Tag: coffee

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.

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.

Wet Leaf

Ariesna and I went out walking today. Partly because I have a couple dozen rolls of unused film collecting dust, but mostly because AWelkin will get a chance to see Iwahara-san & Keki-san at a conference this month. Why is that important? Well, they were fabulous to all of us who went on the trip to Japan last summer that I feel the need to extract some hospitality vengeance upon them. 😀

Around 1pm, we headed out and started today’s walking/photography adventures. We went over to the Iowa River & Power Company’s parking lot and I started taking pictures of the river, some trees the remains of the dam1. However the main reason we were there is I’d heard from a co-worker that there’s a big nest of eagles in that area. We’d probably been there about half an hour without seeing anything when some other people came up with binoculars. From what we could overhear them saying; they were coming to try and see the eagles too. So I asked them about the eagles and they pointed the nest out to us2. We chatted with them for a couple of minutes and they mentioned some other areas around town we could go to look for eagles. Then we started walking away and spotted an eagle a bit further up the river. I probably shot 15-20 pictures using my 35mm camera and I know some of them weren’t focused that well. Hopefully, at least one or two will turn out nicely. We left shortly after that and went to a couple of the parks over in Iowa City and then down by the Iowa River and the UofI’s Art museum. It was a lot more walking than we usually do, but it was a good time.

I only ended up using about 2 rolls of film (~50 total photos) but I also took some shots with my digital camera. The image attached to this post (and now added to the Gallery) was the last photo I took today, as we walked back to the car. I’m starting to feel a bit tired, so that’s all for now.

1 They’ve torn a good chunk of it down, but I’m pretty sure the plan is to rebuild it.
2 To give credit where credit is due, Ariesna had spotted it but from the description I’d gotten; I told her that was too small to be it. Besides, we hadn’t seen any eagles near it or anywhere on the river.

Solar System Chocolates

I saw this article posted over at Boing Boing and I have to say these look much cooler than any chocolates that I’ve ever gotten1 for Valentines day. Fortunately2, the site Boing Boing links doesn’t appear to have any sort of order form that I can figure out or find; so I don’t think I’ll actually be getting them. Still they do look yum!

1 They’re also cooler than any that I’ve ever given out for Valentines day.
2 Some of us are hoping we’ll lose a bit of weight this year and eating a box of these wouldn’t help.