Due to a rather nasty spam storm from those online poker dickheads, I’ve shut down comments for now. Not that I get a lot of them here, but the flood of spam has been quite annoying. I’d put a curse on the online poker dicks if I knew how.
Puffy is touring the U.S.! Yay! Puffy is only touring the west coast! Booo! So once again, it looks like we midwesterners have to bite it. Well here’s the tour schedule Tofu Records sent me and a poster.
PUFFY AMIYUMI WILL BE TOURING THE WEST COAST!!!
CHECK BELOW FOR DETAILS!!
Puffy AmiYumi
is going out on tour and will be playing the following dates!
The Never Ending (formerly known as Sneaker 2 Bombs) will be supporting
these shows.
4/22 – Portland, OR – Crystal Ballroom
(9pm)
Tickets at all Ticketmaster Outlets, charge by phone: 503-224-4400, or
ticketmaster.com
Also available at the Crystal ballroom box office: 503-225-0047
4/23 – Seattle, WA – The Showbox (8pm)
Tickets at ticketswest.com or charge by phone: 800-325-7328
Venue# 206-628-0221
4/24 – Vancouver, BC – Vogue Theatre (9:15pm)
Tickets at ticketmaster.ca or charge by phone (604-280-4444)
4/27 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore
(8pm)
Tickets via ticketmaster.com
Venue Phone: 415-346-6000
4/29 – Los Angeles, CA – Wiltern Theatre
(9pm)
Tickets at ticketmaster.com or charge by phone: 213-388-1400
4/30 – San Diego, CA – SOMA (9pm)
Tickets available via SOMA Box Office: (No service fees)
Tues/Wed/Thurs 5:30-7:30 Show Days 4-11pm.
SOMA Box Office Info Tel: 619-226-7662
Online Ticketing: lunatiks.com or email: tickets@somasandiego.com
5/2 – Tempe, AZ – Marquee Theatre (8pm)
Tickets available via luckymanproductions.net, via box office phone: 480-829-1300
Marquee Box Office Hours: 10:30am-7pm M-F and 1pm-5pm on Saturdays.
or via Zia Records stores throughout Arizona
Check the website for details, ringtones,
wallpaper, IM icons, and much more:
www.puffyamiyumi.com
Cnet is linking to a story today reporting that South Korea is cracking down on online porn. Now I don’t usually write about porn, but I was a bit surprised that porn wasn’t banned in South Korea since it has a relatively large and conservative Christian population (about 30%). Yeah, the U.S. has a large Christian population too, but it also has unconditional freedom of speech written into its constitution which largely protects porn sites. I learned today that South Korea also has freedom of speech written into its laws, but there are so many conditions on this "freedom" that it effectively bans anything that might offend anyone. Anyway, the thing that caught my eye was the following excerpt.
Many
Korean Web sites require users to enter their national identification
card numbers to confirm their age to access adult content. But
tech-savvy children can use programs to create false numbers or simply
use their parents’ IDs instead.
I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit, because it’s always like this. Kids are usually so far ahead of their parents, that technology meant to protect them usually requires a kid to install it! On the home front, I’m going to start teaching my kids to code this summer, but it’ll be a little while before they can hack better than I can…heh!
Cnet is reporting on a New York Times story that started making the rounds a few days ago about how physicists may have created quantum black holes. Even though I’m no longer a practicing physicist, I still love this stuff and it’s especially cool to hear about things from experiments that you or colleagues were working on. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) experiment studies the results of collisions between gold nuclei. One of my old professors is a part of the experiment and told me about it years ago when they were in the planning stages. He said that the goal was to create a quark gluon plasma, a whole new state of matter.
While they are not yet claiming to have created a quark gluon plasma, they do seem to have created something that at least acts like a mini black hole, though not necessarily the quantum black holes of theory. When I first heard this story, I couldn’t help but think of the SciFi series Lexx or the Dan Simmons’ novel Hyperion. In each of these, scientists created black holes with disasterous results for the Earth. Don’t panic yet! Nothing that’s been done in high energy particle accelerators is anything to worry about, but I did always wonder if we’d find something unexpected out at Fermilab. Man I still love this stuff! The real fun is going to begin when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) comes online and begins to create conditions at the interaction point very much like those in the early universe shortly after the Big Bang.
It’s been about 20 years since I experienced my first Spring Break in Chicago and global warming notwithstanding, from a temperature perspective, it still sucks! Today is a relatively nice looking day, partly cloudy with a gentle breeze. But man it’s in the frickin 30’s (near 0C for my metric using friends)! I can’t remember a single spring break in Chicago that had genuinely warm weather! Still, I love Chicago, but spring weather this is not!
On the plus side, it seems that the streets are beginning to fill with tourists once more. I especially like all of the matched moms, daughters, and dolls near the American Girl Place. Here you will see moms, daughters, and American Girl dolls all dressed up in the same outfit! Some people think that’s creepy, but I actually think it’s rather cute, something the world could use more of I think.
This space reserved for the now deleted comments about the attractive women on the streets of Chicago…
It’s fun to be just a little ahead of the curve. When Yahoo released their search API, I jumped in a built a video game news search tool because it was something that I had a need for. Then I thought it would be cool to create an RSS feed from the search results that I could display on my Proliphus Enterprises page. These things were done and I learned a lot from them, so I posted a link to my source code on the search page so that others could go and do the same or make something new.
Well it seems that Amazon.com has caught up so to speak. Today they announced that developers will be able to tie into their A9 search engine and create feeds from the results. It’s nice to know that I’m doing something useful!
Finally I found (actually my wife…) a soy milk that I can live with! One of my biggest problems with other soy milks was the grittiness and the basic incompatibility with cereal. I’ve never been a big milk drinker due to lactose intolerance (which only gets worse with age), but I do like cereal as a breakfast option. So what to do?
We just started buying 8th Continent soy milk which is just what I’ve been looking for! It’s got a great taste and goes very well with cereal. The soy protein is an added bonus as it may be a cancer preventative. I don’t know where this 8th Continent is, but I like it!
I’ve just returned from the University of Chicago Hospital Center for Advanced Medicine and I am still taking in what I experienced. I’ll preface what I am about to write by saying that the care received from our doctor was, and always has been, top-notch. Unfortunately, the people we had to go through in order to get to him could use some serious lessons in customer service!
First impressions are always an important factor in getting and retaining customers. Upon reaching the hospital for our kids’ appointments, we approached the check-in desk and were immediately ordered to step back away from the desk to a point behind a floor painted symbol about 4 feet away from the desk. This immediately reminded me of the Joliet prison scene near the beginning of the Blues Brothers in which Jake has to stay behind some floor tape while retrieving his personal belongings before being released from prison. This left a really bad taste in my mouth. I know a lot of African American men have been to prison, but I have not and I don’t like being treated that way! This is one of the reasons that I refuse to shop at the Ford City Mall, where customers are practically body searched upon entering and exiting the shops! A bad first impression will almost always drive customers away. Customers of the suburban Woodfield Mall would never stand for this kind of treatment. Well Black people don’t like bad customer treatment either!
As usual, even though we were on time for our appointment, we had to endure a long wait. During this time, the kids immediately went to play Sonic the Hedgehog on a game kiosk in the waiting area. I like video games, and kids do too, except when the controller is broken making the game unplayable. Why not just turn the d*mn thing off rather than frustrating child after child in a waiting area bereft of any other toys or books a young child could enjoy. Again, this is bad customer service! We I later told a nurse that the controller was broken making it impossible to play the game, she just denied it. It was worse than just broken, none of the jump buttons worked on the controller which meant that it was impossible for Sonic to clear any level! For Sonic, this must have been truly hellish, trapped in the same area of the same level, forever. For my kids, it was similarly frustrating. We ended up waiting about a half hour past our appointment time before seeing the doctor, which was plenty of time for other kids to approach the game and be frustrated by it. There was also a television tuned to Nickelodeon, but with the volume turned almost all the way down. What is the point of that? They might as well have just turned the thing off. This waiting area can only be described as pure hell for a child, the enticement of fun, but the reality of broken promises.
Again, our doctor was great, but the service at the University of Chicago Hospital totally sucks. Sucks is not a sophisticated expression, but I can find no other way to describe the service accurately. Needless to say, there weren’t any forms or a suggestion box where I could register my dissatisfaction, so I am writing this here and forwarding it to the appropriate hospital personnel. I know many people suffer bad service at the hospital, but it does not have to be this way. My wife has told me that the service at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and Children’s Memorial Hospital is very good. I’ve also heard good things about the Catholic hospitals in general. So clearly, someone cares about customer service while the University of Chicago Hospital apparently does not.
Sometimes life throws some tough decisions at you. This really wasn’t one of those times. Yesterday, my youngest son got sick and my wife and I had to rush him to the hospital. The good news is that he is okay now (praise God!). The bad news is that I had to miss the Nobuo Uematsu concert of Final Fantasy music that took place last night. I’d been looking forward to the concert for months, having bought tickets within an hour of the initial announcement! I even had contingency plans in case we couldn’t find a sitter! But I hadn’t factored a trip to the emergency room into that picture…
Well, I’m overjoyed that my son is better now! My friends all prayed for him and supported me! One even got me a refund on my tickets. But after it was all over, I was really depressed over missing the concert. This morning though, I stayed home with my son and it really struck me hard that he is more than worth a missed concert! I was sooo scared I was going to lose him, yet here he is as if nothing had happened at all. Now that is a freakin miracle!
Universal Music Group and Apple have joined together to make popular Chinese music available for download for the U.S. iTunes Music Store. The press release says that this is the first time Chinese music has been available for legal download outside of Asia. It also says that over 1000 tracks will be available for download in time for the beginning of Chinese New Year celebrations.
I was very excited when I first heard about this. I took a look at the available offerings on iTunes last night and must say that my initial excitement was met with disappointment. The songs are located in a Chinese New Year section of World music. Last night there were 37 albums available, most $9.99 to download the complete album. This sounds good until you notice that most of the music is very old. Most of the music is from the mid ’80s and ’90s. And there were no where near 1000 tracks for download. In the end, I bought about 10 tracks which I will be playing at work today to celebrate the new year.
I can only hope that there will be more recent music available. And eventually, I’d like to see Japanese and Korean music there as well. I guess this is a good start though.
Gung hay fa choi! Happy New Year!
Loose lips sink ships, or so the saying goes. Well it looks like Google blogger Mark Jen has been sh*t canned. Mark joins the growing list of bloggers who have run afoul of their employers. Basically, Mark said a little too much about his work life at the apparently very secretive Google which may be becoming the Proctor and Gamble of the IT industry.
Without going into detail, Mark didn’t exactly give away the family jewels, but this incident showcases the sensitivity of even a company that is generally admired by techies. Well good luck Mark on your next job!
Is any of this really a surprise though? I for one prefer not to talk about my day job here in my blog. I enjoy my job, but I get enough of that during the day, no need to blog about it at night when there are so many more things that need ranting! So my advice to bloggers is one, don’t blog on company servers at all; and two, don’t blog about your day job! Heck, you might even want to think twice about even telling coworkers you even have a blog. The above advice notwithstanding, I would add that you should always blog as if everyone knows who you are and where you live. There’s no such thing as anonymity on the web. If someone wants to find out who you are, most of the time it isn’t very hard to find out. So blog like a celebrity and have fun!
During the bits of Super Bowl XXXIX that I watched yesterday (prior to Iron Chef America), Napster ran some ads for their new Napster To Go music service. The ad promises to allow you to fill up your music player for a mere $15/month (actually $14.95) which is a lot less than the $10K it would cost to fill up your iPod with 10K songs. Well this math is certainly correct and sounds like a good deal when pitched that way. But as the saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics! That may be stretching it a bit, but the damnation lies in what Napster doesn’t tell you in the ad.
What they don’t tell you is that you only get to keep those songs and play them as long as you continue to pay $14.95/month. Not only that, if you do not sync your portable music player with the service at least once a month, it will stop playing the songs you’ve downloaded to it. This is all in the terms and conditions on the Napster web site. I guess there wasn’t enough time to talk about this on TV.
Well this sounds more like being Married to the Napster than Napster to Go. There’s certainly more commitment than a lot of marriages these days. I mean, if you get a divorce, you usually get to keep half of your stuff. But with Napster to Go, forget it! Once you cancel or fail to check in regularly, you lose your whole downloaded collection.
Some people may find that this is still a good deal, but it would be nice if Napster were more upfront with the true level of commitment required for this relationship. There’s nothing new about this though, this model has been tried before and largely rejected, hence the popularity of the iPod and iTunes Music Store. So I can only guess that Napster hopes to hook a lot of suckers before they discover that they’re locked in.
Well it’s upgrade time! So if this site is acting a little strange, well, you get the picture….
Today I spent a good deal of time looking at Plone, the content management system written in Zope which is itself written in Python. I’ve been working on a Zope based app for a while now and have gotten fairly comfortable with Zope, but I hadn’t given Plone much of a look at all. That all began to change last week when I had a situation in which a Plone based portal would have made things a lot easier for the customer.
To make a long story short, Plone has just blown me away! I’ve installed it on both Windows and Linux systems without a hitch and so far I’m very impressed. I’ve been building portals around PHP-Nuke which is a nice package, but Plone runs circles around it in terms of flexibility and ease of use. I know many great modules have been built for PHP-Nuke and I’ve been able to modify many for my own purposes, but Plone just seems to make all of this easier which means less time for me to set up.
In particular, role based user access and security is built into Plone from the underlying Zope. This is the biggest pain to implement in PHP leaving plenty of opportunities for security holes. Another thing I’ve grown to love about Zope and Plone is the browser based management interface. You can do virtually anything in the browser and since everything is stored as an object in Zope’s database, you don’t have to monkey around with the file system to manage your site. I’ll still keep using PHP for some things, but I am definitely a Plone fan now!
When I bought my iPod over a year ago, the first time I used it in public during my lunch time walk abouts, it felt like I’d gone backwards in time. During my college years I would often go on walks around Hyde Park and along the lake shore with my portable cassette player and whatever cheap headphones I had at the time. It was fun to overlay my own soundtrack on the world around me. So experiencing this with my iPod was like revisiting my youth, not that my youth is all gone yet!
This is all good fun, but could there be more to it? Markus Giesler, an assistant professor of marketing at York University in Toronto seems to think so. He thinks that iPods are transforming their users into cyborgs. In his view, a cyborg is someone who uses a variety of technologies and is highly connected. Well that certainly makes me guilty. Keeping the pod fed has led me to make a few computer upgrades for convenience and has increased my desire for convergent devices that embody multiple functions. My poor Palm IIIe finds itself left out in the cold as my cell phone, tiny USB drive, and iPod usurp much of its functionality. While I have no desire to take the next step and make these devices a part of my body, I’m sure that given a chance, many people are going to do just that in the coming years.
Resistance is futile. You too will be assimilated, to the tune of JPop anime soundtracks!