You Got the Dirty Love

Missed the Brits.  Must get a proxy set up so I can watch this stuff on line.

I think this looks wicked... Florence vs. Dizzee...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDCy7iKc_nw

That link is now broken thanks to a copyright claim by British Phonographic Industry Ltd..

Try here - nice mashup, same audio....!  still think it rocks. cant decide who I like better..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjVuMX7GSSk#

Come to think of it maybe they have a point you can download the mp3 all profits go to charity...

I still have his single Bonkers in my head and I haven't listend to it for months and months.  But that could be just me!

Been a good week for Rasu music, Rage Against The Machine annouced a free gig, ballot happens today, Kings of Leon in Hyde Park 30 June, that would be nice, I could do Glasto and that in one hit!

Still not decided on a summer festival.... Soundwave would be nice.  Even found a studio and someone to take me to learn keyboard (and maybe singing??).

And took possession of new Hot Chip finally.  Stuck in my head.... My Brothers!
One Life Stand

Oh and - let's not forget We Are the World 25 for Haiti!

National Foundation Day (建国記念日)

Today is a public holiday in Japan.  Yay!  We get a total of 18 public holidays, and many of the fall on really nice days like a Thursday, so it takes the sting out of the weekend.

Except I am at work.  How did this happen?  Japanese lesson this morning (learnt to read food wrappers, now I remember why I never ate pot noodles. 450 calories and 21 grams of fat, my god...)  So I also had to go for a run.

Now I'm in the office.  Anyway, not the point, at all.  This will be quick.

Video - Japanese Right Wing Nationalists at Work

Filmed these guys on my iPhone on the way in, they are a typical sight, but today it seems, being National Foundation Day, they are all over the place!  I thought it was just because it was a holiday and they are out having fun making noise but it's also the significance of the day.  They are Japan's answer to the BNP.

Tokyo Rasu's Unscientific Guide to Right Wing Nationalists in Japan:

• Are called in Uyoku dantai
• Get money from some dodgy politicians, who may also be affiliated with the Yakuza
• NB- Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) have been in the social and politcal fabric since the end of the war. Construction is where they get a lot of their money from. One reason why there are so many contruction projects all the time!
• Go around the streets in these noisy vans with skinny undernourished looking guys yelling into megaphones
• Promote a return to pre-war values, e.g. pretend we didnt lose
• Support Japan's conduct in WW2
• Dont like foreigners (oops!!) especially Koreans (bad Koreans!) and Chinese etc
• Are very right wing and anti-left

There are around 1,000 of these groups in Japan.  Crazy

Have a nice day... I hear another one coming past the office now, and we're on the 20th floor.

Here's the video again....

We Are The World

Winter Olympics starts this weekend.

Should be a few good events, curling is up there, and the snowboarding.  I wont be competing this year.

Opening ceremony includes a new version of We Are the World, for Haiti.  It promises to be a cheese ridden extravaganza of warmth and huggyness rolled into a sweet pop culture bun.  I'm looking forward to it.

Here are the performers in a funky pic you can drag your mouse over.  Download it, watch it, get into it.  And if you haven't (and I know I am not supposed to start a sentence with "and") you can maybe donate some money for those children and their families.

On a different note, last night I watched a documentary with A band called Gallows, called "Lives of The Artists".  He reckons music should not be acceptable, it should evoke emotion by any means to break the pop-by-numbers hold on the industry.

So if Celene Dion singing we are the children is not your thing then check that out.

Controlling Risk (or "Skynet Becomes Self Aware")

I was reading this blog which is quite funny, and realized that my blog is not so funny. I am not sure why this is, as I am clearly a very funny person. I saw some statistics the other day about how people describe their blogs and the highest rating was for people who describe their blogs as “sincere”. Not: “funny”. At least I am not alone.

I bought a new laptop finally.  Sony Vaio, 6Gb RAM, Solid State Drive, wide screen, HD.  Most important it looks cool, which is a key determining factor in long term enjoyment ... of so many things!

Which links to an article this morning by the Federal Reserve on Algorithmic Trading and "High Frequency Trading", which is where banks use computers (like the one above, which incidentally is not an algorithmic trading computer but a Japanese receptionist robot for firms that dont want to pay for a human, but it is an example of a com-pu-ter) to track miniscule (or large) abberations in the global stockmarkets and then trade heavily and at lightning speed to arbitrage a tiny window of opportunity on that delta before it closes.  This can all happen in less than the time a human could touch their keypad.  The 2% of firms engaged in High Frequency trading could be contributing up to 70% of the worlds stock market liquidity.  They need a lot of very fast fibre optic networks and very clever computers (and very very clever highly paid people to operate the computers) to do this.

Any case, the part I liked was the below (when the Federal Reserve talking about risks and how quickly these could spiral to a very large scale problem):

For example, in 2003 a U.S. trading firm became insolvent in 16 seconds when an employee who had no involvement with algorithms switched one on. It took the company 47 minutes to realize it had gone bust and to call its clearing bank, which was unaware of the situation.


Can you imagine, the cleaner, in the communications room, looking for the switch to turn the vacuum clearner on...........  oops!

Helmet Cam Experiment

Shauno gave me this helmet-cam for xmas. Tried it out the other day.

It's better than holding a handi-cam but still needs a bit of work (to put it mildly), so apologies for the image quality and please turn the sound down before playing.

We'll get some more footage and try and edit a decent clip, preferably with me tweaking an inverted 540 off a monster kicker double hand grab landing fakie.

Tokyo Rasu's Day Off

Monday was a public holiday.

Thanks to some tips from the crazy park rats at the Burton shop, I had a plan.

First problem, 05.30 - who is gonna win, the plan, or the mattress?

06.01 - rolling - the plan wins!

Tokyo central station. Looks like we need the 06.32 to Gala...

Yep, bullet train, or in Nihongo; Shinkansen... fast!

09.03 - Gala station, Yuzawa prefecture. The gondola up the mountain comes right out of the train station. It's like living in the future.

Video 1 - Train leaving Tokyo station (22 sec)
Video 2 - Train arriving Gala Yuzawa (33 sec)

This is taken from top of the gondola looking at the first chairlift.

Nice views!




I clearly got a lot more AIR than this guy....



Nice weather, not too busy, nice people, nice slopes...

Some good options for lunch. I went for hamburger patty with curry sauce on rice and a beer.

Good times.

Spongebob snow camp, all rights reserved, copyright Viacom, cheers dudes!

And home by 6pm! how nice is that. Sore feet, bit of a rest, no worries.

Facebook Kamakaze

I have written about this before.

Something interesting happened this week. To save you reading the BBC article if you haven’t, basically, a tiny not-for-profit organization of programmers from the Netherlands (they always are aren’t they, or Sweden or something), with a SINGLE BLOODY LINUX SERVER have seriously upset the most powerful force in social marketing on the planet.

The only web page to get MORE hits than Google, one day of last year (Christmas day).

That’s right, the internet behemoth that is the friendly Facebook. Stalkbook. The FB.

You know Facebook has 350 million users. Half of those roughly are active every single day. They spend an average, average, or 55 minutes on the site each time. Holy shit.

That’s like 100 x times the population of New Zealand on the site.

That’s like the viewing figures of 9x finals of Strictly Come Dancing EVERY SINGLE DAY on your website. Every one of those viewers provide all their demographic information in advance, age, marital status, location. Come on guys, smell the pizza.

It should come as no surprise that advertising on this medium, when TV is in decline, is of a lot of commercial interest. Big companies are the customers of Facebook, not us. The site is expressly set up to exploit our private and personal networks for others’ financial gain. If that sounds like a conspiracy theory, it’s just a fact.

So why do we participate? Same reason we eat takeaways and watch telly. We like it. I think Web2.0 is the new great time waster. TV is old hat. Early web was kind of fun but this social networking, presence aware, augmented reality shit, it is right up there. And it’s only just getting started.

Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, these guys are all building infrastructure now like what BT and AT&T do. I have seen it. And those old school companies are shitting themselves. Because they cant do the web thing.

So the point of the blog was, Web2.0SuicideMachine, has looked at the structure of Facebook, and realized that parts of a relational database can’t just be deleted. You can go and deactivate and “delete” your account, but the connections and everything you’ve ever said to everyone will still be there. In the shadows, but still there, recorded in a relational database and connected to everything else. If they started to delete your bits, it would screw everything else up. So they actually can’t!

So they have a better plan. Log on SuicideMachine, it will go onto Facebook, and in 1/10 of the time it would take you, it will delete every friend connection you ever had, change your name and password, and then forget your password! You’ll be left there, a zombie on the site with no friends. But because your connections are gone, in time the caching should, should, make it very hard for someone to unpick what you said about so-and-so in 15 years time.

Facebook have come down on these guys like a tonne of bricks. The kind of suing they usually reserve for paedophiles, tyrannical dictators and Bernie Madoff. You will find them gone from search engines, caches deleted, their site restricted, news articles gone.

Ah yes but I have nothing to hide I hear you say. Come on, it’s just a bit of fun, right? True, that’s the other viewpoint, nothing is secret anyway, so better yet, live by your principles, and try not to say anything too stupid in public. The internet is PUBLIC.

And no, I don’t want to join your mafia war, I’m not interested in an old TV ad from 1987 (ooh look its so funny), or making a collage of my freaking Facebook statuses from 2009! Like, WTF?

Here's a funny video on the subject.