Random thoughts from the Pacific Rim
“Der Reisende” is German for “The Traveller”, and Der Reisende is a fun project by two Germans who travelled around the world to get their pictures taken – by webcams!
The first picture was taken in Las Vegas in 2001 and since then they have managed to take pictures of themselves with stationary webcams in dozens of cities from Geneva to New York…
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Last weekend I saw The Returner, a Japanese science fiction movie, and I was very impressed by it. I guess I wasn’t expecting too much and that made it an even bigger surprise.
It’s the story of a teenage girl that is sent back from a future where humanity is fighting a losing battle against aliens. She arrives just a few days before the first contact to prevent the start of the war.
Ann Suzuki is playing the lead and she was only 15 when the movie was made. She is very good for such a young actress in a very demanding role. Her two male co-stars are both also very good, rounding out a great ensemble in lovingly detailed sets, intercut with very decent special effects.
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San Francisco often feels like one big movie set with all the breathtaking views and a plethora of beautiful buildings. Hitchcock was one of the first big hollywood directors to take full advantage of this city in Vertigo.
There are actually several sites that try to compare the San Francisco of Hitchcock’s 1958 movie with the present. Vertigo Then And Now is the one with the best side-by-side comparisons, while Vertigo Virtual Tour.
Check out the streets filled with those cool cars from the 50s!
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Yep, that was the title of a piece of spam in my inbox… spam offering anti-spam software. Ha-ha… very funny.
So after deleting thousands of spam emails since the last Daily Spam, this one caught my attention. 
The spam email itself is a straight text email with no unsubscribe, so it’s a piece of perfectly illegal spam. But whom to sue? The email was sent with a fake sender address from alltel.net, so that doesn’t help, and the email originated from a server in Brazil that is still there, but it doesn’t do much, so I assume it is one of the typical open relays on the net… a badly administrated server that is taken over by spammers to do their thing.
Let’s take a look at the other end then – the web site offering the anti-spam software for 50 bucks. It’s at www.fasteasysolution.com (go there at your own risk!) which is hosted in China and that page has a “secure” link to the order page at the bottom. Which very definitely is NOT secure. Not even close.
The order page tries hard to hide the source code and location, but it is hosted at ded-240.kg.com, a server hosted by the Compass Communications, Inc. (who should maybe check into who their customers really are) in Seattle. The credit card data of the unsecured(!) page goes back to the same server, kg.com.
kg.com was seemingly registered until 10/18/03 by Ascern, Inc. which runs holiday.com, a site offering travel services, cheap flight tickets and DVD rentals (that’s an interesting combination, by the way!).
Did somebody fake Ascern’s address for the registration? Well, I think I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now because they do not show up in any spammer database, but I have found similiar domains registered with the same slight misspellings (disapproval.com for instance), so I guess somebody out there is using Ascern, Inc. as fake ID to register spam-advertised sites.
That’s where the trail turns cold…
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Finally I came back again to do something that I really enjoy a lot, but didn’t really have the time or energy for – building a game.
I’ve been making games off and on for more than 20 years, ever since I first started programming in my early teens. It’s always been fascinating to me not just to write a program, but an experience for other people.
It’s really cool to make a game and see your friends play it. They have fun, they get excited and scream at the screen. It’s amazing how you can stir up emotions through a few thousand lines of computer code – that must be one of the most eccentric art forms that humankind has come up with.
I wrote the game in DHTML as an experiment to see how far one can push modern browsers (and consequently it only runs on IE6 and Mozilla) and I think I have achieved my goal – it looks nothing like the hairball of JavaScripts, HTML and gifs that it really is…
This game is a hommage to all the old paddle-ball-brick games of the 1980s, but I’ve added a few little twists here and there to make it interesting. It’s called KAZ for my lovely beta tester and wife, Kazumi.
Go check it out!
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I’m currently working my way through Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, “Quicksilver“. It’s a big, heavy book and it’s a bit of a slow read… but not in a bad way. If you enjoyed Cryptonomicon, then you will feel right at home.
Mr. Stephenson certainly has a way with words, and he always manages to fill interesting historic scenes with amazing characters that especially apeal to the scientist/engineer/geek readership.
I’m learning a lot about the 17th and 18th century, that’s for sure…
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If you’ve ever played a video game that tried to give you some sort of backstory to what is going on, you’ve probably come in contact with this phenomenon: Horrible Voice Acting.
I don’t think that there is any other medium where a million-dollar product can have such poor production values as seen (or actually heard) in video games.
Flat I-am-reading-this-for-the-first-time acting is pretty much the norm. And Audio Atrocities is documenting some of these jewels of the performing arts for your pleasure. Check out this game. Or this one!
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For quite some time I have been wondering where the US economy is headed. For about a year now I had the feeling that we are driving through dense fog and as a solution for not seeing enough we are actually speeding up!
Our rising debt was really only possible because Japan and China are frantically trying to protect their exports by buying US Treasury bonds, in effect underwriting a major chunk of the US debt.
Lately I’m finding more and more reports about the Japanese and Chinese governments becoming unhappy with their role as the financiers of the US spending spree…
It is a viscious circle that will have to be broken at some point in the near future – and as far as the US administration is concerned, not before the elections in late 2004. But what will happen after the elections? A drop in investments by the Asian governments in US Treasury bonds may very well lead to a total collapse of the Dollar – which will then lead to a shockwave that will leave none of the major economic powers untouched.
Here’s a very good analysis of the current situation. Makes me wonder what to invest in… maybe gold?
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This is turning out to be my big movie review month…
Under the Tuscan Sun has been a very pleasant surprise. Diane Lane is very likable in her role as a divorcee falling in love with a house, a country and a new man. And while the story doesn’t sound like much, the movie makes the most out of the scenery, the characters and the great actors who populate this picture-book version of Italy.
It’s a movie that makes me want to travel to Italy right now and I guess this will be the universial reaction, so if you want to see the Tuscany in peace and quiet you better go there soon before the crowds arrive.
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