blueZhift Blog

Anyone interested in or fascinated by the rise and fall of Sega should take a look at the interview with former Sega of America head, Tom Kalinske on Sega-16.com. I found it particularly interesting that first Sega, and then later Nintendo, both passed on the chance to jointly develop a CD-based game console with Sony. […]

It looks like Inuyasha is still cool. The Virgin store near my office has a display full of Inuyasha related plushies and clothing. I still love Inuyasha, but I really am looking forward to the conclusion of the story. One of the things that I like about anime is the finiteness of it. Typically a […]

Over the weekend I caught an episode of Star Trek on G4. It was Mudd’s Women from the original Star Trek series. In this episode, we meet instellar rogue Harry Mudd who, it turns out, is essentially selling women to be the wives of rich men. This is an old favorite of mine because Mudd […]

The Chinese government has launched a web site to teach Chinese and promote Chinese culture. Unfortunately, many of the 30 million people studying Chinese around the world must be trying to access the site, www.linese.com, all at once because I can’t get through! I can’t wait to try this out once the traffic dies down […]

Not only are geeks still not sexy, now they are a threat to the IT industry, in UK at least. This is just the routine, almost periodic, article about the IT industry not being able to attract enough young people in the midst of the offshoring of IT jobs that gutted the industry in the […]

France just beat Portugal 1-0 to advance to the World Cup final where they’ll play Italy. I generally don’t like recording sports events, so I followed the game using Matchcast. This wasn’t too bad, the updates were useful and the fan chat mildly interesting. Since I’m at work, I have the sound off, so I […]

You hear a lot about so-called piracy on the internet these days. The record and movie industries have made quite a big deal about lost sales…yadda yadda yadda. Well here’s a reminder of what real piracy is, the story of a Japanese freighter fighting off pirates near Indonesia’s Sumatra island. Yes kids, there are real […]

Once again the greatest global sporting event goes on without much attention from me, or many in the U.S.. I’m not a huge futbol fan, but I do enjoy the game and watched a handful of matches during the last World Cup. I would like the United States to make a better showing, but even […]

Once more I’ve been called upon to make onigiri (お握り), rice balls, for the kids. We got some onigiri mixes at Mitsuwa last weekend and my wife bought Nishiki sushi rice which turned out to work very well for this. I feel like Azuma in Yakitate!! Japan except instead of solar hands, I’ve got […]