·:[ Leefe rates the world… ]:·
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Walking though Harajuku I was greeted by this visage staring down at me from a clothing store. Dark glasses, goatee, frilly shirt, bad jewellery… looks like a role player.

Actually, it reminds me of number role players I know in Sydney. And they probably just left a vampire freeform.

Is that a manga character I see before me?

Or a new movie super hero?

No, it is Symantec Man.

Just beside Shinjuku station, outside Lumine Est, last night I noticed a giant inflatable figure. Wondering what new manga, or perhaps a new super hero movie, this figure was here to advertise I walked closer.

With a little disappointment, and some mirth, I read the sign behind its feet. Seems Shinjuku. The giant figure here to protect, or possibly enslave, Tokyo was Symantec Man.

Looking closely at the sign behind the leg you will see that this is Norton for Symantec.

Yes, you read that correctly. I downloaded the Xcode 3.0 disk image at an average of 3000 KB per second. So the 1.1 GB file took less than 6 minutes.

Ah the joys of having an optical link.

Now if only most sites could deal with the speed.

Yesterday there were a few things that happened that I though were a little ironic in the way they were prioritised.

I went to a Denny’s in Shinjuku last night. Like many establishments in Japan, Denny’s doesn’t require you to sign the bill when paying via credit card. The irony of the situation though is that they wanted me to sign the discount voucher that I was using in the space provided.

So they needed to get a signature to use the 500¥ ($5) loyalty card, but they didn’t seem to need a signature for the 2000¥ ($20) credit card slip.

Saw a Nissen blimp moving round over Shinjuku the other night. It was was hovering over the station and had to rise quickly to get over the Takashimya building.

Interestingly I haven’t previously noticed any blimps over Tokyo. I have heard the occasional Chinook helicopter, but no blimps.

Maybe they are just too quiet to attract more notice, competing with the bustle of Tokyo life.

Been taking geotagged photos with a camera phone here is Japan. I though this would make it easier to add photos to Maps in flickr.

Well it doesn’t!

I spent a long time trying to workout where the ‘use geotag data in jpeg’s EXIF‘ command was when adding images to the map. It doesn’t exist. No where to be found.

It appears though, there is a setting hidden in flicker that tells flickr to use the geotag data in photos as you upload them. In flickr go to Your Account, click on the Privacy & Permissions tab, and you can find the Import EXIF location data setting.

But it only works for new or reloaded images, not existing ones.

Bit of a oversight don’t you think?

You would think that, if your jpg has EXIF geotag data, when you went to add it to a map flickr would think “hmm, this this photo has geotag data. I’ll ask the user ‘Would you like to use the geotag data to place your image on the map?’“. But no, it doesn’t work that way.

So you are stuck in an all or nothing situation. Either all your images with geotags are marked on maps, or you have to add them all manually. Come on flickr/Yahoo, it shouldn’t be that hard to implement it for individual images.

(I’d like to say thanks to Jannis Hermann for having a post about geotags in flickr. Everything else I found was about how to use flickr to geotag photos.)

Finally got my own Internet connection here in Japan.

Have been suffering for a month using the apartment complex’s shared wireless connection. About 10 minutes usage an hour randomly in 1-2 minute increments. Not to mention the slow connection speed.

So what sort of connection did I get?

Optical, but not optical. The modem plugs into a phone socket on the wall and it says VDSL on the manual.

But I thought I was having Optical installed?

Well it turns out that in Japan, NTT often connects to an apartment complex with a FTTH service, then wires the apartments with VDSL.

Though I still get my 100 Mbps connection, so I’m not worried

Now I can get round to posting some of the photos I have been taking over the last month.

No posts here for most of a month. But had no time to post anything. Too much time spent on relocation. To Japan that is.

Japan is interesting, but moving is a lot of work in the first few days and weeks. I’ll post more thoughts here as time allows.

In the mean time you can have a look at the first Tokyo train station accident I saw.

(I think the cleaner was a little worried about me taking photos of it )

Seeing as Necronomicon is not running this year another group decided to run their con at Easter, Eyecon. From their FAQ they intend to run it each year. Will it be the new Easter convention in Sydney?

I went and signed up to see how their registration process works, and to see if there was anything worth registering to play.

It was interesting to note that their site tracked how many places in games were available each session, and displayed them to people registering. And that while a couple of game were full, many were very empty.

Hopefully they will get more people turning up tomorrow morning to fill out some of the games. But is begs the question…

Has the Sydney RPG convention scene died and some people just don’t want to accept it? With what seems to be a change from all the Sydney cons being run by one set of past BNGs to another, are they just moving the deck chairs on the Titanic?

(See below for game spaces available at the time I checked tonight, the night before the con.)
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The latest Iron Web Master specs are up. The round 5 theme is fitness. And the sites are due up Thursday 20 March at 3pm PST (-800 GMT?).

But what can I use as a parody theme this time?

I had thought of doing Exercise, but that is too close to the last one. Maybe ‘Get on your bike’? Thought I can’t think of any other bike jokes.

So, I’m suffering from a little writer’s block. Anybody got any good ideas that I can borrow?