Needs more cowbell

Yes, now you too can add more cowbell (and even some Christopher Walken) to your favorite song.

Snapple iced teas to use sugar

Snapple will replace high fructose corn syrup with sugar in their iced teas. No mention is made of their other drinks. This is a nice change to see, though.

Pepsi to reintroduce soda made with sugar to the United States

Apparently Pepsi will sell Pepsi and Mountain Dew made with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). They will be known as Pepsi-Cola Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback. The linked article does not know of a release date, but one site (down as of this posting) suggests that they will be sold on April 20th. Make your own jokes here. The downside is that they will only be available until June. Maybe they will change their mind if sales are good.

Photography Friendly posts

I'm going to close down my Photography Friendly blog in the near future and have moved my posts from there to here, under the label of photography. These are posts that deal with photography law and any issues of taking photos at places (if you need a permit or not, if it is not allowed at all, etc.).

IPIP-NEO personality test

The IPIP-NEO personality test (International Personality Item Pool Representation of the NEO PI-R) looks at 5 broad domains and 30 sub domains of personality. While the full IPIP test consists of 1,699 items, the link leads to a short test of 120 items.

The IPIP-NEO is more complex than the more popular Myers Briggs personality type and as such gives a more indepth look of the personality of an individual, including those aspects that would be considered negative. One weakness I would give this test is that it is a self-assessment, so honesty with yourself is important.

I thought the results of my own test were pretty accurate; the only part that I thought was inaccurate were some of the scores under Neuroticism that I thought should have been higher (more negative). That could just be a lower view of myself than is accurate, though.

The Value of Informed Choice in Protecting Consumers, a Product, and a Company

The presentation brings up some good ideas that I would love to see incorporated by businesses. There should also be a way of taking pages of license agreements and making them into a few sentences for each important point while leaving the option to see the whole license agreement.

A site and a program for learning Hiragana and Katakana

I'm looking at the possibility of travelling to Japan next year, and because of that as well as my love of Japanese culture, I'm wanting to learn Japanese. My main focus is on learning to read and speak Japanese.

The difficult part of learning to read Japanese is the various character sets: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Right now I am wanting to focus on learning Hiragana and Katakana and want to memorize each character. I have found a program and a site to help me with that.

The program is Kanatest and is for Linux. It will produce the character and you type in the Romaji equivalent for it.

The site is easyjapanese.org and it has quizzes for learning Hiragana and Katakana as well as a Kana Invaders game.

Do you know of a good site or program for learning Hiragana and Katakana? Please share them here!