February 11, 2009

Haruhi sez...

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Worship me!

UPDATE: More pictures below the fold.

more...

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Ai Yori Aoshi -- more grabs

Getting close to the end now. I saw this:

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And my reaction was "Fusion Ho!" (A very obscure reference; I'll be surprised if any of you get it.)

Is it just me, or is the second series more ecchi than the first was?

UPDATE: Also more lolicon. There are now three lolis, and one episode has them in swimsuits the entire time, and one shows them at an onsen.

UPDATE: Speaking of which...

UPDATE: Done completely, and I ended up with 154 grabs total. I won't be able to use all those, probably 135. But that's still a lot. I'm feeling better about this now.

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February 10, 2009

Ai Yori Aoshi -- top rotation

Ordinarily I am really loath to use frame grabs in the top rotation that include guys. But I have to make an exception for these two:

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What's Mayu doing with a figure like that? Somehow I had come away with the idea that she was 12. But I reread the spoilers, and see where I made my mistake. She was 12 when she met Kaoru, back before he left his family. I am not sure how long ago that's been, but probably 4 years, so that makes her high school age -- and makes her figure quite plausible.

UPDATE: Pity I can't use this one:

But there are limits.

UPDATE: This one I will use:

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Ah, Taeko! What indignities have they forced on you?

UPDATE: It really is hard to resist the temptation to gather about a thousand pictures of Taeko, you know that? I just finished the first series, and I've got probably 90 grabs so far and the Majority of those are Tina and/or Taeko. Here's one I can't use:

Pity, isn't it?

UPDATE: I can't use this one, either, but I'll be damned if I'll let it go to waste.

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Sun spots -- goose egg

Is it time to start panicking? (Or to start laughing at believers in anthropogenic global warming?)

Cycle 24 should have begun by now, even according to the pessimistic forecast. There should have been a noticeable rise in sunspots by this point.

But there isn't. It's absolute goose egg. It's been flatlined since last June.

Some people have speculated that we might be going into a solar minimum, like the Maunder Minimum, which correlated with the Little Ice Age.

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Watch where you point those things!

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You could hurt someone!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 03:22 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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February 09, 2009

camera -- macro zoom

I can't believe I missed that this was present: my camera does have a macro mode, and it's pretty darned good, for a cheap camera. Combined with manual exposure control, it's possible to get really quite decent closeups of things even using the flash. I've got four pictures below the fold, as examples.

I believe I'm going to have to read the manual to find out what other things this can do that I wasn't aware of. (I know it can take 640*480 video.)

UPDATE: Two more added.

UPDATE: This camera cost me $130, about. Kodak or Polaroid film cameras from 10-15 years ago, were there any in this price range which had remotely this kind of feature set and image fidelity? Not even close! It's no wonder digital cameras have long since killed off film for consumer use -- and for most other photography, too. Film is a niche now, and it's a niche that's continuing to shrink.

UPDATE: They did considerably improve the lenses in the newer version. In my L-18 the macro mode is limited to a range of 6 inches. In the L-19 it's 2 inches.

more...

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Lust for toys

So a while back I bought a cheap camera, partially expecting it to be a tryout where I'd figure out what I like and what I want different.

I've been really happy with the Nikon Coolpix L-18, but in fact I have found one thing I wish I had: a macro focus mode, to allow me to take closeup pictures of very small things.

So I wondered if it was possible to fit a macro lens into this kind of pocket format, and I just now visited the Nikon site to see what they had.

And it turns out there's a new model, called S620. There's also the S630. That one's got a 7X zoom, which is cool. But its minimum focusing distance is 24 inches, and using a zoom lens from away just isn't the same as using a macro lens.

I've been doing that with my current camera. The problem is that when you're in zoom mode, light gathering suffers, and my camera starts using the flash, which often I don't want. And even in that mode I can't get as narrow a field of view as I really want. Also, the camera shifts the CCD down into low-light mode, so the images are grainy.

Anyway, the S620 only has a 4X zoom, but that is still better than the 3X zoom on my current camera. And it says this about focusing range:

Approx. 1 ft. 8 in. (50cm) to infinity, Macro close-up mode: 0.8 in. (2cm) to infinity.

I do believe we have a winner. I guess next time I go to Fred's I'm going to have to check the camera section and see if they have it. The MSRP is only $270.

The only thing about it I don't care for is that it uses a rechargeable battery instead of AA's. That was one of the things I really liked about my current camera. but it's not really a big deal, and in every other regard it's what I think I want next.

UPDATE: Of course, maybe I should get this one instead. It's half the price, focuses down to 2 inches, and runs off AA cells.

Looks like they added macro mode to the cheap line just after the one I bought. Man, if only I had procrastinated a bit longer...

UPDATE: Wait a minute. I just checked the manual, and my current camera has a macro mode. It's just that you have to manually enable it.

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Vista -- patches result

So a couple of months ago I triumphed over my fear and installed a year's worth of Vista patches, including SP1. That also included a year's worth of patches to IE.

As to Vista, frankly I haven't really noticed any difference. Whatever they were doing, it was under the hood. The IE patches didn't seem to add any features, either, but now IE tends to behave strangely some of the time.

There are two failure modes. In one of them, it locks up and goes completely CPU bound. This is a dual-CPU system, so I can still interact, but it's still a bit creepy when suddenly the CPU cooling fan shifts up and starts running as fast as it can.

The other mode is more common but just as annoying. IE locks up cold, again, and ignores all input including mouse clicks, but the CPU doesn't get hammered. The only way I've found to kill it is to use the task manager. This happens to me several times per week, and it's really a pain. And it doesn't correlate to visits to particular sites. (Nor, please, do I need any suggestions or advice on this subject.)

On balance I've found Vista to be serviceable. I suspect that XP would consume less CPU and less HD space, but I've got both to spare and it hasn't been so piggy as to be unpleasant.

So it hasn't really been substantially worse than XP. And it hasn't really been better, either. there are things they added in Vista, but I don't use any of them, and I've got most of them shut down. The Macified OS graphic gimcracks, for example.

Based on my experience, Vista doesn't deserve the bad rep it's got in some circles. But it isn't anything special, either. If you have XP on your system and it works, there's no compelling case to be made for upgrading.

I've been reading a bit about Windows 7, and everything I've seen makes it sound even less appealing to me. Microsoft's biggest competition has always been older versions of their own products, and when it comes to operating systems they've pretty much run out of worthwhile additions, and have taken to adding crap and frippery just to differentiate the new ones from the old.

We've reached the "tail fins and chrome" stage.

UPDATE: Originally it was planned that the big deal in Vista was going to be the new filesystem, which used a relational database for its file index. But they ended up postponing that. Is it expected to be in Windows 7, or was it postponed again? Or did they scrap it entirely?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 05:46 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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Three weeks

So our new President has been in office for three weeks, and how does he look so far?

Like a man in deeply over his head. He looks inept. He looks underqualified. He looks like someone who isn't prepared for the job he's supposed to be doing. He's been making mistakes, lots of mistakes.

He looks like someone who is waiting for someone else to tell him what he should be doing. He looks like someone who expected to be a figurehead, with all the real work being done by his advisors.

comments disabledUnfortunately, what he looks like is an affirmative action hire*, in the worst sense of that phrase, and I really wish it weren't so.

If he doesn't get hold of himself soon, we're all going to be in deep trouble. The President of the United States doesn't get to vote "present".

(*Back in the 1970's, "affirmative action hire" was a term used for someone who was hired to satisfy a quota, without regard to their qualifications.)

UPDATE: Standup comedians say, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."

For politicians, criticizing is easy. Making promises is easy. Leadership is hard. This country elected a politician. Now it needs a leader, and so far it doesn't look like we have one.

I do hope he gets his act together, sooner rather than later.

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February 08, 2009

Shin, god?

I'm rewatching Macademi Wasshoi, because I have in mind to do a TMW about it and I'm preparing my thoughts.

Listening to it, there's a word stem they use, shin it sounds like to me, which they're using to mean "god". For example, at one point they refer to shinkai to makai and it means "the realms of the gods and demons."

makai is perfectly fine; I've run into it before. (That's the name of the place Glenda comes from in Petite Princess Yucie, for example.)

é­” ma means "demon".
界 kai means "world"

But I've been burning up the dictionaries tonight and I cannot identify any kanji or any other use of shin that means anything remotely like "god" or "deity" or "angel". The only word I know for that is 神 kami which they aren't using.

Anyone care to give me a hand here? What am I missing?

UPDATE: And no sooner do I post this than I find the answer. shin is one of the pronunciations of 神. How common is it?

So shinkai would be 神界. I wonder why they're using shin exclusively in this instead of kami?

UPDATE: I was wrong. They also use kami in some cases.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 08:41 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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