This may well be my last post before we start our vacation — NO COMPUTERS on the trip (unless you count the embedded computer in the digital camera) so you’ll all just have to wait for updates! IF you want postcards sent to you from Italy, please send me an email with your address, or post it here. We’ll be sure to send you one!

Last night (well, this morning at 5AM) I finished the xmame-0.60.1 port to the PS2. I have to say the SDL support is terrible compared to the X11 framebuffer…perhaps I’ve just overlooked something, but running in a window under X has far better performance than blitting directly to the gscon via SDL. Hopefully someone will investigate this while I’m gone…if not, I’ll do it when I return, along with porting the rest of the 0.60 input enhancements to the xmame source.

I wore a suit to work today, not because I had to, but because I don’t want to get anything dirty that I’m bringing with me to Italy. It’s a grey pants-suit, somewhat stretchy material, from Express, and I’m wearing this cute, sort of see-through silver tank top underneath it. While going to work, I walked by a tatami customization shop, and this Middle Eastern guy was sitting on the ground smoking. (Never seen him before, but I suspect he works there.) As I approached, he said “Hello,” followed quickly by “Very beautiful.” I was shocked…it’s been ages since I’ve been complemented on how I look, and I figured I had just reached that age where beauty doesn’t really shine anymore, nor are you old enough to command respect. Thank goodness I was wrong. :)

In any case, I’m off — take care everyone!

So the last (?) remaining public bath in Nakano started demolition last week. There had been a notice posted for a few weeks saying it was about to go, and then all of a sudden it was in pieces. They seem not to care that they destroyed some beautiful roof tiling, the main wood beams, and the like in the process, just smashing it down with a large bulldozer. I’ve grabbed what I consider some dramatic shots from mid-destruction this weekend, along with one of those ceiling tiles which will make a nice bookend. Photos soon.

While taking the photos, I passed by a woman who was wearing a shirt: “United States Of America Music Softens Our Minds”. Brilliant. Just wish I could have snapped a shot of that.

And with each passing minute I get closer to Italy :)

May 18th-19th (this weekend) is the 4th annual MASTURBATE-A-THON. It’s all for a good cause. Who will sponsor me for each minute I masturbate??

All money goes to the Hassle Free Women’s Clinic.

See more here or here.

Richard’s sayonara party was last night. After he hired me on and we worked together since November…he felt like a father to me, and I am not sure I’ll feel right about being here without him. When I was impetulent, he was level-headed. When he lost the faith, I helped prop him back up — and likewise in reverse. I always got a boost knowing that I could go to him with a good idea, and he’d carry it to the highest levels of the company with strong enthusiasm. And now, with no foreigners in the company higher than my level, our traction will be even lower than it used to be. Life is going to get hard, harder than it already is. Good luck to you Richard, and let me know when your bed & breakfast in Ashland, OR opens. I want to be one of the first guests.

Just posted a nice nasty thing about Japan. I’m in a bad mood. Read if you want to be pissy too.

…wasn’t a letdown. It rocked. Even though I had to watch it on two VCDs downloaded from the Internet (no, you can’t know how or where.)

The trailers don’t do it justice. Though there is a hell of a lot of cheese in the film too…

If you want spoilers, post a comment to this message, so the rest of you who don’t want to have spoilers won’t see them.

So I ended up spending all day yesterday, and a bit of overtime, working at the Exodus data center on one of our clients’ machines. All three of their severs (two production, one staging) went down within a few hours of each other late last week, cause still unknown (because evidence may have been trashed by the people that tried to fix it.) At least it’s back up and running, and I’ve hardened the machines as well as I know how. Next step: analyzing further to see what really happened…

This morning I went to the post office to pick up a package (the RV-7 preview plans, read on) and the office was closed. Now, the Nakano post office is supposed to be open 24 hours. So I was a bit upset — until I realized it was 8:55, 5 minutes before the “full service” counter opens. I looked through the curtain, and saw what I had previously only heard of: Japanese company morning exercises. But the post office ones were especially fun. They did some arm and leg stretches as a warm-up. Then, they made movements in unison, chanting things like “Greetings” (irasyaimase) “Just a minute” (sho sho omachi o kudasai) and “Thank you very much” (arigato gozaimashita). They looked like marionettes, and I was especialy amused with the vim & vigor with which they all said “I’ve found your package!” :P

In any case, they opened 5 minutes later and let me get my preview plans, which are sitting quite happily next to me (in their cheap-ass 3-ring binder. Japanese binders are SO much better made, but that’s a rant for another day…) All the stares I got from jealous salarymen on the train this morning made up for carrying the heavy thing (along with my laptop) to work :P

So I was posting this BIG comment over on my girlfriend’s livejournal, and when I pressed the BACK arrow on Mozilla 1.0rc1, it lost my entire post! But pushing the forward arrow still posted the form, and gave me the error that my post was too big…

Obviously my post was still in the browser’s memory. But how would I get it out? A disk search didn’t turn it up, and I didn’t feel like dumping memory to look for it…

So I did the next best thing. Installed windump (tcpdump for win32) and:

C:\> windump -s 0 -i 1 -w missingpost.txt

…and hex-edited out the text, converting all the + to spaces and the other ctrl characters to their ASCII equivalents…

15 minutes of work that I could have used to rewrite it, but boy, I am proud I can still do this sort of silly stuff. :)

THIS IS AN EYES ONLY…oh, sod the Dark Angel stuff. :)

Unconfirmed rumor: Spike Tokyo has closed its doors. Supposedly 12 people were fired (probably the rest are heading to Sydney or other offices…)

Since my friend tessier mentioned it, I can’t get it off my mind. I must build and own one of these.

Last night my semi-boss invited me to a dinner party at his place with some friends. It was great — Richard, Angel, thanks for a lovely time! Mercy and I really enjoyed it…

Now I have to get back to work. Between joystick drivers, piles of paper on my desk from the CEO guy, and my semi-annual review, I actually have a lot to do all of a sudden…