Smile Like You Mean It

Best band I'd never heard of until two months ago? The Killers. And Holy Crap, but are they ever good! If you like rock music that is good and does not suck, you owe it to yourself to buy their debut album, "Hot Fuss". Better yet, since Amazon ruleth most righteously, you can listen to sample clips of every song on the album before choosing to buy. If you need to make up your mind, I recommend starting with track 2, "Mr. Brightside", and listening to each clip all the through track 7, "On Top". If that does not convince you that you must own "Hot Fuss", there is most likely something wrong with you.

I almost called this entry "All These Things that I've Done", but then I realised that I have actually only done one thing thus far. The other things are in the pipeline, and I will tell you about them when they are actually Things that I've Done and not just Things that I Would Like to Do but We'll See.

The Thing that I've Done is as follows: there is this groovy Firefox extension called rikaichan, which does inline lookups to Jim Breen's EDICT Japanese dictionary when you simply hover your mouse pointer over a word. Since a picture is worth 1,000 yen words, clicky clicky on the screenshot pictured at left, which shows me using rikaichan on Amazon.co.jp's page for NATSUME Souseki's Kokoro (夏目漱石著 こころ).

So that is what rikaichan could always do. What I did is made the extension also work in Thunderbird, the Mozilla email client. This was mainly to scratch an itch of my own: reading email in Japanese every day. When I got it working, I sent a patch to the author, and he included my work in his next release (0.5.8 for those of you who are keeping score). Clicky clicky on the screenshot to the right to see rikaichan working in Thunderbird.

Finally, I just got assigned to lead a fairly big, important project at work. One that Must Be Complete by May 31. The good news is, if I do a good job, my name will ring out. The bad news is, if I make a mess of this, it could break everything and we will go out of business. Well, OK, we won't go out of business, but people will consider me a Small Tima, and laugh when they see my name in printed form.

This is actually good for me, because I do not make a habit of messing up. In baseball terms, I am a pretty decent choice for who you would want coming up to bat with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. I seem to work pretty well when stakes is high.

And before I go, let me leave you with this jewel: even mechanics walk around with their tool.