If you were wondering, now you know.
Category: General
21 years ago.
I took this portrait of myself when I was a freshman at Penn State. My grandmother showed me how to tint it. She used to do it for a living when my grandfather, who I never met, was a portrait photographer in the 1940’s.
Porn moustaches were cool back then, similar to how tattoos are hip now. (However, I was able to shave.)
Reverse angle shot
All that crap is mine. It’s my habitat. Yes, I’m a manpig.
Want to hear something funny? The guy who sits next to me is a neat freak. He’s the Felix Unger to my Oscar Madison.
Guess whose desk this is.
Hint: It doesn’t belong to any of my coworkers.
Another hint: My boss’s desk is even worse. (I like him.)
Grokking PDF files for free
Here at work I’m occasionally asked to make unreasonably difficult changes to PDF documents for which we don’t have access to the original editiable versions. For example, “Richard-san, here’s the updated version of page 23 from the 150 page CEA brochure. Please relpace it.”
How the heck do I do that? I’ll tell you how. PDFTK. It’s a freeware command line tool that’ll let you, for example, split a document into pages 1-22 and 24-end, then make a new document consisting of pages 1-22, the new page 23 and pages 24-end.
If you want to convert a document to PDF I recommend the freeware Cute PDF Writer. It works like a print driver and you print to it just like a printer, but instead of it coming out on paper you save it as a PDF file on your hard drive. Install it on every workstation in your office and save the company thousands in Adobe Distiller licensing fees. (Just don’t expect anyone to thank you…)
Happiness is a kick-ass radio station
I grew up listening to WMMR in Philadelphia. I just rediscovered it through a Yahoo Widget that’s streaming it into my brain, and I’m happy. It still deserves its long-standing reputation as one of the best rock radio stations in the US. It doesn’t have the homogonized sound of every ClearChannel-owned station. It’s as if MMR’s playlist were put together not by a computer, but rather by someone who loves head-bangin’, air guitar-playin’, hair band world tour t-shirt wearin’ rock music. Imagine that.
I can hear it clearer in Tokyo than I ever could over the airwaves. Here in my little world of earbuds and laptop screen, I don’t feel at all like I’m on the other side of the planet. It’s as though I could walk out of the office down to the local Wa-Wa and buy myself a hoagie and a slurpee for lunch.
Update: Cool, the DJ said my name over the radio. I’m like, famous to the tens of people listening at 3am local time.
The Mixi Challenge!
OK all you Mixi invaders, try to find the Herro Flom Japan community and join it.
Someone who joined wrote their self-intro in Japanese using machine translation. It’s a bit like haiku by e.e. cummings.
Krispy Kreme in Shinjuku
Originally uploaded by TokyoNowadays.
I’ve been meaning to mention how there always seems to be a line for buying donuts at the Krispy Kreme store outside of Shinjuku station. I wonder if they’re as sickingly sugary sweet as in the US. (My taste buds aren’t what they used to be.)
Bloggin’ at you from the Yahoo Flickr widget…
More I’s CUBE ahead
I met with Kana (I’s CUBE’s manager) yesterday at a Starbuck’s in Hiroo. I brought my laptop intending to show her music.podshow.com and hopefully convince her to upload some tracks to it. But Starbucks here don’t have wireless access (campers aren’t profitable) and I couldn’t siphon off enough bandwidth from an nearby unsecured access point. One of these days I’m going to have to buy myself a card with an external antenna jack that I can plug into a Pringle’s can.
We talked about the legal issues that come with playing and recording music. She’s far more familiar with the details than most artists are about their own music and warned me to be very careful. On of the things I want to do is help indy artists sell their music online, either by setting up a Zen Cart store or by helping them take advantage of iTunes, CD Baby, etc. by helping them getting set up with TuneCore. The question for me right now is, how do I find the time? I barely have enough time to even blog.
She also sent me a song from I’s CUBE that I’ll play on my next podcast–the one I recorded last night but need to edit.
Kana is someone I feel lucky to know. Her drive to achieve her goals is greater than her sense of fear–something I’m working on, so it’s good to have a role model. She president of her own record label to promote the bands she loves the most. This is no small feat, considering that the music industry is rife with organized crime and profits are small unless you have a runaway hit. But I have a strong feeling that she has what it takes to be successful. I doubt she’s the kind of person who looks at herself in the mirror every morning and repeats affirmation mantras. She seems to just naturally have confidence. (For the record, I force myself to fake it, kicking and screaming all the way.)