DanTheManInJapan comments

This girl should definitely be punished, joke or otherwise. She's had 17 years to accumulate enough common sense to know better than to make 'jokes' like that.

a race between a first-term Senate opponent of the Iraq War and a 71-year-old Vietnam prisoner of war and staunch supporter of the current U.S. military mission.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the Vietnam war was over? So McCain's running for president from a POW camp? Wow... boggles the mind.

This has got to be the dumbest idea I've ever heard of. And by the way, whose grave did they rob that skeleton from?

If he were to peep at porn and then clear the pc's history, would they still be able to catch him somehow, a friend wants to know?

Yes.

And depending on what criteria they use to count "accesses", 780,000 might not be such an unbelievable number. Cooked a little to make the story more interesting, maybe, but not impossible. If each page has a few dozen thumbnailed pictures and each picture is counted toward the total, then a few pages per minute can add up to thousands of "accesses" per hour.

Saizeriya is my first choice for a cheap date. Hey, at least I didn't take you to 7-11!

You're all hired.

When I read this one, I was actually surprised to see that the focus was NOT on the US military. Does anyone remember her last article on JT?

Wake me up when they start mass-producing THC brownies.

We have a special term of endearment here in Yokosuka for the category of of girls described above--"Honch Monsters". I think these two fit the bill.

The U.S. military said Sunday it will cooperate if requested with Japanese police in their investigation of the case of a cabdriver found murdered in his taxi in Yokosuka in which a U.S. Navy sailor’s credit card was found, but declined to comment about the sailor’s possible involvement in the case.

The article doesn't include the original quote, but again--I think everything you're asking for has already been done. Also, your version of the quote would surely influence the reader to assume guilt on the part of the sailor. Definitely NOT the sort of thing that a man in Adm. Kelly's position should be doing.

As for your previous post, I have a feeling you'd be filled with the same righteous indignation whether Kelly had offered an apology or not. The guy responded in a way that was 100% appropriate given the circumstances and his position.

@Northlondon

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20080403p2a00m0na031000c.html

"On behalf of the U.S. Navy, please accept my deepest apology for this cruel and shameful incident, and the trouble, fear and sorrow it has caused," he said. "You have my solemn promise that a maximum and continuing effort will be made to prevent the recurrence of such a heinous crime in Yokosuka, or anywhere else in Japan."

Minus the part about protecting the sailor's civil rights, I'd say he did pretty much exactly what you said.

http://www.japantoday.com/category/crime/view/us-military-promises-to-cooperate-with-japanese-police-over-taxi-drivers-murder

Kelly also refra**ined from commenting on why the sailor’s credit card was found inside the taxi, saying, ‘‘I wouldn’t want to speculate at any of the things that are being mentioned in media about evidence.’’

Does that really seem like an unreasonable statement? It seems less about dismissing evidence as media suspicion and more about not wanting to put his foot in his mouth and send the media into even more of a frenzy.

Yeah, glad to see that resize bug taken care of. I'm kinda curious what the fix was.

@Yongfook I'm getting 1-3 javascript errors on every page load--I think they're coming from the Google AdSense scripts. I'm running XP SP2 and only see the errors in IE6--Firefox and IE7 work fine. If you like, I can send screenshots.

Had a good laugh at the last line of main.css, by the way :)

You're hired.

Err... that should read, "...knockoffs I see on the way to work..."

"Special Needs", right?

Ditto, for the most part. If car companies (and not just in Japan) would start making cool cars for the average consumer, people might start thinking cars are cool again. The endless stream of Prius-like knockoffs I see to work is a perfect example; hooray for fuel-efficiency, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that the original blueprint was scribbled in crayon in a pre-school for "special needs" students.

Slap an LV logo on it and it'll sell.

I took a marine biology course at the university campus on base here in Yokosuka, and one of our lab exercises was a Saturday morning trip to Tsukiji market. I think we (something like 20 students) managed to piss off pretty much the entire market, but in spite of all the dirty looks, it was a pretty cool experience. Sashimi and beer at 10 AM was a new one for me, too.

"1. Move the picture of the day to the top left corner and embed the weather report on the right hand side of the tabbed navigation bar."

I actually like this idea, although I'd be more inclined to move the Picture of the Day to the top of the right column, move the weather report out of the main content section entirely, and set a fixed height (400-500px?) on each subcontent DIV to get them to line up horizontally.

@Yongfook: In response to the disappearing text issue that IE users are seeing, I did a little testing with the IE Developer Toolbar and after the resize, all of the text appears to move behind the main_content DIV. One possible solution might be capturing the onresize event with JavaScript and setting the z-index on that DIV to 0 or 1. Actually, I think setting pretty much any property will trick the page into reflowing.

Also, it seems like our login sessions expire pretty quickly... by the time I finished typing this message, mine had already expired.

/end technobabble

"But if it does… I’m looking for a few investment partners for Taka’s salary man liposuction clinic/hostess bar."

Whoa, count me in! Sounds like a winner.

"Some people with sight problems can’t distinguish between certain colors but otherwise their vision is fine. Greens next to blues, for example, might be a problem. I was just wondering if the red bar with white font was readable to those sight-disadvantaged or not - given the bleed of the red into the white"

Yeah, good point there. Actually, now that you mention it, I don't think I ever considered colorblindness when designing layouts, and I can think of a few instances where I've done the same thing. Got me kind of curious now...

Actually, I used a SPAN tag with an inline style. It displayed as expected until I refreshed the page.

<span style="font-size:1.2em">Hah!</span> So is embedded HTML a "feature"? :)

[quote]A quick question about the colors of fonts, did japantoday run a usability/accessiblity test to see if those with sight problems can see them?[/quote]

I imagine this site would work just fine with a text-to-speech reader, and seriously, if your vision is so bad that you can't make out these fonts, you should be using one or switching to a lower resolution.

I'd also like to follow up my previous post with a bit of sympathy for the developer(s). We shed a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to roll out a brand-new Intranet site at my previous workplace, and the above comments reminded me of the first weeks after we went live. Overhauling a site like Japan Today is no small task, and minor tweaks notwithstanding, I think they've done a great job. I'll also mention that the layout is much better than anything I've put together (although I'm generally more focused on the back-end stuff).

To youngfook and anyone else involved in the development process, keep up the good work :)

<span style="color:red">PS: Just wondering if this will work...</span>

Doh--first sentence should read "(i.e. &amp;)"

I like the AJAX submit form, too :) Just noticed that.

Just a bit of technical nitpicking, but the main paige fails W3C validation with 7 errors, mainly due to unescaped ampersands (i.e. &). E-mail me and I'll be happy to provide a quick ASP script to handle that.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.japantoday.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

From a technical standpoint, I like it; totally DIV-based layout, clean code, and (mostly) standards-compliant.

Feature-wise, it's a bit lacking/in need of fine-tuning, but that's to be expected with any major redesign. I imagine everything will be nice and smooth within a month or so.