D.O.M.#10

Okay, so I'm reading on line that Aika was recently officially "introduced" to fandom at the a recent Wonderful Hearts concert. So if anything, that makes her fair game... (which in turn means her official promo photos are finally surfacing). Plus, I've been waiting forever to do a new DOM post.
Sadly, there's perhaps only 3 different portraits of her floating around the web at this time... This one being directly from somebody's update to Aika's Wikipedia page. The other one I've seen around (these promo shoots usually come in pairs) was a close-up and I wasn't thrilled with the angle the photograph chose. And of course, there's the costume shows for the new single that's due out in a couple of weeks but that photo's kinda old already.

Welcome aboard, Aika, and good luck!

might be a robeast

I was going to post a review for the recently released in Canada, Voltron Collection 2.

But I mean, how boring would that be? If you were really looking for information on the DVD release of Voltron, I could sum it up in only one line: it's an excellent package - just like the first volume. This series was one of the first television-syndicated series to be originally mixed in stereo so the modern Dolby 5.1 mix had a flawless set sources to work with.



I would rather go on and on about the special features on this disc... which include some vintage video clips of the live stage-show cast World Events Productions put together for their promotional tour in 1985. And several toy commercials that aired back then. What was really funny though was the way the folks behind the scenes remain so dedicated to their work both past and present...


I will paraphrase my favourite passage: The life-lesson I learned from watching the show as a kid was that you should never trust a stranger who claims to be a long lost cousin. Who knows how many times that witch Haggar used that plot tool and disguised herself. And the moment you turn your back, it's robeast city - giant alien robot monsters are attacking. So never trust someone claiming to a lost relative. They might be a robeast!

DL conspiracy: final chapter?

About 4 months ago I had resigned to the fact that Nero wasn't doing its job.

And then about a week or so later, I found a player that actually played my burns.

And you know what else I've discovered since then?
My dad found yet another player that also plays my burns. And of all brands ...it's a Sony one. Yes, the same company so screwed up over content management that they made the PSP insanely user-unfriendly when it came to putting multimedia on it.

The catch? I still haven't figured out what the story is. I have some dual-layer discs that play absolutely flawlessly (and I mean totally glitch-free unlike that grocery-store Accura one)...

...and some that refuse to play at all beyond the main title page. The common denominator being that those were all burned using Nero. I mean, what the hell? I'm not debating whether or not risk yet another DL disc in an attempt to prove that CloneDVD burns work Nero burn don't... And seriously, these discs still aren't common-place enough to be considered cheap.

Cable Chronicles

Well, it seems like I've painted myself into a corner. I do not have cable television for one very simple reason: I grew up in a house located near the bottom of a valley. So all I've ever known is cable television. I can tell you that when the cable was out due to technical problems, the best we could ever get on an antenna was a grand total of one single local channel... and it was a very snowy at that.

Imagine my delight when I moved to Gatineau in the summer of 1999 to discover that an antennae could get me some 5 or 6 channels! And that wasn't even including the use of a UHF tuner. Actually, I wound up getting cable at one point (it was kinda shoe-horned into my life).

Well, now I'm in my new house and I'm back to antenna life. The great thing is that I've discovered since that with a tuner, I'm even picking up stuff from Toronto ...on nothing more than rabbit ears!
In fact, the only thing that could be better when it comes to free television would be if my reception was just a tad better.

Well, I tested out a theory that I've had burning at the back of my head tonight. The house is pre-wired so I've actually got co-ax outlets in every room. I thought perhaps if I plugged my television set into the wall jack in the living room, and an antenna into an outlet upstairs, just maybe that would form one giant circuit. No such luck.

See, I'm subscribed to cable Internet... so plugging my television into my cable jack was actually giving me worse reception: that is, I was getting no reception... I was getting a very weak unboosted cable-tv signal! Which, I might point out with some irony, gave me access to a somewhat fuzzy but very watchable YTV (an specialty channel in Canada for kids).

Anyway, suffice to say that my experiment didn't work. I've got a splitter here that I was going to use for my cable modem in case the "giant antenna" attempt worked. But that would've probably just given my modem a bunch of interference if I tried. Oh well.

Freezing polystyrene?

Just a thought - does anybody know if the cold is bad for soft plastics like polystyrene? It's occurred to me that having bundled up for my trip to work that I left a bunch of my hobby material in the trunk of the car. It's like 20 below freezing today... and I won't be back to the car until the end of the day.

Thankfully I remembered to pack the paints in a separate bag and tucked it into my pack that I brought with me into the office where its nice and warm.

Anybody? Anybody?

I'm sure most plastics are okay - I mean they store plenty of stuff in plastic drums outdoors year-round... I'm just not sure if this rule-of-thumb is applicable to all plastics.

Anybody? Anybody?