I *was* writting this from the Virgin Cafe in Shinjuku. That is until my absolute favorite computer, a Mac, decided that there was no way in hell it was going to let me submit this.

I clicked "submit" and whir, whir, whir, 6 minutes later still, whir, whir, whir. It being 5:45 and having an appointment at 6:00 and a 5 minute walk away I tried a bunch of stuff. I copied this article, opened a new window, logged into Yahoo mail, tried to e−mail it to myself. No go. I logged into webmail and tried to e−mail myself from there. No luck. I logged into my website control panel and tried to add it as a new file. No luck. By then it was 6:05 and I gave up so really this is not the message I was writing for an hour at the Virgin Cafe.

Here is some of what I was going to say though. The Virgin Cafe is on the 3rd floor of the Virgin Megastore in Shinjuku. They have 6 iMacs and 7 new iBooks all on the net free to use on top of which there are also around 6 titainium powerbooks around the CD store area but they are not comfortable since they don't have chairs.

The new iBooks rule in terms of feel. I like the mousepad and the feel of the plastic especially. But.... Macs still suck ass. Did you know a Mac does NOT have a delete key? Unless there is some secret combination of keys to press it appears you are supposed to cursor or mouse over and press the backspace key instead. I thought the Mac was supposed to be user−friendly? Did you know that double clicking on an app, say "Internet Explorer" does NOT open a new document window EVEN if there are no documents open (unlike Windows). In fact, unless you are paying close attention you can not actually tell anything happened. All that happens is the title bar changes it's name. That means that unless you already know that you are supposed to go to the menus and pick "File / New" that you'd have no idea how to get on the net using a Mac. Hardly user−friendly.

This might be a Microsoft plot but IE5 on the Mac always seems to have problems. For example Danchan.com came out with the right most column super−impossed over the middle of the page making it impossible to read. I don't think such a display is even part of the HTML standard.

Did I mention it's got a cool case?

In other news, as of today I'm off on Summer Vacation for 3 weeks. No idea what I'm going to fill it with yet. I have made a couple of new friends recently so hopefully they'll have time to hang out.

I do have one major plan. I'm going to Hong Kong from August 3rd to August 7th. I'm not too happy about going alone and it's friggin expensive because it's summer vacation season in Japan but I guess you have to go when you get the chance so I'm going. Eating dim sum alone sounds pretty sad. They need to have dim sum clubs or dim sum partner finding services 😉 I might get to hook up with a friend of a friend that I've discussed a few things with on the net. I'm also a little scared that I don't know a single word of Cantonese. I assume I'll be okay but it would be cool to speak something.

Anybody have any suggestions on things I should not miss?