“No offense, ma’am, but when does the pretty girl in the kimono come back on stage?”

Happened to wander through San Francisco’s Japantown today, and found something nice in the mall. Not for sale.

So I bought a book on the opening of Japan. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but the author leads off by explaining that Pearl Harbor was a healthy psychological reaction to the deep wounds inflicted by Commodore Perry’s black ships and the arrogant American imperialism they represented.

I’m dying to see how he explains Perry’s culpability in the conquest of Korea, the invasion of China, the germ warfare, the comfort women, and all the other “healthy reactions” of poor, traumatized Imperial Japan.

Now it’s certainly possible that the rest of the book is an even-handed treatment of the events on both sides, well supported by the historical record, but somehow I doubt it.

I wish to state that I am intensely jealous of my sister at the moment:

From: Nellie Greely
Date: May 24, 2010
Subject: Tokyo.....

Found out today that I have to go there on Saturday for work...

I sent her a pop-out map, the excellent (and out-of-print) Little Tokyo Subway Guidebook, Not Just a Good Food Guide: Tokyo, Fodor’s Tokyo, a Japanese phrasebook, a Suica card (the penguin on the card was a nice bonus), and some pocket change.

It’s a short trip, and mostly business, but she’s got two free days, so I made sure she was loaded for bear.

I also emailed her the following picture to print out and carry into grocery and convenience stores:

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[Update: an old interview with Gardner has been reclaimed from the dust.]

Age 95. If you don’t already have his books, go buy some. Somewhere, I think I still have a large pile of xeroxed copies of his old Scientific American columns…

If you have any interest in games, magic, recreational mathematics, or a reality unencumbered by pseudoscience, you should already know how much he’ll be missed.

Hear my words, and know them to be true:

"Adjust the unlabeled knob to the unmarked setting, then press the unspecified button an undocumented number of times. Fixes everything."

I’m only half-kidding. Sadly, it always seems to be worth the effort. This time, it was to replace the CentOS server that kept locking up in less than 24 hours under the stress of incoming syslog data from 80,000+ hosts. Admittedly, syslog-ng is partially at fault, given that it leaks about 20 file handles per minute, but you wouldn’t expect that to cause scary ext3 errors that require a reboot. The BSD ffs seems to be more mature in that regard, although its performance goes to hell fast unless you turn on soft dependencies.

[Update: Oh, and to be fair, I should mention the downside of this, which is simply that adjusting the right knob to the wrong setting (or vice-versa) will kill everyone within thirty yards of the server.]

Natsumi Abe, last seen here looking good in Hollywood, has finally brought together the two things that make Japan great: J-pop idols and tentacle monsters.

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To celebrate the release of Mac Steam, Portal is free until May 24th, for both PC and Mac.

[Update: also, Torchlight is half-price for the weekend, and although it doesn’t sync saved games between Mac and Windows, it at least runs well on both. User-made mods have some issues on the Mac side, including differences in how the engine compresses data, and how it handles mixed-case filenames. Still fun, though.]