Category: General

I have a new motherboard, CPU and C: drive. The closest store that does repairs wanted to charge 8000 yen and spend a week to figure out what broke. It goes without saying, but since my current mobo and CPU weren’t bought within the two weeks, they’re both obsolete. So not matter what part is fried, I’m going to have to replace the whole shebang.

So I saved myself 8000 yen and spent a little extra to buy a motherboard that can take a Celeron D today and a Core Duo later. I’m spending this beautiful summer Sunday to reinstall Windows and all my software.

Can I end with a little bit of geek bitching? This newfangled mobo only has one IDE bus. Like we’re all supposed to throw away all our IDE drives and replace them with SATA. And no onboard firewire either. Both problems can be resolved by buying PCI boards, but most new mobos only have 3 PCI slots. Is it just me or were older motherboards more user friendly?

In the end, none of the cheap and easy solutions worked. I tried:

• clearing the CMOS
• replacing the mobo’s battery
• detaching everything not needed to boot into bios

I wish I knew if the old mobo is OK. Someday I’d like to put together a PVR for the living room.

Tony broke my PC. He won’t tell me how it happened, but the symptom of the problem is that although the fans and drives power up, the BIOS won’t boot.

I can’t test what’s broken because I don’t have any spare parts. Should I assume that the motherboard is fried, or could it possibly be the CPU or memory? I’m guessing that since BIOS won’t even boot, it’s the motherboard, but I don’t know the symptoms of bad RAM or a bad CPU plugged into a perfectly good mobo.

Here’s why I’m asking: we went on vacation to Izu over the weekend and I want to edit the video of incredible Japanese beach babes. The way I figure, there might be a man or two in the audience who might be willing to help me out with some advice so I can get to the job at hand.

(Forward: If I were to talk about what I’ve been doing lately, I’d bore you all to tears. I’m thinking about recoding all those little stories of my life I tell people when we’re getting to know each other. Know what I mean? Like the drug deal that went bad in Bolivia, or that crack whore in Phoenix who turned out to be my ninth grade art teacher.)

Gizmo Project is a VoIP (voice over IP) app similar to Skype. The two main differences that come to mind are that Gizmo has a recording fuction built into it and it uses an open standard VoIP (called SIP if you’re interested) so it’s compatible with other hardware and software that also use it.

Recently, they’ve made it possible to place international calls to landlines and mobile phones in selected countries for free. Of course there’s a catch, but it’s reasonable. The person you want to call needs to download Gizmo, create a user profile and enter their landline or mobile phone number into their profile. After that, they don’t need to use Gizmo at all.

Although I haven’t tried it yet, but I assume it’ll work, I can’t think of anything stopping me from creating a Gizmo account on my parents’ behalf so I can call them for free.

What a brillant marketing strategy. They’ve made the first 24 min. of “A Scanner Darkly” available as a streaming video. More than anything it shows they have confidence in the movie. I hope this is the beginning of a new trend that leads to less piracy for them and less wasted time and money on lousy movies for us.

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No matter how fun it might look in all those viral videos, don’t try to shoot bottle rockets out of your ass. Once the beers wear off, it really, really hurts.

Today for the first time my hometown can be seen in hi res on Google Maps. Not only can I see our house, but I can even spot our neighbor’s white VW bug in their driveway. I’d love to show ya’ll, but something tells me that might not be a good idea. For now, here’s Koga. I labeled the train station.

I’ll definitely do something with this. Maybe a map/video/audio mashup, if I can convince Tony to help out. I don’t need to convince his little brother. Pretty much whatever Tony does, Andy does too.

Here’s the location of the walk to work video I did. I started in the top left and ended in the bottom right.

It’s my blog and I’ll write what I want to,
write what I want to,
write what I want to…

Ever read Larry King’s syndicated newspaper column? (Is it still around?) It is/was a painful-to-read list of short non sequitur, all ending with ellipses…

I can’t live without the Firefox plug-in Rikaichan. If you want to read pages in Japanese, it’s the best thing ever invented. It works like rikai.com, only much better. I uninstalled Moji. Rikaichan is a memory pig and causes crashes, but that’s why I have Tab Mix Plus installed.

The way I figure, the only reasons people have for still using IE these days is either because they’re forced to or they’re too afraid to try something new. Maybe if they knew how much better Firefox is at surfing for porn…

Speaking of music, Radio Paradise is my absolute favorite Internet radio station. (Now playing: Eva Cassidy, Ain’t No Sunshine) For the past 3-4 years I’ve tried to find a better station, but haven’t found one yet. (Disclaimer: I’m almost 40 and I hate rap, hip-hop, trance, europop, and top 40. I can take classic rock only in small doses or I start sprouting a mullet.)

Tony (the 8 yr old) gets paid 300 yen a week for speaking to me in English only. If he doesn’t know how to say what he wants to say, I teach him how and he has to memorize it. He blows his cash on video games and candy. Eventually Andy (the 6 yr old) will want in on the action too.

The World Cup reminds me of Quidditch…

Need a new internal organ? Moving to Pennsylvania might be a good idea. Thanks to the recent news about some stupid quarterback for the Steelers, I learned my home state no longer has a motorcycle helmet law. Lots of fresh organs available, as long as you don’t mind a little road burn on them. So you’re allowed to scramble your brains on asphalt, but not on drugs.

The company I work for bought $1300 worth of halogen lights for shooting video. I need to practice with them. As soon as I think of someone interesting to interview, I’ll probably put out a video. Or maybe I’ll put that “Lonely Japanese Housewives Videocast” idea into action. (Just kidding, Mom.)

Have I mentioned this? I will start making podcasts and videocasts again…eventually. First I need to figure out how to make money off it to recoup my losses. Google ads on the blog, run the videos through revver.com, join Podshow or some other network that inserts ads into audio files, plug Dreamhost for a kickback, hawk for Amazon…did I leave anything out? I’m open to any ideas that don’t involve porn, deai (dating) or gambling sites. And I’ll probably end up repeating much of what I’ve already said. I’ve completely forgotten what I used to talk about, other than Buddhism and avoiding anger.

I started taking Japanese lessons from a retired older guy. Every time I open my mouth, he’s all like, “Yeah yeah, shut up already.” He’s there to teach the textbook, not conversation. So be it. There’s plenty for me to learn.

Hey, who’da figured lots of Japanese bands have MySpace profiles? Why that piece of crap site is so popular, I’ll never understand. It’s an anomaly. But then again, so are most of its users.

OK, done for now. Back to programming.

I could care less about them performing in costume. This is the best new music I’ve heard in a long time. It’s DJ Danger Mouse (of Grey Album fame) and rapper Cee-Lo. Check out their MySpace for more tracks. I’m going to actually set foot in a music store today for the first time in years.

Yes, I know they’re #1 in the UK, and they’re the first to make it there solely by sales of downloads, which puts me at least two months behind the times. I’m so glad it was them to make #1 through downloads and not Madonna or Brittney.

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I finally figured out a way to make money from podcasting! All you who posted comments? I’ve sold your e-mail addresses to a spammer.
Please, write and curse me out. He says he needs more.

Any Blue Frog users out there? If you see the face of a little blue frog in the right side of your task bar among all the other little icons, then you have an anti-spam utility installed that worked so well that spammers retalliated (causing a lot of collateral damage in the process) and shut down the Israeli company that developed it. Next, they’re threatening to turn the utility against its users, and the threat is real.

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