Setting up Wordpress for a labmate's blog took less than five minutes (as advertised), and importing the RSS feed from MSN spaces was a breeze. Grabbing the comments was another matter, though, and my Perl is embarrassingly rusty now. I ended up piping the individual blog pages to a command-line Perl script that spit out SQL code.

Sigh.

コンピュータがこの会社に導入されつつあります。 Computers are being introduced into this company.

On Technorati: blogging, iml

• Research groups are good. The lively exchange of ideas will inspire and support me, and besides, group meetings often have food. It's worth postponing my individual interest in personal information management if I can't find other people who are working on the same area.
• I'm good at networking and relating to people quickly. I'm still a little shy, but I'm starting to be good at remembering names and faces, and people here don't mind helping someone get settled in.
• A personal organizer makes me feel more on top of things. If I can find a ring-bound paper organizer with the same structure as my current planner, I'll switch to it. I really appreciate having weekly and daily goals, and might prepare my own templates if I can't find an organizer that normally does that.
• I can write 800 words easily once I get going. I prefer writing in one go instead of filling out an outline because the former feels more like writing e-mail to someone, and I can get pretty long-winded in e-mail.
• My writing style seems to be matter-of-fact and conversational. Dominique thinks I've found my voice.

近年では、電子コンピュータがますます重要になってきた。 In recent years electronic computers have become increasingly important.

On Technorati: writing, organizer, research

For my birthday and send-off party, a bunch of my friends got together and made a video that I could bring with me to Canada. I haven't watched it yet. I thought I shouldn't do it while I was still settling in, while I still wasn't quite sure that this was a good idea.

I'm going to watch it later. I think I've gotten the rhythm of things and I've found little sources of joy here.

I can't wait to see what they've come up with. =)

ここのパソコンはシステムを変えることができないので何もできない。 Because the personal computer here cannot change the system, anything cannot be done.

On Technorati: friends, barkada