Archive for January, 2004

Thursday, January 29, 2004

Jan 29 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Quiet Country Cafe

My cold is clearing out.

I spent much of my illness laying in bed and watching movies and anime. The list? But of course! I shall share my obsessions with total strangers.

  • Children of Dune, a surprisingly impressive rendition of the second and third Dune books. The actors were quite good (mostly; Susan Sarandon was unexpectedly mediocre).
  • Earth Defence Family, which I believe I’ve effused about on this journal enough. The ending lived up to the show’s established brilliance.
  • Quiet Country Cafe. A beautiful, quiet show that has a lot of fans. It’s the anime equivalent of a secretive woman — coy, fascinating, and a complete mystery.
  • Turn-A Gundam, which continues its political and character-driven musings. It emphasizes the human character development of the Gundam universe, rather than the typical mechs-and-explosions aspect seen in, say, G Gundam.
  • Last Exile, a fusion of early-20th-century German technology, American Revolutionary War-era battles, and an adventurous sci-fi anime story, seasoned with deep characters. Tech TV will be airing this show in a 6.5-hour marathon of the first thirteen episodes on March 14th.
  • Witch Hunter Robin, which is just plain serious adult anime. It’s essentially The X-Files (at that shows’ best); it just happens to be animated. The characters manage to not be annoying.

I also re-watched a few MST3K films, as I usually do when I want to be comforted, and re-re-re-re-watched that wonderful anime adventure film The Cat Returns.

On a side note, I see that CD Japan has started a new column called The Collector’s Den, where an American recommends cool products available on the site. A good opportunity for English-speakers to taste the delicate stew of Japanese pop culture. At the moment, there are only a few columns, and they concern themselves with some basics — Studio Ghibli releases, Toho releases (Godzilla et al), etc. — but even those offer some delights, such as the recently re-mastered soundtrack for The Castle of Cagliostro.

Also in other news, Yo Saalon! Gundam Seed will air in America on Cartoon Network April 17th, or so says this report.

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Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Jan 27 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Ick. I caught a nasty cold on Sunday, and I’m still suffering from it.

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Sunday, January 25, 2004

Jan 25 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Oh, now this is interesting. I’m updating this page through my Treo 600 PDA/phone. It’s awkward and slow, but then wasn’t the web in the early days?

I’m finding the primary inefficiency in this to be the difficulty in typing the < and > characters that HTML requires. But even that is getting easier with time. WikiTextFormatting would actually be very useful here.

In other news, I’m sick with a cold. I probably caught it at the boys’ sleepover Friday night (which went surprisingly smoothly).

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Friday, January 23, 2004

Jan 23 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Blast it! Been extremely busy for the past few days, and unable to spare time for this journal. And just when I have a new theory about the future of computing hardware. :grumble:

Things are going pretty well, all things considered. I have a lot planned for the next few days.

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Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Jan 21 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

I took yesterday off so that I could relax a bit. It definitely helped; I met and talked with my parents for a couple of hours, and I did some errands. I bought a ridiculously expensive chess set, too; partly as a comfort, I think. And the store was going out of business, so it was less ridiculously expensive than it otherwise would have been.

Which reminds me: I’ve replaced my dying Handspring Visor and my old celphone with a new Handspring Treo 600. Yes, it was expensive, but it does everything I want it to do, and it consolidates my Palm device with my celphone in a nice package.

I’m happy with it.

VR story will be posted later today, when I get a chance to type it up.

Thomas pulled up a menu and pointed at the item on the bottom. It was a shortcut he’d made earlier, to a special program he’d bought from a spiky-haired seventeen-year-old, then extensively modified. He cycled through its potential avatars and found a plain cube, which he immediately chose, then placed the object into the middle of the room.

He pulled three cameras away from their positions and pointed them out the door, looking down the hallway. Empty. He couldn’t be too careful about this. He took a breath, then touched the cube.

Flickering beams of light shot out from the cube in all directions, some existing for only a fraction of a second. A few turned bright green and stayed, locked on their targets. Thomas waited. More beams flickered out, some locking on. Thomas began to get antsy, even though it had only been a few seconds. He now counted seven green beams. Eight. A few seconds later, a ninth and a tenth locked on, then they all disappeared and the cube itself glowed green. Thomas waited for another moment.

Then he cursed himself. He hadn’t checked a single security access point since he got here. He pulled up a blue window, touched it to acivate it, and began typing on the virtual keyboard that immediately appeared below it. A few moments later, he retrieved basic status from the security system. No alarms were active, at least. He pulled up a menu and pulled out of it a small, multi-tentacled, blue Cthulu head, and pulled one of the tentacles onto the window. This was a common VR tool; as soon as it touched the status commands on the window, it copied that behavior, scanning continuously.

An alarm blared, pulsing the Star Trek “red alert” sound into Thomas’ ears. He swore. Someone was querying him. THe sysadmin was clearly on duty, and must have noticed Thomas’ entry into the security access point. Thomas immediately grabbed Cthulu and waved at it, canceling its behavior. It disappeared.

A window appeared nearby, asking him how to respond to the query and counting down eight seconds before sending an automatic response. He thought furiously for a moment, then paused the countdown and composed a quick, plain-vanilla response, then sent it. The alarm stopped.

Thomas began to dance.

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Friday, January 16, 2004

Jan 16 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

[Astro Boy]

I’m in a good mood today.

I can’t help being in a good mood today.

Two days ago, a few bootleg anime DVDs arrived. “Oh, fine,” you say, “You watched and enjoyed some new anime.” No, this goes far beyond that.

One of those DVDs contained the first four episodes of the new remake of Astro Boy. Oh, how I wish there were more on that disc.

I watched two episodes Wednesday night, and another two last night. And…oh, the joy I felt. Oh how wonderful this series is.

First and foremost, it is Astro Boy. It is a consistent execution of Osamu Tezuka’s vision. It is bright and cheerful and deep and complicated and spiritual. It explores issues of purpose and prejudice.

The animation is also stunning. Absolutely stunning. Each episode cost a quarter of a million dollars. To put that into perspective: most anime series are made for far less than a million dollars.

The theme song is running through my head right now. I am happy. I have seen a thing that is real anime.

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Thursday, January 15, 2004

Jan 15 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

I am thrilled we’re making plans to return to the moon.

Why? Lots of subtle reasons. Space is far more than the ”Earth’s backyard” that a lot of people seem to think it is. It’s not just another place to explore.

As Solomon Short wrote, “Space is not the final frontier. The final frontier is the human soul. Space is merely the place where we are most likely to meet the challenge.”

As James Lileks wrote, “Not because it is easy, but because it is hard and expensive and boring and lethal and just might – might – give people something to watch that’s more important than Paris Hilton pitching a fit because she chipped a nail.”

In other news, I was endlessly tickled when I flipped open my copy of The Wall Street Journal this morning to see Astro Boy on the front page, at the bottom, with a reference to page B1. And on page B1 was a huge, full-color action shot of Astro Boy zooming through the air, accompanied by a solid article about the anime industry.

How nice of them.

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Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Jan 14 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

I’ve been working on the VR story over the past few days, partly because I’m rather unhappy with what I’ve posted here so far.

It’s moving along very slowly, and I find it somewhat boring. The mundane details of conversations take up too much space in this sort of format. I need more action.

So, I followed some writing advice (I think it was from Orson Scott Card): When all else fails, have two thugs with guns burst through the door.

So. Literally, two thugs with guns burst through the door.

And it worked. The story is rushing forward now. It’s stumbling a bit at this unaccustomed pace, but it’s definitely moving forward fast.

Funny how simple advice like that can work so well.

Also, ironically, we’re a long way from that point. We have another four or five entries to go before the two thugs with guns burst through the door.

In the meantime, what I post here will be good build-up to the background of exactly why the two thugs burst through the door, which I don’t know myself yet for sure.

Thomas stopped. Ah. There was Client D’s office, barely a minutes’ journey away at his current speed. Thomas decided to increase his pace somewhat; his nerves were already humming, and he wanted to finish this job sooner rather than later.

He made it to his client’s office without bumping into anyone or anything. This was expected, as Client D had said that everyone would be out of the office at a party by this time. However, the silent, drab emptiness only served to increase Thomas’ nervousness. He’d spend some time in khakis and a tie; this place was not altogether alien to him. It was one of the reasons why Thomas was now a VR detective, to escape places like this.

The office itself was bare, also as expected. The VR world has no need of workspaces in the physical sense. Your VR office is simply a convenient representation of a conduit between you and data. While in your office, you could summon any sort of data and it would appear there, hanging anywhere within the confines of the office walls. Of course, the higher up you were in the organization, the larger youf office, because of the larger amounts of data you have to access. An executive’s office might be littered with hundreds of windows and deeps1, providing a dizzying cacophony of status and progress in a dozen different ways.

And so, in the digital world as well as the real one, your status is determined by the size of your office.

1 Deep — short for ”datapoint,” normally represented by a small cube in VR space. A deep can be manipulated to express data in a variety of three-dimensional (and other) forms not easily expressed in a flat window.

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Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Jan 13 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

If you ask people about software development, they’ll tell you that software development is like gardening, baseball, writing a novel, a jigsaw puzzle, the stock market, a rock-climbing team, war, blacksmithing, a game of Kerplunk, farming, baking a cake, art, digging a hole, archery, or the oil in your car.

Actually, it’s none of these things. Software development occurs entirely in the design/development phase. You aren’t actually making the product until you burn the CDs. Coding is a process of creating, testing, and refining a design. The source code is the design for the product that you will create.

It took me quite awhile to realize this.

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January 12, 2004

Jan 12 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Well. I’ve fixed the CSS for this journal. It’s not quite as pretty as I’d like it to be, but it renders properly in IE for Windows now (at least, my copy). Which, let’s face it, has most of the market share.

2:44 p.m.

The internet is a World of Ends. You can apply it to your blog with interesting effects, I think. I’m still absorbing this.

Stephen writes, in part: “Expose continues to be the best thing to happen to GUIs since the WIMP (Windows, Icon, Mouse, Pointer) mangement concept.”

Well…no. I’ve been using Expose for awhile, and it’s a nifty way of navigating from one window to another. But it’s essentially another utility for navigating windows, joining the group that includes the dock/taskbar/etc. and Alt-Tab window switching. And I find it a lot quicker to Alt-Tab between applications than to use a key/mouse combination to choose windows.

Don’t get me wrong; Expose is an impressive innovation, so impressive it was immediately cloned for Windows (with no mention of its Apple inspiration). But I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

In other news, I’m feeling better. My sleep patterns are returning to normal.

I had a rather stressful Sunday. I’m taking over the 5th and 6th grade boys’ class at my local AWANA club, as the previous leader of that group was transferred to Hawaii. That was a bit worrying, as I’ve never had that much responsibility, and there’s a lot to keep track of — records, notifying the kids of upcoming events, and keeping order. The night went reasonably well; the kids were a bit loud and raucous, but no worse than they are on many nights. It’s early days yet.

But I came home to a truly amazing comfort meal: hearty macaroni and cheese, good thick white bread with a thick layer of sweet butter, a tall cold glass of milk, and chocolate chip cookies; all homemade.

Sometimes, all that homemaking really pays off.

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