Onigiri for the kids in Eidan's class View at Picasa Onigiri for the kids in Eidan's class02-Feb-2012 23:25, Canon Canon PowerShot SD780 IS, 3.2, 5.9mm, 0.067 sec, ISO 640

For Eidan’s kindergarten class this week, our parental duty was to bring in a snack for all the kids that starts with the letter “O”. So last night Maria and I made about 30 onigiri:

Onigiri (お握り), also known as omusubi (お結び) or rice ball, is a Japanese food made from white rice formed into triangular or oval shapes and often wrapped in nori (seaweed). Traditionally, an onigiri is filled with pickled ume (umeboshi), salted salmon, katsuobushi, kombu, tarako, or any other salty or sour ingredient as a natural preservative. Because of the popularity of onigiri in Japan, most convenience stores stock their onigiri with various fillings and flavors. There are even specialized shops whose only products are onigiri for take out.

justbento.com has some wonderful pictures of the many forms onigiri can take.

We made the traditional triangle shape, and thanks to the 69th St. H-Mart’s dazzling array of nori selections (half an aisle for nori!), we were able to use the nori that comes in individial plastic sleeves. The sleeve keeps the nori dry, so we could get them to school with Eidan and not worry about them getting soggy. You then remove the plastic sleeve right before eating. Of course someone has posted a video on YouTube to illustrate. Ingenious product packaging from the Japanese – what a shocker

Final snack - onigiri and lemon water before getting on the plane back to the US View at Picasa Final snack - onigiri and lemon water before getting on the plane back to the US08-Jul-2010 20:43, SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.02 sec, ISO 100

When we lived in Japan in 2007, the boys and I would stop at a convenience store for onigiri almost every day. It’s a cheap, healthy, and filling snack, and the boys never got tired of it. There’s a huge variety of fillings to choose from, some of which the boys liked (such as salmon) and some which they didn’t (like umeboshi – pickled fruit). So to make sure I didn’t buy the wrong thing, I learned to go to the stores that labelled the onigiri in Hiragana, which I could read, and to avoid the stores that used Kanji, which I couldn’t read.

Please use the comments section for any questions about my plugins. I’m gratified that my plugins are becoming more popular, but it also makes it harder for me to provide personalized support. My plugins have extensive documentation, especially Shashin, so please review the documentation to see if you can find an answer to your question there before posting here. Thanks!

Ad for a show by Maria's father, Tony Toyoda - The Miami News, Dec 20, 1965 View at Picasa Ad for a show by Maria's father, Tony Toyoda - The Miami News, Dec 20, 1965

I just found an old ad from the Miami News in 1965 for a show by Maria’s dad, Tony Toyoda (click the picture to see it full size). Google News search is a wonderful thing. The trick is to exclude Akio “Tony” Toyoda from the search, the President of the Toyota car company (and a distant relative of Maria’s family).

I also found someone is selling one of his old publicity photos on eBay and here’s a great article I found a couple years ago, which is a profile of him and the members of his show “Tokyo Scene”, from 1971.

• Download at wordpress.org
• Documentation here at toppa.com
• Source code for review at GitHub.com

Something I quickly learned working with the QuickTags API is that it’s fairly limited. It’s really designed just for adding simple buttons. Supporting custom dialogs through it required me to do some jQuery gymnastics – see my buttonController.js file if you want the gory details.

If you’re interested in the QuickTags API itself, the qt.addButton function in wp-includes/js/quicktags.dev.js has detailed explanatory comments, and there’s a good, simple working example in this gist file.

Aficiondos of toppa.com (if there are any such people) may notice this plugin sounds a lot like my old Koumpounophobia plugin. That plugin did a lot of jQuery-based scraping of the HTML Editor to make it possible to add custom buttons, since there didn’t used to be an API, and it ceased to work with the rewrite of QuickTags in WordPress 3.3. Also, the name I gave it was a poor choice (it means “fear of buttons” – totally obscure and a little too clever…). So I took the opportunity to re-write it and give it a much more descriptive name.

I’ve been part of the web team in Penn’s School of Medicine since 2004, and I’ve been Director for the past 2 years. My team had a lot of demands placed on them, with the need for projects outpacing what we could provide. One of the first things I did as Director was learn Agile practices so I could teach them to my team (and I brought in a scrum coach to help). These two graphics illustrate the two primary challenges we faced – not enough staff, and too much chaos:

Blue represents available SOMIS staff, red indicates how many people would be needed to complete the desired work View at Picasa Blue represents available SOMIS staff, red indicates how many people would be needed to complete the desired work

Illustration by Esther Derby showing a not very well functioning development process View at Picasa Illustration by Esther Derby showing a not very well functioning development process

For many months my work spilled over into nights and weekends as I tried to move things forward. I can’t say we entirely solved these problems, but we made a lot of progress, and got the wheels turning in higher levels of administration to address the situation (“turning the aircraft carrier,” as one of our project managers put it – change is not easy to implement in a huge institution). Deciding to leave was hard, but an opportunity to turn my WordPress plugin development hobby into a job, to work with Brad (@williamsba) and the WebDevStudios team, and having the flexibility of working at home… it was too good to pass up. I’m especially looking forward to having more time to code again. If the past 2 years have taught me anything, it’s that I have a passion for software development, and always striving to do it better.