Pete linked to this Aya Matsuura fansite in my comments. It’s nicely laid out, and seems to cover her career quite comprehensively. My favorite part is the DVD review section, which includes a 評価グラフ that rates each release by:

• あやや度 - how much Aya?
• ウキウキ度 - how cheerful is it?
• ニヤニヤ度 - are there lots of smiles?
• 泣ける度 - how sad is it?
• 芸術度 - how artistic is it?

Being a purely subjective scale, many of them go beyond 100%. This one’s Ayaya-do is off the charts. I can’t imagine why…

more...

But Brian, isn’t it always?

Oh, you meant the online store. Apparently it’s sending people all over the world today, and not just those who took the 7.0.2 update. I’d guess that their region-guessing heuristic goes by netblocks, and the database got corrupted somehow.

[I was tempted to title this entry 「また会う日まで」, in response to Brian’s Mr. Roboto quote, but it doesn’t really work, even though it’s the refrain in one of the songs pictured]

…John Kerry and Arnold J. Rimmer?

Based on the frantic spin surrounding today’s juicy soundbite, I’d say Rimmer was the likeable one. He also honestly admired the military, despite his failure to achieve the rank he felt he deserved.

"Well, if you'll just bear with me, I think I've devised a fair and equitable system of choosing who should survive. It's based on age, rank, seniority, usefulness... to cut a long story short it's me. I was as stunned as you are, which is why I demanded a recount. But blow me! It didn't come out of me again!"

[Update: I like the way the Leftie horde has descended on the major sites discussing this, insisting that no one could honestly interpret his comment “that way”, and that’s it’s all just a VRWC smear-job. In fact, it’s all too easy to believe that a Democrat would feel that way.]

Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu guy, on Linux success:

"If we want the world to embrace free software, we have to make it beautiful. I’m not talking about inner beauty, not elegance, not ideological purity... pure, unadulterated, raw, visceral, lustful, shallow, skin deep beauty.

We have to make it gorgeous. We have to make it easy on the eye. We have to make it take your friend’s breath away."

A company called Intego, whose business model is “scare people into buying our products”, announced today that they’ve created a proof-of-concept Bluetooth exploit that can crack your Mac wide open in seconds, without any user interaction. You’re vulnerable if you have Bluetooth turned on.

…and haven’t installed any of the patches Apple has released since May.

In my many years of interviewing sysadmin candidates, the most important qualification, and the hardest to explain in terms that make sense to HR, has been “do they think right?”. The core of it, I think, is the attitude with which they approach diagnosing and solving problems.

Behavioral interviewing techniques can produce some useful information about problems they’ve dealt with in the past, but not so much on how they really got from X to Y. HR gets very nervous if you do anything that even looks like a direct test of an applicant’s abilities, so the best approach I’ve found is to swap problem-solving stories and pay close attention not only to the ones they choose to tell, but to the things they say about mine.

I don’t care what, if any, degree you’ve got. I don’t care who you’ve worked for, who you know, what certification programs you’ve completed, or how precisely your last job matched our current requirements. If you think right, and you’re not a complete idiot, I can work with you.

The two people who’ve been hired to replace the five of us are not complete idiots. One of them shows signs of thinking right.

I hope that this book sells really, really well, and that the target audience follows its instructions before the 2008 election. Because if they really think this way, they don’t deserve the freedoms they think they’ve already lost:

Now that habeas corpus and other basic rights, including the right not to be tortured while interrogated, have now been deemed unnecessary, more Americans than ever have been thinking of getting out the door while they still can.

…is WIE pronounced “whyyyyyyy?”?

Quick notes based on running the new IE7 under Parallels on my Mac:

1. It appears that if you accept the default anti-phishing behavior, a record of every new website you visit is sent to Microsoft, omitting only the arguments passed to CGI scripts. "Sanitized for your protection," of course, but my, what a powerful market-research tool you've got there, Grandma.
2. It finally supports transparency in PNG images, so the logo for my blog renders correctly for the first time.
3. It still constructs phony italics for fonts that not only don't have them, but shouldn't (cf. the Japanese song titles in my sidebar).
4. That stupid little print/view/save/molest toolbar no longer pops up on every image in your browser.
5. Still no support for :hover styles in CSS.

More later, if I find a reason to care…

[Update: The WIE team claims that :hover now works, but I can’t seem to set background-color with it. Eh, “standardization; who needs it?”]

[Update: Ah, it’s not that :hover doesn’t work, it’s that some CSS changes don’t get noticed by the renderer. I’ve been playing with jquery recently to improve on my pop-up furigana-izer, and using JavaScript to add a new CSS class to a SPAN doesn’t do the right thing, either; in IE 6 & 7, I have to explicitly add the background color to each object.]