Jim O'Connell Photographs, The Blog.

World’s Smallest V12 Engine

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 16:29:44 +0000

This is an incredible piece of craftsmanship.

Defy Bags

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 17:47:49 +0000

Defy Bags – “Old Materials. New Ideas.” from Jerry Rig on Vimeo.

Defy has been proudly manufacturing durable goods since 2008, with each and every hand-crafted product inspected by me. All goods are crafted to be: simple, clean-lined, sturdy and manufactured to a level that would make my grandfather proud. We art direct each minute detail to ensure every bag feels truly one of a kind. And oh by the way, we mostly use vintage or reclaimed durable materials to do so. Well, that and imported solid steel and brass Austri Alpin Cobra buckles from Switzerland that are load bearing up to 1,000 lbs and used by special forces around the globe because of their world class quality and construction. Pardon the pun, but at each and every turn we like to Defy expectation.

via Story – Defy Bags.

Further afield: Raleigh Denim. | Fog + Foundry

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 17:02:14 +0000

I’d like to start sharing some stories about inspirational small manufacturing companies. This is the kind of stuff I’d love to see grow at the Pajama Factory.
Here’s the first:

Victor and Sarah Lytvinenko founded Raleigh Denim in 2007 in their North Carolina apartment. Selling their possessions to raise the fund for materials and a sewing machine, their launch was long on enthusiasm if short on expertise.

Over the intervening five years they’ve built Raleigh Denim into a cult fave. Fusing traditional craftsmanship with a modern cut, their jeans are made using denim from Cone Mill’s White Oak plant and vintage machinery such as the 43200G Union Special to produce a chainstitch hem. Each piece is signed on its inside pocket and the leather patch is handstamped with its edition number.

via Further afield: Raleigh Denim. | Fog + Foundry.

Raleigh Denim: Handcrafted in North Carolina | UNC-TV from David Huppert on Vimeo.

Matt Dempsey, Metal Artist

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 04:32:50 +0000

The following is a brief profile on Matt Dempsey and his partner Savannah Barr, two of the latest tenants at the Pajama Factory in Williamsport, PA.

Matt Dempsey, metal artist, at the Pajama Factory in Williamsport, PA

Matt Dempsey loves a challenge. For Dempsey, that challenge might be making a thing that nobody has made in generations, or perhaps something that has never been made before. Dempsey works with metal. He pounds it with hammers and heats it using fire and bellows and showers of sparks and, of course, a huge anvil of the sort rarely seen outside of cartoons. It’s the kind of anvil that makes you picture it being unsuccessfully dropped upon roadrunners, more often landing upon coyotes.

“Matt the blacksmith” is how he’s often referred to around the factory, since there are already several people named Matt around the place, but if you call him a blacksmith in his presence, he’ll correct you.

“A blacksmith is a person with very specialized training. I am not a blacksmith,.” he explains. “I am an an artist working primarily in metal.”

Dempsey, 37, is self-taught in his craft. He didn’t apprentice, he learned to do what he does by tackling specific problems and forging both the tools and the techniques to solve each problem.

“Most people just go buy a hammer when they need one, but I wind up making most of mine. Each one was made to do something very specific and the ones that prove useful wind up being used again.” The same goes for many of his other tools: a pair of tongs he he showed was made for a project, when no other pair was quite right for the job. The same goes for his “Hardy tools”, specialized shaping tools made with a stout square shank that fits into the square hole in his anvil.

It’s an uphill battle in semantics, though, for as long as he’s pounding away on that anvil that sits in his workshop, he’s going to be “the blacksmith” to the casual observer.

Matt Dempsey, metal artist, at the Pajama Factory in Williamsport, PA

Dempsey came to the area from Bradford, PA, the home of Zippo lighters and Case knives, both iconic American brands that epitomize reliability and dependability, traits that seem to fit with the sort of work that he does. He and his partner, Savannah Barr, came to the area for Dempsey to work in the gas industry, but it wasn’t long before he was introduced to Mark Winkelman of the Pajama Factory.

It was a natural fit and fast friendship, as Dempsey loves nothing more than solving a unique problem and a hundred year old building like the Pajama Factory is brimming with just those sorts of puzzles. You see it as you enter his studio space on the ground floor of the factory, next to the recently-closed Cobbler’s Outlet store: the latch on the door to his shop is a heavy black thing of iron, made specifically for that door, no doubt because it does something that the store-bought latches don’t.

”I got into metalwork when I learned to weld. I spent six years welding custom prototype radiators for show cars,” he explains. “It taught me to understand metal, to think about how it behaves in certain situations.”

It was a skill that proved useful when he took up horn carving as a hobby.

Turning an ornately-carved horn in his hands, he explains. “To make these kinds of cuts in the materials, you need knives in very specific shapes. I had to learn to make my own.”

Through his involvement with The Society for Creative Anachronism, an “international organization dedicated to researching and re-creating the arts and skills of pre-17th-century Europe”, he was able to meet others with a similar interest in the seemingly obsolete: “I really enjoy the old technology. Before everything was plugged into a wall socket, you had to know how to create the things for your day-to-day life.”

That sort of thinking was what helped him when he was part of the crew of the Appledore IV, a twin-masted schooner that sails the Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron, a wooden sailing ship used in marine biology and education, another of his unusual experiences. “A boat like the Appeldore isn’t a floating museum piece, it’s a working ship. You need a lot of hard-to-find skills to do that safely.”

He isn’t pretentious in the least, and there is no hint of affectation in his demeanor. He’s down-to-Earth in what he does, but when he talks about his work, there’s a playful glint in his eye and his demeanor becomes noticeably more animated. For this reason, it’s fun to watch him work, as everything becomes a demonstration. His partner, Savannah Barr, had some of her textile designs, in this case, long pieces of beautifully dyed silk, drying on large wooden frames. “See where the dye pattern looks different? She’s used salt to change how the dye is absorbed.”

Sure enough, there are tiny crystals of salt on the silk and the pattern it’s made is beautiful, but equally fascinating is the way the silk is held on the drying frame: every inch or so there’s a string attached to the edge of the silk that drapes over the edge of the frame. At the end of each string is a weight, carefully adjusted to pull the silk taut, without distorting the fabric.

Barr is not only an artist in textiles, she is also a photographer, as well as a journalist.

When asked what was in store for them at the Pajama Factory, Dempsey replied: “Classes and workshops. I plan to set up some very hands-on events for people of all ages. Something where they can come in and later walk away with something they made themselves. To get that going, though, I need more commission work.” These commissions and customers help finance his more creative projects and activities, he explained, but it all goes hand-in-hand, like everything else the pair explained.

“See these masks? See this curve here and that right angle on that one?” He shows a set of copper masks, one an owl, another, an impish-looking gargoyle. “I was doing a project where I needed a large circle of sheet copper and I had to cut it from a square piece. These masks were made from the corners I cut off.”

So much of what the pair does is like that—the tools and the process are as fascinating as the thing that gets created.

Matt Dempsey is available for commissioned work, both artistic and practical. He can be reached at (989) 415-8859.

New Video Interview Series

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 23:35:13 +0000

I’ve been putting together a new series of video interviews of the people of the Pajama Factory:

The Pajama Factory Windows

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:03:37 +0000

As a photographer, I spend a lot of time looking at different types of light and shadows, so when I found the Pajama Factory in Williamsport, PA, I was attracted to the exceptional quality of the light afforded by the factory’s large windows.

What I didn’t know was how carefully engineered a modern factory of this era was. Manufacturing was coming into full swing with modern methods on a scale that had never been seen before. Where old factories were smaller, darker and less pleasant for workers, factory owners were learning that productivity could be improved significantly by designing workspaces that employed what would one day become known as ergonomics, a term not coined until 1949, a full thirty years after the Pajama Factory was completed.

An important consideration in designing a large work area is, of course, that sufficient light be made available to workers. Electric light was a fairly new thing, but it was expensive and inefficient for the kinds of spaces that needed to be illuminated. Architects found that they could efficiently light large spaces through the use of carefully-engineered window systems. The engineers needed to add as much light as possible and of course, more windows mean more light.

A typical factory built in the late Nineteenth Century was made of brick and timber, with wood-framed windows that were of course much smaller and less-efficient than they now needed to maximize the usefulness of the spaces they wanted.

Around the turn of the Twentieth Century, architects started designing steel framed factory structures with steel-framed windows that would allow for vast, multistory buildings, such as the 300,000 or so square feet of the Pajama Factory. They designed their buildings to have greater and greater percentages of their outer surface covered with windows and these new techniques allowed them to reach better than eighty percent coverage with glass. This required new types of framing for the windows, such as the “Detroit Fenestra” designs that the Pajama Factory has so many of. These were incredibly strong, far stronger than could be made of wood, and far easier to maintain. Double-glazed windows were an option, but often decided against because the cost of heating the factories was said to be “practically nil.” (Sadly, this is no longer true…)

So by the time the newer buildings of the Pajama Factory were built in the years before and just after World War I, architects could design a building as large as they could afford, with glass covering nearly all of the outside. The problem was, if they used regular flat window glass, most of the light would fall right near the window sills, blinding and baking the workers situated there, while the workers towards the center were left in relative darkness. Lighting engineers of the day set about to tackle this problem. Frosted or ground glass, where the shiny surface was sandblasted to make it translucent, simply reduced the amount of light that passed through. This helped near the windows, but the centers of the rooms on the factory floor were still in shadow. It became clear that the answer to the problem was textured glass of some sort. Glass with patterns of raised bumps were tried. They were an improvement, but not good enough. “Maze glass” had a raised pattern molded to the surface and this had excellent dispersion qualities, but not enough reach towards the center of the halls.

The highest efficiency was found using a type known as “prism dispersion” glass. This type is molded to have an interior surface of 90º ridges about 1/32nd of an inch wide, running parallel across the glass’ surface. These “prisms” caught and redirected the light towards the center of the room, creating a pleasant and efficient environment in the center of a building even sixty feet wide. (A bit more space could be added as a center hallway area, as that didn’t need to be as well-lit.)

Factories could now be built as large as they could be lit. This led to the type of structures exemplified by the Pajama Factory—long, long buildings with windows situated to the West and East.

Looking at the windows of the factory, you’l notice that this kind of glass was only used on the upper panes in each sash. There were a few reasons for this decision: one factor was cost—prism dispersion glass was far more expensive than the smooth kind. It also worked best in the upper part of the room, above the workers and their machines and in combination with white-painted ceilings and columns. Lastly, it was found that the workers actually needed to occasionally glance at a distant object outside, to reduce eye strain. This was balanced against the concern by factory owners that workers, “especially women” would spend too much time staring out the windows rather than working. (This was, after all, 1916 in the example I found and people actually said things like that in public.)

After the windows were in place, the machinery had to be laid out in a manner that didn’t interfere with the light dispersion. Long rows of work area were arranged almost perpendicular to the line of windows so the light could efficiently flow. Ideally, workers would not be facing the windows directly, as this caused undue eye strain, as well as distraction. The same publication noted that this technique had been employed for many years in keeping horses in stables, again stated with no implied irony.

It’s interesting to learn how and why these buildings were made the way they were and what a state-of-the-art facility it was. It’s exactly these sorts of details that make the building so appealing for artists and craftsmen even today, so much more so than even a new building.

Almost a hundred years later, many of the original prism dispersion windows remain, though a few have been lost to the ravages of time. Where practical, broken panes have been replaced with matching vintage panes sourced from salvage dealers.

The next time you visit the Pajama Factory, take a look at the windows and enjoy our exceptional light.

The Garden at The Pajama Factory

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 02:17:02 +0000

Today was a beautiful Fall day at The Pajama Factory.
The day held clear, blue skies with warm sun, but the unmistakable hint of Autumn. I took the opportunity to spend some time in the courtyard, exploring the garden with Koshka, the little black cat. Koshka spends most of her time inside, roaming the halls and visiting the studios and tenants, but likes to come out once in a while to explore and hunt for spiders.

Koshka, the Factory Cat, inspects the garden.

I took the opportunity to do a bit of exploring myself. While I didn’t find as many spiders, I found lots of cool things to take pictures of.

Not long ago, one section of the garden was filled with yellow flowers, Black-Eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta) They have since lost their petals, adopting a more somber beauty.

Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) That have lost their petals.

You may have seen these old-looking iron devices here and there throughout the grounds of the factory. While they somewhat resemble a fire hydrant, they’re actually an active part of the factory’s extensive sprinkler system.

Sprinkler Control Valve #5

This one caught me off guard—it’s a Chinese Lantern Plant, (Physalis alkekengi,) or, as I knew them when I first encountered them in Japan, a houzuki. In Japan, they are strongly associated with Summer and Fall—they last for months, gradually going from green to orange, before the papery flower’s shell disintegrates, leaving a skeleton of lace, surrounding a cherry-like fruit. The plant traditionally is associated with fertility in Japan, popularly kept by couples hoping to conceive a child, though ironically, the fruit itself has contraceptive properties, along with other medicinal uses.
Several times I went to the Houzuki-Ichi festival at Asakusa Shrine in Tokyo, a festival where vendors sell thousands of the plants, as they have every June 9-10th, since the Edo Period (1603 to 1868).
I didn’t expect to see on growing here in the garden, but Barb pointed it out to me, just as the sun was lighting it up.

Chinese Lantern Plant

This sure looks like a footprint from the kind of boots the astronauts wore on the moon. So how did it get on a rock here on Earth, in our very own courtyard? The obvious answer is that aliens visited the Pajama Factory millions of years ago.
Kidding aside, what the heck is this? A fossil? A sandstone concretion? It’s not carved or cut from the stone.

Rock with a spaceman's footprint?

There’s lots of quartz crystals around, in clusters attached to rocks, as well as loose pieces to be found.

Quartz Crystal on the Ground

The old plow.

An old plow

I’m not sure what these vines are. I thought they might be zucchini or something, but I haven’t seen any fruit developing. Whatever they are, I do like the way the tiny tendrils spiral as they reach out and climb whatever’s near.

Climbing Vines

Finally, a pepper growing near the front gate.

A small pepper

Inside Studio Paper+

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 21:26:42 +0000

Inside Studio Paper+

Artist Todd Lim didn’t have to go far to find all the resources he needed to put together a series of prints for an upcoming show at Greenwich Connecticut’s Samuel Owen Gallery.

His new series, a set of prints combining imagery from personal memory and popular culture, are done using a mix of specialized and innovative printing techniques, brought together with the aid of a skilled printer and a ca. 1958 Charles Brand etching press.

No, Lim didn’t have to travel far to find what he needed; it was all just down the hall from his own studio at Studio Paper+ in Williamsport’s Pajama Factory.

Studio Paper+ is the brainchild of artist Chad Andrews. Andrews received his MFA in printmaking at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, so he not only acts as a masterful technician for each project, he’s uniquely qualified to lend a hand creatively, suggesting techniques and processes that the artist can employ to realize their vision.

Master Printer Chad Andrews, working with inks on his glass-topped worktable.

Creating a consistent and reproducible result requires that a lot of factors be considered—the ink, for example, gets checked for color and consistency. Andrews pours a bit of the oil-based pigment out onto the long glass-topped table he built for the studio and works it over with spatulas and brayers, checking it not only for color, but for its viscosity, the thickness and opaqueness of the ink. When he’s satisfied that it’s just right, it’s spread out a final time and then the plate, in this case a thin film of polyester known as a pronto plate, is inked up, the color checked a final time by the artist and placed on the print. This method lets Lim build up the image in layers, the thin plate not damaging the paper as it might with a different process, allowing Lim to make each print unique.

The press itself is a massive thing of black-painted iron and shining steel that despite its outward appearance of indestructibility, must be carefully calibrated for each pass of the plate, ink and paper that makes the prints become a thing that collectors will treasure and display. Owning a press like this is certainly not a reasonable likelihood for most people, certainly beyond the prospects of all but the most dedicated of artists. A well-equipped college art department may have one, but access would be likely limited to students and faculty.

At The Pajama Factory, Studio Paper+ has not only this press, but an equally impressive press for making lithographs, as well as a letter press, on which hand-set lead type is laid out and printed.

Todd Lim inspects the print in process.

After each pass through the press, the print is examined

Andrews doesn’t want to be a service bureau, merely taking direction and producing prints, he wants each artist to be as involved as possible in the process. Not only that, as a natural teacher, he’ll encourage you to expand your repertoire of skills and techniques, but never pushes. As you tell him your ideas, he’ll often cock his head a certain way and say “You might want to think about…” and proceed to tell you about a technique that may be a year old, or perhaps a few hundred years old.

In the course of writing this article, Andrews asked me if I still had any interest in trying etching.

Etchings have been traditionally made by taking a copper plate about the thickness of a penny and covering it with a thin layer of asphaltum, a thin, tar-like substance. The asphaltum dries to a nearly varnish-like finish and the artist scratches through that with a variety of tools to make the design. When the design is complete, the plate is set in a bath of acid and, where the asphaltum has been removed, the acid bites the design into the copper. The artist will clean the plate and rub ink into these etched lines. The inked plate is then run through the press with a sheet of dampened paper and the ink is beautifully transferred from the plate to the paper.

For over twenty years, I’ve been a fan of etchings. I’ve bought and sold many over the years, from “Old Master” etchings of 17th Century Holland, to the revival the media experienced in the early twentieth century. Often times, the artist or subject of the print would interest me little, it was the process itself, the subtle bite of ink lines on the paper, the faint traces of a mistake that had been (nearly) burnished out, the embossed edge of the platemark on the paper and even the occasional trace of an inky fingerprint of the printer, left as he lifted the corner of the wet sheet off the press bed. It was all these things that drew me in and kept me hooked.

A bit later, I left the studio with a print in hand. No old master etching by any stretch of the imagination, it was merely a test of lines upon the paper, sections of cross-hatching that overlapped in ever-increasing densities until it reached the point where the acid ate away everything, leaving areas of “open bite” that lost their detail to the ink. Still, that was what I was after, a test to see what would happen when I subjected my drawing to the acid and the ink. I was hooked. Some of the lines, combined with subtle shadings left on the plate by previous work done on it, were sublime. I could see that, with a lot more intention, talent and control, there was nothing Rembrandt did 380 years ago that I couldn’t do today. Not by me, perhaps, but by someone… Someone, that is, with access to a press and a good teacher.

If you think you might like to try your hand at printing, be it copper etching, pronto plates, linoleum block, stone lithography, or any number of other processes, stop by Studio Paper+ inside studio Nr. 30 in the Pajama Factory most Friday evenings for the Printmaker’s Forum.

What I’m Listening to… – SunGazette.com

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:13:48 +0000

A couple of hours ago, I was asked to write up a short piece on the music I’m listening to. Like many of you, my listening tastes range too far and wide for the scope of this article, so I’m going to tell you a little bit about one thin branch of a musical genre that I enjoy a great deal: Jazz.

via What I’m Listening to… – SunGazette.com | News, Sports, Jobs, Community Information – Williamsport-Sun Gazette.

Clay

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:30:23 +0000

Some random photos around the factory:

Click the thumbnails to view large size:

Maranon Chocolate

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 23:18:15 +0000

This is pretty cool—my sister Leslie has been working with a group who discovered a thought-to-be-extinct variety of cacao beans growing in Peru. The NYT did a story on it:

DAN PEARSON was working in northern Peru two years ago with his stepson Brian Horsley, supplying gear and food to mining companies, when something caught his eye.

“We were in a hidden mountain valley of the Marañón River and saw some strange trees with football-size pods growing right out of their trunks,” Mr. Pearson said by telephone last week. “I knew nothing about cacao, but I learned that’s what it was.”

It was, he would learn after sending samples of seeds and leaves to the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, one of the rarest, most prized varieties of cacao.

“The DNA of this material is pure Nacional,” said Dr. Lyndel Meinhardt, a scientist with the service. “These are very rare.”

I love this kind of story—part Indiana Jones, part Tom Swift, part… Willy Wonka?
They’re now producing chocolate from these beans: Fortunato No. 4 – “preeminent chocolate during the 1800′s, destroyed by diseases in 1916, rediscovered in Peru and released to world in 2011 – Fortunato No.4 is 100% thought-to-be-extinct Pure Nacional. Even more facinating is that this newly discovered Pure Nacional has 40% white beans – never before discovered, never before tasted and absolutely delicious”
“The chocolate is intense, with a floral aroma and a persistent mellow richness. Its lack of bitterness is remarkable. “ New York Times, January 11, 2011:

Marañón Chocolate

Thought to be extinct since diseases struck Ecuador in 1916, Pure Nacional with 100% purple beans was esteemed for flavors of fruit and rare floral. It commanded a dominant share of the worldwide fine chocolate market before it suddenly vanished–until now.

We found Pure Nacional with 40% and 100% white beans growing in a remote canyon of the Marañón River Valley in Peru. “An unprecedented discovery”, said USDA genetics scientist, Dr. Meinhardt, head of the lab that tested the cacao DNA and confirmed the results.

“In my 30 year chocolate obsession, this is the finest I’ve ever tasted”, said Paul Edward pastry chef and co-founder of Chef Rubber with 25,000 customers worldwide.

We are there during every process pictured below: from planting cacao seeds in our nursery, harvesting, fermenting and drying and making chocolate in Switzerland on the 1879 Longitudinal Conche. From Pure Nacional seeds to Pure Nacional Chocolate, Traceability is Guaranteed.

What’s also cool is that some of the beans in the cacao pods are white, apparently something that doesn’t happen unless the plants are left undisturbed for decades.

Surly Bastard

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 18:18:49 +0000

I suppose some of you know this already, but I’ve been secretly updating a new site, Surly Bastard.

It’s a different sort of site than this one has been over the years, more like a “Tumblr Blog” or “tumblog” or whatever they call those things, where you don’t actually write very much, just slap on pictures and links and pithy quotes or whatever. Most of what I post is stuff I’m working on, pictures and whatnot, or links to “shit I like”.

Here’s something I posted the other day, a painting I whipped up for the February “First Friday” event here at the Pajama Factory:

I’m pretty happy with how it came out, especially because it’s my first attempt at painting. It’s four feet by eight feet. On plywood. People seemed to like it well enough.

Oh, if you read blogs though a feed reader, here’s the feed link for Surly Bastard.

Autumn

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Spent the morning raking leaves. Raking, as in, dragging a rake across the lawn, coaxing the leaves to the street, rather than hooking up the leaf blower and doing it the modern way.

Cash For Hot Tubs (New Client)

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 22:17:36 +0000

Just did a nice quick site today:

Cash for Hot Tubs!

Ready to trade up that old tub?
Tired of that old tub cluttering up your yard? Why not turn it into a nice little pile of cash, just in time for Christmas?
Use the form below to get in touch and we’ll get back to you ASAP!

[From Cash For Hot Tubs!!]

Really a very simple site, but the client needed it up and running with a custom feedback form for a print ad campaign by tomorrow.

Surprisingly, we had a real customer use the form within minutes of going live, too!

Bellevue Cottage

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 01:42:17 +0000

Say hello to Bellevue Cottage. Bellevue Cottage is a beautiful mountaintop bed and breakfast not far from Williamsport, with absolutely spectacular views. Barb and I went up there last weekend to shoot some photos and get a start on the website for the cottage. Anna Alford is the owner and heart behind the place. She grew up on the mountain and her love of the place is obvious—it’s a beautiful hundred-year-old building that has been lovingly cared for.

We were lucky to come on a day as spectacular as we did. One thing I really missed when I was living in Japan was the amazing Fall foliage that we get here in the Northeast. Sure, you can go to Nikko and see leaves, but I never saw anything that could compare with the colors of Pennsylvania.

Go take a look around Anna’s new site.

Welcome to Bellevue Cottage

After several years of planning and work Bellevue Cottage is finally ready for you to come and visit. Watch this site for news about upcoming events. I look forward to welcoming you to my home soon. In the meantime you can come for a virtual visit via this web site. Anna Alford

[From Bellevue Mountaintop Cottage]

Stay At Turtle Bay

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 01:00:06 +0000

Turtle Bay Golf

Alida and Eloïse

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:54:45 +0000

(Photo links to slideshow.)

Laura

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 11:59:27 +0000

Laura came by the studio the other day for some pictures.

Lucy

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 11:49:54 +0000

Lucy came to my studio the other day looking for headshots for her upcoming move to Los Angeles.
To get the light right for this shot, I actually went to the space behind the muslin backdrop in my studio. There’s actually about eight feet between the back of the cloth and the studio wall which id painted gallery white. It was late in the day and the light was nice, especially bounced off the wall.

Scenes from the Fan Factory

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 22:26:37 +0000

The Pajama Factory

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

As you probably know, I’ve left Tokyo, gone back to Pennsylvania for a while to help out with my family.

I’m not sure how long I’ll be here, but as it looks like it will be a couple of months at least, I’ve decided to use what free time I do have to take a break from freelancing and do a bit of creative photography.

So long, Japan and thanks for

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Looking for LOHAS in Shimokitazawa

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:03:15 +0000

LOHAS, or Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability, is a movement wherein people take a careful look at how they live and the impact their existence has upon the planet. Here in the urban sprawl of Tokyo, it’s alive and growing, with shops catering to consumers with a heightened sense of responsibility for their actions.

When a possible client for my photography asked for LOHAS-related images, I realized it was one area somewhat under-represented in my portfolio, so I set off today by bicycle, (appropriately enough, I suppose,) to explore Shimokitazawa, a Western suburb of Tokyo, looking for LOHAS.

As the day wound down, I found myself at the Nong-min Café and spoke to its owner, Mr. Waki, who graciously allowed me to take some photos.

In the garden behind the café, there was a small herb garden, just a couple of square meters, that supplies the shop with fresh herbs.

Written on the stick is “Italian Parsely”.

I spoke with Mr. Waki, the proprietor. He told me about the shop’s two rice paddies outside the city and gave me a tour of the shop.

The first floor café is cool and casual.

Inside a cabinet, the glass teapots and handmade bowls await customers’ orders.

An organic cotton t-shirt proclaims “No Chemicals”.

The shop’s brand includes t-shirts, as well as workwear.

The second floor has two café rooms and an adjoining workroom, complete with sewing machine.

A wooden Buddha sits overlooking the tables in a peaceful customer area.

A cotton boll, a reminder of the connection between the goods in the shop and their natural origins.

An un-dyed organic cotton t-shirt on display.

Herbs grow in pots alongside chalkboards announcing the day’s specials.

Veggies.

Licensing Magnesium Photos

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

A Day at the Doujunkai

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:09:43 +0000

Click the photo for a slideshow.

The Dojunkai Apartments : The
Beginning of Apartment Living
　The current mainstream steel reinforced
concrete apartments that were built prior to
World War II are called Dojunkai apartments.
The Dojunkai was a foundation established
following the Great Kanto Earthquake to help
victims in need of shelter. It was an external
body of the Interior Ministry and was funded
by contributions from within Japan and
overseas. The Dojunkai supplied 12,000
housing units, including 2,500 apartments,
between 1926 and 1941. All of the
apartments were reinforced concrete structures
that placed a premium on earthquake
resistance and most of the properties were
three stories in height. In addition to having
proper electricity, plumbing and gas, each of
the units was equipped with flush toilets. At
the time they were built, these housing units
were well known and admired for their
leading-edge conveniences and technologies
such as elevators, steam heaters, telephones
and baths. The aforementioned comforts
proved to be very popular despite the
concern that the apartment style of housing
might not be well accepted as a part of
Japanese lifestyle.

Quoted from http://xrl.us/oq6bk

Magnesium Photos The world’s most respected photo agency.™

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:13:46 +0000

The delights from these food emporiums aren’t the sort of meals you serve up on a first date, nor are they the sort of places you eat at every day (unless you have a very good cardiologist). They’re guilty pleasures to be savored, food shared amongst trusted friends and select initiates in a ritual of indiscretion and indulgence; saying “let’s go grab a bag of sliders” is much the same as saying “let’s be bad” with a devilish glint in your eye.

Magnesium Photos» Magnesium Photos.

Brian Peterson

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 13:45:36 +0000

Photographer Brian Peterson of Zokyo fame and I have been working on a new project for the past couple weeks, working for hours a day with an open Skype call going, usually with at least a couple others on the line, discussing every little detail of how to put together our new site, Magnesium.

It’s almost ready to go, but I thought I’d spread around a little link love for the search thingies.

Magnesium Photos | The world’s most respected photo agency.™

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 09:52:56 +0000

The Tokyo of Yore – The New York Times > Travel > Slide Show > Slide 1 of 12

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:02:33 +0000

Photos I shot in Kawagoe for the New York Times:
The Tokyo of Yore – The New York Times > Travel > Slide Show > Slide 1 of 12

.

New York Times – Near Tokyo, a City Shows Its Age, Proudly

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:53:46 +0000

Photos I shot in Kawagoe for the New York Times:

New York Times – In Japan, a House of Steel

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:49:46 +0000

NYT Alternates: Hokkaido Slideshow

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:55:40 +0000

Here’s another slideshow of takes and out-takes from my Hokkaido assignment for the NYT:

NYT Assignment: A Retreat in Snowy Japan

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:06:02 +0000

Another new set of photos today from the piece I did in Hokkaido recently. There’s the article, as well as a slideshow of a dozen photos. Came out pretty nice, I think.

[From In Japan, a House of Steel - NYTimes.com]

NYT Assignment: Architect Toyo Ito

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:26:40 +0000

Here’s another NYT assignment I did on Toyo Ito, an architect that’s been getting a lot of attention lately:
Inside the Exteriors of the Architect Toyo Ito – NYTimes.com

(Click the photo to open the slideshow, then look for the navigation buttons at the bottom of the slideshow.)

That was a fun shoot. It was the day after I had done the shoot for the Nakagin Capsule Tower and when I got home from that job, I had an email asking me to shoot Mr. Ito at his office in Aoyama.
We talked about the Nakagin Tower a bit and he told me how its architect, Kisho Kurokawa, had been an inspiration and an influence on all young architects of the time.

Mr. Ito was a warm and friendly man, stylish without being fussy and happy to talk about his work.

When I asked him how he came up with the idea for the opera house, he picked up an object that looked like a CD case and pulled the two pieces of plexiglass apart. Sandwiched between the two pieces was a sheet of flexible woven fabric, held to the two sheets with translucent fasteners. As he pulled it, the fabric was stretched into gentle curves, the same as you can see in the building. (Photos of him holding the model start at slide 52 in the presentation.)

To light the shoot, I used a single strobe, with a Gary Fong Lightsphere, a soft plastic attachment that looks a bit like some sort of Tupperware bowl. I always get comments on it and often feel self conscious when carrying it, but it does a fantastic job. I did some of them with a cable, allowing me to shoot with the flash off-camera, but in all honesty, I coule have skipped that and just shot it all on-camera.

NYT Assignment: Coffee

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:03:49 +0000

A while back I did a shoot for the NYT on coffee in Tokyo.

Of course I shot far more photos than they actually used in the piece, so I decided to make a slideshow of the best ones that I took, so you can see them here:

(To play the slideshow, use the little buttons below the photo.)

Coffee photos

Links To My Tearsheets

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:34:32 +0000

If you are interested in seeing things that I’ve had published in the NYT and elsewhere, you can follow my “Delicious” links for my tearsheet tag:

http://delicious.com/jim/tearsheet

Delicious.com is a public bookmark site that lets you share links to things you find interesting. You can follow all of the things that I save there, or just certain tags, which are keywords that I’ve applied to the links:

http://delicious.com/jim/

The funny thing is, since the New York Times is completely unavailable in Tokyo, the above snapshot is the closest I’ve come to seeing my photos in actual print.

New York Times

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:54:57 +0000

My first picture published in the New York Times, right there on the cover:

Here’s the article, where it will live on the site.
You can also download it as a PDF.

Advice to a young photographer

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 11:10:36 +0000

I just wrote a reply over on Lightstalkers to a young photographer of eighteen, asking about what it takes to be a working photographer, The comment before mine brought up the subject of beards, so I started with that:

The beard is a must if you decide to pursue landscape photography. For that it should be big, bushy and unkempt.

Grizzled and stubbly is good for many other types of photographers, but be prepared to fill it out on a few weeks’ notice if you do the type of photography which will take you to places where being clean-shaven carries as much credibility as wearing a frilly pink dress.

Just kidding, of course—JR’s comment above made me smile.

As a photographer, be sure you have an absolute handle on the technical aspects of photography. You’ll need to be proficient, to the point where you can produce a well-exposed, well-composed and well-focused shot whenever you are called upon to produce one. Learn to prepare yourself and your gear. For me, it’s stepping off the train, I have a personal ritual of checking that the ISO on my camera is suitable. (checking that it’s not still on ISO 800 from the night before when I’ll be shooting in the daylight.) After that, I check that autofocus is set and that exposure compensation isn’t dialed two stops in the wrong direction and that my battery isn’t about to die. (That’s also when I pull a piece of gaffer tape from the sharpie pen I’ve wound it around and tape my 5D’s power switch on, because it’s in an easy position to get bumped to off, most likely at the worst possible time.)

Kind of a pre-flight check, but the thing is, I do this not even when I’m “shooting,” but all the time. I always have some sort of camera with me, so I give it a once over, generally as I leave the house and look at the light or step off the train. Doorways, I guess, are my trigger.

When I was teaching myself light, I used to carry an incident meter and meter everything, in much the same way. The thing is, you’ve got to have your camera ready at all times. You don’t want to lose a shot that you’re expected to take, because of something stupid like a full roll of film or a memory card you forgot to format.

Next, master the “straight shot” – a picture devoid of artistic tricks and arty overtones. Unless you have a quite unusual editor or a lot of personal clout, it’s better to not shoot your work pictures on a fisheye Holga using cross-processed expired film.

After that, when you’re comfortable taking a competent shot on ten seconds notice, start to think about how you can take a better shot. How can you add something that you see and no one else sees, something profound and inspired. Having studied music, this is something I think of as “virtuosity.”

While the world has hundreds of perfectly competent musical performers, to get to First Chair, you need virtuosity, a term that has it’s roots in the concept of being touched by God. This is the thing that tells you that the violin piece you’re hearing for the first time must be done by Jascha Heifetz, or that the photo you’re seeing for the first time could only have been done by Diane Arbus.

When you have that, it doesn’t matter what you shoot, because everything you choose to shoot will matter. This comes through being relentlessly demanding of yourself and editing your stuff with a cold, unbiased eye.

Of course, orchestras are filled with musicians who will never be first chair, musicians who are fine technicians and probably have comfortable, enjoyable lives, doing what they love to do and there are just as many photographers doing the same. Nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn’t recommend striving for that when you’re eighteen. Dream big.

Most of the world’s significant images were made by people with cameras not as advanced as whatever you probably carry and captured in less than a sixtieth of a second, often by people your age.

Go read about John Filo and his Kent State photo:

http://edition.cnn.com/COMMUNITY/transcripts/2000/5/4/filo/

Here’s a guy about your age, who reflexively shot something he found mildly interesting and not only won a Pulitzer, but helped bring the end of the Viet Nam war, without going more than a couple of hours from his home in a small Pennsylvania town.

(Plus, he did it with a Nikkormat, half a roll of Tri-X and probably a 50mm Nikkor lens, a setup that would probably cost you $50 today in decent shape used. I don’t like gear discussions, but I find something joyful about that.)

OK – I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent and ranted too much, but good luck to you. Wherever you wind up, you’ll want a solid body of work to open doors and show people that you can do what they need you to do. After that, keep looking for those three or five photos that will define your career and make you live forever.

by Jim O’Connell | 15 Mar 2009 11:03 | Tokyo, Japan

Lenses for portraits

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 11:10:17 +0000

I got an email today from someone asking about portrait lenses.

Looking at her Flickr stream, she seemed to be using a Nikon D-80, which is a DSLR with a cropped sensor, so my answer leans a bit towards users of those cameras. For a long time, I used a Nikon D-100, which has a similar sensor.

Basically, the most important factor in a good portrait is not the lens or the camera that you use, but the level of connection and intimacy you can create between your subject and the viewer.

She asked for a recommendation for a prime lens, but in the end, it wasn’t my first suggestion. Shooting with primes is great, but it can be a lot of work. If you’re shooting a few hundred frames in a session, this can lead to a lot of pictures that look quite a lot alike. Getting something good in a short amount of time often requires a lot of different compositions.

In general, I despise most discussions about gear. No matter how much you try to speak in very general terms, someone will undoubtedly chime in to argue that the new Smegron 3-1500mm f:13.5 zoom that they heard will be announced at Photokina two years from now is the obvious best choice for portraits. These things are a matter of taste, which is really impossible to quantify. For example, one of my favorite portraits ever is one of the painter Francis Bacon, shot by John Deakin. I like it because it’s raw and unflattering, shot in close with a wide lens. In effect, he did it wrong and it works astoundingly well because of it.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote to her, perhaps some of you may find it useful as well:

Hi -

It depends a bit on the camera you use. If you are using a camera with a cropped sensor, like most of the digital SLRs on the market, you may find some of the more traditional portrait lenses to be a bit tight in composition. Still, if you like a close-cropped face in the portrait, something like an 85mm lens is still a good choice with a lot of flexibility. The 85 is a classic portrait lens for 35mm film photography. Being a slightly telephoto lens, it adds a bit of compression to the features of the subject, which is very often flattering. Wider lenses, especially those below 35mm, can be a bit unflattering, at the extreme making the subject appear moon-faced.

The kind of telephoto compression to which I refer is the effect you may have seen with a long telephoto lens, say a view down a crowded street from far away where the people appear almost stacked upon each other. When you read about lens equivalents with cropped sensors, they may say something to the effect of “a 50mm lens becomes an 80mm lens” but this is deceptive. A lens with a 50mm focal length will not have the telephoto compression of an 80mm lens, so you can’t expect the little bit of flattering that you’d get with an 80 or 85 millimeter lens.

That said, a 50mm lens is capable of taking excellent portraits, on any DSLR, regardless of sensor. You just need to get up and move your feet to do your composing. The same with an 85mm lens. It’s a lot of work to shoot a dynamic portrait session with a prime lens, but the benefits can be worth the effort. With any prime, you’re going to get good optics and a wider maximum aperture than on most zoom lenses. The wider the aperture, the more control you have over “bokeh” or out-of-focus blur, which can be good for isolating your subject from a distracting background. Wider apertures also let more light into the camera, allowing you to not only shoot in lower light, they help autofocus do it’s thing better and faster.

So for a good prime, I’d recommend getting the fastest 50mm prime you can justify getting. A 50mm f:1.8 can be had for between $80 and $120. That’s a simply fantastic price for a lens that fast. A bit faster f:1.4 will run you about $300. Canon makes a f:1.2, but it costs about $1,500. I have one of these and while it’s a real beauty, it’s a beast as well. It weighs a heck of a lot more than the others, which is a real consideration when shooting all day. I shot a model in my little studio the other day using that lens and others and after a couple of hours, my shoulders were simply aching. Still, the simply creamy blur it makes in out of focus areas makes it worth the pain—sometimes.

But you know what? If I had one lens to use for a portrait session where there’s be a lot of different poses and styles, where I need a lot of flexibility in composition, I honestly wouldn’t be shooting with a prime. For one thing, I often work in small spaces—my studio in Tokyo is about the size of a 1-car garage. Other times, shooting dancers, I’ll be on stage with them, with not a lot of space to move around.

In these cases, I use a zoom. On Canon, I like the 24-70 f:2.8 L zoom and on Nikon, I like the 28-70 f:2.8.

Both lenses are real workhorses. F:2.8 is about the fastest you can get in a zoom and they are pretty expensive and heavy, but I find them to be a good trade-off between price, weight and performance.

First, I’d take a good look at the lenses you own now. Even the “kit lenses” that come as an option for most DSLRs are often great, flexible lenses for portraits. After all, the makers know that a good percentage of new users will be soon taking their cameras to weddings or pointing them at newborn babies, so I suspect they optimize for those situations. In that case, you might best improve your portraits by getting a good flash with a diffuser or working on your composition. Get on your feet and engage your subject—your portraits will improve.

Shooting in your camera’s RAW mode makes a big difference as well. With that, you can go back and make subtle corrections to lighting and white balance, which is crucial for getting good skin tones.

Still, if you want a good prime, I’d try out a good 50mm. They’re just too much of a good value to pass up.

Good luck!

Jim

Rokuyō days for iCal (六曜カレンダー)

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 02:09:25 +0000

In Japan, traditionally the days also have religious names and meanings. Some days are considered either good or bad for things like weddings and funerals, while other times and days might be good for things like scheduling a job interview or a school exam. I’ve seen them marked on Japanese printed calendars, but never paid much attention to them. In a way, they’re similar to the Christian customs of not eating meat on Friday or being cautious on Friday the Thirteenth.

I’m just learning about these, so I thought it might be handy to have them as a calendar in my iCal program and on my iPod:

To make this, I started with the calendar found here:

http://www002.upp.so-net.ne.jp/yama3/topics/topicsindex.html

I downloaded it and did a series of search and replaces to add not just the romaji version, but a short description from Wikipedia. If you read Japanese and don’t need the English, you should probably just subscribe to the original

Here’s what Wikipedia says about them:

Rokuyō

The rokuyō (六曜) are a series of six days that supposedly predict whether there will be good or bad fortune during that day. The rokuyō are still commonly found on Japanese calendars and are often used to plan weddings and funerals, though most people ignore them in ordinary life. The rokuyō are also known as the rokki (六輝). In order, they are:

Kanji Romanization Meaning

先勝 Senshō Good luck before noon, bad luck after noon. Good day for beginnings (in the morning).

友引 Tomobiki Bad things will happen to your friends. Funerals avoided on this day (tomo = friend, biki = pull, thus a funeral might pull friends toward the deceased). Typically crematoriums are closed this day.

先負 Senbu Bad luck before noon, good luck after noon.

仏滅 Butsumetsu Symbolizes the day Buddha died. Considered the most unlucky day. Weddings are best avoided. Some Shinto shrines close their offices on this day.

大安 Taian The most lucky day. Good day for weddings and events like shop openings.

赤口 Shakkō The hour of the horse (11 am – 1 pm) is lucky. The rest is bad luck.

The rokuyō days are easily calculated from the Japanese Lunisolar calendar. Lunisolar January 1 is always senshō, with the days following in the order given above until the end of the month. Thus, January 2 is tomobiki, January 3 is senbu, and so on. Lunisolar February 1st restarts the sequence at tomobiki. Lunisolar March 1st restarts at senbu, and so on for each month. The last six months repeat the patterns of the first six, so July 1 = senshō, December 1st is shakkō and the moon-viewing day of “August 15th” is always a “butsumetsu.”

This system did not become popular in Japan until the end of the Edo period.

Subscribe to iCal 六曜カレンダー

Christmas Memories, 2008

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 06:42:11 +0000

Ginza Arrows

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 02:17:43 +0000

Today, I spent the afternoon shooting in Ginza. The street that runs along the side of Mitsukoshi, where the Apple store sits, is a broad, East-West avenue that they close to traffic on weekends.

Ginza Arrows is what I call one set I made, using the traffic markings on the street:

Photograph of Jesus

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:10:57 +0000

ginza

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:46:06 +0000

Iron Maiden VS Tokio Hotel

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 00:21:14 +0000

I’m loathe to admit it, but I’m a bit of a regular in the Japan section of Yahoo Answers. It started as a way to pass the time when I was having bad insomnia, but grew into a habit. I’d wake up at three or four in the morning and have a few hours before dawn to kill, so I would answer questions that people asked about moving here or visiting, immigration procedures, customs, food, whatever.

In the Japan group, you get questions from people of all ages, kids wanting some fact for an assignment, people wondering if they will be able to survive here if they’re vegetarians, people who live here and are looking for a place to get some special thing from back home. Most of the questions are pretty basic, the kind of stuff that they could figure out themselves if the had ever heard of Google, but many people want to have a real person answer their question specifically. It’s not a bad way to kill some time, actually.

A few times a day, you get really annoying questions though. People who ask over and over how much a quantity of dollars is worth in yen, or in some cases, they ask about a German pop group called “Tokio Hotel.”

Tokio Hotel is one of those bands that young teenagers listen to, all hair and makeup, led by a pair of german boys called the Kaulitz Twins, who are, according to their fans “the greatest living musical geniuses” and “the best band evarr.”

While I would never deny a young girl her right to have a crush on a boy band, they have absolutely nothing to do with Japan. Their fans, however, often think it best to spurt their enthusiasm in the Japan group, so in one case, I decided to have a bit of fun. The question, (if you could call it that,) came in the form of a very short, very vague few words:

Iron Maiden VS Tokio Hotel?

I decided to delve into it a bit. I’m no Iron Maiden fan, but I’ve certainly heard of them, so I fired up Wikipedia and a few of their fan sites, to see who they were and what might happen if they were pitted against the boys of “Tokio Hotel.” Here’s what I came up with:

Fascinating question!

It comes down to the classic conflict between youth and age. “Tokio Hotel” are young, so that could be an advantage, since the current lineup of Iron Maiden are basically really old. Dave Murray is about 52 and has pretty skinny arms, but I think he could easily take out Bill and Tom Kaulitz, probably with little effort, since they are basically built like a couple of 12 year old girls.

Nicko McBrain is even older, 56, but the guy is a total badass and could make the members of Tokio Hotel cry, just by making a scary face at them. If he actually shouted, they’d pee themselves. The thing is, McBrain became a Christian in 1999 and wouldn’t do such a thing to a group so weak and helpless as T.H.

Bruce Dickinson (now 50) used to be pretty messed up, but he got disgusted with himself after drunkenly eating leftovers from random trays in, get this, a Tokyo hotel (no lie) that he cleaned up his act, became a jet pilot and recently rescued 200 people stranded in Egypt, not to be confused with the time he flew a 747 full of soldiers out of Afghanistan.

Believe me: You Do Not Want To Mess With This Guy.

So, I think it would be no contest. To win any battle, you need to take out the leaders and that’s definitely Tokio Hotel’s weakest point.

The Kaulitz twins wear wigs, makeup and nail polish and exist only to tap into the lucrative demographic of gender-confused young people.

If you eliminated the Kaulitz Twins, there’d be no band. (Nobody cares about the other two guys or even knows their names.)

Iron Maiden, on the other hand, has shown their ability to survive any change. They’ve had at least ten members, including five different lead singers. They had hits that were already oldies when the members of Tokio Hotel were in diapers. You just can’t kill Iron Maiden.

Tokio Hotel, on the other hand are one bad hair day away from falling apart as a band. Even though I just watched a video of theirs on YouTube moments ago, I can’t remember anything about it, except thinking that they must be idiots to leap *up* when jumping from a helicopter.

In five years, nobody will admit to ever having been into Tokio Hotel, while Iron Maiden is still as amazing as ever after 32 years.

So, if it came down to it and they actually did get together to fight, Iron Maiden would crush Tokio Hotel into the worthless little heap of weeping little boys that they are.

By the way, your question has nothing to do with this section of Yahoo! Answers.

I wish I had never heard of this band, but since people keep talking about them here, unfortunately I do.

Best Product Name Ever – Popteen Condoms

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:57:16 +0000

This could only ever happen in Japan. Popteen is a magazine aimed at teenage girls in Japan and through this brand, the goal has been to make condoms something a girl would be comfortable in buying. While I applaud that,…

Tokyo in One Day

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 07:46:40 +0000

Over on Yahoo Answers, someone asked the following question:

“If you had one free day in Tokyo what would you do hour by hour from 5am until midnight?!??”

Here’s my answer, which should be useful to anyone wandering in from Google:

At 5:00, go to Tsukiji fish market, it’s in full swing then. Afterwards, go just outside the market and have a breakfast of sushi and a beer. It’s kind of a tradition.

Next, walk over to Ginza and check that out. Stores might be starting to open, but it doesn’t matter because the clothes won’t fit and you can’t afford the watches. ;-)

Take a short walk to Yurakucho. It’s next to Ginza and sort of interesting.

I’d guess it will be about 9:30 or 10:00 AM at this point. You could head to Akihabara and check that out. It’s all electronics, manga, anime, cosplay maid café, geeks, otaku heaven. Good to go at least once, even if you’re not into that kind of stuff.

From Akihabara, head a couple stops to Ueno and check out Ameyayokocho. It was once the black market after the war, now a big bazaar style market. Ueno park and the zoo are nice if the weather is good, but basically they’re just a park and a zoo.

Hop on the train again and head to Harajuku. If it’s the weekend, wander around the bridge and take pictures of the cosplay freak girls for a little while and then head down to Omotesando. (Just walk down the hill towards the Gap store. Wander, stroll, soak it all in and then head to Fujimama’s for a burger. You’ll want to get a good comfy chair in the front where you can watch the people go by and rest a bit.

Order a second bloody mary and curse yourself for carrying a heavy backpack filled with a GPS, two Lonely Planet guides, an iPhone that doesn’t work here, the power brick for your laptop, all the lenses you own for your heavy DSLR, none of which you’ll use that day, and a bottle of warm water. Better yet, when you head out, carry nothing but a paper map and a pocket digital camera.

After Fujimama’s, cross the big street and wander the back streets of Harajuku until you find Takeshita dori, which means “Jailbait Street” and follow that up to the train station again and head to Shibuya. Have your picture taken in front of Hachiko, the bronze dog statue. Why? no one knows. It’s a good place to chat up cute girls, though, before their boyfriends show up and drag them away, scowling at you. Repeat as necessary. Walk over to the big crossing where they did that scene in the rain from Lost in Translation and walk up the street just to the left of the Starbucks. That’s Centergai. Lots of people.

wander around there.

At this point you’ll be seriously crashing with jet lag. Head back to your hotel and catch a shower, take a nap, marvel at how bad Japanese television is, or, hopefully get to know that girl you met at Hachiko a lot better.

When you’re rested, head out to Shinjuku. Find Kabukicho and wander around, looking for hookers and yakuza. Try not to get too close to either. Don’t go to any of the places that the West Africans will try to drag you in to, but if you must, hide your credit cards and only pay cash. Mostly they’re ripoff places with a few bored Filipina girls in cheap slinky dresses asking you to buy them $20 drinks.

Instead, find “Ramen Jiro” and have the hugest, most amazing bowl of ramen you could ever imagine, or find the little crazy Chinese place called “Shanghai” down the tiny, 1 meter wide alley. You can get dog there, if you ask. (You won’t get it if you don’t.)

Find Goldengai just east of Kabukicho and wander the alleys and little tiny 10-seat bars until you find one that will let you in. “Nana” is good, as is Araku, an Australian bar down the first alley, on the second floor above 10CC. It’s bigger than most, welcoming to foreigners. Don’t go to Champions, the place just at the entrance to Goldengai. Horrible place with drunk Germans singing that stupid Oasis song on Karaoke.

At this point, you should be running back to your hotel.

That about covers everything. You could swap Roppongi for Shinjuku, but not if you care where you wake up. I sort of hate Roppongi anyway—too many foreigners.

Enjoy the trip.

Portland, Maine Show

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:44:30 +0000

If you’re going to be around Portland, Maine, in November or December, be sure to drop in to Ed Pollack’s gallery “A FINE THING” to see some of my photos, along with some of his other friends in his “Friends of ED” show.

Ed’s putting together a show of the work of his friends and I was quite touched that he asked me. I’ve known Ed for more than fifteen years and when I lived in Boston, my favorite way to spend a Saturday afternoon was at Ed’s with a bottle of wine, going through the books and prints that he’d discovered that week. He’s not only a great source of knowledge on the art and artists he likes, he’s also got incredibly good taste.

Sadly, I won’t be able to make it to the show, so if you do stop by, let me know you did.

The “Throw-Away Temple”

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:38:01 +0000

Not far from Minowa station on the Hibiya line is a nondescript temple called 浄閑寺—Jokanji. From the street, it looks like many other Tokyo temples, but behind the new main building is an old cemetery that has one particular point of interest, a crypt and monument to twenty-five thousand prostitutes interred there. Being so close to Halloween, I was looking for a spooky story when my friend Joe mentioned the place.

I didn’t find a ghost story.

What I found instead was a very sad, shameful story about the women and girls used up by the sex industry of Japan. I’ve tried to make this story about the temple itself, but understanding the temple requires a bit of background on the times and the places involved, mainly that of Yoshiwara. This isn’t trying to be a history of Yoshiwara, as plenty of those exist. This piece is about my research into Jokanji, the Throw-Away Temple. I will add to this and make corrections as I find them. As always, I welcome any comment or criticism. There are a lot of parts I may include in the future, such as the nearby memorial associated with Nagai Kafu, a writer whose stories dealt with the lives of these women

During the Tokugawa era, in present-day Senzoku 4-chome, there was a licensed prostitution area called Yoshiwara. The area had been moved from near Nihonbashi in the late 1650′s after a devastating fire leveled much of the city and the new area was known for a time as Shin-Yoshiwara. (新吉原, New Yoshiwara, though eventually the “New” was dropped and people simply referred to the area as Yoshiwara.) For 300 years, the area was home to thousands of women and girls, many of whom were sold by their families as young girls.

Yoshiwara was a walled-in, tightly-controlled area. Patrons entered and exited the area down a curving street headed by a gate not unlike the tori that stands at the entrance to the temple. Transactions were negotiated outside the walls, at nearby teahouses and even samurai were required to leave surrender their swords before they could enter. The women could not, of course, come and go as they pleased. Most were enslaved by debt they could never completely repay. During their service they could leave only for the death of a parent and once a year to view the cherry blossoms in Ueno. For most of the common prostitutes, the only real way out was through their own death.

On on November 11, 1855 the Ansei Edo Earthquake (安政江戸地震, Ansei Edo Jishin) a 6.9 magnitude earthquake struck Edo (The old name for Tokyo) with intermittent aftershocks over the next two weeks. The last major quake to hit Edo had been in 1703, so few if any of the residents of the area had ever experienced a major quake and hadn’t given any thought to earthquake safety.

Buildings collapsed and fires spread rapidly through the city. Unfortunately for the women enslaved in Yoshiwara as common prostitutes, if they had survived the building collapses, they were far more likely to die in the resultant fires. Yoshiwara, after all, was a walled village with only two exits, both narrow, to control the passage of people in and out. Fear of looting slowed the evacuation as well.

Woodcuts I examined at the Taito-ku Library in Kappabashi showed the fates of some of the different classes of people in Yoshiwara—one showed an elegantly-dressed Oiran or high-level courtesan being rushed from the area by two samurai. One samurai was on horseback and both had their swords, indicating that they had been dispatched to rescue this woman, as swords were not allowed in the quarter, even for samurai who were habitués of the brothels. Another print showed lower-class prostitutes clad in the common plain blue kimono that was mandated for working girls. (This rule was ignored by those whose status was higher.) The prints showed the lower classes, both men and women, panicking in the streets, crushed by heavy roof tiles and buildings, crawling through the streets in despair. One showed the interior of a brothel as it collapsed, women and customers tossed about mid-coitus, while a prominent sign on the wall says “火の用心” or “Be careful of fire.” Another showed looters, some themselves trapped under rubble, greedily swallowing gold and silver coins and later “recovering” them as they passed through their systems.

At the time it was a commonly-held belief that earthquakes were caused by an imbalance of the good and evil forces of Yin and Yang, so a major quake, to some, was a sign that social change was needed. (Often referred to as “correlative cosmology.”) The quake was centered northeast of the city and Yoshiwara, too, was northeast of the palace. In Buddhist tradition, the Northeast is known as “Kimon” or the direction that bad luck follows. In 1855, the Northeast of the city was the hardest hit by fires, with the West of the city largely untouched. Yoshiwara in particular was among the worst hit.

Yoshiwara went into a decline and the brothel owners’ profits fell. To counter this decline, the owners brought in more women and lowered prices. Conditions worsened and disease became the norm.

While there had been about fifteen-hundred women working there in 1700, by the turn of the 20th century, there were some nine thousand women working in the area as prostitutes, all in the same small quarter. Most of them suffered from syphilis or tuberculosis or both. Typhoid broke out occasionally. Rarely did a common prostitute live to see her thirtieth birthday. While some historians may glamorize the era in its heyday, life for most of the women working in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries was a miserable existence at best. There was a very high turnover.

At the time of the Ansei quake in 1855, there was a severe shortage of coffins, so much so that people resorted to using sugar casks and barrels as makeshift caskets for even the more wealthy of the dead, so for someone of such low social status as a common prostitute, there would be no such ceremony. Bodies were simply piled until they could be disposed of.

This certainly must have set a precedent for later. When a woman of Yoshiwara died, she died with little pity or notice. Brothel workers would take her body, wrap it in a cheap rush mat, carry her out and dump her at the gates of the nearby Jokanji temple. In all, an estimated 25,000 women were thusly interred. The practice became so common that the temple became known as “Nage Komi Dera,” (投込寺,) the “Throw-in Temple” with all of the connotations of being a dumping ground for unwanted, forgotten women.

Why Jokanji was chosen isn’t clear. It’s not the nearest temple and getting there while carrying a body would have required a fairly roundabout route, at least using the paths shown on maps of the times. Yoshiwara itself was surrounded by rice fields, fairly impassible most of the year. In November, the rice would have been cut to stalks and the ground itself a thick, sticky muck.

The most direct route would have required the use of the front gate, which I find hard to imagine, as it would have been quite bad business to carry dead prostitutes past incoming customers. More likely, the back entrance was used. A woodcut from the time by Hiroshige shows the area, with its narrow roads between the rice paddies.

View of Mt. Fuji from Yoshiwara, from Hiroshige’s 53 Stations of the Tokaido. This is be a Southwest-facing view, therefore from the rear exit of Yoshiwara. The visible road leads away from Jokanji, which is to the North.

Most likely, they used unmarked service paths between the rice fields which would have offered a direct and discreet route straight to the temple, avoiding the streets.

Another view of Mt. Fuji from Yoshiwara, from Hiroshige’s 53 Stations of the Tokaido. In this view, walkable paths in the fields are visible. These paths do not appear on period maps, but may have afforded a passible, discrete route from Yoshiwara to Jokanji.

Around the turn of the century, as Japan opened up after the Meiji Restoration, international pressure started to force some changes to the area. By Meiji 38, (1905,) the practice of dumping bodies there was largely stopped and a monument to the women was erected at Jokanji, but it’s reputation as a dumping ground and the nickname “Throw-in Temple” (nege-komi-dera) stuck. When I first went looking for the place, I wandered a bit before asking a pair of shopkeepers for directions. “I’m looking for Jokanji. A temple in this area…”

“Jokanji? I don’t know it…” the more senior of the two said.

“It’s the throw-in temple,” the assistant offered. “not far from here.”

“Ah, yes—of course!”

He then directed me a couple of blocks away to the entrance to the place. I parked my bicycle outside the temple, becoming a bit dubious that there would be anything worth seeing, as the building is quite new and modern. As you enter the grounds, there is a long wall to the left, behind which is the temple’s cemetery. It’s like most other neighborhood cemeteries, narrow lanes of plot after plot of family monuments. I hadn’t thought of this at first—I had assumed the place would be devoted to the victims of Yoshiwara, but the bulk of the space was used by normal families, most with no likely connection to the mizu shobai or water trade, the sex industry in old Edo. It was, after all, a cemetery before Yoshiwara and continues as one to this day.

A temple worker saw me wandering among the plots and waved me over to the back. “It’s over there” he explained, knowing that I was most likely looking for the monument, without my asking. Once you turn the corner, the monument is obvious, much larger than any of the family memorials. Further down the lane is a large tree. The temple worker explained that the old entrance to the graveyard was beyond that tree and that’s where the bodies were typically dumped.

It’s a grim place on a late October day, so close to Halloween, though there are fresh flowers every few days and ritual incense is burned each day. On the left are sotoba, the wooden sticks that typically bear the deceased’s Kamiyo, the name the person is given after death in the Buddhist tradition. (As most of the souls inside were anonymous, I don’t know whose names are upon these sticks.)

Each day I went there to photograph the place, I’d see a couple of Japanese sight-seers come by with digital cameras to take a few snapshots.

Atop the monument is a seated Buddha holding a staff with six rings affixed to the top. The pillar behind is deeply inscribed “Shin-Yoshiwara-Soureitou,” (新吉原總霊塔) roughly meaning simply “Shin Yoshiwara Memorial.” An older photo of the memorial shows the pillar alone, sitting atop its stone lotus base, indicating that the Buddha figure was added later.

A small shrine sits at the base in the front, with an offering plate (¥7 was in it when I visited) and a place to burn incense, cups of sake and flowers.

Above the standing figure is a red lacquer ‘Hira-Kanzashi’ hair ornament of the type a girl in Yoshiwara might possess, affixed to the wall.

‘Hira-Kanzashi’ hair ornament

Along one side there are a couple of small, barred windows, through which you can see earthenware pots containing the ashes of some of the people interred there:

Along the other side is a locked iron door, leading to the interior of the crypt:

Through the bars, if you let your eyes adjust for a few minutes, you can see that it’s quite large inside. Just inside the door is an iron ladder leading down about three meters to the floor. The walls are lined with shelves on which the pots were stored, but for the most part, empty, as the jars most likely fell and broke in later earthquakes.

Interior of the crypt

Crouching near the window of the door, trying to get a photo, I could smell the interior of the crypt, a cool, earthy smell. It’s much like the smell of an earthen basement, but not quite. It was a familiar smell though, one I’d smelled before, but couldn’t place. I realized after a bit where I’d smelled it before – it was the scent of the bones I’d smelled in the catacombs below Paris.

Addenda, to be streamlined into this at some point:

Matt Treyvaud, of No-Sword was kind enough to provide a translation of part of the inscription on the Nagai Kafu memorial I mentioned. I don’t know a lot about Nagai, so I felt remiss in neglecting him; I’m happy to have this, as he’s obviously an important chronicler of the place and time.

Young people of this world

Do not ask me about this world’s

Art or arts of any times to come.

Am I not a child of Meiji?

When those ways became history, were buried,

The dreams of my youth vanished too

[...]

The last of Edo’s ways are become smoke.

Meiji culture, too, is become ash.

Young people of this world

Do not speak to me of this world’s

Art or arts of any times that may come.

I could clean my clouded glasses

But what could I then see?

Am I not a child of Meiji?

Am I not a child of long-ago and long-gone Meiji?

I had hoped to dig into that a bit more, but haven’t yet had a chance, so I appreciate his help in this.
On another note, Kristen and walked through Minowa, Jokanji and Yoshiwara today and at the end of the day we exited Yoshiwara through what was once it’s back gate and found ourselves at the spot from which Hiroshige had drawn the first image in this post:

I have no doubt that it’s the same spot as in 1830, there was no other road leading from that side of Yoshiwara. Making that realization together with Kristen and having the reference image on my ipod was a remarkable moment.
Oh, I should also mention that I’ll be at Donald Richie’s book launch party this Sunday (Nov. 2, from 5:00 PM) at “What The Dickens” in Ebisu. The book is called “Botandoro” which is a type of Japanese ghost story. I am helping in the arrangements for the party, arranging for the exotic dancers in particular.

On Virtuosity

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 08:00:05 +0000

This started out as an email from a friend who was looking for feedback on his photography, but I decided to take a bit of time and fill it out a bit:

Pardon the delay in replying.

First, I guess a few general thoughts:
First of all, keep in mind this:Every photo that you take is a self portrait. Not your face, of course, but a part of a lifelong portrait of the sort of person you were when you walked this earth. These are the documents that you leave behind as a statement: “This was my life–this is who I was.”
Pretty heavy stuff, but if you think of any dead photographer that you admire, think of how well you think you understand who they were. It’s like that for us, too. Probably moreso, as we have the ability to disseminate any photo we take farther, wider and faster than they ever did. Hell, make explore on Flickr and you probably have an audience bigger than your local newspaper.
Think about that and ask yourself if you’re doing it the way you think is best.

Photograph your life with sincerity and interst, while avoiding banality. Everyday things can be fascinating, but perhaps every little thing isn’t. Are the things you photograph things that you’d write a paragraph about in a book?

Just as anything can be written about, anything can be photographed. This is where things get tricky.

I’ll assume for a moment that you know how to operate your camera—after all, just about anyone can take a properly-exposed picture at this point. The engineers at the camera companies have made it possible for a child to pick up a camera and push the button and get something that’s perfectly-lit, free of blur and technically, well, perfect. That hasn’t been an issue in years.(Of course, you can choose to use your camera in a way that it relies upon you for all of the exposure settings, but that doesn’t enter into this discussion—for now, I’ll assume that you have the ability to make an acceptable photo.)

Photography is a non-verbal form of communication. At its best, it has all of the eloquence of the spoken word, all of the subtlety of a well-played musical instrument. I’m not speaking metaphorically, I mean that photography is a form of language.

What do you want to actually say with your pictures? Think about that. Do you have a message that you want to convey? Do you have some thought that you would put into actual words that you have instead chosen to express through photography?

A competent photographer, however well-schooled in the visual vocabulary of photography, however skilled with his technique, yet lacking a real message is merely acting as a technician. There’s nothing wrong with technicians, of course—the world needs lots of them, even as photographers, to take photos of people and things, but in that capacity they may be artists, but rarely ever will that person be a Virtuoso.

What happens when you transcend the medium, your subject, even yourself, is that you achieve virtuosity. The word virtuoso has been applied mainly to musicians, but it applies to photography as well. The word shares a Latin root with virtue, of course and therein lies the key to understanding what it truly is. When the product of your artistic endeavor becomes more than the notes played, more than the shadows captured on film, more than the words typed dutifully onto paper and manages to grab the audience’s heart and mind, you’ve achieved virtuosity—something akin to a religious experience.

Virtue, after all, is one thing that brings us closer to God. It’s at this point that real communication occurs. This is what it’s all about.

That’s what all artists strive for. It’s why we take photos for the love of it. Photography at its heart is a cold, scientific, technical process. Take a three-dimensional space and use a lens to render it into two dimensions. That’s it, after all—that’s all we do.

When you think of it in those terms, it doesn’t sound very interesting, but then neither does tapping out notes on a piano keyboard or scratching a pencil across a pad of paper. To achieve virtuosity in any of those fields, you need technical ability, of course and some would say, natural born talent.

Once you are a virtuoso, though, the expression of that can be as simple as a single line on paper, a few lines of a haiku or a few notes from your instrument. Rarely does it require overpowering your audience with the technical aspects of your craft.

Sometimes, one achieves virtuosity while striving for the technical. Karl Blossfeldt’s masterwork, Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) was one example that comes to mind. In the 1890′s Blossfeldt set out to document the forms that plants take, in a fairly clinical, precise fashion with his camera, in hopes that it would be a useful reference work for students. What happened was that this book, with its gorgeous, abstracted botanical specimens, touched the hearts of the artists of that time.

His simple, clean, technically-perfect photos transcended his original intention to become a seminal influence upon art for years to come.

Here, a common relative of the buttercup, the Aconitum or Monkshood, becomes almost human in its form, but not merely visually, it shows movement, emotion and expression. The lines and curves of this simple plant have become beauty, music, dance and passion.

These works struck such a chord with the members of the burgeoning Jugendstil and Art Nouveau movements that his forms sprung from the pages of this book and crawled through art and architecture throughout Europe and America, rendered in iron and stone and the stained glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Alfons Mucha, René Lalique, Antoni Gaudí and countless others. Blosfeldt’s work, of course, was not the sole basis of these movements, but each piece became an important part of the cabulary of the meent. The actual plant forms, of course, had been in the gardens and forests since time immemorial, yet it took Blossfeldt to elevate them this way.
Edward Weston did this as well, but perhaps with more awareness of how they’d be received as he shot his bell peppers that evoked nude human forms:

As well as nudes that could be mistaken for bell peppers. ;-)

People have been rephotographing these subjects ever since. You can buy books of poses and lighting techniques, scour eBay for the same cameras these artists used, research film, whatever, but you’re not likely to make a photo that touches the genius of the original. You won’t do it because it’s neither your voice, nor your words.

To make a photo that matters, you need to find your voice and find your message. When you actually feel the spirit and find the words, you’ll know that your work is on track and that someone, somewhere, will care deeply about it. If you are persistent and determined, it’s something that you can achieve, though perhaps not on a regular basis, or with any feeling that it was your hand that created this beautiful thing.

After all, that’s why we have personified virtuosity with the concept of the Muse. The Muse, is a spirit that inhabits the artist’s heart with confounding irregularity. She loves to both delight and torment. She promises eternal devotion to your genius, for you to wake and find her gone without so much as a note of explanation. I’ve written about muse before:

Muses are fickle creatures though—they’ll abandon you at the drop of a hat, or come rushing back when you least expect. It’s a roller coaster that, while it often lifts you to dizzying, spectacular heights, ultimately leaves you standing weak and nauseous on the sidewalk.
Of course, the idea of a “muse” is mythological, but it’s a mythology that has persisted for thousands of years and like most persistent mythologies, it’s workable in practice, even though it’s got no basis in science as we understand it.
If you want to take fascinating pictures, be a fascinating person. Do interesting things and you will make interesting photos. Take honest photos and people will connect with them. Fortes fortuna adiuvat, after all.

Well, I’ve been sitting here in the café for quite some time now, so I should wrap this up for now. I’ll come back and rework it, I suppose, as I’ve touched on a lot of ideas that I’d like to explore some more. Please leave your thoughts below, or just say hello if you’ve read it. I don’t have the readership I once did, so at times I feel lie I’m reading to an empty room.Do sign your name as well, as it’s not always apparent from just logging in, especially from Yahoo/Flickr.

Pole Dance Event Saturday

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:07:11 +0000

Saturday night I’ll be in Kabukicho at an intimate pole dance party, shooting a bit, hanging out all night, having some drinks. You should come by. My dear friend Yuri is organizing the event and it should be a really nice time.

イベントするので

是非来て下さい！
10/11(土)Saturday

新宿歌舞伎町交番から徒歩５分
5min from Kabuki cho police box.

職安通りドン・キホーテから徒歩５分
5min from Don Quixote Shyokuan St.

お蕎麦屋竹村から徒歩すぐ
Soon from soba restraunt Takemura by walk.

の　K’S CAFE (1F)
TEL 0362281465
Kaneshima bld.2-22-8 Kabuki-cho Shinjuku
にてイベントがあります。

☆ Pole dancer’s 　　
　　dream night TIP ☆

@ K’S CAFE
Entrance F/M 2200yen +1Drink
Open 23:00 – Close 4:00

ポールダンサーと仲間がつくるホームパーティー風イベント。
Pole dancers and their friends sets home party style event.

バー、曲のリクエスト受け付け、コンパクトDVDプレイヤー、プロジェクター、ポール、本、ソファ、サボテン、ビーガンケーキなどのあるフロアで楽しく遊んで下さい♪
Bar,music request,compact dvd player,projector,pole,books,sofa,cactus,vegan cake etc,available.

そしてイベントの収益を何かよいことに使うためのアンケートに御協力下さい。
Please fill some enquete/questionaires to use profit from the party for something good.

よいヒント・秘訣をみつけ、シェアする心地良いコミュニケーションの場です。
That is where you find to share and cozy comunication.

映像、写真、音楽、本、衣装など持ち込み歓迎です。
クロークはありません。手荷物はコンパクトに、紛失のないようにして下さい。
Bring your films,photos,music,books,costumes,etc.
NO cloak room.please do not lose and compact your stuff.

☆前売りチケットもあります。お問い合わせは、かおる、ゆり他ダンサーへ☆
Reserved tickets available.Please ask Kaolu,Yuri and other dancers.

British Journal of Photography – Dual-purpose camera on the way from Fujifilm

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:59:46 +0000

Why am I so excited about a camera that looks like it’s from the early part of the last century? While camera companies are doing their best to scrape their film camera divisions from their shoes, Fujifilm and more interestingly , Cosina, are coming up with film cameras that wouldn’t gotten stares snapping photos of the 1939 World’s Fair. (You could easily find film to fit it at the fair, too.) Folding bellows cameras started going out of vogue as amateur cameras at the end of World War II. So who in their right mind would release a medium format folder in this day and age? Fujifilm and Cosina, apparently…

I suspect that Cosina’s president, Kobayashi Hirofumi had a hand in this. Under Kobayashi, Cosina has made some baffling but brilliant design decisions. For example, when they decided to start making cameras for themselves under the Voigtländer name, the design they chose to improve upon was something from the 1920′s—an early Leica camera that didn’t even have a range finder for focusing. (Keep in mind that this is a company that had been building cameras for other companies for ages—it wasn’t that they didn’t know how to make a range finder focusing system, it’s that they chose not to.) When they did start putting range finders on their cameras, they made them as bright and as easy to use as the best that Leica has to offer

When they decided upon the lens mount for these cameras, it too was a design considered obsolete by the rest of the industry, the 39-millimeter threaded mount that was abandoned by Leica in the 1950′s. Canon used it too, plus lots of other companies, but nobody’s made a new one in decades. Perhaps there was a hidden market. Cosina makes fantastic lenses. The quality of the glass is superb and the image quality fantastic. Their lenses are also tremendously well-made and affordable. The lenses I have by them have held up for me for years of abuse. They’re basically brass, glass and steel, with no electronics to fail and no structural plastic. The markings are etched into the brass, not screen printed on, so they’ll never wear away. They look and feel like lenses from fifty years ago. So why the screw mount?

Leica used to use a screw mount. They made hundreds of thousands of cameras with that mount before they introduced the “M” mount, a bayonet type in 1954, with the M3 camera. Lens mount changes are never done lightly—for photographers, the lens mount on a camera body can be the most important consideration in choosing a camera, because one typically can’t use a lens made by one company on another company’s camera body. As a pro photographer will spend thousands and thousands of dollars on lenses, they wind up being committed to that maker.

So when Leica changed their mount, they made adapters for their users to put onto their old lenses so they could be used with full-functionality on the new bodies. This is still the case, actually. You can pick up a lens from 1935, say an old screw-mount Elmar, screw it into an adapter and pop it on the Leica M8, their latest digital and it will work just as well as ever.

Same thing with the Voigtländer lenses. By going with the screw mount, they probably doubled the number of bodies that these lenses will work flawlessly on. There’s an awful lot of prewar Leicas sitting in closets waiting to be rediscovered by young photographers. They were so well-made that a good number of them only need a roll of film to be put back into service. Many of the lenses also come with external finders as well, which is a good thing because these early cameras had finders that are now dim and hard to use.

While many will extoll the virtues of the old Elmar lenses for shooting, if you want some variety Cosina/Voigtländer lenses are the only new options if you want something with modern coatings to reduce lens flare and give accurate color. Compared to antique Leica lenses, they’re a real bargan, too—I’ve gotten most of mine for around $300, where similar Leica lenses would be several times as much.

I have a couple of old Leica bodies, an M3 and an M2 that I got at reasonable prices, but for the most part, I use my C/V lenses on them. Here’s my M2, with a 50mm C/V Heliar and external finder:

It’s a wonderful combination. The Leica body is solid and reliable and the lens is one of the sharpest lenses ever made for any camera. Very affordable, too, if you can find one.

Edit: No discussion of Voigtländer cameras would be complete without a link to Stephen Gandy’s excellent and exuberant site CameraQuest. There is more information than you can shake a stick at there on all things Cosina, plus it’s probably the best place to buy them.

So back to the folder…

Back in the day, the larger 120 format of film was more popular for amateur photographers. It’s several times larger than 35mm film, so the increased size made up for the all-too-often lower-quality cameras and optics in cheap folders and box cameras. The folding design and bellows made them compact and light, something that would easily slip into the pocket of an overcoat, or on a strap on your shoulder all day, unlike a non-folding design. The bellows were cloth or leather, both prone to getting pinholes from wear at the corners, though, so often they didn’t age well. Still, when combined with good lenses, they are capable of taking fantastic photos, at resolutions that far outstrip what you can get with a digital camera that any mortal can afford.

120-size film fell out of favor with amateurs though, with the 35mm SLR craze of the 1960′s and 1970′s. It stayed around mainly for wedding photographers, I’d guess, but was at risk of disappearing as they all switched over to digital a few years ago. Thankfully, it found a niche with the Holga. A Holga is a cheap Chinese plastic camera that’s wildly popular with creative amateurs, due to its quirky, heavily-vignetted style of photos. If nothing else, Holgas taught a new generation how to load and handle 120 film, which is a daunting prospect at first, as the film doesn’t come in a canister, it’s simply rolled on a spool with a heavy light-proof paper backing.

After using a Holga for a while, many people ask what other medium format cameras are out there. How can they improve their image quality, while still using this wonderfully-detailed film? I think Fuji’s folder is uniquely positioned to be that camera.

It will be light and handy. Given that it has a lens shutter, I’m guessing that it will sync a flash at any speed, a limitation with other cameras. Some modern material will keep the bellows light-tight and the range finder will be bright and a sheer joy to use. They call it dual-purpose because you can switch between 6x6cm and 6x7cm, which is a simply huge amount of film to store your image on. I hope they did this in a way that you don’t have to open the camera to switch formats, but even if you did, I could happily live with it. After all, there’s only about a dozen shots on a roll of 120, so you don’t have to wait long between changes.

Sure, there are other options for medium format, but most of them are too heavy to carry around unless you’re out “taking photos.” This will be one you can toss into a backpack and take everywhere.

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on one. When I do, I’ll give it a thorough review.

Dual-purpose camera on the way from Fujifilm

Fujifilm has revealed additional details on its upcoming medium format film camera, the GF670.

Shown as a prototype at the Photokina trade show in Cologne, the GF670 is expected to be released in 2009. The GF670 is a portable folding camera jointly developed by Fujifilm and Cosina. It features a mechanism for switching between two film formats, 6x7cm and 6x6cm. It is fitted with a 80mm f/3.5 fixed lens, which is composed of six glass elements in four groups. It has an automatic lens shutter, an SPD sensor with both automatic and manual autofocus. The ISO ranges from 25 to 3200.

While Fujifilm will release the GF670 under its own brand in Japan, the medium-format camera will be renamed the Voigtlander Bessa III outside of Japan, where Cosina will take charge of its distribution.

[From British Journal of Photography - Dual-purpose camera on the way from Fujifilm]

Keep Shooting

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 02:11:36 +0000

I was really in a funk last night. After I posted yesterday, I went down to Shibuya with Ben to our weekly photo geek beer meeting, had a few beers, but left when it got too crowded and noisy. I was in a pretty foul mood—I didn’t want to sit and talk about cameras and lenses. I didn’t really want to be sitting and stewing, so I excused myself and went to shoot a bit on Centergai, the street that runs from Shibuya station, up towards where we meet each week. Centergai is always filled with people, as you near midnight, it’s Shibuya’s jugular vein, with mobs of people draining from the clubs and cafés down to the station.

I walked the street for a while, looking for some inspiration. I didn’t feel like shooting random strangers, street-style. As I walked around, I spotted a young guy working a corner, selling his CDs and passing out flyers. He had a good look, so I approached him and asked if he would mind me shooting him for a while. He reluctantly agreed, so I told him to basically ignore me while I shot, though we did do a few that were more portrait-like.

He goes by the name YENYEN and has a website for his music business at YenYen.info

I got the sense he’ll do well—he’s motivated and energetic and really put his heart into working the corner to promote his business, which isn’t an easy thing to do.

Café Thoughts

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:47:49 +0000

In my neighborhood is an unlikely little café, far nicer than you’d expect to find in a little shitamachi neighborhood like mine on the north end of Ueno park. It’s a stylish little place, in the shell of an old shop that once made electrical fittings, one of the many places that does Japan’s small manufacturing. In making the café, they preserved a lot of the original—the ceilings are darkened wood rafters and the bookshelves that line one wall are stained to match, but the overall ambience of the place is clean and light and airy. It’s a lovely little place. An iPod plays jazz through a small stereo and the customers, mostly local women, meet throughout the day. If you happen to be in Iriya, you might want to stop by: Iriya Plus Café.

So that’s where I am right now, wondering what I should be doing with my photography. You see, I’m in the middle of a dry spell. I simply have no idea what to shoot and the photos I do take these days aren’t inspiring me. It’s a terrible feeling, to sit in my studio, surrounded by thousands of dollars worth of great cameras and lights and backdrops and not have any desire to make pictures.

It’s not just the prospect of making pictures that fills me with dread—I’ve been having a hard time looking at photos as well. Images that used to stir my senses now seen flat and grey, lifeless and two-dimensional. Not even the pictures of Cartier-Bresson or Willy Ronis, my two old standbys, get me excited any more. I’m just not seeing what I used to see.

It’s not even a matter of getting out to new places—yesterday, Ben and I got up at a bit after four in the morning to catch the first train to the fish market at Tsukiji, to shoot a few rolls of film. In total, I shot three rolls, but didn’t feel much. I’m in no hurry to develop them.

The problem is, if you can’t feel your subject, you don’t really see it. If you can’t see it, you can’t take a photo worth a damn, at least not in the sense that you made the photo and it’s a part of your life. You see, there’s a mental state you enter when you’re shooting worthwhile photos: some describe the feeling as being “in the zone” where you have an awareness that transcends the usual. Though your eye is at the viewfinder, you are aware of things outside the frame and the whole scene takes on a very three-dimensional feeling, as though you are seeing the whole situation from above and slightly behind yourself and the subjects are at once both composed for your frame and carefully-choreographed like actors on a stage. It’s a wonderful feeling—energetic, creative, productive. It’s the feeling of being smiled upon by the muse. I wrote about the muse a while back in a discussion about The Shot That Got Away:

There’s so much more to a good picture than a good subject in an interesting circumstance that it’s not worth worrying about missing what they call here in Japan a “Shutter Chance – シャッターチャンス”. (A term that always make me cringe.)

Adolph Hitler could ride by on a unicycle, naked but for a sombrero, but if you’re not in the right place, with the right light, an interesting angle and no unfortunate distracting elements, it’s likely to be a crap shot.

To make a strong, significant photo, you’re at the mercy of your muse.

If you’ve treated her well, respected and fascinated her with your ideas and vision, you’ll be rewarded with shots that are simply magical.

It won’t be a matter of “getting” or “not getting” an opportunistic shot, it will be a case of everything falling into place, just as the heavens open up and a beam of perfect light streams down.

Muses are fickle creatures though—they’ll abandon you at the drop of a hat, or come rushing back when you least expect. It’s a roller coaster that, while it often lifts you to dizzying, spectacular heights, ultimately leaves you standing weak and nauseous on the sidewalk.

Of course, the idea of a “muse” is mythological, but it’s a mythology that has persisted for thousands of years and like most persistent mythologies, it’s workable in practice, even though it’s got no basis in science as we understand it.

If you want to take fascinating pictures, be a fascinating person. Do interesting things and you will make interesting photos. Take honest photos and people will connect with them. Fortes fortuna adiuvat, after all.

(Oh—Take your camera out of your bag and have it ready, or leave the damn thing home.

Having a camera in the bottom of your bag is insulting to your muse and she will punish you with disappointment.

It’s like dragging your girlfriend around for an afternoon and ignoring her the whole time. It’s not going to go over well.)

I suspect I wrote that at a point in my life when I was actually shooting well; I don’t remember just now.

The real trouble is, this funk feeds upon itself: the longer you go without getting a picture that blows your hair back, the harder it is to get one.

I need to do something quick, or I might as well hang up my cameras and do something else.

Yesterday was an interesting day, but not photographically, really, which was a bit of a nice change. After going to shoot the fish market, we walked to nearby Ginza to shoot some more, since the early morning light was nice. There were schoolgirls on every corner selling red feathers for charity. We bought a couple, much to their giggling amusement. I would have had just as nice a time if I’d left my camera at home, though. When we did return home, I gave my bicycle some much-needed attention, truing the wheels, adjusting the gears and brakes and oiling up the parts that had gotten rusty. It felt good. It felt familiar, with a bit of nostalgia for my days as a bike messenger, tewnty-two years ago. I gave half a thought to applying to a messenger company again, but I suspect my stamina isn’t what it once was, when I was a kid of twenty, happy to ride through any sort of weather, for the sheer joy of being fast and invincible and immortal. After more than my share of accidents, I wised up, when after a particularly severe concussion, the doctor in the emergency room told me I wouldn’t survive another hit like the one I’d gotten. Still, on a cool October morning, there’s nothing like tuning up a bike till it runs like new, even at the expense of a couple of skinned knuckles.

So I don’t know if I’ll be posting many pictures for a while. As is always the case, the muse may ring up for a midnight booty call, or perhaps a quickie in the back alleys of Shinjuku—stranger things have happened, after all.

Wish me luck…

Photo Biz Nite

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 08:54:20 +0000

Ben was kind enough enough to record my speech last night at Martine’s Photo Biz Nite event:

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Jim O’Connell, speaking at Photo Biz Nite Tokyo from Jim O’Connell on Vimeo.

TED | TEDBlog: Bloggers: Help break James Nachtwey’s story on Oct. 3

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:33:30 +0000

27 September 2008
Bloggers: Help break James Nachtwey’s story on Oct. 3

Photographer James Nachtwey will be breaking a big story on October 3 — using his powerful photographs to share a vital story that the world needs to know about. You can be part of the breaking news by adding a badge to your site.

Let your readers know that — starting October 3 — these pictures will be shown on outdoor screens around the world and online. Seeing and sharing these pictures will truly make a difference in solving the crisis that James is photographing.

[From TED | TEDBlog: Bloggers: Help break James Nachtwey's story on Oct. 3]

James Nachtwey seems to be taking a page from Steve Jobs’ playbook to fulfill the wish he made at the end of his speech at TED:

“I’m working on a story that the world needs to know about.

I wish for you to help me break it, in a way that provides spectacular proof

of the power of news photography in the digital age.”

Video

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:44:23 +0000

Trying this on Vimeo instead:

Jim O’Connell Photographs from Jim O’Connell on Vimeo.

(Click on the button to show it in full-screen mode.)

Just a quick idea I was playing around with tonight…

I don’t think I’ve found the ideal way to present my photos yet.

Let me know what you think.

Easier Login

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 06:05:18 +0000

Here’s a bit of a non-camera news about the site: After my last re-vamp of the backend, I decided to add support for OpenID.

What that means, basically, is that you don’t need to create an account to make comments here, you just type in the address of your home page on a service that supports it. In effect, if you’re a member of almost any social network site, you can use that account to log in, except that I never need to see your password.

The Login page is here. don’t use the username and password fields, type the URL in the third box.

Give it a try and let me know if you have any trouble!

As I probably know most of you from Flickr, you’d probably want to sign in using your Flickr address (not your login and password!) It should look like:

Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/username

For other accounts that you may have, here’s a list of URLs to try:

AOL: openid.aol.com/screenname
Blogger: blogname.blogspot.com
LiveDoor: profile.livedoor.com/username
LiveJournal: username.livejournal.com
Orange (France Telecom): http://openid.orange.fr/
SmugMug: username.smugmug.com
Technorati: technorati.com/people/technorati/username
Vox: member.vox.com
Yahoo: http://openid.yahoo.com
WordPress.com: username.wordpress.com

OpenID enabled

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Advice for young photographers | Lightstalkers

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:38:55 +0000

Just read a piece by Michael Kamber of Kamberphoto.com over on LightStalkers that’s well worth a read for all sorts of photographers, not just young ones:

Advice for young photographers:

10 June, 07
I am writing this from the Baghdad bureau of The New York Times where I am on assignment.

I have received dozens of queries from photojournalists starting out in the business. I am writing this in response, partly so I can refer others to it in the future and not spend time on lengthy replies.

Some beginners ask for advice on gear, others on how to get started finding assignments and selling their work. I will describe my own path into photojournalism here and give some general advice that may be useful.

This is not definitive in any way. It is simply my experience and opinion formulated from twenty years experience as a photojournalist. No doubt others can weigh in and improve this with their comments and ideas.

[From Advice for young photographers | Lightstalkers]

Andreas Johnsen Slideshow

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 02:56:46 +0000

Posted new set called Andreas Johnson Slideshow.

Andreas is a filmmaker who was in town this summer to promote his movie “Inside Outside.”

PingMag asked me to do some pictures of him for an article after the interview was conducted. We didn’t have much time and were confined to a small office that was also being used for storage, so I had to get a bit creative to get anything interesting, using a couple of upended tables as a backdrop.

Andreas Johnson Slideshow

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Posted new set called Andreas Johnson Slideshow.
Andreas is a filmmaker who was in town this summer to promote his movie “Inside Outside.”

Ping Magazine asked me to do some pictures of him for an article after the interview was conducted. We didn’t have much time and were confined to a small office that was also being used for storage

A Day at the Doujunkai

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 01:39:58 +0000

Click the photo for a slideshow.

The Dojunkai Apartments : The
Beginning of Apartment Living
The current mainstream steel reinforced
concrete apartments that were built prior to
World War II are called Dojunkai apartments.
The Dojunkai was a foundation established
following the Great Kanto Earthquake to help
victims in need of shelter. It was an external
body of the Interior Ministry and was funded
by contributions from within Japan and
overseas. The Dojunkai supplied 12,000
housing units, including 2,500 apartments,
between 1926 and 1941. All of the
apartments were reinforced concrete structures
that placed a premium on earthquake
resistance and most of the properties were
three stories in height. In addition to having
proper electricity, plumbing and gas, each of
the units was equipped with flush toilets. At
the time they were built, these housing units
were well known and admired for their
leading-edge conveniences and technologies
such as elevators, steam heaters, telephones
and baths. The aforementioned comforts
proved to be very popular despite the
concern that the apartment style of housing
might not be well accepted as a part of
Japanese lifestyle.

Quoted from http://xrl.us/oq6bk

A Couple of New Sets

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 01:15:07 +0000

(For the impatient, you can jump straight to the new sets: Angel and Rebel. Do come back afterwards though.)

If you’ve been following my Flickr account, you will have noticed a preponderance of new photos, mostly titled “Eri.”

Eri, my new model and as some have suggested, perhaps my new Muse. Eri is a girl I met a few weeks ago, when she came along when I was shooting her friend, Mari. At first I was a bit thrown off that she came along—when I set out to shoot someone new, I put a lot of thought into how I’m going to try shoot that person, pose them, bring out things about them.

In Mari’s case, I’d met her and asked to do her photo. She’s quite busy with her work, so it took several adjustments of schedules to find a couple hours to shoot. Mari’s a beautiful girl, with distinctive features and wonderful, kinky-curly hair.

To shoot Mari, I wanted to concentrate on just shooting her, not have to amuse some tagalong friend who might get bored and suddenly decide that the two of them could be having a much better time somewhere else, so I told Eri to jump in for a few pictures.
With Mari, I had thought about how I would put her into the frame, how I’d position her and pose her and how to get her to relax and show the camera the spark that I saw when I first noticed her. It’s a lot of work finding that moment, finding the right light and angle, making sure your lens is focusing and you haven’t filled up your camera’s memory card. You need to do that much to get a good shot and it’s the kind of preparation you need to have out of the way in case The Gods decide to bless you with something better than good, the elusive Great Shot.
I had Eri take off her hat, I had her and Mari move to where the light was good and started shooting a few fun pictures, not thinking they’d be anything but snapshots.

How wrong I was.
Of course I could see that Eri was a good looking girl, but there are a million beautiful girls in Tokyo, both Japanese and foreign. A beautiful girl in person can be quite unremarkable when photographed, after all—being photogenic has little to do with how you look. Finding a photogenic face is a remarkable, rare occurrence, like seeing a shooting star on a cold November night.There’s a simple way to tell how photogenic a person is: Take their picture. Sometimes you see it in the photo when you have gone looking for it, but other times, it surprises you. This time, I looked at the snapshots of Eri on the back of my camera and felt my insides do a flip. She looked like an actress whose name I couldn’t quite place.
That day, my camera fell in love with Eri.

I quickly arranged to start shooting more of her. We’ve gotten together twice now, meeting at my little studio space for a few hours at a time. Eri’s a girl, a sweet, down-to-earth girl, who effortlessly produces looks that ranged from sultry and dangerous to virginal and innocent. One moment she’s a leather-clad biker chick swigging bourbon from the bottle, another moment she’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever spent a Sunday morning whispering across your pillow with.With a change of the lights, she’s a prewar movie star, perhaps young Lauren Bacall or Veronica Lake with peek-a-boo bangs, or even Ocassia, the allegorical personification of opportunity, known by her unruly forelock.

As I shoot her, I can barely keep up—It’s a constant game of focus and frame, check the exposure, check the lights, reframe, recompose and wait for those wonderful moments where something electric happens. “Hold that, don’t move,” I’ll say, as I struggle to keep up, “no, wait, forget it—that’s better!” as she unleashes yet another killer smile, or her eyes burn intensively into the camera. She does this all without pretense or forethought—when she catches herself at it, I invariably wind up with four or five frames of her easy laughter. Shooting her is a delight, an exhausting, wonderful escape from reality.
I hope you’ll pardon all of this fawning, but it’s to let you all know why I’m spending all my time shooting her, rather than roaming the nighttime streets stealing shots of gangsters. Frankly, I’d gotten bored of my photos, uninspired by re-hashing old themes, the same ideas. I would send hours going over frame after frame of the same old photos, trying to wring some tiny bit of the old feeling from them, but it just wasn’t happening.

Now, it’s happening. Where I would before let roll after roll go unprocessed or processed and ignored, now I savor every batch. Before, for every five hundred photos I would shoot, I’d get one or two that I liked, which isn’t bad, as the photographers reading this know. Now, I easily get twenty or thirty from those five hundred. I wake up at 4:30 or 5:00 each morning after the shoot and start importing and processing the photos, sorting, adjusting, cropping them, arranging them into themes and exporting them to galleries. It’s a great feeling to have such great material to work with for a change.
Of course you may be reading this and thinking “Jim’s in love again” and in a way, you’d be right, but I’m not in love with a girl, I’m in love with the image of a girl. Erica’s become a friend and I enjoy the time we spend together immensely, but the girl I might talk to over a couple of beers is not the same as this wonderful fictional creature we create with a camera, when a white muslin backdrop transforms a night in my shabby little studio into lazy day in a Manhattan penthouse.

So I hope you’ll indulge me in this little diversion and perhaps enjoy this bit of fantasy with me. I haven’t gotten the photos I want to get yet, so I’ll keep shooting as long as Eri is having fun.
In the mean time, I hope you’ll like seeing a couple of galleries I threw together. The first is called “Angel” and shows some of the sweeter, softer images. The second, I’ve nicknamed “Rebel“, a fun set done while playing with props like my old leather jacket, aviator sunglasses and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, done while blasting David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel.”

Yasukuni

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:54:49 +0000

On Friday, a group of us went down to Yasukuni shrine for the anniversary of the end of WWII to shoot some pictures.

I’ve been down there a lot, as I used to live nearby in Kagurazaka and once or twice before on the August 15th anniversary.

This time, I wanted to shoot with more purpose than I had before, taking better pictures.
I got there early, around 8:30, which, as it turns out, was a bit too late to see former prime minister Koizumi paying his respects. I ran into a few photographers I knew or that I’d seen around. Bruce Meyer was there, Gon-chan (a tabloid photog I know from Kabukicho,) and a few others who looked familiar.
Since Yasukuni is such a controversial place, you get all sorts of people there, ranging from families honoring fallen relatives, old soldiers, right-wingers and then a strange sub-group I call the CosPlayers. CosPlay is what Japanese call Costume Play and most often manifests itself when fans will dress up as their favorite characters from comic books or animated cartoons. The Yasukuni CosPlayers, however, dress up as soldiers, mostly from the second world war, but there’s one old duffer who wears a white beard and a getup from the late 1800′s. They get a lot of attention, of course, as they strut around saluting for the cameras, before making a grand entrance up the walkway to the temple. You’ll see their photos along with any international news story on Yasukuni, which I think is a bit of a shame. Often you’ll hear them described as old soldiers donning their uniforms, but that’s not the case, as most of them are under sixty, some in their 30′s and 40′s.

Other times, you’ll hear them described as Right-Wingers, but though their personal beliefs might be on the right, they’re not a part of the established right-wing groups. (I could be wrong on that point, but though they sat in the same area with the right-wingers, they didn’t seem to be connected in any formal way.)

The true right-wing groups are known as the Uyoku Dantai. They do dress in uniforms, but para-military at best, not WWII surplus. Typically they wear blue worker’s outfits with the name of their organization on the left breast of their shirt or jumpsuit. Other adornments include embroidered patches such as the Japanese flag. Headbands are sometimes worn, as well, typically with the Japanese flag.

There are many Uyoku Dantai groups, some with close ties to the Yakuza. The largest, the Dai Nippon Seinen Sha, (大日本青年社, or “Japan Youth Party”) was founded by a branch of the noted crime syndicate, Sumiyoshi-ikka. (Sumiyoshi family.)
Wikipedia has a good article on the different groups.

These were the groups I was most interested in shooting.

Adrian had gotten some good pictures of them last year, so I decided to see what it was all about. What happened was a revelation to me. It seems that the whole protest is carefully-choreographed, with well-understood boundaries. Police wear riot gear and protestors make as much noise as possible. There’s some shoving, but no fists thrown. The police have their riot shields, but there are no batons out. Likewise, the Uyoku don’t try very hard to cross the barriers, content to put on a nice display of Aggressive Non-Violence.

Take a look at the slideshow.

A Day at the Doujunkai

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Click the photo for a slideshow.

The Dojunkai Apartments : The
Beginning of Apartment Living
　The current mainstream steel reinforced
concrete apartments that were built prior to
World War II are called Dojunkai apartments.
The Dojunkai was a foundation established
following the Great Kanto Earthquake to help
victims in need of shelter. It was an external
body of the Interior Ministry and was funded
by contributions from within Japan and
overseas. The Dojunkai supplied 12,000
housing units, including 2,500 apartments,
between 1926 and 1941. All of the
apartments were reinforced concrete structures
that placed a premium on earthquake
resistance and most of the properties were
three stories in height. In addition to having
proper electricity, plumbing and gas, each of
the units was equipped with flush toilets. At
the time they were built, these housing units
were well known and admired for their
leading-edge conveniences and technologies
such as elevators, steam heaters, telephones
and baths. The aforementioned comforts
proved to be very popular despite the
concern that the apartment style of housing
might not be well accepted as a part of
Japanese lifestyle.

Quoted from http://xrl.us/oq6bk

A Day at the Doujunkai

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Click the photo for a slideshow.

The Dojunkai Apartments : The
Beginning of Apartment Living
　The current mainstream steel reinforced
concrete apartments that were built prior to
World War II are called Dojunkai apartments.
The Dojunkai was a foundation established
following the Great Kanto Earthquake to help
victims in need of shelter. It was an external
body of the Interior Ministry and was funded
by contributions from within Japan and
overseas. The Dojunkai supplied 12,000
housing units, including 2,500 apartments,
between 1926 and 1941. All of the
apartments were reinforced concrete structures
that placed a premium on earthquake
resistance and most of the properties were
three stories in height. In addition to having
proper electricity, plumbing and gas, each of
the units was equipped with flush toilets. At
the time they were built, these housing units
were well known and admired for their
leading-edge conveniences and technologies
such as elevators, steam heaters, telephones
and baths. The aforementioned comforts
proved to be very popular despite the
concern that the apartment style of housing
might not be well accepted as a part of
Japanese lifestyle.

Quoted from http://xrl.us/oq6bk

A couple of new sets

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

(For the impatient, you can jump straight to the new sets: Angel and Rebel. Do come back afterwards though.)

If you’ve been following my Flickr account, you will have noticed a preponderance of new photos, mostly titled “Eri.”

Eri is Erica, my new model and as some have suggested, perhaps my new Muse. Erica is a girl I met a few weeks ago, when she came along when I was shooting her friend, Mariko. At first I was a bit thrown off that she came along—when I set out to shoot someone new, I put a lot of thought into how I’m going to try shoot that person, pose them, bring out things about them.

In Mariko’s case, I’d met her and asked to do her photo. She’s quite busy with her work, so it took several adjustments of schedules to find a couple hours to shoot. Mari’s a beautiful girl, with distinctive features and wonderful, kinky-curly hair.

To shoot Mari, I wanted to concentrate on just shooting her, not have to amuse some tagalong friend who might get bored and suddenly decide that the two of them could be having a much better time somewhere else, so I told Erica to jump in for a few pictures.
With Mari, I had thought about how I would put her into the frame, how I’d position her and pose her and how to get her to relax and show the camera the spark that I saw when I first noticed her. It’s a lot of work finding that moment, finding the right light and angle, making sure your lens is focusing and you haven’t filled up your camera’s memory card. You need to do that much to get a good shot and it’s the kind of preparation you need to have out of the way in case The Gods decide to bless you with something better than good, the elusive Great Shot.
I had Erica take off her hat, I had her and Mari move to where the light was good and started shooting a few fun pictures, not thinking they’d be anything but snapshots.

How wrong I was.
Of course I could see that Erica was a good looking girl, but there are a million beautiful girls in Tokyo, both Japanese and foreign. A beautiful girl in person can be quite unremarkable when photographed, after all—being photogenic has little to do with how you look. Finding a photogenic face is a remarkable, rare occurrence, like seeing a shooting star on a cold November night.There’s a simple way to tell how photogenic a person is: Take their picture. Sometimes you see it in the photo when you have gone looking for it, but other times, it surprises you. This time, I looked at the snapshots of Erica on the back of my camera and felt my insides do a flip. She looked like an actress whose name I couldn’t quite place.
That day, my camera fell in love with Eri.

I quickly arranged to start shooting more of her. We’ve gotten together twice now, meeting at my little studio space for a few hours at a time.Erica’s a girl, a sweet, down-to-earth girl, who effortlessly produces looks that ranged from sultry and dangerous to virginal and innocent. One moment she’s a leather-clad biker chick swigging bourbon from the bottle, another moment she’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever spent a Sunday morning whispering across your pillow with.With a change of the lights, she’s a prewar movie star, perhaps young Lauren Bacall or Veronica Lake with peek-a-boo bangs, or even Ocassia, the allegorical personification of opportunity, known by her unruly forelock.
As I shoot her, I can barely keep up—It’s a constant game of focus and frame, check the exposure, check the lights, reframe, recompose and wait for those wonderful moments where something electric happens. “Hold that, don’t move,” I’ll say, as I struggle to keep up, “no, wait, forget it—that’s better!” as she unleashes yet another killer smile, or her eyes burn intensively into the camera. She does this all without pretense or forethought—when she catches herself at it, I invariably wind up with four or five frames of her easy laughter. Shooting her is a delight, an exhausting, wonderful escape from reality.
I hope you’ll pardon all of this fawning, but it’s to let you all know why I’m spending all my time shooting her, rather than roaming the nighttime streets stealing shots of gangsters. Frankly, I’d gotten bored of my photos, uninspired by re-hashing old themes, the same ideas. I would send hours going over frame after frame of the same old photos, trying to wring some tiny bit of the old feeling from them, but it just wasn’t happening.
Now, it’s happening. Where I would before let roll after roll go unprocessed or processed and ignored, now I savor every batch. Before, for every five hundred photos I would shoot, I’d get one or two that I liked, which isn’t bad, as the photographers reading this know. Now, I easily get twenty or thirty from those five hundred. I wake up at 4:30 or 5:00 each morning after the shoot and start importing and processing the photos, sorting, adjusting, cropping them, arranging them into themes and exporting them to galleries. It’s a great feeling to have such great material to work with for a change.
Of course you may be reading this and thinking “Jim’s in love again” and in a way, you’d be right, but I’m not in love with a girl, I’m in love with the image of a girl. Erica’s become a friend and I enjoy the time we spend together immensely, but the girl I might talk to over a couple of beers is not the same as this wonderful fictional creature we create with a camera, when a white muslin backdrop transforms a night in my shabby little studio into lazy day in a Manhattan penthouse.

So I hope you’ll indulge me in this little diversion and perhaps enjoy this bit of fantasy with me. I haven’t gotten the photos I want to get yet, so I’ll keep shooting as long as Erica is having fun.
In the mean time, I hope you’ll like seeing a couple of galleries I threw together. The first is called “Angel” and shows some of the sweeter, softer images. The second, I’ve nicknamed “Rebel“, a fun set done while playing with props like my old leather jacket, aviator sunglasses and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, done while blasting David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel.”

On Men and Cameras

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 01:03:33 +0000

On a private forum today, user Ispistole posted the following under the title “Chickensoup for the Self-Doubting Photographer: The DP Review Streetphotography Thread”:

I have a love/hate affair with DP Review. Tech-heads obsessing over the minutiae of cameras that, often, don’t even exist (Canon G10). Or, if they do – say, the Sigma DP1, they’re already demanding the next model and what they want to see on it.

And then there’s the flaming and brand-dissing. Take the new Panasonic Lumix LX3, an interesting camera in itself. I’ve been following the hysteria over on the Panasonic thread at DP Review, as they pull the specs apart, decrying the sensor, the zoom, the noise reduction, even before the cameras been officially released.

But what amuses me most of all, is when these gear-heads post their pics. I mean, I know we all doubt ourselves and our abilities at times, but when I see this I sure feel a lot happier with my own stuff.

Perhaps they should spend more time learning how to use their cameras, and less time discussing the perfect camera. Just a thought.

*edit* Worryingly, on several it looks like they’re stalking human game rather than taking candid shots.

Sometimes, when I’m replying to these, I get caught up in the subject. Here’s what I just wrote in reply:

The reasons for forums like that run older and deeper than you might imagine. It’s a question of impotence.

(Uh-oh, I feel a rant coming on…)

Most men buy cameras because their wives won’t let them have guns. (Though single men often own both.)

They buy them, not to actually *use* them, but to have them “just in case.” Just as buying a gun won’t make you a marksman, buying a camera won’t make you a photographer. That takes practice and skill.

Too often, men buy them for that moment of empowerment that comes when you stand at the counter, fondling it before finally telling the clerk “I’ll take it” with a knowing nod and the clerk’s acknowledgment of “Excellent choice, sir. I can either box it all up, or load it for you if you prefer to try it out on the street today…” with a sly wink.

That feeling of power quickly dissipates for most when they see how bad they are at doing anything significant with their purchase and they slip into an impotent cycle of both defending their choice to their male friends by reciting specifications and talking about others who did significant things with the same gear while guiltily perusing magazines and catalogs, planning their next upgrade.

Of course, they may carry either in the glove compartment of their car and take it out for some fun shooting on weekends, but in both cases, rarely does the outing result in a good trophy.

It’s that cycle of frustration that causes both guns and cameras to be pulled out and finally used most often at holidays and family gatherings.

The gear is similar, as well. They tend to be well-made, precision instruments, machined to close tolerances. They are often the nicest object a man will own.

Compare, for instance, a Leica and a Walther PPK. Both are finely machined things made in Germany. They’re a pleasure to hold, load and fire. Small and discreet, they are a textural delight of satin chrome and knurled grips. (I happen to own both. They’re really quite similar.)

Others prefer the biggest, loudest thing they can afford, with a huge barrel or lens. It’s for walking into a situation and letting everybody know who’s boss. Still, you’re just as unlikely to bag a good trophy, which you’ll probably blame that on some failure of your gear, not the fact that you don’t know how to operate it with any skill.

Women, of course, also own and use both cameras and guns, but they’re far more likely to carry something sensible that they can slip easily into their purse. Smith and Wesson market a line of handguns under the LadySmith brand. A small, but powerful 357 magnum, it even holds one fewer rounds than those marketed to men. Small, unassuming cameras are too numerous to mention, but if you visit your local shop, they’ll probably have more than a couple in pink anodized aluminum.
Consider that, for most of the last century, the camera most popular with women had only the tiniest of lenses and was referred to as a “Box Camera.” Diane Arbus’ camera was a mysterious thing called a twin lens reflex, a very feminine apparatus, the features and functions of which are a mystery to those who haven’t undertaken a clinical study of its morphology, or ar least taken the time to examine one up-close.

Still, on occasion, you’ll see a woman with either a “Man’s Camera” or a “Man’s Gun.” These women hold a certain dangerous fascination for men, they’re beautiful, they’re powerful and they’re dangerous. If Lara Croft or Emma Peel carried cameras, it’d be either a gunmetal Leica strapped to her hip, or an SLR with a huge telephoto, slung over their shoulder like Bonnie Parker’s Tommy Gun.

Catherine Leroy and Patty Hearst
Seeing a female photographer with a couple of battered rangefinders gives me the same thrill I got as a young boy when images of a teenaged Patty Hearst flashed across the television with her long hair, cocked beret and sub-machine gun, standing in front of the flag of the Symbionese Liberation Army, making my G.I. Joe toy seem like the impotent little doll he was.

Girls like that put men in their place—not only do we imagine them getting their trophies, they can drink us under the table and pee standing up. They don’t get weak-kneed and dewy when things get heated, they get girl boners.

So it’s best to avoid tech sites like DP Review and better to spend that time carefully honing your craft and practicing a cool, James Bond/James Nachtwey-like nonchalance. You don’t, after all, see those guys stroking off to equipment catalogs…

Text Chat Snooping

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 12:11:28 +0000

Editor’s note:

After this point, the posts are more than three years old, recovered from an old blog export file.

This is a kind of obscure thing, so a little background:

Often, to type Japanese characters into a computer or cellphone, you type the word in phonetic characters, either the the “Romaji” (Not “romaNji”, by the way…) or the Hiragana and then use another key to select the proper Chinese character-based word.

Since this can be a bit slow, different systems use shortcuts for entering words quickly, kind of a speed-dial for text entry.

Apparently, one suspicious housewife went through her husband’s phone and was able to get a sense of what kinds of text he was tapping into his phone, even if he had deleted the messages themselves.

Yuki from Pineapplemonade has some fun with this and shows what her own texting reveals…

pineapplemonade: Mojihenkan

The woman thought her husband was cheating on her, so she looked into his cell phone. I don’t know how it works in English phones, but in Japanese cell phones, if you write a word and then push a convert button, it shows up the words you wrote in cache memory. She went through all of the words alas, and came up with horribly perverted words.

Leonid Time Again

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 17 Nov 2003 09:36:32 +0000

Leslie about how much less people rely on cars here in ~~Japan~~ Tokyo than they do in the states – as an example, I told her how I had seen on old man making deliveries for a Chinese restaurant. He was in his seventies and made his deliveries by bicycle. He had a half-dozen bowls of soup in ceramic bowls balanced on a wooden tray, balanced on his shoulder, on a bicycle.
Today at lunch, I saw a much younger delivery guy with a couple of bowls and I happened to have my camera ready, so I got this picture:

It’s not uncommon to see a woman with two or three children on a bike, or perhaps a business man with an umbrella riding in the rain. Police, of course, do most of their patrolling by bike.

I wonder if that has anything to do with the longer average lifespan in Japan?

Markov Blogging

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 18:40:05 +0000

Does this sound like me?

The Sensei (Teacher or Doctor) as the landlady referred to him, arrived with an audience of five, whether that number is actual or perceived. The Japan expat bloggers are some of his radio addresses. They were global nomads.

She was a woman buried on the stereo singing Corcovado and I’m here with you as being the most popular leaders of the strange equipment and wires and blinking lights jammed in next to the washer.

I explained that it was kind of natural extension to the basement with just a candle to investigate a strange sight in Japan has almost nothing to do with those square packages of instant noodles you can buy in the old house, way past my bed time…

Time Magazine used to calibrate mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops. November 05, 2003 Be Prepared to be sold to anonymous bidder, the day before halloween…

My camera gained a scuff to to the suggestion that the truer side is the option of having registered users, I guess, or at least turn off comments. For now, I’m closing comments on these little private spaces will become more and more bad guys.

After a while, a particle accelerator is coupled with electric motor technology?

Something that doesn’t exactly behave like either of those nice, slow rainy fall Saturdays that relieve you of the coffee. Hmmm. Not as good as I call them. Those, being the most popular leaders of the popular anti-spam plugins.
(When I see one I like, I may actually plug it in…) You may remember it well, but you’re thinking of somebody else.

You can’t find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those nice, slow rainy fall Saturdays that relieve you of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less; and, wherever there is no way to get these into Bob’s Neighborhood Project.

A very limited audience in a bitterly hostile land. It would be helped greatly if Donald Rumsfeld went to Koishikawa shokubutsuen where Yuka and I were deciding what to do some work on the subway…

I took a bunch of entries from this site and fed them into JanusNode a program that does a lot of neat things with text – one of which is to calculate word frequencies and generate pseudo text using Markov chains. If you’re on a Mac with OS X, (not Panther,) go and get this program and play with it.

Oh – It can also generate a weekly diet for you:
If you want to lose weight try to allow yourself just a mélange of surrealist Asian foods and frozen mushrooms.

This week, I suggest, eat as follows:
- Monday: Consume some fanciful carefully-selected expensive mushrooms that smell fresh.
- Tuesday: Allow yourself Canadian frozen parboiled pickled eggs that are sold illegally.
- Wednesday: Limit yourself to poached poached sculptured Chinese raw Indian foods whose name you can spell.
- Thursday: Allow yourself chemical Canadian difficult crabs that begin with the letter ‘M’.
- Friday: Allow yourself a little baked sour crackers purchased in bulk.
- Saturday: Get by on just some Italian sculptured cold sculptured diet drinks that you find.
- Sunday: Consume a little freshly-killed fanciful Asian Norwegian spices that begin with the letter ‘H’.

(Via boingboing)

I guess I’m not alone

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 15:17:56 +0000

I really think it’s time America got rid of this incompetent, evil man.

Personally, I wish they were bringing him up on war crimes.

Yahoo! News – Twenty-Six House Democrats Push to Fire Rumsfeld

Twenty-Six House Democrats Push to Fire Rumsfeld

Mon Nov 10, 6:54 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A group of more than two dozen House of Representatives Democrats on Monday said they had introduced a resolution urging President Bush (news – web sites) to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“This resolution would make official what so many members of Congress already believe — that the soldiers in Iraq (news – web sites) and America’s foreign policy would be helped greatly if Donald Rumsfeld would leave,” Rep. Charles Rangel of New York said in a statement.

Another Online bookmark

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 12:44:19 +0000

Just so I’ll know where to find it next time…

Steve Ramsay’s Guide to Regular Expressions

If you’ve ever typed “cp *.html ../” at the UNIX command prompt, or entered “garden?” into a web-based search engine, you’ve already used a simple regular expression. Regular expressions (“regex’s” for short) are sets of symbols and syntactic elements used to match patterns of text.

Even these simple examples testify to the power of regular expressions. In the first instance, you’ve copied all the files which end in “.html” (as opposed to copying them one by one); in the second, you’ve conducted a search not only for “garden,” but for “garden, gardening, gardens, and gardeners” all at once.

Time Magazine Editing History

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 12 Nov 2003 01:55:02 +0000

Time Magazine used to have an article that made Bush look foolish. They have recently removed it from their website.

This is an unethical and wrong move on the part of Time.

I’ve lost a lot of respect for the quality of writing at Time over the years, but this goes beyond anything of which I would have imagined them capable. It of course brings to mind the famous phrase by Orwell:

Who controls the past, controls the future.
Who controls the present, controls the past.

—- 1984 by George Orwell

TIME: Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam
By GEORGE (H.W.) BUSH AND BRENT SCOWCROFT

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different–and perhaps barren–outcome.

Via slashdot

Here’s the whole article, in case they pull it from web.archive.org somehow:

SPECIAL REPORT/CLINTON’S CRISES
MARCH 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 8

Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam

By GEORGE BUSH AND BRENT SCOWCROFT

he end of effective Iraqi resistance came with a rapidity which surprised us all, and we were perhaps psychologically unprepared for the sudden transition from fighting to peacemaking. True to the guidelines we had established, when we had achieved our strategic objectives (ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait and eroding Saddam’s threat to the region) we stopped the fighting. But the necessary limitations placed on our objectives, the fog of war, and the lack of “battleship Missouri” surrender unfortunately left unresolved problems, and new ones arose.

We were disappointed that Saddam’s defeat did not break his hold on power, as many of our Arab allies had predicted and we had come to expect. President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to the Iraqi people. Occasionally, he indicated that removal of Saddam would be welcome, but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different–and perhaps barren–outcome.

We discussed at length forcing Saddam himself to accept the terms of Iraqi defeat at Safwan–just north of the Kuwait-Iraq border–and thus the responsibility and political consequences for the humiliation of such a devastating defeat. In the end, we asked ourselves what we would do if he refused. We concluded that we would be left with two options: continue the conflict until he backed down, or retreat from our demands. The latter would have sent a disastrous signal. The former would have split our Arab colleagues from the coalition and, de facto, forced us to change our objectives. Given those unpalatable choices, we allowed Saddam to avoid personal surrender and permitted him to send one of his generals. Perhaps we could have devised a system of selected punishment, such as air strikes on different military units, which would have proved a viable third option, but we had fulfilled our well-defined mission; Safwan was waiting.

As the conflict wound down, we felt a sense of urgency on the part of the coalition Arabs to get it over with and return to normal. This meant quickly withdrawing U.S. forces to an absolute minimum. Earlier there had been some concern in Arab ranks that once they allowed U.S. forces into the Middle East, we would be there to stay. Saddam’s propaganda machine fanned these worries. Our prompt withdrawal helped cement our position with our Arab allies, who now trusted us far more than they ever had. We had come to their assistance in their time of need, asked nothing for ourselves, and left again when the job was done. Despite some criticism of our conduct of the war, the Israelis too had their faith in us solidified. We had shown our ability–and willingness–to intervene in the Middle East in a decisive way when our interests were challenged. We had also crippled the military capability of one of their most bitter enemies in the region. Our new credibility (coupled with Yasser Arafat’s need to redeem his image after backing the wrong side in the war) had a quick and substantial payoff in the form of a Middle East peace conference in Madrid.

The Gulf War had far greater significance to the emerging post-cold war world than simply reversing Iraqi aggression and restoring Kuwait. Its magnitude and significance impelled us from the outset to extend our strategic vision beyond the crisis to the kind of precedent we should lay down for the future. From an American foreign-policymaking perspective, we sought to respond in a manner which would win broad domestic support and which could be applied universally to other crises. In international terms, we tried to establish a model for the use of force. First and foremost was the principle that aggression cannot pay. If we dealt properly with Iraq, that should go a long way toward dissuading future would-be aggressors. We also believed that the U.S. should not go it alone, that a multilateral approach was better. This was, in part, a practical matter. Mounting an effective military counter to Iraq’s invasion required the backing and bases of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

Donald Rumsfeld Lies

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 11 Nov 2003 20:09:00 +0000

Ocala Star Banner

Feb. 20, a month before the invasion, Rumsfeld fielded a question about whether Americans would be greeted as liberators if they invaded Iraq.

“Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?” Jim Lehrer asked the defense secretary on PBS’ “The News Hour.”

“There is no question but that they would be welcomed,” Rumsfeld replied, referring to American forces.

Sept. 25:

“Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said . . . they would welcome us with open arms,” Sinclair Broadcasting anchor Morris Jones said to Rumsfeld as the prelude to a question.

The defense chief quickly cut him off.
“Never said that,” he said. “Never did. You may remember it well, but you’re thinking of somebody else. You can’t find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said.”

Pig

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 11 Nov 2003 17:50:07 +0000

At Yuka’s birthday dinner last night at AOC Yoyogi, our favorite French restaurant, I made this little guy after dinner, because the “00″ on the cork reminded me of a snout…
(I guess you just can’t take me anywhere…)

Where I’ll be Nov. 30th

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 07 Nov 2003 16:16:05 +0000

I’ve never been to an Apple store before – the building looks huge, so I wonder what they’ll fill it up with.

Apple Store – Ginza

Grand Opening
Sun, Nov 30 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Same old tricks

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 14:18:56 +0000

This article reminded me of a joke I heard a while back:
“How do we know that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction?
We saved the receipts…”

Articles like the following really make me wonder why it is that we have to have people like Rumsfeld always lingering around, screwing things up more and more?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

In his own book Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State, George Shultz refers to a declassified CIA report which notes Iraq’s use of mustard gas in August 1983, giving further credence to the suggestion that the State Department and/or the National Security Council (NSC) was well aware of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons at this time. If the use of chemical weapons was known in August of 1983, and Donald Rumsfeld went to Iraq in December of 1983, he was on notice that this country was using and was going to continue to use weapons of mass destruction. Why, then, did the United States move to de-list Iraq from those considered to be terrorist nations?

On March 23, 1984, Iran accused Iraq of poisoning 600 of its soldiers with mustard gas and Tabun nerve gas. Donald Rumsfeld returned to Baghdad on March 24, 1984. On that same day, the UPI wire service reported that a team of UN experts had concluded that:

“Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers. Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld held talks with foreign minister Tariq Aziz.”

Probably the most critical piece of information is that according to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, in a December 15, 1986 article, the CIA began to secretly supply Iraq with intelligence in 1984 that was used to %u201Ccalibrate%u201D mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops.

Be Prepared

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 05 Nov 2003 11:09:58 +0000

Sold to anonymous bidder, the day before halloween…

Yahoo! News – Top Stories Photos – AP

Vampire Killing Kit complete with a wooden stake and 10 silver bullets sold for $12,000 as part of Sotheby’s sale of 19th century furniture and decorative works of art in New York, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2003.

Via the always-excellent Geisha Asobi Blog

Mt Fuji

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 04 Nov 2003 18:05:11 +0000

Mount Fuji from Lake Ashi this weekend

For only $99,000,000 on eBay

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 31 Oct 2003 11:47:08 +0000

eBay item 2568084521 (Ends Nov-04-03 20:52:56 PST) – Pulsed Plasma Mobile Hydrogen Generator

What do you get when a particle accelerator is coupled with electric motor technology?

Something that doesn’t exactly behave like either stand-alone technology.

This is part of what you get!

The Highest Efficiency Plasma Generation system “known to man.”
1 – Produces a plasma skin temperature of over 11,000 degrees F
2 – Production of High Energy Plasma for Industrial Processing
3 – Cracks pure hydrogen effortlessly from petroleum products
4 – Neutralizes toxic Waste
5 – Sanitizes anything that touches it
6 – Produces multiple high energy artifacts
7 – Possible Zero Point Energy Radiation from Plasma
8 – Primary target use for this High Energy Plasma is Fusion
9 – Unlimited Plasma/Chemical reactions are possible with this system

Congratulations, Joi & Mizuka

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 16:36:39 +0000

A Little Game

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 14:19:00 +0000

September 12th. A Toy World.
Not a game, really, a simulation.
You’re given a missile launcher and a small Arab town.

The bad guys look a little bit different than the ordinary civilians, women & children, at least from your vantage point.
Your “mission” is to shoot the baddies while limiting the collateral damage to innocent civilians.
The only problem is, when you *do* kill civilians, other civilians see it – they come over to the body, pray, moan and wail – and some of them become bad guys. No matter how careful you are, you just wind up making more and more bad guys. After a while, you get frustrated and want to just kill them all.

There are no points, no winning and the game doesn’t ever end.

(Thanks, Antonis!)

Huh?

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 02:22:11 +0000

Must be sunspots…
Where is BoingBoing?

ERROR: The requested URL could not be retrieved

ERROR

The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://boingboing.net/

The following error was encountered:

Connection Failed

Solar Flare Headed this way

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 15:49:06 +0000

(For some great pictures of the solar flare, take a look here.)
Basically, the sun has blasted a huge amount of magnetic plasma at the Earth – the bulk of which will start hitting around 9:00 PM (0:00UTC)
Slashdot has a pretty good discussion on the event and what it could mean. Oh, it’s not harmful to people, just electrical stuff.

One good thing, though, is that the Norther Lights or Aurora Borealis will be visible from much further south. I should ask my brother in Colorado to look for them…

Slashdot | X17 Solar Flare Sends 2B Tons of Plasma at Earth

The Sun today unleashed what appears to be the third most powerful flare in recorded history, a storm of charged particles that could hit Earth mid-day Wednesday with more effect than any since 1989, when an entire Canadian province had its power knocked out.

Depending on the storm’s magnetic orientation, it could set off a dramatic display of colorful northern lights well into mid-latitudes of the United States and Europe.

Meanwhile, satellite operators and power grid managers are preparing to endure a potentially damaging event. And astronauts aboard the International Space Station have taken cover from heavier radiation sent out by the flare. They are not expected to be in any serious danger.

Kicked up at 6 a.m. EST (1100 UT) today, the major solar outburst comes on the heels of four other flares late last week and over the weekend. All were considered fairly severe, but the latest eruption makes the others seem like solar sneezes.

Today’s blast is classified as an X17, where X denotes a major flare and larger numbers are stronger. That compares to two flare-ups over the weekend that were rated less than X2.

“The flare today may be the third strongest X-flare on record,” said Paal Brekke, deputy project scientist for the SOHO spacecraft, which first spotted the event.

A slightly stronger flare on April 2, 2001 was not pointed at Earth. Today’s storm is headed directly at us and could generate fantastic colorful lights in the atmosphere, known as aurora. The storm associated with the flare is called a coronal mass ejection, an expanding bubble of charged particles that race outward.

NEWS FLASH!

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 15:07:17 +0000

In an amazing and unprecedented development this morning, the new washer arrived!
;-)
OK, not so interesting. I was getting ready for work this morning when the workmen arrived to install the new washer, which replaced the last one which died. Still, it was kind of interesting – the “Sensei” (Teacher or Doctor) as the landlady referred to him arrived with an assistant. They came in and took off their shoes, laid out blankets and towels all over the work area and got to work.
Way more formal than I ever saw in the US.
Since it’s an American washer, all the labels and settings are in English, so the Sensei went over each one and explained to me that “Cold” means “Tsumetai” and “Hot” means “Atsui”. The instruction lasted a good five minutes and I felt like there might be a quiz at the end, so I tried to pay good attention…
Adriaan was online at the time and advised me that I should offer coffee, but that they would probably refuse. Still, I should offer. I did and sure enough, they didn’t…

The landlady, Mrs. Ono, stopped down as well and after giving me a short lecture on the evils of dust between the louvers of the closet door, got curious about how I am able to work from home. I showed her the chat I had online with Adriaan and the several terminal windows I had open, but I doubt she really understood any of it. Pity no one had their iChat camera going – that would have been easier to explain.

I like working at home like that sometimes – I wind up working a lot earlier, but since I don’t have to shower or shave, it’s less of a pain.

More Airport Fun

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 11:46:56 +0000

Got an email from my friend Antonis, a Greek guy living in Japan. He has to travel to the United States frequently for business and this was from his latest trip. He’s agreed to let me repost it.

Has this become so common as to not be noteworthy?

Anyway, here is what happened to me, when checking-in at Seattle for a
flight to New York:
Somehow, whenever my destination is New York I get a special
check-treatment, even after taking off all the metal I possess and walking
through the metal detector without a “beep.” So, I did the stupid mistake to
ask a “security” guy why I have a body check, even though the metal detector
says I am clean. First he explained to me that if my boarding pass has an
SSSS mark on it, I have been randomly chosen for a special check. “You know
why we do this checks?”, he said. “To prevent us from attacking other
countries.” I didn’t reply anything to that, nor to his comments on my
laptop, but this didn’t stop him from going on. I couldn’t believe the
things I heard.
He said:
“These checks prevent us from attacking other countries. You know why? Cause
if somebody tries to do to us what they did before, we will attack their
country. So to prevent that we need these checks. But this time we won’t
just attack them, we’ll nuke them. Cause we are the only country with
experience with nukes. Ask the japanese, they know,” he said with a proud
smile. “Twice in two days!”
I thought this is a hidden camera joke. I don’t remember exactly why, but
the guy actually said “everything here is filmed, smile up there” and he
pointed the security camera over my head. Unfortunately it was just filmed,
sound was not recorded. Or maybe it was recorded, but nobody cares. After
all, who hired that guy as a security guy?

Anyway. Traveling to the states is not easy. You have to be very patient and
be ready for anything, anytime.

I need an editor

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 01:33:20 +0000

Between the blog spammers and the people who wander in from Google and post absolute crap, I’m getting more junk posts than real ones.

It’s tempting to just shut down the site, or to at least turn off comments.
For now, I’m closing comments on some older posts that are attracting morons. If you really want to comment on an old post, mail me and let me know – I’ll revive the topic.
(I’m also no longer allowing anonymous posts, but I doubt that will make a difference, since there is no way to verify what ~~you~~ they put in.)

Maybe what I’d like is the option of having registered users, I guess, or at least an email confirmation for unknown users. I don’t know – I’ve looked a lot at the blog spam issus and I haven’t yet seen anything that I’m confortable with or confident in. (Yes, I’ve heard of the popular anti-spam plugins. When I see one I like, I may actually plug it in…)

You may never have seen blog spam here, because hardly an hour goes by that I don’t weed out the crap – hopefully before the Googlebot sweeps by and indexes the site. You see, a good percentage of the spammers are advertising porn or adult services. If Google finds links to those kinds of sites, this site will get classified as an adult site and SafeSurf will hide my site from the bulk of its users. I run a pretty PG-rated site, so that’s really not what I want.

So yes, I guess it’s come down to this – if I don’t like your post, I’m going to delete it. If you think it’s unfair, write me – I’ll open up the topic to discussion.
(If you’re reading this, there is virtually no chance that I’ll ever delete a post of yours, though…)

It’s either that, or I pull the plug and go back to a one-way dialogue and I really think the site would suffer. (Or I quit doing this because it’s become un-fun.)

This all OK with you guys?

Writing to groups of five

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 27 Oct 2003 14:19:23 +0000

(An early draft of this was posted last night by mistake, so I took it down and finished it up a bit…)

When Yuka and I were deciding what to do Sunday morning and seeing who was around, we thought of seeing Tod & Kristen, but rather than picking up the phone, (as we didn’t have their number anyway,) we got on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) where Tod runs a private server and a channel for them and their friends to come visit.
It functions as a kind of living room, not for everyone, just invited friends.
Joi also runs one, a much more public channel on FreeNode, where people hang out and chat all the time.

I wonder if these little private spaces will become more and more common. It seems a kind of natural extension to the whole blog thing where people are creating these little microcosms of their public personality. Email is of course, becoming a last-ditch medium of communication. After all, how can you be sure that your message will actually reach the person and not get tossed out with the dirty bathwater of spam that most people seem to get these days?

Thinking about this, I got to thinking about weblogs and their role in the writer’s life. This is where what we do differs from Journalism. Journalists do what they do to have people read what they write. A successful Journalistic publication is one that is widely read and influential – the goal, money aside, is to have as many people as possible read their words.

For this reason, people looking at blogging tend to focus on the big players, or the “Alpha Bloggers” as I call them. Those, being the most widely read, must be the best, right? I don’t necessarily think so.

It’s the little blogs, the ones with an audience of just a few people, that are going to define this medium.

These blogs are conversations. They address a very limited audience in a very familiar fashion. They tend to be on a first name basis. They talk about trivial, often uninteresting (to an outsider) topics.
Maybe that’s ultimately where blogs will make the biggest difference – microscale audiences. Personal conversations, not pronouncements.

So given that thought, why do the big-name blogs work? They drop all pretentiousness and speak directly to with their audiences. They maintain a sense of intimacy with the readers, often by adding the little mundane details of daily life. Stuff that can’t be faked.

Franklin Roosevelt knew that a dialogue with the people was important, opening one with the public in the form of his Fireside Chats. Groundbreaking as they were, they still had the tone of a father speaking to his children. It was a one-way dialogue, firm, yet kind. His wife Eleanor, on the other hand, was able to convey a sense of conversation and intimacy in her daily column My Day.

Boston’s infamously-corrupt and colorful mayor James Michael Curley knew the power of these dialogues as well. I never understood how such an obviously criminal man was able to remain one of the most popular leaders of the 20th century – until, that is, I had the opportunity to listen to some of his radio addresses. They were warm and familiar, delivered in a voice that could have been one of the older Barrymores, kind, fatherly and sincere, yet humble in their tone. After hearing them, I realized that had I been in Boston when he was running for office, I probably would have voted for him a few times too.

Listening to Curley, or reading Mrs. Roosevelt’s column, you get the feeling that you are part of an audience of perhaps five people. Intimate..

I think this is what works best for blogs as well, an audience of five, whether that number is actual or perceived.

The Japan expat bloggers are some of the best in the world, in my opinion, because they are familiar with this style of writing. Many of us were writing emails to small groups of family members and friends back home in groups of five or ten, describing the odd happenings of daily life as a stranger in a strange land. A trip to the market becomes something to write home about. A trip to Akihabara that results in a new digital camera adds images to this dialogue. A bit of web space makes it public and some blogging software makes it interactive.

Yet it’s that original bit of writing that is the heart, not the technology. Not the number of readers, not your rankings on the blog popularity charts. It’s the writing.

Someone trying to compare Journalism to blogging will probably not see this, after all, a blog with five readers cannot possibly be a success, can it? Blogging and Journalism are starting to bump elbows and step on eachother’s toes. There are journalists who blog and bloggers who report news, but the overlap is insignificant, (though not unimportant,) in its scope.

Yet in my opinion, it’s the blogs that speak to with their readers in groups of five that are the true successes, no matter how many readers they actually have.

Japanese Teens Creating Own Language

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 27 Oct 2003 12:46:12 +0000

Karen at Shambolic Jigsaw has a neat article on Japanese slang that I liked:

Japanese Teens Creating Own Language
~~%u6C17%u6301%u3061%u304C%u60AA%u3044 (unpleasant or disagreeable) becomes %u304D%u3082%u3044.~~ (I’m having an encoding problem – just click the link…)

I’d heard “Kimoii” for “Kimochii Waruii” before, but the others are fun too.

Yuka’s (2 minute) One Minute Movie

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 27 Oct 2003 01:33:41 +0000

Small Format 2.3MB

Bigger Format (4.9MB, so go easy on my server…)

This one by Yuka, taken today in Koishikawa.
They look best if you save them to your hard disk, then view at double size. (Probably right-click and do “Save As”.)

Yuka and I were toying with the idea of making a whole lot of these and making a DVD of them. It seems like a good idea, since we’re making them anyway and we have a DVD burner in the new iMac. I wonder if anyone would actually want a copy if we did it…

Microscale Publishing

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 27 Oct 2003 01:22:48 +0000

(An early draft of this was posted last night by mistake, so I took it down and finished it up a bit…)

It’s the little blogs, the ones with an audience of just a few people, that are going to define this medium.

Franklin Roosevelt knew that a dialogue with the people was important, opening one with the public in the form of his Fireside Chats. Groundbreaking as they were, they still had the tone of a father speaking to his children. It was a one-way dialogue, firm, yet kind. His wife Eleanor, on the other hand, was able to conveigh a sense of conversation and intimacy in her daily column My Day.

Listening to Curley, or reading Mrs. Roosevelt’s column, you get the feeling that you are part of an audience of perhaps five people. Intimate..

I think this is what works best for blogs as well, an audience of five, whether that number is actual or perceived.

Yet it’s that original bit of writing that is the heart, not the technology. Not the number of readers, not your rankings on the blog popularity charts. It’s the writing.

Yet in my opinion, it’s the blogs that speak to with their readers in groups of five that are the true successes, no matter how many readers they actually have.

Koishikawa shokubutsuen

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 26 Oct 2003 23:45:37 +0000

Yuka and I went to Koishikawa shokubutsuen with Tod and Kristen today and took lots of pictures. The park was once an herbal botanical garden for a hospital, but now belongs to Tokyo University.
Kristen showed us her favorite trees, a pair of huge trees, the wood of which smelled like cinnamon and the leaves, like camphor.
Afterwards, we had a coffee at a kissaten called “Zou no ko” or “Baby Elephant”, which was a fitting coincidence, if you know how much Kristen and Tod like Elephants. From there, we went to Kagurazak by bike and I learned what a Nikon with a heavy lens sounds like when it falls from a backpack several feet to pavement. My camera gained a scuff to to the corner, but otherwise was unhurt. Nikon makes very durable cameras.
At kagurazaka, we had crepes and galettes and brut cidre… Oishikatta.
Yuka’s on the other computer now, busily editing a new movie from what she shot today, so it should be up here soon.

Down at the coffee shop

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 25 Oct 2003 18:24:52 +0000

I’m down in the coffee shop now, Yuka’s here, reading a book. I brought a wireless access point out to the balcony of my apartment and the signal seems to reach well enough, so I have internet.

I wish the coffee shop had its own wireless – I’d come here a lot more if they did. Daphne just stopped in to the shop – she was driving by and saw us sitting here. This town is getting smaller and smaller.

The washer finally decided to die, so the workmen and the landlady came by again this afternoon to check it out. Not a big deal, but it necessitated my cleaning out the laundry room of all the boxes, wires & computer equipment in there. Less of a hassle than I had anticipated, really. I stacked the servers on my desk and got everything back up and running in just a few minutes really.
The landlady gave me less of a hard time than I had guessed she would over all of the strange equipment and wires and blinking lights jammed in next to the washer. I explained that it was “for my work” and that seemed to satisfy her.

Since they’re all out, I’ll take the opportunity to do some work on the server, I guess – maybe cram in another hard disk and try to add a different video card – I have one that works with these strange proprietary flat panel displays I got. It would be more convenient than bringing in the flat panel from my desk every time I need to reboot.

This is a poster currently on the subway line I take – it’s a “manner poster”, which is of a series to remind people not to do things on the train to annoy other people. I really like the way this is drawn, reminds me a bit of something that Garth Williams might have done.
The caption at the top says “Ajiwattemasu, fukaikan”, or roughly “tasting your newspaper isn’t pleasant”. Maybe I can convince the station people to give me a copy.

Pound – reverse-proxy and load-balancer

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 01:44:27 +0000

Tech stuff – of limited interest…

Pound

Pound – reverse-proxy and load-balancer

The Pound program is a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end for Web server(s). Pound was developed to enable distributing the load among several Web-servers and to allow for a convenient SSL wrapper for those Web servers that do not offer it natively. Pound is distributed under the GPL (with the OpenSSL disclaimer) – no warranty, it’s free to use, copy and give away.

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 01:36:07 +0000

William ~~Henry~~ James, 1899

On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

The spectator’s judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.

Visit

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 00:58:24 +0000

Just got off the phone with my sister Leslie and she’s decided to come to Tokyo for a few weeks. Very, very cool.
OK, Les, now the world knows and you can’t back out…
:-D

Scary Movies

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 00:10:15 +0000

I watched a bit more of 28 Days Later tonight.
Turned it off after a few minutes, the same as I did yesterday.
Too spooky.

I was thinking about what movies have really spooked me out over the years. If course, there was the 1972 classic low-budget film The Gargoyles, which I remember as being scary, yet cool. There was something about the way that the monsters moved that was surreal, yet even more terrifying, at least I thought so as a six-year-old, watching it on the big black and white TV upstairs in the old house, way past my bed time…
A few tears later, in 1976, I saw Burnt Offerings, with Oliver Reed and Karen Black. All I remember from that was being terrified by the Chauffeur, played by Anthony James.
Yet there was another one that always haunted me, terrified me at the time, but I had no idea what it was. It had to do with the lead character going to some kind of resort or home or something and discovering that there was a woman buried on the grounds. The person, who I remembered as being Brian Keith or maybe Brian Denehey, tried to get others to believe that there was someone buried alive, but couldn’t convince anyone.
A year or two ago, I found myself thinking about that movie again so I searched the Internet Movie Database and went through all the movies for both actors. No luck, so I filed it back into the place where I keep dark and disturbing thoughts to keep me up at night…
Yesterday, after a bit of Googling, I finally found it. 31 years later. It was The Screaming Woman, an ABC made-for-TV movie from 1972, starring Olivia de Havilland, not Brian Keith, as I had remembered it. Funny how your mind can work – I’m probably the first person ever to confuse Mr. Keith and Ms. de Havilland. (A bit of local trivia – Olivia de Havilland was born in Tokyo.)
So anyway, back to the movie…

A wealthy former mental patient goes home to her estate to rest and recuperate. While walking the grounds one day she hears the screams of a woman coming from underneath the ground who has been buried alive. Her family, however, refuses to believe her story, and sees the incident as an opportunity to prove the woman’s mind has snapped so they can take control of her money.

Doesn’t really sound so bad now, but it was probably the creepy music they used to play in those things.
I hear it runs now and again on latenight cable – could one of you in the US with a TiVo take a look for it?

So… Since it’s so close to halloween, think back. What movies stick with you as being the scariest? What scenes come to mind when you’re spooked late at night and you’re headed to the basement with just a candle to investigate a strange noise?

Yuka, would yours still be Joshuu sasori: Dai-41 zakkyo-bô (Female Convict Scorpion Jailhouse 41) which we both had a chance to see again recently?

Fox Head Fruit

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 22:58:08 +0000

This is a strange sight in Japan this tome of year – a Fox-Head fruit.
I don’t know much about them, except that they’re pretty much ornamental only.
Anyone know more about them?

Adam and Joe Go Tokyo?

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 20 Oct 2003 14:45:24 +0000

Update!
Since there has been a lot of ongoing interest in this, I’ve created a dedicated Adam and Joe site at http://gotokyo.mmdc.net/
Nik and Tom will be running it for now and I’ll be jumping in here and there.
GoTokyo!
——————————————————————————————
Has anyone heard of this show called Adam and Joe Go Tokyo?
It’s a British reality show where two guys get dropped off in Tokyo and have to become famous in a short time.
I guess they’re famous now, since they’re on my blog, but I hadn’t heard of the show until just now …

Spooky

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 20 Oct 2003 12:08:11 +0000

Shop window decoration, Gaienmae

One Minute in Harajuku

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 20 Oct 2003 09:53:11 +0000

This time, the One Minute Movie is from Harajuku, some scenes from walking around Omotesando Avenue. Here's a small version:(840K) One Minute in Harajuku Here's a larger version: One Minute in Harajuku I need to figure a way to get these into Bob's Neighborhood Project.

Good Luck, Anita

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 19 Oct 2003 13:21:38 +0000

Anita Rowland, a very dear person that I know from IRC, is in the hospital recovering from what looks to be a very succesful surgery.
Speedy recovery, Anita. Take good care of her,

Weekend Report

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 19 Oct 2003 13:13:03 +0000

Yesterday was one of those nice, slow rainy fall Saturdays that relieve you of the sense that you should be out doing something productive.

Yuka and I got up late, having been out with Laurent and Mie the night before. I got up first, as I usually do on weekends and made coffee and brought it on a tray to the bedroom, along with a new copy of Wired magazine and my iBook. I bought the Wired on Friday night after dinner since Joi had mentioned that he had an article about him in it…

The coffee was from the new Cafe du Monde that opened near my office. Now Cafe du Monde uses coffee with chicory, which I remember liking when I was there in New Orleans – the coffee was darker and oilier than what I’m used to, so I thought I better bring some sugar. I rarely ever use sugar at home, so I found a jar beneath the sink and then spooned a couple of half-teaspoons in. The sugar was all clumped together, so I had to scrape a bit.

Then I settled down with my magazine and eventually took a sip of the coffee. Hmmm. Not as good as I remember. Strange taste. (Starting to wonder what Yuka would think about this strange coffee that I had told her was so nice…) Better add a bit more sugar. (My half-awake brain was not working so well.) I scraped out some more sugar, a full teaspoon this time.

I took a healthy swig of the coffee and as the caffeine molecules reached my bloodstream, I realized that there might be a reason that the coffee was tasting so salty… Oh. Yes. That jar was not sugar… Yuka took pity on me and got me another cup, this time with a packet of real sugar…

After coffee, I wandered out to the iMac in the living room to play with that one instead. By the time Yuka wandered out, we were pretty well ready for some breakfast, but instead I popped in the movie “Tampopo”, which I had somehow managed to never see. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a Japanese movie about the quest for the perfect bowl of Ramen. We settled in to watch it together, getting hungrier and hungrier watching people eat bowl after bowl of ramen. Ramen in Japan has almost nothing to do with those square packages of instant noodles you can buy in the supermarket in the US – it’s more of an art form.
By the time the movie was over, we practically *ran* from the apartment down to Akasaka for a bowl at Oshima Ramen, which has a poster that says in English “Ramen is a gift from God”. Good stuff.
We stopped at the Cafe du Monde and had a cafe au lait and I had a couple biengets and then walked to the CD/DVD store at Akasaka Mitsuke station and the little “Asian Goods” shop where I got a new tablecloth and a silk scarf for Yuka.
Then it was back to the apartment for a couple more movies, The Recruit, a forgettable spy flick and School of Rock, which was kind of cute and fun.
Today is beautiful, though, so we’re going to head out to Omotesando for a bit of shopping. Quite a relaxing morning, though, hard to break away – Yuka’s on the sofa now, curled up with the book “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”, Astrud Gilberto is on the stereo singing Corcovado and I’m here with you all, enjoying the act of typing, quite comfortable with a couple of big pillows on the floor of my living room…

Now, of course, this has been quite a bit of needless detail about my weekend, so one might wonder why I think you all might care. I really don’t. :-) A few of you might and that’s great, but I’ve been getting quite a few stupid comments on these little “nothing posts” from the blog haters lately who like to go around and tell people like me to “get a life”.
Now *that’s* something I don’t understand – if these people see weblogging as a pointless waste of time, what does it say about *them* as they crawl around the web leaving snotty comments?

Monument to Apathy

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 18 Oct 2003 02:52:00 +0000

Big Traffic Cones

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 18 Oct 2003 02:44:45 +0000

Tokyo is home to some of the biggest traffic cones in the world, for some unknown reason. The larger one stands about two meters tall and is used to block off a small street every day during the daytime. (I got inspired to snap a picture after reading James "Kibo" Parry's traffic cone site...) Also note the vending machine in the background - yes, that's beer that it's selling...

Gen Kanai gets SD from Matt

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 15:22:21 +0000

Click to View(Quicktime)
From last night’s Meetup at Ebisu Garden Place…

Big Quake

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 16:28:25 +0000

Still Shakin’
Not so big, it seems, but up and down, which was new…

They say you can tell when there’s going to be a quake when animals exhibit strange behavior. Well, Ado sure was acting strange today – I should keep an eye on him…

He did have a cool link on quakes – not updated for this one as I type this, but maybe by the time you read it…

Update:
As I was leaving work, Minami-san, our resident quake expert, showed me this graph:

See anything strange? That line after the quake is still up, on the high side of the quake, which, I’m assuming, means that the Earth has some unresolved business with Tokyo.

Wish us luck…

Turned Away at Border

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 14 Oct 2003 23:16:01 +0000

I read a shocking story today at Joi’s site today.

Turned Away at Border

The love story of Trevor Hughes and his fiancee began in an elementary school in the Himalayan foothills.

They were “global nomads.” He was a diplomat’s son. She the daughter of missionaries. They lived in Asia, attended school together, fell in love and want to get married in June.

But when Hughes’ fiancee, a German national, tried to visit him on a six-month tourist visa Monday, she was detained in Atlanta, handcuffed, jailed–even stripped of her diamond engagement ring.

Then, after 20 hours without food, she was put on a plane and shipped back to Stuttgart.

Trevor and Beate’s site has lots of information, including ways you can help.
Pam Zubeck from the Colorado Springs Gazette has written an excellent piece on their ordeal.

If you weren’t aware or weren’t concerned about the erosion of rights in the post-terror-event world in which we live, hopefully this story will open your eyes a bit. We shouldn’t let this become standard operating procedure.

Monday

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 13 Oct 2003 12:22:35 +0000

Yuka and I are up in Utsunomiya with Satoshi & Naho-chan having a lazy Monday holiday. I found an open wireless connection somewhere nearby, so I’ve been able to get my mail and blog fix.
Yesterday, we were up in Nikko looking at the changing leaves and hiking around. I think about half the population of Tokyo had also gone up, as the traffic was terrible.
Satoshi had his new Canon digital camera, I had my Nikon, Yuka had the Fuji and Naho had some kind of strange camera that used something called “film”. Needless to say, we took a *lot* of pictures.
We stopped at a restaurant that was in a very cool old building from the 1870′s that was originally the vacation home of a Meiji-era American trade representative. Very nice dinner.
At some point today, we’ll take the train back to Tokyo…

Just before we left on Saturday, I downgraded the ibook from a Panther preview, back to Jaguar. I was hoping that I could get away with doing it without erasing all the accounts and settings and such, which seemed to work, until I tried to log in and found my passwords all changed. I booted from the Jaguar disk to reset, but then I could only log in to console mode, so I did a full wipe and re-install. Oh, well, I had backed everything anyway, so I won’t lose much of anything, I think.

Long Weekend

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 11 Oct 2003 16:09:46 +0000

After a slow, lazy Saturday, Yuka and I are off to Nikko for the weekend with friends, so I won’t have email access…
See you all on Monday!

So What Shall I name It?

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 09 Oct 2003 21:30:19 +0000

New member of the family arrived yesterday – a new iMac:

It has a nice big screen and a really big keyboard and all of the neat bells and whistles that comes with such a beast.
Each computer on my network has a name, so I’ll have to get a good one for this one too. My old workstation was Snark, but that doesn’t fit.
Any ideas?

Joi Ito

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 08 Oct 2003 01:59:30 +0000

Apparently, I’ve been using the wrong link:

My Name is Joi Ito

Joi Ito
My name is Joi Ito. I am the only Joi Ito you need. There may be others, but I am the real one. Don’t accept imitations. This is the official Joi Ito website. So what if I’m just a cat. So what if I’m funky. It’s very cool to be Joi Ito. And I am him. Welcome.

So who’s that guy I”ve been working for then?

(Thanks to Me and Ophelia, which, btw, is a great read…)

One Minute in Tokyo

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 07 Oct 2003 16:32:09 +0000

A little film of Akasaka.
Just something I did on my lunch break…
Is quicktime OK for everyone?

Video of Powell

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 04 Oct 2003 15:21:39 +0000

Download file
This is the video I mentioned, where Powell says that Iraq was not a threat.
(Flash version below, if you don’t have Quicktime…)

Flash Version.

Bosai kunren

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 03 Oct 2003 19:42:37 +0000

On my way in this morning, I saw a group of schoolkids out wearing their Bosai Zukin, which are designed to protect their heads from sparks, ashes and fire, in the event of an emergency like an earthquake or housefire.
The last time I saw one was at the Chiyoda Library Museum, where they had a display of wartime relics. Hirata-san from my office said that they are modelled on a samurai’s headgear.
Not sure why the kids were doing it today, if it is some kind of national safety day or something.

Blog Spam

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 03 Oct 2003 15:44:45 +0000

We’ve been talking about blog spammers here at work – people or scripts who post merely so that their links climb up the rankings on sites like Daypop.
Those sites count the number of links on blogs to see where people are linking – unfortunately, people abuse this.

I’ve written a little script to first redirect these links, so that they don’t get counted on the popularity sites. Give it a try by commenting below, then clicking your own link.

Yes, people can still put in any link, the same as before. No filtering occurs – It just adds a step so that they can’t mooch inbound link karma from you…

Gaijin Problems?

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 03 Oct 2003 00:52:38 +0000

From a placard on the train:

These Guys say they can help.

Not sure if they’re offering to help foreigners, or help you get rid of them…
It’s a debt-consolidation service. Maybe it’s to help you get foreign loansharks off your back?

Any Japanese speaker want to call and ask? They’re at: 03-5207-6130…

Dinner With Gen & Yuki

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 18:30:17 +0000

Yuka and I had a nice dinner with Gen Kanai & his friend Yuki last night at Legato.

It was good to finally sit down and get to know him a bit more, yet strange, since we already know quite a bit about eachother from our blogs.
Blogs are like that – You get to know people that you may have never met, yet in this community, there is a fair chance you actually *will* get to know them.

Same for Tod & Kristen, who we saw the other night at the Login party in Shibuya. Having read eachother’s stuff and briefly talked a few times, we were pretty much at ease with them. They wound up spending Saturday night and all Sunday at our place. Later, Satoshi and Naho-chan came over and we made waffles. Really nice time.

Robots on the train

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 12:05:03 +0000

Found a great set of pictures over at KoKoRo:

KoKoRo: Sony’s human type robot boarding a bullet train!

Sony’s human type robot boarding a bullet train

Traitors and Liars

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 14:49:04 +0000

REMARKS BY GEORGE BUSH, 41ST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, AT THE DEDICATION CEREMONY FOR THE GEORGE BUSH CENTER FOR INTELLIGENCE, APRIL 26, 1999

I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors.

–Former President Bush

Bush Administration Is Focus of Inquiry

Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak’s column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson’s account touched off a political fracas over Bush’s use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

“Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge,” the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Saudis on plane

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 18:43:07 +0000

My friend Masaki sent me this picture of his (among others) and it really made me think.
What was your initial reaction? I thought about how any of these people must feel when they travel internationally.

(Comments have been closed, since most of the people who have commented are making wrong assumptions about my motivation for posting the picture. Also, Ali, you can kiss my ass, you fucking moron.)

Something to play with later

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 29 Sep 2003 01:03:27 +0000

Of interest probably only to bloggers – Just an online bookmark for myself…

Layout-o-matic

Select a layout type, width, and other options to the left, and then click Download or View and pick up your multi-column CSS layout starter kit (turning it into something unique and beautiful not included). You’re welcome to use the resulting generated layouts for any purpose, personal or commercial.

Amina Lawal Spared

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 12:39:42 +0000

This is really good news.
:-)

Gulf Daily News

A Nigerian court yesterday spared a woman from being stoned to death by overturning an Islamic court’s conviction for adultery, easing pressure on the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Yuichi Yokayama

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 26 Sep 2003 00:00:00 +0000

By a really fortunate chain of events, I got to meet Yuichi Yokoyama, the illustrator, tonight.

My friend Laurent Bruel in Paris is doing the translatons for Yokoyama-san’s next publication – Yuka and I offered to bring the original artwork back with us to him, so tonight we finally got to return them.
He came by and we got takeout sushi and drank several bottles of wine and polished off the rest of my good whiskey. Very good night…
It’s an interesting feeling to sit in the presence of someone whose work you admire, but don’t yet understand.

Well,

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 23:42:35 +0000

I’m gonna party like it’s 1998…
Someone just said “Architect” and “Software Company” in the same article.
The economy must be recovering…

Joel on Software – Bionic Office

The walls between the offices and the workstations are made of high tech, translucent acrylic which glows softly and provides natural light to the interior without reducing privacy.

Power. Every desk has twenty, that’s right, twenty outlets. Four of them are colored orange and have uninterruptible power coming off of a UPS in the server closet, so you don’t need a UPS in every office.

What? No Foosball table?

Journalist claims proof of WMD lies

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 25 Sep 2003 09:50:57 +0000

NEWS.com.au | Journo claims proof of WMD lies (September 23, 2003)

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 that year, Pilger claimed Rice said the US “must move to take advantage of these new opportunities” to attack Iraq and claim control of its oil.

Pilger uncovered video footage of Powell in Cairo on February 24, 2001 saying, “He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.”

Two months later, Rice reportedly said, “We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.”

Powell boasted this was because America’s policy of containment and its sanctions had effectively disarmed Saddam.

Update: See this for a bit of perspective on what this would have meant.

Shaolin Soccer a hit in the US, despite Miramax’s best efforts

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 24 Sep 2003 18:25:33 +0000

Wired’s Katie Dean has a story about a movie called Shaolin Soccer, that’s been a real hit in the illegal movie downloading circles. The article has a gem of a quote:

“We were pleased to see that there is interest in the film (online),” the spokesman said. “At the same time, we work with the MPAA and our legal department to vigorously prosecute those who take our property and use (it) for their own purposes.”

Um, Miramax… Those are fans. The people who want to see this bit of intellectual property you have the rights to, in exchange for their money, if you would stop sitting on your thumbs. You can’t buy this kind of hype, don’t be idiots.

To compete against online bootlegging, perhaps consider adding some value to the product. When you buy a CD, you get the physical CD, the printed materials that accompany it and the potential for some return if you decide to sell the CD used. (As opposed to downloading the songs from the CD, where the quality is iffy and the tangible part is nonexistant. Try giving your girlfriend a homemade bootleg of a CD she wants and you’ll see what I mean.)

DVD’s follow this, but with a movie, what do you get? $10 popcorn?
In an age where digital copies of movies are leaking out of the studios and hitting the net before the movie hits the theaters, the incentive to download for some is strong – sure, the experience of watching on a 17 inch screen pales in comparison to a 10 meter screen, but here’s a case of people wanting to see the movie so badly that they’re will to break the law to do so. Miramax should pay attention.

The Main Event: Lessig vs. Rosen

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 24 Sep 2003 17:41:59 +0000

It would be almost worth going to Los Angeles for this debate between the RIAA’s former head, Hillary Rosen and Stanford’s Larry Lessig.
Ms. Rosen’s no longer officially representing the RIAA, it will be perhaps more interesting to hear what she has to say.

He’s good with kids, too

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 24 Sep 2003 12:45:33 +0000

Yuka and I met our friend Sachi yesterday in Ginza for some lunch and shopping with Ami-chan, Sachi’s six-month-old.
We started with lunch at the Muji Cafe near Yurakucho, which seemed to be quite filled with babies and parents. After lunch, I walked around with Ami as Yuka and Sachi talked. It was amazing how many women smiled at me – if I was single, I’d definitely borrow a baby now and then… ;-)
(Gallery of dozens of pictures of Ami-chan.) [Link fixed, click on first album...]

Orion

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 02:06:55 +0000

The sky is wonderfully clear tonight.
This is orion, taken from my balcony. Pretty amazing for central Tokyo, one of the world’s most light-polluted places.

For those unfamiliar with Orion:

Great Weather

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 22 Sep 2003 02:01:41 +0000

We’ve been feeling a bit of a tai-fu the last day or so – in Japanese, ~~Tai means big~~ and Fu means wind. In America it’s called a Typhoon, but that might translate a bit differently: Tai – Big, Phoon – Pile of poop.
(Correction: got the kanjis wrong in this case – it’s

Well

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 20 Sep 2003 12:56:33 +0000

We just got that quake -
Pretty strong, but no damage…
Update:
It was a 4 or so here, but a 5.5 in Chiba. That would be scary.
After all of the talk and predictions this week, I guess it’s a bit of a relief…

Test

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 19 Sep 2003 17:36:38 +0000

Flash Contest

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 16:35:08 +0000

Camera phones ready, all!

Tokyo apparently now has “Hello Kitty” taxis.
Be the first one to take a picture of one, post a link to it and win a prize!

Rules: (May change, as I see fit… {Gimme a break, I just thought of this…})
1: It must be an original picture – yours, not snagged from the web.
2: You find a place to put it. (If you don’t have a blog or something, post below that you got one, then email it to me.)
3: Creative photoshops may be considered. (They’d have to be really good, though…)

4: Posting anything obscene or defamatory is obviously a no-no.
5: To be considered, your picture should be released with a Creative Commons License.

Prize: TBA, but probably something ~2000 yen from the Hello Kitty shop near my office. (I’ll look after work…) Also Fame, Glory and a link to your blog from mine!

I’m not certain

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 11:44:43 +0000

But I think this came directly from my 1982 highschool yearbook.

(I never sported a ‘do like this – I’ve almost always worn my hair the same…)

Conbini Nation

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 17 Sep 2003 21:36:57 +0000

They opened another convenience store in my neighborhood. Another AM/PM. We already had 2 within 2 blocks on one street, a similar chain “Poplar” down the other way and a couple more up the hill.
The new AM/PM is a block away, almost next door to another. 42 steps away from an almost identical store, to be exact.
The night it opened, I asked the clerk why. He laughed and shook his head. He couldn’t explain it either.
I guess I don’t really mind, but it is odd.
People walk a lot more in Japan than they do in America, especially in my neighborhood, where it’s too expensive to park a car, so that may be part of the reason – the scale is a human scale, rather than a scale of what’s convenient to drive, they have to worry more about being within walking distance.
Convenience stores here are also a bit different from the US, in that the prices are not really out of line with other stores and the food is more edible. You won’t see week-old hotdogs turning on those rolling grills and few, if any Slurpee machines. You can buy fresh eggs there, or bread, or milk and it’s the same quality as in a super market.
One thing that always amuses me is that you can buy socks, underwear and dress shirts there, I guess for the Salary men who missed the train home and now have to look somewhat fresh for work.
In almost any convenience store, or “conbini”, as they’re called, you’ll see people standing and reading the magazines, sometimes for extended periods of time. (It is, after all, air conditioned.) The clerks wouldn’t think to chase people away, though they might give the evil eye to a schoolboy lingering too long over the soft-core porn magazines they sell.

Thoughts two years after

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 17 Sep 2003 21:35:41 +0000

Last night, I was talking with my friend Joe about the attacks of September eleventh and it occurred to me that I really don’t know why they took place.
I mean, what was the specific aim of the terrorists? Did they have a set of demands, or grievances or even reasons, other than blind, evil hatred of the United States?
The only justification I ever heard was that they “were envious of our way of life”, but I really don’t buy that. Bin Laden comes from a family that is far wealthier than almost any in America – why didn’t he just kill his family if he hates wealth and excess? Why not attack Saudi Arabia then – they’ve got lots of money and luxuries…
Some would say that Bin Laden was bitter about being left high and dry in Afghanistan and broken promises made by the Central Intelligence Agency, but how then, did he convince a handful of Saudis to hijack and crash planes?
Do they really see the United States as a “Great Satan” or a tool of Israel? Why didn’t they crash the planes into targets in Israel then?
I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate. I just don’t really understand why they did it.
Do you?

Still no quake

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 17 Sep 2003 12:12:03 +0000

It’s noon here in Tokyo – still no quake, thankfully…
I never did get over to Tokyu Hands for helmets, but hopefully won’t need them. I did remember to bring my passport and bank documents with me today, plus my good watch, just in case. I also rode my bike to work,
I was wondering about this Kushida guy who made the prediction – do you think he’s *hoping* for a quake, despite the fact that people would certainly die, just so that his reputation doesn’t go swirling down the drain?

Stealth Disco?

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 16 Sep 2003 15:16:38 +0000

This is silly.
Stealth Disco is the act of sneaking up behind a coworker and disco dancing, while a third person video tapes it.
Very, very silly…
(Thanks, Boing Boing.)

Our own Ado & Nob take a stab at it: Download file

Off to buy helmets

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 14 Sep 2003 13:53:10 +0000

Minami-san from my office, was talking the other day about this scientist in Japan who is predicting a major earthquake for the Tokyo region this week.
The scientist, a Mr. Kushida, has apparently had some success in the past predicting quakes, based on his measurements of radio waves coming from the earth’s crust.
He is considered a kook by many, but statistically, he is ahead of the curve…
I guess though, now is as good a time as any to make a good plan. A big quake could hit at any time, after all – we get little ones all the time. So we’re buying hard hats and stuff at Tokyu hands, packing some stuff into waterproof boxes and making sure all of our important papers are together, like passports and bank books and insurance cards and such.
(Of course, if there is a big one, my server will probably go off-line, since it’s in my laundry room.)
So have you guys heard about this? I would have missed it if Minami-san han’t mentioned it and Japan has laws against news organizations reporting predictions of quakes. I did notice, though, that Tokyu Hands, the big Do-It-Yourself department store in Japan, has quake kits on their front page today, so there must be some awareness of it.

Another Cool Clock

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 10 Sep 2003 18:02:46 +0000

The Cable Clock.
(Also look around the site for more stuff, including the cable clock as a screensaver…)
Via MetaFilter…

Odd

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 10 Sep 2003 17:34:16 +0000

Just saw IBM’s ad for Linux. Odd.

Not about WMD?

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 10 Sep 2003 17:22:11 +0000

John Bolton, US Under-Secretary of State for arms control, said that whether Saddam Hussein’s regime actually possessed WMD “isn’t really the issue”.

I thought that it was the issue.
The whole issue.

That’s what they said:

The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.

(State of the Union address, January 29, 2002)

The US decided to wage a pre-emptive war on Iraq. They said that it was because they possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Now they say that it wasn’t at all about that.

And now?

Lately

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 08 Sep 2003 23:45:34 +0000

Busy, tired, busy…
Work is going well, but busy… Installing and configuring…
Picked up some parts in Akihabara yesterday – a new processor for the Windows box and some more hard drives for the web server. With these 2 new drives, I’ll be up to over half a Terabyte of storage… (That’s kind of amazing to an old fart like me.) Of course, I’ll have to re-start the server to install them, which means I should take the time to shuffle around the directories and upgrade the OS.

The stupid Windows machine is working OK (for now) with the new CPU. This is the replacement for the last one that fried a month or so ago.

Jaan Pehechan Ho

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 07 Sep 2003 12:51:07 +0000

(Actually, I hadn’t meant to publish this – I also use my blog as a kind of notepad for stuff I want to remember…)
These are the lyrics to an Indian song by Mohammed Rafi from a movie in the 1960′s. The movie Ghost World also used it…

By Mohammed Rafi

Jaan Pehechan Ho,
Jeena Aasaan Ho,
Dil Ko Churane Walon,
Aankh Na Churavo,
Naam Tho Batavo..

Jaan Pehechan Ho,
Jeena Aasaan Ho,
Dil Ko Churane Walon,
Aankh Na Churavo,
Naam Tho Batavo..
Aaj Ki Yeh Shaam Javan,
Yun Na Chali Jaaye,
Aaj Ki Yeh Shaam Javan,
Yun Na Chali Jaaye,
Phir Se Na Aayegi Yeh Kisi Ke Bulaaye,
Phir Se Na Aayegi Yeh Kisi Ke Bulaaye..
Jaan Pehechan Ho,
Jeena Aasaan Ho,
Jaan Pehechan Ho,
Jeena Aasaan Ho,
Dil Ko Churane Walon,
Aankh Na Churavo,
Naam Tho Batavo..
Jaan Pehechan Ho,
Jeena Aasaan Ho,
Bolo Yeh Na Bolo Tum,
Hogaye Ishaare,
Bolo Yeh Na Bolo Tum,
Hogaye Ishaare,
Sidi Sidi Chot Huve Dil Pe Hamaare,
Sidi Sidi Chot Huve Dil Pe Hamaare..
Jaan Pehechan Ho,
Jeena Aasaan Ho,
Jaan Pehechan Ho,
Jeena Aasaan Ho,
Dil Ko Churane Walon,
Aankh Na Churavo,
Naam Tho Batavo..
Jaan Pehechan Ho,
Jeena Aasaan Ho,
Chup Chup Dekha Dekhi,
Nazaren Diwani,
Chup Chup Dekha Dekhi,
Nazaren Diwani,
Zara Si Yeh Baat Ban Jaaye Na Kahani,
Zara Si Yeh Baat Ban Jaaye Na Kahani..
Jaan Pehechan Ho,
Jeena Aasaan Ho,
Jaan Pehechan Ho,
Jeena Aasaan Ho,
Dil Ko Churane Walon,
Aankh Na Churavo,
Naam Tho Batavo..
Jaan Pehechan Ho,
Jeena Aasaan Ho..
Jaan Pehechan Ho, Jeena Aasaan Ho,
Dil Ko Churane Wale Aakh Na Churaavo, Naam Tho Bataavo

Personal Branding?

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 04 Sep 2003 09:57:47 +0000

Is it just me, or do other bloggers who actually wind up meeting bloggers, have trouble figuring out just who the heck people *are*?
For example, you might meet Jane Doe and start talking to her and after quite some time, figure out that she does SomeBlog.xyzzy.com, one of your favorite sites.
I wind up introducing myself to people as “Jim, aka ‘mmdc’ on IRC, who blogs at WireFarm and wrote joi.mmdc.net”
Too much.
Jim is, after all, my name. That’s not likely to change. MMDC is from way back when – (it’s “2600″ in Roman Numerals…) – hate to give that up.
“Wirefarm” is a domain name that I’ve had for years – 1996 or so. It came from a comment my mother once made that was something like “Why does everything you do involve so many wires? Your room is like a Wirefarm…” It’s a name that I feel like I’ve outgrown, but in a way, I kind of like it. Stupid but just distinctive enough. Familiar, mostly, I guess…

So should I just be using my name for my site? How important is personal branding?

Blogs are about people’s stories, not dot.com-era concepts where a hip-sounding domain name could land you some venture capital. So is it better to just push your own name? Your name, after all, usually translates well into your real-life life better than the moniker you picked out as an adolescent in 1987 on a BBS somewhere. (“This is our CIO, DarkLordAvenger25…”)

Blogs also seem to be translating into real-world connections more and more, so maybe this is more important than it used to be. Maybe it’s time to start looking at an URL that’s closer to my name.

Maybe Google is more important anyway. If you search Google for “Jim O’Connell”, my site comes up first. I guess that’s good. Maybe good enough. Some people argue that Google destroyed the market for domains. After all, who cares who has the domain $HOUSEHOLD_ITEM.com? People don’t think to type “brooms.com”, they just search google for brooms.

Interesting, when you remember that people once took their surname from what they were known for. If, for instance, you know someone named John Smith, chances are, someone in his lineage worked with iron, way back when. Same for Ms. Baker, Mr. Cooper (barrel maker), the Brewers & the Carpenters and even nice Mrs. Butcher down the street.

So at one time, names came from occupations and avocations.

Storm

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 03 Sep 2003 21:26:00 +0000

Test Post From Kung-Log

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 03 Sep 2003 17:25:20 +0000

Just trying out Kung Log, the offline blog poster.
~~Pretty sure this will crash my machine, as Ado wrote it…~~

Actually, it’s pretty great.

Update:
Ado… I found a bug.

If your username contains an apostrophy,(as mine does,) KLog converts it to '. MT doesn’t seem to like this…

New Category

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 02 Sep 2003 23:47:21 +0000

I decided to add a new category to my blog. Yes, this blog has categories for each story. The thing is, I don’t *do* anything with categories yet. I don’t display them or sort by them or anything. But they’re there, just in case.
This new category, I entitled “Blogs I Like”.

Someone told me once that if you notice something nice about a person, you should tell them. I guess that counts for blogs, too.

I just popped over to M. Sinclair Stevens’ site Nippon Daze and had the thought “I really like this site”. Aesthetically pleasing. Good writing. Honest, casual, friendly. Interesting. Everything a good blog should be.

M. Sinclair seems to be a fairly regular reader, but I don’t think we’ve met, yet Nippon Daze is the sort of blog that I want to show people who are thinking of blogging to show how it’s done well. (I don’t show them my own, except in passing, because even though I do it, I really don’t think I do it so well.)

If you haven’t been over, go now. That’s where I’ll be for the next hour or so…

Howard Dean

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 02 Sep 2003 22:25:17 +0000

Found a link to a speech by Howard Dean over at David Weinberger’s Blog. Wow.
I may have to go vote for this guy. Joi says Clinton hates him, too. (All the more reason to vote for him if you’re not a Democrat…)

What’s your homepage?

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 02 Sep 2003 14:28:27 +0000

When I start up a browser, I usually go to Slashdot, news.google.com, daypop.com and also Joi’s page. (So I’ll know what the heck he’s talking about that day.)
What do you look at first?

What time is it?

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 14:03:38 +0000

Mike!

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 09:13:52 +0000

It seems my friend Mike Placonouris has started a blog…

Mike, go turn on comments. Having a blog without comments is like having a conversation with your fingers in your ears.

Bastard sons of the fourth estate

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 01 Sep 2003 02:20:37 +0000

“The first freedom of the press consists in its not being a trade.”
Karl Marx: Rheinische Zeitung May 19 1842

The nineteenth-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle spoke of a “Fourth Estate” which has come to mean the role of the media in government as a watchdog of the three official branches. (In his time, he was referring to the three percieved estates of government, the priesthood, aristocracy and commons.)
The term Fourth Estate survives, though the other three estates have come to be the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the American government.

The Fourth Estate was seen as an independant watchdog, able to keep the three estates from becoming too corrupt. The press is free, after all, its freedom guaranteed by the American constitution. The authors of the constitution understood how important a part the press would play in society and guaranteed its freedom in the first amendment.

Yet many people feel that the media is no longer enough. They feel the need to raise their own voice. The traditional news media are, after all, commercial in nature, bound on one side by the spectre of financial loss from libel judgements and bound on the other by the need to create revenue by selling advertisements and to some lesser extent, selling their product to the general public.

This commercial nature of their existance has bred distrust in some people. The voice of traditional media has seemingly become centralized in a world where centralization and globalization is seen as an extension of corporate control of our lives. The likes of MSNBC, Time Warner AOL and Clear Channel are seen as fulfilling their corporate responsibilities first, the interests of the public, second at best.

Can weblogs fill a need for a decentralized voice in media?

I would not presume to suppose that I, or any armchair journal-keeper could replace traditional media. We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the training. We can’t afford to give up our day jobs.

We report our reactionary and uninformed opinions on whatever the story of the day interests us. We don’t have editors or news desks or legal departments. We do, however, have opinions. We also have a medium of distribution that enables us to spread our thoughts and ideas for a negligible sum of money.

We can’t be influenced by advertisers because we don’t have them. We don’t have advertisers because we don’t need them. The threat of lost profit is not a factor in what we decide to publish, because there is no profit to be considered.

Marshall McLuhan didn’t live to see the rise of weblogging. He did, however forsee much of the potential impact of such a technology in his 1964 book “Understanding Media”:

An example of the disruptive impact of a hot technology succeeding a cool one is given by Robert Theobald in The Rich and the Poor. When Australian natives were given steel axes by the missionaries, their culture, based on the stone axe, collapsed. The stone axe had not only been scarce but had always been a basic status symbol of male importance. The missionaries provided quantities of sharp steel axes and gave them to women and children. The men had even to borrow these from the women, causing a collapse of male dignity. A tribal and feudal hierarchy of traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind. The medium of money or wheel or writing, or any other form of specialist speed up of exchange and information, will serve to fragment a tribal structure.

Some journalists resent the current vogue enjoyed by the weblogger. (Andrew Orlowski of The Register regularly mocks what we do, yet many people would never find his writings if it weren’t for the links from the very blogs he disdains.
Is it his is the “male dignity” that McLuhan refers to that is on the verge of collapse?

McLuhan continues:

Similarly, a very much greater speed-up, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now tending to happen as a result of TV in America. Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes. The process of upset resulting from a new distribution of skills is accompanied by much culture lag in which people feel compelled to look at new situations as if they were old ones, and come up with ideas of “population explosion” in an age of implosion. Newton, in an age of clocks, managed to present the physical universe in the image of a clock.

Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.
We are becoming retribalized. We can conceptualize what we do in terms of what we know, which is journalism. Yet we are hardly journalists.

“Journalism” is a word that has abandoned its roots. A journalist, it could be argued, is a person who keeps a journal. A “journal” is but a daily record. So are we, the webloggers who write our thoughts daily, journalists?
No. Journalism has come to mean something else and journalists are not mere diarists. We, for the most part, are not doing what they do. We are free from the responsibilities they bear as well as the risks many of them take.

We are not the Fourth Estate, we are the bastard sons of the fourth estate.

What we do is not without merit.
It matters what we think and what we feel and also what we publish. If not in individual voices, in a chorus of raised voices, in the way we cross-reference and agregate and propogate stories whith which we agree.
The technology handles the details. (In Movable Type, the software I use to publish this site, certain technologies are built in to enable the propogation and dissemination of the articles. Trackback Pings, Syndication, Permalinks, Comments. These things all serve to make it easy to combine these articles with others.

This “nonspecialist electric technology” is retribalizing us.
Cool…

Thai food

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 30 Aug 2003 18:01:02 +0000

went out last night with Yuka and Akiko and Kuri from work – we went for Thai food at Kaffir Lime, one of my favorite restaurants in Tokyo.
(If you go there, be sure to try the “Crispy Fried Egg Spicy Salad” as an appetizer. Trust me, it’s wonderful.)

My laptop seems to have forgotten that it has USB ports, so I’m having trouble importing pictures… Harrumph.

Afterwards, we went up to Good Day Cafe for a drink and sat in the back where they have a DJ and show old movies. Pretty cool place…

Please Help

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 30 Aug 2003 15:14:31 +0000

Imagine for a minute being dragged to the center of your town and buried up your neck in sand.
Terrified, unable to move, you watch as your neighbors gather around you in a big circle, not to free you, but to throw stones at your head until you die.

Imagine that your only crime was having a baby without being married.

That’s what’s going to happen to Amina Lawal next month, unless her government intervenes and upholds the international Human Rights agreements that they have signed.

Right now, you can go to Amnesty International’s website and sign their petition and show the Nigerian government that the world is watching.

Please sign the petition and let others know. Please put it on your blog if you have one.

Doing this has saved lives in the past. It just might save Amina Lawal.
There is very little time before she will be killed, please do it now.
Thanks.

Lessons in how to lie about Iraq

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 18:11:24 +0000

Digging through my Technorati Link Cosmos last night, I came across a link to my site from fredshouse.net. (Cool thing, technorati, I don’t check it enough.)
One article I found there, posted by Gene, was a ref to an article by the musician Brian Eno that has some interesting observations on propaganda.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America. According to Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in their new book Weapons of Mass Deception , it was used to engineer a state of emergency that would justify an invasion of Iraq. Rampton and Stauber expose how news was fabricated and made to seem real. But they also demonstrate how a coalition of the willing – far-Right officials, neo-con think-tanks, insanely pugilistic media commentators and of course well-paid PR companies – worked together to pull off a sensational piece of intellectual dishonesty. Theirs is a study of modern propaganda.

Being somewhat isolated, I’m perhaps a bit less subject to whatever propoganda might be floating around, especially the blurring of the responsibilities for September eleventh. Yet people I know who *should* know better have told me that it is important to remove Saddam Hussein because of what he did on 9/11.

I might feel the same way if I had been subjected to the barrage of information and mis-information being injected into the American consciousness.

I have no doubt that this blurring is intentional. Was the greatest lesson learned in Viet Nam that you have to control the ‘spin’ back home?

We’re now watching a short, triumphant victory in Iraq turn into a long, bloody streetfight with a group that has nothing to lose. This has gone beyond being something that you “win” and turned into something like Israel and Palestine, where there will be violence as long as there is anyone capable of filling a bottle with gasoline and a rag, or picking up a rock.

How do you justify losing a few soldiers a week in Iraq with no visible gains or advances in “Freedom”? What is freedom, anyway? How do we know when the Iraqis are free? When they hold democratic elections?
{

SAMARRA, Iraq — U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.

}

(Or do you show the public the annual report of the Halliburton company or Chevron and say “this is why an Iraqi cab driver put a bullet in the back of your son’s head”? )

Sadly, I think the only way to keep up public support is to either win this thing by killing every “potential terrorist”, or to keep up the percieved need for this struggle by allowing more and more terrorist attacks to occur. If a bus filled with schoolchildren were to explode on Broadway and it was shown to be Islamic terrorists, you could probably convince the public that the use of tactical nuclear weapons on {enemy of the week} is not only justified, but prudent.

You could also let these things happen offshore, but close to home: Nightclubs blowing up in Bali isn’t really enough motivation for most people to hate enough. But what if a popular club in Cancun or Bermuda was levelled by a car bomb, this time filled not with Australian tourists, but American? Targets like that are better, because people would lay the blame not with the American police and FBI, but directly at the terrorists. (Mexican police, after all, are bad movie caricatures to many Americans, hardly to be expected to be able to thwart the likes of Saddamma Bin Laden.)

An important distinction I’d like to make about what I’m saying here is that I don’t believe that the United States War Machine needs to do these things. (I still like to think that on some level they must still posess some bit of humanity.)

What I’m saying is that the United States War Machine needs these things to happen. and as we’re seeing, that’s easy enough, if they are made to hate us as much as we have been made to hate them.

Who the hell are you people??

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 13:35:32 +0000

;-)
I was looking at my logs last night and I saw that my traffic has quadrupled.
The number of comments is about the same as ever, but so many more people seem to be reading. Strange.

Anyway, welcome. (Whoever you are…)

The server is really due for a rebuild. It’s running RedHat 7.1, with every concievable patch applied and all sorts of software upgraded. After a while, updating gets to be a very complicated thing. I was trying to upgrade the Python language and it seems that so many things rely upon it, it would be much quicker to start clean with a new disk and re-install. (Don’t worry, those of you with sites on my server, your stuff will be safe if I decide to do it.) I was trying to install a “wiki”, which is a kind of collaborative site that lets anyone edit and something I upgraded broke some of the picture galleries. Upgrading the gallery program for each site seemed to do the trick and I think most of the sites are back to normal. I think. The music site is still down, but that needs a major rebuild and re-organization of where I store the music files. I started that with a 60GB disk a while back – when that got full, I added a 120GB and made a lot of symbolic links. I need to take a day and get them in order. (Not a high priority, since the music server is really only for me… No, you can’t have an account.)

I’ve really got to start looking at increased disk space in general. I was working on some video on my iBook this morning and it gave me a “DskFul” error. Oh.
I pretty religiously dump off any extra files to a 120GB firewire disk, but it still fills pretty quickly. The main problem is digital pictures – I generally take 100-1000MB of photos *every day*. That fills up things pretty quickly. I guess I should build a firewire RAID array that I can expand as needed. But then, if I want to use it from the web server, it’s gotta be on the lan, which means that it’s got to be powered up. My electricity bills are already high enough. Maybe I should look at those “Wake on Lan” network cards and motherboards that can spring to life as needed. Or just build something capable of powering down the disks to save juice.

Then there’s the iBook itself. I wonder if I can just open it up and pop in a bigger disk the way I have with other laptops. It just went out of warranty, so I can’t see a downside. A quick google shows a page that explains how. Got to think on that a bit. A nice 80GB would be good. (For a while…)

A weak tie comes undone

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 16:41:29 +0000

A couple of days a go, Mike Lea, aka Mazeone from our IRC channel #joiito committed suicide.

I’ve been in a strange, sort of shocked, state for the past hour since reading about it, mostly because I don’t know what to feel.

He and I weren’t friends. He was someone I would have said “Oh, yeah, that guy…”

I was used to seeing his nickname in the channel list and may have talked to him on occasion, though we weren’t so close that we’d ‘shout’ a ‘hey’ to eachother when the other arrived.

But that’s what IRC is like – you’re only a few comments or conversations away from a new friendship or a new job. Loose, elastic ties that sometimes solidify into real-world relationships.

I think about the job I have now, which came about after I dropped a casual line into the channel saying that I hated the one I was at.

I think about Boris who was just another guy from the channel that I didn’t really know, who wound up staying on our spare futon for a few days on his trip to Tokyo. Now I consider him a friend.

I think about Karl and Steph who are better known as Cow and Sniffles on #joiito – people I got to know and respect through IRC.

I think how weak these ties we make are, yet how little effort it takes to to make them real.

I think about what a terrible, senseless shame it is that Mike Lea didn’t reach out to someone, somewhere, somehow.

Rest in peace, Mike.

Sunburned

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 25 Aug 2003 17:01:05 +0000

Yuka, Satoshi, Naho, Andrew, Yurika, her dad and I went fishing yesterday off Enoshima in a boat that Satoshi chartered and now I’m quite sunburned.
We caught dozens of Saba, which I think are mackarel and took a bunch of pictures, but today I forgot my little adapter and therefore can’t upload them.

Tonight’s going to be abother PC-Free night, so it will have to wait until tomorrow…

Koh & Gen

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 14:41:27 +0000

[[[Kohichi Aoki and Gen Kanai of Sony at the Pink Cow for the Weblogger's MeetUp.]]]

Last night, Gen brought along his friend Koh to the meetup -
Gen is one of those people I’ve been kind of “peripherally aware” of for some time that I’m just now getting to know a bit better.

That happens a lot with blogs – you read a lot of pages a day and notice that some sites you’ve been to before, some name or alias becomes familiar, someone’s style of writing or photography just sort of fits with what you want to be looking at. Then, when you meet them, your reaction is like “Oh – you’re *that* guy…”

Hopefully, you get to then sit down with the people who write the blogs you read and get to gain a better sense of who they are…
(At least for me, that is – I get so distracted in crowds and large parties – I much prefer to focus over a dinner or drinks and figure out who someone really is.)

So Gen & Koh, consider this post an open invitation to grab a couple of beers or dinner some time…

Ethical Question

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 20 Aug 2003 18:14:30 +0000

I was just wondering something:
If I go out and buy a CD of music that I like and find that it won’t play in my system because of copy protection technology, can I ethically (or legally) go onto one of the peer-to-peer file sharing networks like Kazaa and download the MP3s of the songs?

I have 2 devices capable of playing an actual CD. One is my laptop, an Apple iBook and the other is an iMac, neither of which are capable of playing copy-protected CDs. So if I find that this is the case with a CD I legally bought, can I go to the net and get those very same tracks and store them on my laptop or iPod or whatever? (Of course, I wouldn’t re-share them, just use them the way I would any of the other music I listen to.)

You see, when I buy a CD, I immediately ‘rip’ it and then put the original onto the shelf with the others, keeping it from getting scratched or damaged. I have a server for myself that has thousands of songs from my CDs that I can listen to in any order I like. The original CD for me, is just the delivery mechanism as well as proof that I bought it.

Today I saw a CD I wanted and had to skip over it because it was copy protected. They lost the sale. Afterwards, I was thinking that I could just buy it, then download… Hmmm…

So what do you say? Ethical? Legal?

Osram Dulux Mini

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 20 Aug 2003 17:40:39 +0000

When I’m packing up my bag to go to work in the morning, I tend to take a *lot* of stuff.

Laptop, of course, camera, extra lenses, spare memory cards, adapters, wires, spare contact lenses, big Sharpie Marker, iPod and one new thing that I’ve found to be especially handy – the Osram Dulux Mini flourescent light.

This is a really great little light – it always seems to be just what I need to flood a bit of light where I’m working, be it behind a desk plugging in cables, or reading a map or using my laptop on a plane. I used to like those MagLites that use 2 AA batteries, but for most things, the MagLite’s beam is too narrow.
I’ve found that it’s expecially handy inside the bag, when I’m digging around for something way down at the bottom. It’s good on batteries and works well with rechargeables.

I bought mine in Kita Aoyama, but you should be able to find them for sale on the web, too.
Here’s a pretty in-depth review also.

Why are so many reporters dying?

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 19 Aug 2003 02:42:45 +0000

Accepting the CPJ award at the National Press Club in Washington, Mazen Dana remarked "Words and images are a public trust, and for this reason I will continue with my work regardless of the hardships and even if it costs me my life." Sadly, it did.

Earthquake

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 18 Aug 2003 18:59:23 +0000

Was I first?
Update – Just a tremor…
More of a little jolt that rocked through the office. Funny that my first instinct was to post it here…
I’d guess it was about a 3 here in Akasaka, but I don’t have access to NHK tv to watch their almost instantaneous reports. Reports might not be the word, since they’re really just a bit of text overlay that runs across the top of the screen. Maybe, if it was more than a 4 or so, they’ll have a little report somewhere after a bit. I’m sure this one won’t make it, since it was just a bump, only interesting to people like me who are fascinated by the fact that the ground can suddenly start moving around on its own. I’m also fascinated when the sun comes up on the wrong side of the world and when water flows uphill – some things, the ground shaking included, just shouldn’t happen…

Connected

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 18 Aug 2003 12:35:48 +0000

I got the old iMac working again the other day. The internal screen had died due to (probably) a fried flyback transformer. I’m using an external flatscreen now, which is quite nice. I set it up with iChat, the mac chatting software, too. iChat is pretty nice with a lot of great features, but unfortunately, the best features are mac-only. For instance, if you are on a PC, you can install AIM and we can do text chat, but no voice or video, I think. Last year, I convinced everyone I know to get on Yahoo messenger, so I’m reluctant to tell everyone to go get Aim, especially since it’s text-only so far.
(Note: I did find “Ophonex”, which is a mac app that supposedly works with GnomeMeeting and Microsoft Netmeeting. I haven’t tried it yet though. )

One neat little thing I found for iChat is iChat Streaming Icon, which is a little utility that takes a picture from your webcam and makes a small icon for ichat that others see. At first, I thought it was just a gimmick, but I found that it was actually pretty useful. The icon is tiny, only about 30 pixels on a side and the quality at that resolution is bad enough that I don’t worry about it being an invasion of my privacy, since the people who can see it already have access to my online status. All this adds is a little more immediate presence information, so I can know if people are really sitting in front of the computer when I try to message them.

If you have a mac and an iSight, you should play around with QuickTime Broadcaster. It’s a free utility that lets you stream pretty high quality video across the net to either a single person or to a relay that can display the stream to as many people as you have bandwidth for. The software also lets you record to disk from your iSight, which lets you then import it into other applications. You can also use other video sources – the other day, I tried it with my VCR, which has a firewire output. A camcorder would work as well.

When I was on vacation, I had a lot of fun streaming video to my friends on the IRC channel – I found a free wireless connection at a cafe in Saint Germain des Pr

Family Album

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 18 Aug 2003 01:10:12 +0000

Today we were up at Yuka’s parents’ place, playing with her nieces & nephew and eating lots of her mom’s cooking, generally having a really good time.
After the kids left, Yuka showed her dad a project that she’s been working on which was scanning photos in old family albums. This picture is her dad looking at the presentation onscreen, a photo of his late sister.

I also took about 70 pictures of Yuka’s nieces & nephiew, Ayumi-chan, Chihiro-chan and Hajime-kun – those will be posted soon.

In the future…

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 14 Aug 2003 17:59:13 +0000

: Summary: the machine of 2003
: 1GB RAM
: 2.7 GB disk
: 528 MHz processor with 1 GIPS performance (is this
: contradictory?)

Sounds a bit fishy.. What about 8 processors running at 200MHz
instead?

: 24-bit video at 24 fps at 1150×1540
: But will it be IBM-compatible?

God forbid!

I found an interesting thread from alt.folklore.computers from 1994 (via slashdot) discussing what computer would be like a few years later. Of course, lots of people seemed to be hoping for voice-controlled PCs with huge screens, but some of the more realistic and thoughtful opinions were pretty close – except they all seemed to be pretty conservative in their estimates of hard disk size – I guess nobody foresaw the amount of space we’d typically be using for MP3s and video storage. RAM estimates seemed to be a bit high and processor speed a bit low. Still, it’s a quite interesting read.
So what do you think will be your “computer” in 2013? I’m guessing that I’ll still be sitting in front of a QWERTY keyboard looking at a screen pretty much the way I do now – no voice or pen input and no artificial intelligence. Maybe by then, Steve Jobs will have made a cube-shaped computer that people will actually use, but somehow I doubt it. Maybe by then, Microsoft will make software that doesn’t absolutely suck, but again, somehow I doubt it.

Don’t mess with Joi

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 13 Aug 2003 18:50:11 +0000

Joi explains what happens when you break the rules at Neoteny…

Much Ado about networks

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 13 Aug 2003 14:05:00 +0000

If you were part of the First Annual International Moblog Conference, you may remember all of the trouble with the wireless network – it seemed that someone was running a rogue access point in the room, using the same channel as the legitimate access point. I downloaded a scanner and found that the access point was called “Amnesia”. I set up another AP on a different channel at the conference, to get around the trouble and pretty much forgot about it.
Until today, that is, when at a meeting, I saw that computer’s network name again, this time in Apple’s rendezvous:

It was our very own Adriaan “Ado” Tijsseling…

Lunch

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 15:13:49 +0000

Waited too long to go to lunch today and wandered around a bit looking for something good. It’s always that way in a new neighborhood – you never can find the gems straight away and half the time you wind up at some place that really sucks.
Fortunately, I found a “Pret a manger” and even though the selection was a bit thin, even for 3:00, it wasn’t bad.

BLT, Sea Salt & Pepper chips, Muscat juice…

Street Sign

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 11 Aug 2003 15:47:32 +0000

Karl & Steph

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 09 Aug 2003 19:09:51 +0000

This is Karl and Steph. Karl is someone Yuka and I met through my blog. (He was visiting Tokyo for business and happened to see a post I had done about a restaurant.) Later, we met in person and then I “met” his girlfriend Steph on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and we arranged to have a lunch together in Paris.
Really nice people. :-)

Too much IRC

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 08 Aug 2003 17:33:50 +0000

Too much IRC, or too little sleep (probably both,) resulted in the following conversation with my computer today:
jim% ssh root@192.168.xxx.xxx The authenticity of host ’192.168.xxx.xxx (192.168.xxx.xxx)’ can’t be established. RSA key fingerprint is xx:x:xx:xx:x:x:x:x:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:x. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yeah Please type ‘yes’ or ‘no’: ok Please type ‘yes’ or ‘no’: yes Warning: Permanently added ’192.168.xxx.xxx’ (RSA) to the list of known hosts. root@192.168.xxx.xxx’s password: Last login: Fri Aug 8 14:36:22 2003

Lost in Translation

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 08 Aug 2003 16:03:03 +0000

Remember a few months ago, I was in that Bill Murray / Scarlett Johannson movie that they were filming in Tokyo?
Well, it’s finally coming out, but probably not for a while in Japan…
Site and Trailer

Moon Tonight

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 07 Aug 2003 19:24:04 +0000

I took a picture of the moon just now. (I know, I do that a lot…) I thought the craters were kind of cool, since the moon wasn’t full.
Click for larger view.
Please Note that this picture is from 2003-08-07, which was “tonight” when I posted it. The moon is probably different now…

Efficient Meetings

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 05 Aug 2003 21:13:41 +0000

Strange to have a meeting where most of the people are in the room, but don’t speak. To type on an IRC channel rather than talk, because it’s the most efficient way to communicate. No need to take minutes since there are logs. No need to translate since text is easier to comprehend. Video gets set up with no preplanning. Networks are arranged without engineers being called. It all just happens.

Great to be having meetings with people for whom none of this is unusual…

Stuck-in-the-rain notes

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 05 Aug 2003 19:24:58 +0000

Got out of a meeting in Akasaka tonight just as it was starting to rain, so I ran to the nearest Starbucks and now I’m stuck here…
At the meeting, we watched TypePad go live – congratulations, SixApart!

Fun Stuff: Take a quiz to see if you can tell a serial killer from a programmer. (I only got 6 out of 10 right…)

I’m on Joi’s Moblog again. Thanks, Joi!

xxxxx xxxxx

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 23:40:51 +0000

So tomorrow, I start at ~~Xxxxxxx~~ doing ~~xxxxxx~~ for ~~Xxx Xxx~~. For ~~xxxxxx,~~ at least.
I don’t think I can say much more at this point, can I, Joi???

Airport (In)Security?

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 17:09:19 +0000

Yuka and I got back from France without incident, except that they confiscated my camera’s monopod at the airport. OK, they really didn’t confiscate it, but they made me check it, which is basically the same thing, since it was so small and I had no other big luggage to check. In fact, as we boarded the plane at DeGaulle, we could see it sitting by itself on the steps to the cockpit, for some unknown reason. It’s probably still there now.
The funny thing is that also inside my carry-on camera bag was a cigar cutter, left over from a party at the Belgian Embassy. Now a cigar cutter in and of itself is not so dangerous, as it’s like a little guillotine for cigars. I suppose you could threaten to lop off someone’s finger, or perhaps circumcise them, but if you dis-assemble it, it does have a very sharp blade, not unlike a box cutter… They didn’t find that, though I’m sure they would have found a pair of nail clippers, since the lucite contraband box at the screening gate had plenty of those. So, as a result, I had to cut my nails in France with the cigar cutter… Boy, I feel safer.

The monopod, I can kind of understand, since, when it was collapsed, it *did* sort of look like a police baton. (Ok, a *lot* like one…) Still, I had no problem taking it on the first flight, so either they were being paranoid in France, or too lax at Narita. I felt like mentioning to the security guards that it was possible to buy a 12 inch tall statue of the Eiffel tower, made of metal, at the duty-free shops *inside* the security gate, but then, I’m sure I’d be locked up as a terrorist…

Of course, the guards had to look through my camera, too, to make sure it was legit, but didn’t look through the extra lenses I had. Now my big lens, the new 28-70 1:2.8 zoom is plenty big enough that if you took out the innards, could easily hold a couple of hand grenades and maybe a few nail clippers, as well.

That my iBook would turn on was enough to appease them, even though I could have tucked some box cutter blades between the battery (4-5) and the body, under the keyboard, (at least 30) and jammed into the CDRom tray. (Another 20 or so.) Enough to arm the whole plane, or at least the section of it that I was in…

Now maybe you might think that this is dangerous information that I’m posting, but think about it: I’m not a terrorist. I have no desire to hurt anyone. I don’t sit around scheming any more than it takes to alleviate my annoyance at this very expensive and seemingly-innefective system. There are, however, probably whole teams of terrorists who do spend their time thinking about this kind of stuff and I bet they could come up with many more clever and lethal ways to hurt people. That’s what worries me. After all of this annoyance and bother, all that we’re really left with is a false sense of security. The terrorists know this.

Take CAPPS and CAPPS2, for instance – It’s a system to build profiles of likely terrorists to see who should be kept off a plane. OK, so they figure out that someone who’s behind on their Visa bill has nothing to lose and must be a terrorist. They keep him off. So terrorists just have to stay in the black on paper. Easy – fundamentalist loonies don’t generally gamble or carouse – they probably live modestly and dress plainly. If the system is neutral to race and religion, the system will probably keep a lot of Amish and Mennonites off the plane, too. (If, in fact, Amish and Mennonites fly on planes… I don’t know.)
Maybe, they can screen out most legitimate terrorists – then what? So the terrorist organization takes their best people and sends them through the system on a dry run, to see what happens to them. No guns, knives or explosives, just Mr. Freddie Bin Laden on a typical business trip or a vacation to Disneyland. If he notices anything funny, an extra look at his luggage or check of his person, guess what? Terror, Inc. just picks the next guy for a dry run. It’s a faulty system that at best becomes a poker game where the stakes are the innocent passengers. More of the same very expensive false security.

So what do we do? We can’t just stop screening, nor can we rely on it to find everything. Do I have an answer? No. But that shouldn’t stop me from saying when there’s a problem. Hopefully someone more clever than me can come up with a workable solution.

Maybe the solution is not to try and prevent them from being able to hurt us, but to make them stop *wanting* to.

Paris Pictures

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 00:09:06 +0000

Tango Lessons on the Seine

This picture was a bit of a surprise – I didn’t notice until now that it was actually pretty nice – it was a group along the Seine in Paris practicing dance. I must have been swinging my lens in time with the music…
More below.

Paris Catacombs

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 21:13:04 +0000

We went to the catacombs beneath Paris yesterday – A couple hundred years ago, the city moved the cemetaries to a series of tunnels, to make space.
Creepy, dusty, drippy place. Bizarre assemblages of bones. Very strange.
It was very hard to take good pictures, even with a monopod, but a few came out pretty well.

We’re going to go get on a plane now to go back to Tokyo – when I get home, I’ll start sorting through the gigabytes of pictures we took and get a decent presentation together.

St Severin Cafe

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 31 Jul 2003 09:42:19 +0000

This is the cafe in St. Michel that I went to last night because I found that there was a nearby wireless internet access.
I managed to do a live video feed from my laptop and camera, which was quite cool.

Net Withdrawl

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 28 Jul 2003 21:48:03 +0000

I’m making this post from my friends’ apartment in Paris – painfully pecking out the letters on a French keyboard, which is more different to me than a Japanese keyboard.
I’m only able to get to the net using Laurent’s old pc, an old P166 that is going through a personal crisis so bad that I had to set the SHELL: to “progman”. (You may remember Progman from Windows 3.11)
We just got back from the South of France this morning, where I couldn’t get online at all, so this is a big improvement, I guess…
Ah! I just found Mac drivers for this weird USB DSL Modem! Let me go download them and get online with the iBook…

Eleanor Roosevelt as a blogger?

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 20 Jul 2003 14:09:15 +0000

I called my mom late last night (mid-day for her) to tell her about my new job and tried to explain the whole weblogging phenomenon. Now my mother has no interest in computers and very rarely looks at the web, but this time, she let me explain what it is that I do, without getting that “you’re talking computers, I’m no longer listening” tone in her voice. ;-)
When I started to explain how I just write about whatever happens to me, or whatever I happen to be thinking or feeling, she said, “Oh, just like My Day.” I was confused. Had my mother taken up blogging when I wasn’t looking?
“Like your day? I don’t understand. What did you do today?”
“No… My Day, You must remember, Eleanor Roosevelt’s column.”
“I’ve never heard of it, mom…” I said as I started googling (~~Elenor~~…Elanor. Google: “Did you mean: Eleanor?”)
“All through her adult life, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a syndicated column called “My Day”. Everybody read it. ”
I was intrigued – I really don’t know much about Eleanor except for the stories my mother told about meeting her and the rumors about her sexuality.
The more I searched, the more interested I got. Take, for example, this ~~blog entry~~ column that she wrote in 1939, announcing her resignation from the “Daughters of the American Revolution” when they refused to let Marian Anderson sing at the DAR Hall, because of the color of her skin:

WASHINGTON, FEBRUARY 27, 1939 – I am having a peaceful day. I drove my car a short distance out of the city this morning to pilot some friends of mine who are starting off for a vacation in Florida. I think this will be my only excursion out of the White House today, for I have plenty of work to do on an accumulation of mail, and I hope to get through in time to enjoy an evening of uninterrupted reading. I have been debating in my mind for some time, a question which I have had to debate with myself once or twice before in my life. Usually I have decided differently from the way in which I am deciding now. The question is, if you belong to an organization and disapprove of an action which is typical of a policy, should you resign or is it better to work for a changed point of view within the organization? In the past, when I was able to work actively in any organization to which I belonged, I have usually stayed until I had at least made a fight and had been defeated.
Even then, I have, as a rule, accepted my defeat and decided I was wrong or, perhaps, a little too far ahead of the thinking for the majority at that time. I have often found that the thing in which I was interested was done some years later. But in this case, I belong to an organization in which I can do no active work. They have taken an action which has been widely talked of in the press. To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.

You can recognize the candid tone of a weblogger, the openness and sincerity that typifies the best of our current writers. In these columns, she wrote about her day, her thoughts, her trivia as well as issues that affected all of the people of her time.
I like to think that it was this candor, this openness that made her the most popular first lady. Popular, in the sense of being of the people – not the movie star idolization that the world had for Jacqueline Kennedy, who was much more a private person, but as someone that the people could understand and feel for.
My mother described the first time she saw E.R. in person, when, as a teenager, she went to wait in front of a hotel to try and catch a glimpse of the first lady before a speech she was giving. While the bulk of the people waited at the front entrance of the hotel, my mother went to the old entrance, which was now more of the back. After a while, a little black convertible drove up with 3 women inside, Eleanor at the wheel. It’s hard to imagine now a first lady in an open car, let alone driving, with no Secret Service escort, during wartime… This was someone who was unafraid of the world.
It occurred to me that perhaps Eleanor’s writing may have been ghost-written, or perhaps propoganda, but upon reading a few ~~posts~~ columns, such a thing is impossible to imagine. Still, one has to wonder how the president felt about having their daily life discussed with the people of his country; he was, after all the president. There must have been issues of national security discussed in their home and no Ari Fleischer to backpedal and excuse and put a spin on every word. No, it seems that they relied on simple honesty and decency to keep them out of trouble. In a Look magazine article after her husband’s death, she had this to say about her writing:

Never in all the years can I remember his asking me not to say or to write anything, even though we occasionally argued very vehemently and sometimes held diametrically opposite points of view on things of the moment.

I think my husband probably often used me as a sounding board, knowing that my reactions would be the reactions of the average man and woman in the street.

So I wonder if it might have been “My Day” that made her such a popular and effective leader. Was this conversation with the people so powerful as to make her voice heard? (She never had the beauty of a Jacqueline Kennedy to enchant the people, in fact, as a child, her own mother told her she was ugly.)
When she was 14, she wrote:

“It may seem strange, but no matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and loyalty are stamped upon her face, all will be attracted to her and she will do good to all who come near her and those who know her will always love her for they will feel her loyal spirit and have confidence in her while another woman far more beautiful and attractive will never gain anybody’s confidence, simply because those around her feel lack of loyalty.”

PBS has a few of her columns Online. If you’d like to read even more, De Capo Press has published a book, that I hope to pick up soon.

So much going on

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 20 Jul 2003 12:55:02 +0000

What a week…
If you know me, you probably know that I left Global Dining this week. I left on pretty good terms and with a lot of friends there. I’ve told them to just call if they need anything, since I was really the only Linux guy there and I’d hate to see them replace the Linux servers with Windows…
So anyway, I got a new position on Friday. I’m not sure how much I can say about it, since much of it seems clouded in secrecy, but I can say that I’ll be working with some really great people doing some intensely cool stuff. (Cool stuff for a geek like me, anyway. ) I’ll post more, of course, when I know that I can.
Tomorrow, Yuka and I are heading to France for a quick vacation before I start my new position. First we’ll be in Paris for a few days, then down to Nimes in the south for a bit, then back up to Paris to meet some friends. (Calendar.
I’m not sure how much email access I’ll have there, but hopefully, I can pop on and update my site here and there…
Hopefully I’ll be able to take lots of pictures – I even bought a new lens for the trip, a Nikkor AF-S 28-70 1:2.8. It’s a great lens, but big and heavy and everyone is warning me about the thieves who snatch cameras over there. We’ll see. Still, I’m a bit nervous as a google search on “Paris Thieves” turned up some real horror stories.

Lunch

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 18 Jul 2003 16:26:43 +0000

Today I made lunch for Laurent, Mie-san and Yuka – Laurent works in the same building as Yuka and I recently built him a Linux server for his office.
I made a caesar salad and home-made pasta. I was really happy with the noodles – I’ve discovered that to make really tender pasta noodles, be in a huge hurry and pound the hell out of the dough to get it to behave…
Laurent brought a nice wine and Mie-san brought these beautiful little orange flowers:

Matsuri

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 17 Jul 2003 10:35:50 +0000

Bayview Perl Training

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 15 Jul 2003 17:54:10 +0000

I had a nice chat today with Bill and Holly Ward from Bayview.com. Bill’s been giving PERL training classes and have just started a translation service for translating software and documentation to and from Japanese, so I thought I’d give them a plug. Though he’s a PERL guru, he has none of the arrogance and impatience that you often associate with such people. For years, he’s answered my stupid unix questions (Me: “If you ‘rm -Rf’ something, how do you get it back?” Bill: “Easy – restore from tape…” ) and helped me with the occasional PERL problem.
I also encouraged him to set up a blog, though he’s a bit hesitant. Personally, I hope he does, because blogs are so easy to add pictures to and he’s an excellent photographer.
Bill, check out Movable Type – after all, it’s written in perl!

Living in the future is neat

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 15 Jul 2003 12:19:43 +0000

Joshua Ellis made a comment on Joi Ito’s blog:

My God, Joi, this is incredible. I’m sitting in my living room in Las Vegas as the sun comes up, watching you playing with your Mac in (apparently) bed, wearing a CRYPTORIGHT t-shirt.

Living in the future is neat, as my friend Frank says.

(Joi had set up a streaming video server that took a live feed from his laptop and rebroadcast it to whoever wanted to see.)

It *is* neat.
I had the same feeling as Joshua, so I decided to set one up for myself. I downloaded Quicktime Broadcaster to my laptop and Darwin Streaming Server to this server and just a very little bit of poking around, I was sending streams to Victor in the Canary Islands, Boris in Canada and a couple others from parts unknown.
All of this with consumer-grade equipment and a $30/month internet connection.
Simply amazing.

Pictures

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 14 Jul 2003 00:49:28 +0000

Just messing around with my 20mm 1:2.8 lens before taking it to the shop for a cleaning…
These are photos of junk on my desk at home – a tin robot and a little sculpture I made a couple of years ago in a pottery class I took.

Bastille Day Party

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 13 Jul 2003 23:12:21 +0000

MailBlogging

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 11 Jul 2003 15:44:51 +0000

My little spam blog has been getting some notice, which is fun, (but still no Nigerian bank scams, which are always fun to read.)

It’s really just a proof of concept for what you can do with a mail interface to weblogs. Even though it uses Moblogging (mobile weblogging) technology, it’s not a moblog. For me, I think it’s an interesting thing to find a use for.
So many devices and services and legacy applications are email-capable, but not really convenient. For example, my router can send an email when someone tries to attack. Generally, I don’t want to receive those kinds of emails on my main account, so the other choice is to have it go to an email that I rarely, if ever, read. This is where using an agregator, like NewsMonster or NetNewsWire could come in handy.
I could set my router to send status reports or alerts vi email to an address that gets added to a weblog that produces an XML feed. It’s not really an elegant solution, but since all the components exist and are tested, along with the fact that very little standardization is needed, it will be guaranteed success, with an amazing amount of flexibility.

On a unix system, it’s amazingly easy to send a mail from the command line. So to send a simple report of a server’s processes, you could do something like:
ps ax|mail moblog@server -S “Status Report”
That’s it. You can send any file and parse it on the fly. You can do it on a schedule using cron.
Of course, many blogging applications have an API called xml-rpc to do this kind of stuff, I suspect that’s how these mail to moblog services work.

A long time ago, I wrote a very slow application to process millions of lines of punch-card data for the FAA. My tests generally ran for about an hour, parsing, inserting into a database and reporting the totals and errors. Rather than sit there and watch it, I scrounged an old 2400 baud modem and set the program to use it to dial my pager and report when it was done. Then, I’d start a test and go to the nice cafe in the atrium and wait. I thought it was a pretty cool hack. When it came time to demo it for the client, I forgot to disable the feature, so when the short test was over, they looked puzzled when the modem came on and started dialing. I apologized and explained what it was doing and that I would take it out. Needless to say, they demanded that I keep it in, knowing that they’d be able to take a break when it was running and return just after it was finished.

That’s the kind of automation that I like – as it is, I generally like anything that makes my day a little nicer or more efficient.

As people write more and more XML-feed-aware applications, this kind of stuff becomes more useful…

Spam Blog

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 09 Jul 2003 13:34:18 +0000

Update: The spam Blog is Offline.
I made a spam blog today.
It uses Daiji Hirata‘s moblogging application and a unix ‘dot-forward’ to take mail that was delivered directly to the web server, rather than to the proper MX host and display it in all of its humiliating glory on my Spam Blog.
Sure, it’s probably a security risk, but more for you than for me, if you’re a Windows user.

Now the interesting part is that if you send a message to info@…, it won’t show up on the blog. That’s because I’ve told the DNS server that the mail server for the domain is somewhere else. A well-behaved mail program will first look up the proper mail host, whereas a spambot will just check for a running mail program on the web server, which, for this experiment, I will happily provide.
(It is a pretty secure mail server, I’ve tested for open relays.)

Spambots, please send crap to: info@mmdc.dyndns.org !
Update: The spam Blog is Offline. I may do something else with it some time, but for now, I don’t want to do anything to promote the products offered by the spammers…

Yes, they exist

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 08 Jul 2003 22:38:48 +0000

Cube-Shaped Watermelon. One hundred bucks.
There were two Japanese guys also looking at it when I took the picture and I told them that you could now also get cube-shaped eggs…

Yoshida-san

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 08 Jul 2003 22:24:26 +0000

(Click to enlarge)
This is Mr. Yoshida, who I met near Shibuya station last night with Boris.
He had such a great face that I asked to take his picture.

Daytrips

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 07 Jul 2003 01:36:30 +0000

There’s a certain feeling when you come back from a day trip during the summer in Tokyo — You’ve been out in the sun all day, you’ve sweated, maybe swum, eaten too much and you’re sleepy from the sun and the tall glass bottles of Sapporo. You’re shoulders hurt from carrying a pack all day and the green flourescent glare of Tokyo station or Shinjuku station at 11:30pm makes you realize that wherever you were, you’r now back, nine or so hours away from sitting at your desk again, thanking friends by email, posting pictures to your site and waiting desperately for the next few days to pass so you can do it all again. But of course, you still have that long walk from the station to your apartment, which is now quite stuffy after a day of closed windows. The stairs up each feel like three and you don’t even bother to take Fridays mail from the box. As you kick off your sneakers or hiking boots at the doorway and say your “Otsukaresamadeshitas”, you realize that this feeling has somehow become a part of your life…
Scenes from our day in Chinatown, Yokohama:
(The first two are Yuka’s, of a brother and sister sharing a coconut. Very sweet.)

At the moblog conference

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 05 Jul 2003 12:44:25 +0000

PeteBW did an excellent blow-by-blow of the conference. Better than what I could have done.

WiFi is cool…

It’s raining here

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 04 Jul 2003 02:22:24 +0000

Take a listen…
Download file
Rain, Tokyo (35.684678, 139.746567), July 4, 2003 2:22 am

INSERT INTO person ( personID,

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 03 Jul 2003 17:35:44 +0000

INSERT INTO person ( personID, givenname_R, familyname_R, branch, start_date, givenname_K, familyname_K, class, bdate )
SELECT Other.Stffcd, Other.StffKana, Other.StffKana, Other.Tnpcd, Left([Enterday],4) & “-” & Left(Right([Enterday],4),2) & “-” & Right(Right([Enterday],4),2) AS Expr2, Other.Stffname, Other.Stffname, Other.Syinsbt, Left([birthday],4) & “-” & Left(Right([birthday],4),2) & “-” & Right(Right([birthday],4),2) AS Expr1
FROM Other
WHERE (((Other.DELDATE) Is Null));

Landscaping

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 03 Jul 2003 15:58:13 +0000

Jason van Herik stopped by to say hi today – he’s a landscape architect who’s doing the garden designs for a new restaurant we’re opening. We started talking about websites and I recommended that he start a weblog – he’d be perfect for it.
I jokingly asked if he had any recommendations for our narrow, near-useless balcony. Surprisingly, he had *lots* of ideas…

(Image updated to not be so freaking huge…)
Even though our view is all trees, he recommended breaking it up a bit with a bamboo fence and some plants to create more interest.

It’s always a pleasure to talk to someone who gets excited about what they do.
Go visit his Site – I told him I’d send some people his way.

Just testing

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 03 Jul 2003 11:51:59 +0000

Download

Fixing a paper lamp

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 03 Jul 2003 11:04:25 +0000

I had a little Noguchi paper lamp that had gotten torn a while back, so I decided to fix it…

I very carefully sewed the torn paper back together, then painted over the repair with starch.
Came out nicely:

I used to do this kind of stuff a lot more. I miss it. Maybe I should have a “no pc” night every week…

No entries tonight

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 02 Jul 2003 19:35:10 +0000

I’m having a computer-free night tonight.
No blogging, no IRC, no chat, no browsing, no downloading, no patching servers, no configuring apache, no picture editing with the Gimp, not even email…
Scary.
I’ll be so… disconnected.
Offline…

Attack?

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 02 Jul 2003 01:45:57 +0000

I have thousands of hits in my firewall logs like this:
00:01:48 input eth1 IGMP 219.18.133.231 65535 224.0.0.1 65535

Is this some multicast thing, or is it an attack, I wonder…
Too late tonight to worry about it now, I guess…

Voice Mail Server

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 02 Jul 2003 01:18:30 +0000

I’ve been thinking that I may build a voicemail server – something to take my phone messages using the PC’s hard disk and convert them to MP3, then present them as an RSS feed or as a web page. I haven’t really started with it at all, just thinking around the idea a bit. The thing is, I don’t even get very many voicemails, it’s just that when I do, I can’t listen to them remotely.
Any ideas on what make this more interesting? Of course, caller ID could be used to check an address book for an email that could be used to send replies and such…
Keying a special code could allow me to make audioblog entries. Hmmm…
Anyone know a good callerID-capable modem that works with Linux? Off to search for VGetty…

Site was down

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 02 Jul 2003 00:42:28 +0000

Got to work this morning and noticed that my site was down.
A bit of pinging and logging in to the router showed that it was just the web server box, not the whole network. Sure enough, when I got home tonight, I saw that a network cable had been knocked loose when I was moving some things around in there this morning.
Sorry if it caused any trouble. (Allow me the fanciful notion that anyone, besides myself, noticed…)

Who’s that girl?

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 30 Jun 2003 16:43:15 +0000

Weekend Report

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 30 Jun 2003 12:25:04 +0000

Back at work now after a busy weekend that started with dinner in rainy Shibuya, a stop at Neoteny, rush to the office, home early, quiet night, up early, prowling the back streets of Akihabara, buying hard drives, Sobu sen to shinjuku, yakitori in a back street chicken shack in Shinjuku listening to the Beatles, mad dashes through Shinjuku station, taxis, trains, cell phones, new friends, new restaurants, after midnight at a blues bar drinking Lagavulin and listening to Leadbelly, missed trains, taxis, new friends on spare futons, up at the crack of dawn for bagels and coffee, installing hard disks and having them catch fire, more trains to Shinjuku, the “Romance Car” train to Kamakura, soba lunch, temple with no Daibutsu, slow bus, temple with Daibutsu, lots of pictures, playing catch with an Akatombo toy, train to Enoshima, fireworks on the beach, beers and yakisoba at a beach cafe while watching the topless surfer girl and finally local trains home, somehow managing to wake up at each necessary transfer and dragging ourselves back to our suddenly-empty apartment.
Pictures will follow…

Busy Morning

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 27 Jun 2003 11:41:47 +0000

Boris got in to Tokyo last night so Yuka and I braved the rain for his first glimpse of Shibuya and a nice dinner at Sei Ryu Mon.
This morning, we stopped by Neoteny‘s office for a quick hello with Joi, so Boris could pick up a camera keitai and try to do some moblogging.
(We also got Moblogged by Joi with his incredibly cool camera phone.)

(Of course we all pulled out laptops and popped on to IRC for a quick chat…)

Thierry Falise and Vincent Reynaud

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 23 Jun 2003 08:58:08 +0000

Read more ›

Legs

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 22 Jun 2003 13:59:25 +0000

This picture is one of Yuka’s – a display of stockings in Shibuya the other night.
(She’s a better photographer than I am…)

Papparazzi

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 22 Jun 2003 01:13:09 +0000

Saw Victoria Beckham tonight in Omotesando at the Missoni shop.
Woo hoo.
Hard to miss the huge crowd that was following her around, tracking her with GPS cellphones and instant messages…

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 21 Jun 2003 01:31:34 +0000

Halley’s Comment

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 21 Jun 2003 00:55:26 +0000

The other day on Joi Ito’s IRC channel, someone asked what the big deal about weblogs was. Why, after years of being written, did they suddenly seem to matter so much? Why are so many people paying attention to them now?
Being in a bit of a trollish mood, I ventured that perhaps they matter now because women were now playing the game, where, for the most part, they hadn’t been before.
Some of the people reading instinctively disagreed, but as I was reading what I was writing, I realized that I just might be on to something.
Blogging tools have made it easy to just write, without having to prove yourself at proficiency with VI and FTP and a myriad of arcane tools and commands. Of course there have always been women who were good at using these tools, but until some point, personal publishing on the web was about publishing on the web, which was a bit about having bragging rights, which is a bit of a male thang…
Now, anyone can publish, it’s as easy as using hotmail. The process can fade into the background and the message can rise up and take prominence.
I think having women along side us is teaching men how to be better writers. I know that I write more honestly and I care less about who reads, or, more specifically, how many people read.
I welcome the change – It’s more rewarding.
Halley Suitt wrote a piece the other day that seems to say many of the same things that I was feeling:

Halley’s Comment

Around about 1999, a new bunch of blogs started showing up

Just so you know

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 20 Jun 2003 23:41:09 +0000

It’s about the quotes.
No, not the things I might happen to quote, but the way I do it. Yes, I put the period outside the quotes wherever possible. I know that it’s “wrong”.
I do it anyway.
I mean, of these two, which makes more sense, logically?
This is a “word.”
This is a “word”.
Yes, the second is much better…

Maybe it comes from writing computer code, where punctuation has to fit logical rules. I can’t remember if I always did it this way, but perhaps.

An interesting thing to note, although a bit apocryphal at this point, (since I’ve forgotten where I learned it,) is that the custom of putting ending punctuation inside the quotes is a fairly recent custom, one born with the invention of movable type. (Not “Movable Type”, the weblogging program, but actual movable type as in presses and Gutenberg.)
Back in the late 1400s, typesetting was born. Since printers could now play with things like justified text and leading and kerning, they noticed that they could really make sentences line up nicely in columns if they didn’t have a period hanging off the end of the sentence after a quote…
Until that time, the way I do it was considered correct.

Speaking of early printing, I used to have a few sheets of “incunabula”, which are things printed with movable type before the year 1500. If you ever see examples, you may be struck by how new and fresh they look, due to the incredible quality of the paper they used. They’re fairly cheap to buy, generally they’re just a page from some Latin religious text, not interesting in what they say, but in the fact that you can hold something in your hands that was made over 500 years ago…

Funky Feed

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 20 Jun 2003 18:00:57 +0000

This thing says that my RSS feed is funky.
It doesn’t say why.
I’m not sure why anyone would care at all about this sort of thing…
Funkidator by There Is No Cat

Funky!

Downtime

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 20 Jun 2003 02:19:35 +0000

Had a bit of downtime tonight in the server farm…
Nothing major, just a popped circuit breaker on the circuit that handles the web server, as well as my washer and dryer. ;-)
Actually, I think the washing machine is on its last legs, much more so than the server.
Speaking of servers, I put together a really nice one today for a friend, Mr. Swinnen. I had a very clean old Gateway 2000 PII 266 with 128MB RAM and a 6GB drive, that I added a nice 120GB drive to and installed Red Hat 9 on.
I did a really lean install, basically only Samba and WebMin to make it into a backup server. I gave each user on the LAN a home directory on the server, shared by Samba. Then I set each home directory to be automatically backed up at midnight. You may scoff at using a 266 for anything besides a doorstop, but for 5 users, it’s overkill for what it does. For example, a few years ago, I had an account on a machine that was a 66 Mhz machine running BSD. That machine had 5500 users…
With a fairly cheap 120GB drive, it’s a lot of network space to play around with – this server, unagi.jim.mmdc.net is only a 300Mhz Pentium, but it serves up

Meetup

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 19 Jun 2003 18:15:52 +0000

Went to the meetup thing last night. Though I couldn’t stay too long, I had a good time – lots of new faces there.
In particular, shout-outs are in order for Video-Link‘s Lars, ChibiNet‘s Alan, (Who was visiting Ian, who may or may not be repatriating this July 4th,) and to Stuart, who worked his butt off organizing this mutinous event.
Also to Daphne of Yaw and Mog.
I talked to some others, but didn’t get names, as usual. I also took pictures, but only a couple came out OK:

Neater! Quicker! Cheaper! (Than string…)

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 18 Jun 2003 19:21:36 +0000

From a box of rubber bands. Sublime.

Rain rain rain

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 17 Jun 2003 11:16:39 +0000

The Rainy Season is now in full swing here, with days of seemingly endless showers, humidity and mosquitos.
Vile. I absolutely hate it.
I went to bed quite early last night, around 10:00, which is about four hours earlier than usual, hoping to get a full, restful sleep. I should have known better than to try such a crazy scheme.
Around midnight, I realized that a mosquito had bitten my hand, on the palm, just below the thumb. Now how exactly she was able to sneak under my pillow where my hand was wedged, or why she would go to the trouble, is completely beyond me, but sure enough, she did. (I say “she”, because only the female mosquito bites, not because I have good enough eyesight to check out the little bugger’s anatomy…) She also bit the bottom of my foot and several places around my ankles.
Normally, we burn one of those wonderful green mosquito coils. I like them quite a bit – not only do they keep the room wonderfully skeeter-free, the scent of burning DDT takes me back to when I was a child and my parents would burn one or two on the side porch while they played bridge or chatted with the neighbors and us kids would play kickball or catch fireflies in empty mayonnaise jars.
Of course, that was all before the FDA banned the things for causing cancer…
Well, maybe these don’t actually have DDT in them anymore, but they still smell the same. The packages are great, too – made by a company called Kincho, they are very Chinese-looking, with a Rooster head logo:

When it comes to mosquitos, though, I really don’t care if they get cancer. All of them should die a horrible, prolonged death. Evil things. I mean, what purpose do they serve on the earth? Benjamin Franklin once said “Beer is proof that God exists and wants us to be happy”. Using that sort of logic, how do you explain mosquitoes? What do they do, except perhaps serve as food for bats? Now bats are kind of cool and all, but I think they can learn to eat something else, so we can get rid of the mosquitos. Moths, perhaps, or these monster cicadas that we get here. Maybe I should just get a bat for the bedroom and let him flap around the room while I sleep. Nah, probably not a good idea…
So off I go today to the kusuri to pick up some more DDT so I can get a good night’s sleep and not be so grumpy tomorrow…

Bat

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 15 Jun 2003 02:33:54 +0000
Taking pictures of bats with a handheld still camera is tough! Yuka and I tried for an hour last weekend and this was the best one of the lot, which isn't saying a lot, but at least it sort of looks like a bat...
Read more ›

Shop Window

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 14 Jun 2003 01:17:31 +0000

Goodnight, David.

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 00:11:50 +0000

Read more ›

Thanks, Yuka

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 12 Jun 2003 00:40:07 +0000
I came home from work tonight with the worst headache I've had in a long, long time. I immediately lay down, took out my lenses, took some aspirin and tried not to move any more than I had to, occasionally making pathetic moaning sounds. Yuka suggested a bit of accupuncture, which she seems to recommend for just about anything, but this time I was powerless to resist. Within 10 minutes, I could feel my headache slipping away... Thanks, Yuka. (I had her take pictures of the needles stuck deep into my neck - want me to upload them?)
Read more ›

ssh Client Keys

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 11 Jun 2003 12:40:41 +0000

This, I guess, is of limited interest, but handy nonetheless if you use ssh as much as I do. It works on Mac as well as Linux, too.
O’Reilly Network: Quick Logins with ssh Client Keys [June 10, 2003]

Quick Logins with ssh Client Keys
Using ssh keys instead of password authentication to speed up and automate logins

Skateboarders

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 10 Jun 2003 15:14:48 +0000

Today at lunch, there was a group of skateboarders doing jumps right in front of my building.
Of course I took the opportunity to take a few hundred pictures…

Update: Many more skate pix added here.

Sea of Ghosts

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 10 Jun 2003 12:04:39 +0000

Another long exposure from last night in Shibuya.
Details below…

For this set, I set the camera to Aperture Priority mode and set the aperture to the highest setting, F22, I think. The exposure is probably around 10 seconds in this case, 5 in the one of the lady. Of course, for exposures this long, you need a steady tripod.

iPhoto on the Mac did the black and white desaturation.
Fun stuff.

Ghosts

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 10 Jun 2003 00:08:02 +0000

Yet another

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 09 Jun 2003 19:03:10 +0000

Read more ›

Yoshimi Hirai Dancers

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 09 Jun 2003 01:18:49 +0000

Last night, Yuka and I met some dancers who were practicing their routines in Shinjuku.
They agreeed to let us take pictures while they did their workout.
(From left to right, back row: Ayako, Rina, Iku. Front: Yasu, me & Nami)
They’ll be performing June 16th in Ikebukuro – see the Yoshimi Hirai site for details.

We took a few pictures that you can see HERE.

Waiting for the Train

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 08 Jun 2003 17:30:13 +0000

Girl waiting for the train at Shibuya Station 07 Jun 2003 23:08:48

Ficus Leaf

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 08 Jun 2003 17:21:14 +0000

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 08 Jun 2003 16:52:46 +0000

Quake?

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 06 Jun 2003 11:38:55 +0000

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Going (went) For Drinks

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 05 Jun 2003 19:25:13 +0000

Off to Las Chicas in Omotesando, if anyone wants to stop by…
–Updated:
Yes, I spaced out that the Tokyo Bloggers were giving a presentation last night. Gomen ne, all… Thanks to Karl Dubost for stopping by – tanoshikattayo.

Gonpachi Sushi

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 05 Jun 2003 14:06:26 +0000

Went to Gonpachi in NishiAzabu today for lunch.

Thought

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 04 Jun 2003 08:43:49 +0000

Just another online bookmark…
And a thought, courtesy of Epicurus:

“It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life.”

Cicero – De Finibus

The conclusion is that no foolish man can be happy, nor any wise man fail to be happy. This is a truth that we establish far more conclusively than do the Stoics. For they maintain that nothing is good save that vague phantom which they entitle Moral Worth, a title more splendid than substantial; and say that Virtue resting on this Moral Worth has no need of pleasure, but is herself her own sufficient happiness.

De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum
Marcus Tullius Cicero

In this selection from book I, sections 9 through 21, Lucius Torquatus delivers a monologue explaining and defending Epicurean ethics:

IX. I will start then in the manner approved by the author of the system himself, by settling what are the essence and qualities of the thing that is the object of our inquiry; not that I suppose you to be ignorant of it, but because this is the logical method of procedure. We are inquiring, then, what is the final and ultimate Good, which as all philosophers are agreed must be of such a nature as to be the End to which all other things are means, while it is not itself a means to anything else. This Epicurus finds in pleasure; pleasure he holds to be the Chief Good, pain the Chief Evil. This he sets out to prove as follows: Every animal, as soon as it is born, seeks for pleasure, and delights in it as the Chief Good, while it recoils from pain as the Chief Evil, and so far as possible avoids it. This it does as long as it remains unperverted, at the prompting of Nature’s own unbiased and honest verdict.

Hence Epicurus refuses to admit any necessity for argument or discussion to prove that pleasure is desirable and pain to be avoided. These facts, be thinks, are perceived by the senses, as that fire is hot, snow white, honey sweet, none of which things need be proved by elaborate argument: it is enough merely to draw attention to them. (For there is a difference, he holds, between formal syllogistic proof of a thing and a mere notice or reminder: the former is the method for discovering abstruse and recondite truths, the latter for indicating facts that are obvious and evident.) Strip mankind of sensation, and nothing remains; it follows that Nature herself is the judge of that which is in accordance with or contrary to nature.

What does Nature perceive or what does she judge of, beside pleasure and pain, to guide her actions of desire and of avoidance? Some members of our school however would refine upon this doctrine; these say that it is not enough for the judgment of good and evil to rest with the senses; the facts that pleasure is in and for itself desirable and pain in and for itself to be avoided can also be grasped by the intellect and the reason. Accordingly they declare that the perception that the one is to be sought after and the other avoided is a notion naturally implanted in our minds. Others again, with whom I agree, observing that a great many philosophers do advance a vast array of reasons to prove why pleasure should not be counted as a good nor pain as an evil, consider that we had better not be too confident of our case; in their view it requires elaborate and reasoned argument, and abstruse theoretical discussion of the nature of pleasure and pain.

X. But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of reprobating pleasure and extolling pain arose. To do so, I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of the pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided.

But in certain emergencies and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.

This being the theory I hold, why need I be afraid of not being able to reconcile it with the case of the Torquati my ancestors? Your references to them just now were historically correct, and also showed your kind and friendly feeling towards myself; but the same I am not to be bribed by your flattery of my family, and you will not find me a less resolute opponent. Tell me, pray, what explanation do you put upon their actions? Do you really believe that they charged an armed enemy, or treated their children, their own flesh and blood, so cruelly, without a thought for their own interest or advantage? Why, even wild animals do not act in that way; they do not run amok so blindly that we cannot discern any purpose in their movements and their onslaughts.

Can you then suppose that those heroic men performed their famous deeds without any motive at all? What their motive was, I will consider later on: for the present I will confidently assert, that if they had a motive for those undoubtedly glorious exploits, that motive was not a love of virtue in and for itself. – He wrested the necklet from his foe. – Yes, and saved himself from death. But he braved great danger. – Yes, before the eyes of an army. – What did he get by it? – Honor and esteem, the strongest guarantees of security in life. – He sentenced his own son to death. – If from no motive, I am sorry to be the descendant of anyone so savage and inhuman; but if his purpose was by inflicting pain upon himself to establish his authority as a commander, and to tighten the reins of discipline during a very serious war by holding over his army the fear of punishment, then his action aimed at ensuring the safety of his fellow citizens, upon which he knew his own depended.

And this is a principle of wide application. People of your school, and especially yourself, who are so diligent a student of history, have found a favorite field for the display of your eloquence in recalling the stories of brave and famous men of old, and in praising their actions, not on utilitarian grounds, but on account of the splendor of abstract moral worth. But all of this falls to the ground if the principle of selection that I have just mentioned be established, – the principle of forgoing pleasures for the purpose of getting greater pleasures, and enduring, pains for the sake of escaping greater pains.

XI. But enough has been said at this stage about the glorious exploits and achievements of the heroes of renown. The tendency of all of the virtues to produce pleasure is a topic that will be treated in its own place later on. At present I shall proceed to expound the essence and qualities of pleasure itself, and shall endeavor to remove the misconceptions of ignorance and to make you realize how serious, how temperate, how austere is the school that is supposed to be sensual, lax, and luxurious. The pleasure we pursue is not that kind alone which directly affects our physical being with a delightful feeling, – a positively agreeable perception of the senses; on the contrary, the greatest pleasure according to us is that which is experienced as a result of the complete removal of pain. When we are released from pain, the mere sensation of complete emancipation and relief from uneasiness is in itself a source of gratification.

But everything that causes gratification is a pleasure (just as everything that causes annoyance is a pain). Therefore the complete removal of pain has correctly been termed a pleasure. For example, when hunger and thirst are banished by food and drink, the mere fact of getting rid of uneasiness brings a resultant pleasure in its train. So generally, the removal of pain causes pleasure to take its place.

Epicurus consequently maintained that there is no such thing as a neutral state of feeling intermediate between pleasure and pain; for the state supposed by some thinkers to be neutral, being characterized as it is by entire absence of pain, is itself, he held, a pleasure, and, what is more, a pleasure of the highest order. A man who is conscious of his condition at all must necessarily feel either pleasure or pain.

But complete absence of pain Epicurus considers to be the limit and highest point of pleasure; beyond this point pleasure may vary in kind, but it cannot vary in intensity or degree. Yet at Athens, so my father used to tell me when lie wanted to air his wit at the expense of the Stoics, in the Ceramicus there is actually a statue of Chrysippus seated and holding out one hand, the gesture being intended to indicate the delight which he used to take in the following little syllogism: “Does your hand want anything, while it is in its present condition?” Answer: “No,nothing.” – “But if pleasure were a good, it would want pleasure.” – “Yes, I suppose it would.” – “Therefore pleasure is not a good.”

An argument, as my father declared, which not even a statue would employ, if a statue could speak; because though it is cogent enough as an objection to the Cyrenaics, it does not touch Epicurus. For if the only kind of pleasure were that which so to speak tickles the senses, an influence permeating them with a feeling of delight, neither the hand nor any other member could be satisfied with the absence of pain unaccompanied by an agreeable and active sensation of pleasure. Whereas if, as Epicurus holds, the highest pleasure be to feel no pain, Chrysippus’s interlocutor, though justified in making his first admission, that his hand in that condition wanted nothing, was not justified in his second admission, that if pleasure were a good, his hand would have wanted it.

And the reason why it would not have wanted pleasure is that to be without pain is to be in a state of pleasure.

XII. The truth of the position that pleasure is the ultimate good will most readily appear from the following illustration. Let us imagine a man living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures alike of body and of mind, undisturbed either by the presence or by the prospect of pain: what possible state of existence could we describe as being more excellent or more desirable? One so situated must possess in the first place a strength of mind that is proof against all fear of death or of pain; he will know that death means complete unconsciousness, and that pain is generally light if long and short if strong, so that its intensity is compensated by brief duration and its continuance by diminishing severity. Let such a man moreover have no dread of any supernatural power; let him never suffer the pleasures of the past to fade away, but constantly renew their enjoyment in recollection, and his lot will be one which will not admit of further improvement.

Suppose on the other hand a person crushed beneath the heaviest load of mental and of bodily anguish to which humanity is liable. Grant him no hope of ultimate relief in view also give him no pleasure either present or in prospect. Can one describe or imagine a more pitiable state? If then a life full of pain is the thing most to be avoided, it follows that to live in pain is the highest evil; and this position implies that a life of pleasure is the ultimate good. In fact the mind possesses nothing in itself upon which it can rest as final. Every fear, every sorrow can be traced back to pain; there is no other thing besides pain which is of its own nature capable of causing either anxiety or distress.

Pleasure and pain moreover supply the motives of desire and of avoidance, and the springs of conduct generally. This being so, it clearly follows that actions are right and praiseworthy only as being a means to the attainment of a life of pleasure. But that which is not itself a means to anything else, but to which all else is a means, is what the Greeks term the Telos, the highest, ultimate or final Good. It must therefore be admitted that the Chief Good is to live agreeably.

XIII. Those who place the Chief Good in virtue alone are beguiled by the glamour of a name, and do not understand the true demands of nature. If they will consent to listen to Epicurus, they will be delivered from the grossest error. Your school dilates on the transcendent beauty of the virtues; but were they not productive of pleasure, who would deem them either praiseworthy or desirable? We esteem the art of medicine not for its interest as a science, but for its conduciveness to health; the art of navigation is commended for its practical and not its scientific value, because it conveys the rules for sailing a ship with success. So also Wisdom, which must be considered as the art of living, if it effected no result would not be desired; but as it is, it is desired, because it is the artificer that procures and produces pleasure. (The meaning that I attach to pleasure must by this time be clear to you, and you must not be biased against my argument owing to the discreditable associations of the term.)

The great disturbing factor in a man’s life is ignorance of good and evil; mistaken ideas about these frequently rob us of our greatest pleasures, and torment us with the most cruel pain of mind. Hence we need the aid of Wisdom, to rid us of our fears and appetites, to root out all our errors and prejudices, and to serve as our infallible guide to the attainment of pleasure. Wisdom alone can banish sorrow from our hearts and protect its front alarm and apprehension; put yourself to school with her, and you may live in peace, and quench the glowing flames of desire. For the desires are incapable of satisfaction; they ruin not individuals only but whole families, nay often shake the very foundations of the state. It is they that are the source of hatred, quarreling, and strife, of sedition and of war.

Nor do they only flaunt themselves abroad, or turn their blind onslaughts solely against others; even when prisoned within the heart they quarrel and fall out among themselves; and this cannot but render the whole of life embittered. Hence only the Wise Man, who prunes away all the rank growth of vanity and error, can possibly live untroubled by sorrow and by fear, content within the bounds that nature has set. Nothing could be more useful or more conducive to well-being than Epicurus’s doctrine as to the different classes of the desires. One kind he classified as both natural and necessary, a second as natural without being necessary, and a third as neither natural nor necessary; the principle of classification being that the necessary desires are gratified with little trouble or expense; the natural desires also require but little, since nature’s own riches, which suffice to content her, are both easily procured and limited in amount; but for the imaginary desires no bound or limit can be discovered.

XIV. If then we observe that ignorance and error reduce the whole of life to confusion, while Wisdom alone is able to protect us from the onslaughts of appetite and the menaces of fear, teaching us to bear even the affronts of fortune with moderation, and showing us all the paths that lead to calmness and to peace, why should we hesitate to avow that Wisdom is to be desired for the sake of the pleasures it brings and Folly to be avoided because of its injurious consequences?

The same principle will lead us to pronounce that Temperance also is not desirable for its own sake, but because it bestows peace of mind, and soothes the heart with a tranquilizing sense of harmony. For it is temperance that warns us to be guided by reason in what we desire and avoid. Nor is it enough to judge what it is right to do or to leave undone; we also need to abide by our judgment. Most men however lack tenacity of purpose; their resolution weakens and succumbs as soon as the fair form of pleasure meets their gaze, and they surrender themselves prisoners to their passions, failing to foresee the inevitable result. Thus for the sake of a pleasure at once small in amount and unnecessary, and one which they might have procured by other means or even denied themselves altogether without pain, they incur serious disease, or loss of fortune, or disgrace, and not infrequently become liable to the penalties of the law and of the courts of justice.

Those on the other hand who are resolved so to enjoy their pleasures as to avoid all painful consequences therefrom, and who retain their faculty of judgment and avoid being seduced by pleasure into courses that they perceive to be wrong, reap the very highest pleasure by forgoing pleasure. Similarly also they often voluntarily endure pain, to avoid incurring greater pain by not doing so. This clearly proves that Intemperance is not undesirable for its own sake, while Temperance is desirable not because it renounces pleasures, but because it procures greater pleasures.

XV. The same account will be found to hold good of Courage. The performance of labors, the undergoing of pains, are not in themselves attractive, nor are endurance, industry, watchfulness, nor yet that much lauded virtue, perseverance, nor even courage; but we aim at these virtues in order to live without anxiety and fear and so far as possible to be free from pain of mind and body. The fear of death plays havoc with the calm and even tenor of life, and to bow the head to pain and bear it abjectly and feebly is a pitiable thing; such weakness has caused many men to betray their parents or their friends, some their country, and very many utterly to ruin themselves. So on the other hand a strong and lofty spirit is entirely free from anxiety and sorrow.

It makes light of death, for the dead are only as they were before they were born. It is schooled to encounter pain by recollecting that pains of great severity are ended by death, and slight ones have frequent intervals of respite; while those of medium intensity lie within our own control: we can bear them if they are endurable, or if they are not, we may serenely quit life’s theater, when the play has ceased to please us. These considerations prove that timidity and cowardice are not blamed, nor courage and endurance praised, on their own account; the former are rejected because they beget pain, the latter coveted because they beget pleasure.

XVI. It remains to speak of Justice, to complete the list of the virtues; but this admits of practically the same treatment as the others. Wisdom, Temperance, and Courage I have shown to be so closely linked with Pleasure that they cannot possibly be severed or sundered from it. The same must be deemed to be the case with Justice. Not only does Justice never cause anyone harm, but on the contrary it always adds some benefit, partly owing to its essentially tranquilizing influence upon the mind, partly because of the hope that it warrants of a never-failing supply of the things that uncorrupted nature really needs. And just as Rashness, License, and Cowardice ever torment the mind, ever awakening trouble and discord, so Unrighteousness, when firmly rooted in the heart, causes restlessness by the mere fact of its presence; and if once it has found expression in some deed of wickedness, however secret the act, yet it can never feel assured that it will always remain undetected.

The usual consequences of crime are, first suspicion, next gossip and rumor, then comes the accuser, then the judge; many wrongdoers have even turned evidence against themselves, as happened in your consulship. And even if any think themselves well fenced and fortified against detection by their fellow-men, they still dread the eye of heaven, and fancy that the pangs of anxiety night and day gnawing at their hearts are sent by Providence to punish them. But what can wickedness contribute towards lessening the annoyances of life, commensurate with its effect in increasing them, owing to the burden of a guilty conscience, the penalties of the law and the hatred of one’s fellows?

Yet nevertheless some men indulge without limit their avarice, ambition and love of power, lust, gluttony and those other desires, which ill-gotten gains can never diminish but rather must inflame the more; inasmuch that they appear proper subjects for restraint rather than for reformation. Men of sound natures, therefore, are summoned by the voice of true reason to justice, equity, and honesty. For one without eloquence or resources dishonesty is not good policy, since it is difficult for such a man to succeed in his designs, or to make good his success when once achieved.

On the other hand, for the rich and clever generous conduct seems more in keeping, and liberality wins them affection and good will, the surest means to a life of peace; especially as there really is no motive for transgressing since the desires that spring from nature are easily gratified without doing any man wrong, while those that are imaginary ought to be resisted, for they set their affections upon nothing that is really wanted; while there is more loss inherent in Injustice itself than there is profit in the gains it brings.

Hence Justice also cannot correctly be said to be desirable in and for itself; it is so because it is so highly productive of gratification. For esteem and affection are gratifying, because they render life safer and fuller of pleasure. Hence we hold that Unrighteousness is to be avoided not simply on account of the disadvantages that result from being unrighteous, but even far more because when it dwells in a man’s heart it never suffers him to breathe freely or know a moment’s rest.

If then even the glory of the Virtues, on which all the other philosophers love to expatiate so eloquently, has in the last resort no meaning unless it be based on pleasure, whereas pleasure is the only thing that is intrinsically attractive and alluring, it cannot be doubted that pleasure is the one supreme and final Good and that a life of happiness is nothing else than a life of pleasure.

XVII. The doctrine thus firmly established has corollaries which I will briefly expound. (1)The Ends of Goods and Evils themselves, that is, pleasure and pain, are not open to mistake; where people go wrong is in not knowing what things are productive of pleasure and pain.

(2) Again, we aver that mental pleasures and pains arise out of bodily ones (and therefore I allow your contention that any Epicureans who think otherwise put themselves out of court; and I am aware that many do, though not those who can speak with authority); but although men do experience mental pleasure that is agreeable and mental pain that is annoying, yet both of these we assert arise out of and are based upon bodily sensations.

(3) Yet we maintain that this does not preclude mental pleasures and pains from being much more intense than those of the body; since the body can feel only what is present to it at the moment, whereas the mind is also cognizant of the past and of the future. For granting that pain of body is equally painful, yet our sensation of pain can be enormously increased by the belief that some evil of unlimited magnitude and duration threatens to befall us hereafter. And the same consideration may be transferred to pleasure: a pleasure is greater if not accompanied by any apprehension of evil. This therefore clearly appears, that intense mental pleasure or distress contributes more to our happiness or misery than a bodily pleasure or pain of equal duration.

(4) But we do not agree that when pleasure is withdrawn uneasiness at once ensues, unless the pleasure happens to have been replaced by a pain: while on the other hand one is glad to lose a pain even though no active sensation of pleasure comes in its place: a fact that serves to show how great a pleasure is the mere absence of pain.

(5) But just as we are elated by the anticipation of good things, so we are delighted by their recollection. Fools are tormented by the memory of former evils; wise men have the delight of renewing in grateful remembrance the blessings of the past. We have the power both to obliterate our misfortunes in an almost perpetual forgetfulness and to summon up pleasant and agreeable memories of our successes. But when we fix our mental vision closely on the events of the past, then sorrow or gladness ensues according as these were evil or good.

XVIII. Here is indeed a royal road to happiness – open, simple, and direct! For clearly man can have no greater good than complete freedom from pain and sorrow coupled with the enjoyment of the highest bodily and mental pleasures. Notice then how the theory embraces every possible enhancement of life, every aid to the attainment of that Chief Good which is our object. Epicurus, the man whom you denounce as a voluptuary, cries aloud that no one can live pleasantly without living wisely, honorably, and justly, and no one wisely, honorably, and justly without living pleasantly. For a city rent by faction cannot prosper, nor a house whose masters are at strife; much less then can a mind divided against itself and filled with inward discord taste any particle of pure and liberal pleasure. But one who is perpetually swayed by conflicting and incompatible counsels and desires can know no peace or calm.

Why, if the pleasantness of life is diminished by the more serious bodily diseases, how much more must it be diminished by the diseases of the mind! But extravagant and imaginary desires, for riches, fame, power, and also for licentious pleasures, are nothing but mental diseases. Then, too, there are grief, trouble and sorrow, which gnaw the heart and consume it with anxiety, if men fail to realize that the mind need feel no pain unconnected with some pain of body, present or to come. Yet there is no foolish man but is afflicted by some one of these diseases; therefore there is no foolish man that is not unhappy.

Moreover, there is death, the stone of Tantalus ever hanging over men’s heads; and superstition, that poisons and destroys all peace of mind. Besides, they do not recollect their past nor enjoy their present blessings; they merely look forward to those of the future, and as these are of necessity uncertain, they are consumed with agony and terror; and the climax of their torment is when they perceive too late that all their dreams of wealth or station, power or fame, have come to nothing. For they never attain any of the pleasures, the hope of which inspired them to undergo all their arduous toils. Or look again at others, petty, narrow-minded men, or confirmed pessimists, or spiteful, envious, ill-tempered creatures, unsociable, abusive, brutal; others again enslaved to the follies of love, impudent or reckless, wanton, headstrong and yet irresolute, always changing their minds. Such failings render their lives one unbroken round of misery.

The conclusion is that no foolish man can be happy, nor any wise man fail to be happy. This is a truth that we establish far more conclusively than do the Stoics. For they maintain that nothing is good save that vague phantom which they entitle Moral Worth, a title more splendid than substantial; and say that Virtue resting on this Moral Worth has no need of pleasure, but is herself her own sufficient happiness.

XIX. At the same time this Stoic doctrine can be stated in a form which we do not object to, and indeed ourselves endorse. For Epicurus thus presents his Wise Man who is always happy: his desires are kept within bounds; death he disregards; he has a true conception, untainted by fear, of the Divine nature; he does not hesitate to depart from life, if that would better his condition. Thus equipped he enjoys perpetual pleasure, for there is no moment when the pleasures he experiences do not outbalance the pains; since he remembers the past with gratitude, grasps the present with a full realization of its pleasantness, and does not rely upon the future; he looks forward to it, but finds his true enjoyment in the present. Also he is entirely free from the vices that I instanced a few moments ago, and he derives no inconsiderable pleasure from comparing his own existence with the life of the foolish.

Moreover, any pains that the Wise Man may encounter are never so severe but that he has more cause for gladness than for sorrow. Again, it is a fine saying of Epicurus that “the Wise Man is but little interfered with by fortune: the great concerns of life, the things that matter, are controlled by his own wisdom and reason”; and that “no greater pleasure could be derived from a life of infinite duration than is actually afforded by this existence which we know to be finite.” Logic, on which your school lays such stress, he held to be of no effect either as a guide to conduct or as an aid to thought.

Natural Philosophy he deemed all-important. This science explains to us the meaning of terms, the nature of predication, and the law of consistency and contradiction; secondly, a thorough knowledge of the facts of nature relieves us of the burden of superstition, frees us from fear of death, and shields us against the disturbing effects of ignorance, which is often in itself a cause of terrifying apprehensions; lastly, to learn what nature’s real requirements are improves the moral character also. Besides, it is only by firmly grasping a well-established scientific system, observing the Rule or Canon that has fallen as it were from heaven so that all men may know it – only by making that Canon the test of all our judgments, that we can hope always to stand fast in our belief, unshaken by the eloquence of any man.

On the other hand, without a full understanding of the world of nature it is impossible to maintain the truth of our sense-perceptions. Further, every mental presentation has its origin in sensation: so that no certain knowledge will be possible, unless all sensations are true, as the theory of Epicurus teaches that they are. Those who deny the validity of sensation and say that nothing can be perceived, having excluded the evidence of the senses, are unable even to expound their own argument. Besides, by abolishing knowledge and science they abolish all possibility of rational life and action. Thus Natural Philosophy supplies courage to face the fear of death; resolution to resist the terrors of religion; peace of mind, for it removes all ignorance of the mysteries of nature; self-control, for it explains the nature of the desires and distinguishes their different kinds; and, as I showed just now, the Canon or Criterion of Knowledge, which Epicurus also established, gives a method of discerning truth from falsehood.

XX. There remains a topic that is pre-eminently germane to this discussion, I mean the subject of Friendship. Your school maintains that if pleasure be the Chief Good, friendship will cease to exist. Now Epicurus’s pronouncement about friendship is that of all the means to happiness that wisdom has devised, none is greater, none more fruitful, none more delightful than this. Nor did he only commend this doctrine by his eloquence, but far more by the example of his life and conduct. How great a thing such friendship is, is shown by the mythical stories of antiquity. Review the legends from the remotest ages, and, copious and varied as they are, you will barely find in them three pairs of friends, beginning with Theseus and ending with Orestes. Yet Epicurus in a single house and that a small one maintained a whole company of friends, united by the closest sympathy and affection; and this still goes on in the Epicurean school.

But to return to our subject, for there is no need of personal instances: I notice that the topic of friendship has been treated by Epicureans in three ways:

(1) Some have denied that pleasures affecting our friends are in themselves to be desired by us in the same degree as we desire our own pleasures. This doctrine is thought by some critics to undermine the foundations of friendship; however, its supporters defend their position, and in my opinion have no difficulty in making good their ground. They argue that friendship can no more be sundered from pleasure than can the virtues, which we have discussed already. A solitary, friendless life must be beset by secret dangers and alarms. Hence reason itself advises the acquisition of friends; their possession gives confidence, and a firmly rooted hope of winning pleasure. And just as hatred, jealousy, and contempt are hindrances to pleasure, so friendship is the most trustworthy preserver and also creator of pleasure alike for our friends and for ourselves. It affords us enjoyment in the present, and it inspires us with hopes for the near and distant future.

Thus it is not possible to secure uninterrupted gratification in life without friendship, nor yet to preserve friendship itself unless we love our friends as much as ourselves. Hence this unselfishness does occur in friendship, while also friendship is closely linked with pleasure. For we rejoice in our friends’ joy as much as in our own, and are equally pained by their sorrows. Therefore the Wise Man will feel exactly the same towards his friend as he does towards himself, and will exert himself as much for his friend’s pleasure as he would for his own. All that has been said about the essential connection of the virtues with pleasure must be repeated about friendship. Epicurus well said (I give almost his exact words): “The same creed that has given us courage to overcome all fear of everlasting or long-enduring evil hereafter, has discerned that friendship is our strongest safeguard in this present term of life.”

(2) Other Epicureans though by no means lacking in insight are a little less courageous in defying the opprobrious criticisms of the Academy. They fear that if we hold friendship to be desirable only for the pleasure that it affords to ourselves, it will be thought that it is crippled altogether. They therefore say that the first advances and overtures, and the original inclination to form an attachment, are prompted by the desire for pleasure, but that when the progress of intercourse has led to intimacy, the relationship blossoms into an affection strong enough to make us love our friends for their own sake, even though no practical advantage accrues from their friendship, Does not familiarity endear to us localities, temples, cities, gymnasia, and playing-grounds, horses and hounds, gladiatorial shows and fights with wild beasts, then how much more natural and reasonable that this should be able to happen in our intercourse with our fellow-men!

(3) The third view is that wise men have made a sort of compact to love their friends no less than themselves. We can understand the possibility of this, and we often see it happen. Clearly no more effective means to happiness could be found than such an alliance.

All these considerations go to prove not only that the theory of friendship is not embarrassed by the identification of the Chief Good with pleasure, but also that without this no foundation for friendship whatsoever can be found.

XXI. If then the doctrine I have set forth is clearer and more luminous than daylight itself; if it is derived entirely from Nature’s source; if my whole discourse relies throughout for confirmation on the unbiased and unimpeachable evidence of the senses; if lisping infants, nay even dumb animals, prompted by Nature’s teaching, almost find voice to proclaim that there is no welfare but pleasure, no hardship but pain – and their judgment in these matters is neither sophisticated nor biased – ought we not to feel the greatest gratitude to him who caught this utterance of Nature’s voice, and grasped its import so firmly and so fully that he has guided all sane-minded men into the paths of peace and happiness, calmness and repose?

You are pleased to think him uneducated. The reason is that he refused to consider any education worth the name that did not help to school us in happiness. Was he to spend his time, as you encourage Triarius and me to do, in perusing poets, who give us nothing solid and useful, but merely childish amusement? Was he to occupy himself like Plato with music and geometry, arithmetic and astronomy, which starting from false premises cannot be true, and which moreover if they were true would contribute nothing to make our lives pleasanter and therefore better? Was he, I say, to study arts like these, and neglect the master art, so difficult and correspondingly so fruitful, the art of living?

No! Epicurus was not uneducated: the real philistines are those who ask us to go on studying till old age the subjects that we ought to be ashamed not to have learnt in boyhood. I have explained my own view, but solely with the object of learning what your verdict is. I have never hitherto bad a satisfactory opportunity of hearing it.

Cool

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 03 Jun 2003 13:43:48 +0000

Via Antipixel
Antipixel | Blog | Weather Map Project, Summer 2002

Weather Map Project, Summer 2002

Last summer vacation, my daughter chose weather tracking for the holiday project. Notes were kept, skies were photographed, QuickTime movies were made.

Preservation of context

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 03 Jun 2003 10:01:36 +0000

A couple of years ago, I found one of my first web pages, a truly sad effort. Done before I had a web server, I made it available via FTP, with images linked from other servers. (Tiny gif icons, for which I actually apologized for wasting bandwidth…)
Still, it is important, in a way, at least to me, because it was my entry into this medium. I’d drag it out every once in a while and have a chuckle at my own expense. (No, I’m not going to link to it – way too embarassing.)
The last time I did, I noticed that one of the oldest active links had gone dark – a guide to using the “World-Wide Web” from a university in Hawaii. Of course, a good percentage of links from any page get broken every day, so what’s the big deal? What I felt when I lost that link, was that my page was now lacked some of the context of its time.
What does this mean for blogs, where each entry is suspended, supported and sometimes entirely composed of external information?

Over time, how do we preserve the context of what we write? What mechanism is there for ensuring that what we write now will still have meaning when the people we cite and link to shift their attention to other things and let their domain names lapse and their servers fall silent?
Does it matter?
There’s a group called the Internet Archive that has for years been making snapshots of the web at certain intervals, to hope to preserve a bit of the context. For example, take a look at wirefarm, circa 1997. That’s the earliest example that they have, but I had already been using that domain name for almost a year. Before that, I had a series of

Salam Pax was Peter Maass’ interpreter

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 03 Jun 2003 09:32:02 +0000

Read more ›

Prediction…

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 03 Jun 2003 01:11:07 +0000

One prediction before I go off to bed:
Earthquake. Around 3-4 am…
Let’s see if I’m psychic. (Hope not – I’ve been edgy lately about these things…)

Dojunkai Aoyama demolition

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 02 Jun 2003 20:02:46 +0000

Stopped by the old Dojunkai Aoyama apartments today at lunch.
Sad to see them go…

Nadine has more on them:

TokyoShoes

Dojunkai Aoyama demolition

Demolition has begun on the Dojunkai Aoyama apartments, beautiful old buildings mostly vacant, lining a stretch of Omotesando. The Japanese abhor anything old; old, slightly decrepit, and beautiful is even worse. Down it goes to be replaced by some glass box with 6 floors underground.

Blogger’s Lunch

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 02 Jun 2003 14:13:34 +0000

Daphne and I are meeting tomorrow afternoon for a bit of a blogger’s lunch at Good Day Cafe in Omotesando/Harajuku, if anyone wants to join in and give tips on using MT to a new user…
Here’s a Link with a map for Good Day…

(I know I keep plugging the place, but be assured, I’m not affiliated – just a happy customer.)
Good Day Cafe’s site which is in Japanese.

Newsreaders

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 02 Jun 2003 11:42:02 +0000

I’ve been using a program called NetNewsWire this week, ever since I got my iBook back from the shop.
What it does is take those “Syndicate this site” links from people’s weblogs and grab the headlines and story summaries and present them in a format something like a mail program or Usenet newsreader. All of the colors are stripped, most of the images, too. Clicking the entries brings up the web page for the entry.
The good thing about it is that it’s a great time saver. No need to go to pages that haven’t been updated.
The bad thing about it is that it’s a great time saver. You’re updated in just a few minutes. Hmmm. No more killing time with the web…

Website color picker

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 02 Jun 2003 11:18:15 +0000

VisiBone Webmaster’s Color Lab

Just a handy link I don’t want to lose…

Cigars

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 01 Jun 2003 02:16:06 +0000

Here’s a picture of Yuka and I enjoying our cigars at the garden party held by the BLCCJ last night.
I’m processing all of the pictures I took and just found that one, which I liked…

3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 31 May 2003 17:20:30 +0000

3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference

The 3rd Annual Nigerian
EMail Conference
“Write better emails. Make more moneys.”

Test Moblog Post

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 30 May 2003 17:14:54 +0000

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Metropolis

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 29 May 2003 15:54:19 +0000

(Showing Ned how to use bookmarklets… Switching him over to MT soon.)

:: Metropolis Tokyo :: INTERNATIONAL DINING – Chill factor

Chill factor

Summertime and the drinking should be easy. Ned Goodwin tells you what to sip when the heat soars.

Tokyo is fun and intriguing, but by no stretch of the imagination is it beautiful. The city’s lack of deft aesthetic and greenery, its swarming artifice, is exacerbated by the brutal humidity during the summer months. The only one true respite: to drink lustily.
What to do when naked in front of the air conditioner and in need of something to slake the thirst and perspiration? Often a bottle of wine is daunting before dinner and too much when alone. In such cases I reach for a swathe of unusual aperitifs. Interestingly enough, these are usually from countries of a sort of louche repute; renowned for the “good life,” or in other words, lands boasting an elevated insouciance bristling with abandon of the everyday. In essence, a good aperitif should be the ultimate mood-elevator to launch you far from the mundane.

Good Day Cafe

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 29 May 2003 14:23:07 +0000
Just a plug for the Good Day Cafe in Omotesando/ Harajuku, where I'm having lunch now. They have a nice patio, good, cheap food and drinks, Belgian beer and best of all, Free Wireless Net Access. To get there, go down Omotesando Dori from Omotesando, until you pass Paul Stuart and it's about 10 meters from the corner. The access point is called "Good Day Cafe"...
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Bear Attacks Submarine

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 29 May 2003 13:11:40 +0000

Sheesh – Americans aren’t welcome *anywhere* any more…

Bear Attacks Sub

Bear Attacks Sub

During the ICEX 2003 naval exercises near the North Pole, the American submarine Connecticut (SSN 22) poked it’s sail and rudder through the ice. When an officer looked around outside via the periscope, he noted that his sub was being stalked by a hostile polar bear. The periscope cam was turned on, and these photos of a polar bear chewing on the subs rear rudder resulted. The damage was said to be minor. The SSN 22 is a Seawolf class boat, one of the navy’s newest submarines. It wasn’t designed as a polar bear snack, but that’s how life is sometimes.

All these tokyo blogs

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 29 May 2003 01:33:25 +0000

There are a lot of Tokyo bloggers around…
I got my iBook back today and started re-setting up all of the software that I like.
Mozilla was first, then the X Window server, all of the updates to OSX, VideoLan Client…
One new one that I got was NetNewsWire, a news aggregator that takes all of those XML/RDF/RSS feeds that these blogs all have and lets you browse them kind of like reading Usenet or something.
So I started digging around the links on my BlogRoll, looking for the “Syndicate This Site” links and found that they are often quite hard to find.
That, coupled with the fact that everybody else’s blogroll seems to have a few I’ve missed, I found quickly that having a good set for NNW is going to be a lot of work…

Yes, as a group, we have the webring, but that’s not quite the same.
I think we need a pre-aggregator.
Something to collect the news feeds and keep them updated quite automagically.
Maybe to start, just a list of feeds, as a feed itself.
Actually, a bunch of J-Blogger feeds would be cool, or maybe an app that pulls them dynamically from a database, given a set of parameters like:
UPDATED:<24H
CONTENT: PHOTO
CONTENT: !dreams
ICBM: TOKYO+100KM
CONTENT: ++MOBLOG

Hmmm. Gotta think on that…
In the mean time, get your XML feeds in order.

Ryukai Junior High

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 28 May 2003 18:39:14 +0000

Today I met some very nice 9th grade students from Ryukai Junior High School in Aichi Prefecture. They asked me some questions and took some pictures.
(What is my favorite food, favorite sport, do I like Japan? Their English was perfect!)

(I gave them this address and they have promised to visit.)
Click the picture for a bigger view:

Missing the point

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 28 May 2003 01:24:30 +0000

The BBC has an article up about the pirating of the new Matrix movie on the net:
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Film | Matrix sequel pirated online

Matrix sequel pirated online
The third film, The Matrix Revolutions, will open in November
Pirate copies of blockbuster hit The Matrix Reloaded are available to download online, less than two weeks after the film went on release around the world, BBC News Online has learned.

Good Wine

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 28 May 2003 01:12:13 +0000

Saturday, we had a case of wine delivered, a split-case, actually, half and half of Domaine des Espiers 2001 Cotes du Rhone and a really fun Domaine Sorin ‘Les Terres Rouge’ 2000.
The Terres Rouge is a new one to me, but it’s good. I kind of prefer it to the Cotes du Rhone.
The Merlot that we were enjoying so much this winter is now vinegar, but it sure was good while it lasted . We practically raced through the three cases I bought, keeping it flowing at every party, which was perfect…
Ned‘s recommendations, of course.
Thanks, Ned – Good stuff!

A great picture

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 28 May 2003 00:13:08 +0000

Yuka too this picture last Sunday in Shinjuku. It’s one that I wish I had taken.
We were watching those really strange dancers that often perform over there – you’ve probably seen them, with the white faces and odd, sort of Tibetan-ish music that they slowly and intensely dance to. Their faces are so striking, their poses so dramatic, that that’s all that I had ever thought of pointing my camera to.
Yuka, on the other hand, always manages to find a unique perspective.
Arrgh. I have so much to learn from her…

Earthquake Prevention Tips

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 27 May 2003 14:24:13 +0000

Earthquakes are a part of daily life in Japan. To help you do your part to avoid unnecessary danger to your family and damage to property, I have prepared the following:

Wirefarm’s Earthquake Prevention Tips:

1.) Remove shoes when indoors and only wear well-cushioned sneakers when walking on fault lines.

2.) Lie flat on the floor and don’t move. All the time.

3.) Try to avoid excessive volcanic activity. If you must release hot ash and magma, try to only do so in the ocean, well away from populated areas.

4.) Earthquakes are often caused by cracks in Tectonic plates. If you have any such cracked Tectonic plates in your home, properly dispose of them and consider using plastic plates in the future.

5.) Earthquakes can also be caused by extreme pressure buildup in the earth’s crust, caused by heat. Always remember to pierce the crust of the earth with a toothpick before baking.

6.) Buy a good Earthquake Emergency Kit. The more expensive the kit is, the less likely it is that you will ever need it.

7.) Pets often exhibit strange, excited activity before an earthquake. Keep sedatives on hand to prevent excited animals from causing an earthquake.

8.) Appease the gods with gifts of fruit and virgins. This can be done at any local temple or shrine in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area, or your post office or ward office. (N.B.: As of 2001, gifts of virgins are no longer tax-deductable.)

9.) Many times, new residents in Tokyo will assume that any time the ground shakes, it is an earthquake. Often times it is merely a passing truck or huge mutant lizard.

10.) Remember: Only *you* can prevent earthquakes.

Jishin!

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 26 May 2003 18:34:42 +0000

Big One

–Update–
It’s over now – the office (8th Floor was shaking quite a lot but everything seems OK…
I’m starting to hate these things…
Mie felt it on the 21st floor.
Crap – time to buy a helmet…
MJ’s take. Very complete.

I was the only foreigner in the office when it happened, so I was the most freaked out, I think.
Other people were laughing a bit. My hands were shaking as I gathered up my stuff to get the hell out. Now I just feel like I want to throw up.

When it started to get big, I started posting this – My boss Kozo was teasing me, saying it looked like I was trying to pretend it wasn’t happening – I explained the blog thing and I think he thought I was strange…

This was the biggest one since 2000.

Next time there’s a quake, listen. I could almost swear they make a sound. Not the sound of the building shaking and creaking. Something else. Know what I mean?

Oh – almost forgot – I replaced my cell phone – same number, but lost my addresses. (070-6643-0506) if any family wants to call and be re-assured that I am, indeed, OK…

I guess it’s official

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 26 May 2003 09:21:14 +0000

Yuka and I picked up an engagement ring yesterday, so I guess we’re *officially* engaged…
:-)
I know it took forever for me to actually get around to getting it, but…
Anyway, she loves it. She cried…

In situ:

Binh Danh

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 24 May 2003 03:05:17 +0000

Binh Danh Remembrance

I thought this was simply fascinating. The artist writes:

In this body of work, I have recorded the images of the Vietnam War onto and into tropical plants. One summer, I was motivated to experiment with photosynthesis and its pigments after watching the lawn change color due to a water hose that was placed on it. Soon after that observation, I was making chlorophyll prints.

World as a blog

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 24 May 2003 01:10:57 +0000

This is a flash site that shows blogs around the world getting updated. Wait for one to pop up somewhere far away and then go and make a comment right away…
Very, very cool.

the World as a Blog

1974 Weight Watcher’s Recipe Cards

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 23 May 2003 21:52:17 +0000

I love you, Pecky. Every part of you.

Chicken Liver Bake: enjoy it with the ashes of a loved one.

Dancing With the Devil

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 23 May 2003 12:36:26 +0000

Dancing With the Devil

“Since at least the 1980′s, federal laws have prohibited U.S. companies from doing business in one or more of these countries. Yet Halliburton appears to have sought to circumvent these restrictions by setting up subsidiaries in foreign countries and territories such as the Cayman Islands. These actions started as early as 1984; they appear to have continued during the period between 1995 and 2000, when Vice President Cheney headed the company; and they are apparently ongoing even today.”

Some meetup Pics (In Technicolor)

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 23 May 2003 01:38:16 +0000

I did some color correction to take out the yellowy incandescent color, but some of them came out looking kind of weird, like stills from a 1960′s movie. I kind of like it, so I’ll leave them.

Waiting for my iBook

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 23 May 2003 00:20:36 +0000

Remember way back when in January, when my iBook dided? Well, I finally took it in to be repaired. Should be back any day now.
I was kind of surprised that I waited so long to take it in, but when it died, I just felt so sick that I didn’t want to even look at it. I mean, Mac’s are suposed to be such high quality, aren’t they? Mine had all sorts of little problems before it died – it couldn’t sleep or wake up well, the cover was loose – that kind of stuff. Sure, they’re just details, but that’s what Apple is supposed to be good at.
Hmff.
If it doesn’t work well, I doubt I’ll buy another – I’ll just stick to Linux, I guess.

How much content do you post?

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 21 May 2003 13:08:17 +0000

I found a site via Edward Felten‘s site that takes a look at your page and analyzes how much of it is actual content, as opposed to images and scripts. If only it could tell you how much of that would be actually worth reading. No, bad idea…

GetContentSize

GetContentSize

Enter a Web page’s URL, and we’ll give you four things:

1. The size of the page, in bytes (just the HTML page — no images, associated JavaScript or CSS files)
2. The size of the page’s “text content” (What does that mean?)
3. The percentage of the page’s weight devoted to text content (#1 / #2)
4. The page’s text content itself

Beer For The Homeless

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 20 May 2003 18:39:22 +0000

Now here’s a site whose mission is truly noble:

Beer For The Homeless

Welcome to the Beer For The Homeless website

This site is dedicated to the thousands of men and women in America who have been relegated to the status of children, regardless of their age, by the do-gooders of society who believe that merely because a person has no home they should therefore not be allowed to drink beer.

I should have an anonymous blog

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 20 May 2003 02:29:48 +0000

I know that people from my office ocasionally stop by here and see what I’m up to, so what should I do when I really want to post some scathing criticism?
I mean when you get out of a meeting that just leaves you reeling – when you’re forced into making a design choice for a project that you just *know without a doubt* is wrong?
Oh, I guess I know how to cover it – make small cosmetic adjustments to the program, but leave the structure intact, all while pretending that the “clients” are geniuses. “Clients”. I can’t think of a different word – I was a consultant for to long to think of the other people as anything but my clients. Whenyou’re a consultant, it’s easy: Do good work, make sure that your check clears and don’t fraternize too much.
Of course, that was the late 90′s, way before ~~work as a whole~~ everything sucked.
So what can you say? There’s no legal protection for bloggers the way the US (supposedly) protects whistleblowers – if I vent a bit of vitriol generated by the fact that my company just fails to *get it* sometimes, I’m taking a risk.
Of course, we have this “just us” thing going on right now, since only bloggers read blogs, but what about the “Great and Powerful Google”?
When Google made almost all of Usenet searchable, going back to the late Paleolithic era, a lot of people got agitated- suddenly, posts that people wrote *years* ago, with a reasonable expectation that they would be gone in a few weeks were online again, a few keystrokes away from anyone who could guess at your old email addresses. Often embarassing stuff. Often written before you knew what you were doing.
Surely blogs will be similarly etched into the granite – right now we’re all probably being indexed and cross-referenced by some undergrad who thinks that blogs are truly something more than the Pet Rocks of the turn of this century. (Probably he carries a current copy of all of the Blogosphere around on his TiBook with a 1TB drive…)
So, knowing that, how much do you hold back? Because I really need to vent and this seems the natural place to do it, but I guess I’l have to wait for the meetup thing and do it the old-fashioned way, over too many beers…

All of these earthquakes

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 18 May 2003 23:06:44 +0000

We’ve been having a lot of quakes lately. Actually, tonight, I’m sort of waiting for the next one in the next few hours. Living in Tokyo, we get a lot of quakes, most of which you don’t notice – I read somewhere that it was a thousand a year or so, or almost 3 a day, but lately, they seem to be different.
The tremblors that I’ve grown used to have always been gentle, side-to-side movements that seem like some sort of natral settling of things. Nothing to worry about… In fact, sometimes I would be halfway through the next day and think to myself, “did we have a quake last night?” A call to Yuka would usually confirm that we did.
Lately, though, these have been different – they seem “angrier” somehow. We get up now and move to what might be a safer part of the apartment and talk about getting those construction hardhats and putting all of our important papers together in this yellow plastic waterproof, crush-proof box, just in case.
We talk more now about “The Big One”, but it seems a bit more real now.
(Ever since I moved here and probably for many many years before, people have been predicting “The Big One”, probably so that they can claim a bit of fame, just in case it actually happens.)
So why has it been different these days? I heard that Fuji’s seismic activity has been slowly creeping up towards the crater, but I don’t particularly think that we’re going to be the next Pompeii. I figure they’ll see some steam from the crater or something before we’re all sweeping ash from our balconies…
I saw a documentary on quakes a while back and they had this scientist who had built the most realistic simulation of how the tectonic plates behave – it was an inclined plane about a meter long that he’d covered with sand paper. On top of that was a brick that he’d attached a long elastic band to. He’d put the brick at the bottom of the plane and increase the pressure on the band until the brick moved up the slope.
Sometimes the brick would just slide up evenly, other times it would kind of shuffle upwards. The most interesting was when the brick just sat there as the pressure increased, unmoving. Then, suddenly, it would start to go, hopping at first, til it was fairly bouncing by the time it toppled off the top. Scary.
So are these that we’ve been having of the first type that are just a gentle release of pressure, or the buildup to a much bigger quake?
Are you more worried about the ones you’ve been feeling?
Thinking of buying a helmet?
I just took a look at my ward’s English web page, which has some earthquake information in English. Not too informative, but worth reading. If you’re in Japan, you may want to do the same…

Yaw and Mog

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 18 May 2003 22:16:35 +0000

My friend Daphne has just set up her blog on my server and she’s got some interesting stuff up, so go take a look.
(Those of you in the Meetup group will get to meet her at the next meeting. )
Yaw and Mog

When it will be all over,
you will just be a memory that
someone wishes to forget.

Lead a useful life–
and someone might just remember you for it.

Yet another quake

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 17 May 2003 23:48:57 +0000

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June Carter Cash – 1929-2003

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 17 May 2003 00:24:00 +0000

Very very sorry to see this.
I met June Cash’s niece a few months ago at the Whiskey a Go-Go in Hollywood and asked her to say Hello for me, since she said she’d be seeing her the next week.
I’m a very big, but fairly recent Johnny & June Carter Cash fan. Of course, their music is brilliant, but their marriage is also legendary.

Very very sorry to see this…
Johnny, hang in there…

Johnny, on June:

“June and I met back stage at the Grand Ole Opry in 1956. She was already a veteran in Country Music, having performed with her family since was six years old. She worked with me since the early sixties, and in her I always found a friend. Now the sharing of our Christian faith strengthened the bond between us. She is my wife, lover, friend, and my biggest critic…We work things out; heart to heart, soul to soul. We’re in love. “

June Carter Cash – 1929-2003

In his biography Cash said of his wife, “What June did for me was post signs along the way, lift me when I was weak, encourage me when I was discouraged, and love me when I was alone and felt unlovable. She is the greatest woman I have ever known. Nobody else, except my mother, comes close.”

Give a Listen, then go
buy a CD.(Song link will be removed in a few hours.)

D100 Lounge Downloads D100 Reference

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 16 May 2003 17:09:15 +0000

D100 Lounge Downloads

D100 Reference Manual (English)
This is a very important document to read. Please note that the file size is rather large. For those on a slower connection, you may want to plan on about 1hr to 1hr 30mins for the entire file to download.
File size: 15.5MB

Crashed Computer Traps Thai Politician

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 15 May 2003 15:10:19 +0000

Crashed Computer Traps Thai Politician

Crashed Computer Traps Thai Politician
Updated 14 May 2003

Should have used Linux instead of Windows CE…

ABCNEWS.com : Sources: Al Qaeda

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 14 May 2003 12:13:40 +0000

ABCNEWS.com : Sources: Al Qaeda Fractured, Ineffective

April 24

And the following

U.S. and Saudis Sensed Attacks Were Imminent

“We’ve never believed that we had rendered them incapable of conducting operations. We know they have lots of folks who are willing to conduct these operations, and although it’s harder for them to do so, they can still carry them out, as these attacks have proved.”

My Next Digital Camera

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 13 May 2003 15:26:26 +0000

(Don’t worry, Yuka – the camera I’m about to describe doesn’t exist yet…)

OK – My next camera. Well, I want a few features on it:
(Though I won’t go into hardware so much as software.)

Embedded Linux.
Now, you may think that I’m just a Linux nut and that the operating system on a camera shouldn’t matter, but there are a few reasons I’d like it to be Linux. First, if the camera maker discontinues the camera, the user community can continue its development.
Features can be added or removed by the user.
Bug fixes.
Plus the fact that Linux can already do everything I am describing here.
More:

Encryption.
If someone steals my camera, I don’t necessarily want him getting my pictures. I want the camera to have its own GPG key. I’ll upload my public key into it and the camera will sign and encrypt each picture to me alone. Having the camera digitally sign each picture would give the added benefit of showing that a photo was never altered. You could then use the digital photo as evidence in a court case.

Apache.
An HTTP Server. Having a web server on a camera may seem extreme, but it would allow you to show your pictures immediately after you take them, or have it become a member of your network. CGI could let it *take* pictures remotely.

SSH. SSH is the Secure Shell – a way of logging in to a remote computer and doing stuff. Why not be able to log in to a camera and delete files? Or manipulate them?

ImageMagick.
ImageMagick is a suite of command-line based tools for image manipulation.

GPS. (Global Positioning System.)
OK, this could be optional, but not only could it place the current Latitude and Longitude into each picture taken, it could let you know where it is, via the web server, if it’s ever stolen.

OK, now let’s imagine the camera itself – you go out and take a bunch of pictures. While you’te having a coffee somewhere, you take out a miniature keyboard and LCD monitor and plug them in to a port on the side of the camera. You answer a few emails and update your weblog with the picture you just took.

Who should be blogging (but isn’t)?

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 13 May 2003 14:24:08 +0000

Who’s blog would you want to read if only they had one?
What I mean is, is there someone you *just know* could do an excellent job of posting their thoughts, but isn’t yet? Here are a few of mine, off the top of my head.

Yoko Ono.
No matter what you think of her music, her blog would be a good read. She has always been active in blending public media and art with a cause. For example, in 1969, she had a billboard put up in New York’s Times Square saying “War is Over ” with “If you want it” in small letters beneath. After Sept. 11, she again hired billboards there with a few lines of one of her husband’s songs. She has Ideas and opinions and like them or not, she manages to get them out in front of people.

Tim Robbins.
If he can write as well as he can speak.

Tim Burton. (Film Director.)
TimBurton.com seems to be under construction, but from the look of it, it looks like it will be a Flash site done by an outside company.

Len Adelman.
The “A” in RSA encryption. Fascinating mind. I read a long time ago in a New York Times article that he hated computers though, doing everything on a chalkboard.

So who would you add?

Thinking of having kids?

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 13 May 2003 14:22:30 +0000

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Anything from a vending Machine

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 13 May 2003 01:28:47 +0000

Up on the way to Chichibu, there was a vending machine near the train station selling old coins and bills.
Very cool. I love old coins…
It worked like those vending machines outside a supermarket in the states where you never know what you’re going to get til you give up your money.
I wound up getting two bills that really confused everyone I was with – Five Peso notes marked “The Japanese Government”.
When I got home, I did a bit of googling. It turns out that they’re from the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Oh.
I also got a few nice Japanese coins and a Chinese Ten Yuan note.
The machines also had new foreign coins, also for 100 yen – since one of the coins that they were offering was an American penny, I avoided that one…

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 12 May 2003 23:39:01 +0000

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 12 May 2003 23:31:22 +0000

The Coca-Cola Company Under the

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 12 May 2003 19:48:38 +0000

The Coca-Cola Company Under the Nazis

Sometimes during one of the many reversal of fortune so characteristic for the North African theater of war, German troops on the offensive stumbled across a cache of Coca-Cola left behind by retreating Allied troops. But the welcome find came with a snag and thirsty throats stayed dry despite the heat: The enemy had forgotten to leave some ice as well, and since every German soldier knew that a bottle of Coca-Cola had to be consumed eiskalt, the booty remained worthless unless somebody came up with another method of refrigeration under the scorching African sun.

Luftwaffe-pilots stationed nearby eventually provided an ingenious answer to this let-down by wrapping wet towels around the bottles and tying them to the wings of their Messerschmidts 109F before take off. Once the fighters were airborne, evaporation and the lower temperature of higher altitudes cooled the precious load down. The subsequent scene upon the pilots’ return to base must have been irresistible: The pilots hopped out of their planes, plucked ice- cold Coca-Colas from the wings, opened them and then let the brown juice run down their throats to celebrate the thirsty return from another successful mission.

Coca-Cola again promoting Nazi Images?

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 12 May 2003 19:37:12 +0000

Ananova – Coca-Cola promotes drink with ‘swastika’ robots

http://www.ananova.com/images/web/52505.jpg

Ananova:
Coca-Cola promotes drink with ‘swastika’ robots

A Coca-Cola promotion in Hong Kong featuring a robot adorned with ‘swastikas’ has been condemned.

Brian Walski Discusses His Doctored Photo

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 12 May 2003 16:05:28 +0000

Update: I’ve added some thoughts. Be sure to read them.

Photo District News Online: PDNewswire

The Los Angeles Times fired Brian Walski April 1 after the staff photographer admitted to digitally combining elements taken from two different exposures. At the time of the offense, the award-winning photojournalist had been covering the war in Iraq from the town of Basra. The composite image ran on the front page of the Times as well as its sister paper The Hartford Courant, among others.

Why Will Wireless Camera phones Revolutionize the Photography Industry

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 12 May 2003 15:55:13 +0000

Why Will Wireless Camera phones Revolutionize the Photography Industry by Evan Nisselson- The Digital Journalist

Why will wireless camera phones revolutionize the photography industry?
May 2003

by Evan Nisselson

The digital screen in front of me says that it

Today’s Pics

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 12 May 2003 13:07:57 +0000

Dog in Chichibu

Wild ape

Earthquake

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 12 May 2003 12:58:03 +0000

Strong earthquake just now…
2 of them -
everything fine…
Monday, May 12 2003 12:57AM
—
It was 2 strong earthquakes, but NHK said that they were only around 4s, so they must have been centered right below us. They’ve been happening more and more lately. This one was shaking the bookshelf quite a bit more than any we’ve had in the past. Yuka and I both jumped up, which we never do and moved to the center of the room.
Really spooky. This time I felt like it was going to get much bigger.

Cool

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 12 May 2003 09:33:34 +0000

SAFETY SIGN BUILDER
Make industrial warning signs that say whatever you like. Then print them and post them. Great potential for mischief…

Hiking in Chichibu

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 11 May 2003 14:00:30 +0000

Went for a ~~grueling deathmarch~~ hike in Chichibu yesterday with Punchoo, Siddharth, Otake-san, Paul, Akiko and Yuka.

Salam’s Back

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 08 May 2003 12:57:47 +0000

He’s back on line, sort of. I’m going to go read it now.
…
He doesn’t have proper internet access, but managed to email a friend who posted for him.
Where is Raed ?

Where is Raed ?

Recent Pictures

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 08 May 2003 11:39:14 +0000

Open 11:00 – 20:00
(Click the pictures to see larger views. )

More below…

Act casual, boys…

Crossing girl

Ojisan with hat

Young Kid with hat

Dynebolic Live Distro

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 07 May 2003 19:32:39 +0000

dyne.org :: [ d y n e : b o l i c ] GNU/Linux Live CD

Dyne:bolic is a GNU/Linux distribution simply running from a CD, without the need to install anything, able to recognize most of your devices and periferals: sound, video, TV, network cards and more. The basic requisite you need is just a i586 PC with 64Mb of RAM and a IDE CD-ROM.

All the strange pics

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 07 May 2003 11:05:06 +0000

If you go over to the gallery, you’ll see a lot of pictures of chocolates and stuff. No, I’m not trying to be artistic, it’s for work – some prototypes of pictures for the online shop I’m designing…
(Using the gallery is an easy way to share them with the other people involved in the project.)
Do feel free to add comments to them, if you feel compelled… ;-)

Missed Train

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 04 May 2003 13:07:34 +0000

XMMS Proxying

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 03 May 2003 10:57:49 +0000

Linux Notes To Myself…
[XMMS-DEVEL] http proxy support

> i wanted to know if xmms has got supoort for http proxy … Preferences->Audio I/O plugins->MPEG Layer 1/2/3 Player->Configure->Streaming->Proxy

Remember the Register?

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 01 May 2003 17:27:59 +0000

The Register, which a few of you may remember as a vaguely clueful tech site back in the dot-com era, again linked to my site today in one of Andrew Orlowski’s fluffy diatribes that again takes jabs at Joi Ito for liking his job.
(The first was in an “article” where Orlowski complains about Google’s method of ranking pages, calling it ‘Semantic Ethnic Cleansing’. How charming. )
In one article, Orlowski ‘s complaining about what he calls ‘Googlewashing’, where words can be adopted by the blogger crowd and repurposed. What a tragedy…
Then in another, he’s complaining that Google doesn’t give him a good ranking when you search for his made-up word.
Well, here’s a word that I’d like to Googlewash: “Orlowski “. I’d like to use the power of Google to repurpose it mean “Ass”…

Quitting Smoking (Again)

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 01 May 2003 11:33:24 +0000

I decided to try again to quit smoking.
I am edgy and crabby and I feel like I’m going to lose my temper all the time…

The May Day Project

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Apr 2003 19:43:50 +0000

the May Day Project – Saturday May 10th 2003 – Your Day In Photos

the may day project is about collecting glimpses into people’s lives through photographs. whether they be self portraits, landscapes or macros, candid or posed, snapshots or something more creative – we want to see what your day was like saturday may 10th 2003.

FTP Servers

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Apr 2003 18:25:16 +0000

I just upgraded FTP servers to Pure FTP.
Looks like it adresses a lot of the security concerns I had with other software. Nice product, if you must run FTP…

PureFTPd – A fast, standard compliant, production quality FTP server.

Pure-FTPd is a free (GPL), secure, production-quality and standard-conformant FTP server based upon Troll-FTPd. It doesn’t provide useless bells and whistles, but focuses on efficiency and ease of use. It provides simple answers to common needs, plus unique useful features for personal users as well as hosting providers.

New Pictures

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Apr 2003 16:11:34 +0000

Just some random uploads to the gallery:

(About half are Yuka’s…)

Kyoto Pictures

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 30 Apr 2003 10:54:42 +0000

Yuka and I took about 800 pictures in Kyoto & Osaka, all of which are now on line in the gallery.
They’re pretty unsorted now, I may do a ‘best of’ gallery soon.
There are lots of pictures of cats, which was mostly Yuka’s doing. (Mine are the fuzzy, dark, ot-of-focus pictures of trite subjects…)
Be sure to click on the ‘slideshow’ link in the gallery.

A few days off

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 25 Apr 2003 08:41:12 +0000

Yuka and I will be in Kyoto the next few days on a little vacation for my birthday.
Here are a few pictures from the other night:

300 reasons why we love The Simpsons

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 17:07:49 +0000

The Observer | Review | 300 reasons why we love The Simpsons

300 reasons why we love The Simpsons

Lunch

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 14:12:34 +0000

Just got back from the opening party for the new Grand Hyatt Tokyo in Roppongi Hills.
Had a bit too much wine with lunch – This is going to be a long day…
This is Noris from my company and I:

God Bless America

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 23 Apr 2003 01:51:15 +0000

Free Freedom Fries!

Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 22 Apr 2003 16:14:41 +0000

Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations

When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.

As a practical matter, a mere failure to speak out upon occassions where no statement is asked or expect from you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father’s, offering you a place at his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if you any of young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. “In a few years,” reasons one of them, “I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good.” Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don’t be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

John J. Chapman
Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900

Nina Simone

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 22 Apr 2003 11:22:43 +0000

Two nights ago, I was at AOC talking about Jazz with François, who was talking about the difficulty of finding new Jazz acts for the Fuji Rock Festival. I pretty much regarded it a hopeless task, since there hasn’t been any great Jazz in years, let alone in Japan.
François is as passionate about music as he is about good wine and after years and years in the business, he still believes in it, which is inspiring.
For me, I don’t hope to hear anything new in Jazz.
“I want a to feel the same way I do when I hear Blue Train or the sheer happiness of the piano at the beginning of My Baby Just Cares for Me by Nina Simone. You find that and I’ll come to Fuji Rock,” I told him
(Of course I’m a total Old Fart in my music tastes, but that’s the stuff I listen to and like.)
I listen to Nina Simone’s music nearly every day, that song being on a compilation I made last October.

She died yesterday, April 21st, 2003.
(More below)

MTV.com – News -Jazz Legend Nina Simone Dies At Age 70

Legendary jazz and blues singer Nina Simone died in her sleep at her home in Southern France on Monday, Reuters reports.

The 70-year-old singer was known for her fiery persona, civil rights anthems and versions of the jazz standard “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You.”

Lil’s on line

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 22 Apr 2003 10:47:58 +0000

esthet.org – daily photography eyecandy from Tokyo
Somehow I missed the launch of Lil’s site. Congratulations, Lil, great site!

Rainbow

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 21 Apr 2003 16:33:02 +0000

Saw this on Saturday when I was in Aoyama helping Yuka set up for the fair….
Mie saw it too.

That Honda Ad

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 21 Apr 2003 13:51:01 +0000

Click below if you haven’t seen it.
(You need Flash to view it and it takes a few minutes to download, so be patient.)

Sorry! I just got back from a weekend in Kyoto to find that this has gotten quite a few hits.
1.8 Gigabytes of hits today alone!
I had to take it down – I’ll find the original and post that.

Try here.

For a bit on how they did it, see:
Lights! Camera! Retake!
(Filed: 13/04/2003)

The Honda Accord campaign launched last week looks certain to become an advertising legend. Quentin Letts goes behind the scenes

Ned’s Birthday Party

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 21 Apr 2003 13:02:19 +0000

After the Belgian Fair, Yuka and I went to AOC Yoyogi for Ned’s Birthday.
Pictures to follow…

199 Pictures

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 18 Apr 2003 20:07:23 +0000

I took 199 pictures so far today.
*This* is my favorite so far…

Blogger Meetup Pictures

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 17 Apr 2003 14:34:20 +0000

Gallery :: Blogger Meetup

Blogger Meetup Pictures

To work

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 17 Apr 2003 14:32:12 +0000

I rode my bike in to work this morning and it was simply beautiful.

This Weekend

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 16 Apr 2003 19:44:19 +0000

This Sunday and Monday is the BLCCJ Belgian-Luxembourg “Joy of Life” event. There will be Belgian Beer, Chocolate, Jam, Belgian Beer, Luxembourg Wine, Belgian Furniture, Diamonds, Belgian Beer, Belgian Beer and, of course Belgian Beer.

I’d really appreciate it if you stopped by – my girlfriend Yuka is organizing it and it will be lots of fun. We’re thinking of having a party at our place afterwards for those who stop by.

Click here:

joyoflife

BLCCJ “Joy of Life”
April 20 and 21, 2003, 10AM – 6PM
At Exhibition Space 2F, Minami Aoyama 291
(3 minutes walk from Exit B1, Hanzomon/Ginza Line. Tel# 03-5778-0291)

Don’t think, Just blog

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 16 Apr 2003 13:16:16 +0000

Last night, I saw Office Space which somehow I had missed seeing before, probably because my Lame Ass Video Store (TM) only has DVDs of movies that reallysuck. /rant

Tonight s the Meetup thing with an amazing 23 people confirmed.
(I think it was 2 months ago when Stuart marveled that we had 6 or 7 people show. )
Given that people often bring friends, I think we’ll be spilling out into the streets – that Zest location is one of the oldest and smallest. Joi is DJ’ing at Moda, so we may head over there at some point.
(more below)

If you’re not familiar with the Meetup thing, basically they take any loosely-defined group that exists on the internet and encourage them to meet up in real life, once a month.

The group in Tokyo consists mainly of expats who as often than not, created a weblog to keep in touch with family and friends back home. That being the case, the sites are often casual and chatty. They are on a first name basis with both the readers and the other bloggers.

When you have a site, it’s easy to post pictures and stories and document all of the strange little things that happen in your day. Ubiquitous digital cameras, wireless network connections, email access from your phone, high speed internet at home and cafes added to often long train rides with nothing in English to read have produced the ability to blog everything, to produce microdocumentaries of the daily life of an expat in Japan.

Let’s say you’re walking in your neighborhood and you spot a bit of funny English on a sign or you bump into a friend. Since your camera phone is probably either in your hand or your back pocket, there is nor reason to hesitate – you don’t even have to stop walking. As a recent Lomo photography book exclaims in its title, “Don’t think, Just shoot.”

Bloggers carry it a bit further – they tend to document everything with text as well, not just the photos. Does it really matter that a Cinnamon Roll and a Grande Coffee at Starbucks in Tokyo cost 598 yen in April of 2003? Who’s to say? But that’s the kind of information that will be waiting in the blogs for whoever wants to know a year from now or a hundred years from now. When your phone has a built-in camera and email, the immediacy becomes intense. The other night Mie announced via her phone that she was at Cafe8 at that moment and invited anyone reading to come join. When Kristen was having Chinese food in Suidobashi, she blogged a bit about
a decoration in the shop. MJ describes Yakiniku. Fleeting details. Endless streams of data. Minut
I’ve got a lot to learn from these sites. I should stop trying to “write” and just write.
So here goes:

Today at lunch I went to Shibuya and had my boots shined. From Hachiko, walk to the right and go under the underpass and you’ll see a couple of men shining shoes. While he was working, we spoke a little bit and he told me that he was named Shoeshine Champion in 1957. He showed me his award plaque. Cost to make my engineer boots look fantastic: 1000 yen. Tip: 500 yen.

Don’t think, just blog…

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 14 Apr 2003 16:45:40 +0000

Read more ›

Lazy Sunday

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 13 Apr 2003 23:09:54 +0000

Did just about nothing, except watch a few movies (Night on Earth & Oh brother where art thou) and hang out with Yuka.
Made nachos for dinner.
Yup, lazy day…
Last night was Vincent’s birthday – pictures to follow

On Joi’s Site

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 11 Apr 2003 11:53:43 +0000

The head of my company, Kozo Hasegawa got a nice mention on Joi’s site:

Joi Ito’s Web
Had dinner last night at G-Zone Ginza Global Dining’s new restaurant complex in Ginza. Yesterday was the first day in business. It’s a HUGE space with a Gonpachi, a Zest, a Monsoon, and a La Boheme, all Global Dining restaurants. It feels almost like Disneyland, tunnels connecting the restaurants and lots and lots of theme stuff like a fake entrance to a Western Inn, etc. The opening party the day before attracted about 4000 people. Hasegawa-san, the CEO of Global Dining, Jun (my partner who is on Global Dining’s board), Oki Matsumoto the CEO of Monex and I ate at Gonpachi. The sushi looked REALLY good, but I kept away from the carbs…

On the synchronicity side, the twin brother of a guy who has worked for me at Infoseek forever, Hamano, is in charge of facilities and suprised me. Also, the former manager of Tableaux Lounge in Daikanyama where I used to hang out A LOT is now the manager of La Boheme in Ginza G-Zone. Anyway, you can reserve rooms, they’re open late. I think G-Zone will be my Ginza hangout, although I rarely have any reason to go to Ginza these days.

Spring

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 10 Apr 2003 15:34:35 +0000

Tulips behind the koban at Omotesando kosaten where I usually eat my Subway tuna sandwich.

A Disgusting Practice Vanishes With the Token

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 10 Apr 2003 15:12:28 +0000

A Disgusting Practice Vanishes With the Token

A Disgusting Practice Vanishes With the Token
By RANDY KENNEDY

In five days, when the last New York City subway token slides through the slot of the last booth to sell them, few people will notice and fewer will care. There will be no official ceremony to mark the passing. If there is music in the background, it will not be taps; it will be the bleating song that turnstiles sing to valid MetroCards.

But off in a corner, hidden in the shadows where things begin to smell bad, at least a few observers will notice and care quite a lot. They belong to a sad and desperate breed of criminal that has been in decline for a long time, one that will soon become as irrelevant as bootleggers and horse thieves.

Journalists perish, looters flourish and medics despair in the chaotic jigsaw of war

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 09 Apr 2003 08:59:12 +0000

News

In Brussels, the International Federation of Journalists said five foreign journalists covering the war in Iraq had been killed and at least four others wounded after coming under fire around Baghdad in the past 24 hours.

The federation warned that any deliberate strike against journalists, “are grave and serious violations of international law”.

US spokesmen stuck by their version of events, and insisted they were not targeting journalists, Western or Arab.

“It is something we all regret. But I don’t believe that it is possible that it was deliberate,” a US State Department spokesman said.

But when confronted with the contradictory testimony of the press corps, a US military spokesman could only say that events would be investigated.

Peace & Resistance Babies of Iraqi soldiers born with no eyes

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 09 Apr 2003 01:52:18 +0000

And the US says that Depleted Uranium Weapons are benign…

Peace & Resistance Babies of Iraqi soldiers born with no eyes

Babies of Iraqi soldiers born with no eyes
Dr. Mohammed A. Salman 02/02/2001
source : Vereniging van Oogartsen in Vlaanderen (www.vvov.be)
URL : http://www.lai-aib.org/lai/article_lai.phtml?section=A3ABBDBB&object_id=8858

Irak Depleted Uranium
Babies of Iraqi soldiers born with no eyes
From Vereniging van Oogartsen in Vlaanderen

Pretty baby Haneen Ameer born at 1.1.2001 is a small infant, brought to my clinic by her parents, she didnt open her eyes since her birthday, tears comes out when she cries.

Babies of Iraqi soldiers born with no eyes
From Vereniging van Oogartsen in Vlaanderen

Pretty baby Haneen Ameer born at 1.1.2001 is a small infant, brought to my clinic by her parents, she didnt open her eyes since her birthday, tears comes out when she cries.
On clinical inspection ,the lids of both eyes were shortened ,thin and caved in.
Eyelashes are present; palpebral fissures are reduced in their vertical and horizontal diameters.
The lachrymal glands were presents as demonstrated by tears when she cries.
Examination of the sockets was so difficult, but when opened by lid retractors, both sockets were shallow, reduced in anteroposterior diameter, with a small cul-de-sac.
The Rt. Eye: A small cornea at the base of the socket was present which were vascularised and 2 mm. in diameter.
The Lt. Eye: Completely lined by conjunctiva, which is bulging anteriorly.
No associated malformations were detected.
Asking the mother about the medical history during pregnancy, she denied any illness or drug intake.
Investigations:
MRI shows an eyeball, which is not more than 1cm. in diameter and with out lens at the Rt. Orbit.
In the floor of the Lt.orbit there was a small eyeball about 1cm. in diameter hidden behind a membrane.
No treatment could be suggested, except a prosthesis, which should be employed during the first year for cosmetic purposes, and to avoid entropion and deficiency of the cul-de-sac which could become a problem requiring multiple surgical interventions.
As I have no experience in such congenital anomalies I hope to receive advice and help from my colleagues every were in the world.
I have 9 cases, 8 of theme are cases of total ANOPHTHALMOS – 7 of them, their fathers were soldiers in the Iraqi tank power troops which were exposed to U.S.army attack by anti-tank missiles of DEPLETED URANIUM, which was proved to be used against Iraq, during the aggression at 1991.

With IRAQI children

More Fearmongering

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 08 Apr 2003 19:12:05 +0000

MSNBC had an article today that caught my eye:
Iodide pills urged for homes, schools

Thinking this was the result of some new threat, I read the article. As it turned out, I’ll be keeping my magic Iodide pills next to my duct tape and plastic sheeting. (We *are* still supposed to keep those, aren’t we?) Read more below.

Iodide pills urged for homes, schools

Spurred by concerns over bioterrorism and the war in Iraq, the American Academy of Pediatrics on Monday urged households, schools and child-care centers near nuclear power plants to keep potassium iodide pills on hand to protect children from an accidental or intentional radiation release

Ok, what does bioterrorism have to do with radiation? These pills would be useless against biological or chemical weapons.
What the AAP actually said was: “It may be prudent to consider stockpiling potassium iodide…”

“May be prudent to consider” doesn’t exactly conveight a great sense of urgency, at least to me. It does make for a catchier headline, as if to imply that somehow the Iraquis or Al Quaeda suddenly had nuclear-capable intercontinental missiles. (Maybe the North Koreans? No, wait, Mr. Bush has labelled that a “Regional Issue” and not a concern… This must be something else.)

If you read a bit more, the AAP is really only saying that you might want to buy some of these pills if you live within ten miles of a nuclear power plant. That sounds reasonable, but what has it got to do with bioterrorism?

I did find a mention of nuclear terrorism on the AAP website:

“In light of the events of Sept. 11, a terrorist attack on a nuclear reactor no longer is considered a remote possibility. Parents may be concerned that their children will develop thyroid cancer after exposure to radioactive iodine (RAI) released during an attack or accident.”

But that was from March of last year. (ref.)
Why the sudden urgency? Do they know something that we don’t, or is this just more of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Keep People Nervous and Cooperative” program?
Just for fun, I Searched the AAP website for the word “bioterrorism”, but found nothing from this year.

Of course, there has been speculation that terrorists might have the materials to a ‘Dirty Bomb’, which is a bunch of low-grade radioactive material packed inside a conventional bomb, which basically just spreads the radioactive material around where it kills you much more slowly. (Not to be confused with “Depleted Uranium Weapons” that the US uses in Iraq. Those also spread low-grade radioactive material around the environment causing slow death, but for noble purposes when used by the Good Guys.)

Actually, these little pills won’t protect your little ones from a dirty bomb, any more than they would have protected those babies in Iraq born with no eyes as a result of our ~~Dirty Bombs~~ depleted uranium weapons.

To quote the article:
The pills are not effective against the type of radiation that most likely would be used in so-called dirty bombs, (Dr. Michael Shannon) said.

And from the AAP site:

KI (iodide) protects only the thyroid gland from radioiodines, offers no protection from external radiation and does not protect the body from effects of exposure to other radioactive materials.(ref.)

Comforting.

So basically, they’re saying that if you live near a nuke plant, it might be a good idea to keep some of these pills handy.
(But if you live near a nuke plant, wouldn’t this have always been a good idea?)

Where does this kind of crap reporting come from?

By the way, if you are looking for better information, I’d suggest reading the FDA’s FAQ on the subject before spooning the stuff to your loved ones. There *are* risks, after all…

Diving in Truk

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 08 Apr 2003 16:06:53 +0000

I put up a Gallery of my friend Paul’s underwater pictures. Very cool stuff.

Drummer

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 08 Apr 2003 15:38:05 +0000

Today in Shibuya, a traditional drummer pauses during a performance for the dedication of a new bus line.

Forensic and Incident Response Environment

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 08 Apr 2003 11:20:09 +0000

I know, I know, I need to start a geek-only blog…
Normal people, please ignore this one too.

F.I.R.E. Forensic and Incident Response Environment Bootable CD

FIRE is a portable bootable cdrom based distribution with the goal of providing an immediate environment to perform forensic analysis, incident response, data recovery, virus scanning and vulnerability assessment.

Also provides necessary tools for live forensics/analysis on win32, sparc solaris and x86 linux hosts just by mounting the cdrom and using trusted static binaries available in /statbins.

Memtest

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 08 Apr 2003 11:16:37 +0000

Non-Geeks, please ignore…

Memtest86 – Memory Diagnostic Page

Memtest86 – A Stand-alone Memory Diagnostic

Memtest86 is thorough, stand alone memory test for x86 architecture computers. BIOS based memory tests are only a quick check and often miss many of the failures that are detected by Memtest86.

Knoppix

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 08 Apr 2003 01:21:32 +0000

After reading about the release of Knoppix 3.2 the other day on Slashdot, I downloaded it and burned it to a CD and have been enjoying it quite a bit.
I thought I’d subject you all to a mini review…

If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a complete Debian distro with KDE 3.1.1 that runs off a bootable CD and doesn’t require a hard disk, though of course, if you have one, it will use it without a problem. (Perfect if you want to get real work done on a machine that has been hobbled with Windows.)

I thought it might be handy as a rescue/administration disc, but found myself running it on my big NT work machine almost exclusively for the last week. Really impressive.

It has some pretty amazing hardware detection and boots very quickly. The last version that I tried would not boot on my ThinkPad, but this one did without a hitch. As a test, I plugged in my digital camera (usb) and got ready to type the mount command, but before I could, an icon appeared on the desktop for the camera. I’ve never gotten Gnome on RedHat to do that.

Strangely, it boots into KDE without asking for a password. (The user is ‘Knoppix’) It’s not quite a root account, I think, but user knoppix is a sudoer, so there must be some risks. Certainly I’d want to have a firewall in place between it and the net.
Net configuration is automatically done with DHCP and worked. I later changed the settings to my custom settings and was able to make them persistent.
OpenOffice is installed and worked well.

LinNeighborhood automatically discovers Samba and Windows network shares.
Soundcard was detected and appropriate music players were installed.
Wine is included.
Gimp works.
Mozilla is installed but would not open. The machine had plenty of RAM, so I think it was some other problem.
Konqueror seemed a suitable replacement for Mozilla, though I was not fond of the keybindings.

It likes a lot of RAM, but can use a swap file on the HD. Since I have lots of RAM, I haven’t tried this. It reads from the CD drive a *lot* which was a bit annoying at first, but I got used to it. (A quick test just now on a 400 with 64Mb of RAM had it asking to either add RAM or set up a swap file on the HD.)

After a couple of days, I discovered the utility for saving settings to disk. You can use either the hard disk, (DOS is fine – it seems to use a dos file for the settings) or some other disk. I may pick up one of those USB keychain hard disk thingies, just for that, or save everything to my camera. Once I had saved the settings, I no longer had to reconfigure the network and proxy settings each time, though I now have to type ‘knoppix myconfig=/mnt/sda1′ at boot.

I haven’t gotten Japanese input to work, but I think that’s more from not knowing KDE than the fault of Knoppix. I got it to display menus in Japanese, just using the KDE control panel. Fonts were quite nice and readable.

This would be a perfect disk to give to friends who are just getting into Linux. It’s probably goung to work right out of the box and give them a good impression of the Operating system. Certainly it removes the myth of Linux being hard to install. It may show you a feature or two that you didn’t know was available. (Having it automount my camera has inspired me to get that working on my RedHat box. )

Another place I could see it is on a shared workstation. We have a couple of terminals in the office for outside staff to use to browse the web and check email. They regularly get bogged down with spyware and crap. It would be nice to be able to admin them just by cycling the power.

All in all, I think I’ll be keeping a copy in my backpack, in case I ever need an instant Linux install. Really nice product.

Anyway, you can get it here:

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Just For Fun

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 07 Apr 2003 00:50:54 +0000

This little game is quite a bit of fun, especially as an American who was never taught Geography…
It’s a map of the Middle East and Northern ~~Australia~~ Africa. Below are the labels of the countries. You drag them into place. Pretty simple, if you know where the countries actually are.
I did OK from the Persian Gulf westward, but embarassed myself in Northern Africa.
Give it a try.

Games and More – Just For Fun – Rethinking Schools Online

Geography Quiz–Did you know “the Middle East”‘ stretches as far west as the Western Sahara in Africa? What is the smallest Middle Eastern country? Test your knowledge on a new drag-and-drop game by clicking the link or the map graphic. (All ages). Requires Flash.

Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 03 Apr 2003 11:32:24 +0000

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates

How many children, in how many classrooms, over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the wings of these words? And now the bombs are falling, incinerating and humiliating that ancient civilisation

Eject! Eject! Eject!

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 02 Apr 2003 22:07:28 +0000

Eject! Eject! Eject!: HISTORY

This war is an abject and utter failure. What everyone thought would be a quick, decisive victory has turned into an embarrassing series of reversals. The enemy, — a ragtag, badly-fed collection of hotheads and fanatics – has failed to be shocked and awed by the most magnificent military machine ever fielded. Their dogged resistance has shown us the futility of the idea that a nation of millions could ever be subjugated and administered, no matter what obscene price we are willing to pay in blood and money.

The President of the United States is a buffoon, an idiot, a man barely able to speak the English language. His vice president is a little-seen, widely despised enigma and his chief military advisor a wild-eyed warmonger. Only his Secretary of State offers any hope of redemption, for he at least is a reasonable, well-educated man, a man most thought would have made a far, far better choice for Chief Executive.

We must face the fact that we had no business forcing this unjust war on a people who simply want to be left alone. It has damaged our international relationships beyond any measure, and has proven to be illegal, immoral and nothing less than a monumental mistake that will take generations to rectify. We can never hope to subdue and remake an entire nation of millions. All we will do is alienate them further. So we must bring this war to an immediate end, and make a solemn promise to history that we will never launch another war of aggression and preemption again, so help us God.

So spoke the American press. The time was the summer of 1864.

At lunch today

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 02 Apr 2003 00:54:43 +0000

Today was beautiful in Tokyo. The cherry trees are in full flower, the sun was out and the breezes light.
I took my lunchbreak in the little park near my office where mothers and nannies bring their charges to play on the swings and slide and sandbox.
There’s usually at least a half-dozen women there, about half Japanese, the rest invariably Phillipina nannies with little blond children. (The Japanese kids are always with their mothers, at least in my limited observation.)
What struck me as I read my book and munched my crappy combinisando was one tow-headed three-year-old who started arguing with his nanny (who wanted to leave the park,) in what sounded like pretty decent Tagalog.
Some cruel part of me hopes that he has only learned to speak Tagalog.

What have I done?

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 23:37:26 +0000

10886 hits today as of 11:20 pm and it’s only 9:20 am, April Fools Day on the east coast.
My poor server is gonna fry.
It’s not hosted somewhere – it’s a 333Mhz box I found in the trash a couple of years ago and it lives in my laundry room. (Picture)

Depleted Uranium

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 08:19:50 +0000

Sunday Herald

The use of (Depleted Uranium Munitions) has also led to birth defects in the children of Allied veterans and is believed to be the cause of the ‘worrying number of anophthalmos cases — babies born without eyes’ in Iraq. Only one in 50 million births should be anophthalmic, yet one Baghdad hospital had eight cases in just two years. Seven of the fathers had been exposed to American DU anti-tank rounds in 1991. There have also been cases of Iraqi babies born without the crowns of their skulls, a deformity also linked to DU shelling.

A study of Gulf war veterans showed that 67% had children with severe illnesses, missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems and fused fingers.

Rokke told the Sunday Herald: ‘A nation’s military personnel cannot wilfully contaminate any other nation, cause harm to persons and the environment and then ignore the consequences of their actions.

‘To do so is a crime against humanity.

Joi Ito’s Site

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Joi Ito’s blog (http://joi.ito.com/) sure has some unusual entries today…

What does a “Thumbs Up” mean in Iraq?

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 31 Mar 2003 21:36:08 +0000

What Does a “Thumbs Up” Mean in Iraq?

Iraqis are giving passing Americans the “thumbs up” sign, which the troops interpret as a symbol of support. But many veteran travelers insist that the gesture is a crass Middle Eastern insult. How should coalition forces take those skyward thumbs?

Collateral Damage

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 31 Mar 2003 19:44:46 +0000

Don’t read the rest of this entry .
It has a picture of a four-year-old Iraqi girl wounded in the US invasion of Iraq.
(I don’t think you’ll see this on Fox News or CNN anytime soon.)
This is dedicated to the anonymous subhuman scum who scrawled this post today.
How in God’s name did Americans become like this?

eTaiwanNews.com/Baghdad bombardment continues

A wounded Iraqi girl is treated by U.S. marines in central Iraq March 29, 2003. Confused front line crossfire ripped apart an Iraqi family on Saturday after local soldiers appeared to force civilians towards U.S. marines positions. The four-year old girl, blood streaming from an eye wound, was screaming for her dead mother, while her father, shot in a leg, begged to be freed from the plastic wrist cuffs slapped on him by U.S. marines, so he could hug his other terrified daughter. (AP)

Spring skiing

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 30 Mar 2003 12:39:11 +0000

Punchoo and Siddharth and I went to Gala Yuzawa yesterday for the final ski of the year.
(Actually, Punchoo was snowboarding, but since he’s an otherwise nice guy, I’ll forgive him his poor taste in sports.)
Some pictures follow below…

We got to Tokyo station at 6:00am to take the 6:20 bullet train, but couldn’t find eachother so we had to take the 7:05.

This isn’t our train, but it was cooler-looking than ours – it’s an early 1960′s Shinkansen. Ours was newer.

One hour and thirty minutes later, the train drops you at the ski place:

You go up the escalator, pick up your skis and get your lift tickets and from there, take a gondola to the actual resort. Very convenient.

When you’re ready to leave, you can send your skis back to your house by Takkyubin. which is like UPS:

Next we went to the hot spring/ sauna that was at the base,
bought a couple of beers from the vending machine:

then back on the train…
You can even turn the seats around on the train so that a group of four can talk more easily, or just put your feet up and relax like this guy:

Happy Birthday, Mighty Atom!

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 16:22:27 +0000

If you read the story of Astro Boy, aka Mighty Atom, you’ll realize that Kubrik/Spielberg ‘borrowed’ parts of it for the movie “AI” (Artificial Intelligence.)
Astro Boy

April 7, 2003 marks the day Japan’s iconic emblem of post-war hopes for peace and prosperity, Tetsuwan Atomu, was “born.” Better known to his legions of Western fans as Astro Boy or The Mighty Atom, Tezuka Osamu’s most famous creation first entered the Japanese public’s consciousness in 1951. Astro Boy was a robot boy created by a scientist who had lost his real son and the original stories were set some 50 years in the future. With rockets in his legs, large fish-like eyes and a machine gun in his rump, Astro Boy was a friendly creation, always helping humans against monsters and other assorted foes. Unlike American comic-book heroes of the day, who were constantly fighting for “justice,” Astro Boy aimed towards the far loftier goal of “peace.” Initially a comic-book smash, Astro Boy’s fame was propelled around the globe with the advent of a ground-breaking, black-and-white TV series in 1963.

Another Update

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 14:52:06 +0000

angiej: Another Update

Another Update
We think Ali is okay.

Questioning his peers, and *pressing* them to remember, revealed much. Apparently, he talked to one of his friends the day before he left school. He told this student in confidence that he was going to “stay with his uncle in Europe, in Amsterdam”. So whatever happened, the family likely had anticipated it and left of their own volition. Also of note is the fact that he told another kid about it and not administration or teachers… not even me, who (I think) spoke with him most.

Where Have All The Muslims Gone?

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 28 Mar 2003 12:20:16 +0000

angiej: Where Have All The Muslims Gone?

Where Have All The Muslims Gone?
Remember Ali, the Iraqi student I wrote about a few weeks before leaving for Italy when telling about going to the antiwar rally?

He’s gone. Disappeared.

His parents’ phone number is disconnected.

His mother cannot be reached at work.

His father disappeared first… and now, one of our babies is gone!

His counselor said to me this afternoon: “Either the parents have been called in by the government for questioning, or else they’ve all fled.”

Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 27 Mar 2003 11:18:11 +0000

Another Vietnam: North Vietnamese Images Show Unseen Side of War

Photographer Douglas Niven made more than 16 trips to Vietnam to look for images made by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong photographers during the Vietnam War. He found thousands of images, many of which had never even been made into prints.

One part of the interview I found interesting, though they didn’t have the picture on the site:

One really classic picture shows soldiers pretending to fire at wooden model enemy airplanes strung along a wire. When we see images like this, we can readily identify them as propaganda, but they’re also interesting from a documentary perspective. The purpose of that image was to show the Vietnamese people that with World War II rifles it is possible to shoot down American warplanes if they used the proper technique of shooting in front of the plane’s path. In fact, they did shoot down some American planes and helicopters with World War II carbines, and they used this same technique to shoot down even more planes once they had bigger guns. So this picture illustrates a home-grown technique that, in the end, was very useful to them.

One rule for them

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 27 Mar 2003 11:03:39 +0000

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | George Monbiot: One rule for them

Five PoWs are mistreated in Iraq and the US cries foul. What about Guantanamo Bay?

George Monbiot
Tuesday March 25, 2003
The Guardian

Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that “it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them”.

News Sucks

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 27 Mar 2003 01:21:05 +0000

You know, I hate CNN. Yup. Never liked em.
I hate them even more lately. You know that they’re enjoying themselves now, sort of – I mean, we have a bush in the White House and a war in ~~iRaq~~ Iraq. I mean, this is what made them famous, right? ~~Dirk Diggler~~Wolf Blitzer standing on top of some hotel, watching crappy, jpeggy night vision bombs going off some where.
Does it strike you as odd that the video quality hasn’t improved very much in 12 years? Well, the thing is, it has – but thanks to CNN in 1991, that crappy quality is what an Iraqi war is *supposed* to look like.
The same way Robert Capa’s WW2 journalism defined a certain look for battlefield photography, CNN’s late 1980′s technology defines how a modern war looks. Don’t believe me? Why is it that

Just saw this on CNN

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 27 Mar 2003 01:01:40 +0000

Read more ›

Kafunshou

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 27 Mar 2003 00:30:49 +0000

I have hayfever and it royally sucks.
I actually wore one of those ridiculous surgical masks most of the day today at work on the insistance of my boss.
As soon as I got home, I took one of my few remaining Seldane tablets. I’m pretty sure they were banned years ago, but they are the only thing that work for me at all. Pity is that I only have a half-dozen or so left…
Made a truly kick-ass putanesca tonight with handmade pasta noodles. I was really short on flour, so I had to cut it with cake flour and soba-ko. Took ages to get the dough right, but the noodles were fantastic.
Anyway, Kinokuniya was having a sale, so I grabbed a half-dozen cans of Anchovies, lots of stewed tomatos, black olives, capers, spices, whatever. Yuka insisted on white wine, which was surprisingly good, despite being the stuff that I normally use to take scuff marks off the linoleum.
What else? Not much.
Nope – that’s it for now.
ta.

Rumsfeld’s strategy under fire as war risks become increasingly apparent

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 19:25:17 +0000

KRT Wire | 03/24/2003 | Rumsfeld’s strategy under fire as war risks become increasingly apparent

Another retired senior officer said the Apache Longbow helicopter gunships that were shot up badly Sunday had been sent on a deep strike against Republican Guard divisions guarding the approaches to Baghdad. He and others said the Apaches shouldn’t have been used that way.

Little Car

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 13:13:39 +0000

More random pictures.
(Justifying my camera purchase…)

Messenger

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 12:54:36 +0000

Jan 31, 2003, Shibuya

Sleepy Cat

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 12:49:12 +0000

(Click for larger view.)

Behind my office live a few cats.
Some of the people in the neighborhood paid to have them all spayed/neutered a couple of years ago.

Mary Ann Wright

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 11:31:08 +0000

Government Executive Magazine – 3/21/03

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a despicable dictator and has done incredible damage to the Iraqi people and others of the region. I totally support the international community

Journalists suspect US deliberately bombed Al-Jazeera

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 01:58:54 +0000

A bit old (November, 2001) but interesting, nonetheless.

Journalists suspect US deliberately bombed Al-Jazeera -DAWN – International; 21 November, 2001

21 November 2001 Wednesday 05 Ramazan 1422

Journalists suspect US deliberately bombed Al-Jazeera

LONDON, Nov 20: When BBC World Service correspondent William Reeve dived under his desk in Kabul last week to avoid shrapnel from the US missile that had landed next door, some think it marked a turning point in war reporting.

The US had scored a direct hit on the offices of the Qatar-based TV station Al-Jazeera, leading to speculation that the channel had been targeted deliberately because of its contacts with the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. If true, it opens up a worrying development for news organizations covering wars and conflicts: now they could be targeted simply for reporting a side of the story that one party wants suppressed.

THE ONLY THING FRENCH ABOUT FRENCH

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 25 Mar 2003 18:34:48 +0000

Read more ›

This war is starting to show its ugly ugly face to the world

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 24 Mar 2003 23:32:19 +0000

“This war is starting to show its ugly ugly face to the world.”
“Salam Pax”, (the pseudonym of a young Iraqi weblogger,) talking about the images on Al-jazeera of the dead and captured Americans.

You won’t see the footage on American television. Donald Rumsfeld has made sure of that – after all,
it’s illegal under the terms of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which prohibits in article 13,
“Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.”

Seeing these faces is heart-wrenching.
I hope somehow God sees fit to bring them safely home to their families.
((Read More))

What Iraq has done here is wrong. We should be above doing this kind of thing. We are, after all, the Good Guys.

But consider the following:
“On December 7, heavily armed US soldiers blindfolded and handcuffed (John Walker) Lindh, scrawled

War ‘n Stuff

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 24 Mar 2003 01:53:29 +0000

I’ve been asked to pull this entry by the author of the original article. In fact, the author deleted their blog over it, which is regrettable, but understandable. I’ve removed the author’s name and quote.
The comments, I’ve left in place.
That’s the danger of speaking your mind publicly – any idiot can come and take jabs at you, anonymously. (Like Dolgotha@yahoo.com , posting from 68.16.19.50 and bombiraq@aol.com from 66.210.57.9 )

You are the stupidest person I have ever heard. You know nothing. You are probably French for all I know. You yourself are a terrorist and not American.

Wonderful commentary from bombiraq@aol.com.
“You are probably French” – I’ve been chuckling about that one all day…
(Ah, la vache, Emile – finish that wine so we can Molotov cocktails with the bottle! Vive la r

Hiking in Shuzenji

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 23 Mar 2003 13:43:55 +0000

Akiko, Olivier, Yuka and I went hiking on Friday in Shuzenji Temple, in Shizuoka.
A bit after this picture was taken, I managed to drop my favorite lens (Nikon 20mm 2.8 Prime) into a creek.

First mobile post

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 23 Mar 2003 12:25:13 +0000

Read more ›

Mirror of “where is raed? “

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 20 Mar 2003 14:37:51 +0000

Very hard to connect to – I managed to get it using Lynx, so here it is:

:: Thursday, March 20, 2003 ::

there is still nothing happening im baghdad we can only hear
distant expolsions and there still is no all clear siren. someone
in the BBC said that the state radio has been overtaken by US
broadcast, that didn’t happen the 3 state broadcasters still
operate.
:: salam 6:40 AM [30][+] ::

where is raed? v2.0
*with new BILINGUAL flavour* ie. sorry about those wierd
characters, but you really should have installed that Arabic OS
if you have seen [1]Raed today please tell him [2]Salam Pax is
still looking for him.

Where is Raed ?

[10479113100.jpg]

———-

“the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values
or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized
violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”

———-

Samuel P. Huntington

[3][::..bloghome..::]
[::..archive..::]
[::..Where is Raed?..::]
v1.0
:: [4]September Archives ::
:: [5]October Archives ::
:: [6]November Archives ::
:: [7]December Archives ::

[::..Daily Reads..::]
:: [8]NME.COM::
:: [9]al-jazeera ::
:: [10]NY Times ::
:: [11]Guardian.com ::
:: [12]Google News ::
:: [13]Reuters.com ::
[::..Daily Blogs..::]
:: [14]Sudden Nothing::
:: [15]Letter From Gotham ::
:: [16]The Pandavox ::
:: [17]Culpepper Log ::
:: [18]Path of the Paddle ::
:: [19]Al-Muhajaba’s Blog ::
:: [20]Back to Iraq 2.0 ::
:: Under Construction ::
[::..Secretly Stalking..::]
:: [21]Circular Logic::
:: [22]Blee Bloo Blar BLOG::
:: [23]UglyFatKid::
:: [24]Bifurcated Rivets::
[::..Eye Candy..::]
don’t read, just look
:: [25]1000 Journals::
:: [26]Ziboy from Beijing::
:: [27]Oates for Tanger::
:: [28]Hunkabutta::
:: [29]A day in the life::
[::..Things I stare at..::]
::

:: Thursday, March 20, 2003 ::

there is still nothing happening im baghdad we can only hear
distant expolsions and there still is no all clear siren. someone
in the BBC said that the state radio has been overtaken by US
broadcast, that didn’t happen the 3 state broadcasters still
operate.
:: salam 6:40 AM [30][+] ::
…

air raid sirens in baghdad but the only sounds you can here are the
anti-aircraft machine guns. will go now.
:: salam 5:46 AM [31][+] ::
…

It is even too late for last minute things to buy, there are too
few shops open. We went again for a drive thru Baghdads main
streets. Too depressing. I have never seen Baghdad like this. Today
the Baath party people started taking their places in the trenches
and main squares and intersections, fully armed and freshly shaven.
They looked too clean and well groomed to defend anything. And the
most shocking thing was the number of kids. They couldnt be older
than 20, sitting in trenches sipping Miranda fizzy drinks and
eating chocolate (that was at the end of our street) other places
you would see them sitting bored in the sun. more cars with guns
and loads of Kalashnikovs everywhere.
The worst is seeing and feeling the city come to a halt. Nothing.
No buying, no selling, no people running after buses. We drove home
quickly. At least inside it did not feel so sad.
The ultimatum ends at 4 in the morning her in Baghdad, and the big
question is will the attack be at the same night or not. Stories
about the first gulf war are being told for the 100th time.
The Syrian border is now closed to Iraqis. They are being turned
back. What is worse is that people wanting to go to Deyala which is
in Iraq are being told to drive back to baghdad, there was a runor
going around that baghdad will be “closed” no one goes in or out
[[32]check the map go from Baghdad in a N/E direction until you
reach Baqubah, this is the center of Deyala governerate] people are
being turned back at the borders of Baghdad city. There is a
checkpoint and they will not let you pass it. there are rumors that
many people have taken the path thru Deyala to go to the Iranian
border. Maybe, maybe not.
If you remember I told you a while ago that you can get 14
satellite channels sanctioned by the state, retransmitted and
decoded by receivers you have to buy from a state company. This
service has been suspended. Internet will follow I am sure.

Things on Iraqi TV today:
- an interview with the minister of interior affairs. Turned the
volume down, didnt want to hear anything.

[10481034463.jpg]

- demonstrations in Iarqi cities

[10481034462.jpg] [10481034461.jpg]

-yesterday the last 500 prisoners from the Iraq-Iran war were being
exchanged. I cant believe they are still doing this, for fucks sake
that war ended in 1989. every Iraqi family can tell you a hundred
heart braking stories about things that happen when you have
thought you brother/father/son is dead and he suddenly appears
after 10 years.

[10481034474.jpg] [10481034475.jpg] [10481034476.jpg]

:: salam 12:21 AM [33][+] ::
…

:: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 ::

-
:: salam 11:32 PM [34][+] ::
…

I would have posted something earlier today but there was a lot to
do and my brother reminded me that we have to go refill the car and
that was two hours of wasted time waiting. It is not as bad as two
days ago but the gas stations are still crowded. A couple of hours
after I wrote that two police cars were standing near gas stations
to keep things in order we went out again and there were more party
members wearing their olive-green uniforms with Kalashnikovs in gas
stations but today it is back to the police cars. There is a rumor
that they will open the special gas stations for the public too,
there are four of these in Baghdad used only by them or whoever has
the right ID.
Before I go into what was going on today I really want to thank all
the people who have been sending emails and letting me know that
they care and worry about what will happen in Iraq, thank you so
much. I hope you understand that it takes a bit of time to answer
your questions so please dont be angry if I dont reply promptly. I
print them out for Raed to read and he is totally baffled. some of
them I wish I could publish or print and paste on light poles.
Thank you very much.
And as a thank you here is a little web-gem. a true ohmigod moment.
[35]This is an image I found on [[36]spaceimaging.com]. It is
rather large but worth every second. Below I have posted a color
coded thumbpix to give you a little info.

[10480304040.jpg]

The feature most people would recognize when not seen from the top
is the grand festival square (which is not a square at all. It is a
semi-circle) it is in light blue. This is the one which has two
huge intersecting swords at its entrance. The building below the
semi-circle is the grand stand; this is the place that saw the big
army marches last winter. The road to the right of it is called the
Zaitoon (olive tree) Street, it has lots of olive trees obviously.
On the green side of that street (the green area is a residential
area called Harthiya) live many big wigs, dont bother you CIA types
reading the blog, they are empty now. The yellow area is the Zawra
public garden, you see it here during the renovation period. They
have just finished working on the garden. The brown longish thing
down the left of the image is the clock tower of Baghdad, a very
very hideous building and it houses the museum of Saddams presents
(the ones he got from everybody, there was an article about a
couple of months ago in the guardian I think). The blue square is a
building that has been hit twice (desert storm and desert fox)
after desert fox they decided to do a redesign since it was hit
really bad. It is still unfinished but it does look nice. The red
area is something I see with you for the first time. This is off
boundaries to Iraqis, the whole area is a presidential Palace. The
Sijood palace can be seen from the other side of the river and it
is one of the most beautiful palaces, I really hope it does not get
its havoc recked. I see it as a museum or some sort of academy in
the future, I really like it.

A couple of weeks ago journalists were exasperated by that fact
that Iraqis just went on with their lives and did not panic, well
today there is a very different picture. It is actually a bit scary
and very disturbing. To start wit the Dinar hit another low 3100
dinars per dollar. There was no exchange place open. If you went
and asked they just look at you as if you were crazy. Wherever you
go you see closed shops and it is not just doors-locked closed but
sheet-metal-welded-on-the-front closed,
windows-removed-and-built-with-bricks closed, doors were being
welded shut. There were trucks loaded with all sort of stuff being
taken from the shops to wherever their owner had a secure place.
Houses which are still being built are having huge walls erected in
front of them with no doors, to make sure they dont get used as
barracks I guess. Driving thru Mansur, Harthiya or Arrasat is
pretty depressing. Still me, Raed and G. went out to have our last
lunch together.
The radio plays war songs from the 80s non-stop. We know them all
by heart. Driving thru Baghdad now singing along to songs saying
things like we will be with you till the day we die Saddam was
suddenly a bit too heavy, no one gave that line too much thought
but somehow these days it is sounds sinister. Since last night one
of the most played old patriotic songs is the song of the youth
al-fituuwa, it is the code that all fidayeen should join their
assigned units. And it is still being played.
A couple of hours earlier we were at a shop and a woman said as she
was leaving, and this is a very common sentence, well see you
tomorrow if good keeps us alive itha allah khalana taibeen and the
whole place just freezes. She laughed nervously and said she didnt
mean that, and we all laughed but these things start having a
meaning beyond being figures of speech.
There still is no military presence in the streets but we expect
that to happen after the ultimatum. Here and there you see cars
with machine guns going around the streets but not too many. But
enough to make you nervous.
The prices of things are going higher and higher, not only because
of the drop of the Dinar but because there is no more supply.
Businesses are shutting down and packing up, only the small stores
are open.
Pharmacies are very helpful in getting you the supplies you need
but they also have only a limited amount of medication and first
aid stuff, so if you have not bought what you need you might have
to pay inflated prices.
And if you want to run off to Syria, the trip will cost you $600,
it used to be $50. its cheaper to stay now. anyway we went past the
travel permit issuing offices and they were shut with lock and
chain.
Some rumors:
It is being said that Barazan (Saddams brother) has suggested to
him that he should do the decent thing and surrender, he got
himself under house arrest in one of the presidential palaces which
is probably going to be one of the first to be hit.
Families of big wigs and his own family are being armed to the
teeth. More from fear of Iraqis seeking retribution than Americans.
And by the smell of it we are going to have a sand storm today,
which means that the people on the borders are already covered in
sand. Crazy weather. Yesterday it rains and today sand.
:: salam 3:12 AM [37][+] ::
…

:: Monday, March 17, 2003 ::

impossibly long lines in front of gas stations last night, some
even had two police cars in front of them to make sure to no
“incidents” occur.
the price of bottled water jumped up 3 fold.
on “shabab TV- youth TV” there were announcements that the NUIS
(national union of iraqi students) is selling. water pumps and
tanks, hard helmets, small electrical generators and most surreally
Chemical-biological attack protection chambers, in the picture they
showed it looked like an octogonal barrel layed on its side with
two bunks in it and some starnge equipment on the outside. no
prices just a phone number.
rumors of defaced picturs of Saddam in Dorah and Thawra Districts
(maybe maybe not)
and the cities of Rawa and Anna are so full of people now you
wouldn’t find a hut to rent, it was pretty safe to be there during
the first war and people who have the money are renting placed
there hoping that it will be safe this time.
the dinar is hovering around the 2700 per dollar and the hottest
items after the “particle-masks” are earplugs, they can’t be found
in shops and you have to pre-order.
:: salam 8:48 AM [38][+] ::
…

:: Sunday, March 16, 2003 ::

[RANT]
No one inside Iraq is for war (note I said war not a change of
regime), no human being in his right mind will ask you to give him
the beating of his life, unless you are a member of fight club that
is, and if you do hear Iraqi (in Iraq, not expat) saying come on
bomb us it is the exasperation and 10 years of sanctions and
hardship talking. There is no person inside Iraq (and this is a
bold, blinking and underlined inside) who will be jumping up and
down asking for the bombs to drop. We are not suicidal you know,
not all of us in any case.
I think that the coming war is not justified (and it is very near
now, we hear the war drums loud and clear if you dont then take
those earplugs off!). The excuses for it have been stretched to
their limits they will almost snap. A decision has been made
sometime ago that regime change in Baghdad is needed and excuses
for the forceful change have to be made. I do think war could have
been avoided, not by running back and forth the last two months,
thats silly. But the whole issue of Iraq should have been dealt
with differently since the first day after GW I.
The entities that call themselves the international community
should have assumed their responsibilities a long time ago, should
have thought about what the sanctions they have imposed really
meant, should have looked at reports about weapons and human rights
abuses a long time before having them thrown in their faces as
excuses for war five minutes before midnight.
What is bringing on this rant is the question that has been bugging
for days now: how could support democracy in Iraq become to mean
bomb the hell out of Iraq? why did it end up that democracy wont
happen unless we go thru war? Nobody minded an un-democratic Iraq
for a very long time, now people have decided to bomb us to
democracy? Well, thank you! how thoughtful.
The situation in Iraq could have been solved in other ways than
what the world will be going thru the next couple of weeks. It cant
have been that impossible. Look at the northern parts of Iraq, that
is a model that has worked quite well, why wasnt anybody interested
in doing that in the south. Just like the [DEL: US/UK :DEL] UN
created a protected area there why couldnt the model be tried in
the south. It would have cut off the regimes arms and legs. And
once the people see what they have been deprived off they will not
be willing to go back, just ask any Iraqi from the Kurdish areas.
Instead the world watched while after the war the Shias were
crushed by Saddams army in a manner that really didnt happen before
the Gulf War. Does anyone else see the words (Iran/not in the US
interest) floating or is it me hallucinating?
And there is the matter of Sanctions. Now that Iraq has been thru a
decade of these sanctions I can only hope that their effects are
clear enough for them not to be tried upon another nation.
Sanctions which allegedly should have kept a potentially dangerous
situation in Iraq in check brought a whole nation to its knees
instead. And who ultimately benefited from the sanctions? Neither
the international community nor the Iraqi people, he who was in
power and control still is. These sanctions made the Iraqi people
hostages in the hands of this regime, tightened an already tight
noose around our necks. A whole nation, a proud and learned nation,
was devastated not by the war but by sanctions. Our brightest and
most creative minds fled the country not because of oppression
alone but because no one inside Iraq could make a living, survive.
And can anyone tell me what the sanctions really did about weapons?
Get real, there are always willing nations who will help, there are
always organizations which will find his money sweet. Oil-for-Food?
Smart Sanctions? Get a clue. Who do you think is getting all those
contracts to supply the people with food? who do you think is
heaping money in bank accounts abroad? It is his people, his family
and the people who play his game. Abroad and in Iraq, Iraqis and
non-Iraqis.
What I mean to say is that things could have been different; I cant
help look at the Northern parts of Iraq with envy and wonder why.
Do support democracy in Iraq. But dont equate it with war. What
will happen is something that could/should have been avoided. Dont
expect me to wear a [I heart bush] t-shirt. Support democracy in
Iraq not by bombing us to hell and then trying to build it up again
(well that is going to happen any way) not by sending human shields
(lets be real the war is going to happen and Saddam will use you as
hostages), but by keeping an eye on what will happen after the war.

[10477697570.jpg]

To end this rant, a word about Islamic fundis/wahabisim/qaeda and
all that.
Do you know when the sight of women veiled from top to bottom
became common in cities in Iraq? Do you know when the question of
segregation between boys and girls became red hot? When tribal law
replaced THE LAW? When Wahabi became part of our vocabulary?
It only happened after the Gulf War. I think it was Cheney or
Albright who said they will bomb Iraq back to the stone age, well
you did. Iraqis have never accepted religious extremism in their
lives. They still dont. Wahabis in their short dishdasha are still
looked upon as sheep who have strayed from the herd. But they are
spreading. The combination of poverty/no work/low self esteem and
the bitterness of seeing people who rose to riches and power
without any real merit but having the right family name or
connection shook the whole social fabric. Situations which would
have been unacceptable in the past are being tolerated today.
They call it al hamla al imania the religious campaign of course it
was supported by the government, pumping them with words like poor
in this life, rich in heaven kept the people quiet. Or the other
side of the coin is getting paid by Wahabi organizations. Come pray
and get paid, no joke, dead serious. If the government cant give
you a job run to the nearest mosque and they will pay and support
you. This never happened before, it is outrageous. But what are
people supposed to do? thir government is denied funds to pay
proper wages and what they get is funneled into their pockets. So
please stop telling me about the fundis, never knew what they are
never would have seen them in my streets.
[/RANT]
:: salam 1:37 AM [39][+] ::
…

:: Saturday, March 15, 2003 ::

the big momma of all demonstrations is going on and I will be stuck
in the office for ever. maybe i will take a walk and watch the
show. Operation “Office Evac” is now in its final phase. any day
now.
:: salam 10:30 AM [40][+] ::
…

:: Thursday, March 13, 2003 ::

Today is a public holiday, in the Muslim calendar it is the 10th of
Muharam, or Ashura (3ashura2) for Shia Muslims. A pivotal date in
the history of Shia. Today is the day Imam Hussein was killed in
Karbala/Iraq. Which in the words of Shiapundit [41]is a time for
grief, reflection, and ibadat . Nothing else.
My mother is Shia from Karbala, so each year we wake up in the
morning (it is 1am as I write this) to the sound of the 3azah al
7ussain the lament of Hussein from the radio, not very pleasant.
And after that we hear the stories of the public laments that used
to take place in Karbala, now they are banned. The last three days
of the Imams life are acted out throughout the whole city of
Karbala. Ill give you an idea of these last few days, I hope the
Shia readers will excuse me if I dont get it fully right:

Basically it is the story of the battle between Imam Hussein, the
grandson of the prophet Mohammed, and Caliph Yazid on the Kerbala
desert in 680 A.D.
Imam Hussein is to return to Kufa/Iraq after he has been reassured
that the people there will help him in his struggle after he had
fled to Mecca under the threat of being assassinated by Yazids
people. On his way back the horse he is riding stops at a certain
place near the Euphrates and doesnt move. When the Imam asks the
name of this place he is told it is the desert of Karbala (karrun
wa bala2) which roughly means harm and calamity. He tells his
followers that this is the place where he will be killed as
prophesied. Tents are put up and they are very soon after that
surrounded by Yazids army. The Imam does not have many people with
him and most of them are family members with women and children.
Well move a bit quickly thru the events now. First their water
supply is cut off for three days, and then the battle starts,
family members of the Imam die one after the other trying to
protect Imam Hussein including his young sons. After all the men
have been killed, Yazids army moves thru the camp and burns the
tents down. Imam Husseins head is then taken to Damascus to prove
to Yazid that al-Hussein has been killed.

Now imagine this being enacted in real life thru the whole city, to
this day there is a district in Karbala called Mukhayam the camp
which actually used to be the site of the tents for the play. The
most hated role that had to be played is the role of the soldier
who will kill Imam al-Hussein, my aunt tells me it usually ends
with the people running after him throwing stones until he hides in
one of the houses. Groups of lamenters would then move thru the
city, from the scary groups of people hitting themselves with whips
on their backs for not being there to help al-Hussein in his
tragedy, to the poetry reading groups of students, to the solemn
lawyers. People would come from all over Iraq, and from as far as
Pakistan to join with their own lamenters. In houses and mosques
you would see loads of men and women listening to the maqtal the
killing of Hussein beating their chests and crying. There is even
special food for these days cooked in the streets.
I have seen nothing of this ever. It has been banned as long as I
can remember; it is considered a public unauthorized demonstration.
Laments can be held in houses but not the big play in the streets
of Karbala. Lately even the cooking of (qima – minced meat with
chickpeas) and (Harissa – something which looks a bit like gruel
actually) in public has been banned. My aunt just came from Karbala
today said that the army is all around Karbala, which happens every
year.
:: salam 2:17 AM [42][+] ::
…

-
:: salam 2:13 AM [43][+] ::
…

:: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 ::

here is something fun to read, unlike the comments down there where
we engage in index-finger wagging at each other. this i got from
Douglas who has always been thoughtful and sends me artcles from
french magazines or newspapers translated. thanks douglas, this one
is exceptionally good.It is about events before the first Gulf War.
if vous parlez francais then go to this link:
[44][Un apr

Just a fun picture

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 18:58:57 +0000

All this war stuff is depressing me, so I’ll just pust something fun:

Search Strings

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 17:11:13 +0000

Below are the search strings that brought people to this site.
How did I get to be #10 on the Goog for Moab Bomb Pictures? I don’t even have any…

1 14.72% moab bomb pictures
2 13.50% moab bomb pics
3 4.29% moab bomb picture
4 3.68% shibuya girls
5 2.45% 21000 bomb
6 2.45% france evil
7 2.45% pictures of the moab bomb
8 1.84% moab bomb
9 1.84% movix2
10 1.23% backward compatibility will not be a design feature
11 1.23% fake lomo effect
12 1.23% france is evil
13 1.23% guernica un
14 1.23% lomo effect
15 1.23% m.o.a.b. bomb pictures
16 1.23% massive ordnance air blast pics
17 1.23% moab bomb test
18 1.23% pics of moab bomb test
19 1.23% secret city beneath tokyo
20 1.23% seven riddles
21 1.23% midget in daipers chainsaw
22 1.23% pornblogging for great justice since 1982

Ok, ok, the last two are fake, but you get the idea…

Where is Raed

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 10:56:11 +0000

The weblog of a young Iraqi.
(Sometimes the site goes down, but keep trying – it’s quite a good read.

Where is Raed ?

No one inside Iraq is for war (note I said war not a change of regime), no human being in his right mind will ask you to give him the beating of his life, unless you are a member of fight club that is, and if you do hear Iraqi (in Iraq, not expat) saying

Fun with France

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 19 Mar 2003 01:24:23 +0000

Some stuff going on in one of the articles – Read the reply to this comment:

Wirefarm : France to join Axis of Evil?

Comments

france is not only extremely wrong in its anti-liberation of iraqi innocents stance, the populace of the entire country are idiots. the french economy will be decimated and france will become in reality what it has been since its inception, N O T H I N G.
Posted by: me on March 18, 2003 08:22 PM

Rachel’s War

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 13:18:27 +0000

Reporters have been in Gaza for ages, yet I’ve never seen a story like this come out.
Remarkable and tragic

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Rachel’s war

Rachel’s war

This weekend 23-year-old American peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the Israeli army destroying homes in the Gaza Strip. In a remarkable series of emails to her family, she explained why she was risking her life

February 7 2003

Hi friends and family, and others,

I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what’s going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States. Something about the virtual portal into luxury. I don’t know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I’m not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur his name to me – Ali – or point at the posters of him on the walls. The children also love to get me to practice my limited Arabic by asking me, “Kaif Sharon?” “Kaif Bush?” and they laugh when I say, “Bush Majnoon”, “Sharon Majnoon” back in my limited arabic. (How is Sharon? How is Bush? Bush is crazy. Sharon is crazy.) Of course this isn’t quite what I believe, and some of the adults who have the English correct me: “Bush mish Majnoon” … Bush is a businessman. Today I tried to learn to say, “Bush is a tool”, but I don’t think it translated quite right. But anyway, there are eight-year-olds here much more aware of the workings of the global power structure than I was just a few years ago.

Nevertheless, no amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can’t imagine it unless you see it – and even then you are always well aware that your experience of it is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, and with the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and the fact, of course, that I have the option of leaving. Nobody in my family has been shot, driving in their car, by a rocket launcher from a tower at the end of a major street in my hometown. I have a home. I am allowed to go see the ocean. When I leave for school or work I can be relatively certain that there will not be a heavily armed soldier waiting halfway between Mud Bay and downtown Olympia at a checkpoint with the power to decide whether I can go about my business, and whether I can get home again when I’m done. As an afterthought to all this rambling, I am in Rafah: a city of about 140,000 people, approximately 60% of whom are refugees – many of whom are twice or three times refugees. Today, as I walked on top of the rubble where homes once stood, Egyptian soldiers called to me from the other side of the border, “Go! Go!” because a tank was coming. And then waving and “What’s your name?”. Something disturbing about this friendly curiosity. It reminded me of how much, to some degree, we are all kids curious about other kids. Egyptian kids shouting at strange women wandering into the path of tanks. Palestinian kids shot from the tanks when they peak out from behind walls to see what’s going on. International kids standing in front of tanks with banners. Israeli kids in the tanks anonymously – occasionally shouting and also occasionally waving – many forced to be here, many just agressive – shooting into the houses as we wander away.

I’ve been having trouble accessing news about the outside world here, but I hear an escalation of war on Iraq is inevitable. There is a great deal of concern here about the “reoccupation of Gaza”. Gaza is reoccupied every day to various extents but I think the fear is that the tanks will enter all the streets and remain here instead of entering some of the streets and then withdrawing after some hours or days to observe and shoot from the edges of the communities. If people aren’t already thinking about the consequences of this war for the people of the entire region then I hope you will start.

My love to everyone. My love to my mom. My love to smooch. My love to fg and barnhair and sesamees and Lincoln School. My love to Olympia.

Rachel

February 20 2003

Mama,

Now the Israeli army has actually dug up the road to Gaza, and both of the major checkpoints are closed. This means that Palestinians who want to go and register for their next quarter at university can’t. People can’t get to their jobs and those who are trapped on the other side can’t get home; and internationals, who have a meeting tomorrow in the West Bank, won’t make it. We could probably make it through if we made serious use of our international white person privilege, but that would also mean some risk of arrest and deportation, even though none of us has done anything illegal.

The Gaza Strip is divided in thirds now. There is some talk about the “reoccupation of Gaza”, but I seriously doubt this will happen, because I think it would be a geopolitically stupid move for Israel right now. I think the more likely thing is an increase in smaller below-the-international-outcry-radar incursions and possibly the oft-hinted “population transfer”.

I am staying put in Rafah for now, no plans to head north. I still feel like I’m relatively safe and think that my most likely risk in case of a larger-scale incursion is arrest. A move to reoccupy Gaza would generate a much larger outcry than Sharon’s assassination-during-peace-negotiations/land grab strategy, which is working very well now to create settlements all over, slowly but surely eliminating any meaningful possibility for Palestinian self-determination. Know that I have a lot of very nice Palestinians looking after me. I have a small flu bug, and got some very nice lemony drinks to cure me. Also, the woman who keeps the key for the well where we still sleep keeps asking me about you. She doesn’t speak a bit of English, but she asks about my mom pretty frequently – wants to make sure I’m calling you.

Love to you and Dad and Sarah and Chris and everybody.

Rachel

February 27 2003

(To her mother)

Love you. Really miss you. I have bad nightmares about tanks and bulldozers outside our house and you and me inside. Sometimes the adrenaline acts as an anesthetic for weeks and then in the evening or at night it just hits me again – a little bit of the reality of the situation. I am really scared for the people here. Yesterday, I watched a father lead his two tiny children, holding his hands, out into the sight of tanks and a sniper tower and bulldozers and Jeeps because he thought his house was going to be exploded. Jenny and I stayed in the house with several women and two small babies. It was our mistake in translation that caused him to think it was his house that was being exploded. In fact, the Israeli army was in the process of detonating an explosive in the ground nearby – one that appears to have been planted by Palestinian resistance.

This is in the area where Sunday about 150 men were rounded up and contained outside the settlement with gunfire over their heads and around them, while tanks and bulldozers destroyed 25 greenhouses – the livelihoods for 300 people. The explosive was right in front of the greenhouses – right in the point of entry for tanks that might come back again. I was terrified to think that this man felt it was less of a risk to walk out in view of the tanks with his kids than to stay in his house. I was really scared that they were all going to be shot and I tried to stand between them and the tank. This happens every day, but just this father walking out with his two little kids just looking very sad, just happened to get my attention more at this particular moment, probably because I felt it was our translation problems that made him leave.

I thought a lot about what you said on the phone about Palestinian violence not helping the situation. Sixty thousand workers from Rafah worked in Israel two years ago. Now only 600 can go to Israel for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because the three checkpoints between here and Ashkelon (the closest city in Israel) make what used to be a 40-minute drive, now a 12-hour or impassible journey. In addition, what Rafah identified in 1999 as sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed – the Gaza international airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with Egypt (now with a giant Israeli sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years by a checkpoint and the Gush Katif settlement). The count of homes destroyed in Rafah since the beginning of this intifada is up around 600, by and large people with no connection to the resistance but who happen to live along the border. I think it is maybe official now that Rafah is the poorest place in the world. There used to be a middle class here – recently. We also get reports that in the past, Gazan flower shipments to Europe were delayed for two weeks at the Erez crossing for security inspections. You can imagine the value of two-week-old cut flowers in the European market, so that market dried up. And then the bulldozers come and take out people’s vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can’t.

If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several hours – do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained? I think about this especially when I see orchards and greenhouses and fruit trees destroyed – just years of care and cultivation. I think about you and how long it takes to make things grow and what a labour of love it is. I really think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could. I think Uncle Craig would. I think probably Grandma would. I think I would.

You asked me about non-violent resistance.

When that explosive detonated yesterday it broke all the windows in the family’s house. I was in the process of being served tea and playing with the two small babies. I’m having a hard time right now. Just feel sick to my stomach a lot from being doted on all the time, very sweetly, by people who are facing doom. I know that from the United States, it all sounds like hyperbole. Honestly, a lot of the time the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the wilful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I really can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. It really hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be. I felt after talking to you that maybe you didn’t completely believe me. I think it’s actually good if you don’t, because I do believe pretty much above all else in the importance of independent critical thinking. And I also realise that with you I’m much less careful than usual about trying to source every assertion that I make. A lot of the reason for that is I know that you actually do go and do your own research. But it makes me worry about the job I’m doing. All of the situation that I tried to enumerate above – and a lot of other things – constitutes a somewhat gradual – often hidden, but nevertheless massive – removal and destruction of the ability of a particular group of people to survive. This is what I am seeing here. The assassinations, rocket attacks and shooting of children are atrocities – but in focusing on them I’m terrified of missing their context. The vast majority of people here – even if they had the economic means to escape, even if they actually wanted to give up resisting on their land and just leave (which appears to be maybe the less nefarious of Sharon’s possible goals), can’t leave. Because they can’t even get into Israel to apply for visas, and because their destination countries won’t let them in (both our country and Arab countries). So I think when all means of survival is cut off in a pen (Gaza) which people can’t get out of, I think that qualifies as genocide. Even if they could get out, I think it would still qualify as genocide. Maybe you could look up the definition of genocide according to international law. I don’t remember it right now. I’m going to get better at illustrating this, hopefully. I don’t like to use those charged words. I think you know this about me. I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions.

Anyway, I’m rambling. Just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me. This is not what I meant when I looked at Capital Lake and said: “This is the wide world and I’m coming to it.” I did not mean that I was coming into a world where I could live a comfortable life and possibly, with no effort at all, exist in complete unawareness of my participation in genocide. More big explosions somewhere in the distance outside.

When I come back from Palestine, I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being here, but I can channel that into more work. Coming here is one of the better things I’ve ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible.

I love you and Dad. Sorry for the diatribe. OK, some strange men next to me just gave me some peas, so I need to eat and thank them.

Rachel

February 28 2003

(To her mother)

Thanks, Mom, for your response to my email. It really helps me to get word from you, and from other people who care about me.

After I wrote to you I went incommunicado from the affinity group for about 10 hours which I spent with a family on the front line in Hi Salam – who fixed me dinner – and have cable TV. The two front rooms of their house are unusable because gunshots have been fired through the walls, so the whole family – three kids and two parents – sleep in the parent’s bedroom. I sleep on the floor next to the youngest daughter, Iman, and we all shared blankets. I helped the son with his English homework a little, and we all watched Pet Semetery, which is a horrifying movie. I think they all thought it was pretty funny how much trouble I had watching it. Friday is the holiday, and when I woke up they were watching Gummy Bears dubbed into Arabic. So I ate breakfast with them and sat there for a while and just enjoyed being in this big puddle of blankets with this family watching what for me seemed like Saturday morning cartoons. Then I walked some way to B’razil, which is where Nidal and Mansur and Grandmother and Rafat and all the rest of the big family that has really wholeheartedly adopted me live. (The other day, by the way, Grandmother gave me a pantomimed lecture in Arabic that involved a lot of blowing and pointing to her black shawl. I got Nidal to tell her that my mother would appreciate knowing that someone here was giving me a lecture about smoking turning my lungs black.) I met their sister-in-law, who is visiting from Nusserat camp, and played with her small baby.

Nidal’s English gets better every day. He’s the one who calls me, “My sister”. He started teaching Grandmother how to say, “Hello. How are you?” In English. You can always hear the tanks and bulldozers passing by, but all of these people are genuinely cheerful with each other, and with me. When I am with Palestinian friends I tend to be somewhat less horrified than when I am trying to act in a role of human rights observer, documenter, or direct-action resister. They are a good example of how to be in it for the long haul. I know that the situation gets to them – and may ultimately get them – on all kinds of levels, but I am nevertheless amazed at their strength in being able to defend such a large degree of their humanity – laughter, generosity, family-time – against the incredible horror occurring in their lives and against the constant presence of death. I felt much better after this morning. I spent a lot of time writing about the disappointment of discovering, somewhat first-hand, the degree of evil of which we are still capable. I should at least mention that I am also discovering a degree of strength and of basic ability for humans to remain human in the direst of circumstances – which I also haven’t seen before. I think the word is dignity. I wish you could meet these people. Maybe, hopefully, someday you will.

Rachel

What’s up with News Reporting?

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 18 Mar 2003 11:46:39 +0000

Keeping a blog has made me much more aware of the news. I read more stories and I also examine the writing carefully. What I’ve noticed is that “real news” sites often are far shorter on details than the weblogs written by non-journalists

Yahoo! News – Survey Ranks World’s Best, Worst Places to Live

Survey Ranks World’s Best, Worst Places to Live
Mon Mar 3, 4:10 PM ET
Add Health – Reuters to My Yahoo!

By Jason Hopps

LONDON (Reuters) – The Swiss city of Zurich edged out Vancouver, Canada, and the Austrian capital of Vienna to top a quality of life survey published on Monday, with impoverished, war-torn African cities dominating the bottom ranks.

Appellate Court Rules Media Can Legally Lie.

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 17 Mar 2003 09:15:02 +0000

Of course, this may not be true. But then again, it would have to be, in order to be a lie itself.

Appellate Court Rules Media Can Legally Lie. – SierraTimes.Com

On February 14, a Florida Appeals court ruled there is absolutely nothing illegal about lying, concealing or distorting information by a major press organization. The court reversed the $425,000 jury verdict in favor of journalist Jane Akre who charged she was pressured by Fox Television management and lawyers to air what she knew and documented to be false information. The ruling basically declares it is technically not against any law, rule, or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news on a television broadcast.

PENTAGON THREATENS

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 14 Mar 2003 21:00:15 +0000

GuluFuture.com 4Dimensional News eZine

The Pentagon has threatened to fire on the satellite uplink positions of independent journalists in Iraq, according to veteran BBC war correspondent, Kate Adie. In an interview with Irish radio, Ms. Adie said that questioned about the consequences of such potentially fatal actions, a senior Pentagon officer had said: “Who cares.. ..They’ve been warned.”

US to use nukes in Iraq?

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 14 Mar 2003 20:59:18 +0000

Even before the Serbian killing, the US test of a high power Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB bomb in Florida, was a clear sign it is readying the nuclear option in the coming Gulf conflict. Although the 21,000 bomb used conventional munitions, it was universally described in Western media as having an explosion signature indistinguishable from a nuclear weapon mushroom cloud. That emphasis achieved two purposes:

For US public consumption, it served as convenient cover should such bomb signatures be detected as a result of the use of theater nuclear weapons in the Gulf conflict. The widely publicized bomb test allows these to be dismissed as MOAB effects. An unconvincing cover, as in fact the signature was nothing like a nuclear mushroom –but a cover nonetheless.

For international geopolitical elite consumption, the “mushroom” references were a clear sign to US enemies, that faced with possible conflicts on multiple fronts, the US will not risk depleting it’s forces and resources in protracted battle in any individual region, but will seek quick victories by means of battlefield nuclear weapons.

GuluFuture.com 4Dimensional News eZine

The world just became a very dangerous place. The first significant shots of World War III were the two sniper bullets which downed Zolan Djinjic.

We are lurching toward a conflict of global dimensions, in which the major powers may well loose control of the geopolitical situation and which will feature both chemical and nuclear weapons.

LOMO Effect

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 14 Mar 2003 20:11:23 +0000

LOMO Effect

Mostly a link I just don’t want to lose.

IYDK, Lomo is a brand of small Russian camera that takes very distinctive pictures. Like this:

The lens is a 28mm focus-free – I don’t know what causes the “peeping through a keyhole” effect, but it’s kinda funky.

The first link is to a site that shows how to fake the effect in PhotoShop – I’ll have to translate it to Gimp, which I prefer.

Anyone else using Gimp for photos?
More pics below…
Here’s my old camera bag:

Shinjuku Gyoen:

Here’s my first try -

Earthquake

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 13 Mar 2003 12:21:14 +0000

Just had a quake here. No damage, from what I can tell.
–
Apparently, it was a 5.1, centered around Ibaraki prefecture.

Blogs to die out soon

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 13 Mar 2003 08:02:11 +0000

Japan Media Review — New technologies likely to change Japanese journalism

Devlin: “I think that blogs will die out soon. ”

(Mark Devlin of Japan Today, which in addition to having a news site, apparently still prints stories on pieces of dead trees. )

Personally, I have to disagree. They won’t die out. They won’t fade away. They may, however, become ubiquitous. (Whatever happens, I do hope they stop calling them blogs. I hate that word.)

Blogging, in whatever form it evolves into, will continue to exist because it is simply too important a form of communication to go away.

What Devlin (and many others,) seem not to understand yet is that it’s not just about the stories themselves, nor the ability to comment on the stories. People have been doing that ever since the web was born. The introduction of the CGI specification spurred the creation of online guestbooks, forums and bulliten boards that really don’t differ much from the blogs you see today.

Blogging has enabled a new form of communication and community, often creating the two where there was none before. Sometimes it’s a local community, limited in its interest or relevence to the world, but that in no way diminishes its importance. It’s still a community.

People (including myself at times) criticize the banal nature of the day-by-day entries with which most blogs are filled. For example, a random blog search turned up the following entry:

Today I came home to find the apartment in a shambles. A plant had been knocked from its stand, the bathroom rugs were all askew, and the shower curtain nearly disconnected, among other abnormalities. Twinkie had greeted me at the door, yelling her most piercing meow.

(Twinkie is the author’s cat, if you hadn’t guessed.)

It’s unfair to compare blogging to journalism and shortsighted to say that one will devalue or replace the other.
Journalism offers startements.
Blogging offers conversation.

Sometimes those conversations are about journalism and perhaps that’s why the journalists feel threatened. Once in a while, a blog serves to keep journalists in check and make them work a bit harder:
A year ago, Pim Fortuyn was shot dead outside a Dutch radio station. Western media initially wrote off the incident as the assassination of a radical right-wing politition, until Adam Curry wrote an entry in his blog called The Big Lie.
If you haven’t read it, go do so now. (I’ll be here when you get back.)
This changed the rules of the game. Journalists began to realize that they might have to answer for their stories a bit more. Where in the past, they had sole access to the soapbox, they now realize that there might be someone with a better view of the story and perhaps a bit more insight.
Now the likes of Adam Curry and the other ‘Alpha Bloggers’ are few, they can no longer be denied their pulpit.
A story like that one can race around the world in hours or even minutes. Other bloggers link to the story and then the aggregators like Daypop.com see that this sis something that people care about and the effect snowballs.
But after Adam’s story, people didn’t write off Pim Fortuyn as a radical any more.

Aggregation is the new element that changes everything. Aggregation is replacing editing.

An aggregator, though is not an editor. It’s a bit of database code that counts the links to an internet address. So far, the aggregators have no opinion or agenda. The don’t have advertisers to answer to and can’t discern between a link to a story about Iraq and a link to a new Flash game or funny picture.
Maybe this is how it should have been all along: “Without Fear or Favor (or even spellchecking)”

You see, a blog is a camera and a blog entry is a snapshot. It’s not a journalist’s trusty Nikon, corners worn to brass in foreign jungles – it’s just a cheap point and shoot that captures nearby happenings with poor depth of field and bright red devil’s eyes.

Point and shoot journalism. I like that.

Immediate, spontaneous, emotional. Unlike journalism, it doesn’t tell you reliably what happened, it tells you what beople believed. What they felt.

So yes, I think blogs are not going away. I also think that the day to day ramblings of even teenagers can matter. They can change the world. Consider these journal entries from a 14 year old girl in Holland:

“

Shibuya Girls

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 11 Mar 2003 13:47:23 +0000

Pictures from Shibuya

From another angle…

Japanese Marketing Disaster

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 11 Mar 2003 08:57:16 +0000

Somebody in the marketing department of the Maruzen Fish Works should be fired…
We found these fish sausages at a convenience store at a rest stop on the way back from Shigakougen.

Andrew Grygus

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 06 Mar 2003 19:06:35 +0000

Maybe a bit geeky for most, but I wanted to keep a link to this.
Very interesting read if you are involved in purchasing operating systems.

E-029 2003 And Beyond

The successor to Windows XP (due in 2004, and rapidly slipping to 2005) is currently code named Longhorn, and it will not be compatible with your existing software, hardware or methods. Microsoft has already stated that backward compatibility will not be a design feature.

Sites near Wirefarm

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 05 Mar 2003 09:39:06 +0000

GeoURL

Sites near Wirefarm
using GeoURL, you can add a bit of code to your headers and report where in the world you are. This site keeps track of nearby weblogs.

Puttanesca

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 04 Mar 2003 01:05:41 +0000

I was poking around Kristen’s site before coming home tonight and came across the following.
Yuka and Akiko loved it, though I had difficulty explaining what the name means in Italian…

Kristen’s Japan: Warm sauce

Kristen’s Putanesca

1 can whole Italian (plum) tomatoes
4 or 5 anchovy fillets, chopped
1 teaspoon capers, smashed up a bit
2 tablespoons black olives, sliced or chopped
2 tablespoons green olives, sliced or chopped
minced garlic (as much as you like, the more the better in my opinion!)
1 teaspoon olive oil
red pepper flakes to taste

State Farm to exclude nuke attacks

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 04 Mar 2003 00:42:51 +0000

From the “Some people have a strange set of priorities” department:
State Farm to exclude nuke attacks

“A nuclear event has the potential to threaten the financial security of an insurance company,” he said. “Obviously nuclear activity could really threaten any ability to pay our claims in the future.”

One more party pic

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 03 Mar 2003 14:47:06 +0000

Karen of Hunkabutta, Robb of Bento.com and Mie of TokyoTidbits.

That’s the really great thing about these kinds of parties – you get to put a face to an URL. Some of the people I met that night have sites that I’ve read for a long time. Robb’s probably goes back the farthest – I first read bento.com’s excellent restaurant listings a couple of years ago.

Hunkabutta I first read when this party was announced and Mie’s, I saw after meeting her very briefly at the Neoteny party for Ben and Mena Trott.

I do hope they keep having these. (Hint, hint…)

(Yes, I got the names and URLs confused… Sorry for that…)

Star Witness on Iraq Said Weapons Were Destroyed

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 03 Mar 2003 10:47:28 +0000

Yes, another straight off of DayPop, but then again, still worth a read, if you haven’t seen it:

FAIR MEDIA ADVISORY: Star Witness on Iraq Said Weapons Were Destroyed

But according to Kamel’s transcript, Iraq destroyed all of these weapons in 1991.

According to Newsweek, Kamel told the same story to CIA analysts in August 1995. If that is true, all of these U.S. officials have had access to Kamel’s statements that the weapons were destroyed. Their repeated citations of his testimony– without revealing that he also said the weapons no longer exist– suggests that the administration might be withholding critical evidence.

Candid report from Davos

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 03 Mar 2003 10:32:47 +0000

Found this quite interesting:

Topica Email List Directory
From the article:
I spent a week in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum. I was
awarded a special pass which allowed me full access to not only the
entire official meeting, but also private dinners with the likes the
head of the Saudi Secret Police, presidents of various insundry
countries, your Fortune 500 CEOS and the leaders of the most important
NGOs in the world. This was not typical press access. It was full-on,
unfettered, class A hobnobbing.

The complete entry follows, in case it becomes inaccessable:

With apologies for the group email… I thought this was interesting enough
to pass along. These are the notes from a friend of a friend who writes for
Newsday.

Adam Davis
Director, EPRIsolutions Environment Division

1299 4th Street, Suite 307
San Rafael, CA 94901
Main Office:415-454-8800
Direct:415-257-4631
Cell: 415-305-4786

Hi Guys.

OK, hard to believe, but true. Yours truely has been hobnobbing with the
ruling class.

I spent a week in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum. I was
awarded a special pass which allowed me full access to not only the
entire official meeting, but also private dinners with the likes the
head of the Saudi Secret Police, presidents of various insundry
countries, your Fortune 500 CEOS and the leaders of the most important
NGOs in the world. This was not typical press access. It was full-on,
unfettered, class A hobnobbing.

Davos, I discovered, is a breathtakingly beautiful spot, unlike anything
I’d ever experienced. Nestled high in the Swiss Alps, it’s a three hours
train ride from Zurich that finds you climbing steadily through
snow-laden mountains that bring to mind Heidi and Audrey Hepburn (as in
the opening scenes of “Charade”). The EXTREMELY powerful arrive by
helicopter. The moderately powerful take the first class train. The NGOs
and we mere mortals reach heaven via coach train or a conference bus.
Once in Europe’s bit of heaven conferees are scattered in hotels that
range from B&B to ultra luxury 5-stars, all of which are located along
one of only three streets that bisect the idyllic village of some 13,000
permanent residents.

Local Davos folks are fanatic about skiing, and the slopes are literally
a 5-15 minute bus ride away, depending on which astounding downhill you
care to try. I don’t know how, so rather than come home in a full body
cast I merely watched.

This sweet little chalet village was during the WEF packed with about
3000 delegates and press, some 1000 Swiss police, another 400 Swiss
soldiers, numerous tanks and armored personnel carriers, gigantic rolls
of coiled barbed wire that gracefully cascaded down snow-covered
hillsides, missile launchers and assorted other tools of the national
security trade. The security precautions did not, of course, stop there.
Every single person who planned to enter the conference site had special
electronic badges which, upon being swiped across a reading pad,
produced a computer screen filled color portrait of the attendee, along
with his/her vital statistics. These were swiped and scrutinized by
soldiers and police every few minutes — any time one passed through a
door, basically. The whole system was connected to handheld wireless
communication devices made by HP, which were issued to all VIPs. I got
one. Very cool, except when they crashed. Which, of course, they did
frequently. These devices supplied every imagineable piece of
information one could want about the conference, your fellow delegates,
Davos, the world news, etc. And they were emailing devices — all
emails being monitored, of course, by Swiss cops.

Antiglobalization folks didn’t stand a chance. Nor did Al Qaeda. After
all, if someone managed to take out Davos during WEF week the world
would basically lose a fair chunk of its ruling and governing class
POOF, just like that. So security was the name of the game. Metal
detectors, X-ray machines, shivering soldiers standing in blizzards,
etc.

Overall, here is what I learned about the state of our world:

- I was in a dinner with heads of Saudi and German FBI, plus the
foreign minister of Afghanistan. They all said that at its peak Al Qaeda
had 70,000 members. Only 10% of them were trained in terrorism — the
rest were military recruits. Of that 7000, they say all but about 200
are dead or in jail.

- But Al Qaeda, they say, is like a brand which has been heavily
franchised. And nobody knows how many unofficial franchises have been
spawned since 9/11.

- The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year
when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, “Yeah, it’s bad, but
recovery is right around the corner”. This year “recovery” was a word
never uttered. Fear was palpable — fear of enormous fiscal hysteria.
The watchwords were “deflation”, “long term stagnation” and “collapse of
the dollar”. All of this is without war.

- If the U.S. unilaterally goes to war, and it is anything short of a
quick surgical strike (lasting less than 30 days), the economists were
all predicting extreme economic gloom: falling dollar value, rising spot
market oil prices, the Fed pushing interest rates down towards zero with
resulting increase in national debt, severe trouble in all countries
whose currency is guaranteed agains the dollar (which is just about
everybody except the EU), a near cessation of all development and
humanitarian programs for poor countries. Very few economists or
ministers of finance predicted the world getting out of that economic
funk for minimally five-10 years, once the downward spiral ensues.

- Not surprisingly, the business community was in no mood to hear about
a war in Iraq. Except for diehard American Republicans, a few Brit
Tories and some Middle East folks the WEF was in a foul, angry
anti-American mood. Last year the WEF was a lovefest for America. This
year the mood was so ugly that it reminded me of what it felt like to be
an American overseas in the Reagan years. The rich — whether they are
French or Chinese or just about anybody — are livid about the Iraq
crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial
fortunes.

- Plenty are also infuriated because they disagree on policy grounds. I
learned a great deal. It goes FAR beyond the sorts of questions one
hears raised by demonstrators and in UN debates. For example:

- If Al Qaeda is down to merely 200 terrorists cadres and a
handful of wannabe franchises, what’s all the fuss?

- The Middle East situation has never been worse. All hope for a
settlement between Israel and Palestine seems to have evaporated. The
energy should be focused on placing painful financial pressure on all
sides in that fight, forcing them to the negotiating table. Otherwise,
the ME may well explode. The war in Iraq is at best a distraction from
that core issue, at worst may aggravate it. Jordan’s Queen Rania spoke
of the “desperate search for hope”.

- Serious Islamic leaders (e.g. the King of Jordan, the Prime
Minster of Malaysia, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia) believe that the Islamic
world must recapture the glory days of 12-13th C Islam. That means
finding tolerance and building great education institutions and places
of learning. The King was passionate on the subject. It also means
freedom of movement and speech within and among the Islamic nations.
And, most importantly to the WEF, it means flourishing free trade and
support for entrepeneurs with minimal state regulation. (However, there
were also several Middle East respresentatives who argued precisely the
opposite. They believe bringing down Saddam Hussein and then pushing the
Israel/Palestine issue could actually result in a Golden Age for Arab
Islam.)

- US unilateralism is seen as arrogant, bullyish. If the U.S.
cannot behave in partnership with its allies — especially the Europeans
– it risks not only political alliance but BUSINESS, as well. Company
leaders argued that they would rather not have to deal with US
government attitudes about all sorts of multilateral treaties (climate
change, intellectual property, rights of children, etc.) — it’s easier
to just do business in countries whose governments agree with yours. And
it’s cheaper, in the long run, because the regulatory envornments match.
War against Iraq is seen as just another example of the unilateralism.

- For a minority of the participants there was another layer of
AntiAmericanism that focused on moralisms and religion. I often heard
delegates complain that the US “opposes the rights of children”, because
we block all treaties and UN efforts that would support sex education
and condom access for children and teens. They spoke of sex education as
a “right”. Similarly, there was a decidedly mixed feeling about
Ashcroft, who addressed the conference. I attended a small lunch with
Ashcroft, and observed Ralph Reed and other prominent Christian
fundamentalists working the room and bowing their heads before eating.
The rest of the world’s elite finds this American Christian behavior at
least as uncomfortable as it does Moslem or Hindu fundamentalist
behavior. They find it awkward every time a US representative refers to
“faith-based” programs. It’s different from how it makes non-Christian
Americans feel — these folks experience it as downright embarrassing.

- When Colin Powell gave the speech of his life, trying to win
over the nonAmerican delegates, the sharpest attack on his comments came
not from Amnesty International or some Islamic representative — it came
from the head of the largest bank in the Netherlands!

I learned that the only economy about which there is much enthusiasm is
China, which was responsible for 77% of the global GDP growth in 2002.
But the honcho of the Bank of China, Zhu Min, said that fantastic growth
could slow to a crawl if China cannot solve its rural/urban problem.
Currently 400 million Chinese are urbanites, and their average income is
16 times that of the 900 million rural residents. Zhu argued China must
urbanize nearly a billion people in ten years!

I learned that the US economy is the primary drag on the global economy,
and only a handful of nations have sufficient internal growth to thrive
when the US is stagnating.

The WEF was overwhelmed by talk of security, with fears of terrorism,
computer and copyright theft, assassination and global instability
dominating almost every discussion.

I learned from American security and military speakers that, “We need
to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but
preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a
campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet.”

The mood was very grim. Almost no parties, little fun. If it hadn’t been
for the South Africans — party animals every one of them — I’d never
have danced. Thankfully, the South Africans staged a helluva party, with
Jimmy Dludlu’s band rocking until 3am and Stellenbosch wines pouring
freely, glass after glass after glass….

These WEF folks are freaked out. They see very bad economics ahead, war,
and more terrorism. About 10% of the sessions were about terrorism, and
it’s heavy stuff. One session costed out what another 9/11-type attack
would do to global markets, predicting a far, far worse impact due to
the “second hit” effect — a second hit that would prove all the world’s
post-9/11 security efforts had failed. Another costed out in detail what
this, or that, war scenario
Would do to spot oil prices. Russian speakers argued that “failed
nations” were spawning terrorists — code for saying, “we hate
Chechnya”. Entire sessions were devoted to arguing which poses the
greater asymmetric threat: nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Finally, who are these guys? I actually enjoyed a lot of my
conversations, and found many of the leaders and rich quite charming and
remarkably candid. Some dressed elegantly, no matter how bitter cold and
snowy it was, but most seemed quite happy in ski clothes or casual
attire. Women wearing pants was perfectly acceptable, and the elite is
sufficiently
Multicultural that even the suit and tie lacks a sense of dominance.
Watching Bill Clinton address the conference while sitting in the hotel
room of the President of Mozambique — we were viewing it on closed
circuit TV — I got juicy blow-by=blow analysis of US foreign policy
from a remarkably candid head of state. A day spent with Bill Gates
turned out to be fascinating and fun. I found the CEO of Heinekin
hilarious, and George Soros proved quite earnest about confronting AIDS.
Vicente Fox — who I had breakfast with — proved sexy and smart like a
— well, a fox. David Stern (Chair of the NBA) ran up and gave me a
hug.

The world isn’t run by a clever cabal. It’s run by about 5,000
bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who
are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal
power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive –
especially about science and technology. All of them are financially
wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock
investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy
if the global political system behaved far more rationally — better for
the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to
nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis
to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They
have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global wearming, AIDS
pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are
comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white
caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi-tech
gadgets and are glued to their cell phones.

Welcome to Earth: meet the leaders.

Ciao,
Laurie

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 02 Mar 2003 23:19:40 +0000

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 02 Mar 2003 23:19:00 +0000

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 02 Mar 2003 23:18:29 +0000

Mie Kennedy

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 01 Mar 2003 12:14:04 +0000

Mie Kennedy of Tokyo Tidbits. (The guy on the right I didn’t meet…)
As Paul pointed out, it’s Seth from Big In Japan.
(Pity I didn’t talk to him. I like his site…

Bryan Snow of the

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 01 Mar 2003 12:08:24 +0000

Bryan Snow of the Japan Media Review.
At first, I didn’t know he was a reporter, I thought he was another blogger who compulsively took notes…

Ian & Stu

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 01 Mar 2003 12:03:57 +0000

Ian and Stu also at the Pink Cow for the Hunkabutta Blogger Party.

Jeff and Junko

Jim O'Connell — Sat, 01 Mar 2003 11:58:56 +0000

Jeff and Junko of SushiCam fame at the Pink Cow last night.

As if today couldn’t be worse

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 27 Feb 2003 20:08:50 +0000

The Globe and Mail

Fred Rogers dead at 74

Public Service Announcement

Jim O'Connell — Sun, 23 Feb 2003 11:10:01 +0000

The Colorado State Department of Fish and Wildlife is
advising hikers, hunters and fishermen to take
extra precautions and keep alert for bears when outdoors this season.

They advise people to wear noise-producing devices such
as little bells on their clothing to alert but not startle
the bears unexpectedly.

They also advise the carrying of pepper spray in case of
an encounter with a bear.

It is also a good idea to watch for fresh signs of
bear activity.

People should recognize the difference between brown bear and black bear droppings.

Brown bear droppings are smaller and show the remnants of nuts, berries and vegetable matter.

Black bear droppings have little bells in them and
smell like pepper spray.

Upgrading Postnuke

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 21 Feb 2003 18:07:46 +0000

Read more ›

Tokyo Bookstores

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 20 Feb 2003 12:11:57 +0000

I found a list of bookstores around Tokyo that sell foreign books:
Bookstores in Tokyo.
Right now the Geocities site that holds it is over its quota and inaccessible, but I have a mirror of it here on mmdc.
Yes, this is mainly for my own reference, but someone else may find it useful or interesting.

New Book

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 20 Feb 2003 05:58:11 +0000

Lots of book stuff lately.
Anyway, today at lunch, I went to the Shimada Yosho Foreign Book Sale that I mentioned and picked up Lartigue en Hiver.
My friend Ed Pollack first introduced me to Lartigue’s work about ten years ago, when he showed me a copy of Lartigue’s “The Family Album”, which was done in the style of a turn of the century family album. It struck me as a strange work at the time – the photos were tipped in, much the way you might paste photos into an album yourself. I didn’t realize it at the time, but these turn of the century images, many of which are quite famous now, were all but unknown until the book’s publication in 1966.
As a teenager, Lartigue took candid photos of his family, their friends and the things that they did and saw.
His photos of auto races, like the one below, are pretty much unparalleled in their depiction of the speed and excitement of the race.

Car Trip, Papa at 80 kilometers an hour – 1913
His society pictures are remarkable:

Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Paris – 1911

A short biography of Lartigue from www.lartigue.com appears below:

Jacques Lartigue was born in Courbevoie on June 13, 1894. He took his first photographs at the age of six, using his father

Strange Day

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 20 Feb 2003 02:09:53 +0000

Today was a sort of odd non-day. Work was the same as usual, spent programming a web app in perl and poking at the web, checking the five or six sites that I usually check until lunch time rolls around.
Today’s lunch, I went out on my bike with my camera and my new 20mm wide-angle lens, hoping to find something to shoot. First I headed to Omotesando and saw nothing.
Then I rode down to Harajuku, which seemed like a good bet, but none of the freaky teenagers were out, except for a couple of desperate posers in front of the Gap and I wasn’t quite desperate myself to bother taking their picture.

Next over to tried-and-true Shibuya to maybe take some crowd shots, since the sun was getting lower and more golden. Nothing. Nada. Nanimo.
I even switched from the 20mm to a 300, to try to catch people walking through a particularly nice patch of sun a ways off, but that defeated the purpose; I wanted to practice with the 20. The 20 is a difficult lens, especially here in tokyo where there always seems to be a pole or electrical line in the middle of your scene. The 20 gets them *all*.
The upside is that it gets a very wide, natural-looking view of what’s in front of the camera, even from very close in. No good for portraits, though. Unlike a telephoto, you get none of the flattering distortion. People tend to look a bit odd, ie, realistic.
After getting a couple of really boring pictures in Shibuya, with my lunchbreak almost over, I headed back towards the office and stopped in kita aoyama at this strange bookstore behind the United Nations building to look for a book called “Me no mae no tsuzuki” (That which passes before my eye) which is a simply amazing photo book. I’ve had 3 copies, each of which I’ve given away to friends. Can’t seem to find another copy though. Damn.
By that time, I was due back at my desk and still hadn’t eaten, so I swung by the Z-One convenience store and bought a couple of sandwiches which I stuffed into the pockets of my jacket, so it wouldn’t be quite so obvious that I was going to again eat at my desk during work, after taking a bit of a long lunch.
Funny thing – the work was the high point of my day. I seemed to be writing pretty well-thought-out code, even though some of it was re-writes of stuff that I would probably generally leave alone, since it worked. Who knows why that happens?
Dinner was at “Specialities Chinoises AOI” with Yuka. That place always vaguely annoys me, I’ve come to realize, though I don’t know why. The rice porridge is damn good though.
Oh, well…

Foreign Book Sales

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 19 Feb 2003 23:47:17 +0000

A couple of book sales this week:

Kinokuniya to hold ‘Foreign Book Mega Sale’
and
Shimada Yosho Foreign Book Bargain Sale

Kinokuniya to hold ‘Foreign Book Mega Sale’

Kinokuniya Co., Ltd., Japan’s largest bookstore, will hold a “Foreign Book Mega Sale” offering some 30,000 foreign books with discounts of 30-60 percent, at Shinjuku Takashimaya Department Store.

On sale will include: Mass-market paperbacks (fiction/non-fiction), hard covers (fiction/non-fiction), reference books, children’s books, visual books (interior, fashion, cooking, craft, photography, fine art, etc.), travel books, comics, science books, computer books, 2003 calendars and French/German books.

Dates: Feb. 20-Feb. 24, 2003 (Feb. 20-23: 10 a.m.-8 p.m. and on Feb. 24: 10 a.m.-6 p.m.)
Venue: Event space, 10F Shinjuku Takashimaya Department Store
Information: Call the foreign book section of Kinokuniya Shinjuku South Store at (03) 5361-3301.

MDN: Japanofile

Shimada Yosho Foreign Book Bargain Sale

A bargain sale offering discounts of 20-70 percent for books on gardening, flower arrangement, art, design, photography, architecture, interior, cooking as well as picture books.

Dates: Feb. 8-Feb. 23, 2003 (11 a.m.-8 p.m.)
Venue: Shimada Yosho Book Store, 5-5-25 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo
Information: Call Shimada Yosho at (03) 3407-3863.

Great Gatsby

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 19 Feb 2003 16:00:33 +0000

The complete text of The Great Gatsby. (Uploaded for my brother, but maybe someone else would like it too.)

The Moon

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 19 Feb 2003 11:24:05 +0000

On the way back from Nozawa Onsen, I got out at a rest stop and took this picture of the moon.
(300mm lens, handheld, manual exposure.)

When I was in Pennsylvania for Christmas, I got a chance to play with my sister Leslie’s Celestron NexStar telescope. After about half an hour of fiddling with it, I was able to see both the rings of Saturn as well as Jupiter and its moons.
If I didn’t live in Tokyo, where there is so much light pollution, I’d love to get one and get the camera adapter for it.
I’ve always loved astronomy, but I really don’t know much about it formally. I just like looking up at stars, I guess.

We’ve Got to Stop Eating Like This

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 18 Feb 2003 17:20:58 +0000

This is *really* cool…
A school where they actually make great food themselves for the same cost as using a commercial institutional “catering” service. Plus, the students love it.
They should post the recipes on their website…

Fortune.com – Magazine – We’ve Got to Stop Eating Like This

If food companies are to grow, so must we, it seems. What would transform our diet on a national scale?

And how is the food at the Calhoun School in Manhattan this year, now that Chef Bobo is in charge?

“It’s awesome,” says a student diner. “The hot dogs don’t bounce.”

Nozawa Onsen

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 17 Feb 2003 15:59:20 +0000

I took my new camera skiing last weekend and took lots of pictures of the scenery in Nozawa Onsen in Nagano.
You can go straight to the Slide Show here.
Enjoy!

New Pictures

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 17 Feb 2003 15:54:58 +0000

Schroder Ski Trip 2003 Photo Album

Schroder Ski Trip 2003

I think I was too busy taking pictures of the mountains, because I got relatively few of the other people on the trip. Still, one or two good ones in there…

The Small words in Japanese

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 10 Feb 2003 16:46:16 +0000

Found this site a while back – very handy if you’re studying Japanese.

Japanese Language: The Small words in Japanese

THE MOST FREQUENT SMALL WORDS, ADVERBS AND SHORT EXPRESSIONS:

Oh, great…

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 10 Feb 2003 16:22:10 +0000

Tokyo battens down for feared attack – smh.com.au

Tokyo battens down for feared attack

By Shane Green, Herald Correspondent in Tokyo
February 10 2003

A DigitalGlobe satellite image taken earlier this month, shows a nuclear reactor site in Yongbyon, North Korea. Photo: AFP

The Japanese Government has contingency plans to deal with a ballistic missile launch by North Korea, a possible step in the worsening nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula.

News of the plans came as the United States Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, warned in Germany on Saturday that North Korea was on the verge of producing enough plutonium to make six to eight additional nuclear weapons by mid-year.

Good Weekend

Jim O'Connell — Mon, 10 Feb 2003 11:24:52 +0000

It’s monday now, back to work for me, with a terrible case of Hay Fever.
We had a nice weekend, though – Saturday night we made pasta using the pasta maker that we bought in Kappabashi last weekend.

Update:Added a link to Kappabashi. Actually, that makes two links now…

It’s really a lot of fun to do with friends – Yuka and Akiko mixed up the eggs and flour while Siddharth and I hovered nearby, suggesting that they add various things to the dough to get a better consistancy. Then we each took turns flattening and cutting the noodles, which is great fun.
For a sauce, we chopped up half a cabbage and saute’ed it in olive oil, adding lots of garlic, salt, black pepper and red peppers. It’s really fast and quite tasty.
Fortunately that day, I had had three cases of wine delivered, so we had plenty to drink…

Sunday we went over to Daikanyama to take some pictures and have brunch at a cafe’.
Later on, we went to Muji and bought a lamp and a mirror for the bedroom, which we had promised ourselves that we would clean. We made a valiant effort, but only got it about half cleaned, though we did put together a big suitcase full of clothes for the Salvation Army, or whatever the equivalent is in Japan. (Salvation Self-Defence Force?)

France to join Axis of Evil?

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 05 Feb 2003 19:05:13 +0000

Like a spoiled child declaring “you’re not my best friend anymore!” when he can’t get his own way, pentagon advisors seem ready to pack up their toys and play by their own rules…

United Press International: Pentagon adviser: France ‘no longer ally’

France is no longer an ally of the United States and the NATO alliance “must develop a strategy to contain our erstwhile ally or we will not be talking about a NATO alliance” the head of the Pentagon’s top advisory board said in Washington Tuesday.

Guernica Covered at UN

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 05 Feb 2003 11:15:51 +0000

Guernica Reproduction Covered at UN – Art Daily

Can’t let people see the horrors of war…

Guernica Reproduction Covered at UN

NEW YORK.- The “Guernica” work by Pablo Picasso at the entrance of the Security Council of the United Nations has been covered with a curtain. The reason for covering this work is that this is the place where diplomats make statements to the press and have this work as the background. The Picasso work features the horrors of war. On January 27 a large blue curtain was placed to cover the work.

Fred Eckhard, press secretary of the U.N. said: “It is an appropriate background for the cameras.” He was questioned as to why the work had been covered.

A diplomat stated that it would not be an appropriate background if the ambassador of the United States at the U.N. John Negroponte, or Powell, talk about war surrounded with women, children and animals shouting with horror and showing the suffering of the bombings.

This work is a reproduction of the Guernica that was donated by Nelson A. Rockefeller to the U.N. in 1985.

:-)

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 04 Feb 2003 19:25:11 +0000

You know that feeling when you’re leaning back on a stool and it starts to tip over? Well, that’s how I feel all the time. — Steven Wright

New Camera

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 31 Jan 2003 12:10:07 +0000

Sometimes I think that I like cameras better than the pictures that they take. I always loved going out to ‘take pictures’. I think it was because you had to really *look* at things and consider them.
Getting the pictures back was so frequently a disappointment that I almost gave it up as being too expensive.
Now there’s digital…

I was definitely an “early adopter” with digital cameras – The first I bought was an original black and white QuickCam. Even though it was low quality and tethered to the computer by a (serial!) cable, you could actually squeeze some good images from it, especially in “forced Macro” mode, achieved by disassembling the camera and manually adjusting the focus.
Later, I had a casio, which was fun but not very interesting.
When Kodak came out with the DC-100 Megapixel, I was definitely beginning to see that digital had some real advantages over film for me. Mainly, I was no longer afraid to shoot. A lot. Simply being able to delete photos that I didn’t like let me shoot much more freely than with film.

Another Picture

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 29 Jan 2003 01:56:57 +0000

From the same set as the girls below.
I like this one a lot.

Shibuya Girls

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 29 Jan 2003 01:50:51 +0000

Still busy playing with my new camera.
Took this one today…
More here!

US buys up Iraqi oil to stave off crisi

Jim O'Connell — Tue, 28 Jan 2003 16:03:07 +0000

Guardian Unlimited Observer | International | US buys up Iraqi oil to stave off crisis

Five years ago the then Chevron chief executive Kenneth Derr, a colleague of (Condoleeza) Rice, said: ‘Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas – reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.’

Go Play With This

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 23 Jan 2003 14:43:11 +0000

Read more ›

A Picture

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 22 Jan 2003 19:55:36 +0000

Just testing something. Enjoy the picture…

Bootable Movies

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 22 Jan 2003 11:18:22 +0000

Movix – Content

MoviX2 is a small Linux distro on CD aimed at playing multimedia: when you boot your PC with the MoviX2 CD the distro should be able to start X-windows and launch gmplayer, the GUI interface to mplayer, so that you are left with a nice user-friendly interface you can control by your mouse.
At that point you can safely remove the MoviX2 CD and play all multimedia files you want: DVD [no zone constraint], VCD, DivX, avi, mpg, mp3, ogg etc.

(Ths post went on a bit – sorry for the lack of brevity. But, hey, it’s a slow day…)

A bit more on this, from a post I made on the Tokyo Linux Users Group:

On Sun, 19 Jan 2003 15:12:40 +0100
Godwin Stewart wrote:

> Ogle does a very good job of playing CSS’ed DVD’s and it’s a lot cheaper
> than that.

Thanks for the tip on Ogle. *Very* nice little player. I had a look at their FAQ at http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/faq.shtml and found it extremely helpful.

They recommend using the RPMs for setup on most systems and since I was working with a fresh RedHat 8 system, it was quite easy to get going. (They had direct links to the DeCSS files, too.)
Still, the video was staggered and crappy, so I looked inside the box and found that at some point, I had stolen the 80 lead IDE cable and put in a 40, which is fine when you just use the drive for installing software or playing music CDs, but cripples your transfer capabilities. (That machine tends to be my “spare parts” box, the first to get pillaged when I need a part for something else.
Putting in a proper cable solved the problem.)

MoviX2, however, has support for a couple of DXR/Hollywood-style TV-out cards, so it may be a good choice if you are building something that you are going to plug into a TV or VCR. Of course, those could just be features of MPlayer, which MoviX uses, but I haven’t tried that yet on a box that has a traditional Linux install. (I also like that MoviX requires no knowledge of Linux, so I can burn a disk for friends who have never used Linux, if they just want to play ‘wrong region’ disks.)

Looking at the MPlayer site http://www.mplayerhq.hu it also seems to support a *lot* of formats including Real, Windows Media and Quicktime. It looks like that’s what I’ll be installing and playing with tonight. Ultimately, it might be nice to build a HD-Free box that runs nice and quiet and outputs to a TV and works with a remote.

All-in-all, I’m really pleased with the way DVD movie support has grown. Obviously a lot of people have put in a lot of effort in this area since the last time I tried to play a movie in Linux.
Now the players have features and conveniences that the mainstream players do not, such as skipping ahead right from the start (past the place where they will eventually start putting advertisements) and navigating as you like, not just chapter-to-chapter, the way the mainstream players do it.

> Also, bear in mind that the MPA is now producing DVD’s which will only play
> on region 1 players, not on region-free players. I don’t know how/if ogle
> will play those back, bit I know that your Win3132DH (the name sounds a
> little offensive…) certainly won’t.

They are truly a hateful organization.
When I moved to Japan a few years ago, I gave away about a dozen region 1 disks that I had collected, some of which I have since re-purchased in region 2 format. When I was back in the states over the holidays, I passed up lots of cheap disks at the stores, thinking I would be unable to play them. I have no qualms about bypassing that particular ‘feature’.

Cheers,
Jim

–

Bootable Movies

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 22 Jan 2003 11:17:51 +0000

Movix – Content

MoviX2 is a small Linux distro on CD aimed at playing multimedia: when you boot your PC with the MoviX2 CD the distro should be able to start X-windows and launch gmplayer, the GUI interface to mplayer, so that you are left with a nice user-friendly interface you can control by your mouse.
At that point you can safely remove the MoviX2 CD and play all multimedia files you want: DVD [no zone constraint], VCD, DivX, avi, mpg, mp3, ogg etc.

Pic-o-the-Day

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 17 Jan 2003 17:25:57 +0000

“A rainbow trout fingerling peers out from the gullet of a northern pike at the Alaska Department of Fish & Game aquarium in Anchorage. “

Dead iBook

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 17 Jan 2003 13:06:50 +0000

Well, my iBook seems to have taken a turn for the worse. The other day I set up a 120GB firewire disk so that I could sort my mp3s, backup some stuff and generally clean house a bit. That all went well, then I re-installed Jaguar and downloaded the update from Apple. Pretty soon afterwards, my screeen went all tweaky and died. I tried everything, such as zapping the PRAM to get it back, but it seems to be pretty much dead. Plus, unlike Unix’s X Window system, it seems that when Mac’s graphical interface dies, the whole machine is dead. If it were a Linux box, I could log in remotely and at least save my files.
The funny thing is that there seem to be a *lot* of people that this is happening to, but apparently Apple won’t admit that there’s a problem. The users, too, seem pretty forgiving of Apple. I saw a lot of comments on Apple’s support website along the lines of “I’ve been a loyal Mac user for 20 years and…”
The thing is, I’m not.

I’m a recent convert to Mac and I’m not so forgiving.
People have always said that Apple hardware is expensive because it’s so great, but that seems to longer be the case. It may be that there is so much demand for their machines that they’re skimping a bit on quality control.
Or could it be the software? Is Jaguar pushing the hardware too much with its “Quartz Extreme” technology? It used to be that when you were setting up X on Linux, you had to have a lot of accurate specs for your monitor and graphics card or else it was possible to damage your hardware. Perhaps there is something along these lines going on.

The other thing is, this isn’t the first time I’ve had the graphics system on a Mac fail right after upgrading to Jaguar; my green iMac (slot loading) also died shortly after upgrading the OS. For a while, I thought it was just the CRT’s ‘Flyback Transformer’, as I could use an external monitor, but sure enough, that went dead too.

This weekend, I had been planning to buy one of those white 17 inch iMac desktops, but now I’ve decided to hold off. After all, how can I justify having 3 dead Apples in my living room to my girlfriend?

Still Limping

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 17 Jan 2003 12:26:00 +0000

Read more ›

Laptop Blog

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 12:58:05 +0000

I have a blog running on my iBook.
If it’s on, you can see it.
Update: Well, the iBook died, so no blog, I guess…

Limping Around

Jim O'Connell — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 11:11:44 +0000

Yesterday I sprained my ankle and had to go to the hospital.
I’ve twisted my ankles that way before, but never as badly, I guess, or maybe I’m just getting older and more prone to such stupidity.

Another Picture

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 10 Jan 2003 16:37:06 +0000

Testing again.
Pictures with Japanese characters in the name do not work.

Now what?

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 10 Jan 2003 14:24:46 +0000

A few days ago, I was asked to set up this site, which involved setting up Movable Type on one of the web servers here.
(‘Blogging’, you see, is the latest and greatest thing for companies.
Why? I don’t really know. )
I’ve had websites since around 1994 and after a while, they sort of evolved into a blog-style format with new entries just added to the top of the old entries. Having an application like MT just makes it easier, I suppose.

So what do we do with these things now?
Will people actually read or update them?
We’ll see…

New Look

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 10 Jan 2003 11:53:36 +0000

I found a new style sheet for changing the look of the weblog.
Go to the Templates section of your blog and paste it in to “styles-site.css”.

Download file

Question

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 10 Jan 2003 11:15:52 +0000

Why do Startbucks coffee cups always leak?
Very annoying.
(Actually, I’m just posting this because I want to test the “mail notification” feature of Movable Type.)
Movie Test

Friday

Jim O'Connell — Fri, 10 Jan 2003 11:04:29 +0000

Day 5 of no smoking.
Kazy thinks we should plan a ski trip. Good idea. Go look at his blog.
I still hate the word ‘BLOG’.

Belgian Beer Night

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 09 Jan 2003 20:01:53 +0000

Download file
This is a calendar file for the Belgian Beer Night Parties.
Open with Outlook or any Calendar Program.

New Blogs

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 09 Jan 2003 19:22:32 +0000

I made a Blog for Noris and one for Aki.
Go look at them.
…
Today is Day 4 of Quitting Smoking.
Not too bad, but for some reason, I don’t really feel like eating.

Snow in Pennsylvania

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 09 Jan 2003 17:17:37 +0000

It snowed for Christmas in my home town.

I had to shovel it.
This is an uploaded picture.

Blog Blog

Jim O'Connell — Thu, 09 Jan 2003 17:13:27 +0000

This is the blog.
I haven’t installed the Japanese language files yet, but I will soon, as soon as I figure out how.
‘BLOG’ is an ugly word.