Anybody else?

[Update: apparently everybody else. This is the fastest I’ve ever seen an Xkcd cartoon spread around the net.]

This is the Asus EEE PC slogan localized for Japan: “manabu hataraku asobu”, which copies half of the English slogan, leaving out the whole “easy” part. Then again, it ships with Windows XP instead of a dumbed-down Xandros derivative, which might make it less approachable for a complete novice, but definitely more familiar to the Windows-centric Japanese audience.

Now that there’s a working Fedora 8 distribution for the EEE (thanks to the new official kernel support and Philip Pemberton’s RPMs), I can really start using mine. The supplied Xandros-derivative was amusing, but much too limited. Among other things, WPA2 Enterprise wireless was messy to set up, the Juniper VPN software simply didn’t work, and I really, really like chkconfig.

The most important software I’ll use on it? Claws Mail, Perl, emacs, minicom, Firefox, and StarDict. StarDict isn’t as useful a Japanese dictionary as Jedict for the Mac, but at least it uses the same source data. I’d prefer the “Green Goddess” dictionary that’s being included in some of the recent handhelds, but the EEE is small enough for most occasions, and I’ve already got a WordTank and a DS Lite running Kanji sonomama.

Toshiba has abandoned HD-DVD, and Castro has stepped down. I wonder which one of these will get more attention over the next week.

The test last week in my Japanese conversation class covered some useful grammar, including “dou yattara” and “~ka dou ka” (also humble form, about which the less said the better). The structure of the test was that the tutors composed a number of questions in advance, and students were chosen to answer each one. Grading was subjective, but just understanding what you were being asked was as important as composing a grammatically correct answer. There’s no penalty for occasionally passing with “wakarimasen”.

One that stumped a few people was a very polite and grammatically annoying version of “where can I go to see plum blossoms blooming?”. After someone finally got it, I said “my back yard”. It’s not as fancy as a proper Japanese plum garden, but at least I’ve got some.

Amazon’s recommendation system just blew a gasket. Here’s proof:

more...

So, with 10.5.2 and SuperDuper 2.5 out, I was finally willing to upgrade my primary Mac.

First problem: it merged down an old version of my Safari bookmarks from .Mac, even though I had sync turned off, and the last sync had reset this machine as the master. Fortunately, it was a merge, rather than a replace, so I didn’t lose anything, and only had a small amount of cleanup to do.

Second problem: I can’t turn .Mac sync back on to reset the bookmarks, and it falsely thinks that I’ve got local iDisk sync turned on as well (something I used to use a lot, but shut off a while back due to .Mac flakiness). The whole .Mac connection seems pretty hosed, actually.

Third problem: Mail.app’s IMAP insists on showing my entire home directory on one of my servers, and walking the tree each time to check for “new messages”; this behavior cannot be overridden from the GUI. It also completely lost track of how to connect to my primary SMTP server, but after the third try I was able to get it to send mail again.

[this doesn’t include the many problems I already knew about from upgrading other machines, of course…]

[…and I’m sure I’ll find more…]

…utter crap.

I’m not sure which is worse: having their system recommend a z-grade porn cartoon, or recommending it because I liked the Mahoromatic Summer Special.

[Update: More oddities: the “better together” section says that if I buy a really nice men’s watch, I can get a great deal on another really nice men’s watch. Of course, the price is exactly the same as if I bought them separately. Sadly for them, I bought a really nice men’s watch about ten years ago, and it’s still going strong. (and, yes, it’s a Citizen Eco-Drive in titanium; definitely worth buying, but one should be enough)]

[Update: Oh, my, this one really says something about… something:]

If ANN’s episode titles are correct, it looks like…

(no fancy spoiler tags here, so below the fold it all goes)

more...