With watching so much Japanese TV, I’ve noticed a very distinct pattern: plenty of Western male TV talents (variety/talk show programming, quiz programming, etc), but virtually no Western female TV talents. It’s been suggested by several friends of mine that I should consider going into Japanese show biz.

I say give it a go. After all, you’ll never know until you give a shot. When you throw yourself into something that sounds awesome to you, you, by extension, become a more awesome person.

I know that sounds extremely reckless of me, but curiosity is nibbling at me.

Nearly anything thing can look reckless to those who are playing it conservative in life.

Mmm… Smallville. I love me some Clark Kent and Sexy Lex Luthor (I am so torn. I’ve only seen through season 2 as they aren’t coming out in Japan fast enough, and I’m trying to resist dropping the money to buy seasons 3-6 (since I have enough junk in my apartment as it is).

I’m really excited about the whole Spaces concept, since I often multi-task and it can be quite a strain on my desktop organization. I was considering (if its possible) creating separate user IDs for work and play stuff. Perhaps its the neat freak in me… I don’t know.

p.s. How is the PSP? They’ve just released a pastel series and I am desperately trying to avoid caving to the pressure of the sexy Sony hardware.

iTunes. I couldn’t live without smart playlists and podcasts. Both have affected my life way positively.

Safari. I go back and forth between Safari and Firefox as the new releases leapfrog each other. Right now, Safari is faster. However, Firefox 3.0 clears up a lot of memory bugs, so it may somehow beat Safari. Either one is a decent browser though.

Mail. Be sure to use Apple’s Mail program (or a web-based client like GMail). Programs like Firefox or Microsoft Entourage keep all of your mail in one big file. Now, normally this isn’t that big of a deal, but OS X causes two decent sized problems with such files. First, you can’t use Spotlight to search out individual messages this way. Second, with Time Machine automatic backups, you’ll end up backing up that whole big file every time you get a new email. This will cause your backup drive to fill up too fast.

Adium X. iChat works fine, but Adium allows me to sign in to every single one of my accounts — Yahoo, Google Talk, AOL IM, MSN — at the same time. It’s no longer important to me what service someone is contacting me from since they all show up in the same window.

Handbrake. Want to rip your DVDs so that you can watch episodes of your favorite shows on your video iPod (or in my case, PSP)? This program makes is simple. Just put in the DVD, select your DVD drive, and pick a preset for the device you want to use. It will spit out a video file that will play on it. This is how I watch Smallville.

Weatherpop. This cool little program does one simple thing very well. It displays the weather in your menu bar up by the clock. It does either metric or Fahrenheit, and it has most world cities. I loved it so much that I actually sent them a few bucks to unlock the full version even though the shareware version did everything I need.

You should be able to find all of these with a Google search. If I think of anything else, I’ll email you. A lot of my favorite programs became sort of irrelevant when I switched to Leopard.

Happy birthday, chica. Rock your socks off.