“A recent study at my ol’ Alma Mater has concluded that when whiny kids grow up, they become conservatives. When they don’t, they become liberals.”

— Liberal Larry explains shoddy research

Service! Service!


Coming to Japanese tv in January: Asu no Yoichi, a fish-out-of-water harem comedy about a young swordsman who ends up living with and studying under a Rushuna-scaled high-school girl.

The manga is up to seven volumes now, so perhaps it’s developed a solid story since I commented on the first one. At the very least, there’s enough material that they shouldn’t have to resort to random filler episodes.

Bare-bones home-page here.

Apple US goes International


For a long time now, when you order a laptop directly from Apple’s web site, you’ve been given the choice between US and Western Spanish keyboards. With the latest models, they’ve added French and Japanese keyboards (and matching user manuals) for both MacBooks and MacBook Pros, with no effect on the promised shipping time.

The new one will have to be a Pro, since they’ve ripped FireWire out of the base MacBook line and once again left out the expansion slots. Which means that I really can’t justify the expense right now. I mean, for what it would cost to buy a tricked-out MBP, I could buy the new Sinolta 25-megapixel camera body, and I can’t justify that, either. Right now I’m barely using the extremely nice camera gear I already own, and we’re headed into the rainy season. And the current laptop is a 2GHz Core Duo with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive.

I’m not buying either Really Cool Toy. This year. Spring, maybe. Yeah, that’s it, Spring. The economy can wait until then for major new contributions from me. I might need a new car by then, too. My 2002 RX-300 has over 200,000 miles on it, and Lexus is promising that the new RX-450h will be showing up around then.

Also, my company will have had the chance for real holiday retail sales, the current product will be available in a lot more stores, and we’ll be showing off our next-generation product, so I might even be able to afford all three upgrades. Or get the company to spring for the laptop and buy the other two. :-)

Words I never thought I'd hear...


From the nice folks at Lexus, on their new in-car control system:

Remote Touch is as natural to the driver's hand as a computer mouse.

So, expect to hear about a lot of car-pool tunnel injuries in a few years.

Smoked visitor


Smoked Visitor
[via EngrishFunny.com]

The sign reads:

 〜 喫煙されるお客様へ 〜
構内禁煙になっております、
の喫煙コーナーでお願いします

Literally translated, it says: “To respected customers who (honorably) smoke tobacco: the premises have humbly become non-smoking, we request (you do it) at the outside smoking corner”.

The English translation is broken in a number of ways, but the most interesting part is “smoked visitor”, because it demonstrates that the translator wasn’t fluent in Japanese. The verb conjugation sareru is the passive form of suru, “to do”, so the first line really does say, “to visitors who are smoked”, but no one who speaks Japanese would interpret it that way. The context makes it painfully clear that this is the passive honorific form, and the honored visitor is the smoker, not the smokee.

So, we have a translation done by someone who doesn’t speak English or Japanese, better known as a computer. Without knowing how long ago the sign was made, it’s impossible to determine which software, but here are some modern attempts.

Babelfish (and anything else based on SYSTRAN, including Apple’s translation widget) produces something that’s almost English:

- To the customer who smokes -
the enclosure we have become prohibition of smoking,
we ask with the smoking corner outside.

Google’s attempt is poetic, but incomprehensible:

Smoking to be one of your
Smoking is on the premises,
In the smoking area outside.

Reverso, one I’d never heard of before, gives something that looks quite familiar:

I ask a smoked visitor for the yard at the outside smoking corner that smoking is prohibited in.

Paralink’s translator offers a nice contradiction:

Customers will be smoking on campus is a non-smoking, smoking outside corner.

Windows Live thinks different:

and smoking that is customer to premises smoking and: on the outside smoking corner in.

The Japanese site OCN has an interesting answer:

Premises at the outside smoking
area which becomes no smoking
to the customer who smokes, please.

Another Japanese site, @Nifty, gives this:

- Visitor smoked -
please give me premises in the outer smoking corner which is giving up smoking.

I won’t dignify Animelab’s web form with the term “translator”, but they give a link to Excite, which produced this:

?To the customer from whom it smokes?
I hope premises in the smoking corner of the outside that is no
smoking.

Chipshake


In the land of Your Mileage May Vary, I found this music video so cute that I went to Amazon to look for the CD/DVD single, and was saddened to find that it was a very limited limited edition.

But I have to say, I wouldn’t drink her milkshake. She has excellent taste in potato chips, but that’s just not how you’re supposed to eat them.

[this is the OP song from Kannagi, by the way]

Dear random anime song lyrics site,


Using a forced refresh inside a NOSCRIPT tag combined with Javascript that disables text selection and right-click is not a copy-protection system. It’s 30 seconds of mild annoyance, at best.

You see, browsers have this remarkable function called “save as”…

Dear Electronic Arts,


Spellcheck != editor.

Spore Teaming

[from the iPhone version of Spore Origins]

A little Ghibli to start the day


Rooftop view at the Studio Ghibli Museum

If you like anime, and you plan to visit Tokyo, you’d be a fool not to visit the Studio Ghibli Museum. Just make sure to buy your ticket before you get to Japan, to avoid the weeks-to-months waiting list.

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”