Today was weird, I came across 2 of the biggest insects I ever saw before.

In the morning I was waiting to cross a road and some creature came buzzing towards me in the air. I ducked and dived to avoid it but the thing landed in the groin area of my shorts. It was big with long tentacles, unlike anything I had seen before. I shook it off and it landed on the pavement and I left it alone. I have no idea what it was, a kind of long thin brown insect with 2 long feelers in front of it and the ability to fly.

Next up was a giant wasp in our house in the afternoon. I am used to wasps that are yellow/black and around 1cm in body length, but this one was like something out of Jurrasic park! I was actually scared of it because of the thought of how much poison it might have if it bit me. I would say the body length was around 1 inch (~2.5cm) as it was resting on a wall. Luckily, by the time my wife came along with a brush to remove it, it seemed to have buzzed away.

Directories can be a great way to get vital links to your Blog but the problem is actually getting your site listed.

Take for example Blogwise.com today they have 71067 blogs listed and a queue of 48335 blogs waiting to be approved. There current rate of approval is a mere 25 sites in the last 7 days. Clearly they cannot cope with the boom in Blogging.

The reason for this slow approval rate is that every site is manually reviewed by volunteer editors. This outdated approach is bad for the  blogosphere and  creates frustration with webmasters, just like with the old dinosaur DMOZ (open directory). In these days of high speed internet, the mechanics of these incredibly slow search aids should be re-thought.

My suggestion is that all submissions should be instantly added to the database with the assumption that most will be honestly submitted to the correct category and contain inoffensive content. Automatic spam filters could be used to hold suspicious sites in a queue for manual checking. This way the approval queue would be much reduced in size.

Sites in the index could then be subject to user voting to adjust their ranking in the directory rather than it being an alphabetical list that attracts spam names such as 1aardvark.com

Also, there could be a “report this site button” where people can send feedback to the editorial team.

Submitting to directories should be made quick, free and easy. Please comment…

Today I went over to take some photos of the fish that hang out near a small dam. But the water was more polluted than usual with scum on the surface. The fish seemed to be making a meal of it though. Maybe it was waste water from restaurants? The fish are many years old so they probably contain lots of unpleasant chemicals, so you wouldn’t want to eat these fish.

We went to the beach which is around 27 minutes drive away to see if there were any kinds of water sports going on. I have a windsurf board so wanted to find a good place to use it.

In Japan, we can drive onto the beach and park close to the water. Our car is 4WD which makes this possible too. Much better than in England where I used to have to park well away from the beach and pay for parking and risk getting my car broken into.

At the beach we found surfers, windsurfers and kite boarding. So plenty of action. There were waves, wind and it was warm. So it seems like I found the ideal place to come and windsurf