Animeseijin

February 8th, 2010 omo

Why do I follow Mako’s silly excuse of a blog?

Because she post pics like these.

It’s not exactly a secret, but I can’t read Japanese. So why do I read Japanese blogs? I’m subscribed to Makkun’s blog, out of some misguided sense of duty–the same reason why I buy almost every solo CD she puts out I guess.

I also follow ItoShiz’s blog, but because she usually posts some interesting pictures and she doesn’t post much anyways, so it isn’t as if it makes a difference.

I follow a few other Japanese blogs for non-informational purposes, but they usually have some actual utility even if I can’t read it.

(BTW this post will get crossposted to omonomono.com in a slightly different form.)

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Posted in Anime, Social | No Comments »

2010 Cleaning

January 11th, 2010 omo

I suddenly found myself at a slow work day, so I’ve finally migrated the current omonomono WP theme over to 2.9 usability. Probably it is better if I spend more time investigating pre-existing themes to avoid reinventing the wheel, but this was pretty quick and painless. The only thing that I might have problem down the road is the static page mouseover things, as there are dynamic versions available… Not that it matters, omonomono is unlikely to go through a design change anyways. Even visual, let alone topical.

If you know any good (meaning very simple) single column themes (no sidebars!) that offers page templates like “archives” and “links” etc and must have a dynamic mouseover page link implementation, let me know.

Another 2010 thing is I joined a gym. Because it was $20 a month and they have a pool. Now it’s just a matter of seeing if I can make the time to go. I am plenty motivated if the facilities are good, actually.

Maybe I can squeeze in some time to actually migrate this thing today. Or perhaps a blog post…

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Posted in Admin, Social | No Comments »

LOL FCC x BLOG

October 6th, 2009 omo

So the FCC finally got its advertising rules for blogs straight. Or gonna.

To me it’s hardly a surprise. But if I didn’t shop around for ad services for my blogs I probably would have been surprised. There are, to say the least, ethical grey areas in the way some of these services operated, getting paid by post and only when the advertisers are happy about it…

But my question now lies how free samples work. I think in most of the instances that I’ve read, all reviews tend to mention where they got the stuff from. For example if I review Crunchyroll I will say I bought it, because, well, it’s part of the consideration for it. However if I review Strained I will have to say something like “Funimation’s promo copy” or some such. But this is different than people who are otherwise paid for their writing beyond the sample.

That said I think Jtor needs to have a giveaway policy. Right now it feels too much like people are treating the samples like part of their perks for writing for it :x

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Posted in Anime, Social | No Comments »

Superbowl, Bowl, Interviewer

February 6th, 2009 omo

I was going to drop this only after the Utada write up went live, but to back track I was sick for two days and that put a cramper on the workings. Also I spent an entire Saturday playing Fallout 3, so that didn’t help.

Just wanted to say that it’s not fun being on the wrong end of religious ridicule, even if you’re just standing in the shadow. Still, it’s a good experience.

Maybe I can actually get stuff done this weekend and do my taxes. Gasp.

Superbowl party at Grace & Q’s was always good. Wish I could’ve had more wings. But I think they got rid of all 300? I have to ask. And talked to more people.

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Posted in Social, food | No Comments »

Twitter, Cereal

June 30th, 2008 omo

Is this any good? It’s having a MIR promotion that makes it FREE after rebate. And I thought the original frosted wheats were pretty ok.

I signed up for a twitter account a while back, but I just updated my profile on it. And made a post. With my phone. Thank God for $30 family plan unlimited text messaging package… I’ll probably just use it to live blog.

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Google Feed Reader

June 3rd, 2008 omo

A while ago there was some controversy about how Google Reader shares your feeds with people whose email are recorded in gmail, as a way to get some kind of social networking going on. Criticisms aside, I think stuff like that turned me away from using it.

But having a centralized, online feed that is customized by you is pretty useful for reading blogs at work, and Google feed reader is actually quite excellent of a feed reader. It could be a little more feature rich but I was surprised already at what it had. I didn’t really have much of an expectation to begin with, I guess.

So after a week of use I have to say it’s quite cool. I’ve shared a few (like my anime blog :toot:) blogs there. Can’t say much about the social networking aspect (don’t really care, and it isn’t well-developed anyways), but it’s nice to browse fat wallet this way.

Coincidentally it also keeps track of numbers of subscribers via Google Reader for each blog you subscribe to. It’s much more reassuring to see that Jeff Lawson’s blog has more than 10x the reader than mine (compared to animenano’s subscriber thingy), but at the same time I’m nearly shocked that I have even 1/10th of the reader he has.

Well, I guess I know one subscriber other than myself personally :)

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The Internet Is a Super Copyright Infringement Machine

February 5th, 2008 omo

This is what Congress said, and it’s true.

I was just browsing the random RSS aggregated links on my Wordpress dashboard as an admin, and it linked to a few blog posts about how to protect your copyrighted work on the internet.

The biggest problem a blogger faces is actually spam bots and scrappers. Content scrapping is something that’s actually hard to truly appreciate (both in the good and bad), because it’s not easy to understand nor is it all that different from just how the internet works normally.

That didn’t really bug me–I learned a few things reading those blog posts about “protect your copyright” and generally those made sense. But even taking all those IP courses in law school didn’t drive those point home in my mind: protect your IP? If you treasure your IP you wouldn’t put it on the internet in the first place. If we pay a professional for his or her services, it’s a bargained-for exchange. When you disclose your IP on the internet freely because you want people to read your blog, it is also a bargained-for exchange. Granted copyright law provides remedy that ought to be pursued by more people against a handful of unscrupulous “thieves” and to save those victims from being search engine collateral damage, this kind of legalism can only go so far with a crappy copyright system that we have today. It is just irrational to believe that people are not going to copy something good you posted on the internet for their own ends. It’s not a matter of if but when. And I think that alone has a lot of weight in the debate.

Of course there may be remedies, if someone copied your work on the internet in a way you don’t like. But if prevention is protection, the much better way is to not post it at all. There’s a precious balance between disclosure and the public domain and being a whore and locking things down. It’s the Prisoner’s Dilemma. And I would implore bloggers and other content providers to be judicious in the very first instance–post only what you can afford to lose. If I was a copyright lawyer, that’d be my best advice. (And no, I am not a copyright lawyer.)

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Posted in Legal, Social | No Comments »