It’s time to start thinking about an HDTV. I probably will buy one this year (though not for a few months yet at minimum). The main question of course is what sort of HDTV to get; the Laser HDTVs have not yet made an appearance and would probably be too expensive anyway. The main choice seems to be between plasma and LCD. Thanks to this article on the 9 advantages of plasma over LCD, it looks like plasma is a no-brainer… assuming that by the time I am ready to buy one, there still are plasma TVs left on the market to buy.
I watched disc one of Fullmetal Alchemist tonight (episodes 1-4). I got kind of interested in it via Shamus’ early review, so added the series to my netflix q. I have to admit that the premise is engaging and original and the characters thus far are appealing. It’s fun to watch a mahou shoujo where the magical girl is actually a boy for a change.
That said, I’m not sure if I want to commit ot a 51-episode series based on what I’ve seen. Thanks to the OSE, I found Shamus’ review of the ending, which would be spoilerific if I had seen more than 4 eps but on the whole the details were largely meaningless (though I do gather that we meet Rose again).
Sometimes it is hard to judge how a series will wear on you. Shingu and Dennou Coil started out very slow, and I was actively repelled by Ranma’s first couple of eps. But in the end, all of these series became strong favorites that I am glad I stuck with (though I’ve stalled a bit on Ranma in season 7). There are other series, like Samurai Champloo, that grabbed me right from the start and were gripping right to the end (in fact, Champloo might be one of my top ten of all time, surprisingly.) And then there are those series that I do make the time investment in, but ultimately didn’t really impact me upon completion (I am thinking of Samurai 7 and Escaflowne specifically).
There’s no algorithm to help you assess how a series is going to go based on the first few eps. But I wonder what others have to say about FMA. Any opinions anyone has on eth matter would be helpful; there’s a lot of other stuff I want to watch, after all, so this isn’t a critical series.
An irrational number that has been calculated to more than 1 trillion digits, pi is a concept not totally foreign to today’s Washington. But in this case, the goal was to promote efforts by the National Science Foundation to improve math education in the United States, especially in the critical fourth to eighth grades.
Rounded off, pi equates to 3.14, hence the designation of March 14 as Pi Day under the resolution. Informal celebrations have been held around the country for at least 20 years, but Thursday’s 391-10 vote is the first time Congress has joined the party.
So who exactly were the ten who voted against? What are they, non-Euclideans or something?
Incidentally, one of my close friends from grad school is actually getting married today. Congratulations, Dustin and Gwen!
I’m increasingly disillusioned with google reader for keeping up to date. Its better than visiting sites manually, but I’d rather have a twitter-based model. I am thinking of setting up a twitter feed dedicated to the same blogs as the Otakusphere search engine (henceforth abbreviated as the OSE). Will work on this and report back when I’ve got something to show…
On my trip to San Francisco last weekend ((btw, I went to San Francisco this past weekend)) I encountered one of these for the first time:
That’s a fried twinkie, purchased at the Santa Cruz boardwalk. And I confess I couldn’t take more than two bites of it before admitting defeat. I still need to try fried Oreos at some point, though…
It’s somewhat ironic that after having finally settled on a blogroll length of manageable size and purpose (namely, just the blogs I read on a regular basis), my embrace of a RSS feed reader essentially rendered the idea of a blogroll moot. But as a reference of sites I recommend, it still has value. I find myself relying on the sites on my blogroll almost exclusively when researching anime series to watch, as well as finding the diversity of topics beyond anime very well-matched to my tastes (such as games, movies, science fiction, etc). I have increasingly found myself doing custom google searches on site:chizumatic.mee.nu or site:nickistre.net etc etc all the time, which became somewhat cumbersome. So, in search of a better solution, I decided to roll my own search engine for my personal slice of the Otakusphere. Using Google’s backend, now, the search box on Haibane.info searches every site on my blogroll (see the Otakusphere section on the sidebar to the right). You can also access the Otakusphere search engine directly without visiting Haibane.info by visiting http://bit.ly/otakusphere ((which redirects to a very ugly Google URL. The google folks very badly need to read this screed by Dave Winer on the topic)). You can even embed the search box on your own site – see below the fold for the relevant HTML code for cut and paste.
The Otakusphere search is of course very highly tuned to my needs and tastes. However i do want it to be of more general use, so i woudl like to solicit suggestions for high-value sites in the Otakusphere for inclusion. I’m looking for sites that have a lot of in-depth reviews of anime titles in particular. Note that since most of the sites I am already including tend to link to smaller sites with detailed reviews ((particularly Pete at Ani-nouto, who is very skilled at finding excellent quality reviews from the furthest reaches of the Otakusphere)), these sites will get indexed too, since the Otakusphere search also indexes pages linked from the core sites. Still, there must be other great aggregators of reviews out there that i’ve missed, so please do let me know.
I assume that very few people are going to use this as often as I do. In a sense, by using it I am being counterproductive since searches on my site will now lead more often away from my content than towards it. Still, since I blog primarily for my own benefit, that’s exactly the way i want it to behave. I hope it’s of some use to others as well.
Digital video has its advantages over discs, but also suffers from a major flaw. I have to admit that (unlike others who are more diligent) I haven’t taken full advantage of the Netflix streaming video service, because I find that being tied to the PC screen just isn’t the most convenient location for watching movies. I do use Hulu.com a bit but still, it’s being tethered to the PC that really inhibits usage. I’ve found that I do watch a lot more anime now, though, because I can torrent the AVI files, put them on a USB jumpdrive, and watch them on my DVD player (which has a USB connection). However, that process is time-consuming since you need to download the whole video file before watching, and of course there’s the inconvenience (not to mention legal gray area) of finding torrents in the first place.
Roku digital video playerThis is why Roku’s new digital video player
box is so exciting. Unlike the latest piece of s^&t from Sony, the Roku player is a simple and small box with the standard video outputs (component, HDMI) and an ethernet jack, plus built-in wifi. It connects to the internet over your home network, plugs into your TV, and brings Netflix streaming-on-demand and Amazon.com’s video store right to your living room. The concept works because it’s so simplistic and cleanly executed – it doesn’t do anything else. Even the remote is a piece of utilitarian art.
There are other ways to get Netflix streaming onto your television – for example, the Samsung BD-P2500 Blu-Ray player, which adds the streaming capability. But at $300, it’s three times the cost of the Roku (and doesn’t support Amazon). Amazon’s video store lets you rent or buy movies and television and rivals Hulu.com and the iTunes store for selection, so the Roku really almost replaces the need to go to a retail video rental store like Blockbuster in a way that Netflix alone never could.
If digital downloads are going to really kill off the physical-disc format, it won’t be until devices like Roku become mainstream. And at the price point of $99, that’s not too far off at all.
I’m not sure when i discovered The Princess Bride, but by the time I got to college I was badly addicted to the movie, and delighted to find a bunch of close friends who were just as insane about it as I was (and pretty much everything else I was insane about, for that matter). This was back in the day when a VCR that was both Hi-Fi and stereo (and 4 heads, to boot) was considered bleeding edge. As it happened, I managed to snag such a godbox for within a college students’ budget and decided to record for posterity my favorite quotes from the movie from my (already) aging VHS copy. These were recorded using an analog mike next to the output speaker of my television; I think I may have also been using an abacus to keep time, though I can’t be sure, as that giant black monolith was really distracting.
At any rate, these WAV files, named under DOS eight-character limits, lived on my 386 PC and then migrated to my 486 as various system sounds for my amusement for a few years, after which they ended up in a folder somewhere that then got passed from system to system like a set of junk DNA, lost in arcane hierarchies of old data. I was motivated to dig these out of the primordial digital slime this evening seeing @musabb live-tweet the Princess Bride as a fresh initiate to its mysteries, and decided that they were too good not to inflict upon everyone else. So, enjoy – and please copy them locally for your own use rather than hitting my host with direct links, so I can afford to send my kids to college someday instead of paying bandwidth overages.
(also – please – don’t Stumble them, Digg them, or what have you. I prostrate myself upon your good graces)
Incidentally – the audio soundtrack to the movie is probably one of my top five CDs of all time (though I have to count the collected H2G2 radio series discs as one to make it fit). If you are a fan of this movie, and/or of Mark Knopfler, this is essential music.
This is from Stargate: SG-1‘s 200th gala episode, which was.. different.
I’m starting to realize that SG-1 is one of the hidden gems of science fiction television. I will probably have to netflix the whole thing at some point. Ten seasons… yikes. Bigger than Ranma!
Also, I probably need to get started on Farscape too, if I have any hope of understanding why this is funny. “Something a little more obscure” indeed 🙂 Claudia Black’s little gleeful rubbing her hands together is just so awesome at the end of that clip, that it really motivates me.
I’ve been trying to get a Wii Fit from the local Target for weeks now but just could not get my hands on one. It’s as popular as the Wii itself was when it first came out; now they routinely have 3-5 Wiis in stock but the Fit is sold out within minutes of new stock. On a lark, I gave Amazon a shot this morning and found to my astonishment that they had them in stock! I grabbed one immediately and it arrives on Wednesday. I look forward to being serially abused by my new electronic master forthwith.
right to your living room. The concept works because it’s so simplistic and cleanly executed – it doesn’t do anything else. Even the remote is a piece of utilitarian art.
Now, these bring back some memories!
