France just beat Portugal 1-0 to advance to the World Cup final where they’ll play Italy. I generally don’t like recording sports events, so I followed the game using Matchcast. This wasn’t too bad, the updates were useful and the fan chat mildly interesting. Since I’m at work, I have the sound off, so I don’t know what bells and whistles it had there. But since my main objective was to follow the game more or less in real time, it was more than good enough for that. My next problem is juggling the Sunday final with the Chicago NASCAR race! This year I’ll be cheering for Italy because one of the lovely ladies I work with’s husband is Italian, and he’s a big fan. Go Italy! Viva Italia!
Author: blueZhift
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Real Piracy
You hear a lot about so-called piracy on the internet these days. The record and movie industries have made quite a big deal about lost sales…yadda yadda yadda. Well here’s a reminder of what real piracy is, the story of a Japanese freighter fighting off pirates near Indonesia’s Sumatra island. Yes kids, there are real pirates in the world, oh and in a battle between pirates and ninja, why ninja would win of course! Ninja are better trained, that should be obvious! 😉
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World Cup Blues
Once again the greatest global sporting event goes on without much attention from me, or many in the U.S.. I’m not a huge futbol fan, but I do enjoy the game and watched a handful of matches during the last World Cup. I would like the United States to make a better showing, but even if your team doesn’t go too far, it’s still fun to watch. This year my bane has been money grubbing media companies that make it hard to easily find out who is airing the games on TV! I know now that ESPN is carrying the games in the U.S., but I would never have figured that out from Yahoo’s World Cup site, which is the official FIFA World Cup site, as nowhere can I find a link to this basic information! I suppose they wanted ESPN to pay big money for this, so nothing! There’s plenty of blame for both sides, but it just irks me when simple information for the fans is hidden or omitted for fundamentally stupid reasons. I know they want to make money, but without the fans, they’d be out of business.
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Onigiri Hands
Once more I’ve been called upon to make onigiri (ãŠæ¡ã‚Š), rice balls, for the kids. We got some onigiri mixes at Mitsuwa last weekend and my wife bought Nishiki sushi rice which turned out to work very well for this. I feel like Azuma in Yakitate!! Japan except instead of solar hands, I’ve got onigiri hands which won’t stick to the rice. Whenever my wife tries to make rice balls, even with sopping wet hands, the rice just sticks to her like crazy! After much frustration on her part, I got the job of making rice balls as an almost hereditary duty now! That’s cool with me though. One should always be indispensible for a few things!
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NASCAR Big Hit With TiVo Users
It looks like my favorite sport of driving fast and turning left is a hit with other TiVo users as well. For the week ending 6/25/2006, NASCAR Racing is the 10th most recorded show on TiVo according to TiVo’s weekly rankings. At number 10, it’s the highest ranking sport in the top 25 followed by World Cup Soccer down at number 19. It makes me wonder if we’ll see the TiVo guy painted on the side of a Nextel Cup car in the near future!
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Hooray for IE 7!
Microsoft released the final beta for Internet Explorer 7 today which brings it a big step closer to being released. It looks pretty good, and after 5 years of gathering dust and being the cracker’s (black hat hackers) dream, it’s way overdue. I’ll install it once the final release comes out, but IE 7 is not going to displace Firefox for daily use. The reason I’m happy IE 7 is coming out is because there are web applications I have to use that are IE only. So when I have to fire up IE, it won’t suck so much anymore! IE sucking less is teh win for everyone! So hooray for IE 7!
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Coconuts Taking PS3 Pre-Orders
On my lunch time walk I went to a nearby Coconuts hoping to find the Eureka 7 soundtrack that is supposed to be out today. Unfortunately I didn’t find that (though they do have a lot of the Geneon series soundtracks now), but I did see that they were starting to take Playstation 3 preorders for a $50 deposit. I’m on the fence with respect to the PS3 right now, so I definitely won’t be plucking down $50 towards a $600 console that will be in short supply and doesn’t have any games slated for it yet that I personally find compelling. Heck, I haven’t bought an Xbox 360 yet for similar reasons. Though, I do find some of the Xbox Live offerings very tempting. Right now I really want to concentrate on reformatting Flash games to look and play well on the PSP. But I have little doubt that Coconuts will fill up their preorder roster pretty quickly.
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My Pan-Asian Sunday
Today, despite some early storminess, we started the day with dim sum at the Phoenix in Chinatown, where I wowed the wait staff with the little Cantonese I’ve learned from my wife. Then we shopped some stalls in New Chinatown Square before heading west to Arlington Heights for the 25th Japan Festival. Not only that, I got back home in time to see Jeff Gordon win at Infinium!
The Japan Festival was a lot of fun. We hadn’t been to it since it used to be out at the Chicago Botanical Gardens. This year was the second for the festival at the Forest View Educational Center, just a stone’s throw from the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Arlington Heights IL. The gardens are nice, but they have a lot more room in the new location for events, and because of this, the rain outside really wasn’t a big issue.
Before the day was finished, we’d heard koto and violin concerts of traditional and contemporary Japanese music. The kids had fun breaking wooden boards with karate, and I enjoyed some long sought after takoyaki (octopus balls). And this time, I did not miss the Cha no yu, the tea ceremony! I also enjoyed the taiko performance with my youngest daughter, who had come with me to see it without my wife’s knowledge, which led to a somewhat embarrassing announcement of her being missing. But all was well, as parents must often suffer much loss of face because of their children. It just goes with the job. The kids had a good time. We finally ended our Pan-Asian adventure with a trip to the Mitsuwa Marketplace where I bumped into some of the young violin performers in the grocery store, which gave me a chance to thank them in person for a great performance.
Returning home, the day was completed with a Chinese dinner prepared by my lovely Chinese wife. She made me say that last part, though it is true! 😉 Here’s a bad cell phone picture of the taiko performance.
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Connie Chung Sticks It!
I finally got a chance the look at Connie Chung’s Swan Song on MSNBC this morning. It was pretty hard to listen too, but after reading the various media criticisms going around on the net and remembering the relative rockiness of the last decade or so of her career, I think this performance was a fun way of sticking it to the man. Connie Chung had the great misfortune to be on the way up in TV journalism at a time when it was dominated by white male anchors. It probably didn’t help that she was Asian on top of being a woman. So whatever other fair criticisms there may be of her style, she never really had a shot at having a top anchor position all to herself (that pairing with Rather was disasterous). So with nothing left to lose, she just let it fly. It was a wonderful “up yours” to the establishment, and even at 59, I must say she looked pretty hot doing it. Bravo!
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Game Girls Are Too Perfect
Perfection is a funny thing. We all seem so enamored of it, and many persue it their whole lives. But honestly, is it all that great? I get the daily GameSpy newsletter via email and right now they’re running an ad for the Girls of Gaming. As one might guess, it’s a publication containing the typical busty chicks that inhabit video games. And, of course, these babes are perfect.
I’m sure these perfect females attract a lot of mostly male attention, but I’m finding that it is the little imperfections that add the spice of real human beauty. These game girls are nice to look at, but their general lack of blemish ultimately makes them kind of creepy. This calls into question the whole notion of perfection itself. An artist may add any number of what might be considered extraneous features to a work of art, but it would hardly be correct to call these imperfections. In the same way, the unique features of any human form can hardly be called mistakes either. These are part of what make us each unique works of art. Indeed, you might even call them signature elements of the artist.
So until our game machines have the horsepower to feature human models with the same kinds of signature features, game girls can’t hold a candle to the real thing. Give me that real girl and a freckle or three every time!
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Big Brother Meet Big Mickey
I got email from Disney Mobile this morning. It looks like Mickey is in the phone business now and among other things, promises to give me the ability to track my kids’ phones via GPS. Move over Big Brother! Now admittedly, being able to track my kids may have some practical benefit, but despite my love of most technology, I’ll take a pass on GPS tracking. Parents today have a lot of tech tools to monitor/control their kids, but the real job of parenting is not going to be accomplished via V-chips, internet filters, and GPS tracking. I want my kids to develop discipline, self control. That means that I have to give up some control and allow them the room to make mistakes. And since this has worked fairly well for the thousands of years of human history prior to GPS satellites, it probably has a pretty good chance of working now, as long as I put the work into it. So sorry Mickey, I’ll just do it the old fashioned way.
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Sega Back In The Day
Reading The Rise and Fall of Sega at 2old2play I began to think about my own last decade or so with Sega consoles and games. For the most part I look upon them very fondly, having been swept away in mouth frothing fanboyism back in the day. I mean after all, Sega did have superior technology, riiiiight? Even if that were true, sadly, superior tech does not always win the fight. Just ask IBM about OS/2. Sega also had a stable of arcade hits to draw upon for console conversions. I got a Saturn mainly to play Virtua Cop and Sega Rally.
Looking back, I think one of the things that ultimately led to Sega’s demise as a console maker was their failure to go all the way and build something completely new each generation. I bought a Genesis in part because it used the same CPU that had been used in Macs around that time. My goal in buying a console was to get off of the never ending treadmill of upgrades needed to keep up with PC gaming. So I figured a console that had recognizable computer innards was probably going to be powerful enough to play the sort of games I would find interesting. This did not turn out to be the case, and yes I still game on the PC too. But from that point on I was in love with Sega. So when the CD add on came out, I jumped in. Afterall, CD games were the future, right? Sega was right on this point, but they didn’t go all the way and build a completely new box that could really take advantage of what the CD medium could bring to the table.
Sega may have had a chance of running away with it all, having caught up with Nintendo during the Genesis era, but they weren’t willing to push it all the way and make something completely new. They tended to favor using off the shelf components, which, in retrospect, can only take you so far. And they clearly wanted to keep building on what they had started with the Genesis, which led to missteps which cost them the time they needed to come with something good. Imagine if the Saturn had come out a couple of years earlier than Sony’s Playstation and without the last minute addition of the second CPU. But the time wasted on the CD addon and later the 32X, the CDX, the Nomad, and the Neptune project would prove fatal.
Sony, being new to the game, built a new box full of custom chips and made it easy for developers to work with. And since that time, every new generation of hardware has meant a new set of chips. Even within a generation, components are routinely redesigned to cut costs and take advantage of new techniques. Needless to say, this is very expensive, but that’s what it takes to stay in the game. In the end, Sega lost too much money, time, and goodwill with their mistakes to keep up. I think Sega’s last console, the Dreamcast, was a great console. But by that time, Sega simply didn’t have the resources to support it.
Sega’s days as a console maker may be over, but as a game developer/publisher they seem to be doing pretty well. And if there are more young people like my oldest son, a Sonic the Hedgehog fanatic who dreams of programming games for Sega someday (or having them as a sponsor if he becomes a NASCAR driver), their future may yet be bright. Se-gah!!
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Shoujo For Father’s Day!
I must admit that I usually approach Father’s Day with a bit of dread because of what I may or, often as not, may not get. Yeah, that’s pretty selfish, but to deny the facts would be illogical. This year though, I was very pleasantly surprised to get volumes 4, 5, and 6 of Kare Kano! 🙂 I’m a big fan of shoujo manga, and Kare Kano is one of my favorites, but it’s definitely not the sort of thing generally associated with Father’s Day. My younger daughter, our household Chiyo-chan, made me a cool Inuyasha themed card. I was just sooo surprised to find that people were actually paying attention to what I liked! Oh I am so selfish, but I guess that’s okay one or two days a year…
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Cars Just Feels Right
I took my youngest ones with me to see Cars today not really expecting much. I was delightfully surprised to find a movie that just felt good all over! As a racing fan/driving enthusiast/gear-head I was absolutely delighted with all of the nods to the greats of racing, NASCAR in particular. And as a tech enthusiast, the fluid and very natural feeling animation was like good sex, or good drugs, or good beer…you get the picture. Seriously, when I say natural, what I really mean is that the cars literally came to life. If cars were alive, they’d move like that! And to top it all off, the human story and good acting completely sold me. Anyone who likes racing and cars and believes that the trip is as important as the destination, should give Cars a look. But if you’re taking small kids, be prepared to see the movie again sometime on your own, because at nearly 2 hours, I probably missed 15 minutes due to potty breaks…sigh… But this one is well worth seeing again!
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Manga Vs American Comics
Anyone who’s seen my book collection over the years would see that if has evolved from an ever growing collection of Star Trek and Science Fiction novels, to a now rapidly growing collection of manga. I still love sci-fi and fantasy too, but now I’m getting my fill of these via manga and anime. And even better, there’s an even richer diversity of other genres that I’m enjoying via manga. Indeed, for me, manga has been a gateway to many strange new worlds and places I’ve never been before. So it was with great interest that I read 12 Reasons Why Manga is Not a Gateway Drug to Western Comics. I found this excellent analysis of why the manga boom is not likely to raise the fortunes of American comics while perusing articles at When Fangirls Attack. To boil down Barb Lien-Cooper’s analysis, the worlds of manga and western comics are just too different, particularly with respect to the roles of women as authors, fans, and characters. This takes an ironic twist given that in many respects the roles and opportunities available to women in Japan are not only behind those in the U.S., but also China. But in the worlds of manga and anime, this is not the case, and with the growing international popularity of these media, perhaps there will be some leverage to change things back home.
I never really got into American comics. When I was younger, I read mostly comedies like Archie and some Disney based stuff. Then later The Avengers were a favorite. But by the time I went to highschool, I was finished with comics and reading science fiction. Then for a brief period in the 80’s I got hooked on Batman via some really good graphic novels that came out during that time. I loved the art and the very mature nature of the stories. I would probably have kept buying them if it wasn’t so hard to find the stuff. At the time there was only one place I knew of that I could easily get to for graphic novels and even that was a hassle. This is in contrast to today where chains like Borders carry most of what I’m looking for and of course everything else can be ordered from Amazon.
I’m firmly in the manga camp now, having come over via anime. There’s a lot to see and I’ve met some very interesting people, so I think I’ll stay for a while.