Greetings. I now know what being a few days ahead is like. It's good for doing timeless stuff, but these rants are not cool. You see I'm 3 days ahead and so I just upload the new files everyday. I don't get to explain my opinion on something because then it will get confusing. Writing 3 days ahead? What brain surgeon came up with that one? Well, I simply can't do it.

I recommend Lost in Translation with Bill Murray. I saw it tonight and I was quite pleased with the story. Seeing the reality of what an American tourist in Tokyo, Japan can see is depressing, but it really motivates a tourist to learn a bit of Japanese before they go. I could understand a lot of what they were saying "kimochi", "warui", and "yoroshiku" are part of my vocabulary after learning so much. Anime is an okay way to learn common grammar and phrases in my opinion, but it isn't very good at increasing vocabulary easily. The best way is to do the levels at The Japanese Page. Level 4 is trivial. Level 3 is very hard. Add in some common phrases and you're set. "Sensei, doko e gozaimasu ka?" is a part of Javantea's Fate Scene 5, Page 1. It is literally translated, "Teacher, where that it is?" I don't think that it makes sense in Japanese, but the JF manga is supposed to reflect my foresight into my own future from 3 years ago. I came up with the phrase two years ago when I had just one quick translation sheet and a Japanese/English Dictionary. I could have Jav say "Sensei wa?", (literally "Teacher is?") but people don't make that much sense when they talk to themself aloud anyway. I wanted Jav to be explicit when he says, "Where in the world is my teacher?" Because the next box answers the question.

This is a funny screen capture:

It shows me downloading GTA 1 Classic from Rockstar. I own GTA 1 and I bought it many years ago. But I want the new one because it probably plays at a higher resolution and doesn't rely on old icky code. The old icky code works, though. Still to this day. An interesting question arose when my friend and I discussed this. Why in the world is the download 350 MB? The program files and data are ~15 MB says my friend. The rest must be music. But the music is only 1 CD worth. If they compressed with MP3, it would add 60 MB. So where is the rest coming from? Bloat? Obviously they decided not to compress the audio. My friend has not heard the audio. I explained to him, "The audio is a lot of the game, really." It gave character to the action. A person feeling like a gangster listening to gangster music. Of course my friend was somehow already into the music scene before that. He's only a year older than me. How in the world could he have better musical taste than me back then? I mean, my brother had better taste in music than me... Hmmm... Maybe I had bad taste in music back then. Well bygones I say. GTA1 turned me on to techno and I only go back to alternative for vacation and punk for mood music.

But there is a serious problem with the GTA download. Here is a good lesson. Do not offer a 350 MB download on an unstable connection without resume. This is what Rockstar did. I downloaded 45 MB and it stopped. I downloaded 50 MB and it stopped.* I downloaded 80 MB and it stopped. I downloaded 212 MB and it stopped again! I have decided to stop trying since it's costing people a lot of money. The correct solution is to enable resume or better, use BitTorrent!

* I hate to say it but I was pretty desperate for this download. I should have stopped after the second time, since it was costing so much bandwidth. But it's not like I was using it for anything else. Upload bandwidth on the other hand, whoo hoo! I'm uploading Slackware 9.1 CD 1 at 27 kbps 24/7. I bet MSN loves that. They're probably losing money on me. Hahahah.

On a slightly more serious note, I was thinking that I would offer Hack Mars on CD and Bit Torrent. I could mark down the Bit Torrent to $10 (from $20) since it doesn't cost anything. What do you think? Would a person go for that? The only thing is that I would need an encryption/registration system to make it work. I guess I could make that happen. It isn't very hard to make one of those register things. I could have it not go past the third mission until they put in a key that decrypts the data. Something like xor encryption with a one-time pad. I'm all about DRM, yeah =p.

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