TechgnosisWeb Prime

Another day, another BedBlog. I got out of the office again today, had to set up a WinME (ugh) box at a client’s office. While walking around the side of the building, I took this shot:

It’s funny, this is a side of the building that a vast majority of the power-suited executives that haunt the place never see. It’s the backend, where deliveries come in, and where service people enter. Oddly enough, it’s much prettier, and certainly much shadier, than the front of the building, where the lack of shade from the sun causes it to shine blindingly from the white marble, making all those power-suited executives walk around witha continual squint. I wonder if the building’s original architect meant for that to happen, and if so, if perhaps he hated executives and this was his odd way of taking a stab at them.

I just ran across this site on the web today: Project LRNJ — Accelerated Japanese Instruction

Here’s a little snippet of what it’s about straight from the website:

“The goal of Project LRNJ is to make Japanese accessible to people who enjoy anime or video games, and wouldn’t otherwise learn it. To meet this goal, it is necessary that the training program be freely available, efficient, and both attractive and fun for the target audience. There are years of part-time R&D on the project, but the idea of making it into a game only came up in March 2003.

Long story short: I’m making a serial RPG that teaches you Japanese. Enough Japanese to use a native dictionary. Once you can do that, I don’t think there’s any training better than practice through regular use. It will be released in regular chapters like other serial web projects such as web comics, usually each introducing 4-9 new kana or kanji.”

Basically they’re releasing this cute little CRPG which allows you to learn Japanese while you play, and it’s targetted at your average american otaku who loves anime and mange but doesn’t know a whit of Japanese. Sounds like fun, go check it out, and if you like it, register, I think this is one of those projects that could use our support.

Behold! Tremble before the might of the new chair!

Ph34r the chair!

So, when Natalie and I moved in together about a month ago, we each brought our computers: me with my PimpRig, her with her KittyCom. We set them up side by side and hooked them together so they could share a Net connection. Life was good, except for one detail: we only had one chair.
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BedBlog time again. Well, I’m not sure this pic is any better than the two I showed you last night, but it’s the last missing angle. If you combine the two pics from last night with this one, putting this one in the middle, you should get a fairly accurare idea of my view here on my side of the bed. I rather like my bedroom, though I suppose it could use a dash of extra decorations here and there. Maybe a poster or a painting above Natalie’s chifferobe.
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You know, this client has all of 2 employees and one boss. What the hell do they need so many cables for?

But now they have DSL, so the boss can download his pr0n 10 times faster. We’ve just torpedoed this office’s productivity all to hell.

Riding shotgun with the boss again, this time on the way to Carolina. I even had the temerity to whip out the digicam and snap a couple of shots of traffic on the way there. Then I told him that I was testing the camera so we could use it to give demos of the picture upload capability of our shopping cart software, and he actually bought it. Damn, I’m good.

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I haven’t spoken much about it here yet, but there’s been a bit of a commotion in the world of Open Source Software, and specifically for Linux users such as myself. What’s causing all this commotion is a little company called SCO (formerly Caldera) that’s led by a bunch of professional litigious bastards. SCO recently rediscoverd that it apparently owns the code to System V, a flavor of UNIX, the operating system that was the spiritual ancestor of Linux. SCO saw an opportunity to create a bit of mayhem and make itself rich in the process, so it looked around for companies that had a big stake in both Unix and Linux, and found themselves one hell of a big fish: IBM. SCO immediately went about suing IBM, claiming that IBM used it’s knowledge from UNIX to make changes to Linux, changes that came directly from code that was in UNIX, in breach of the contract IBM signed when they got access to the UNIX code.
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On my way to work. Natalie’s driving, bless her heart, and that gives me the opportunity to snap a shot of what it looks like out there while our horseless carriage ferries me to work.

Gotta love that metro area traffic!

Oh, as a side note, that black-and-silver blob at the top of last night’s first BedBlog pic, is a Gothic Cthulhu.

And so another BedBlog rolls around, and I begin my little experiment with the digcam. For ease of management, I’ll be taking the pics at a measly 320×240 resolution. Small enough to fit in a random blog post, just large enough to show a little detail. Tonight’s photoblog entry is entitled: The BedBlog View. Just a couple of pictures of what I see from the bed while I type up your average BedBlog.

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Allright, I just realized something: I actually have a digital camera. It’s a cheap little 1.5 Megapixel number that uses CF cards as memory (coincidentially, the same type of memory I’m using on my Z, in fact, the exact same card), and by lowering the quality of the pictures to something that’s web-ready only instead of as high as possible for printing, I could fit quite a few pics on the spare space inside my Z’s memcard. So, if I start carrying the digicam around and taking pics with it when neccesary, then I swap the memcard out to the Z where I can edit those pics and add captions, then I can upload them here when I get back home at night, or the next day, or whatever. Sure, it’s not the immediacy of a mo-pho-bog, but there have been photoblogs long before there were celphones with cameras in them. It might keep me happy for now till I can afford one of those. Keep an eye out here for some random pics tomorrow. I dunno how many pics I’ll be able to put up (I tend to travel to the same places and see the same things almost every day, so I dunno how much variety I’ll be getting), but this should be an interesting experiment.

Submitted, for your consideration.

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Ah, those last few thoughts before you drift off to sleep. What better way to capture them for posterity than by blogging them? Bedblogs are sort of a way to capture the last word of the day, the last few shreds of consciousness before it’s time to fall into the arms of Morpheus for another night. And tonight’s last thoughts are: I want a camera phone. Also, I’m never buying catfish again.
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So I’m tapping away at this while I ride shotgun on my boss’ car on the way to deal with a couple of clients. He’s blathering away at something or other, and I’m nodding and smiling and tapping away here. He swears I’m busy at work hacking some code, so it’s a good thing.

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OK, I know I can only use the "but I’m moving in to a new apartment!" excuse for not updating my blog for only so long before it stops making sense. I’m already fully moved in and rather settled, and I do beleive that the fact that I was able to (finally) spend a whole day last Sunday just lazying in front of the TV with FFX proves it. So let’s go back to some semi-regular schedule for these updates. How’s at least once a week sound to you?

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Which side of your brain do you favor most? Go take the Brain Persuasion Test and find out. Here’s my results:

Your Brain Usage Profile

Auditory : 60%
Visual : 40%
Left : 68%
Right : 31%

Katsushiro, you are mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing. This overall combination seems to indicate a well-working blend of logic and judgment and organization, with sufficient intuition, perception and creativity to balance that dominance.
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Saw the following posted on Slashdot, and I figued I’d reproduce it here, some interesting points:

What is Engrish? You probably allready know. if you don’t, go here. Engrish is the strange, often hilarious english produced by the Japanese when they translate their language into ours. Since Japanese is so completely different from English in so many ways, sentence structure, meanings, the way words are modified, it’s really a very alien language (and English must seem equally alien to them), the results of amateur translation end up with a distinctive sort of style that’s known as Engrish. Well, I was recently let in on a secret: you can produce instant Engrish, without needing any help at all from an actual Japanese person! Do this: Go to Altavista.com’s Babelfish, and ghet whatever original English text you want to turn into Engrish, and translate it to Japanese. Then take that Japanese text and translate it back to English. Poof! Instant Engrish! To demonstrate, I will now paste one of my previous posts that has been Engrishified:

I couple day downloaded the Knoppix 3.2 editions, ago, then I the plopped to burn the CD of drive, and re-booted the iso to the CD. 3 minutes less than, I operated sufficiently afterwards, with the desk top of the very splendid KDE, was logged on in the Linux which is continued. After that the couple of amount, I while operating possessed my web browser of the Mozilla, as for the OpenOffice.org the writing document opening, doing the Vorbis file which is the Ogg, as for me passing by xmm, had with the drive where the computer is hard, the thing brainless perhaps anyone did that, entirely it was so complete. As for this the fair work which is the distro of the Linux (the tm). That the video card namely the healthy card namely the feed of everything - the net card namely me my pure relationship (the boots which do not have the necessity to form single thing it did simply, I attached the Mozilla idea contest, it was the online) to detect, you installed, did not install thing in the computer. Perfection possibility it gives this to the pwoerful and the emergency ‘ in you of the os of the stealth ‘, practical with any machine and (with the busy compression where the obscenely of the software which the boots, it could be agreeable to 2 gb of the software the person of the Knoppix in the single 700MB CD can be done the os which can prepare the network which has large selection almost can do with anything), when you you fair shock being done, the te system. There is no mark no matter what in the thing computer which the take your CD you lower, has you there.

Well, the moving’s finally done. Natalie and I still have some work to do in the apartment, to finish setting everything up, and we have no phone line at the moment, which means that my only Net access right now is here at work (and you have no idea how that pains me), but the place is shaping up nicely. We’re sorta straddling the line between ‘cramped’ and ‘cozy’. However, all the moving and stuff has, indeed, kept me from updating much here, so here’s a quick update on stuff. Let’s start with Knoppix, a distribution of Linux that runs entirely from a CD, without touching your harddrive. It’s cool, it’s geeky, it’s simple and very elegant and professional looking, and it’s completely Free.
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