San Francisco is looking to invigorate its Japantown with an infusion of pop culture. I’ve been insisting for a while now that Otaku Tokyo is one of the few colorful themes left unlicensed for a major Las Vegas casino, so perhaps this will help show the money-men the power of kawaii.

Just for the record: I believe that my friend Hans Reiser did not commit murder, a crime he’s currently suspected of. I hope that his wife is found alive and well, and that their children are not forced to grow up without parents.

[Update: formally charged. I agree with the defense attorney that the police seem to be aggressively feeding the press. They’d constructed a compellingly sinister narrative and handed it out to reporters before charges were even filed. Sorry, guys; it’s supposed to be “trail by jury”, not “trial by a pack of j-school hacks”.]

My new MacBook is not the ideal machine for running Apple’s Aperture application, but it’s supported, and with 2GB of RAM, usable. At least, it would be if Aperture didn’t crash every five minutes on a brand new install of version 1.5, while just poking around with the supplied sample project.

I hope it will be more stable on my Quad-core G5, which is the ideal machine for this sort of application…

(or was, before the new Mac Pro came out; still, one can’t whine too much about the power of Last Year’s Computer, especially when it’s quite the screamer)

…just not in English, and not this song.

[link goes to full-length, heavily-compressed MP3; the resulting quality loss does not significantly alter the effect. The full album, which is mostly not at all like this, can be found here]

Anime-themed motivational-poster contest over at Riuva. Why not?

I went to all the trouble of doing this in Illustrator before I discovered that Despair.com has an online generator. No biggie.

Going through my Quarantine folder, I found something that had all the hallmarks of spam: a hotel reservation confirmation for a city I’ve never visited (Orlando), sent to an email address I would never have handed out for that purpose (_______@mac.com), with graphics and links coming both from the real site and elsewhere.

When I read the raw source of the message, though, I started wondering. All the Marriott links actually go to the Marriott web site. Everything is spelled correctly, with no attempt to hide spammy keywords. The headers all look legit. Even the links to elsewhere go to legitimate travel-related sites.

Then I remembered My Evil Twin, who, by the way, lives in Boca Raton. I guess the other Jay Greely and his lovely(-sounding) wife are off for a little R&R, and they mistyped their .Mac email address again.

A 1.25GHz G4 PowerBook plays World of Warcraft far better than a 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo Macbook, even with 2GB of RAM, even with the video settings set lower on the MacBook. Civ IV, on the other hand, runs fine, something that’s not true on the G4. There’s got to be a bug in the video drivers, because that just doesn’t make sense, even with shared video memory.

[and why did I buy a MacBook instead of a MacBook Pro? Partially because I already have gaming hardware at home (and, at least for now, a work-owned MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM), partially because I wanted the slightly smaller form factor and increased battery life, partially because Sony launched the α100 with a 135mm f/1.8 Zeiss lens…]

[by the way, I replaced the stock drive with a 160GB Seagate from OWC. I never even booted off of the supplied 60GB drive; I just moved it into an external enclosure and copied everything over with SuperDuper!]

[Update: I expected the problem to be related to the variety of shapes and textures used for player-character armor and weapons, so that having more people around made the performance worse. Nope, it’s geometry. I can run through a crowd in Undercity at 15 f/s, but I can’t stare at a single complex building (such as Light’s Hope Chapel, with no players in sight) without the frame rate dropping to 4-5 f/s. The crowds of people around the bridge in Ironforge aren’t what slows the MacBook down to 2 f/s; it’s the buildings themselves. The game is perfectly playable away from architecture.]

[Update: Damn. I mean, damn. I just finished putting the latest Boot Camp beta on the MacBook, and tested WoW under Windows. The frame rate was 3-5 times higher, across the board. Exact same hardware, exact same game settings, ridiculously fast. So I turned the settings up, restarting every time to see when it would choke, and found myself riding past the bank in Ironforge at 10 f/s with every setting at maximum, on Saturday night at 9pm. I realize that a reliable OS can’t let random drivers get as chummy with the hardware as Windows does, but damn. “Dear Apple. Fix this. Love, J”.]

I was working from home yesterday, and connecting to the office via VPN. In the past, this hasn’t been a big deal. This time, just as I was getting set up to start Something Important, the connection went down. Deliberately.

Secure VPN Connection terminated by Peer.
Reason 430: Configured Maximum Connection Time Exceeded.

Connection terminated on Sep 28, 2006 18:28:40   Duration: 0 day(s), 08:00.12

Good thing they bought a new VPN server to replace this one. Oh, wait; the new one’s still in beta, has been for months, and recently stopped working. Feh.