Driving back to San Diego was an invitation into the worst air quality I have ever experienced. Obviously because of the fires.

The San Diego news broadcast above was not comforting. If you look at the center of the image where "Mira Mesa" then you're looking at my current homestay. The fires were occuring all around. Around noontime this is what the view looked like from Mike's balcony:

The air quality was horrible. The smell of smoke. Burnt and suffocating. By the time I was done with the workday (I work night shifts for now, around 4 to midnight), my eyes were red and stinging. Even from inside our building.

The drive home was nice. But the air was still thick; I could tell from the streetlamps that smoke was still heavy.

The word yesterday was that weather might be better today. Something about a marine layer or what not. In any case, I woke up today and was finally able to open the sliding door to smell the air. From the apartment, it seems fine.

It's unbelievable. The damage the fires have caused is unsettling. Over 1,000 homes destroyed in San Diego county.

It was interesting yesterday - the news ran stories where people who lost their homes blatantly lashed-out at the media. I don't recall seeing any new stories in L.A. broadcasts where reporters would actually say "They are mad at us for not reporting things better". I could be mistaken or uninformed, but that was a bit surprising, in a good way.

Mike was catching his usual dose of WWE on TV. An added plus was the spattering of game commercials for games like Tony Hawk Underground and Super Mario Advance 4 (essentially "Super Mario Bros. 3" ported to the Game Boy Advance, with some extras).

I was really entertained by the commercial. First because it is supposedly filmed in Japan. Second because it's got schoolkids doing cool acrobatics. Jumping in various gaming fashions (we discussed how one boy did a flip jump quite similar to Metroid Prime character Samus Aran's moves), running atop commuter trains. I like how it's put together.

AdTunes.com reports that the song used in the commercial was Mayumi Kojima's "Hatsukoi" (First Love).

You can see/download the commercial at Nintendo's site:
http://www.nintendo.com/news/news_articles.jsp?articleID=9036

Images from today on my way back from La Verne to San Diego via the 15 Freeway.

Television "coverage".

To say that air quality has been poor is an understatement. This afternoon the ash was coming down with slightly more frequency than it did in La Verne, where things are calming down, fire-wise.

I have yet to move into the master bedroom of an apartment with Jerry, my roommate-to-be. I'm approved to move in on the first of next month, so it's just around the corner. I contacted him and it looks like Encinitas (my future residence) is in a safe spot, further north and west of all this fire choas. It's unreal to see a news graphic of Southern California to see fire icons from one area to another.

Noon on Saturday: the sky was still blue, but smoke was creeping in.

Noon on Sunday: copper/orange sky.

The wildfires are everywhere, with an emphasis on "everywhere", in Southern California.

My Saturday was not so relaxed. The morning consisted of getting my car jump started, driving back home to La Verne, noticing the copper sky and then realizing that fires were breaking out all over southern California, and spending the rest of the day fixing my nephew's PC and cursing over setting his computer over wireless network.

Today, Sunday, seemed a little better. Daylight savings time ended, allowing me an extra hour to stay up and tend to my web hobbies.

And then I popped in "Lily Chou-Chou no Subete", or "All About Lily Chou-Chou". A film by Shunji Iwai.

I've not seen Iwai's previous works, but I can relate to this one on several levels.

"All About..." revolves around the world of Japanese junior high school students. The bullying, confusion, peer pressure. And a few other Japanese JHS phenomenon. Well, mostly the darker side if it exists in the kids' lives. On top of this is the connection of every character to Lily Chou-Chou (Riri Shushu as pronounced by the cast). Her music creates a web (pun intended) of interaction between everyone. The film ends in an anti-climax which I found satisfying. But that's just me.

I wanted to see this film when I heard about it sometime a year and a half ago. Recently it showed up on eBay: it was officially released in Hong Kong. I got my hands on a region 3 copy. The transfer is a little dim, but generally acceptable. The subtitiles are pretty decent - I never found myself doing any major double takes trying to re interpret any badly translated text

Because a lot is taped on school locations, I found myself nodding or smiling when I saw something familiar. Namely, a rebellious school kid here and there, or the uniformity of the gym (I really do think that most school gyms I've seen in Japanese junior high schools look exactly the same). So those who have had some experience seeing school life in Japan will see glimpses here.

Opinions are mixed. Still...

For a film that is full of sadness, it was extremely uplifting for me.

I'm afraid I don't have any pictures to show today - I'm logged in at my friend's iMac. Actually, I'm staying at his place since I cannot move into my apartment yet.

My new job is interesting. Interesting in that it's a variably different experience from my former testing with Squaresoft (now Square Enix, USA). I'm not at liberty to go into details, so I will just say that I'm enjoying it so far. It's good to be working again, in the sense that I can start covering my bases, financially. Of course, the work is fun also.

Last Saturday I spent all day at my sister's place to fix my nephew's, JJ's, computer. I ditched efforts after running some diagnostic software on the hard drive - at that point the drive made enough noise to creep anyone out. It's being sent back to Western Digital for a replacement.

That same evening I was uploading files to my new web host. As I mentioned before, this hindsightproject.com domain is now hosted at 8-95 Internet Services. They had a two week special going on that I took advantage of.

A few hours later, Frank tells me about Surpass Hosting.

I ended up signing with them for jameswong.com. If I'm happy with them, maybe Surpass will host all my sites. My primary concern was bandwidth. And at their pricing plans it was a bit hard to resist. We'll see how it pans out over the next month.

Sunday I've done little. I woke up, ran some small errands and drove back here to San Diego in the evening. It's back to work on Monday.

On Tuesday, I begin working a night shift. 4:30 - 12:30. It looks like I'll be resuming my "post-Japan" sleeping schedule for maybe a month or two.

More to come.

Tomorrow will be the first day at my new job. It's been two months since I've worked in any capacity - I'm thankful I've found something.

I'm headed down south to San Diego to stay with my friend tonight - apparently I can't move into my apartment until next month, so I've been offered a place to crash on weekdays while I make this transition. Have laptop, will travel. Have games, will travel.

I am switching to a new webhost in the next few weeks. If you come back and things have vanished, chances are I'm working on a fix.

Well, here we go. See you in a few.

The first: October 7, 2003. Huntington Beach, California. Foggy drive home. The second: Yesterday.

A few weeks ago I would open the front door, looking at the ground to see if packages had arrived for things I won off eBay. Such hasn't happened now and soon I won't have this sort of view. Wednesday I start working.

I'm listening to "Kaihukusuru Kizu" from Shunji Iwai's film "All About Lily Chou Chou". I dug it up from the mp3 folders because it was used in "Kill Bill". I had a feeling I'd heard the song before last Friday when I watched the film. "Wait a second," I thought. I know that song...

I never got to see "All About Lily Chou Chou", but I will soon.

Last night I thought about things that would keep me busy once I start working. That is, aside from work. I thought about my fantasies of playing the drums or writing more for future video projects. And I really need to attend to both of those somehow. Such thoughts got me out of a rut that I was in yesterday - I was at my cousins' housewarming party that eventually turned into a gathering for their friends. In a few hours the place was filled with everyone around my age. Lots of great looking girls and their boyfriends. I left early feeling lonely and having nothing in common to chat with. Most attempts to talk lasted but a few minutes before fizzling out. I felt sad.

It is a little past two months since I left Japan. I've gained weight, naturally - no more walking and sitting in a car does not make James happy. But c'est la vie here in Southern California. Taking up rollerblading suddenly seems very, very attractive.

I am not sure how I'll feel in a week. I certainly won't be starved of work or peace. But I would like to see where else my curiosities with creativity take me. I'm optimistic, for once.

I must be the only person I know who didn't like "Kill Bill" as much as everyone else.

Random thoughts... With spoilers...

There's a lot to like and a lot not to like about Kill Bill. On one hand, you could say that it's ultra stylish and just ultra cool. That's an obvious gift of Tarantino, make it cool. On the other, you could say that it's a bunch of asian cinematic devices rolled up into one film without any originality whatsoever. It may be original, but in the sense that it's not been pushed onto U.S. soil so strongly before.

Watching KB is like watching live-action anime. Limbs and head fly off with one swift slash. Blood spurts out like water and makes us laugh at certain points in the film. Woo-ping Yuen was on hand - the fight choreographer for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix, among other films.

Heck, even Production I.G. (Patlabor, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) produced an animated sequence for a good portion of the film.

Some of the best humor is best achieved through its editing. The "..wiggle the big toe..." sequence being the most obvious one.

The cast is good. Uma Thurman kicks ass pretty damn good. Lucy Liu does her part and Chiaki Kuriyama (as "Go Go Yuriba") plays the lolita-fatale schoolgirl with sharp objects.

It's a well packaged film - half in Japanese (with subtitles) and half in English. Whether you play this film here or in Japan, you will have an equal amount of subtitling. The Japanese will love it for the U.S. cast and the casting of Kuriyama (Chiaki Kuriyama was also a knife wielding neurotic in "Battle Royale").

So why do I mention all these things and still find myself disappointed with the film? I went in with not a clue of what KB was about. All I knew about the film was that it was by Tarantino and that Uma wears a Bruce Lee jumpsuit.

Perhaps it's because I'm familiar with anime, some martial arts films, and I'm just seeing all of it crammed together in something that most casual moviegoers haven't seen elsewhere. Maybe I'm spoiled by the quicker action sequences of "Hero" or the slower pacing of "Ghost in the Shell". I got tired of the long stares between fights that, while present in most anime, just fails under the guise of a U.S. film designed to mimic it.

Maybe I thought Tarantino could push it even further. Or maybe I just have to wait for the sequel so everyone on the bandwagon can call me stupid while I stand on my soapbox. I find it difficult to explain why.

If Kill Bill were directed by Joel Schumaker, people would call this shlock. But since it was Tarantino, it can be classified as the best of his work. His directorial style doesn't deviate too much from his previous works (Pulp Fiction comes to mind, obviously). Tarantino-buffs will not be disappointed at all.

Over the last few nights I've surfed from web host to web host to see what plans they offer.

I currently have two domains: jameswong dot com & hindsightproject dot com.

I'm looking to have both domains hosted under one web host, under one account. The blog you're staring at right now is under aplus.net. I've never had any problems with them, but I know there are better hosts out there who offer more storage (my plan caps me at 300MB, and I'm running out).

I basically dabble with things like Movable Type, upload Quicktime videos of my work and so on.

As far as my other domain (jameswong.com) goes, my biggest project seems to be my Yoko Kanno Project. Bandwidth is intensive on that site at the moment. I've never moved hosts for five years. But my account lacks any features (PHP, MySQL database needed for MT, etcetera). It takes up almost 600MB of space right now. That is most likely to change, though - Kanno project is loaded with low-sampled music files that need to be truncated down (working on that).

Any recommendations or suggestions?

One night I was surfing away and I stumbled upon Wikipedia. I heard this term "wiki" before but I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Perhaps another cute name that ran along the tech-oriented terms "Unix", "root" and whatever else avid computer freaks like myself knew or used in our daily lives.

So I look up Wikipedia and I see that I can change any of the pages anytime I want. As if I'm given full control over that page with my own free will. This seemed unreal. Utopian and utilitarian.

Now, whenever I use Winamp to listen to an MP3 or CD, you'll see what I'm listening to.

On the right sidebar you'll notice "Now Playing". If you see a song, it's actually running right now. That means my computer is on or I could actually be sitting in front of my computer listening to some song as you read this weblog. Kind of creepy, isn't it?

I noticed it on Jeff's sidebar, so I started to dabble. If you know how to copy and paste things and use general logic, you can probably do everything that I am about to explain. Being a weblog enthusiast doesn't hurt either.

If you have a Mac (lucky bastards), there's an iTunes plug-in that does things differently. Mac-users, skip all this and go here:
Trackback from iTunes

Okay, Movable Type users.. let's continue.

Here's how I did it:

1. Follow the instructions on Matt Haughey's site (which includes downloading the "DoSomething" plug-in for WinAmp):
   Trackbacks in Winamp

Everytime Winamp loads up a song, "DoSomething" sends a category-based Trackback ping to my Movable Type weblog. So MT is actually sending the last ping "excerpt" and listing it. The "Now Playing" section is actually a separate .php file I created that gets include onto this Main Index page you are reading.

If you got this far, make sure that "Disable Plugin" in DoSomething's configuration screen is NOT checked. Otherwise you'll wonder why it's working half the time.

Issues
If you like to get e-mailed whenever a Trackback ping is sent to your weblog, you won't like DoSomething. You can, however, turn off the option to be auto-notified of every ping by way of MT's Preferences under your Weblog Config menu.

Cool, that was that. Then I realized that for every song I played, a ping record is sent. This means that MT will record every single ping Winamp sends. It could swell my MT database with (for me) useless ping data. How can I fix this without manually deleting pings for the rest of my journal's life?

Brenna made a fix for this called "RemovePings":
MT Plugin Directory: RemovePings

1. Download her plugin and drop it into your "mt/plugins/" directory.
2. Login to your weblog in Movable Type, create a new index file per her instructions with her example code and tweak as necessary.
3. Whenever you rebuild that RemovePings template, it will clear pings from your MT database.

Her plugin allows you to set the maximum number of pings you want to keep on record. So it could be 5, 50 or any other insane number if you're really that obessessed with your playlist history.

Achieving Perfection (Sort of)
Okay, so now I'm all set. But wait. When I turn off Winamp, my weblog still says I'm listening to a song. Call me a perfectionist - I really want to push this "listening to this right now" feature that I've been working towards.

In an update, Matt mentions that Jason Bergeman uses a little PHP code in my "now playing" include to fix this. His code says "Hmm, if there is no ping update for 15 minutes (or whatever time you tweak it to), let's just say on the web page that Winamp is off".

How to display "Winamp is not running"

Note: I was looping a song for awhile, and the ping wasn't updated, so my output just says "Winamp is not running right now". If anyone knows a workaround, please leave a comment for this post.

Jeff told me that the DoSomething plug-in can automatically say "Broadcast Stopped", so maybe I am missing something. If you know, please leave a comment here so I can update this post.

Conclusions
So after way too much time and perfections, I use the following just to put one little thing on my sidebar. You can actually customize things more: for example, list the last 10 songs played instead of just one. Tweak away.

1. DoSomething plug-in for WinAmp.
2. Trackbacks in Winamp.
3. RemovePings by Brenna.
4. "Not running" PHP code by Jason.

I am running WinAmp v2.91 with DoSomething v2.12 and RemovePings v0.1

.....I am also a big geek.

Another pointless (but hopefully meaningful) image I took today. I was going through my things stored in boxes, and here is an offering from XianMrtyr (see: sidenav).

I was journal hopping and stumbled onto an interesting post by Jim O'Connell: Conbini Nation. He talks about the number of convenience stores near his home in Tokyo and how people may think along a "human scale" rather than one relative to driving distance.

Last weekend I drove down to San Diego County to meet up with potential places to live... and their resident(s). I stayed with my friend on Friday night where a good session of Def Jam Vendetta (trust me, it's good) was had, among other games. Saturday morning I started my day too early - at 7:30am.

I asked questions, took the dime-tour of each place and so on and so forth. It's the first time I've done so to move in with a complete stranger and they all turned out to be positive experiences.

I've made a decision already about it, so I'll be about 10 miles from my new job if all the proper red tape checks out.

There was a lot of time to kill once I was done. Wrapped up at 10 or so and had no place to go until my friend returned home from his overtime shift at 2, so I took the 78 around. Stopped by a Fry's Electronics here, a Best Buy there and other such geekness. I realized that I really have not gone out in awhile and all these movies I had forgotten about are now on DVD. I've been living in my bubble.

Driving - I feel more comfortable about driving now then I did before I left Japan. It doesn't quite make sense since I'd walked and rode trains in Kitakyushu. I would think that the hiatus just refreshed me. That and not being at home was the big sell.

So I am thinking of what my new room will be like and how it will be living alone again. Grocery shopping not at the Sun-Live down the corner across from Nishikokura Post Office but across the street at a Ralph's or some other variant with the Post Office a five minute drive away.

I feel like I'm taking another small step in my life with new unknowns. Not as adventurous as going abroad. Still, another case of the nomad soul working with a new set of circumstances.

Lost in Translation isn't so much about Japan. In fact, there is very little of Japan itself in the spotlight. It is about relationships. Loneliness. Dealing with decisions, personal lives, abandoning them for a night or three, finding out more about yourself. Japan serves as a backdrop to place two of these people in a situation where they have more of a reason to connect and look into their own lives. In a way, watching "Lost" was a way to reflect on how I felt at times living in Kitakyushu.

I loved it. My ability to understand most of what the Japanese cast said (subtitles are not provided in the entire film, which makes perfect sense) was an added plus. I brought with me to the theater the bit of enthusiasm and nostalgia I've always had for Japan since I returned.

Can't say much more. I was pretty moved by the final scene. I recall having a note jotted down for a video project very similar to it. I want to see it again sometime, so I'll most likely acquire it once it's out on DVD.

Things are going to look real messy as I modify the layout here. If things appear strange, hang in there - I'm working on it.

Although idol/actress Ryoko Hirosue has absolutely nothing to do with today's events, she and I share the same birthday... separated by a two year difference. The image above now graces the center of the void that is my Windows desktop.

Aside from that good news, there is more.

Early in September I drove down to San Diego county for a job interview. I don't live near San Diego. In fact, I live some two hours north. But with not much in sight and a firm enthusiasm for video games, off I went. Some five days later, I was notified that I made it to the "hired" list.

Just yesterday, Tuesday, their human resources department called me to notify me of the kind of pay I would be getting and a firm start date. I begin working on October 15th. Two weeks from today. Temporary to possible permanent.

This week has started off well. If anything I am happy to find work that will allow me to be distant, but not too far, from home. So far I've arranged to see three places where I might be rooming, this Saturday.

Moving again will make things better, considering I've felt no support from one of my folks. I'm ready to have my own unconditional, personal space again. The sort of space that really is worth paying for.

Jello shots. Beer. Smirnoff Ice Triple Blacks. Vanilla-Vodka shots. Last Saturday seemed to break my super sobriety and a good time was had by all. I saw a lot of faces I hadn't talked to [in person] for quite some time, and being a little off kilter didn't seem to hurt. Laughs and such. It got so wacky that Jon, one of my former coworkers, was practicing his martial arts skills with others. A sort of mini Fight Club if you will. But never violent. White trashfest 2003.

Kidding. Maybe? Entertaining nonetheless.

Maybe I am getting too old, or maybe my drinking habits were more sensible when I was in Japan. The hangover the following morning was not very forgiving. In fact a mild headache accompanied my Sunday for the rest of the afternoon until I decided to give into a geltab of Advil.

Prior to all of this madness, I had dinner with Linda at a TGIFriday's she spotted off the street as we drove through Brea for something to fill up on before the mingling. It was nice. Chat and good food, Jack Daniel's steak for me. It was a good night to splurge. That Saturday night was probably the start of a brighter week, which seems to be happening now.