Muzak once more...

Yes, even more muzak… Pretty worn out these days with all these little concerts. Another night at the 2nd Street Jazz and this time not only was the sound rubbish, but there were technical delays that caused us to wait an hour or so before being on let in. Again, we were there mainly to catch Thee Out Mods. Instead of waiting in a queue outside, we decided to meander (one of my GF’s pals walked by, and suggested we have some drinks elsewhere) on over to another bar on the other side of the village. It turned out to be quite amusing as I’ve walked by it many times over the past few years but never bothered to walk in. Turns out it as a rather good choice as I’ve forgotten how pleasant it is to suck down a couple of beers while munching on Japanese snacks as watching baseball with a bunch of old, drunk Japanese people…

So after all of that, we went back to the Jazz, only to find that we still had to wait in line for a while longer. After a while we got in and got settled, and the first band started up. While significantly better than the other band that’s been opening up, Hokma Gandhi still wasn’t quite up there with the other bands (and what the hell is it with asian chicks playing bass?). Anyways the singer (big, tall, white dude) though was actually quite good, although I think the band would have looked (and sounded) more appropriate singing covers of anime opening themes. Next up was Mongoose, and they were much cooler. I’ve seen the drummer around quite a bit, so it was kinda nice to actually see him play rather than just move equipment around.

Afterwards came Dig Jelly (don’t really care for the name). Reminds me a lot of Korn/Limp Bizkit hip-hop rock blend. Not really being my flavor of music, I still enjoyed their performance and I was impressed that they made the most off the Jazz’ poor sound (personally acoustics wise, they sounded the best of any of the bands there). For the first half though, I also could only hear Rayko rather than see her as her small stature prevented me from seeing her over the crowd (granted I’d seen her walking around the club earlier). Still, it allowed me to focus on her voice, which was wonderfully good when she actually sang. The whole, guttural, death metal wail in to the mic thing though didn’t really do anything for me (although I was impressed to see such a sound emanate from such a compact, cute little package). Later on she moved to sitting and strutting around on what looked like a piano (yes she’s that tiny) and thus I got a better look at her performance. A couple of observations.

1. She needs to perform more with her hair down. Looks much better than the girly little pig tails.
2. Part of me wants to say “cover up the mid section and cool it with the sports bras”. I mean don’t get me wrong, her mid section is pretty awesome and she sports a lovely set of well done tits (and who wouldn’t wanna see that!?!). Still, I found myself paying more attention to her figure than her singing, and personally I think she could do better style wise (the cute, athletic school girlish look, while nice to look at, doesn’t really jive all the well image wise to me).
3. Like I mentioned above, lose the guttural wailing thing. It’s just not cool, hot or anything when chicks do it, and is more of a novelty coming from a cute, small package. I think she should focus more on the singing quality of her voice (which is quite good IMO).

One final thing that I liked that she did though was instead of drinking bottled water or a beer, she drank milk instead… Coolio…

At last came Thee Out Mods. All done up with white pressed shirts and black ties, you’d think Oreskabandhad gone punk! Anyhow, they rocked as usual, although Sana had to suffer through technical failures as her mic kept going out during their performance. Still, even when the mics are working, the Jazz never quite seems to do them justice… At least we got to have fun ’cause Yoshiki passed out party poppers. Also, he didn’t moon the crowd this time… Dunno if that’s a good thing or bad thing though (after all there are lots of fan girls there)… Well I guess that’s enough for now, hopefully this will be the last of these muzak posts for a while.

More Muzak...

Only a few days later and even more music. Although unlike Sunday it was more along the lines of smaller (in some cases, local) bands playing at Zen Sushi. Mainly we were there for Thee Out Mods, but my GF had a friend showing up who knows Justin, the drummer for Lemon Drop Kick. The place was so-so, but I liked the layout with the stage upstairs and all. Unfortunately that rather blah band who’s name I don’t even remember was opening things up again. The singer is weak-sauce (seriously the guitar player sings better), and they don’t have a drummer (yet?), instead relying on drum machine. Plus they looked all disconjointed in terms of image. The bass player was the only one who seemed to fit the image behind name of the band (who’s name I can’t remember). Actually the vocalist tried too, but failed miserably in my opinion.

There was some other band that came on later, but I can’t for the life of me remember their name either, it’s like on the tip of my mind. There weren’t bad, but I didn’t listen to them much. I was downstairs at the bar chatting it up with their tour guide/promoter and Justin (Lemon Drop Kick) along w/the GF and her friend (who’s name I can’t remember now (bear with me, I’ve only met him 3 times!). Actually I did hear one song I really liked, but honestly the conversation downstairs was more interesting.

Eventually we got around to Lemon Drop Kick and they were alright. Honestly the songs didn’t do much for me. The singer was pretty good though, really strong voice, especially considering how tiny she was! Still live music is live music, and it’s the experience (good or bad) that make it, and in general I give ‘em a good rating. Plus it’s always cool when you can chat up members of the band readily, and jabber about videogames.

Anyways, the other band that the guy was with was The Psycrons. They turned out to be a quite a pleasant surprise! At least after a few technical difficulties were resolved. They definitely had that 60’s British Invasion look and sound going on that’s for sure, although perhaps with a bit of Japanese flavour. Being from Kyoto, they immediately reminded me of all the random little bands we saw playing in Kyoto (usually along the Kamo river). I was particularly fond of this one couple that was playing along the banks with a guitar hooked up to a little battery powered amp, and a mic hooked up to a boom box. They (a girl and a guy) sang and played their hearts out. Karaoke basically means empty orchestra. In this case it was more like empty audience as there was nobody really sitting and watching except for me and my GF and a couple of old guys. Still, they prattled on as if they were standing in the middle of a packed Tokyo Dome. It’s things like that that make me feel genki.

But enough of that digression. Finally we got to Thee Out Mods, who we came to see. They rocked as usual, although they had somebody else (who I’ve seen at their other concerts, but for the life of me I can’t remember his name) playing guitar (which allowed Sana jump around the stage a lot more (girl REALLY knows how to shake the head and waggle the tongue)). Yoshiki managed to lose his shirt promptly and by the end of their performance mooned the crowd (I have a good idea for a poster using that shot!). Thankfully the Zen has better acoustics than the Jazz (which usually has malfunctions and other issues), so you could actually hear her singing.

And last but not least Inazuma. I saw them earlier at the 2nd. St. Jazz, but we left early ’cause me and the GF were wiped out. So it was cool to see Thunder (Vo/Gt) jamming. Plus he was nicer than you’d imagine after watching him help out The Psycrons with their technical difficulty earlier on in the evening. However, I think Thunder over powers the rest of the band. Still pretty impressive to watch. Unfortunately, for the last song one of the fans got to go up and sing with them. Cool in principle to let a fan up on stage and sing one of the band’s song with them. Bad execution though. I mean seriously, YOU DON’T NEED TO SCREAM INTO THE MIC at the top of your lungs! It’s amplified so you don’t have to! While listening to that my brain decided to deactivate the ear drums for the rest of the evening.

Lots of Muzak

Pretty tired. The whole SXSW Asia going on this month, and yesterday we went down to the Knitting Factory to catch their performances in Hollywood, and it was definitely a wonderful treat. For one, the doors actually opened on time (and by on time I mean only 10 minutes late instead of what seems to be the obligatory 45 minutes). At first I was also bummed out that it was just the front stage being used mainly because it gave me flashbacks to The Pillows concert at the sadly waaaay overcrowded Whisky. However it turned out to be just fine as there was a decent sized crowd, but it was still easy to move about. Plus you could get fairly close to the acts if you felt like braving the mosh pit…

Asakusa Jinta was the first band we saw get on stage. Quite a hoot too. While I’m not particularly into what they’d call “hard marching band” music, they’re definitely a blast to watch like, especially with Mika as lively as she is. Next up came the 50 Kaitenz; much more my style. Plus Danny is completely off the wall hilarious on stage with his facial expressions (seriously, has to be seen). After came one of the two bands I was actually there to see; Oreskaband. No need to comment on their performance, as they were totally awesome (and I’m not a big ska person either). Plus i was rather impressed how they interacted with the crowd (e.g. not shy, or quiet on stage), then again, they are from Osaka.

Then finally came GO!GO!7188; THE band I was there to see. Pretty much worth it too, as I was blown away getting to hear “Ukifune“ live. The amusing part for me though was that Akko and Yuu were so plainly dressed (jeans and t-shirt). All the other bands had very distinct appearances, but Akko and Yuu just looked so casual, as if they had just been loafing around at home (and it’s not like they’ve never dressed up at their concerts either). Granted it really didn’t bother me, as they were quite cool even in such casual persona.

Then along came Pistol Valve. Very different. Very cool looking. Very annoying delays in getting set up. Granted you’ve got 10 girls to hooked up and dialed in properly. Unfortunately the neat little parking garage where the car was was closing around 11:30pm so we pretty much had to bail. So we only got a brief chance to see a bit of Pistol Valve. Personally I think they need some stronger vocals, but they do look and sound pretty cool otherwise (C’mon 10 cute girls and a ton of brass? What’s not to like!?!)… Also HY was there as well, but as we left during Pistol Valve’s performance we missed out on that. Bummer too..

"Special Edition"

This is amusing… It appears as though North American studios are really starting to pick up some Japanese habits when it comes to “Special Edition” versions of titles. I’m surprised they haven’t done this more in the past, especially with rising game costs; It makes for a nice additional source of revenue while giving the fans more stuff to chew on.

New Toy...

Got a new toy from the girlfriend as a late birthday present. So far not too bad. I certainly found the packaging to be rather nice (not something I’d expected). Anyways, it wasn’t something I wanted so much for running emulators or stuff like that (which is what seems to be the most popular use for the system (along with it’s predecessor (the GP32) and the homebrew hacking on the PSP). Nor was it as a collector’s item to play the paltry amount of native games on it, nor use it as a poor man’s portable media player.

No I mainly bought it to do a little handheld tinkering and development. PSP homebrew is nice, but without official endorsement you always feel like you’re climbing through mud, uphill. I’m not really interested in emulators (I prefer the original hardware (MAME is the only real exception for me), nor do I feel like having to reverse engineer everything and then figure out why things break. Nor do I feel like bricking my PSP.

This really isn’t a slight against PSP homebrew (although it may seem as though it is). No, it’s really about having an environment you can play in. Having nice devtools (or just decent ones). Sure you don’t have a fancy CPU or GPU to mess with. But it’s no slouch. Besides, it’s mostly for prototyping little ideas for handhelds that I have that I can legitimately show off (Nintendo & Sony ususally aren’t too thrilled when you show up with an idea that’s running on their hacked systems (even if it is cool)).

On to the hardware. While it looks quite nice in pictures (and it’s not bad hardware either), when you hold it, it does feel a little cheap (it’s pretty light until you put the batteries in it). I think it’s mostly down to the type of plastics though and the controller nub. The screen is pretty nice though, although the menu/UI feels a bit on the “rough” side (sorta reminds me of my Modix HD-3510). Boot time is a little long and the UI navigation is a bit clunky to boot (no pun intended).

The video playback is a bit spotty. Depends on the video, but even within the supposed parameters, it still seems to drop frames. That’s usually a gripe I’ve had with DivX, XviD and the lot with hardware decoders. On a nice note, it does use AA batteries and comes with some rather nice 2500mAh AA batteries. Good thing too ’cause it’ll tear though alkalines as quickly as 10min depending on what you’re doing (e.g. having the CPUs clocked up to 240MHz+). Well that’s all for now… I’ll see what comes about after I start playing with the SDK.

Much ado about nothing

I’d been meaning to comment on this lately, but have been a bit too busy at work to get around to it. In case you haven’t been following, Ars has been a bit bearish on the PS3 as of late. Actually you could say anybody with an online presence in general has been fairly harsh (at least until GDC!). Of all the recent articles however, this one takes the cake.

To start off with, there’s this gem:

I suggested that Sony should have abandoned Blu-ray or, at most, should have made it an add-on, such as the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360. The reason is simple: by pushing the console’s price into sky-high territory, Sony was stretching themselves dangerously thin.

Almost a year later, it’s completely obvious that Sony has stretched itself too thin.

Sony, stretched thin? Seriously, we’re talking about corporation that’s been consistently generating over $60-$70 billion dollars of revenue each year, and yet still remain profitable (albeit tight at times). SCE? Yeah you could say they’ve bitten off a sizeable chunck that may be hard to swallow; but Sony as a whole? C’mon… Is this fundamentally any different than the original Playstation or the PS2?

To the typical armchair analyst/CEO/blogger, you might think hell yes! In reality it’s not. From a technical standpoint there are some differences, however as far as impact and/or scale of what they were trying to accomplish? Not really.

Yeah, Blu-Ray is the neat new format, but is it really that big of a deal with regard to the PS3. Personally I don’t think so. The PSP debuted with a new optical disc format (UMD), yet we didn’t see as much fuss over that (other that the typical grumbling over another format (strangely nobody grumbles when it comes to proprietary carts though…)). But really, how about building semiconductor fabs (PS2)? How about creating a whole new division and entering new, competitive market (Playstation)? With a bit of perspective, this whole ruckuss over Blu-Ray seems like a pile of nonsense.

However, this part seems the part where I take issue:

As we learned this morning, Sony is now bifurcating their product line even further, delivering a lesser product to the European market in order to save a few bucks. Dumping some of the dedicated hardware for backwards compatibility should save Sony a few greenbacks (or yen, as the case may be), but it screws gamers. And for what? How much cost is Sony saving by scratching this hardware?

Ken seems really upset! Don’t know why though. It’s not like you couldn’t see it coming! And even before this there was speculation and debate on how backwards compatiblity was going to be achieved. So why all the fuss? Iteratively trimming complexity in the system has been going on since the original Playstation. Japan got one with a nice little S-Video port on the back while the US didn’t (although I guess it was of minor consolation that S-Video/AV cable was made avaialble 4 months later). Later on, the composite jacks got tossed, then the parallel port, and finally by the PSOne, the serial port.

The along came the PS2… And when it came to the US, away went the PCMCIA port (although only used for an external HDD in which the US and EU models relied on an internal bay for). Then away went the firewire port (but along came IR!). The came the slim 7xxxx series with no HDD support whatsoever (ah but it did have an ethernet port in the back). However Sony had a little surprise for everybody in 75xxx. Out went the original IOP, to be replaced with a different one, and can you guess what that affected?

Another thing. I think Ken is underplaying the significance of shaving components off of a system. Removing the EE+GS saves you not only the cost of the chip itself, but also ancilliary costs such as the DRDRAM modules for the EE, board real estate and routing. It reduces part count which decreases complexity, which in turn reduces assembly costs. You might say it’s a bit of a trickle down effect.

With the PS3, Sony has let its video entertainment aspirations dictate the design of a gaming console, and the results are now plain for us to see: when the going gets rough, the gaming functionality gets going (going, gone!) out of the box. Buh-bye. Sure, now Sony will use software to provide some backwards compatibility, but not full compatibility. They’ve got a stop-gap measure in place, and we’re hoping that it works really well because who wants to keep an old PS2 sitting around once you have a PS3?

Really now… We need to lay off the Kool-Aid. Yes Blu-Ray is a critical component of the PS3. Dictate the design of the console? Please… Does the 360’s DVD-ROM drive dictate it’s design? In the end, it’s just a denser optical disc. As for the full compatibility? Here’s a news flash, the PS2 never attained “full compatibility” with the Playstation (in fact it PS2 games started breaking on later PS2 models!), and when it comes to the current PS3 with regards to PS2 compatiblity? Guess what? It isn’t “fully compatible” either. I hate to break it to you, but leveraging an emulator for backwards compatiblity has always been the target goal. Utilizing hardware has generally been a plan B that so far has worked out OK.

Really, the article is just plain poor… I don’t know what else to say…

Funny, but not...

This is funny until you realize that Live and the Wii online experience is pretty much the same thing. At least it uses real cash values instead of insipid points. But in all honesty, all the online services need to spend time using Amazon for a while or the iTMS…

More Cubicle Life...

More cubicle pics for today! The lightbox macro is sorta pissing me off right now with layout and image sequences (and I don’t feel like messing with it right now). Anyways, these new ones are from my current building in the first spot I was shoved into. Granted the building is a wee bit nicer (although not much IMO) but since we lease it, it kinda sucks because it doesn’t feel like it’s “yours”. The old building felt cozier and in retrospect I preferred the old style cubicles with high walls and little windows. These new ones have no wall space for white boards, posters and other knickknacks. OTOH, I did like the view from the new location. No need to check traffic online, just lean back and see how the 405 is doing. However the other inconvenience of this particular cubicle spot is that it’s right along the walkway to a couple of meeting rooms, so you got a fair bit of foot traffic walking by. Plus it was always a bit drafty too.

Cubicle Life

Not much to ramble about today, I’ll probably get around to reading some GDC stuff later on. Until then, I figure show some cubicle stuff instead. Anyways, here’s a shot from several years ago in the first cubicle I had (with the current employer). As you can see, it’s rather barren and I’m apparently hard at work. In retrospect, considering the cubicle (and building) I’m in now, I think I prefer the old building and the old style cubicles (as seen above) to the ones I’m currently in. There’s a certain level of coziness that I miss from the old ones.

Budget Title

While shopping around at Best Buy for some Xbox 360 accessories, I stumbled across a bargain shelf by the checkout line. Behold, I noticed the title a friend of mine worked on. I already have the title (always support your peeps), but couldn’t help but resist take a snap of it. Amusingly after talking to him later, he was quite happy to see it up there at that price (for consolation the Ford Racing was going for $4.99) since the title was also sold as part of a bundle (which usually isn’t all that great except for bringing in the numbers). In any case, considering how hard it was to find when I was actually looking for it, it was amusing to just suddenly stumble across it.