My new thang

I’ve been getting more and more into photography lately, in that half-assed way of mine. Ever since getting a new camera last November I’ve been slowly absorbing little tidbits like photo retouching, panorama stitching, and hacking my camera.

What I’m most pleased with just now is my panoramas, like this one:

Onomichi, Hiroshima

I discovered Hugin, an open-source panorama stitching suite that runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X. It makes great, practically seamless panoramas out of even poorly aligned photos; it’s leagues ahead of PhotoStitch, the OEM panorama software that comes with Canon cameras. Unfortunately the current version (0.7), which automates pretty much the whole stitching process, is unstable on OS X so I’ve been running it under Ubuntu in VMware.

See some more of my panoramas:

• Mikame coast north of the Susaki Kannon
• Mikame bay
• Yawatahama Sports Park
• Onomichi and Mukai island
• Onomichi at dusk
• Ikuchi island and the Tatara Bridge
• Kōbe cityscape
• Marugame cityscape (super wide)

Click the previews at the links above for the full size photos.

Spring is here

Onomichi sunset

It’s been quite a while since my last substantive update, so I’ll keep this brief.

• I ran my first half marathon. It was just a practice run for an upcoming competition, but it was great. Unfortunately I soon afterward hurt my foot and had to sit out the actual race.
• The last ekiden (relay race) of the season was yesterday. I managed to run 5k in 19:59, which is probably the fastest I’ve ever run.
• I decided not to recontract, so some other lucky person will get to come and internationalize this pubic hair on the right testicle of Japan.
• I’m thinking I want to go to China to study Mandarin for 6 months or so, but I’m having a hard time choosing a school. Any recommendations?
• This weekend I’ll be biking across the Shimanami Sea Route (link fixed), a series of bridges connecting small islands in the Inland Sea between Shikoku and Hiroshima. I took the above-right picture last November from atop a mountain in Onomichi on the other end of the route. Onomichi is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen. In the future when I’m independently wealthy and have villas and vacation homes all over the world, the first place I’m going is Onomichi.

A lukewarm reception

I did some freelance translation into Japanese, the exact thing a native English speaker usually shouldn’t do, for a friend of mine’s video game. Following some linkbacks to my blog, I found the one and only piece of feedback I’ve received from that job so far:

硫黄島が舞台ということで、相手になるのは日本軍。もちろん敵は日本語を話す。日本語音声の翻訳は[amake.us]なるプロジェクトが努め、イシカワタクミさんという方が声を担当しているお陰か、話している言葉はまとも。イシカワタクミさんの声に覇気があまり感じられないが、今までの洋ゲーに登場した日本語に比べればマシな方だろう。
「左舷に米軍を発見！」
「やっつけろぉー！」
「助けてくれぇー！」
「やつらぶっ倒した！」

English (my translation):

Since it’s set on Iwojima, you’re pit against the Japanese Army. Of course they speak Japanese. Perhaps since the Japanese voice translation was done by the [amake.us] project and a guy named Takumi Ishikawa provided the voice acting, the vocals are passable. Ishikawa’s voice doesn’t have much impact, but it’s decent Japanese when compared to other Western games up to this point.
“Americans on the port side!”
“Get ‘em!”
“Help!”
“We got ‘em good!”

That’s good, I suppose. Except none of the lines I translated involved “port” or the exact phrasing of “Get ‘em!” that the blogger uses. I’m the only one listed in the credits as a translator, so either the voice actor did some on-the-fly rewriting, or the blogger is misremembering what he heard in the game, or there’s a ghost-translator involved.

Spooky.

Overall the blogger pans the game for being way too short and boring, though the visual effects were nice.

Unthinkable! Unconscionable!

I’ve officially gone off my nut—I’m drinking English Breakfast Tea… at dinner!

[Shocked gasps leap from the mouths of every decent, God-fearing Christian in the ball room. Someone's monocle falls to the floor, shattering]

What next, bacon and eggs for lunch? Does my brazen disregard for common culinary customs know no end?!

Won’t somebody think of the children??

Mii Contest Channel

The Mii Contest Channel arrived today for Japanese Wii owners. I thought it sounded stupid at first, but it’s actually kind of fun.

Mii-making contests are offered, such as the current “make Mario without a hat on” contest. Or, you can also submit your Miis to the channel for general purposes: People tag interesting Miis, and you can view the most popular ones for your region or for the world, in a grid or marching by. There are some really clever ones, like Darth Vader and the Terminator robot; you wouldn’t think such Miis would be possible, but there are some smart people out there who are good at twisting the limited Mii tools into recognizable caricatures.

I will award 80 million awesome points to whoever can guess what these Miis are:

Mystery Miis

(No looking at the filename!)

Today’s Million Dollar Idea

Are you ready? Here it is:

YouTuber. The site where you upload photos of potatoes and shit, and people vote for them. Or something like that.

I’m still working out the kinks leading up to the IPO, but here’s a rough example:

My potatoes

Share	Favorite	Add to Recipes	Flag

Comments & Responses

Someguy718 (5 minutes ago)

thaz totlaly l4me, gaywad

Now I’ll just sit back and wait for either Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo! to buy me out. Hell yes.

MacBook report

My new MacBook arrived last night, much to my relief. Even though people in Japan do it all the time, I don’t like carrying around huge amounts of cash.

After 24 hours, here are my gripes (because I’m much better at griping than just about anything else), both about Leopard and about the MacBook.

• Time Machine doesn’t like my external hard drive. I have a 320GB external FireWire hard drive with two partitions, one for data and one for backup. I successfully set Time Machine to use the backup partition, then let it go. It repeatedly stalls a couple gigs into the backup, then one-by-one system services start being flaky. Eventually everything stops responding and I have to force reboot. Boo. (Edit: This seems to be fixed in 10.5.1.)
• The 3D Dock style sucks. Luckily you can switch to 2D style by entering defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock in the Terminal.
• Displaying folder contents instead of folder icons in the Dock is the stupidest thing ever. (Edit: This was later made optional.)
• Stacks and Grid view are sort of ok, but I prefer the original behavior. Please give us the old behavior as an option! (Edit: This was sort of addressed eventually.)
• The menubar transparency is distracting. (Edit: This was later made optional.)
• The new scheme for specifying individual window view preferences is beyond stupid. I shouldn’t have to say “FTFF” 7 years after 10.0 was released.
• Front Row lets you browse your ~/Movies folder, which is great. It doesn’t, however, let you browse your ~/Pictures folder; instead you’re limited to viewing the contents of your iPhoto library. That seems like something of an oversight.
• While everything is much faster than my old iBook G4, the MacBook still chokes at things that it shouldn’t—switching between resource-intensive apps, for instance. Since I can see my CPU isn’t being pegged, I suppose that means it’s swapping RAM out (I can’t hear it because the hard drive is so quiet); the stock 1GB must not be enough (I’ve got 1GB of swap without having run anything particularly demanding), but that’s kind of annoying coming from my iBook where 1GB was enough.
• The USB ports are even closer together than the iBook’s, where things were already not quite fitting in. Now I can’t have my iPod and my Logitech mouse plugged in at the same time. Obnoxious.
• In general the machine is very quiet, but when the fans reach full speed (Spotlight indexing seems to be a major cause of this) they sound like jet engines.

I’m sure I’ll think of more stuff soon.

Edit: I can’t believe there’s no way to have Front Row run on an external display without either turning on mirroring or switching main screens. Very disappointing.

Edit: A new first: My keyboard stopped working. Entirely. Across the whole system. I didn’t install or run anything weird. Fixed by rebooting. (Edit: Fixed by a MacBook keyboard system update.)

Captured…

…on film! Some random person caught me and M in a shot of the local train station. Weird.

M and I at JR Yawatahama

In other news, the copious photos of mountains and coastline that I’ve taken here in Ikata are finally up in Google Earth. Check it out. Most of the photos in the area are mine

To upgrade, or not to upgrade

Well, it finally happened: Leopard came out, and the MacBooks were updated. This is the exact time I vowed I would upgrade from my decrepit old iBook G4.

Back in high school I always had to have the newest gear. Now I just don’t care that much. The iBook is old. It’s damn slow for some things. It can’t run Leopard (it’s short exactly 67MHz). But do I really want to spend about $1,500? Now that it’s not my parents’ money, I don’t know anymore.

Am I becoming old and wise? Or just old and lame? Probably a little of both, but mostly the latter.

Update: I just ordered myself the white MacBook with SuperDrive. My Japanese credit card has too low a limit, so I had to choose cash on delivery. I guess I better be walking around with $1,500 in my pocket for a few days now. (Please don’t mug me.)

Some sort of demographic

Owning a Wii and doing the Everybody Votes Channel in Japan is like peering into the lives and brains of Japanese people.

Did you know that only 29.5% of Japanese people wear wristwatches most of the time?

Err, make that 29.5% of Japanese people who own Wiis.

Oops, no, make that 29.5% of Japanese people who have Wiis and hooked them up to the internet.

Hmm, actually that’s 29.5% of Japanese people who have Wiis, hooked them up to the internet, and bothered to vote in the “Do you usually wear a wristwatch?” poll.

Well, I suppose it would be 29.5% of people in Japan who have Wiis, hooked them up to the internet, and bothered to vote in the “Do you usually wear a wristwatch?” poll.

Ok, let’s just say it’s 29.5% of respondents. I’m sure there’s a meaningful statistic in there somewhere.

Other recent poll results:

• 58.0% of respondents didn’t know that the “ABC song” and “Twinkle, twinkle little star” have the same melody.
• 49.% of respondents didn’t ride a bicycle even once during the last week.
• 61.3% of respondents (almost entirely in the Tokyo area) are currently living in the prefecture in which they were born.
• 77.8% of respondents have gone fishing.
• 54.5% of respondents think they had a dream last night.

What a time to be alive.