blueZhift Blog

A couple of days ago, I bought my first ebook. I bought Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S.. I bought the Kindle version for my iPhone and so far, I’m pretty happy with it. As a life long book lover, I’m both pleased and surprised at how this came about.

Reading digital books was not the reason I got an iPhone. And while the Kindle, Nook, and other book readers are attractive, they just weren’t a top priority item for me. Digital books are a good idea and long overdue, especially for heavy laden school children, but I was in no rush to get there. But now that I’ve slipped in through the side door, I’m glad I came. The iPhone screen is pretty much perfect for the extremely casual sort of reading I would be doing on such a device and so far at least, I’m not seeing any downsides to this at all. Of course, that’s bad news for anyone trying to sell dedicated book readers, unless they get a lot less expensive.

I ended up buying a book because I was in an adventurous mood and decided to try out the Kindle reader for iPhone. I was hoping there would be some free books available like the Barnes and Noble Reader had. And I wanted to compare the two readers. There weren’t any free books, but there was a sample available of the Japanamerica book. So I downloaded that and started reading, got hooked on it and bought it. Ultimately, the content made the sale, and since I usually buy books from Amazon anyway, it was easy for me to buy one more.

I still like physical books, and have no plans to stop buying them, especially since some, like manga, wouldn’t be good on the iPhone’s screen. But from now one I’ll definitely be looking for a digital version.

I still can’t get over the feeling that time is running out. Of course, that’s probably because it’s true. There’s only a finite amount of time left in my sojourn on Earth and I have no idea just how much of it is left. I suspect that most people just ignore this and carry on, but I just keep having these feelings that I need to try new stuff before I run out of time.

Even though I believe that there is more than this life and that God has a purpose for all of this, I still want new experiences in the here and now. Is that bad? I’d like to think that this is all preparation for whatever role I may have in the next life. But I have no proof of that, and it seems likely that’s it’s all my own depraved thrill seeking.

Oh well, none of that changes the fact that the sands in my hour glass are running out. I don’t think my faith has been shaken, I just want to understand all of these feelings better.

A few days ago, I spent a couple of hours in Playstation Home on my PS3. I wanted to see what it would be like to watch and episode of Full Metal Alchemist in the theatre there. On that point, I was a bit disappointed because Playstation Home doesn’t have a proper first person view such as found in any FPS or MMORPG game. As a result, I had to watch looking over my own shoulder, only satisfying to the consumate narcissus!

Unfortunately, narcissism, mine at least, is a little hard to satisfy in Home because the avatars are just so darn creepy looking. Part of it is the design, which could be fixed if Sony would just rip off Square Enix’s beautiful Final Fantasy models. Right now, even Second Life avatars look better and at least in SL, the user can greatly improve this. The other part though is the way the avatars move and carry themselves. It’s just very unnatural and robotic, which is fine for robots, but not something that purports to represent humans. The Wii and Xbox Live avatars are much better in this respect.

Aesthetics aside, I decided to go to the mall and see what clothing I could find to dress up my little doll. Again I was disappointed. The store interface really leaves me flat, literally. You don’t enter a store when you walk in. Instead you go to a flat display of the items. The pictures representing the different clothes don’t do justice to them and to make things worse, if you select an item, only a small selection shows your avatar wearing it. Please Sony, just copy Xbox Live on this point! What self respecting female avatar can shop for clothes without trying them on?

In the end, I bought a few items before returning to my apartment. On my next foray I may play with the avatar editing tool some more before going out on a more general tour to try out a few mini-games.  I know Home is still in beta, but I would have hoped that the look would have improved by now.

This morning I had the strange revelation that my dreams often have multiple, secret bases so to speak. Last night’s had two such places that I was using to change from one outfit into another. I thought about this and remembered other such dreams having either additional offices or apartments almost like safe houses in their use.

I don’t have any conventions coming up until Ohayocon in January, so it’s a little early to start the preconvention cosplay dreams. Oh well, who controls the subconcious? At least my dreams are in color!

As a university staff member, I was able to take advantage of a discount on Windows 7 Ultimate. As it turned out the upgrade version was the only version available on DVD with no manuals. No problem. And since VMWare Fusion 3 supports 64 bit Windows on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, I figured, what the heck, let’s go 64 bit at last! Even though, this was a upgrade version, because I had previously installed Windows 7 Release Candidate, I was eligible to use the upgrade. The question that remained was how to actually go about doing the install. I’d read a lot about what others had done on the net, but of course everyone’s experience may vary. So here is what happened to me, in the hope that it will be useful to others.

The first thing I discovered was that there was no way to do the install from the physical DVD in VMWare Fusion 3. I started using the Easy Install option in VMWare, but for some unknown reason, it was never able to boot the VM from the DVD. As near as I could tell, it wasn’t even detecting the DVD at all. To be sure that the DVD was in fact bootable, I tried it out on another PC. Since the Windows 7 RC was installed from an ISO image, I decided to create an ISO from the DVD using the Mac Disk Utility. This is done by creating a new CD/DVD master image from the DVD. The resulting file will have a .cdr extension. Just change this extension to .iso.

So with ISO in hand, so to speak, I tried the install again, also choosing not to enter the product key during the VM setup process. I’d read that you should install without the key first and then activate within Windows later. This install went well and all was good until I tried to activate Windows. Then I got an error saying that my key was for an upgrade version not a clean install.

Ok, that wasn’t entirely unexpected. I had hoped the install would ask for the product key of an upgrade eligible version of Windows. But it turns out, and this was confirmed by other net reports, that the install needs to see a Windows installation somewhere on the computer when it runs.  Now how to do that in a VM? I had read of people connecting external drives with Windows on them to get around this, but I wasn’t clear on how to do this in a VMWare VM. Then I noticed that I could add additional hard drives to the VM, including virtual drives of other VMs!

So I junked the new Windows 7 VM and started over. This time though, before starting the install, I edited the VM to add the Windows 7 RC VM virtual disk (.vmdk file) as another hard drive. This time, the install proceeded as before except the activation was successful! Once I was sure everything was working as necessary, I shut down the VM and removed the Windows 7 RC virtual disk from it.

So far, everything is running smoothly. Hopefully, VMWare will fix what I think is a bug with the DVD boot issue I encountered. As for Microsoft, they could make things easier for upgraders too, but I won’t complain too much. Letting the Windows 7 RC users upgrade rather than pay full price is a nice gesture on their part, even with the little puzzle I had to solve.

Now with Youmacon 2009 in the past, life is returning to what passes for normal for me. This last week I’ve been wrestling with SAS at work. It’s definitely different from the programming languages I’ve used in the past, but I should have it down pretty soon. It’s just maddening to not be on top of things like this.

At home I’m having a lot of geeky fun transitioning from Windows XP to Mac OS X Snow Leopard on my new Mac, Mikuru. I use a Mac at work, so I’m very familiar with the platform, but at home I’ve been using Windows on home built PCs for the last 10 years or so. As a result I have a lot of development stuff that I need to transition. I’ve decided to do this by running Windows 7 in VMWare Fusion 3 on my Mac. If performance in the VM is acceptable, I’ll be able to avoid having to use Boot Camp.

Yesterday I finally got wireless working on my daughter’s old Windows XP laptop which I’ve converted to Ubuntu Linux. It’s an ancient Dell Inspiron B120 with 512MB RAM that even after a clean install runs XP horribly slow to say nothing of after the kids have managed to load it up with malware. I finally gave up that battle and put Ubuntu 9.04 on it. But wireless is usually tricky on Linux. In this case installing the b43-fwcutter package did the trick. Then I upgraded to 9.10 without any trouble. The new Ubuntu machine, dubbed Yoshi, is mostly dedicated to homework assignments and cannot run Roblox, which is a good thing in this case!

And I’m finally catching up on a lot of manga and anime that’s been piling up. There were a lot of new releases over the last two weeks that I’m having a great time with. I just finished Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project volume 2 yesterday. The Shinji and Kaworu shonen ai plotline is very funny and I found myself loling on numerous occasions. At the behest of my youngest son, we’re finally going to finish watching Kaleido Star, so we capped off the evening’s family viewing with volume 4 of the DVD set.

Well, I’ve got manga to read, so I’ll be finishing this up now. It’s going to be an interesting month I think.(^_^)

In short, I had a pretty good time at this year’s Youmacon. I didn’t have any new costumes to finish, so no morning of con rush to finish and get out the door this year! Instead I had a bunch of stuff at the office blow up on me. But I cleaned that up in time to go. Happy days!

After a lot of thought, I decided not to cosplay on Thursday night. I had been toying with doing the OL version of Mikuru, but decided against it in part because no one would likely recognize it as cosplay. So normal me just had to do, which is fine…usually.  The pre-reg pickup was reasonably quick once the line got moving. After that I had to great pleasure of chatting with a couple of friends who I had been looking forward to seeing at Youmacon. Later I went to the How to Con panel, which was hilarious, followed by the Sera Myu panel which was…interesting. Let’s just say I wasn’t expecting Sailor senshi dancing. The Sailor Mercury was quite cute though!

Friday was Mikuru cosplay day! I was happy the socks I had wanted came in time and I think it went over pretty well. Not too many pic requests though since the Haruhi craze is pretty much over. The highlights of the day for me were really the AMV contest, karaoke, and the AMV dance that night. I still don’t get people who go to dances and just watch other people dance. And I felt sorry for those guys wandering about looking for girls to dance with. Just dance! I still don’t know if my AMV entry won or not, but it was fun seeing it on the big screen.

Saturday is the biggest day of any con. For me it means getting out my newest costume. I’d tuned up my Princess Sakura and entered the Hall Cosplay competition. As always, I enjoyed telling the judges all about the costume and what went into making it. And I got some very positive feedback. And feeling more daring than usual, I followed there suggestion to get some professional pictures taken by the photographer they had for the event just down the hall. After that, I joined the CLAMP cosplay shoot in the very humid pool room. It was fun! I always worry that I’m messing up the shoot, but I tend to be a little over critical of my cosplays. Other people seem to think they are pretty good, so I should just chill a bit.

Last year, I missed a lot of the guest, so I wanted to make up for that this time around. I went to the Yugioh: The Abridged Series panel, and a little later, partially by accident, attended the Team 4 Star, of DBZ: Abridged,  panel as well. I ended up changing a lot of my plans in order to avoid ridiculously long waits in line. The 4 inch heeled boots I was in were not made for long periods of standing. And my outfit was definitely not made for sitting on the floor too long either.

As a result of this, like some divine retribution/irony, I ended up in standing room only at the Masquerade. Since standing just wasn’t going to work, I found myself sitting on the floor, unfortunately on top of my belted right leg. After half an hour in this position that leg went to sleep and I couldn’t feel it at all! So I stood up not knowing if I was going to topple over or not. Soon, the feeling came back and a short time later, at the end of the skits, some seats opened up and I was able to sit down. The Masquerade skits and costumes were quite good on the whole with a minimum of puerile yaoi skits, thank goodness!

I had planned to go to the Saturday night rave, but things were behind schedule and I had absolutely no desire to wait in any more lines. I’d already changed out of the boots and into flats, so walking and standing were no longer problems. I mainly wanted to make sure I didn’t miss my chance to sing. So I spent a big chunk of the night in the karaoke room enjoying the singing of an old con friend and some very very lively young women! I capped off the night with a few hilarious hours watching hentai in the VAT room.

Sunday is usually a sad con day for me because it marks the end of the fun. This Sunday was a little different though because I had a good time getting omiyage (souvenirs) for the family. And I met up with some more con friends that I had been wanting to see. I went to the Laura Bailey panel too. She is a super sweet heart! And at the panel, I met a young lady who I’d seen in Cosplay Shougi the day before, but didn’t have a chance to get a picture then. She sat down right next to me and agreed to pose for the picture below in which she is cosplaying Kuradoberi Jam from the Guilty Gear video game.

I had a great time at Youmacon! But it was time to go home, besides I had gifts for everyone deliver. Hopefully I can go again next year!