Home
Webmail
Sakura
Flickr
About meArchives for November, 2006
Esperanto accomplishes something
All these years of thinking that an artificial “world” language drawn from a few tongues spoken in one corner of that world was about as useful as Klingon. But it turns out I was wrong. Yakult, everyone’s favorite probiotic drink in the tiny plastic bottle, got its name from jahurto, an archaic Esperanto word meaning “yogurt.”
I am told this stuff fills your belly with helpful bacteria, and we drink it at home fairly often. Megumi is a Swallows fan, too, which helps.
PS3 auctions followup
Saw a post on the Ars Technica forums from a person who dug up the 2channel thread where people are organizing their assaults on the PS3 auctions. Peek at it here if you’ve got the Japanese skills. You can also click here to see the highest-priced bids in the system right now. Looks like a deal to me!
PS3 units all going straight to Yahoo Auctions
This is an interesting read. The PS3 launch happened yesterday morning, and it was all over the news . . . Crowds of people lining up for hours in the predawn dawk of Yurakucho to get the goods from Bic Camera. Excited gamers who couldn’t wait to get their hands on the latest and greatest—to take it home and start playing all weekend long.
Or not. The mail in that link describes a different situation—a bunch of Chinese people who were paid maybe ¥20,000 each to stand in line and get one unit each, which they then carried around the corner to give to some Japanese guy.
“Thank you for your patience!,” welcomed the cashier to the first PS3 buyers. “What game software would you like with your purchase?”
“Hai,” the consumer nodded, not understanding the question.
Most cashiers soon figured out that the men and women standing in front of them didn’t speak Japanese. Some would then repeat the same question in English, and would all get the say reply, “Only hardware.”
Based on my observations of the first twenty PS3s sold at Bic Camera, they were all purchased by Chinese nationals, none of whom bought any software. After making their purchase, television crews asked for interviews but all were declined. These temporary owners of PS3s would then make their way down the street where their bosses waited. After several minutes, a dozen PS3s were rounded up, as their Japanese business manager paid out cash to those who waited in line for them. I witnessed a homeless-looking Chinese man, in his sixties or seventies get paid 20,000 yen for his services and was then sent away.
These things will probably all end up on Yahoo Auctions. (Ebay doesn’t exist over here, so these are the big ones.) Most of the PS3 units for sale there now are listed at around ¥80,000 and up . . . but I wouldn’t be surprised to see that number go lots higher.
I doubt very much the numbers will go as high as they are in this auction, which seems to have been hijacked by some people who want to mess up these auctions by making absurd bids (and then failing to do a thing after winning, no doubt). ¥1.4 million is the high bid as of this post. Hah.
Sony needed to have a lot more of these ready for launch. The Nintendo DS Lite is still impossible to find on shelves, so all you can see is oceans of software for the things . . . I predict similar sights in the Sony PS3 sections of game stores for months to come. Plenty of cool-looking games that nobody can play. Unless they hire a Chinese guy to stand in line and get them a machine, I guess.
Heh . . . One of the units has been bid up to a billion yen. Yeah, these guys are serious all right.
More Tolkien homes
A while ago I mentioned the Tolkien-themed housing units going up in central Oregon. Turns out those were pretty cheap, though, compared to the price for the home where Tolkien actually lived.
A bungalow once owned by the author of The Lord of the Rings has gone on the market for £1 million.
The three-bedroom property in Lakeside Road, Poole, Dorset, was home to JRR Tolkien during his retirement from 1968 until after his wife Edith died in 1971.
Yeah . . . I’ll probably pass on this one too.
Costume photos
Each year a bunch of us from the company (current and former) get together at the home of the person with the largest home for a Halloween party. Sometimes this is right around Halloween (this year it was a few days later, on Friday) and some years it’s much later. Once it was close to Thanksgiving so we had turkey along with our pumpkin.
Click the pic for photos with captions in Japanese. This was the first time I used iWeb to actually publish anything online, so it was like an adventure! to the land where tightly coded websites are extinct. But no matter. Anyway, I was dressed as Saitô Yûki, the “handkerchief prince,” a high school baseball pitcher who won fans in this year’s national tournament for his ridiculously long-lasting arm and his little towel he used to wipe his face instead of his sleeve. My wife went as a baseball.
Flickr photos
www.flickr.com 
More of Durf's photos