Neil Hopcroft

Ooo, just cheered myself up a bit by finding an instrumental version of “You really got me” played on tubular bells by an 80s JNewWave band…I love dodgy JPunk compilations. Sadly ‘Plastic Toy’ from the same album is not the one covered later by Rosetta Stone.

Incidentally, anyone got any ideas who recorded a song which goes something like:

“…Black eyes, black lips, black nails…”

I’m assuming they’re not English (Finnish would be my first guess) because we’d never use ‘black eyes’ like that (Meguro, the place I work, means black eyes, too – Me=eye, Kuro=black)…it turned up on a mix CD by the DJ from Osaka but I don’t have a track listing.

There are days when everything is fine. Today is not one of those. For some reason, today I am feeling particularly distant from my culture.

Maybe its the weather being British (showers, Tokyo doesn’t do showers, it rains or it is sunny, all day).

Maybe I should try harder to ignore the hype about Valentines day (we lurch from one commercial festival to the next without actually *thinking* about what we’re doing).

Maybe I should have gone out and done something at the weekend.

Maybe I need to know what happens next.

Maybe I’m just a long way from home.

shake shake shake senora! shake that body line!
You are everything intelligent and pure in this
world. You are the goth wino.

Which Winona Ryder are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

The second installment of last weeks antics…

Megaphone speeches over the air

It seems Damian is working too much, so I went shopping today instead of waiting around for him…hopefully he’ll escape later.

Todays find was a couple of JPunk&NewWave compilations, featuring none other than a Rosa Luxemburg, which now saves me from asking out loud the obvious ‘who was Rosa Luxemburg?’ when I don’t really care anyway. I still don’t know why she was (they were) murdered, the music doesn’t seem bad enough to warrant death, so it must be something else.

Disturbingly Helen Love’s ‘Big big kiss’ makes more sense now too, I knew they had at least some JPunk influence.

Dream machine

“The general concept is you’d sit down with it for a few minutes before you go to bed,” said Peter Harwood, senior marketing manager with Takara USA. Once this is done, he added, you are ready to visit Venice in your dreams.

A new dimension

Once photographed and enrolled in the database, a person approaching a camera or a security checkpoint apparently can be identified accurately in less than five seconds within a 6.5-foot range.

And some more questions from ladycat:
1. You have a single day to be unexpectedly back in England, what are you going to do with it?
Go to BMovieClub – I’ve only been once but had such a good time and loads of people were there. I don’t know, really, I’d like to see lots of people, but equally I’d like to spend some real time with people I care about, its a difficult balance to get right, suffice to say I wouldn’t be sleeping for those 24 hours. Oh, and I’d have a sunday roast with plenty of mustard.
2. What is the most surprising thing about living in Japan?
That I am still here. I arrived at Narita airport expecting to be heading back after three months. But due to having too much of a sense of duty and actually finding that I can get by over here I’ve stuck around a little longer.
3. What has been the hardest thing about living in Japan?
Not being able to communicate with all the cute girls.
4. Do you feel that your perception of UK current affairs is more considered because you are at a distance from the media hype?
I was at a considerable distance from the media hype even when I was living in the UK – not owning a TV or reading newspapers (save for the occasional peek at the FT). I do think living here has given me a different view on culture and society in the west, but current affairs have not been of much interest for years.
5. What is your favourite thing in the world?
The internet. Without it I couldn’t be here doing what I’m doing, I’d go mad. There are lots of other things that are good too.

Some questions from sciamachy
What’s the best thing about living in Japan?
The girls here are cute. Not that I can really communicate with them very well. I’ve been learning lots about communicating with different people from all around the world.
What do you think will be the Next Big Thing in computing?
Theres got to be some kind of ease-of-use revolution, we cannot carry on the way things are going with everything getting more complicated all the time. We’ve now reached the point where people don’t really care about most of the functionality in their DVD machine or mobile phone, they care whether they can use if for what they want. Maybe this is just a UI revolution, but I hope its a bit more than that. Universities seems intent on churning out more computer science graduates with no idea about user experience, and they will continue to do so while industry doesn’t know any better. The inmates are running the asylum.
How do you rate your childhood – was it a good time overall, a hellish time, or what? What memory from your childhood expresses how you feel about that time the best?
I was glad when it was over, I was always an awkward child (I’m not sure I’m much better now), never really fitting in with social groups or making friends.
What do you really aspire to – when you’re at the peak of your career, where do you want to be?
Why set limits? I’ve already gotten further in my career than I’d ever expected to, so I’ve learned not to set those kinds of goals. If, over the next five years I can get to a position where I choose what to work on and when I work on it I will be happy.
D’you think you’d make a good dad someday – if so, what qualities do you think you would bring to the role, and if not, why not?
No, I wouldn’t be a good dad, I’m too weak on personal relationships and empathy to make a good job of it. It is something I always thought I would do when I was young, and my life was structured around that plan, school, university, work, wife, house, children, retire, cruise, nursing home, die. A couple of years ago I figured out that wife wasn’t going to happen, so I may as well put my all into work, I’ve got potential to do much better for myself than I am now, I just need to figure out how.

(you know the score…leave a comment if you’d like me to ask some questions, or ask me some or whatever)

Vice or Vertu?

GSM handsets starting at 5k UKP, at least they’re not optimising BOM.

I take it everyone else is getting buried under emails from this latest virus too?