With a head that feels like it’s going to burst, one grabs on to what one can to survive the days. Under my heading of, “why isn’t this game in the US yet?”, I’ve found the following Idol Master clip on YouTube sufficiently buoyant in cuteness. Now how’s that for a bad sentence? In any case, if this Japanese Xbox 360 game ever makes it to the US, I’ll be picking it up on day one.
Yesterday I was treated to a wonderful sight on the streets of Chicago. Despite the impending colder fall weather, I noticed a lot of miniskirts with black tights being worn. As a big fan of that combo, not only was I pleased, I briefly forgot all about the horrible head cold I’ve been suffering. Thank you Chicago ladies for defying the season! ^_^
Here’s some pure geek gold from xkcd. Just a reminder to us pros to never trust user input! It reminds me of the story behind the naming of Slashdot.
It’s kind of sad when kids start calling you old. Yesterday’s soccer scrimmage was, by popular demand, kids vs the old people. So I teamed up with my assistant coach plus a couple of parents to take on 7 girls in a cloud of soccer fury! It was a lot of fun, and I just could not believe the trash talk my youngest daughter was giving me about beating the old people. LOL, a couple of quick (and lucky) goals from me quieted things a bit and in the end you had a 2 to 2 tie score. Take that young-uns!
Besides managing to defend the honor of “old people”, I had the chance to utter a few words that are amongst my favorites from anime series, “I’m not goin easy on you!” And I didn’t, unfortunately, I think I overdid it on myself, and this morning am feeling very zombie like. Sadly, I can’t do anything about the passage of time, but I can, to borrow some more from the world of anime, get stronger. I’m quite pleased that my program of diet and exercise has paid off. I feel a lot better, and I can still move pretty fast. Not only that, my wife says I look better too, which coming from her, is very high praise. I still have a long way to go, but I haven’t hit the limit yet. So getting stronger is still a goal I can reach, though I’ll have to do it without a hyperbolic time chamber!
Okay, Halo 3 topped the Japanese game charts this week. That’s good news for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in Japan and may be a sign of a good future for the 360 in Japan. But if anyone still needs proof that the Japanese video game market is different in a lot of ways, take a look at this week’s top ten from gamesindustry.biz.
1. Halo 3 (Xbox 360)
2. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Toki (DS)
3. Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (PSP)
4. Tamagotchi DS (DS)
5. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Yami (DS)
6. Bleach Blade Battlers 2nd (PS2)
7. English Test 2 (DS)
8. Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters GX (PSP)
9. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PS3)
10. Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops + (PSP)
See number 7! English Test 2 on the DS, WTF!!
As I had hoped, the attack of the iPhone killers has begun. Verizon has fired the first shot with its soon to be released LG Voyager. First, this is a nice looking phone with a buttload of features, but iPhone killer it is not. Indeed, I’m not really sure that is the true intention anyway. The LG Voyager has features that I think are designed to keep the Verizon faithful, well, faithful. As long as the interface works well, and the phone comes in at a price point less than the iPhone, it will make a lot of people happy. I’m just happy that the popularity of the iPhone is starting to grace the whole US market with better phones through competition. Now if we could just get rid of that nasty locked phone business and long term contracts, then we could all ascend to cell phone Nirvana.
In the meantime, if Verizon really wants to move this phone, they need to hit us with some really sweet deals. I, for one, just bought a new phone a few months ago. So by the usual rules of the game, switching phones for me would be an expensive proposition. I might be persuaded to go with a Voyager, with the right deal. I like the hidden keyboard, and if the web browser is good, the Voyager may be just what I’ve been looking for. But without some incentive, I’ll probably continue to wait for the next version of the iPhone, and hopefully a wider range of providers.
My short answer to the question of whether geeks are cool yet, is no! Indeed, one could argue that by definition, being a geek necessarily means not being cool. Nevertheless, Cnet has launched a geek culture blog that is taking a different view. Maybe times have changed since I first ranted about this, still I would argue that while bits a geek culture may leak into the mainstream, the geeks themselves remain a despised class, the target of bullies in school, and offshoring layoffs in the work place. The work geeks do is important, and much of our modern society would cease to function without it, but the geeks themselves are not respected and seen as expendable. In the US, at least, until there is real respect for scientists, engineers, and intellectuals, being a geek can never be cool. What is respect? Respect is, in part, being able to be paid what you’re worth without having your job go overseas to someone who makes less than half the pay, and then hearing tech CEOs bemoan the lack of qualified US citizens to do the job!
It looks like I’m not the only one who thinks the Rush Hour films suck, Jackie Chan doesn’t like the Rush Hour series either! He said that he did the first one to get into the U.S. market, while the second and the horrid third one were done for the money and to satisfy fan demand. And in a great proof of his humanity, he said that he still doesn’t understand the humor of the films. Well that’s because there isn’t any! I suppose that makes Jackie the ultimate straight man!
After reading what he had to say, I really wish the films had been made in the Hong Kong style that he pioneered. Nobody did or does the kind of high action, with a dose of slapstick comedy, films that introduced me and millions of other fans to Jackie Chan. I hope I’ll get to see at least one more of those before Jackie Chan retires from the screen.
The thing that grabbed me about this story was what appeared to be a lot of condescending remarks about Japanese consumers. The Japanese digital media company, Transcosmos Inc., is hoping that their upcoming virtual world, meet-me, will be a G rated alternative to Second Life for Japanese consumers who are so “well behaved and conformist”, passive, and not interested in individual creativity. Well, I suppose a Japanese company would know better than I what the Japanese are like. But it still comes off sounding a bit condescending. Perhaps something was lost in the translation but it appears that some folks at Kotaku feel the same way.
There wasn’t any technical information in the CNN article about what platform(s) meet-me is supposed to run on. The picture in the article showed someone holding a Game Cube controller, so who knows? It makes sense to guess that it will run on PCs initially. But what I would really wonder about is how it hopes to compete against Sony’s virtual world, Home on the Playstation 3 due out in 2008. Consoles enjoy much more popularity in Japan than PCs do, so that alone would seem to doom meet-me to a small niche in Japan. In order to avoid total obscurity, I think meet-me is going to have to get out the gate before Home does and steal away many of the Japanese residents of Second Life.
Update: I found an old (June 2007) article in the Japanese ITmedia News that says meet-me will run on PCs and is slated for a winter release. They’ll still have an uphill fight against Second Life and Home, but I, for one, look forward to their efforts. Here’s a link to the Google translated story and my own rendering of the article title.
As much as Bush and Cheney like to demonize Iran’s president Ahmadinejad, they should actually be quite flattered. Imitation is, after all the sincerest form of flattery and Ahmadinejad’s comment that there are no gays in Iran is just a variant on GOP strategy concerning gays in the US. It is no secret that Ahmadinejad is not particularly popular at home in Iran right now. He simply hasn’t delivered on his promises to the people there on the economy, and they’re pissed. So he needed a distraction. Gay bashing is a strategy that has served the GOP very well in the US and probably plays very well in Iran too, along with poking the Great Satan US in the eye. It’s really quite a delicious treat he served up because Bush and company can’t really condemn his remarks without somehow coming off as pro-gay which they are about as likely to do as anything that would make them look pro-black in any meaningful sense.
So a tip of the hat goes to President Ahmadinejad, we have been soooo played! And as a nice, cover your tracks, twist his comments have been scrubbed from Iranian media. Can’t have those nonexistent people getting ideas you know!
After a nap, followed by some hemming and hawing, I jumped into the car and went to Chicago’s Microcenter to get Halo 3 at midnight. I was hoping for more of a carnival atmosphere, especially since they were giving away a copy of Halo 3 Legendary Edition to the best Master Chief cosplayer. There were only 30 or 40 people lined up, and not one, not even one, Master Chief! Oh the lameness! Heck, if I’d suspected it was going to be like that, I could have whipped up a passable Master Chief myself!
Game in hand, regular edition, I raced back home only to first get lost on the far south side due to all of the ramp closures on the Dan Ryan Expressway. It’s a little crazy, but there was something almost electric about being out in the night last night. Or maybe it was just all of the blue lights from the very active police presence around the city! I have no idea why so many police were out, or why so many people seemed to be crashing their cars. Maybe it’s like that every night. Sigh, shows how much I get out!
By the time I got home, I only had time to play about half an hour. I got totally pwned in multiplayer. No surprise there because I just jumped in without any preparation to see how badly I would suck if I did that. Next time will be much better because it cannot be any worse!
With Halo 3 coming out tomorrow, I’m once again wondering if I should do something with the old Xbox which currently gathers dust in the living room. An article at Lifehacker has me thinking Xbox Media Center once again.
Soup Up Your Xbox Media Center
I hear that I can install XBMC without a mod chip, so this time I may give it a shot. Still, Dead or Alive Extreme Volleyball doesn’t work on my Xbox 360, but hey, there is a new version! :3
Sometimes I really feel that I’m beginning to hate my wife. It seems that all she does lately is bitch about everything, yelling at me and the kids for no good reason. But I generally prefer not the bitch about things like that myself here. As uncomfortable as things are right now, it’s just a temporary thing and not anything to get too excited about. Still, it really hurts because I still want to share so many cool things with her, but there just isn’t an opening right now… I think this is also a good reason to hold on to one’s hobbies and the things you’re independently passionate about, and of course, your own friends. Without those things, I’d be adrift on a sea of someone else’s anger. And I really don’t want that. Oh thank the maker that Halo 3 comes out tonight!
And so it begins again! I had originally only planned to tune up my current cosplays for Youmacon, but had a Halloween inspiration and decided to make a new costume. The inspiration came via the anime Princess Princess when I realized that Yuujiro’s goth loli nurse outfit would be perfect for Halloween and Youmacon. Most anime cosplays don’t really line up with the traditional assortment of Halloween costumes, but this one is almost perfect!
I bought the shoes and stockings last week and started cutting fabric yesterday. This time I’m going to pay some extra attention to internal details and depending on the outcome, I may enter this one into competition. It’s been months since I last touched the sewing machine, so I’m really excited to be starting a new project!
I’ve been working a bit with RSOAP and one of the required packages is SOAPpy which unfortunately does not appear to be actively supported anymore. Attempts to compile SOAPpy on Windows or in Cygwin always resulted in the following error.
SyntaxError: from __future__ imports must occur at the beginning of the file
I’m no Python expert, but I managed to fix this by placing the following line,
from __future__ import nested_scopes
before any executed statements in the file, including the ident= statement. This had to be done in 3 files in the SOAPpy subdirectory.
Client.py
Types.py
Server.py
Doing that allowed me to build and install SOAPpy 0.12.0 on Windows XP. I haven’t checked this on Linux yet, but my guess is that this fix should work there since I think it is due to changes in Python going from version 2.3 to 2.5.
I’m passing this on here in case anyone else runs into this problem since googling it didn’t turn up any solutions for me in my own searches.