TheTechMatterAnswer: Japan Travel & Internet survival guide

Nara, named “the deer city” was the first capital of Japan and is located a few kilometers from Osaka and can be reached easily by Yamatoji line from JR Tennoji Station to Nara (42 min).
The town is small and one can visit it quietly walking along the paths through the woods.
The whole town (at least the old part, the area with the temples) is full of deer that run freely and eat biscuits that tourists can buy during their journey.

There are several temples very pleasing and the climate is extremely peaceful and quiet.

The most beautiful temple to be seen, that’s one of the things that pushed us to choose Nara as one of our destinations (besides the presence of the deer that help to create a surreal landscape) is the Todaiji temple. This temple is the largest wooden building in the world and contains the world’s largest statue of (sitting) Buddha (more information can be found in japan guide website).
Nara deserves to be chosen as a destination for an holyday Japan.

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For the second day in Japan, after eating bread, marmelade, banana and orange juice in our awesome hotel, we start the morning at 9:50pm taking the Shinkansen (high speed train) from Osaka  to Kyoto, and in less than 20 minuts we reached the destination.

The JR station in Kyoto is a very futuristic structure that remember us another aspect of Japan: a place where the historycal traditions and the technology are fused together. The station is filled of shopping mall and, for more or less two hours we made some shopping in here.

Then we took the “JR Nara line” toward Nara and reached Inari station (is the first stop), where we visited one other particular attraction of Japan: the Fushimi Inari Shrine.

This Shintoist Shrine is characterized by very long routes made of many big red torii (the wood portal showed in the gallery of photos below) that extends in a mountain woods. After one hour of walking, when we reached a small mountain lake, we ate the best granita ever in a little food shop near the Fushimi Inari Shrine… that granita was served in polystyrene cup and the juice was in the inner of all the “crumbs” of ice. No juice has reached the bottom of the cup! Simply very yummy and refreshing!

Then we returned in JR Kyoto station where two of us made some other shopping and in the meantime
I was interviewed by a teacher from Hiroshima and three of her middle school students.

After this we went to the Sanjusangendo Temple (that for us was not so good. Is worth to skip it) and walking for over 7km through the city on foot, from the JR station we reached the Kiyomizu-dera, the most famous Buddhist temple of Kyoto, located on a hill immersed in a wood.

After the 5:30pm we leaved Kiyomizu-dera and (again on foot) we returned in the JR Central Station zone to try the panorama of Kyoto Tower (that is in front of the station).

Then, very tired, we reached the Arietta Hotel and made some shopping (food shopping… we were with an empty stomach all of the day!).

For your holyday I suggest you to eat some things at Kyoto station in a reasonable hour of the day.

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Our journey to the land of the rising sun started from  Venice, with a stopover in Helsinki, directed to the airport in Kansai.

We traveled with Finnair (good service but the food was not exceptional). We arrived around 12:30 am in a really excellent hotel in Osaka (Arietta Hotel).

We then did a little stroll in the Osaka Castle park, where, besides the beautiful castle we found a real surprise as in front of the castle there was a Kendo and Judo dojo with childrens who train with their teachers.

Towards evening we met with some Japanese friends who accompanied us to the “Kumata shrine summer festival” a real traditional Japanese festivals held in the district of a temple near Tennoji. The festival was very joyful and you could see that all the involved people were doing everything to ensure that the festival should take place in the best possible way.

Finally after this fascinating visit, we went to eat in a ramen shop.

It was a very tiring day but it was an amazing day: I believe that in no other place in the world one can see such dedication to own work.

This is the picture gallery of the first day with captions:

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For today, since I’m very busy to think some solutions for the graphic of this website (and to promote the inclusion in google index…but seems to be difficult!) , the matter is Cascading Style Sheet version 3.

In particular I found very useful the property: text-shadow

We can obtain, effects like this for text-shadow:

using in the css style sheet the string: text-shadow: 2px 2px 4px #220000;

that for browser that support CSS3 appears as in this picture:

Using multiple text shadow we can obtain effect like this:

Some other examples are available from the w3c website and at the css3.info website.

To solve momentarily the bug of (actual version of) Word Press that show an erroneous number of uncategorized posts in the widget, is enough to create a new post, save it as draft and delete it.

This is a momentarily solution because every time you edit or add a post, the number of posts in “uncategorized” category will assume a strange value in widget.

Oddly, the “uncategorized” posts number will return to the correct value… but more oddly this old bug persists.

Having found a solution that suggest us what websites should be secure to view, another question related to internet security is about viruses, worm, and others malware that tend to propagate over the Internet: is there a valid software antivirus (that usually searches not only for viruses, but is a jargon term) really free available?

The answer is obviously yes, and for selecting what kind is not so difficult since the number of free antivirus is little: Antivir, AVG, AVAST, ClaimAV are the most famous, but for me and for others well known and reliable source such as Tom’s Guide , the best is Antivir.

The only price to pay for using Antivir is to view a (secure) banner every time when Windows start.

Avira Antivir Personal is however free only for single computer use for home and non commercial use, so that public no-profit association seems to be excluded from the “free of charge feature”.

Is a fortune that Microsoft in these days, Microsoft decided to give to all Windows users his antivirus: Microsoft Security Essentials. It can be downloaded for free of charge and without limitation relative to its use.

The travel is started, on the left there’s the plane wing of one of the airplanes that bring us to Japan… we made 10.000 km.

This is another little preview of my summer Japan trip to show one of the places that more have impressed me: Kanazawa.

The follow video is from “Japan Channel” in Youtube:

One of these days I will write some words about the Japanese cities I visited on this summer. For now I want show you some images of Kanazawa,

a medium dimension city in the west coast of Japan main island, rich of history places, not so crowded and very clean place to view some aspect of traditional Japan.

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To start with the section “Internet Security”, I want to suggest you a system to evaluate the reliability of a website.

This is perhaps one of most important questions of these years (concerning Internet “surfing”): “how to check if a website is secure?”, and WOT (WEB of Trust) community (but the owner is a private company in Finland) can give you the answer (reliable in a percentage of 99%).

To check if a website is good, simply cut and paste the URL of the suspicion website in to the text field in the up right position of the screen:

The result is a mix of information that derive from a vote systems of Internet users that have installed a browser add-on from WEB Of Trust Website.  Will be shown information relative to the number of people that have voted every aspect of the website: , and a little circular image for wich color means if the propriety is “good” (green image) or not (red image) or dubious(yellow image).

For example, the reputation rating of the NASA.GOV website is:

The first propriety “trustworthiness” is relative to the presence of malware in the website (if is green, probably there isn’t malware in that webpage).

The second is “Vendor Reliability” and in practice indicate if is secure to buy some things by using that website (so is a propriety more suitable to an e-commerce shop)

The third “Privacy” indicate if we can freely give to that website out personal data (such as email address) or if there are spyware or adware present.

Finally the fourth parameter “Child safety” is relative to the possible (in internet in very probable) presence of adult only contents (red picture).

Installing the browser plugin (available for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer), and searching with google, the picture above described will appears in the search results page (and near the address bar of the browser relate to the current website) and people can vote in realtime the website they are visiting… however I don’t know if the plugin itself will send or not information about our Internet navigation “tastes”.

Overall this is the free solution to the trust problem of Internet Websites and not participating to the vote system, is not privacy invasive.

For the first post I want to report two websites I used to install this blog.

The first one is a simple but useful archive to have an idea of what kind of shape our blog must have:

http://www.openwebdesign.org/

it contains thousands of template free to share and use.

Some of that templates has been converted for use with WordPress, but, as for the template I used, there can be a little modify to make possible use of widget. To solve this problem, this other website can help the “blogmaker”:

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2007/11/how-to-widget-enable-wordpress-themes-in-3-easy-steps/

that contains the instruction to make our “old” template widget compatible in only 3 steps.