blueZhift Blog

This is just one of those stories that makes you chuckle a bit. My wife just told me of a coworker who recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. Before he left he packed a National Geographic map of Iraq among other things. He didn’t really think he would need to bring his own map, but he packed it just in case.

Well it pays to be prepared! During his months of service, he and his unit relied heavily on this map to get around as they were never issued anything official by the Army. Oh boy…

This past weekend I took my daughter, one of her best friends, and the best friend’s mom to see Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Both of the girls are 11 year old 5th graders studying Japanese in school and while they are both anime fans, I was rather dubious at first of the wisdom of taking them to see a PG-13 film knowing the graphic nature of the first Ghost in the Shell film. This had originally been suggested by the friend’s dad who knew that I was an avid anime fan. The dad was unable to come due to illness, so mom filled in.

After giving it some thought and considering the personalities of the girls, I decided to take a chance. Besides, I figured it would be a good opportunity to show the friend’s mom that anime is not just for kids. Both my wife and I went to some length to warn them about this, but like many Americans, they tended to think that anything animated was a kid show. Well after Ghost in the Shell 2 that would all change.

Now as for the movie itself, it was pretty good. This is a very stylish film that does a good job of blending computer generated graphics with cel shaded hand drawn characters and backgrounds. The look is not unlike Witch Hunter Robin, just on a greater scale. Ghost in the Shell 2 is a good cybercop movie with decent doses of action and a heavy dallop of philosophizing over life, death, and what it means to be human. If you liked Blade Runner, then you will probably like this too.

As for the girls, they enjoyed it though the philosophical talk may have been over their heads. There’s nothing too shocking, and sexual content is virtually nonexistent, which is interesting given that the central plot revolves around the question of why robots made for sex (gynoids) are killing their masters. The film is in Japanese with English subtitles. And the mom enjoyed the film too, quite impressed with the visuals in particular.

Ghost in the Shell 2 is currently playing at only two movie theatres in Chicago with no marketing to speak of. This is really too bad, because on more screens and advertising this could be a top ten box office film just as the Chinese martial arts drama, Hero, has been this summer.

This is just a little experiment to see if I can post Japanese text with this thing.

はい! まにあさん!

As near as I can tell, it appears to have worked! This was just a simple copy and paste job. I entered the text using the Unitype Global Writer (in romaji) then copy and paste in here. What does it say? It says "Yes! Mr. Mania!"

Update:

BTW, you won’t see the characters properly unless you have Japanese language support installed. If you are running Windows, the easiest way to get this is to go to Yahoo Japan using Internet Explorer. A dialogue will pop up asking if you want to install the language support. Just follow the instructions from there. You might be able to get the language support kits via Windows Update, but that didn’t work for me.

It looks like this is a very good time to be a gamer. Nintendo and Sony are introducing some much anticipated new hardware at the Tokyo Game Show. Nintendo’s new dual screen DS looks like a nice machine, but I still don’t really get it. I can’t think of just how much more compelling gameplay the second screen adds and certainly not enough to go out and plunk down $150. I’d rather buy a couple of SPs for the kids, or maybe some copies of the new Pokemon titles.

As for Sony’s PSP, weighing in at $300 definitely puts it in wait and see land for me. I like the looks (oh sooo sexy) and the potential, but I won’t be an early adopter there as I have other bills to pay first! Sony also introduced a new slimmed down version of the PS, the PStwo. At $149 with network adapter built in, it’s a tempting cute little package. I don’t really need another PS2, but the small form factor just screams out, portable DVD player!

There are a lot of interesting games coming out too. Maybe I’ll write a bit about that next time.

"Rocket science is more fun when you have real rockets." Or so said the Navy ad that just aired during Adult Swim tonight. I could hardly believe my ears though because it was pretty funny, until I began to think that they were making light of real warfare. Then I couldn’t help but think that it was inappropriate, especially with over 1000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq.

I’m no proponent for political correctness, and I do enjoy various types of war games. But those are just games! The Navy is recruiting people for the real thing, something far more solemn and with no reset button. There are few things more honorable and brave than volunteering to defend your country and I don’t think "fun" plays much of a role in that decision.

There have been rumors going about that Xbox 2 may achieve backwards compatibility with the current generation of Xbox games through emulation. Attendant to these rumors were also concerns that this would run into legal problems with Nvidia, the company that makes the graphics chips for the current Xbox, but will not for Xbox 2 (ATI got that job).

I’ve believed from the beginning of talk about the next Xbox that backwards compatibility was something that Microsoft could not afford to be without. They simply are not in a strong enough position relative to Sony and Nintendo, to just dump the current library of Xbox games and force everyone to start over again. More to the point, Halo is perhaps the one game most responsible for much of the success that the Xbox has seen. And with the much anticipated Halo 2 just over the horizon, it is hard to imagine that Xbox 2 could launch without the means of playing the platform’s most successful title to date. And it should be noted that the Playstation 2 benefitted greatly at launch from its ability to play games written for the original Playstation. Backwards compatibility lowers a lot of buyer resistance to upgrading.

Emulation has so far withstood legal challenge (but not ROM copying!). That is, emulating someone else’s hardware can be done legally if proper clean room techniques are followed. This doesn’t mean you won’t get sued, but it does mean that you will win, if you don’t run out of money defending yourself first! So if the Halo Effect holds, then expect backwards compatibility in Xbox 2. Microsoft has legions of lawyers, so if Nvidia wants to sue like a jilted lover, MS can deal with it. But of late, MS has shown little desire for legal entanglements, so some sort of licensing deal is more likely.

As always, I reserve the right to be completely wrong about all of this!

Oh fickle fame! After much anticipation and fretting over whether I would look fat on TV, the true star of the show was my iPod! The only part of my interview used in the news story was a 3 second shot of my iPod on my butt! I snapped a shot off of my TV for posteriority! The woman in the picture is not me, but that is definitely my behind! Oh well, to quote Ai from Excel Saga, “Ketsu wa ai ja nai!”

A couple of weeks ago I was taking a lunch time walk to Chicago’s Millenium Park. As I often do for long walks, I had my iPod all hooked up and pumping out a mix of techno and Japanese anime tunes. Near the Tribune building I noticed a camera crew and took steps to avoid them, so as not to get in their shot. We’ll it turns out that they wanted to talk to me about my iPod, what I use it for, and why I bought it. I agreed, and if the footage is used, you can see me in all of my glory tonight at 10pm central time on WLS ABC news, channel 7 locally. Just look for the geeky Black guy.

Andy Warhol said everyone would get 15 minutes of fame. Well actually, this would be my second 15 minutes since several years ago, during the tech boom, I was geek of the week in the Chicago Tribune careers section. I like to joke that I have a pretty high luck multiplier!

After I left work yesterday, I walked over to the Virgin Megastore to see if I could find the new Inuyasha movie on DVD. This should have taken just a few minutes. Instead I was greeted by quite a jumbled mess as the entire DVD section had been relocated. Virgin employees were busily reorganizing the shelves. Unfortunately for me, the anime DVDs had not been reshelved, so I couldn’t find anything.

Later I gave some thought to the overall meaning of this relocation. The first thing to notice is that the new location is more prominent and spacious than the old. Indeed, previously DVDs and video games were in a smaller area off to the right of the escalator on the second level. They were almost there as an afterthought, not a main part of the business. When the store first opened, years ago, the music CD was king. But oh how times have changed. The rise of music downloads, video games, and the steep fall in the prices of DVD movies and DVD players has probably resulted in a flip flop reflected in the new arrangement of stock. Right now CDs still have more floor space at Virgin than DVDs and video games, but probably not for too much longer.

In the meantime though, Inuyasha is still nowhere to be found.

Here in Chicago, the day after Labor Day means back to school time. This year that day was especially full of promise as my youngest daughter was entering Kindergarten. Oh what a beautiful day to begin school…then it hit…

Hair hair hair! Such was the cry of thunder as the perfect storm began to brew. Growing up, I was always considered to have the good hair. We African Americans tend to make a lot of hair, I think because there is so much variance among us. Some have nearly straight or wavy hair at one end of the spectrum, at the other end are tightly curled naps. I’m somewhere in the middle. My wife though is Chinese and has very fine hair with only a hint of waviness. So what do you get when you mix these together? Hmmm, for the boys it’s easy, they have wavy hair that is really easy to take care of. On the other hand the girls’ hair is more of a challenge. They have fine corkscrew hair that is actually very amenable to braiding. Unfortunately, I didn’t grow up doing hair and my wife didn’t grow up dealing with this kind of hair either. So today was the perfect day to have the hair argument right at the school, oh joy! If only that were the end of it…

I’m not one to let things sit without a solution, so I resolved to learn to deal with this hair so that I wouldn’t have to take a sword to the chest (Hero reference) in order to make a point. That was the plan anyway. The call I got on the phone would say otherwise. It was the school calling me. At first I thought it was something with the youngest, instead the call was about my oldest son. All plans were dropped as I left work to pick him up. On arrival at the school I was not surprised to find that he had thrown up at lunch. Sickness calls from school always involve vomit. What did surprise me was the principal telling me that the rash on his chin was ringworm! I later joked with him that if he wanted a few more days of vacation, stomach flu and ringworm was overdoing it a bit!

Well maybe it wasn’t the perfect storm after all, but it was a rocky start to the school year. We capped the evening with a tussle over our differing pedagogical styles in helping our eldest daughter with her homework. Yeah, in all a perfect day in paradise!:-)