Today is the last day of another fiscal year here. This is the first non-work related thing I have written this week. I am in spreadsheet mode and have no brain cells left for blogging. But I have much to write stored in my brain. Will attempt a post later in the week.

You are a sick teddy. You are a very sick teddy.

In fact you are such a sick sick teddy that I'm also becoming sick.

Oh lord, please turn me into a sick sick teddy...

I found this gem in my inbox today. It kind of made my day.

This is my Hangame avatar. Hangame is the site where we play hanafuda
(Go Stop); I described it in this post a few weeks back. Basically, I picked the most insane combination of clothes, accessories, and facial features I could in order to distract opponents when my avatar appears on screen. Not surprisingly, most players I go up against leave the playing table fairly quickly. I used to have a machine gun slung from my avatar's shoulders, but it was so otaku that nobody would play with me. I had to tone it down.

My bro has been posting photos of our trip home so I shall retaliate with some from our day trip to the DMZ in January. I'm not as spiteful as he is, so I won't include the pics of him getting raped with axe handles by starving NK border guards.

Props to the Big Ho. His evil plan has worked. I was two clicks away from climax before I found his turd in my cream pie.

In all fairness, I can't really complain now that my own evil plan has achieved an admirable ranking of its own. Now everbody repeat after me:
Adam Yoshida is an English Teacher living in Japan.
Adam Yoshida is Canadian.
Adam Yoshida is a "pretty princess."

Also:
Kevin Kim (aka Big Hominid) is the owner of the Anger Poultry House.
Kevin Kim is a slobbering australopithecus with mad drawing skills.
Most importantly, Kevin Kim loves Korean wrestling.

Any person who can defend this despicable shit isn't welcome here. There is a line that demarcates what is OK and what is not, and although its exact location can be perceived differently depending on who you are, it has clearly been crossed here. My love for my country is deeply ingrained, and I felt deeply insulted when I saw this photo of the war anniversary protests floating around the net.

Just because you have freedom of speech doesn't mean we must forgive the shit flowing out of your mouth.

In 3 words: Disappointing as hell.

Description: CS 1.6 with bots. There were a few new maps and minor tweaking of some old maps. Whoopee.

Worth 30 bones (at discount price)?
HELL NO! But if you are a CS junkie, you will buy it anyway (like I needed to tell you that)

Interesting note: If HL2 is this disappointing, I may smash my comp and only play sissy console games from now on.

It is just past ten o' clock and I am stewing in my own fumes. I ate a plate of spicy Thai pork for breakfast and it is now overly apparent that the secret ingredient was garlic. Normally I would have no complaint as the breath of death keeps perky morning office assistants at arm's length until well past lunch, but today I have a meeting. With bigwigs from overseas. Overseas as in, "garlic novice" overseas. Heh.

I have popped a lemon cough drop in my mouth and it now feels as if I could marinate a chicken in there to make some exotic chinese dish. Hooray for honey-lemon eucalyptus. This should do the trick as long as I keep a lozenge in my mouth at all times.

Except that now I've started burping under my breath. Garlicky richness erupts from the depths... Guess I'll show up at that meeting with some stakes and holy water just to get into my role - wouldn't that be a first! I'll completely redefine my company's approach to hostile negotiations...

The most important first-person shooter ever created was Half-Life. The most important mod ever created was Counter-Strike. The most anticipated game of last year AND this year, IMHO, is a three way split between Half-Life2, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, and Doom 3. I now have 1/3 of the trifecta pre-loaded on my gaming comp and am waiting for it to be released.

Steam rocks!

My Hikari rocks. This is the fastest browser download I have ever experienced.
Question: Why does IE express download speed in bytes/second? According to numion:

In data communications only the Metric definition of a kilobyte (1000 bytes per kilobyte) is correct. The binary definition of a kilobyte (1024 bytes per kilobyte) is used in areas such as data storage (harddisk, memory), but not for expressing bandwidth and throughput.

So is this usage in IE correct or not? Somehow, I think it is not. Anyhow, this speed of 1.00 MBps is also equivalent to:
8000000 bps (bits per second)
1000000 Bps (bytes per second)
8000 kbps (kilobits per second)
1000 KBps (kilobytes per second)
8 mbps (megabits per second)

It is near the maximum speed of a 10Base-T LAN (10 mbps). The speed tests that I sometimes use show that my max download (and upload) speed on an average day is actually more than three times this, but I have never connected to an HTTP server that could keep up with this during actual net use, even in Japan. It's like buying a Ferrari - 99% unused potential, and you just know the girls be all over my ride (Can you take me for a ride on your fiber, baby?). Smokin!

Even though I haven't posted forever, I feel the burning need to warn fellow FPS enthusiasts about the PC game, Dead to Rights. I am very glad I "test drove" the "free" version (thank you, BitTorrent!) of this dreck before buying it. This is an X-Box title ported to PC, and it apparent in its blockiness, difficulty of use, and bloated code. The cracked version is 4 CDs in size! (The fourth CD contains only the crack.) Dude! This game is GAY! Better yet, this game is FAG! To summarize, Dead to Rights is GAYFAG (half of a star out of five, almost as bad as Cool Darts). On one of the earlier levels, you suddenly switch from the role of the main character, a dual .45 packin' cop with attack dog, into an exotic dancer. I shit you not. You have to tap arrow keys to the rhythm indicated on screen to make the dancer on stage shake her ass in order to create a distraction and allow your main character to sneak by the bouncers in the club. GAY FAG! I can't even begin to express how gay this gender-switching role made me feel. I am secure in my homophobia, let me tell you. By the end of the scene, I was looking for exotic dancers in the room just so I could shoot them and work off some steam while making that icky feeling go away.

So have I made myself clear? Only homos play this game. (I finished it in one night.)

Also, a general observation regarding this whole genre of games:
Mandatory "auto-aim" sucks! I understand it as an option for the console game crowd, but people who play FPS on the PC platform are more sophisticated than that (or at least most of us like to think so). I mean really, why the hell have a scoped rifle in the game if you can't even use the scope and aim it by yourself?

/end nerdrant

New multipurpose tool on top of new coffeemaker (retro Bondi Blue skeleton design - so 90's).

There's nothing like coming home to a pot of day-old curry. The house reeks with pungent goodness and the first mouyhful warms the soul.

I don't like using third party mouse drivers/software so I usually buy Microsoft mouses although the red one in the middle is a Logitech that has served me well with my Fujitsu laptop. It wasn't the greatest for playing CS when I started out but either was the 8MB Rage Mobility video card on the laptop...

Lotte's "dental" chewing gum - supposedly helps keep teeth white. I nominate it for Official Chewing Gum of Aryanfest 2004.

Wait, maybe this isn't the bridge. How am I supposed to remember? I was driving, man.

I have no idea why the stalls crammed into overflowing buildings of Namdaemun were so enthralling. It may have been the sheer volume of stuff literally stacked to the ceilings... Or the fact that most of the stores fell into one of the following categories:
- Medicinal/Pharmaceutical
- Leather belts, wallets, and stainless steel kitchenware
- Fake zippos, stunguns, and sunglasses

There were hundreds of stalls on multiple floors of this building... Simply wonderful just to wander around.

I wanted to take photos this weekend but I somehow managed to lose BOTH chargers for the rechargeable Li-Ion batteries. I invested in a second unit since I thought it would be nice to always have one in the car for trips. How I lost both of them is a complete mystery and makes me want to buy a whole new camera.

Gadgets can be clever and evil, and conspire to either sate you only temporarily or completely consume you; toys beget toys.

The hard board at Bill's. Remarkably sharp in B&W.

Lawson is the foundation upon which modern lifestyles are built in Japan.

I have never confirmed the oft-heard rumor regarding the Lawson closest to my university, Morimedo Lawson - that it was the busiest branch in Japan. Well, on the 26th of every month I wouldn't dispute it...

Waiting for Bill outside of a Mickey D's in Shinsaibashi, I was proposed by some Chinese girls who offered to do just this. Wait that's a lie. They only offered a massage, "kimochi yoku shite ageru yo ni-chan". Goddamn, gotta love that.

Anyway, this sticker was pasted to a light pole right outside the golden arches, and the previously mentioned ladies of da knight giggled ferociously as I nerdily took a photo of it. Biotches.

I wrote a haiku today, inspired by this site:

Dusty desert road.
Weary rocket soldier sits,
opening the can.

Obviously, I've been playing too much Generals lately. And Adam's recent post on Spam ignited a firestorm in my gut. I was forced to recognize that I need Spam on a regular basis. Need. But it's too damn expensive in Japan. It's as if they still price it the same way they did on the black market after the war, but adjusted for inflation.

Happy Spam thoughts:
Spam is one of the few foods that taste better in the "low salt" version. I tried a can of the spicy-flavored Spam a couple weeks ago and it was nice, but I prefer the low salt Spam sliced into slabs and crispy-fried with eggs, sunny side up, decorated with ketchup and sriracha sauce. Oh, damn, why so I do this to myself at work? I'm HUNGRY.

When I was ten or eleven years old, my friend Kohei came to a profound realization and announced that "Spam" spelled backwards is "maps". It would be much less embarassing for him if I had forgotten to state that he was twice my age; luckily, I remembered.

UPDATE: It seems my black market comment above may have been unfounded. Apparently we Americans blessed the Japanese with loads of Spam after the war, at least this seems to be the case in some people's experiences:
http://runker_room.tripod.com/tiestalk/spam.htm

You MUST try a Spam Musubi before you die. Must. A musubi is just a ball of rice. Spam musubi has chunks of pink (former) flesh interspersed in it. I have independently developed a thermonuclear version version of the Spam musubi involving kimchi and mayonnaise, and it is a meal unto itself unless you are drunk. In which case, I sincerely hope you don't get barfy, because the only grosser thing to spew is a meat pizza (personal Bombay Sapphire memory - friends don't let friends drink gin neat, even if there is no ice and nothing to mix it with).

If you are a mac buff, go forth:
The Macintosh at 20: Interview with Jef Raskin

And by "mac buff", I mean a true OG (GFINDER) type playa. Not this new breed of iTards whose solution to everything in life is "Buy a Mac!" Yeah, buy a $2000 mac to surf the net and send e-mail you brainless chatwhores.

"Chatwhores" should be my word for the day, but it's even below my taking credit for.

Note: This entry was posted by my Powerbook 190 (16-shade greyscale, although the right bottom corner of the lcd has inexplicably become a solid yellow). Which means not a goddamn thing except that I miss System 7. Am I alone in my misery?

By the way, GFINDER worked for me exactly ONE time out of approximately 200,000 tries. It exited the command window to the Finder, and then froze, instead of just freezing at the command window.

A client just asked for a 90MB 3D CAD file data to be sent on multiple storage mediums: 250MB Zip, 100MB Zip, CD-R, 128MB MO, and split up on floppies for God's sake! His reasoning: The workshop in Singapore uses old equipment. He will not listen to my reasoning along the lines of, "if they can open a 3D CAD file that size, I would assume they can surely pull data off a CD."

Somebody send me an IT geek with a few free hours to play the floppy insert-write-eject-label game (cuz I really SUCK at it)! Well, this is a first if nothing else. All hail the mighty morphin' corporate tech retards!

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount."

However, in government, education, and in corporate America, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.

2. Changing riders.

3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.

4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride horses.

5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.

6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.

7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.

9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse's performance.

10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.

11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.

12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

And last but not least, the corporate steadfast:

13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

I am a packrat. I am also a slob by nature, although sometimes I put on a good show of being organized when it counts. I spent the weekend cleaning out my small room upstairs and thinking, "Damn, I'm a packrat." During my long years as an amateur geek/professional gadget junkie, I have accumulated enough electronic parts and contraptions to completely fill a six-tatami room. I'm talking boxes haphazardly stacked to the ceiling. This is a room you do not want to be in during an earthquake, which isn't really a joke since this island was the epicenter of the largest quake in Japan in recent history. A hundred pounds of shielded cables crashing down on your leg would be a lousy way to wake up, methinks. Anyway, regarding this room - basically, I have been promising my girlfriend that I would clean it up and organize my CDs for the past three years. I think I decided to clean it up this weekend just to show her that my word is good. Also, I there was a steady list of "lost" things that I strongly suspected were hiding in that room somewhere - company health insurance card, backup software for my cellphone, ADSL line filters I promised to give to my manager, etceteraetceteraandsoforth.

So. I didn't finish. Mainly because I started out by trying to organize my CDs. That was a mistake. Let me be clear - when I did my half year of duty in Canada five years ago, I took two weeks and organized all of my CDs into binders. I did this by lining up every CD I had (about 600) and entering them into a spreadsheet (Lileks would have been been proud at the hours of effort I spent on creating the perfect system), then breaking them down into genres and putting them in color-coded Case Logic CD notebooks (the BIG ones). I then placed all of the empty cases into boxes and stored them at my office on Gastown (where they remain to this day for all I know). This was a major accomplishment in my life and every time I DJed after that, I thanked God for giving me the foresight to organize those discs (of course, He decided to relieve me of foreskin so I guess I deserved something in return).

My problem as is related to this post is all of the CDs I have since acquired. Many, many. Between DJing and my lifelong quest for decent tunage (needle in a haystack warehouse if you know what I mean), the amount of CDs I bought in the past five years have been a boon to the music industry. Don't get me wrong, I was on the empeethree bandwagon before most of you knew that your computer could make more sounds than "beep", but I like CDs like most audiophiles claim to like records (Yes, I have records too but gimme a fuckin' break. I drive a sports coupe and have a hard enough time carrying my digital gear around.). I like jacket art, CD-quality sound, and the warm fuzzy feeling I get by filling the pockets of old white CEOs and black street thugs alike.

Well, I forgot where I was going with this post, but I suppose that's the point.

Oh yeah.

In the grand scheme of my 2nd Grand CD Organization (2004), I am exactly 1/3 finished. Which means my bedroom, where my girlfriend and I usually sleep (Sa-priize!), is filled with boxes and boxes and bags and bags of Compact Disks, CD-Rs, DVDs, floppies (many varieties including "TRON" disk size), Iomega media (both Zip and Jaz. Or was that Jiz and Zap? Ziz and Jap? Wuteva.), and several proprietary media types from various failed loser companies that tricked me into buying their shit and then went tits up. I mean, it's a fucking joke. Don't forget, this is just CDs and other assorted media - the small room I'm trying to clean out is probably only 1/10 finished. And now our bedroom is also unusable, almost unenterable. I just called Nam during lunch and without even a hello, she started cursing me out. She was upstairs despairing about where to start cleaning up because she doesn't want to sleep on the couch again. I forgot what I called for, so I got an earful about what I will be doing when I get home tonight instead. Oh, and I got hung up on. Girls, man. Peh!

I gotta take some pics of the destruction I've caused so far. It's hard to believe it will ever look clean in either of the two rooms. Then again, it's gotta get better than it is now, or I'll just burn the whole damn place down after the neighbors next door move to their new house next month. One of the scientists at Peenemunde (where they built rockets during the great war) was reported to have said somthing along the lines of "every fifty years all the factories should be burned down" in order to stimulate technological progress. Exactly what the hell that has to do with burning down my apartment, I don't know. I just work here, fella.

One of you sickos deserves to die in Politically Korrekt hell... Straight from my inbox:

- What Other Cultures Learn from the Media -

It was the first day of school (in America) and a new student named Suzuki, the son of a Japanese businessman, entered the fourth grade.

The teacher said, "Let's begin by reviewing some American history."
Who said "Give me Liberty, or give me Death?"

She saw a sea of blank faces, except for Suzuki . "Patrick Henry, 1775." He said.

"Very good! Who said 'Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth'?"

Again, no response except from Suzuki: "Abraham Lincoln, 1863."

The teacher snapped at the class, "Class, you should be ashamed. Suzuki, who is new to our country, knows more about its history than you do."

She heard a loud whisper: "Screw the Japs."

"Who said that?" she demanded.

Suzuki put his hand up. "Lee Iacocca, 1982."

At that point, a student in the back said, "I'm gonna puke."

The teacher glares and asks "All right! Now, who said that?"

Again, Suzuki says, "George Bush to the Japanese Prime Minister, 1991."

Now furious, another student yells, "Oh yeah? Suck this!"

Suzuki jumps out of his chair waving his hand and shouts to the teacher, "Bill Clinton, to Monica Lewinsky, 1997!"

Now with almost a mob hysteria someone said, "You little shit. If you say anything else, I'll kill you."

Suzuki frantically yells at the top of his voice, "Gary Condit to Chandra Levy 2001."

The teacher fainted. And as the class gathered around the teacher on the floor, someone said, "Oh shit, we're in BIG trouble!"

and Suzuki said, "Arthur Andersen, 2001"...

When the president of the staffing company (5,500 employees) you work for makes it a point to see you in person by pulling you from your desk in front of the whole office, you may feel several hundred thousand butterflies moshing at the Pantera concert in your stomach as you get up and proceed to an adjacent conference room.

Then, when he offers you 3,000 yen ($30) for every gaijin you can introduce that signs on to the firm with the single stipulation that "they are like you", you can nod and say thank you.

Then again, you could always point out that he is implying your own worth and feel insulted. And tell him the last time you saw somebody sold for so little it was paid for in crack and the bitch looked skankier than Paris Hilton after a six-week opiate binge. Or you could also explain that $30 isn't even enough to hire an illegal immigrant to do your yardwork back home in sunny CA. To top it all off, you could tell him in your best gutteral gangsta-Japanese to shove it up his ass.

Me, I just nodded and said thank you.

This is how much a "Cool Darts" PC game CD-ROM was in a bargain bin at Autobacs. Laugh #1: It was a Daiso 100 Yen Store game, so I only saved 23 yen. Laugh#2: I paid too much for it either way. The programming was so bad the shit didn't work after installation, and when I finally did get it to work, a little window popped up with the simple greeting, "Hello, world!"

I guess the thing I want to know the most is why they were selling a Daiso CD-ROM at an Autobacs.

Via Bruce Sterling:

Bagle and NetSky are fighting with each other. In NetSky.F, researchers found the following text: "Skynet AntiVirus - Bagle - you are a looser!!!!" This NetSky worm variant tries to remove Bagle worm infection if it finds it on an infected computer. And in Bagle.K, a message is embedded saying, "Hey, NetSky, f*ck off you b*tch!"

Today's New Word is: Applicosinox. Applicosinox made its debut about five years ago in a song recorded by Taro and I in his old juku (cram school). I made it up to fill a particular line in the song and it fit perfectly. Applicosinox is spiced wine made from apples that makes your nose itch and causes sneezing if you drink too much. On the plus side, your eyes start glowing like Dune if you drink more than a cup a day.

A search for this word on Google used to return a lot more hits than it does now. In particular, I remember it being researched on a linguistics department website of some university in Tokushima. Wonder where all that went...

Do you realize how hard it is to keep up with a no-carb diet right now in Japan? There are problems with all four of my food groups!

Beef: Australian is the only beef available in quantity but the grade of meat they are importing has the texture of reconstituted beef jerky.

Pork: Pork has always suffered a stigma here, and it sounds like they are going to stop the import of American pork due to the mad cow scare. (I was going to write a joke about increased imports of Canadian pork here but I got engrossed in this page instead. Too bad.)

Chicken: Goddamn avian flu coupled with in-country corruption (they just busted a local hatchery for selling laying hens to butcher shops!) means that eggs and rows upon rows of possibly tainted fowl were the only goddamn meat product available at the store today. And the egg section was plastered with recall notices for lead-tainted eggs they sold last week!

Fish: Smaller, more expensive, increasingly frozen, and more likely to be farmed than caught lately.

Maybe the trees really are screaming.

I ate the last of the lamb chops I squirreled away last week for dinner. Oh, tofu also. Shit, I even ate a pack of natto, so I guess I'll see what that does to my ketotes tomorrow when I do a test strip.

Lord Atkins in heaven, the natives of this savage land have forsaken me! Send me some lobster and steak dinners, stat!

On the way home from field archery a few months ago, I spotted this bad boy about to get squished on the road. We took him home for lack of a good place to release him, and I snapped this shot with the Nikon in one hand and steering wheel in the other. (On a scale of difficulty, it was somewhere between eating a Big Mac and changing a CD while driving.)

Anyway, Mr. Turtle got to play in my bathtub for a few hours and he surprised us all by screeching the entire time. Yes, it's true. Turtles screech. Eeek eeeeek eeeeeeeek. So the next time some hippie starts crying about the trees screaming (as opposed to the Screaming Trees), you can tell him it was probably just a turtle he stepped on.

Well I thought of a new pursuit and went ahead with it before it escaped my memory (volatile). Now I should explain: When learning a new language, I often experience meltdown trying to think of the English equivalent of a particular word or phrase. Since I am a product of American public schools (K-12) and Japanese university, I am pretty much the stupidest, laziest, least-inclined-to-use-a-dictionary fool you will ever meet. Hence, my need to create new words, even if they already exist. OK?

FAQ:
Q. Can your New Words be used for free?
A. No. Every spoken usage costs a beer. Every written usage costs a car (scaled to wealth of individual; Bill Gates can afford a lousy Maybach, etc.). Corporate usage is banned unless your company markets trendy fruits such as the pitaya to medium-sized co-op grocery chains in the northwest.

Q. Are volume discounts available?
A. See your monthly statement and perform a quick scalpulation.

Q. I represent so-and-so publishing. May we include your New Words in our dictionary/linguistics journal/"Asshat Central" project listing?
A. Yes, but please include the following tagline: --> k0zBu 0NZ J00!

Q. What if you create a word but it already exists?
A. It becomes mine by default.

Q. Won't that enable you to claim the entire English language as your own?
A. Heh.

Q. This sounds like complete BS, just how many people do you expect to pay you to use the English language?
A. My Nigerian mentor, Roberl Dungabe, says "plenty."

The new word for today is "scalpulation." Scalpulation is an answer or calculation derived by much head-scratching, chin-fondling, and mutterings of the word "Um".

Yellow helicopter. Landed. In my parking lot.