It is difficult to see the newsprint J-Media as anything other than 3rd rate enablers for entrenched interests.  (The alternative reading is that they are incompetent, but I am sick of letting them get away with that simple excuse).

Their utter ignorance of this scandal, and their initial propagation of the “Clueless gaijin” angle has exposed them as wading in a pool of old memes.  A 20 year veteran of a Japanese company doesn’t “Hate Japan”, idiots.

Kudos to Facta.  You guys are awesome for starting the ball on this.

I used to be a big fan of Hasbro’s Transformers franchise. However, for the past 2 or 3 years, it has more or less passed into irrelevance for me. I’ve been thinking why (other than the fact that it is childish) and the reason I came up with points to a larger issue; I generally hate slavish homages, remakes or re-dos.

I love creation. I love the process of creation; it is the best part of my job. Listening to a client, absorbing his suggestions, and combining previous experience to “reason out” an idea, which I then produce. Creation itself is terrible and divine; the very act of creating is respected and feared. Steve Jobs is currently in the process of being deified by people, all stemmiong from his courage to create. I am completed by creating. That is why I feel a certain outrage when our creative instincts are restricted by strict conservative forces within a company, country or elsewhere.

Why the 100th Optimus Prime? Why the 20th “Final” Fantasy? Why the 20th Twitter clone? Why the 10 Star Trek movies? “Because they sell” is not a satisfying answer except to a bean counter. “Because it makes us feel good” is even worse, with the implication that we are unable to obtain enjoyment from new sources of input. Is there really a point after which assimilating new experience is a zero sum game, with real “cheap” joy only coming from the familiar and boring?

I know there is the entire “standing on the shoulder of giants” issue; I appreciate that there is very little that is “original”. I certainly do not begrudge the enjoyment people may extract from these franchises. To me though, they promote mental regression. They are constantly safe and easily accessible through previously formed memories and experiences. To businesses, they are deceptively profitable. Finally, they just seem to promote weaklings clinging to past humor and past glories, riding an old broken horse, unlike the spirited dangerous one we call “the future”.

Someone at Oracle once told me that the key to being a successful businessman was to “create”, no matter how small or unimportant the creation itself was. The first step of this is, no doubt, throwing off the uncreative forces that stifle us in our spare time.

Congratulations to India for this development.  Having a cheap, easily-charged “tap” into the fountain of knowledge that we call the Internet is exciting.  To me, the opportunity for a billion people to reach potential data parity with those of us in the west is an incredibly development.  

I got a Galaxy X S2 today from work, as I’m programming and planning the future of an Android application.

Some quick thoughts:

- The phone itself is wonderful, but the experience thus far has been akin to pulling teeth. The way it comes initially configured is akin to putting a supermodel in Walmart rags; various unnecessary applications clutter the visual experience, while stuff you may need (ie: Text Messages) are hidden.

- The Launcher Pro application is a gift from God Himself. It solved the biggest, most irritating problem of all – Docomo’s launcher applications that are not removable. (On a side note, isn’t that the very definition of treacherous computing? My purchased device refuses to comply with my instructions. Sure, I can overcome that quite easily, but why should I have to depend on the grace of a 3rd party?)

- Docomo’s One-Seg application doesn’t work very well. No surprise there. There are complaints about how quickly the Docomo email program is filled, but I’ve already complained about that once above so…

- Developing on it is a dream, except that Java interprets dates differently from the other phone I have (HTC Desire HD). I can’t explain how that happened. It doesn’t even happen in the simulator. I had to redo the entire date input methodology, as the date.rfc(something) command was returning null from the string, instead of returning a proper value.

It is a great phone for me, but I’d buy most everyone else an iPhone, and I say that as someone with a vested interest in the success of the Android platform.