Today I had no school, as they made up for Bunkasei school-day on Saturday, and yesterday [Monday] was a holiday…so we had Sun/Mon/Tues as our weekend basically.  It was nice.

Yesterday I got to go to the Zoo, which was awesome, there were quite a few interesting animals there!  I got to see the Giraffes gallop around and there were several alligators and a *giant* sea turtle that I found really interesting.  Tomorrow I’ll upload the pictures into my PhotoAlbum for you guys to see, I took a lot…but mostly of the animals.  It was Haruko [host mother], Yoshinori [little host brother], and myself.  So hot though!  At the end we got ice cream, and I don’t think it’s ever tasted better.  It’s fall here, and supposed to be getting cooler, but that really hasn’t happened yet.

Not everything’s great though, my older host brother, Yoshimitsu, left for University as his summer break ended, and I may not get to see him again.  I really liked having an older brother ‘n stuff, so it’s really kinda sad for me.  Luckily he took me to Den Den Town on Sunday before he left Monday.  That was fun.  Den Den Town is basically the geeky place of Osaka, with tons of anime/manga/electronics/adult shops.  I saw like 12 white people, adults, and they were looking at figurines and anime and stuff.  That’s what happens when you get too obsessed with Japan unfortunately.  We also stopped some other places, most notably an Arcade and played some games together.

In other news, online actually, I won a “Post of the Week” award at Nintendo’s official forums for my review of the DS Headset, which was actually kind of cool.

But…the whole reason I wanted to write this post right now has not been mentioned.  You may not be aware, but the site “YouTube” has caught on like wildfire in Japan.  I have an account of course, I’m working on some compilation videos fo my trip to Japan and eventually a video blog when I get a webcam [it's on my to-do list].  Japan doesn’t have a site of their own for homemade video sharing though, one that’s actually in Japanese.  So what am I to do?  Build one of course!  I’m going to finish reading my PHP/MySQL book and start getting a layout up.  Hopefully I can get my best friend, Yudai, who is very good at English, to help me with my little project for the lnaguage part.  So I will be taking on the massive task of making a comparable site to YouTube in Japanese.  Right now I’ve put myself on a 6-month timeframe to get the book read, HTML-PHP frontend and MySQL backend up.  I’m also doing my homework on Japanese copyright laws, and the laws to keep in mind when the users are Japanese, but the site is hosted in the US.  International things can get sticky.

I think it’s my best idea yet, since Japan doesn’t really have a comparable site and YouTube was recently estimated to be worth in the millions, and was actually founded by only 3 men who all used to work at PayPal, one of those “garage” stories that turns into something massive.  And if I could create a Japanese site that’s more user-friendly and actually geared towards Japan, well, that’d be awesome.  Of course, I’m not out to make a copy of YouTube, that’d be stupid.  I want to make something better.

And that about wraps it up.