Engineering Manager | Trail Runner | Stockholm, Sweden
A BlizzCon nominee for Best Drama. I really like the creativity and the ingenious use of game resources behind the movie. It feels like a real one. If you've ever played WoW, it's worth to check out.
[vimeo width="500" height="281"]http://vimeo.com/2066806[/vimeo]
Walking down a generally under-lit and deserted Japanese street late at night with the Resident Evil theme playing on the iPod has a level of creepiness unimaginable.
The title says it all.
After a long running session I had my iPod nano completely run out of battery power. Arriving home I put it on the charger. I used the one I got for the iPhone, since it goes to the wall outlet.
The following day however when I wanted to do a run the iPod reported that it's almost out of power again. I didn't care much at the time since I'm prone to clumsiness and forgetfulness: maybe I just haven't plugged it in properly.
When I tried to use it again yesterday evening however I couldn't help to notice that in spite of the iPod being on the charger for more almost a full day it's still not full. I just stepped out of the door when the music stopped as well. Checking the nano it was booting up as if recovering from some software error. It turned out to be more than a one-time glitch though, since the iPod kept restarting over an over again. Boot up, stay on for about 20-30 seconds then reboot.
I googled the issue a bit but none of the forum complaints seemed to contain anything helpful. Finally I tried connecting the unit to the MacBook and - surprisingly - that solved the reboot issue.
My theories are that either the iPhone charger didn't agree with the nano (which I find problematic to believe since it's basically just a wall outlet to USB port adapter) or the prolonged unsynced time paired with running out of power completely triggered some bug in the software.
If your iPod keeps acting up, try syncing it first.
I have a class in which we watch a couple of movies revolving around racism, stereotyping and cultural problems. Then there is supposedly a discussion.
In the first class we received a list of movies we'd watch during the semester. One about Koreans living in Japan, one about the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda, child soldiers in El Salvador, a political prisoner in Chile and finally about the Japanese history textbook scandal.
We were organised into groups and were given a movie to do a short presentation on them beforehand.
The titles of the movies were in katakana. I tried asking the professor how my movie, ショア, was really spelled, but she had absolutely no idea. Really though, I should have expected that. Japanese customs dictate to rewrite everything in katakana, following some rough pronunciation. The only problem is it's usually futile to even try to decipher what the original word was, especially the case with names.
I know, I should look things up in Japanese instead. It would improve my language skills.
A few keywords in google helped me out soon enough, and the Wikipedia even has a disambiguation for ショア. Without any sarcasm this time though, I should have known the Jewish word for Holocaust (Shoah). Or could have known about this apparently famous movie.
Mentioning the Holocaust also led to an interesting experiment, when the professor asked the students if they knew what the word meant. To my honest surprise none of them could explain, and only a few have heard it before. Even considering the predominant attitude of japanese students towards questions asked by lecturers (stare at notes, don't say a word), this was quite shocking.
I don't think you could get away with not knowing what happened - for example - in Hiroshima in any European university. And how is the Holocaust any different? Maybe history is like geography: for those living in the top economic powers it's safely negligible.
Or I'm being a snob.
Anyway, today we finished with the first movie, パッチギ, about the life of a Korean family (?) in Japan. To be honest I didn't like it one bit. It had everything that makes contemporary Japanese movies unwatchable. It just pelt stupid, with the actors running around with flailing arms at supposed fight scenes, the incessant shouting matches. The acting was so overdid and insincere that could only be compared to the TV dramas here. It just didn't feel right with a topic originally serious to fool around like that.
Coming home I looked up the title and I learned two things. It is actually a comedy/drama, which explains the absurdity of it. I suppose I just don't have the same humour the Japanese have. And also that it's a sequel (?) to a previous one with a similar title.
What the class completely failed at was the discussion part. It could have been actually interesting for once to pick the brains of my fellow classmates on the topic of foreigners living in Japan. Not that I expected anything resembling a honest conversation... not in class. (Well, not wherever.)
We didn't have time to actually talk about anything we saw, and next week we're going on to the next movie. I suspect though that even if we did have an attempt at discussion, no-one would have spoken up anyway.
Angelday wrote about - he feels - unfair fines he had to pay for breaking traffic regulations. The post and the comments just strengthened my belief that traffic morale is catastrophic in Hungary...
When I was home for the summer I heard in some TV programme that most drivers in Hungary use driving as an outlet for their frustrations. It is actually fashionable to ignore traffic rules and especially speed limits. After all it makes a good topic for conversation to brag about the speeds and times reached during various routes.
I try to drive as much as I can when I'm home. I spend most of my driving time on Route 4, one of the most notorious ones for accidents. The bad statistics are understandable considering this is one of the only regions of Hungary without a highway. We have to make do with Route 4's two lanes.
Most of time time I get taken over within city limits (the road rarely bypasses towns and villages). People don't like slowing down just because they happen to drive through a populated area. Taking over is like a fetish. If the car in front of you is older, less expensive, or if it's a woman or old person driving, or if you feel like it, you must take over.
And when there's an accident the one who who dies is not the one who caused it.
Last.fm's recent decision to change some more musical tags overnight started a heated discussion on their forums. Up until now I mostly tagged my musicals with the artist being the title of the musical. Musicbrainz - and lately to some extent Last.fm - is of the opinion however that the composer should be credited. Which is equally wrong if you ask me, after all isn't the composer a separate id3 tag?
The way I see it the biggest problem is with the id3 tagging. I think it's the remainder of an obsolete format (mp3). It would be a lot better if there were a standardised tagging method, using XML, that all formats could embed from m4a to flac. I see XML as a solution because it doesn't limit the amount of data that can be added. It could even incorporate a plethora of additional information such as if the track in question is a live recording or not, if anyone's guest starring, if it's a cover of a song, etc.
Of course I'm dreaming of some utopia...
I'm sorry that the site wasn't available for a few days. The reason is very prosaic. Despite the numerous emails I received reminding me of the domain needing renewal, in the end I forgot to actually wire the money to the registrar. Laziness or forgetfulness I don't know... but it does tend to reflect my life.
One thing I hate when going home is the increased exposure to cigarette smoke.
You'd think that it's because an undeveloped semi-Balkan country like Hungary would have a lot more smokers. I don't have statistics at hand but based on my observations there aren't any fewer smokers in Japan compared to Hungary. If anything there are more.
It's the attitude that makes it hard to cope with at home. In Japan the only time I can't escape smoke is in the narrow streets. On the more crowded ones they even use megaphones to ask people to refrain from smoking.
Not the case in Hungary. People tend to disregard rules and they smoke where they damn well please. A prime example is trains: apparently the strain of being confined in the enclosed space of a passenger car is too much to bear without a couple of sniffs.
On the way to Szeged a girl went to the corridor at every station and puffed happily. The only problem was that with the practically nonexistent insulation of the compartments everyone else got to inhale the smoke.
Another time I asked a young man to please wait a bit with his cigarette until the train stopped and we got off, since it was impossible to escape the smoke while queued up in the corridor. He ignored me obviously. After all isn't is his bloody birthright to kill himself?
Yet another time passengers watched dumbfounded as a heavyset man with a prisoner demeanor walked through the car (coach style not parlor) with a lit cigarette leaving a trail of putrid stench. No one was brave enough to challenge him of course.
It would be easy to blame the railway company. However I believe the main problem lies within the people. It's easy to deduct that not even smokers can stand the prolonged exposure to smoke: this is why the majority of smokers tend to sit in the non-smoker cars, and use the aisles to satisfy their addiction. Obviously the doors cannot prevent the smoke from entering the compartments. People can't even refrain from smoking when the trains are so crowded that the aisles are full as well. And I don't think it's the controller's job to keep order, even if he/she could...
I have yet to see anyone in Japan smoke on a train. The concept of smoking cars in unknown too, except for the shinkansen, where there's always one dedicated to smokers. However on regular trains it simply is forbidden. And however much they crave, Japanese would never break this rule.
In my opinion the Japanese overdo the whole keeping in line thing, nevertheless we could learn a thing or two about courtesies to others from them.
Szerintem is nagyon szimpatikus a kezdeményezés, hogy október hónapban (és egyébként mindig) úgy hallgassunk zenét, hogy az nem csak az agyunk egy rejtett hátsó zugába jut el, hanem figyeljük a szöveget, a különböző hangszereket, egyszóval értve hallgassunk. Via isolde, via allie, via Cluster One.
Én legutóbb az if_then_else albumot hallgattam az esti félhomályban az ágyon ülve. Semmi mást nem csináltam közben, csak ezt. Egészen más, főleg ha az ember uralkodik az időnként elkalandozni vágyó gondolatain.
Az angol nyelv ebből a szempontból kifejezőbb, hiszen ott a zenére figyelünk (listen) és nem csak halljuk (hear). Nálunk talán a hall és a hallgat árnyalja a figyelem fokát.
Én is választottam számot, amit meghallgatásra ajánlok: The Animals - Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood. A dalt eredetileg Nina Simone jazz-blues énekesnőnek írták, de az 1965-ös feldolgozása lett végül ismertebb. A klip is rendkívül vicces, ahogyan öltönyben karót nyelve adják elő.
[youtube]http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=zsru-M79EvM[/youtube]