Ann Oyama Official Website

I’m pissed off at Apple right now as I’m getting periodic Snow Leopard lockups (like everyone else) and it’s really impeding my work efficiency:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2141492

And that’s just one thread.

So what’s the fix? There doesn’t seem to be one right now. ARGH! Why did I have to pay $10 plus tax for this crap upgrade?

This coupled with my horrible Macbook Pro buying experience (brand new with case scratches, replaced with another new one with a dead pixel smack in the middle of the LCD, then finally a third one which is fine) is giving me a REALLY bad overall impression of Apple’s QC.

I was browsing Flickr the other day and found this photo commemorating the first time I held a Leica (D)SLR in my hands! It’s the Leica M8 digital body with a NOCTILUX f1.0!

Photo by Mark Jaquith. (He has a Nikon.)

But sadly it is not mine. (It belongs to PhotoMatt.)

Although I would gladly use it if it were given to me, I would probably never buy one. (Especially not the digital body… didn’t care for it at all…)

Unless, perhaps, I already had a Ferrari. Then… maybe. (But more likely still no.)

So anyway, YAY Friday!! (WEEKEND! And the weather is excellent!)

I like to use parentheses. (Doesn’t everyone?)

I’ve always been interested in photography but up until recently had been discouraged by all of my photos invariably turning out really boring and crappy. Recently, my friend (BayAnime’s official staff photographer) let me borrow his old manual lens, a Super Takumar 50mm/f1.4 adapted for the Canon EOS mount, and I have since realized that what I was really missing in my life (and photos) was the presence of extreme bokeh!

Wearing contact lenses coupled with the dim viewfinder of my XTi makes manual focusing incredibly difficult, but for now, I am just happy knowing that one in a hundred photos might actually turn out in some way that I like!

Of course this likely means that in another few months I will be lusting after ludicrously expensive bodies and lenses. What’s that you say? Noctilux f1.0? Curse you, Tommy Oshima’s Flickr photostream!

But for now I really need to get my own Super Takumar! Anyone have one in minty condition for sale (preferably an SMC)? Or a comparable inexpensive, sharp, fast, and awesome lens that can be adapted to the EOS mount?

Anyway I finally got around to taking a picture of one of my most treasured of stuffs…

Grandpa Oyama sure had excellent taste in guitars! I am especially proud of having accidentallycleverly used strategically placed bokeh to obscure some dust.

And the usual flower and bird pictures… but now with more bokeh! YAY!

The (really crappy) stock Apple power adapter for my old Powerbook G4 finally died. I had already been employing the constant twisting/fiddling method for a couple of months before it failed entirely. There was no way I was going to shell out $79 for another Apple power adapter and I also figured that given the symptoms there was a good chance that it was just a short in the poorly designed strain relief area near the jack… so I did what any person who has ever had the pleasure of inhaling the sweet fumes of lead solder would do and happily took a hammer to the damned thing. Using my limited toolset (a pair of scissors I found on the ground), I clipped and stripped the wires in preparation… then realized that I actually couldn’t find my soldering iron anywhere.

However, I did find some alligator clips. And fashioned a very temporary, extremely unsafe “fix” that got my Powerbook charging again! YAY!

But really… this is definitely NOT recommended.

I’ve been a heavy user of GrandCentral’s phone/voicemail service since some time before they were acquired by Google. I found it especially handy for allowing me to have a San Francisco area code (415) phone number that forwards calls right to my original Hawaii cell phone number, which is pretty much the only phone I ever use. I’ve also used it to screen out those really annoying car warranty expiration spam calls.

Earlier today I got an email from Google saying that my GrandCentral account was finally ready to be upgraded to the new Google Voice service. Naturally, I had to upgrade and check out the new features! After only a few minutes I had already decided that the new service was much better than the old.

The new interface is very similar to Gmail’s and much easier to navigate than the GrandCentral interface. Google Voice now allows incoming calls to go straight through to you rather than being interrupted by the voice menu that used to force you to manually choose how to route the call every single time (this was my biggest complaint with the old service). They’ve also expanded their SMS features significantly. You can receive SMS messages at your Google Voice number and view/reply to them from the Google Voice web interface. Additionally, you can have SMS messages forwarded to your mobile phone and reply from there as usual. I was able to receive SMS messages sent from mobile phones just fine, but unfortunately test messages sent to my Google Voice number from AIM were never received.

Google has also added a voice to text service for voicemail messages. Although it’s a sweet feature for sure, I suspect that it will be pretty useless for actual use.

The test voicemail message I left: “Hello, how are you? What are you doing? Goodbye now.”

Google Voice’s text translation: “hey bill how are you went are you doing good site now”

But hey, what can you expect for free? It looks like the only feature they did away with was the ability to set custom ringtones, which I never used anyway. The one thing I thought they should have added is the ability to receive voicemail in your email as an attached audio file rather than just receiving a link to play it back online, along with their crappy text translation. Still, aside from charging for credits to place international phone calls (another new feature) the service is completely free, so I won’t be complaining…

Unfortunately for those of you who don’t already have GrandCentral accounts, there are no open signups yet for Google Voice. They are, however, currently taking requests for invites on their site.

I’m slowly working my way through rewatching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (series 1) and I just had to say, the Tachikoma are probably the best non-human/oid characters in anime, ever! They are kind of shaped like toilets, but that’s okay… I still want one.

Other favorites:
- Totoro
- Domo-kun
- Afroken
- Penpen

Here’s a super simple WordPress plugin that automatically adds HTML anchor tags to plain text links and email addresses embedded in the content of posts and pages (WordPress already does this by default for comments). It also gives you the option to set the nofollow attribute value on all automatically generated hyperlinks.

Download this plugin at WordPress.org.

Horrible story… check. Embarrassing, lame dialogue… check. Annoying actors and actresses coupled with really bad acting… check.

This was all expected. Look, I don’t go to a movie based on a video game and expect great things. But I do go to a movie titled “STREET FIGHTER” expecting to be ENTERTAINED and to see some CRAZY FIGHTING ACTION!

SO WHERE WAS THE ENTERTAINMENT AND CRAZY FIGHTING ACTION?! NOWHERE I TELL YOU! ALL I SAW WAS CRAP AND IT WAS BORING AND ONE OF THE WORST MOVIES I’VE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE!

You see, the original Street Fighter movie was crap too. But it was funny ultra campy crap with a ridiculous story and cheesy dialogue to match, and it had lots of silly action scenes with characters we all know and love from the game. Plus Van Damme was in it, and he is so bad that he is always good for some laughs. So overall it was really bad entertainment that was still possibly worth watching (while heavily imbibing).

This new Chun-Li movie has no Van Damme, no funny campy bits, is missing all of the game’s other main characters, and worst of all has barely any action. Moreover, the little action that is there is super lame and not cool at all! (Come on, Chun-Li is supposed to be ripped and ass-kicking!) In short, this movie is TOTAL CRAP! And because I actually expected it to at least match the low standards set by its predecessor, I am now disappointed and heart-broken! MY EXPECTATIONS WERE SO LOW YET THE MOVIE STILL FAILED ME! HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN, REALLY?!

But there’s the good, although it had nothing to do with the movie itself. While exiting the theater, I was part of a large crowd of people to witness a kid in a headband (I’m guessing it’s the one you get in the SFIV Collector’s Edition pre-order) jump off the railing over the walls, land into a roll onto the grass, and climb back up ninja-like to do it all over again. The thing is, you don’t get to see this kind of awesome dude in real life every day. In fact you probably only get the chance when you do something like go out to watch “Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li” on the date of its theatrical premiere. So for this, I feel very lucky! Good luck, kid! I hope you grow up to become a real street fighter someday!

This plugin is for WordPress 2.6 or 2.7. It enables WordPress to generate cookies that work with bbPress 0.9 so that single sign-on can be accomplished between the two. Follow the usual integration instructions and enable this plugin in your WordPress installation. I also advise clearing your cookies.

The integration is all up and running on my site at BayAnime.com. I’d like to add that I was able to put the plugin together without writing a single line of code! It’s literally all the necessary functions cut and pasted directly from WordPress 2.5.1 pluggable.php, so kudos to WordPress for making it easy!

Download this plugin at WordPress.org.

When you do cookie integration please keep in mind that there are some login hooks in pluggable that might not be called in either WP or bbPress depending on which side your user logged in from. This might affect the functionality of some plugins.

For example, after rerouting all my bbPress logins to WP I realized that the ‘bb_set_current_user’ action hook on a bbPress plugin I used was no longer being called, so I had to incorporate it in on the WP side using the ’set_current_user’ hook.

bbPress 1.0 users should use this plugin instead.

I loaded up BayAnime.com this morning and to my horror the Google AdSense spaces had “Yes on Prop 8″ ads all over it! What is wrong with you, Google?! I am a firm supporter of same sex marriage rights and am VERY OPPOSED to Prop 8, which is both evil and hateful! While I can’t speak for the entire Bay Area anime community, I will say that most people I know who are fans of anime and manga are also very accepting of homosexuality. Either way, the ads are completely irrelevant to my site and I am FURIOUS that they were allowed to end up there!

I’ve submitted a request over an hour ago to block the ads, but since Google was taking its sweet old time to comply I just took them completely off for now. If you have a site that runs AdSense and would like to block the ads too (good luck), these are the steps that supposedly may eventually work:

1. Login to your AdSense account
2. Navigate to: AdSense Setup -> Competitive Ad Filter
3. Enter “protectmarriage.com” in the text box
4. Press the “Save changes” button

More ranting and raving on the BayAnime Forums.