Things that I'm excited about right now

Update [Mar. 25, 2010]

• The kichigai promotional site is up and running and can be found here.
  
• Another short film that I worked on last year, "Banki", is a nominee at the Tokyo Short Shorts Film Festival taking place later this spring!

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It's been a very enjoyable month thus far even if I haven't been lucky enough to win an Olympic medal. I've been busy meeting friends, both old and new, and working on a pretty large swath of projects that will hopefully make waves later in 2010.

Here are some of the big things that are making me smile:

Script. I'm currently working on the spec script for a film that we'll probably start filming in late March or April. I'm very stoked about this because we're exploring a new genre and looking to build on what we learned from the production of Little Tokyo (more info on that later).

Pre-production. Not exactly film-related, but in the prep-stages nonetheless, a couple of new web projects look like they may be getting off the ground soon. One is an information portal related to living in Japan and the other is a site about celebrity fashion. My role in both projects is mostly on the developer side which is probably hard for some of you to believe--especially regarding the fashion site.

Filming. Japan Booze Blind continues to grow within the Japan Eats network. The word 'network' is apt here as we've been experimenting with live tapings of the show, and the next one is scheduled for March 28th at 3pm (Tokyo time). Live tapings via Livestream are a blast because I can interact with the audience in (nearly) real-time. The show on the 28th will deal with my favorite spring pastime, hanami. This post over at Tokyo Terrace will give you a good idea of what we've been up to.

Post-production. A film that I worked on last fall, Kichigai (Japanese title: Wasted), is in post production now and will hopefully be screened at a film festival later in 2010. There's a website being developed to help promote the film, but I've been advised that it's not ready to go live, so I'll hold off on posting a link just yet.

Promotion.  We'll be hearing back next month about whether or not Little Tokyo will be screened at the 2010 Short Shorts Film Festival. Please keep your fingers crossed  for us. Another film that I had a leading role in, Banki, will also hopefully get screened. Fortunately (for me, anyway), Little Tokyo and Banki are not entered in the same category.

Of course, there's also the redesign of the Tokyo Swallows website to be excited about. That took quite a bit of hair-pulling and face-slapping (my own) to get under control, but I think that it was definitely worth it. There are still several things to get sorted out, but I think that we'll have a better feel for what we need to do once more content gets posted within the new framework of the site.


And as many of you know, I've jumped face-first into the world of social networking sites (SNS). Facebook, Mixi, Twitter, and Disqus to name a few. I've actually hooked this site up with Disqus, a service that aggregates the social aspects of several SNS platforms, so make sure to leave a comment at the end of this post and see how it all works. I'm very interested in seeing how it helps users keep track of the ongoing dialogue as it moves and changes across the web.

Anyway, one thing that I'm very grateful for is that I've been able to easily reconnect with a bunch of people that I didn't have any idea how to contact, and that includes both family and friends.

So those are some of the things that I've been thinking about, stressing over, and working on recently. Just need to stay motivated and keep working with the talented people around me. Hopefully I can keep up.

Things that I'm excited about right now

Template Tweaking

I just added a blogroll to the sidebar that is more dynamic than the last one. The site that updated most recently will appear on top. Kind of a cool idea.

There's also the option of including a snippet from the post pulled off the top of each site's feed, but I wasn't sure if that would balloon the thing out too much. Maybe I'll turn that thing on in the future.

I may also reorganize my "More Links" section. There are a lot of sites in there that update regularly that are mixed in with more businessy sites. Sites dealing with Asia in particular, which happen to be mostly blogs, probably deserve their own blogroll similar to the one at the top of the page.

Template Tweaking

SONY to do away with DRM

I threw a bit of a hissy-fit a couple of years ago over the digital rights managment (DRM) software that SONY was building into its CDs.

As soon as you popped a SONY CD into your computer, a nasty little program would load onto your computer. While being illegal in and of itself, it had the unexpected consequence of making the computer more susceptible to a viral attack.

Well, there are finally whispers that SONY has reversed course and decided that it needs to be a little more realistic about this matter.

SONY is expected to make an announcement soon about its decision to ditch DRM.

SONY to do away with DRM

Antivirus Program Switch (APS)

I'm in the middle of an anitvirus program switch (APS) again. I was with Norton for a long time (which is inexplicably popular), but bravely got over that addiction. Trend Micro's PC-cillin (aka Virus Buster in Japan) was a breath of fresh air in that it didn't conflict with most of the other things on my hard-drive (unlike Norton). The sudden dearth of blue screens of death was not something that I lamented. I stuck with Trend Micro for two years.

But Trend Micro was a bit of a resource hog. Not nearly as bad as Norton, but it still slowed my computer down to the point that it was difficult to have more than one other window open while I was doing a scan. Plus there was no perceivable way for me to switch to an English-based version of the software because I had originally downloaded the software over the Internet and I'm located in Tokyo (so I was only allowed to have a Japanese version of the software). I could have just lied and said that I was in America, but I believe that the fewer hassles the better when dealing with credit cards, so I opted to be truthful. Oops.

One other thing that annoyed me about Trend Micro is that it's not easy to delete it from your computer. They make it unnecessarily difficult to get rid of it. They require you to type in a password when you go through the control panel's add/delete program function (Windows). I've kept all of my correspondence with Trend Micro, and after a long-winded search I didn't find any mention of a password...in other words, I wasn't able to uninstall the very program that I paid money to purchase. That didn't make me happy. I expect this type of underhanded tactic from SONY; I don't appreciate it coming from companies that seem to be otherwise rooted in reality. Long story short--I may not go back to Trend Micro in the future even though I was relatively happy with the product.

Now I'm testing out NOD32 Antivirus which is doing pretty well so far. They provide a free trial download, so I'm currently working through that. The one problem that I've noticed so far is that iTunes is now acting all funky. I purchased an album from iTunes after the APS, and after allowing me to listen to the first two tracks, my computer lost the rest of the tracks. OK. Reboot, try again. My computer finds them and allows me to listen to one of the tracks that had previously disappeared, but then loses the rest of them again. When I say lose, I mean that a search of both hard-drives turns up empty. We'll see how that goes.

Other than that, NOD32 seems to be a bit lighter than the other programs I've tried in the past. Of course, my hard-drive is pretty well maxed out, so any antivirus program is going to have its work cut out trying to plow through such a huge number of files. But NOD32 seems to do its job without sucking up an unreasonable amount of computer resources.

Hopefully everything will work out with the iTunes conflict (I'm not discounting the possibility that remnants of Trend Micro are responsible for the bug), and I will become a paying NOD32 customer at the end of the month.

Antivirus Program Switch (APS)

PC vs MAC

I'm not picking sides; I just thought this was funny.
Caution: adult language.

PC vs MAC

Template Update

Not much has changed since I elected to update to an easier-to-use version of my blog template.

The one major change is that you can now find a list of labels on the right side of the blog if you scroll down far enough. It should be noted, however, that the labels are not in any way exhaustive, comprehensive, or truly indicative of what is contained therein. I'm slowly updating each individual post so that clear categories will be set up. I hope to reduce the number of labels in the future, but there are too many posts to be able to do that quickly.

Other than that everything is pretty much the same. I'm kind of sick of the color of this blog, but the other options offered weren't a whole lot better.

Template Update

Polls

The poll I included in the post just below this one is crap, so I apologize, but it took a lot of work to make it look that crappy.

There are several free poll concocters out there, and they all promise different things. Some of them will cause your computer to crash, and others will do nearly what they say they're going to do. My guess is that you can only get real stability by plunking down between $10 and $20 per month. However, for those of us who blog just for the hell of it paying $10 per month is dumb.

Anyway, please try it and let me know if it works.

Thanks!

Polls

No More Blue Screens of Death! Norton's vs. Trend Micro

I'm happy to report that I found the source of the instability that my poor desktop was suffering from. It was Norton's Anti-Virus. My system routinely crashed if I let it idle long enough. I tried a number of tricks advised by some of the generous tech people who can be located in various forums on the net. Nothing worked.

Then my subscription to NAV ran out. Nice nice! I uninstalled Norton's, and voila! No more blue screens!

I'm now running Trend Micro's PC-cillin. No complaints so far. One of the big bonuses, aside from system stability, is that it doesn't use up nearly as many resources when doing a scan as NAV did. Norton's was slow!

No More Blue Screens of Death! Norton's vs. Trend Micro

Beware of Reunion.com!

I spent about 15 minutes trying to track down the name of an old friend from when I lived in Spain. I was easily able to find his address and phone number, but no email address. Didn't hotmail used to have a service where they would let you mail other hotmail members through a search function? They would allow you to send an email, but they didn't allow you to see the person's email address until that person decided to write back to you. I can't find that service now--just the MSN white pages...

Anyway, I clicked on a link that said it would help me find my friend's email address. That link directed me to reunion.com. In bright red letters reunion.com informed me that they would reveal all of their information on my friend if I registered as a non-paying member of their site. Harmless enough, right? Well, on the very next page they informed me that my registration went through successfully, but that, alas, they had no information on my friend. In my book, they lied to me.

So, to quickly rescue my email address from additional spam, I raced to my inbox, and found my confirmation email. Instead of confirming my account, I went back to their website and asked them to delete my account. I might add that it isn't nearly as straightforward as it should be to delete one's account. At least not as easy as it is to delete your blog on blogger.com.

After going through the necessary motions to delete my account, I received this email from reunion.com:

We received your request to be removed from the Reunion.com database. This is assigned Help Request number..............................
The account associated with email address {mailto:{blahblahblah}@hotmail.com is now queued for deletion.
Please allow 10 business days for processing of the removal request. (bold lettering mine)

If you have billing or other issues please go to http://help.reunion.com/selfhelp/
and create a separate ticket with the appropriate category.

Regards;
Customer ServiceReunion.com, Inc.


I'm pissed that they plan to take 10 days to delete an account that took me less than 10 seconds to create! Let me see, how many organizations can you sell someone's email address to in 10 days?

I wonder how many other people have been lied to by reunion.com.

Beware of Reunion.com!

Rash of Photos

I just felt like posting a bunch of pics from the past 12 months, so it now takes twice as long to scroll down to the bottom. I wish there were some other way to organize photos on here. There probably is, but it would most likely take too long to figure out how to do it.

I'll be doing more mass-postings of photos in the near future. It's so easy to do, so I might as well...

Rash of Photos