Makiko Itoh : Not a nameless cat.

Links for 2009-11-07 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Photo: free photo and free stock photo - Photoxpress
free stock photos

Email woes

maki — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:31:20 +0000

To "Victoria": I tried to email you back but your email inbox is full.

So it's really you, not me.

Links for 2009-10-14 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Snow Peak | Backpacking Cutlery
Great looking titanium cutlery for backpacking, good for bentos too.

Links for 2009-10-07 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Comparing 300 yen-and-under bentos (Japanese)
@nifty：デイリーポータルZ：300円以下の激安べんとう、食べくらべ: Comparing bentos that sell for 300 yen and under in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Mainly they use cheap protein and lots of rice.

Links for 2009-10-05 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

smarthouse architekturkonzept | Home
minergie modern prefab houses, not too expensive.
Einfamilienhäuser in massiver Ziegelbauweise zum Festpreis - SWISSHAUS AG
another prefab modern house builder

Links for 2009-09-23 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 PDT

La gamelle du midi revient en force - Vidéo du journal televise : Le journal de 13h - TF1
French TV news report on the growing trend in France of bringing lunch from home. Mentions bento, including Bento & Co website!

Links for 2009-09-21 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Drinking straw condiment packets
A neat trick with straws for carrying powdered condiments.

Links for 2009-09-18 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Japan's white-collar workers turn to homemade lunches in face of recession
Another 'poor Japanese salarymen take homemade bentos to work' article. With accompanying video of white dude making his own bento.

Pot, kettle, black and Kindle: The New Yorker Digital Edition sucks

maki — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 09:42:19 +0000

In a recent article, which thankfully is readable on their website, The New Yorker, or rather writer Nicolson Baker, dissed Amazon's Kindle soundly. The main complaints: The screen is not white enough, the digital ink is not inky enough, not enough books available, and so on and so forth. I do not have a Kindle, mainly it's not available here in Europe (I could buy one in the U.S. but it would be useless, since can't download any books here). But the article did take the edge away from my formerly very deep desire to obtain a Kindle, once a European edition came out.

However, what made me snort in derision was the fact that, while The New Yorker features a 6,000+ word article saying how unworkable the Kindle is, they aren't exactly blazing new trails on the digital reading material front with their Digital Edition. Basically, it sucks and is a huge pain in the ass.

I love The New Yorker, and had an ongoing subscription for all the years I lived in New York. When I moved to Switzerland I wanted to continue, but it would cost me $112 a year, or nearly 3 times what a U.S. subscription costs. So I had contented myself with the articles they put on their website.

Still, I did miss getting the whole thing, so when the Digital Edition was announced earlier this year, I subscribed right then and there. (Expats like myself are the ideal customer for digital books. I read a lot of books on screen, and get most of my news from "back home" online.) A Digital Edition subscription costs the same as a U.S. dead-tree subscription, $39.95/year. I was happy.

Until I opened up my first digital issue. Basically it's a collection of rasterized images of each 2-page spread in the magazine, arranged in the same order as the paper magazine. Here's a spread from the most recent issue as it first appears on-screen (click to see full window version:)

Yep, totally unreadable like that. It's not meant to be readable I think. It's just a pretty picture.

So, to read a page, you have to click on it. You then get a legible size pretty picture of the 3-column layout, which you have to scroll up-down, left-right, several times to read. This is not user friendly.

Add to that the annoyance of slow loading pages. This occurs whether I am on a dialup or a very fast near-a-hub connection. Pages usually load within 10 seconds, but sometimes they get stuck for minutes.

They did however go to the trouble of making the URLs in the ads clickable. Oh joy.

Reading the Digital Edition is so annoying that I haven't really used it much and will probably not renew my subscription. I just wait for the articles to come out on their web site, which is set up for reading on-screen properly (being that it's a web site and all).

What I wonder is, why can't The New Yorker arrange all of their content in an on-screen readable manner instead of giving us this digitized-paper nonsense? Surely all of their content is in digital form already anyway. I suppose they are trying to recreate the paper reading experience, but really, it does not work.

(You do have the option of printing out every page. But surely only people over 60 (aka my parents' generation) print out web pages to read.)

One great plus of the Digital Edition is the access to the complete magazine archive, going back to 1925. To read the 1925 edition I will tolerate this scanned-paper nonsense. But for the 2009 edition? I don't think so. I am contemplating buying the DVD archive, which costs less than $20, but it only goes up to 2005. Grumble.

Anyway, if you already have a paper subscription to The New Yorker, you can get access to the digital edition for free. A digital-only subscription is not quite worth it. And really, if you are going to go around pontificating about 'the future of digital books' blah blah, fix your own house first.

Star Trek, and movie watching in France vs. Switzerland

maki — Sun, 10 May 2009 11:45:49 +0000

I've only mentioned this on my About page, but I am a long time Star Trek fan. At one point in my life I even was the type of Trek fan (Trekkie, Trekker, whatever) that went to conventions (though I never got into Trek cosplay). For what it's worth, I have autographed photos of all of the captains except for Jonathan Frakes/Scott Bakula. Yipes.

My Trek fandom started at an early age, when I used to watch the original series in repeat on British television, then later, dubbed (!) on Japanese TV. I was especially fond of the mythological references, since I was also deeply into Greek and Roman mythology at the time too (Who Mourns For Adonais? is one of my favorites from the original series). Later on, I became a fan of The Next Generation, though the first couple of seasons were a bit hard to get through if I recall. I love and still love DS9, and Voyager - well, even though the series itself had its ups and downs, it indirectly lead me to a very interesting period of my life, which I may talk about some time.

I lost my Star Trek obsession though somewhere around season 2 or 3 of Enterprise. I can't quite put my finger on why, but that series just didn't grab me. I still haven't watched the whole series yet. Still, it was sad to see it cancelled. And in the following years, the Star Trek franchise itself seemed to be dying slowly. They shut down the Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton last year (yep, been there too). Star Trek fandom seemed to be relegated to the handful of diehard fans that the general public sneer at.

The general public would scoff at this too probably, but I firmly believe that a world without Star Trek going on somewhere is a world that is a bit less optimistic about the future. There are plenty of other great scifi franchises, from Star Wars to Stargate to Battlestar Galactica and more of course. Star Trek is the one that seems to have the most faith in humankind. That's the main reason why I've always loved its universe.

So, the new Star Trek movie.

I resisted reading too much about the new J.J. Abrams-helmed Star Trek movie beforehand - whether they were faithful to the 'canon' or not, whether this actor was suited to the roles they were taking over. What's the use of worrying about a movie before you actually see it anyway?

I saw the movie yesterday, and, as an old school Star Trek fan, I loved it. Forget about the nitpicky things like casting and how close they adhere to the established canon and so on; what I really appreciated about this movie is that, while adding a lot of modern things, it really did stay true to the spirit, the philosophy if you will, of this particular fictional universe. This is a universe where Starfleet is a force for good, with flawed yet ultimately fine, upstanding and heroic humanoids (no insect-like species or so on seen yet in Starfleet, only two-leggged ones) as officers.

I also liked that the cool-whizzy CGI/visual parts did not overwhelm the narrative. They were there of course, and very impressive indeed (I especially liked the robot-cops chasing after the young Kirk in one of the opening sequences) but they were definitely not the stars. The characters are.

And, not to spoil things, but I think overall the new bunch of actors taking over these by now mythic roles did a great job, both in terms of keeping the gist of the original characters and updating them. Zachary Quinto as Spock looks uncannily like a young Leonard Nimoy - as he might have looked about 10 years before he was Spock on the original series. This is a great achievement by both the actor and the makeup department. Actually, just about all of the characters are plausible, more or less, as younger versions of the original series' crew.

If this movie ends up rebooting the franchise and making a whole new generation fans of the Star Trek universe, as an old timer I'd be very happy. Live long and prosper, Star Trek!

Movies in France vs. Switzerland

I went to see the Star Trek movie in Lyon, which is about a 2 and a half hour drive away from where I am living at the moment, in the Provence area. Why such a long drive? All the theatres playing it nearer here had it (shudder) dubbed. Finding a version originale was difficult. Original language with subtitles is the norm in Zürich, not to mention the Geneva-Lausanne area too (we often took a trip out there to catch movies that were released much earlier in French-speaking areas than in German-speaking areas), but apparently not so in most of France, with the exception of central Paris. (This is the case in Germany too.)

This could end up being a serious strike against the idea of moving to France. I don't go out to the movies every week or anything, but when I do I certainly want the original version. To me it's hard to fathom why anyone would prefer a dubbed version to the original, but apparently this is preferred by most people. (When we bought the tickets at the theatre in Lyon, the ticket seller warned us that it was version originale, I suppose to ward off complaints.)

Right now, I'm pondering whether a 2+ hour drive to Lyon, or even a 4+ hour drive to Geneva, would be worth doing on a semi-regular basis, should I decide to settle in this area. Living somewhere permanently is so different from going there on vacation, as I'm finding out in so many ways right now.