what's new

Some recent updates to the website.

Joyent is a leading web hosting company that's great for rails/ruby-based sites. We use nginx as a front end on our Joyent node. Here's how.

How to use actionmailer in your ruby app from your (OSX) Mac with Joyent when your ISP blocks port 25. Yes, a techie how-to.

This is a city for street photographers. Huge, endlessly fascinating, and populated by encouraging citizens.

I've made a tool for learning Japanese vocabulary. I'd like to improve upon it and maybe make it public, so I thought I'd share this description. Comments anyone?

This is my book of street photography from Tokyo. An eighty-page distillation of ten thousand photos taken from the nameless streets of the world's largest city.

My partner and I made an online engagement ring business. We're two foreigners operating in a country where business development is notoriously difficult.

My working career, spanning back to 1994.

When I first came to Japan, I let my employer take care of the paperwork, just as many of my colleagues had done. Big mistake.

I've learned a fair bit about producing photos of diamond jewelry in the past year. This is the result.

One of my beliefs is that everything in life is attributable in some (large) respect to luck. Don't believe me? I have everything for which a man could want, and I'm not terribly gifted.

I've invented a routine for preventing spam to a website's comments field. It does so without those annoying and feeble 'captcha' routines, and without the need for login.

Some photographers I recommend.

I've encountered some notable toilets in my travels.