Nothing Really Poignant - James in Taiwan

Incandecent lightbulb
CNet recently ran an article covering advances in indoor lighting as well as suggestions on how you can save quite a few dollars by replacing your incandescents. This is a great article, but they had one FAQ that really disturbed me:

Traditional bulbs could be phased out in the United States over the next decade. Australia and the Canadian province of Ontario are set to ban them.

Whats so bad about replacing lights with compact fluorescents? Well if you ask me, almost nothing. They do tend to have an annoying buzz, but hopefully that will go away as I get older and lose my hearing. As the article points out compact fluorescents are now even dimmer switch compatible and many companies are releasing bulbs the exact same size as traditional incandescents.

Fluorescents are great, but if you ask me there is nothing like the warm glow of an incandescent on a book, but I guess we will be replacing paper with electronic paper, so who really should care because we all want to be modern. If you ask me only the owners of the classic Easy-Bake Oven should care, but owners of the newer versions shouldn’t fret, because Easy-Bake Ovens no longer use a 100 watt light bulb to heat the cakes.

Wii Friend Code
Originally uploaded by James in Taiwan.

Recently I have been spending a lot of time on my Wii. I know my friends and family have to have a Wii as well. If you do, here is my friend code. Send me a message and then I can reciprocate. If you do you will soon find a virtual James and Steven in your Mii list on your Wii.

Long before I got my first Mac I asked for the CD-ROM game Cosmic Osmo and an AppleCD drive. I ended up borrowing a friend of the family’s Mac Plus to play the game and I was hooked. You could say my love affair with apple products started with this game.

Cosmic Osmo is a game set on exploring a surrealistic world. You start off in a strange spacecraft that can visit pre-planets ranging from a giant fish to a planet with a house on one side and a boat on the other. This game was created by Cyan, the creators of Myst and was an evolutionary step in Cyan creating Myst.

This game has no start or end and is pure exploration. Almost anything you see in this game is click able and will start a animation and music sequence.

Recently I downloaded a program called Mini VMac which lets you run old MacOS 6 programs. After booting up an old system hard drive and I opened up my Cosmic Osmo CD and booted it up. It worked, although some of the sounds were out of sync, some of the audio was scrambled and some animation was too fast.

Many people have fond memories of Cosmic Osmo. It was the first CD I ever played on my Sony Diskman (the game had a music track with jazz songs from the game). I also know that my nephews in Portland played the game quite often. So what games can be compared to Cosmic Osmo? Unfortunately there arn’t any.

Myst focuses on solving puzzles, which isn’t the main focus of Cosmic Osmo. There is Leo’s Great Day, a Flash 3 game by Pepworks, but once again this is a story with a beginning and end and a few puzzles, although the animation style and game design approach seems to be similar to Cosmic Osmo. There are really no other games out there like Cosmic Osmo where you can just explore and interact with the world.

So if Cosmic Osmo is so great, why isn’t anyone selling it now? Well for one it was released as a B&W game just for the Macintosh using Mac only technology. There were hints at a masterpiece update to this eleven years ago from a story writeup on the creators of the game, but unfortunately there hasn’t been much progress or cash to throw at a project like this - until recently.

I happened to buy a piece of software last year that is similar to HyperCard, called Runtime Revolution. Every month or so the company that creates the software sends me a developer newsletter. Normally this goes into my special circular file called a trash can, but the last one caught my eye because it was an interview with a developer who is updating and converting Cosmic Osmo. Here are the facts I picked out of the article:

1. This game will no longer be released as a HyperCard based game
2. At least 90% of the original game can be ported, the other 10% will be re-created for modern operating systems
3. All of the original sounds and music will be included in the game
4. There is a hint at a technology advance that is available and that was not available in the original HyperCard version (I imagine this is hinting at color graphics)

There is one more point from the article. This will be released as a Windows only application - even though it is being developed and can be ported to an updated Mac version with the flip of a switch. This started out as a Mac game, and is being released on Windows even though a Mac version could be created by a flip of the switch, or as the developer puts it:

There are currently no plans to re-release a Macintosh version, though if that should change it would be trivial to recompile the main stack for OS X, which is all that would be required.

I understand the need to release this for Windows, but what about all the loyal fans who have been waiting for a re-release. This is really heartbreaking.

How do you feel about this?  Please leave your comments here for requesting a Mac version of Cosmic Osmo.

Clean, Mean, Flying Machine: Plane Clean Air Filter will Bring Out the OCD Sufferer in You - Gizmodo

Gizmodo brings up a great IDEA for a product, but think about it, is it really practical?

When you breath air on a plane, you arn’t just breathing the air from your vent, but from your neighbors vent. For this to be effective you would need to buy a $19.95 device for everyone, not just yourself.

If you are looking for personal safety, consider purchasing a gas mask for yourself instead like these happy passengers.

In early 2007 my friends Fritz and Sue Ann met Steven and me in Tokyo. We had a great time eating sushi and visiting the sights.

One of our favorite places that we visited on this trip was the The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. Here they had exhibits on space, the body, mayonnaise and robotics. Yes, you heard that right, robotics.

Giant LCD Globe at The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation
Originally uploaded by James in Taiwan.

It so happens that the museum has an actual Honda Asimo on display. A couple times a day they have a show where the robot comes out, walks, runs, dances and carries on a conversation in a squeaky voice which was quite annoying.

OK, you don’t want to hear that squeaky voice, but you will want to see this 3.75 minute clip video (with the conversation edited out) playing to Styx’s Mr. Roboto.

This tip originally posted on Craigslist is important and every potato-chip loving person should read this. It provides you (the reader) with many reasons why you do not want to try Pringles Fat Free Chips.

DO NOT EAT PRINGLES FAT FREE POTATO CHIPS. THEY WILL GREASE YOUR ASS.

In my freshman year of college I had a crush on a classmate named Rob. He was a classically cute uke-type guy. Sometimes we would bump into each other at the cafeteria and we would chat. I tried to become friends of his friends, but that wasn’t too successful and I thought that nothing was going to come of this.

At the end of the year I decided to enter the random roomate lottery for my sophomore year. Two weeks later I went to see the computer generated list and I found that Rob was going to be my roommate. Boy, was I shocked!

Summer came and went and soon I was moving in. Rob was an out-of-state student so he had already moved in when I was carying in my clothes and stuff. I was ready to have some time getting to know the guy I had a crush on for the previous year.

Things were fine for the first few weeks, but soon Rob’s habits began to get on my nerves. For example, he liked these special crackers (which taste nice) but he would nibble them like a chipmunk. Unfortunately these crackers were extra crunchy and this sound would really get on my nerves.

That aside, Rob and I still got along. We would listen in on our neighbor talking loudly on the phone. (Our neighbor was a dance major named Ernie who always was looking for a new sugar daddy.) We also would go out and see movies together, have dinner and share gossip, but this didn’t absolve Rob from one of his most annoying qualities, his love of Bette Midler and Judy Garland. I don’t mind them, and honestly I do have some of their music, but I don’t listen to the Beaches soundtrack every weekend.

I still could not figure out everything about Rob. Sure, he liked Beaches, but he had a photo of a really beautiful girl on his desk who is his “ex”. Sure he only had female friends, but he was friends with me. Sure he liked sports, but he was the mascot on the university cheer leading team. Everything added up to a normal gay male, but I wanted confirmation.

I would occasionally ask him about a girlfriend, and he would point to the photo of the ex, but this is just a photo. I would ask if he had a crush on any of his friends, but he always said no. Enough was enough, I was tired of waiting and finally decided to just ask him straight out, “Rob, are you gay?”

He was quiet for a while, and he said no. I wasn’t really heartbroken, just confused. This can’t be, he is so queer! I wasn’t convinced, so every night before I went to bed I would ask him, and he always said no. This went on for the entire year, and if anything he was consistent in his responce.

So it was the end of another year, and I decided that I was tired of roommates and wanted a single room. Sure living was Rob in the beginning was nice, but I got to learn all his bad habits and he became less and less attractive over time. It was time to live alone and move on.

A few years later I graduated. I found a boyfriend in LA and a job in the Bay Area and life went on. One summer we went back to LA to visit my boyfriend’s family and we swung by WEHO. We went to a few clubs and then to Don’t Panic which sells t-shirts that say “I’m not gay, but my boyfriend is” and surprise-surprise, guess who was working there? Rob…

So we said hi and I introduced him to my boyfriend. We talked for a while to catch up and talk about our careers. The whole time we were avoiding the one question, why was Rob working in a gay t-shirt shop in WEHO. I had to ask it, it was driving me crazy and I finally felt that I caught him in his lie so I had to ask again… “Rob, are you gay?”

He was quiet again and my boyfriend and I were staring at him waiting for him to respond. Rob was looking very nervous and then he gave the following response, “No, but don’t tell my manager. He thinks I am!”

Still Life
Originally uploaded by James in Taiwan.

This was originally drawn with a white background in Freehand 7 while I was working at a startup around 8 years ago. I was the go-to guy and wore many hats in that startup. I did UI Design, product demos, requirements gathering for sales, presentations to VCs and the list goes on.

Our company was going specifically after the food and beverage vertical market and we had some major accounts with Gilroy Foods and See’s Candy. I originally was going to use this for a promotional brochure, but our company went belly up before I had a chance to use it. I always liked this image (especially the wheat) so I decided to post it here.

It is somewhat sad to think that there will no longer be any updates to Freehand.  There was a recent announcement by Adobe that there will be no future development of Freehand and they will let the application slip into obscurity.

I did the original storyboard for this animation back in college for a 3D animation class I was taking as an elective. I began to model the all of the characters in 3D Studio Max and was 75% done and about to animate the models and my hard drive crashed. This set me back so much that I had to drop the class.

I kept the story board and after graduation I wanted to at least produce something out of that story. I just purchased Flash 4, and felt that this would be a good pilot project.

I drew all of the elements from the story board in black and white, scanned them in and colored them inside Flash. I then when about and did the animation.

This would be relatively easy to animate now, but this was very complicated with Flash 4’s limited tools. I just got the CS3 upgrade and found a nice QuickTime export function which now allows me to post this to YouTube.

Strangossi al ragu
Originally uploaded by James in Taiwan.

A few weeks back Steven and I stumbled upon a small cafe that specialised in pizza and pastas. We decided to try both, and the pasta was so good, we had to order another plate (even though we were full).

If you are looking for a great place for a plate of pasta and a pizza, go to Pizzeria Rialto on No 116, Sec. 7, Chung Shan N. Rd. or their sister resturant Osteria Rialto found at No. 5, Lane 260, Kuang-Fu S. Rd.