Back from Japan

I'm back from my (fifth!) Japan trip which went a little bit differently than I expected. You can read more about it (in Czech) here.



This time, we (me and two other people) visited different Japanese cities, including Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukuoka, Saga (where my friend's wedding took place), Osaka, Kyoto and the amazing Naoshima "art island". The photographs can be seen here.

A Walk Through Osaka

These photos were taken several hours ago, while strolling through Osaka, "the anti-Tokyo".

While the other guys went to explore the seedier city life, I fired up the Gimp and mutilated my pictures:



Coincidentally, if you live in Osaka, Kyoto or Tokyo and would like to show me some interesting stuff during the following days, don't hesitate to contact me.

Testing, testing…

This is a test post from the official Blogger app for Android.

Meanwhile in Japan...

This is REAL, unedited, non-ironic advertisement of Japanese McDonalds...

My Dogs Need Your Love

(This is for Czech readers only, sorry)

Basically, I need your votes to get my dogs' love message to the first place for this Milka love poster to be displayed in Vysocanska metro station:



To accomplish this, you should go here, register using a SMS (the cost is just 3 CZK) and then click on "Dát hlas" every single day (or as many days as humanly possible) until February 1st - you pay just for a single SMS, then you can click each day...

This is supposed to be a Valentine Day surprise for Albert, so don't tell him about it...

Today in pictures

P.S: I didn't have sex with anyone / anything in these pictures. And yet, it was a good day.

What's Wrong With Today's Video Games?

A few days ago, I gave an interview (in Czech) where I mentioned my disdain for most of mainstream games of today.

Here I have two perfect examples of current high-profile videogames.

First, here is one of the levels of the latest Call of Duty videogame, played on "Hardened" difficulty. The player beats the level WITHOUT SHOOTING, just semi-randomly dodging bullets.



Even funnier is the following racing game using Kinect (i.e. controlling the car using your own body). Note that the player doesn't do anything during the whole race, not even pushing the gas. He finishes third out of 8 racers...



You can argue the second game is aimed at "casual" players... You can argue anything you want but I consider this to be very sad. And I consider it amazing that no high profile review mentions the interesting fact that you don't in fact have to play these games to finish them...

Whole Lotta Light Fun

For those dark moments with dogs, I got myself Philips Imageo TableLights. I like them a lot. Other photos are in this photoset.



(I only got 2 of them and photographed them between two large mirrors.)

And here is the self-explanatory video about how they work. After charging, they last for about 12 hours.



They still got them at Alza.cz...

Yo Ho Ho, I'm An MP3 Pirate!

I wanted to legally buy full MP3 album of Trent Reznor's Social Network soundtrack from Amazom.com. I wanted to pay my money to support Reznor & Co. and the price seemed more than fair ($2.99). I was glad they don't use any stupid pointless DRM and are offering the MP3 files.

I clicked on "1-Click Buy" and was greeted with the page explaining that I need Amazon's special downloader in order to downoload the MP3s. I thought "WTF, these files are freely copyable MP3s without DRM, why should I use any kind of downloader?" but I had good will. My OS (Ubuntu 10.04) was not listed amongst the offered version. I tried older Ubuntu version and the Debian version. Both gave me the "Error: Dependency is not satisfiable: libboost-filesystem1.34.1" error.

I could've probably solved this in some way but... Why the fuck should I attempt to fix non-working software whose sole reason to exist is to complicate perfectly simple task of downloading one MP3 album?

I cancelled my purchase and downloaded the MP3 album elsewhere, in a matter of seconds.

I hope Amazon is happy now...

UPDATE: One day later, I bought the same MP3 album directly, for $5. More precisely, I just gave them my $5 and I didn't download anything because I already had the MP3s on my drive...

Albert's New Friend