Tag: english

Recent music

February 6, 2009
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I can’t wait to hear the new Gathering album coming this spring. I hope they’ll do something of the quality of if_then_else. I’m in love with that. It’s simply fantastic. I don’t know what came to musicians in 2000, but that year spawned great stuff. Just a few examples: the Dark Ride by Helloween, Brave New World by Iron Maiden, Modern Szerenád by Macskanadrág, Wishmaster by Nightwish, Crimson by Sentenced, and i could go on with the list for a long time still.

Now there’s also a nice bunch of great music, but also a lot that disappoint me. For example the new Iron Maiden album is nowhere near the level of Brave New World or Dance of Death, and that’s not what i expected, even though it’s still great.

The new Rage, Carved in Stone’s pretty good too. It’s almost as good as Speak of the Dead, which was simply fantastic (2006 was a great year in music too). The title song, Carved in Stone is very catchy, i was humming it for days now. And there’s more like that on the disc… Great.

All that is left now
Is only names carved in stone
Forgotten heroes underground
Not much is left now
Some rusty nails and rotten bones
The dead heroes names carved in stone

Rage – Carved in Stone
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World Embryo

February 3, 2009
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Saturday morning i was just downloading my usual dose of Bleach and Naruto manga from MangaShare, when on the first page the featured manga caught my eye. It looked awesome. (Since then i just go to the front page and reload a couple of times to see if something interesting pops up, eg that’s how i learnt about To-Love-Ru.) It was called World Embryo, and it’s great. And quite difficult to find, because it’s already licensed in the States. (That means most of the manga sites take it down, claiming i could buy it. Yeah, i could, almost as easily, as from Japan.) But after looking around and searching and a bit of luck i found most of the chapters on MangaHelpers. (If you download there, don’t forget to click “thanks!”)

The story is great. There’s a mysterious infection spreading through electromagnetic waves that turns people into monsters called kanshu and those trying to stop them and find the source of the infection, NEFT, their “annexed department” FLAG, but mostly and only jinki users. There’s also a cocoon. The graphics are fantastic, and altogether it’s one of the best manga i’ve ever read.

Luck it’s still ongoing. Bad luck is though that chapters are not released weekly but monthly, but who cares, as long as the quality’s so great! By the way, the mangaka is the same Moriyama Daisuke, who did Chrno Chrusade.

Boooring

January 31, 2009
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It’s a bit monotonous to meddle with databases all afternoon. But i rather do it now than later… It was quite a challenge to squeeze as much stuff into one single query as possible and reduce manual work to the minimum. Still it took quite long. To sum it up: for the Hidden Leaf Team fansub group i had to pack some releases. About 6-7 series worth of. That means i’d to change the comment’s links to the downloads to the new pack one, add all the download count and thanks to the pack and then delete the old ones. Seems easy, but i was lazy to think much so i didn’t force it even more when i ended up with seven queries per series. That goes. But i don’t want to see any phpMyAdmin anytime soon.

Juno

January 30, 2009
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Yesterday i watched a movie that a long time ago Glendi suggested, Juno. It was great. It’s about a high schooler indie girl who successfully gets pregnant on her first ahem… sexually active act. The movie’s about her nine troubled months, from the first doubts of whether to bear the baby or not, and all that’s coming after. There’s a lot of crying and a lot of laughing in there. The story’s altogether simple, but great. And Ellen Page is a beauty.

Her cool style makes this movie special. That’s what “indie” supposed to be, not that totally trend-dependent hype called indie nowadays. The music’s great and perfectly fitting, as well as the graphics of the opening.

Once again i’m in trouble saying i enjoyed this movie. It was great for sure. But a drama (i think) isn’t supposed to be fun. Yet… Juno has a lot of fun in it too. I say it’s a must-see for everyone, especially those teens who are, so to say, already sexually active.

A huge 5/5. Fantastic.

Oh noes

January 22, 2009
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I just translated the 203th episode of Bleach and in the afterword it’s stated more or less clearly that fillers are coming. I guessed. They were way too close to the manga, even with the Turn back the pendulum gaiden. That’s how it goes. I won’t really like to take translating jobs in the coming times. I hate to watch fillers. Especially since i’m reading the manga, so i know what’s supposed to be coming. And that rocks. While that whatever party… well i couldn’t care less about it.

Today i fixed the coming layout for IE6 too. Gave me a few minutes pure fun (not). But i still have to optimize for it, because (according to my stats) about every tenth of my visitors uses that. That’s more than i’d ignore. Well, at least when it comes to layout bugs. The resolution stuff doesn’t really interest me. Everyone can scroll, and also, why would anyone use a 800×600 resolution in 2009? Honestly… It’s another thing when it’s about mobiles, naturally i’ll have a separate handheld stylesheet.

And today i closed the autumn-winter semester.

Daemon

January 21, 2009
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Been ages since i last linked a deviation, but i couldn’t resist posting this.

Title: daemon
Creator: ~bird-z

Day of God

January 20, 2009
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Yesterday was sunday, when religious people go to church and are supposed to honour that day as that’s when God rested after the six days of creation. Yesterday i decided to keep it holy too, and after arriving home soon before noon instead of spending all my time on plurk and twitting about nonsense, i rather read the Bible all afternoon, with Neal Morse for background music. It was really… a good feeling. Sometimes it really feels good to believe without doubt and praise God for every little success.

In the evening i once again did exercises, so today my legs hurt pretty much. Then played a Scrabble game with my parents and watched the snooker Master’s final. That poor Selby looked quite worn, so he was nowhere as sympathetic as O’Sullivan. The ambidextrous master won, as i hoped… But Selby would’ve deserved it too.

Again

January 16, 2009
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I’d rather not give the title “plans” to any more posts. First, there are already way too many such, second, those “plans” are rathermore dreams, as i somehow never manage to follow them. But now i have a break (yesterday was my last exam in this semester) until february 10th, and i want to spend it well. I have to code a lot. I really want to finish a project that i kind of dropped many times before just to start it again and again. It’d be a great reference and it’ll be useful for others too. Now i have time for it and i’ll take it seriously. I’ll try, at least. It seems i’ll also have another project, an online typography magazine, it’ll be very interesting for sure, though yet i don’t really know any details about it.

I plan to finish at least Ulysses (but hopefully more) and start learning languages again. I’ll have to practice japanese a lot again, since in the spring i’ll start my studies in Japan, but i also want to refine my german and learn as much spanish as i can (i think i won’t really have much time for these later).

That’s about all… Now i start coding. Imagine it as if i had to fill an empty pool with water out of nowhere. A challenge.

Winamp vs foobar2000

January 12, 2009
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Lately i’ve been using foobar2000. Don’t ask me why—there’s no particular reason. When i was using Winamp back for years, i was perfectly fine with that too. And so i am now. There are a few features in both that i’d miss. For example, foobar has very clever tools for tagging and renaming masses of music, which came pretty handy when i reorganised my library in the winter break. Foobar can also ping last.fm without needing any plugin or such, while i’d need to install something to do that with Winamp. But Winamp can instantly burn music cds, with it i can put music on my mp3 player, and a lot more than else ways, because i can make it transcode them if the quality’s too high—since i mostly use that gadget when i’m outside, there’s no need for extreme high quality, but file size does matter (it’s an 1 gig Creative MuVo, in case you haven’t read me back in summer 2007). Also, i have a totally legal pro licence for Winamp.

Why do i still use foobar then? No reason (maybe the last.fm thing being the only point). I think i’ll use them what they’re fit to. I’ll categorise, organise and manage my collection mostly with foobar, while exporting will remain Winamp’s job. For playback i’ll use whichever i first start. It doesn’t matter. For opening any kind of media file (audio and video) i still have VLC as default, because it’s dead annoying when accidentally opening a file resets my carefully built playlist (sadly foobar doesn’t open a new playlist for that—in Winamp that’s not even a question, as there can’t be more than one playlist open at a time).

Oh God…

January 9, 2009
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My Windows died, out of nowhere. It’s not letting me log in. I enter the pass, then wait… and wait… and then reset and decide to try what i wanted under linux. Ubuntu says it couldn’t mount my drives, because the logs show that it’s in use, indicating unclean Windows shutdown. Sure it was unclean, but not that much that all (not just the system) ntfs drives would be locked. Force mount them, they work fine, no trouble. I can’t see anything wrong with the system drive either–last time i had such a problem, i accidentally created (due to a typo) a directory named “Documents And Settings” (capital A), which confused Win. But now there’s no such. At least, not apparent.

What might be important: before shutting down the last (then working) session of Windows, i wanted to run an AdAware scan, but it crashed. I wanted to check if i had a virus but it’s not that easy installing an antivirus program with the most recent database under Ubuntu–with direct net access it would be, but my laptop couldn’t connect, because Ubuntu can’t handle my wireless network card. I’m right now trying to update the ClamAV database, and then run the scan on my drives. Maybe. (Though it shouldn’t find anything: after downloading something i always make eTrust AV scan it–and that thing won most of the antivirus tests i’ve read.)

Edit 17:40

It turned out that the AdAware service couldn’t start, and that made the logon hang. Logged on onto the command line safe mode, and managed to figure out what the problem was, so at logging on normally i could evade it using alt-tab, then uninstall the whole thing. It works fine.