The Blog From Another Dimension

I Think Our Standards Are Dropping

Jogging became a popular means of exercise for a great many people, as a way to lose weight and stay healthy. Then it seems like doctors eased up a little, and said that all you need is a nice, leisurely 20- to 30-minute walk. What will be the new exercise regime of the future?

Fidgeting.

What's next? Tapping your feet? Breathing hard?

Pages: A Quick First Look

I will return with a much more detailed review in the future, but just wanted to come out on the record immediately as casting my vote for Pages over MS Word, hands-down. People have been calling Pages more of a low-level Desktop Publishing program than a word processor, comparing it with MS Publisher rather than Word. And maybe if you really need the extreme features of a high-end word processor, it might seem that way to you. But for the other 99% of users, Pages will do everything you want--and much better than MS Word, in my opinion.

I've only had Pages for a few hours now, but it does not take long to dismiss all the not-a-word-processor claims. I'm not sure how the people who make that claim define "word processor," but Pages does everything you want, and it does it with far more ease and style than Word.

The "Inspector" is a key component: a floating window in which one can access most of the settings and controls of the program. It is similar to Word for Mac's floating toolbar, but much better-executed; a ten-button button bar at top allows you to access all the major formatting elements: document, layout, wrap, text, graphics, metrics, table, chart, links and Quicktime. Each inspector pane can have tabs at the top which allow further diversification, such as the Text Inspector containing "text," "list," "tabs," and "more" areas. Altogether, 18 different control panes can be accessed within the one small inspector panel. Instead of having to open up a dozen different dialog boxes like you do in Word (especially the Windows version), a few clicks will get you quickly to the controls you want. If you prefer having multiple control panes open at the same time, just open more inspectors.

And I cannot figure out what controls 99% of people would find Pages lacking as a word processor. Font control is far superior to Word, with Apple's font window (command-T); in the inspector, you can easily control margins, sections, columns (much easier than Word), line & character spacing, bullet and numbered lists, tabs, indents, pagination, so forth and so on. Tables and charts are far, far superior to MS Word's. What's missing? Sorry, critics, but this is a word processor--maybe the fact that it can also do some pretty amazing things with layout and design is what confused so many--but that doesn't make it less of a word processor. On the contrary, it makes it more of one.

Some people, used to MS Word's cluttered approach, may even see Pages' simplified style as a drawback, but it is anything but. Just give it a chance, and you'll find it a much superior approach. And don't give up on certain features--Pages will do things you may not expect, since you might automatically expect Pages to act just like Word does, and for things to all be in the same places that Microsoft has dictated. Others simply haven't explored the program well enough; for example, one review I read complained about the toolbar at the top of the main window, lamenting that the buttons on the toolbar are not ones they would often use. A simple right-click (or control-click if you don't have a two-button mouse) on the toolbar will show that you can customize it, with a lot of choices, to put your favorite features right there at the top.

Then there are the graphics, which (as usual for Apple) are ten times better than what MS Word offers. The ability to use shadows and opacity with objects does wonders for image quality, along with auto-centering, provide far richer graphics than MS Office allows, while still matching all of Office's other graphics features, though far more easily accessed. It's probably this kind of thing that made people think "desktop publishing," but Pages mixes them both quite well.

There are some features that Word has and Pages does not that I would like to see added: for example, the customization of keyboard commands (the big missing feature here), a more fully-featured find-and-replace, the ability to center the WYSIWYG "page" in the work window (Pages always has the page stuck at the upper left of the window), slightly easier-to-click indent tags on the ruler... I'll probably stumble over some more, but aside from keyboard command customization, it's all pretty minor stuff as far as I'm concerned. One just occurred to me: a clip-art library. But that kind of thing can be bought for cheap nowadays. Some might say the words "grammar checker," but not around me--I find Word's grammar checker to be much more annoying than useful. Pages does lack a thesaurus, but Nisus makes a free one that will work in Services (easily accessible in other applications). Most other lacking features I have read about are either esoteric (only 1% of the high-end users will miss them, like header/footer style adoption) or relatively unimportant (like the inability to have dashed lines for table borders).

And let's not forget that this is the first version of the software. Was MS Word this good when it started? I doubt it--and seeing how much Keynote has improved from version one to two, Pages will likely get whatever it lacks fixed very nicely in upcoming versions. Other apps will likely be added to the suite as well, though Apple's priority on keeping things simple and aimed at the majority, low-end users may limit how far they go in adding apps and esoteric features.

And finally, there's the price. MS Office is $360, though you do get Excel with that. Individually Word and Powerpoint each cost $195.

iWork, with Pages and Keynote, is $79.

Now all Apple has to do is add a spreadsheet app (maybe throw in database and graphics apps, too)--and then make Windows versions! But then, Microsoft will likely just steal all the ideas like they usually do....

Powerbook G5: Tantalizing and yet Dubious Signs

Apple is now overdue for an update to their laptop Powerbook line: usually new versions of the line come out every seven or eight months at most, and this is month nine since the last release. Usually a new release is just a speed bump, that is, the computers feature a slightly faster processor and little else that has changed. Once every few years the computer changes more significantly, changing in form or basic design, or adding new features. And every three or four years there is a huge jump, one to a completely new processor, like the jump from the G3 to the G4 in 2001, when they changed from the rounded black encasing to the slimmer, square-but-sleek titanium enclosure--and, of course, got the much better G4 chip.

The G5 chip has been out there for some time, but like the G4 chip, it did not go into the Powerbook line quite some time (and may not yet). It took a year and four months for the G4 to appear in a Powerbook after first appearing in a PowerMac (desktop) model. Well, the G5 was introduced about a year and four months ago, so isn't it time for a G5 Powerbook? Whatever the case, a new Powerbook release is imminent: reports starting in France and now spreading indicate that the current Powerbook line has been EOL'd, or end-of-life'd--in other words, Apple is no longer restocking the current models, a proven sign that a new model release is imminent. But what model? A G5?

Not so, say many: the G5 is a blazing chip, and not just in speed: it also introduces significant heat radiation--something the Powerbook G4 was infamous for, but for the G5 to an even greater degree. Apple has been developing a liquid-cooling system to handle the heat in smaller case designs, but the word on the street is that Apple is not ready to release such a laptop--unless the beast weighs 8 pounds and is three inches thick, so they say. Instead, rumor sites are reporting that the next model will be a speed-bumped G4, at speeds of 1.5 and 1.67 GHz, maybe with a bigger hard drive, better video memory and new Bluetooth built-in. Some whisper about the Powerbook going dual-processor, or that the chip will be dual-core. But few indeed expect the new Powerbook to be a G5.

Nevertheless, there are tantalizing bits and pieces of news floating around out there that Apple may shock everyone. The first report came about two weeks ago in a journal called DigiTimes, which featured a report from Taiwan that certain factories there had received orders to produce Powerbook G5s and, strangely enough, iBook G5s as well. Some thought it to be a typo, but the iBook information noted that they would be producing the "iBook/iBook G5," noting a clear difference between the G4 and G5 iBook. According to the report, both iBook and Powerbook G5 models would start shipping in "2Q 2005." Many doubted the story, however, not just because of the heat problems in the G5 and common reports that the G5 Powerbook is way off still, but also from the idea that a Powerbook and iBook G5 would start shipping at about the same time--it took almost three years for the G4 to make it to the iBook after the Powerbook got the chip.

So the collective community settled back and more or less disregarded the article as a non-starter. But then, just a day or two ago, The Register reported that one of their readers pointed them to a literally tiny clue that the Powerbook G5 might be real and imminent: on Apple's own web site, on the page for the Powerbook, the source code for the page revealed a miniscule, single-pixel blank image used to count how many people access the page. These one-pixel-images are often employed and are named after the devices featured on the page. The filename for this image: apple_g5_powerbook.gif. Within an hour after the image was sighted and reported, Apple yanked it off the page, replacing it with a "g4" pixel, but the damage was done: rumors started flaring that this was yet another infamous Apple accidental leak, like when images of the then-new Power Mac G5 release were featured on Apple's pages the night before the product was officially announced--only the images, the text still reflected the older models.

This kind of thing happens fairly often, in fact; when preparing for a new model release, a great number of changes have to be made in advance for the web sites, and sometimes things slip through--images are accidentally renamed and replace others, bits of advance work are mistakenly published.

Or, of course, it might have been an honest typo--the difference was just between a "4" and a "5" in the code, after all.

But then, another strange clue appeared: someone found that on the French-Canadian Apple web site, on a page for--oddly enough--a discontinued model of an Apple monitor (the 17-inch Apple Studio Display, replaced almost three years ago), there appeared a mention of the Powerbook G5--look near the bootom of the page, under the last paragraph, titled "Configuration requise": "L’Apple Studio Display nécessite un Power Mac G5 avec un connecteur ADC ou un PowerBook G5 avec un port DVI vers ADC Apple...." Translated, it means, "The Apple Studio Display requires a Power Mac G5 with an ADC or a PowerBook G5 with a DVI port and an Apple DVI to ADC Adapter."

The English version of the Canadian page has no such mention of the Powerbook G5. Some say that this new page also represents a typo--but the page previously said "G4," and was probably not completely rewritten--which means that someone actively changed "G4" to "G5." In addition this is now the second "typo" for a "Powerbook G5" on Apple's own web pages in as many days, and such typos have not been happening before now. It is beginning to look more and more like the usual leaking of bits of info as a flood of Powerbook G5 web page code changes well up behind the corporate secrecy dam. And Apple has completely surprised everyone before.

So when will we know? Barring the release of even more evidence before an official announcement, we are likely to be informed by Apple of what's cooking in their famous Tuesday announcement, when they often reveal new stuff coming out. And of course, an announcement is not the same as an actual release--even if a Powerbook G5 is announced in four days, it might not actually ship until March, April, or even May (which would fall into the second-quarter range mentioned by DigiTimes).

For me, that would mean a new computer on my desk maybe a month after units first ship. The delay would be to let others be guinea pigs, as new processor releases often have first-generation bugs, and if I read that the bugs are significant enough, I will be able to hang in there long enough for the first revisions to come out, likely by next January.

All the News That Your Tax Dollars Can Buy

When Armstrong Williams was caught taking payola from the Bush administration in exchange for pushing their agenda as if he were an objective observer, he not only denied that he had done anything wrong--he also hinted that he was not alone. He was not lying, at least not about that.

As a journalist, you are supposed to subscribe to at the very least some minimal standards. Being objective and avoiding conflicts of interest are among the most important, as you are in a position of trust and responsibility; your readers take you as you represent yourself, and if there is a conflict, you are morally obliged to reveal that. Which is why on newscasts where the network is owned by a corporation, and the news show reports on something related to that corporation, they mention that relationship.

The government of the people is expected to steward taxpayer dollars in the way that best suits the populace, and, as much as possible for any government, be straightforward with the people. The Bush administration long ago tore these expectations to shreds; aside from the copious lying, such as about the known budget of Medicare, the administration also spent public money on fake news spots which were barely veiled campaign commercials for Bush. Using tax dollars to fund them was illegal. This, along with their blatant cowing of the news media, demonstrated that they cared little about ethics and were willing to pervert the process of providing accurate information to the public in order to sell their agenda--proving their moral bankruptcy as well as the unpopularity of their real plans by the fact that they could be passed only if the public were lied to about them.

Well, all of this didn't end with Armstrong Williams. Soon after he stated that he was not the only one taking taxpayer money--specifically, he said, "This happens all the time, there are others"--to push the partisan Bush agenda, out came the news that Maggie Gallagher, a columnist for UPS syndicated nationwide, had accepted $21,500--and probably another $20,000 as well--from the Bush administration (specifically, the Department of Health and Human Services) to push their marriage act, just as Williams had been paid to push "No Child Left Behind." Like Williams, Gallagher claims she did nothing wrong, but even a first-year journalism student would finding it glaringly obvious that if you are being paid by the government to publicize their agenda, then whenever you speak on that issue, you damn well better mention that relationship. Gallagher is either clueless to the basic ethics of her field, or is being unabashedly and knowingly unethical, and trying to cover up for it.

And now a third syndicated columnist, Michael McManus, whose ironically titled column "Ethics & Religion" is published in 50 newspapers, also is revealed as being on the take, like Gallagher from HHS to promote the Bush marriage act, and like Williams and Gallagher, did not disclose the fact as any competent journalist would know they are obliged to do. Paid $10,000 for his shilling, McManus must be slapping his forehead for being paid off so cheaply when Armstrong got nearly a quarter of a million dollars for his payoff.

Meanwhile, Bush is trying to make it look like this was all a rogue act and he had nothing to do with it and it was just some bureaucrat or something, and that he greatly disapproves of it all. But as I have pointed out before, if this has happened multiple times through several different government agencies, it is not an isolated act--it is, by definition, administration policy, and Bush is directly responsible.

Not that "responsible" means anything to Bush, Williams, Gallagher or McManus--or, very likely, to an undetermined number of other "journalists" who have been paid of but who are still hiding from public view.

Japan Fun Fact #9: Apartment Hunting, Part II

All of the experiences I outlined in my last post about apartment-hunting were from the 1980's. Those were heady days for Japan, when it was the nation of the future, buying up everything and set to take over the world economically. Japan was feeling its oats a lot more, and there was a lot more conflict, especially in trade, with the United States. Japan was the country of success--in business, in education, in a safe society; the United States, and other countries, were seen in a more adversarial light than today, and foreigners were seen more as a threat, commonly represented in media as violent, criminal, or diseased, a contrast to Japan.

Then came the 90's. Aum Shinrikyo and the subway gassings. Children killing children in the schools. Horrific stories being told about domestic crime in the press. And, of course, the bursting of the bubble economy. Japan's ego took several palpable hits, and the recession kept going and going and going. America retook the computer industry, Japan was no longer seen as the juggernaut, and Japan's markets opened and Japan's ironclad grip on the future of the world economy seemed like a strange illusion of yesterday. Suddenly, Japan was no longer on top of the world--the economy sputtered, and crime seemed to spike at home. In short, things changed. The national ego lessened, the feelings of superiority ebbed, and the adversarial atmosphere thinned.

Those changes were also reflected in how foreigners were regarded. Less and less were we threatening aliens who were taking over sumo and baseball; less and less were we icons of crime and disease. Or, perhaps, more and more Japan focused on its own ills. Japan is kind of like that, in extremes when it comes to international comparisons--either it sees itself on top of everything, or on the bottom, to overstate the matter perhaps a bit.

Not that this changed much immediately in the early 90's when I came back to Japan and looked for an apartment anew, but it changed things somewhat. The real change was much more apparent when I returned again in the late 90's. I heard a lot fewer stories about foreigners being stopped on the street and asked for ID, or accused of having stolen their bicycles. The media represents foreigners in a far less negative light today. And apartment hunting similarly became easier.

By the time I left Japan for the second time in 1995, I had lived in five apartments: two in Toyama and three in Tokyo, the last one secured in 1993. I had also found an apartment for my brother when he moved here (I used the same agent who had pushed for me in finding my own apartment). In every case, I found myself up against the rather formidable "gaijin wa dame" element.

When I returned in 1998, things had noticeably changed. Though I was looking for an apartment in much the same areas, I found a lot less resistance, and a lot more possibilities. This time, I found a place just a ten-minute bicycle ride away from that first cockroach-infested dump in Asagaya, but this place was a lot nicer. It cost a little more, but for the price, it was much nicer. Two seven-tatami-plus rooms, plus the kitchen/bath areas, but also a nicely-built three-unit apartment with a rather kind landlady living with her family on the second floor, just five minutes' walk from an express station on the Seibu Shinjuku line just 12 minutes out from Shinjuku. And this I found after only a very brief search that lasted only a few days, not a few weeks. The agencies I visited along the way were much more accommodating than the ones I had experienced five years and more before, and I had several units to choose from despite the brevity of my search.

After two years, however, I decided to move up. The job I had originally been hired for changed--soon after I had moved into my new place, I was promoted from newbie EFL instructor to the coordinator and effective dean of the academic department of the college--a change that shocked me, but which I happily accepted, and it came with a nice increase in pay, needless to say. I stayed in the first apartment more through inertia than anything else, but after two years, I faced the familiar one-month's-rent gift money fee, and I also was getting tired of bumping into furniture when I had to get up and move around at night. So I started looking again.

Let me stray from the narrative a bit here so I can explain a bit more about apartment hunting in Japan. First off is cost, and cost is determined roughly by a formula which includes the chief variables of distance from central Tokyo, distance from the local train station, and the size of the apartment, though not necessarily in that order. Go far out from central Tokyo and rent a small place 15 minutes away from the station by bus, and you can get it for a pittance; the reverse will be costly. Some train lines are more expensive than others as well: the Chuo Line, for example, can be pretty pricey, and express stops are at a premium. If you can walk to the local train station in a few minutes, that'll cost you. It matters a lot more than what shops or schools may be nearby, as most people commute by train in Japan. Proximity to town can also mean a lot to people; some cannot stand having to commute long distances to get to work every day; that can be a deal-breaker for many. The trade-off is for size, and that's what I've chosen myself; It's a 45-minute-to-one-hour commute to work from where I am, but I have a nice, spacious place.

Size of apartments in Japan is usually measured by square meters, and room sizes are measure in tatami mats (thatched straw mats three feet by six feet in size), even if the room in question does not use tatami mats. Tatami can be nice--softer than hardwood floors and less prone to be cold--but they also have their drawbacks, in that they don't last too many years, and often are home to small bugs.

A standard room size is six tatami mats, or nine by twelve feet--a smallish room, especially if that's the only real room of your apartment. Standard studio apartments in Japan will consist of a single 6-mat room with a small kitchen area, a bath room and a toilet room (or both bath and toilet combined in a pre-fab "unit bath"). No room for a western-style bed without serious crowding, so a futon is used. Not like many futons in the U.S., which are often thicker and more rigid, Japanese futons are more like thick, heavy blankets than mattresses, and are folded up and put in large two-tiered cupboard/closets during the day, leaving space for moving around and the like. The image at right illustrates this kind of room, the double doors in back being the cupboard/closet.

The apartment I had in Tokyo in the mid-90's had a six-tatami room and a three-tatami room; the three tatami room (six feet by nine feet) was pretty much just enough for a futon to be laid out in. Eight-tatami rooms (twelve feet square) are considered fairly spacious in Japan. See this page for standard tatami layout patterns. Newer apartments have hardwood floors more often, though multi-room apartments often have one tatami room.

Another way to measure the size of apartments is by room counts. In this system, L is a living room, D is a dining room, and K is a kitchen. Often they are combined to read LDK, especially if they are in fact one room. Additional rooms are represented by number. If there is just one room, it is called so: a one-room (studio) apartment. A 1LDK would be one room plus a living-dining-kitchen room, or what in the U.S. would be called a one-bedroom apartment.

Other considerations for apartments in Japan include the age of the building (chikunen); if the building is more than, say, twenty years old, it is much less desirable. The construction type is also important--you have apartments and mansions. "Mansion" doesn't mean the same thing here as in the U.S.--a Japanese mansion is like a condo, as they are more often bought than rented. The building is usually much more solidly constructed--thick concrete walls and floors, for example, rather than the thinner, shoddy walls found so commonly in apartments.

Okay, back to the story. When I got tired of the apartment I had lived in since arriving in Tokyo, I decided I would be willing to spend a bit more and live farther out in order to get more space. After searching for a while (I had more time to hunt this time), I found the place I was looking for when an acquaintance clued me in on public housing. I'm still not entirely sure exactly how "public" it is, but I get the feeling that it is more publicly-subsidized than publicly-owned. They used to be called Toshi Kodan (都市公団), or the Urban Development Corporation, but sometime last year they changed to Toshi Kikou (都市機構, or "Urban Renaissance"), and I have no idea what that signifies.

But what it mean for apartment hunting is just what I was looking for. First of all, you don't go to a real estate agent for these places--you go straight to the local UR office. That means no paying one month's rent for the agent. Second, and more significantly, because it is not a regular landlord, that means no gift money, a huge advantage. And finally, it's government-related, so that mean they can never say "gaijin wa dame"--you don't even need a guarantor! I just walked into the office, asked to see a place, and then reserved it once I found I liked it. You do have to certify that you can earn enough to pay for the place, show some tax forms or the like, and there's a bit more paperwork than the usual apartment requires. And there is still a deposit--a bit steeper than usual, three months' rent--but that's refundable. Moving in was just the deposit and first month's rent.

Also, the building I got was a mansion type, meaning great walls and floors--there's a couple who live right next door, and they have an infant. I never hear it, not even a bit. At most, I'll hear people upstairs banging around a bit, but not often and it's not loud. My previous place was so un-sound-proofed that every time my smoking next-door neighbor went to the bathroom, I could hear him go, even when he didn't loudly hawk and spit into the toilet. The soundproofing in my new place also means that I can play music or have the TV on at high volume even late at night, and I never have to worry; I've asked neighbors if they can hear anything, and they say nothing gets through.

But the best part of the new place is the size: 84 square meters, almost double my older room. All hardwood floors, it consists of an 8-mat-size master bedroom, a 4.5-mat second bedroom, a large genkan (vestibule, or whatever) leading to a toilet room and a bath room off a small dressing room with sink and mirror, and then the big "LDK-plus" area--an 8-mat living room, 4.5-mat dining room, 4-mat kitchen and 6-mat extra room, all in one large joined area (no doors, but a few interior walls). And that does not include the walk-in closet (albeit a small one). If you want to take a look, I have the layout and some photos of the place I made before I moved in.

Then there's the rent--at ¥136,000 when I moved in, it was low for such a big apartment--but then something strange happened: it went down. Usually it's supposed to be the reverse, but not with this place. After a year, it went down to ¥131,800, then ¥127,200, then to ¥123,400, and this year it's ¥119,800. All this despite the fact that the apartments are almost completely occupied, more than when I first moved in. And there's also no contract renewal fee--just another rent decrease. Bizarre. Great, but bizarre.

I'll likely stay here until I buy into a new place, either a mansion or a house--which will lead to a whole new level of possible conflicts, including taking out a loan, which I kind of dread. But, as I like to say, I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Train Over the River

Caught a nice shot of a train passing over the Tama River the other day at sunset. Click on the image for a larger version (1000 pixels wide).

Japan News, January 25th 2005

Some interesting news items about Japan recently:

Highlighting Japan's reluctance to take in immigrants is this story about Japan deporting U.N.-recognized Kurdish refugees back to Turkey despite the fact that they will likely be persecuted there. In response to sharp international criticism, Japan belatedly allowed five of them, the mother and children, to stay in Japan--for one additional month only--after the two adult males, the father and eldest son, were sent packing. Not that Japan has always been the choice of immigrants, anyway--I recall hearing that when Japan has, in the past, opened its doors to refugees, though in far smaller numbers than other countries, few refugees choose Japan as the destination of choice. Even when other countries' much larger quotas get mobbed, Japan's quota has remained unfilled (though I don't have a source on that).

Meanwhile, there is argument over the privatization of Japan's postal system. I have to admit that wasn't even on my radar. Many do not know that Japan's post office is not just a post office--they also sell insurance and are the nation's largest bank--in fact, it is the world's largest bank, with trillions of dollars in savings and assets. When you go to a post office in Japan, there are windows for mail and others for banking and other services.

Under the privatization plan, the post office would be split into four groups (banking, insurance, and then mail services would somehow be divided into two different sections), but all four would remain connected under an umbrella organization--presumably so they can remain operating in the same locations instead of having to split the 24,000 post offices between them and opening up huge numbers of new offices. The privatization would begin in 2007 and be complete by 2017. The 290,000 workers for the post office would be transformed into private-sector jobs, which many are unhappy about, but it would also cut the federal payroll by a whopping 30% of its total.

It's still not a done deal, but one way or another, it will almost certainly happen. The effects are anyone's guess, though many see it as a sop to the banking and parcel delivery services, which would gain from lessened competition--since today the Japanese post office is not taxed, and has fewer restrictions than private commercial institutions. The claim that this privatization will benefit consumers is dubious at best.

The head of NHK, the government-owned broadcasting corporations, is being forced to step down after some scandals dogged his career. In Japan, every TV market has NHK as two of its stations--General and Educational channels, usually channels 1 and 3 on the dial--which are operated by the government. Broadcast satellite also has two NHK channels. Most foreign residents are familiar with NHK primarily as the organization that sends people to your door demanding that you pay a monthly fee for the NHK service, whether you watch it or not. They say you have to pay, but if you don't there is no penalty. As for me, I refuse to pay for what is essentially a propaganda arm of the Japanese government, even if I did watch it--which I do not.

NHK is not like PBS in the U.S.--NHK is much more closely related to the government. As a case in point, the latest scandal was over an NHK documentary about sex slaves during Japan's occupation of Korea. Some politicians--predictably--did not like the subject matter, and pressured NHK to censor parts of the broadcast, which it did.

Not that this is really shocking or worse than other countries, of course; actually, I think that at this time, American media are far more influenced by political pressure than NHK is.

North Korean residents in Japan are fearful of how the Japanese population will treat them as relations with North Korea are not going well, There have been many unsavory incidents including assaults on North Koreans--particularly high school students in recognizable garb. Much of the resentment stems from North Korea's admission that they did indeed kidnap perhaps a dozen Japanese citizens some decades ago in order to use them to train North Korean spies bound for Japan.

Of course, there is rather supreme irony here, in that Japan has been incredibly obstinate in apologizing for or making reparations for its 35-year occupation of Korea, the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Koreans to Japan for forced labor, or using their women as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during the war. But a dozen kidnappings of Japanese by North Korea has Japan inflamed. I guess that there's a 60-year statute of limitations or something.

Japanese citizens seem just as pessimistic about Bush's second term as I am. In their man-on-the-street interviews, Japan Today printed eight responses to the question of whether things will get better or worse under Bush in the next four years. Three of the eight pleaded ignorance and refrained from opining, but the other five were less reticent:

"Of course, the world will be more dangerous. Bush is ferocious. He is for armed force and so I'm sure we will see more bloodshed and death in the next four years."

"There is absolutely no way that the world will be safer. I don't think Bush will withdraw his troops from Iraq. He won't give in until he gets what he wants. Things will just get worse and worse. The Americans will see hell sooner or later."

"I think the world will be more dangerous because of Bush. I don't like the whole Bush family and the new administration. But since half the U.S. elected him, apparently they are not fed up with war yet. They still want to fight more. That's a scary thought."

Finally, every year, some institutions make predictions about the future. Also from Japan Today is the report on one magazine's predictions, which include:

Global warming and the heat island effect will torment Tokyo even more this summer than they did last. Look for temperatures of 45 degrees and clouds of "killer bugs" breeding in the congenial torpor. AIDS will spread. Suicide, too, will rise among retiring baby boomers who have lost their reason for living, and among younger people who feel they never had one.

Gloom and doom indeed. 45 degrees C? That's 113 degrees F! And swarms of killer bugs, eh? Here comes the apocalypse!

iBento vs. the Dell

Since the Mac Mini (which I like to compare to a bento box, complete with the Apple logo as umeboshi) was announced, just about every news item I have seen on the product announces without fail the fact that there are PCs out there even cheaper than the $499 Mac box. It's relentless, almost as if it would be sacrilege to say that a Mac is just as good or just as cheap as PCs out there. But just like the media always pointed out higher hertz ratings for PCs while ignoring the fact that Apple's processors are more efficient at lower hertz speeds, everyone is now comparing the discounted PCs with the Mac Mini based upon price alone--completely ignoring the fact that the PCs in question are stripped bare and have hidden costs to boot.

This article in MacWorld does a good job of bursting that particular illusion. It would be hard for PC advocates to defend the favorable-to-PC comparisons based upon the idea that however stripped of features, they are still cheaper, because every article I have seen mentions, without fail, that the cheaper PCs come with a Monitor, mouse and keyboard, which the Mac Mini lacks. Well, if being stripped of features is OK on the PC, then why go out of your way to point out the features stripped from the Mac as a downside?

What is not mentioned in the articles you read is that the Mac comes with a dedicated graphics chip, a Combo optical drive, a firewire port, a one-year warranty (as opposed to a 90-day warranty), and a far superior software suite, nor do they usually point out that this machine is targeted at people who already own a monitor, keyboard and mouse, meaning that it will not be an added cost for most people. Nor do they mention that the Mac does not need antivirus software, though the PC does--tack on another $62 at least for that to the price of the Windows machine, almost the same cost as a monitor, keyboard and mouse for the Mac. Add the CD-R/RW and DVD optical drive and burning software to the PC and the price goes up about $100, bringing it right up to the price of the Mac Mini--and you're still missing many features the Mac has built-in. And let's not forget that the low PC prices are almost always arrived at through mail-in rebates, which require you to jump through hoops and cough up private information to advertisers in order to get the chance to wait months to get a rebate check in the mail.

And then there's the small detail that the PC is a monster tower, and the Mac Mini is arguably the first truly portable desktop computer, and is a hell of a lot nicer-looking to boot. The PC is 14.5" tall, 7.25" wide, and 16.75" deep; the Mac Mini is 2" tall, and 6.5" wide and deep. The Mac Mini weighs just 3 pounds; the Dell weighs 23 pounds. In addition to everything else, you get compactness and style. That may not sound like too much, but look at the illustration above right: that's what the two computers look like, side by side. Tell me that you prefer the look of the computer on the left, or that it would sit better on your crowded desk.

Gonzales Weasels on How He Helped Bush Ditch Jury Duty

Something I've written about on this blog almost since its inception was an early scandal for then-governor of Texas Bush. As governor, he was called for jury duty, and made a big deal about how he was just an ordinary guy, and would of course serve on the jury. From CNN in '96:

GOP Gov. George W. Bush, saying that it's "a feeble excuse" to say he's too busy or too important for the task, reported for jury duty today. He said he doubted he'd be called for a trial given his job. He has the power to commute sentences in criminal cases, and has strongly and publicly favored limiting damages awarded in civil trials. Reporters asked Bush if he thought he'd be elected jury foreman. "I had enough trouble getting elected governor in Travis County," a traditionally Democratic area, he joked.

Right from the start, Bush had to squirm to avoid incriminating himself. Bush "overlooked" a section of the jury questionnaire (a legal document) which asked him about his criminal record; had he filled it out honestly, he would have revealed that he himself had been arrested for DUI. But he was doing his best to lie by omission on that one, and no one questioned the governor on how he filled out the form.

His smug confidence in having avoided that particular bullet, however, was soon shattered: he was selected to serve on a drunk driving case for an Austin, TX strip club dancer. Maybe he recognized the significance of that news, but I'll bet that it was Alberto Gonzales that had to explain it to him: if he came to serve on that case, the lawyers involved would almost certainly ask Bush if he himself had ever been arrested on the same charges that he was now being called upon to consider as a juror. Oops.

Here comes Gonzales' weasel. As Bush's legal counsel in '96, he had to get Bush out of hot water. Bush had already made big noises about how he was just an ordinary guy and would of course serve. But now he needed that "feeble excuse" like never before, and Gonzales provided it:

In separate interviews, [presiding judge] Crain—along with [defense attorney] Wahlberg and prosecutor John Lastovica—told NEWSWEEK that, before the case began, Gonzales asked to have an off-the-record conference in the judge's chambers. Gonzales then asked Crain to "consider" striking Bush from the jury, making the novel "conflict of interest" argument that the Texas governor might one day be asked to pardon the defendant (who worked at an Austin nightclub called Sugar's), the judge said. "He [Gonzales] raised the issue," Crain said. Crain said he found Gonzales's argument surprising, since it was "extremely unlikely" that a drunken-driving conviction would ever lead to a pardon petition to Bush. But "out of deference" to the governor, Crain said, the other lawyers went along. Wahlberg said he agreed to make the motion striking Bush because he didn't want the hard-line governor on his jury anyway. But there was little doubt among the participants as to what was going on. "In public, they were making a big show of how he was prepared to serve," said Crain. "In the back room, they were trying to get him off."

But now, before Congress, being interviewed for consideration of his nomination to the highest legal position in the country, Gonzales tried to pretend that he didn't really help Bush out in his attempt to evade jury duty and an admission to drunk driving. Specifically, he claims that he did not "request" that Bush be excused; instead, he "discussed" it. The wording suggests that he was not the instigator:

Gonzales last week refused to waver. "Judge Gonzales has no recollection of requesting a meeting in chambers," a senior White House official said, adding that while Gonzales did recall that Bush's potential conflict was "discussed," he never "requested" that Bush be excused. "His answer to the Senate's question is accurate," the official said.

Of course, if he did not make the request, then who did? And is he now trying to claim that the defendant's attorney, the prosecutor and the judge are all lying or completely mistaken in their separate but identical recountings of the event?

Get ready to have an all new weasel be our next Attorney General. At least Bush is being consistent.

Japan Fun Fact #9: Apartment Hunting, Part I

Looking for an apartment in Japan can be a trying experience. When I first came to Japan, I had trouble because few apartments would rent to me. The first agent I saw showed me three apartments; I did not like any of them. When I asked to see more, I was told that there were no more. Apparently, the city of Toyama, population 300,000, only had three vacant apartments in the ¥60,000/month price range. So I went to another real estate agent. They showed me three places also. All were the exact same as the ones I'd been shown by the first agent. Back at the office where I worked, I asked the receptionist to call a third agent and ask them to show me apartments. They said that they would see me in an hour, then asked the receptionist for my name. She told them--and then was asked to wait. After a few minutes, they said that they would have to wait until the next day to show me any open units. And when they did, they were--you guessed it--the exact same three units as the other places showed me.

It was clear what was happening: before showing me any apartments, they were checking with managers in advance to see if foreigners were allowed to stay. Thus the sudden wait-until-tomorrow change from the real estate agent when they found out they would be dealing with a non-Japanese. And few landlords were willing to let a foreigner live in their units. When I asked agents--two different ones--about all those other, many apartment buildings studding the landscape, I was told uniformly that they were inhabited by yakuza gangsters and prostitutes, so i wouldn't want to live in any of them. Let me tell you, that town must have been brimming with yakuza and prostitutes.

When I moved to Tokyo, things were different. Not in that discrimination was lesser, but rather in that people were far more open about it. Instead of trying to save me face by making up stories, they just out-and-out told me: gaijin wa dame, literally "foreigners are no good." That was the exact phrase used by everyone, and its constancy was somewhat startling--no one used variations, just the same exact words.

And I heard them a lot. When I was moving from Toyama to Tokyo, I was on a three-week vacation in which I looked for both a job and an apartment. The job I found fairly easily; the apartment nearly broke me. My method was to visit at least two or three train stations per day, and I would find maybe four or five real estate agencies at each station. At each agency--that is, the ones that let me in, though only a few refused to let me enter--I would look through their bound book of available apartments. I got to know those books pretty well. Each apartment would have a one-sheet, which showed a layout of the apartment and had all the relevant information. First, the amount of rent (yachin), the deposit (shiki-kin), and the "gift money" (rei-kin, more or less an outright extortion fee demanded by the landlord), each denoted in the number of months' rent each would cost. Typically, the deposit and the gift money would be two months' rent each. Unspoken but understood would be the additional one month's rent paid to the real estate agent as a commission for the sale. That means that moving in--including paying the first month's rent in advance--typically cost 6 months' worth of rent, which could really put a dent in your wallet.

Also noted on the sheet were the age of the apartment building (I got to recognize the age of units just by the floor layouts, which were different according to age), and which units were available. The latter was most important because which floor you live on makes a big difference. In apartment buildings with just two floors, the second floor was commonly reserved for female tenants, likely for reasons of privacy, to guard against peeping toms and underwear thieves. Finishing up the one-sheet data would be distance from the local station, and special items in the apartment--was there an air conditioner, TV antenna, tatami or hardwood floors and the like.

Back tot he story. I would go to a real estate agent, look through the book, and find a unit which was in my price range, was not too far from the station, and which wasn't a really terrible-looking place. I wasn't too fussy, really (evident from the fleabag place I eventually settled for), but I didn't have much luck, either: despite finding three or four okay-looking units at each agency, I only saw a total of five or six units in the entire two-week period in which I searched. And I enquired about a few hundred places in total. I asked about so many because I was not finding anything I liked--the few places I was allowed to see were really unattractive units, so I kept looking and looking, stepping up my search as time ran out. But even if we assume I am misremembering, there is no way in heaven or earth it was less than a hundred in all--and even at that, I was refused 95% of the time.

The refusal was, as I noted, strangely identical, like there was an agreed-upon expression. Gaijin wa dame. Gaijin wa dame. Gaijin wa dame. Over and over and over again, many times a day. (And Japanese friends would wonder why I didn't like the term "gaijin.") I was not presenting myself poorly; I was clean-cut, clean-shaven with trimmed hair, and wearing the business suit I used in job interviews. I spoke Japanese fairly well, and explained at each place that I had lived in Japan a few years and was familiar with Japanese living customs, and knew how to take care of an apartment. I also presented at each place a copy of my new work contract, which showed I had ample salary to pay for the place, and could pay the entire six-months'-rent fee in cash, all right there. In addition to which, I had the all-important guarantor, my new boss (a Japanese national for a major corporation), who would cover any damages should I flee the country. But it seldom made any difference.

One place in particular still sticks in my memory. It was one of the last agencies I visited, so I had the patter down strong. I explained all of my good points to the agent, the experience in Japan, new contract, so forth and so on, and instructed the agent, when he spoke to the landlord, to relate all of these things so that the landlord would know that this was not some gonna-trash-the-apartment-and-ditch-the-country foreigner. I asked the agent if he understood, and if he would relate all of this. He grunted acknowledgment, and picked up the phone and dialed. "Hello? Mr. Landlord? Yes, this is Yaddayadda at the agency. That apartment you have open? Foreigners are no good, right? Yeah, OK. Thanks. Bye."

Sometimes you didn't have to wait for the agent to call up the landlord. I saw perhaps half a dozen apartment one-sheets that had it written down right there in black and white: petto, mizushobai, gaijijn fuka. No pets, prostitutes or foreigners allowed.

I eventually got a place, because one landlord really did his best to sell me as a tenant. "Hello, Mr. Landlord? Yes, about that apartment. I have a possible tenant. He's a foreigner, BUT he's a gentleman. He seems very nice." And so on. He actually used the word "gentleman," the English word in katakana pronunciation. He had to push the landlord for several minutes, but finally got me in. I took the place, but it was not exactly the ritz. The good points were that it was just a 3-minute walk to Asagaya Station on the Chuo Line, a short hop into Shinjuku, where my job would be. It was fairly cheap, ¥60,000 yen for a 6-tatami main room and a 4-tatami kitchen (more on that later). But that was about all that was good about the place. The building itself was pretty rickety, and as I would find out later, it was a sieve--it had tons of cracks and crevices, through which, I found to my disappointment, cockroaches entered in droves.

Still, I survived there for two years, until faced with a decision: apartment contracts usually last two years, and if you want to stay longer, you are forced to pay an additional one month's rent "gift money" at the signing of the new contract. So I instead opted to find a new place. More on that in the next post...

Japan Fun Fact #8: Japanese Bacon

Whatever it is, whatever has been done to it, it sure isn't like the bacon back home. For some reason, bacon in Japan doesn't cook anything like it's supposed to, at least by American standards. Instead of cooking up crispy and juicy, the Japanese stuff cooks up flat and relatively dry. Imagine taking thinly-sliced ham and trying to fry it--kind of like that.

the only thing I can figure is that it's pre-cooked or otherwise treated before it's sold. From my first year in Japan, I noted that a lot of bacon here is barely cooked when served--often times you get it pink and (pardon the expression) limp, so much so that I initially feared food poisoning. That would explain why it cooks so badly. Anyone have any information on this?

American-style bacon is pretty much impossible to find here. Costco had it for a while, up to maybe 8 months or so ago, but then they stopped carrying it. When I called them up, they said that they had stopped carrying it because--and yes, I couldn't believe it either--of mad cow disease. Which is just as bogus a reason to deny pork imports as it is to deny beef from America, considering that only one confirmed case of mad cow has been reported in the U.S., and that was from a Canadian cow, and it did not enter the food supply; additionally, despite thorough testing of 140,000 high-risk cattle, no new cases have emerged in the U.S. for more than a year. Meanwhile, Japan has found no fewer than 15 cases in the past four years, including the first one where the carcass was actually sent to be turned into cattle meal after the disease was detected. See more on that here.

It also doesn't explain why bacon isn't imported from Australia or other countries without even a single case of mad cow--or why Costco continues to stock pork sausage from the U.S. (pretty bad sausage, alas).

UPDATE: I tried asking a meat counter guy at the supermarket about the bacon today. He seemed unsure about how the bacon was prepared, but he did know one thing: he held up a package of bacon and told me I could eat it as-is, right out of the package, without cooking it. Yech. But it does mean they're sure doing something to it....

Fuji, Day and Dusk

Just a few photos of Fuji with the new camera, at full optical zoom.

click for larger, unscaled image

The Stupidest Poll Ever

CNN is reporting that they took a poll to see if people thought President Bush was a uniter or a divider. 2% didn't know, but 49% said he was a uniter, and 49% said he was a divider.

Do I even have to comment on what that proves?

The WMD Case Crumbles Further

You know that the case is shot when even Fox News (sic) runs the story that:

Intelligence and congressional officials say they have not seen any information — never "a piece," said one — indicating that WMD or significant amounts of components and equipment were transferred from Iraq to neighboring Syria, Jordan or elsewhere. ...the officials familiar with the search say U.S. authorities have found no evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (search) transferred WMD or related equipment out of Iraq.

Which decimates the last shred of fantasy that Bush was actually right about the WMD. Of course, this doesn't faze Bush. Doesn't matter to him that his justification for the war is completely and utterly disproven--in fact, he actually believes that his thin margin of victory in the election last November was not only a mandate for his new agenda, but also doubles as proof that the American people approve of the entire Iraq War (and, to Bush, probably every other insane whim that enters his head). This guy just can't accept the idea that this was anything but a great idea and that nothing is wrong with it--perhaps the ultimate and definitive example of cognitive dissonance. Or perhaps just simple schizophrenia.

Japan Fun Fact #7: Vending machines

You've probably heard about all kinds of crazy vending machines in Japan, like those that sell jewelry, hot lunches and even schoolgirls' underwear--but the fact is, such machines are pretty rare. That's not to say that vending machines are rare in Japan--quite the opposite. Aside from scattered cigarette butts in the street, they are perhaps the most ubiquitous sight in Japan. And while most are for soft drinks (including water, coffee and tea) and most of the rest are for cigarettes, there is still a fair number that are for alcoholic beverages (and still fewer, though no less noticeable, for condoms, usually located outside pharmacies). One such alcoholic vending machine set is pictured above, though only beer is sold from it (some offer saké and/or bottles of whisky).

Now, you would think that such publicly available and unpoliced vending machines would be an open invitation to minors to buy and consume alcohol--and you'd pretty much be right. The only measure taken to safeguard against such things is that the machines automatically turn off at 11:00pm. Which, if you ask me, is pretty stupid--as if that's the time after which minors are mostly out and about? What's to keep a 15-year-old from buying up drinks at 10:30?

But, as I said, most vending machines are for drinks, and yes, they are everywhere. It is hard to go several blocks without seeing a cluster of them, and they are not just outside convenience stores and other shops. You'll find them everywhere. Even on Mt. Fuji. In fact, the vending machines on Mt. Fuji are an excellent way to keep track of your progress up the mountain: the higher you go, the more expensive the drinks become, from normal prices at the fifth station starting point, until you pay 300 yen for a drink at the peak (at least that was the price when I last climbed).

A few small notes about Japanese vending machines: first, there are no snack or candy vending machines. I don't know why. And second, in my experience, they never have problems with old paper money. Every American knows quite well that if you try to put a beat-up dollar-bill into a vending machine, you have to unfold the corners, feed it into the slot repeatedly, and pray real hard. Never had that problem in Japan.

Japan Fun Fact #6: Now Entering Hell

This last weekend was not just an ordinary one for 570,000 high school students in Japan--it was the highlight of what is called "Exam Hell," the extensive period of intensive study culminating in a series of exams that have decided the fate of millions of Japanese for many decades, and continues to this day. Students who do well get into name institutions; those who don't get into lower schools or no school at all.

First off, Japan's compulsory education only goes up to age 15, the end of junior high school (it's 16 in America). What surprised me was that, unlike in the U.S., getting into a senior high school is not guaranteed here. Back in Toyama in the 80's, one of the office workers in my conversation school had two young daughters, neither of which passed their senior high school entrance exams, so mom had to pay for them to get into private schools.

But getting into universities is harder, and even more exclusive. This weekend was the exam time for almost all students, but it's not like the SAT or ACT exams. Here, there is one test for nearly all schools on the same day--but you have to choose to take the test for just one school. Not like in the U.S., where you get an exam score and can take that to any school. No, here you not only have to choose one school, you have to choose one major, and take the test for that. If you don't get in, then your options suddenly become much more limited. Public universities are now closed to you, unless you wait a year (as a "ronin," like a masterless samurai) and take the tests again, pass or fail again. But for right now, you've lost, you're out in the cold. But not without options: you can take another test for a private school--probably a much lower-ranking one than you had hoped--and if you pass that test you can get into their school.

But even for those who passed, it's not over; typically, the top schools are flooded with more applicants than they can take in, so there is a second entrance exam for them.

And even if you get in after that, you are stuck in the major you chose. Unlike in the U.S., where you can switch majors practically at a whim, in Japan, you must first take an even harder cross-major entrance exam, and if you pass that, you must pay a fee of several thousand dollars to complete the transfer.

So I am informed, at least, by a highly reliable source. The Internet does not exactly seem to be brimming with this kind of information, at least not in English. Does anyone have anything to add to this, or to correct?

Looks Like Bush Bought Off TIME Magazine Too

TIME Magazine has an article out which describes the "pros and cons" of the Bush Social Security privatization plan, but you begin to wonder if they too have been paid off by the Bush administration; the pros are overstated and the cons are understated, to say the least. The "pros":

1 Control. Under the current system, each generation of workers pays for the retirees ahead of it. With a private account, some of the money you put in would be there for you alone rather than fund someone else's golden years.

This "pro" is illusory--you would not "control" your account as much as the unpredictable stock market would. There is far more stability in the current system. As for "funding someone else's golden years," under social security it is far more likely the other way around--most people get far more out of the system than they put in. The "funding others" is a communal safety check, one that privatization lacks, making it far less stable or dependable. Under the current system, you can know exactly what you're getting into; under the Bush plan, it will be impossible to plan for retirement, as you will be unsure of what your account will be worth when you retire. If anything, there is less control, not more, under Bush's plan.

2 Better Returns. With Social Security, funds set aside for the future earn a minimal return over time, because the government invests them conservatively, in Treasury bonds. Investing in the stock and bond markets via private accounts could allow those dollars to grow faster.

"Could" is the operational word there. This plan will allow your retirement savings to tank far faster as well. There's a reason why you want conservative investments for retirement, and cover your possible losses. It's why social security has worked so well over so long a time: it's safe. Somehow the "conservative" politicians today have lost all sense of conservatism when it comes to economics.

3 Offset the Pain. Benefit cuts will probably be necessary to keep Social Security solvent as the number of retirees grows. The appeal of private accounts might persuade voters to accept the trade-off.

This is amazingly overstated: the private account system could drain social security by as much as one-third of its funding, bring forward the insolvency and therefore benefit cuts by a matter of decades earlier than otherwise. The "appeal" (a purely subjective and one might even say imaginary benefit) itself would make the benefit cuts grow far faster.

4 Encourage Savings. Private accounts reinforce a mind-set of saving. When you see a direct connection between what you put in now and how it can grow in the future, you may be motivated to save more elsewhere.

Are they insane? First of all, this is not saving, it is investment. Second, does the writer of this piece really think that no one understands the potential benefits of saving their money outside social security? And finally, it is a pipe dream to think that this will really encourage people to save more--if anything, the false hope of riches that could come from investment accounts will probably encourage people to not save as much, because they will believe that the private accounts will be enough for their future.

5 No New Taxes. The commission's plan, if adopted, avoids the unpleasant medicine of higher payroll taxes. Set at 12.4% of taxable wages, they already squeeze earners.

Oh, for crying out loud. Taxes by any other name squeeze just as hard. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. There will be taxes, just for different things, like paying off the enormous debt incurred by this system, not to mention to massive bailouts that will have to be paid when a generation of seniors gets their benefits destroyed by a market fall just when they retire. Or else we let them starve, of course. But taxes? You bet there will be taxes, and maybe even more than before.

The "cons" listed by the article:

1 Risk. Getting a good return on your private account is up to you. If you make poor choices, you can lose money, and your nest egg will suffer. Invest too conservatively, and you will not be able to make up for the cuts in benefits.

Well, this is rather mildly understated. Under the privatization system, we will see in effect a lottery for retirement funds: some will get more money because they will retire under a market boom. But the market drops as well, as we are seeing now. If we had had privatization already, we would be seeing millions of seniors, who would have been so hopeful in their 50's when they saw the boom, instead get their private social security accounts wiped out just as they are reaching retirement age. Either we abandon so many people like that to poverty, or--especially in election years when the seniors vote strongly--we see a bailout proposed and paid for with either more debt or taxes.

2 Debt. The costs of making the transition to a private-account system are estimated at up to $2 trillion. That burden will widen the government's already yawning budget deficit, and could put the economy at risk for higher interest rates.

This is massively understated; as Paul Krugman points out, the $2 trillion figure--already an unbearably massive amount--just covers transition costs over the next ten years. The fact is, privatization will cost more than it may reap for the next forty five years, and those transition costs will be $15 trillion! It would mean a tripling of the already bloated national debt, not to mention that annual servicing of the debt will increase to one trillion dollars per year, almost half the entire current budget. This could be severely crippling to the entire economy, unless--you guessed it--we institute massive tax hikes. Bush always talks and acts tax cuts, but everything he does incurs massive debt, and that means future tax hikes, like it or not.

3 Uncertainty. Private accounts on their own do nothing to solve Social Security's solvency challenge and may discourage people from supporting real solutions.

"Do nothing to solve" the solvency problem? Are they kidding? It is widely known that the Bush plan will accelerate the solvency crisis! Right now, social security is solvent until 2052, and even after that, will meet 81% of all payouts. Bush's plan will take away huge chunks of social security's funding, bringing the insolvency much closer, and probably making the program less able to pay as much as 81% of benefits when that insolvency comes. And TIME's own understating of the real costs and detriments of the Bush plan are a huge part of what will discourage people from finding a real solution to the problem.

The last two "con" points of the TIME article similarly understate the problems while at the same time contradicting the "pros" listed before; #4 speaks of "undersaving," which contradicts the Pro #4; Con #5 is about the pushing of debt from this plan--wildly understated in this article--to future generations. But the cost will be not just for future generations, as we have to service the debt that is incurred, and will have to deal with the damage to the economy, and then the damage to senior's accounts when the economy takes inevitable dives.

All in all, the TIME article looks like it was written by an administration flunky, and this is why I am frightened by the prospect of Bush's plan passing. Not because it holds merit, but because the media is so generous to Bush and his agenda that people will get an incredibly skewed misperception about what that agenda really means. Just like Bush's "tax cuts for the middle class," which were nothing but robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul schemes, taking money from taxpayers' pockets to provide them with the illusory "cuts" (damned right it's "your money," just not they way you thought), in order to pacify the people just enough to give real tax cuts to the massively wealthy. But the press went with it full-bore like the good whores and patsies they are, just like they're doing now. God help us.

You Gotta Love This Stuff

The Huygens probe has landed successfully on the surface of Titan, and has beamed back pictures as well as a bonanza of data, far more than mission engineers had hoped for. The lander was supposed to collect about 2 1/2 hours of data on the descent, and then only a few minutes of data from the surface. But the probe continued to send out an extra two and a half hours of data to the Cassini satellite for relay to Earth, after which Cassini had flown too far away to receive any more data.

The photo shown at left is the first from the moon's surface, and was colorized to match the data received from the probe. A great many photographs of Titan from the descent and landing are available, but so far are raw images; cleaner, sharper images, larger in scope once the panoramic elements are successfully stitched together, will doubtlessly be coming soon. This particular shot shows small-to-medium-sized "pebbles" starting less than a meter from the probe, possibly made up of ice.

The atmosphere is also noticeably thick. Even if you knew that Titan is the second largest moon in the solar system (after Ganymede; both moons are larger than Mercury) and the only one with an atmosphere and clouds, you may still be surprised to learn that its atmosphere is thicker than the Earth's, and while primarily nitrogen (like Earth's), its other major components are apparently methane and cyanide.

This March 25th will mark the 350th anniversary of the moon's discovery by Dutch mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens (read the entry on him).

This mission marks yet another success for space agencies, recently plagued by a variety of failures. Both this mission and the Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit--also both drastically exceeding their expected lifetimes--have been spectacular showcases for how space exploration is done right. (Opportunity is now inspecting its own discarded heat shield, pictured below, found quite a distance from the landing site.)

We're getting treated to an enormous wealth of photos and data about Mars and Saturn this year, and all I can say is, money well-spent. Give us more of this kind of thing!

Classic Lies

The same old lies, regurgitated. From ABC's The Note:

Barbara Walters: This was our main reason for going in. So now when we read, "Okay, the search is over," what do you feel?

President Bush: Well, like you, I felt like we'd find weapons of mass destruction. Or like many, many here in the United States, many around the world, the United Nations thought he had weapons of mass destruction, and so therefore, one, we need to find out what went wrong in the intelligence gathering.

I've already thoroughly debunked the lie about "the United Nations thought he had weapons of mass destruction" in this post. And the repeated statement that somehow the intelligence was at fault is just as much a lie. The Niger story, the "sixteen words" is evidence of that: our own intelligence was telling the White House that the Niger story about Saddam trying to buy uranium was false, so Bush instead turned to foreign intelligence sources and used them over the advice of his own intelligence people. As to the people who believed there were WMD, it must be pointed out that many did not, and those who did believed largely because Bush convinced them--circular evidence to justify that he believed there were WMD. The Bush administration was clearly cherry-picking evidence and then exaggerating what they had selected to such a degree that anyone who thinks it was the fault of the intelligence community is either ignorant of the facts or is in an extreme state of denial.

Administration Payoff Policy

From USA Today:

President Bush expressed "serious concerns" Thursday about the Education Department's decision to pay conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to promote the administration's education policies. Bush said he wants his Cabinet to take steps to prevent a recurrence.

Yeah, right. I am certain that he is greatly "concerned" over this whole fiasco--only because it's been revealed even more than before. This has been endemic to the administration, not to the Department of Education. If you recall, an infomercial was produced for Bush's Medicare plan just like it was for No Child Left Behind, the same kind of abuse we see in the Armstrong case. If this were just a problem in the Education Department, then it would be localized there. Because identical abuses exist in more than one department, that makes it an administration abuse--and Bush is doing nothing except cover-up at this time, yet again being the coward and blaming others for his own corruption.

Meanwhile, Williams says that he's going to keep the money.

A New Computer Class

These are my new students for the Winter 2005 semester of Introduction to Computers at Lakeland College Japan. A big class this year!

Of course, after the photo was taken, I realized that someone was missing--but there was no way to take the photo without leaving someone out of the picture. Except, of course with Photoshop--so we took another picture just of me, and with a little retouching--

Voilà!

Oops, Our Bad

From the Boston.com News:

The search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has quietly concluded without any evidence of the banned weapons that President Bush cited as justification for going to war, the White House said Wednesday.

Well, isn't that a surprise? And, of course, Bush will suffer no repercussions from this, will not drop an iota in popularity, and will not suffer from the fact that he blatantly lied to the American people and sent more than thirteen hundred American soldiers to their deaths, thousands more maimed and crippled, and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead because of those lies.

The article ends with:

Bush has appointed a panel to investigate why the intelligence about Iraq's weapons was wrong.

And by golly, they're going to get to the bottom of this!

This is why I'm not reading the news so much any more. The sheer sickening vileness of the Bush administration, and the ignorant, sheeplike following it enjoys is just too much to take sometimes.

Oh, and yes--it looks like Armstrong Williams was not the only member of the press on the take--he let slip that "This happens all the time. There are others." And you wonder why we've been calling the media whores to the Bush administration?

The Expo Is On

So we're having to do with live text-blogging-style reports from the Expo on the various Mac sites (you can find them at MacSurfer). MacMerc will have photos up very soon.

So far: Tiger is on schedule and, among the 200 new features (probably a dozen or two actually of interest to most people), it has a killer search engine called "Spotlight" which puts the new Google and Microsoft desktop search engines to shame. iTunes gets across-the-board upgrades to all its apps. And iWork is a reality, with the "Pages" word processing app and Keynote 2--together priced at $79, which would be $20 less than the Keynote app has been priced alone up until now.

And then there's the biggest announcement so far: the iMac Mini, priced at $499 and $599, with a 1.25 GHz/40GB HDD and 1.42 GHz/80GB HDD, both with the G4 chip, analog/digital video out, Combo optical drive, Firewire, USB2, ethernet, and Panther/iLife included--and from reports, it is very, very small. In a brushed-metal enclosure, square-shaped and two inches tall (no reports on the width and depth measurements aside from that it can "fit into the palm of your hand"). This will make the Mac very competitive in the low-end market.

And then there's the iPod Shuffle (early photo), the tiny version (pack-of-gum sized, one ounce) of the iPod mini, a flash-memory iPod without a screen per se; the two models are 512 MB of memory for $99 and 1GB for $149.99, shipping immediately. So far, almost everything at this expo has been predicted by the rumor sites--few surprises, but probably a lot of happy campers out there. Probably in an hour or so the Apple web sites will be updated and the rest of us can see this cool stuff--but not quite yet. And I am dead tired and have to go to sleep.

Update: Okay, I stayed up just a bit longer. The Apple web site now has everything up. The iMac Mini looks like a small white bento box! I keep looking for the umeboshi. Those who live in Japan will understand.

Heck, I wasn't planning on it, but I might even buy one of these things...

...When It Works

Haven't been able to get anything done, including blogging, for the past 24 hours, because KDDI crapped out on me. If I hadn't complained loudly, they would've kept me hanging another one or two days, but I did insist and so they sent someone over a day after the outage started. And it's not just the Internet, it's also my landline telephone line. Apparently their "portability" between the lines is not even close to being as seamless and easy as they made it out to be when they were selling it.

Since mid-afternoon, I've had 5- or 10-minute islands of Internet workability, this being the latest--and if the KDDI guy, who spent an hour traipsing around my apartment opening up every phone jack panel and cutting a few internal lines, knows more than he's letting on, then maybe it'll actually stay on--but I'm not holding my breath. As it is, I've lost a lot of work time--and my phone line is still dead, and may be for another three or four days.

So far, I'm not incredibly impressed with the stability of the service, even though the speed is killer when it does work....

Yowza--This F/O Is Fast

One piece of evidence that the new fiber optic Internet connection I just got is indeed blazing: I tested large downloads from big-name sites, both Apple and Microsoft, and got the following measure:

The download was about 300 MB and took a little more than 100 seconds--almost 3 MB per second, or 24 Mbps. Not too shabby at all. Unfortunately, not everyone has such a high-speed upload connection, meaning that while I can potentially get 45 Mbps, I really won't, unless I download simultaneously from several sources--something which does not often happen. But it's nice to have the speed. For example, movie trailers from Apple's site come down about 3 or 4 times faster than I can watch them.

And the difference, the contrast between now and 4 years ago when I was limited to ISDN at 64 Kbps, feeling lucky if I was getting a download at 6 KB/sec, and now getting nearly 500 times that speed in a real-world test...

What, am I crowing too much?

Did You iFall For It?

A series of photos and a movie were recently released that appeared to be a sneak peek at the new "iHome," supposedly the "headless iMac" that is rumored to be the big release at MacWorld this week. The photos, at first glance, seem convincing, and a lot of people excitedly believed that these were genuine images of the real deal:

It would seem to be too elaborate to be a hoax, too well-produced.

But there are problems that people soon started pointing out: first, the font is wrong; Apple uses Myriad, but the typeface on the box in the photos is called Frutiger. The box itself is in fact an iBook box. The handle on the box is positioned so that if held, the printing on the side of the box would be upside-down. Apple would release this in the US first, and so would not use the British "Centre" spelling. "iHome" is not yet trademarked by Apple. And people in the know say that the styrofoam fitting is imperfect, as well as many other small details. But if none of this is proof enough for you, look at this:

First of all, you can see the piece of paper with the fake name attached to the box pretty clearly. They did not even seem to glue the edges down very well, or used too heavy a paper--you can see the raised leading edge of the paper showing as a contrasty white line about a quarter- to a half-inch from the front edge of the box, highlighted in red in the bottom part of the image. The red circle shows the corner of the box which seems to be dented, unlikely for a brand-new box in its packing. This next photo seals the deal as far as the attached piece of paper is concerned:

Some people also point to the lack of RCA/S-Video ports as proof, but there is a port on the back (second from far right) that could be a custom video-out jack like that used on some Apple portables, which uses a converter cable to lead to RCA and S-Video (come to think of it, the ports almost look like they were stolen from an iBook; the ports shown here have a gap between the firewire and USB ports, and there are two firewire ports instead of one, but aside from that, they match the iBook ports exactly). But there is enough overwhelming evidence otherwise to conclusively prove this to be a fake.

But who knows? Apple is not new to the game of rumor-mongering. Perhaps they are responsible for this, trying to discredit the rumors which they obviously believe are far too close to the mark this year (considering their lawsuit against Think Secret). A fake like this could make people think twice. Or, for all we know, there is a new machine that looks just like this and Apple made the fake to throw people off from it. Doubtful, of course.

One thing for sure: this is generating a lot of buzz for the upcoming Expo, and that can't be bad for Apple at all. We all love rumors, getting a sneak peek. But let's just wait for the real deal. After all, rumors in the past have heightened our expectations too high from time to time, leading to disappointments. So just wait and see.

All New Slime

The Slimeball Presidency, Part II.

Alberto Gonzales will probably be confirmed as the new Attorney General, despite his having forwarded and approved of the president subverting the law and ordering torture on suspects. This would be achieved by granting immunity to those the president ordered to torture people--effectively using the the president's power to commit illegal acts at will. If this sounds slightly Nixonian, it is because it is--the assumption that the president is above the law. You thought Ashcroft was bad?

Let's not forget that Gonzales is really not much more than a class-A flunky for Bush, who got his start as counselor to Bush as governor of Texas, whose main distinction was that he got Bush out of trouble when Bush's attempt to look like an everyman by doing jury duty backfired when it threatened to expose Bush's drunk driving conviction. Gonzales was the one who got Bush out with the weaseling "logic" that the governor should not be part of a jury that decides the sentence of a person who might appeal for clemency to the governor--as if there was more than a one-in-a-billion chance that a nobody convicted of a drunk-driving charge would be asking the governor for a pardon, or that it would really present any kind of conflict whatsoever. More recently, Gonzales was the one responsible for vetting Bernard Kerik, a job which he failed at miserably. This guy's supposed to be our top lawman?

I am a little surprised, actually, that the right wing hasn't pulled out the old "Democrats are racists for opposing our extremist right-wing nutcase nominee because s/he's a minority" chestnut, but maybe that's just because it looks like Gonzales will pass. Whoopee for us.

And then there's the revelation that the Bush administration paid out nearly a quarter of a million dollars as a bribe to a conservative black journalist to push the president's agenda on education to the people who would most likely get hurt by it. The grateful reporter gave air time to Bush staffers and even urged other journalists to push the same agenda.

This is a bit similar to the time when the Bush administration abused their funding powers to create fake news stories about Bush's Medicare program (complete with fake news reporters) which acted as Bush campaign commercials, and then get local stations to run them as if they were real news. Of course, this all should be of little surprise, considering the Bush administration's success in turning the journalistic community into a harem of whores for the administration, but an outright bribe like this has got to be illegal. So what will happen? Just add it to the list of felonies committed by this administration so it can just lay there for a while and be ignored and eventually dismissed.

One thing that these two items bring in to focus is that this administration considers itself above the law, and has no qualms about doing whatever it desires to subvert or just outright break the law of the land. There's your "values" for you.

The Unpopular "Mandate"

While Bush is out there claiming that he has a "mandate" despite a slim margin of 3% and only 51% of the vote, his followers are crowing about how more people voted for Bush this time than voted for any other president in any other election--whilst blissfully ignoring the fact that more people voted against Bush than they did against any other president in history.

But the fact remains that Bush is an unpopular president. He has the lowest poll numbers of any president entering his second term (most second-term presidents start at about 60%), and a new AP poll shows that his current approval rating is only 48%--and his disapproval rating is 49%. Not many undecideds there. As such, Bush is not only unpopular, but he is, most likely, the most divisive president ever. Such does not a mandate make.

No MacWorld Expo Live Webcast, But...

That there will be no live webcast is a downer, because it was the best way to both see and hear about new Apple products when they come out. It would start late night here in Japan, but I would always stay up to watch it.

The next best thing is to view the Mac rumor sites, which usually have reps at the event doing live blogging as the keynote goes on. Probably someone will do that this year as well, though Apple has been highly antagonistic to these sites in recent times. But someone is bound to have live input on this.

There is a bright spot though: the keynote speech may be available online some time after the event is over. So for us here in Japan, where the keynote starts at like 2:00 am, it might be ready and waiting on the web when we wake up here the following morning. By that time, though, one could just as easily look at any of the Mac sites and get the main gist in a few seconds' time... but watching the keynote can be a lot more fun.

Cityscapes with the New Camera

I haven't had much chance to get out as I'm resting up from the whole nosebleed situation, but at least I can take snaps out the window, as I have before. And jet lag, for all its inconvenience, does wake you up in time for the sunrise.

This one was just out the dining room window at sunrise. But then I decided to take the elevator up to the top of the building, where there is a landing which affords much better photos:

This is fully zoomed-out of the Tokyo cityscape from about 20 km out...

And above, this is zoomed in on Shinjuku--but this image is scaled down to fit a 450-pixel width, while the image below is simply cropped. I'll have to wait for a very clear daytime shot to get the best detail on these buildings. The building at center, by the way, is the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.

And finally, a shot of Tokyo Tower and its surrounds. That's a bridge over the Tama River in the lower foreground.

Home

Ah, may it be ever so smelly upon return. Not because it's a sty or anything, I always clean it up before traveling--but after 2-3 weeks away, it starts to get that moldy empty-apartment smell. I've try desiccators, leaving windows cracked open, closing doors and closing up drains, nothing keeps the smell from accumulating. Actually, the bath and toilet rooms are the only ones that don't have the smell, so go figure. It takes a few days to get rid of, but it's survivable. I just wish I knew what it was and how to keep it from happening.

The trip home went quite well, aside from my forgetting my cold cuts for noshing on the flight. The trip was about as good as one could normally expect from economy class. And, hey, I didn't erupt into nosebleeds over the Pacific, so how much could you ask for? At the airport, the bags came down quickly enough, I got waved through customs, and there was a Narita Express at just the right time to allow me to takkyubin (express deliver) my bigger bag and then sit down for a caramel frappuccino at the airport Starbucks before getting on the train.

Arriving home was a slightly different matter. KDDI pulled a fast one on me. I got home to no Internet. I had ordered their "Hikari Plus" vDSL service a few weeks before I left, but the KDDI rep who came to help me fill out the forms promised me a mid-January start date, and said that the ADSL would continue until I got and set up the vDSL modem and asked them to switch. I left Japan on December 14th, early. And that's when KDDI sent out the modem by takkyubin--a month before they said it would come. Had they warned me that such a thing might even possibly happen, I would have told them to not do it during my traveling. But early they were, and so they started my vDSL service on the 16th, and cut off my ADSL--without any indication I was ready for that--on the 18th. But since I had no idea the vDSL stuff would start so soon--a month before I was told to expect it--I could of course not be there to get the modem or set it up (being 5,000 miles away at the time). And when the ADSL got cut off, my HDD recorder lost its connection to the scheduling service. It still recorded the shows I asked for, but all are mislabeled.

But worse, I was supposed to email my folks and let them know I had gotten home OK. I couldn't stay awake long enough to catch them in the morning in California, and had promised to send them an email saying I was OK. But here was my Internet connection severed, with no way to connect to the new vDSL, the modem being with the takkyubin people. Fortunately, my brother--also living in Tokyo--was able to shoot off the email, so there was no panic at home, but I am somewhat miffed at KDDI for botching that one. And they still say that I have to pay for two and a half weeks of vDSL service despite not receiving any service whatsoever during that time. I'm not paying for being cut off without notice, not if I have anything to say about it.

But the modem got takkyubin'd to me this morning after I called them (it got delivered along with the second suitcase, in fact), and with a little assistance, I got it set up. A speed check claimed I was getting 44 megabits download speed, and 13.5 megabits upload. Not too shabby--more than 100 times what a lot of people in the U.S. get nowadays. Certainly fast enough for whatever I'm doing on the net these days.

Now to get over jet lag, and finish recovering so there's no chance of me bleeding profusely when I start teaching again next week.

Heading Home

Wow. I'm finally heading home. Not that there's anything bad or good about leaving where I am or getting to where I'm going, it just seemed there for some time that I wasn't gonna go anywhere for a while. The nosebleed was just so unpredictable--there was no telling when it would stop or rebleed or why. Probably pretty soon I'll post in gruesome detail about the nosebleed situation, because it helps to record your experiences to help others (we wish we could've found something like that to better understand our situation). But not now. It almost feels too much like jinxing the trip home, and right now, the last thing I need is a jinx.

Hiring Foreign Teachers

Either the JET Program is being junked, or Japanese schools are taking a wrong turn in hiring teachers. A news story in Japan Today reports that vacationing foreign university students can, from February, serve as language instructors at Japanese public elementary, junior high, and high schools. Now, if we're talking JET-style human-tape-recorder jobs, then okay, I guess. But the article leaves open the possibility that these people will be teaching classes, possibly even solo. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I think the policy up until now has been that no foreign teachers, no matter how qualified, were allowed to teach solo in any public schools. If this new policy has university students teaching classes solo, then they're out of their mind. But I figure there's gotta be some qualification of the circumstances in there somewhere. Anyone know about that?

What Japanese schools need is to allow fully qualified non-Japanese TOEFL teachers to get full-time jobs teaching language in those schools; that alone will seriously improve the end result of those long years of otherwise half-wasted study. In my experience as a student in American schools, I never saw a class that was taught by a non-native speaker. I'm sure there are quite a few in America, but I'll bet that they're the exception rather than the rule. And I think it's a good rule to have someone who is both intimately familiar with the language in question, and with professional credentials, to teach the class.

News Leak on New Apple iMac?

The British News Telegraph has a blurb out on the headless iMac which has not much new except it does offer one interesting detail: that the computer is packed in a box 1.7 inches thick. Unless it's a misunderstanding or simply made up, it offers an idea of the form factor of the new computer, rumored to be "iPod-like" in appearance. One wonders if the computer doubles as a base station for the ipod--just set it down on a port atop the computer and it connects and recharges.

One week left before the MacWorld Expo.

Cassini at Iapetus

One of my favorite moons in the solar system is Iapetus, and the Cassini probe just made its closest flyby of the moon a few days ago, at the end of 2004. Iapetus is an alluring moon because of a fascinating surface feature: an incredibly high-contrast swath of blackened material over much of its surface. Look at the first image here: it looks like you are looking at the shadow side of the moon, but that is a full-on bright side view; the "shadowed" areas are the dark swath I mentioned.

Other features show themselves at this distance as well: note three very large impact craters, the largest located on the left edge. Also note a ridge on the middle right that leads to a small visible rise on the limb of the moon (see below). There will be some talk about whether the ridge is related to the dark material, which is as black as coal.

The contrast can be seen even better in this time-lapse image, taken of the dark side of the moon, brightened by the light side of Saturn.

There is also this image of one of the large craters, caught very nicely in light and shadow.

Cassini also just released the Huygens probe, a package that will, in ten days, fly into the atmosphere of Titan (the largest moon in the solar system, and the only one with an atmosphere) and perhaps give us some astounding data of the satellite close-up.

So far, NASA has been just stellar this year, with the energizer-bunny Mars rovers (images all available here) which have so far outlasted their 90-day lifetimes by nine months, and now the Cassini probe doing so spectacularly well, imaging the Saturn system. We need to hear more praise for this government-agency-that-could.

The Cassini probe can be followed at CICLOPS (more of a diary of events) or at the European Space Agency, but the best page is at NASA, with a great image library, including the latest, unprocessed raw images (which NASA has been publishing from all its missions) in a searchable database. Cool.

Bits of Stuff, January 1, 2005 (U.S. Time)

Bits of leftover stuff that I won't blog on in detail here (at least not yet), but which are still of interest:

The Republican party is all about letting a close race stay final. No more recounts, we won the vote, even if there were huge irregularities and even outright fraud, an election is an election, we won so that's it, stop the counting don't count anymore don't even think of counting any... what? We lost? Well, damn, we have to have an entirely new election! it will be an incredible injustice to everyone everywhere unless we win--er, have an election where we win--er, where there is a fair election, nudge nudge wink wink.

I'm not kidding. The GOP seem to trust machines more than humans, because they loathe hand-counting of votes. But the manual recount uncovered 700 ballots that the machines had misread or had been rejected, and in addition to that, found that some absentee ballots had been wrongly disqualified (many of which were likely from the military). But when the votes were really counted and certified, when the election was most accurately measured, the Republican that lost just couldn't handle it. (At least the county auditor, a Republican, disagrees with Rossi.)

As I've said before, the GOP will do anything to win an election they lost fair and square, no matter how sordid or dirty their method: impeach, steal, or recall--but now we can add "revote" to the list.

What will they think of next?

I was kind of surprised by what I saw on Comedy Central last night. I was watching the South Park marathon leading up to midnight, and toward the end they showed the movie, "Bigger, Longer and Uncut" (script). Now, had I thought about it, I should have foreseen the difficulties involved--half the movie consists of obscenities never allowed on TV; to clean it up, the movie would have to be literally butchered.

So, to my surprise, they showed it uncensored. In this age where networks shudder in fear that even the suggestion of obscenity could get them fined in the millions of dollars, Comedy Central, bless their hearts, showed the whole movie with untold hundreds of f***s, s***s, and other creatively constructed obscene expressions (such as "testicle-s***ting rectal-wart"), including the entire musical number, "Shut Your F***ing Face, Uncle F***er."

They achieved this, apparently, by using he following warning:

TV MA LSV MATURE AUDIENCE ONLY This program is specifically designed to be viewed by adults and therefore may be unsuitable for children under 17. This program contains graphic violence, explicit sexual activity, and crude vulgar language.

I, for one, am impressed. And Comedy Central used good judgment, too--to keep that kind of thing away from the kiddies, they showed the movie late in the evening on New Year's Eve--the one night of the year, after all, when young kids are least likely to stay up late!

Mac Rumor sites are abuzz over what will be released in ten days at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. There are always rumors swirling around the new products that Apple so closely guards, and usually they do a pretty good job of keeping things mum. But this time, there is a fairly strong expectations for a "headless" iMac, that is, an iMac without a monitor attached to it--something Apple has never had since it first introduced the iMac in 1998. This would reduce the price of the iMac to maybe $500, and the form factor would apparently be similar to that of the iPod--the computer intended, some say, to attract PC users who have gotten the iPod and would like to expand their Apple experience.

Also reported is the long-rumored iWork suite, which would include Keynote (the replacement for PowerPoint), and Pages (formerly called "Document," Apple's word processor), and, presumably, other apps, likely including the now suite-free apps Mail and iCal. No word out yet on a possible spreadsheet app.

It should be an interesting expo, and probably will be webcast. I'll try to give info about the link for the webcast when I find out about it.

And finally, we have the next step in the GOP's campaign to complete seize all power and disenfranchise Democrats: getting rid of the filibuster. Despite the fact that the Democrats have been blocking only a fraction of the judicial appointments from Bush that the Republicans did against Clinton, Bush has taken 20 judges that the Democrats blocked and recycled them, as Republicans work to get rid of the ability of the Democrats to have any say whatsoever in the workings of Congress.

Phishing

My father just got his first phishing email. "Phishing" is a "leet" word, intentionally spelled wrong in the fashion of "warez" (illegally copied software), "n00b," (newbie), or "h4x" (hacks). "Leet" is short for "elite," a kind of hacker's written slang, invented in the late 80's probably to allow hackers on BBS or chat areas to talk about illicit deeds while avoiding text filters. Phishing is certainly an illicit activity, and fits into that category nicely.

Phishing is when someone sends out massive emailings designed to get unknowing victims to cough up vital information, like bank account numbers and passwords. The email is often easily spotted as fake, but if a scammer sends out a million emails, they're bound to get several bites, ergo the reference to fishing.

Today's phishing scams are centered on bank accounts primarily (though eBay and PayPal are hit quite often as well). You get an email from a bank; sometimes you belong to it, sometimes not, it's all part of the fishing experience. Let's say you're a customer of the bank, for this example. The email looks very official, and appears to come from a valid address with the bank's domain name (e.g., users-billing21@citibank.com). It may or may not contain the bank's logo and other official-looking graphics. The email is written in a professional-looking way, and it contains an alarming message: your account at the banks is going to be suspended. Now, nobody wants that! The concern that such a thing might happen will drive a lot of people to give respect to the email.

The reason given for account closure is usually that someone has been trying to access your account with an incorrect password, and in order to ensure security, they will suspend your account--unless, of course, you go to the bank's web site and verify your logon information. Now, the link is the tricky part. Usually they will display a link that looks quite official--again, with the bank's domain name. Here's where the slight of hand comes in, and they hope you won't be looking all too carefully.

Now, when you are presented with a link, there are two parts to it: the link text that is displayed to you, and the actual address which it links to. With a link as part of an email message, you might view it in a browser or in an email program. In the browser, the link is supposed to be more transparent; as you hold the cursor over the link, the address it links to should appear in the status bar (the strip at the bottom of the browser's window). Here, let's try it. Hold the cursor over this link: http://www.cnn.com . Note that the URL in your status bar at bottom left is not the same as the one displayed in the link. That's because the displayed link can be anything you want. The same is true in your email program, like Eudora, except that the link is even more opaque because the actual link is usually not displayed in a status bar or elsewhere; you click on the link, and it just takes you there.

The reason I'm telling you about the status bar in browsers and the real link is not just to demonstrate how you can be faked out, but also because that's a good thing to look at in browsers before following a link. You can be faked out. You should not just jump willy-nilly into any link thrown at you, especially in email, where spammers may have given it to you. Not only could it lead to a fake site, but it could also include a code that clearly identifies you as being the visitor. But that's another scam, so let's get back to the phishing.

So you get the email, apparently from the bank, telling you your account will be suspended, and to stop that follow this link. On the face of it, the link will appear to be one that goes to the bank's domain, or will just be a link saying, "To confirm your bank account records please click here." The thing is, if you follow the link, it will not take you to the bank's web site, it will take you to the scammer's web site, which is reconstructed to appear identical to the bank's page, using graphics stolen from that page, and to a great degree is completely stolen from the bank's site, so as to fool you into thinking you're at the bank's site.

There is a telltale, though: look in the URL window at the top of your browser window. When following a phishing link, you should see an address that looks like this: http://218.65.110.11/suntrust/internetbanking/ (though be careful--one of the security holes you hear about in Explorer allows hackers to fake even this). Note that it begins not with a domain, but with a number. That's an IP Address, which is the same to your browser as a domain name. But to you it's a number, and as such is nondescript and anonymous. That's what the scammers want--they want you not to know where you really are. That number I gave you--218.65.110.11--was the IP address of a real scammer who recently phished for me. That wasn't the address for the Sun Trust Bank, it was the address of the computer where the phisher was lurking.

So if I had gone to that page and input my user ID and password, I would have gotten an error message. And in the time it would have taken me to call the bank and ask what was wrong with their page, the scammer would already have gotten into my real account, changed the password, and done his best to empty it of all my money. What the scammer would really love is that after you get the error message, you simply give up and not look into any of this for a while. But they wouldn't need long. They tend to scram pretty fast--most links to phishers' fake bank pages go offline very quickly.

So don't trust any message like that, if for no other reason that banks never send emails like that. The only time banks will send you email is if you send them an email query first, and even then, they will address you directly by name (phishers don't do that), and they don't respond with a detailed message, just with a note to go to their main home page (they do not even give you a link, just tell you to go to their honest domain).

So the simple solution is not to trust any email message that claims to be from a bank. Beyond that, don't trust any official-looking email that does not address you direct by name; don't try to communicate with banks by email; and for that matter, don't trust any email that has to do with financial institutions at all. And never enter a financial web site through a link--type in the domain name directly.

Divorce, Washington Style

How's this for screwed up: a woman in Washington State escaped an abusive marriage two years ago, when her husband was jailed for beating her. Last April, she filed for divorce. The divorce came through, but now it's rescinded. Why? Because she is currently pregnant by her new partner.

Yeah, I know, that's like a "Wha???" kind of thing. But it's true. She got pregnant by a different man after she had filed for divorce. She was getting on with her life, thought that she'd left her wife-beating husband behind, and now the State of Washington throws this at her.

The reason? According to Spokane County Superior Court Judge Paul Bastine, the judge who rescinded the divorce, he doesn't want the child to be illegitimate. "It's not the child's fault that mom got pregnant," the judge said. "The answer is, you don't go around doing that when you're not divorced." This, even thought the woman has clearly stated that she wants to marry the child's real father before the child is born. She commented, "If this court vacates my divorce and requires me to stay married to a man I have no desire ever to have a relationship with and who has brought significant physical harm to me over the years, I would be emotionally devastated. If the court vacates my divorce and stays it until the birth of my child, it will prevent me from marrying the father of my child prior to her birth."

Who wants to bet money against the chance that this idiot of a judge is a Republican?

New Year's Eve

Usually I come back to Japan from my American Christmas vacation in time for New Year's, so I can enjoy the event in Japan at a local shrine where they have fireworks, a traditional Japanese band, shi-shi mai dances, chidren dressed as hyotto-ko, free hot sake, and a nice bonfire. This year I'll be enjoying it at home because of the whole nosebleed situation. The last time I stayed this late was the millennium, but I did not think to ask ahead--my family was planning nothing for the evening, and I would up watching TV at midnight by myself. But this time promises to be better, as everyone who can stay awake is planning to do so, and we'll have a nice, warm little celebration at home.

Happy New Year!