Posted in Linguistics, Mew at 12:15 am by TBBle (Visited times)
Went to see Race tonight. It's actually not marked on the Hoyts site, but it's Hindi/English blend with English/nonsense blend subtitles. It's mentioned on the IMDB front page, but I missed it looking for the comments on the plot. The front page comment was satisfyingly spoiler free, and very positive. Had I noticed that the commenter was Indian, I might have clicked. Ah, hindsight. >_<
As an aside, the Hindi/English mix was interesting. I haven't seen enough Bollywood films to know if it's particular to this film or is part of the style (a friend suggested it was the latter) although I noticed while researching this post that one of the actresses doesn't speak Hindi. I need to learn more languages, at least reaching the point where I can watch movies in Japanese, Cantonese and now Hindi. And of course I wonder if I can possibly swing a research project into a Hindi/English pidgin. A university-funded Bollywood movie collection would be a thing of beauty...
So I took a few friends, all of us completely unprepared. I really should have clicked to it being Bollywood, given I'd noted the Indian director, actors, etc...
On the plus side it's really good. Turns out that the best way to improve a twisty, turny, windy plot, double-plot, cross and recross fest (ala Wild Things, which I've raved about here before) is to have the actors stop to sing and dance about what they're feeling every so often.
I also want to get married in Cape Town, at the registry office.
If you haven't seen Wild Things or Race, go do so.
Now Playing: Wild Things. My housemate hadn't seen it! This is a revelation akin to discovering another friend of mine hadn't seen The Princess Bride. There's also a Princess Bride Game coming, although I'm a little concerned, after seeing the trailer.
And just in case you didn't twig, this post's title is of course related to revelations. I'm not harbingering the end of Bollywood...
Now, my Japanese is not exactly spectacular, and rikaichan proved unhelpful as well, but this appears to be to be a 3-month exercise cartridge for women to increase their 女ヂカラ. As the joke goes, you fuck just one goat...
(Japanese is my best non-native language, too. My knowledge of Modern Standard Chinese currently extends only to 你有好乳房 "You have excellent breasts" and 你的妹妹有十六歲嗎 "Is your sister 16?", although if pressed occasional other words, interspersed with Japanese and the occasional mumble will emerge. ^_^)
Now of course I need to go assert my masculinity by buying something like this: (The infamouswitch touching game)
Granted, I'd have bought this game whether Amazon was trying to make me buy girly things or not and I realise that my other purchases (Kakitorikun, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon DVDs, for example) may have given Amazon the impression that I was a female Japanese primary-school student, but seriously, who gives a credit card to an eight-year-old girl named Paul?
Of course, my last AmazonJP shipment went to a female friend who was in Japan, maybe they assume I've been pretending to be a foreigner all this time to avoid sales tax? (Which is the opposite of online games, where I usually claim to be from very very south Okinawa, on the grounds that they don't actually ask what country you're from, just which prefecture of Japan.... This isn't a problem, both because I am roughly south of Okinawa, and because Japanese MMOs lost their appeal to me once I realised that the Japanese seem to produce nothing but grinding MMOs.)
On that topic, I was disappointed to see that the Romance Of The Three Kingdoms MMO, at least from the two gameplayvideos posted on YouTube, looks like another grinder. A translation of a beta test announcement however suggests that some level of facitonality will enter into it. Shame, really. ROTK would have been an excellent setting for the MMO I've been dreaming of creating. And sadly, the link to Dynasty Warriors Wave on the Wii is still not actually a link, at the Koei site. They showed this at the Tokyo Games show in 2005. And after the wonder experience The Godfather turned out to be, I was so looking forward to uniting China under the kingdom of Wu with nought but a pair of chakrams, a Wiimote, and the sweat of my brow (and other body parts). I guess I'll just have to grab Dynasty Warriors DS: Fighter's Battle when it ships somewhere in English.
I just now finished watching Dexter, (Warning, Wikipedia article contains unmarked spoilers) which I enjoyed quite a lot. I have to say though, I'd have been frustrated to be watching it week by week. And the second half of the season involved me yelling at him a lot for being an idiot.
Oh, and I joined Mensa the other day. I've spent all week telling people I'm a card-carrying genius, which is a bit of an exaggeration, as I don't know if I get a card (I've been too busy to check my post office box.)
Just to reinforce my genius status, I tonight completed all the character writing and drills for the grade 1 of Kakitorikun. That's 80 kanji, and technically I've got an academic transcript that says I know several hundred, but... yeah. That's not as impressive when I write it down, it turns out my level of Japanese approaches that of an particularly uncommunicative six-year-old. But I have gotten a stamp for every day this month so far. ^_^
I get proud about completely the wrong things, sometimes.
In somewhat more age-appropriate educational news, I'm finally getting back to uni this coming semester, taking Morphology part-time. Work's pretty good about flexible hours and stuff, so this will hopefully only consume time from my life, rather than life from my veins, as per my previous attempts at part-time study. It helps that this time I'm not travelling interstate to work and further again to study. However, I think I'm going to have to withdraw from the ANUAS comittee, as I'm going to be even more pressed for time than I am now.
If anyone from the ANUAS exec is reading this, sorry. I'll prolly make an official announcement this week, although given the way things are going, that's about as reliable as everything else I've promised I'd do for the exec.
・I went to relatives at Saitama's home.☆ My second cousin was just born! Already inevitably really really cute.*^_^* I hope I too soon get married and have a child.♪♪(smile)
This is actually not the regular weekly update, hence no date in Mew's post... Also, the rest of the site needs updating... The Schedule and Works pages don't list Gachi Baka! nor the 2006 calendar.
Posted in Mew at 9:08 pm by TBBle (Visited 687 times)
CAPS LOCK CANNOT EXPRESS MY FANGIRLY JOY
Yes, I know I used it less than an hour ago regarding Web 2.0. Seriously, it's true again. Not only did Mew's new TV series start last Thursday (I reckon they posted it late to her site. I'm sure I visited it last Saturday!), but a fansub of the first episode is already doing the rounds, with episode two not even available as a RAW yet.
「ガチバカ！」's official website is of course in Japanese, but JDorama.com have of course launched their own reference page for Gachi Baka!. JDorama's cast list looks kinda short, compared to both the cast and character lists on the official website.
Mew's character is named 牛島理恵, and there's an interview and some character background there, again in Japanese. I'll add it to my pile of Mew-related stuff that needs translating. ^_^
So to all those naysayers who said Mew wouldn't do any more acting (this includes Mew herself, as I recall)... Yay Mew!
Edit: How could I forget to include a picture?
Edit: And then the alt tag?? My fangirly joy must have flooded my HTML neurons.
Overnight interlude: Talked to rene, he didn't seem enthused about a dscape package, so I'll do it myself (based on his code. ^_^). Also, halfway through S.O.S. I really just want to hit Irie-san with something... Gah!
LCA2006 conference opening this morning. As I'd gleaned from the Rough Guide to New Zealand, it is unexpectedly hot. This place looks more and more tempting, although the Internet link (NZ - Spiritual home of IP over Carrier Pigeon according to one wag) scares me.
QT4 tutorial this morning. Not a lot to say, lots of concentrating on slides. However, I did observe a serious problem that I was not expecting... They've not supplied a single power board, and the powerpoints in Castle 1 are even more dearth than at the ANU. Castle 2 (where the Debian miniconf was) is excellently appointed for powerpoints, on the other hand. On the gripping hand, this was my main contribution to the pre-LCA network survery they undertook... Oh well, I'll see if I can go make noise on IRC or something...
Well, maybe I'll say something about QT4. I've not done any GUI programming before, so it's both interesting, and looks like a lot of work. Much as I can read and understand C++, I think I'd be more comfortable doing it in perl or similar. Also, the presenter moved quite quickly, so I suspect this was aimed slightly over my head (although I could follow what was going on, I certainly couldn't be aping him as we went. I guess I was spoilt by Rusty and Robert's kernel module tutorial last year... Maybe it's like The Princess Bride in that it's a beloved movie, but for many people watching it years later pales in comparison to their fond memories... Although neither the kernel module tutorial nor The Princess Bride have paled in my memory yet.
Oh yeah. And I had to keep stopping to apt-get install things during the tutorial. We were told we'd need qt4 w/sqlite support (qt4-dev and qt4-sql), nothing was mentioned of the Assistant (qt4-doc qt4-dev-tools) Designer (qt4-designer) nor the SQLite client (sqlite3) and admittedly the first and last are optional. I guess the presenter assumed we'd be fetching qt4.1 from source and installing it...
Morning tea: Rene's online, and _is_ working on a dscape packageset. ^_^ And in completely unrelated seen-on-IRC news: OpenJazz Jazz Jackrabbit 1 reimplementation (uses original tilesets etc)...Someone's started porting it to the Nintendo DS. More on this after I find cookies or something.
Also during morning tea, I was roped into coming to the Perl BOF on Thursday afternoon. Although there's several BOFs on I'm interested in, the perl6 talk from Monday has me all Perl-enthused right now. Especially if it means I can sensibly resurrect my SOAP server for CBIT, and send out my auto-emails without the evils of perl5's format code. (This modules implements Exegesis 7, although I think what Damian described on Monday was slightly different. There's no Synopsis 7 yet either. -_-
More QT4. I18n support's there and easy to use programatically, although they apparently expect literals in UTF-16... The suggestion is to work in latin1 and just provide a translation for the target language to start with. This is prolly a quite sensible idea in general, as it allows your documentation writers to rewrite the text in the interface as needed, and lets the programming team leave the messages in the untranslated version in a format and phrasing useful to them, which as everybody knows is rather different from the way users work. Who is General Protection and why did his mistake crash my program?
This reminds me of a neat thing an IRC friend of mine once showed me that she was working on for a games company. She'd managed to independently re-implement po (in fact, it looked more like the QT4 i18n does, now I've seen it) for Visual Studio programs, while extending it to not just text, but all kinds of resources, drop-in-able with DLLs. So graphics with embedded text, video, audio and country-specific non-language things were all trivially handleable by their l10n teams. I bet it was doing encryption too, from my experience with Japanese games' text resources.
Wow, haven't seen or heard from her since the fall of #pgsm to TVNihon... One of the sadly few IRC friends I have who get my programming stuff, my linux stuff, my anime stuff, my random Japanese stuff, and was still genki in the morning. ^_^
Lunch: Seen on Planet linux.conf.au 2006: Splashpower, an induction-charger for mobile devices. According to Arjen Lentz they're in discussions with distributors. Amusingly, each submenu on their site has a picture at the top of someone who stuck the little metal strip to their foot and then walked across the pad. Possibly this could supplant firewalking as a harmless but dangerous-looking power-activity (or would that be extreme walking?) of the future.
Also lunch: I finally understand why the power-point cable on my PowerBook's adaptor comes off. You can replace it with a plug, which is almost as neat a solution as the retractable version I was talking to Jez about last week. I wonder if that's something I need to poke my boss about, or if it's an optional extra...
Wow. I sneeze, a few months pass, and life turns upside down...
Firstly, obviously no The Other Day's Mews posted. I've got backlogs ahoihoi (although I'm missing about a month from October 3rd through November 11th) which I might have to start cherry-picking just to get them up.
Still, I got my 2006 Mew Calendar from AmazonJP. It was too expensive to ship by itself (shipping was significantly more than the calendar. >_<) but then I decided to buy myself an LPIC I book, and found a friend who wanted some stuff, so it came out quite cheaply. (Pictures and links at bottom of post)
I need the LPIC I book because I'm going to linux.conf.au 2006 in New Zealand later this month, and will be sitting two LPI level 1 exams there. I'm really looking forward to it, I had soo much fun last year. And I've never been overseas before (over strait, technically), so I've now got my first ever passport.
The passport was surprisingly quick to get. I had most of the paperwork already, and put the application in on the 23rd of December, and when I got back from Queensland, it came by registered mail on the 6th of January. And my mother was worried that I'd be hard-pressed to get it before I left for New Zealand if I put it in in December. There's an online tracking system, but I never got to try it, because I was in Queensland, as I mentioned.
I was in Queensland from the 30th of December until the 5th of January. I went up with my mum, step-father and sister for my youngest uncle's wedding. It was a nice wedding (outdoors, on a jetty-type thing the name of which escapes me) at a golf resort near the Gold Coast. And I use "near" loosely. For Queenslanders, it's near. For a Canberran like me, it was half-way to Sydney. It was also very hot, and very humid. I basically did two things in Queensland apart from the wedding, play video games and sweat. I also saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (good!) and Fun With Dick and Jane (also good!). Many of our family members (now numbering 33 in Lyall the clan) had t-shirts and such made up with "I got Lyalled at the Wedding of the Century" and "Lyallfest 05/06" on them. They were very cool, and slightly silly. Which seems appropriate somehow. It was an idea that came up after a little too much booze at the Lyall Christmas Party.
Christmas was fun, visited cousin's new place on Christmas Eve, spent night at Mum's place, visited Dad and grandparents in the morning, backto Mum's for lunch. Roast, of course. ^_^ A nice relaxing time after the hectic chaos of the preceeding two months, and my new job.
Yup, I've gained another new job. I also got rid of two, so I'm actually not doing too badly for a change. At the end of October, Bandwidth Unlimited folded, much to my shock, despair and disappointment. CBIT (note the new category!) bought the customers and equipment, and while I was there getting all the systems transferred over, they offered me the job of Internet Operations Manager for CBIT Internet. From then until now (and onwards into the future) I've been working flat-out with my old BU job, Richard's BU job, and all the jobs we both weren't doing. (Which possibly explains why BU folded...) If that sounds too much, it is. Luckily, CBIT's already been doing Internet (reselling BU since May) so a lot of the sales and management infrastructure is in place, so it's not like I'm doing it myself. And it's a chance for me to reshape all the things that were wrong with BU because I didn't have the time to fix them. The main worry I have with CBIT is what happens if I get into the JET program and leave in July
I applied for JET in December, haven't yet heard if I got an interview. I did spend a hectic morning photocopying and getting signed various documents. The ANU Union's JP was away that day, so it was more hectic than I expected. Happily, the ANU Student Admin had a JP on the front desk who could sign things during quiet periods. So I've applied, and have references from Steve Thiele of TransACT and Ikeda-sensei of the ANU Japan Centre. I think I'm in with a good chance, but then again I always think that. ^_^
My DebianNM application was finally processed to the policy and procedures stage (which is to say, I got a AM assigned to me) in the first week of November. This of course was the week I started at CBIT, so I had to place it on hold while I got things organised there. It's still on hold. I was hoping to have it done before linuxconf, but such is life. I'd still like to submit my next _stage_ by linuxconf, but part of the task is rereading policy. That's a thick thick document, and I'm still working on my LPI ExamCram book. If I get the stuff in, I think I'm in with a good chance there too, although the FreeRADIUS package has been suffering a bit of neglect. Luckily, it hasn't needed a lot of attention, although 1.1.0 is going to be released this week so I'll need to get that uploaded.
I think that's all I've done in the last couple of months. It seemed more at the time. Anyway, I'm back on IRC at nights after nearly two months absense, and I'm now hanging around the Whirlpool Forums particularly TransACT (professionally) and Linux/BSD (lifestyle). ^_^
For Christmas, I scored Red Dward VI, Red Dwarf VII, and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy movie.. AmazonJP doesn't list the latter two yet.
I've left ActewAGL now. The projects have been handed over more or less, and therefore hopefully no longer my problem. I hope that doesn't mean they become no one's problem, but I guess I'll not know. Now my only remaining work is for BU.
I've spent the last couple of weeks doing some work at cbit, getting the web interface for the SOAP stuff I talked about below (months ago ^_^) going. They'd started one, but the guy doing the work has now been deployed somewhere else And when I say some work, I mean that took me about a week, and so far this week (it's been short, public holiday on Monday) I've just slacked off in the office, waiting for the web interface to break. Lots of time on IRC and email and it's been a good chance to do some reading. I've been reading up on integrating Linux into a Win2K AD Domain, preparing for my return to TransACT, subcontracting via BU.
I did a couple of months at TransACT, and am currently waiting on approval to do more time there. Working on an interesting project, and a less-than-interesting project. Happily, TransACT's standardised on Debian GNU/Linux as their Linux platform. I like to think I helped that by spreading as many Redhat scare stories as possible in my time there. ^_^ I was originally doing two-and-a-half days a week due to university commitments, but am now available full time...
I enrolled, started, and pulled out again from the ANU. I've finally bitten the bullet, and decided I'm not going to get through my final Japanese studies without spending some time there. I've applied for an eighteen-month deferment so I can do JET from August 2006, and be back roughly in time for semester two, 2007. I'm disappointed, I made a good run of it for the first four or five weeks, and that segues neatly into my next topic:
I had a four-week bout of depression. I basically only left the house every couple of days to buy more food, and when ActewAGL called me up to come in and do the handover. This was two weeks of uni, and then the two weeks of the lecture break, so a lot of lost work-time. Turns out that I'd neatly finished the TransACT pre-approved work, although I didn't discover this until three weeks in. I'm seeing the ANU Counselling Centre, which has been helping, as well as making what changes I can myself, including divesting responsibilities. I knew I had too many responsibilities, and it was highlighted by how good I felt when I went to Melbourne and put everything else on hold for the weekend I was there, during these four weeks.
I went to Melbourne for a weekend, to visit friends -- Anna and Naoko. Phil and Emma were unfortunately out of town at Phil's mother's wedding (Congrats to her) -- as well as visit my sister and see her in the MedRevue. It was really really really funny. I laughed so hard. ^_^
I had a good time in Melbourne, it was nice to be out and about without any particular responsibilities. I saw Sin City -- Yes, I went to Melbourne and went to the cinema, by myself -- ate all kinds of bad for me but very tasty foods, and took mobile phone photos of the places I ate. I need to post them somewhere. I really think that weekend without commitments was a really helpful guide as to how I could break out of the depression cycle I'd gotten into. The only downsides of the weekend were the bus ride from the train station at Cootamunda to Canberra (I enjoyed the train ride from Melbourne to Cootamundra, mind you, prolly more than I enjoy even flying) and the fact that I was out of town for the chibi.au.august05 convention.
Despite my best efforts to avoid responsibility in the anime.au conventions, after my poor performance as Events Co-ordinator for anime.au.05, I became Sponsorship and Vendors Co-ordinator for chibi.au.august05, although I was going to be out of town on the day. I did a pretty pitiful job of that, and probably will go down as the only Sponsorship Co-ordinator who ever managed to get nothing out of Madman for an anime convention. The convention itself went quite well, by all reports, and I'm currently Events Co-ordinator ("in charge") of chibi.au.summer05, in November (No one noticed this discrepancy for about a month. I originally coined the moniker because we were not sure if we were going to be November or December, kept it because it has a nice seasonal sound to it, and overlooked the fact that November is actually in Spring.) This convention's been a lot better organised, in large part because we've given ourselves a month longer to prepare, and because we've picked up a couple of enthusiastic people to look after promotions, volunteers and the website, which were noticably absent from chibi.au.august05 until the week before it was actually happening. Hmm. Now I think about it, the first day I skipped any classes at the start of my depression was the day I met with the just-mentioned enthusiastic people to bring them up to speed on what they'd let themselves in for... Prolly a co-incidence. The meeting was after my skipped class after all. These same people look like stepping up to doing stuff on the ANUAS exec at this year's AGM, too.
The ANUAS has of course been running along like the large locomotive of anime viewing that it is. I've managed to not derail it with a stance of "do as little as possible" which really should have been my presidential election platform. One new thing I've introduced is "Saturday Afternoon Drama", where we hold a marathon screening of a live-action series, one series a month. So far we (and by we I mean I) did Great Teach Onizuka in September (with the movie and OV on October 1st due to a scheduling error on my part) and will be running Gokusen over October 8th and 22nd. I do wish I'd thought of this six months ago, but I was actually inspired during and by the chibi.au.august05 preperation process. The ANUAS AGM was supposed to be tomorrow, but I have been browbeaten into moving it back to the 21st, largely because I completely forgot to check with anyone before calling it. In fact, that's pretty much the entire root cause of the move. Once the ANUAS AGM is out of the way, I suspect my only official ANUAS executive position will be Video Ad Creator.
I've spent a little bit of time knock up video ads, two for chibi.au.august05 and one for the GTO live action screenings. All done on Linux, with command line tools and The Gimp, except the picture-editing for the first "Recruit" video which was done using irfanview. The hardest part was getting them Internet-distributable, which meant finding either Creative-Commonsnon-NC or Gnu GFDL licensed-content (and you can't mix these two!), although I fudged the music on the first version of the second ad, because it just seemed to fit the pictures so scarily well. Kinda like the whole "Dark Side Of The Moon is a co-incidental soundtrack to The Wizard Of Oz" thing. The GTO one on the other hand was done just out of Google images one night, so I haven't put it up on the web for download. My current project involves teaching myself Blender3D, so I can produce a cooler ad. I've always wanted to get into 3D programming, and I finally completed the first step (putting Debian onto a 3d-enabled machine of decent speed).
I'm now running Debian when I can on my desktop box. The only things I use windows for now are Quickbooks (I've gotta get Quickbooks going in wine, I just haven't bothered yet) and video games. I've got the machine using libpam-mount (with a couple of patches which I submitted to the Debian BTS) to mount directories from Keitarou. I migrated my email from Outlook onto my fileserver with IMAP, and now use mutt-ng for all my email, which is a big improvement. This also means I revoked my old @Pobox.Com PGP key and added the email address to my newer GPG key. I can sync my phone against Evolution, although I never fire up Evolution, and I can print using CUPs happily to my HP LaserJet 1200. The only other thing I can't do on my desktop machine from Linux is wireless multiboot my Nintendo DS, and I'm working on that.
I decided it was time to spend some money, and I was intrigued by a talk at linux.conf.05 about GameBoy Advance programming, and had heard about recent developments letting people launch homebrew software wirelessly on the new Nintendo DS. So I gave in, and bought one. I played Mario64DS for a bit, and bought Another Code while in Melbourne, all the while getting involved in the DS Homebrew community. I played with my Prism54 wireless cards to get wireless multiboot going, and could get the DS to see my machine, but not boot from it. Eventually I got a hold of the rt2500-based card neccessary to use the only existing publically available wireless multiboot software (includes a custom driver for Windows) and found I could get further in the process, but not by much. I had some spare credit at Lik-Sang, so I got a GBA Movie Player v2, and with a bit of futzing about (which I'll document here later) I can now load a homebrew rom onto the CF card I borrowed from Shane and the DS will run it. ^_^ So time to start actually programming again. I've still gotta get some more work done on the WMB process, but I'm waiting on driver developments in the Linux rt2x00 driver project, since right now they can't transmit packets, at least in monitor mode, but progress is ongoing. I've been documenting the WMB stuff in my wiki.
One of the things that made this blog go quiet was the addition of a wiki to my site. Semi-static stuff (like the SOAP stuff below) is now going in the wiki, and I plan to migrate all the stuff from www.tbble.net into the wiki. It's just such a good platform for publishing stuff categorised, without having to code the HTML. I'm now over HTML coding the same way I'm over compiling my OS from scratch -- I did this in 1998, before I'd discovered Gentoo or Debian and got as far as upgrading to the latest libc, gcc and whatever else was in the base Slackware '96 install, when I discovered Debian, found a use for having a linux machine, and wiped it out in an afternoon in 2000.
Now that I'm back updating the blog, I'm going to have to see if I can make time to update all the old old old The Other Day's Mew entries. (Mew's got a new calendar coming, which I need someone to batch into an AmazonJP order for me at some point...) I was actually loading the Japanese text into my blog, but not publishing it because I was having trouble with the translations. This obviously is not a winning strategy. ^_^ Now I think about it, the other challenge to The Other Day's Mew was I was updating from ActewAGL, where I didn't have a dictionary handy, nor Japanese input support to use an online dictionary, and then they changed their firewall to block sites with 'blog' in the domain.
Which brings me full circle in this long rambling story. ^_^
★What did everyone overdo in their Golden Week(^_^)?? For me... I didn't go anywhere special.(^_^;) Playing with friends, playing with friends, playing with friends... sort of feeling (y^^y)(smile) but was really fufilled Golden Week☆. Frequently I haven't been able to meet with school and work friends so I played very happily.♪♪
Man, I spent so long trying to work out what GW was. My first thought was "Graduation Week" but that was too long ago. Thanks to SailorV for being present on #solarmiracle when I figured it out. He didn't actually _help_, but he was there. ^_^.
< SailorV> hey she's cute
< SailorV> what's she do?
Yes, #solarmiracle is a Sailor Moon-related IRC channel...
★What is everyone's favourite TV program??For me it's Ainori during Hamari.(y^^y) I always watched it in sequence before, but I was unable to watch one so since then I haven't watched it but again I started watching it and then Hamari had finished.(*^^*)
FujiTV also has an English page for Ainori. I can't believe I've been so careful to check for updates, and the moment I move home and get busy with work and anime.au.05 Mew posts not one, but two entries. Gah! Anyway, it looks like Mew just consumed every 'けど' I had in stock, and possibly some she'd snuck in earlier in her purse.
Hasn't everyone had the experience of going outside, listening to music and then there's not batteries in or the batteries immediately become empty!?Recently I'm that sort of fool.(>_<)At that time the strong shock makes you very blue... (++)Really one day I'll lose my mind...(*laugh*)
She must have posted this one in the evening, since I'm sure it wasn't there when I checked about 5pm yesterday. One of these days, it'll be Today's Mew!
★The Sakura finally finished falling.↓Did you go blossom-viewing!? I really wanted to but I'm sad that in the end I couldn't. (>_<) but next year I will go for sure! I've already promised with a friend to go at full bloom time♪.(y^^y)(smile)
Continuted skiing and snowboarding, also my first experience with an onsen came. In Okinawa there aren't any, so by no means do I have a chance to go(^_^;) but now I went and I was really happy.
(Thanks to Snowflake for stopping me from translating that as "I'm not in Okinawa". I couldn't explain how a nice Okinawan girl like Mew could not have been to Okinawa.)
I had my first experience with skiing and snow boarding. At first my heart was beating hard when I rode the "Forest Foot" up, so it turns out I can do sliding-type things.(y^^y)
Quick updates: Shane got a dog, and I'm seeing Machine Gun Fellatio tomorrow night. (Now tonight)
PGSM Act.ZERO arrived. Pretty box, haven't watched it yet.
Dropped my uni units, and gave ActewAGL notice I had to be out by July.
And in unrelated news, the government of Robert Mugabe has demonstrated that they are holding fair and transparent elections by using clear perspex ballot boxes. ^_^
★Finally made to graduate senior high school (*_*) but I don't at all have true feelings about it, only rather sorrowful (+_+) sort of thing, it seems like the end of youth and a hugely lonely feeling.(^^;)
I was awoken this morning by my mobile at the ungodly hour of 7:50am. It seems the changes I made last night caused BU to cease to work. Which is weird since I made the change at 1am, and the traffic graphs indicate it was all working fine until 6am. Maybe a daily cron-job decided to rearrange things for me? Either way, it took under a half-hour to fix, another two hours of mucking about with the network to see where we stood on the issue, at which point I decided that rather than go to work and have a late lunch, I'd have an early lunch and spend a long afternoon at work before cruising on to ANUAS.
I don't remember what happened at this point, but I think it involved more mucking about with BU stuff and similar. Or I might have played with the L2TP stuff.
Either way, I agreed to be available at about 4pm, so I figured at this point I'd kick back, watch The Jerry Springer Show, and chat to people on IRC and IM. I was also playing with the L2TP stuff during this, but it was largely kernel compiling so it was "type command, wait an hour" type work. Being on IRC reminded me of my occasional project to create a PGSM Music Video. In order to do this, I obviously need to have seen the whole series. Hence I decided to finall watch my PGSM Special Act DVD.
(The lesson learnt is inside the spoiler tag. I'm sorry, but it's the final scene of the whole show. I'm also gonna talk about the story of Hitch. Yes, I saw Hitch last night. It's good. ^_^)
Spoiler Alert
Wow. Absolutely no Beryl (which shot my plan for Beryl + Jaedite set to Elephant Love Medley onto the backburner) and in fact a surprisingly small amount of senshi action. Largely due to their inability to transform for the entire sequence. I really must rewatch Final Act, and possibly Act.48 as well, and/or get around to watching the latter part of the series with subtitles, rather than waiting for the MGC to get up to it at the end of the year.
I was very pleased to see that Motoki got Mew Makoto in the end, after what I think was four years of persistence in the face of almost complete indifference. I guess the lesson learnt was that persistence and patience pays, both in a general sense, and specifically in my designs upon the person of one Azama Mew. I watched Hitch last night, which taught me that someone, somewhere, will find your personal foilbles endearing. I'm combining these thoughts into the idea that if I keep hoping, worshipping and stalking Mew, she'll find my personal foibles adorable. ^_^
Oh, and for some reason the image of a pregnant Sawai Miyuu made me laugh. It just seems so implausible. I think I have trouble picturing any thin Japanese woman pregnant. (That's thin by my standards. It includes almost every Japanese woman I've met. Maybe small is a better word than thin?)
It was nice to see that Ami had moved on to a nice American university, populated by a German doctor who tries to steal her credit, an Australian doctor who sees her running desperately down the corridor and points out that the operating theatre is in fact in the other direction, like he (or in fact anyone) sees running Japanese women in hospital corridors all the time, and another person who doesn't speak, and may or may not have been American.
I suspect Japanese television shows populate their gaijin quotas by randomly pulling gaijin off the street, dressing them up, and slowing their English until it's identifiable without being understandable. Certainly Ami's response to the Australian ("But Japan is this way") took two watchings to understand, and I probably wouldn't have worked it out except for it being the obvious comedic response, and the helpful Japanese subtitle. The only American accent you get to hear in PGSM is Mamoru's English friend. Yes, that's right. The one non-American gaijin in the show, and he has an American accent. ^_^
It also looked to me like the American diet had affected Ami, she no longer looked like she blow away in a strong wind. Given how Hama Chisaki's diary entries during PGSM filming usually centered around the enormous amounts and varieties of foods she'd eaten, I dread to think what she'd eaten to actually look like she'd gained weight. Or maybe puberty finally caught her up?)
Makoto was stunning as always. Just in case I didn't make that clear above. I also liked her in reading glasses. And the green dress with choker. I thought the top with the one button was a bit weird looking, but I can forgive it for two reasons: anything which gives one-button access to a naked Mew is a good thing; and even with the button done up, any kind of movement showed off alternatively a bra strap, and a wonderful expanse of upper right torso and shoulder.
I also cracked up when the Shitenou showed up at the wedding, and no one seemed to bat an eyelid. Maybe only Mamoru could see them (like in the manga), or maybe everyone just happened to be facing the wrong way (like in most of PGSM. ^_^)
And possibly a lot of trouble could have been avoided all around if someone had pointed Mio at an English->Japanese dictionary with the definition of "Dark" in it. A brightly lit throne room and clowns certainly don't appear there, Beryl's dark brooding-room, the grey and black-decorated piano room, and the Nazguul (I don't think they were ever distinguished from the other youma, but I've taken the liberty to do so. You know which ones I mean. Act.31 onwards. ^_^) certainly fit the idea of "Dark Kingdom". Mio's was more like "Completely-psycho-whacked-out-princess kingdom". Kinda Queen Nephelia's kingdom, at least what little we saw of it at the beginning of Sailor Stars.
Of course, this still doesn't explain who Mio is. Maybe it was explained in the series somewhere, and I missed it (very possible), but I figure she's the reincarnation of Beryl (as Usagi and the other are reincarnations of Queen Serenity et. al) which only slightly complicates matters as Beryl's not actually died yet. (Or maybe she did at the end of Final Act? I don't see how though, Jaedite survived. I like to think Jaedite's working hard in his off time (which covers the missing four years, and most of Special Act) and has set up some kind of love nest in an inexpensive studio apartment, while Beryl tries to find some kind of job suitable for her outstanding talents. Then again, I like to think Nephrite's running Crown Karaoke while Motoki's spending all day wandering around Makoto's florist, waiting for Ami to return from America. On the other hand, this would preclude Jaedite working at Crown, since the only way Jaedite and Nephrite could work together is with a strong personality to manage them. And while Motoki is many things (engaged to Makoto, for a start) a strong personality he is not. I'm glad Nephrite didn't kill him during the TV series. (Although then Mew Makoto would have been free still. But that's TV, not reality.) Still, I hope Jaedite has found a nice steady job, and Beryl recognises a good thing when it throws itself at her. Certainly, he seemed in a good mood in Special Act, so I like to think they found happiness together. (And that she kept that purple dress. I could find happiness with someone who can wear that well. ^_^) What can I say, I'm an incurable romantic at heart. Since I see nothing romantic happening for Kunzite or Zoicite. Kunzite and Minako could certainly have formed a good friendship, having suffered as first warrior under a leader (or two in Kunzite's case) who let love cloud their judgement. If it went further than that, it would be a... torrid affair to say the least. And I'm sad to say that I think Kunzite's gay, and has it for Endymion. And he is never going to be more than a third wheel there. Maybe he can appear on Queer Eye for the Senshi or something. Oh crap, I just inspired myself to writea fanfic. (Not Queer Eye. The rest of this paranthetical diversion.)) It would explain the weird connection thing they had which caused everyone to believe (or at least everyone on IRC I was talking to) that Mio was some kind of clone of Beryl, or a construction Beryl was using. I think my theory's better.
If you want to make sense of that last paragraph, highlight everything between matching parenthesis and ignore it. Then read the bit in parenthesis. Repeat this process until things make sense. Congratulations, you've just had a glance into the thought process of a TBBle. In fact, the TBBle. ^_^
And no, Usagi doesn't get pregnant, but I think she manages to mention babies in one of the very early scenes. it was certainly nice to see that four years and engagement managed to completely not change Usagi at all.
Rei was way underutilised in Special Act. I suspect Keiko's modelling career may have been at a particularly high point at that time, while Mew seems to be in the lull between modelling and idoldom at the same time. I hope Mew makes the transition well, and I also hope Keiko does. Her minimal work in Special Act against showed hints of acting talent which were mocked by detractors ("I... Am.... Rei...") back at the beginning of PGSM, but which will hopefully stand her in good stead in an acting career in J-Dramas; while I expect Mew may have more of a career as an actor and idol lined up, with her strong singing/dancing skills and demonstrated acting skills (by all reports Mew is very different from Makoto in personality, which is not surprising due to something I term tall-girl syndrome, which due to Japanese social training means tall Japanese girls (the ones I tend to refer to as stunning ^_^) become somewhat quiet/introverted during schooling in order to achieve certain aspects of femininity (Makoto's solution was not to be quiet, but to be good at cooking, sewing and other feminine arts. Sakai-san from Azumanga Daioh went the path of introversion and a strong obsession with the small and cute. Both she and Makoto had "florist" on their list of career choices.) I can't say if this is a good thing or not. But it's an interesting phenomenon to observce both in popular culture and personal interactions.) Anyway, I look forward to seeing more of Kitagawa Keiko acting in the near future, and more of Azama Mew in my arms in the near future. (Hey, if I'm in a relationship, and have a celebrity clause, she'd be it. ^_^)
For reference, the current AMV plan is the Shitenou set to "Knights Of The Round Table" from Monty Python and The Holy Grail. It has the huge advantage of being only a minute long. ^_^
Anyway, Special Act was a surprising DVD, in that there was no omake, and the menu only appears at the end, which has the choice of Whole Movie, or one of six chapters.
As far as the story goes, I enjoyed it as far as I understood it.
Then I got ahold of the guy I needed to talk to to get the rest of the BU changeover done, and we worked through and identified the last of the remaining issues, and he went off to work on them.
At this point I was getting hungry for lunch (being about 6pm) when Shane walks in and says "If you want barbecue for dinner, you'd better go get some stuff, Julia and Bek are coming around in five minutes." Needless to say, (but I'm going to) I did. Sometime over an hour later, Sean, Julia and Rabekah arrived. We barbecued, watched some of the Canturbury VS St. George NRL game, and Shane went to bed and the others retired to Sean's house (across the road) once more leaving me on my lonesome. >_<. This I think may point the sorry state of my social affairs when I'm disappointed when people stop watching a rugby league game and leave. I consoled myself with the best of the Melbourne Comedy Festival, and a repeat of The Glass House from Wednesday (Still funny the second time around), and by harassing Julia over MSN when I could. I also at chocolate cookies. ^_^;;;
Those of you playing along at home may have observed that the above overlapped the ANUAS screening. Which is correct. Kaz had the membership stuff, so my presence wasn't neccessary, and I was debating whether to drop in at the end when Shane arrived and triggered the above.
I tried a Cruise Juicy tonight, and it was OK, but too juicy for my taste ie. too much like overstrong cordial. They're also only one standard drink per, which makes them weaker than a standard cruiser.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to plug Television Without Pity as an amusing website of episode recaps for various TV series. The only one they're tracking that I'm watching (largely because the number of TV series I'm watching is down to Battlestar Galactica, The Glass House (these two class on Wednesday night), Little Britain, and Rosemary and Thyme) is Battlestar Galactica. And I'm enjoying it. ^_^
Here's PGSM Special Act. I got this with the 7-DVD box, which now holds PGSM Vol.1 through Vol.7. The second box comes with PGSM Act.Zero, shipping end of March. (Also below. ^_^)
Time to get back into updating this blog, I guess. It's just that I've been so boring recently.
I'm back in ANU, taking Japanese Lexicon, Teaching Languages and Semantics. These classes all look interesting, and I've got the first Japanese Lexicon assignment to do over this weekend.
I handed in my Written Japanese D assignment at long last, and now once Ikeda-sensei has the time, I'll finally get some closure on that unit. ^_^
Still working for ActewAGL, despite my best attempts to get away. I guess the disadvantage of job security through irreplacebility is irreplacebility. >_<
The anime.au.05 anime convention is coming up, and I'm the Events Co-ordinator so that's taking up a bit of time, but not too much at the moment.
I've been playing with some wiki software (PMWiki, the only one I could find that didn't require anything not available on Debian/stable) but I haven't actually got a good use for a wiki on TBBle.net. Maybe when I get back to the Winny reverse-engineering project or something.
I picked up PGSM Volume 12 from DHL today, so now I've only got the one DVD to go. It's gonna be weird to not have $140 disappear from my credit card every month... And I'm still praying for a second series, some more OAV things, or a personal visit from Azama Mew. Of course, I still haven't watched Special Act yet. Nor the live action version of Great Teach Onizuka... Or the rest of Excel Saga. Or Poemy. Or... wow. My DVD collection is largely still in shrink-wrap. ^_^
OK, so I haven't actually been that boring. A friend of mine pointed out to me recently that having too much on one's plate is better than being bored, but I fear that may actually have been my own words being repeated back to me. (Hello, if you're reading this! I promise I'll update more often. ^_^)
Once again, instead of doing my very overdue linguistics homework, or even showing up on #pgsm and #solarmiracle to help distribute today's Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, I hacked away more at CenterICQ.
And lo and behold, it can now negotiate an audio conversation with MSN Messenger 6.2. A quick compile of linphone later (quick being relative. >_<) and I could hear my voice coming out of the speakers on the server a half-second after speaking into the microphone on Shane's laptop.
*dances*
Anyway, I prolly should go see what the #pgsm people are up to. Or I could eat breakfast...
Or put breakfast on, and while that's cooking, clean up the patch to deal with actually checking if the user _wants_ to have a voicechat before accepting the offer. And also allowing CenterICQ to cancel the chat when it's done.
Had to withdraw from Project Yuka (and that's the only mention it'll get here for the moment) and that's a real disappointment.
Am behind on my Uni stuff but catching up.
Watched PGSM Act.44.
Oh yeah, Anna is back in town briefly, had dinner with her last night. Indian (Flavours Of India) and that was really tasty. She's well, in case you're wondering. ^_^
Umm. Yeah, that's about it.
Oh, I bought new jeans. I think stetchy denim is the weirdest thing I've ever worn.... But it's comfortable. ^_^
I promise more frequent updates, but I don't think I'll manage "The good, the bad and the educational" daily... I'll put up Japanese and/or Linguistics stuff instead, as it comes to mind.
Slept in, and missed my personal Iaido/Jodo time. And next week if I make it, I have to share the dojo with a Kendo team full of enthusiasm after today's competition.
Something new
Sometimes, if you ignore a bug, it _does_ go away by itself.
Another Saturday morning, so another episode of PGSM. Even though we're all terrified of what will happen after Act. 50, it's taken nothing from the atmosphere of anticipation and jubliation on Saturday mornings on IRC.
And since I missed the dojo booking this morning, and haven't had my gi pants repaired and couldn't train in Jujutsu this afternoon, I spent the entire day on IRC having fun.
It was supposed to be my first Iaido and Jodo training in more than twelve months. And my first self-directed one in two years. Instead, I read Damia (by Anne McCaffery) until some stupid hour of the morning. >_< On the plus side, it's a good book. ^_^
The other thing I played with today was my work on pulling apart the source code for WinNY that I found on the Internet once. It looks like it's been decompiled from an unpacked executable, and large chunks are missing. The missing stuff is largely the interface support code, but half the software (including much of the network protocol) is done using Winsock callbacks, so I can only decode the first few messages (up to the first rekeying) of a conversation.
On the other hand, the file formats are quickly revealing their secrets to me now. I can now decode a nodelist into the node addresses, and pullall the metadata from a cache file. I actually had most of that already working, but the data I had was giving bad results. So I fired up the English-localised WinNY on my housemate's laptop, which is based on the same version as the source code I had, and found that its cache files would decode fine. So I used them to complete the meta-data extracting code, and apart from the MD5 verification failing, it was good. Then I pointed it at the earlier data from a later version of WinNY, and instead of getting the 'bad key' I was getting before, I got output. O_O!! Anyway, I don't know what was wrong with the old code. It's gone now.
Oh, and in perl, $value & 0xffff doesn't seem to do what a C programmer like myself expects. Happily, $value % 0x10000 does the job. ^_^
