Out of the way

I'm sitting in a friend's spare bedroom in London, thinking of going to work soon now that the transport system is coming back to life.

I went to the "Days of Web Standards" conference in Japan, organised as part of the CSS Nite series. It is hard for me to judge it really, since I didn't understand a lot of what happened. I guess I should learn more japanese. But there were a lot of people, a lot of talks, and interesting questions came out of my talk. I also participated in a browser panel with guys from Mozilla Japan and Microsoft Japan.

Early in the second day there was an earthquake in Japan. It turned out to have been a serious one killing a handful of people near its epicentre. In Tokyo on the 6th floor it just made the building wobble - and sway, and wobble... It is a sensation unpleasantly like a very nasty hangover just beginning. But either something bad happens or it doesn't - there isn't a lot you can *do* in an earthquake. So I just went on with what I was doing, and feeling the swaying building.

Apparently a lot of the time people who die in japanese earthquakes are killed by the stress of repeated aftershocks, which I can understand. What was more worrying is that the world's biggest nuclear plant is in Japan (I believe it is still the country with the highest proportion of power coming from nuclear energy), and according to the company that runs it, it wasn't built to withstand such a powerful quake which is why it was damaged (although apparently not very seriously). What is disturbing is not the damage done, or the radiation leaks that are known to have occurred, but the fact that this quake was the biggest in a few years. In other words, already this decade a larger quake has struck the same place. And Japan has been having regular earthquakes for a long time, so it makes sense that there will be more.

A fairly punishing travel schedule meant that I was pretty tired by the end of the trip. Which in turn meant that I was not great company at the dinner held for the winners of our design contest - but then I don't speak much japanese, so I was probably already the least interesting person at dinner.

Of course jetlag being what it was, after dinner I was wide awake. I managed to sleep a little, but got onto my flight having managed an average of 4 hours sleep in the 4 days I spent in Japan. Luckily, I ate well.

So far the UK is shaping up as similar - my baggage still hasn't appeared, a week after I last checked it in, my sleep pattern has gone, and my days are already going to be completely filled with work so I won't have time to shop for clothes when shops are open. And I am not sure the food in London is as good as Tokyo...