i-sako.com

My wife, who often finds herself frustrated with the amount of time I spend on the computer, recently found that she’s not alone. According to this survey from Citizen (link to Kyodo news article in Japanese), nearly 30% of wives and 20% of husbands feel frustrated about the amount of time their spouse spends using a computer.

(This is actually one of the reasons I haven’t posted anything to this blog for nearly two months. I’ve been trying to be more available for my family by limiting the amount of time I spend doing computer-related things.)

Consider this post a public service announcement: If you are reading this, there is a good chance your spouse is not very happy with you right now. Go fix that.

We took our daughter to Sankeien yesterday. It’s a nice place for hanami (cherry blossom viewing), although it’s very crowded this time of year.

More pictures here for registered friends and family. 

I seem to have come into possession of a limited number of tickets to the Photo Imaging Expo 2005, which will be held next week at Tokyo Big Sight. If you would like to go, please let me know.

I’ll probably try to go on Saturday the 19th to catch the “Digital Camera Workflow for Freelance Photographers” seminar.

I’ve been waiting for quite some time to hear confirmation of what I’ve been expecting for nearly as long, that the Democrats would choose Howard Dean as the chairman of their national committee. I see that news has now arrived:

Dean Accepts DNC Helm With Low-Key Speech

Capping an improbable political comeback, Howard Dean was unanimously elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday, accepting the job with a low-key speech that depicted the struggling party as the nation’s voice of fiscal responsibility and social progress.

Good for them. It’s about time the Democrats did something right.

There seems to be some concern that Dean might not be the right man for the job, but I think that notion is misguided. Rather than asking if Dean is fit to lead the Dems, I can’t help but wonder if the Democratic party is fit to follow Dean. If he can prod the Democrats into finding their collective backbone again, the entire nation will be in his debt. 

Recent discussions with my adorable wife have led to the conclusion that we would prefer to limit access to news about (and pictures of) our family life to our friends and family from now on, so I will be setting up a separate, password-protected weblog for that purpose. This will most likely be the last entry in the Family category of this blog. Subsequent posts about family-related matters will be posted in the new blog (the details of which are forthcoming), but you will need to be a registered—and recognized!—friend or family member to be able to read them. If you are one of these, but have not yet registered, please feel free to do so now. 

It’s too early to say for sure at this stage, but there has been some discussion about having said adorable wife contribute to the friends-and-family blog….

Incidentally, this also means that our Family galleries at smugmug are now password-protected as well. If you would like to know the password, please contact me.

Update 1: Okay, the new blog is more or less ready. There are still some bugs to work out, but it’s in good enough shape to share with family and friends (who will be forgiving, I hope!). The new blog can be found at http://ff.i-sako.com/. Offhand, I cannot think of a more auspicious topic to kick off a new blog than our daughter’s fifth birthday today.

It requires a separate login from this blog, even though the login information for both blogs is the same (I’ll work on fixing that soon).

I’ve received comment from a number of people about this change, but haven’t been able to respond to most of them yet. I will soon. I promise!