New Skin

I spend the whole Saturday watching online drama and tweaking layouts. And venturing into Hatena. Not something productive physically I tell you, but lazying around do give me some blissful feeling.

I am not sure whether it is the sign of aging or maturity that get me thinking I am getting lazier and lazier, day by day. I used to have habit in diligently drilling into html or xml codes to get what I want for the layout, sadly, I am no more near that feeling. Just upload the downloaded templates from the Internet, add some Blogger gadgets and Twitter/Facebook widgets, gotcha here I am. Simple, I don't even have blogroll now.

I remember I signed up with Blogger service since 2002, and have been blogging ever since although I changed URL few times and lost my early archives. This blog has seen my ups and downs in life. I have been tempted to switch to WordPress and Movable Type, for reason that they have cooler features and designs, but true what people said, first love remains forever. I first fall in love with Blogger and for that reason, I decided to keep blogging in this platform.

Even after I found Hatena and their cool features like Diary(the blog service, with some cute layouts to drool), Fotolife (replacement of Flickr and so on), Haiku (similar like Twitter), Ugomemo(you can create your own drawings and scribbles; normally by Nintendo DS, big thing in Japan) and Bookmark(like you share links on Facebook), I keep with my decision, to stay blogging in English, in Blogger.

As a non-native English speaker, I used to suck in English (in fact I still do), mispronouncing words is my common habit, when I was in elementary school, I cannot understand any English fiction I read and I don't score much in my high school English exam. I started blogging initially just to share my own thought, and like others do, to improve my writing skill in English. Without realizing it, blogging does improve my English skill.

When I come to Japan, one problem that I have to face is the challenge of maintaining the English skill (which already broken prior coming here, unfortunately) and yet at the same time, improve the skill in Japanese. I bet it is common challenge to all foreigners here (who interested to learn Japanese and has not gave up yet, obviously).

So I decided to start blogging in Japanese, for the same initial reason when I start blogging in English. It is the same feeling, embarrassed by limited vocabulary and broken grammar rules, but learning is never an easy process. It's like climbing the mountain, they said, you stopped to take your breath, then continue walk up the path.

My Hatena user ID is groover58. Yoroshiku.

p/s- One of Hatena blogger that I love.