狂った!

I’ve moved the blog to WordPress, and it can now be found here.

Hip-hop Kung-Fu… how can you go wrong?

This is a clip from the ever popular trivia izumi. The TV program is conducting an experiment to see how many fathers will allow their daughters to marry a man older than the father.

This makes for an excellent study since the “boyfriend” is basically saying minor variations of the same thing over and over again. The cameras are hidden so the fathers reactions are all real.

またあいのりをアップルロードしました。是非御覧なさい。

本日の８月２８日のあいのりです。

Well, after a year or so of development Matt and i finally managed to get the Whit McLeod revamped website live. Not very proud of the backend work i did so much (a lot of hacks based on last minute customer changes), but Matt did a great job designing it and it does make the furniture look good. They got three orders within the first week!!

I guess the really snazzy photographs help a lot too. Return of the furniture pron?

あいのりはだんだん暗くなってきた気がします。何年前からずっとファンだったんだけど、年明けから、大分変わったと思います。

本日のあいのりです。

Jun-Daiたちへ。日本語の勉強に対して、テレビ番組を見るのはかなり役に立つと思います。よく下のほうに字幕がついているので、見ながら、知らない単語等が調べれる。ちょっとやってみてください。

A strange experiement i conducted in Japan (mostly) with various reflective surfaces. Most of them didn’t turn out so well but some of them came out okay. Well, at least well enough to post it to a blog.

Ah, such a great concept, and an even better name: Boba Tea+Martini=Bobatini. Check out the video to see how it turns out.

After much discussion about how to backup your mac10 incase of disaster on the mac10 list recently, i decided to write my own script that takes advantage of rsync’s “don’t copy the file unless it changed feature”.

You can download mrbackup.sh here. It includes the script, a readme and an example crontab file.

My all time favorite ad campaign ever.

In the dark hours of Apple Computings long and embattled history, the Steve Jobs headless giant, still wheeling from the release of windows95, shot itself in the other foot by opening up it’s hardware market to… (Que. scary music) the clones.

The clones, of course, were smaller, faster and smarter, and quickly began to gobble up Apple’s already shrinking hardware market. The Macintosh had been boxed even further into it’s corner: it was nothing but the expensive toy of artists. Weirdos. Freaks. It was a time when it was largely considered that it was just a matter of time before Apple withered up and died.

And then along came Power Computing.

Power Computings message was simple: The all-out-war against wintel would be won by selling zillions of faster, way faster macs. This is not the subtext, this actually was the message. “Let’s kick wintels ass”, “Join the mac resistance”, “The counter assault begins!”, and so on. All of this done in a not-so-subtle half Maoist Communist Propaganda, half comic book drawing style. They were very loud, and really fast. They held the exact opposite image of the wintel axis. Where wintel was gray, blue and cool, power computing was red hot and angry. I always felt that more than selling clones, perhaps they were selling attitude.

If nothing else it was certainly pure marketing genious. Their imagery is both inspiring and unforgettable. My longtime friend, and Macadvocate (even during the dark hours) STILL HAS this poster hanging in his bedroom behind his desk.

“You can take my mac… …when you pry my cold dead fingers off the mouse.” says a blond with a smoking .45 in her hand and an American Flag as the backdrop. A quick look at the “Seybold, San Francisco 1996” copy at the top and you realize that it turns ten next year.

Jobs wiped out the clones, all of them, in one swift blow when he re-took the helm at Apple. And then from there here turned things around, just like he always does. In fact, at least financially, things have never been better than the are today for Apple.

But at the same time something has been lost. The end of the dark ages also seems to co-inside with the end of the “think different” movement. The loyalists who would never give in to a wintel empire. Wouldn’t dare think about using IDE when there was SCSI. That unique group of artist elites seemed to have quietly been absorbed into some sort of larger faceless cloud that makes up the industry today.

I sometimes wonder if perhaps the greatest creativity in rise of the personal computer movement is already behind us. And whether or not that can be attributed to the death of the clone, and the dark ages at Apple Computing.