nanikore

I know this site is still on hiatus, and brightblack.net looks the same (sorry, not had a lot of time lately), but if anyone wants to see what I’m up to, I’ve aggregated a few things under Friendfeed. Cheers.

I know this site is on hiatus and all, but I do try and keep it maintained whilst it’s up.

I was reading this article on ‘Getting Rich Slowly‘ about some whacky fun-loving malware invading some blogs.

Though I’d updated WordPress a couple of weeks ago, and Akismet today, I thought I’d see what Google thought of this site, as I usually search with Yahoo. According to Google, my site may have some infection, though apparently my latest version wouldn’t have helped.

Anyway, I’ve done most of the suggested actions, and checked the most recent posts and will request Google rescan this site, and should have it resolved shortly. I’ll try, over the next week or two, to scan the SQL dum and see if any other posts have been hit.

Apologies.

Alas once more the word ‘hiatus’ appears on Nanikore. It’s a shame, but it’s life. Last year the blog was on hold for three months, and this may well be the case again, for the same reason. It’s not that weak excuse of ‘life getting in the way’. How the hell can life get in the way? I love my life. That actually seems to be the issue. I have so many things I want to do, and finite time and energy to do them. Right now then, the blog is falling in priority in comparison to these other goals.

So then, another hiatus. During this time I want to take the few minutes I spend thinking and writing on this blog, and transfer them to working to complete a few personal projects - from finishing a few short stories I had ideas for, to actually finishing a full novel length story which is scandalously still in progress.

I don’t have delusions of grandeur, I wont be a published author, even a self published one; that’s not the goal, just finishing it is the goal.

Other than that, I’m thinking of listening to all 3,200+ songs on my iPod from A-Z. Sounds difficult.

As I’m paid offshore, I have to sort out my taxes locally and either file them over the net, or go down to the tax office, and then pay the due balance by bank transfer etc.. Well, today, with two weeks to spare on the deadline, I went down to the ward tax office, submitted my forms and supporting documents, and paid my taxes up for fiscal 2007.

I have to say that there’s something uplifting and refreshing about just getting it sorted out in one fell swoop, so now, with the except of pre-payments for 2008 taxes, and local tax payments, that’s it for another year.

Overall it’s not too painful for me to actually get the numbers together, as I don’t claim for much except the family. We’ll see how nasty it gets next year if we buy onto the property latter during 2008.

’shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather’

My first finished game of 2008, and it was the rather interesting Assassin’s Creed from Ubisoft Montreal. Reviews are here.

Ostensibly set during the third crusade, you play an assassin (no shock there then), sent to kill a number of town and civic leaders in a number of large Middle East cities. With each kill you get more weaponry, and learn a bit more of the overarching plot.

Of course this is all a ruse and really you’re reliving the memories of your ancestor and actually, you’re the assassin’s descendant in the near future. Don’t worry about that though, just enjoy the well rendered cityscapes, jumping around, killing lepers and beggars, and when you feel like it, actually taking out one of your targets and wading though the piles of corpses you leave behind, to which dimwitted guards will remark “Who did this?”, without questioning the guy stood next to the aforementioned pile of bodies, armed to the teeth with knives and swords because, hey, he’s praying.

Wacky notions of A.I aside, it’s a solid game, nicely plotted, both in the game world and future world, though the sequel set-up is rather clumsy. The only oddities is the lack of crossbow shown in the trailer, and the fact that for some reason your character cant swim at all, even though there may be a boat next to him, but leaping huge distances across buildings is no problem.

Definitely worth a play.

Rise from your ashes and kneel in your prayers

Often when I post anything about earthquakes, it’s about one here in Tokyo, or somewhere in Japan at least, but it seems today there was one a stone’s throw away from where I grew up, in Grimsby on the coast of England.

It’s kind of odd to me, having been through a lot of earthquakes, thankfully all safely, here on the Pacific rim, that a real jolter happened in Grimsby just still requires me to alter the angle of my forehead to get it in there.

Well, I know my family is OK, because I called them pretty smartish to make sure nothing had fallen off or down, so I hope all the other people are OK too.

Just a short post on this - after three and a half years, I’ve finally unsubscribed to the MMORPG City of Heroes. I used to really enjoy it, but alas, in the last year or two I just don’t have the time and inclination to ‘play’ a grinding level game. I only made it to level 32 with my top character.

Don’t misunderstand; I think it’s a great game, and would encourage people to go and try it out, whether or not you’re of the super hero inclination. It looks nice, plays well, and most of the other people online are fairly civil and accommodating, which is an absolute revelation after years of playing Counter Strike. Part of my problem has always been that being here in Japan, the population density in my evening was low, as the roaring lion’s share of players are in North America and to a lesser extent, Europe. That means that picking up teams or even partners for missions wasn’t easy when I was on, except at the weekend, which has increasingly become family time.

I would say I really enjoyed it for the first two and a bit years, then I would only play a bit now and again, and last month I just decided to cut my losses, or at least my subscription fee, and cancel it. I had about six characters I would play with because I was more into trying out all the different powers than advancing much higher. Ultimately, in 42 months, I burned 544 hours on it. for stats freaks, and as an example, I clocked up only 18 hours in the last year. Still, that’s an absurd amount of time when I think about it.

So that’s where I am. I won’t be going to WoW, or EVE or any other pay as you go game per se, I’ll be spending what little gaming time I have on shorter term completion projects like console games, solo or co-op, and the odd DS game.

Feeling ill. Had to take the day off work due to calls from the big white telephone. Probably more than anyone wanted to know.

You can tell we’re about to go on a family snowboard trip, because it’s almost midnight the day before we have to takkyubin the boards, and I’m here on the balcony waxing the aforementioned boards, using the meagre light from the living room, and a small torch to see what I’m doing. Fortunately they’re in good repair and only need a minor tune and clean.

I’m definitely looking forward to Kiroro this weekend, partly because it’s the first trip we’ve managed this season, but mainly as it’s our daughter’s first view of real snow. Hopefully it’ll be safe, yet entertaining!

That there title does indeed say ‘Seikatsu Happyoukai’, which the best I can divine, translates to ‘Lifestyle Presentation’.

As you would expect, this has virtually nothing to do with the event we actually went to.

What we actually attended was our daughter’s hoikuen (Day Care) year in review event, which combined some little musical numbers with some dancing and singing by the children (mercifully, just a couple of minutes for each of the hoikuen’s classes) and a slideshow of their various events from 2007.

I suppose though that you can indeed consider that a lifestyle?

That all said, it was entertaining, and a chance to see all her classmates and meet some other parents, and wield camcorders in absurdly amateurish ways. That is one of the best things about being a parent in these situations. Panning and zooming. All over. All the time.

One of the things I always kind of dread doing is moving between apps - especially those which I can’t easily import/export between. Right now I’m doing that on two fronts: firstly I’m migrating the brightblack site from Textpattern 4.0.6 to Drupal 6, and secondly, I’m moving all my writing projects from Jer’s Novel Writer to Scrivener.

In both cases it was a tough choice, as they’re all great applications and worth the time to evaluate. However, that decision has been made in the last few weeks and I begin the arduous task of moving my work across.

In the case of the content management systems, I’m making more work for myself as I’m using it as a reason to sort out a selection of bugs and dead links which had crept in over time.

For the writing apps, it’s slightly more straight forward in theory, just copying text and links into their new homes. For some reason though, over the last fifteen months, I’ve developed something of a liking for JNW though, and the forums are an excellent place to wander (I don’t know too much about the Scrivener ones yet). Still, it’ll always be there should I decide this new place is not for me.

Anyway, I’ll update on Brightblack on both cases on how the choices were made and the transitions went.

There was a few bits on the tech side this week which pleased me, or in some cases almost impressed me.

Mac OS X 10.5.2 was unleashed this week, at a behemothic (that’s not a real word) 350MB download. Amongst a raft of fixes and improvements, the pips for me were the toggle for transparency on the menu bar (now off on my Macs) and the options for Stacks in the dock (now on folder icon / list). It also got the company some fairly decent press on the net. Not much news on the 49MB Leopard Graphics Update which followed on it’s heels.

iPod Classic Firmware 1.1.1 stops the hissing many of us Classic owners could hear through the headphones when the unit was in sleep. Disconcerting, apparently not damaging. Anyway, it’s apparently fixed now. I’m updating now so I guess I’ll see in the morning.

TrueCrypt 5.0 is out (now 5.0a) and amongst a host of new features in my favourite file encryption system, it now works in GUI mode on Mac OS X and Linux, which makes it even better for people like me who positively insist on having as many operating systems around as possible. It’s a great solution worth looking at.

Drupal announced Release Candidate 4 of their content management system for their upcoming version 6 release which looks very nice. I’ve been testing it with a view to shifting Brightblack over to it from Textpattern. Let’s see how that goes.

Today is a national holiday over here - National Foundation Day - which means most people are about and about, which means that it’s generally a terrible day to go to a public place. That said, this is also the day when a lot of Tokyo-ites seem to go to various snow resorts, for elevated prices, for the long weekend.

We then, as a family, decided to go over to Chiba, on the sadly not often used sea bus (水上バス) to Kasai Rinkan Park. The trip took us about an hour and twenty minutes in both directions, but it’s very relaxing and picturesque, especially on a day like today - blue skies and very pleasant weather - and it was more like a sight seeing cruise, which is what some passengers treated is as, having a picnic in the stern. you can also get off at tokyo Big Site and Odaiba if the feeling takes you.

It’s not a cheap jaunt at 1,500 yen per person, one way, but on balance, especially given the sunset run coming back, it was worth it. Kasai Rinkan is quite a decent park, but it seems to be suffering from multiple personalty disorder. On one hand it has some very nice wooded areas, picnic areas and nice walking trails, like a real park, then it has a small aquarium, which we went to which was also a nice touch, but then it has a huge ferris wheel with some other minor ‘attractions’, which, given the fact that it’s a stone’s throw from Disney Land is a bit odd. That said, the park is free to enter and the rides cost, pay per play.

On the whole I really like Kasai Rinkan, with the only real downside being the terrible options for food: McDonalds, a tiny ramen place and back-of-van food, which whilst fine for a snack, wont keep you going a whole day. Our advice: take a bento or a full-on picnic.

We had a good look around the aquarium, which isn’t bad for it’s size, and did have some medium sized tuna in as part of a campaign, and some small penguins as park of another exhibit which was quite good - another 700 yen for entry fee though.

For us it was great to give our daughter space and time to run in some sunshine and fresh air, test her sea legs on her first boat - a test she passed with flying colours - and let he see some real fish for a change. Also a bit of a first - a day out on a national holiday to a park where it wasn’t at all busy. I guess everyone was at Disney or on the slopes.

Today I finally closed my account with Spinnet, the ISP I’ve been using for over six years. They’re a great company, who I still recommend, but as I get my internet access via my apartment building, and all my e-mail, and my websites are hosted by another company, there was little reason to continue to pay 2,100yen a month. I was hoping, with potentially many in my situation, they’d allow for tier-ing of their fees, but alas not. Anyway, if I need a pure ISP in the future, I’ll be sure to sign up with them again.

If you’re still using my Spinnet e-mail (which bizzarely ends with the very legacy ‘@***.att.ne.jp’) then you’ll get bounces. Either use the other one I sent out, or reply via this site with a comment.