malvasia bianca

• Untangle, a flash game about representing graphs as planar with straight edges. (Hmm, are there planar graphs that can’t be drawn with straight edges? Not clear to me.) I linked to another game like this before, but this one’s better.
• TypeRacer, if you’re curious how fast you type. (I’m usually in the 95-100 wpm range, it seems.) (Via Game | Life.)
• Japanese anatomy scrolls from 1819.
• The Piet programming language. (Via Notional Slurry.)

• An amazing video:

  (You’ll have to bear with it a bit, it doesn’t really get going until about 40 second in.) (Via Penny Arcade)

• Japanese highway interchanges. (Via Pink Tentacle.)

• How to crush an egg:

  (Via Vacuum.)

• Pretty pictures. (Via Drawn!.)
• Virtual methods in the CLR and JVM. (Perhaps only interesting to me because I’m so ignorant about the CLR…)
• Samuel R. Delany gets laid more than I do. (Click on “The Polymath”; not even direct-linkable, alas, let alone embeddable.)
• As a manager is explaining that photography is allowed in Union Station, a security guard comes over telling them to turn off the camera…

I was happy when volume 11 of the DVD of Hikaru No Go included 5 episodes instead of 4 - more stuff, and we’ll make it through the qualifying tournament, right? Well, no: more stuff, but they leave us half way through Hikaru’s match versus Ochi. (Instead of stopping before the match, as would have happened if they’d included 4 episodes.) Grr…

I was in Japantown in SF today, and picked up copies of Tales of Earthsea and Ocean Waves. (Both in Japanese, with English subtitles available.) The former of which I’m wondering about: no booklet, bad printing, claims to be region 1, and now that I’m poking around, I’m not convinced that there is a legitimate region 1 version available? We’ll see what the video/presentation quality is when I play it…

The latter is region 2; now I have to figure out how to play it as well. I’m planning to use my Mac for that; my options are:

1. Use an external DVD drive, set to region 2.
2. Use the internal DVD drive, with software that can read from all regions.
3. Use the internal DVD drive, set to region 2.
4. Use the internal DVD drive, with new firmware.

Which is more or less the current order that I’m planning to try them in: I have an external DVD drive around, so I might as well set it to region 2, but if I have to end up setting the internal DVD drive to region 2, no big deal - I don’t plan to start watching DVDs on it in general, and if I change my mind later, the machine will let me change regions back to region 1.

Still looking for a copy of Only Yesterday. I was thinking about doing an order from Amazon Japan soon; I guess I’ll just throw it on that.

Following Steve Yegge’s recommendation, we just finished watching Last Exile; it, like Haibane Renmei, is excellent. It took a little longer to get into the story this time, but somehow we slipped from “hmm, pretty interesting, nice mix of computerized and hand-drawn graphics” to “just how many days to we have to wait until the next DVD shows up, and why did we stick a regular movie in our queue instead of restricting ourselves to episodes of this series, anyways?” (The movie was History Boys, which I actually also recommend, just not when you’re in the middle of this series.)

Now that I think about it, both series do have some elements in common. Both set in a future world, where most of the technology feels like a not too distant (100-year old?) European style, but there are interjections of advanced technology controlled by mysterious forces. (More of that in this one than in Haibane.) Transcendence that isn’t particularly well explained, or really explained at all. (More of that in Haibane.) Hmm, maybe they don’t have much in comon after all; a lot more action here, more of an epic scale, more gizmos, somewhat more explanations.

We’ll take a break from his list now: Liesl’s dad gave her a few volumes of Slings & Arrows for her birthday, so that will be our series to spend time with for the time being. But I’m looking forward to getting back to his list: recommendations of that quality are a gift to cherish.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but learning Japanese continues to increase my sympathy towards kids who are learning to read and misread words in ways which seem inconceivable to me. My brain is pretty much incapable of looking at a word in English and not reading it immediately; the same is far from true in Japanese. For example, one of my vocabulary cards has a character written on the front, and the readings shutsu, desu, and deru on the back. (With their meetings.) At least that’s what I thought was written on the back for several days, until I took a closer book, and noticed that the second reading was dasu, not desu. Oops. I mean, it’s not like da and de even look similar, I simply wasn’t paying attention, and my brain isn’t yet wired to read correctly when I’m not paying attention.

I started off studying the language with the help of JapanesePod101 and a textbook (Japanese for Today). Then I added Read Japanese Today, which I continue to think is an excellent way to learn kanji. I’d also been using Kanji & Kana as a reference book, so I got my stroke order right when writing characters for vocabulary cards; over the last few month, however, I found myself browsing through it more often in odd moments.

It’s a book I’ve had around since the last time I tried to learn the language. It contains the government-approved list of 1945 basic kanji, showing how to write each, giving the various readings and meanings, as well as a few compounds in which they appear. And does so in an order based more or less on how important they are. A great book to have around, if you want to immerse yourself in the basic kanji; last decade, I tried to go through the book and memorize the kanji in order.

But I went too far with the book. At one point, I could go through the first 200 characters or so, and write them down in the order given in the book, with the proper stroke order. Which is a very seductive thing to do: it gives you something to practice if you just have some spare time, or are falling asleep at night, or whatever. The problem is that my memorizing of my strokes got ahead of my memorizing of the readings and the meanings, so things got unbalanced.

Because of my bad experience, I stayed away from doing the same thing this time. But then I glanced through the start of the book and realized that I claimed to know most of the characters on the first few pages. So what’s the harm in memorizing the order in the book, and reviewing the strokes in my head?

Thinking about it more, I think that, not only isn’t there harm, there’s virtue in it. If I claim I know a character, even if I’m only interested in reading the language rather than writing it, I have to be able to recognize it completely reliably; given the number of characters that look similar, in practice I can’t claim that unless I could write the character. But vocabulary cards, by their nature, don’t give me practice in writing characters. So I have to find another way to practice writing them; memorizing them in the order in that book is as good a way to practice that as I can think of.

Having said that, I don’t want to forget what happened last time. I think/hope I’m doing a better job of managing my learning; the key here is to not have my memorizing how to write the characters get ahead of my memorizing their readings/meanings. If I do that, I’ll be okay.

The other book I’m reading right now is Japanese the Manga Way. It’s a relatively informal grammar of the language, with examples taken from manga. Which works well: besides being fun, manga gives a natural source of language examples that are closer to regular spoken Japanese than other written examples would be.

Other things I like about the book: for one, I can occasionally figure out what the examples are saying, kanji and all, before reading the explanations. And, for another thing, it presents the grammatical points in a rather different order than other sources that I’m using. (Perhaps because it isn’t constrained by having examples only use material that has been previously introduced.). I like seeing another lens on the language, and one which is perhaps a bit more coherent than others I have access to, one which is less intent on mapping the grammar to concepts in English.

The other thing I’ve been doing is watching (the excellent) Last Exile in Japanese with subtitles; again, nice to occasionally be able to figure out by myself what people are saying. Don’t get me wrong, the vast majority of the time I depend very much on the subtitles, but I’m starting to get the feeling that it might really stick this time.

Or maybe I’ll burn out in another couple of months! Always a possibility…

Apologies for my recent silence; the cause is a combination of watching movies (well, DVDs, mostly Last Exile) and being pretty busy last weekend. But now I am, for once, caught up with my other odds and ends (i.e. reading blogs) early enough at night to actually be able to write something.

As I mentioned before, Miranda seems to have gotten serious about the idea of us writing a video game. And we actually have been spending some time on it over the last month, mostly at her prodding. So far, I’ve mostly been playing around with programming, while she draws pictures in a notebook. I’d been using rubygame as a programming framework, and I still might stick with it, but it doesn’t have support for sprites at different depths; this is a problem if, say, you want to have a character walk behind a tree. So now I’m thinking I’ll go with gosu: not much documentation yet, but it seems to be able to do what I want, its sample game is extremely short yet fully functional, and when I was poking around its web site, I saw several pages that showed signs of having been edited within the last hour. All good stuff.

So, right now, I’m trying to find time to convert my rubygame spike into a gosu spike; assuming it goes well, I think I’ll go with gosu. But what should Miranda do while I’m doing my programming?

She’s drawn lots of neat pictures, and I’m sure she could profitably continue along those lines for quite some time. But, if you’re doing things incrementally, you want something functional crossing all layers as soon as possible; by now, my programming is coming along well enough that I could imagine using a picture of hers, and she has drawings to give me. So the only thing stopping us from putting the two together (other than that I’m switching development frameworks!) is that I don’t know how to get her pictures in the game!

Given that, the next step is clear: rather than puttering around with game libraries, I should face up to my fears and attack that problem head-on. So when Miranda asked me this morning if we could work on the game this evening, I decided we should start on digitizing her pictures. Fortunately, my brother was kind enough to give us an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax doohicky last Christmas; time to break in the scanner functionality. Which we did, giving us an electronic copy of one of her designs.

Next, a graphics editor: at the very least, we need the backgrounds of her images to be transparent instead of white. I’d considered and mostly rejected Pixen earlier, but hadn’t found anything better in the interim, so I decided to give that a try. Somewhere either from Scott McCloud or Penny Arcade I’d gotten the idea that the proper technique is to take a scanned-in drawing, add a transparent layer on top, re-ink and color the drawing on the new layer, and then hide the original drawing. Which took us half an hour or so to figure out, both of us being new to the software and ignorant about the details of the process, but ended up working out just fine. So the result is that two black-and-white pencil drawings have turned into colored PNG files with transparent backgrounds; I should be able to just stick them into the game (maybe doing a bit of resizing first) and see how they look. Which will be very exciting!

Watching her do this has also gotten me more convinced of the merits of graphics tablets: she was happy to ink in the lines with the touchpad, but I’m sure it would have been much easier with a tablet. I’m not going to go out and buy one immediately, but she’s sticking with the project well enough that my worries that she would lose interest in a graphics tablet are quickly diminishing. (She’s also spent a lot of time playing around with SketchUp over the last few months, incidentally.)

A fun way to spend the hour between getting home and starting dinner.

Forget Halo 3, GTA IV, and all that: it’s starting to look like the real reason I’ll get an Xbox 360 this year is that there’s an RPG coming out for it starring Frederic Chopin. Yes, that Chopin. From IGN’s capsule summary:

Three hours prior to [his death], Chopin saw a dream of a fairy-tale land populated by people with incurable diseases but also magical powers.

Now, I ask you: who wouldn’t want an RPG with that as its premise?

(Speaking of works about Chopin, of the first things Liesl and I went to together was a showing of Impromptu. We were supposed to go with our friend Jim Blandy, but somehow he neglected to show up. At first, we assumed he was setting us up, but no, he just forgot…)

What a glorious day yesterday was: the seventh Hikaru No Go DVD came out, and the ninth book. And now I have to wait another two months for the next DVD, another four months for the next book. Aargh!

We finished the DVD today, after which Miranda asked me if we could play through the ear-reddening game. So we did. Funny what she remembers me telling her about; it’s not like we’ve actually played go since I first taught her several months ago. She’s asked twice if we can play again this weekend, though.

I didn’t realize that it had been four years since I added Divine Intervention to my list of movies to check out, based on a review in The Nation. (The link won’t work unless you’re a Nation subscriber, alas. Which I would recommend you all do, actually, despite that annoyance.) That list never got too long, so fairly soon after I got around to subscribing to Netflix, I added the movie to the queue.

And regretted it. I had no memory of the review by this time, so I was left with a vague idea that it was some sort of artsy Iranian movie which Stewart Klawans loved but I would think was really boring. Which is both unfair and wrong: for one thing, it’s Palestinian (oops), and, for another thing, I haven’t even seen any of these well-regarded Iranian movies that have come out over the last decade, and for all I know, they’re fabulous. (I guess I should add one of them to the queue, too?)

Before I could decide that it was a mistake, though, the movie showed up in my house. So after a bit of waiting around (and going on vacation), I finally couldn’t avoid the fact that this movie was sitting there, waiting to be watched. And I put it in the DVD player.

Surprise, surprise: it’s an arty Middle-Eastern movie. Starts with kids following and killing somebody in a Santa Claus outfit, then switches to a scene of somebody driving down a street, waving and smiling at everybody while insulting them from behind closed windows. And then it switches to somebody carrying dozens empty bottles up to his roof for unclear purposes. But, somehow, I kind of liked it. And then police showed up (or something), and he ran up to the roof and started throwing the bottles at them. A few more scene transitions, some fantasy elements, some actual bits of continuity between these scenes, and I was hooked.

I mean, it’s not the best movie ever, or anything. But I’m very glad I watched it: a lot of pretty scenes, funny vignettes, and it hangs together quite nicely. I added Elia Suleiman’s other movie to the queue: that one I am actively looking forward to.

• I didn’t realize it was possible to beatbox while playing the flute.
• Gyoza stadium sounds awesome.
• Star Wars in ASCII.
• I spent a pleasant hour last weekend watching Ben and Fitz’s poisonous people talk. (And then caught myself exhibiting one of those symptoms on a mailing list last week. Sigh…)
• I suppose you’ve already seen Peter Gutmann’s cost analysis of Vista content protection, but if not, give it a read.
• I didn’t really get Line Rider the first time I saw it, but now I’m starting to understand. Also a good example of why we don’t want copyright law to get in the way of mixups.
• Map of the internet.
• The Japanese Wii safety manual.
• A nice optical illusion page.
• Go Sun!

Miranda’s reading rather more comfortably now than she was in the past; at least partly because of this, she’s noticeably expanded the range of her desired sphere of competence.

Examples:

• We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she really loves it. She started on the DS version, but the GameCube version has been drawing her curiosity on the shelf for some time, so she started playing that, too. She prefers the latter, and, watching her play it, I’m surprised how much I agree - some of the gameplay changes are for the better, some are for the worse, but it’s just nice seeing the game on a full screen instead of a tiny one. I’ve even gone back and played a few times myself, if for no other reason than to answer letters that she’s sent me.
• She likes using computers, and wants to use both of them. So she’s quite frustrated that the mac is in for repairs (and taking longer than Apple had led me to believe) and that I’m still not letting her use the Linux box; my excuse for the latter is that I want to switch to Ubuntu first, and I have some things I need to do before doing that (rearrange filesystems, burn an Ubuntu DVD), and it would be easier to burn a DVD if my Mac were back. If it takes much longer, though, I’ll find another way: I do approve of Miranda using Linux, after all.
• She mainly uses the computer to draw, and Tux Paint will work fine on the Linux box. She’s also discovered browser games; there, the story isn’t so good, because Flash doesn’t work in 64-bit environments, and I don’t feel like going through the rigamarole of getting a 32 bit browser running there. (Java should work, though.)
• I let slip the fact that drawing tablets exist, which she’s quite curious about, but I’m going to wait a while before buying her one of those - she actually is fairly serious about her drawing, but I don’t think she’s come very close to exhausting the possibilities of analog methods, and I imagine a good tablet isn’t cheap enough to buy on a whim.
• She’d also like to have more software available. Which I’d be happy to get for her; I’m just not sure quite what she’d like the most. I just don’t have good info as to quality kids’ software. (Not that I’ve looked very hard.)
• She also is talking about how she wants to make her own games on the computer. (Her ultimate game is an improved version of Animal Crossing.) I’m happy to support that, and I’m not in a horribly bad position to help. Having said that, it’s not clear to me exactly what to start with - one simple question is, what language should she work in? Given the games she plays now, some obvious possibilities would be Java and Flash; I know nothing about the latter, though. Are its authoring tools free? I should do some research on that, and see if there are intro programming books that focus on game programming. (I would think that such a thing would exist somewhere - it must be one main reason why people become curious about programming.) Admittedly, I doubt that anything will come of this - I suspect that she’s much more interested in the fantasy of having written a game than the reality of programming, but who knows.
• She’s also getting more consistent about wanting to learn how to play an instrument. Not the piano, which is too bad; sometimes flute is the main possibility, sometimes violin. Her desires haven’t settled down enough for us to do anything about them yet, but I imagine we will at some point over the next year.

Other excellent daughter moment: we told her she could pick a DVD for Christmas (we knew she was already getting several others from relatives). At first, she wanted The Little Mermaid, but after thinking it over for a little while, she decided that she’d rather have the first volume of the anime of Hikaru no Go. She was also quite pleased with the manga of The Cat Returns, and read it through rather quickly.

Some random comments, after four weeks of Netflix membership:

• One movie at a time works if you’re sure you don’t want to watch more than one movie a week, and if you don’t mind missing occasional weeks due to shipping vagaries. Neither of those proved to be the case for us, so we’ve switched to two movies a week.
• The impetus for signing up was so that we could watch the rest of Haibane Renmei without paying full price. It turns out that that series is good enough that I’m sure we’ll want to watch it again, however.
• A couple of weeks after signing up, they sent me an e-mail asking if I could drop by Los Gatos. (As part of some sort of user-experience study.) I didn’t find the time, but it’s great that the company is doing studies like that. (And I suspect that even the act of asking customers helps build loyalty.)
• Their web design isn’t quite to my taste, for reasons that I’m having a hard time putting my finger on. Having said that, it’s pretty good, and the queue management page is nice.

This weekend’s DVD (we should have had two, but the other seems to have gotten delayed in the mail) was the first volume of the anime version of Hikaru no Go. Not as good as the manga version, but it was okay, and Miranda quite liked it. So she grabbed the first volume of the comic off the shelf, and started reading it. (In fact, she’s reading it right now.) And then she asked me to teach her how to play go. Which was fun, but quite different from teaching an adult how to play go: for one thing, adults are usually trying to figure out how to play as well as possible, while that didn’t particularly seem like an issue to her.

I don’t know if that’s good, bad, or neither. For whatever reason, I find it a little disconcerting (and it’s not the only time I’ve seen such behavior). But it’s a good idea for her to be focused on, say, actually enjoying herself. And one lesson I’ve taken from John Holt is that an important early stage in learning something is just messing around with it, getting your hands dirty with it. To that end, the less pressure there is to use it properly, the less pressure there is to do it well, the better: it increases the chances of the marvel of internal motivation taking hold, if nothing else. (And there are other benefits, too.) We’ll see if she wants to play again after the next DVD arrives…

And, as always happens in these situations, I was reminded that go is Teh Best Game Evar. Yesterday and a game with Karl Fogel a couple of weeks ago were the only times I’ve played go in the last two or three years. There was a reason for that decision - it’s hard for me to find time to regularly attend the local go club, and I find it easier to go cold turkey than to drop by the club once every few months.

But I still miss go. Maybe it’s time to start playing it online again. I think my hands will survive me doing that a little, and it happens fairly frequently these days that it’s 9:30 at night, I’ve finished my daily web browsing, I don’t feel like gracing the world with my words of wisdom, and I have half an hour or 45 minutes to kill. So maybe a go game would hit the spot then? I should look into online servers again, make sure that the world hasn’t changed too much, download clients if necessary. (Any blog readers feel like an online game?)

We’ll be moving to Sun’s main campus towards the end of the month. There must be enough go players there that I can find a game during lunch, surely? I don’t know of any formal go club; I’ll have to look.

I signed up for Netflix today. It fits in well with my current philosophies; the reason why I’d been holding off was that Liesl and I don’t watch movies very often, and we have a fair number of unwatched movies around. So we wanted to go through the backlog first.

But it’s becoming clear that much of that should simply be treated as sunk cost: maybe we’ll watch them, maybe we won’t, but we shouldn’t let it stand in the way of watching movies that we’re more interested in. So I bought a copy of the first volume of Haibane Renmei last week; after buying that, I realized that I wasn’t sure that I’d want to watch it over and over again, so why did I buy it instead of renting it? Oops. Having said that, we did enjoy it, and I could imagine buying the later volumes at some point, but for now signing up for Netflix and renting the rest of the volumes sounds like a better idea to me - for the cost of the remaining volumes, I could get seven months of a 1-DVD-at-a-time-Netflix subscription instead. (There are also a few other anime series that I’d like to dip into without spending hundreds of dollars.)

We’ll see how it goes, but I’m optimistic; and if that causes us to shift more of our free time to watching movies, that wouldn’t be a bad thing. I’m curious how their series management works; it looks like you can sign up for an entire series at once, and I hope that, if I do that, it will be smart enough to make sure to always send me volumes in order. So if, say, I’ve finished volume 1, and volume 2 is unavailable but 3 is available, it will wait instead of sending me volume 3.

What are good formats to use for purchasing and storing music and movies? I remember a time in the past where it was possible to pretend that Ogg Vorbis was a reasonable choice for many of your audio needs; that is, unfortunately, no longer the case.

Desirable qualities for a format, in no particular order:

• Quality should be as high as possible.
• File size should be as small as possible.
• The standard should be open.
• The standard should be unencumbered.
• There should be a wide range of software tools (including free ones and best-of-breed ones) to play the format, on all platforms I use.
• There should be a wide range of hardware devices (including best-of-breed ones) to play the format, in all locations where I’d like to use it (home, car, bus, jogging, …).
• There should be a wide range of software tools (including free ones and best-of-breed ones) to convert to/from the format.
• It should be possible to easily purchase content in this format.
• It should be possible to easily find free content in this format.
• I should be able to easily copy, excerpt, etc. the content for the forseeable future.
• The format should support adding metadata (titles, composer, performer, album art, …)
• The format should support aggregation (e.g. a podcast with multiple pieces of music should be a single file with indexing).

These are, of course, incompatible goals, but never mind that. Given the above, what are the conclusions?

One is that DRM is to be avoided: it fails on the copy/exceprt criteria, and probably also fails on open standard and free tools criteria. Having said that, it’s almost impossible to purchase video without some sort of basic DRM being involved. So, in some circumstances, I guess I can live with DRM, as long as tools for cracking it are widely available. Which is, fortunately, the case for DVD’s, though I’m somewhat worried that hardware might start getting in the way there. (For example, my understand is that many current DVD drives force you to respect region encoding.)

What are suitable audio formats? The aforementioned Ogg Vorbis unfortunately doesn’t look so hot to me. The big reason is that best-of-breed hardware devices don’t play it: I can’t use it on my iPod. There’s very little content available in the format. And it’s lossy, so I can’t store content in it and convert it to other formats as necessary.

Also, its main advantage over MP3s is that it’s unencumbered by patents. The problem is, in this crazy day and age, I don’t know if I can even be sure of that. There are so many overbroad software patents being granted that I can’t be confident that any decent a/v compression format couldn’t be attacked by patent trolls.

So, basically, it only helps me if I want to burn a CD and play it on a computer using particularly purist tools. And that’s a situation where I never find myself. The only Ogg Vorbis files I had on my computer were from Lambda Expressway, but now I see it’s available as MP3s, so that won’t be necessary any more.

So, in practice, there seem to be three obvious candidates for music: Audio CDs, MP3s, and AAC files. Audio CDs are widely available for purchase, playable in lots of ways, as high quality as is easily available, easily convertible to other formats. The downside is that file sizes are somewhat large, and they’re lacking in the metadata department.

MP3s are quite widely available, too. File sizes are smaller; quality is generally acceptable for my listening purposes. They’re lossy when compared to CDs, though, which makes them less suitable for archival purposes. Better than CDs for metadata, but there’s room for improvement there. Bad for aggregation. Also, it’s quite difficult to purchase MP3s; I hope that will change in coming years (decades?), but maybe I’m over-optimistic. Tons of players.

AAC is one of my current favorites: it has most of the advantages of MP3s, but does better in metadata and, especially, aggregation. So it’s a great format for podcasts. Slightly fewer players, but enough of them for my purposes. The patent situation seems somewhat better than that for MP3s, but not perfect.

MP3s and AAC suit my needs for free stuff. For purchasing, CDs are good, but it would be nice to have a format that I liked that would enable me to purchase music digitally. Unfortunately, all the choices suck: Apple’s and Microsoft’s DRM solutions are both loathsome. So, for now, I’m buying music on CDs: I’d rather do that, wait a couple of days to have it shipped to me, and rip it myself, than have music delivered quickly and painlessly in either of those formats. I have to think that this suggests that the recording industry could find a way to make more money off of me if they were willing to give up on DRM; the recording industry is not, alas, well-known for its forward-thinking business acumen.

I am a little worried that, at some point, music that I care about won’t be available on CD. Recently, for example, I wanted to get music of some of the artists I liked from Next Big Hit. They’re all independent, so it wasn’t too surprising that I couldn’t find all of them at Amazon; that’s what CD Baby is for. But I couldn’t find any of the music from one of them there, either; looking at her website, I did find her music for sale, but not on a CD, and some of it was apparently only available from iTunes.

So it sucks that new artists are getting caught up in DRM protection that’s really designed to serve (or “serve”, perhaps) the interests of large labels. Fortunately, in this case I could just e-mail the artist directly, and it turned out that she did have a few copies of her CDs left over. But a taste of a world that I’d just as soon avoid.

For video, the story is less pleasant. There’s no long-standing open format like CDs. Videos that are on the web are generally either in Quicktime (which encompasses many different formats, but these days I can usually play it under Linux) or Windows Media (which I can’t play under Linux). Actually, that’s not even true - videos are frequently hidden behind Flash front-ends to the extent that I don’t know what the underlying format is, and can’t get at the bytes short of doing a tcpdump or something. MP3s and AAC both have analogues, namely MPEG-2 and AVC (a.k.a. H.264), which are as acceptable as their audio compatriates. And there are new physical formats coming out that do look noticeably better than their predecessor, and that will probably be harder to copy and play on free players. (And there’s no reason to believe that this is the end of video formats.)

The upshot is that, for video, I just stick my head in the sand. Fortunately, most stuff on the web I click on once to watch but have no desire to save. And almost nothing I really want to watch is in Windows Media format, so I don’t have to install that viewer on my Mac. I like watching DVDs, but will happily avoid upgrading to newer formats for the indefinite future. (And I’m cautiously optimistic that the general public will be slow to adopt either of the new formats.) I haven’t yet grappled with the whole backup issue: my DVDs aren’t showing signs of age the way my CDs are, and disk space isn’t quite cheap enough for me to want to back them up wholesale anyways.

I suppose I should look on the bright side: no matter what, we live in a much better world now than when we had to deal with LPs, cassette tapes, videotapes. New media are much more robust, much easier to copy, much higher quality, much more broadly available. And the current RIAA leadership will retire eventually.

I can report that Animaniacs holds up quite well. Miranda approves, too.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Whisper of the Heart. It’s a Studio Ghibli film, which is obviously a big plus. On the other hand, it’s not by Miyazaki or Takahata, and it somehow sort of shares a character or two with The Cat Returns, which isn’t the biggest recommendation. All in all, I didn’t have high hopes.

And for the first twenty or thirty minutes, the low hopes seemed on track. Middle school girls confused about boys and life; whee. It could be worse - they were treated humanely enough - but it could be a lot better, too. But then it started pushing my buttons; I’ve always been a big bildungsroman fan, and I like kids who start figuring out what they want to do and pursue that instead of more conventional paths. (Somewhat ironic, given that I’m thirty-five years old and don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I suppose that’s a topic for another blog post.) And I rather choked up during the chamber music scene.

So a quite pleasant movie, when all is said and done. And with it, I’ve seen all the Studio Ghibli movies except for Only Yesterday (which Disney apparently has no plans to release, grr) and Tales from Earthsea (which only just came out in Japan; actually, apparently it’s not coming out until a week from now). Amazing studio, that, and I don’t think it’s just my pro-animation and pro-Japanese bias showing. (Let’s test the latter - would I like, say, animated movies about self-directed girls as much if Disney made them? It’s hard to tell, isn’t it, given the almost complete lack of such movies! But Beauty and the Beast is fantastic.)

While Miyazaki gets more press in this country, I’m not at all sure that I don’t like Takahata’s movies just as much. Don’t get me wrong, Miyazaki’s movies are wonderful. But the visionary intensity of his environmentalist movies can be a bit much for me, Porco Rosso is decent but not great, I don’t like Totoro as much as some (sorry, Jim), and Howl didn’t do a lot for me. They are all rather better than your average fare, and I really like Kiki and think I probably really like Spirited Away (I haven’t seen it enough), but I like Pom Poko a good deal more than most of Miyazaki’s movies (and in particular I prefer its less mystical treatment of environmentalist themes). I’ve only seen Grave of the Fireflies once, maybe three years ago; I should really watch it again, if I think I’m up for it, but my recollection is that it was quite good. And I’ve also only seen My Neighbors the Yamadas once, but it was rather charming. Hard to say; I guess the next thing to do is to track down a Japanese copy of Only Yesterday (the Japanese DVD apparently does come with English subtitles).

The Cat Returns isn’t one of my favorite movies. I’m happy for Miranda to watch it, and I won’t normally leave the room just because she has it on, but Studio Ghibli has produced much better stuff.

The theme song, however, I totally love. (Miranda and Liesl agree with this.) Very catchy in a rather understated way; and now I know what a ukelele sounds like. It’s in Japanese, of course, and, judging from one translation of the lyrics, I’d quite possibly not like it as much if it were in English.

I got a CD of Ayano Tsuji’s which contained this song. At first, I didn’t particularly like any of the other songs on the CD, but now they’re starting to grow on me. Maybe I’ll investigate further.

(Speaking of Studio Ghibli, I just noticed that Whisper on the Heart has just been released in the US; we’ll see if I like that movie any better.)

Apparently there was only one AIDS death in Santa Clara county in 2004. A ways to go still, but that’s real progress.

We just finished watching the version of Angels in America that HBO did a couple of years ago; fabulous.

Anybody have any good Japanese pop recommendations? I suspect that there’s music to be found there that I would enjoy, but I don’t have any good routes in. So far, I’m dipping my toes in based on video games and movies, which is fine, as far as it goes. From the former, “Everlasting Love” continues to be excellent, and Miranda and I are big fans of the theme song to The Cat Returns, so I got a CD of music by Tsuji Ayano containing that. But I don’t yet like the other songs on that CD nearly as much, though admittedly they are growing on me, so I don’t think I’m going to seek out much more of her singing. (And ukelele playing!)

I’ll try visiting a local Japantown and see what I can find. I’m also in the market for Korean pop: I get the impressing that it’s starting to seriously take off, and the music that I hear in our local Korean restaurant is pleasant enough.

One thing I forgot to mention about Broadway Melody of 1940: I liked the way they showed the differences in ability between Johnny (Fred Astaire’s character) and King (George Murphy’s character).

Right at the start, they’re dancing together; to my untrained eye, there weren’t obvious differences in the quality of their dancing. (I’ll watch it a bit more closely next time.) But later in the movie, you see them differ in two important ways:

• Johnny is always coming up with ways to improve the choreography of the dancing.
• King engages in misguided behavior, sometimes seeming actively self-destructive.

About the first of these: dancing isn’t choreography, so one could imagine that they’re both equally skilled dancers, but Johnny simply happens to be a better choreographer. And that’s probably some of what’s going on. I actually have no idea to what extend dancers are, or should, be thought of as choreographers; Johnny’s explanation of why one of his suggestions was an improvement seemed to make sense, though, and suggested to me that good dancers should, at the least, understand the benefits of local elements of choreography and be able to refine them, even if their grasp of global elements might not be so hot.

But the other thing that’s clear from this is that Johnny thinks about dancing all the time, in a way that King doesn’t. Which is very important: if you want to get good at something, being obsessed with it is a big help. I just finished reading Musashi (quite good, by the way), and there, too, we see Musashi following his art with single-minded determination, constantly trying to improve his art, and applying lessons from all aspects of life to his art.

This is something that I am both good and bad at. I am a fairly obsessive reader, so, for example, I’m the only person in my software group at work who is reading books about programming or managing whenever I go to the bathroom. (Incidentally, I’m kind of running out of good books to read on those subjects. Though I do have books that I’d like to re-read, to be sure. But I also am in a bit of a rut, and should be spending more time broadening my programming, I suspect.) Which is, of course, hardly the only way to improve your skills, but reading definitely helps me.

The flip side, though, is that I will read all sorts of random stuff, and flit from topic to topic. Which can be useful for future career growth (not that one’s career is the measurement of one’s success, to be sure), but it also means that I’m quite unlikely to develop the level of skill that either Fred Astaire or Miyamoto Musashi had in their respective areas of interest. Not that they were necessarily narrow-minded; while Musashi was doubtless a better swordsman than artist, his paintings are lovely. (I wish I could find some good links to show you.)

Anyways, back to the movie: another difference between Johnny and King is that King makes a lot more mistakes, often engaging in what seems like actively self-destructive behavior. I make a lot of mistakes, too; some of them are simply areas that are hard to master, or areas where an expert could show me what I’m doing wrong and, with more or less effort, I could do the right thing. E.g. it took me a while to be able to successfully put the planning game into practice; I think I’m getting there now, but if I had a good XP coach, it probably wouldn’t have taken me nearly as long.

But I’m sure that I also could be seen as engaging in self-destructive behavior; for example, I’m sure that people could point out ways in which my actions while I was trying to be an academic were actively counterproductive. The interesting thing there, though, is that my actions may well have been quite productive/constructive at a higher level - academia wasn’t a good fit for me, so actions that look counter-productive in the context of me getting another academic job may have been ways in which my subconscious was acting productively to get me steered to a better path.

Or maybe not; maybe I just got lucky. (And I’m still very curious to what extent my current job is a good fit for me, and what I’ll be doing ten years from now.) There’s a similar ambiguity in the movie: at some level, it seems like being a dance star perhaps isn’t the best fit or King, so maybe it’s best if he gets out of that now.