Came across a blog that gives a better rundown than I could about why the iPhone is going to have a hard time succeeding in Japan.

In other news, sorry I haven’t posted an entry in quite awhile. On Sunday I went down to Kumamoto University and presented my paper, "Speaking Truth to Power from the Depths of Insanity: Melville’s Cassandras, Azzageddi and Pip." A title like that just makes you want to read it, doesn’t it? Well, I finished it on Saturday and it felt so great to finally present the damn thing and put it behind me. The audience was sparse, but not moreso than for most other presentations–holding this year’s Japan English Literature Society (Kyushu Branch) conference in Kumamoto meant that some people who usually come didn’t make the extra distance.

Now I’m buckling down on my next paper, on Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games. It’ll be nice to do something non-Melville. I’m reading a bunch of books on utopianism, which will be good grounding for the next paper after that, for a conference in the spring. But this one on Banks is for the Australian conference in early December, so I need to concentrate on that for now.

Also, today my friend Jan arrives to stay with us for 10 days. Whoo! Haven’t seen her in years.

After this months-long period of busy-ness is over–that is, after I get back from Australia–my Hungarian buddy Laszlo is loaning me his Gamecube and an HP Lovecraft game. I expect to spend the rest of December just doing my job and playing. Man, am I looking forward to it!

[  Mood: Distorted ]
We all know LOLcats, right? Very cute. Here is more to my taste:

The iPod Touch has finally arrived at the local Apple Store, and I got to play with one a couple days ago.

Oh man, I am so tempted to impulse buy.

The interface is amazingly cool–it’s like something from a cyberpunk movie set twenty years in the future. It weighs a tiny fraction of my PSP, my current portable-video choice, and has a footprint that makes the PSP look elephantine. The screen is smaller, but it seems bigger, because the picture quality blows the PSP out of the water–especially because video played from the Memory Stick in the PSP is purposefully crippled to lower resolution, to encourage people to buy videos on the hilariously mis-named Universal Media Disk. I never minded a maximum of 15fps until I watched OK Go’s amazing "Here It Goes Again" and Muse’s fun "Knights of Cydonia" on the Touch.

Using the Safari browser was quite easy. The first demo model I tried wouldn’t let me click links by tapping them, but I switched to another one and it was fine. (An employee rebooted the malfunctioning one and it was fine after that.) Zooming in on web pages is fun, and switching to keyboard mode to type in text is ridiculously easy compared to the PSP and any cell phone. Sure, I wish I could install Firefox, but what the hell, eh? People complain that it doesn’t have built-in email, but that’s what Gmail is for. I’m so mobile, I pretty much have to use web-based mail anyway.

With all the other features, I’m sure to get one eventually. Have to wait a few months, though–there’s got to be something wrong with it. I stopped being an early adopter long, long ago. In six months, any serious bugs should be fixed, and it’ll probably have twice as much storage for the same price. 32 gigs is more than my notebook’s hard drive.

I’m in the process of working out my travel to Australia, wading through the accounting office’s arcane rules and so on, all of which is taking time away from research and writing, but it looks like I will be arriving at Melbourne Airport on the morning of Tuesday, Dec. 4, and departing on Saturday morning (the 8th). I’ll have to stay overnight in Seoul, S. Korea, and then arrive home to the family on Sunday morning.

Junko and Natsumi are going to have to take Lili the dog for 6am walks for six days! Will they survive?

Anyway, if by chance anyone reading this is a Monash student or otherwise lives in the area, let me know. I’d love to see you, and I hope to stop by a shop well-stocked with RPGs (that’s Role-Playing Games, not Rocket-Propelled Grenades, for the Homeland Security guy who has to read this), comics, and miniatures.