Pointing at her computer monitor, she asked me “Can you read German?”

I looked at the screen, and it was plainly in German, but beyond that basic conclusion it was pretty incomprehensible.

So I said, “I’m sorry, high school German was a long time ago.”

and this didn’t seem enough, for some reason, so after a pause I added “in high school”.

this I thought was a little bit ridiculous, so after another pause I added “which was a good time to take high school classes I suppose.”

I don’t think I helped my case at any point.

One of the things about being a bit of a geek from an early age is that you’re exposed to the notion that other countries have things that are cooler than you can get at home.  When I was a teenager, I used to hunt down British editions of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books in used bookstores, I bought Japanese versions of Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo games, and of course I imported the very occasional laserdisc.

As long as I stuck to Japan and other NTSC countries, I was pretty comfortable importing media.  The video game console manufacturers paid a sort of lip service to the idea that they didn’t want you playing games from other regions, but it was never difficult to circumvent; you could always get an adapter or fit a mod chip or some such.  Of late, of course, I’ve taken to simply buying consoles from other regions, which neatly sidesteps the whole issue.

Europe, however, has always presented a bit of a problem, mostly because of PAL.

The first time I imported anything in PAL, it was because the powers-that-be had decided to delay broadcast of the last four episodes of season 2 of Babylon 5 for several months in the US, while airing them on schedule in the UK.  I managed to find a chap on the net who wouldn’t mind taping them for me in exchange for a favor on my side and wound up with a tape that I couldn’t play but that represented me raising a middle finger to regional broadcast decisions.

Another friend tracked down a VCR that could play PAL tapes on an NTSC TV and we had a bit of a viewing night.

The quality was, simply put, dreadful.  The technology to do on-the-fly conversions simply wasn’t quite there.  Nonetheless, it was watchable.

Technology has advanced somewhat since the mid 1990s.  Region locking is more omnipresent than ever, but technology for freeing your media from region locks has kept up.

Even more promisingly, the PS3 was released completely region-free and blu-rays are frequently (but not always) likewise released without the studios bothering to region code them.

Most importantly, the advent of high-def resolutions has freed us from worrying about PAL or NTSC or what have you.

Or so I thought.

When we were in Britain, we bought a batch of media, knowing full well that it would come with some hitches when we got home.  For the most part, these hitches turned out not to be.  The DVDs, well, they play just fine; we have a DVD player that was made region-free with a simple remote control code and our TV is smart enough to understand an incoming PAL signal and display it.

Likewise, the PS3 games I brought back – “Siren: Blood Curse” and “Arcana Heart 3″ work without issue.

It’s this one Top Gear blu ray I brought back that gave me fits.

I was worried about region coding.  I needn’t have been, it went right into the PS3 and spun up, played the studio logo, and then nothing.  A simple black screen taunting me.

It turns out that, yes, 720P and 1080P and such are universal; they cross borders. 1080i at 50Hz, however, that is a different story and that happens to be how this disc was encoded.

I had never had occasion to rip a blu ray before, so I needed to get my toolbox up to date.  Fortunately I ran across a lifehacker article  that recommended a product called HD Decrypter, and it turned out to do just what it said on the tin.  30 minutes to rip, three hours to encode, and I was once again sneering at the thought that I could be thwarted by mere national boundaries.

It strikes me that a good 99% of the world probably goes through their day without worrying about stuff like this.

Some days, I kind of envy them.  :)

I’m going to rank this somewhere between “faith in humanity failing” and “well, civilization has had a nice run, don’t forget to turn off the lights and lock up when you leave”

Westminster Bridge spans the Thames in London, with Big Ben and Parliment at one end and a whole mess of touristy stuff at the other.  I like to imagine that the railings were designed by a very serious man, who took great pride in his work and was thoroughly satisfied to see the bridge completed.

Then I like to imagine him walking across the bridge at just the right time of day, looking down, and then smacking himself on the forehead.

It’s a wonder that she hasn’t strangled me in my sleep yet.

I also had a birthday recently, and received some excellent gifts to commemorate the occasion.  One in particular stands out because it was given to me by a grown woman who was, I think, attempting to determine whether I was capable of shame.  Note that the following, which is a small zippered pouch, was given to me with about 8 witnesses in the room:

I will honor her gift by proudly using it to store my new dice in and will display it without shame at all gaming events.

Normally I’d say something like “in my defense, I was incredibly busy with school” or the like, but I was actually just playing a lot of EQ2 and studying the bare minimum needed to keep my final school GPA above 4.0.

So uh oops.

Anyway, no self-congratulatory stats post for this year because I have no idea how many visits were in the last 14 months as opposed to the year between Mar ’10 and Mar ’11.

Simply a “thanks for reading” to people who come here and get something out of my unfocused and frequently incoherent ramblings.

Generally I am actually quite a nice person, but today I was presented with a situation where I could not avoid being evil.

A young man walked into my office – bypassing, by the way, the front desk staff that are supposed to keep people from walking into my office, and said unto me, without preamble, “What’s a fuser?”

Now, I have learned to speak the simple, yet elegant language spoken by college students, and I understood his meaning. In English, he was saying:

“Hello, good sir, I am attempting to print a document that is of grave import as it is midterms week, and yon printing device is giving me an error saying something about a fuser that I do not understand as I am a business student and need a technically inclined person to bail me out”

But, that is not what he said, and unfortunately for him I used to work for a Major Printer Manufacturer doing development on laser printers, so I have a reasonably in-depth understanding of the process of printing and the role of the fuser in binding your words to paper, and I explained this at length for several minutes while I watched his eyes glaze over and his soul die and then I took pity on him and went and fixed his printer.

Now that I think about it, I retract my previous statement: I wasn’t evil at all.

After all, the young man in question now has his paper printed out AND a somewhat better understanding of How Things Work, and possibly a valuable life lesson in how to properly formulate and ask a question.

So it was a good day.

And yeah, it is a pretty serious privacy issue and I’m not downplaying it.  Granted, it’s only a serious privacy issue if someone actually gets access to my computer or steals my phone or something, and in that case I’m going to be a lot more worried about my online banking passwords than wondering whether they’re going to spend a few hours looking through my movement history.  Essentially, once someone has physical access to my computer, I’m screwed in all the least pleasant ways, this just adds another level of hurt.

But I have to be honest and admit that my first reaction on reading these news articles was to say “cool! now I can get a look at all my rambling around Japan last summer and figure out where I went to!”

So, I downloaded the program and told it to get snoopy and then I was really disappointed because all it came back with was this:

See, I hadn’t upgraded to iOS 4.0 before going to Japan, and the tracking feature was new to iOS 4.0, so all the data I have on me says that I spend a lot of time in Eugene and Portland and have gone to the coast once.

Seriously, I haven’t even been to freakin’ Seattle in the last 8 months, much less anywhere exotic.

I’m so depressed.

By the time I was born, TV was just “something that was there”.

Another one of those things that’s “just there” is the common computer hard drive.  Let’s think about that for a second.  You can buy hard drives right now that store three terabytes of information – that’s three trillion bytes of information, multiply by eight for bits, and it’s all stored in the form of imperceptibly faint magnetic signals on tiny metal platters that are just about the smoothest things in existence – they have to be that smooth because the read/write heads that access all this data don’t actually touch the surface of the drive; they float above it on a cushion of air measured in nanometers, and in order to play you back a video of a cat jumping into a box and falling over they need to be able to find each and every single bit of data on the surface of a disk that is rotating 120 times a SECOND and keeps spinning at that speed hour after hour, day after day, as long as it’s needed.  I’ve taken twenty-year-old hard drives and put them back into service and they’ve come right up, their capacities laughably small by today’s standards but as ready as ever to serve.

The technology needed to make mechanical devices move that precisely and the physics involved in actually being able to store that much information are mind-boggling; I can’t even fathom what goes through the minds of the people who design these things.

On the other hand, hard drives can be risky things.  We put so much of our lives on to them, and when it’s invariably time to move on and get a bigger drive or a newer computer, that information is still on those drives.

So, one of my projects at work last week was to wipe a bunch of decommissioned drives so they couldn’t be read.  It’s pretty tedious work – basically you hook up a drive to a computer and start a piece of software that runs for several hours and then you do it again with the next drive – but it did have one redeeming feature:

Every once in a while I’d hit a drive that couldn’t be wiped and it would put a little smile on my face and I’d set it aside on a little stack of drives and I’d write BREAK on it in red ink…

…and then, I got done wiping those drives that I COULD wipe and I was left with the drives that I COULDN’T wipe because they were no longer working but that still potentially contained sensitive data, and then I got to turn this:

Into this:

And let me tell you, engineering marvels or not, amazing pieces of technology that I take for granted and will never understand fully or not, it’s occasionally fun just to let the inner luddite out and break things.