Author Archives: dpkworldwide

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About dpkworldwide

Native Californian, water rabbit, aries, lover of travel, trains, history, music, wrestling, anime, minimalism, stoicism, objectivism and things Japanese.

My iPhone Wish List

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So, I’ve now had my iPhone for about two weeks, and it is quite simply the most exciting piece of technology I’ve had for a long time. It is the sort of thing that people merely dreamt about only a few years ago and something I’ve longed for for ages. It was well worth the money and having to break contracts and switch to a more expensive service plan.

However, there are five things that right off-the-bat I would like to have changed or added, in no particular order:

  1. Ability to view lyrics in iPod app – I have a lot of songs in Japanese that I listen to, and it sure would be nice to be able to access the lyrics since I went to the trouble of importing them.
  2. Ability to reorder lists in the Stocks and Weather apps – If you want to add new cities in Weather or new tickers in Stocks, they always go to the bottom of the list. It would sure be handy to be able to reorder or at least alphabetize them—right now you have to delete them and retype them to change the order.
  3. Access Tasks in Calendar – To me this is really a pain: there’s no way to access your iCal tasks on the Phone, making it useless as a way of tracking things I have to do. If not in the iPhone’s calendar app, then how about a separate dedicated app?
  4. Beef up the Calculator app – I’m not talking super-scientific go nuts here, but it would be really nice to at least have a % key. Something really good would be to include tip calculator and maybe foreign currency calculation functions. The world has advanced way beyond +-*/ only calculators (at least it’s got a memory function).
  5. Make the Notes app usable – This is probably the weakest app right now and needs to be so much more. First, the notes need to be able to be synced with my Mac and accessible from there. Having to edit everything on the phone and only being able to see it there is kinda a pain. Second, the ability to do minor formatting would be fantastic—I mean, I’m doing that right now in a browser window typing this Blog entry. Nothing fancy, just the standard text editor functions would be nice for things like numbered lists, Bold/Italic/Underline, etc.—I’m not asking for a word processor, since I don’t plan on writing my next novel in my phone. But formatting would be really helpful in having more organized documents. Finally, It would be nice to have a font other than the goofy one provided which looks something like the repulsive Comic Sans. Since iPhone is based on OS X, what would be the difficulty of porting TextEdit over? That’s all I’d really ever need. I have a feeling that some of these things might be addressed in Leopard from what I’ve seen on Apple’s website.

Other than those observations—which according to my layman’s perspective shouldn’t be too difficult to implement—I’m completely satisfied with how the software performs and how intuitive it is to use it all. Some of this might come out with the next revs of the iPhone software or with the advent of Leopard.

Actually, I almost feel sorry picking-nits like this since it’s such an amazing device. But there are my reasonable two-cents worth!

Happenings and Rants

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So here are some archived “Recent Happenings” and “Recent Rants” from my main page:

Recent Happenings
Today something pretty exciting will be happening: 100,000 people or so will be right outside my door watching the finish of Stage 6 of the Amgen Tour of California bicycle race. They closed McBean Parkway last night in front of the mall and there will be all kinds of festivities there today along with the stage finish this afternoon between 2:30-3:00 PM. At first, I wasn’t so interested but now I think it’ll be pretty exciting!

I’m hoping to take some HD video from my balcony and down on the street, then I’ll edit and upload it as a podcast (if I actually can get that motivated). That way you’ll be able to see what it was like. Not only that, but it’s another beautiful day in Southern California!
The last thing is that I’ve begun exploring the idea of entering an online university program to get my Masters in Education. My boss already said she thinks that it would easily fall under the Tuition Reimbursement program, so the company will pay. Stay tuned!

Recent Rant
Okay, so here’s a first rant: why are PCs such CRAP?

I went through the trouble of redesigning my website with this beautiful new layout and when I first looked on it with MSIE on my PC at the office, it looked horrible. I know that one of the problems seems to be with the default fonts selected, so I changed some of them yet they still look awful. PCs seem to be so far behind the quality of Macs in the world of graphics and display technology. If you really want to see what I’m talking about, have a look at this site from a mac using Safari.

It’s just so frustrating having to futz around with things so they’ll look good on both platforms in the supposedly “standards-based” world of the web.

Launching my New and Improved Blog

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This is always problematic: what in the world should I say for my first entry?
Again, the biggest thing that happened to me in the past few months was buying my first condo and moving to Valencia, California. I really love it here too! It’s a wonderful area to live in and I’m right smack in the middle of town within walking distance to everything I’d need.

Of course, my commute to work is now nearly 100 miles roundtrip each day, but I think its’ worth it. Luckily, I seem to have found the correct morning and evening routes that usually take me under an hour each way and relatively traffic-free; I don’t mind driving, it’s just that I can’t stand traffic!

The large picture on the right is out my bedroom window. The first row of small ones are just some shots around the area—the first two are on the Santa Clara River trail which is part of the 28 miles of trails available in the city for walking and bike riding (that I’m keen to start taking real advantage of) and the third one is right across the street going into the mall. Everything’s so convenient!

The bottom photos were of my first invitation to the annual “Anti-Super Bowl Party” that my friends Mike and Matt throw. We went a played a round of golf at El Cariso in Sylmar—it was nice and empty since everyone else was home watching the game! It was a gorgeous day and I didn’t feel too bad about how I played, considering I had not even picked up my clubs in I’m not sure how many years. I think I’m going to have to start getting into it again!

Finally, I’m undecided as to whether I should leave my old blog just the way it is in my old software or convert everything over here. I’ll probably be lazy and leave well enough alone. If you want to see older stuff, click the link from my Journal main page.
See you down the road…

America is now less safe…

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At least, that’s my opinion after yesterday’s mid-term elections.

So people have got their way: they voted the Republicans out of power in both houses of congress, and the news media is in its typical gloating mood. It’s a sound defeat for the President and a repudiation of everything he’s done, the war in Iraq, etc., etc.

Of course, everyone thinks things are going to change. They’re right: but not in the ways they think. With two years left of a Republican administration in the White House, the country at war with hundreds of thousands of our troops in harm’s way and now a hostile, bitterly partisan congress about to be seated, absolutely nothing will get done. If anything does, it will no doubt make a bigger mess of things. I can just see it now: Nancy Pelosi—Speaker of the House to be and international embarrassment—starting up investigations into whatever the Democrats want to score political points with, then clamoring for an “organized timetable” to withdraw troops from Iraq. Our troops in the field will become even bigger targets and unrest will become even greater as the Muslim world thinks they defeated us and we’ve given up the fight.

The Dems will concentrate on “domestic” issues and do things like raise the minimum wage to stifle the economy, raise taxes (especially on the “wealthy”) to reinforce class warfare, and then probably concentrate on such important things as Roe v. Wade and gay marriage. And if I were Al Qaeda, I’d take the opportunity to wreak some more havoc while we Americans are running around bickering, obfuscating, dissembling and stonewalling. It makes me sick to thing of what’s ahead for the next 24 months. More and higher taxes—yay! Just what I’ll need as a first-time homeowner scraping the bottom of every barrel to afford a place to live in this overpriced So Cal market…

And then we’ll have the next Presidential election and things will go even further downhill. I swear to you right now: if Hillary Clinton is elected president, I—unlike all the liberal leftist Hollywood stars who did nothing but talk—WILL leave the country. Japan is starting to look like more and more of a possibility every day (wait—maybe I shouldn’t be buying a condo…).

What a disaster…

Voice Acting Boot Camp

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Boy did I have FUN today!

I finally got to participate in the Voice Acting Boot Camp I’d found out about at Anime Vegas and signed up for in September. Taught by veteran voice actors and anime stars Lex Lang (Sanosuke Sagara in Rurouni Kenshin, among many others) and Sandy Fox (the voice of many young girl characters including my favorite Marie in Hare + Guu), it was a ton of fun and extremely interesting. It was held at Bang Zoom Studios’ place in Burbank for a full day’s worth of microphone time.

It started off a bit rough—when we were all going around the room introducing ourselves, one guy had a seizure and ended up being carted off in an ambulance—but quickly got rolling as a fairly comprehensive overview into the world of voice acting and voiceover work. We talked about a lot of basics, from vocal warmups and terminology, to studio etiquette and SAG rates. We each got to try our hands at a mock audition, reading three different scripts in the studio. Being my first VA experience, i didn’t know exactly what to expect other than to read something and talk into a microphone. Lex did the auditions and played the part of the director, and I was shocked at myself for how much I was able to change and improve my performance as he directed me. One of my parts was a commercial for an auto insurance company where I had to play two sides of a character: the nerdy, practical side and the suave, Italian-sports-car-driving, ladies’ man. The first reading was OK, I guess, but with his direction it almost didn’t sound like me anymore. Woo hoo! I felt like a real voice actor.

My other parts were some kind of wizard/advisor to the king (which I did with a pretty good English accent, if I do say so myself) and some jaded spaceship pilot from a video game or anime. Later on, we got to do the reading for an original animation (I played a fairly convincing anchorman), did some “Walla” (that’s the sort of background audio for a movie—we did a crowd in the stands of a football game: Go possums—moo). The “final exam” was when we did about a 2 minute scene from the anime Fafner, voicing about 8 different characters. I somehow got picked to be the Commander and had twice as many lines as anyone else. I only wish I could have a copy of the finished product, because it was awesome watching an anime with my own voice talking from the screen. I’ll also tell you something I learned: doing anime voice work is really hard! It was tons of fun, and I’m thinking very seriously about continuing on, getting more experience, and breaking into this world. I also learned some things readily adaptable to the e-learning voiceover work I do at my job (which is why my company is reimbursing my fee for the class—lucky).

Lex and Sandy are WONDERFUL teachers and coaches, and I’m looking forward to them offering an advanced class next year!

Just what country am I living in anyway?

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I’m generally a person who’s not easily offended, but this one absolutely galled me…

So it’s bad enough that it’s election season—that time of year when I get barrels full of junk mail from candidates and others trying to sway my vote and countless messages from politicians on my answering machine. Just knowing that it’s going to be waiting for me when I walk in the front door every night makes me crabby.

So imagine how I felt when I went to listen to my messages and heard ” Hola. Yo soy Antonio Villaraigosa, alcalde de la ciudad de Los Angeles…” coming out of my phone. For those of you who don’t speak spanish (like me), it was the idiot mayor of this God-forsaken city I live in trying to win my vote by speaking to me in a foreign language! Just what country am I living in? It’s clear where the mayor thinks he is.

Before you go and flip out thinking that I’m some racist white guy, remember you’re reading about someone who speaks 5 languages and has lived abroad on two continents. I wouldn’t even have been upset if he’d spoken English first then Spanish later on. But now I know for sure (as if I didn’t already) that the mayor of this city doesn’t represent me or one of America’s greatest cities—his agenda puts him in charge of a metropolis he thinks should belong a little further south…

Needless to say, I didn’t vote for anything he wanted me to—I was absolutely livid.

Annual Cotsen Go Tournament

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This past weekend was the annual Cotsen Go Tournament here in L.A., and I once again participated in the vain hope that I might get better. My record ended up being 1-4…

Of course, I have nobody to blame but myself. I’ve just not had enough time or patience to do any playing or studying of the game at all. In fact, I haven’t played since the first part of August after returning from Japan. “You can’t win if you don’t play” is, I believe, the old adage. The worst part was that on the first day I had to play on this flimsy, vinyl mat goban that was on a table that was too narrow; about 20 minutes into the game, I accidentally knocked the 1/4 inch edge of the board that was hanging off the table, all the stones on my half of the table slid to the center and I had to forfeit! There was absolutely no way I could’ve put the game back together. AARGH!

The one game I ended up winning (by a sheer fluke, I assure you) turned out to be the most fun and interesting game for both myself and my opponent (Lisa from the Tucson Go Club). She and I were both the same ranking (22 kyu) and we both did good and bad moves. It was really fun—thanks, Lisa! That was my fourth game—the fifth and final game was up against a charming young lady who basically handed me my head.

So in the end, I suppose it was good practice. There were actually 6 of us playing for the Ventura County Go Club this year, up from only 2 of us last year, so that was good. I also promised my fellow club members that I would begin playing again regularly and studying the game—specifically because since I’ll be a new homeowner soon and have absolutely ZERO disposable income for other distractions, I’ll be able to concentrate on free hobbies like studying my Go game! That way maybe I’ll be able to get out of the 20’s someday.

I’ll look forward to next year’s tournament to have a little better success!