Maitta! Always - Daily Amazing Confusions -

Now the skills competition ended, I was free to go out for early morning bicycling. I went for "autumn color hunting" along Hirose River, running through Sendai from west to east. It was as cold as 5C (41F) this morning. In the western mountain area of Sendai has gotten fully in autumn color in higher elevation areas, but the area near home was yet to fully get in autumn color. Still I enjoyed the scenery from several bridges upstream. The problem was the I wasn't fully prepared for this coldness. When I road downhill, my ears and ankle was chilled. Next time I hope I'll see the scenery in fully autumn color near my area, preparing some equipment which make me warmer.

My performance of the skills competition (creating web pages) wasn't up to satisfaction, so was my result. In the competition, each player was given 3 hours and 4 requirements, plus descriptions of improvements each player made during the time of the competition. I spent too much time on one requirement, for 2.5 hours out of 3 , installing a slide show on my website. I hadn't perfectly mastered the usage of JavaScript setInterval function and jQuery removeClass method, which made me spent twice time as I had expected. I had little time to cope with the rest 3 requirements, so my overall score wasn't up to any award, but when I heard the comment from the judges, my score was a little bit lower than those who won medals, and if I had chosen the right strategy, I might have won a medal. This experience showed the result of my effort and my weakness, which also often appear in my work every day.

Today is the day.  In this afternoon I'm going to go for the competition. Today is the day. In this afternoon I'm going to  go for the competition. There are still a few hours until the competition actually begins. I'm having a cup of Starbucks VIA coffee to energize myself. I have no idea if all my efforts are going to produce something worth an award, but at least I have done well that I finally didn't give up or run away from participating in the competition.  I have no idea if all my efforts are going to produce something worth an award, but at least I have done well that I finally didn't give up or run away from participating in the competition.

The opening ceremony of the skills competition for this morning, and in the afternoon inspection on and setup for the PC I'm going to use tomorrow. I'm relieved that the ceremony and the setup have been done successfully. In the opening ceremony, there were hundreds of, perhaps more than one thousand participants from all over Japan. There are 22 skills they compete in, including cleaning a building, serving as a waiter, and data entry. People with disabilities, with brushing up and competing their vocational skills, will obtain confidence more as working parts of society.

I'm really grateful that many invisible helps that brought me here. I has been poorly in shape in my state of mind from this September. It's already been the end of October. The time I've really worked hard with web page creating, but I'be been fighting with great anxieties from my poor state of mind. It's been a victory to some extent, and this is every reason to go to the coming competition with my face up.

It's time for final check for a skill competition. It will be a four-day trip. I'm checking if all data required will be available and luggage for the trip.

I learned a lot about customize of a Wordpress site, a day before the departure day of a skill compatition. I have to make a DVD-R medium with the data of my work before I start in the next afternoon. I don't bring Wordpress document with me, but a html and css reference book for reference, so I would like to do as much as possible on Wordpress tomorrow morning.

No time to lose for setInterval function I have only less than 24 hours available to complete main contents!!

I have just worked on the breadcrumb navigation on my Wordpress site, which will be my base work for the vocational skill competition for this weekend. It took longer than I had expected, because I misunderstood several concept. First, I confused post objects with post IDs when I deal with a post with its ancestors. Finally I decided to control everything based on post IDs rather than post object, because when I tried to obtain the post object of the parent object. Second, I have misunderstood array operation in php. I wanted to connect two arrays like [apple, orange, banana] and [dog, cat ,bear] into [apple, orange, banana, dog, cat, bear]. I had thought that the array_merge function inappropriate because I had thought it overwrite the former one with latter one and all I would get in the example above would be all animals, losing fruits. (This function do overwrite associative array and I have known this by reading examples of building a mini blog framework)

Many progresses for Abylympics for the next weekends, especially in web page layout, illustrations and icons essential for user interface of the webpages. I have to prepare for 4-day travel in the first half of this week, as well as preparing for skills I'm going to compete in.

One of the problems with my perception is my recognition, is that it tend to delay my telling whether information is appropriate or not. This sometimes cause check many times the sheet I have sit on on a train when I leave the train. Otherwise I won't be sure that I leave nothing on the train.

I hope to create a refined and well-organized web site, and I have been frustrated that all I can present is a set of crude thought. However my heart has become much lighter after I have come to thought that a crude idea can be a start point for a refined work.

Web sites of major businesses look like not to consider viewers viewing in a narrow window in order to cope with other task with another window side by side. Typical widths of corporate web sites are more than 980 pixels, and many of them are more than 1000 pixels. These widths isn't good for working on multiple windows, for example editing a document, and looking up on the web for reference. The advent of smartphones may make us forget that there are still many users who view webs in multiple window environments. This is a point we want to consider when we design a website.

Until now I haven't noticed that I was kind of affected by mental depression in September, last month. I'm finally getting back the energy to tackle problems prepared for vocational skill competition in 10 days away. Until 10 days ago, I didn't have the energy to learn anything to build up skills for this competition.

I have learned that anxiety beats me, actually kills me, but this week, I have hard time with beating anxiety. When I looked up Google for an expression "kill anxiety" I got a practical advice to reduce my anxiety. Breathing deeply may help to some extent. By the way, when I was elementary school, I learned how to take a deep breath. I learned the form of swinging my arms around my body, so taking deep breath was about the action of my arms, rather than about actually my breathing. I noticed this when I was said that "You are stopping breathing, although you are moving your arms." It was not until then I really learned deep breathing is actually about my breathing, rather than actions of my arms.

These days, I'm working on applying for Wordpress the style of a website I have made. I'm learning how to create a wordpress theme from html and css files I have already created. There are a lot of rules and functions to learn in order for my style to work as a wordpress site.

I have a lot to learn about web page creating, preparing for a skill contest for 2 weeks ahead. I'm now struggling with incompatibility between css display and transition property, although I had expected that I would like to show a transition effect of an item of animation, expanding child items when the mouse pointer is on an item. I sort out that css transition property isn't compatible to display property, although I have preferred to use display property to implement a drop down navigation.

[Notice] This is not real disaster information. This is an incident in my last night dream. It was before daybreak. I was writing this drinking non-wake-up (decaf) cafe au lait, hoping to get back to sleep then. Last night I had a busy dream, and I felt an earthquake. It was rather mild but the quake lasted for more than a minute. I anticipated that a big earthquake was happening far away. I saw news, probably on TV, and surprised. M 7.8 in Kanto area. It looked like in some areas were volcanic eruptions. Then soon after I heard an early earthquake warning although I hadn't turned on my TV, radio or PC. The quake wouldn't stop. It continued during all this happenings. Soon after I noticed that it wasn't ground that shook as an earthquake happens. It looked like it was only me that shook during all this dreadful nightmare news.

Challenging a vocational skill competition with mental disorder is not an easy way. My performance sometimes sharply decline as my mental state goes down. However, I can see this challenge as honorable challenge. I wouldn't have a chance to face this challenge if I hadn't won a prefectural contest and fight the competition on behalf of my prefecture.

I post a brief article every day here Blogger. Sometimes I wonder, "Why not Twitter?" Twitter, as I see , by every user's brief posts as contributions, is a service to help viewers have a glimpse of what's new. The problem is I'm more interested in my inside than what's new in the world. This is one of the reasons I'm not so familiar with twitter, and I prefer to use blogger to post daily short posts.

This week I'm abstaining from having Starbucks coffee, which is luxury for me, because I had a holiday on Monday. I treat myself with a cup of Starbucks coffee for working through 5-day weekdays.

Disaster prevention for disabled people, I hope, would be an extend of total care of their daily lives. Under this concept, I'm thinking of "disaster prevention cafe", a place (either on the Internet or in the real world) people can casually discuss disaster prevention, just an extension of everyday conversation.

Designing structure, editing contents, creating images and logos. It's really hard to do these tasks required to design web pages all by myself. Looking for good available material for the sites is also the work for a web page desinger.

My panic behavior has apparently gotten better these days, but sometimes take some invisible forms. Some symptoms take forms of obsessive behavior. For example whenever I get off train, I can't help checking three times the top and the bottom of the seat I have taken before I get off a train to work.

Yesterday I installed an extra memory in my PC. The memory cost about 3,000 yen. I had ordered it Thursday morning and It had arrived by the time I was back from work. After I had supper, I took up installment. Although I had to open the bottom cover of it, the installment ended in 20 minutes. Now my PC has 8 GB memory and works much lighter than before.

In order to prepare for a skill contest, I test my web page 2 browser. I also use Illustrator to edit images for the pages at the same time. I felt, "I want more memory". Yesterday I ordered extra memory and today it arrives. I'm going to install this evening or next morning.

My mind has gotten weak for 3 months. I often turn away from braking news because it easily make me upset. Keeping in touch of news is basically good for us, but news, most of which are bad ones, can be stumbling blocks for us when our mind is weak.

On the way home I felt a strange tension and had a tic that violently pushed my body forward. I walked a little more right after I arrived home to calm myself down. I had intended to spend time slowly, taking a train 15 minutes later than the one I usually take, but with a train delay, I after all took the train I usually take. It was so crowded that my stress came over the limit. Now, at home, I'm thinking that I'm going to take time out carefully.

In the morning my condition was not bad, but it required more sleep to recover from my tiredness. The time of this morning was passing. It was windy outside, although a strong typhoon was 1800 kilometer from here, near Okinawa. It was going to be hot, with high temperature 26C (79F).

I wear ties from today, considering appropriate outfit for season, weather and area, although "cool-biz" style is still allowed in October for still hot weather of south and west regions in Japan. Yesterday's low was 17C (63F) and high was 25C (77F), and it was beautiful day.

I go to bed as soon as possible to recovered from my tiredness from 2 consecutive days bike riding. I wake up around 5 a.m. My condition will get much better. I make my morning coffee, do some exercise, and hopefully work a little bit for web page coding. Game play will be once at most. I clean up my room a little bit hopefully. I get a few podcast files I listen for this week.

In the morning I went on bicycling, and in the afternoon I went shopping by train and returned by bus. On the bus, the last half was the same route as the last half of the ride in the morning. I enjoyed much just a fact that I passed the same road by bicycle and by bus on the same day. This may be because it was clear today, for the first time in half month.