| Anime mumblings. (I've been sick, can you tell?) |
[Apr. 10th, 2009|08:47 pm] |
Just finished watching Tytania. I liked it a lot, although the fleet tactics kept making me wince. I also found the ending quite weak; it seems to confirm the concern I had waiting for the series to get moving faster that, as space opera, it was intended to keep going and going. Also, as I believe I've mentioned, love the OP.
Also finally got around to watching the last few episodes of Hayate no Gotoku. Discovered that there was (another? Isn't 52 episodes two seasons already?) second season, and that it had already been licensed, and so AnimeSuki didn't carry any links to it. Still pondering that one. Not sure how much I really want to pay for it; more of a "would watch with ads" than "would pay for" series, although I will buy out the manga.
Still watching Tora Dora, Baccano (well, it's in the playlist, which I'm trying to clear out), and RideBack.
Finally snagged the last episode of Giant Formula, which was pretty much exactly what I expected. Good show, though.
Watched, or more probably re-watched, the last few episodes of Clannad. Not sure why they were still on my playlist, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to be sure. Very drama. Next up, the after-story.
Also finally got around to finishing Strike Witches, whose ending was very silly.
Finished watching Shakugan no Shana, which was fun to watch but hardly a classic. Ending made me wonder WTF is going on with the manga, though.
Also finished Nodame Cantabile: Paris, which was satisfying. |
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| Randomly, |
[Mar. 11th, 2009|01:15 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | Shakugan no Shana | ] |
in fact, J-Randomly, I noticed that "Dollhouse" has a character named Echo who's called a "Doll." Synchronicity makes me twitchy. (Especially since Garran likes banging the malleability drum for Ping, and that's apparently what Dollhouse is all up to. Creepy.)
In other news, I've been watching Tytania, Shakugan no Shana, and the tiger-and- show whose name I just forgot. (More the first two than the last, recently.) I really like the Tytania OP.
... and that's enough for lunch. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 13th, 2009|09:10 pm] |
just how awesome the drawing of Junko in the last panel of today's MegaTokyo is. (I'm also amused by what appears to be the massive retcon that's going on, but I also haven't been paying much attention, so I won't talk about it.)
In 27 minutes -- I'll go ahead and write this and post it then -- the all-new Az-chan will have been up for eight days, matching her recent records in this incarnation. (Hopefully I'll finish standing her up the rest of the way this weekend, so that, forex, the CWDB comes back.) I will therefore speculate/rant about a possible cause: apparently, the DDR2 spec does not require that you, um, meet the DDR2 spec. That is, it is apparently not a breach of the DDR2 licensing agreements to not support a third of all the DDR2 RAM out there, and then not bother to tell anyone about it: DDR2 RAM can be 1.8, 2.0, or 2.2 volts, and the M3A doesn't actually support 2.2 volt DDR2, according to the hilariously misnamed "Qualified Vendor List". This fact is not mentioned anywhere in the hardcopy that comes with the motherboad; in fact, it's not even explicitly mentioned in the "QVL"; it "just so happens" that all the "Qualified" memory modules (note, explicit model #s in the "QVL", not /vendors/) are 1.8 and 2.0 -volt modules.
The above, in fact, never made it to posted. Odd, that.
Garran, thank you for the "Princess Tutu" recommendation; it's been magnificent, up through half-way through and then one more, to the opening which begins, "Once upon a time there was a man who fell in love with a doll." Naturally, I capitalized the last letter... and left this here, just in case the story in a story which contains another story interacts strangely with its subject. |
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| A breakthrough, sort of. |
[Dec. 30th, 2008|06:25 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | Sky Girls (still) | ] |
So I've been leaving my monitor on and at VT1 when I leave Az-chan alone at home to see if I could get some error messages before she committed suicide. I got one today, a kernel panic. Unfortunately, the top half had scrolled off the top of the screen, but the call tree was kind of scary: from cstar_do_call/sys_write/vfs_write through some timer code, into sock_aio_write and tcp_sendmsg, through down to dev_queue_xmit. The RIP printed at the bottom was in loopback_xmit, which suggest the scary possibility of something fairly seriously buggy with the kernel.
On the other hand, after rebooting with the reset switch, the BIOS detected bad RAM, which it's never done before. Some repeated variants of soft resets and hard reboots all blew up and died. Holding down the front power switch, waiting for the system to shut off, and immediately restarting it into memtest86+ caught more errors. (This lattermost has happened before after restarts.) Turning it off again and letting it sit for 30 seconds resulted in a fully-functional system again. None of the temperatures reported by the BIOS were anywhere near the warning level, although the CPU fan was running flat-out (which, as usual, puts the CPU at about 55degC). I don't like the heat explanation, anyway; I ran two BOINC jobs and pegged both CPUS at 100% for eight hours or so the last time this happened. Loafing around handling my e-mail shouldn't cause a heat problem.
I'm hoping one of you has an idea, because I don't really want to have to start swapping parts through. Grr. |
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| I'd been thinking about this for a while, |
[Dec. 18th, 2008|02:54 pm] |
and finally decided to ask here. Then I did some quick googling to find out and stumbled on this editorial, which asks the same question but comes up with a totally different answer. (They want to say that the difference between GM and Toyota's respective homeland operations is that if Toyota were paying what GM were paying for its retirees' healthcare, Toyota wouldn't be making a profit. That doesn't mean that GM /would/ be, and being unable to export cars from the home market is a sign of weakness on GM's part, not of a lucky bonus on Toyota's.) My question was this: there's an assumption that Toyota is badly skimping on healthcare costs for its transplant factories (rather than saving money, by say, competent management and lower salaries for what is, after all, generally unskilled labor). Is that really tru? Could it be used as a protectionist lever to get universal healthcare in the US?
Another article from a while back basically said that GM was paying for health care on three times as many people as Toyota because 2/3rds of GM's healthcare recipients were retired, which could limit the scope of the health insurance discussion... although from what I understand, GM has mostly kicked a lot of them off to another company/trust it will fund with a huge one-shot pile of cash and then spin off.
I was going to go check Toyota's corporate website to see what they said about their healthcare plan, but the 'careers' link is, you guessed it, 404.
Anyway, the comparison I really wanted was GM/Toyota productivity and expenses per worker in the US. In terms of a bail-out and other politics, the question is of what's possible in the US -- not how much better of GM would be if it spun off its American operations and let them collapse. (GM of South America (no idea) and GM of China (high-quality Buicks, oddly enuogh) made a bucket of money last year, from what I've heard. I think GM of Europe (read: Opel) isn't in bad shape either. |
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| Uncertainty |
[Dec. 10th, 2008|09:44 pm] |
So I'm not sure if my response should be 'THIS, ZOMG!one!11, THIS', or to send ninjas to check on Fred, because he did a Ping strip and managed to get it right. |
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| *sigh* Az-chan down again. |
[Nov. 26th, 2008|08:25 pm] |
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I'm thinking it's an I/O issue. 'egrep '80\d\d\d\d' *' shouldn't do much of anything else... |
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| I should mention, |
[Nov. 21st, 2008|06:11 pm] |
seeing three Az-chan related posts in a row, that Youmacon was tasty. (Although sad for Chad.) I've beaten Half-Life 2. Terrible last level. And Half-Life Ep 1, and I'm half-way through Ep 2. Ep 1 was a good way to kill some time, but deeply unsatisfying. (Yay! I've escaped the city! When does the game start? Oh, look, the closing is an ad for Ep 2. Woo.) Episode 2 has actually been pretty enjoyable so far. I think "Lost Coast" is the next down in my column of icons, and then Portal.
All this after I decided to put HoI 2 down for good a week ago. After annexing Germany playing as the Polish, I figured I'd kind of pwned the game. (I'm resisting the temptation to play out my previous game and have the French conquer the world.) (Why did I try? I'd just finished rereading a book by John Mosier, "The Blitzkreig Myth"; it's flawed in a lot of ways, but Mosier's analysis of the fall of Poland matches up well with what you actually end up doing in wargames. He also said something about Poland not having a prayer against both Russia and Germany (true) and that the Polish defense plan was to buy time for the French to save them (true, but in hindsight, rather foolish). However, he also mentioned that the Russians only occupied their half of Poland /after/ Germany announced its victory (and the Allies had done nothing), leading me to believe that the same would happen in HoI 2, especially if Poland joined the Allies /before/ the war. Turns out this is true -- Poland only has to fight Germany... and I had a challenge. :)) Installed Supreme Ruler 2020 afterwards, before going back to Half Life 2. (HL2 is almost as addicitive of HoI2, but has more natural stopping places, so it's less distruptive. I was actually looking for something even more "episodic", in the sense of a bunch of hour-or-so segments to play through, so I could work on my campaign, but whatever.) I didn't actually play it though; just trying to figure out what was going on proved to be damn near impossible. I don't mind a lot of detail and what game reviewers call "micromanagent", usually, but the more you put in, the better your UI has to be. Battlegoats didn't have a UI I would've been happy with trying to play HoI 2, much less the more-complicated[-looking] SL 2020. Come on... individual battalions? For a game where your goal is to reunite the states of America? At least let me group them into divisions...
Was really irritated by this week's Terminator. Not sure why. |
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| Lament |
[Nov. 21st, 2008|05:57 pm] |
Az-chan has a new CPU fan and I replaced and reactivated a case fan. Also sent half the software RAID back to Samsung. *sigh* Maybe Az-chan will stay up for more than a day now. |
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| *sigh* |
[Nov. 2nd, 2008|04:49 pm] |
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udevd crapped itself and blew the kernel away (bad page table) just after I crossed the border into Illinois. WTF? |
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| Az-chan's PSU thermal diode failed... |
[Jun. 25th, 2008|05:23 pm] |
... so don't be surprised if she yo-yos for the next few days.
(I base my diagnosis on the fact that the exhaust coming out of the PSU is both cool and much harder than usual, and that the case fans plugged into the thermally-controlled "fan-only" leads from the PSU are also working at full speed. I certainly hope it's not a sign of impending PSU death, since I'm leaving Az-chan on.) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 23rd, 2008|01:33 pm] |
So my battlestation is fully... er, gaming rig if fully operational. I've already forgotten the name of the motherboard, but it's a Gigabyte P35-based system with both RF and optical SPDIF out. The CPU is an Intel E8400 (3.0GHz Core 2 Duo); the retail HSF for new Intel chips is now quite impressive: the fan is kind of open-framed, and the heatsink is kind of twisted into a spiral, presumambly to minimize drag. The case is a P182B, and the system as a whole is I think quieter than my Antec Sonata, which is kind of surprising, and orders of magnitude quieter than the jet engine it's replacing. GT8800 512MB video card and 4x1GB of Ballistix DDDR2 1066, and a Samsung F1 750 GB SATA2 HD. It flies. :)
Half-Life 2 is gorgeous, and the physics are impressive (if, occasionally, completely bizarre). It's kind of addictive to play, but I'm also kind of unhappy with it. I don't like the vehicle sequences, and they take much too long. The linearity of the game is generally really artificial, especially once you have the gravity gun, and becuase the physics and destructability is quite good, that's very annoying. (Why are so many of the windows in the game unbreakable? About half of them are because they didn't feel like mapping or matteing in the rest of the map, and about half because that would let you do cool things that they didn't think of.) This also shows up in how you get past some of the obstacles; it's never "think of something clever" like in Deus Ex, but always "what did the designer want me to do /this/ time?" (This is especially noticeable in places with crates and the legendary invincible fencing. Sometimes they let you get over it; other times, they don't.) The scarcity of suit recharge compared to the surplus of health is also annoying, especially because the maps are designed such that sometimes you just have to suck a lot of damage. (Also, maybe I'm going blind, but sometimes it's surprisingly hard to tell, given how linear the game really is, where you're supposed to be goind. Losing a bunch of health because you unexpectedly hit a dead-end sucks.)
What do I like? The fights themselves are generally really excellent. (Sometimes, though, and I hate this, there's not really a way to survive your first time through an area. But usually you can do well.) And the nonfighting scripted scenes are very, very nice. It's the tremendous amount of slogging between them that really gets on my nerves. (Literal slogging: there's far too much long-distance travel that you the player have to spend time on. I think that's because Valve developed a hatred for more location-based map design, but saying "it's OK that the travel bits of the game are linear" isn't really what you want to do. Even Ravenholm, which was an awesome opportunity to let you pick your style of play (straight up the middle, along the alleys, over the roofs, through the big buildings, etc), was generally linear, just folded in on itself. (Awesome set-pieces, though.) And like the train station at the beginning: was there any reason /not/ to have modelled the whole station? Even just exploring the place and discovering that all the exits were guarded would have had a better feel of player freedom than "this is the railroad".) Heck, for that matter, why can't you climb chain-link fence? |
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| A Long (Parenthetical) Remark |
[Apr. 1st, 2008|08:58 am] |
Got my hands on a copy of the Hearts of Iron II anthology. Good game, but it would be much better with only a fair amount of UI work. And enemies that were more willing to give up. Grr. (So I played a few years of two games as the French to get a feel for the game, and then conquered Germany in the third. Managed to smite them before the Russians stuck their nose in, which was rewarding. Then switched to playing the Germans and am trying to take over the world. Conquered the Netherlands without anybody seeming to even notice (...), then decided to try and see if anyone would care too much about Belgium. That didn't go over so well. I took two weeks longer than Germany had historically to smash Poland, but two weeks after that, finished off all of continental France. (Which may have been a mistake. Apparently, they get all snooty if you refuse the Vichy settlement and refuse to surrender later. So the larger part of the army, by manpower, is squatting around in France, keeping the marquis under control. *sigh*) Italy, bizarrely, joined the Allies after I bypassed the Maginot Line, and was promptly beaten soundly for its troubles, also losing all its continental territory (and also, bizarrely, refusing to surrender). The plan, I'd guess, had been that Italy would attack into Austria, well behind the front in France, and force the German armies to turn around and go home to chase them back out again. Seems they'd forgotten about the rest of the Axis, somehow... which held them off in the mountains until the armies in France finished up and turned east. (IIRC, the Axis at that point included Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Yugoslavia joined up shortly after Italy joined the allies, and Greece after they declared war on Russia after it declared war on Germany. (Huh?) More on that later. There's also no Slovakia, primarily because the country was totally useless to the Axis, if not an actual detriment, when I was playing as France.) Then I waited around for my paratrooper divisions to recover from their drops in France and the Luftwaffe to win the Battle of Britain. (The key is to hit each of the airfields in southern England as hard as possible in turn, leaving one bomber group behind each time to prevent repairs. Then your interceptors win the war of attrition, since England's can't get repaired.) I paradropped six divisions into Plymouth and Dover, and tried sneaking six divisions across the Channel by sea. The Home Fleet sank two (both panzer divisions!), but the U-boats distracted them for long enough for the others to make it ashore. After that, it was just a matter of time. The English, of course, are still harassing me from their bases in India and Egypt, but unlike the French and the Italians, retain enough of an industrial base to be problematic. Specifically, enough of a base to keep the Royal Navy in supply, which means I couldn't go chase them. So the spring of 1940 was very quiet, with Germany trying to build a fleet and an air force to get its army to Africa (and a bunch of annoying little islands in the Med). Then Russia decided it actually had really wanted half of Poland after all, and attacked.)
As you can tell, I'm having a ball with this game. :)
(The Russians were mostly held at the border by Axis infantry, probably saved by the otherwise-idle bombers of the Luftwaffe. The German army was stooging around in southwest France, getting ready to smash Republican Spain (yeah. The Nationalist Chinese beat the communists, too, before getting smashed by Japan.) so as to take Gibraltar and gain a bridge to Africa. Within hours of the declaration of war, the French rail system was in chaos, as tanks and men were loaded to be shuttled east, to retake Memel and Konigsberg and counterattack in the broad Kazakh plains. (Actually, I had to back and redo that -- the first time the tanks went to Konigsberg, but northwest Russia, southwest of Leningrad, Moscow, and Smolensk, is a maze of swamp and forest; the tanks, they did nothing.) Before the first snows fell, the Axis had trapped and obliterated fifty Soviet divisions, and captured Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev and Kharkhov. With the Soviet army in disarray, a slow drive through the snow to the east captured Stalingrad with minimal fighting. There the war froze for a few months, as I tried to redress my lines, which were stretched thin over to Stalingrad, mostly held by tank divisions I would need for the assault in spring. But the Russians rebuilt their shattered army while I waited, not wanting to attack into the snow across the rivers I'd established as my primary defensive lines in the north and center. They attack in Januarary, and a very slow-motion war developed, in which I lost a great deal of territory I'd speculatively taken in the direction of Baku (a major oil center), but took Moscow in two weeks of heavy slogging and captured Leningrad with another combined air- and sea- borne assault. As the situation stands when the spring muds of 1941 arrive, the German army holds all of Russia's major cities, although Leningrad can still only be supplied by sea. However, much of Russia's industry had been relocated east of the Caucus Mountains before the war began, and much of her legendary reserves of manpower remain. It's going to be a long slog to victory.)
(Bizarrely enough, sometime during this, Portugal joined the Axis. I'm still not quite sure why, but that got me close enough to Gibraltar for my paratroopers to take it. In response, England invaded and almost conquered Portugal; I had to rush the invasion reserves in England down to save them. Luckily, closing the Straights of Heracles made life hard enough on the Royal Navy that I didn't lose anyone doing so. Unfortunately, since then, the French fleet has sailed from Casablanca and begun intercepting any vessel venturing in or out of Gibraltar; the Baltic Fleet was obliterated discovering this. Because of this, my plan at the moment is to drive on Baku; the Soviet Union has a border with Iraq near there, which is a British puppet ... and connects through some French colonies to, you guessed it, Egypt.) |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 3rd, 2008|09:03 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | Terminator: the TV | ] |
Sometimes, I really like what happens when budgetary limits force you to get creative.
Aside from that: forced cliff-hanger much?
Fortune cookie: pay attention to the future. The present will reward you. |
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| thoughts from SFO |
[Feb. 22nd, 2008|11:16 pm] |
I wonder if it's worth trying to SSH+VNC to Az-chan in order to get my weekend's anime downloads started early?
[Note: Panzer Genral is the wargame I've been playing on this here MacBook Pro under dosemu. I'm starting to get my hate on for the second campaign, I think mostly because I really don't like the way the army you start out with was put together. You can probably change that in later versions of the game, but I don't have them handy.]
Sitting at the back of the 777 still disconcerts me. The sight line is much too long for something that flies. (The overhead storage system, if I get to use it this flight,* looks really cool. It kind of hydraulics up out of the way to get you more headroom and to mke the plane feel more spacious.)
Bizarrely, the airport has a T-Mobile hotspot. I worry this means I'm trapped in a closed area with a Starbucks, but what can you do?
*: The flight attendants lied and said the back of the plane's overhead bins were filling up, and then lied again when they said my "gate-checked" carry-on would be available plane-side in SFO. I had to wait for a full hour for it at the baggage claim. This time, we're going to go in at the tail-end of the preceding seating area. I /really/ don't want to find out what happens to my carry-on in Chicago, when I'm trying to maek a connection. |
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| Random mumblings. |
[Feb. 17th, 2008|09:04 pm] |
So I beat Final Fantasy XII; there were so many more sidequests and such to go through that it seems like the main plot ended very early. Possibly as a result of all the extra running around I was doing, the fights in the final area and the final boss were pretty easy. Now I'm kind of wondering if I want to bother finishing up. I think my yearning is drifting closer towards more tactical combat, or possible a WWII grand strategic game. (Like Hearts of Iron II... which just came back into stock at Amazon. Tasty.)
an interesting tidbit that LJ pulled from the etherdeep for me:
I think the National Weather Service (haha! no link for you!) is trying to kill me: how else does "One to three inches of snow overnight" turn into "three inches of snow in the two hours after you decide to get on the road"?
Also, I am annoyed that I missed this week's Terminator, after talking about it with Garran yesterday. However, I have confidence that the Internet will come to my rescue... |
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| Monday Woes |
[Jan. 21st, 2008|09:46 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | Sakura Taisen (TV) | ] |
I think the National Weather Service (haha! no link for you!) is trying to kill me: how else does "One to three inches of snow overnight" turn into "three inches of snow in the two hours after you decide to get on the road"?
Also, I am annoyed that I missed this week's Terminator, after talking about it with Garran yesterday. However, I have confidence that the Internet will come to my rescue... |
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| Not a Flash person? |
[Jan. 12th, 2008|01:59 pm] |
The default answer floating around on the 'net to the problem of getting Firefox to stop bugging you about Flash with that obnoxious yellow bar at the top of the webpage you're viewing (setting plugin.disable_default_plugin to true) doesn't work all that well, because Firefox promptly goes back to popping up a dialog box asking you to get Flash. (Older versions of Firefox apparently put the yellow bar code in the default plugin, so you could leave it "on" but remove the library, and get rid of it that way; but the Firefox jokers are proud that this is not the case in 2.0.x.) Instead, drop the following in your userChrome.css:
#content .notification-inner {
display: none !important;
}
This will, I believe, supress all of those annoying yellow bars. If you use the other ones regularly (the only one that comes to mind off-hand is the "blocked a pop-up" bar, which I think I also never want to see, especially, IIRC, that Firefox will drop an icon in the status bar), there may be CSS cleverness to move that yellow bar to the /bottom/ of the page. |
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| XO |
[Dec. 15th, 2007|04:41 pm] |
It's cute! It's really, really cute! The photographs I'd seen online don't do it justice; I didn't have a real sense of the scale. IRL, it's about the size of two moderately thick paperback novels joined at the spine, and then a few more inches at the top for the handle, that make it pretty much square.
I haven't played with yet; I'm being responsible and working on chores and then a new incremental backup scheme for Az-chan, now that I've gotten all her partitions RAID 1'd. (Oh, yeah: if you hadn't heard, Az-chan blew a drive on Wednesday without warning. Now I'm using the new drive mostly as a software RAID 1 of what used to be the backup and is now the primary drive. I lost 12-16 hours of data from that morning's backup, but bringing everything back up was pretty smooth. Mostly it just took a while to do the data shuffling to set everything up for the RAID. Of course, it'll probably be another few days before Azureus can recreate the bits that I hadn't been backing up. It's not the delay that's annoying, really, but that I'm not 100% sure what I'm missing now...) But test-typing while it's off indicates that it'll be a little strange; my hands don't quite fit on the home row, but I think I'll be able to type easily quickly anyway, especially if I'm watching my hands and can see the keyboard in relation to them. |
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