Bonus point to the first one who can guess the new flavor of the month as featured here on a box of Kit Kat and a bottle of Fanta…

In this place, if at the end of your meal, you can hit the bull’s eye out of three darts, you pay half price… Nearly got it…
E. and I decided we’d train at home and come back….

A few very random observations prompted by the music in my life these days:

• Keith Jarrett is a bloody genius (dug the Köln Concert’s vinyl boxset last week-end in Koenji.)
• Sometime during the late 90’s, there was a point where it seemed House was about to break into the mainstream: radios started playing House tracks, cross-over successes appeared, major venues featured House acts.
  Eventually, the trend fizzled out and, instead, Hip Hop became the music of choice for the average dance-impaired suburban white kid…

  I take a deep hard look at any random Hip Hop producer on TV nowadays and thank the gods that House never made it to that level of buffoonery…

• My personal theory regarding Drum’n'Bass is that it is a project gone out-of-hand, developed in the Secret Research Labs of the British Dentistry Association aimed at removing patients’ fillings without anesthesia.

  An alternative theory would be that somebody once decided to make a music so caricatural that it begs to be used for one of these 60 Minutes special on The Youth of Today and the barbaric music they are into nowadays.

  Note: My current appreciation of that thankfully near-extinct musical genre is possibly biased by the fact I was just handed such a massively retarded piece of washing-machine rhythm with mission to make the sound “Phat” and to compress the bass more (you stupid tweakhead: if I throw one more inch of compression into that track, it’ll pretty much become one single pulsating bass sound with a few signature d’n'b, motorcycle-on-the-highway, sound effects here and there).

• Also among the insanely cool picks of that last vinyl hunt to Koenji: Cymande, probably one of the best funk band of all times.

… would be Jagermeister ＋ Red Bull

A while back, Jeremy, at Antipixel, commented on the deceitfully symmetrical appearance of the human body after stumbling upon the frightening realization that he was a freak of nature whose eyes and ears were both uneven.

His findings on feet sizes are perfectly accurate too: as any shoe store clerk will gladly confirm, it is no secret that practically everyone has got one foot a tad bigger than the other. It took me many years to finally remember how crucial it is that I try both shoes before buying, no matter how great the right side fits. My left foot’s big toe, permanently traumatized by years of dancing in undersized sneakers, is a sore reminder of the dangers of impulsive shopping.

Jeremy is too much of a gentleman to allude to another famous occurrence of body asymmetry. One that only members of the feminine gent usually worry about (although they certainly shouldn’t: I think it’s awfully cute).

(more…)

One evening during my stay with Miss Kate in Vancouver last week, the topic of discussion had veered toward my, err, rather memorable twenty-first birthday party…

Yea, that’s the one where I ended up getting married the morning I turned 21, thus topping a week-end that would make any Hunter S. Thompson’s story sound like a Nancy Reagan biopic in comparison…

(more…)

ホント驚いた！
台湾って皆さん日本に興味があって好きみたい。

(more…)

Among the many horrific experiments conducted by the nazis on their prisoners during WWII, a whole set of them focused on hypothermia: hapless Russian POW were put into icy water baths until they collapsed, then attempts to reanimate them using more or less scientific means were made.

Unlike most of their other pseudo-scientific experiments, this one actually had some kind of vaguely reachable goal: improve the life expectancy of the average Luftwaffe pilot forced into a sudden scuba-diving trip in the English Channel. Quite a problem at the time, especially among German tourists returning home from a leisure flight over London.

(more…)

Damn, I was hoping to get out of the damn topic for a while, but my baldness-induced striking cold precluding most other activities worth narrating here, I might as well, give my two cents about the no follow “anti-spam” tag…

In a nutshell: it’s very cute, but it won’t do much to help major existing platforms (might help smaller ones, but they weren’t really concerned with the spam problem in the first place).

(more…)

Yea… anything to deflect attention from the hair. Or lack thereof.

… is wrong with hairdressers here?!?

Could somebody tell mine that I am not a US serviceman.
I mean, how freaking complicated can it be: I said “a little bit shorter”, not “shave it to the bone”…
もう少しだけ短くと言うたよ！

Not been back for a week and they are already announcing snow for tomorrow…

I guess I could launch into my usual bitching about cold temperatures, poor standards of insulation in Japanese architecture and the fact that I can feel the wind blowing from one side of my appartment to the other, through closed windows…

See, that’s what I would have done a month ago.

But today I won’t.

Not only because I’ve just spent two weeks in Montreal, where -15° C is considered a warm day. But also because I have heard of Nunavut.

(more…)

Yea, me too.

As I mentioned many times before, recent development and support on both Spam Karma and WPPM have taken a serious toll on a schedule that certainly didn’t need the extra excitement.

On an average, I receive over a dozen emails/comments a day regarding SK or WP-related support. A good 90% of which are usually RTFM-related and not in any way due to a bug in SK. Lately, I have spent upward of two hours, every single day, dealing with plugin development issues (mostly SK). Very often to come to the conclusion that the bug I’m going after has been introduced by some changes in WP’s code, user hacks, exotic server configurations or any of the hundred parameters I have little control over.

And this, of course, for the mere glory of it all. Because it is doubtful I will ever make a buck off it (and that’s really not the goal), nor is this type of development ever likely to impress anybody reading my resume (the kind of people who employ me usually, ignore until the very meaning of the word ‘blog’).

But this is quite alright.

The many thank-you notes, sincere props, pitches in the tip jar, as well as the personal benefit from using these tools on my own blog, definitely go a long way toward making it worth my time. And I am certainly not gonna start complaining because a project of mine gets some amount of popularity. User adoption is indeed the greatest form of appreciation for one’s work.

Why am I putting Spam Karma’s development on hold, then?

(more…)