While taking a walk in the neighbourhood on Sunday, we ran into this house, literally decked in water bottles. Pictures fail at conveying the utter craziness of the arrangement: thousands bottles covering every inch of fence (not to mention seashells and pieces of aluminum foil)… All makes my own half-hearted cat-fighting efforts, back in the days, seem pretty tame by comparison.
Month: July 2008
地下足袋
Got a new pair to replace the ones I left in Paris…
This model ups the coolness factor a notch by having an air bubble in their sole (so not kidding). Yes, I am wearing the Japanese Edo era equivalent of Air Jordans…
The debate is still up as to whether wearing them in the street makes me a complete tool, given that:
1) I do not work as a rickshaw runner.
2) I am a pale-skinned gaijin.
(current consensus seems to be that points 1 and 2 cancel each other and it’s OK for me to wear them, possibly even cool… but seriously, who cares: they are super-comfy and funky-looking… good enough for me)
象ご注意
Another major problem in Tokyo’s Shinjuku area: hordes of wild elephants roaming the streets and littering.
タヌキご注意
This Summer, Tokyo Metro is tackling a major issue throughout its network: rampant tanuki infestation…
Helpful signs spread through stations and trains help you spot and identify the cheeky critters. Here seen engaging in such antisocial activities as: biting hands, chasing human preys and staging unauthorized protests…
Let’s hope authorities quickly regain control of the situation. In the meantime please be careful of marauding hordes of tanuki when boarding cars, especially late at night.
Spam Karma goes GPL
Geek news warning: sane people and anybody for whom such acronyms as PHP or GPL merely evocate some brand new drugs the kids might be into these days: you are probably better off skipping this one.
I’ll try to keep it short.
Spam Karma 2 is now released as GPL v.2. This essentially means you can do anything you want to it, except claim you made it (copyright and attribution notice must remain there). You should also note that any attempt at deriving some ill-deserved profit from it through harebrained web marketing schemes will earn you both my long-standing scorn and a nut-shriveling decrease to your actual karma.
I suppose another angle to that post’s title could be:
Officially discontinuing Spam Karma’s development: so long and thanks for all the fish
as this is what this truly is about.
But, such a title would be slightly misleading (and no doubt heavily quoted out of context): Indeed, I am hereby officially announcing that I will no longer support, maintain or further develop Spam Karma (beside some very occasional, very limited poking, until the transition to a self-maintained project is completed). However, thanks to the magic of free software, all the unsung heroes of the Open Source world will soon rise to take over and bring you a stronger, better, more closely supported version of Spam Karma!
Okay, what’s more likely to happen is that nobody will really bother taking over, except perhaps a handful well-intentioned but utterly clueless beginner coders who will quickly find themselves overwhelmed by the task and next be seen running away screaming at the top of their lungs. Hey, I’m not blaming anybody: I wouldn’t waste my time on a non-paying, open-source community project either…
But on the off-chance that you would (and trust me it won’t do anything to help you get laid either), I have set up a Google Code repository, which could become the jumping point to some magnificent community-based development effort (or not). If you are interested in participating in any way, contact me (mail or contact form) with a *brief* description of who you are, what you can do and what you wanna do. I don’t need a resume (I am not hiring), just a very quick idea of what level of responsibility you’d be willing to take on the project. I’ll put in the first couple people that seem to know what they are doing (and do not sound like they’ll be selling everything to Russian mafia-owned spam sites) as administrators of the project, and hopefully from there on, things will work by themselves…
If you think you’d like to tackle any aspect of SK2 development (including possibly porting it to other platforms), here is your chance. Speak now or go back to more fruitful and life-rewarding endeavours forever.
Oh, and as for the “reasons”, well, here they are:
Music Connoisseurs
Location: Hair of the Dog, Golden Gai’s one and only true punk bar.
Yi and I having a heavily inebriated wednesday evening night out, group of young Japanese boys discussing their band’s next club night on the other side of the bar, 時計じかけのオレンジ projecting to the tiny corner screen, random punk score blaring through the speakers…
Barmaid: [handing a menu-like list of all-time punk records] Please pick anything you would like to hear from that list.
Dave: Huh… let’s see… I don’t know… how about Japanese punk…?
Yi: [showing rather random entry in the list] Hey! that Japanese punk band’s called So-Do-Mu!!! Tee hee hee…
Dave: Yay for Sodomu…
Yi: Tee hee hee…
Dave: [to the barmaid] How about playing some “Sodomu”…
Barmaid: Sure, Right on its way…
[couple minutes of fumbling around the mp3 collection on the computer, then finally the track changes…]
Yi: Hey! that doesn’t sound so bad actually…
Dave: Yea, I’m not sure that part is really their own… Probably an intro of sorts…
[Young japanese guys mumbling things about ongoing music in their corner]
Young Japanese Guy #1: Blahblahblah, right?
Young Japanese Guy #2: Blahblahblah… No, I don’t think so, this must
be Chopin…Young Japanese Guy #3: Chopin? Mmmnnn… Blahblahblah…
Dave: Actually, that’s Beethoven… Moonlight sonata.
Young Japanese Guy #1: Really? Oh… maybe…
Young Japanese Guy #2: Oh yea! of course…
Young Japanese Guy #3: Definitely Beethoven!
[All three guys: swooning to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata’s first movement, Adagio Sostenuto]
Dave: …
Dave: So yea… this is one of Tokyo’s most hardcore punk bar.
Dave: …
Nifty Japanese Input Trick
One little-known feature of the Japanese Input tools on OS X is the ability to easily access a whole lot of unicode symbols without having to go dig through the Character Palette each and every time. If you enable Japanese Input (also known as Kotoeri) on your mac, hitting a keyboard shortcut (apple-space by default, I think) will toggle kana input on and off, whereby you can type japanese words in kanas and press the spacebar to pick a matching kanji (followed by ‘enter’ to validate the transliteration).
The nifty bit comes from the availability of UTF-8 characters that are not kanji, but nonetheless useful in a lot of situations. Just as any other kanji, typing a kana sequence (usually the name of the symbol in Japanese), followed by a press of the spacebar, will automatically let you insert the desired symbol.
Note: Apparently, most of these work equally well on Windows Japanese Input system, but I haven’t tested it.
For example, any Japanese girl knows all too well how to obtain the following cutesy icons:
おんぷ[onpu] → ♬♩♪♫
ほし[hoshi] → ☆★
On a more pragmatic note, you can also choose from a very complete set of arrows:
やじるし[yajirushi] → ↑↓☝⇔ etc.
And one of my personal favourite: european currency symbols that would otherwise take half an hour to find on a standard US keyboard:
ゆーろ[yuro] → €
ぽんど[pondo] → £
Another very cool set for your scientific paper-writing needs:
すうがく[suugaku]/えんざん[enzan] → √∃∀≠±∇
Not to mention the entire greek alphabet:
あるふぁ[arufa] α
べーた[be-ta] β
がんま[ganma] γ
でるた[deruta] δ
しぐま[siguma] σ
etc. etc.
You will find even more of these in this large (albeit probably not exhaustive) list of special character shortcuts.