Geekery and Awa odori pics
These pics are from the massive Koenji Awa Odori Festival a few weeks back. I love the Awa Odori dance and music, and it has a great history, full of debauchery. A perfect summer evenings activity.
Computer love. Not.
Justin sent me this gif a few weeks ago, I laughed my head off when I got it because I knew it would come in handy one day. Hands up everyone who has ever felt this way?
Link Power
I am really quite astonished at the amount of traffic the site has received in recent weeks. Apologies for the bandwidth issues, and huge cudos to my fabulous hosts (Earthfirst) who expanded my bandwidth allowance every morning they came into work and found the site down. You guys rock. Most of the traffic has been following links to the gallery page – in particular the manholes and ganguro galleries. It’s been great to see so many new people loving the …erm…. manhole action. I’ve been collecting these pics since I arrived in Japan, 2 and a half years ago, so I like it that other people dig them too. It’s been good to get a wave of new submissions, too.
All the traffic has had another nice side-effect – generating more photo sales to professional companies (editors, advertisers, artists), very cool indeed.
Anyways, some of the sites who linked to the manholes gallery include (for your viewing pleasure):
Hedonistica (My fave)
fazed
Boing Boing
Core 77
Gorilla Mask (webfinds)
Pixelsurgeon
Go on, go check em all out. My fave is definately Hedonistica – check out the amazing pics of the python devouring a whole wallaby. A.M.A.Z.I.N.G.
Frangipani gets boinged
I’ve been watching the interest in the manholes gallery grow a little like a snowball roaring down a mountain the past month. First, it started with some cool European (German, French, some undecipherable nordic country) forum boards and sites, then some Spanish sites, portuguese sites and in the last week it has hit the Nth Americans. And today, the gallery was Boinged – added to the directory of wonderful things, known as Boing Boing. I’m so glad it’s taken a bit of attention away from the ganguro gallery.
The back end….
Yup, that’s a whole lotta back end there. More to come from the Sumo ring in the coming days.
The photo is supposed to segue neatly into the theme of back ends, and particularly website back ends. I’ve been tinkering around with the frangipani back end a bit, and discovered a great little service called feedburner which helps you track your RSS feed readership and edit your feed styles a little. I have often wondered how many people use RSS feeds to read frangipani, so this’ll be an interesting experiment. So this post will be the first to test the new services here. If you do use a reader, the address has changed so could you please update the address in your readers : http://feeds.feedburner.com/FrangipaniPhotoblog
The weekend will be busy: off to see the awesome lineup at the Canada Wet show (Featuring Broken Social Scene, The Dears, Death From Above 1979, Metric, and Stars) on Saturday night, and of course Design Fest.
Wired sponge
I feel like a radioactive learning sponge, like my mind is bouncing around like an agitated microwave particle in the attempt to be totally conversant with every single new program on my new mac. I can hardly sleep. Emails are going mostly unanswered. Most phonemessages are returned only after the particular problem at hand is solved. and I get annoyed by every distraction. Work is a pain in the arse. My concentration has developed into a kind a super-multi-tasking cathode ray, every time I turn around there is something else that needs to be tweaked or downloaded or rebooted or researched or personalised. My diet has been mostly vegemite toast and coffee. My learning curve is through the roof. Found some great programs for mac users including Acquisition and iView Media Pro (a great Photo catalogue program).
I am loving every second of it.
Boo!
Thought I’d surprise you all with a post. (Aren’t these pretty flowers!)
Sorry to drop out so completely for a while, but I just was sooo sick of my old computer speed, I couldn’t cope with doing anything more than the most basic of functions like checking emails (and mostly not replying to any of them). It was kinda fun to step away so completely from that part of my life. There was virtually no output of any kind, and I really enjoyed it. Just watched lots of movies and ate out with friends and enjoyed the glorious weather.
But… be warned, now that I am armed and dangerous I may become highly prolific once more….
My computer is dying
My computer is dying a slow, painful death.
I believe infinitely more painful for me than for it. I have so many photos to share, and Christian and Yuiko’s fabulous wedding to talk about and how there is such a spring in my step these days. But I can’t bear the agonising wait for each.single.task.to.run. It’s killing me. In the time it took just to OPEN this page I went to the loo and brushed my teeth. In the time it takes to open my email program, I could walk down to the supermarket and buy some bananas and yoghurt for brekky.
It’s not a problem of memory or ram, there is plenty spare. The system is regularly defragged with O&O defragger and constantly virus checked.
She’s just dying. She’s done the hard yards. It’s time for her to take a rest in the great big gigamemorial in the sky.
Just in time for me to receive a double pay check (long story) and for the new mac O.S. TIGER to be launched. On the 30th of this month, I will be the proud owner of a 14 inch powerbook with the latest, greatest operating system. Only 12 days to go ’till I can lay my hands on my new precioussssssssss.
If I have the time and patience before then I will try really hard to get photoshop to open and not freeze after a single import, so I can share some photos from the fabulous wedding (party) I went to yesterday. I’m sorry for those of you waiting to see them (Christian, Yuiko and Amanda especially)….
9 year jail sentence for spammer
Jaynes, of Raleigh, N.C., told the judge that regardless of how the appeal turns out, “I can guarantee the court I will not be involved in the e-mail marketing business again.”
Prosecutors have described Jaynes as among the top 10 spammers in the world at the time of his arrest, using the name “Gaven Stubberfield” and other aliases to peddle junk products and pornography. Prosecutors say he grossed up to $750,000 per month.
This Wired article made me punch the air in triumph. Dirty evil spammers. May they all rot in hell.
Oh, Ka-Tan, if you only knew…..
Ka-tan, if you only knew how much interest you and your ganguro friends generate and bring to my Ganguro gallery – honestly, it’s crazy.
And the comments! I don’t get the comments posted to my gallery emailed to me, so I never really know what’s going on there. Every so often, I’ll trawl the comments to check for spam and …well, comments. I was quite surprised when I checked into the comments section of the gallery for the first time in ages and found so many new comments. I swear, the Ganguro Gallery hosts the most ridiculously active comment section on this site. Seems everyone has an opinion.
Go check it out, especially the comments left at the pic of the Ganguro idol, Ka-Tan. I don’t know how I feel about some of the comments, and I did actually delete some of the more offensive racial slur stuff.
Here are a few of the milder (non-deleted) samples – This from bondgirl:
ARE YOU PEOPLE CRAZY? Since when is the above a representation of an entire people? So, as a Black Woman – if I go over to Japan, will people love me or hate me? Just because some get their “ethnicity clues” from the media does not make it right or correct. If you really want to know, BE INTELLIGENT & HAVE ETHNIC FRIENDS. . . We live in an integrated world…
and this from VEGA-mexican:
ID tap that ass. Id tear it up like I was Kobe Bryant with a white girl.
Such a piece of class, Vega-mexican.
This one is also quite popular, and check out the flames on this one!
All this for a passing fad that is in its dying days. On the original blog entry from last August I put up a 1 MG video of the event, thought I’d offer it up again since I have plenty of bandwidth left for this month – go check it out, it’s very funny!
Welcome
Hello and welcome to frangipani.info.
My name is Martine Cotton. I started this website back in November 2002, just before I moved to Japan. It wasn’t really a blog back then, but I can thank Movable Type for making blogging a natural evolutionary process. I tinker away at it whenever I have some free time.. although I get the feeling web 2.0 has left me behind, and with the latest install of MT 4.1 I kinda broke the site comments and have no clue how to repair them at this point…. anyways, the site contains about 7 years worth of content so please settle in and take a look around. I hope you enjoy it here. I do.
After 6 years in Japan, in Feb 2009, I made the move back to Australia to try life in Port Douglas for a while. My family lives here, and it’s a beautiful part of the world so it seemed a good place to re-enter Australian life.
So what does “Frangipani” mean? I’m always surprised by just how many people ask me that question. Frangipani’s are a particularly pretty (and my fave) tropical flower, also known as Cultivar Plumeria. The little pink flower popping up all over the site and in your menu bar is a frangipani. [pron: franj-i-panni].
About me
View image
frequently and rarely asked questions…..
so, what’s your name?: martine
what’s your email?: martineatfrangipanidotinfo
where were you born?: brisbane, australia
where do you live now?: tokyo, japan
why japan?:
… a rare moment of synchronicity …
… the epiphany that one can work your way teaching english and photographing around the world with simple ease …
… japan is close to australia and yet unique enough to be in another galaxy …
… actually, i was never a japanophile – i just like a bit of adventure …
… australia can get very.very.very boring after a while…
occupation?: photographer and english teacher (high school, elementary and private lessons with adults)
loves?: photography, music, film, reading, writing, animals, sunny days, kids, old people, riding my bicycle around tokyo, spring afternoons, walking on grass, beer, coffee, holidays, travelling, asia, four sisters semillon sauvignon blanc wine (but cheap cask wine will do), file sharing & bit torrent stuff, beautiful things…
when did you arrive in japan?: christmas eve 2002
have you always lived in tokyo?: no, i lived in the beautiful fuji-go-ko national park district at the foot of mt fuji for 15 months.
what did you do before japan?: many things music-business oriented. band/venue/event/tour management. but i burned out and became a jaded old fuck. as you do. fortunately japan changed all that.
where else have you lived?: bouganville, new guinea and many places in brisbane, and north of brisbane – mooloolaba, hamilton island, green island, kuranda, cairns, port douglas… and melbourne once for 3 months while the band I was managing were doing an intense touring/recording stay there. if i ever return to australia, i think it’ll be to melbourne, my fave australian city.
where else have you travelled?: all of australia (and i really do mean ALL), lots of regional japan, north india, bangkok & sth thailand, fiji, on the to do in the near future list: the rest of thailand, cambodia, laos, vietnam, india – this time rajasthan and west india, china, korea, russia, spain, morocco, ireland.
so whats the story with this website?: it’s primarily a means of showing my life to my loved ones back in australia. it’s also a great way to develop my webtinkery and photography skills, and an interesting means of archiving my life as it happens…
what are your astrological signs? i’m a sagittarius (fire)goat. mystic medusa says the thing about saggos is our ability to stay one step ahead of adult issues by always just being somewhere else. she’s pretty right on.
Places I’ve been… (only 4% of the world. That’s soooo gotta be fixed)
create your own visited country map
OK, still want more info?
Administrivia
what programs and equipment do you use? please check out the tech stuff page
can i use your photos for my project/paintings/magazine, etc?: well, i love to share (and sell, naturally)… but all the contents of frangipani.info are subject to some copyright. here’s the speil: 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.