tonari no shibafu

Do you feel lucky punk?

Had some time to kill and so went to an arcade for the first time in about 5 years.
First person shootergasm...

A Facebook privacy issue you may not know about. via Boing Boing

A commentary on Facebook by Cory Doctorow. Excerpts:

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling -- you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other "social" apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"

...

That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go -- and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.

Personal anecdote:

I received an email from a college friend asking me to check out her Facebook stuff, which I was happy to do. Unfortunately, I couldn't see any of it without signing up. Also, as I returned to her mail (to let her know I'd be unable to do the requested checking out) and continued scrolling I realized that there was also an invitation to me from someone I lost contact with about 5 years ago. How is that possible? I've changed email addresses and whatnot, so it must be that someone has input data on my behalf.

Not remotely amused.

Kurosawa films

Watch some now-public domain Kurosawa movies online.

via Japan Probe

The other Happy Valley

The New York Times has an article about the hyper-literate culture out in Amherst. I was there, of course, for the pizza, five videos for five days for five dollars, homeboy, cheap used bookstores that specialize in academic books, and a few things that need not be spoken aloud.

Really Achieving your childhood dreams

Best talk ever. It's an hour and a half long, so do yourself a favor and don't go there until you have time to watch it all.

excerpt: I have experienced a deathbed conversion...I just bought a Macintosh.

via Obachan

Technorati Tags: Academe, Carnegie Mellon, Randy Pausch

For Nate

The Japan Times has an article today about vegan food in Japan.

The Tokyo places mentioned after the break

Technorati Tags: food, Setagaya, Shibuya, Tokyo, vegan

Posted without comment

An interesting post about gendered language in Japanese over at Language Log.

Crap!

Burt's Bees is being bought by Clorox.

For all of you...

...like me trying to crawl out of the luddismic ooze and walk upright through this increasingly digital landscape of ours: it turns out that there are programs that enable you to annotate PDF files. I just found out about one such called Skim. I haven't played around with it yet, but am psyched to get out of the cycle of making hardcopies.

via Cool OSX Apps

The Pink Cow at Spinshell.tv

For a long time now I've had a bookmarks folder where I would dump everything with which I didn't have the time or energy to deal. Sort of a dysfunctional browser tickler file. I found something a little bit ago that I wanted to dump in there and thought that it might be a good idea to put my 'other' folder in my bookmark bar (rather than hidden away behind the scenes) for easy packratting of new stuff. Unfortunately in the middle of a drag I was prompted about a cookie and inadvertently dropped the folder onto the current blank tab. Well, about 40 <deny> clicks later I have all manner of sites up that've been gathering e-dust in the darkest reachest of my Camino. Master procrastinator that I am I decided to try to cull their numbers and got lost in a morass of things that I don't remember.

Lo and behold I come across a site called Spinshell.tv and there on the front page is a video that has Traci's face on it. Turns out that these folks did a nice interview with the proprietress of The Pink Cow and so now any of you who haven't been there before can get a sense of it and her.

Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Japan, video, puppy, Shibuya, Spinshell.tv, The Pink Cow, Tokyo, Traci Consoli

Back in business baby!!!

Anticipation

New Macbook in hand, on the way home from Akihabara.

It's over

I came home from work yesterday to find the screen of my laptop fried. I've had a good run -- 4+ years -- and it has been through hell and back. I'll be heading out to pick up a new Macbook tomorrow at Macichiba.

Macichiba is a store in Akiba that my boy Bunshi turned me on to when I was looking to buy my current laptop. They run a great little outfit. Somehow they manage to offer deals such as maxing out the memory for the base price, etc. Currently they don't have the prices for the Macbooks listed, but I specced what I want at the Apple website and it came to about ¥200,000 (including Applecare). Hopefully, the Macichiba boys will be able to offer me some savings or more value for the same price.

In any event, I hope to have a new machine in about 30 hours.

Late notice

Today in Japan is 文化の日 (Culture Day). As such, there will be a number of demonstrations within the grounds of Meiji Jingu. The highlights are:

9:00 am Aikido

10:00 am Kobudo

1:00 pm Yabusame (mounted archery)