Well, Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and as they say, “love is in the air.” 🙂 Of course, come February 14, in Japan it would be women giving out chocolates to men, not the other way around. Years after living in this country, I still find this to be a rather strange custom. And I’ve never handed out chocolates to anyone, not even my own husband. But I’m sure he understands. He has gotten chocolates from the secretaries in his lab group, by the way. 😉

Speaking of love, there’s this interesting site where it purportedly evaluates the compatibility of two blogs. Called ????????? (translated: my peace(?) beta version. Don’t know if it’s right, but I sure hope it’s not “my piss”) ). All you have to do is input the url of, say, your blog, and that of the person you’d like to check out. The program will then go through the RSS feed content and search for keywords that recur through the blog entries. Based on the recurrence of these particular keywords on both blogs, the compatibility of the persons who own the blogs will be evaluated. The result will change depending on the updates made to the blog. According to the news released by ITMedia, for example if the words “soup,” “rice” or “menu” appear frequently, then the evaluation report will give something like, “the two of you often talk about o-bento (but I guess dining out would be preferable to o-bento).

So what would they think of next? How many compatibility tests are out there already?Just for fun, perhaps, it would be worth checking out. Unfortunately, I think this works exclusively for Japanese blogs only. But I do wonder if a similar system has already been developed for English-written blogs. Might be useful to those singletons out there who are still in the market, errr, searching for their soulmates.