So after many delays, we finished moving the company to the new building. We had a few small issues to work out Monday morning, and I spent the evening on the phone with someone in China who needed to bring up a new VPN connection, but All Is Well.

My reward, apart from an Amazon gift card, new business cards, a coffee mug full of candy, and a Blu-ray box set, was that on Tuesday night, our Shinkendo dojo did tameshigiri for the first time.

Nothing like cutting up targets with a katana to take your mind off of work!

Sending a bit of a mixed message here, girls?

heLOVEnus continues to taunt fans with pictures; there’s a new album, you just can’t have it yet!

The more usual form of k-pop tease (aka “cute girls doing cute things”) can be found here.

And then there’s the unfortunate phonetic problem with the group’s name…

Makoto Ogawa’s Bagel Navigator.

Meet Ren. She’s an alien slave girl with a brain the size of a walnut and a heart the size of, well, something big and chest-related.

This is one of the postcard-sized bonus items included with the deluxe edition of the DearS PlayStation 2 game. Notice anything odd about it, besides her rather distorted anatomy?

Let’s take a closer look:

more...

Here’s what I like to imagine Stephen’s post-stroke physical therapy is like:

Long strings of digits pasted into the Notes app on an iPhone are not necessarily phone numbers. Do not immediately start autodialing when I select them. That’s fucking stupid.

In this specific case, they were product serial numbers pasted from a barcode scanning app (of which the only useful one appears to be ZBar; all the rest auto-search shopping web sites and refuse to just give you the contents of the goddamn barcode).

I tend to toss my Japanese spam into a folder and then try to read it when I’m feeling bored. I’ve commented in the past about trends where 90% of the stuff all falls into the same category for a while, but I recently noticed one particular subject line that’s been showing up at least twice a month for the past six months:

人妻と秘密な関係を作りませんか？

The SYSTRANS-based Apple translation widget’s English is amusing, but quite wrong: “The human wife and secret isn’t relation made?”. Google and Bing produce the exact same slightly-wrong translation: “You do not make a secret relationship with married woman?”

The thing that G&B missed is that this sort of negative question means “wouldn’t you like to”, and neither one of them lets me flag the error. Google has a very clever UI for suggesting corrections, but it’s quite shallow, limited to rearranging and selecting alternate interpretations for individual words; you can’t select between different grammar patterns. Worse, you can only flag the translation as good, bad, or inappropriate; there’s no “right words, wrong meaning” button, suggesting that literal conversion is valued over accuracy.

Anyway, back to the spam. The sender and contents that go with this subject line aren’t always identical, but being spam, there are only a few variations. Because G&B got so close on the subject line, I decided to see what one of them could do with the rest, and the results were so entertaining I think I’ll leave them as-is.

more...