I know many people loved my blog posts about Japan but I no longer have time to post about it in a diary style. But, I am going to build another site about my area featuring the Geisha district and later another site may be built about the Samurai district.

I have registered the domain name of Geisha Walk dot com for the purpose of building a business about walking tours of my local former Geisha district and more.

Also I am planning to use my own website development software to make this site as a showcase example. So you have the link and with time you can see the new site. Thankyou for your interest. p.s. I have some great photos of the modern-day Geiko’s as they now like to be called to feature on the site. Look forward to it!

Well, I decided to make a living developing software. Not working for anyone else though but developing my own software products. I am already in business so this is a simple extension to my existing business of web marketing.

In my last post I toyed with the idea of developing language software but now I junked that idea. What I have been working on for about a month now is web site development software. I am aware that there is a vast number of existing products out there but I have never really found one that is ideal for my needs.

Most tend to be all bells and whistles and the process of making a web site with them is harder than it should be. Some that make it very easy to make a basic site produce very bad code though with lots of formatting code in the content.

My solution will produce very neat code and be like a rapid website development solution. In the programming world we have RAD (Rapid Application Development) tools where wizards and drag and drop controls save you hours of coding standard things such as file opening dialogue boxes.

As an example, my way to produce a site map will hopefully be jaw-dropping to anyone used to the usual methods of doing it after you created a site with specialist tools. My way will be right at the start where you will be helped to define a set of pages based on keywords for your topic. Then you will play around with a graphical tool to produce your site structure by dragging, dropping and shuffling around the pages or lists of pages. And I will save the site map as XML so it’s compatible with the Google standard.

I would struggle to code this feature if I hadn’t already coded something similar for my table editor. This is a graphical tool where you define table cells in a graphical manner and it spits out the HTML code once you are happy. One feature of this I haven’t seen before is the ability to change your mind anytime about how many rows or columns you need and not have to start again.

There will be so many cool features in this software. Even the text editing is cool! Wait till you see the way you edit styles with this software, see the colors and sizes in the code.

I am hoping to release the first version in December.

I am planning to write some software that helps you learn the Japanese language. It will be based on a flash-card approach where you choose a topic and view flash cards that show sentences or words in English and you have to remember how to say them in Japanese.

At first you may not know anything so you would start with basic symbols (Hiragana and Katakana). There are about 46 of these to learn. Hopefully I can include audio too so you get to hear the pronounciation too.

Next there would be simple sentences shown in English where you learn how to say them in Japanese.

So you would learn by repetition. Using software it should hopefully be quicker to learn than with a phrase book and tapes. One reason it would be quicker is that the software would learn which things you have mastered and cut them out.

This software would not be a substitute for formal lessons but it could be a great way to get your knowledge of vocabulary and basic phrases up to speed.

Update:

Well it seemed like a good idea at the time but there is already very good yet cheap software already in the market so I decided not to persue this idea. Some software I downloaded to try out was from Declan Software and it was very impressive and at a low cost.

Every year in August a group of restaurant workers meet up at the beach to play in the water and have some grilled food and drink. We can drive on the beach with 4-wheel drive vehicles so it’s easy to set up and unload right next to the sea shore.

Most people got there very early around 6am but I set of later with my wife. She was supposed to know where they were but unfortunately didn’t have a clue. I am getting used to this. Even with a map we usually go 10km out of our way trying to find places. So the obvious thing to do is phone people but the one contact we had had their phone off which is understandable.

So we turned onto the beach and randomly chose a direction to head in. After a few Km’s I decided we were headed in the wrong direction since all I could see far ahead were fishing boats. So we did a u-turn and headed the other way. Now it was becoming like a jeep safari, but without the jeep!

I was starting to think about all the fun we were missing out on and started to speed up to find them faster. I always fancied rally driving so this was the next best thing. Up over crest, desent into stream. Up soft, muddy bank. Dodge the debris on the beach. Keep the momentum incase we get stuck.

Finally we saw some jet skiis in the sea ahead and found them. This was Monday morning, so very different from the old commute to work LOL. Especially as a beaker of chilled draught beer was thrust into my hand once we said hello. This was a beach barbeque, Japanese style. In the UK we would probably have a bag of chips and a can of warm beer with the sun roasting our hides.

They had a canopy to shield people from the scorching sun, a grill with fresh slices of meat, people were harvesting shell fish from the sea and did I mention there were barrels of beer being piped through a box of ice to deliver it ice cold by the gallon. Oh it was free too!

After quenching my thirst I was urged to try the jet skiis out and compare them. What a hoot. I hired one once in Spain but got bored with it, I guess it was de-tuned. But these were full power with engines up to 800cc. I’m a sports motorcyle enthusiast so I am used to high performance. Well these jet skiis accelerate fast and are fast enough to start feeling dangerous so they were great fun. The most fun seemed to be going flat out and jumping your own wake after a turn.

The first time I tried a quick turn, I got thrown off so had to struggle to climb back on. But after this it was plain sailing so to speak. I just needed to lean into the turns more like on a motorbike. btw you need a licence to pilot these and it’s best if you are sober

Girls seem to like being thrilled on Jet Skiis:

“Come on somebody” :

About to do a beach landing:

Grilling the oysters found under the sand:

The dreaded jelly-fish. There were several around that day.

Chef knows how to handle it, thinks “yummy”:

Kids enjoying the Banana boat:

Pictures from the nightime festivities…