Haibane.info

Author: Otaku-kun

  • Donna for Office!

    Michael Scott is resigning from Dunder Mifflin, who will replace him? Count me on Team Donna!

    Ray Romano, James Spader, and Catherine Tate will join Will Arnett and Ricky Gervais as guest stars on Steve Carell’s last episode of The Office. They’ll appear as candidates to be office manager. So will one of them be Carell’s replacement? You can probably rule out Romano, who is committed to Men of a Certain Age. Arnett also just got an NBC pilot of his own, while Gervais is unlikely to return to the show he created in Britain. TVLine says Spader and Tate are the only two with “ a realistic chance” of taking over.

    Catherine Tate played Donna on the new Dr Who and she was easily the best Companion the Doctor ever had. In fact I’ll make the assertion now that she is the best Companion of all 11 Doctors to date, despite my having not actually seen the older series. She was, to borrow a Britishism, brilliant. Tate is amazing and she could really bring an acerbic take to the manager role.

    If they pick James Spader over her, I’m not sure there’s any point to even watching the post-Michael era.

    The appearance by Gervais should be fun though. I’m hoping he will be in character from UK Office. Maybe he immigrated?

    UPDATE: Will Ferrell will play a temp manager while they find Michael’s replacement. I’m not sure if he can pull off ironic humor though. He’s more of a unsubtle freight train.

    UPDATE 2: OMG OMG OMG!!!

  • screwed again by Charter Cable?

    ARGH.

    I renewed my service with Charter last fall, drawn in by the promise of $400 rebate if I renewed the “triple play” service of voice, data, and cable TV. Its been months without my rebate arriving so I sent in a query to the helpful (until now) email contact, having learned the utter futility of having phone conversations with Charter’s customer service.

    Here is my email to Charter customer service:

    Hello,

    I am writing to inquire about the status of my $400 rebate for renewing my Charter service last year. I had signed up for a triple-play package with voice, internet, and television with a two-year contract, and was supposed to have received $400 credit. Kindly advise on the status of my rebate. Thank you.

    name on account – XXXX
    service address – XXXX
    service phone – XXX

    Regards
    Aziz Poonawalla

    Here is the infuriating reply:

    Aziz

    Thank you for contacting us with your question, we’ll be happy to look into the status of your gift card. For future reference, and for a faster reply please send your inquiry to Umatter2Charter@chartercom.com.

    After reviewing the order history on the account we don’t see a qualifying service order placed within the timeframe of the current gift card promotion period.

    Unfortunately you do not qualify for the offer and will not receive a gift card.

    If you have further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

    Thank you,

    Steve Creameans | Social Media Communications Specialist
    941 Charter Commons Drive, Town & Country, MO 63017

    I am certain there must be some loophole I did not anticipate and which the person I spoke to when ordering mys ervice did not bother to alert me to. This is frustrating beyond measure. Unless Steve misunderstood my question and thought I *just* renewed? But if he looked up my account he will clearly see that I renewed last year. So the response makes no sense.

    At this point I am basically resolved to switch to Verizon FIOS as soon as it is available. Unless Charter makes good on this, this is really the last straw, no matter how attentive their social media folk are to blog posts or the twitter feed. Will update the post as I get further responses.

  • Dirk Gently series on BBC?!

    How the heck did I miss this?

    Following a successful one-off special that made its debut on BBC Four last year, the Beeb has confirmed that Dirk Gently, the world’s only holistic detective, will be returning for more adventures next year.

    Stephen Mangan starred as the titular detective who may or may not be an utter charlatan, and while the adaptation didn’t please all fans of Douglas Adams’ original novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, the special was widely seen as a decent jumping off point for further stories in the future.

    Raking in a more than respectable 1.1 million viewers when it screened last December, the show’s success has led the BBC to commission three 60-minute episodes, which will be again written by Howard Overman.

    There was a Dirk Gently one-off on BBC 4 last year???? TORRENT TIME

    If it’s half as good as Sherlock it will be brilliant. If it’s twice as good as the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, it will be wretched.

  • Kirk versus Picard: the die is cast

    Focus your rage upon Shamus for the provocation.

  • The reconquista subtext of The Lord of the Rings

    Courtesy of Wikipedia, some history about the fall of Granada:

    On January 2, 1492, the last Muslim sultan in Iberia, Emir Muhammad XII, known as Boabdil to the Spanish, surrendered complete control of Emirate of Granada, to Ferdinand II and Isabella I, Los Reyes Católicos (‘The Catholic Monarchs’), after the last battle of the Granada War.

    (emphasis mine)

    I’ve completed a detailed textual analysis of all references to Tom Bombadil in the Fellowship of the Ring and consulted supplementary texts such as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (reprinted in The Tolkien Reader) and I’ve concluded that Bombadil is indeed Boabdil. The implications of this upon the subtext of the entire trilogy (and especially the reinterpretation of the prequel, the Hobbit) cannot be overstated.

    It’s no accident that later that same year, Columbus – aka Celebrimbor – sailed into the West.

  • Alienware M11x R3 crossing the Sandy Bridge in April, joined by M14x

    Back in January, Anandtech previewed the entire Sandy Bridge lineup, including the mobile LV/ULV parts, and commented:

    What’s interesting to note about the ULV parts is that even the slowest i5-2537M (yeah, those code names are going to be easy to remember!) comes clocked higher than the outgoing i7-640UM, with more aggressive Turbo modes and a 1W lower TDP. Perhaps we’ll see an M11x R3 with 400M (or 500M?) graphics and one of these ULV chips?

    It’s amazing to think that Alienware’s M11x has achieved such mindshare among gaming laptops that the first thing people think about is the R3 when presented with a new chip! But this is also a commentary on how badly the M11x is due for a refresh. Well, looks like the wait is over – here are preliminary specifications for Dell’s new Alienware M11X R3, due out in April:

    LCD: 11.6″, 1366×768, TrueLife glossy panel, White-LED backlight
    RAM stick options: 1GB/2GB/4GB/8GB, 1333MHz, DDR3
    CPU options:
    i5-2537M, 1.4GHz up to 2.3GHz
    i7-2617M, 1.5GHz up to 2.6GHz
    i7-2657M, 1.6GHz up to 2.7GHz

    Check out the comparative stats on those LV/ULV CPUs from Anand’s January post. No word on what discrete GPU will be used yet, but nvidia is a good bet for Optimus.

    But the more interesting news is that Alienware is also releasing a M14x version – not an M13x as previously assumed and lusted after:

    RAM options: 1GB-4GB, DDR3, 1333MHz or 2GB/4GB, 1600MHz
    CPU options: i3-2310M all the way up to i7-2820QM
    LCD options:
    14″ Full-HD 1920×1080
    14″ 1366×768

    The downside is that battery will be the same 8-cell, 63 Whr used in the M11x R3 above, which is a real problem since the CPUs are the OEM/Retail ones not LV/ULV. The TDP is 35W-45W for these CPUs versus 17W for the CPUs in the M11x R3. Between the more thirsty CPUs and the larger screen, expect battery life to be the Suck for the M14x. It doesn’t make much sense to go for a M14x when you could wait a bit and get an M15x instead (also overdue for a Sandy Bridge refresh).

    The M13x would have been far more reasonable, with LV/ULV and a 63 Whr battery, than the M14x. I think I’ll stick with the M11x – can’t wait until “early April” !

    UPDATE: Eric at Dell-Lab blog responds to my critique of the M14x:

    Currently, I have no information on an M15X refresh. It could be that the M14X is the successor to the M15X. Dell must have figured that going for a 14″ form factor would be better overall.

    I agree, that would make more sense. But the current lineup of 11, 15 and 17 is well-spaced out, and has a natural opening for a 13. If Dell is instead going to have 11, 14 and 17 then that is also evenly spaced, but fewer options. Maybe that is deliberate, easier to have three models in the lineup than four. But the discrepancy between the midrange and high end will be greater. It remains to be seen how the pricing goes.

  • remembering memory

    Nicholas Carr (not to be confused with Paul Carr) has a tremendous essay which follows the theme of his writing in general being a skeptic of Google and the modern information era. Just a teaser:

    Our embrace of the idea that computer databases provide an effective and even superior substitute for personal memory is not particularly surprising. It culminates a century-long shift in the popular view of the mind. As the machines we use to store data have become more voluminous, flexible, and responsive, we’ve grown accustomed to the blurring of artificial and biological memory. But it’s an extraordinary development nonetheless. The notion that memory can be “outsourced,” as Brooks puts it, would have been unthinkable at any earlier moment in our history. For the Ancient Greeks, memory was a goddess: Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses. To Augustine, it was “a vast and infinite profundity,” a reflection of the power of God in man. The classical view remained the common view through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment—up to, in fact, the close of the nineteenth century. When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that “the art of remembering is the art of thinking,” he was stating the obvious. Now, his words seem old-fashioned. Not only has memory lost its divinity; it’s well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine.

    The shift in our view of memory is yet another manifestation of our acceptance of the metaphor that portrays the brain as a computer.

    It’s entitled, “killing Mnemosyne”. I reject that metaphor, as well, and this ties into my own skepticism on Singularity, as well.

    UPDATE – Mark comments, and discusses the relevance to Exformation. Now there’s a Carrian concept! I also agree that our blogs are probably our modern-day “commonplace books”, but I am tempted to try and actually do one in paper. My problem is my handwriting speed is not fast enough to record my thoughts, and the result is usually illegible. So the blog is probably the best outlet. This is kind of ironic.

  • The aPad – Amazon’s imminent android tablet and iPad killer

    Look, it’s basically obvious – Amazon’s new Android Appstore is the precursor to Amazon launching a full-fledged Android tablet of its own. And, true to the character of the kindle, it’s going to be cheaper than other tablets, won’t be packed with features like gyroscopes and cameras, and will probably use a Mirasol color display that is just as readable outdoors as e-Ink and can support video.

    This inevitable Amazon tablet, which I am dubbing the “aPad”, will allow complete vertical content management just like Apple does with iTunes, since Amazon also sells movies, music and now apps – but Amazon has a bigger customer base, and also has that one-click patent everyone loved to hate. Also, the appstore even lets you test-drive apps from right in the web browser.

    No wonder Apple is scared sh#$&less and is suing Amazon over the name and trying to boot Kindle from iOS.

    I cannot wait.

    UPDATE: On facebook, a dear friend (and Apple zealot, in a good way 🙂 comments:

    …just like the android phones killed the iPhone! …wait..

    Now, let me assert and concede that the iPhone is probably the finest phone in existence. And frankly I don’t think that there will ever be a iPhone killer. It should be noted however that the definition of “killer” is rather loose – Android is indeed eating the iPhone’s lunch with respect to market share, for example. But user experience? I’ve never used Android, so I can’t comment, but we are an iPod Touch 4, iPhone 4, and iPad 1 family. I personally use a blackberry because I am a keyboard guy, and the bberry approaches Thinkpad transcendence in that regard. At any rate, I know and use iOS and no one is going to beat iPhone on that field, not for a long time.

    But a tablet is a different matter. iPad certainly opened the door, but the iPad is still a flawed device in a fundamental way: it’s not even remotely “post-PC” as Apple pretends it to be. Without a PC the iPad is unusable. Without iTunes the iPad is closed. Only a technology company with equal vertical integration of a content ecosystem, like Amazon, can match the iPad. Here’s your basic task: decide you want to watch a certain movie, get it on your tablet, and watch it on the train during your commute. How can you do that on Android right now? Only Amazon and Apple can make that happen.

    But where Amazon has the advantage is that it sells un-DRMed MP3s for music, permits video downloads as separate files, and (this is where the Andoid advantage comes in, which is irrelevant on a phone platform) supports industry standards for content. So you have the best of all worlds.

    Don’t get me wrong – the iPad won’t die after being killed. But for the average family, the aPad will simply be a better value – half the cost, half the weight, and none of the hassles. For surfing the web, parity; for watching TV and video, advantage.

    I think Apple’s true genius device is the iPod Touch. No one has anything like it. and the iPhone is king. But the iPad is a niche product, like netbooks were – and Apple has left a huge opening for Amazon to exploit by making it such a closed ecosystem.

  • Conan the Immortal – pure awesomeness

    I agree with @headgeek666 – this is the coolest picture I’ve seen today, and probably in a long while.

    (click to enlarge)

  • Explaining Fukushima: Nuclear Boy and his toxic poo

    So, how do you explain the nuclear disaster to children, without overly alarming them but still trying to convey some sense of the seriousness of the event? Naturally, you make anime – and replace radiation with “poo”.

    I am reminded of this video I shot on a television screen in a department store in Shinjuku five years ago:

    I was politely, but firmly, discouraged from taling more video than this, thankfully. Like Cthulhu, seeing more might have destroyed my soul. I can only shudder at the thought of what horrific disaster that video was trying to explain.

    (BTW, excellent overview of the nuclear plant disaster at Ars Technica.)