Rants from Vas

You know the catgirls that proliferate manga, anime and video games? (These are typically girls with cat-like features, such as cat ears and tails. Look at Zoey/Ichigo from Mew Mew Power for an example.) Or maybe you’ve seen catgirls on the streets of Japanese cities. (These are typically schoolgirls who, for the sake of fashion, […]

I just thought I should blog about this, as it’s bitten me recently: if you plan to use ATMs overseas, make sure your PIN isn’t too long to be accepted at your destination. For example, the maximum length PIN accepted by Australian and Japanese ATMs is eight digits. However, the maximum length accepted by Vietnamese […]

Last weekend I happened to be at Eastland shopping centre in Ringwood. I don’t go there very often as it’s not that close to where I live. As I always do when I’m in Eastland, I went to GameTraders to see what new and/or cool games are out. Yes, JB Hi-Fi have a big sign telling […]

Why, oh why did you do it Apple? The new MacBook could have been great, but you had to ruin it. Shiny screens might make people go “Oooh!” but they don’t make a better notebook. They pick up all kinds of horrible reflections and glare. Not that long ago, we were buying CRT monitors with […]

You just have to check this out (warning, telnet lin, opens in terminal window, if you don’t know what telnet is, forget this). It’s a complete, subtitled rendition of Star Wars episode IV in streaming VT100.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of low-level debugging at work lately. It’s never been my favourite activity. It would be nice if software just worked. But of course, it doesn’t. Computers do what they’re told – not necessarily what you want them to. Something gets lost on the way. But that’s not the topic […]

I’ve been tagged, so I may as well do this. Although the person who tagged me knows very well they’re wasting my time 😉

Current affairs programmes on TV are so hypocritical. I saw an advertisement for Today Tonight on Seven that made me laugh. They had a big spiel about their upcoming feature on Australian companies selling out to England, Korea, China and the USA, asking the viewer, “Can we afford to keep it up?” Then they finish […]

Here are a few photos we’ve taken around the place. Just a few to capture some of the things I’ve mentioned.

So far, we’ve been getting around Tokyo on trains. We didn’t really think a great deal about the other forms of transport, because the the trains have been so good. Tokyo is one of only about two cities in the world where public transport runs at a profit, and you can see why: trains go […]