*

On the iMac I use at work, I use Bootcamp to run Windows XP.  When the system wakes from sleep (suspend) the built-in Bluetooth device fails to wake up.  This is nearly 100% of the time.

Solution: I bought a little USB Bluetooth device, plugged it in, and disabled the built-in device.  After waking from sleep the external USB Bluetooth device ALSO fails to wake, but if I just physically disconnect it and then reconnect it, it comes to life and with a slight delay, my wireless keyboard comes back to life.

Lovely, I see this on the Lloyds TSB remittance calculator page for today’s exchange rates:

Hopefully just a website error, right?

I happen to live in Tokyo.  I have friends here and in the US, and London, and various countries actually.  That means I would like to be able to try to play networked games not necessarily just with people who live geographically very close to me, but with friends that live network-topologically close to me.

What does that mean?  To play online games with any degree of smoothness, you can pretty comfortably enjoy the experience with a delay of only about 100-150 milliseconds from your network connection to the other machines you are playing with.  That’s about a 10th of a second.

Thanks to undersea fibre-optic cabling, this means that california is actually right next door, and I should reasonably be able to play with people both next door and across the pacific ocean.  An amazing feat.

In fact, Microsoft’s renowned Live paid multiplayer network service allowed me to purchase a prepaid year subscription in Tokyo, and since their network is global, connect in theory with people in california with no trouble.

Problem is, even though their network treats every user like they live in one big space, on top of that they have region-coding that says that when you create an account, you have to pick a region.  This has nothing to do with the region you are actually physically in.  This is the region that you want to play in, and you can pick regions that are network-topologically very far away, say, the UK.

But it happily accepts whatever setting you want.

They then insist that you pick a language that is defined by your region, so if you choose North America, you can only pick English.  What happened to Spanish and French?  Sorry, we all know in America only english is spoken, right?  Sure.

If I choose Japan, sure enough, even though the system can show me text in whatever language I please, my only choice is Japanese.

Ok, fine, so I choose America, since it has English as a choice.

Unfortunately that means that in-game, if I ask to join a multiplayer game, it doesn’t try to find people nearby me to play with, it finds people that are online in the selected region.  This is moronic, since it ends up choosing someone in montreal speaking French, over someone right next door to me that, while I may have the same trouble understanding, at least has a good ping to me.
It gets worse.  In Japan I bought both the pre-paid one year subscription and, in order to buy online content, $15 of their scrip currency, live points.  Except that while their account creation system lets anyone in the world choose to create an account tied to a locale that is nowhere near them, their scrip redemption system insists that if you buy a scrip card in a specific region, that scrip card can only be used in the locale of that area.

So here I am, having bought, in Tokyo, at the same time, both a one year account card and $15 worth of points to use with that account, stuck with an account that is tied to games in north america and points that it refuses to let me redeem, since my account is now “in” north america.

After spending about 30 minutes talking about this with a microsoft representative on the phone, he said that for some reason he cannot cancel the account, and he cannot change the account locale to Japan, and he cannot issue me a credit to create an account in Japan.  In fact, he cannot refund the scrip points either.

In short, because of their idiotic partially applied region-coding, they may as well have sold me a pair of gills.

All this when I could have just bought a PS3 and enjoyed FREE networked multiplayer gaming.

This article on The Age website has near the end this quote:

Japan’s meat consumption had increased by 900% since 1955, in part because expanding incomes had enabled families to supplement the sparse national diet of rice, fish and miso soup with more Western-style food.

Which made me laugh because just before reading this, for lunch I had multigrain (16!) rice with miso-saba (fish), and miso soup, something I eat about 3 times a month simply because there’s a nice little place nearly in front of my office that has it.

But 900%! Wow. All those insanely old very healthy active japanese people in their 90s did not grow up eating tons of meat, they ate that “rice, fish, and miso soup” diet.

I haven’t tested the official 1.01 build yet, but since it incorporates the ALT image support I added, my own build is probably nolonger necessary.  Rikaichan 1.01 announcement

By the president of Cypress Semiconductor speaking before congress, in the 1990s.  Well worth reading.

Some comments on Marvin Minsky’s writing on this mistaken ways in which we teach children.  First: his article.

Looking at the systemic failures of the US education system leaves me unable to see a viable route to a high functioning system[1].  This leaves me wondering, when I  have children, how to deal with educating them when even the very best private OR public schools have to conform to a very broken system, and when home schooling might even be illegal.

The only solid answer I can come up with is to move, though I am not sure where to.  I live in Tokyo right now, but the school system there is even worse.

On a different note, I was surprised that Minsky makes the mistake of suggesting that it is a positive thing that subjects other than math are taught by bombarding students with tons of new words to remember (names, dates, etc), saying “[in other areas] each pupil learns hundreds of new words in every term. You learn the names of many countries and organizations, the names of leaders and battles and wars”

The students by and large “learn” these useless data points one week, regurgitate them for the test, and then forget them when the testing is over.  We would do far better to teach people to think for themselves, to analyze information as it comes at them, and to focus, in as much as we really want them to remember history, on the relation of people and events as a narrative story, rather than obsessing on meaningless dates.

[1] world-leading in meaningful terms, not just learned-knowledge tests.

Listening to the BBC News podcast for 2008 March 10, they have a fascinating debate between the host and a deaf parent, where the deaf parent, Tomato Licci (sp?) argues with real vigor and tremendous intellectual dishonesty, for his right to pay to have an IVF embryo that is deaf, versus requiring that IVF-created embryos of deaf parents be screened for deafness.

His key argument?  Deafness is not a disability, since there is deaf culture, and he wants his children to be part of that culture.

The host responds quite nicely but logically that obviously it is a disability, since you cannot HEAR, while certainly a hearing person can learn to sign.

The parent just retreats to arguing about discrimination and the horror of calling the inability to hear a disability.

I would like to actually hear an argument about whether parents should be allowed to choose to have disabled embryos engineered for them, regardless of the disability.  There are certainly those out there that would love to be able to choose to have a child that never became an adult.  Is that right?  Is that just?  I don’t know the answer to that.

I love the band, I love the music.  I even went to see them live recently and would gladly pay for a high definition DVD of the performance, if they ever make one, it was that amazing.

But this extremely slow film, even at 2x fast forward, still manages to express in an hour what should be about a 5 minute short film, and even then it would put me to sleep.  Avoid.

I woke up this morning after an unusually vivid dream in which I was at a tech conference and stumble upon a demonstration of a new immersive 3d viewing system where you sit down at a table that has a set of glasses with flat semi-transparent screens for lenses, attached to a swing arm (think Pixar’s Luxo Jr lamp) so it can minutely track your head’s rotation and position.  On the table were special sheets of plastic paper that the display could understand the position of, and map showing you data as if it was on the paper.  Bending and wobbling the paper even produced nice distortion of the data, and if you bent the paper too much it would sometimes fail to fully faithfully reproduce the right distortion of the virtual paper.

There was no eyestrain, and although the imagery produced was of fairly large pixel-size, the width and depth of perceived field was nearly the entire size of an office desk.