our life

All about Lisa Chou Chou

One of my favourite anime's is one called FuriKuri. Its one of many Japanese movies that is focused on teen characters. Why this appeals to me is that as somebody not from Japan, and who is only learning about Japanese culture, these kinds of films give you a better glipse since as the characters ( teens ) are growing and learning ( their own culture ), you get to see everything they learn through their own eyes. The best eyes to experience something new is through the eys of somebody who is also experiencing it as something new.

Thats why I was excited to see this film too. All about Lisa Choi Chou is a Japanese movie ( not an anime ) again centered around Japanese pop culture and teens. Its an interesting ride.

Alot in this film is generic to teens everywhere, and that is somehow comforting. Most cultures don't drift to far from North American culture, but some drift very far, and feel almost alien - this is pretty much why I have a facination with Japanese culture. Of all the asian cultures it is the one that is most alien to me, and it doesn't hurt that it is heavily future centric at the moment ( it wasn't always ).

This was an enjoyable film to escape with for an afternoon. This film reminded me a lot of FLCL ( FuriKuri ), but without the giant robots and aliens.

Imports - thats what its all about

Watched New Police Story last night. Its a new Jackie Chan movie. Hasn't been released in North America, and I'm not sure if it will be. This is the kind of movies that really motivate me to go with another ISP to keep being able to continue BTing.

Watching Jackie Chan in a Hollywood film is just not the same. He always seems to come off as some odd parody of himself - its the language barrier, but I also think Hollywood really has new clue on how to use the man in a film. Make him do some stunts. Make fun of his accent/engrish. Then finish it off with some martial arts and done. Slap it into a box and get that baby off to walmarts dvd shelves.

Get the same feeling when watching Jet Li. He gets used like some cheap trick in Hollywood movies, never really get to see what the man can do. Like some two dimensional character. Queue the uber slick wire fu master - < enter Jet Li > . Again I agree there is a language barrier, so it is a bit of reality combined with Hollywood really just not making films that work well with him.

If you see these two fellows in Hong Kong films, they are much more interesting. But it takes years for them to appear here. Hero Just got released. Its a film from 2002, and its now making it here. Likely take that long for Jackie Chans New Police story.

Tonight were watching a flick from the other side of the globe. A Brit Flick. Beyond me really loving the accents in films like this, I also dig the sense of the style that the Brits have. Great humour too - they really do make some silly films - even when they are being serious, they can be really clever.

The movie tonight was called Human Traffic - its about Club kidz in britain ( the movie takes place during the 90's ). I can relate a bit, reminds me of my early twenties - fun times. I miss the days when I was part of the rave scene in SWO.

Again this movie isn't released here, so again it would be something I'd miss without being part of the world BT phenominon.

I think I've pretty much formulated my plan for post Rogers. It involves a bit of IGS DSL, a dash of Static IP option, and to kick the whole thing off, it will need a call to Sprint Home service. But I won't be doing any of that until I see how this whole thing plays out a bit more with Rogers. In the mean time I'm well over 300 gigs and hope to see 400 before the end of the Month.

Thank you very much Rogers - I'm a happy customer.

oops

Downloaded my first Region 2 DVD, and I thought no problem I'll just upgrade my AD-1100W ( Apex DVD ) player to be region free. I've had the instructions and files to do the upgrade for a long time.

So what started out to be a simple upgrade ended up being a search for a replacement for my DVD player.

Followed the instructions, but during the upgrade the DVD player froze, and now it doesn't do anything at all.

So I'll keep it for a bit and see if I can still flash it somehow, but frankly I think I won't be able to do it. So I went next door over to Zehrs and picked up a Philips 642 DVD player. When I bought the Apex buying one of these low end DVD players was the best choice, not only for the price, but these DVD players would play PAL and often could be modified to be Region free ( see that part worked well for me eh ).

Not much has changed today. Buying a major brand DVD player still doesn't make sense. The new big thing now is for these lower end DVD players is to now play DivX movies. Of these models the Philips is the most compatible, and Philips has promised to keep providing updated firmeware from their website to support newer versions of DivX ( it currently supports version 3 to 5 ).

So for $89 I now have a DVD player that has all the outputs that you could want, does progressive scan, supports PAL/NTSC, is region free ( out of the box ), plays MP3/VCD/SVCD, and after trying out a bunch of my data DVD's with DivX movies on them - i can confirm it can do this too.

Its not better then the Xbox media center project, but not everyone will want to do this. Its certainly not something I could hand over to my parents - but this DVD player I could give to them.

2046

Finally got the DVD of 2046. Its not released yet on DVD yet, and frankly even when it is, it won't be in North America ( at least at first ). Perhaps this makes sense. I'm halfway through watching it ( took a break to watch Enterprise ), and I think I only understand the movie at a superficial level.

My plot summary would be something like - a lonely man unhappy about his past as a writer writes about the future but really writes about the past.

So its not that I don't understand the movie so far. I think I actually do, but I'm noticing a trend in asian films. A film maker will often create similar movies throughout his career. Sometimes they will be honest sequels or prequels to one another. More often they will be something that I don't quite understand. A sequal or prequel but not. Same characters, a storyline in one film that does appear to connect to the other film - but something will be different. Almost like the real intention is that the first film was good, but they wanted to improve on it, so they take the characters and create another story with them that is similar but improved on in some way. The fact that you the viewer is trying to mentally connect the new film with a previous film because the location and characters are the same - to in your mind make them a prequel or sequel - well thats your problem, it wasn' the goal of it all.

Worse is a similar trick. Where they take the same story and make it into a film more then once. Oh you say that isn't so wierd - we remake movies in North America so. No that would make some sense - or perhaps it would make sense to me since culturally I've been exposed to that. I'm talking about just making the film over as the same filmmaker a few times, changing a few things each time. Just because people liked the story once, so you just redo it with some new twist. I'm getting used to it though, and now perhaps even starting to like it.

I guess all cultures do it, just in different ways. We enjoy a story. We don't want it to end. There are many ways you can keep it alive. You can remake the story, change the story, expand on the story - its universe of characters and culture....its all for the same purpose.

Ring update

A week ago I talked with Customs Canada, in hope to try to track down what was happening with the ring. I was really relieved to find out that they not only knew where it was, but that it was now on its way back to us.

Heres the funny part.

I thought they had screwed up, since things were taking so long. Well they did, but in our favour. Like I said before, Canada customs is like a lottery game. What happened was the ring got to customs, and instead of them re-assessing the value, they thought that I was returning the item to the US, and that by mistake it got sent to them. The policy for this is to send the item back to the customer, so they can send it again back to the sender.

So what does that mean? No taxes or duty for us.

So after much worrying it all came to a good ending. The ring arrived, even though it took almost forever, but it did eventually arrive, and were pretty happy.

So now its my turn to look for a ring.

This might be the final straw

Back in 97 rogers began taking orders for the first customers for Rogers WAVE. I was pretty much first in line, and was so happy to get it after reading above it for almost 2 years from the first cable trials in Markham. They had some really wierd idea's for what they would do with it back then. From the community bulletin boards ( a website owned by each neighbourhood - kinda like a wiki web site, but not really ), to offering all sorts of services over IP ( video, telephony, games etc ). None of these idea's panned out, so what ended up being offered was a conventional ISP offering - internet connection, mail, news and some webspace. I paid $55 and was told that eventually I'd pay $15 more for the modem rental. Didn't care about the price - I was happy. I was considering going bonded ( Shotgun ) dialup just to get more speed prior to this.

It was unreliable at times under the WAVE service, but at least it was an all canadian solution. It wasn't much better under @HOME, but it was still amazing, so I put up with it. Being on cable was like being on a large LAN ( before we started calling these things WANs ), since we had incredibly low latency within the cable network. I could get 10ms pings within the network back then with my Lancity modem. Incredible for FPS games - which I played a lot of back then.

Later we had the Shaw transition issues, the issues of moving mail and news from @HOME to servers ran by Compaq for Rogers, and then finally the complete outsourcing of mail and news to Yahoo.

Lots of issues but the whole time the same thing kept me with them - PPPoE DSL is way worse. I never cared about mail, news, or webspace with Rogers and whatever or whatever it was that was providing these features since most of the time I did this stuff myself - pretty much from day one. The near static IP, and not having to deal with PPPoE made life okay. Having more speed and lower latency was also a nice plus.

So whats changed? Well Rogers has decided to get greedy. VOIP is the new hot thing in the consumer market, and Rogers wants to be a part of it. They have been talking about the service for a while, but now I know why they delayed it. Somebody brilliant at Rogers decided that while they would like to offer services over IP ( video on demand and VOIP ), they are going to also make it so that your not going to want to use any other competitor services. How? Put in a bandwidth cap. So not only are you afraid to use the service for normal internet use after paying to do this, but your not going to consider using VOIP from another provider ( YAK, Primus, Comwave etc ), or even upcoming IP TV solutions.

Bell tried to do a cap prior to this, and even some of the third party DSL providers followed them. Well it didn't work out. People who didn't even use the internet a lot left Bell basically on the principle that you shouldn't accept a limit on a service when their competition doesn't have a limit. So Bell now brags about how they have no limits on use...

I am predicting the same for Rogers with this cap. I'm not going to say that they will reverse the cap, but I will say that I not confident this will be a smart move for Rogers. I predict they will loose customers, and they will loose more revenue from those customers then what they will gain in VOIP customers.

Now I'm looking for my next provider. If I can find it, I want a DSL service that will provide me with Naked DSL with straight ethernet ( no PPPoE ), and a static IP. I'll even pay more then what I pay now. If I got this, I can get then layer on other services ( VOIP and IP TV ), and not worry about it.

Hope I don't jinx this one...

So on sunday we found a buyer for our place ( again - we've had this happen before ). This time I feel more confident that this will work. The last deal feel apart due to the buyers not managing to get financing. This time we got mortgage pre-approval papers from their bank, so hopefully this means this one is solid. We've met all their conditions except one - they wish to do an inspection of the house this weekend - so we get kicked out of the house one last time this saturday.

Were considering ourselves pretty lucky, since the buyers managed to give us the money we wanted, and the closing date we needed. All this and the house hadn't been on the market for even a week yet. So we are pretty happy with the work our agent did for us.

So besides getting to move on with things, the next best thing out of this is now I get permission to have a cat. So I've been taking a look around via Petfinder, the ontario SPCA, and checking the local Pennysaver to see what the Upper Credit Animal shelter has.

What I want is going to be pretty hard to find, so I'm likely going to have to wait. I like big cats, not chubby, but large, as in the size of a small dog. Thats actually not the tricky part. I've found a few so far - some nice ones actually - but none of them are declawed.

I feel like its cruel, and if we got a kitten I would have a hard time going to get it declawed. Heck each year more and more countries even ban the practice....BUT I've had cats before that weren't declawed and I really enjoyed having them, but they did a lot of damage.

So now I have to make a decision. Do I pick from one of a nice large cats that I've found or do I wait to see if I can find a declawed one.