From the Boston.com News:

The search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has quietly concluded without any evidence of the banned weapons that President Bush cited as justification for going to war, the White House said Wednesday.

Well, isn’t that a surprise? And, of course, Bush will suffer no repercussions from this, will not drop an iota in popularity, and will not suffer from the fact that he blatantly lied to the American people and sent more than thirteen hundred American soldiers to their deaths, thousands more maimed and crippled, and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead because of those lies.

The article ends with:

Bush has appointed a panel to investigate why the intelligence about Iraq’s weapons was wrong.

And by golly, they’re going to get to the bottom of this!

This is why I’m not reading the news so much any more. The sheer sickening vileness of the Bush administration, and the ignorant, sheeplike following it enjoys is just too much to take sometimes.

Oh, and yes–it looks like Armstrong Williams was not the only member of the press on the take–he let slip that “This happens all the time. There are others.” And you wonder why we’ve been calling the media whores to the Bush administration?

So we’re having to do with live text-blogging-style reports from the Expo on the various Mac sites (you can find them at MacSurfer). MacMerc will have photos up very soon.

So far: Tiger is on schedule and, among the 200 new features (probably a dozen or two actually of interest to most people), it has a killer search engine called “Spotlight” which puts the new Google and Microsoft desktop search engines to shame. iTunes gets across-the-board upgrades to all its apps. And iWork is a reality, with the “Pages” word processing app and Keynote 2–together priced at $79, which would be $20 less than the Keynote app has been priced alone up until now.

And then there’s the biggest announcement so far: the iMac Mini, priced at $499 and $599, with a 1.25 GHz/40GB HDD and 1.42 GHz/80GB HDD, both with the G4 chip, analog/digital video out, Combo optical drive, Firewire, USB2, ethernet, and Panther/iLife included–and from reports, it is very, very small. In a brushed-metal enclosure, square-shaped and two inches tall (no reports on the width and depth measurements aside from that it can “fit into the palm of your hand”). This will make the Mac very competitive in the low-end market.

And then there’s the iPod Shuffle (early photo), the tiny version (pack-of-gum sized, one ounce) of the iPod mini, a flash-memory iPod without a screen per se; the two models are 512 MB of memory for $99 and 1GB for $149.99, shipping immediately. So far, almost everything at this expo has been predicted by the rumor sites–few surprises, but probably a lot of happy campers out there. Probably in an hour or so the Apple web sites will be updated and the rest of us can see this cool stuff–but not quite yet. And I am dead tired and have to go to sleep.

Update: Okay, I stayed up just a bit longer. The Apple web site now has everything up. The iMac Mini looks like a small white bento box! I keep looking for the umeboshi. Those who live in Japan will understand.

Heck, I wasn’t planning on it, but I might even buy one of these things…

Haven’t been able to get anything done, including blogging, for the past 24 hours, because KDDI crapped out on me. If I hadn’t complained loudly, they would’ve kept me hanging another one or two days, but I did insist and so they sent someone over a day after the outage started. And it’s not just the Internet, it’s also my landline telephone line. Apparently their “portability” between the lines is not even close to being as seamless and easy as they made it out to be when they were selling it.

Since mid-afternoon, I’ve had 5- or 10-minute islands of Internet workability, this being the latest–and if the KDDI guy, who spent an hour traipsing around my apartment opening up every phone jack panel and cutting a few internal lines, knows more than he’s letting on, then maybe it’ll actually stay on–but I’m not holding my breath. As it is, I’ve lost a lot of work time–and my phone line is still dead, and may be for another three or four days.

So far, I’m not incredibly impressed with the stability of the service, even though the speed is killer when it does work….

One piece of evidence that the new fiber optic Internet connection I just got is indeed blazing: I tested large downloads from big-name sites, both Apple and Microsoft, and got the following measure:

The download was about 300 MB and took a little more than 100 seconds–almost 3 MB per second, or 24 Mbps. Not too shabby at all. Unfortunately, not everyone has such a high-speed upload connection, meaning that while I can potentially get 45 Mbps, I really won’t, unless I download simultaneously from several sources–something which does not often happen. But it’s nice to have the speed. For example, movie trailers from Apple’s site come down about 3 or 4 times faster than I can watch them.

And the difference, the contrast between now and 4 years ago when I was limited to ISDN at 64 Kbps, feeling lucky if I was getting a download at 6 KB/sec, and now getting nearly 500 times that speed in a real-world test…

What, am I crowing too much?

A series of photos and a movie were recently released that appeared to be a sneak peek at the new “iHome,” supposedly the “headless iMac” that is rumored to be the big release at MacWorld this week. The photos, at first glance, seem convincing, and a lot of people excitedly believed that these were genuine images of the real deal:

It would seem to be too elaborate to be a hoax, too well-produced.

But there are problems that people soon started pointing out: first, the font is wrong; Apple uses Myriad, but the typeface on the box in the photos is called Frutiger. The box itself is in fact an iBook box. The handle on the box is positioned so that if held, the printing on the side of the box would be upside-down. Apple would release this in the US first, and so would not use the British “Centre” spelling. “iHome” is not yet trademarked by Apple. And people in the know say that the styrofoam fitting is imperfect, as well as many other small details. But if none of this is proof enough for you, look at this:

First of all, you can see the piece of paper with the fake name attached to the box pretty clearly. They did not even seem to glue the edges down very well, or used too heavy a paper–you can see the raised leading edge of the paper showing as a contrasty white line about a quarter- to a half-inch from the front edge of the box, highlighted in red in the bottom part of the image. The red circle shows the corner of the box which seems to be dented, unlikely for a brand-new box in its packing. This next photo seals the deal as far as the attached piece of paper is concerned:

Some people also point to the lack of RCA/S-Video ports as proof, but there is a port on the back (second from far right) that could be a custom video-out jack like that used on some Apple portables, which uses a converter cable to lead to RCA and S-Video (come to think of it, the ports almost look like they were stolen from an iBook; the ports shown here have a gap between the firewire and USB ports, and there are two firewire ports instead of one, but aside from that, they match the iBook ports exactly). But there is enough overwhelming evidence otherwise to conclusively prove this to be a fake.

But who knows? Apple is not new to the game of rumor-mongering. Perhaps they are responsible for this, trying to discredit the rumors which they obviously believe are far too close to the mark this year (considering their lawsuit against Think Secret). A fake like this could make people think twice. Or, for all we know, there is a new machine that looks just like this and Apple made the fake to throw people off from it. Doubtful, of course.

One thing for sure: this is generating a lot of buzz for the upcoming Expo, and that can’t be bad for Apple at all. We all love rumors, getting a sneak peek. But let’s just wait for the real deal. After all, rumors in the past have heightened our expectations too high from time to time, leading to disappointments. So just wait and see.

The Slimeball Presidency, Part II.

Alberto Gonzales will probably be confirmed as the new Attorney General, despite his having forwarded and approved of the president subverting the law and ordering torture on suspects. This would be achieved by granting immunity to those the president ordered to torture people–effectively using the the president’s power to commit illegal acts at will. If this sounds slightly Nixonian, it is because it is–the assumption that the president is above the law. You thought Ashcroft was bad?

Let’s not forget that Gonzales is really not much more than a class-A flunky for Bush, who got his start as counselor to Bush as governor of Texas, whose main distinction was that he got Bush out of trouble when Bush’s attempt to look like an everyman by doing jury duty backfired when it threatened to expose Bush’s drunk driving conviction. Gonzales was the one who got Bush out with the weaseling “logic” that the governor should not be part of a jury that decides the sentence of a person who might appeal for clemency to the governor–as if there was more than a one-in-a-billion chance that a nobody convicted of a drunk-driving charge would be asking the governor for a pardon, or that it would really present any kind of conflict whatsoever. More recently, Gonzales was the one responsible for vetting Bernard Kerik, a job which he failed at miserably. This guy’s supposed to be our top lawman?

I am a little surprised, actually, that the right wing hasn’t pulled out the old “Democrats are racists for opposing our extremist right-wing nutcase nominee because s/he’s a minority” chestnut, but maybe that’s just because it looks like Gonzales will pass. Whoopee for us.

And then there’s the revelation that the Bush administration paid out nearly a quarter of a million dollars as a bribe to a conservative black journalist to push the president’s agenda on education to the people who would most likely get hurt by it. The grateful reporter gave air time to Bush staffers and even urged other journalists to push the same agenda.

This is a bit similar to the time when the Bush administration abused their funding powers to create fake news stories about Bush’s Medicare program (complete with fake news reporters) which acted as Bush campaign commercials, and then get local stations to run them as if they were real news. Of course, this all should be of little surprise, considering the Bush administration’s success in turning the journalistic community into a harem of whores for the administration, but an outright bribe like this has got to be illegal. So what will happen? Just add it to the list of felonies committed by this administration so it can just lay there for a while and be ignored and eventually dismissed.

One thing that these two items bring in to focus is that this administration considers itself above the law, and has no qualms about doing whatever it desires to subvert or just outright break the law of the land. There’s your “values” for you.

While Bush is out there claiming that he has a “mandate” despite a slim margin of 3% and only 51% of the vote, his followers are crowing about how more people voted for Bush this time than voted for any other president in any other election–whilst blissfully ignoring the fact that more people voted against Bush than they did against any other president in history.

But the fact remains that Bush is an unpopular president. He has the lowest poll numbers of any president entering his second term (most second-term presidents start at about 60%), and a new AP poll shows that his current approval rating is only 48%–and his disapproval rating is 49%. Not many undecideds there. As such, Bush is not only unpopular, but he is, most likely, the most divisive president ever. Such does not a mandate make.

That there will be no live webcast is a downer, because it was the best way to both see and hear about new Apple products when they come out. It would start late night here in Japan, but I would always stay up to watch it.

The next best thing is to view the Mac rumor sites, which usually have reps at the event doing live blogging as the keynote goes on. Probably someone will do that this year as well, though Apple has been highly antagonistic to these sites in recent times. But someone is bound to have live input on this.

There is a bright spot though: the keynote speech may be available online some time after the event is over. So for us here in Japan, where the keynote starts at like 2:00 am, it might be ready and waiting on the web when we wake up here the following morning. By that time, though, one could just as easily look at any of the Mac sites and get the main gist in a few seconds’ time… but watching the keynote can be a lot more fun.

I haven’t had much chance to get out as I’m resting up from the whole nosebleed situation, but at least I can take snaps out the window, as I have before. And jet lag, for all its inconvenience, does wake you up in time for the sunrise.

This one was just out the dining room window at sunrise. But then I decided to take the elevator up to the top of the building, where there is a landing which affords much better photos:

This is fully zoomed-out of the Tokyo cityscape from about 20 km out…

And above, this is zoomed in on Shinjuku–but this image is scaled down to fit a 450-pixel width, while the image below is simply cropped. I’ll have to wait for a very clear daytime shot to get the best detail on these buildings. The building at center, by the way, is the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.

And finally, a shot of Tokyo Tower and its surrounds. That’s a bridge over the Tama River in the lower foreground.

Ah, may it be ever so smelly upon return. Not because it’s a sty or anything, I always clean it up before traveling–but after 2-3 weeks away, it starts to get that moldy empty-apartment smell. I’ve tried desiccators, leaving windows cracked open, closing doors and closing up drains, nothing keeps the smell from accumulating. Actually, the bath and toilet rooms are the only ones that don’t have the smell, so go figure. It takes a few days to get rid of, but it’s survivable. I just wish I knew what it was and how to keep it from happening.

The trip home went quite well, aside from my forgetting my cold cuts for noshing on the flight. The trip was about as good as one could normally expect from economy class. And, hey, I didn’t erupt into nosebleeds over the Pacific, so how much could you ask for? At the airport, the bags came down quickly enough, I got waved through customs, and there was a Narita Express at just the right time to allow me to takkyubin (express deliver) my bigger bag and then sit down for a caramel frappuccino at the airport Starbucks before getting on the train.

Arriving home was a slightly different matter. KDDI pulled a fast one on me. I got home to no Internet. I had ordered their “Hikari Plus” vDSL service a few weeks before I left, but the KDDI rep who came to help me fill out the forms promised me a mid-January start date, and said that the ADSL would continue until I got and set up the vDSL modem and asked them to switch. I left Japan on December 14th, early. And that’s when KDDI sent out the modem by takkyubin–a month before they said it would come. Had they warned me that such a thing might even possibly happen, I would have told them to not do it during my traveling. But early they were, and so they started my vDSL service on the 16th, and cut off my ADSL–without any indication I was ready for that–on the 18th. But since I had no idea the vDSL stuff would start so soon–a month before I was told to expect it–I could of course not be there to get the modem or set it up (being 5,000 miles away at the time). And when the ADSL got cut off, my HDD recorder lost its connection to the scheduling service. It still recorded the shows I asked for, but all are mislabeled.

But worse, I was supposed to email my folks and let them know I had gotten home OK. I couldn’t stay awake long enough to catch them by phone in the morning in California, and had promised to send them an email saying I was OK. But here was my Internet connection severed, with no way to connect to the new vDSL, the modem being with the takkyubin people. Fortunately, my brother–also living in Tokyo–was able to shoot off the email, so there was no panic at home, but I am somewhat miffed at KDDI for botching that one. And they still say that I have to pay for two and a half weeks of vDSL service despite not receiving any service whatsoever during that time. I’m not paying for being cut off without notice, not if I have anything to say about it.

But the modem got takkyubin’d to me this morning after I called them (it got delivered along with the second suitcase, in fact), and with a little assistance, I got it set up. A speed check claimed I was getting 44 megabits download speed, and 13.5 megabits upload. Not too shabby–more than 100 times what a lot of people in the U.S. get nowadays. Certainly fast enough for whatever I’m doing on the net these days.

Now to get over jet lag, and finish recovering so there’s no chance of me bleeding profusely when I start teaching again next week.

Wow. I’m finally heading home. Not that there’s anything bad or good about leaving where I am or getting to where I’m going, it just seemed there for some time that I wasn’t gonna go anywhere for a while. The nosebleed was just so unpredictable–there was no telling when it would stop or rebleed or why. Probably pretty soon I’ll post in gruesome detail about the nosebleed situation, because it helps to record your experiences to help others (we wish we could’ve found something like that to better understand our situation). But not now. It almost feels too much like jinxing the trip home, and right now, the last thing I need is a jinx.

Either the JET Program is being junked, or Japanese schools are taking a wrong turn in hiring teachers. A news story in Japan Today reports that vacationing foreign university students can, from February, serve as language instructors at Japanese public elementary, junior high, and high schools. Now, if we’re talking JET-style human-tape-recorder jobs, then okay, I guess. But the article leaves open the possibility that these people will be teaching classes, possibly even solo. Maybe I’m mistaken, but I think the policy up until now has been that no foreign teachers, no matter how qualified, were allowed to teach solo in any public schools. If this new policy has university students teaching classes solo, then they’re out of their mind. But I figure there’s gotta be some qualification of the circumstances in there somewhere. Anyone know about that?

What Japanese schools need is to allow fully qualified non-Japanese TOEFL teachers to get full-time jobs teaching language in those schools; that alone will seriously improve the end result of those long years of otherwise half-wasted study. In my experience as a student in American schools, I never saw a class that was taught by a non-native speaker. I’m sure there are quite a few in America, but I’ll bet that they’re the exception rather than the rule. And I think it’s a good rule to have someone who is both intimately familiar with the language in question, and with professional credentials, to teach the class.

The British News Telegraph has a blurb out on the headless iMac which has not much new except it does offer one interesting detail: that the computer is packed in a box 1.7 inches thick. Unless it’s a misunderstanding or simply made up, it offers an idea of the form factor of the new computer, rumored to be “iPod-like” in appearance. One wonders if the computer doubles as a base station for the ipod–just set it down on a port atop the computer and it connects and recharges.

One week left before the MacWorld Expo.

One of my favorite moons in the solar system is Iapetus, and the Cassini probe just made its closest flyby of the moon a few days ago, at the end of 2004. Iapetus is an alluring moon because of a fascinating surface feature: an incredibly high-contrast swath of blackened material over much of its surface. Look at the first image here: it looks like you are looking at the shadow side of the moon, but that is a full-on bright side view; the “shadowed” areas are the dark swath I mentioned.

Other features show themselves at this distance as well: note three very large impact craters, the largest located on the left edge. Also note a ridge on the middle right that leads to a small visible rise on the limb of the moon (see below). There will be some talk about whether the ridge is related to the dark material, which is as black as coal.

The contrast can be seen even better in this time-lapse image, taken of the dark side of the moon, brightened by the light side of Saturn.

There is also this image of one of the large craters, caught very nicely in light and shadow.

Cassini also just released the Huygens probe, a package that will, in ten days, fly into the atmosphere of Titan (the largest moon in the solar system, and the only one with an atmosphere) and perhaps give us some astounding data of the satellite close-up.

So far, NASA has been just stellar this year, with the energizer-bunny Mars rovers (images all available here) which have so far outlasted their 90-day lifetimes by nine months, and now the Cassini probe doing so spectacularly well, imaging the Saturn system. We need to hear more praise for this government-agency-that-could.

The Cassini probe can be followed at CICLOPS (more of a diary of events) or at the European Space Agency, but the best page is at NASA, with a great image library, including the latest, unprocessed raw images (which NASA has been publishing from all its missions) in a searchable database. Cool.

Bits of leftover stuff that I won’t blog on in detail here (at least not yet), but which are still of interest:

The Republican party is all about letting a close race stay final. No more recounts, we won the vote, even if there were huge irregularities and even outright fraud, an election is an election, we won so that’s it, stop the counting don’t count anymore don’t even think of counting any… what? We lost? Well, damn, we have to have an entirely new election! it will be an incredible injustice to everyone everywhere unless we win–er, have an election where we win–er, where there is a fair election, nudge nudge wink wink.

I’m not kidding. The GOP seem to trust machines more than humans, because they loathe hand-counting of votes. But the manual recount uncovered 700 ballots that the machines had misread or had been rejected, and in addition to that, found that some absentee ballots had been wrongly disqualified (many of which were likely from the military). But when the votes were really counted and certified, when the election was most accurately measured, the Republican that lost just couldn’t handle it. (At least the county auditor, a Republican, disagrees with Rossi.)

As I’ve said before, the GOP will do anything to win an election they lost fair and square, no matter how sordid or dirty their method: impeach, steal, or recall–but now we can add “revote” to the list.

What will they think of next?

I was kind of surprised by what I saw on Comedy Central last night. I was watching the South Park marathon leading up to midnight, and toward the end they showed the movie, “Bigger, Longer and Uncut” (script). Now, had I thought about it, I should have foreseen the difficulties involved–half the movie consists of obscenities never allowed on TV; to clean it up, the movie would have to be literally butchered.

So, to my surprise, they showed it uncensored. In this age where networks shudder in fear that even the suggestion of obscenity could get them fined in the millions of dollars, Comedy Central, bless their hearts, showed the whole movie with untold hundreds of f***s, s***s, and other creatively constructed obscene expressions (such as “testicle-s***ting rectal-wart”), including the entire musical number, “Shut Your F***ing Face, Uncle F***er.”

They achieved this, apparently, by using he following warning:

TV MA LSV MATURE AUDIENCE ONLY This program is specifically designed to be viewed by adults and therefore may be unsuitable for children under 17. This program contains graphic violence, explicit sexual activity, and crude vulgar language.

I, for one, am impressed. And Comedy Central used good judgment, too–to keep that kind of thing away from the kiddies, they showed the movie late in the evening on New Year’s Eve–the one night of the year, after all, when young kids are least likely to stay up late!

Mac Rumor sites are abuzz over what will be released in ten days at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. There are always rumors swirling around the new products that Apple so closely guards, and usually they do a pretty good job of keeping things mum. But this time, there is a fairly strong expectations for a “headless” iMac, that is, an iMac without a monitor attached to it–something Apple has never had since it first introduced the iMac in 1998. This would reduce the price of the iMac to maybe $500, and the form factor would apparently be similar to that of the iPod–the computer intended, some say, to attract PC users who have gotten the iPod and would like to expand their Apple experience.

Also reported is the long-rumored iWork suite, which would include Keynote (the replacement for PowerPoint), and Pages (formerly called “Document,” Apple’s word processor), and, presumably, other apps, likely including the now suite-free apps Mail and iCal. No word out yet on a possible spreadsheet app.

It should be an interesting expo, and probably will be webcast. I’ll try to give info about the link for the webcast when I find out about it.

And finally, we have the next step in the GOP’s campaign to complete seize all power and disenfranchise Democrats: getting rid of the filibuster. Despite the fact that the Democrats have been blocking only a fraction of the judicial appointments from Bush that the Republicans did against Clinton, Bush has taken 20 judges that the Democrats blocked and recycled them, as Republicans work to get rid of the ability of the Democrats to have any say whatsoever in the workings of Congress.

My father just got his first phishing email. “Phishing” is a “leet” word, intentionally spelled wrong in the fashion of “warez” (illegally copied software), “n00b,” (newbie), or “h4x” (hacks). “Leet” is short for “elite,” a kind of hacker’s written slang, invented in the late 80’s probably to allow hackers on BBS or chat areas to talk about illicit deeds while avoiding text filters. Phishing is certainly an illicit activity, and fits into that category nicely.

Phishing is when someone sends out massive emailings designed to get unknowing victims to cough up vital information, like bank account numbers and passwords. The email is often easily spotted as fake, but if a scammer sends out a million emails, they’re bound to get several bites, ergo the reference to fishing.

Today’s phishing scams are centered on bank accounts primarily (though eBay and PayPal are hit quite often as well). You get an email from a bank; sometimes you belong to it, sometimes not, it’s all part of the fishing experience. Let’s say you’re a customer of the bank, for this example. The email looks very official, and appears to come from a valid address with the bank’s domain name (e.g., users-billing21@citibank.com). It may or may not contain the bank’s logo and other official-looking graphics. The email is written in a professional-looking way, and it contains an alarming message: your account at the banks is going to be suspended. Now, nobody wants that! The concern that such a thing might happen will drive a lot of people to give respect to the email.

The reason given for account closure is usually that someone has been trying to access your account with an incorrect password, and in order to ensure security, they will suspend your account–unless, of course, you go to the bank’s web site and verify your logon information. Now, the link is the tricky part. Usually they will display a link that looks quite official–again, with the bank’s domain name. Here’s where the slight of hand comes in, and they hope you won’t be looking all too carefully.

Now, when you are presented with a link, there are two parts to it: the link text that is displayed to you, and the actual address which it links to. With a link as part of an email message, you might view it in a browser or in an email program. In the browser, the link is supposed to be more transparent; as you hold the cursor over the link, the address it links to should appear in the status bar (the strip at the bottom of the browser’s window). Here, let’s try it. Hold the cursor over this link: http://www.cnn.com . Note that the URL in your status bar at bottom left is not the same as the one displayed in the link. That’s because the displayed link can be anything you want. The same is true in your email program, like Eudora, except that the link is even more opaque because the actual link is usually not displayed in a status bar or elsewhere; you click on the link, and it just takes you there.

The reason I’m telling you about the status bar in browsers and the real link is not just to demonstrate how you can be faked out, but also because that’s a good thing to look at in browsers before following a link. You can be faked out. You should not just jump willy-nilly into any link thrown at you, especially in email, where spammers may have given it to you. Not only could it lead to a fake site, but it could also include a code that clearly identifies you as being the visitor. But that’s another scam, so let’s get back to the phishing.

So you get the email, apparently from the bank, telling you your account will be suspended, and to stop that follow this link. On the face of it, the link will appear to be one that goes to the bank’s domain, or will just be a link saying, “To confirm your bank account records please click here.” The thing is, if you follow the link, it will not take you to the bank’s web site, it will take you to the scammer’s web site, which is reconstructed to appear identical to the bank’s page, using graphics stolen from that page, and to a great degree is completely stolen from the bank’s site, so as to fool you into thinking you’re at the bank’s site.

There is a telltale, though: look in the URL window at the top of your browser window. When following a phishing link, you should see an address that looks like this: http://218.65.110.11/suntrust/internetbanking/ (though be careful–one of the security holes you hear about in Explorer allows hackers to fake even this). Note that it begins not with a domain, but with a number. That’s an IP Address, which is the same to your browser as a domain name. But to you it’s a number, and as such is nondescript and anonymous. That’s what the scammers want–they want you not to know where you really are. That number I gave you–218.65.110.11–was the IP address of a real scammer who recently phished for me. That wasn’t the address for the Sun Trust Bank, it was the address of the computer where the phisher was lurking.

So if I had gone to that page and input my user ID and password, I would have gotten an error message. And in the time it would have taken me to call the bank and ask what was wrong with their page, the scammer would already have gotten into my real account, changed the password, and done his best to empty it of all my money. What the scammer would really love is that after you get the error message, you simply give up and not look into any of this for a while. But they wouldn’t need long. They tend to scram pretty fast–most links to phishers’ fake bank pages go offline very quickly.

So don’t trust any message like that, if for no other reason that banks never send emails like that. The only time banks will send you email is if you send them an email query first, and even then, they will address you directly by name (phishers don’t do that), and they don’t respond with a detailed message, just with a note to go to their main home page (they do not even give you a link, just tell you to go to their honest domain).

So the simple solution is not to trust any email message that claims to be from a bank. Beyond that, don’t trust any official-looking email that does not address you direct by name; don’t try to communicate with banks by email; and for that matter, don’t trust any email that has to do with financial institutions at all. And never enter a financial web site through a link–type in the domain name directly.

How’s this for screwed up: a woman in Washington State escaped an abusive marriage two years ago, when her husband was jailed for beating her. Last April, she filed for divorce. The divorce came through, but now it’s rescinded. Why? Because she is currently pregnant by her new partner.

Yeah, I know, that’s like a “Wha???” kind of thing. But it’s true. She got pregnant by a different man after she had filed for divorce. She was getting on with her life, thought that she’d left her wife-beating husband behind, and now the State of Washington throws this at her.

The reason? According to Spokane County Superior Court Judge Paul Bastine, the judge who rescinded the divorce, he doesn’t want the child to be illegitimate. “It’s not the child’s fault that mom got pregnant,” the judge said. “The answer is, you don’t go around doing that when you’re not divorced.” This, even thought the woman has clearly stated that she wants to marry the child’s real father before the child is born. She commented, “If this court vacates my divorce and requires me to stay married to a man I have no desire ever to have a relationship with and who has brought significant physical harm to me over the years, I would be emotionally devastated. If the court vacates my divorce and stays it until the birth of my child, it will prevent me from marrying the father of my child prior to her birth.”

Who wants to bet money against the chance that this idiot of a judge is a Republican?

Usually I come back to Japan from my American Christmas vacation in time for New Year’s, so I can enjoy the event in Japan at a local shrine where they have fireworks, a traditional Japanese band, shi-shi mai dances, chidren dressed as hyotto-ko, free hot sake, and a nice bonfire. This year I’ll be enjoying it at home because of the whole nosebleed situation. The last time I stayed this late was the millennium, but I did not think to ask ahead–my family was planning nothing for the evening, and I would up watching TV at midnight by myself. But this time promises to be better, as everyone who can stay awake is planning to do so, and we’ll have a nice, warm little celebration at home.

Happy New Year!

Well, I’ve had the Canon S1 for a few weeks now, but because of my nosebleed situation, I have not had all that many opportunities to test it. But soon after I got here in mid-December, I did have one chance to test it against the old Canon PowerShot model’s zoom lens. The PowerShot S30 I’ve got has the typical 3x zoom for a digital camera, and that is identical to the zoom on my father’s S45. So when we went to the 49ers-Washington game a few weeks back, we took side-by-side photos for comparison.

The grid of four images below represent the extremes of the zoom lenses for both cameras. Due to size restrictions, I couldn’t post the full-sized comparison here, but if you click the image, it will take you to the 800×600 original image in a new window.

Of the four images in this grid, the two on the left are taken with the S45, and the two on the right are taken with the S1-IS. The top two images are fully zoomed out, and the bottom two are fully zoomed in. All the images are cropped, and in the full-sized image, are not reduced or enlarged in any way, so what you see is the original image, pixel for pixel. Since the images are cropped, that in itself acts like a zoom, but since I don’t want to burden you with four megabyte-sized images each many times larger than your display, this will have to do.

The two key images are the ones at the bottom, which show the difference you get between the 3x zoom and the 10x zoom. These images were shot from the upper deck at Candlestick Park during the pre-game activities. I figure that the 25-yard-line, where the kicker was practicing, was about 60 yards distant from the lens. So looking at the lower-right image of the ball at the kicker’s feet, that’s a pretty good zoom image. I mean, I’m getting blades of grass and you can almost read the writing on the football.

So until they come up with a 20x zoom in a mid-range digital camera, I’m going to consider this as being pretty cool.

I teach great students.

Teaching English in Japan is not always a walk in the park. Whatever difficulties there may be, motivating your students tends to be the most troubling. Teaching can be a joy, but the greatest threat to that joy is a class full of unresponsive, bored students who would rather not be there. Worse are those students who know they don’t have to try. Japanese universities are filled with students who come to class only to sleep, read comic books, chat with friends, or even use cell phones (though usually through typing, not talking).

I had a class like that once. It was when I was teaching at a YMCA up in the countryside, in Toyama Prefecture. They would rent me out to local schools, and the least liked of all was the Computer school. This was a “senmon gakkou,” or a trade school, where English Language was required on the curriculum. However, it was not really required; the students could come and sit and sleep if they wanted, and if they failed the tests, the teacher would simply be asked to have the failing students re-take the test until they passed–with an understanding that the second test would not be so hard (let’s not waste time unnecessarily, after all).

Since the students knew that they’d pass no matter what, and since it was not the core subject of their trade school, it tended to be a pretty horrible class. A teacher would be lucky if they got three minutes of the students being even halfway quiet. If the students just slept, read, or (as many of the girls were wont to do) pulled strands of hair before their eyes to inspect for loose ends, that was a good class. But usually, a class meant that students wanted to gab in Japanese, and that meant the teacher shouting for quiet every four or five minutes when the sound level of the students made it so the teacher could not be heard even in the first row–were there any students listening anyway. One of the other teachers from the Y also rented out to that school became so frustrated at one point, they actually threw an eraser at a group of chatting students. It is not a job you want to have, certainly not for any stretch of time.

So the students I have at my college today are more than just good; they are spectacular. Lakeland College is one of only two remaining U.S. colleges in Japan that have full accreditation from an American agency (the other is Temple University). Students who come to us do so because they want an American education, and they understand that this means actual work, and actual learning. These students want what the college offers. Most colleges in Japan are seen as standard diploma farms–plant yourself there for a few years, and you get a diploma. Students at Japanese institutions know they don’t have to excel too much, that many professors only read the first and last pages of their essays, and that their GPA won’t matter much.

Students at Lakeland, however, know that they must excel, and by the time they get through the pre-academic language program this has been well-established. But it’s more than just the fear of a failing grade–it’s in their hearts. they want to do well. And this was expressed better than I could otherwise describe, at a recent lecture event in Tokyo.

On November 30th, there was a speech by former Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker (wife of US Ambassador to Japan Howard H. Baker), followed by a question-and-answer session, at the U.S. Embassy’s Tokyo American Center. After the Senator finished, students from around Tokyo were invited to step up to the microphones. The first person to do so was from Lakeland College. She stepped down, and another student stepped forward–and it was another Lakeland College student. After she finished, a young gentleman came up to the mic–and introduced himself as a student of Lakeland College before asking his question.

At this point, a moderator asked the students of Lakeland College to please give the students of other colleges and universities a chance to step up to the microphone. After all, the audience was full of students from such prestigious colleges as Tokyo University and Waseda (think of Stanford and Harvard). After that request, there was a prolonged silence. Nobody came up to the mic.

After about a minute had passed, a student finally stood up and walked to the microphone to ask a question. “Good evening,” she started. “My name is Shizuka Saito, and I’m from Lakeland College.” After that, they just let the Lakeland students come. And the questions were not softballs, either. One was, for example: “Senator Baker, in 1996 you voted against a bill that would recognize same-sex marriages. Could you please explain this vote?”

These are the students we have. In the writing class that I taught last semester, there was just supposed to be a simple review and strengthening of the students’ writing skills, but every chance they got, they reached for complex, difficult topics to cover, eager to achieve beyond their capabilities.

That’s the biggest reason why the job I have now is the best job I have ever had.