Engineering Manager | Trail Runner | Stockholm, Sweden
I got an email from Nike rewarding me with an iTunes song code since I participated in the 10k Human Race they organised earlier this year. So now I can "buy" any song priced at no more than ¥200. (That's most songs.) The only thing is, I'm not sure what I'd buy. I might end up supporting one of my favourite artists by choosing their songs but feel free to recommend anything. My listening habits can easily be familiarised with from my last.fm page.
Sounds easy? Most of the things I find myself postponing. Yeah I'll do this and that tomorrow. Just one more day of not doing it. Exactly like in Ekaterina's post. There are times when I feel full of energy and positive thoughts only to find myself sink back to lethargy the next hour crushed by my seemingly insurmountable problems.
I'd want to wake up early, refreshed from a good night's sleep. Have the time to make breakfast (in a proper kitchen), an omelet with bacon for example. Then I'd go to class, which I'd have in English. It'd be a small group class where we wouldn't notice the passing of time because the topic is both exciting and challenging.
After my classes I'd go running, which would fill me with endorphins. In the evening I'd either spend time with Nora or we'd go out with friends to watch a movie or have some beers at Happy Time. On the odd day I'd raid with pvc. If I decided to stay home I'd catch up with the latest TV Shows on my iMac or read a book I definitely had money to buy while sipping on a glass of Chianti.
I'd reply my emails on time. I'd be prepared for my exams. I'd realise my ideas rather than just ruminating over them.
So what prevents me from just doing it?
This post is dedicated to Nora, a fangirl of unexplainable levels. :)
Yesterday Relani told me that she found a hatch in Scholazar Basin and I went to investigate. The screenshots speak for themselves:
This happened to me once already: I got an email from Youtube that copyrighted content has been found in one of my videos and because of that it got removed. It contained a song by Ayumi Hamasaki.
Your video "Osaka Tabehodai & Karaoke EMV" has been identified by YouTube's Content Identification program as containing copyrighted content which Avex Entertainment, Inc. claims is theirs.
Your video is no longer available because Avex Entertainment, Inc. has chosen to block it.
Yes it's very likely I prevented that couple hundred people who watched the video from buying the song... In my opinion if the movie had any impact whatsoever, it'd be promotional. People who didn't know the music might have become interested.
I did what others did before, used a song I actually own on CD to supplement a short video I made. Sadly the senseless and counterproductive system of copyrights we have today prevents me from sharing it apparently. The - statistically proven - truth is that any form of sharing is not even hindering sales but boosting it. People get to like songs, TV shows, movies through the internet and then they start spending money on them. Kind of what I wrote about the Little Brother. It's also not stealing.
Oh yeah, please note, it's not the artist who made the claim, but some corporation I have never heard about. Am I supposed to believe they work in their artist's best interest?
There are two others like this, the Masatoya EMV and the what_used_to_be EMV. Watch them while you can.
Obviously I can just put my video on any other of the countless sites available. Eventually freedom will win. You can't stop the signal.
This post holds little information for non-WoW players.
The reason I haven't posted in more than a week is that the expansion to World of Warcraft came out. I have spent enough time in front of the computer as it was, and didn't have the motivation to blog really.
It's also the fact that I kind of like the changes and improvements WotLK brought. The new areas are breathtaking, instances included. Just flying around and observing is great fun. Also the new quests and places to explore are a welcome change from the umpteenth dungeon run or raid.
I started off with Silq, my warrior. However what begun as checking out the new hero class, evolved into a complete change of plans and now I'm leveling my death knight, Milq, instead. To be honest I was caught right on the character selection screen when I saw the looks...
Other than playing a bit more than usual there really is nothing happening around here. Same classes, same boredom, same frustrations.
Our presentation on the Holocaust went interesting... Of course most of our audience either slept, did homework or stared absently. When we finished and the professor asked if anyone had questions: no-one did. Again, no surprise here. She was adamant though and started to call people to ask something anyway and then a girl asked if there are any Jews living today.
I couldn't help saying まだ残ってます。(There are still some left.)
So yeah, it's good we worked on the presentation, it clearly had educational value.
Then we watched a part of Shoah. It's an unusual documentary in the sense that it doesn't use any archive material. All of it was shot at present day and it only contains experiences recounted by Holocaust survivors, guards, etc.
I was expecting a movie even I could enjoy, but it turned out to be in French. Additionally most of the interviewees spoke in their mother tongue, overdubbed in French, with Japanese subs applied. However much it bothers me for example that they silence the original English when dubbing the F1 interviews in Hungarian the lack of silencing here was very annoying. Try listening to someone speaking in German with French lagging behind half a minute...
For that matter, I actually have proper classes, where we're supposedly learning professional material, not just goofing around and playing film aesthete. But those classes are lectures: a hundred students flock together, the professor gives a 90 minute speech, then we're dismissed. No interactivity, no midterm papers, no nothing.
I find it absurd that we have to work for nonsense classes and where it could actually prove useful to do something outside of class we just have to mindlessly attend.
Oh I know it's so yesterday to rant about how great Wall-E is. This is a little like Firefly that rested on my hard drive unnoticed and mostly forgotten for over a year only to be found and to turn my world upside down.
With Wall-E I was caught from the very beginning with the grandiose shots of mountains of trash and dirt so alike live-action. Later I half-expected the protagonist machine to don a leather jacket and track away into the sun Fallout-like, because La vie en Rose is very similar to A Kiss to Build a Dream On.
And of course any self-respecting geek stifles a joyful yelp when Wall-E's fully charged sound turns out to be the Mac's boot-up chime. Eve's sleek design is also reminiscent of the white iMac, and I learned from the castlist that the evil Autopilot speaks via MacInTalk, OS X's built-in text-to-speech software.
To test I typed "Captain? Captain? Let go!" to TextEdit and had it voiced. It really is the same (with some change of pitch and tone).
Actually laughed out loud at Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Pure joy.
Looking to refresh the look on my iPhone I found Poolga. They describe themselves as people who:
... love our iPhones and we love customizing them. But we hate the standard wallpapers and cheesy nature themes available everywhere. That's why we create our own, and thought it would be nice to share them. So here they are. Enjoy!
The wallpapers reminded me of 80's adverts and kids drawings or something Einstürzende Neubauten could use for a CD cover. For now my choice is this one:
The wallpapers are free to download and use on your phones.
I'm actually surprised no-one has complained yet about the site being English. Apart from the voiceless masses who just stopped reading: logs show the number of visitors about half - at best - of what it used to be.
If there were expectations that I'd return to Hungarian, I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint. I actually like SeSam.hu as it is, accessible by an infinitely bigger number of people than when it was written mainly in my native tongue.
I'm sorry for those who will have to miss out this way. I tend to think not knowing much English is like living without a limb lately. And I'm disinclined to be apologetic about the fact that I do speak the language.
Funny though, when I was home for the summer even my mother chastised me for - in her words - being snobbish and looking down on dubbed movies and TV shows. She's right though, I really don't like watching movies translated to Hungarian anymore if the original was English. I don't doubt that the dubbing can be excellent quality and we have many talented voice actors. Nevertheless the movie inevitably changes, since no two languages have identical words and phrases. Some nuances are lost, some are added.
The best thing about knowing a language is when you start to understand the little details. Find the untranslatable sentences, phrases that only seem to make sense in that particular language. Try watching a standup comedy for instance. Understanding those completely is - I believe - a sign of proficiency.
If this is pretentiousness or arrogance, I can live with it.
Education at its best. Hiding behind the door I took a snap of the whiteboard after an English lesson at Kobe-U. Summerize!
I suppose what might comfort the Japanese is the thought that it's really hard to get unemployed here:
Would you sit in a street holding a sign for a living?