you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

Today, I needed to look up an Employer ID Number, also known by it’s abbreviation EIN of FEIN (F is for federal). Believe it or not, there are NO free resources on the net to do this. You’d think the IRS would let you look it up directly from their site, seeing as how this is a government created identifier. There may be some privacy issues that prevent this, but I don’t know the reason why this is not available. Unlike a person’s social security number which SHOULD be hidden to prevent identity theft, EIN and company registration information is public domain and should be freely available.

But given my past frustrations with looking up very specific information, like SCAC¹, I wasn’t expecting to find much, if anything at all. All the results Google returned are pay sites and they look suspiciously like the car history history sites, credit reports, or people finder sites. I just needed one. Some of the prices are ridiculous. I don’t want to pay $40 for a one-day pass or per month.

This reminds me again of the huge gaps of information on the web and the limit of what’s available. The web is great if you’re looking for certain things (porn, porn, and more porn), but when it comes to highly specific things like EIN and SCAC, you just hit a brick wall.

¹SCAC are Standard Carrier Alpha Codes, used by the shipping industry to identify shipping companies.

You already know that I had to send my XBOX360 back to the shop for repairs. Now, there’s yet another issue: widespread reports of Halo 3 special edition discs arriving scratched. So now, Microsoft has yet another replacement program. The tin the game comes in is poorly designed, allowing the discs to fall out easily during transit. Mine was rattling around the case when I got it, and I knew this wasn’t a good sign. If Microsoft had properly tested the packaging and thought this through, they could’ve saved themselves some money on the replacement hassle… but you know good ole Microsoft. Never one to do things right the first time.

Kotaku has a picture of the replacement mailer. Apparently, it comes w/ a free month of Xbox Gold Live for your troubles. That’ll add to the one you get from the XBOX360 repair. But this time you have to send it back to Microsoft on your own dime. You are entitled to only 1 replacement. If it gets cracked or scratched again, you are SOL.

And this particularly strange requirement: “No replacement will be made if less than 90% of the damaged disc is enclosed.” ????!! I guess people are trying to scam Microsoft by cracking their game discs in half and trying to claim 2 copies for free?

Luckily, I bought mine through Amazon so I don’t have to jump through hoops like a monkey. They’ve offered to replace it free of charge, with 1-day shipping, and even pay for me sending it back to them. My copy plays fine, but when I buy stuff new, I want it new. I don’t want it to arrive all beat up and damaged.

I’m really hating these tins. Gears of War came in one as well, and it arrived with several small dents, particularly at the corners.

More stupidness:

Wonderful.. as I was holding up the box to take a picture, this happens. The thin metal rod that holds the hinge together falls off, sending the cover and DVD to the floor. Another example of fine craftsmanship. Now I have 2 pieces and don’t have the patience or delicacy to try to push the rod back in without scratching the box.

For some really bizarre reason, Microsoft has made the Halo 3 box openable from both sides, so the contents can fall right out if you’re not holding it right. Presumably, this is make it more convenient for you to remove the two discs, but what kind of tin have you ever seen that opens from both sides, allowing stuff to fall right out the bottom? All that’s holding the cases shut are little metal protrusions in the shape of a dot. As they become worn over time through use through friction, the case will become loose, and not even stay shut if you invert it.

This is the Gears of War tin. Notice it is a normal tin. It features a bottom and durable outer casing to prevent fallapart.

This is the DVD case. It has strong grip claws to hold the DVDs in place, and placed in a recessed holder. The two halves onto itself, so even if the discs fall out, there’s no place to shift around. Halo 3 discs are on opposite sides of the tin, stuck to the inside covers, in a non-clawed, non-recessed manner. This lets the discs easily fal out.

A 24 year old physics student made his own helicopter from some old car parts, in today’s Yahoo News story. That’s really cool! I gotta look into that. Nothing says chick magnet like your own helicopter! It looks like a piece of crap, but if it flies. The guy is a little insane to think he could convince the government to buy helicopters from him though. But that’s not the distressing part. This is:

“It is powered by a second-hand 133 horsepower Honda Civic car engine and kitted out with seats from an old Toyota saloon car. Its other parts come from the carcass of a Boeing 747 which crashed near Kano some years ago.”

The carcass of a crashed 747?! Oops.

My friend Phil talks a lot about diesel cars and how he was looking to buy one. He said they are more fuel efficient and environmentally friendly. But, he couldn’t find any that weren’t at least 20 years old. I guess they don’t make them anymore, so what does he do? He goes to the polar extreme and buys an an SUV.

Not knowing anything about cars, I couldn’t add anything to our conversation about diesel engines, except what I saw on Myth Busters. The hosts of the show were going to make a car run on used vegetable oil. That’s right, discarded kitchen grease. They were going to put it in their car and see how it compared to gasoline. From what I remembered of the show, the car was an old wood panel station wagon, so Phil was right about diesel cars being dinosaurs.

They went around to various restaurants, collected several gallons of this goo, and let it filter to get rid of all the food particles. The next day, they drove the thing around a test range. And surprisingly, not only did it run, they got the same mileage out of it as gas.

I have heard people ask about putting cooking oil in their car on radio shows, but I never believed it would work. The explanations always sounded unbelievable to me. If we could just drive our cars on corn oil, why aren’t we doing it instead of fighting wars over petrol? It’s even the same word: oil– whether it comes from corn, or some fossils. Vegetable oil is a renewable resource. Petroleum is not. People don’t have to die for corn oil.

An article on Yahoo today talked about the Japanese developing hybrids and alternative fuel vehicles. This is a wonderful step in the right direction and I wish American car manufacturers would follow suit. After watching Who Killed the Electric Car last years, I was outraged. But, in the end, what goes around comes around. US car makers are fading into irrelevance. Their decades-long lack of vision and technical excellence has left the US auto industry in ruins. When people think innovation and fuel efficiency, they don’t think American. They think Japanese.

And for good reason. Toyota and other Japanese automakers committed to building cleaner cars a decade ago, and as in the past, they’ve become leaders in the field of low-emissions automobiles. Here’s Yahoo’s article on the comeback of diesel.

.. or IV or V. I lost count. But anyway..

I forgot I had this on my old dead Fujitsu laptop. I made it shortly before coming back to NY to use as the graphic for a group I created on Hi5.. yet another social networking site. For some reason, a lot of Japanese people are on it, even some of my former h.s. students, but none of my friends have heard of it here in the US. Hi5 is pretty much a has-been (if it ever was anything else). It’s not popular, it’s not fun to use, and it’s not pretty.

That’s supposed to be a super genki Japanese guy with an Afro, a reference to the trendiness of hiphop music and fashion in Japan. There’s a famous cartoon character named Afro Ken (”ken” means dog) that sports a rainbow Afro. That thing in his head is an Afro pick/fork.

I don’t know if I kept the PSD for this. The effects seem pretty cool and I don’t remember how I originally made them.

These are some fugazi batteries my dad bought. Can you guess which one is the real brand?

“Super Extra”… super extra what?

The real batteries are quite hefty and heavy to the touch. The fake ones feel hollow inside. Chinatowns and grey markets all over the developing world are full of stuff like this, where dodgy manufacturers try to trick people who can’t read speak English by blatantly copying the packaging of the original product. Some people like my dad, I think, knowingly buy these knockoffs, because there’s no way in the world the real item costs so little. The pack of 16 AAA batteries above costs $1.59.. a deal if I ever saw one!

I’ve seen:

• SQNY batteries
• a Homda motorcycle
• a PolyStation (which is an 8-bit Nintendo disguised as a PlayStation)
• the Nintendo Vii
• now a Mini PolyStation 2

…and even a fake Qoo softdrink. Man.. that just looks so crap and freakishly retarded, like Dr Mephisto’s little monkey guy Kevin on South Park. The real Qoo, which came with my real bottle of Qoo is pictured below, attached to a Kingston 1GB USB drive. This guy has more niseimono on his blog (Japanese only). Stuff like Caca-Cala, which doesn’t sound very appetizing at all!

The real Qoo… all smudged up from being carried in my pocket.

..and lastly here something I’ve been meaning to photograph for a long time. I have no idea where it came from. I think it’s been in my house since I was a child.

Here’s me holding a “Chiaopi The Dog” bookend.

I wish these counterfeiters continued longevity if only to serve as a source of comedy.

Microsoft Zune 2. I hate to have two related posts following each other, but this entry is just too juicy to pass up for another day. icrosoft seems unable to sue Zune.com out of the rights to that name or buy it from them, so they have to use Zune.net. But that’s not the point of the story.

The point is: Microsoft is releasing generation 2 of their Zune player at the end of November, but honestly, who cares? Is this really going to make a difference? Zune sales have been abysmal. The Zune has gotten to be something of a recurring joke every time it is mentioned on Engadget or … well, basically anywhere else. It’s the laughing stock of the mp3 player world due to its unpopularity and the typical Microsoft Borgthink.

It’s no big secret that Bill and friends copy their way to the top. With the Zune, this goes down to the “Hello from Seattle” on the back cover, as opposed to Apple’s “Designed in California” (but shhhh! Microsoft is not really in Seattle but it’s cooler to say Seattle instead of really in Redmond, Washington because that’s where cooler things come from, like Starbucks, the Seahawks, Space Needle, Kurt Cobain, Mt. Rainier… etc.). To say that the Zune 2 looks very similar in form and function to the original iPod and iPod Nano would be an understatement. About the only thing Microsoft can’t seem to copy is Apple’s success. (OH ZING!!!!!)

Priced at $249 to compete with the iPod, Microsoft hasn’t given anyone enough incentive to give a crap. I anticipate the sound of crickets (just like the Halo Special Edition Xbox 360) come November 20 when Zune 2 launches. 80 GB? Who cares! 80 GB probably sounded like a good idea during the development of this product, but Steve Job’s announcement of the new 160 GB iPods at Macworld Expo was probably the biggest “in your face!” to Microsoft’s Zune efforts. Apple has once again one-upped Microsoft and given them an engineering yardstick to play catchup with. This will keep Microsoft chasing for a few more years.

The new Zune colors are cute, but I don’t think this redesign will do Microsoft any good. It’s too-little-too-late and I don’t think customers will bite. The Zune is still slightly bulkier than their iPod counterparts. The original Zune was a disaster of idiotic user-hostile interface decisions, like making it NOT natively support USB mass storage, so you have to hack your registry to use the device as a USB hard drive. Zune 2 may still have this restriction. The 3-days-or-3-plays rule is now only the 3-plays rule for shared files. The song becomes locked after 3 plays. Even if you play it for only 1 second, that counts as one time. As I wrote several months ago, this defeats the whole purpose of sharing and nullifies the Zune tagline “Welcome to the Social”, which makes Buy.com’s ad all the more hilarious in its delusion: Join the crowd and order your Microsoft Zune! Don’t be the only one without it.”

Yes… a crowd.. a crowd of one. Don’t be the only one WITH it. One whole year after the Zune’s release, and I still have seen nobody with a Zune, except that one person I mentioned in the previous Zune entry. Maybe Microsoft should switch gears and use that to their advantage. Sure, everyone has an iPod, but YOU are ORIGINAL. You are ONE of a kind. You don’t follow trends. You have a Zune.

… and the biggest ongoing disappointment: Microsoft has still crippled the WiFi. This is the one feature that users consistently clamor for and consistently say would swing them over to Microsoft’s side of the fence and actually make the Zune worth considering. In light of the iPod Touch’s WiFi browsing capability, this one single feature would make the Zune a viable contender for many people. The Touch is $299 for 4 GB. Microsoft has repeatedly ignored these requests.

..oh and ya, it’s still PC only. Sorry Mac fans. Unless Microsoft changes their boneheaded thinking, the Zune will continue to be the retarded kid with no friends who talks to himself in the corner versus the iPod’s captain of the baseball team.

In a surprisingly smooth experience, my XBOX 360 came back a few days ago all repaired and looking newer than it left. Microsoft may have sent me a new one, but I’m not sure. There are no signs of dirt or dust in the vents, so they either cleaned it real well, replaced my casing, or sent me a new one. I didn’t note the serial number so I can’t confirm this.

I was expecting my XBOX to be in the shop for 2 months, but the entire transaction only took about 2 weeks. It took 10 days for the box to leave my house, arrive in the Texas repair center, and come back to me. Microsoft even included a nice letter inside (with some weird highlighting!) and a free month of XBOX Live as apologies for the trouble.

As a bonus, I also discovered that my XBOX and I share the same birthday when I looked on the back of the console. (It’s not getting any of my cake though.)

Speaking to my friend in HK today, he said between him and his dad, they’ve gone through 5 XBOXes! His first one red-ringed the first day he got it. This now makes it an 86% failure rate, as 6 out of 7 XBOX owners I’ve spoken to in the last month have had it red-ring.

I’m buying a Divx capable DVD player. I’m fed up with trying to convert .AVI’s to play them on a regular DVD player.

It takes several hours to transcode a DIVX/XVID file into to MPEG-1 (for VCD) or MPEG-2 (for DVD). I’ve done this only a few times successfully in the many years I’ve been dabbling with video encoding and muxing. After letting the converter crank over night, you burn it to a CD/DVD only to find out the audio is horribly out of sync, or the subtitles are illegible, or the transcoder used the wrong language encoding and you’re left with ASCII garbage.

So forget this crap. I’m ordering a Philips DIVX DVD player from Amazon. They are ridiculously cheap these days and you can get one for under $50.

The cheapest one listed was $35, but I settled on the DVP5140, which is $10 more. (Breaking the bank here!). 4 stars after 156 reviews. That’s quite an achievement. Products with such a large number of unanimously high rating are a surefire indicator of their quality. Not only can it play DIVX/XVID files natively, it can also be region unlocked via the remote control. That is great for people who enjoy watching foreign films not distributed in the US, or expats like me who have a lot of DVD’s from another region.

I’ll let you know in a few days how this turns out.

It has something to do with koalas. I won’t spoil the surprise, so here’s the article.