Today I took a rather large step. I changed the link at the top from my own homemade photosite to my flickr account. I just think that flickr works very cool, with a far easier upload function that I have made myself, and with all the nice features in general.
Plus the fact that I don’t have to update it with nice features, they will do it for me.
I am although, not entirely ready to shut my old bluespot.dk/pictures down just yet… So far i will just call it deprecated and keep it alive.
Some weeks ago I stubled across a cool application at binarybonsai.com to manage media collections, called MediaMan. Apparently I have to use the knock off windows version, but it seems just ok for me. But I must admit that the apple version has cooler dark wood background.
The application can import the media, buy scanning the barcode (or maybe the number on it), using a webcam. It didn’t work with mine though, maybe because it was of a low quality with bad resolution. It uses Amazon web service to fetch information, like images and general movie info. It couldn’t find all of my obscure Asian titles though, and I had to manually ad them myself. I started by using the EAN product code (barcode) but it could pretty much only find the titles are bought from Amazon self. It didn’t have information of DVD’s bought on CDON or yesasia or in stores here in Denmark. But fortunately it is possible, to search by keyword, and ad the title that are most similar to your copy.
This little application makes me hope that the global data synchronization project will speed up, and that we will soon have an object name server (ONS) like we today have the DNS. That way we could be able to look up the information that the barcode actually contains. Of course Amazon doesn’t have all the information, and by asking an ONS first, it could be possible to be directed to a place which knows about the product, and retrieve the information from there. Even better, when someday hopefully the EPC gets integrated in our products, we can look up the exact transaction date of the unique DVD. And we can use a centralized placed RFID reader in the room, to automatically detect new DVD’s and add them to the digital library…
I just realized that not everybody is familiar with the Japanese movie icon, Takeshi Kitano, which is big a mistake. I myself am a big fan of his movies, about which I have a hard time coming up with one single word they have in common. His movies are just too different, although they are usually very dramatic in some way. I think he would be an obvious theme for my second 3 of a kind posts. Not only does this guy make movies. You might have heard about Takeshi’s Castle, and he is generally very exposed in the japanese media. While I was in Japan in 2004 i was able to watch him several times in tv shows. (Wearing a dressing gown for some reason).
By looking at the pictures below you might notice that there is no Battle Royale, which you might think is utterly insane. But off course you have already watched that movie, and if not, then try by all your powers to wriggle your toes so the doctors will try harder to wake you up from your coma. By the way, these movies are only movies that mr. Takeshi himself directed, which he didn’t do with Battle Royale, even though I suspect a lot of influence from him. I am mainly thinking about the scene in the end where Takeshi is shot several times, and everybody thinks he is done. But then his phone calls and he just have to get up at get it like nothing have happened.
My friend Muskel Anders reminded me yesterday that I also made some music once. I have happily forgotten all about it, until he played some old fast tracker tune which I stole and changed a littlebit around the late 90′ies… It was a “remake” of the fantastic giana sisters theme. That small outburst of nostalgia made me look on my old drives for some “music” that I made around 2001-2002, and I found 4 unfortunate songs, all made using the excellent program fruityloops. Common to all is that they are really really horrible, so I would really recommend not using time and space on downloading this crap. About the genre I would say it is “progressive house”, which Anders W from subdelay told me is the proper modern name for that kind of techno like music electro-crap. Maybe ad a “monotone” and a “daft” in front of it. However, here they are..
Primal Species was inspired by the phenomenon Star trek, and contains samples from the show. Even though it is only about 1½ minute, it is increeeedible monotone, which by the way all of them are.
Vacation fever is a tribute to Arnold Schwarzenegger and his constant battle to make the world a better place.
And about these two I can only warn you, that they are not worth even reading their names on.
Brian Zhang Larsen | 
02 26th, 2006| 