blueZhift Blog

It looks like my favorite sport of driving fast and turning left is a hit with other TiVo users as well. For the week ending 6/25/2006, NASCAR Racing is the 10th most recorded show on TiVo according to TiVo’s weekly rankings. At number 10, it’s the highest ranking sport in the top 25 followed by World Cup Soccer down at number 19. It makes me wonder if we’ll see the TiVo guy painted on the side of a Nextel Cup car in the near future!

Microsoft released the final beta for Internet Explorer 7 today which brings it a big step closer to being released. It looks pretty good, and after 5 years of gathering dust and being the cracker’s (black hat hackers) dream, it’s way overdue. I’ll install it once the final release comes out, but IE 7 is not going to displace Firefox for daily use. The reason I’m happy IE 7 is coming out is because there are web applications I have to use that are IE only. So when I have to fire up IE, it won’t suck so much anymore! IE sucking less is teh win for everyone! So hooray for IE 7!

On my lunch time walk I went to a nearby Coconuts hoping to find the Eureka 7 soundtrack that is supposed to be out today. Unfortunately I didn’t find that (though they do have a lot of the Geneon series soundtracks now), but I did see that they were starting to take Playstation 3 preorders for a $50 deposit. I’m on the fence with respect to the PS3 right now, so I definitely won’t be plucking down $50 towards a $600 console that will be in short supply and doesn’t have any games slated for it yet that I personally find compelling. Heck, I haven’t bought an Xbox 360 yet for similar reasons. Though, I do find some of the Xbox Live offerings very tempting. Right now I really want to concentrate on reformatting Flash games to look and play well on the PSP. But I have little doubt that Coconuts will fill up their preorder roster pretty quickly.

Today, despite some early storminess, we started the day with dim sum at the Phoenix in Chinatown, where I wowed the wait staff with the little Cantonese I’ve learned from my wife. Then we shopped some stalls in New Chinatown Square before heading west to Arlington Heights for the 25th Japan Festival. Not only that, I got back home in time to see Jeff Gordon win at Infinium!

The Japan Festival was a lot of fun. We hadn’t been to it since it used to be out at the Chicago Botanical Gardens. This year was the second for the festival at the Forest View Educational Center, just a stone’s throw from the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Arlington Heights IL. The gardens are nice, but they have a lot more room in the new location for events, and because of this, the rain outside really wasn’t a big issue.

Before the day was finished, we’d heard koto and violin concerts of traditional and contemporary Japanese music. The kids had fun breaking wooden boards with karate, and I enjoyed some long sought after takoyaki (octopus balls). And this time, I did not miss the Cha no yu, the tea ceremony! I also enjoyed the taiko performance with my youngest daughter, who had come with me to see it without my wife’s knowledge, which led to a somewhat embarrassing announcement of her being missing. But all was well, as parents must often suffer much loss of face because of their children. It just goes with the job. The kids had a good time. We finally ended our Pan-Asian adventure with a trip to the Mitsuwa Marketplace where I bumped into some of the young violin performers in the grocery store, which gave me a chance to thank them in person for a great performance.

Returning home, the day was completed with a Chinese dinner prepared by my lovely Chinese wife. She made me say that last part, though it is true! Here’s a bad cell phone picture of the taiko performance.

I finally got a chance the look at Connie Chung’s Swan Song on MSNBC this morning. It was pretty hard to listen too, but after reading the various media criticisms going around on the net and remembering the relative rockiness of the last decade or so of her career, I think this performance was a fun way of sticking it to the man. Connie Chung had the great misfortune to be on the way up in TV journalism at a time when it was dominated by white male anchors. It probably didn’t help that she was Asian on top of being a woman. So whatever other fair criticisms there may be of her style, she never really had a shot at having a top anchor position all to herself (that pairing with Rather was disasterous). So with nothing left to lose, she just let it fly. It was a wonderful “up yours” to the establishment, and even at 59, I must say she looked pretty hot doing it. Bravo!

Perfection is a funny thing. We all seem so enamored of it, and many persue it their whole lives. But honestly, is it all that great? I get the daily GameSpy newsletter via email and right now they’re running an ad for the Girls of Gaming. As one might guess, it’s a publication containing the typical busty chicks that inhabit video games. And, of course, these babes are perfect.

I’m sure these perfect females attract a lot of mostly male attention, but I’m finding that it is the little imperfections that add the spice of real human beauty. These game girls are nice to look at, but their general lack of blemish ultimately makes them kind of creepy. This calls into question the whole notion of perfection itself. An artist may add any number of what might be considered extraneous features to a work of art, but it would hardly be correct to call these imperfections. In the same way, the unique features of any human form can hardly be called mistakes either. These are part of what make us each unique works of art. Indeed, you might even call them signature elements of the artist.

So until our game machines have the horsepower to feature human models with the same kinds of signature features, game girls can’t hold a candle to the real thing. Give me that real girl and a freckle or three every time!

I got email from Disney Mobile this morning. It looks like Mickey is in the phone business now and among other things, promises to give me the ability to track my kids’ phones via GPS. Move over Big Brother! Now admittedly, being able to track my kids may have some practical benefit, but despite my love of most technology, I’ll take a pass on GPS tracking. Parents today have a lot of tech tools to monitor/control their kids, but the real job of parenting is not going to be accomplished via V-chips, internet filters, and GPS tracking. I want my kids to develop discipline, self control. That means that I have to give up some control and allow them the room to make mistakes. And since this has worked fairly well for the thousands of years of human history prior to GPS satellites, it probably has a pretty good chance of working now, as long as I put the work into it. So sorry Mickey, I’ll just do it the old fashioned way.

Reading The Rise and Fall of Sega at 2old2play I began to think about my own last decade or so with Sega consoles and games. For the most part I look upon them very fondly, having been swept away in mouth frothing fanboyism back in the day. I mean after all, Sega did have superior technology, riiiiight? Even if that were true, sadly, superior tech does not always win the fight. Just ask IBM about OS/2. Sega also had a stable of arcade hits to draw upon for console conversions. I got a Saturn mainly to play Virtua Cop and Sega Rally.

Looking back, I think one of the things that ultimately led to Sega’s demise as a console maker was their failure to go all the way and build something completely new each generation. I bought a Genesis in part because it used the same CPU that had been used in Macs around that time. My goal in buying a console was to get off of the never ending treadmill of upgrades needed to keep up with PC gaming. So I figured a console that had recognizable computer innards was probably going to be powerful enough to play the sort of games I would find interesting. This did not turn out to be the case, and yes I still game on the PC too. But from that point on I was in love with Sega. So when the CD add on came out, I jumped in. Afterall, CD games were the future, right? Sega was right on this point, but they didn’t go all the way and build a completely new box that could really take advantage of what the CD medium could bring to the table.

Sega may have had a chance of running away with it all, having caught up with Nintendo during the Genesis era, but they weren’t willing to push it all the way and make something completely new. They tended to favor using off the shelf components, which, in retrospect, can only take you so far. And they clearly wanted to keep building on what they had started with the Genesis, which led to missteps which cost them the time they needed to come with something good. Imagine if the Saturn had come out a couple of years earlier than Sony’s Playstation and without the last minute addition of the second CPU. But the time wasted on the CD addon and later the 32X, the CDX, the Nomad, and the Neptune project would prove fatal.

Sony, being new to the game, built a new box full of custom chips and made it easy for developers to work with. And since that time, every new generation of hardware has meant a new set of chips. Even within a generation, components are routinely redesigned to cut costs and take advantage of new techniques. Needless to say, this is very expensive, but that’s what it takes to stay in the game. In the end, Sega lost too much money, time, and goodwill with their mistakes to keep up. I think Sega’s last console, the Dreamcast, was a great console. But by that time, Sega simply didn’t have the resources to support it.

Sega’s days as a console maker may be over, but as a game developer/publisher they seem to be doing pretty well. And if there are more young people like my oldest son, a Sonic the Hedgehog fanatic who dreams of programming games for Sega someday (or having them as a sponsor if he becomes a NASCAR driver), their future may yet be bright. Se-gah!!

I must admit that I usually approach Father’s Day with a bit of dread because of what I may or, often as not, may not get. Yeah, that’s pretty selfish, but to deny the facts would be illogical. This year though, I was very pleasantly surprised to get volumes 4, 5, and 6 of Kare Kano! I’m a big fan of shoujo manga, and Kare Kano is one of my favorites, but it’s definitely not the sort of thing generally associated with Father’s Day. My younger daughter, our household Chiyo-chan, made me a cool Inuyasha themed card. I was just sooo surprised to find that people were actually paying attention to what I liked! Oh I am so selfish, but I guess that’s okay one or two days a year…

I took my youngest ones with me to see Cars today not really expecting much. I was delightfully surprised to find a movie that just felt good all over! As a racing fan/driving enthusiast/gear-head I was absolutely delighted with all of the nods to the greats of racing, NASCAR in particular. And as a tech enthusiast, the fluid and very natural feeling animation was like good sex, or good drugs, or good beer…you get the picture. Seriously, when I say natural, what I really mean is that the cars literally came to life. If cars were alive, they’d move like that! And to top it all off, the human story and good acting completely sold me. Anyone who likes racing and cars and believes that the trip is as important as the destination, should give Cars a look. But if you’re taking small kids, be prepared to see the movie again sometime on your own, because at nearly 2 hours, I probably missed 15 minutes due to potty breaks…sigh… But this one is well worth seeing again!