Shack Attack

Shack, Interrupted

This blog will be on temporary, maybe permanent hiatus, while I'm in Japan. You can read about my year in Japan at dshack.net.

For the Dre fan / road cyclist subset

dznuts bag balm. From Hugger Industries' Flickr stream via Bike Hugger.

Odd Japanese Coke Found in the Company Fridge

I moseyed into the Six Apart kitchen Friday afternoon to grab a soda, and this caught my eye:

 Being both a Japanophile and lover of soda, this can (bottle?) was calling me. It's got the approximate  shape and capacity of an aluminum can, except that it has a screw-top, which is way nifty. I'm not particularly excited about its ability to keep <12oz of soda fizzy for an extended period of time, since I down a can pretty fast, but it seems genius for an under-the-radar flask (or for drinking soda near a computer; the small opening and screw-top seem like a good spill deterrent).

Aaah....tasty! It's diet coke, but for some reason they mix aspartame and sucralose as sweeteners, rather than use one or the other. The flavor was fairly indistinguishable from American coke, though I think the small, round opening changes its character a little, and makes the carbonation a little more pronounced.

(Props to Beau for the soda and the iphone pictures)

Feeling Less Than Secure

Google Reader was a non-stop stream of unsettling news this morning.

First up: Apparently pacemakers can be disabled remotely. What? We're outraged at the prospect of cars or iphones having a remote kill switch, but somehow we let one in our grandparents slip by unnoticed? (via BB)

Next: With a couple hours and $100 of equipment, a University of Amsterdam security researcher cloned and altered a 'Fakeproof' british microchipped passport, which supposedly compares biometric information about the holder against a secure, international database.

The tests for The Times were conducted by Jeroen van Beek, a security researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Building on research from the UK, Germany and New Zealand, Mr van Beek has developed a method of reading, cloning and altering microchips so that they are accepted as genuine by Golden Reader, the standard software used by the International Civil Aviation Organisation to test them. It is also the software recommended for use at airports.

Using his own software, a publicly available programming code, a £40 card reader and two £10 RFID chips, Mr van Beek took less than an hour to clone and manipulate two passport chips to a level at which they were ready to be planted inside fake or stolen paper passports.

From The Times Online via BB

And finally, the New Yorker has a typically well-written article on a horrifying new strain of treatment-resistant superbugs that may kill us all. The culprits? Globalization, unsanitary hospitals, and over-use of antibiotics.

Ten years ago, the Institute of M edicine of the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, D.C., assessed the economic impact of resistant microbes in the United States at up to five billion dollars, and experts now believe the figure to be much higher. In July, 2004, the Infectious Diseases Society of America...estimated ninety thousand deaths annually in U.S. hospitals owing to bacterial infection, more than seventy per cent had been caused by organisms that were resistant to at least one of the drugs commonly used to treat them.

Drawing on these data, collected mostly from hospitals in large urban areas which are affiliated with medical schools, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found more than a hundred thousand cases of gram-negative antibiotic-resistant bacteria. No precise numbers for all infections, including those outside hospitals, have been calculated, but the C.D.C. also reported that, among gram-negative hospital-acquired infections, about twenty per cent were resistant to state-of-the-art drugs.

The researcher's eventual conclusion:

“We can temper things, we might be able to slow the rate of emergence of resistance, but it’s unlikely that we will ever be able to conquer it.”

Full article at The New Yorker

Perfect Google calendar syncing on the iPod Touch.

I recently got an iPod Touch, and while it does plenty of things well, one feature sorely lacking was good calendar syncing. I don't ask for much- I want events scheduled online to be reflected on my ipod, and events scheduled on the ipod to be reflected online the next time it connects to the web.

Unfortunately, Apple doesn't want me to do this with Google Calendar- they would rather have me pay $99 a year for their so-far-not-so-hot MobileMe service. Because of the lack of a cellular data connection, I can't just use Gcal through Safari (plus, I like a lot of the features of the native calendaring app, like alarms), and if I used my work's Exchange server, it would overwrite my personal calendar.

Enter NuevaSync. This free service offers "direct, over-the-air, native synchronization of certain smart phones and PDA devices with public PIM, and calendaring services including Google Calendar." Setup is easy:

1) Create a NuevaSync account

2) Tell it whether to sync your Google Calendar, Contacts, or both (no tasks support right now)

3) Add it as an Exchange account on your ipod or iphone.

So far, I'm sold- the service is in beta, but I've been using it for about a week with no problems, and it does exactly what it's supposed to do: let me see and edit my calendar wherever I am, regardless of web access. Add an event in the subway station on my ipod? Once I get wi-fi, it's in my google calendar. Add an appointment from Gmail? It shows up on the ipod. Just another entry in the saga of how the ipod Touch is good enough for most of us.

Life on the ipod isn't quite perfect yet, though. There's still the issue of how I can't send mail from every address I want to, like in gmail, and I need to sort out which contacts I really want access to (less than in my gmail address book, essentially, but more than and from different circles than my company exchange book).

The Couchbike

Amazing- motivated people investing time and effort the kind of thing friends and I have always joked about doing. Rent one here.

The Bicycle Forest, the guys behind this, are pretty nifty- besides the Couchbike, they also produce BikeCAD, a mountain bike design program, and host a gallery of homemade bike mods.

(thanks, Web Urbanist!)

I Heart Digsby

I'm going to take a little time to talk about my all-time favorite IM client, Digsby. Like many, I have a few different internet communication services going- a Gtalk/Gmail account, AIM, Facebook, a Jabber service at my work, and twitter.

I've tried serving them all out of one program with limited success- Trillian did most things pretty well, Gtalk did Gmail and AIM great (as did chatting straight out of the gmail web client), but left out any other functionality.

However, I just discovered Digsby, an amazing cross-platform client that serves up about any account you  can think of. Not only does it let you chat across services, but it shows you facebook updates in a way that makes sense, and lets you interact with Gmail messages without opening up a browser (not even Google's own IM client does that!).

Here's Digsby on AIM (SMS and file transfer work fine):

And here it is doing twitter:

You can see exactly what sort of facebook updates are waiting for you:

And my favorite, gmail. Actually, any of the clients can be displayed as tiny icons in the taskbar as well as from the sidebar, but gmail is my favorite, because I can see a snippet of the message, and instantly archive it (I've been working on the theory of Inbox Zero lately) if it's something I don't need to deal with.

All in all, a sweet client, and the best part is that your preferences and accounts sync across computers! Digsby runs a free server that stores user settings, so when I get home from work and boot up, my digsby client behaves exactly the same as the one on my work laptop. Genius!

Sticking it to the Man, and Ten Interesting Credit Card Facts

[UPDATE: Consumerist has a new, in-depth post on the subject below]

    I was at US bank, trying to make a deposit, and I wrote the cash amount in the check line and vice versa, so I scribbled it out and changed it. Then the teller told me I needed to initial my changes, and I'm just thinking "Really? I mean, I get that there's some verification you can do on a signature, and if you want me to write out a clean deposit form, that's cool too, but initials?" So I wrote "MAC DRE" in big capital letters next to the change. She didn't say anything, but she processed my transaction. Speaking of silly instructions from people behind counters that you don't listen to, you don't need to provide ID to use a credit card (an, and having a minimum charge or service charge for using a credit card can get a business fined big-time from the card companies. Consumerist had an interesting article about all the things businesses do that, if they were to be reported, would get them hit with a fatty fine or even an account cancellation from their credit card companies.

1) Unsigned Cards Are Not Valid And Merchants Can And Will Refuse Them

2) The Maximum Liability For Unauthorized Use Of A Credit Card* Is $50 According To Federal Law

3) Merchants Cannot Require You To Present ID, Unless Your Card Is Unsigned

4) Merchants Cannot Require A Minimum Transaction Amount

5) Merchants Cannot Charge A Surcharge For Using A Credit Card, However, They Can Offer A "Cash Discount"

6) Many Credit Cards Have Programs That Will Automatically Double The Manufacturer's Warranty And Other Excellent Benefits

7) Merchants Are Not Allowed To Make You Give Up Your Right To A Chargeback

8) Merchants Are Not Allowed To Place A Hold For The Estimated Tip

9) If Merchants Suspect You Of Fraud They Are Supposed To Call With A "Code 10"

10) If Merchants Break These Rules, You Can Report Them To The Credit Card Company

    With a lot of these, I feel like I'd be unlikely to report a business I liked, but if you want a service and the guy's being a dick and not letting you charge it to your card, feel free to let him know that he needs to let you make the transaction or you'll be giving Visa a call. I really recommend reading the full article on Consumerist; it has links to the Visa/Mastercard policies that back these claims up, as well as information about how to report violations. 

[UPDATE: Consumerist has a new, in-depth post on this subject; I would check it out]

The Website is Down

If you've ever worked in IT, this should have you laughing until it hurts.

The official title of the video is "Sales guy vs. Web Dude," and it was put together by a crack team of jaded nerds, mashing up various IT horror stories into a nightmarish-but-possible episode in the life of a corporate techie.

The Great Happiness Space

This documentary about Japanese male "host" clubs is possibly one of the most troubling films I've ever seen.

Host clubs in a nutshell:
Women begin by sitting down and paging through a catalog of the club's wares, an assortment of crazy-haired, blinged-out, slightly effeminate (to my American eyes) Japanese twentysomethings. They then choose their host, who entertains them for the night, drinking with them, teasing them, talking with them, and generally making them feel special. It's largely platonic, though there are exceptions- women visit the clubs for emotional more than sexual fulfillment.

On the surface, not so bad, right? It may seem a little off, but people like to feel special, and there's nothing wrong with selling a service that provides that, is there? These were my initial sentiments when I heard about these clubs, and I'm sure there are perfectly healthy host-client relationships where the host is little more than a paid drinking buddy.

However, Rakkyo, the #1 club in Japan and the subject of the film, is anything but healthy. Its clients drop anywhere from $300 to $3000 in a night, competing for the affections of the top hosts in Japan. Interviews with the women reveal delusional, addicted girls, genuinely believing they can one day be together with their host, and often turning to hostessing or full-blown prostitution to fund the habit.

The hosts fare no better. While at first they seem like actors, putting on a nice show and entertaining a girl for a night, they string girls along, always hinting at a relationship but holding it just out of reach, all the while binge drinking and encouraging their "dates" to do the same. They pander, lie, and read and manipulate girls' feelings enough that they talk about going numb, about being unable to have an actual relationship with anyone.

This film swings your feelings for the characters back and forth, revealing insecurity, manipulation, and abject materialism on both ends of the relationship. The world of host clubs is a crazy one: hosts regularly bring in over $100,000 a year drinking in nightclubs, a top host downs ten bottles of champagne in a night, vomiting as necessary to keep the alcohol from killing him, and girls profess their love to a host at one club while hitting multiple clubs over the course of a week, then talk later about the true, deep love they feel for their host at Rakkyo.

The direction is awesome in its simplicity; the directors simply intersperse footage from an actual host club with interviews with its denizens. The camera feels like the eyes of someone simply curious about this phenomenon: transparent, honest, and occasionally voyeuristic. Hosts and clients play their teasing, lying love games as if no one was watching, and the picture that emerges is fascinating and twisted.

Watch the trailer here

 

If you have Netflix, you can watch The Great Happiness Space online here. Otherwise, there's always Amazon.