Neography 2.o  -

I have a weird interest in Japanese commercials, and not those 'zOMFG how funny!' ones that seem totally otherworldly, but normal, every-day commercials. They're fascinating to me because of their differences from what I'm used to in Canadian (and to a lesser extend, Australian) ads. I think they're a fascinating insight into a different culture.

So I record them. I've got over 300 on my server in Japan for everyone to enjoy (if you're into that) but the reason I bring it up here is a recent crop of game ads I recorded.

These are perhaps less interesting culturally, but they're about games so... here they are!

Pink PSP
New PSP Colours
Secret of Mana 4
DS Cooking Generations
DS Chocobo
PS2 Gundam S
Wii Kororinpa
DS DragonQuest
DS Card Fighters

There are over 300 more available!*

(There's More!)

As some of you might remember, after writing my Mario Sprites article I was given the opportunity to write a book focusing on video game sprites. Included in the book were several game sprite histories like the Mario one. One of them is Castlevania.

I've put it online, along with some updates and what I hope are slightly better captions describing the sprite sources. Included is every pre-DS 2D castlevania main character released from 1986 to 2003. They're divided into six distinct groups, more or less divided by hardware era. In addition there are the ugly-vanias, the ports to platforms that might better have been left ignored.

Please have a look!

Acclaim magazine has run a short article on parkour, and have used a couple of my pictures:



Larger versions of those two pics are here:
Top image
Bottom Image

Woo, etc!

Sadly the cover's not mine.

I've been working on my JAMMA gear here at home, trying to make my arcade games run on my TV. After a couple of weeks fucking around with joysticks and RGB cables I finally got things working, more or less.

I've got a weird problem with the TV, the image skips and rolls frequently, enough to be annoying but not enough to prevent play. I tried everything to fix it, and as a last resort I decided to try ANOTHER power supply (this being the third).

When I was in Japan I picked up a surplus PC power supply unit (PSU) and I pulled it out of storage, and checked it out. 50/60Hz (good), 100V & 240V (good). I plugged it in and turned it on and BAM, smell of smoke and asplodey bits.

Turns out the 100V/200V switch was hidden under a metal mounting plate, and I fried it before ever getting to try it out.

It's been bugging me for a while. I see it most on sites written by people who can't write, but sometimes I'll see it on sites mixed in with words from people who can and it surprises me. Recently someone I know did it, and I gave him shit for it. He demanded I prove to him it was wrong, and so I set out to do exactly that.

couple things versus couple of things

I maintain that 'couple things' is just plain wrong. If you omit the OF you're doing it wrong.

Searching google for things like this is maddeningly difficult. Eventually I tried dictionary.com to see what they could offer, and found the following two Usage Notes:

--Usage Note: The shortened phrase a couple, without OF (The gas station is a couple miles from here), is an Americanism of recent development that occurs chiefly in informal speech or representations of speech. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary) (Bold emphasis mine)

--Usage Note: The of in the phrase a couple of is often dropped in speech, but this omission is usually considered a mistake, especially in formal contexts. Three-fourths of the Usage Panel finds the sentence I read a couple books over vacation to be unacceptable; however, another 20% of the Panel finds the sentence to be acceptable in informal speech and writing. (The American Heritage® Dictionary)

Basically it's about as gramatically correct as ain't.

I've talked about this before in a hilarious comic.

That is all, carry on.

It's been busy times around here.

You may have noticed in a very recent post I recently took a trip to Sydney. It was the first Australian national jam for the parkour peoples. It was an interesting time, Zumi and I had no trouble navigating our way around Sydney, saw some sights, rode the pathetic monorail, people-watched for a while, slept in the park. Sydney's a lot colder than Brisbane, dunno why anyone would want to live there. Our experience with Sydney people as a whole left us feeling the entire city is populated with angry people.

The jam was fun, you can read a little more about that if you like. Check out the gallery!

Sunday Oct. 15 was Drive Day. Four of us Renault Sport drivers got together and tore up the backroads. There are some brutally awesome roads around here, and we put our vehicles to the test. Here are some pics.

I recently had some pictures published in a local 'scene' magazine put out by a chain of nightclubs. There's a scan of the two-page article right here.

I've started a new website: NFGphoto.com. So far so good.

So we rocked up to the airport and filed into the plane like good sheep, only to find that our window seat was a dirty lie of the worst sort. What kind of bastard fills in a window??

So, an update.

I called Customs about the airsoft pistol they didn't want me to have. They said I couldn't import it without a permit, but in order to get a permit I needed to get a license, and for that I needed to know what category of wickedly dangerous firearm this plastic gun really was.

It's a class H, an air powered pistol.

The customs guy assured me that in order to get a license I had to have the gun pass safety testing, which it wouldn't because it's plastic. Nice work, despite being plastic it's dangerous enough to be outlawed, but because it's plastic they couldn't approve it for use. That was, he was quite firm in telling me, the end of it.

In Australia you also need a license to have ammunition. This must naturally extend to nearly weightless plastic BB pellets. Despite confiscating a bag of 2,000 pellets Customs left about 20 pellets in the box I received. "Oh," I thought. "Oh shit, I'm in possession of illegal ammunition!" So I called Customs again, and the conversation went something like this:

"I need a license for ammunition, don't I?"
"yes"
"But you left 20 of them in the box."
"Oh.. well, they're just plastic balls."
"Yeah, well, it was just a plastic GUN, and you need a license for THAT."
"Oh..."
"So do I need a license to dispose of them properly? Should I take them somewhere?"
"Well, they're... Uh..."

and I think she started to doubt my mental faculties at this point:

she says "OK look, can you send them back to us?"

That's right folks. In Australia you can't have plastic guns and you need to send plastic balls to customs for safe, licensed disposal.

UPDATE: My dad points out I probably can't send illegal ammunition through the mail.

I've been abused in the past for hating on Australia. I'd like to take this moment to write some positive words about this country. Specifically, I'd like to talk about Australia's super-happy protective gun laws.

Let's start with the backstory. Nolan sent me an airsoft gun from Korea. Customs in Australia seized it and sent me an 8-page letter detailing the reasons for seizure and the methods for claiming the gun. Bottom line, I need an import license, the same license I'd need to import a high-powered hunting rifle, to import this $5 toy plastic gun.

Australia is so eager to protect its citizens that it has classed a toy gun in the same category as real rifles. I need a license to import it, but to get that I need a license to own it, but to get that I need a REASON to own it, and to get that I have to get permission from a landowner to shoot it on his property.

Let's recap:

Someone who owns land needs to give me written permission to shoot a plastic gun on his land.
The government needs to give me a license to shoot this plastic gun on his land.
The government needs to give me a license to import this plastic gun to shoot on his land.
The government needs me to apply to get my newly licensed toy gun out of customs.

Let's be clear: It's a plastic gun. It shoots plastic pellets. It has a spring inside, it's not a high-powered maglev CO2-driven armour-piercing plastic gun. It can't pierce the skin of any normal human.

Booyah, Australia for the win!

So not long ago I had to call 3, my cellular provider. While we waited for answers I chatted up the girl who answered the phone.

The company that pays them chooses their name. Though she said her name was "Julia" she confessed that it wasn't her real name, and said it was assigned to her when she started working there. Company policy prohibits them from giving out their real names, which is unfortunate.

It's an interesting tack, giving random names (but assuredly not using the same one twice) to your employees. I can't help but wonder if that doesn't lend their job a sense of unreality, and whether it prevents them from taking the job seriously on any level. I mean, if I rocked up to work and people called me Dave all day I think I'd have to find that pretty weird.

So I sold my soul and picked up a new cellphone. Another two years under the heel of 3, but now I've finally got a phone I can enjoy. Why, you might ask, do I hate the old one so much? why do I now hate Motorola with a fierce passion? I'll tell you why:

1. If the camera was accidentally activated, it would never shut off and the battery would go dead.
   
2. while charging the screen wouldn't shut off, it was on like a fucking lighthouse in your bedroom.
   
3. there were menu items that were blank. You could highlight and select them only to see an error and get booted back to the main screen.
   
4. the camera was ass, it was so ass it would have been bested by my first digicam back in 1996. 1.3 megapixels of crap.
   
5. the memory card slot was under the battery.
   
6. the little joystick was between the 5 and 2 keys, and was never totally comfortable to use.
   
7. the battery would go dead in 24 hours even if I didn't use it.
   
8. the image viewer only used half the screen.
   
9. selecting '50%' didn't show the image at half size, it showed it at half of the half-screen size it was at. Ditto for 25%.
   
10. the digital zoom didn't enlarge the image, it cropped it, so on the phone it looked like it was zoomed in, but on the PC it was just smaller.
    
11. the little loop for a wrist-strap was so badly designed it was a lengthy ordeal to actually thread something through it.
    
12. it wouldn't auto-lock the keypad.
    
13. the alarm clock wouldn't work at all if you didn't leave the phone at the main menu.
    
14. it had a nice high-res screen, but used such a large unchangable font the extra resolution was wasted.
    
15. the phone didn't charge from USB, and the USB cable covered the power port, so if the USB cable was attached for, say, accessing the internet, the phone would quickly go dead. Use, recharge, use, recharge. Stupid.
    
    Seriously, Motorola, this phone is fucking pathetic. You guys should be ashamed. Other companies should be using this as a case study in how badly things can go completely wrong.
    
    

This is a Renault 5 GTE. It's the last model made before the Clio and is, IMHO, a better looking car. It's all sharp edges, more agressive, less girlycar. That said it didn't go quite like a Clio, though I'd wager that it cornered nearly as well.

It was a homologation special, this. Despite the appearance it was not a GTturbo, it instead had a normally aspirated 1.7 litre engine, multiport injected, with a massive over-the-top intake. The speedo only went to 220, but I can confirm that it would easily do 190 given a straight stretch of road.

This is the only car of its kind in North America. It's nigh impossible to import a car into the US or Canada, but this particular model was brought over by an immigrant as 'personal effects'. The government-run insurance body registered it as a 1987 Renault Encore, the closest match they had for it. My father saw it on the street in vancouver a couple of times and eventually tracked down the owner, and they swapped phone numbers. A while after that, this poor guy crashed it, and couldn't afford to get parts for it. My dad swapped my mom's Renault GTA (a 2-litre sport version of the Alliance) for the GTE, and proceeded to order a massive pile of parts from Renault France.

(There's More!)

I still don't have internet at home. My ISP has thrice requested connection at my house and thrice been told it had failed. The reason given the first two times was that I already had ADSL - the third time they got an error they'd never seen. Something about an already requested code, or something equally obtuse. They said I had to call Telstra, the national telecom monopoly.

To no one's great surprise Telstra said I had to get the ISP to take care of it, since the problem was with Telstra wholesale, who won't talk to the little people, only ISPs.

So I called the ISP back and they were disgusted that Telstra would say such a thing, and were convinced they were simply passing me off.

So I called my mobile provider, 3, and asked for their $30 monthly internet plan. 100MB for thirty bucks seems like a better deal than $4/MB, but get this - while the last guy said I could have it applied to my account in 4-24 hours, the truth of the matter was that it would only be enabled at the start of the next billing cycle, the 13th of next month. If I'd only called yesterday, the thirteenth, she said I could have had it ready that very day.

Instead I had to wait a month - A MONTH! Preposterous said I. The poor girl - Anna was the name given to her by 3 (She was not allowed to tell me her real name) - offered to see if there was anything she could do, and promised to call me back inside of two hours.

She didn't.

She called back four hours later, which would have angered me but for the fact it was 10PM, well beyond normal hours, to let me know that while they couldn't give me the internet plan until next month they'd be able to let me use the internet this month at the obscene non-plan rates, and they'd credit me next month for the amount I spend this month.

Hot damn, says I! Hot damn indeed. No massive DLs for me, but I'm online and that's what counts.

I have no internet at home. It's been almost three weeks. First it takes a week for the useless Australian monopoly that is Telstra to actually TURN OFF the ADSL at my old place, then it takes a week to confirm that yes, in fact, it's taking too damned long to turn it back on, and then a week later they say that "Oh, we tried to turn it on, but the computer said you already had ADSL from a different provider."

What the hell.

Seriously. It's NOT THIS HARD. Assholes, I want my internet back!

I can't fit enough porn on my 256MB USB-key at work to make the effort worthwhile.

So far so good.



Hard to imagine it's been ten years, but it has. June 15, 1996, we tied the knot. There's been no shortage of adventures since then, and with a little luck there'll be a few more to come.

The Book (Amazon US) has consumed a large part of my life in the last twelve months. It was an incredible ordeal, a real pain in the ass. The story goes something like this:

After agreeing to do the book, but before a contract is signed, the focus changes. Thanks to the US publisher/distributor the book shifts to cover more of the mobile space, cellphones and their ilk. Everyone with half a brain knows that the cellular industry is a faddish maelstrom of moneygrubbers and, as a platform for games or art, it's a wasteland. From a development perspective there's little substantive difference between developing images for a mobile screen or a TV screen. Sure, there's a difference between modern consoles and mobile phones, but phones today are remarkably similar to consoles ten or fifteen years ago. It's not different, and from the perspective of pixel art, it's completely uninteresting. But what the publisher wants the publisher gets. Thinking I could work in a lot of screenshots of cellular games, I agreed to do the book and signed the contract.

(There's More!)

Things are happening. Things are always happening, of course, but lately they're happening a lot.

First, the big news: I got paid for the book. More on that soon. With the money I've paid off most of my car loan, and I've earmarked a couple of dollars for some new toys.

My love of photography has increased lately. With the book money I'll be getting a new lens, a wicked nifty 18-200mm beauty, which will allow much greater flexibility than the 18-70mm I'm using now. I look forward to that. The other day I took a picture that I'm really impressed with.

I joined a gym. I've been going frequently and am rewarded with near instant results. I've always had a pretty decent metabolism, and it's nice to see that it's not failing me in spite of my advanced age. I leg-pressed 300kg the other day. Almost triple my body weight. Yow, who da man? (Hint: me)

Zumi's still in Japan, she's still sick, but getting better slowly. I look forward to her return, but in the meantime the girls at Domino's keep me in smiles.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: We're evicted. The landlord sold the house we rent so I'm scrambling to find a new place. Four weeks is all I'm allotted, it sucks, like I need this extra stress? Bah. There's no houses to choose from either, rental properties are down 75% compared to a couple of months ago. <sigh>

In my never ending quest to become an amazing, fawned-over chick-magnet photographer, I went out last night and took a bunch of pics of the Brisbane Buddha/Lantern festival. 200 pics made, about 10 worth showing off. That's about par.

There was a lot of experimentation, so every shot was taken several times, to see what worked and what didn't. The hope is this'll see me ready for instant action when the time arises.

Brisbane from South Bank. I had the white balance set to tungsten, which gives everything a very cool, blue appearance. City lights look excellent this way. This one's from the same spot, facing the other way.

A fireworks shot. The problem with fireworks is they all look the same. I have 50+ pictures of pretty explosions, but after you see ten of them they get kind of boring.

Some candles from the large shrine/display. I've always wanted to do a shot like that, with a very shallow depth of field. My old camera wouldn't do it at all, everything was in focus. I think it turned out well. Again the WB was tungsten, otherwise the whole image was too red.

On the way home I took a picture of my car in the parking lot. I'm very pleased with this one. There's a gritty feel lent by the concrete which I really like, the "ENTRY" text looks neat, and there's a certain dynamicism to it all.

Here's a train I found in Corinda, covered in grafitti.

I've been experimenting with other techniques and fancy trickery. Here's a Hori Gamecube controller that, while interesting, serves more as a learning experience than an actual nice image. Here's me shilling for RedBull, a cow under a tree, A butterfly candle,

Latest images in my gallery. are here.

More Brisbane shots are here.

I haven't updated in a while, I'm sorry.

Let's see... I'm back in Australia and I've been running amok with the new camera. I've put up a new gallery (again) since the old one sucked. The new one doesn't have a "Show latest images" button but in all other respects it's pretty great.

Best image taken this week: Looming Buildings. There's no shortage of other Brisbane shots in the gallery, and a lot of them are quite decent, if I dare say so myself. Have a look at the best looking Burger King in the world, and the Pancake Manor, a 24 hour pancake joint inside an old converted church.

After work I often crest a hill to see a sunset that really is impressive for reasons I can't put my finger on. While it seems plain it just cries out "Enjoy me!" and so I do. I snapped this picture, which looks all the better having been taken with the new camera.

I thought I'd mentioned it, but I don't see it anywhere, I took some pics of an accident where an idiot trucker going too fast around a corner tipped his truck right off a bridge. He survived, but his truck was a mess. Carnage 1, Carnage 2, Carnage 3.

Also, I got a couple of really groovy shots of lightning with the old camera: Lightning 1 and lightning 2.

Some new pics of the Megane.

I tried shooting in RAW mode today, which is basically allowing the camera to save a massive ton of extra data compared to the basic JPG, which can be edited to no small extent later. The problem is these files are massive, 3x larger than JPGs, and they take forever to work with. I messed around with them and decided I didn't like the extra hassle, so screw RAW.

While cruising around town on the City Cat again today. While taking pictures of nothing in particular, two chinese guys (I assume they were chinese, and I assume they were students as they got off at QUT) asked if I could take a picture. I assumed they wanted me to take a picture of them, but no - one guy stands next to me and his friend takes a picture of us. How bizarre, I've no idea why I was picture-worthy for them, but I got my revenge!

While out with my dad we ran into a group of Parkour... Guys.. They were running and jumping, just a practice session. I sure as shit wish I had heard of this when I was younger, it looks like a mad amount of fun. Here's their site.

That's all for now!

Had quite a busy time around here. Well, not so much busy perhaps as... Camera-filled. I picked up a great hand-strap for the new camera, which essentially bolts the camera to my hand, and since the DSLR never needs to be shut off I can walk around with a camera ready to take an image in less than a second flat. My old camera took several times longer than that just to turn on, never mind zoom and focus and release. So it's been a magical fun time.

For no other reason than "I can!" I took this interesting shot. It turned out very clear, but really it's kind of pointless.

While shopping at a local pet store I took some pictures of their beetle supplies. Stacks and stacks of exotic imported beetles, and entire shelves full of food and cages and accessories and so on. I love this stuff. You walk into a pet store in Australia and ask about beetles and the clerk goes "What? Eeeew, we only carry dogs and cats, birds and fish. What's wrong with you?" What's wrong with me indeed. For fun, here's a map of beetles around the world.

To try out the camera a little I went out for a walk at night, and took some pictures. This one looks like a snow strewn trail, this one kind of looks like a disneyland fantasy, and this one has a lot of lights.

Tokyo Tower
We walked to the Tokyo Tower last night, and I took some 100+ pictures while we were out. In the interest of maintaining sanity around here, I present to you only a few.

En route to the tower, there was this lovely park of sorts, with an interesting contrast of old fashioned silhouettes and new buildings in the background. A little farther on, I spied this incredible view of the tower, through some trees. When you get close to the tower, you can see how much it resembles the Eiffel tower, but orange. This image shows the two observation decks more clearly, and this one shows the rather intricate girder structure. If it were me I'd have painted them red and thrown some enormous Mario and Donkey Kong sprites on them. Finally, here's a shot of the foot of the tower.

Tokyo from the Tower
From way up in the tower you can see an awful lot of Tokyo. We had originally hoped to get there during daylight hours and maybe catch a sunset, but we were too late. It was pretty foggy besides, so I'm sorry to say you'll have to settle for some night shots of Tokyo from 150 and 250 metres:
Tokyo at Night 1
Tokyo at Night 2
Tokyo at Night 3
Tokyo at Night 4
Tokyo at Night 5

Tokyo at Night: Street Level
After the tower, we walked back to the Yamanote line and headed back to Ueno. Between these two locations, I snapped a few interesting shots, like this incredible street shot. Try as I might, I couldn't match it, and I swear I really did try. I did however get this really neat image of a piece of sculpture.

Random Tokyo Street Scenes, near Ueno Station
Ueno Station Overpass.
Ueno Station street.
A temple in Asakusa.

Cats
This is Hiro. He's old, but oh-so-lovable.
Charan, an ex-stray.
Goku.

It's picture time! I got the new camera, but most of the images below were taken with the old one. There's some interesting stuff here, along with no small amount of dross.

On the flight over I got bumped into business class, and was served this amazing meal. I can't remember the last time I had bad food on a plane, really. When arriving at Narita, I took a picture of what appears to be a madman's solar panel, overcome by moss. After crashing for the night, we hit Akihabara where we saw this lovely creature and met up with a friend from Europe.

While in Akihabara, we found a surprising number of street performers. Young people, mostly girls, trying to get their faces out there, trying to be noticed. Or, perhaps, merely attention whores tired of singing in the karaoke box near their homes. They're pretty much entirely talentless. This not completely unattractive lass was completely unremarkable. She could sing, but you just couldn't care. She wasn's alone in her mediocrity, this girl had a tambourine but was otherwise just as forgettable. This girl had a guitar, and a hat, and was quite talented if the slobbering mass of otaku photographers around her was any indication. Also note, she has a lacky. Then there were these three girls, whose voices were shrill enough to shatter glass. Because there are three of them, I offer another image.

The last girl was amazing. She didn't look amazing, couldn't dance, and she sure as hell couldn't sing. She was terrible. From here we headed back to the main drag and ran into this freak of nature. Seriously, how does anyone get out of bed, let alone go out in public, when they look like that? And he's on TV to boot.

This girl was gorgeous, and she kept on smiling and handing out band pamphlets aven when the cops were hassling the rest of the band for setting up shop in the middle of the street. The sign behind the girl reads "No street performances".

And now, some Akihabara pictures:
The Akihabara crowd was present, an ever-moving stream of people. Check out this shot from Mister Donut's 2nd floor window. What a crowd! Here's the Taito S@Y arcade, one of the largest Don Quixote stores, the Tsukumo tower, the Rocket Soft Centre and a lovely night shot of Ishimaru and LAOX.

This is what you see exiting Akihabara station, here's two more electronics dealers, and finally, Club Sega and the Akihabara main drag.

Here are a couple of rainy-day snapshots of flowers in the neighbor's yard:
Purple and Red.

I'm back in Japan for ten days. I arrived yesterday in the early evening, after what can only be described as a fantastic flight. When checking in at the Brisbane airport I had asked for first row seats, since the first row of economy seats have by-your-side storage compartments and lots of legroom. The guy running the checkin said he could get me first row window, no problem. Great, I said, and it was great.

It wasn't until I got onto the plane and the stewardess directed me to the very front of the plane that I realized - first row, the very front of the plane, is business class. Wahoot! I was pampered in luxury the whole way over. The flight, normally about eight hours, seemed like six. Or five! Barely had I gotten used to it all that it was over. Good times.

So Japan - wow. It's like I never left. Except everything's different. Despite all the familiar neighborhoods and sights, there's a ton of new buildings near the place I'm staying. And wow, the changes made to 7-11. Crazy. All the smells of the old house I'm in are immediately familar from the year I spent living here when I first moved to Japan, and Zumi's mom cooked up a massive great meal, the kind she used to make. It was deleriously cool.

It's nice to be home. Despite never really synching with Japan I do feel more at home here than Australia, no doubt because I've only been in Australia for twelve months. Japan's so wonderfully dynamic. Every week there's something new in 7-11, or some crazy event to go see, or some wacky thing on TV. By comparison Australia's in a coma. Nothing changes, tho from what everyone says it's much better now than it was even a decade ago.

Yeah, that's true, even my own recollections of a decade ago in Australia lend credence to that, but still... Australians are too complacent and too unwilling to complain, so nothing changes for them. The Japanese on the other hand are kept in a constant state of distraction, to take their minds off their cramped little polluted corrupted society.

I really feel that once you've travelled you realize that everywhere sucks, but in different ways. When you live a life as ludicrously unproductive as mine, where the important things are trivial and ill-considered at best, then you're just never happy.

(There's More!)

I've installed a new gallery script, it's the new permanent home for all my photos.

Here it is.

It uses the Coppermine gallery, which is dreadfully ugly but very functional. Someday I'll try and pretty it up. Now, on to the pictures!

Of course there are some of The Megane, this time in the dark under a light in a parking lot. I think they turned out really nice, even the badge is very dark and moody. Also, key card!

(There's More!)

There are no good email clients. Every single one of them has a flaw, a bug, a problem that prevents it from being totally great. In my never-ending quest to find a decent app, I tried Foxmail, a chinese program that works very well, is very polished, and does more or less everything I want. The only place it falls down is in HTML mail representation - it uses Explorer, and it doesn't show the URL when you hover over a link. (Talking of Foxmail 6 beta 2 here).

Microsoft antispyware freaked out when it ran a scan of my system. Foxmail 6 Beta 2 comes with CnsMin Browser Modifier, an Internet Explorer plugin of sorts that converts chinese characters into usable URLs. It's considered a "high level threat", though it seems innocuous enough. In fact, I seem to remember it asking if I wanted international character ability. Doesn't matter much, I don't use IE, so I nuked it anyway.

FoxMail also has an RSS reader, though it comes preinstalled with a billion Chinese links and crashed after I deleted a dozen or so of them.

Nice mail app, they don't have any English info on their page, but by deleting the Chinese language file it magically starts running in English. Go figure.

Not sure if I'll keep running it, that Explorer/URL thing is a big problem for me, but in all other respects it's great software.

I want to be a photographer. The more pictures I take the more I like taking pictures.

Here and here are two pics I took tonight, and if you'll wander yourselves this way there's a bunch of pictures of Brisbane at night.

Last sunday was a RenaultSport drive day, and I took a small handful of pics.

Finally, while out at the airport on Friday, I found these amazing Cotton Harlequin Bugs. Yes, that's actually what they're called. Or you could call them Hibiscus Harlequin Bugs. Whatever, they're very orange, but despite appearances they're not beetles.

I realize I haven't posted most of my recent pictures here. Whups. There's a bunch that you might like to check out.

Here's a bunch of the Brisbane skyline at night. In a similar vein, I offer you a set of Goodna at night, complete with motion trails and time-lapse trains.

Recently I checked out the Brisbane Auto Show 2006, but I was quite disappointed to find there weren't many girls. It was, in fact, a really boring show. Got a couple of good pics out of it though.

In downtown Brisbane there's a series of shops, skyscrapers, and parks. You see the most incredible bodies sometimes, as well as Buddy Jesus, chicks with cat-ears and other stuff.

I'm getting a new camera. I tested it out, and these are the test shots.

One of the girls I work with occasionally throws some pretty fun parties.

Here's a cicada shell, a bearded dragon, a goanna lizard.

Finally, I've been growing habanero plant. Read on for some details about what happens when you dare touch a habanero pepper.

(There's More!)

This morning I was assaulted by the CEO of the company I work with. Names have been changed 'cause it's really not important. This was my reply, sent to everyone in the company who deals with me on a regular basis. I sent it on the advice of my boss (Daddy).

The back story: Our company has an e-commerce solution that has suffered a lack of development for a year as the old programmer jumped ship halfway through and didn't leave a lot of documentation or source code behind. Customers can't do much with it, as the programmers have been basically recreating one wheel after another to catch up to where we were, with working modfiable code. Two days ago one of our newest customers, the nicest people you could possibly meet, finally had enough of waiting for a simple problem to be resolved, and emailed the head cheese.

The cheese called me, and we had what I thought was a one-sided conversation where he ignored what I had to say and demanded I follow their established procedure. After one completely failed attempt to explain myself (I've set up a wiki and several other tools for our Australian office, which head office won't even read, let alone participate in), I capitulated on every score, and shortly thereafter I sent in the required documentation in the required format, but managed to use the wrong URL. I went to bed, and shortly thereafter the staff in the other office - a world away, in a different timezone, rolled into work only to find I'd prepared documents they couldn't find. That's about when the CEO went batshit insane.

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It would seem Vodafone have no idea WTF they're doing in Japan. They were consistently innovating, making giant advances with the assistance of their hardware partners (mostly Sharp, but also Toshiba, Sanyo and a handful of others) and offering many features well in advance of other carriers. Docomo gets all the press overseas, but Vodafone was first with great family pricing, 2-megapixel cameras and a unified gaming structure: There are only 4 levels of gaming for Japanese Vodafones, where trying to find compatible games on Docomo is a bit of a minefield.

But I digress.

It would seem that Vodafone K.K., the Japanese arm, simply couldn't or wouldn't communicate with the rest of Vodafone's global operation, and none of the world-class phones, customer-first philosophy or affordable pricing made it out to the rest of us. Vodafone worldwide is an evil giant, with the same shitty phones as everyone else, and the same shitty rates. Vodafone is, it would seem, better at colluding with its enemies, the other carriers, than it is with its purported partner in Japan.

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It's official.

As of now, I hate Australia.

Allow me to tell you a story about my incredible inability to make a collect call.

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When I was a lot younger, about nine years old, I was reading a lot of sci-fi. Ringworld Engineers was a book I picked up from my school library, and I read it from cover to cover. The book was a bit beyond me at the time, I remember getting quite lost while reading it. I don't remember much of it, beyond the central character's name (Louis Wu) and his problem (He was a wirehead). I liked the concept of ringworld, and I vaguely remember thinking it was an immense thing, this ringworld, and I couldn't imagine trying to find anything useful at that kind of ridiculous scale.

Recently I picked up a copy of the first book, Ringworld, and read it again as an adult.

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I'm going to get a new camera. I probably won't be able to afford it until I get paid for the book, but that said I can't really afford anything until I get paid for the book. Moving on:

I currently have a Canon G3, which has served me very well for a very long time. It's the top of the line for Canon, before moving into the DSLR gear, which I've always feared. DSLR introduces a whole new level of complication I've sought to avoid, but I think I've reached a point where I need t move into a camera that's a little more advanced.

Primarily I'm looking for two things:
- Speed. I want something that powers up instantly, focuses in an instant and generally operates quickly. The G3 tends to 'hunt' for focus too much, and takes a good three seconds to power on.
- Low light, low noise. The G3 couldn't even focus in low light half the time. Trying to take a picture of a possum in a tree at night was nearly impossible, it'd make four blurry shots for every clear one.

So I settled on the Nikon D70s, a DSLR which has achived practically universally great reviews. Its failings are few, and its benifits are many. And it's a 50% resolution increase over what I've got (4MPix to 6MPix).

I'm really, really excited.

I went into Brisbane today, to the Queen Street Mall (it's not, like, a MALL) and hung out for a few hours. It was pretty awesome. First I arrived late and missed my train into town, and since I was going in to buy books I didn't bring any with me, so it was a long boring 25 minute wait for the next train.

Anyway, that boring tale behind us, the day was a lot of fun. They're filming another commercial in town, so one major street is blocked off. A bunch of Koreans were hard at work, though they didn't actually DO anything while I was there. So I wandered around, ate mall-pizza (in, like, a MALL) and then sat around and watched people for a while.

And I took their pictures.

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A few days ago I posted about Livedoor still selling Horienergy on their site. The energy drink, no longer available from AM/PM, is no longer available from Livedoor either.

The site still lists the sale page when you search for it, but the page is now gone.



Translated for your convenience.

So I've been clearing out a lot of shit on ebay, partially to lighten the load (shoulda done that in Japan, I'm an idiot) and partially because I'm totally broke. Stupid car. Stupid rent. Stupid Australia.

Anyway.

People kept asking me about one of my auctions, a game + controller set. "Have you got a picture of the paddle?" they'd ask. "Yes," I replied, "It's on the box." Dumbasses, there's a picture of the damned thing on the box, what do you want from me?

So the auction ends in 25 minutes, and I check it to see what the bidding's up to.

Oh.

I forgot the picture of the box.

I just hate that. I'm such a retard.
<puts righteous rage back into the box for another time>
<pulls humble facade out of its box and tries it on>

In case you're wondering why I talk so much about Livedoor, the Japan Times has a great article on the subject. Some choice quotes:

"...Horie's aggressive M&A style, which has been intensely covered by the media, helped change the way people think..."

"In its reported quest to become the world's No. 1 firm in terms of market value, Livedoor bought out about 40 companies."

Livedoor "tried to take control of Nippon Broadcasting System Inc.", which "was probably the first hostile takeover (attempt) of that size in Japan."

"The young Internet tycoon first grabbed attention when he tried to buy the Kintetsu Buffaloes baseball team in late June 2004.
The team flatly rejected the offer.
Livedoor then applied to start a new team but was again snubbed by the closed circle of big companies that run the league.
Massive media coverage of the failed bid, however, made him a young national hero who challenged the conservative old guard."

It's a good article. Go read it.

[note: the linked URL above was deprecated without notice by the Japan Times. It's been corrected. For those who care, the text is included in the rest of this post.]

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So Horie, the charismatic leader of Livedoor, has been arrested. Then he resigned. Someone else has taken his place. You might assume the ride's basically over for him, and I think that's probably going to prove to be the case for the short term.

Interestingly, Crisscross says Livedoor's #2 man implicated Horie, but on Mainichi's site they report on Horie's denial, and refusal to sign a confession.

CrissCross also says Horie has offered his resignation, though Livedoor hasn't accepted it, but Mainichi counters with the news that Livedoor's already named a successor (who's already slagging Horie!).

In an uncharacteristic response (For a Japanese politician) Prime Minister Koizumi says he'll accept responsibility for backing Horie. FujiTV, which bought 12% of Livedoor to settle Livedoor's takeover attempt, is dumping stock in apparent breach of contract. The Tokyo Stock Exchange has limited Livedoor trading to a mere hour and a half to prevent it from 'disrupting' the otherwise enjoyable fall of Japanese tech stocks.

Koizumi's not the only person who's distancing himself from Horie. Several politicians are suddenly finding their previous Horie-backing something they'd like to forget.

Joi Ito has some interesting things to say about the Livedoor saga: "My wise attorney in Japan always tells me to try to stay out of the press. There is an old saying in Japan that the press always get to use you twice. They write about you to push you up and they write about you to tear you down. This is clearly the case with Horie."

He goes on to offer four pieces of advice:
1) Manage media exposure
2) Don't believe the hype
3) Don't say or do ANYTHING that might be used to tear you down
4) Don't piss people off for fun

Horie's rocketship ride to the top made him a lot of enemies, and they're falling over themselves to knock him off his lofty perch now. AMPM convenience stores have gone so far as to stop selling his energy drink. "We can't put products on our shelves that are connected to someone who has been arrested," a company representative said. (Mainichi)

Business is still continuing as usual at Livedoor. Yahoo, who you might consider a Livedoor competitor, still shows the cutest little Livedoor Credit (one of many popular, legal loan-sharks in Japan) ads on Yahoo Auctions:


Livedoor's site still offers the drink for sale, though I suggest some changes to the banner:

There's a reason the movie industry doesn't want people downloading movies: They'll find out they suck and not pay to see it in the theatre (or anywhere else).

Syriana sucks.

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So I went into town today to buy some books. More about that later.

What I saw will shock and amaze you!

This is my hand, holding a hamburger, in front of a trainload of cows that are about to become hamburgers. Notice their lightning eyes!! While they were stopped, their delicious fate hit home and many of them pissed themselves. In cold hearted fear, no doubt.



And now, some real live scientologists:

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There are three TV shows in my life right now. Read on, if you care.

1. Boston Legal
My father returned from a trip to Canada and said that pretty much everyone he knew was watching this new show called Boston Legal. If you don't know (and I can't imagine anyone else is as out of touch as I am about this) it's a lawyer show with a demented comedic bent. It features William Shatner (Kirk from Star Trek) in a role he seems to have been born for - an aging, once-great lawyer with mad cow disease who speaks his mind in a hilarious, lascivious fashion. Candace Bergen (Murphy Brown) is his ex, and a partner in the firm. The pedigree of the actors is unquestionable and the writing practically... Well, if it was a comic their word balloons would scintillate. It has a lot of what I want in a show - good writing, good dialogue, snappy comebacks and little speeches which virtually resonate in my mind.

2. House
A show about a doctor who is a real misanthrope. He believes everyone is a liar, as if it's a condition of humanity, and he's not shy about speaking his mind. He is as I see myself - angry, bitter, but having a fantastic time telling people exactly what he thinks about them. Also there's a fantastically cute girl in the show, who in season 2 got a makeover that makes her look just drop-dead. Umph!

3. BattleStar Galactica
It doesn't move fast enough, and it's intentionally drawing out the resolution of mankind's hatred of the Cylon doppelgangers. I can't watch it without screaming at the actors to just get over this irrationality and consider for a moment that this poorly written hatred is just a plot device. But the action scenes... Well, they're pretty damned cool, if short-lived. The cinematography is exceptional, all of the space battles have me cheering on the edge of my seat. More boom and less gab, please. And, oh yes, Grace Park. Yow.

That is all, carry on.

There's not really any question that 'the industry' (Pick one) is way off base with this whole DRM crusade. Digital means that only one un-restricted copy needs to exist and then anyone can make a copy of THAT file, and everyone who paid for a legitimate, restricted copy now owns something less useful than the pirated version.

Given that you pay more and get less, why would anyone do it? I sure as hell won't - there's not a signle piece of restricted-use content (music-wise, anyway) on my harddrive.

This topic comes about as a result of this forum thread. A quote from a post I made:

My problem with DRM is twofold:

1. I hate real CDs. I like their durability and their quality, but when I move or travel I curse their very existence. Heavy, and not very data-dense. It takes a 20kg pile of CDs to equal my 300g music player stuffed full of OGG files. And this is where the idea falls down. Copyright nazis would freak out if they found 2,000 audio files on my harddrive, unless I could prove I bought them. Having to lug around heavy, tangible proof is a PITA. What about the rips I made of CDs I've since thrown away? Do I have to delete them now? Bullshit, I say. The whole idea of ownership in a digital age needs to be completely re-thought.

2. Don't limit me. Fuck off, I bought it, I own it. NONE of these limits stop actual pirates. They ONLY harm legitimate purchasers. This goes for showing "Don't steal movies!" to people in the theatre too, it's fucking insulting.

I bash Australia a lot. It's expensive here, and the amenities are few. It's a beautiful place and the people are nice, but it costs a lot to live here.

But now, finally, Australia has won one.

Bubblewrap is cheaper than Japan. I thought it was nearly double the price until it arrived and turned out to be double the size. So it's cheaper. Wow, WTF will I do with 250m of bubble wrap? Seriously, I'll never use it up.

Livedoor, a Japanese portal company offering many Yahoo-like services, has long been an underdog in Japan, an unruly upstart challenging the old guard and, generally, kicking ass at it. (intro and recap here)

Well, Livedoor's in the news again. The crime? Basically Livedoor announced they were buying a company they already owned, and the Livedoor share price jumped up as a result.

From CrissCross: "According to prosecutors, Value Click Japan Inc, now called Livedoor Marketing Co, announced in October 2004 that it would turn a publisher, Money Life, into a wholly owned subsidiary through a stock swap.

"But Money Life had already been effectively controlled by the Livedoor group at that time because an investment fund, financed by Livedoor, had taken a 100% stake in the publisher, the prosecutors said."

Many observers are convinced this is a tar-and-feather campaign by the established powers. This has resulted in, as you might expect, the typical denials of wrongdoing, panicky stock selloffs, political posturing, and obligatory apologies.

It's bloody weird here. It's as if Australia's stuck in some sort of pre-revolution world where corporations are not answerable to their customers, where fundamental services can just go dead without explanation or apology, where things just run out.

Last week the power went out for over an hour. It was a clear evening, no storms, and suddenly BAM, no power. I can't even remember the last time this happened, it was so long ago. Before Australia, I mean. Here it happens a lot, as if electricity isn't something that can be controlled and guaranteed. It's still a mystery, it's hard.

Our internet at the office has been spotty lately. It's on for a couple of hours, it's off for a couple of hours. Like Canada, Australia has been divided into two non-competing territories between (in this case Fox Cable and Optus Cable), and where there's no competition there's no love for the customer. Calls to Optus go virtually unheeded. There's no problem, sir. A few other complaints, yes, maybe ten in your area, but there's no problem. The earliest a tech can get out here is ten days from our first complaint, as if having a node go down simply doesn't matter.

The other day the gas station ran out of gas. Can anyone tell me why this isn't incompetence of the highest order? As if it's hard to build stockpiles, reservoirs, or accurately predict demand? And don't get me started on the general acceptance of gas prices that shoot upwards every weekend! It's preposterous.

And Australians, by and large, accept it without comment or complaint.

It's been an interesting night.

First I found a microscopic baby gecko in the kitchen. After chasing him around for a while, I coerced him onto my hand.

Then I had a nasty, nasty shock. Witness The Lurking Horror!!

He's missing a leg. After hosing him down with enough poison to gas a moose he wouldn't f##king die, so I can only assume he sacrificed one leg to his gods to become immortal.

I took some new pictures recently. I'm particularly proud of the first one, a Spotted Katydid. The next is a Jewel Spider, then an unidentified grey spider, and finally some sort of beetle... You can click them for larger images.



There are, of course, more images of bugs and other animals.

For most of the five years I lived in Japan I was selling games on ebay. It was fun, back when you could get stuff cheap and sell it dear, but times changed. Still though I find stockpiles of games now and then and I sell them on ebay. Currently I've got about 85 games on auction, and I've got at least double that again to go up, in addition to a fairly sizable stack of hardware.

But ebay, oh how it's changed.

I posted an auction for a soft called Tennokoe Bank, it's a data backup card that allows a user to copy their save data from one machine to another. It's possibly the first 'memory card' system ever used. But ebay, that champion of all things straight and narrow, threw up this warning before I'd even finished posting the auction:



It pisses me off to no end that ebay caters so willingly to the DRM crowd, to the intellectual rights holders who insist they have a right to tell me what I can and cannot do with the stuff I purchased lawfully. Here they are giving me shit in advance, promising to investigate my auction, and threatening to turn me in to law enforcement! Ebay's always been like this.

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According to this New Scientist article dogs are 99% and 88% accurate at smelling and detecting lung and breast cancer in patients, with a miniscule 1% and 2% false-positive rate, respectively.

This isn't the first time New Scientist has talked about it, and National Geographic has mentioned as well that dogs can detect more than just cancer.

This is very interesting, and could lead to all sorts of reduced-cost detection of treatable cancers, and possibly to better, less invasive electronic testing as well.

Many of you might not know I've been writing a book. I don't talk about it much 'cause of the problems I've been having getting it done, and working with the publisher, but it's starting to look like it'll actually get printed, so here's an update.

It's nearly finished. I've completed the main body of text (some 40,000 words) and supplied about 99% of the images. Recently I finished writing all the captions for the images, which accounted for several thousand more words.

The whole adventure has been something of an ordeal,

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I finally redesigned the site, as you can see. Gone are the dark colours, and multi-coloured side-boxes which complicated and compromised the design. I hope all three of my irregular readers approve of the change. It's better than it was but, while I'm satisfied for now, there are still things I want to change. It's quite a lot of work making even these small changes; editing templates and CSS files, rebuilding archives to see how it looks, repeat.

Current news: Zumi's in Japan for a few months. Her health has been deteriorating lately as she found herself sucked into a spiral of not being able to eat 'cause of old stress, which resulted in a real inability to live normally, which caused new stress. So she's gone home to try and relax.

I've not posted to this blog in a long time, most because the layout sucked and I hated looking at it. It's much cleaner now, so let's hope that leads to more content. For now, a billion images for you.

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