Benjamin Hourigan

While using Wikipedia to research Montréal and the surrounding area, I came across this image of a New Hampshire numberplate. I wouldn’t die for freedom, myself; under dire oppression, I’d rather bide my time looking for a way to put my life and liberty together. Yet I have always loved this American revolutionary slogan, and it shocked and pleased me to see it on something so mundane as a numberplate. I think I’m going to like North America…

Last night I changed my blog header image. Since I’m thinking of moving to Vancouver, I wanted an image of the skyline. I was planning on using Doug Morgan’s wonderful Twilight Over False Creek, which I’d recently seen on the Wikipedia article for Vancouver.

When I went to check on the license for it, though, I found the image had disappeared. A little googling found “Doug Morgan’s” page on Pbase, but it also found text like “All images property of Douglas Morgan”, and “Do not use without permission.”

I could have emailed Doug, but it was getting close to bedtime and I wanted a new image up to go with the day’s post, “In Search of Home”. So I went with a vastly inferior skyline image, still available at Wikipedia, and available for use under a Creative Commons license.

Now, Doug really might not want people using his images for blog headers, and that’s up to him. But, he might not mind, either; and if so, he just missed an opportunity for (a very small amount of) exposure. I don’t have my blog available for use under a Creative Commons license, so I can’t claim any moral high ground, but I have thought, in the past, about using the licences, and I will continue to in future. This is just a case that shows how choosing to use a Creative Commons license can result in your work getting publicity, and someone else’s losing out.

I implore the maintainers of event- and opportunity-related email lists to use RSS instead. Get a free blog at Blogger or Wordpress.com, post your notices there, and let the interested subscribe to or unsubscribe from the feed as they like. Keep the email lists for the RSS-illiterate if you must, but let the tech-savvy turf the email-list cruft from their inboxes.

Every week during semester, I receive an email newsletter from the postgraduate association at my university. It’s called UMPAnews, and while it’s seldom of interest to me, particularly because I live around 8000km from campus, I don’t want to unsubscribe because sometimes there is a point of interest, or notification of some genuinely important event.

My digital life is littered with such lists, and with people whose job it is to notify groups others of events and so on, by email. Every day, at least several such emails, only partially relevant, reach my inbox, along with all the personal and business communication that I really want and need to read.

Email lists are not the most effective way to disseminate the kind of information that they tend to carry: event listings, calls for papers, and so on. Often the volume of messages from even a weekly list can be great enough that one ceases to care, and ceases to want to read them. One creates a filter, the messages get sent automatically to a folder, and they are never read again.

Do yourself and your content a favour, maintainers: switch to RSS for delivery!

Around five months ago, I left Australia for Japan. I never intended to live permanently in Australia again.

Ever since I was a child, I was always disappointed by my country. I lived most of my childhood immersed in books, which are still, for me, the most important objects in the world. It disappointed me that none of the authors I loved were from Australia: not Alfred Bestall (of the Rupert books), not Enid Blyton or Tolkien. As a teenager, I felt the separation from the culture of the American fantasy and science-fiction authors who inspired me, and later I was away from all the literary writers and philosophers from the Northern Hemisphere whose work preoccupied me at university. I felt let down, too, by Australia’s dry landscape, compared to the mountains, the lush forests and snowbound winters of England and North America, that I knew from fiction and from film and television. And as it neared time for me to enter working life, I felt that there weren’t any opportunities for work that interested me in Australia. Not any at all.

As Yoda said of Luke Skywalker, so one might say of me:

All his life he has looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was.

This is not the way I wanted to be my whole life.

For a long time I’d thought of leaving. It’d stopped me from working out issues in my first relationship, which lasted six years. I always figured I’d have a way out. And I always figured it’d be pointless to start something new if I’d be gone in months, a year, two years…

Through university, I was fascinated by Japan. It seemed a place where I might be able to carve some kind of life, as a valued outsider. I applied for a job on the JET Programme in 2002, but failed. The following year I got a place after having been put on a waitlist, but I turned it down, partly because I was infatuated with a woman in Melbourne, partly because I was disappointed by the calibre of the applicants who’d been accepted before me. I felt I was better than them, and felt bitter about having been passed over.

Finally, in 2005, I made it here. Japan has been nothing of what I thought it might be. It’s a beautiful country in parts, but Tokyo and Osaka can be dirty and ugly, and they literally stink, thanks to sewage vents placed in major pedestrian areas. The work culture is unforgiving, and makes most lives and people dull. The creativity seen in Japanese anime, manga and videogames is not an expression of joy in life, but an escape from drab reality. The quiet and charm of traditional Japanese culture is something largely lost in the past.

Certainly, I’m a little bitter. I found that I don’t like being an outsider at all. What I wanted, leaving Australia, was to join a culture and participate in it. I wanted to find a career, a community of minds, a woman to love and a place to live and one day raise my children. Since I was about 8 years old, I’ve wanted to be a novelist, and I also wanted to find a place with a strong literary culture that I could be a part of. Japan cannot be any of these things for me. And so I am, still, in search of home.

The new header image shows part of the beautiful Vancouver skyline. For my next destination, I’m currently torn between Vancouver and Montréal. More on this later, but if anyone can help me decide, please let me know.

A recent article on the commercial failure of the Xbox in Japan, to which I contributed some comments, has been syndicated from The Christian Science Monitor to USA Today. Read it again, if you like, or refer to my earlier post about its first appearance in the Monitor. The article also contains some comments by Gonzalo Frasca. Kudos to Matthew Rusling, the article’s author, who’s so far managed to have his article printed twice!

Update (20 Jan 2006, 14:17)—The article also appears on (at least) the following sites:

CBS News
Xbox Addict
Yahoo News
Kink FM

January is more than halfway through now, so this is, as entries here so often are, a little late. But there’s been plenty of activity this year, the first of benhourigan.com, so it’s time to review 2005.

Progress

I started this blog on 18 January 2005. Subsequently, during the summer holidays (in which I was still meant to be studying) I indulged in self-pity, began playing World of Warcraft, and finished the first draft of my PhD thesis. That, however, was the last major progress I made for a while. Blogging reinvigorated my love of writing, but took time away from my PhD, as did World of Warcraft.

In mid-February, I started meeting with a woman who I developed a crush on by reading her blog, and though we had some brilliant conversations, the romantic element of it went nowhere, for reasons no doubt involving but not limited to my own reticence and lack of emotional energy. Meanwhile, an old relationship was still experiencing some of its last death throes.

Reflection

On 28 February, my grandfather, Hugh Slattery, died. We’d not had the closest of relationships in recent years, partly because I felt our ideological disagreements would make it difficult for us to talk, partly because his crippling emphysema really did make it nearly impossible to have a lengthy conversation with him.

The sad thing was that many of our ideological disagreements had disappeared not long before he died. In his prime, in the 1950s and 60s, Hugh was an anti-communist activist in Australia. Since about 1997, when I was just 15, I’d considered myself a socialist of one brand or another of each of the intervening years. 2005 was the first year when I didn’t even consider myself “left wing” for a single day. I rather spent my time feeling uneasy about being associated with the “right wing,” an uneasiness which continues to dissipate by the day, since I now consider myself closest to “conservative” in political disposition. More on that another time, but it’s seen me endure an unprecedented amount of personal attacks, which I’ll no doubt become inured to in the near future.

Hugh’s death made me think more carefully than I had in a while about my relationship to traditions, both political and family. Having turned against socialism, I could now view my anticommunism as being in continuity with my family’s politics (on my mother’s side particularly, but my father is no ally of communism, either). In addition, I thought of my own interest in intellectual work in the light of the role reading and writing played in Hugh’s political life and in his recreation. And even though I consider myself an anti-theist agnostic, I could still see that the orthodox Catholic religious beliefs so dear to my grandfather had, through the education I received from my mother and from Catholic schools, given me a familiarity with religious concepts that enriches my agnostic spiritual life and my understanding of the theism I despise.

In the aftermath of his death, my mother and I co-wrote obituaries published in News Weekly and The Age. These were the most major and widely circulated publications I’d ever had my name attached to.

Stagnation

As the year wore on (and yes, even by March it was already wearing), I plodded through revisions of my thesis, which I had long since lost enthusiasm for, partly because so much of it bore the stamp of the Marxist and post-ist cultural theory I had been indoctrinated with during my undergraduate degree, and which I now recognised as, for the most part, utter drivel.

As the expiry of my scholarship approached, I began to prepare for life after government support by applying for a job teaching English with NOVA in Japan. I’d been planning to go to Japan since 2001, but the plan had now reached the point of inevitability. My plans to leave Australia (and leave for a long time, if not for good) had kept me from investing a lot of energy in my life in Australia, and now I entered a true phase of limbo, where my life in Australia was coming to an imminent end.

I left my apartment in Malvern in July, after around 5 and a half years, and packed my life into two suitcases. Without any sense of having a home, I spent time between my ex-girlfriend Annette’s house, and my parents’, barely working on my thesis but managing to write my first published-for-pay article, “Are Videogames Conservative?”, which appeared in The IPA Review in September.

On 31 August, I left Australia from Tullamarine airport, excited about a new life in Japan.

Japan

I arrived at Narita Airport, Tokyo, on the morning of 1 September 2006. I’d already discovered that I was heading not for Tokyo or Osaka, as I’d requested, but to the industrial city of Ota in Gunma prefecture, some 2 hours north of Tokyo by train. Not so bad, I thought: at least my life was going somewhere different, and I’d soon be transferred somewhere better.

Alarm bells should have started ringing for me, and they certainly did, when one of NOVA’s HR managers, who escorted me to the train to Ota, told me he didn’t have a clue about where I was going because he “never goes north of Ikebukuro” (Ikebukuro being one of the more northern areas of Central Tokyo).

My good sense was initially wiped out by the shock of discovering that the world outside Australia was in fact real, and did not exist only in books and on tv, and the exhilaration of having left Australia and finally being in Japan as I had so long desired to be. But within weeks, I was painfully aware of the dire boredom that faced not just me but the other residents (gaijin and Japanese alike) in Ota, the complete lack of intellectual life, and the question of how I’d manage to find a woman to hop into bed with in a town with 200,000 residents but only 5 or 6 female gaijin and most of them married or close to it.

In one of the most unexpected instances of risk-taking in my entire life, I, already around A$8000 in debt, and with no salary coming my way, left NOVA and Ota at a day’s notice for not a job, but a mere job interview with Berlitz in Osaka. Later reflection on the decision-making process involved in moving to Osaka, coupled with philosophical discussions with my friend Sasha, prompted me to accept determinism, something I’d been fooling myself into avoiding for a while.

Fortunately, I got the job, but managed to max out my credit card at its limit of A$11,300 by the time I got my first Berlitz paycheck, around 3 months after I’d arrived in Japan.

In the beginning, Osaka was an interesting playground to explore, and with Kyoto and Kobe just 30 minutes away, the Kansai area is full of charming landscape and historical attractions. Shortly after I arrived, I also had the pleasure of doing my first radio interview, with Libby Price of 3LO, who’d been intrigued by my piece in the IPA review. (Some time later, my work also got somewhat misrepresented when blogged on by Edmund Tadros of the Sydney Morning Herald.)

As it had in Ota, though, my initial attraction to Osaka palled, partly because of a burden of debt and expensive catastrophes like hard-drive failure. Life in Japan, for a foreigner, is isolating and unstimulating. Now in the city, I got to really test whether I could live here, and found the answer to be a definite “no”. Japan is, more than 100 years after opening its ports to the West, still an extremely closed country, totally uncosmopolitan and unwelcoming. English teachers here have very limited opportunities to learn Japanese, and the “work-hard-and-long, not smart” culture that prevails here leaves most Japanese people little time to cultivate interesting and vibrant personalities. Being an intellectual, I’ve spent most of my life on the outer of Australian society, and contrary to my expectation, I’m less comfortable, not more, being an outsider by virtue of my language and appearance alone.

Disillusion

Living in Japan has probably permanently cured me of my fascination with it and its culture. But on the upside, I’ve a newfound appreciation for the spiritual achievements of Western culture, of the flowering of the mind that comes in the ease of an autonomous, individualisitic life in a free society (at least for those who are inclined to reflect). I’m now planning to try living in Canada, something that would never have happened had I not come to Osaka and met some lovely Canadians who speak glowingly of their country (and particularly of the city of Vancouver).

At the moment, I’m trapped here by my massive debt. But thanks to Berlitz’s excellent wages, and my willingness to work 6 days a week, it should be cleared in a matter of months. In the meantime, teaching English here is tolerably interesting, and the students and teachers at Berlitz are, for the most part, extremely gifted and interesting. My family plans to visit here in March, after which only a few months will remain until I can leave, spend a couple of months at home, and head to whichever of Vancouver or Montréal most takes my fancy at the time.

And I still hack away at my PhD, due to be submitted in August 2006…

2005 was not a splendid year, but it was a worthy one. I took more initiative that year than in any other. I pursued my dreams, I stripped illusions bare, I made mistakes and felt disappointments. I also gained a very small amount of much-desired media reputation. On this path, 2006 will see me pay for past profligate spending with achingly hard work and more stagnation in a country I have decided is no fit home for me, but it may well see joys beyond any I’ve seen once I finish reaping the ills of what I have sown.

I’ve just finished watching “Steve Jobs’ keynote” from Macworld San Francisco 2006. I’m about to give you my personal impressions, from the perspective of this one, particular Mac user. I own a 2004 Powerbook G4 1.5ghz, 15”, and I use it for the following things:

• Writing my PhD thesis, and dabbling in fiction.
• Blogging
• Reading articles in PDF format.
• Heavy web-browsing (10-20 tabs in Firefox at any one time).
• Light gaming, since it’s not good for much else.
• Experimenting with Open Source software, including Linux.

I do these things at home on a small desk, and at work during my breaks, on the same laptop. Bear these use-cases in mind as I give you what I feel are the highlights and disappointments, for me, of Macworld SF 2006.

Highlights

Intel Processors

Two new Macs were announced today: a new iMac, and the rebranded Powerbook (now the MacBook Pro). The performance gains are going to make a big change to the user experience for OS X users, particularly Powerbook users. iMac performance is up to 3-4x what it was (so says Steve, although Apple’s iMac page says it’s only up 2x) from the previous model, and the MacBook Pro performs at 4-5x the rate of the latest Powerbooks. This is going to mean, I suspect, that Powerbook owners will finally get instant search from Spotlight.

More importantly, Apple users are going to see compatibility gains with Linux and Windows by being in the x86 world. I think we can expect a new version of Virtual PC that will run Windows XP (and soon Vista) without the need for x86 emulation. If it supports graphics acceleration (which Microsoft will want for Vista), we may just be able to do some decent gaming under Windows without leaving OS X. No word yet on whether these new machines will be able to dual-boot Windows and OS X easily, but I’m sure we’ll get there. People using Linux on Apple hardware are now going to be able to use binary drivers for their video cards, and applications like Skype. It’s about time.

iLife ‘06

The new version of iPhoto is reportedly much faster. It needed to be. Let’s hope we see no more library-mangling and colour-corruption of the kind we’ve had from iPhoto 4 and 5.

Apple’s commitment to making Garageband a great podcast creation tool is, I predict, going to markedly improve the average quality of podcasts.

Industrial Design

The new MacBook Pro uses a magnetically attached power cable, which will reputedly prevent the notebook being yanked off the table if one trips over the power cord. This is a common problem for me, and it’s nice to see it solved. This is an extremely small design point, but one that’ll make a big difference for users, and probably improve turnaround times for Apple notebook repairs, because there’ll be less of them to be done.

Disappointments

The keynote was, for me, more one of disappointments than highlights:

Notebook weight

This is the big one for me. At around 2.6kg, my current Powerbook is too heavy to be considered really portable. I want a notebook that I can put in my bag and carry around without the extra weight reminding me there’s more than books in there. Full-featured pro notebooks from major manufacturers like Sony and Lenovo are now routinely coming in around or under 1.5kg. The MacBook Pro, at around 2.2kg, has shed 300-400g, but that’s not enough. At this rate, my next laptop is going to be an Intel iBook.

One Button

The MacBook Pro still has only one button. Since people will be running Windows and Linux on this, it’s not good enough. OS X itself makes ample use of right-clicks, something which Apple evidently recognises, since it recently released the Mighty Mouse. Some apps, like Maya, are downright impossible to use without a right mouse button. So, Apple, it’s time to stop this one-button foolishness and admit you were wrong. Give your notebooks a second mouse button.

Price

The new iMac and MacBook Pro come in at the same price points as their predecessors. If we’re going to see any price-cuts as a result of volume discounts from Intel, we’ll have to wait.

.Mac

Since I have a web-hosting plan and a Gmail account, .Mac is of absolutely no interest to me. But Apple keeps including features in its products that are .Mac only. I can’t get or use its Backup application, and I won’t be able to do photocasting from iPhoto, and probably I won’t be able to use a bunch of functionality in the iWeb suite.

Requiring a .Mac subscription for some features is a real turn-off for internet users whose expertise is even moving in the direction of “pro.” If a feature requires it, I’m simply not going to use it. Neither, I suspect, wil the numerous pro-Mac web-designers out there (such as Michael Heilemann, who although a .Mac subscriber, may not be one for much longer).

What I would really like to see is for Apple to release a little app that I can upload to my webhost which will give me access to all those little .Mac-only features, without a .Mac subscription and all the pointless things, like another web-mail account, that I don’t need.

Boring

Previous Jobs keynotes I’ve watched have been a lot more varied than today’s. Today’s focused too much on software demos for software that’s been around a while (iPhoto and Garageband for instance). I had an IM session with a friend going in another window, and I didn’t mind the distraction at all.

Conclusion

iLife ‘06 looks like a nice incremental upgrade, and I’m sure to enjoy using it. The introduction of Intel processors into Macs is going to deliver a lot of benefits for Apple and its users down the track, but not just yet. When we start seeing Intel-only software for OS X, the fun will really begin. The Powerbook upgrade is largely a disappointment, despite massive processor performance gains. Apple’s notebook line is desperately in need of a truly light-weight model, and the lack of a second trackpad button is absolute madness.

Nevertheless, I am, and will probably remain, for some time, a relatively happy Mac user.

Today the Christian Science Monitor has an article about the failure of the Xbox in Japan. There’s some comments there by me, on Japanese tastes and the centrality of the RPG genre to console success there. Gonzalo Frasca also contributed his words to the piece. Despite the Xbox’s apparent failure, Microsoft

“were able to jump into a very closed market and become a major player,” says Mr. Frasca. “Sure, they burned a ton of cash doing it but, still, it is a major achievement.”

Read more here:

Matthew Rusling, “No Clamor for Xbox in Japan,” Christian Science Monitor (10 January 2006).

Thanks to Joystiq, it’s just come to my attention that some of my favourite comedians from Melbourne, Tripod, are videogamers!

Tripod are, rather than stand-up comedians, a band that sings comic songs. In the past, I’ve been a fan of such gems as the “Xmas Song” and the “Ikea song”. I also had the great honor of serving Gatesy, one of the band members, at the supermarket I used to work at in Toorak. Tripod’s songs on videogames, which I’ve just discovered, are not only funny, but also capture a lot of the emotion of videogaming life.

This video of the group performing “Make You Happy Tonight” plays out the story of a man being cajoled by his significant other to come to bed for some “sweet, sweet love.” While he evidently has every intention of making it to the bedroom, he never quite gets there, staying on at the console in search of the next save point.

Having been in similar positions myself, in the numerous death throes of my previous relationship, I’m inclined to say that this fictional guy probably has some deeper relationship problems behind his apparent preferral of videogames to sex.

The next videogame-related song I discovered by Tripod is “King of the Video Arcade”, about a guy who drew in the ladies with his prowess at Pac-Man during the 1980s, but now finds himself left behind in a world that has no appreciation for his public displays of skill at 20-year-old arcade games. The song evokes a nostalgia for the era of arcade gaming, something which I remember from my childhood and early teens, but which has now almost completely disappeared in Australia. I strongly suspect that there are few women in this world who’ve ever been entranced by expert Pac-Man play, but it’s nice to think back and dream…

Australian Gamer also has this interview with Scod, the band’s geekiest member (in a good way), in which he reminisces about videogaming on the C64, one of the great gaming computers of the 1980s. The piece is fairly banal, but another nice Tripod/videogaming interesection nonetheless.

Don’t forget to check out the two songs!

“Make You Happy Tonight” (streaming video)
“King of the Video Arcade” (mp3, skip past the talk)

Ever wanted to convert a PDF to HTML, but didn’t feel like paying for a converter utility?

Well, cast aside those thoughts of giving up your cash, because Gmail may have the answer…

If you have a Gmail account, you can follow these simple steps:

1. Mail a PDF to your Gmail address.
2. View the email in the Gmail web client.
3. Select “View as HTML” in the attachment area.

The converted document will be missing most of its formatting, and you’ll miss any images it contained, but you can now save the HTML to your computer.