Kaz's Rants and Reviews

1:01am: Last.fm...
I've been using Last.fm for a long time. One problem just keeps cropping up with it, along with others. Bands with the same name are irrevocably lumped together never to be separated out.

Last time it was Goner, where a one-track-band made a single track and posted it up to last.fm, and managed to take over the entry for a band which had 3 whole albums out.

This time I ran into the fact that there are two bands named Pollyanna. Unlike last time though, I like both of the bands... But it would be nice if you could really split their songs up properly. All this time I was listening to a french band wondering why their later stuff sounded so far away from their early stuff as an Australian band.

Emusic even gets their bands mixed up like this. There's a CD for the Australian Pollyanna mixed in with a bunch for the French Pollyanna, and also a bunch of new stuff from a new band named Buck along side the old Lisa Marr band Buck...

I guess people that listen to major label stuff don't have to worry as much as the lawyers get deeply involved and chase people off the names...

1:20pm: PS3's
Here's a note to anyone who owns a PS3 or PSP.

If you haven't played it already, go buy Grandia from the PSN store. It's a bit dated, but it still rates as one of the best games released for the PS1. $10 is a steal compared to what I paid for it on Ebay. The battle system is really what makes it good. It's not a time-sensitive battle system, but it is time dependent. It pauses for you to make your moves, then times down for you to execute them. Attacks delay enemies, and critical attacks when an enemy is charging up an attack can cancel their moves entirely. It makes for a very strategic type of gameplay, trying to time everything just right, but at the same time it gives you time to think things through. It's made by the same team that made the Lunar games that were wildly popular. They bulid on and really improve lunar's battle system.

(If I didn't have a PS3 or PSP, I'd buy one just for this game. That's just me though. I'm a Grandia series fanatic. ;)

3:58pm: Multimedia Completion, February
Another month, another small stack of things finished.

Books:

5. Cross the Stars. David Drake dips into the Hammers slammers universe to try and mimic the Odyssey. *shrug* It was annoying at points, had a decent enough ending though.

6. Neptune Crossing. First book from Jeffrey Carver that I've read. I'll have to read more. Was interesting. A guy who formerly interfaced with computers to pilot shuttles is crippled by incompetent doctors and loses his link, and thus he frequently drops into a state of disconnection from the world... encountering an alien who wants to ride around in his head.

Games.

1. FF2. 21 hours, seemed awfully abbreviated. The beginning of actual storylines in FF games.

Videos.

Lots of videos this month, mostly very short...

4. Doctor Who: The Rescue. Their first attempt at introducing a new companion for the doctor. Not horrible.

5. Doctor Who: The Web Planet. Alien tale with multiple warring aliens on a planet. Mostly horrible.

6. Doctor Who: The Time Meddler. Fun episode, I wish I hadn't missed the ones between the web planet and the time meddler though.

7. Doctor Who: Lost in Time (Hartnell): They give you the audio to fill in the gaps on one of the series, but they didn't on the other 2 that are included. I think it would have been better with this.

8. Doctor Who: The War Machines: A bit choppy in places where some of the images were missing, the insertion of unrelated imagery was jarring. I thought the episode was meant to be that way and it was the fault of poor directing and camera work until I watched the part where it mentioned how they were reconstructed, then it made sense... The storyline was amusing enough.

9. Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury. Probably not the best movie to start watching Riddick. 30 minutes long and pretty much relies on you having seen the first movie... I guess I should go back and watch the first one now.

10. The Sky Crawlers: Looks really good, aside from some early shots where they were going "Look, we can have 2d characters interacting with the 3d environment!" It has some jarring transitions, the air combat is all 24fps and smooth. The initial ground stuff was 12fps, even for the 3d elements. It seemed like it got less noticeable at the end. Air combat was also in english, whereas the rest of the movie was in japanese. As for the storyline, think Roman Colosseum in aircraft.

6:50pm: Great post
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918

I love it when someone will peel back the layers of what's going on and tell you something in depth like this. This alone is enough to make me start following his blog. I've been thinking of getting a Chumby unit for quite awhile, and this helps a bit as well knowing how much research they're putting into these things.

3:06am: Displayport
http://www.pcworld.com/article/142270/dells_displayport_folly.html

I ran into this article when searching for more information on DisplayPort.

Needless to say, I disagree with him. HDMI is not a technology for computers to use, it's made for HDTVs, and because of such it has limitations when used on computers and computer monitors. One such that many monitors have is that even if the monitor is 1920x1200, it will max out at 1920x1080 on HDMI and can only attain its full resolution with DVI. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem I'll admit, but DisplayPort is already landing on many computers including my own with my new HD5870 card. There are 61 cards for sale on Newegg that have this technology including cards all the way down to $53 and going all the way up to $830 dual-core 5970 monsters. There's only a few monitors out there that support it, but that should go up as computers all across the spectrum start having these ports built in. They're already present in some corporate thin-client units.

There's a small premium to buying a monitor now with DisplayPort, but the same was true when monitors first came out with DVI ports compared to VGA. It's an economy of scale thing. VGA only LCDs were more complex and expensive to produce than DVI only LCDs, but there wasn't as much of a market at first so the price was higher. DisplayPort LCDs will be even simpler than DVI only ones and will ultimately be the same price or cheaper.

He dismisses the daisy chaining technology saying that DisplayLink for USB already does that, but neglects to mention that DisplayLink doesn't really handle high speed graphics or decent 3d acceleration. With a good video card and DisplayPort, you could do a number of monitors all with full 3d accel and a single cable going out, greatly reducing cable clutter. That's not to say DisplayLink is a bad standard, but it's not meant for anywhere near the same market as DisplayPort. It's best for small embedded systems and little auxiliary monitors that don't need to be updated very quickly, and it should shine in that market range.

They may not be smart in removing dvi and hdmi from monitors coming out now, but it wouldn't be hard to see that in 5 years, the vast majority of the hardware now out will be obsolete and on its way to the dustbin, while most new systems will have these ports built in.

VESA is a respected standards organization dating back to the DOS days. They are the ones who standardized VGA and video higher than VGA for use in DOS, and had many other standards that were relatively widespread back in the day. The path they've taken with getting it into most computers before really pushing it to monitors is a good one, and should lead to this thing at least being common, if not ubiquitous in the next decade.

5:30pm: A feature to stabilize the image, or planned obsolescense?
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/04/panasonic-cops-to-rising-black-levels-in-its-plasma-hdtvs-but-q/

A feature that made the black level brighter over time on plasma TVs was miscoded and does it faster than it is supposed to, causing black level problems with older plasma TVs.

Now the question is, is it really necessary for them to do this, or is this a planned obsolescence feature to make new TVs appear more attractive when they come out?

1:52am: Multimedia Completion
Short one this month, didn't get much done.

Books:
1. Doc Sidhe. Basic premise, what if all those old irish and other folk tales had some basis in reality, in an alternate world with limited capability of travel back and forth? Drop one or two humans into the fairy world, and watch League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-esque hijinks ensue. I admit, I randomly picked this one for the first book of the year because it was the shortest one in my stack...

2. A Logic named Joe. Great short story collection. Went from the shortest to the longest in my stack. I really need more of the old science fiction like this, It seems so hard to find good ones like this though.

3. Far side of the Stars. Another one of Drake's Cinnibar Navy books. Always fun.

4. N-Space. Niven's collection of random tales from conventions and meetings with other interesting people, combined with assorted selections from his novels and many interesting short stories. Recommended.

Games:
I haven't finished any yet this year. :(

Videos:
1. Pi. I was hoping for something more like Primer. Instead I get an artsy descent into paranoia and insanity. Maybe that's what the two letters in the title stand for.

2. Doctor Who: The Romans. Very funny episode dealing with rather serious subject matter.

3. Grave of the Fireflies. You know when your main character dies in the first 5 minutes and meets up with the ghost of his sister it is going to be an uplifting and enjoyable movie... ( Minor spoilers... )

1:35pm: Two cautionary things about Nelnet
I sure was younger and stupider back when I was a college student. Because of this, I collected a nice cautionary tale for anyone going to college now. Collegeinvest was the company that did my student loans way back when, towards the end of the time I had their loan, they switched to using an external processing company, Nelnet, to handle their billing. My interest rate was 5% but I had a 1% reduction for paying on time every month. Collegeinvest kept trying to get me to consolidate, but I was a bit paranoid about it because they weren't listed anywhere on my loan statements, the papers were covered with mentions of Nelnet instead. My interest rate went up twice in the course of 2 years, so I decided it was time to consolidate before it went even higher.

So I instead went with Nelnet. The consolidation process was easy, but the person handling the loan told me that my 1% reduction couldn't be carried over, but they would give it back to me if I paid on time for a year. Here's the two cautionary bits. Never believe what a loan officer tells you. Read the contract, and keep the contract where you can easily reference it.

I've pretty much lost all of my old paperwork in the move from the old house, and I didn't check at the time to make sure that 1% was in there. I was assured by the loan officer though. If they hadn't, I wouldn't have gone with their consolidation loan. I remember clearly having that as part of the deal. A year after I consolidated? They sold the loan to US Bank and no hint of the 1% reduction is present. I called nelnet recently (I'm very busy most of the time, this is years later and I was calling them about something else) and they said that the 1% was not part of the loan, and don't know why the person told me it was. Obviously they either reworked something when they sold it, or the loan officer lied to get their commission... but the lesson stands. Never sign anything unless you read through it and make sure that everything they're telling you is in the actual contract, then KEEP the contract so they can't say that it is otherwise later. Especially when dealing with scum like Nelnet.

7:58pm: Buying a TV card.
I went back into the market for a new TV card recently. My trusty old WinTV Theater from Hauppauge was nowhere to be found, and I was tired of my huge old clunky 720p 27 inch TV. Reading the reviews though makes me realize how much confusion there is about what kind of TV cards exist, and what their purpose is.

1. Old style SD Analog framebuffer card. This is what I want. It just captures from Svideo, composite, and NTSC signals and sends them across to the computer raw. Pros: Fast speed, no latency. Cons: No built in encoding, uses lots of bus resources. Modern day purpose: Old video game consoles, from the Magnavox all the way to the Nintendo Wii, if you want to play them on a computer monitor, this is the card to get. If you're trying to make your own TIVO though, these are useless.

2. SD Analog Encoder/PVR card. These are the second generation of analog cards. Svideo, Composite, and NTSC, just like above. Instead of sending the raw picture though, they encode it, typically into MPEG2, before sending it to the processor. This makes it so recording is a snap. Just stream the data straight to the hard drive. Pro: Doesn't use much in the way of bus resources or processor. Con: Adds a good half second of latency before you see the picture. Modern day purpose: DVR for standard definition on Cable or Satellite. Useless for gaming.

3. ATSC/QAM capture cards. These are electrically the simplest of all 3 of the types of card. ATSC and QAM are already passing digital data, making these little more than a glorified wireless receiver card. The data is already MPEG2, they just pass it along. Pros: Records off the air HDTV, and unencrypted Cable TV. Cons: Can't record any analog sources or HDMI, nor encrypted digital, nor Component. Modern Use: Over the air HDTV TIVO or limited Cable TIVO, when paired with #2 above.

4. Component Capture Cards. These are the most complex of the types as they have to record HDTV in at least 720p and encode it into MPEG2 or another format on the fly. They're also still exceedingly rare. Pros: Capture Hi Def video game footage and anything from a component video source. Cons: Adds latency to signal, Expensive, poorly supported. Modern Use: High Def Satellite and Cable DVR, and capturing video game footage (but not watching it live, it adds latency.)

There are potentially other kinds of cards, such as a component raw capture card, or a DVI or VGA capture card, but I haven't seen any examples of these in the consumer market, only in high end products.

Straight #1 and straight #2 are very hard to come by these days. They are almost always paired with #3 above. 1/3 combos are also getting pretty rare. 2/3 is the most common card around currently. I ended up buying a ATI 650 card thinking that it would be a 1/3 and useful for gaming, but the reviewers were wrong. It's a pure 2/3 card. Finally, I searched for an available analog card and found the MSI TV@nywhere card that is supported in linux and a #1 card.

I'll have to post how well it works later.

3:40pm: Multimedia Completion December.

Books:

#28: Baen's Universe 2-5: The SciFi portion of this one was the best Baen's Universe I've ever read.. I may update this in the comments, no time right now.

#29: Baen's Universe 2-6: This one was a bit Ho-Hum compared to 2-5.

Games:

#5: Disgaea 2: About 35 hours and also a lot of fun. I wouldn't have beaten it so fast without the DLC.
#6: Fallout 3 & DLC: 136 Hours total. X_x Lots of fun, lots of bugs.
#7: Pixeljunk Shooter: Very short, but interesting while it lasted.

Video:

#49: Heroes Season 2: This show keeps getting grayer and grayer. Awfully short season. Interesting though.

#50: Visioneers: An interesting idea told in a boring manner.

#51: Dr. Strangelove: Rather amusing and silly.

#52: UHF: Less amusing, but still silly. It had a few good moments. Like drinking from the firehose...

#53: Barton Fink: High concept film about those on the left who claim to speak for the little guys.

#54: THX 1138: Surprised I didn't see this one before. A future film with a mild difference. Religious nutjobs combined with complete control of the populace by the government. All people mostly playing the role of good little drones.

#55: Paycheck: I was pleasantly surprised by this one, given that Matt Damon's little buddy Ben Affleck in the lead role usually doesn't make for a good film. It seemed to get bad reviews on most sites, but I still enjoyed it.

#56: Smart People: A show about people who are fairly smart making fairly dumb choices, as is the norm. (Smart in one area, dumb in others.)

9:44am: Multimedia Completion November
Books:

#26: Course of Empire. Take Eric Flint's political intrigue and KD Wentworth's fuzzy aliens with interesting cultures, and you have a fun little alien invasion tale. It's very long, but worth it.

#27: Baen's Universe 2-4: Laws of Survival was interesting. Aliens come to earth to collect dogs because they think they're intelligent, but finds that none of them behave as they do in the TV shows. Misfits is a Liaden story of a weather specialist. Fossilized Gods started really slow, but had some funny moments and ended well. Second Banana was a fun little metal-gear-solid sort of thing. Countdown to Armageddon continues to be interesting. I really enjoyed Inheritance, but then again, I really enjoy getting in the head of machine intelligences.

Games:
#4: Mana Khemia. Fun, but rather long...

Videos:

#39: The Big O Season 1. Interesting concept, but it didn't really seem to go anywhere. Kind of like a japanese Batman...

#40: Lord of the Rings: Fun series, perhaps doesn't follow the book as well as it could.

#41: Doctor Who: The Next Doctor. I really enjoyed this and can't wait for the next few episodes... Hope they come out over here soon.

#42: Chrno Crusade: No relation to Chrono trigger or chrono cross, even though the US logo was redesigned to match it. The series wasn't bad, but wasn't really great either. The whole 20's slang thing was fun. Basically, it's a story of a militant order of nuns and priests using guns to fight demons.

#43: The Last Exile. This one was a lot of fun, basically a story of a couple of courier pilots that get involved in a war that ultimately changes the whole world. Reminded me of Grandia 3 a lot.

#44: Heroes Season 1: Not your typical superhero show... but it does deliver a complex plot involving time travel and the like. Some of the powers in the show just seem useless though.

#45: Revolution OS: An old show about the origins of linux. I was happy to see them try and debunk the whole communism thing in spite of RMS acting like one.

#46: Primer: Interesting time travel concepts... I like how they didn't try and dumb it down for the audience, but expected the audience to rise to the level of the movie.

#47: The Hudsucker Proxy: Very much like It's a wonderful life. It was fun, though I didn't enjoy the stereotypical corporation nonsense in it.

#48: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I understand the arguments that people make against Intelligent design about it being a wedge to force creationism in, but this makes the argument that it's a scientific discussion and that creationism is not, and that by shutting out anyone who mentions Intelligence being involved in the construction of cells, getting them fired, getting them blacklisted, modern science is throwing out the baby with the bathwater and acting very much more like a religion than science. It breaks godwins law a bit though. It also has quotes from prominent evolution supporters like Richard Dawkins essentially saying that it's possible, but that it would have been another form of life that evolved, then created our form of life, which is perfectly in line with the theory of intelligent design. It doesn't say that all life is intelligent designed, just that life on earth seems to have no easy start to evolution without some intelligence tying it together. For me? I'm open to either idea. It's quite possible that we'll ultimately find some mechanic where the low level proteins of earth-based life could have evolved. We'll have to keep studying it, as long as we don't shut the argument down before we have all of the data. Maybe as we explore space we'll find some primitive proto-protein arrangements that would function as a living cell without the extreme complexity of earth-based cells. Until we find it or replicate it ourselves, we're shooting in the dark as to the whole issue. (Intelligent design is a bit of a cop-out to not having enough information.)

3:34pm: Out of E-Books...
I just finished The Course of Empire, which means I'm totally out of Baen E-books now. I stopped buying them because I had a huge backlog of secondaries that came with sets that I wanted. Now I need to go find some more to toss on my phone.

I'm thinking I should pick up the Storm from the Shadows book from David Weber, plus some of the early Liaden books. The first 8 chapters of the Agent of Change book seemed pretty good. I still need to get the last book in that whole Esmay Suiza series as well...

I do still have 3 issues of Baen's Universe to read, plus 2 more years after that I need to buy...

2:57pm: Multimedia completion October
Books:

#23: Baen's universe 2-3. I'll just hit the ones I enjoyed here. "A better sense of direction" is interesting, I wonder how possible it is. About a kid growing up in space seeing the universe differently from the adults. "From the badlands" is a trigun-esque tale of humans surviving on a remote colony after aliens pound civilization to the ground. "Necromancer in Love" is an interesting thing about someone trying to bring one they love back to life, and different means to which it could be done... "Countdown to Armageddon" is a story of someone trying to take nuclear weaponry back to the past to allow the muslims to overrun the christians in that time period. "The Quiet Man" has an alien space ship land on the washington mall, asking for their children who crashed some time before and were given the Area 51 treatment.

I must take exception with at least one part of the non-fiction and columns. Mike Resnick just doesn't get the line "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." He says it's false, but the truth of it is, if he would bother to look, that there isn't a free lunch, it's always subsidized by someone else's work. Just because it's free to you doesn't mean it's free. If they are doing it out of the kindness of their heart, or for some ulterior purpose, is for you to determine. Many of the others he trots out are just abbreviated versions of more specific ideas. The "whatever does not kill us makes us stronger" thing for example would need to include permanent crippling or maiming in its definition of kill.

#24: Through the Breach. David Drake tells the story of Francis Drake's journey around the world, except in space...

#25: Fireships. The whole Francis Drake thing again, in breaking the back of the Spanish North american federation domination of the galaxy.

I read through a bit of the Liaden universe stuff, and I think that's one of the next places I'm going to go for books...

Games:

#3: Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time. Excellent game. Finished it in 12 hours... Will probably put another 28 into it before I'm done.

Videos:

#36: Startrek Voyager, Season 7. Interesting way to end it. I'm not sure about its place in the whole Startrek Chart of What Is Good, but it was fun to watch.

#37: Space Above and Beyond. Interesting marine themed space story. Twists and turns and the like, but oddly abbreviated by being only 26 episodes long. The ending was strange, with minor cliffhangers that will never quite be resolved.

#38: Coraline. Very good, but any adult can see the plot coming from a mile away. Should be good for kids as long as they're not scared by Tim Burton style movies.

1:23pm: Emusic keeps getting worse.
Emusic has been dropping their service down for awhile. Initially they were a subscription service where for about $15 per month, you could download an unlimited number of songs, and you could use them as long as your subscription was valid. It was a great setup for the customers and for the artists. It helped unknown artists find an audience, and helped customers find indie bands that they didn't know about. In general, the idea is that it was for trying them out and that you would ultimately buy a CD. I bought a number of discs based on downloads on Emusic. They also had a setup where various third parties had made download managers for their service.

Then they decided to limit the number of downloads. 50 downloads for $10 per month. That was reasonable, but it also meant that it wasn't as much of a place to try new artists as it was a place to buy music. Then it dropped to 40 downloads per month. Then the price went up to $12 per month. That was OK though, it was still an OK deal, and they let you download the songs more than once if you wanted or if you lost your copy, even though the third party download managers had stopped working and you were stuck using their lousy download manager. Shortly thereafter, it dropped to 30 downloads per month. If you ever changed your plan, you got even less, 24 downloads for $12 per month. And now they limit you to about 3 downloads, and because of their lousy download manager, it always expends 1 of those without actually downloading anything! It still seems like an OK deal at around $0.50 per song, except that if you don't use your downloads you lose them, so if you miss a month, that next month is more expensive than iTunes.

A few years back they also had a fairly nice policy for inviting friends over. You invite them over, you get 50 downloads, they get 50 downloads, everyone is happy. You could keep your 50 downloads for as long as you want. I just received an email from them...

Invite five friends to try eMusic and you'll get 10 free downloads* as our thanks. We'll also give each of your friends 50 free downloads to check out eMusic**
* Get 10 Free credits when you invite 5 of your friends through the eMusic referral page linked in this email by November 15, 2009. Your credits will be awarded 7-10 days after you have completed the form, whether or not your friends decide to sign up for eMusic. Visit eMusic by December 1st to claim your credits. Your 10 free credits will be good for 30 days from the date you claim them. You must enter valid email addresses. This offer is only redeemable once per customer.

10 downloads... For inviting 5 friends... That's 1/25th of what their old deal was. Not only that, but the 10 songs expire! I still have 10 credits from my last 50 pack a year ago. Not only that, but 10 downloads that are of unlimited time cost $6 to buy. That's about $1.20 per friend you push into the service. I wonder how much that is in pieces of silver. Given that silver is around $15 an ounce, I would suspect it's far fewer than 30.

12:09pm: UMD
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2009/10/psp-go-review-sony-is-charging-you-much-more-for-much-less.ars

A fairly fair and balanced review of the PSP go.

They're whining about the UMD disc going missing though.

The one constant in the last 4 years or so has been all of the people whining about how bad the UMD drive is. Constant, annoying whining about how much they hate the UMD drive and how UMD is a dead format, and so on and so forth.

And now they're whining about the opposite. It just goes to show that you really should stick to your guns on ideas. You'll never please all of your detractors, and when you try you just end up annoying even more people and giving others an I Told You So moment against you. I still think they should have stuck to their guns on the Boomerang controller, and they should stick to it with the Cell processor and Bluray drive as well. I will be very disappointed with them if they drop the cell in their next system and go with Intel instead.

11:16am: Coin-sized nuclear isotope batteries
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/08/nuclear_coin_battery/

I can't wait for them to be commercialized. Now lets see if the PTB and other pointy haired politicians permit these to come to market...

12:29am: Multimedia Completion
September edition... Not very full because I've been utterly hammered at work this month. In fact, all but 3 of the items on the list are from the first week of the month...

And I just heard the news about Baen's Universe ending. I feel really bad now for canceling when I stopped having time to keep up with them. :( I'll definitely buy the back issues for the magazine though...

Books:

#21: Igniting the Reaches. Retelling Drake's story in space. It's quite a stretch, but I see where he's going with it.

#22: Baen's Universe, Year 2 issue 2. Man, this is something like the Green issue of Baen's universe aside from the first story. The first story is a post-scarcity thing where people have the freedom to pretty much do whatever they're interested in, this one has two documentary writers competing to write a documentary about mars being terraformed. At the watering hole is murphy's law first contact with aliens. Concentration of Dogs is a thought experiment in collective intelligence. Free space is about an arms dealer trying to dodge the export taxes and exposing people to radiation while doing it.

Murphy's War is one I find mildly naive and a bit absurd. A president that's obviously trying to be a stand in for Bush takes an extreme religious view and absurd levels of cowboy attitude and starts nuclear war with China. The series alludes to hackers rigging the votes for this guy. They go on about absurd stereotypes only believed by the most naive of bloggers on both the American and Chinese side, then spin a web where peace is created by a bunch of hackers wrecking the computer systems for launching missiles for both sides.

Lord-Protectors Daughter was a lot of fun. Experimenting with high end powers, and accounting all in the same story. :) Creation: The Launch! I think the story by James P Hogan did this better. Basically, God as an insane hollywood director type. Hogan's story was more fun with telling creation from the standpoint of an engineering firm dealing with all of the insane agencies and the like. Dark corners was a mildly bland nazi vs. faerie story... Squish was fun, intelligent ants... Didn't find Mrs. Schrodinger's cat all that interesting.

Games:
#2 Front Mission 1: Definitely not the best in the series, and has a number of flaws, but it's still a lot of fun for the character strategy RPG loving segments of the population. Took me about 25-30 hours to complete both storylines once.

DVD Series

#30: Read or Die TV: Excellent series, a lot of fun. Mostly new characters for the first half, and some of the characters you would only know if you read the Manga, rather than from the movie.

#31: Flight of the Conchords Season 1: A bit disappointing. I like a fair subset of their songs, but their TV series is just a little daft and uninteresting.

#32: Scrapped Princess. At first this seemed like a silly fantasy show, but it drifted off towards a very Gurren Lagann style storyline. It's not bad, but I wouldn't recommend it for non-anime fans.

#33: Mezzo: I chewed through this one on netflix watch instantly in about 2 nights. It's not really a great show or anything, but it was fairly good for what it was. It feels like the characters are scrambled up remixes of all the Cowboy Bebop character's traits. The thing doesn't go solidly to detective/mercenary stuff however, there's a fair bit of supernatural and alien junk in it. There were a few of good episodes and a handful of not-so-good episodes.

#34: Kite Liberator: Like Mezzo, this one isn't all that great, but it's OK. It's a little too coincidental how it turns out though.

#35: Divergence Eve: Absolutely awful. Terrible. Dreadful CGI, terrible acting, lots of graphical glitches, absurd storyline, etc. The only redeeming quality was the first few episodes had an interesting history where it explains how humans found FTL travel, with the original transmissions from earth bouncing back through FTL conduits from other stars. Interesting idea, but it's not worth sitting through the series for that 3-4 minutes of interesting stuff. I only watched the first and last DVD, I doubt the middle one could have done anything to save the series.

12:48am: PSP go
The PSP Go comes out soon, and Sony has released a mountain of new downloadable content for the system. I myself have a mountain of purchased UMD content for it, so I figured I would look into how much it would cost me to upgrade to that system, and how many games are getting left out.
( List of games )
I'm sure I'm missing a few of them. Some of my game cases went missing after my last trip.


If I upgrade to the PSP Go now, I would need to pay $249.99+119.92
Or $369.91 total. And I would only get 12/26 of my games...
If I just cherry pick the ones that are inexpensive and that I would like to carry around digitally on my existing PSP, it's just short of $90. That won't get me Ratchet or Patapon, but I'm done with one and the other really didn't draw me in much.

I really appreciate NIS working so hard to get that many of their games up. That makes life easier even without the Go... Only one they missed out of my collection is Spectral Souls.

1:26pm: Overregulation.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/28/motorised_crate/

They confiscated someone's home built transportation because they have excessively restrictive laws towards what people can drive. Is there any wonder that corporations are getting so huge? There's no way for smaller things to break through and start out if the regulations are so onerous and odious that only the large corporations can afford to follow them all. Who knows? That experiment could be the first step someone made to founding a new car company a decade or two down the road, but the legal establishment has cut it down at its very root.

2:09pm: Naive solar enthusiasts.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/18/ja-solar-and-innovalight-team-up-to-commercialize-silicon-ink/

In the comments, one person comments that he can't wait to see when the printable solar cell technology can be used for cars.

He really doesn't understand the energy involved in cars. At work we have 80-watt panels that are just huge. I think you could probably squeeze 8-10 of them on my car, for a total of about 800 watts power generation on a good, sunny day. Assuming that they are 9% efficient and the new solar cells are 18% efficient, that gives you 1.6 kilowatts.

Car engines are generally measured in Horsepower in the US. My car outputs 131 horsepower, which equals around 97 kilowatts (Rounding down to give solar the benefit of the doubt. 1HP is about 745 watts.)

That's over 50x as much power.

The engine on the ultra-efficient VW car that they've been showing off recently http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/18/vw-l1-hybrid-most-efficie_n_291257.html , has an engine that outputs 39 horsepower. Its backup hybrid electric motor is 14 horsepower. That's 29 and 10 kw respectively. ( http://www.product-reviews.net/2009/09/18/volkswagen-l1-concept-frankfurt-auto-show-2009/ ) Even with the larger surface area of a big car, you couldn't run the electric motors of a tiny cigar shaped coffin car off solar yet.

About all you could do with it is let it sit for 8 hours in the parking lot at work in the sun and charge up your batteries for your 30 minute drive home... Which in itself could be a workable thing, but even 100% efficient solar cells are probably never going to drive a car directly and maintain anything near the performance of an underpowered econobox.

A house is a different matter. You probably never exceed 6kw in the average house, and you have a much higher surface area to work with.

11:00am: Muse website, and right wing libertarians
I was searching the website about a band called Muse and what their political persuasions were. An interesting task given that they are foreign and US and European political terms don't exactly match up. Their recent songs though seem very libertarian to me. On their forum, they used the term Liberal which is generally the european way of saying Libertarian, and to them is tied closely to anarchists.

One of the posters on their forum though expressed disbelief at the american concept of Right wing Libertarians. They said that Right Wing generally means trying to uphold a social order from the past.

I would argue that it's actually easier to convince people on the right about libertarianism than it is to convince left wing people about libertarianism. Libertarians are really the true big tent ideology, because pretty much everyone can join it by merely believing one simple thing. It is not the place of anyone, or any government, to force anyone to do anything. For a right wing person to be libertarian, they can still hold all of their religious beliefs and all of their stances on how society should be, and just advocate it themselves, in their organizations in a non-violent, non-forceful manner. Basically, preaching the word to others. That's a familiar concept to most church goers, for example. With a government generally cutting against them in most of these issues for decades, they're familiar with trying to convince people to see it their way rather than using the government to take guns out to force people to see it their way. It's only recently that they re-lost their way and started using government to do this anyway.

The left wing people say they are all about freedom, and they back it up with certain things like abortion and sexual preference, but their other goals go significantly away from freedom. Social Justice, redistribution of wealth, "Fair" distribution of wages, the green movement. All of these goals are impossible to achieve without forcing people to do it. You can ask people nicely to give their money to charity, but it doesn't manage an overarching redistribution of the kind they desire. The green movement is possible without it, but they have this false sense of urgency around it and believe that they can't wait for green technology to catch up, they have to force people to stop using the old technologies and go to the green technologies right now.

All in all, it's much harder to get left wing people to abandon or delay their core principles than to convince right wing people to use persuasion instead of force.

I also found this, a nice justification of the philosophy of liberty.

4:16pm: Templar AZ
Reading a new comic called Templar, Arizona. It's mildly political, but in a way that keeps me guessing about what the author's own views are. But one thing in particular made me think.

One of the characters espouses the idea that all prisons should be Vegan. I have no problem with people who themselves want to be vegan as long as they're not trying to use the government to force me to do the same, but in this case I don't have such a clearcut view on it. As long as the people in prison are there because they did something truly bad that damages other people, and not just because of some political law that is there just so they can arrest whoever they want, then I really don't have a problem with prisons serving only a certain kind of food.

Prison is not there to be a resort playground. It's there as both a consequence and deterrent to bad acting in a society, and as a way to keep them from doing it again. Our current prison system is a lousy deterrent, and a poor consequence for many actions. It would probably be better to go to a purely economic penalty system than our current system as a deterrent.

Don't give me anything about cruel punishment with that diet. Back in the feudal days that's all anyone but the nobility had.

I wouldn't agree with spending money on special vegan meals though. Just get a contract with the various grocery stores to get whatever they throw out for the day cheap, and hand the mess off to the kitchen workers to try and do something with.

11:56pm: Multimedia Completion
Darth Paradox just posted another, so I figured I'd post my own update even though it's not the end of the month yet.

#17: Baens Universe: Volume 2 Issue 1. Big Guy: Story about giving a thirsty man water, and him gorging on it, or rather, an emotion starved android emotions. Running Water: Fun little adventure tale about a world where the coastal towns in california will do anything for water, and the future tech submarines they use to get it. Thin Ice is a thin story about aliens and an ice skater on the moon. *shrug* Weredragons of Mars starts as a wierd story of generational colonization ships, but turns into something even weirder. Swing time is the story of very odd time travelers who don't need machines...

Cryptic coloration, students falling in love with the professor story with a twist. Littlest Wyrmmaid. I'm sure you see the pun already. Child, girl, woman, crone... This one is actually very interesting with navajo mythologies and other native south-western gods and the like. Realm of Words is just a groan-worthy excuse to try and make a obtuse point about DRM.

Giant killer was quite fun, though I pretty much guessed what was going on before the story tells you.

Touching the dead is excellent, a psychic detective sort of story. Chicken Soup was another shaggy dog-ish story. Chirus Fever was a good little adventure story too.

And Fish Tales continues to not be my thing at all.

#18: Spheres of Heaven. Trapped in the solar system by aliens that think humans are too violent, 3 races of absurdly pacifist aliens, and a mystery gateway that could be the key to humans getting out into the universe... Fun, though I don't agree with some of its views...

#19: The Dance of Time. The last Belisarius book. If you haven't read this series, you really should. It's lots of fun. This is the first paper book I've read since the First Meetings Orson Scott Card book.

Currently reading the Reaches series from David Drake...

#1: Dragon Quest 4. I'm not sure if this is the first game I've finished this year, but with my limited time it might be. -_- Might be the second or third. I did finish Flower and Braid, but those hardly count.

DVDs

#25: Mahoromatic Summer Special. I must be a masochist because I already knew how painful this series was, but I went back and watched another dvd of it anyway.

#26: Appleseed. The first one. I think that both the remake and Deus Ex Machina are better. This one seemed a bit lacking. Maybe it's just how old it was.

#27: Doctor Who, Planet of the Dead. A great adventure, and a worthy entry in the last 4 episodes for the current doctor.

#28: Starship Operators. I've already commented on this one before, it's great. It's so good that I even posted about it out of sequence. 5-stars for me.

#29: El Hazard: The Alternative World. Another oldie. Standard fare for what usually got translated back in the dusty old days of them first bringing anime over. Not great.

2:32am: Dragon Quest 4
I've finished Dragon Quest 4! That means I'm officially half-way done with playing all of the mainline Dragon Quest games... at least until DQ9 comes out in the US.

36 hours and 19 minutes to complete. There's still more bonus content, but I haven't done that content on any of the DQ games yet... I really should get around to it at least on 4 and 8...

36 hours is definitely short for a DQ game. I wonder what I should play next on my DS?

Poll #1445785 What DS game should I play next?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 2

Approval Voting Stage

Plurality Voting Stage

1:10am: Starship Operators
I normally don't post about individual DVD series I watch until I can aggregate a bunch of them into one post, but this isn't a normal series. I'm a David Weber fan, and enjoy the sort of political intrigue combined with the slow paced combat that his books provide.

Starship Operators is probably the first TV show I've seen that really captures the essence of this sort of space combat and political intrigue all at once. It's a little shallower on all fronts than most novels, but it's hard to fit as much into a 13 episode series of 22 minute shows, and it is deeper than many space combat oriented novels I've read. If you're a fan of space combat novels, then you really should watch this even if you're not an anime fan. I place this one amongst my top few for all types of anime. Cowboy Bebop is one of the few I would put in the same class as this, and it's hard to say which one is really better between the two. If you're on netflix, then it's only 3 dvd's worth of rental...