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Archive for the ‘The Lighter Side’ Category

Just So You Understand, It’s Not an Actual Bargain

August 25th, 2010 Luis No comments

Hopeful01

Fun with PHP

August 12th, 2010 Luis 8 comments

Okay, all of you actual programmers out there, get ready for amateur hour. I have been working to understand programming better for a while now, and have made a teensy bit of progress. I learned HTML and CSS the natural way–I gleaned it bit by bit off of instructional web sites and peeking at other people’s code (a lot of CSS I learned, in fact, came from editing the themes for this blog). But I wanted to get beyond simple scripting and into some actual programming, something I hadn’t done since I took that BASIC programming class back in 1982.

I figured that my best chance would be to take advantage of the online classes from the college where I teach, free to faculty. Intermediate Algebra was a prerequisite, and though I passed it back in the 80’s (one of my few “B” grades in college), I figured it was time to freshen up, considering that (a) it could help in programming, (b) I have a bit of a phobia about anything more complex than basic math, and (c) I hadn’t used any of it since I took the course and remembered pretty much squat. So I took that class, aced it, and went on to take the next class, “Introduction to Computer Programming.” Which it pretty much was–just an intro course. We never got beyond making little C++ command-line programs. Alas, another Math class–Discrete Math–was required before taking any other programming courses, so I bore down and signed up for that. Problem: the text was horrific, requiring about 30 hours a week to get past the atrocious writing so I could spend another 10 hours learning the material. It was just too much on a full-time schedule, so I reluctantly withdrew.

Not wanting to just give up (our local Math professor has kindly agreed to arrange a private independent-study course that might get me the credit for Discrete Math, but not this year), I started studying PHP. I want to re-write my Introduction to Computers web site from the ground up anyway, and I figured that knowing some PHP would help. Well, now that my August break has started, I started diving into it. The result so far: a crude, basic understanding… and a result. I figured out how to add a much-needed feature to my web site. My students crave feedback at every step, and I wanted to add little exercises after each page or two of study. PHP gave me a way to create very slightly interactive quizzes, very simple–choose the answers from drop down menus and check to see if you got things right.

Pleased with my little success, I figured I’d have a bit of fun and add a quiz you might want to take–not on computers, but on some basic political points. Just click the link below, choose what you think are the best answers, and then click “See Results” to find out how many you got right. Since I like my students to figure out correct answers, I don’t give the answers on the results page; you have to go back and try again. Enjoy!

Quizy01

Categories: Programming, The Lighter Side Tags:

Turnen Ze Righten

July 12th, 2010 Luis No comments

This is a fascinating little video made by performance artist Gavin Nolte (via technabob), a concept which, at first, struck me as incredibly funny: he stuck 25 German GPS navigation computers on his windshield and they all gave him directions at once. As I watched the video, however, it seemed less funny and more fascinating, how the various computers seemed to work, what similarities and differences were apparent.

Categories: Technology, The Lighter Side Tags:

This Is a Great Idea

July 6th, 2010 Luis No comments

Seriously. I would just love seeing slides in every train station. I would totally use them all the time. Too bad in the U.S. it would just lead to countless lawsuits. In Japan, people in charge of stuff simply wouldn’t allow something this light-hearted.

Categories: The Lighter Side Tags:

Recent Engrish

July 5th, 2010 Luis 1 comment

Finding that fully dentist’s sign recently made me remember that I have a few similar images on file–though none can top the dentist, really. But here are a few honorable mentions.

Cheegoo

I don’t think I want to know what or who “Chee” is in this case.

Hairfanny

Not to be confused with fanny hair.

Lustypark

The actual name of a housing complex in Hibarigaoka. Don’t ask.

Hardoff

They sell cold showers, baseball imagery, and saltpeter, one can only assume.

Duck

Always good advice: you never know when something will fly right at your head, after all.

Until My 80 What?

July 4th, 2010 Luis No comments

Why can’t I keep the other 12? And do I get to choose which twenty?

An actual dentist’s office near Hibarigaoka station. The slogan is supposed to mean, “Keep your teeth as healthy as a 20-year-old’s until you’re 80.”

Categories: The Lighter Side, iPhone Blogging Tags:

Yeah. I Want to Send My Teenage Daughter to a School with a Slogan Like That.

April 4th, 2010 Luis 6 comments

An advertisement for a girls’ private junior/senior high school seen at Komagome Station, Tokyo:

Somany

Seriously, can you get much creepier than that?

Yeah… That’s What’s Wrong Here

March 19th, 2010 Luis No comments

How is it that no one doing PR against piracy can open their mouths without sounding like complete idiots? Agnete Haaland, the president of the International Actors’ Federation, has the solution to the piracy scourge:

“We should change the word piracy,” she told reporters at the unveiling of the report on Wednesday.

“To me, piracy is something adventurous, it makes you think about Johnny Depp. We all want to be a bit like Johnny Depp. But we’re talking about a criminal act. We’re talking about making it impossible to make a living from what you do,” she said.

And no, that’s not from The Onion. I did not make that up. Piracy, according to Agnete, is making it impossible for actors to “make a living.”

It’s not the greed of giant megacorps that make $2.64 billion from a movie like Avatar, or, as the same article points out, rakes in nearly $2 trillion every year. It can’t be that the huge parasitic media corporations are robbing the performers blind and making life tough for the rank and file. No, because $2 trillion can only go so far. No, it’s the pirates who are sucking up as much as 1.16% of that total (again according to that same article, and that’s probably an over-estimate) who are the real problem. If only the megacorps could recoup that 1.16%, then it would all go to the starving artists, who would reap the full rewards of their efforts and could finally make a decent living. Yeah. I believe that. That makes sense.

And what’s the biggest part of that problem? That they’re called “pirates.” Normally, these people would be leading responsible lives, paying $40 for that second visit to the multiplex instead of downloading the film online–but the urge to visit thepiratebay.org and download a torrent so they can feel just like Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Caribbean” is just too damn strong.

And it’s not just the swashbuckling image of clicking a web link, it’s that label, “piracy.” Oooooohhhh. That’s what sucks people into these lives of reprehensible crime–they can’t resist the cool name.

Says “Agnete Haaland.”

Show Us the Money

March 12th, 2010 Luis 4 comments

Obama is doing the only really reasonable thing with the $1.4 million he’s getting in Nobel Prize winnings: he’s giving it to charities. The list:

– the Fisher House $250,000
– the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund $250,000
– the College Summit $125,000
– the Posse Foundation $125,000
– the United Negro College Fund $125,000
– the Hispanic Scholarship Fund $125,000
– the Appalachian Leadership and Education Foundation $125,000
– the American Indian College Fund $125,000
– AfriCare $100,000
– Central Asia Institute $100,000

As I thought about how it might have looked had he kept the money, what instantly came to mind was: Sarah Palin. Had she (so impossibly as to be hilarious) won the prize, she would have announced that she would give the money to charity, given no details about it, and then we would never hear about it again while she quietly pocketed the money. It’s gauche when a former politician whores around for any money they can get; for a hopeful politician to do so is pretty ugly.

Palin2012

Categories: Political Ranting, The Lighter Side Tags:

Breaking News: Fantastic Coincidence Strikes Bush White House Email Records

February 27th, 2010 Luis No comments

In what analysts are calling a breathtaking string of coincidences, every single email written by every single official and staffer in the Bush administration, from the very first day it began to Bush’s very last day in office, has been accidentally erased. In 7,538 separate cases of human and mechanical error, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of email messages were erased. Additionally, in each case, backups were also destroyed, and then, in thousands of completely unrelated mishaps, the hard disk drives which once contained the emails and their backups, located on hundreds of different servers at sites spanning the entire continental United States, were accidentally removed and magnetically wiped, and then physically destroyed. In what is being termed a statistical fluke, there were virtually no such errors before January 2001, and have been no such reported incidences since January of 2009; the outbreak of purely innocent accidental erasures is fully contained to a sharply defined eight-year period with no meaningful pattern that anyone has been able to discern.

When asked to comment on the phenomenon, former White House technical staffer Steven McDevitt replied, “Huh. How about that?” After hearing that a question concerning the matter was asked by a member of the media, Minority leader John Boehner (R-OH) immediately assailed what he termed “a Liberal-media witch-hunt instigated by known Socialist George Soros, with the clear intention of undermining American values and killing American soldiers.” Upon hearing the news, Congressional Democrats, distressed and fearing reprisal nine months prior to midterm elections, instantly withdrew a variety of bills related to health care, gun control, and education reform, and called instead for renewal of the Patriot Act, after passing a bill exonerating anyone who could have been involved in what were clearly unintended accidents regarding the Bush administration emails, promising to never, ever ask any questions about it, we promise and please don’t attack us.

</snark>

Okay, I exaggerate. But it wouldn’t be funny if there weren’t an element of truth involved.

Categories: Right-Wing Lies, The Lighter Side Tags:

Send in the Clowns

February 2nd, 2010 Luis No comments

It’s inevitable: Apple releases what is to be a hit device, so smaller companies line up to sue Apple for “copying” or “stealing” from them, hoping the deep-pocketed company will settle and cough up the cash. In fact, it is so established an industry that some companies are designing their wares so they are set up to sue Apple. It only took a few days for Wu Xiaolong, the president of “Shenzhen Great Long Brother Industrial Co.” to announce that they were furious:

I was very angry and flabbergasted when I saw the news of the iPad presentation two days ago… It is certainly our design. They’ve stolen because we present our P88 to everyone six months ago at the IFA (International Electronics Fair in Berlin).

Now, if you’ve seen the iPad, you may be wondering: how can you copyright that design? I mean, it’s a rounded rectangle with a metal bezel and black border. You can’t get more simple than that. Zillions of devices have that basic look; it describes half the monitors on laptops today. Besides which, one of the major grouses people have been lobbing at the iPad is that it looks exactly like an oversized iPhone or iPod Touch–so if Apple’s design is just like the P88’s, then isn’t the P88’s a copy of Apple’s handhelds?

According to Wu: “[Our machine has] nothing to do with it, as they have completely different functions.” Ah, I see. And so the P88 and the iPad have identical functions? Well, not quite. The iPad has a 9.7“ capacitive multitouch screen, the P88 has a lower-resolution 10.2” resistive touch screen (no multitouch) and uses a stylus; the iPad runs the iPhone OS on flash memory in a closed ecosystem, the P88 has Windows on a HDD and is essentially a PC crammed into a tablet form; the iPad gets 10 hours of battery life, the P88 less than 2 hours; the P88 is thicker, heavier, and sits on an ugly metal bracket. But the real difference is in appearance:

P88-Ipad

P88-Ipad-2


Whoa! Spooky, huh? I mean, I can hardly tell the two apart!

What was even more funny was that when the P88 was released, it was called a “non-existent Apple Tablet Clone,” as it resembled most mock-ups and estimations of what the iPad was supposed to look like.

But it gets even better. Want to see another computer made by the Chinese company?

Nottheimac

OMG! Apple stole the iMac from them too!!

Expect this lawsuit to fizzle. As Wired so aptly put it, “Anyone confusing the two products deserves the P88.”

The Onion Channels the Weak, Suffering Voice of the Remnants of Rush Limbaugh’s Broken, Microscopic Conscience

January 26th, 2010 Luis No comments

When you read it, you keep thinking, “My god, they are really going over the top with this one,” and then you remember who they’re talking about and go, “Well, maybe not.”

Categories: The Lighter Side Tags:

Apple Juice: The Next Generation

December 9th, 2009 Luis No comments

This had me in tears. Literally.

Categories: The Lighter Side Tags:

Hair

December 1st, 2009 Luis 1 comment

During a recent visit to Tokyu Hands, Sachi and I were tempted by the wigs:

Wig-01Wig-02Wig-03Wig-04

We tried on about 5 or 6 before a clerk told us to cut that out (more I think because we were taking photos). Personally, I like the blond one: “Waaaayyynnee!!!!”

Sachi came out looking like one of my students:

Wig-05

Me, I just look cool.

Hat-01

No, Really! It Works! I Swear!

October 24th, 2009 Luis 8 comments

Classic:

Looks like they forgot to plug in a cable. People have pointed out a touchscreen on a standard desktop computer monitor is pretty pointless–nobody is going to reach out to their screen like that to control it all day. The orientation problem will have to be fixed before it is actually something people will want to use. Microsoft’s jump into this functionality is an excellent example of kitchen-sink mentality: use something because it’s there, rather than because it’s a good idea.

The TaliPhone?

February 13th, 2009 Luis 1 comment

You gotta love this: Al Jazeera reporter goes to interview Mullah Zaif, the former ambassador to Pakistan for the Taliban, which shunned many things western, including most of its technology. The man walks in, sits down… and whips out his iPhone. Yep, his iPhone. Then he proceeds to rave about it: “I’m addicted. The internet is great on this, very fast.” He then proceeds to show it off for the reporter. Really, I had to double check the web site to make sure it was really Al Jazeera and not some satire site. Even had to inspect the photo closely to make sure it wasn’t a Photoshop job.

200928142749646580 9

Is Apple converting the Taliban with its subversive seductiveness?

Categories: The Lighter Side, iPhone Tags:

Something to See

January 17th, 2009 Luis No comments

This is great. I’m not sure I want to post it on this blog, but I’ll risk a link to the comically risqué.

Categories: The Lighter Side Tags:

Must-See TV

January 11th, 2009 Luis 1 comment

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Dum-Dum, DUM DUM, Dum, Dumb

January 6th, 2009 Luis 1 comment

Sachi was watching a program recently which involved some celebrities and athletes (including some U.S. Olympians). There was a big buildup to one part of the competition, with dramatic music and jazzy graphics, ending with the title of the competition in big letters spread across the screen:

TAIL IMPOSSIBLE

I never could figure out what the heck they were trying to say, I just had the giggles for a while. While I missed the big reveal, I did get a few images of the title in other graphics:

Tailimp01

Tailimp02

Is it a typo or an example of strange usage, of borrowed English distorted beyond the original meaning? Maybe it doesn’t matter, and one should simply sit back and enjoy the absurdity.

Weirdness

January 2nd, 2009 Luis 2 comments

Would you buy discount goods from a kind-of-anatomically-correct naked pig wearing a necktie?

Boods01

The “DS” is not Nintendo, is stands for “Discount Store.” And don’t ask me what the deal with the pig is. (Photo of a shop awning on Yamanote Blvd. west of Ikebukuro.)