Ughhhhh. DO I REALY FEEL LIKE WRITING? Yes I do. Christmas is a wonderful season after – all. Why is it wonderful? ~~~ Things I got for christmas. They say that you can tell a lot about a person from the gifts they receive. Actually, no one says that, but just roll with it. ~~~

Vegabond, volumes 1-3. <- Santa

This was the first thing that caught my eye, it was rather big – after all – and completely unwrapped. With rising wrapping paper costs this season, Santa has had to lay off some of his elves. Manga, huh. Santa reads manga too, you know. I have not started reading it yet, but it looks intersting enough. Just the cover tells me that it might be more manlyness than I can handle, and I am looking forward to it.

BestBuy Gift Card <- Grandma

What would you buy the gods who already have everything? A gift card. What do you buy someone when you don’t really know what they want? A gift card. Never the less, a gift card is just what I need, because it can turn into almost any valuable Item and the batteries are rarely included.

Best Buy Gift Card <- Aunt (B)

See above.

40$ right then <- Grandma

If you want to show someone that you care just give them some money. Bonus points if you hand it right to them. (Inversely, if someone wants to show that they care back – they might try to reject the money. Obviously I am not the caring type)

PortaPros <- Aunt (A)

These are the best freaking cheap headphones I have ever come across. I already have one and a half pairs so this one so the one I just got will be going into storage for the time being.

How do I manage to half half of a pair of headphones? I broke the band that connects the to sides, so I sewed them into a winter hat. The result was glorious! My head stays warm and I get amazing sound quality. I should upload pictures sometime.

Tetris Axis <- Aunt (A)

I fraking love Tetris. Being able  to pop it into my 3DS and play it on something other than my phone will be fantastic. Also, if there is anyone out there who plays Tetris Battle on facebook let me know.

CDr set <- Mom

This is a subtle stab at me taking her cd-r’s all the time to burn off linux distributions for testing. She did get one thing wrong, the CD’s have designs on them – I can’t label them properly if they have designs on them.

Sansa Clip+ <- Dad

I ran my last one though the wash. Let’s hope that I don’t make the same mistake.

I should probably put some of my Christmas money toward an expansion for the player. Like what the living hell >>> http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Class-microSDHC-Flash-Memory/dp/B001F6YRNO <<< That deal looks almost tood good to be true.

Leopold Tenkeyless Keyboard <- Dad

This was a bit of a luxurious item, but I really wanted a tenkeyless keyboard with mechanical switches. Previously I was using a 12 year old Dell Quiet Key – so cut me some slack.

I have a sort of small desk, so a smaller keyboard is ideal. Once again, I should upload pictures sometime.

Tickets to… <- Mom.

ABBA lookalikes
NSO – The music of john Williams

Framed Picture <-Aunt (B)

Christmas is a time for family, don’t you know.

Uniball Pen 1mm <- Santa

What? 1mm? I can’t write with this! It’s too thick! But it writes so smooth~

USB Stick 8GB <- Dad

I have a LOT of USB sicks, but one more can’t possibly hurt. I think I should burn off a little more of my Christmas money for a USB hub – even though I already out a PCI card to add two USB 3.0 ports to my computer.

Stuff is so crammed in there I am afraid to open it up to clean the fan!

~~~ And that is all the stuff I got this Christmas. It is a rather large amount of stuff, isn’t it?

But that is not really what Christmas time is for, is it?

It’s great time to relax with my family, and I can’t really ask for more than that.

I can ask for more than that. I often do.

I found out something interesting the other day and I felt like I should share it, even though it feels like the sort of thing that everyone already knows.

In linux (I think you can pass command line arguments to chrome in windows, but I don’t know how) I would toss together little web apps by running ‘chromium –app=’http://whatever_url.com’

It turns out that there is a much easier way to do this in the tools menu. It works for gnome anyway, I don’t know about KDE or others.

This kind of stuff should really be better advertised. And to think gnome’s half-ass-backwards browser was marketing this sort of thing as a new feature in the current 3.2 release.

I wonder, just how long has that convenient button has been there?

http://www.infoworld.com/t/misadventures/the-2011-infoworld-geek-iq-test-178642?page=0,0

 
I scored a 55. That’s pretty bad.

I am now part of the team over at Daifuuku (http://daifuuku.com/) now so I will be doing episodics from over there from now on.

Which pretty much means that this place will begin to grow cobwebs.

…

I am just being honest, there is no way I will be able to regularly post in both places – I am just not that awesome. But I might put the occasional post up here yet.

Like the occasional technology related post, or manga related thing – or just a rant or two…

Also if I ever get around to actually posting some reviews of anime I watch out of season it’s going here.

But the more I think about not posting here, the more I want to post here – so I will just lean back into cruise and the where this road goes exactly.

This is an uninteresting story of how things could have gone really badly.

So one day I was thinking, “what would be a bad idea?”. The best I could come up with is installing an ssd to replace the terribad hard drive in my netbook.

This is a bad idea for a few reasons. The main three are…

1) Putting a ssd in a netbook? That does not really make sense.

2) With it’s extreme lack of processing power the ssd won’t benefit me as much as if I put it in my desktop.

3) Netbooks are not meant to be up-gradable other than the ram. I had to carefully tear the machine to pieces to get to the hard drive.

Take careful look at the last one. Yea, that means there is a medium to high risk of something breaking during the upgrading process.

I however, being the geek that I am knew exactly what I was doing when I was taking that thing apart down to the tiniest detail. Even how to properly disengage the ribbons for the keyboard and touch-pad and how to move the wifi wires out of the way to get to the screws that hold the the rail that the hard drive is connected to.

So I disassemble and re-assemble, and the machine and quickly install arch linux to the new drive mostly from memory.

And when gnome-shell finishes loading (in less than half the time it usually takes) I notice that the the wifi connections are nowhere to be found.

I flip out man. I nearly toss something out the window.Words can not describe how much distress I was under.

It’s not the first time I have busted wifi on a laptop, I once did it accidentally to another one I was fixing.

And you know, I am pretty sure whatever I did to it voided the warranty. So yea, stress.

Then I force myself to calm down, hell I cant let my self get defeated like this! I boot into an arch live cd to use the hardware information system thing to see if the wireless card is listed – and it is -.

I boot onto the Jolicloud cloud to see if I can get onto the net there and it works. All the way to the net.

Relief. Hardware is fine, just the software is ****** up.

So I must have just installed arch wrong somehow, thank god. In fact, I already have a theory that I broke autodetect when compiling the kernel. EDIT: Derp. Found the problem. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Broadcom_wireless#Wi-Fi_card_does_not_work.2Fshow_up_since_kernel_upgrade_.28brcmsmac.29

Gonna wait for gnome 3.2 to release before I go to re-install. That should be tomorrow I think.

The first thing I have to say is that I am going to do episodics for the fall season. It has been a while since I last did posts episode by episode, so I think that it is about time I get back to it. Also, usually the reason that I am hesitant about doing episodics is because I am afraid that I will get suck doing some show that sucks. But this time there are enough things that are sequels or things I have read the manga that it should not be a problem if I just take the easy way out and choose based on that.

That’s the plan, anyway.

Now about the actual episode…

Good, good, good, good, good.

It feels just as good as the first season. And there is not really a lot to say about that. This episode (I am not sure what exactly preair means) really seemed to focus on the Takanashi small things dynamic. And that’s great, because there is nothing better than watching short people struggle with their height.

I am a tall person. A very horrible tall person. Bleh.

Also I think I figured out why the abnormal, normal person is always in the background. Maya Matsumoto, that is her name. It’s because she might be working part time while the rest of the people there are working full time. After all, she came in midway through the day and was not there during closing time.

I could just be over-thinking this though. Bleh.

Also, the title now has an apostrophe preceding the exclamation marks. Life just keeps on getting better.

So, I just watched Redline for the nth time. It should go without saying that it was pretty good.

I, for some reason, vaguely remember hearing about Redline a long time ago. But then it took a long time for it to come out. At least, that is how I feel.

This is reasonable considering the amount of time and effort they appear to have put into making it. A friend of mine commented of how he could pause the video at any point in time and he could make that into a desktop image.

So yeah, the supreme quality of the animation was nice to look at – especially at glorious blue-ray quality – but honestly I thought the Haruhi movie and the Nanoha movie were even higher up in the beauty scale. Of course I probably think this because the animation style is different, not because the animation was of higher or lower quality – I just did not like the style as much.

One thing that I really noticed was the music. MACHINE HEAAAAAAD!! Yea, I see quite a few people saying how they don’t really like techno, but I am totally cool with just about every type of music except for deathmetal(it really just sounds like painfull noise to me) so natually I realy liked it. Johnny Boya~. Also the ending theme was pretty good, It is a little funny how about how long it took me to actually figure out that the song was in english, and not terribad english either but really great english.

The characters were kinda weak all around, but you can only spend so much time introucing characters in something so short of a movie – and let’s face it, no one really watched that movie for it’s deep, engaging plot-line. And, while at first I was a bit taken aback by the ending of the movie how the two main characters just randomly fell in love – in truth it was a good ending because the action ended the second the race ended and it needed a good way to end it on the ultimate high note.

A few of the scenes that stick out in my mind…

The complete incompetence of the roboworld military was hilarious to watch.

At some point JP’s eyes catch on fire, and I don’t know why.

Lynchman could win these races without his vehicle if he just ran really fast.

Everyone in the races seems to have a pack mentality thing going on – that really is not how you win races.

Other things I can’t remember right now. Grrr…

For anyone who does not know what gimp is… it is the best full featured and FREE image editing program in existence! And no, pirating a copy of Photoshop does not make the program count as free.

Also it works on windows too, just saying.

Oh and guess what? It just got twice as good! I would not have believed it myself had I not pulled gimp-git from the AUR just now.

The one big issue with gimp was always with how it handled toolbars. They would not follow the regular rules of the window manager and would constantly need re-sizing or get lost in the sauce. Also they would prevent you from using maximize properly because the would hover over the sides of the window covering stuff.

Apparently that less than small issue will be resolved with the release of gimp 2.8. Even better news! It should be out by the end of the year.

Of course, if the development track record is anything to go by then we will actually be getting it sometime in 2015, but hay – they try their best.

I had forgotten how much of a fun ride Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei was.

For those that It may concern, my desktop has been tweaked a bit. The gnome-theme has been changed to something just a little more awesome Metacity Mutter theme has been changed to something deliciously simplistic.

Additionally I now have a window list, places menu, better tabbing, and I don’t have ta hold down alt to shut down the computer any more. There are a few more tweaks here and there to help with my workflow, nothing earthshaking. Still one or two things i’d like to fix though. If I right click on somthing in the notification area the menu spawns a few pixels too low, I want to be able to go into activities mode with my 8th mouse button, and want to make the top left hotcorner toggleable somehow.

But that’s another story.

A friend of mine had just recently finished Madoka Magika and I wanted to introduce her to anime that was in the same vain but also matched the type of anime that she likes.

Oh by the way, she friggen loves Madoka Magica, but really that should go without saying.

The two anime that I recommended to her were Clannad (because it is moving and funny – but not at the same time) and Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (Because Shaft and high-tier openings and endings).

In the spirit of things I decided to go rewatch the first episode.

After that I decided to re-watch the second episode, and after that the third episode and in the end I re-watched all three seasons and the five OVAs here and there.

And they were fantastic, just freaking fantastic.

Well to start out, the plot for this anime is just plain genius. It opens to a beautiful spring scene where a lone student finds a man trying to hang himself.

This man turns out to be her schoolteacher.

A man who can only see everything in a negative light. A girl who can only see everything in a positive light. ~ A meeting that was never meant to happen. ~ *que wistful music*

(They actually first met long before this time but you don’t know this yet.)

And that by itself would be fantastic enough, but it gets even better. Every single one of the students in the class is extremely unique in some way. The girl with OCD, the guy who can turn anything into a fairytale story, the shy one  who communicates only through mail, the balding class president that will forever go unnoticed, the girl who appears to be a victim of domestic violence – and many many others. I think it was 32 students in that class, and there are a few in other classes and an ex-student.

Even the few characters outside the classroom are fun.

Each episode satirises some aspect or aspects of Japanese culture or subculture.

These episodes happen after (or perhaps, while) characters are being introduced, but the character introduction episodes are great anyway.

Initially my friend did not like Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (Granted, it did not help that she watched the first episode of the second season first – that episode is kind of creepy and is my least favorite. Half babies hanging from the ceiling can be legitimately traumatizing.), but after convincing her to give it a second try she as admitted that it is the funniest thing she has seen all summer.

And that should be good enough for you to at least give the anime a shot, don’t you think?

Things with a red line through it I am not really interested in.

Things with a red X I am really not interested in.

Things with a green line i am interested in.

Things with checks on them I am definitely watching.

It’s still pretty early in the game and I have not even seen all the trailers yet – so it might change a little bit at time passes.