Your site will come in handy for my trip on Friday, as I do not really know too much about Tokyo, except for the subway system.

BTW, I really like the placement of Google AdSense under the photo on your site’s homepage. Looks like a photo caption, excellent.

Can you tell me the lottery numbers for Tuesday?

Sorry old joke, couldn’t help myself. Getting silly from winterizing here.

{Middle of USA/Central Time Zone/No Daylight Savings Time/November 14, 2005/8:45 AM }

First snowfall expected today.

Also on time zones, do other Aussies find that their blogging week is more like Tuesday to Saturday? I find Monday’s my quietest day, as roughly speaking, it’s Sunday in the US, where most of my information sources are.

They havn’t released any details yet but it’s supposed to be happening.

It also makes it hard to call my family in Oz since it is now 2 hours difference, instead of the usual 1 hour.

Japan needs summer time too!

Hey Darren, any blog or search conventions coming up in Australia?

Which screws up my screwed up schedule even more as my mornings here (which usually start around 10 am, but started at 7 am today with the mini-earthquake) usually are spent catching up on news which happened during the day in the US and trying to catch West Coast readers before they get off work.

Then I tend to emails, contracts, non-time restrictive blogging, hit the gym, take a bike ride, go grocery shopping, time with the wife …etc.

Then, about 9 pm Japan time I’m back on the computer again, working/blogging till about 12 pm or 1 am here – Catching the (US EST) morning scoops and attending to new morning emails, interviews, phone calls… afterwards some TV, a drink and a shower, then off to bed around 3 am Japan time (unless I check my noon time US EST emails).

Yikes.

I’ve always wondered how Eastern Hemisphere bloggers divide their time when they plan IM’s with Western Hemisphere residents, and it’s always nice to publish some posts between US EST 9:30 am and 11:30 am, when folks are checking their RSS before meetings.

Seriously, time zones (and various daylight savings schemes) really do add unnecessary difficulty to international trade, on line commerce included. And then we have (I believe one or more Australian States with one of those 30 minute time zones and if I recall correctly there’s a plus 45 minute time zone as well, India perhaps?

I know they did it as a marketing stunt but couldn’t we all adopted the Swatch Internet Time system?

The US is going to make it even worse in 2007 (not to mention the US states that do not change along with the others and the US states that are in two different time zones … it’s silly indeed. Several large, civilized countries are smart enough to leave the whole darn mess alone .. China and Japan spring to mind … I’m in favor of dropping the whole shifting time zone nonsense world-wide.

will rectify that in the post :-)

You guys got it easy, try getting people to listen to you when they find out you live in the uber seclusion of…Kentucky !

I’m with Cary, let’s get together someplace nice, like Wichita !

And for anyone who doesn’t understand how that isolation works Toni and I have had a very similar experience. We have been online in marketing since 1998 and providing written work for webmasters since 2001.

At that time we were living in Tasmana – even further south than where Darren is now – and we basically struggled for work. It was almost as if people didn’t want to deal with us because we lived somewhere that they had never heard of.

Within weeks of moving to Queensland and people finding out that we were somewhere that they knew about our work started to increase and every month has been bigger than the one before.

It’s a strange situation but one that is very real and does affect a lot of talented people who just happen to live in the wrong parts of the world.