These articles inspired me to learn and practice more for my craft (programming if you haven’t guessed it by now 
)
http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/practicing-programming
http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html
This video reminds me about being grateful for what we already have.
2 websites that I use everyday are Gmail (to read my emails of course) and Google Reader (to read news and article of interest to me). If you haven’t used Google Reader, or not sure what it’s useful for, just look at these help videos from Youtube.
If you wonder how the credit crisis in US happened, there’s a video on Youtube that explains it in simple language. This video is done in 2 parts.
This Joy of Tech comic is so geekilicious.
I like to see user interface progress that makes it easier to interact with our tools/gadgets. This one about ’see through’ with touch screen looks promising.
One of my favourite ways to keep up with the news is BBC’s news in pictures section. The pictures are interesting and combined with the short headline, perfect for a quick glance of what happened around the world. I use the rss feeds with Google Reader for a more convenient reading.
Now I’m back in Sydney. Here’s what we did on the last 2 days in Japan:
Day 11. Kyoto - Philosopher’s Walk or Path of Philosophy. Beautiful weather for a walk. This is the Sunday of a long weekend in Japan (that Monday is Culture Day), so Kyoto and the temples are full of local tourists/pilgrims. Then to Fushimi Inari Taisha. The gates are amazing to look at. At first we thought the area would be a small one, but turned out to be a quite large mountainous hike. Legs were tired by the end of the walk.
Day 12. Nara - More temples, Japanese garden, and of course deers. The deers are cute (though some are quite aggresive in search of food from tourists). The flight back to Sydney left in the evening, so we had to go back to Osaka a bit early.
Overall a very memorable journey. There are places which we wish we knew in advance how to enjoy it more (Mt Fuji - because we got there quite late. Akihabara - not enough time to peruse the cool gadgets). But we learned a lot about transport and accomodation for future visits and sharing tips to friends. Perhaps next time a better command of Japanese language will make it even more fun.
