blueZhift Blog

When I bought my iPod over a year ago, the first time I used it in public during my lunch time walk abouts, it felt like I’d gone backwards in time. During my college years I would often go on walks around Hyde Park and along the lake shore with my portable cassette player and whatever cheap headphones I had at the time. It was fun to overlay my own soundtrack on the world around me. So experiencing this with my iPod was like revisiting my youth, not that my youth is all gone yet!

This is all good fun, but could there be more to it? Markus Giesler, an assistant professor of marketing at York University in Toronto seems to think so. He thinks that iPods are transforming their users into cyborgs. In his view, a cyborg is someone who uses a variety of technologies and is highly connected. Well that certainly makes me guilty. Keeping the pod fed has led me to make a few computer upgrades for convenience and has increased my desire for convergent devices that embody multiple functions. My poor Palm IIIe finds itself left out in the cold as my cell phone, tiny USB drive, and iPod usurp much of its functionality. While I have no desire to take the next step and make these devices a part of my body, I’m sure that given a chance, many people are going to do just that in the coming years.

Resistance is futile. You too will be assimilated, to the tune of JPop anime soundtracks!

Here’s a little something I just got in the CNet newsletter. It’s a little old now, but pretty funny. In Dear IE, I’m Leaving You for Good, Robert Vamosi describes his unhappy breakup with old squeeze Internet Explorer. All I can say is, I hear you! Four years ago I was really excited about IE because it had all of these cool programming hooks, bells, and whistles. It really looked like a platform that a Windows programmer could build on, and to some extent that is still true. But once Netscape Navigator all but died, IE got all fat and lazy. No more sweet talk of new features, no more cool stuff, no more nothing!

Firefox is my browser of choice these days. I only use IE for Windows Update (because you have to) and testing web pages for compatibility.

Last weekend winter made its reappearance here in Chicago and dumped about two feet of snow on us. Needless to say, most people stayed inside. It was the weekend afterall, so why bother going out into a blizzard? I didn’t mind too much since it gave me a chance to spend some quality time in Vana’diel!

So far my life as a girl is going pretty well. Laureta has reached level 7 without too much trouble and I’m having a lot of fun with the new quests. And there have only been a couple of instances of other players seeming to take more notice than I’m accustomed to. One guy seemed to follow me for a bit and offered some help. Another gave me a link pearl which can be used to connect to his link shell. I’ll try that out later. Right now I’m more interested in blasting through the early quests and the Rank 1 missions of which I’ve completed the first one. If I can get another chunk of time, I’m going to find a party and do some real hackin’ n slashin’.

Ol’ WillowBrow isn’t a big fan of my gaming tastes, but I think she understands my need to have some fun. So last weekend was actually a lot of fun, well until I over did the shovelling at church…But that’s another story.

My head is swimming with possibilities since news leaked out that Sony is planning some PDA-like applications for the Playstation Portable, the PSP. Sony, you’re killin me here! But this is a good thing because it could save me some money and give me more than I had hoped for.

Why? Well my old Palm IIIe is dying a slow death of hardware failure plus the death of software support. So I’ve been left with the choice of foregoing a PDA altogether, or shelling out big bucks to get what I want. There are cheap replacements, but none of these have Wi-Fi support. I want a machine that will let me sit on the couch and surf the web and maybe do some email or messaging. Getting that last bit of networking support is the deal killer, leaving me with choices costing anywhere from $400 to $700. This is way too much money for what I want.

So in comes the PSP, currently slated for a March 2005 release in the U.S. at about $200. The PSP already has Wi-Fi support and now with word that a web browser is included with a coming update nearly closes the deal for me! If they play the convergence game right, the PSP may well become the killer hardware of 2005.

After much on and off badgering, the good kind mind you, my lovely spouse has finally joined the blogosphere. Be sure to check out Willow Talk, and bring your brain, it’s a bit more intellectual than the fare you’ll usually find here or anywhere else! So welcome to the machine! I think the internet just became a better place.

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XI Online on my Playstation 2 since it came out for the PS2 in the U.S. last spring. I readily admit that I am an FFXI dilettante. I’m not a level grinder and don’t really like to play that way. My Elvaan monk Phareaude is rank 2 and almost at level 14. That’s not very powerful, but good enough to move with a lot of confidence, and I’ve enjoyed a number of special events and learned a lot about the game and the game world. It’s been a lot of fun!

The recent Christmas season event gave me the opportunity to visit several of the other nations for the first time. I enjoyed that so much that I began to think about creating another character to play in one of the other nations. So yesterday I created Laureta, a petite female Hume warrior living in Bastok. So yes, I’m yet another guy using a female avatar in the game world! The change of life has been fun so far. I really haven’t noticed anything different about playing as a girl, but Bastok isn’t as busy as San D’Oria so this may take some time. As for the rest, it’s just what I had hoped for, a new city, new job, new quests!

I haven’t given up on Phareaude, but I’m going to enjoy being Laureta for a while!

Every now and then I think we all have a moment when we realize that life is imitating art or vice versa. I had one of those today at my son’s chess tournament.

It was the Latin School Chess Championship at Navy Pier and only the second that my son was playing in. He was very excited as were most of the players there who ranged from Kindergarteners to High School aged. I had a lot of fun taking him there, especially since I didn’t get to do things like that until I was in High School.

Anyway, if you are a parent at a such an event, you spend a lot of time standing around, mainly because there wasn’t anywhere to sit except the floor. While standing around between rounds, I noticed that all of the players were running around everywhere. It was as if walking was not even a valid mode of transportation. That’s when I had my moment, this is like Final Fantasy XI Online! In the game most players run everywhere. Walking can be done, but most never do. This is something in the game that I always think is kind of funny. But after today, perhaps it merely reflects the age spread of most of the players, for whom running is the first and best option both online and off!

Looks like the Sunday that just ended was a bit more active than I would have expected from the beginning, but that could just be all of the caffeine from the tea I’ve been drinking… Anyway, the things one finds on impulsive searches amaze me. I was watching Adult Swim and got curious about the woman doing the bump and grind promoting Aqua Teen Hunger Force, so I hit the AS boards and learned that her name is Lindze. A little googling lead to some video of the commercials currently playing, but it also lead to this! I really gotta stop with these quizzes!

You’re Spring. You usually are very close-knitwith your friends and value every friendshipyou have. You’re a real people person andeveryone loves how friendly you are. You’regood with encouraging people but usually don’tlike to be the center of attention. You are asocial butterfly and probably are in severalcircles of friends but it’s just because you’rewell liked and you make people comfortable.You’re both fun and wise but you are veryrealistic about life.(If you can’t see thepics, go to my homepage and look near thebottom and find your result)

What season are you? (pics) brought to you by Quizilla

I’ve been watching Ghost In The Shell: Standalone Complex on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim with mixed feelings. Yoko Kanno’s (of Cowboy Bebop fame) music is pretty good, but other aspects of the show, such as animation quality, have been disappointing. The stories had been pretty forgetable until they introduced the Laughing Man backstory.

Critiques aside, the show has made me think. Would I want to replace my human parts with machine parts? I don’t have any religious or philosophical prohibitions against cybernetic implants, but I certainly won’t be the first in line to try them out! In a recent episode, the Major hacked into an android maid’s eyes in order to see what she was seeing as a drug deal was going down. In another episode the police depart was illegally using monitors to record everything their agents were seeing (without their consent). Having parts that someone else might hack into is not the warmest thought!

So when I saw the story Google Exposes Web Surveillance Cams on Slashdot today and did some poking around, Ghost In The Shell immediately came to mind. Apparently, there are hundreds, if not thousands of web enabled cameras that anyone on the web can connect to. In some cases, you can even control the camera. To test this out, I visited a number of these cameras spread around the globe and saw everything from empty locker rooms in Europe, to convenience stores in Japan. I suppose if I spent more time at it, I’d have found more interesting sights. But the ease of this was rather shocking. It felt rather like a voyeuristic game of Myst.

Yet again, security has probably been ignored in the name of ease of use by end users. So why should anyone expect that cybernetic implants should have any more security? You can’t really blame the web cam manufacturers too much. When they started selling these cameras, they may have never thought that they needed to worry about what a search engine would turn up. When cybernetic eyes become available, the security may be up to snuff then, but what about later?

Well I don’t know if I should be worried or not yet, but it looks like the popular press has discovered manga just as anyone who has frequented a Borders or other major bookstore chain recently. Have you too had to trip over an aisle of usually young people camped out reading manga? It’s gotten so bad that some titles, such as Ken Akamatsu’s Negima, come out sealed in plastic, though with Akamatsu (of Love Hina fame), that may be for content!

The January 5, 2005 issue of the Chicago Tribune has a story covering the popularity of manga in its Woman News section. Knowing my interest in manga, a friend gave me a copy of the article (thanks Peggy!). According to the article, manga sales in the U.S. topped $110M in 2003 nearly double the $60M taken in the year before. But the primary motivation for the article is apparently the growing popularity of manga with girls, particularly the shoujo manga which are targeted at girls to begin with.

It’s a nice article that will give the uninitiated a fair intro to manga, but it is mainly written in the context of American comics and American views of comics as being fluff for boys. In this sense it paints an inaccurate view of manga and perhaps misses the point of why it is becoming popular here in the U.S. as it has been in Japan for some time. I believe the reason for the popularity here with both boys, girls, and old guys like me, is story! The anime and manga that are making their way to the U.S. have interesting stories and characters which with the mix of an unfamiliar culture and different ways of looking at life, are proving to be a potent brew.With this in mind, the popularity of manga is unlikely to revive traditional, super hero oriented American comics. The article doesn’t go into this in great detail, but does indicate that a transformation may be starting to take place in the American comics industry in response to manga and what it is telling them about what readers want. So expect to see manga style offerings from the likes of Marvel and DC Comics in the near future. One particularly welcome development is publisher Del Rey’s entry into the manga market with two strong offerings from the legendary CLAMP, Tsubasa and xxxHOLiC. Not only are these a couple of my favorites, but Del Rey has given TokyoPop a real run for their money by not only publishing in the manga style like TokyoPop, but also providing contextual information on honorifics and other cultural references (though you’ll also see some of this in Fruits Basket, one of my TokyoPop favorites). For someone who wants to have as authentic an experience as possible, short of learning Japanese and moving to Japan, this is da bomb! For more about manga, I’d recommend Dreamland Japan, it’s a little dated now, but still a good starting point for the academically inclined.