A lot of it is explained here, but the short story is that the iPhone has had a successful launch here, allowing 3rd-place SoftBank to grab the lion’s share of new activations this quarter in Japan, many of them stolen from other carriers.

I’ve observed this on a small scale at my school, where students have invariably reacted to the iPhone with intense interest, many asking to see it because they’d heard that I got one, and more than a few saying they planned to buy one. This from a population which is made up almost completely of DoCoMo and Au (KDDi) users–I know because I asked two of my classes, nearly 30 students, and not a single one had a SoftBank account. But now several are planning to change, once they can find a store that has iPhones in stock.

All this despite no handstrap, no emoji (color graphic emoticons), so electronic wallet, and (as yet) no QR Code reader. Go figure.

I’ve heard that more and more on TV in the past few years–certainly it’s been making the rounds on sci-fi shows like Stargate Atlantis and Eureka. But now the Chinese know what it’s about as well. You probably didn’t notice, because of the TV camera angles and the sheer number of things to look at, but during the opening ceremonies at the beijing Olympics, Windows XP treated the crowd to the old crowd-please, the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death):

This just as they were about to light the torch. Ouch! And apparently, the Chinese had moved to XP because Vista was too unstable. At least, had they been using Macs, they would have had the last image frozen with a pretty rainbow beachball.

More images, including hi-res, here.

Bush’s frat-boy persona appears to resurface:

But hey, don’t worry; he’s only representing the United States of America at the Olympics, that’s all. Figures that of all of the sports he would choose to dive into, it’d be women’s beach volleyball. Me, I like the food stains on his shirt. Classy.

The headline blares from Electronista: “Average Mac Price Now 2X Windows PCs.”

According to data collected by the NPD group, the average Windows notebook goes for $700, while the average Apple laptop costs above $1,500, dropping a mere $59 in the last two years. And that’s nothing compared to desktop computers.

The average Mac desktop sells for about $1,000 more than the average PC desktop, which sells for a mere $550.

Oy. Here we go again. First, I was unable to find the “NPD” study data (everybody quotes them, nobody links to them, and the study is not up on their site), so I was unable to find out how the study was weighted–did they weight prices by each single available model, or by the number of each model sold, or what?

That aside, the study is horribly flawed based on one basic point: Apple does not sell dirt-cheap, bare-bones systems. They just don’t make a computer which sports a Celeron or Sempron CPU and cut corners in a lot of places. They start at the mid-range level. As I tell my students, if you want a really cheap computer, go with a Windows PC. But that does not mean that Macs and PCs of the same quality have a 2-to-1 price ratio. They’re averaging prices of cheapo units to mid-level units–not very honest or accurate. That does not take value into consideration at all.

The second flaw is the lack of attention to details, if not outright fabrications:

…a Dell Inspiron 518 tower nearing the $700 mark features two more processor cores, three times as much memory, and twice the hard drive space of an $1,199 entry-level iMac despite both coming with near-equivalent LCDs.

If you check out Dell’s web site, the Inspiron mentioned starts at $724, for the bare-bones version. No monitor, no WiFi, no antivirus, no webcam. Add these little details and the price jumps to $1173, slightly more than the $700 suggested. Then there’s the issue of “two more processor cores, three times as much memory, and twice the hard drive space.” They’re right about the cores (more on that below), but the basic Inspiron 518 has a 320 GB HDD and 2 GB of memory; the iMac has a 250 GB HDD and 1 GB of memory. So, not quite. Upgrade the Mac to match the HDD and RAM, and it’s $1349, less than %15 more expensive, not 50%. Wait for the next iMac release and all of those discrepancies will likely disappear–or the Mac might actually wind up being cheaper.

In fact, that brings up another dishonesty in the comparison: the article uses a brand-new, just-released Windows PC taking advantage of the latest CPU releases and component price decreases, and compares it to a Mac which has not been upgraded in a while. The next iMac will very likely have quad-core CPUs, and will follow the trend in other Mac lines to have 2GB RAM minimum, not to mention a 320 GB or better HDD.

Also not to mention that with a Mac, your machine will likely break down less, and tech support will be far better. Installs and maintenance will take far less of your time (what is that worth?), and you won’t have to fret about keeping malware away or keeping your antivirus up to date. Plus, the Inspiron is a big, fat box, while the iMac has an attractively slim footprint. Not to mention that the Mac runs a far superior OS. In the end, even at the current price differences, the Mac is still probably a better value. Especially in notebooks, which is why Macs are selling like hotcakes in that category.

So if you see one of the stories saying how Macs are prohibitively expensive, remind them that these overblown, biased hit pieces are a common occurrence and should just be ignored.

So, I am guessing that this does not do wonders for Edwards’ vice-presidential chances.

What alarms me is that Edwards, knowing he has this skeleton in his closet, chose to run at all this time. That’s a judgment which (depending on your perspective) is even worse that deciding to have an affair in the first place.

Talk about the Democrats (unknowingly) dodging a bullet….

Something which has long been suspected among some vendors on the Internet is faked good reviews of an item. When something is sold on a site which allows customer reviews, what is to keep the seller from using varying IP addresses and user accounts to create a herd of sock puppets to give glowing, rave reviews of a product? The answer is, nothing. And the problem is that it is very difficult to find out if this has happened, as tracks can be covered pretty well and most people would not deem such an offense worthy of a detailed, difficult investigation. Even so, fake reviews are sometimes caught.

Right now, I am wondering if I wasn’t the victim of fake reviews for an iPhone app. After downloading only free apps for several weeks, I started buying a few cheap paid apps. The first was a good purchase–something called “Mileage Tracker,” an app which allows you to track what mileage your vehicle is getting by inputting odometer readings and information about each gas purchase.

But the second app I bought was a Japanese language study aid, a kanji flash card program called “Kanji Flip.” Priced at what I believed was a reasonable $3, it promised to drill me on kanji based on JLPT levels, keeping track of wrong answers and working me out on those more than other cards. As usual, I checked out the reviews, and they were all glowing–and maybe that should have tipped me off, as almost no app gets purely good reviews. Anyway, I bought it, and quickly discovered that I had bought a dog of an app.

First, let me spell out what’s wrong with the app; if you don’t need to know this, then skip the next five paragraphs.

The problem that immediately stands out is that the data is incomplete. Several flash cards have missing or incomplete Japanese readings (pronunciations) of the kanji. There are only 2230 cards in the set, it would have taken the author only short time to check for blanks, maybe an hour or two to check for missed data. See below just a half dozen examples of botched cards out of more than a dozen I found after reviewing only a few hundred cards–which means well over a hundred cards are seriously flawed, about 5%.

Furthermore, the app is totally non-configurable–in any flash card set, you want to have some control, some manner of setting aside unwanted cards or being tested in some way; this app has none of that. In fact, the only “feature”–marking your guesses right or wrong–is user-driven, not part of the app itself. It doesn’t test you, it asks you to test yourself.

Then there’s the mixing of the levels. You would think that the author, having categorized the kanji by their JLPT levels, would have kept them separate–but no, when you choose a higher level, it includes flash cards from all the lower levels–there is no way to keep out the easy cards.

But what is worst about the app is the repeats: as you continue using the app, it starts sending you more and more repeats of the same cards. I just tested this by trying out level 3, which has 986 cards. The first seventeen cards were unique–but then it tossed me three repeats from the first seventeen. Then, after three new cards, it gave me eleven repeats in a row. Then I got six new cards and eight repeats. Out of the fifty or so cards I tried, nearly half were repeats, and a couple were given three times. With nearly a thousand cards in the level, it would have taken far longer than it should have to get through the entire set.

Even worse, many of the cards which were repeated were ones I had tagged as having scored correctly on–in fact, the last four I tried were all previous “correct” cards. The author says that he gives you some “easy” cards to “encourage” you, but swamping you with cards you have already mastered is aggravating, not encouraging. But the only useful feature of this app is the claimed ability to track wrong guesses and give them back to you later. These two features cancel each other out; the author could easily have included no wrong answer tagging and disguised it with the “easy” card “encouragement”–there was no way to distinguish these two features at work from simply random card repeats.

Okay, so the app is a dog–so why all the rave reviews? It’s rare for an app to get more than four stars on the App Store, especially one with so many problems and limitations. Then I noticed that a lot of the reviewers gave simple, one- or two-sentence reviews, and had no history of other reviews–and a few actually gave only one or two other reviews, those being negative reviews of competing apps. Wanting to warn off people who might be getting the wrong idea, I wrote my own review.

Then I noticed something else happening: you can also rate reviews as being helpful or not helpful. Suddenly, most of the rave reviews, including some of the simplistic ones, started getting only “helpful” ratings–and my review suddenly got a whole bunch of “not helpful” reviews. And one five-star commenter actually edited their review to include a criticism of my review.

Like I said, there’s no way to check, but it all comes across as being very fishy. Still, all I lost was $3, and it re-taught me a good lesson: don’t always believe the customer reviews for a product, especially if they’re unusually glowing.

The latest lame excuse/story/rationalization out of the McCain campaign, on why McCain’s campaign has been so negative:

“I’m very sorry about it,” McCain said in a Saturday interview at his Arlington headquarters. “I think we could have avoided at least some of this if we had agreed to do the town hall meetings” together, as he had suggested, during the summer months.

Wow. So, McCain is saying that because Obama did not agree to McCain’s idea that they debate in McCain’s territory on McCain’s terms, because Obama did not accept a challenge that McCain knew Obama would turn down, because Obama did not respond to McCain’s grandstanding–because of that, McCain was forced to release a series of heavily negative attack ads filled with lies, distortions, and racial & sexual innuendo.

Wow.

Obama’s response sums it up perfectly:

I think the notion that somehow as a consequence of not having joint appearances, Senator McCain felt obliged to suggest that I’d rather lose a war to win a campaign doesn’t automatically follow. I think we each have control over ourselves and our campaigns, and we have to take responsibility for that.

McCain: “It was all his fault.” Obama: “We have to take responsibility for our own campaigns.”

So, who is the more reasonable candidate?

There are two good sites out there closely tracking the numbers in the election, Five-Thirty-Eight, and the Princeton Election Consortium. Both look at state (not national, because elections are decided state by state) polling and create statistical models showing where the campaigns currently stand.

Five-Thirty-Eight currently gives Obama a 62.7% chance of winning. While the Princeton Election Consortium doesn’t make predictions, they state that if an election were held today, Obama would have a 99% chance of winning.

The two sites are currently arguing over whose models are better. If you though Mac Geeks were bad, try Math Geeks.

In case you were still not decided on who is getting better breaks from the media, well, aside from the fact that you should really be paying closer attention, all you have to do is look at this story. McCain, drawn in to the “Buffalo Chip’s annual Tribute to American Veterans and Active Duty Servicemen” without (presumably) knowing the activities they usually hold, volunteered his wife Cindy for their “beauty contest”:

I was looking at the Sturgis schedule, and noticed that you had a beauty pageant, so I encouraged Cindy to compete. I told her [that] with a little luck, she could be the only woman to serve as both the First Lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.

The problem: the “Miss Buffalo Chip” contest is topless, and occasionally, bottomless as well.

So far, according to Google News, this story has only been mentioned in a few news blogs, but not any main sites (though ABC is currently offering the link to its blog story on the contest on its front news page). The LA Times mentions the incident deep in a story, but did not pick up on the nature of the contest. As I and others have pointed out many times before, there is an obvious disparity here: if Obama had done this–offered up Michelle for a nude contest, no matter that it was unknowingly–we’d be seeing is slathered all over the media, 24/7, for quite some time, with questions of appropriateness sprayed at Michelle and no end to the jokes.

But if you think that’s too frivolous (hey, that’s mostly what the news media does nowadays, frivolous), then how about energy plans? The media has jumped all over Obama for “shifting” his energy policy, even though he clearly stated from the start that he maintained his policy but, with the emergence of a new plan offered in Congress, would accept compromises including drilling if it meant achieving the important goals. Which is what you’re supposed to do as a good politician and leader–accept compromises in order to get the job done.

Why is this an example of media bias? Well, the media had no such rush to judgment about John McCain when, in late June, he made offshore drilling a centerpiece of his campaign and a cudgel with which to beat Obama over the head. They should have, because just a month before, in late May, McCain was still fully opposed to offshore drilling (a stance he has held for many years), saying:

With [offshore drilling], which would take years to develop, you would only postpone or temporarily relieve our dependency on fossil fuels. We are going to have to go to alternative energy. [Audio here]

But today?

And I noticed that it’s confusing now the information from Senator Obama as to whether he actually supports offshore drilling or not. The fact is, we have to drill here, and we have to drill now, and we have to drill immediately. And it has to be done as quickly as possible. And I believe that it’s vital that we move forward with that, regardless of what we do on other energy issues.

So, we have McCain doing a complete, unabashed 180-degree turn within a month, and the media barely blinks; but Obama saying that his position is unchanged but he’d be willing to compromise to get the job done, and he’s “shifting.”

The topless contest and the oil drilling are just two examples of what has been a few months of non-stop examples of absolute bias in reporting–hell, more than just a few months. Remember when John McCain broke the law? Not a peep out of the media, even though he is still in constant violation of federal law with every dollar he spends. But when Obama made the completely legal move of opting out of public financing? There was a media storm over the issue.

Just browse the news from each week over the past several months, and you’ll see a multitude of other examples of bias in reporting, from the media’s failure to cover McCain’s dozens of outrageous and sometimes sudden flip-flops and flip-flop-flips and double-triple somersaults, while immediately jumping on Obama for even minor revisions in policy. Or examples like months of non-stop replaying of the “God Damn America” clip while ignoring statements made by preachers McCain desperately sought out to receive endorsements of–or how about the “liberal” CBS “accidentally” re-editing a McCain interview, cutting a massively embarrassing gaffe which they should have highlighted as a major “get,” and splicing in clips from two other answers to make it seem like McCain didn’t gaffe?

Print this out, along with the associated links. The next time anyone within earshot even questions who the media is favoring, just unpocket the printout and hand it to them, shaking your head slowly and sadly.

Japan Probe reports that Google’s “Street View” feature is now finally active in Japan. Only in major cities, though–aside from the greater Tokyo metropolitan area and the Osaka-Kyoto area, only Sendai, Hakodate, and Sapporo are included. But in the Tokyo area, almost every street is included–very few blank areas indeed!

As in the U.S., the views are in 360˚ views, which can be scrolled by dragging the cursor over any view. The images seem to have been taken over the past 9 months or so, some even more recently. Take, for example, this image of my school: we moved in in May, and that’s my scooter parked in front.

In the views, certain parts seem to be blurred out, especially people’s faces, one can suppose to calm fears of intrusion of privacy–though if you’re on a public street, it seems that you can’t expect too much “privacy.” Also, it doesn’t work perfectly, especially in crowded places–but the resolution is low enough that it’s doubtful you’d recognize anyone outside of a specific context (like standing in front of their house). There is a “zoom” feature allowing you to zoom in to any view by two steps, but there’s no increase in resolution–you’re just blowing up the existing image.

I appreciate that Google has this–it represents a lot of effort–but I would much rather they had worked on directions and traffic first. This is a toy, directions and traffic are tools, and very useful ones.

For those of you wanting a few interesting spots:

The base of Tokyo Tower
In front of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building
In front of the National Diet Building (the Japanese parliament)
The National Sumo Stadium
Asakusa Shrine Main Gate
Look to the east to see the “turd building” (atop the Asahi Beer building; it’s supposed to be the head of a glass of beer somehow)
Akihabara
Tokyo Dome (not so visible from this angle–but look across the street for the amusement park with roller coasters jammed into a city block in central Tokyo)
Sunshine Shopping Street, near our apartment (must have been early morning for (a) cars to be allowed down the street and (b) pedestrian traffic to be so limited)
Budokan!

Any suggestions or requests? Links to your favorite places of interest?

I have to admit, the latest public reactions to Obama and McCain are truly mystifying to me. Yes, I know, probably due to my clear bias, but nonetheless, there seems to be a lot more to it than just that.

A week ago, we had Obama make a truly impressive overseas trip, showing his foreign policy weight. The Iraqi president virtually endorsed Obama, saying his 16-month withdrawal program was what Iraq wanted. Obama pulled off all points of the trip virtually flawlessly, winding up (mostly) with a big rally in Berlin, a great speech setting the perfect tone, with Berliners waving U.S. flags, signaling a potential new wave of U.S. popularity and influence under an Obama administration. This should have helped Obama greatly due to foreign policy and Iraq supposedly being his weak points. It helped that during the same time, Bush, and then startlingly, McCain, adopted Obama policies for Afghanistan and Iraq.

At the same time, McCain performed pathetically. Stuck in supermarket aisles dealing with tin can collapses, speaking in front of lots of cheese or alternately at the Fudge Haus after a hurricane blew off his hopes for a helicopter landing on an oil platform (to demonstrate how hurricanes don’t affect oil platforms), McCain was tripping and stumbling throughout the week. And then he started a blisteringly negative string of ads, most of which were not only demonstrably false, but which the media surprisingly tagged as such.

So what are the polling results after that week or two? Obama pretty much steady, but McCain gained a few points. Polling aggregates from Real Clear and Pollster.

What the hell? Are Americans stupid? Sorry to be so blunt, but this should have been a week or two where the doubts about Obama started melting away while doubts about McCain intensified. Usually negative ad campaigns drag both candidates down. But instead, Americans ignored Obama’s impressive performance and rewarded McCain for being a nasty-mannered liar.

It’s gonna be a long three months….

Used the GPS feature on the iPhone for real yesterday–drove down to Kawasaki to go to CostCo, using a new route and everything. The GPS saved me from getting lost at least a few times, though the as-usual horribly bad Japanese street signage did get me off course at least twice–at which times the GPS came to the rescue again, confirming that I was lost and showing me where I went wrong and how I could get back.

If I could, I’d mount the iPhone above my dash; I had to settle for pulling it out of my pocket at red lights.

Of course, I wouldn’t mind it if Google’s Directions feature worked in Japan….

Yakitori is quite the popular dish in Japan, and rightly so–it’s one of my personal favorites on Japan (and, of course, very easy for westerners to adapt to). Usually it’s just in the restaurants, but sometimes they branch out onto the street. Like this place–just around the corner from our place. Yum!

Okay, so the close-up doesn’t look fantastic… but it tastes great! Though frankly, I never tried that one in the middle–in case you’re wondering, that’s chicken skin. Not gonna try it, either, even if I wasn’t on a diet….

From a local Ikebukuro street:

Sachi and I just finished going over some arrangements for our wedding reception here in Akasaka, and so we decided to have dinner at a local izakaya. Because it’s Sunday, we get a private room all to ourselves.

Nice place!

We got a nice salad, some beer, some Maguro sashimi, prawns in mayonnaise, and the very delicious yakitori you see below. We’ve decided that when we go back to Ikebukuro, we will stop by a nice ramen shop for their terrific gyoza….

Sachi took this photo of me blogging now and sent it to me by email. The things you can do with a couple of iPhones!

– – – – –

It’s about an hour later, and Sachi and I are now at the gyouza place. They mostly do ramen, but their gyouza is delicious–light and tasty!

The place is called Fuku-shin. Here are photos of the ramen and gyouza.

There’s been quite a bit of talk out there about a new iPhone app called NetShare (iTunes Store link). The app allows you to use your iPhone as WiFi base station, “tethering” your Mac to the iPhone and using its 3G Internet connection. In essence, you can connect your Mac to the ‘net wherever you can get a 3G signal; your iPhone becomes a cellular modem.

This app is controversial because the mobile carriers obviously don’t want you to use it. There are Internet apps on your computer, like torrent downloading, voice and video chat apps, and other high-bandwidth programs that could seriously strain their broadband services. Some believe that AT&T’s contract forbids the use of such an app, which is the reason many believed Apple took it down from the App Store yesterday–except that now the app is back up.

Interestingly, NetShare is listed on the Japanese App Store, but when I try to see the app’s details, I get a message saying it’s not currently available; if I click on the “Buy App” button, I get prompted to enter my password, and because I don’t really want to buy it (I don’t really need to, and it’s ¥1200), I can’t see if the purchase would actually go through (I am guessing not).

But if you have access to the U.S. App Store, if you could really use this app, and you are willing to risk the wrath of your carrier for over-using the supposedly unlimited data plan you paid for, then you should buy it before Apple changes its mind again and takes it off the market.

Update: Too late, it’s off again. Any bets as to whether it’ll come back?

In case there was any remaining doubt about whether Wal-Mart was completely without any sense of morality or ethics, this article should dispel those illusions. They are telling their people that unions are bad and they should vote against Democrats who will help the unions. Now, I’m not legal expert, but isn’t such mandatory anti-union and vote-persuasion propaganda illegal in this context?

“The meeting leader said, ‘I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won’t have a vote on whether you want a union,’” said a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor from Missouri. “I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote,” she said.

And can Wal-Mart get off the hook simply by claiming they’re not doing what they’re obviously doing, or is that power limited only to the Republican Party? Or is there no difference?

There are a lot of free apps hitting the iPhone and iPod Touch App Store which help you keep data–to do lists, reminders, voice notes, etc. However, they have an interesting twist: instead of simply being apps which keep the data on your device, they require you to sign up for an account with the maker. Now, perhaps in some cases, like the voice transcription services in “Jott”, there is a need to do this–the CPU on the iPhone might be too taxed, and/or the memory not big enough to hold the software. But in most cases, there is simply no need for transmitting the data–your iPhone can keep and store voice memos without sending them to some corporate server, and certainly this is true with text and schedule notes. But services like “Reqall” and “Zenbe Lists,” both recent additions, join a list of other apps which require you to sign up for a service which is unnecessary for the task the app does. There is probably no reason to believe that these people want to peep in on your private life, but I would have a concern that they’re trying to get my marketing data.

Nope, your computer is not going to self-destruct. Bobbeh had it right: today is my 5-year anniversary of nonstop blogging–1,827 consecutive days of writing some form or another of babbling stream of consciousness on this virtual slate. Whether that is a remarkable achievement or a sign that I need counseling is up for interpretation, but I just wanted to mark the milestone. (Another one coming in three days: Sachi’s and my 2-year anniversary since we first met!)

One thing I decided was that after the five-year mark, I would not longer hold it as a rule that I have to blog every day. I will still try to, but if I miss a day somewhere along the line I won’t hold it as a big tragedy or anything. I’ll certainly keep up the volume, especially over the next three months until the election, but if I have nothing much to say some days, or if I am really incredibly busy with other stuff, then I won’t force myself.

Anyway, on with the babbling!