tonari no shibafu

On what seems to be track for fiber optic

The internet here is bad.

When it was first installed it was very fast; seemingly close to the maximum of 12 Mbps in Misa's plan. Over time it's become slower, and worse, the connection sometimes drops. After enjoying the steady-state and high speeds of fiber optic it has been a bitter pill indeed.

Things appear likely to improve before long. I hesitate to be jubilant as we were close before, but Misa has been doggedly assaulting the involved service providers' customer service blockades. It looks like for about ¥300/month I can keep my old email address even after the switch to the building's contractual provider.

So some time in the next month or so, the unstable SKYPE-ing should cease.

For those outside Japan:

Connection speeds are comparatively good here for the cost, but installation/modification of service tends to take a few weeks (at least).

Japanese problem

I sometimes experience a problem with Japanese input. I use Camino as my browser and there are times when entering info in to web forms, that I can't see the characters as I'm typing them. It is only after I hit the space bar (twice) to bring up the kanji menu, that I can see whether I've entered the kana correctly. I should also mention that often on these web sites, I can't read the navigation buttons either, which has led me to hit the wrong one thereby erasing the form instead of continuing.

Anybody else encounter this problem?

Getting caught up with my reading

JAL CEO cuts his own salary to respond to poor performance and problems.

Esquire's 7 Best Stories via Kottke

Canada's Internet is Crap

Credit Default Swaps Demystified

Hulu workaround

For those of you like me that have been lamenting that you can't access hulu from outside the country, look no further.

Speedtest

The upload speed seems a bit off. I know I've gotten quite a bit faster than that before.
I wonder if the wireless has something to do with it.
Hmmn.

Finally

The guy's coming in about an hour to install my fiber optic connection. I may be offline for the next two hours or so.

I guess I was a byte bit premature

As of Monday I will finally have a fiber optic connection. A possible 100 Mbps will be quite a step up from the heretofore 10 Mbps. But Digital World Tokyo informs us that my carrier KDDI is about to offer 1 Gbps. An order of magnitude difference? And I'm missing it by two days?

Feldercarb !

Cool stuff I've found...

...and need to get out of my newsreader.

Filedropper. Share files of up to 5 GB size for free.

How to burn multiple CDs at the same time with ITunes. (Of course you need multiple burners...)

Jump through files alphabetically regardless of sort order (mac).

Eye-Fi wireless memory card. How'd you like to have your pictures sent wirelessly to your computer as you take them. This would be great at house parties.

FuseCal. Online app to sync ICal based calendars. Perfect for finding time to work out with over-scheduled profs. on vacation.

Fontstruct. Create your own fonts.

Most of the above links go to the sites on which I found these neat things. I was to lazy to make a bunch of 'via X' links.

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.

NengoCalc

An excellent tool for calculating the Western date from the corresponding date using the old Japanese calendar. There is a downloadable version as well.

Sweet.

Into the video age

My friend Kozak just gave me his old webcam, so now I have video chatting abilities.

Suhweet!

Online flashcard maker

Wow this is cool. Cueflash is a site that allows you to create flashcards (and group them) online. I just checked it out and it has no trouble displaying kanji. Also, you can see other users flashcard sets and add them to your own library. Smooth.

via Lifehacker

MC Router callin out Wired

Nerd-hop, or in her nomenclature, Nerdcore.

Sweet. While I'm loathe to link to MySpace, I think that this is worth it. Reminds me a lot of MC 900 ft. Jesus.

Bill Gates Revolution is also worth the time.

Camino new version

For all the mac users out there, there's a new beta version of Camino available. For those unaware, Camino is the cocoa-based version of the open source Firefox browser. It's been my primary browser for some time, as I found Safari a bit cumbersome.

via Wired

For anybody like me...

...who just thinks that it's creepy to have Google keeping track of their search history. A way to opt out.

via Boing Boing

Technorati Tags: Google, puppy

An interesting lecture entitled TV's New Economics by David Poltrack and Jorge Schement about the future of television distribution.  Admittedly, it is a bit statistics-laden and dry at the beginning, but still worth a listen.

Planning your Fall courses?

A site that allows you to search for syllabi.

What me worry?

Gotta say that because of my blog I've gotten back in touch with Smitty, Smitty, and Double-O, made some e-friends, and have discovered some very entertaining writers.  Not to mention the fact that I've wiled (sp?) away countless hours reading the likes of Bill Simmons and searching for anything and everything under the sun.  I've only been connected -- in the internet sense, not the Sopranos one -- for 3 short years, but can't now imagine not having access at home.  Still, as time marches on, and this is in no small part due to my realization that folks who really know the way our current technologies work can wreak havoc on the unsuspecting, I have become increasingly concerned about privacy issues and our collective lemming-esque rush to make our lives public...and googlable.

I've been puzzled by sites like YouTube and others where the bandwidth usage would suggest huge cash outlays with little obvious revenue.  How are sites like that and others, for example the social networking sites that seem to be popping up everywhere, making any money? 

Perhaps the answer is that they aren't.  Perhaps there is a bubble growing based on future revenues. 

Just kinda cool

While I don't think that it would have any practical application in the life I lead, besides perhaps, just being made aware of the preponderance of fields in my environment, this is just pretty cool.

Cory Doctorow:  This morning's Wired News has a fascinating article on the practice of implanting small, strong rare-earth magnets in one's ring-finger. The result is a kind of "magnet sense" -- people who've had the implant report that they can tell when a wire is live and when they're going through a magnet security-scanner at a store, even when their laptops' hard drives are spinning up.

Quinn Norton of Wired News has had the operation and writes in detail about how it felt, what the problems were, and what she was able to do once it was in place. The most amazing part is that months after the magnet implant fragmented and Quinn lost her "sixth sense," it reassembled itself (magnets tend to draw towards one another) and the sense returned. 

  What if, seconds before your laptop began stalling, you could feel the hard drive spin up under the load? Or you could tell if an electrical cord was live before you touched it? For the few people who have rare earth magnets implanted in their fingers, these are among the reported effects -- a finger that feels electromagnetic fields along with the normal sense of touch...

According to Huffman, the magnet works by moving very slightly, or with a noticeable oscillation, in response to EM fields. This stimulates the somatosensory receptors in the fingertip, the same nerves that are responsible for perceiving pressure, temperature and pain. Huffman and other recipients found they could locate electric stovetops and motors, and pick out live electrical cables. Appliance cords in the United States give off a 60-Hz field, a sensation with which Huffman has become intimately familiar. "It is a light, rapid buzz," he says.

Link

Figures

The first time i'm going to be home for March Madness in 5 years, and now they decide to offer games on the web.  To make matters perfect, I  get back to Japan 2 days before the finals...

via Gizmodo

Movies on your Mac

Posting this for reference.  A nice guide to putting DVDs on your hardrive for long plane flights.  Might come in handy soon.  Includes some nice tools for reencoding movies to take up less drive space.

Grocery List Generator Software

This seems like it might be pretty cool.

Windows, Mac, Linux: The Grocery List Generator extension for Firefox stores all your favorite recipes and the ingredients needed to make them, and generates a shopping list for your next trip to the supermarket.

Yes, this is a bizarre thing to use your web browser for, but the Grocery List Generator in action works well, especially for those of us who hit up the web for recipe ideas. Enter how many of which dishes you're planning to cook, and print out a well-formatted list broken down by what store stocks what ingredient before you head out the door.

via Lifehacker

IMDB RIP

So I'm doing my normal bit of sleuthing in order to find out how tall someone is or to see if Lili Kane's mom on Veronica Mars is the girlfriend of the Jake in Sixteen Candles, and I can't get there.  The staple of our Clerks-esque existence has been the ability to say that 'yeah, Janet Ashikaga is responsible for the casting on some of my favorite shows', and our world was made so much easier by imdb.  Now, it seems that some of the information beyond the first page, like the recurring cast and special guest stars, now requires registration at imdbpro.  While i love useless knowledge as much as the next guy, can't really see paying 12.95/month for it.

Oh happy day

I am sooo all over this.  Someone has created software that looks for the latest episodes of your favorite shows and them downloads them through your bittorrent client.  And I thought I was smart to have automatic reminders to look for new episodes in ICal.

via Life Hacker

Anonymizing Google's Cookie

A helpful page for keeping Google's prying eyes off your searches without giving up Google's functionality. 

Why do this you ask?  Info after the jump.

via Boing Boing

Good images for use in presentations

There is a post at presentation zen that has a list of links to free and for-pay sources of images.  Could be useful for those designing websites and/or presentations that will catch and keep he attention of students (or other audiences).

One more reason to use Mozilla

I mentioned a while back that there was a Rikai XUL plugin for Firefox that provided for the functionality that some of us were used to over at rikai.  Now it seems that even more cowbell functionality has been added to help people learning kanji.

I'm gonna download them now and try them out.

via Hmmn...

The NSA's invisible cookies

Check out this article on invisible cookies set by the NSA website on any computers that visited the site.

Didn't even know that there was such a thing as invisible cookies.  Truly disturbing.

via Truthout

Holiday Gift Ideas

Here are some things that I am thinking about getting myself some folks for Xmas.

The best Cookbooks of the year.  (via Rebecca Blood)

Michael Broadbent's book, Vintage Wine. 

Riedel wine glasses.  Heard about these on Hsiao-ching Chao's excellent On Food podcast.

Dr. Toy's best children's products of 2005.  (via Rebecca Blood)

Nigella's measuring cups.  Mmmm, Nigella...  (via Slashfood)

External harddrives that look like legos. 

A bike helmet cover.  (via Boing Boing)

Google, cookies and privacy

Color me nutty, but I avoid like the plague sites that require cookies.  The one exception to this being GMail (ok, ok, my fantasy NBA  league on Yahoo also requires cookies).  I just don't know enough about cookies and what they're capable of to not be wary of them on spec.

Also I have been reading some disturbing stuff over Professor Lenz's blog and elsewhere over the past few months. 

Is it just me, or does the idea of targeted ads freak anyone else out?  It felt to me like Google did an amazing marketing job getting people to move over to GMail en masse.  1. Offer 1GB accounts to all these users of other types of web-based email, whose accounts got full everytime someone sent us some digital photos.  2. Make the initial offering by invitation only, so that there is some cachet attached to having an account.  3. (And this is clearly not nefarious) offer more 'natural' ways of accessing emails (threads, searching, etc.)  And the small price that you pay is just to have ads targeted to you based on what is in your and your friends' emails.  Just a step in the evolution of the book recommendations from Amazon, right?  Right...? 

Well, check out this excerpt from a post at Schneier on Security:

Daniel Solove on Google and privacy:
A New York Times editorial observes:

At a North Carolina strangulation-murder trial this month, prosecutors announced an unusual piece of evidence: Google searches allegedly done by the defendant that included the words "neck" and "snap." The data were taken from the defendant's computer, prosecutors say. But it might have come directly from Google, which -- unbeknownst to many users -- keeps records of every search on its site, in ways that can be traced back to individuals.

I'm not sure what I am going to do about my current reliance on Google.  I really do dig GMail's massive inbox, but I may have to quit using it.  Also, I may move to clusty or some other search engine until Google works out it's privacy issues.

Anyone interested in the Google/Privacy issue should check out Professor Lenz's writings as well as the full post by Schneier above.  Enlightening.