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From our stating-the-blindingly-obvious department:

You might have noticed this website has just undergone a complete face-lifting…
For the sake of argument, we’ll say it’s not completely finished… But mostly, it is.

It should look good, or acceptable, on every browsers. If it doesn’t, please let me know. But as usual I can only stress how much better it’s likely to look on real browsers (not Microsoft’s twisted version thereof).

I still need to brush up the menu content at the top of this page (organize, add some more items, update my bookmark list etc), but everything else is now in place. And all modesty aside, I dare say it kicks major ass.

Let me use this occasion to invite longtime RSS reader to pay a quick visit to the online version… While I won’t be stopping to provide full-content RSS any time soon, there are in fact many other incentives to checking the page itself that are not visible in the RSS feed.

For your benefits (and the benefit of other less sharp readers who might have missed hidden jewels of this corporate behemoth of entertainment we run here), let me list a few:

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Started playing around with a new layout for this blog.

Not the final version by any mean…

I had to separate the redesign in two phases. This is only the first phase: structural changes.

Second phase (actual theme change) will come later, when I’ll be done with the coding and can concentrate on finding inspiration (I cannot code on mushrooms: just doesn’t work).

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This entry was originally gonna be a comment posted on Dave’s Chalkboard in response to this post. But then I realized it had taken the size of a novella, and furthermore, most of its content is probably relevant to other people too. So here goes another entry about Spam Karma…
Sorry, I know this is getting tedious, I’m tired of talking about it too… I promise this is the last time you hear about it until I finally get off my ass and release SK 2.0

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You know, despite my best efforts, I have never managed to reach celebrity status in Japan… and when I see the kind of humiliation my friend the “talento” has to go through, every time he is featured on TV (full story for another day), I am quite happy with that.

However, I can now die a happy man, since a small part of my work has finally been recognized for what it’s worth, and featured in a Fijian Newspaper. Yea, you read correctly: I am a star in Fiji.

Well, kinda.

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I know this might sound hard to believe, but if you know me personally, you know I am quite a good-natured person. I can get irritated at things, but hardly ever go any farther than that.

In fact, provided my meds do not run out, it is awfully hard to really piss me off for good. And to get on my permanent unexpiring shit-list, you have to really overdo it.

One easy way to do it, though, is to successfully DDoS my host on a Sunday morning, resulting in the suspension of my whole account, mail server included.

The debate is still open on whether that was an actual DDoS attempt (I do have many friends out there, and they have been trying similar tricks in the past) or just one the most braindead of that already rather stupid sub-species known as referrer spammers. Granted, my own host hardly showed much efficiency in the matter, since, upon seeing a few IPs querying my blog index.php file upward of 200 times in 50 seconds, they merely took offense of the fact that it was overloading the mySQL server (thanks WordPress and its 70 queries per pageload) and pulled the plug without any further consideration.

A quick look at my logs eventually showed that these hits were pushing some second-grade junk website in their referrer field.

And just like that, unbeknownst to him, that spamming wanker made himself one very decided enemy.

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Found this awesomely dorky time-waster through Cosmic Buddha and here is what it’s got to say about Spam Karma:

This new pizzle is destined ta become tha permanent news repository fo’ all th’n Spam Karma
[…]
Spizzay Karma in tha dogg pound.
[…]
Spam Karma cuz this is how we do it.
[…]
Spizzam Karma . Ya fuck with us, we gots to fuck you up.
[…]
You can leave a response, or trackback fizzy yo own site fo gettin yo pimp on.
[…]
S-P-to-tha-izzam Karma has gizzle nuts . Relax, cus I’m bout to take my respect!
Chosen excerpts from search results

Now I ask all the spammer beeatch out there, you sure you wanna fuck with my homies?

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Because we all need an entry filled with pointless acronyms and meaningless technical gibberish every once in a while…

As you may remember, and despite my recent vow never to trust technology again, I recently purchased a brand new keitai.

For those of you without a geeky masochistic streak who do not intend on reading the whole tedious entry, let me give you a quick sum-up: this in-depth report on the merits and shortcomings of AU’s W21T model is split into three main sections: 1) All the features that makes it so great 2) Why you can’t do crap with all these features and that sucks 3) How I intend to break my way through these silly limitations.

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Picture keitai_w21t.jpg
Sunday, I took my roommate Eriko on a record-shopping spree in Shibuya.

The principal goal of our expedition was not for me to pack up on yet more records that I will probably have to leave behind when I move, but rather to help her get started with her career as a world-renowned DJ.

People coming over and asking you to “teach them how to DJ”, is pretty much par for the course whenever you start playing outside of your bedroom. This is how everybody get started, this is how I got started… You pick a DJ you know or that you particularly like and humbly go asking for advice and guidance.

DJ’ing, in that respect, still holds much of that old “master-apprentice” tradition that you get, both in western and Japanese craftsmanship.

But enough with the Mr. Miyagi bullcrap: Eriko didn’t turn to me because she was blinded by my turntablism wizzardry and had a striking revelation in the middle of a dancefloor. Rather because we live under the same roof and she couldn’t help but become increasingly curious about the pleasure I seemed to draw from playing with all these colorful knobs in my bedroom.

Note: If you didn’t grin stupidly upon reading that last sentence, you are way too pure to be reading this blog and have probably lived a very sheltered life so far.

Anyway, after explaining that she probably didn’t need to get the full Midi keyboard and TB-303 kit just right now, I gave her the usual drill. In a nutshell: “Sure, go for it, but not with my records, please”.

Hence the trip to the store, hence the last two days spent enduring the same continuous soundtrack of mismatched beats from the same two records for hours on end…

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