japan!

  So! I've probably already let a lot of you know about this, but I'm going to Japan this summer!  Well, to be more accurate, my flight leaves Monday morning.  That's... less than four days away!  It's been quite the rush recently as well.  People keep asking me if I'm excited about the trip.  And honestly, I think I've been too busy to have built excitement in my mind.  Though, if I sit down to think about it, yes, I've been looking forward to this study abroad for quite some time now.

  Anyway, I proposed to keep a blog about the experience for one of the scholarships I received, and that's what took all of yesterday to create.  At first I was toying around with my own design. 

But I was never truly artistic, and halfway through, I decided it looked too amateur. That and I also thought about having to create the entire CSS for it and gave up. Instead I went around looking for templates to modify.

  Oh but before that, I wanted to try out Wordpress.com instead of blogger.  It looked more professional and I thought it would be a good feel for the blog.  Unfortunately, I didn't know about how limiting Wordpress.com is in regards to javascript and extensions.  I really like Lightbox (that image viewer that comes up when you click an image), but there just wasn't a good way of doing it at wp.com.  I spent some time searching and found a workaround, but it required an advertisement module to be placed on the sidebar.  Looked pretty ugly to me.  But I really really liked the theme I found on there.

  So, it was back to blogger, where I could use link external scripts.  Luckily I found an adapted version of the same layout and modified it a bit.  Right now, though, it has a random banner from my own picture collection, but I will be sure to update it with a pertinent image once I get to the host university (Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University) in Japan.  Since it's basically on a mountain overlooking the shore-side city of Beppu, I'm hoping I can get a nice shot of the sea and city.  Oh, here's the link to the LBAT Japan 2010 blogspot.

  My guess is most of my updates over the summer will be on that blog, but since it's associated with my university, there might be some posts here that might not be appropriate for the other blog.  No, no naughty stuff; but maybe more personal thoughts and observations.