Driving

So I'm back in Australia once again. Last time I was here for approx 3 weeks, this time, I'll be here for a month (the exact returning date is actually TBD but most likely will be sometime mid-December).

One thing I was grateful about when I moved back to Japan 5 years ago was that I no longer had to drive everywhere I needed to go. I'll be the first one to admit that I am not the greatest driver and there were all these complications that driving created such as insurances, gas, you have to get it fixed if something breaks, and finding parking always was a pain even in Seattle. Can't even imagine how bad it would be in Tokyo..

However, in Australia, it appears that you pretty much have to have a car if you have a slightest desire to go out and maintain a social life of a sort unless you live in Sydney and Melbourne. And I'm not in either one of these big cities. In fact, I'm staying in the suburb of Gold Coast, which itself is like one-seventh or eighth the size of Melbourne and I'm in the suburb of it, meaning you really gotta drive to go ANYwhere. There's only one bus every hour at the nearest bus stop and it's not even on a major route.

So I decided that I'm really gonna have to start driving or I'll be stuck here at home on weekends. I've already got my International Driving Permit issued by AAA and one of my co-workers that happens to be in Japan right now graciously has agreed to let me drive his car while he's away.

So I'm supposed to go pick up the car this evening. It'll be my first time driving in Australia, driving back (first time driving in the left-hand side of the road, as a matter of fact). We'll see how it goes.. If this works out well, I think I'll start thinking about getting my license in Japan when I get back. I guess it is about time I do that after 5 years..

Details Revealed: Google OpenSocial To Be Common APIs For Building Social A

This is very interesting.. They've got major career-oriented SNS sites like LinkedIn and salesforce.com to personal ones like Friendster and hi5... and of course their own orkut. Not sure what Oracle's role is in this... the backend DB used for this is Oracle?

This is obviously Google's way of countering ever-growing Facebook.. instead of creating or promoting an SNS site of their own, why not create a platform for all of them. Nice concept. Let's see how well they'll do..

Kinda reminds me of when Google Base came out. There was a lot of hype and people were talking about how it was going to change the way the Internet works and all but haven't heard much about it since..

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