The Nine Lives – Ian Cheung, Information Architect in Osaka, Japan

I’ve noticed that there are an awful lot of bricks and mortar establishments using the equivalent of <blink> tags to catch people’s attention. I’m talking about flashing lights, some as “subtle” as emergency or road work rotating lamps stuck on top of signs. Some pachinko palours have bright and excessively powerful strobe like lights.

Does it catch people’s attention? Most likely. But at least subconciously there are negative connections tied to the memory of the shop or business. One being the irritation, and one of unsophistication of the business. When there is so much competition out there, you want to be remembered, but you want to be remembered in a positive light (pun intended). Most web sites have learnt this from experience, I just wish the real world would follow suit.

My current system is starting to show its age so before it totally falls apart, I am building a replacement system.  It’s going to be a quad-core system with 8GB of ram so that it has a chance to last 5 years or so my current system has.

One of my pet projects oboeyasui.com is down. My service provider just turned it off without any notice. It is the first time I have had a site become so popular (apparently a million hits a day) that it got shut down. So I don’t know whether to feel extremely sad or just normal sad.

I can’t really argue with my service provider about turning it off, as the site was hosted on a shared server. I didn’t realise it had grown into such a monster. It would have been nice to have been given even a day of notice. Also they say that I need a $125 a month package to host it. Since the service was a free service (it didn’t even have ads) I don’t think that I can afford to pay out $1500 a year out of my own pockets. I do believe that other providers probably could host it for a lot less but still it wouldn’t be self-supporting. It’s a shame as it was a useful (and popular!) service that no-one else was providing.

Maybe one day it will live again. Let’s see…

PS. I’ve managed to keep a few shortcut urls going via manual .htaccess/apache rewrite rules going.

Our second child Jamie Robbie Shinji Jan Ji Cheung was born last week. Both baby and mum are doing fine, and Michelle is now a proud big sister. I’ve posted a couple of photos and a video to facebook but I know not all of you have a facebook account so will post some photos and the video here. If you have flickr you can see a few more photos.
Photos:

Video:

It’s my birthday soon and usually an infallible present choice for me is a Liverpool shirt or some other kind of merchandise.  However this year if you are thinking about getting me something like that, don’t.  I still support Liverpool Football Club (and always will) but I don’t support its owners and the way they are behaving.  And as they seem to listen to money first and fans last, I will not buy any official merchandise until things change.  I also don’t want anybody to buy merchandise for me.

If you are a lifelong fan like me, I hope you will consider doing the same for the sake of our club.