you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

Microsoft is obsessed with (re)naming everything “Live”: Xbox Live, Microsoft Live Search, Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live ID, Live SkyDrive.. the list goes on.

OK.. we get it. It’s part of the “Live” suite of applications and services. Your services are live, and fresh, not dead and stale. You want to impart all the meanings and connotations that the word “live” carries with it: live broadcast, live wire, etc. I don’t think this is a clever bit of marketing at all, however. In fact, it’s worse just tacking on “Live” to the names of everything. If nothing else, it just makes everything take more time to say and sound so hokey and lame when you actually do say it. People are still going to refer to the products in the old way, like Hotmail and MSN Messenger, not change because some marketing guy at Microsoft decided so.

Ok no.. I lied.. I really don’t get it. What’s with calling everything Live? Bad marketing-speak just creates more confusion, not less. As they say, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Recall the head-scratching several years ago over ASP.NET.

As for live and fresh… see for yourself in this photo I took of the screen just now. Hotmail copyright date 2006. In a separate Firefox tab, you see the NY Times headline for Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia, today September 25, 2007.

Today I have the unfortunate distinction of joining the ranks of the thousands of unhappy XBOX 360 owners. My Matrix HD boxset arrived over the weekend and I was looking forward to enjoying it while I did some work. I sometimes like to put on a movie for background noise to help me concentrate, but when I connected the HD player and went to power on the XBOX, I got an unpleasant surprise. I am now one of the estimated 1/3 of XBOX owners affected by the dreaded Red Ring of Death.

This is a real bummer. Since Microsoft acknowledged this as a common problem (to the tune of a $1 billion charge against profits), I expected it to happen eventually, but not in this way. My brother had warned me a week ago that this would happen to me too, after his XBOX suddenly died. He had been using his to watch DVDs. I, on the other hand, have not turned on the unit for 3 or 4 months so this was completely unexpected. It’s like some kind of bad Mission Impossible joke. The thing is rigged to self-destruct after x months.

Not happy.

The job of a translator is far from easy. Some people do a great job of it, and some people are completely lousy. When it comes to movie titles, translations are an inconsistent and unpredictable mix. Some titles are translated word for word into native Japanese, or transliterated while others are partially or completely renamed.

Verbatim transliterations seem to be most common (porting the sounds of English over to katakana). Movies like Blood Diamond, Little Miss Sunshine, The Usual Suspects and Hannibal Rising preserve their original English titles. This appears to be the case for more than half of the movies, from a quick look at Tsutaya’s website. (Incidentally, there are some truly ridiculous prices on there — The Truman Show VHS is over $150!)

In some cases, the names are translated directly into their Japanese equivalents: Silence of the Lambs, for example, becomes “羊たちの沈黙”, a word for word translation into Japanese words. Perfume - The Story of a Murderer stays the same and gets translated to “パフューム ある人殺しの物語”. These cases seem far fewer.

Yet still others have their names partially changed to make more sense to Japanese audiences. Rear Window, for example, is “シークレット・ウインドウ” (Secret Window). Pursuit of Happyness becomes “幸せのちから” (The Power of Happiness) and Shawshank Redemption is “ショーシャンクの空に” (To the Heavens of Shawshank).

Some movies though, get completely different names. The Mummy Returns is changed to “ハムナプトラ 2 黄金のピラミッド” (Hamunaptra 2 - The Golden Pyramid(s)”. In case you’re wondering why the seemingly strange name Hamunaptra, it’s the name of the city the movie is set in, the City of the Dead in Egyptian mythology. Pixar’s recent Ratatouille is called “Remy’s Delicious Restaurant” (レミーのおいしいレストラン)! I think this spoils the surprise.

While we were out on Friday, my friend Monica saw one of these newly decorated flower cabs rolling down the street and said she hated them. She thought they were just ugly. I do too. This is the work of an art project called Garden in Transit. For months and months, I passed by their studio on 32nd Street on the way to work, peering in to see groups of school kids painting flowers on the floor.

It’s for a good cause (kids with disabilities). I’m not knocking that. But does it have to be all flowers and ugly? They should just be able express themselves and draw some unique art, instead of following templates of daisies and such. All the taxis look the same.

photo hotlinked from International Herald Tribune

Beijing is trying to whip its public image into shape in time for the 2008 Olympics, instituting public education campaigns and fines to curb spitting, cursing and other uncouth behavior that is likely to cause embarrassment. The Chinese government is even trying to correct some of the horrible English that appears on billboards, like the one above… although I would enjoy some pleasanty surprise of groping.

This Flash tower ad is for Ready For Media, a media coaching firm in Malibu, CA. Getting the mouths to animate with that white border was extremely difficult. It goes by too fast to notice, but the mouth movements are randomized.

I saw this poster at Borders, announcing Kanye West’s upcoming release. It doesn’t feel right at all having a picture like this on a hip-hop album. It is by a Japanese artist named Takashi Murakami, founder of the “Superflat” art movement.

I’m not a fan.

Not having a phone while traveling abroad can be quite inconvenient, to say the least, but renting one can get expensive pretty fast when you count the high per minute charges or per day charges.

A prepaid phone is one way let your friends stay in contact with you while saving both of you some money. If you frequently have visitors from abroad, this may be a good investment since anyone calling the prepaid will just be calling a local number. My friend visiting from Japan rented one before she left Tokyo, but the number is Japanese so it costs a fortune calling to and from it ($2.50 a minute).

The cheapest phones are approx $50, which includes some airtime. You can order them from most electronics web retailers or directly the service provider’s website. Amazon took 5 days to get me my phone on what was supposed to be next business day shipping, so it wasn’t worth giving to my friend for the 3 days she had left in the US. (So much for Amazon Prime!) I resorted to creating a SkypeOut account to call her, remembering the one time it cost me a ridiculous $120 for a 1 hour call to Montreal.

Even don’t have friends coming often, a prepaid is handy just as an emergency phone or replacement. You can swap out the SIM card and use it with your monthly plan if you break your regular phone, provided that the carriers are the same. If they are not, you’d have to unlock the phone first, which you can do with instructions from the web, or directly from the provider.

Sony has released yet another PS3 system update, only a short time after the previous one. 1.92 was released on Sept. 4.; 1.93 just 9 days later! This is quite annoying to find out as I had just downloaded 1.92 last week and installed it today, only to learn that I needed to update my the system AGAIN. I wanted to check out the PlayStation Store for new demos and trailers, but without the latest update, the PS3 won’t let you online.

This is a little ridiculous as each update is 100 MB. All for ONE — count them — ONE fix: “New for 1.93: The stability of the network connection has been improved.” Not a big deal if you’re on broadband, but 9 days after the previous update, particularly for something as minor as this. If the PS3 could download and install in the background while you played a game or watched some Blu-ray movies, this wouldn’t be so bad. But unfortunately, you can’t.

Yahoo posted this article about Halo 3’s upcoming release. It gives 5 reasons why you must have it, yet all the reasons are pretty trite and uninteresting. Nothing that gamers really care about:

1: Everybody’s waiting for it
2: It’s the conclusion of the Halo story
3: It’ll be the best place for hot competition on Xbox Live
4: You can “Forge” your own maps
5: Halo meets YouTube — Share your replays.

No mention of new gameplay features, graphical enhancements, new weapons, enemies, etc. It just sounds like a non-gamer writer regurgitating marketing hype targeted at non-gamers. It doesn’t even sound like the writer has even played this game, given the lack of detail about the game itself.

http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/halo-3/halo-3-five-reasons-you-want-it/530414

And in the “who gives a shit” department:
If you want to see an annoying clip of Hollywood actors talking about Halo 3 go here (click Red Carpet Premiere). To paraphrase one of the punks in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle: Dude, on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being not so extreme and 10 being extremely extreme, I give this a 0!