A historically-accurate Yagyu Jubei isn’t nearly as much fun as the anime version…

Well, for corporate customers, at least.

It’s no secret that Vista sales have been sluggish, with many people (and most companies) preferring to stick with Windows XP for now. Retail sales are pretty much Vista-only, though, and online dealers have a strong preference for it as well.

At my company, application compatibility has been the main reason to avoid Vista (as opposed to Office 2007, where “user pain” tops our list). If all their apps and peripherals worked, I think most of our users would quickly adapt to Vista, and prefer it over XP.

Until that day comes, we’re sticking with the XP-based models in Sony’s SZ and BX series, which continue to deliver excellent performance and stability (one motherboard failure in 20+ machines, quickly repaired). I’ve been casually keeping an eye on Sony’s lineup, on the assumption that when the existing supply of XP-based VAIOs runs out, it will be Vista time.

Maybe not. Today’s press release from Sony Japan only has assorted versions of Vista on the A, F, and G series, but still offers XP on the brand-new widescreen BX’s. The BX series is still completely absent from sonystyle.com, but now that the new model has been announced in Japan and Europe, it should show up soon here.

Sadly, all recent models in the lightweight SZ series (beloved by our non-Mac-using executives) are Vista-only, but unless we hire a lot more execs soon, we’re in pretty good shape there.

Tokyo Times reports that facial hair is getting popular in Japan, leading wig companies to branch out:

If this catches on, perhaps they’ll add a line of merkins.

A very active spammer decided to use a phony return address on munitions.com yesterday. The rejection messages from spam filters (“gosh, thanks, assholes”) were coming in in batches of around a thousand, which was not healthy; the machine was even rejecting SSH connections.

Fortunately, I have two virtual IP addresses with separate CBQ bandwidth queues, and ssh still worked on those. Once in, I was able to shut down the Postfix listener for munitions.com. I’ll leave it down for a few days, and hope that this clown switches phony addresses soon.

And maybe I’ll see about adding that SPF record I haven’t gotten around to…

1. The director of Constantine and Britney Spears Greatest Hits.
2. The screenwriter of Poseidon (whose next project will be Marvel Comics' Thor).
3. More a remake of The Omega Man than a straight adaptation of the original story.

Why it might not suck:

1. Will Smith appears to be acting, not simply mugging for the camera.
2. Cinematography by the Director of Photography from the Lord of the Rings movies.
3. Decent trailer.

Recently, Steven said:

After you've finished watching Misaki Chronicles, what becomes clear is that the story tellers had a really good story to tell, and knew they did -- but didn't think they could sell that story on the merits, either to their studio or to an audience. So they had to hide it, disguise it, attach things to it. Like huge boobs.

In the interests of clarity, I want to say that when it comes to the new manga series HEAVEN, creator Aoi Nanase has not gratuitously added large breasts and panty-flashing in order to market a serious story about the nature of good and evil.

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Whether I try to upgrade some of my music to the new iTunes Plus format, or buy something new, I just get this:

It can wait.

[update: I can’t buy anything at all; my account is now thoroughly confused in their database.]

[update: okay, it took a week, but they figured out which Dean Martin album shouldn’t have been trying to upgrade to iTunes Plus, and with that out of the way, I could determine that the season pass for The Dresden Files (not as good as the books, but not bad) was also broken]

Please point the download link on your site at the stable Mac client (4.4.1), not the CPU and memory-hogging “beta” (4.27.2) that not only clobbered my machine, but didn’t actually download anything to the directory it was pointed at.