Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Yongfook.com is made out of people. It’s made out of people!

No but being serious and breaking my Food Review Czar character for a second, many of you will no doubt have noticed that I recently went on one of my unexplained sabbaticals for a few weeks. However this time, far from being caused by an implosion of my personal love life because I’m an “asshole, a fricking fricking asshole!” (verbatim) or because updating my site got in the way of my masturbation counseling or giant bonsai tree class or attending to my latest side-project that being “drawing Raymond Briggs’ animated movie The Snowman, IN REAL TIME”, I actually have a valid and excusable reason for not updating which would definitely at least stand up in court when one of you lawsuit-happy middle-class suburbanite punks decides to sue me for not updating which threw you into depression and you choked on a 6 pound helping of Toblerone.

With my JET contract finishing up soon (I am currently wearing my “I Lived In The Inaka For 3 Years And All I Got Was This Eye Twitch And This Withered, Underused Penis Where My Old, Good One Used To Be” t-shirt with a proud smile) about 2 months ago I started to really get stuck into preparing for finding my next job. As if I could ever forget, what with the weekly phonecalls from the folks back in the UK:

Mum: Hi Jon!

Me: It’s 4am.

Mum: Well you are never in are you, so we had no choice.

Me: I’m always in, I just never answer my phone. Never, until now.

Mum: Anyway I’m talking let me talk. Have you thought about your future?

Me: I’ve thought about how I’d like to sleep for the next 3 or 4 hours, yes.

Mum: You know what I mean. Are you going to put your Accounting degree to any use? We know a guy who said that he heard Accounting & Japanese is an in-demand skill.

Me: That may be so, but I have to be honest, Accounting excites me about as much as the ill-fated Atari 2600 version of E.T.

Mum: What’s that?

Me: Well you see, to take advantage of the popular Christmas-holiday-crazy-parents buy-whatever-the-frick-because-Jesus-commands-it-eureka! generic marketing strategy for selling children’s toys and games, around that time in 1982 Atari rushed through the development of and released a game in time for Christmas based on the popular film E.T. which was a substandard melee of unrecognisable graphics and barely identifiable game objectives that consumers and distributors bought up in droves, largely because of hype and branding. When it was discovered that it was in fact a steaming pile of rancid whale testicles in 4 colours instead of the fun holiday game many people had hoped for, it was returned to stores in massive quantities. Atari had to somehow dispose of 5 million game cartridges that no-one wanted and decided the best way to deal with the embarrassment would be to dump all the cartridges in a big fricking hole in the desert, cover it over with concrete and then whistle nonchalantly whilst looking apprehensive and saying “what?” to passers-by, even before they ask anything.

Mum: What’s an Atari?

Me: Look “mother”, the point is that I don’t really want to do Accounting. It’s boring and I don’t enjoy it and I hear it gives you cancer of the wrists.

Mum: Ok, so what do you want to do then?

Me: I’ve always enjoyed web application / interface design and development, maybe I’ll give that a go.

Mum: What’s that?

Me: I’ll call you when I have a job, mum.

Mum: Ok.

And so after a bit of work on my portfolio and some flying up to Tokyo for interviews later, I accepted an offer I liked and was able to have the following conversation with my mother:

Me: Hi mum, got a job.

Mum: Ooh, Accounting?

Me: No no, the other thing.

So yes, the Yongfook that you know and love and probably receive masturbation counseling because of, is moving on from the JET life. Next month, I’ll be moving up to Tokyo to start work at a web design/development company, name and location tantalisingly withheld due to the constant fear of the yongfook.com fan/axe-in-my-face “I love you! I love you! That’s why you have to die!” quandary that I often think about when imagining what kind of human beings actually read this site.

Anyway why should any of you give a toss about all this? Well, since moving the 1000-odd km to Tokyo is going to take up a decent wedge of my time what with packing, cleaning and throwing out the hundreds and hundreds of stupid UFO catcher toys I’ve won in the last 3 years, I’m probably going to be absent from my site for a while.

However! I have some plans for the big come-back. I’m going to give the site a spring clean and I’ve decided that it’s high time Yongfook.com became entirely database-driven a la regular blogs, despite the fact that I keep telling myself “I’m not a blogger! I’m not a blogger!!” when I look into the mirror, eyes all red from being clawed at. What does that mean for you? Well it means easier navigation, better searching, better structure, better commenting, the possibility for features such as trackbacks and even becoming a Yongfook.com author (ie. writing articles for the site if for some peculiar reason you actually wanted to).

The benefits are there for me too: easier updating, which will probably lead to more frequent, shorter diary entries to keep you moist in between the not-so-frequent lengthy food reviews, and it will also mean that all the data will be easier to manage. Tentatively I’m going to say that I’ll start talking about life in general again and not just limiting myself to food reviews, since it is highly likely that once I move to Tokyo I’ll have an interesting life again, given all the hover cars and sex machines and whatnot. I’m also going to implement an entirely new feature of Yongfook.com that will rely on a database to function nicely. I’m not explicitly saying what the feature is yet, but it is very funny and very awesome (I made the beta version already) and I think that Yongfook.com readers are going to love it. All I’ll say is that it involves drawing.

Note: Just in case you haven’t realised, you are now LOOKING at the updated version of yongfook.com that I am talking about in this entry.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 at 6:25 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.