Zzzz

So I just found my Sakuraya point card hidden in my wallet, it has more than 20K points. Then I checked their website and it says points can be used as yen to pay for stuff 1:1. Score!?

After some quick mental math it turns out I spent almost 150K yen just at Sakuraya for various tech things in the past two years (which isn’t even all that much, considering the prices for “tech things”) – I wouldn’t have expected this large a percentage of it back. Looks like there are some XBOX HUEG profit margins if it’s still worth it for the store.

Anyway, if that means “free” stuff for me, I’m not complaining!

(the other big chains also work similarly, I guess. I have three different yodobashi point cards because I never carry it with me)

After years of rumors about producing a cell phone, Google released some sort of Linux+Java based open mobile platform. They don’t produce any actual handsets, only the software. Risky, IMO, since they will have to rely on the handset makers to jump on the bandwagon – and the providers to play along. This is why the initial intuitive response is “this will never happen (if it weren’t Google doing it, that is)”, especially over here, where phones are locked down with DRM tighter than a twelve-year-old. (one-hour break as I try to look up on wikipedia whether the previous highly inappropriate statement was a simile or a metaphor, get carried away, and end up somewhere at agglutinative languages. It’s like crack.)

But anyway, as a big promotion push for all this, they’re giving away a couple of millions of dollars in prizes, $25K for starters and another $275K for a select few (guaranteed to be some sort of interwiki-flickr-mobile-web-streaming-4.0 buzzword tagcloud beta++). So tempting. Google is just very tempting in general.

I was also going to write about the guy who published a new Grand Unified Theory of Everything and the entire internets got their panties in a bunch because he’s portrayed as “some surfer dude” as opposed to a “theoretical physicist”. It’s cool how the paper might as well be completely made up and an elaborate joke on us mere mortals, and I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

This is the fourth paragraph, wherein I realize that blogs are a waste of time and this post sucks, and decide to go sleep. It’s getting cold outside and I could kill for double pane windows.

箱根、芦ノ湖

I need to watch V for Vendetta again

to the left, an n*s sdk
in front, two screens
to the right, a small hdtv and a w*i sdk
below, enough cables to reach halfway to the moon

warm and fuzzy on the inside

Mini-survey on new graduate salaries

SCE $35.3K
Nintendo $25.6K
Namco $24.6K
Konami $23.8K
Square: based on abilities, not based on age? (very unusual)

hurrr

so apparently, the game industry doesn’t pay (that well)

spent sunday re-reading my favorite obscure webcomic isometric, it has cubes and dadaism to rival pokey the penguin, and every strip either ends unexpectedly or evolves into an epic hollywood-esque action sequence with an amalgamation of cliches and philosophy and obscure geek humor subtly hidden in between the lines, also inspiring this shitty stream-of-consciousness blog post made of fail and run-on sentences which I am writing while sitting bored in a seminar and waiting for it to be over — after the experiment, you will be baked and there will be cake (alcohol)

also looked through a lot of my old computer crap and feel like I lost a part of my inner geek with no motivation to work on personal projects anymore and just wasting time on 4chan, after the cave story psp port I started on a DS kanji drill program (since all the japanese ones are made for japanese people) but that is going nowhere fast due to lack of effort, I was expecting to use it to study for JLPT 1 this december but now that is highly unlikely. Anyway, it was fun to see stuff that I barely remember doing like a swearword generator which outputs gems like “assnozzle” etc or a ti-83 (z80) emulator in java (wtf was I thinking) or a program to cheat in flash flash revolution or wowmapview which I spent most of 2005 on and I still remember the rush I had from finding out what this or that means, or being so excited that I took a printout of a hexdump to class to look over that instead of paying attention [citation needed]

now we’re 12 minutes overtime and there’s still 1.5 presentations to go please hurry up argh

edit: over 9000 minutes overtime

edit edit: fluid simulation, nice boat

edit edit edit: the Enrichment Center would like to remind you that Portal is the most quotable game of 2007

Tags: shit, crap

Yoshiko and Carson, congratulations & good luck!

ps. kz neked is congratulations am, azert ugy idozitsetek hogy otthon legyek, haha

Portal was so much fun.

Weighted Companion Cube!!! <3 <3 <3

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From Ars Technica

The new average salary for a job right out of college is now $53,051. That’s the highest amount this decade.

Hmm. I wonder how that compares to Japan. Over here, the formula is generally in the ballpark of $your_age*10000 yen a month plus bonus(es). A smaller CG related company who recently visited us were offering about 250K for new grad school graduates. So this figure would be twice that. I guess I’m ignoring taxes, but still. (ok, wikipedia says it’s 25% for that bracket)