Sapporo…

Last Wednesday I was privileged enough to be invite to climb to the 38th floor of JR Tower by my friend JP (The dancing one, not the snowboarding one!) JR Tower is one of the tallest buildings in the city, if not the tallest…

From the top floor you can see pretty much all the city, from the mountains in the west to the fields to the east… So what better place to have a go at making some panorama pictures?! I was quite lazy though and didn’t maintain position well enough to take good pictures for stitching really, but here are four rough panoramas of Sapporo from the top of the JR Tower! The pictures are pretty large, so once you’ve clicked through to the album, you can click to zoom in for a closer look…

Sapporo panorama from JR Tower

If you live in the city see if you can spot your area (For the Higashi-ku folk, you can see the Tsudo-mu community dome in the north picture…

Then on Saturday I went with Emily to Shinrinkouen in Nopporo, Ebetsu, or Nopporo Forest Park and climbed to the measly 8th floor of the Hokkaido Centenary Memorial Tower to find out of use elevators. But the view from the 8th floor was still quite nice, particularly as there isn’t anything to get in the way… And of course the tower looking like the tower of Barad-dûr of Mordor in Lord of the Rings was a bonus!
So I took a more simple series of pictures and made another panorama! The glass was pretty dirty (lots of insects on it, ladybirds and stinkbugs) but here is the result!

From Shinrinkoen

New domain again!!

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was writing about getting Flat3d.org as my nice domain. And while I really do like flat3d.org and like having it as my blog title, it isn’t really all that descriptive of me. At one point I lived in Flat 3D, Stranmillis Court, so it did have some actual meaning instead of just being geeky, but no longer. So I have got a new domain name that is more to do with me.

A bunch of missionaries have domain names that signify their calling to Japan, something of their background and their calling (German), or use their names so that people can find them easily.

But I didn’t really want something as generic as to be just about Japan, or even Jesus in Japan, it might also become dated and not be consistently usable if we leave Japan or God takes us in a different route… and risking offending people from other cultures, my Northern Irish sensibilities found something like “johninjapan.com” or “ormesinjapan.com” a bit cheesy, but I have noticed we are particularly sensitive to cheese in NI!
I thought for a moment about seeing if I can just get orme.com or something like that. But it wasn’t available! Apparently there are other Ormes in this world! Part of the reason for thinking about change is it would be nice to set up Google Apps for the domain and have Emily and I be able to use it once we are married, sharing calendars, contacts and such like as well… We will see if that comes to pass!

Anyways, all this to say that, in the end I settled on “orumu.org”. Initially as a playful attempt to play with my name, as Orumu is my name in Japanese (オルム), but as I let it lie it grew on me. It is my name, but as Emily and I marry it will become her name too, and she is Japanese. It sort of includes all of that and the fact that we are in Japan serving God all in the one domain, all the while sneakily avoiding the obviously-his-own-name-domain potential for cheese and self-importance, even though telling all this eliminates any benefit that might have had! So I will be able to have email addresses like john@orumu.org, emily@orumu.org and so on under the Google Apps system, giving us all the benefits of apps without such abstract addresses. When I will start to roll over to that I don’t know yet, the old gmail address will hold forth for the time being!

So orumu.org it is! I have decided that, at least for the time being I will keep the time honoured Flat3D as the name of my blog, henceforth found at flat3d.orumu.org (ie here!), and until flat3d.org expires in February, it will also point through to flat3d.orumu.org and all it’s parts so links and so on will remain valid for a while at least!

I hope you haven’t fallen asleep reading. It’s a common problem on these kind of rambling blogs about nothing. This kind of waffle is exactly why blogs are a bad idea. But I am doing it anyway!