And thus, a meme. Make a post on your blog listing up to 5 sites or services that amuse you/intrigue you/help you the most at the moment. This list (at least for me) always changes, as I tend to discover new things, or grow bored with old ones.

Or as in the case with dictionary.com … I had enough of the god damn ads. It’s as if they added a new banner or “text-ad” once a month for the last year. I used their dictionary service very very satisfied for I can’t count how many years (from before my Skotos days), but now my faithful “di” keyword in Firefox went from dictionary.com over to dict.org, which is quite ad-free, thank-you-for-asking.

So my list of 5, backwards because I’m hip that way:

5. dict.org — a free dictionary, and by free I mean very free, as in free of ads and stuff

4. smart.fm — I have been lagging behind recently, because I’m nearing closure on my kanji studies and that’s taking up most of my spare time, but this is a cute site for hammering Japanese (or whatever language it is you wish to study) vocab into one’s brain.

3. gmail — boring, I know, but gmail is actually sort of new to me. I went with POP3 for the longest time, but when my move to Japan started drawing near, I realized that it was just stupidity not to stop with the POP.

2. VISA exchange rates page — call it a blessing, call it a curse, but at least it tells the truth. Most of the time*. Oh and yes, this is above gmail. That says something about my economic situation, I’d say.

1. Zero Punctuation — this guy makes my day. Totally. He reviews games (PC, console, etc) and as the title suggests, he speaks very very fast and very angrily, most of the time. You’ve gotta see it to understand. Even if you don’t know any of the games on the list, just check one out anyway.

Now your turn. I’m not asking you to do this to make me feel all gooey about having started a meme, I’m asking you to do this because I’m honestly curious about what the people I know are entertaining themselves with that I have yet to discover. Call me a greedy bastard.

*) Once about a month ago I went there and saw that the yen had dropped like a rock in the ocean. It had happened overnight, and it was a matter of something like a 30% difference in “price” for me right there. So I scampered off and withdrew money, and when I got home, the amount withdrawn was not at all matching up with this new, glorious number. Turns out the Visa site screwed up somehow, because the day after it was all back to “normal”.

“The characteristics of foreigner criminals visiting Japan.” (“来日外国人犯罪の特徴”)
A handbook “sponsored by the Shizuoka-Ken Head Police Station, the Shizuoka-Ken Association for the Prevention of Crime”

Link to Zone81 blog where this masterpiece is printed in its entirety (though without Japanese you won’t get much out of it — the pictures are fun to look at though).

I’ve been looking around a lot for some form of confirmation on this one, but my Japanese sort of fails me. What I did find was almost as bad though. Practically every prefecture in Japan has a [prefecturename].go.jp (government dot japan) page which lists “visiting foreigner criminals/crime in Japan”, divided into racial heritage with cute little diagrams and such.

Before I came to Japan, I knew it would be one of the few places on earth that I could go to and be “mistreated” for being a white male. Not a lot of places where you can get that these days. I knew, and I came here anyway, because I am fascinated by the Japanese language, the people who speak it, their culture, and how they came to be as isolated and “we vs them” as they appear from the outside (and from the inside as well, to a great extent). If I had wanted good treatment and smiley faces and chirpy birds, Japan would not have been on my list of places to go.

Some days pass and all I am greeted with is friendliness, openness, a willingness to accept each other as brothers across the world, and such floweriness. Today, as I came home from my test-ride to my potentially new school (was timing it to see when I had to get up in the morning) an old lady walked across the street as I was buying a coke from a … uh … jidouhanbaiki (the fuck is that in English?). I looked at her and she looked at me for a sec, and then she nodded and smiled and I nodded and smiled back. I realized that the Japanese are big on greetings. Even if you don’t know a person, you might nod to them if you end up inadvertently trampling into their bubble — such as looking at them while they happen to be looking at you. I tend to turn my head away and do my thing in those cases, but I think a Japanese might have nodded or something to acknowledge the other’s presence.

Then other days I am baffled by the blatant racism and ignorance that permeates this place. Such as the above “handbook”. I think part of the problem is that 20% of Japan’s population are all above 65 years of age. Old people tend to forget about equality and understanding cultural differences and such things. Sadly.

The thing got a huge amount of attention, and the author of the book made a response to the international audience in Japan Today, here.

I’m not sure what to think of this all. I knew racism existed in Japan (against everyone not Japanese), and I do not have any illusions (like so many other people who are planning on moving there) on ever being seen as “Japanese”. No, I would rather be seen as “Kalle”, and I would rather see people as who they are as individuals, and to hell with belonging and becoming.

But this is just… wow. It smells and looks and feels like the racism of half a century ago. Where am I headed again? And why? I hate having to ask myself those questions when I’ve been set on this plan for over a year already.

So she came over and, cunningly, she brought her knitting… stuff, with her. For various reasons, the rest of this post is in bullet form. Enjoy!

1. I plug my wireless thing, my monitor and my speakers into my lap top and boot up. The wireless keyboard does not work. I use the laptop keyboard “for now”.
2. I give up on the “for now” concept, pull the wireless thingie, plug in my wired keyboard and mouse. Nothing’s happening. It died? I end up doing the “hold-it-fer-five-secs-m8″ trick to force a reboot. My mother is getting the hint, and pulls out her knitting stuff and goes at it. I admire her foresightfulness.
3. Computer finally gets back up, but that reboot took 10 minutes, what the fuck? Anyway, the wired keyboard + mouse work now at least, imagine that. I log in and start up Firefox and head over to sf-anytime.com.
4. *meep* They require Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or above. I knew that’d happen. I happen to have IE 7 installed. I try to start it up…
5. And then I try to start it up again.. thinking maybe Windows didn’t actually realize that when I clicked on that icon I wanted it to start — if I click it again, maybe it will get the hint.
6. And then I try to start it up again, thinking that it might, just might, have missed the fact twice.
7. Reboot. Or, attempt to. Everything’s frozen. 5-second-killer-c-c-c-combo!
8. Back inside, I decide to do a Windows Update. Ha! Thought I! Windows Update uses IE which, currently, does not work very mightily.
9. I cunningly decide to open Firefox, head to sf-anytime.com, and tada! There’s the “if you want to upgrade to IE, click here” link. Yeah, I want to upgrade to IE. Upgrade. Yes. Let’s upgrade ourselves, because upgrading ourselves to IE is such an upgrade. Anyway, I download IE via the functional browser, Firefox, and start up the installer.
10. It wants to make sure I have a valid version of Windows, for my sake, so that I may buy a legal version in case I was handed a dirty one. So thoughtful of them! Now it wants to reboot.
11. Okay, we’ve rebooted. That took 10 minutes. I log back in and it wants to delete the old version of IE. Fair enough, I prefer a clean upgrade. Ha.. haha. It takes 10 minutes to remove the old version. (What on earth? I’m beginning to suspect the hardware is fried on this thing, except that it works perfectly fine in linux, and while, as we all know, linux is superior in every single way, shape and form, it does not have the ability to magically use broken hardware.) It wants to reboot. Wow, this reminds me of when I was a little ignorant and exceptionally dumb boy who used Windows .. what was it? 95? I think so. Anyway, I quickly grew up. Moving along.
12. We’ve rebooted again. It wants to install IE now. Yay! Finally we’re agreeing about something. Well, sort of anyway. It seems stuck.
13. We’re waiting for it to unstick itself. I am beginning to recall my Windows l33t-ness which is a Zen-monk’s patience incarnate. Yes sir. Meanwhile, I’m explaining to my mother whose wide-eyed, incredulous stare has been glued to the monitor (all the while knitting away on whatever it is she’s knitting) for all this time that in Windows, it controls you, and you obey it. (She’s been using linux since she started using computers some 3-4 years ago. Exclusively. Windows scares her shitless, and believe me, it scares me shitless too.)
14. I decide to make some coffee while we wait. Suddenly my mother yells excitedly, “It’s finished! I think.” I look at it and, believe it or not, but the little shit rebooted! It didn’t even ask! What the hell? I log back in, and it starts doing some weird “Setting IE up, customizing your computer, optimizing the hyper drive”, whatever. I ignore it and drink my coffee. Afterwards, I am faced with a dialog telling me it wants to upgrade Windows. No, it needs to do so. Okay then, I let it.
15. 30 minutes later it’s done. We sat down to watch the movie at ~8 pm and it is now 10.30 pm. Will we finally get to see that movie? That remains to be seen.
16. I load up IE (it works this time) and head over to sf-anytime.com. Or I try. It seems Internet is down. Huh. I open up Firefox and go to google. It works in a flash. Hm. I close IE, reopen it, do not hit ESC to stop it from loading “blabla.msn.com” this time. Wait it out. It loads up fine. Try sf-anytime.com again, and this time it works. The wonders of Microsoft.
17. After installing a DRM thing (a little piece of my soul died when I clicked ‘install’), we finally got in, to see exciting titles such as …
18. … movies that were hip 20 years ago. That, and a few obscure titles from 2004. Is this a joke? The selection is pretty large, I give you that, but there’s literally nothing on there worth watching. My mother finally points out a movie (Zozo by Josef Fares) that she said I’d like, so we watch that one (super-condensed review: started out great, ended suckily). Or we try! Ha. Ha. Ha.
19. Or as Santa would put it – ho. Ho. Ho.
20. We are told that some DRM error occured. For some magical reason (I think it’s my ancient Windows intuition pinging me from someplace), I decide to upgrade Windows Media Player. I do so. I try again.
21. It works.
22. Except it’s now 11 pm.

I occasionally reflect upon my hatred towards Microsoft Windows. I mean, people do use it, and there has to be a reason. Sometimes, a friend of mine decides to switch over to linux, saying they’ve “had enough!”, and I help them out. But inevitably, they will come to a point where they think “Dude, this is just too much work. I’m thinking of installing Windows again,” and I always tell them the same thing: “Yeah, do so. You should use what feels best for you.” One thing is abundantly clear, however, and that is that I personally cannot use Windows. It’s following a philosophy that I can understand, but never agree with. The philosophy of “handling stuff for me”. This philosophy works great for an absolute beginner, but not so great for a person with a tiny bit of adventurism in them. Try to “play around” with Windows and you will kill Windows. And I’m completely ignoring things such as virii and worms and trojan horses and whatever have you. The way I see it, those will come to linux as well, when linux has a big enough player base. What I do believe though, is that it will take an idiot to get a virii in linux, and it will be more about fooling people than it will be about brute-forcing one’s way into another person’s operating system, as is the case with Windows.

Security holes exist in both places, and I remember one time when some Windows advocate said in response to an article, “Where are the linux people now?” Well, my answer to that question is, “We’re somewhere else, not giving a shit,” because the blown-up “security holes” mentioned in that article were for specific pieces of software. It’s a much bigger deal when a security hole applies to every single computer running a particular operating system (i.e. a kernel flaw), and you will find very few of those in linux. Unpatched, that is.

In any case, there you have it, my Windows experience for the year. And believe me, I am not looking forward to a second one. Those movie tickets I got (I have like 6 of them) will remain unused. If you find something at sf-anytime.com that you’d like to see, let me know, and I’ll get you a code, but you better hurry — they expire on new years, GMT+1.

“Q: Is it legal to say the word ‘foo’ while chopping another human being to little pieces with an axe?”

“A: No, it absolutely isn’t!”

I mean… I can say that anything and everything is illegal if I word it right and quote the wording just so.

Space = the 51st state? Lovely. Want some fries with that megalomania, Mr. President?

Unfortunately I don’t have Windows.

Unfortunately for them.

If they expect a consumer to support their business (i.e. not download stuff from the ‘net) and purchase their products, they had better try harder than this. The movie site which provides the movies (sf-anytime.com) dismisses its linux users indifferently, saying DRM technology is unsupported on the platform and thus, the linux users can go fuck themselves. Using their hard earned movie tickets, perhaps. The same, by the way, goes for the Mac users. Yessir, you wanna be legal and watch movies from home, you better be using Microsoft Windows. “With all the doubts of crystal clear,” as Peter Murphy puts it.
So I contacted my ISP, saying I would like reimbursement for the 3 tickets I got. They did reimburse me, a whooping $2 US or similar. (Though in their defense, those tickets are still valid — I just have to go to some funny friend who’s dumb enough to run Windows.) Gotta give it to them, though. I definitely didn’t expect them to give me anything at all.

Conclusively, the message from the Music and Movie Industry is clear. Download stuff online, as you have no other option. “Buy the DVD,” you say? Well, sure, but that, too is borderline illegal. The encryption algorithm for DVD playback has already visited court on one occasion, and who knows when that whale resurfaces. “Buy Windows,” you say, and I shall steeple my fingers and snicker.

Update (2006-08-20): I emailed my ISP telling them that my mother is in the exact same situation, and she, too, got the $2. Cute. (But to be honest, it’s actually not $2. It’s $1.39 according to the current exc. rates.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/14/AR2006061402071.html

Allow me to repeat that. It is worth using America’s muscle to protect movie and music interests abroad.

Allow me to clarify that. By “America’s muscle”, we cannot presume anything other than “American military power”, at best used as a threat, and at worst used to murder people. Taking lives over movies and music.

How hilarious is that? It’s quite hilarious, lemme tell ya.

Right up until they start dropping nukes over my head. After all, I committed the mortal sin of being in the same country as some guy who has an unhealthy obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost, 24, or whatever else there is (or was) the so called entertainment industry spews out these days. (Speaking of that, this gives a kind of Romanesque, Gladiatorish meaning to the word entertainment, doesn’t it?)
I’ve kind of felt that this whole thing has been steadily ascending toward war. War, over movies. What’s left of us in the future won’t know whether to laugh or cry when they look at the dumb shit being produced today and compare it to the devastation that will befall us over that same, dumb, mass-produced shit.

Richard owns a store chain with shops worldwide. It’s an immensely popular store because Richard has managed to obtain a worldwide monopoly on the distribution of bananas — don’t ask the narrator how, or why, Richard managed such a feat, but he did, and here he is — mad, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment.

Richard’s many many stores contain boxes and boxes of bananas of various flavor and sorts, for Richard indeed has the monopoly to distribute all kinds — African bananas, Kenyan bananas, American bananas, Swedish bananas, big bananas, small bananas, and so on.

Richard’s customers were at first satisfied with his service. The bananas were out in clear sight and the customers could pick and choose the best and the fresh. However, this lead to a very annoying issue, at least in Richard’s eyes…

The rotten fruit remained. The bad fruit remained. Even the bananas with such a simple flaw as a little fur on the edge remained. For many a day, Richard pondered how to counter this problem, and how to manage to sell the rotten fruit also, for, in his eyes, the millions he raked in on the fresh fruit nigh on outweighed the losses he made for the rotten fruit he had to throw away!

And one day it came to him — and the very next day as customers trickled in to get their bananas, they were met with quite an extraordinary surprise…

The bananas were boxed! Each bunch was in a separate, non-transparent, plastic-wrapped box labeled with its origin and flavor. Now customers suddenly couldn’t pick and choose between the individual fruits anymore. They had to go for the flavor and origin that they thought might suit their tastes and then hope for the best.

Some customers came home with a box filled with only 3 or 4 good bananas and the rest simply went in the trash. Some came home with a single banana that was fresh and all the others bad. Some even came home with boxes filled with rotting, decaying fruit. Needless to say, customers were upset, but what could they do? They had the choice of no bananas, or Richard’s bananas, and, banana-loving folks as they were, they swallowed their pride and went on with it.

Years passed, and Richard raked in the big bucks. More shops opened all over the place, and the banana prices soared. Customers with all-bad boxes were given the option of returning their boxes — presuming they hadn’t removed the protective plastic covering the box that is, and while some of the more daring customers accusingly pointed out that there is no way to check the state of the bananas without opening the box, and no way to open the box without removing the protective plastic wrapping, most of them seemed content with this obvious robbery. The bananas weren’t that expensive, anyway, and they could always try again tomorrow and hope for a better, fresher result that time.

However, a most unpleasant circumstance had developed. All over the world, illegal groups had started buying bananas, planting the seeds and producing their own bananas. And worst of all, they gave bananas away for free, to anyone who wanted one! Not only were they planting banana trees illegally, but they were planting banana trees of every single kind, and all of these banana trees were directly derivative of Richard’s own harvest. Since Richard owns a monopoly on bananas, this thus was a most illegal endeavour; thievery in fact, and thus the reason for his anger.
These banana-pirates producing their own bananas off of his are causing his winnings to drop substantially. Of course they are! If people can get bananas for free, why would they buy them? The only thing keeping Richard afloat is the fact most people don’t know where to go to get illegal bananas, but Richard knows it’s only a matter of time before his industry collapses in upon itself and falls apart.

But he, being the fighter he is (I mean, he managed to get a monopoly on bananas, for crying out loud; you bet he’s a fighter for pulling such a feat off — sort of like patenting “water”), won’t give up without a fight. So he calls to the aid of the governments of the individual countries, preaching to them, pouring his entire soul into charismatic speeches about property rights; and the governments, teary-eyed, set it upon themselves personally to invest some of their police force’s time into finding these banana pirates, “and to hell with the unsolved murder cases!” one of the prominent ministers exclaim with unabashed excitement, his enthusiasm not at all colored by the shiny bills that found their way into his pocket somehow.

So a few years pass, but Richard realizes that the illegal banana business has only increased in intensity. The police investigations are for the most part fruitless (pardon the pun), as the illegal banana pirates are cunning about covering their tracks. So Richard decides it’s time for the bigger tools. He calls again upon the governments of the countries of the world, preaching throughout the night about the need for surveillance and the need to ensure that citizens behave themselves — and to ensure that no illegal bananas plantations take place, as an afterthought.

The government leaders, mightily impressed with this for-humanity, for-the-world exclamation, realize that Richard’s foremost wish is the good of mankind, and solemnly they agree. And to hell with integrity.

This story is obviously not real, but it’s reflecting a very real situation that is occuring in the world right now. It is hopefully a humorous story that will make you think about what is going on, especially with the Record Industry of America, persecuting the very fans whom are the foundation of the industry they are attempting to protect.

How many times haven’t you bought a movie or a music album which turned out to be incomprehensibly, unthinkably, unbelievably bad? To the point where you, for the remainder of your life, will even be embarrassed about the fact you made the purchase in the first place? The rampant, illegal pirating of movies and music out there began for a reason — and it’s not exclusively “people are cheap thieves”. I may be wrong, but I am of the firm belief that humans prefer to not break the law. They prefer to be law abiding citizens, paying for their cartons of milk and their loaves of bread, paying their taxes and being in general on the light side. But despite this, more people download stuff illegally than not. And while this occurs, many artists, from whom the products being stolen originated, are making statements about what THEY think, which seems to differ greatly from what the record label companies think.

My take on things is that there are a lot of things wrong with the music and movie industries right now, and these wrongs have a truckload of side effects. One of these side effects is the intensity of illegal sharing of music and movie products.

Update: Coincidentally, the next post in his blog contains a quote from a person named Richard. Judging by the content, it should be clear that it is not the same person in any way, shape or form.