprises; my brother was surprised by something as well)
Anthony is often quite sleepy/fussy by the time his nap time rolls around, which makes getting him down all the more challenging. Today was no different, but it was wonderful three hours later when he awoke and came into the living room and said...
“I slept a long time. I had a good nap. I feel happy.”
Today I got the first look at the completed condo we're moving into in two weeks. They had a little event in the morning at which we picked up keys and such (some people showed up with suitcases), and then the place was ours. It was wonderful to be able to finally see inside, and while I'm sure I'm looking at things with rose-colored glasses, that's just fine with me. I love everything about this building, the company that made it, and about our unit within it.
I'd been a bit worried about the lack of a view, being on the 2nd floor (out of 5), but now that I've seen it, I think we have the best unit in the whole building. From the living room we look straight out onto a lot of trees just across the river (not such a common site in the city), and when we go out on the veranda, we look right down on the Shirakawa river, along with a nice view of the Heian Temple's big orange gate. It's just wonderful in every respect.
The location is wonderful, as I knew (and my pictures attest to). To highlight how nice the area is, we ran into one of our new neighbors who, we found out, are moving from all the way... just across the river. They're moving, as the crow flys, perhaps 50 yards. They must like the area.
Mom and Dad will be moving into their unit in a week and a half, and we'll move into ours in two weeks. I can't wait!