My friends, The Tockman, will be playing at Live House Otsuka - RED ZONE on Saturday, November 3, 2007. The cost is 3,000 yen for all-you-can drink and a full-on evening of hard-rockin’ live music. The show starts at around 4pm and will go on until around 9pm. If you’re in the Tokyo area and want to have a good time, come on down.

Live House Otsuka’s website can be found at: http://www.blue-ocean.jp/

!– UPDATE –! I was mistaken…The Tockman weren’t playing, it was a couple of The Tockman members playing in a couple of their other bands. The concert was a good time, and I got to catch up with some old friends from university.

ザ・トックマンがライブをすると思ったけど、勘違いだった！トックマンのメンバー二人が別のバンドで演奏していた。メッチャ楽しかった！

I designed my first website more than 10 years ago on a Mac G3 at my university. Being a newbie, I had no idea the trouble that lay ahead. I was showing the site to a friend on a Windows machine and was horrified to see that it displayed nothing like the site I designed in the Mac lab at school. My eyes were opened to the on-going browser war and cross-platform peril that was the world of web design.

After graduation, I took a position as a web designer for a local media firm and was surprised to find there wasn’t a single Mac in the building. I was a little reluctant to make the switch to Windows when Mac was the only thing I knew for the years I was in school, but the cold reality of the times was that web design was most reliable on the Windows platform. Besides, all of our clientele were on Windows and the cross-platform compatibility issue was a major concern. The situation at work coupled with the high price tag of the Mac (as a fresh-outta-school punk, I was only making about $16/hour) was the final nail in the coffin and I became a Windows user from that day forward.

Skip ahead to the present. The recent surge in Mac users (including an all-Mac client of mine) prompted me to take another serious look at the Mac OS. I purchased a Mac Mini — strictly to use as a local test server and to view my websites on a Mac, and to my surprise, the system had come a long way to bridge the gap for web designers and the new networking features in OSX make the cross-platform issue almost non-existent. An added bonus was the ease of multi-lingual integration. My current Windows machine is native Japanese. Not a problem being fluent in the language, but a move to the US next year means either a replacement of all my software for the English versions, or pay twice the amount in import charges to continue upgrading my Japanese language versions.

The interface and design of the Mac OS (although it took some getting used to) was a huge breath of fresh air and a bit of an inspiration. And, although I haven’t tested it with my usual applications, the speed of the machine at start up totally buries my Windows machine…despite it being pimped out with the latest and greatest in memory and CPU performance. And, at the risk of sounding like those annoying Mac ads on TV, working on the Mac was just plain fun.

With the new features promised in Leopard, I’m seriously considering making ‘The Switch.’ Guess I’d better start saving my money!

WindowsからMacに換えようかと思っていて．．．いろんなプラス・マイナスがある。Macにするなら、お金を貯めなきゃ！

I was looking around the Web yesterday, and I came across a very cool, open source PHP framework. I haven’t had a chance to install it and try it out yet, but it looks like it’s going to be a great tool for development. Check it out at symfony-project.com.

PHPプログラマーなら、上記のリンクをご覧ください。オープンソースのPHPフレームワークで、デベロプメントを楽にしてくれそう。