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.