Luxor Steakhouse: not what it was a few years ago. The meat isn’t as good, and with the loss of their pastry chef, dessert has descended to the ordinary.

Nobu: just say “omakase, traditional”, and you will be rewarded with something wonderful. The nigori sake was also quite tasty. Cover your ears when the American employees attempt to shout “irasshaimase”.

Mandalay Bay: the cocktail waitresses are now in dresses. If this is progress, I want no part of it.

Wynn: it seems there’s a second tier of cocktail-waitress outfit, reserved for special places and exceptionally well-formed employees. I enjoyed the brief exposure I received, but on a future trip, I’ll have to find out where they keep them. Perhaps the next time they send me a cheap room offer, they won’t have filled up by the time I’m able to accept it.

Other than that, the free suite room was nice, the scenery was reasonable, and I remain only lightly bound by the laws of probability.

On the way out, we once again were pleased to find the middle-of-nowhere bonsai dealer on highway 58. Sadly, he wasn’t there on the way back, possibly due to the ridiculous winds between hither and yon, so we didn’t buy any.

Also, in a moment of pure serendipity, we discovered that there’s a Jersey Mike’s on Paradise. Jersey native Dave was stunned by this, especially since he’d just finished saying “is there any chain that doesn’t have a restaurant around here?”. A quick check of the phone book dug the knife in even deeper: this place that is home to mysterious delights peculiar to the Jersey shore, and which cannot be found within 100 miles of the Bay Area, has six locations around Vegas.

This morning I found myself with the urge to search for two of the best stories about the early days of WebTV. Everyone involved has long since moved on to greener pastures, so I was sure at least one person would have spilled the beans.

No. Google searches for both “webtv reindeer games” and “webtv launch day fuck” return nothing relevant. Perhaps it’s time for Rory to update his blog with a tale of The Good Old Days.

An in-depth, carefully researched exposé of a company fraudulently marketing a product at outrageous prices.

I suspect the answer is that the reporter actually knew something about the subject, and thus smelled the bullshit.

It’s been a while since someone was stupid enough to go to the trouble of coming up with a script for spamming my comments. Stupid not just because I’m small-fry who can’t significantly affect his client’s page-rank, but also because my comment pages are not indexed by any search engine.

So, a quick delete from comments where author is like “%phenter%” or author is like “%roulet%” combined with a quick pfctl -t badlife -T add 58.142.103.165 68.184.254.247 68.184.254.247 213.115.205.82 202.78.170.3 209.212.20.250, and the problem goes away again.

If I get another attack in the next week, I’ll change the comment URL and add the current one to the insta-ban trap in robots.txt. That’s the most I’ve ever had to do to maintain several months of trouble-free open commenting.

[Update: sigh, add “%viag%” and “%ltram%” to the expression list, and 62.3.244.166 to the banned IP list. Time for a new disguise, I suppose; I’d hate to go off to Vegas and let some moron think he’s accomplished something clever.]

Just search for it on Google and Youtube. It’s terrifying, in a “do I really need a Japanese Xbox 360 right now” kind of way. If you find yourself downloading the 720p version of the trailer from that German torrent site, all hope is lost.

[Update: this site seems to have the best set of screenshots showing the gameplay. I like the dialogue in this one:

]

[Update: holy crap, that qj.net page is a giant cesspit of Javascript, weighing in at nearly 240K of code, and maybe 2K of actual HTML content. I was initially curious how much overhead the trendy-annoying JS image display code was adding (72K if it’s the only thing prototype.js is used for, 21K otherwise, plus the overhead of actually calling it, which makes the HTML basically unreadable), but now I’m wondering just how painful this site is for anyone with low bandwidth and an older browser.]

I think the Iranian president’s got JC’s number here. He’d totally go jihadi on the UN leadership and rulers of most Middle-East states, as well as their loyal followers:

If Jesus Christ (peace be upon Him) was present today, he would order an encounter against those who would propagate corruption, obscenity and perversion, and try to nullify and exterminate the merits and the rights of women and diminish their position – a position that virgin Mary (peace be upon Her) – is their role model and sample.

Oh, wait; perhaps he’s using different definitions of “corruption”, “obscenity”, “perversion”, and “rights of women”. My mistake.

It should really be called World Domination 050, because it’s providing remedial education that the student should have had before coming to college, but it’s a start:

Linux on the desktop has been a year or two away for over a decade now, and there are reasons it's not there yet. To attract nontechnical end-users, a Linux desktop must work out of the box, ideally preinstalled by the hardware vendor.

...

When somebody with a degree in finance or architecture or can grab a Linux laptop and watch episodes of The Daily Show off of Comedy Central's website without a bearded Linux geek walking them through an elaborate hand-configuration process first, maybe we'll have a prayer.

...

You can't win the desktop if you don't even try. Right now, few in the Linux world are seriously trying. And time is running out.

...

Unfortunately "good" isn't the same as "ready to happen". The geeks of the world would like a moonbase too, and it's been 30 years without progress on that front. Inevitability doesn't guarantee that something will happen within our lifetimes. The 64-bit transition is an opportunity to put Linux on the desktop, but right now it's still not ready. If the decision happened today, Linux would remain on the sidelines.

[Update: as usual, those wacky kids on Slashdot just don’t get it.]

A while back, I mentioned that I was tinkering with jQuery for updating my pop-up furigana. This dovetails nicely with my attempts to improve my Japanese reading skills, which currently involve working my way through Breaking into Japanese Literature and ボクのセカイをまもるヒト.

The first one is a parallel text with all vocabulary translated on the same page. I wish he’d formatted it a bit differently, and my teacher isn’t pleased with some of the translation, but it’s a useful learning tool, and there’s a free companion audiobook on the web site.

The second is the first in a new light novel series from Nagaru Tanigawa, also responsible for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and it includes furigana for almost all of the kanji. My goal is to read it, not translate, but I have to look up an awful lot of vocabulary, and there’s not enough room on the page to annotate.

So I’m typing it in, and using a Perl script to add my shiny new pop-up furigana.

(and, yes, I’m deliberately over-annotating; I don’t actually need many of those annotations, but someone else might, and it’s not that much work)

[Update: I should mention that I’m using Jim Breen’s translation server to speed up the glossing process. The parser gets lost occasionally, but it’s still very helpful, often finding idiomatic phrases that cover several words.]

Oh, here’s the cover, courtesy of Amazon:

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