01.26.04
Posted in Modern Life at 1:10 am by Thomas
Every now and then I check what people have been searching for when they come to my site, and a lot of the searches make sense – there are always a lot of surfers who are looking for travel information on China, or Chinese history and also searches for one of my other hobbies featured here in this weblog.
But yesterday a user came looking for “raincoats in chinese films”… What???
And indeed – this site shows up in 8th position on google for this search because of an old travelogue I wrote.
I’d really, really like to know the circumstances that led to this search… so if you recently checked for “raincoats in chinese films”, please let me know what this was all about… 
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01.18.04
Posted in Media at 12:55 am by Thomas
We saw Tokyo Godfathers today, and I’m still trying to recover from this movie… maybe there can be too much of a good thing after all!
This is the third movie from Satoshi Kon, and as he as already shown with Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress, he is pure genius.
Godfathers brings us into present-day post-bubble Tokyo on Christmas eve and the movie then shocks and amuses us with the tale of a dysfunctional homeless “family” and how they try to bring a found baby back to its mother.
It is a different kind of Christmas Story – gritty, snotty, bloody. We learn a lot about the unlikely heros in this movie and not all of it is likeable. They are real people, more real than would seem possible for animated characters.
And the movie is also a love letter to Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo. He clearly loves this city and he is uniquely able to transform this concrete desert into a crystal lit from within, bringing out beautiful colors and bizarre reflections of its inhabitants.
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01.11.04
Posted in Daily Spam at 3:02 am by Thomas
A few minutes ago I got a brand new version of a Citibank fraud in my inbox… The subject line says “Important Fraud Alert from Citibank”, and I actually almost clicked on that thing before I came to my senses… a quick check revealed that this mail came from a prodigy email address, so it’s for sure not the real thing.
The email comes in full citibank colors and warns the reader that due to fraud…blah, blah, blah… you should reconfirm your account information. With a nice friendly link to click on.
The link address is not very well hidden and sends the browser off to a login page at http://211.239.150.170, which is urbanus.co.kr and seems to be a valid Korean online magazine – I’m wondering if they know what they are hosting…
The login page at http://211.239.150.170/login/login.htm looks exactly like citibank’s homepage – everything, even the tracking pixels in the page are from the original citibank site. The only change is the login form which asks for yor ATM card info and will forward all your information to a PHP script hosted on the same server (urbanus.co.kr).
The script at http://211.239.150.170/login/form.php will probably save your citibank login in a database and a fake error message is displayed which then redirects you to the real citibank site.
This fraud email was done a lot more professionally than the last few I’ve dissected… it worries me that a lot of people will not be able to discern this stuff from valid emails. I wish I could think of a way to stop this kind of stuff, but I guess for now we can only try and warn all the people out there and hope that nobody falls for these scams.
Update 01/12/04:
The fake pages have disappeared from the Korean website – I guess citibank must have sent them one unhappy email…
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01.05.04
Posted in Photography at 9:55 pm by Thomas
While going through some old photos, I found this shot I took two years ago on Hill 88.
I thought this would make a colorful counterpoint to my earlier post of Hill 88 in the fog.
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01.03.04
Posted in Photography at 3:37 am by thomas
During a trip to Italy last year we visited Venice, maybe one of the most beautyful cities on this planet. There are more photo opportunities than you can point a camera at.
It was just before the Iraq war had started and like the rest of Italy, the whole of Venice was covered in Peace flags.
Here is my small tribute to the Italian peace movement: Venezia – Pace
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