The uncloaking of a stealth blogger: Esthet.org comes in from the cold

I’ve been linking to her for a while now, in the sidebar to the right, but today Tokyo-based “a photography, digital media, film, visual culture and techno-gadget enthusiast” Lil has “officially” launched her esthet.org site, complete with a wonderfully understated look put together with the help of MJ of Cerebral Soup. And a great found photo gracing the top that reminds me a bit of one of my father-in-law’s photos I wrote about here.

If you are at all interested in photography and art, be it from Japan or elsewhere, I strongly suggest you start poking around in her archives or use her search widget. Many treasures await you there, as do many great yet-to-be-discovered sites that Lil will undoubtbedly be continuing to turn up as she continues her “photo-trawling.”

Congratulations Lil and MJ — a job well done!

A political situation to be proud of: Finland’s first female prime minister

On Monday, the Finnish parliament voted Anneli Jaeaetteenmaeki into office as the next Prime Minister of Finland, the first Finnish woman to hold the post. Her appointment also means that Finland is the only country in Europe with both a female president (Tarja Halonen, elected 2 years ago) and a female prime minister.

Now, I know nothing about Ms. Jaeaetteenmaeki’s politics, and wouldn’t normally be reporting on the political makeup of a Scandinavian country of only 5 million people, but as someone who is half-Finnish, and as the son of a strong, self-willed, and politically active Finnish woman, I couldn’t help but beam with pride when I heard the news.

(Link via Robot Wisdom)

Another attempt at moblogging…

If this works, then I owe Kevin of Bastish.net a beer, or two….will post more via the desktop (again, if this works).

FROM THE DESKTOP: Well, lo and behold, it worked! I should perhaps first off explain that what I just did there was post to this site via my cellphone, by sending an email from my phone’s email client. This is what they call “moblogging”, and something I’ve been pining for ever since I started to see Joi Ito start to do this late last year.

As mentioned above, credit for being able to do this goes to Kevin and his Moblog for Other People widget, not to mention his server which is receiving the email and then passing on my text (and later images) to this site. Kevin rightly realized that non-techie folks like myself would find the various scripts out there a bit beyond the pale of understanding and know-how, or as I discovered in earlier forays into this technology, not something one’s web hosts might readily setup. (I should also here send out a special mention to Dav, who set up Mie’s Tokyo Tidbits and very generously offered to do something similar for me to what Kevin ended up doing, though at the time I wasn’t sufficiently interested to bother him with it).

Now, I have moblogged before, using wapblogger and my cellphones web browser, but it was more cumbersome than I wanted. I’m still not too much further along in answering the question I’ve asked before, which is why exactly I need this capability, especially at the moment when all I can post is text. My musings are hardly of the variety that they need to be instantaneously sent to that part of the world that is reading this site, but then again, there are lots of small and perhaps inconsequential thoughts and observations that I do have that never see the light of day because I don’t notate them down.

Others who are now moblogging thanks to Kevin’s generosity include Japan-based blogs Based on a True Story, Domo Domo, and Tokyo Boy.