Cameras in the streets: Japan

I came across an interesting article in the Japan Times that discusses cameras which are being used in a pilot program to identify people at train stations. The cameras are able to scan a traveller's face and give them a unique identify. It bring up some interesting questions about privacy vs. security. This new form of technology is not yet being used on the public however it could be rolled out more widely in the future. It may be that to pay for the train you must have your facial scan completed. Imagine that other video surveillance systems begin to use the same information and start collecting data about where you are, who you are with, what you're doing, etc. Also in this article is the how police lease security cameras to private residents and businesses for about 13000 yen ($110+). The footage (stored for the police) is supposedly used only to investigate crime.

Now I want a P2: Tourist Trophy

The makers of Gran Turismo have come out with a motorcycle game based on a slightly modified engine. It looks pretty sweet and I've heard good things. If you have a P2 check-it out!

Sun in Seattle

It's finally t-shirt weather! I had an excellent couple of days. As Tom said "This weekend has been executed perfectly". I finished my second day-hike of the year and climbed Tiger mountain (7 miles roundtrip, 2500ft). Tom had a party/jam session and a bunch of people jumped in with song, piano, and 2 guitars! This makes me want to get back into music. Maybe I'll buy a trumpet again. That'll piss off the neighbors.

Pictures up in the gallery.

Europe Pictures POSTED

I've finally motivated myself to format and touch-up the pictures from our trip to Europe. Now all I have to do is compress the 1.5 gigabytes of video I've got lying around from the trip. View all the pictures in the Europe 2006 album.

Pics from Q1 2006 and Nanaimo Partying

I'm trying to work my way out of the backlog of photos from since I got the new camera until now. I've posted two new albums. One that covers Jan-April 2006, another from partying in Nanaimo last weekend. Here they are: Q1 2006 and Nanaimo Celebration

Back from Nanaimo

Last weekend Amanda and I travelled to Nanaimo, BC to celebrate our engagement with our families. We were at Earl's for dinner and had 16 people from our families in attendance. It was a great meal and fun for Amanda's brother's and their kids to meet my sister and parents. Aferwards most of us went to my mom's to view pictures of our trip to Europe (yes... I'll post them someday). That night Amanda and I headed out to Miller's with Cathers, Christine and some others and listened to a live band rock out with Zepellin and other old-school tunes. It was awesome. I'll post a few pics from the night soon.

Check-out this cool web-cam of an eagle's nest. The mother is nesting eggs.

And these pictures of Mexico city from helicopter are amazing! I don't know much about the city but it looks incredibly vast and diverse. As well as very poor in many areas.

More useless links

What is the world coming to when the war on terror cracks down on harmless NINJAS? You might as well kick a 16 year old in the nuts for beating you at DODGEBALL. I guess it's to be expected when people are scared of EVERYTHING. Nowadays you can even use the internet to order a HITMAN. But don't worry, your fate has been written in stone by this PSYCHIC.

Oh... and speaking of ninjas: www.askaninja.com

Ski photos and how BillG works

I put up some pictures from my group's ski-trip morale event to Crystal Mountain. I posted a report on it a while back. Not many pics but some good ones of me carving up the powder bowl.

If you're interested in seeing some more Capoeira vids youtube has a bunch here (sorted by rating).

Here's a link to an article on How BillG Works. It answers some questions like "How does he deal with that much email" and "What tools he uses to stay productive.".

In local news, Tom's about to buy another house! I'm proud of him but hope he won't be burried in restoration and remodeling for the summer.

Springtime rocks!

Thanks to everyone for their congratulations. Amanda and I really appreciate the support and enthusiasm! Everyone, of course, has the same question. When's the date? Well we're going to wait a while. Amanda's in school for one more year and planning a wedding is both stressfull and expensive. Once she's done school we'll really start figuring it all out. It might be a couple years until we actually get it done. No hurry... so far being engaged is pretty fun!

As you know we've been back from Europe since last Wednesday. Since then we're acclimatizing to the time-zone and enjoying the Spring weather. I'm back to work and things are steady but not insane since we just shipped a few products and we're in planning mode.

Last weekend was pretty cool. I went to Capoeira and plan on attending 2-3 times a week. Tonight I'll go again for a couple hours. It's a great way to increase balance, rhythm, strength and agility. Sunday Amanda and I went out on the motorcycle with everyone. Derek, Chris, Greg, Octavia, Peter, and Gil were on the bikes with us. William and his wife Rachel followed in a shiny new Porche Cayman. We rode for the afternoon down to Alki, south into Burien and East to Snoqualmie. It was a fun and spirited ride. Gil had an encounter with a guardrail but he only received minor scratches on both himself and the bike. Safety gear saves the day again. Wear your pants! If he was in jeans it wouldn't have been pretty.

I'll post the Europics soon. I'm having trouble dealing with the sheer volume of photos and 1 gig of video. My friend suggested IrfanView to do the initial rotation of the photos. Apparently Windows Explorer uses GDI+ which only performs lossless rotation on images with size multiples of 16. With IrfanView you can download the plugins which will auto-rotate based on EXIF data in the thumbnail view. It's the first thing I do now when downloading pics from my camera. I'm picking up a copy of Adobe Elements to try with my pictures. If anyone has suggestions on imaging tools or video editing apps (free is better) I'm interested.