blueZhift Blog

After some initial reservations due to the awefulness of the English dub, I’m giving Gundam 00 another try from the beginning. I just watched Gundam 00 Episode 1 in Japanese on YouTube, legally!

With the explosion of anime and other programming moving to the web on sites like YouTube, Hulu, Joost, and CrunchyRoll, the triumph of the small screen over the big one in the living room seems well on its way. I still prefer to watch the living room TV, but I have more time away from that one, than with it. And if my household is typical, I have a lot more small screen around than big ones.

This freedom does come at a cost though, but not the obvious visual one. Instead, the cost is becoming your own programming director. On demand, ubiquitous entertainment means freedom from someone else’s scheduling decisions, but responsibility for doing it yourself. I think the current generation is up to the task, just we older ones have to catch on. I wonder if there is a market for tools to make this task easier?

The show, btw, was pretty good and sounds much better in the original Japanese. I like English dubs too, but what I saw for this particular show kinda put me off.  So hurray for subtitles! Just remember, on YouTube you have to click the caption icon to get the subtitles.

Yesterday was kinda tough. I’m not sure where the quake occurred, but the wave of depression that hit yesterday was nearly irresistable. Maybe it was a mix of things, bad weather, flu virus, and a collection of frustrations and recent disappointments.

I was proud to get through work, progress made, no meetings missed. But it was hard, and looking back, I probably should have gone home. Today is better, but sadly I can only whisper into the knothole of this digital tree.

sometimes life is hard

With a new administration in the US White House, I think we are poised to make some real progress in combating global warming. The crazy weather I’ve seen over the last few years in the Chicago area makes me wonder if this is only a taste of what is to come if we do nothing. Still, there is a lot of resistance to doing what is needed and even dispute over whether global warming due to human activities is real or not. Even if it isn’t, I don’t see anything bad about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and generally taking better care of the Earth.

If positive arguments don’t make a dent in the psyches of many, perhaps an opposite approach would yield results. In short, the climate changes due to global warming may actually benefit some regions of the world. While this isn’t very likely, it is a possibility. If the many of the rich are devastated while some of the poor elevated by climatic changes, then maybe the rich will get off their butts and do something. No one, especially the rich, wants to be on the opposite end of someone else’s schadenfreude. Perhaps the fear that someone else will benefit from our misfortune will be enough to motivate us to do the right thing.

Today we had our first house cleaning day. Since just telling people to keep things clean and clean up after themselves never seemed to work, I decided to schedule a work day to clean house. Each person in the house got a personalized list of cleaning tasks to perform based on their relative abilities. And as our house cleaning mascot I chose the cute, responsible, and powerful Mahoro from Mahoromatic. Clean thoughts and a clean house, that’s Mahoro’s way!

Mahoro Cleanup Assignment Page

Mahoro Always Works Hard

After twittering my thumbs, so to speak, I finally joined twitter. I thought the stream of updates on Facebook was bad enough, oh boy! In any case, my plan is to explore and learn. So far I like it for blogging little stuff that I don’t really want to write a full entry about anyway. Duh, I suppose that’s what it was made for in the first place.

Link: blueZhift on Twitter

Seemingly yesterday, when my first daughter was born, her first and only interactions with a computer was through a Mac game called Baby Smash. She’d bang the keyboard with tiny little hands and interesting shapes and sounds would appear on the screen. Later I wrote a clone called Baby Mush for my OS/2 PC so that she could do the same there. Fast forward to the present to witness me discussing World of Warcraft strategies with my second daughter and her desire for a Builder’s Club account on Roblox! In no time at all, my babies no longer just bang the keyboard, they’re using it to create and play in virtual worlds all over the net with friends from school, around the corner, and across the ocean.

As technology enthusiast and professional, I think it’s pretty cool that they’ve reached the stage where we begin to enjoy some of my favorite things together. In a lot of ways they’re way ahead of me, fearlessly exploring these new worlds and trying to reshape them. Of course, I’m not too wild about this additional evidence that my time is passing, but I can’t wait to start setting up accounts the accounts for us! I’m reminded of a scene from the anime series .hack//Sign in which the character Bear is meeting up with his son in the MMO game, The World. Their meeting wasn’t so great, but I hope that in the future our massive clan, though separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, will join forces on some instanced battlefield to pwn mobs and claim leet loots!

It’s been about 7 months since my last convention, so I’m really excited that Anime Central starts less than 48 hours from now! As usual, I’ve got last minute stuff to do, but nothing too bad. I can’t believe I actually got my hand embroidery work done weeks ago. So I think I’m pretty good to go costume wise. The real challenge will be getting everyone to the hotel and them managing costumes and activities.

Also this week marks the opening of the new Star Trek movie. I’m a long time Trekker, so I’m definitely going to see this! I just haven’t decided the where and when. Right now I’m leaning towards a late night show at the Muvico near the convention center after a pre-con meetup.

It should be a lot of fun if I can just manage the logistics. I have so much fun at these cons, I just wish my wife could enjoy them as much as I. But she tends to be a rather serious person, so just letting go isn’t really in her nature. Oh well, at least she tolerates my hobbies somewhat and since the kids like them too, I guess she’s just out numbered!^^ Yes, I’m a baaaad man.

When Sun was bought out by Oracle, many wondered what was going to happen to things like Java, MySQL, and VirtualBox. Well given the way trying to upgrade to version 2.2.2 on Windows XP totally nuked my working installation of 2.1.4 which I can now neither remove or repair, I think I’ll be saying buh bye to VirtualBox and hello to VMWare.

The VBox 2.2.2 install runs and then rolls back. This has been described in the VirtualBox forums, but the solution there doesn’t work for me. Not only that, running the old 2.1.4 installer in Repair mode does the same thing.  So rather than waste anymore time, I’m simply noting it here. Yeah I could login and post to the forum but after wasting half a day on this problem, I’d rather just switch to VMWare which we use at work anyway. It’s a real shame when you can’t get the installer to work right. Color me annoyed…

Update: Since I’m a glutton for punishment and loathe defeat, I searched the VBox web site and found in the wiki a link to Microsoft’s Installer Cleanup tool. After running the tool I ran the 2.2.2 installer again. Like the first time I ran it, it hung at the very end. But while the installer is botched, apparently it installed enough of VirtualBox for it to work. So at least it works now even though as far as Windows is concerned the installation was interrupted. Now only slightly annoyed.

While sales of 360s in Japan are probably better than the original Xbox, they still pale compared to the Wii and even the beleagured PS3. So I guess it’s time to bring out the big guns, moe! Click the pic for the story on Kotaku. This is the first time I’ve seen a console tan used in any official advertising.