Year: 2005

Chrno Crusade

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.

While browsing around the iTMS, trying to find all the latest free songs; I ran across this iMix. It’s a collection of 41 tracks all of which are less than 30 seconds long. As you might know, iTunes allows you to preview 30 seconds of any track in their store. In effect, you get to listen to all of these tracks for free!

Vivid Flower

Recently, I was going through some of my old photos and ran back across this one. I rather liked it, so I decided to toss it up here on my site. That I actually like this photo is a bit of an oddity as I do not usually care all that much for reds or other bright, vivid colors like this. Still, the extreme closeup1, the lines (veins?) on the petals and the pink bits so bright they’re almost silver running across the top of the folds in the petals just really work for me. *shrug* Go figure.

Oh and as long as I’m talking about photos today; I should mention my experience with a Kodak Picture Machine. These are those stations you see in grocery stores and Wal-Marts to make enlargements or whatever from either prints you already have or directly from the digital media that your camera uses. There are a couple of things to keep in mind about these things.

  1. It’s basically an underpowered PC with a fancy interface stuck ontop. So expect it to be slow.2
  2. Enlargments, to 8×10, made from standard prints will look grainy and the colors will be a bit off.
  3. When planning to use the machine, make sure you leave yourself plenty of extra time in case somebody else is using it already. I stood behind another customer for probably 20 minutes or so before I could get up to the machine to use it myself. Oh, how I wish I’d had my iPod on me during that wait!

1 It’s a pretty extreme closeup for my digital camera, though others do have a better macro mode and could get in closer.
2 To be fair, it’s probably not that slow but having to stand there while it does its thing makes it seem extremely slow.

I got my photos back from the film processing lab today and most of them turned out pretty good. Unfortunately, even with my telephoto lens I was too far away for the eagle pictures to turn out really well. You can sort of make out the eagle in a few of the shots, but not enough to make blowing them up worth while. *grumpf* On the bright side, some of the arty pictures turned out acceptably. Now I just have to scan in the best ones for my gallery (and enlargements made for Iwahara-san & Keki-san). I paid the extra cost on the photos to have them go through the Kodak processing instead of the normal Hy-Vee stuff and am I ever glad I did. The last couple of times I sent photos through just Hy-Vee; they came back looking like crap. The photos this time came back looking pretty much like what I saw when I took them (a few were a bit off, but I’m sure that’s my fault).

Oh and the other thing that happened today? I got my kilt & jacket in the mail, complete with the invoice. *urk* The kilt & jacket look great but the invoice is kind of scary. I could pay it off right now from my savings, but I like having a bit of a buffer in there and this would nearly wipe that out. *sigh* I’ve really got to learn to stop spending so much money. Ah well, this is all in a good cause but more info on that will appear on this site in due course. 😀

Update: For the curious, I bought my kilt through the Scots Dragon and the tartan for my kilt is Graham of Menteith.

Recently, I’ve been experiencing some problems getting iTunes & Windows to read/write from/to my iPod. Sometimes, both Windows & iTunes could see it but even then I could only transfer maybe 1 or 2 files before I’d start having problems. And occassionally, Windows should BSOD on me. I started browsing the Apple forums and found out I wasn’t the only one having this problem. But I’ve got an older iPod and my PC has onboard Firewire ports that I use to connect my iPod to. Finding somebody else reporting the exact same problems I was having was simple, but most times the solution mentioned was to switch from using USB connections to Firewire. After some more hunting around in the forums; I noticed that most people recommended using an Adaptec FireConnect 4300 to hook up your iPod to your computer. And yesterday while shopping for my brother’s birthday present at BestBuy; I noticed they had the card in the store. I thought about it but held off; as I hadn’t really tried out GTKPod under my Linux install yet. It started to work but my computer ended up freezing solid. I couldn’t SSH into it or get it to switch to another session to close out and had to power my computer off/on.1

So when that didn’t work; I decided I’d go back to Best Buy and get the card. I am ever glad that I did. Hooking up the iPod to the FireConnect 4300 works like a charm. Neither Windows or iTunes had any trouble reading/writing from/to the iPod and it feels like the music files get transfered over faster too. So if you’re having read/write problems with your iPod and you’re not using an Adaptec FireConnect 4300; buy one now!

1 I don’t blame GTKPod for this, as I’ve heard the 2.6.8 kernel has issues with Firewire drives and I am currently running a 2.6.8 kernel.