Baneblade 2

On Day 3...




If the parts look like they're just barely hanging on for dear life, it's because this is just a mock-up assembly for fit....




After putting on the exhaust, that's the end of the assembly! The final photo (below) is extra big, so click it now!

Baneblade 1

Letting the photos doing the talking here...

Clannad PVC

I treated myself at the specialty shop today and picked up a character from the recent Clannad series. This is Nagisa Furukawa.

She's a little nervous and shy. She was sick most of last year so she's been force to repeat her senior year of high school. She also regrets missing out on joining the theatre club and has recruited friends in an attempt to restart a new club since there was a lack of interest in her absence (forcing the student council to shut the previous club down.

Oh, and, also, she has a quirky habit of muttering the name of a tasty food whenever she's agitated. She does that to remind herself to look forward to a good meal at the end of the day when things are going badly. In the second picture, Nagisa is dressed as a kitty... I'm not sure why.

The tail is supposed to clip into place by sliding its hooked end under her jacket but all I could do was wedge it in place because I couldn't feel it snap in place or anything. The ears are held on her head by little magnets!

For anybody wondering, to date Clannad still (as of this post anyway) has not been licensed abroad so you can still legally obtain fansubs. Here's a good place with pretty good translation subtitles. They have several versions to choose from. Personally I prefer XViD codec (no real reason, I just find it doesn't suck as much CPU power from me as h264 codec for me) in 704x400 because that fits widescreen. Of course if you have the juice for it, h264 version also comes in widescreen but in HD size.

Why am I paying for DRM?

Nothing is truly free. If it came in a bundle, you paid for it. Suppose you buy a game console, and the price is the same with or without a pack-in. You may think you get a free game, but in fact, the seller is simply making more profit if you don't take the "free" game.

The other day I picked up "Order of the Phoenix" on DVD. Warner Brothers includes a "digital copy" for my convenience. Unfortunately, it's utterly useless to me thanks to DRM. I'm all for the right of the producer to control distribution of their products, but this particular case is like shooting fish in a barrel.

The digital rights management scheme WB chose is Microsoft's WMV. When you put the disc in, you are prompted for a key code (included on an insert in the box). This downloads the DRM's decryption key to your computer. The actual WMV file is already on the disc itself and the interface, after installing the key, will copy that file to your hard-drive.

Supposedly, this file is encoded at a particular resolution that will make it easily portable on popular devices. Apparently Sony PSP is not "popular." PSP does not support the WMV codec. And I can't do anything with the WMV file sitting on my hard-drive thanks to the DRM encryption (can't convert it or anything).

The only way I can get my movie playing on my PSP is to rip the DVD to MP4 format (something that the RIAA and very likely the MPAA have previously established in court is "stealing"). And while this process doesn't cost me anything (my CPU cycles are all paid for), I've already paid for the DRM'ed copy currently wasting about a gigabyte of my drive-space. Why was I forced to buy that?

Life... and a little bit of D.O.M.

For anybody wondering what I've been up to, I tried my hand at making a casserole again this weekend. I went to a potluck with the people from the movie meetup group last night. Considering the ad-hoc nature of organizing a potluck, I'm amazed everything turned out as well as it did. The party room we booked was actually free because one of the members lives in that apartment building and it was arguably the nicest party room I've ever seen. In the heart of downtown, it was fully equipped with a kitchenette area, had a pool table and foosball table, and even opened up to a nice terrace (not that we used that feature much - it's still cold out these days.

Anyway, nobody died from my tuna casserole and that's all that matters. Somebody had a camera but since it wasn't me, I have nothing to share with you...

...so here is a shot of Kamei Eri (6th Gen member of Morning Musume).She like Yaguchi was known as "that other one" and they even poked fun at that in the beginning when the group released the auto-bio track "A Noisy Girls' Tale." But that was years ago and now she's made her mark as the comedian of the group.

SF: TLY 7

Who the hell am I kidding? Collegehumour keeps sneaking these out and they tend to do it 2 at a time. So here's part 7 (even tho it actually came out a couple of weeks ago)!


The mystery deepens. Ryu reveals the truth about Capcom... and eating rats.

As usual, you can find all the parts by clicking on the "Street Fighter" tag at the top of this post.

Street Fighter: the Later Years 6

Collegehumor.com keeps putting these out there...
...and I'll keep posting them!



...man, no freaking idea where they're going with this!

adding to the DVD backlog

The nature of my backlog is a little strange - I actually have backlogs of stuff to buy rather than just stuff to watch. That is, from time to time, I come to a screeching halt because I look at the price tags and think, "nobody in their right mind would pay that!" And then I wait...

and I wait...

and I wait some more...

Eventually the discs I want go out of print and I'm screwed. Enter sales from the 'net. Just in time to get my mind off the sh*tty turn of events in my basement, I was able to pick this haul up from the post office today.

A quick rundown before I go starting to rip through the packaging to watch some anime tonight.

Irresponsible Captain Tylor is one of those old-school anime that never quite beat cult-status. I'm one of those guys who was into anime before anime was mainstream. I remember trading VHS fansubs by mail! That makes me 1337 before 1337 was invented! Anyway, I got a pretty good deal for both these "Ultra Edition" boxes (one is the TV series and the other is the OVA series).

And then there's the remastered Macross collection - for whatever reason, I got volumes 1 and 2 many moons ago and I never got volume 3. I'll admit, this was not such a great deal, but I needed something to pad the order so that I could get free shipping.

And finally, the fourth box of Patlabor - another very old-school favourite. I never completed the TV series collection. This is the franchise that all fans love but no company respects. Central Park Media couldn't even be bothered to make the cover art from volume 1 to volume 2 be consistent! Anyway, for some reason, CPM gave up just before the end of the series and decided you could not buy volume 11 seperately... Good thing I was behind because I had only up to volume 8 anyway. *close shave!*

Reaction: L'Âge des ténèbres

Saw this yesterday and I thought I would do well to sleep on it to allow a period of digestion before posting about it. But it hasn't really helped matters. "Age of Ignorance" is the kind of thing that either you love it because it reminds you to make the most of your life, or you will hate because it makes you think your life is just as dull and meaningless as the poor schmoe featured in the show.

The story revolves around the life of Jean-Marc Leblanc (played brilliantly by Marc Lebrèche as a sad every-man character). JM is a middle-aged fellow who's life superficially resembles perfection: lives in a big house with a hi-income wife, two kids... Just one problem: he's miserable. In possibly the only "fun" portions of the movie, are JM's point-of-view fantasies and the audience follows him drifting in and out of reality with his daydreams.

In his random encounters of fantasy we meet several familiar faces including well-known Quebecois figures, alternate lives (Jean-Marc as an actor, a successful writer, a newly-elected leader of the Partie Quebecois), etc. On the other hand, his random encounters in real-life more resemble... well, if you ever met a public service worker... Suffice to say that his existence is rather dull and all he can really do is escape into his fantasy-world.

That is, until one day, the scale tips just a little too far. What with two children who don't seem to care about the family, a wife who spends more time on the phone with her clients than with her family, and a work environment that, to be honest, makes very clear what director Denys Arcand thinks of his province's social-climate thanks to a meddling government... something's going to give.

It doesn't turn into Kill Bill (it almost does). Jean Marc effectively runs away from life to start all over. Makes one wonder what sort of message Arcand was trying to say when he wrote this tale.

After the movie, I was involved with a discussion group and I think I realize now that the film resonates very differently to different people. The fellow sitting next to me absolutely hated it while the fellow next to him loved it. One was in his early 20's and the other was in his 40's. Guess who was which age. I think I walked away from the movie knowing that there are things you can do about your life and there are things you can't.

Late X'mas - Round 1

Picked up a package at the postal outlet today. One of those "mystery packages" that customs won't touch with a 10-foot-pole because they'll never be able to repack it when they're done inspecting it. Here's why:
For one, there is no box. This is the way we roll in Hong Kong, brother.Rolled completely in bubble-wrap, yo. I swear, the world's supply of bubble-wrap comes from Hong Kong.Look like 100 kilos of drugs or something until you star peeling back the tape... anyway, here's what was under all that. My self-purchased X'mas goodies.The funny thing is, the thing that prompted me to place this order was because I found a place that offered the Japan-only exclusive red version of the Brokken figure. But I wound up padding my order with this unusual trinket.
It's a 1/2 scaled helmet from Kamen Rider The First. Now I'm not a huge fan of the franchise, but I did enjoy the theatrical remake of the original show and what better way to celebrated it than with yet another outlandish prop piece in my house.

Fixing the damn HID

In their trademark outstanding attention to detail, Microshaft had seen fit to have an infinite number of variations on your typical Windows install. For my part, I use a version of XP Pro with SP2 and guess what? Although this is the very same version that my parents have, while their HID service started without problems, my service did not.

HID stands for Human Interface Device and is basically Windows' way of recognizing industry standard signals coming from a given keyboard. Have one of those fancy keyboards with media keys like volume up/down, play, stop, etc? That's an HID. And HID Service is what "makes it go."

So on day 2 of running on my G15, I decided it was time to stop goofing off with my macros and start playing with the media keys (which weren't working yesterday). Turns out my HID Service was not running. I found clues on-line what the problem was (not missing files but actually a registry problem. That is, in order for HIDSERV to work, the service keys under your HKey Local Machine registry should look like this:I was missing an entire key under HIDServ. Now for those of you who aren't really into mucking around the registry, it may look like Explorer, but it doesn't quite navigate the same way. Each "directory" is actually a key itself. And mine was missing "Parameters" key under the "HIDServ" key. So you need to right-click in that window and say "new" and "key." In there, you need to create a new "expandable string value" with what you see in my screen capture.

I'm basically repeating info I found on the web but I think a picture is worth a thousand words. Because reading other peoples description of the registry, I had no idea I had to create my "ServiceDll" value inside another "subfolder" I was missing!

Anyway, being that DJ Specs asked so nice, here's a shot of what my work area looks like at the moment. I only now realize after having photographed it, what a frickin' eyesore this mess is! :P

First Impressions: G15

So yeah, I'm enjoying a week-late X'Mas present to myself. I picked up a G15 (version 1 - the blue one) on December 24... needless to say, besides just plugging it into my parents computer to make sure all the keys worked, I didn't actually get to put it through its paces until now

So my first impressions after fooling around with it for about an hour or so?
Well, first of all, it's a pretty solid keyboard. And you can't really deny the inherent coolness of having a "gaming keyboard." I mean, forget the plain keyboard you "just get by with" this is a keyboard made for playing with, for crying out loud.

My second immediate thought was, "damn it, this thing is pretty big." I mean I'm used to having my keyboard on my lap (depending on the chair I'm in, of course) but at that LAN party last month, people looked at me funny when I told them I wouldn't need as much table space as everyone else. It's that additional keypad of macros keys on the left that gives it width. It also takes a moment to acclimate to the shape. I'm on those folks who rarely looks down at his keyboard, so I operate by touch, mostly. But now ALT+Tab and the ESC key down feel like their in the same place anymore. They're no longer at the left-most edge: the programmable macro keys are!

And what of that fancy LCD screen now that I've had some minor experience with it? Well, it's cute, but I don't see myself using it that much. I do feel ambitious and I think I will try the included SDK. I've already downloaded the Unreal Tournament patch that puts a running ammo count on the LCD. That's again, something cute, but why the hell would I take my eyes off the screen to look down at my keyboard?

And while Logitech has added a Dawn of War to the profiler software, Relic still hasn't patched it with any usefulness with the G15. That is, the G15's macro key profile manager is smart enough to recognize that have Dawn of War installed and will let me reserve a keyset for it. But I was really hoping for the LCD panel to, I dunno, tell me how many critical points were being captured or something.

So, uh, yeah... anybody want to do that?