MatthewMeyer.net

This is a genuine psychological test.

It is a story about a girl. While at the funeral of her own mother, she met this guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing, so much the dream guy that she was searching for that she fell in love with him right then and there.

However, she never asked for his name or number and afterwards could not find anyone who knew who he was. A few days later the girl killed her own sister.

Question: What is her motive in killing her sister? (Give this some thought for a while before you read the answer.)
Read more »

My website got me into an article in the Hokkoku Shimbun.

Translation (courtesy of Yasuko Aizawa):

Hokkoku Newspaper
March 20, 2005

“Want to convey Ishikawa’s traditions and people’s warm heart”
American students made websites
Kanazawa Castle, Omicho Market, festivals…
Detailed information based on their own experience

(Photo) Eurocentres staff enjoying the websites that their former students created; Rifare, block 1, Honmachi, Kanazawa

Two American students who studied Japanese in Kanazawa made websites that introduce Ishikawa’s traditional culture and people’s life. The history of Kanazawa Castle and Omicho Market, traditional festivals in Ishikawa and the like are edited in the websites accompanied by photos and illustrations. The personnel concerned are welcoming their contribution because the websites written in English can promote the charm of Ishikawa to the world as well as helping people in Ishikawa to discover the new charms about our home prefecture through the eyes of foreigners.

Two students who made the websites are Leo Hourvitz, a computer animator from California and Matt Meyer, a college student from Florida. They took a Japanese course at Eurocentres Kanazawa for two to three weeks and experienced Japanese culture including tea ceremony while doing the homestay.

After they returned home, they created websites which link each other in order to introduce the charm of Ishikawa to the world. Hourvitz introduces people’s everyday life in Kanazawa using a lot of photos including the structure and history of Hishiyagura that was reconstructed on the Kanazawa Castle Park, tea ceremony manners that he learned during his stay, the lively Omicho Market, and life with his host family. Meyer introduces Children’s Kabuki from the Otabi Matsuri in Komatsu, the landscape of Nata-dera temple and such, using a lot of illustrations.

They comment on the charm of Ishikawa, “Ishikawa is full of Japan’s traditional culture, which is hard to find in big cities, and people’s warm heart.” Yasuko Aizawa, Program Director of Eurocentres Kanazawa says, “We can see through their websites how foreigners look at Ishikawa. We hope a lot of people both in Japan and around the world will look at these sites.” The websites:

http://webspace.ringling.edu/~mmeyer/Japan.html

In the near future, you may see things change quite a bit on this website. I’m trying to spend my freetime updating it, changing it, and generally making it better. If you’ve visited my Japan page recently, you’ll see the huge amount of work I’ve done both to redesign the site and add more information to it (considering that I threw the page together really quickly after returning and never really developed it further after that). Transferring it to post-format really sped things up.

You may have heard that my Japan sketches did a little tour around the prefecture I stayed in. I was also asked a few questions by a newspaper from there about my stay in Japan and my website. So I guess that’s another one of the reasons I was concerned about the shitty quality of that page I had up before this new incarnation.

I plan on doing some more design tweaks to the Japan page, as well as redesigning the main blog and the other subpages. I also need to finish updating the humor archive, and then redesign that page as well. The biggest change I want to do to my site is the creation of an online portfolio, stepping away from purely a blog.

It’s taking me a while to do because the last time I learned html was back in 1996 and 1997 when I first started playing around with websites. Things have changed quite a bit since then. So I have to learn a lot of new things, which are really cool the more I learn about them.

I’m spending the rest of my time, of course, working on my thesis. I’m almost done it, and since I worked so hard before Spring break, I can spend a little more time on other things (like this page) now. I only have 4 paintings left to do, and then I need to get all twelve of them framed. I will, of course, scan final version of them. I know a lot of you are waiting to see them. Rest assured it will be worth the wait.

Other things I’m doing include planning for after graduation. I need to fix up my portfolio to show the remainder of the recruiters here at school. I also need to plan for finding a job and a place to live after graduation. I don’t know what I will be doing after leaving Florida, but I know that I need to be ready for whatever opportunities come up.

So much to do, and so little time to do it. And I keep getting distracted by browsing wikipedia and google.

I’m in the process of moving all of my bookmarks to del.icio.us, a really cool bookmark site. It’s sort of a bookmark community that lets you publish your bookmarks for sharing and for viewing from any computer. You can see my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/dminky. You can even read them as an RSS feed, which is t3h uber-cool.

I only which I found this earlier so I could have saved a lot of the funny links I’ve recieved over the years. I periodically deleted links because it was a pain to organize hundreds and hundreds of them. Well, not anymore!

I have not said anything in a long time… so here’s an overdue update.

Last week was Spring Break. I spent the week in Vancouver with Frances. It was super awesome. I’m in the middle of painting right now so I’m too distracted to be able to go into lots of detail, but suffice it to say it was the best Spring Break ever, and it was certainly the best vacation I’ve had since going to Japan. Even if not for the fact that I was with Frances, Vancouver was a really cool place. But being with my girlfriend just made it immeasurably better. So yea, I had a good time.

I also planned the remainder of the chickens I’m going to attempt to paint this semester. I planned 8 more, which would bring the total to 16. I highly doubt that it is possible to do 8 more, but I will try. A more realistic number is 5 more… but I always like to aim high. I’m just about finished the Sultan, and I’ve prepared the Aztec and the Bolshevik so they are ready to go. I have to do 2 chickens a week to meet my 8 chickens mark… so really, it’s not going to happen. We’ll see what I can do though.

Igor has become much more lively. I’m not sure if that’s a result of me leaving him for a week (fear of a second abandoment?) or because it’s Spring (mating season?) or because he’s able to fly 100% now… but he no longer wants to spend all his time in his cage and would rather be on top of it. He’s just about finished molting now and is quite pretty, too, so maybe that has something to do with it.

OK, back to painting. I can’t take too many breaks if I want to finish two more chickens this week.