Etoan Irshlu

We’re used to getting our laptops back in… “worn” condition. Usually just cosmetic wear and loose display hinges, but some of them get dropped or otherwise abused (our CEO apparently uses his MacBook Pro to stop bullets), and a few have been completely trashed.

The one we recently got back from our copy-writer when she left the company (“Hi, Sue!”) was special.

Kindle play

So, my mother has a shiny new Amazon Kindle, and before they continued on the next leg of their vacation, I helped fill it up with free e-books from Mobipocket’s web site. I also played with it for a while.

Notes:

1. Every time I picked it up, I hit a button by accident.
2. There’s no reliable way to void a pending button-press, and it keeps a queue at least five clicks deep.
3. The “like a book” way of holding it with the cover makes the “previous page” button awkward to use.
4. Western European/American font support only. I didn’t really expect it to have kanji, but I was surprised that it was also missing things like “ō”, affecting things like the English-language Wikipedia entry for Toshirō Mifune.
5. Web sites that can’t be rendered are falsely reported as down. I was all set to rush into the co-lo to reboot dotclue.org when I checked from my laptop and discovered that it was fine. The Kindle just refused to render it, because of the Japanese text.
6. It always took a long time to connect to Whispernet, leaving me wondering if our hotel was in a cellular dead zone. No, it’s just that slow.
7. Frequent ghosting on the display, something that’s less of a problem with newer e-paper displays and ones that do a full erase before a full redraw.
8. Unlike the early photos they showed off of it, it’s not hideous to look at. It definitely needs some work in the human-factors department, but it looks much cleaner than I expected.
9. The sidebar-slider UI is a reasonable compromise between clarity and responsiveness, but takes some getting used to.

Net result: I’ll hold off until Kindle 2.0, at least.

Um, but…

A frustrated fan of post-racial Democrat candidate Obama says:

“Hillary Clinton would not even still be in the race if Obama was a white man.”

If Obama had been a white man, he wouldn’t have been in the race at all, because he’d have made John Edwards look too good.

女盛り

[Update: I feel a little better, after getting email back from my Japanese teacher that read, “I don’t know what they’re saying, either.”]

Lyrics to the b-side from the latest single release by Melon Kinenbi. I didn’t have much trouble with the Japanese part, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out half of the loanwords they’ve worked in.

顔がダメ　会話がダメ
タイプじゃない　ピンと来ない
合コンもこの頃マンネリ

私には時間がない
回り道してられない
違ったら次を探さなきゃ

賞味期限って何よ！
私はまだ旬よ！
大人の女

パスよ　パス　チェンジ　あり得ない
坊や帰って寝んねしな
ハスッパ　ゲロンパ　バレテーラ　それが何？
パスよ　パス　チェンジ　聞こえたの？
よい子じゃ物足りない
ペロっと　ガンターれ　オンナザカリ

あれもダメ　これもダメって
わがままは女の権利
花の命は短いのよ

流した涙の数は
未来の幸せの数
怯まないで前に進みましょ

白馬の王子様
そんなの戯言だわ
クールな女

パスよ　パス　チェンジ　繰り返す
こんなはずじゃないでしょ
サラッと　スリット　しけテーラ　現実は
パスよ　パス　チェンジ　ごめんなさい
妥協は許されない
チュチュッと　バローレ　オンナザカリ

賞味期限って何よ！
私はまだ旬よ！
大人の女

パスよ　パス　チェンジ　あり得ない
坊や帰って寝んねしな
ハスッパ　ゲロンパ　バレテーラ　それが何？
パスよ　パス　チェンジ　聞こえたの？
よい子じゃ物足りない
ペロっと　ガンターれ　オンナザカリ
ペロっと　ガンターれ　オンナザカリ

そう、リウイは冒険者になったのだ

I just finished chapter one of the first 魔法戦士リウイ novels, in Japanese.

[Pardon my shouting: I just read thirty pages of Japanese prose written for a native audience!! Ahem.]

The anime adaptation opened with the experienced adventuring team of Genie (amazon warrior), Melissa (priestess of the war god Mylee), and Merrill (thief) finding a magically-sealed door in a ruin. They headed to town to recruit a mage, preferably female, but the only one that seemed interested was Louie, a brawny goofball who had already “rescued” Genie from a fight and pantsed Merrill while being chased by a mob of angry women. Later, he accidentally blew up a bar trying to prove himself to them, and then while being chased by a mob of angry priestesses, destroyed the roof of Mylee’s temple with his magic, inadvertently revealing himself to the (naked) Melissa as the hero her god had chosen for her to serve. By the end of the first episode, Louie was firmly established as a drunk, a womanizer, a careless street brawler, and a terrible student, with no real interest in or aptitude for magic.

The novel starts out a bit differently. Louie is being congratulated by his classmates for finally mastering enough magic to earn his mage staff, making him the fifth to succeed out of the hundred apprentices that their class had started with ten years earlier. The next day, the others are all nursing a hangover from the party, but Louie cheerfully heads off to the entertainment district in pursuit of wine, women, and trouble. The sound of a tavern brawl draws him in from a distance, and he pushes through a crowd of onlookers to find two apprentice knights fighting three women (guess who?), and the women are wiping the floor with them.

The benefits of a classical education

Not my education, you understand. I merely quote. More here.

J: My pardon; did I break thy concentration?
Continue! Ah, but now thy tongue is still.
Allow me then to offer a response.
Describe Marsellus Wallace to me, pray.
B: What?
J: What country dost thou hail from?
B: What?
J: How passing strange, for I have traveled far,
And never have I heard tell of this What.
What language speak they in the land of What?
B: What?
J: The Queen’s own English, base knave, dost thou speak it?
B: Aye!
J: Then hearken to my words and answer them!
Describe to me Marsellus Wallace!
B: What?
JULES presses his knife to BRETT’s throat
J: Speak ‘What’ again! Thou cur, cry ‘What’ again!
I dare thee utter ‘What’ again but once!
I dare thee twice and spit upon thy name!
Now, paint for me a portraiture in words,
If thou hast any in thy head but ‘What’,
Of Marsellus Wallace!
B: He is dark.
J: Aye, and what more?
B: His head is shaven bald.
J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?
B: What?
JULES strikes and BRETT cries out
J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?
B: Nay!
J: Then why didst thou attempt to bed him thus?
B: I did not!
J: Aye, thou didst! O, aye, thou didst!
Thou hoped to rape him like a chattel whore,
And sooth, Lord Wallace is displeased to bed
With anyone but she to whom he wed.

Dear Hello!Project Costume Designers,

Die in a fire. Exhibits A through D. I refuse to copy these to my site. Once was enough for this fabric.

These deserve a double unicorn chaser.

[hmmm, looks like they have some unreliable hotlink-prevention code, and no supported way to link to a specific image outside of their forums. Feh. … Ah, you can create a blog and embed thumbnails; that’ll work.]

Ruined for life

After far too many years online, I was initially unable to parse the following photograph correctly:

More fun with furigana and jQuery

When I first started playing with pop-up furigana, I was aware of the official method of specifying them in HTML, using the RUBY, RB, and RT tags. They’re only supported in IE, though, and the standard half-size presentation simply doesn’t make sense for the low resolution of displays, even with good anti-aliasing.

Some folks are using them anyway, like the University of Virginia Library Japanese Text Initiative, which is another good source of free literature. If you’re not running IE (or the Firefox extension that they say works), the furigana degrade relatively gracefully into full-sized kana in parentheses following the glossed word, with no indication of how many of the preceding kanji are being glossed.

Tonight, I had the sudden urge to adapt my system to work with the will-eventually-work-in-other-browsers RUBY tags. This turned out to be pretty easy, for the simple case. I just added this code right before my gloss script:

$(document).ready(function(){
$("ruby").each(function(){
	var rb=$(this).children("rb").eq(0).text();
	var rt=$(this).children("rt").eq(0).text();
	var gloss=$('<span class="gloss">' + rb + '</span>');
	$(gloss).attr('title',rt);
	$(this).replaceWith(gloss);
})});

Dear Google,

I like Google Earth. I even pay for the faster performance and enhanced features. A few things, though:

• Why can’t I keep North at the top of the screen? I hate constantly double-clicking the “N” in the gaudy navigation scroll-wheel.
• Why do you auto-enable new layers in my view, so that, for instance, I suddenly see every golf course on the planet, even though I had that entire category disabled?
• Why can’t I switch between different sets of enabled layers?
• Why is the “Google Earth Community” layer such a dumping ground of unsorted crap? For instance, what value does this have to anyone who’s not an airline pilot? Or this, where points scattered around the globe are all labeled, “here’s my collection of 4,728 placemarks”.

I’m sure I can come up with more if I think about it for a bit…

[update: ah, press ‘n’ for north, ‘r’ for a total view reset, and then figure out how to fix all of the KMZ files that were broken by the upgrade]

Tools Customize Remove Menu Shortcut

In Microsoft Word 2008, there’s a menu called “Work”. At first, it contains only one item, “Add to Work Menu”. If you select this, the location of the current document is permanently added to this menu. There is no obvious way to rearrange or delete items on this list, or inform Word that they’ve moved to a different folder.

The only way to modify this list is to open the “Customize Toolbars and Menus” screen and bind a key or menu item to “ToolsCustomizeRemoveMenuShortcut”. When you run that command, the next menu item you click on will be deleted. Any menu item, in any menu, and the only indication that you’re in this mode is a different cursor that reverts to normal when you open a menu…

The work menu was apparently in Office 2004, too, but I never noticed it. Apparently the only difference was that there was a default keybinding for the magic command, which was removed for 2008 because people sometimes typed it by mistake and had no idea what had happened to their menus.

How does Microsoft feel about this? Read this thread. Short version: “stupid things only get fixed if more than 1000 people use the Send Feedback form and describe the problem precisely enough for the automated system to collate them together”.

Best. Supermegatopia. Ever

Ahem.

Not Safe For Work Engrish

This quote comes from the cover of an adult magazine, so I’m not kidding about the lack of worksafeness.

Passing the torch…

After being passed the Olympic flame, Majora Carter pulled out a small Tibetan flag that she had hidden in her shirt sleeve.

“The Chinese security and cops were on me like white on rice”

(via ESPN)

Konno’s Proudest Moment

Asami Konno joined Morning Musume as a baby-faced 14-year-old, and after five years, put her career on hold to go to college. She later decided that she could balance the two, performing occasionally while giving priority to her studies, but in the interim, she had the chance to do something that must have been the envy of all her friends: