Month: July 2004

Over the weekend, I started visiting some MP3 blogs and downloading some of the free tracks out there for extra listening material on my iPod. Today over lunch, I booted my home computer into Windows; so I could transfer those tracks to the iPod1. However it seems I’ve been biten by a bug in the iTunes/iPod software.

See, iTunes wouldn’t launch with the iPod connected; it would start in the background but wouldn’t display the GUI (at least it wouldn’t do it quick enough to satisfy me). If I disconnected the iPod, launched iTunes, reconnected the iPod then iTunes would continue to run but would fail to see the iPod. I tried dinking around with this for a while (rebooting, disconnecting, reconnecting, checking for updates and whatnot) but didn’t get any closer to having iTunes recognize the iPod. Though at one point an error message did pop-up telling me I needed to reformat the iPod.

I started searching Apple’s website, as I remembered hearing that there was an issue like this back in April when the last update for iTunes/iPod was released. The most info I could find basically told me to backup, reformat the iPod and try again. *sigh*

That’s not something I really wanted to hear. I guess tonight I’ll be booting back into Linux; backing up the data from the iPod to DVD-Rs and then trying some more drastic measures to get the iPod working right again.

Oh and the other reason I’m upset with iTunes; is that I forgot to go buy some songs from them over the weekend and hence had zero chance to win a free Powerbook. *double sigh*

1 For the record, I am familiar with gtkPod but it gives me errors everytime I try and get it just to read from my iPod which makes me disinclined to use it to write to the iPod.

Well, I finished reading Patrick Drazen’s Anime Explosion! The What? Why? & Wow! of Japanese Animation over the weekend. It’s not a bad read but it’s also something that I never would have read on my own1. Mostly because I think I can grasp enough of the culture concepts presented in the Anime I watch from the context that they are given in to get the jokes. Though I will admit some of the things mentioned in this book do help with my comprehension (e.g. the concept of yasashii and some of the Japanese mythology mentioned in the book). It’s a lot more interesting than any textbook that I had to read in my college years and makes a pretty decent introduction to anime for the uninitiated.

Something to keep in mind while reading this book is that the author tends to speak about the Japanese people and their beliefs/culture as though they are a monolithic whole. While I have never been to Japan (yet); I think this is overly simplistic as there are variations in all cultures and differences between individuals2. This would break down some of the authors points, but then going into that sort of thing would probably be better addressed in some sort of advanced book about the Japanese culture rather than a beginners introduction to anime.

My only other complaint is the author seems to feel compelled to spend a large portion of the book talking about ecchi/hentai and the differences in how Japanese & Americans think about nudity. Perhaps I’m not a perfect fit for the target audience of this book; as I’ve heard about this many, many, many times before and I would have prefered the author to devote more time to other topics.

Even given my complaints, I think I would recommend this to any recent fan of anime that wants to learn more about anime’s background. At least, any fan who asked me about it in the next year or 2. Anime shows are very in-the-now and in a few years the new anime fan will not likely have heard of any of the animes mentioned by this book, which would reduce it’s value to them. As a plus3, the author does not include a must-see list of anime. This helps keep the book feeling timely as there’s no ancient list of anime to make one wish to scorn the book as being outdated and anybody who recommends the book to a new anime fan will surely have their own list of favorites to recommend as well.

1 This book is required reading for the course I’ll be starting in a couple of weeks.
2 While the Japanese due to seem to generally put the group ahead of the individual; anybody who’s looked at their J-Pop musicians can say there is definitely some variation in there!
3 I saw some reviews of this book on Amazon.com that complained there was no recommended list of anime to watch; but if those reviewers had read the book carefully, they would have realized this was deliberate due to the very ephemeral nature of anime.

YOU ARE THE ATACAMA DESERT

You are the driest area on Earth. Your annual rainfall is roughly the depth of a dollar bill. In fact, often you can go for several years without any precipitation whatsoever. If you wanted to fill a pint glass by rainfall alone, you would have to have started in 1704, five years before the invention of the piano; to get enough water to drown a man of average height would take 3600 years, or the time between us and the Hittites. You really put Canadian “dry” ginger ale into perspective.

I am the Atacama Desert!
Which Extremity of the World Are You?
From the towering colossi at Rum and Monkey.

You’ve been here since the dawn of time itself, old timer, and you’ve been biding your time with your eye on the boss’s job.

You deserved to have a promotion. You’ve been here longer than anyone else. Your fingers have become craggy, and you see Excel spreadsheets when you go to sleep at night. More than half your life has been spent at budget meetings, advertising liason sessions, team-building seminars and pub lunches with people you hate. Yet for some reason you’ve been passed over every time in favour of younger, less competent workers.

No more. You’re at the end of your tether. Where’s your gold watch? Where’s your acknowledgement? Your raises? When does your time come around?

Your time is now, hombre.

Give me what's rightfully mine! Or I'll hit you with this brick.
Which Office Moron Are You?
Rum and Monkey: jamming your photocopier one tray at a time.

I really wish Threadless wasn’t out of this shirt.

What does a t-shirt have to do with the future? Here’s the text from the shirt:

this was
supposed to be
the future

where is my jetpack,
where is my robotic companion,
where is my dinner in pill form,
where is my hydrogen fueled automobile,
where is my nuclear powered levitating house,

where is my cure for this disease