Found via Danny Choo

Killer Rabbits 2.0 © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Good grief! The lines for registration were insane and stretched around practically the entire hotel.
• That many people in one place, even a place with excellent A/C, stink! Seriously the funk around those lines was as bad as most cons on Sunday and this was only the first day.
• With registration so backed up most early panels were empty, which was really good as from what I was hearing most didn’t start on time anyway.
• The hotel was gorgeous and much better laid out for the con, excluding that con-com put the consuite on the 8th floor. Also, paid parking sucks but Ariesna & I got lucky and found a free spot.
• The con ran a blood drive in cooperation with a local blood bank. I donated and it was kind of fun seeing how the medical staff were reacting to the con-goers. Some were interested, some ignored them and some looked confused.
• Driving back in the next morning, our free parking spot was still empty. Wahoo!
• This year’s dealer’s room was huge. Unfortunately, the number of dealers was not as large as it initially appeared as the artist’s alley was in the middle of the room.
• Though that was cool for the artists and not bad for the con-goers.
• The dealer’s room had a decent selection of merchandise. I filled in some missing discs of R.O.D. TV and Ariesna got a doll she’s been looking for. Still there was considerable overlap in the merchandise between boths, not surprising but not pleasing either.
• A larger number of con-goers were costumes this year¹. Good! A good portion of them had giant sized weapons (ala Final Fantasy) and the costumers didn’t really know how to handle their props safely. Bad!
• Once the con-goers were more spread out; the funk in the air lessened somewhat. Though you could still tell where the A/C was weakest by the strength of the funk.
• Watched some excellent anime in the Natsukashii video room, heard it was the best video room at the con.
• I saw a dealer selling large, wooden paddles. Weird! Later noticed the goobers who bought them spanking one another with them in the halls. Bad! I also noticed they didn’t pay much attention to their surroundings, and so were constantly in danger of hitting people who did not want to be hit. Very bad!
• AI’s idea of a fansubbing panel was to have an industry shill sit up in front of an audience and tell us all the ways people can pay to watch anime rather than downloading the fansubs. Seriously, odds are this guy would have never heard of anime if people hadn’t started fansubbing it and all he can do is sit up there babbling on how people who download fansubs are all thieves. Note: It is possible that the panel discussion actually had something useful in it later on; however I grew sufficiently discontent with it that I left after listing to ~20 minutes of this nonsense.
  

¹ I also found this somewhat depressing as nothing like this exsisted when I was the same age as these kids and there were a fair number of attractive, young ladies in rather interesting costumes. Which had I been single and of the same age (or at least close to) I would have enjoyed making their acquaintance.

AnimeIowa 2007 © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I did get one break since my last real post and that was last weekend’s AnimeIowa. I was rather disappointed with this year’s con. The programming track was only sparsely filled and I didn’t see anything in it that interested me¹. So I mostly hung out with people I knew at the con and tried to help out the con photographer². Mostly, I just helped tear-down/setup his gear in different rooms. *shrug* It was no big deal and I got to see pretty much all of the costumes. As usual, some were fabulous and some were.… not. Of course some of the best were in the Masquerade, and the Masquerade was the main reason we went this year. A friend of ours was in charge of it and overall it appeared to go fairly well. However there were a few problems; most of which I did not hear about until after the con was over. The main thing that I noticed was the costumers wouldn’t shut up. It may seem a bit harsh, but they all know they’re supposed to keep quiet while in the green room and we had to constantly go around asking them to be quiet throughout the whole Masquerade. *sigh* If you know the rules in advance, have them re-explained to you when you show up shortly before the Masquerade then why do you have to continually break them? *grrr*

As for the rest of the con, the dealer’s room was smaller this year and unless you wanted Naruto or Full Metal Alchemist merchandise; you were pretty much out of luck. Since they didn’t have as many dealers; the con-com put the Artists’ Alley inside the dealer’s room. This was a bright idea and I ended up buying some magnets from the guy who does the FAUB webcomic. I was not familiar with the webcomic prior to this year’s AnimeIowa but I really liked the artwork in the magnets and have since read through their entire archive of webcomics and added it to my Portal page.

I didn’t have much desire to go into any of the video rooms, but I did find one playing Bubblegum Crisis which was kind of nice. Though I didn’t get to stay around long as that was just before I had to help Wookie move his gear from the hall cosplay judging room to the green room for the Masquerade.

All in all, it was a disappointing weekend. *shrug* Oh well, can’t win ‘em all.

In more current news, I’ve finally gotten caught up in listing to all the podcasts I’ve downloaded. It’s nice to listen to them and actually hear other people’s thoughts on current events while the events are still current. Along those lines, the jazz mashup from the episode# 240 of the Daily Source Code was extremely cool. Anyway, that’s all I’ve got time to write for now.

¹ I should say nothing on Saturday or Sunday as I wasn’t there Friday.
² Wookie comes to the con and takes pictures of all the Hall Cosplay entries & after the con puts them on a site where people can order prints if they want them. Also, Wookie’s a fun guy to hang around the con with.

Quick Update © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

One of the many lovely gifts that Ariesna and I received for our wedding was a Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G router.¹ Since a wireless router is useless without something to connect to it; I went out and picked up a Linksys WPC54GS Wireless-G Notebook Adapter. Since I was still kind of dazed from the whole wedding/honey-night experience; I didn’t stop to check whether the router had SpeedBooster and if I could get the card online for much cheaper than I could in the store.² I had cash in my pocket and techno-lust burning in my heart. I bought the card, took it home and immediately started mucking about with my laptop to try to get it to work. In a previous fit of whimsey, I had wiped M$ Windows from my laptop and replaced it with SuSE 9.0 Pro. Since APT is such a wonderful thing, I used it to keep SuSE updated; rather I used it to update SuSE on the laptop whenever I booted it up to use it. So the first thing I tried doing in my quest to get wireless networking running on my laptop was to run APT and grab all the latest stuff for SuSE 9.0.

For the first time ever, APT let me down and in doing so it let me down badly. Something in my xserver configuration (or maybe the startup scripts) got hosed. I fiddled with it for a couple of days, but had no luck in correcting the problem. I could work around it, but not fix it. Once I got to that point, I tried to load some missing software I needed to get the wireless card to work, but the software was not listed in the APT repositories I was using. This is especially problematic as the CD-ROM in this laptop tends to be very flakey, so I couldn’t hope to go back to my original CDs and load it from there. In the meantime, I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu (Hoary 5.04). I did this planning on borrowing the modular CD-ROM drive of a co-worker with the same ancient Dell laptop to replace SuSE on my laptop (if all else failed). Tonight, I was home alone and annoyed that I still didn’t have my wireless network up & running. So I ran over to Best Buy, picked up a spindle of CD-Rs, burned Ubuntu to disc and tried installing it.

Much to my utter amazement and total surprise, my laptop decided that it liked this burned CD and allowed me to install Ubuntu without error. It took several hours to do it, but eventually I was looking at an incredibly ugly Ubuntu desktop. This struck me as odd, but then I realized it was displaying at 800x600 when my laptop’s native resolution is 1024x768. So a bit of googling later and a quick run of: sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and I was looking at the very pretty version of Ubuntu’s desktop. About an hour later, after following these directions in the NdisWrapper wiki, and I have wireless networking running on my laptop. Now I just need to look into a 2nd battery for the laptop so I can have be a bit further away from the wall socket than my power cord lets me go. Still, it’s so very nice not having to sit in my lousy desk chair to do some work on the computer. It’ll be even nicer when I can put the funds together to build a MythTV box for the living room to watch all my anime with. :)

Updated 2005-05-27, 19:55 GMT-06:00: I noticed a typo in the dpkg-reconfigure command above, so I’ve edited this post to correct it.

¹ Yes, I do realize that considering this a lovely gift puts me completely and forever in the “geek” category,
² The answers to those questions were: No and Yes.

Sweet, Sweet Wireless Internet © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Of course, staying home to fix my computer means I missed another Mindbridge meeting but I doubt they’ll really miss me there as usually I just sit there silently. Hopefully next month, I’ll be able to make it to a meeting again And come to think of it, I probably won’t make it to next month’s meeting as that’s awful close to my wedding day. *shrug* You win some, you lose some.

¹ Usually, it’s up & running either grabbing new, fansubbed anime via BitTorrent or transcoding video files for burning to disc.

Back in Business! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

One of the great advantages of having a broadband internet connection and fat hard drives; is the ability to download large quantities of stuff and then do something with it later. One of the things I like to do is download the latest/greatest fansubbed anime; however my schedule is such that it is much easier for me to download it than it is to watch it. I finally got around to watching an one of the older series that I had sitting on my hard drive. And tonight, I figured I’d finish off the series; unfortunately, fate decided that such was not to be.

I’d watched through sixteen episodes prior to this even and tonight I made it happily through another six. The plot was building, you could see that the final battle of Good vs. Evil would happen very soon. Then upon starting episode twenty-three; I learned that life is a funny old thing. Funny like a broken arm that is. My copy of episode twenty-three turns out to be a fansub done by a French group. ARRRRGGGGGHHHH! It’s been over 10 years since I took a French class! I could sort of understand what was going on but not much more than I would have gotten if the episode had not been subtitled. Then to add insult to injury; 23 was not the final episode! ARRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!

So if any of my friends out there have the final episodes of this series, can I borrow them from you? I know the series is really all that wonderful but the artwork is kind of nice and having sat through 23 episodes; I’d really like to see the finale.

Chrno Crusade © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Still, today’s not been all bad. While searching for book 2; I did run across some Discworld books that I’d forgotten I had and those will give me something to read for the next couple of days. Maybe even enough to get me through to the weekend, when I might rip the house apart to find book 2. *shrug* I hate having to stop reading in the middle of the series. Particularly, when I know I have the next book. But I’m trying to focus on the good things about today here; so that’s enough of that. Umm, tonight was the monthly Mindbridge meeting. It appears now that I have officially taken over their webmaster duties. Spif. Now I just need to finalize our plans regarding the hosting and what I’ll be basing their site on. As mentioned in previous postings, their current site is a nightmare of M$ FrontPage generated vomit and since I’m a lazy git; I want to implement a CMS. Of course, I also need to know what all they want out of the site and if they want to merge their Yahoo! group into the real site or to keep that seperate. It’ll be a lot of work, but I’m oddly looking forward to it, even –and this is the kicker– in my *grumpf* mood. Anyway, that’s enough for tonight; so good night inkernet  vast repository of porn  all you people out there in TV land. Ah screw it, stop reading this drivel and go get yourself some sleep.

¹ I’m not really going to get into it further here; as I need to keep my job. So let is suffice to say some people have left the company recently due to changes that are a result in the company having been bought out. I respect their decision and somewhat wish I could take the moral high ground with them. However, I’m in a 2 person household with a 1 person income and plenty of bills; so that’s not really an option for me. *grumpf*
² Sometimes I surf the internet. Other times I play video games. Occassionally I’ll watch some anime, but lately I’ve been really enjoying kicking up my feet and reading in peace & quiet. *sigh*

Grumpf © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Fansub — short for “fan subtitled”; a copy of a foreign movie or television show (most often anime) which has been subtitled by “fans” into their native language. This has been done to provide shows that would otherwise be unavailable in one’s native language, but with the growth in the popularity of anime, fansubs’ purpose has expanded to include programs that would be commercially unviable (I.e. older or niche appeal market titles.) in one’s country or simply to reduce the amount of time one would wait to see a particular program. Also, many American anime viewers feel there is too much censorship of anime broadcast on TV, especially in scenes related to nudity, which is common in Japan (even in children’s shows) but is typically considered inappropriate in the United States.

I mostly get my fansubs from online sources via BitTorrent¹. This allows me to:

• Judge if a series will be worth the money to buy once a U.S. distributer starts selling it here.
• See some of those niche shows that no distributer will bring over.

Given that I quite often am not fond of the “mainstream” anime that is brought over and that my budget is limited; being able to view the series completely via fansubs is a vital part of my process for deciding what series I will buy. If the anime studios force the fansubbers to stop their work; then I’ll be forced to spend my money elsewhere. Harsh, but I’ve already bought my share of crappy anime and I’m not willing to shell out ~$20/disc in the hopes that a given series won’t suck.

Oh and in case you were curious, this article over on C|Net prompted my post.

¹ If you’re interested in more info on this; leave a comment and I’ll see about writing something up.

Don’t take away my fansubs! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Still, being home all day gave me a chance to catch up on watching some of the anime I’ve been downloading. Some of it’s good and some of it’s not, which means I’ve got more to watch but I’ve also deleted some to free up drive space. More free drive space, means I can download more newer stuff. :)

In other news, one of my slightly, older posts has been getting a bit of attention from somebody out there. I guess I’ll have to keep watching that post to see how the discussion goes.

Fah © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• It’s a Mac and it’s affordable.
• If it’s really as quiet as they’re saying; it could make a great computer to put next to the TV, for watching video files off my server¹.
• It’s smaller than the phone on my desk at work!
• Did I mention it’s affordable?

Of course, these products have only just been announced and aren’t available just yet. Not that I’ve got the money to buy either one right now. *sigh*

¹ For the record, those video files are episodes of fan-subbed anime that haven’t been licensed in the US yet.

Mac Mini © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.