• Saturday, April 24th, 2010
Argh, I’m feeling really tired. Haven’t slept that well for the past few days. What better to do at such a time than write a blog post? So what have I been doing lately? Not really any gaming for once. Well okay, I have slipped in a bit of Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey on Nintendo DS in between other things. Good game and probably the best DS RPG I’ve personally seen to date. Lately I’ve only spent the odd half hour here or there playing the game though.
Oh, I’ve also been doing a bit of plumbing. Seems the tap controlling the water coming into the house developed a leak. Not a good thing to have extremely waterlogged earth under your house. It wasn’t especially visible because the pipe and tap were buried about 30cm under the ground. Seems the builders who constructed the place not only decided burying the tap was a good idea, but also that gluing the entire system together in such a way that that you couldn’t take any of it apart without physically breaking stuff was too. This made the job a lot harder than it needed to be, but to cut a long story short after spending $30 or so at Bunnings on bits and bobs the tap is replaced and everything is nice and dry again. Oh, and as a word of caution to anyone else thinking of doing something similar…new taps aren’t always assembled watertight when they leave the factory. You don’t want to have the replacement tap leak worse because the gland nut isn’t tight.
I’ve been keeping rather light on spending for some time now. Not completely by any means, I try and avoid extreme actions that I’d never stick to long-term, but more-so than usual. The biggest exception would have been the Westone UM3X earphones I needed for work when my Shure E5cs died. Yes, needed. For my sanity. But I digress. The improved cash flow may prove useful though given I’m eyeing up laptop upgrades. One of the new Macbook Pros specifically. Buying could either be viewed as canceling out all the good work of my reduced spending, or as an opportune “Just as planned” moment capitalizing on my cunning forethought . Currently I’m going with the latter.
There’s always the prevalent view out there that you have to be mentally incapacitated/gullible/rich/pretentious to buy a Mac when there’s cheaper and “better” Windows machines out there. In reality though there’s solid reasons to run any of the popular operating systems, and Apple hardware has some genuinely nice aspects to it that other brands lack. All of that aside though actually using Windows at least five days a week for a decade hasn’t made me like using it any better. Little frustrates me more than many of Window’s little party tricks. I’m not just talking about old stuff either; Windows 7 is no panacea. Non-Apple “Hackintoshes” running MacOS X have their place too (I dabble in this myself), but using one for my main machine when it could break with the next OS upgrade? No thanks. Honestly I’d sooner switch to Linux than use either of those (well technically I already maintain three Linux servers, but none even have a GUI installed). I may actually switch to Linux one day if Apple annoys me enough, which is entirely possible, but for now I want to always have at least one computer in the house that always works, has a responsive user interface, doesn’t interrupt me with inane dialogs all the time, and doesn’t get more convoluted with each release. And lets face it. There’s no debate that for those who aren’t afraid of the command line…Unix userland >>>>> DOS.
I think I’ll drop things here for the time being. That bed’s looking mighty alluring right about now.
• Thursday, March 18th, 2010
So the news has been doing the rounds that Hamilton’s ITM 400 V8 race hasn’t been doing so well financially. Ticket sales are slow even compared to last year. A year which apparently didn’t make a profit and certainly didn’t bring into the region anywhere near the business that had been promised. Supposedly the council took out a $7,950,000 loan in the first year to help fund the initial setup. Now that may not look like a lot of money in this day and age, but it’s worth keeping in mind that this loan lasts for 25 years and is accruing approximately $500,000 in interest annually. In other words over the 25 years the interest alone will add up to $12,500,000, and that’s without even contemplating repayment of the principal itself. That’s another $300,000 every year. Nice one guys. The race organizers are now busy trying to scare people into buying tickets with the threat of us potentially losing the race in coming years. Well cry me a river. Or that’s what I would say if it wasn’t the rate-payers who are going to be left holding the bill for this mess.
But enough about that. I managed to hurt my right hand/wrist/arm recently and have been doing my best to let it recover. Don’t really know what the cause was, but there were a few things I’ve done lately that could have led to me pulling something. At it’s worst it felt like that moment just after someone has punched you really hard in your shoulder, only it felt like that 24-hours a day. Thankfully it’s much better now and seems to be on the mend so I’m just going to keep going easy on it for a while.
I haven’t been playing many games lately. Partly due to the sore arm, but I’d also finished Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth about two weeks back. Now I’m mostly waiting for the Dragon Age Origins: Awakening expansion (why do we get this three days later than the rest of the world?). I was planning to buy Yakuza 3, but it seems when it came to the western localisation SEGA decided to phone it in and cut significant content from the game. Elements of the dialog don’t even make sense any more with the cuts. It’s a shame as with Yakuza 3, and Yakuza 4 just released in Japan, the series looks to be finally getting beyond the “low budget Shenmue” vibe that it’s carried since it’s inception. I can’t say I’m too surprised though with SEGA once again making it clear they are their own worst enemy, but it would be nice if they at least tried to do right by their customers. On the whole it’s a big month for games, but I have no interest in Final Fantasy XIII and only a passing interest in God of War 3, so it’s looking rather quiet for me. Gives me a chance to catch up with highly recommended items on the back-burner like Batman: Arkham Asylum.
• Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Well the latter part of 2009 and the start of 2010 just blew past me. I did my usual trick of having a half written post or two lying around, but they aren’t significant enough for me to feel the need to poach anything. I’m not one to buy into the idea of years being “lucky” or “unlucky”, but quite a few of my family and friends seem to have been having a hard time at the start of the year in various ways. Broken limbs, infectious diseases, expensive stuff breaking or just general bad times. Certainly hope that doesn’t last.
In my gaming time lately I’ve been playing Bioshock 2. Finished it last night and I was impressed with what they’ve done. I finished Mass Effect 2 fairly recently as well and it was good, although not as good as it could have been. It improved on the first game in numerous regards, but fell down in some other key areas. The dialog was rather shoddy for a Bioware game which was made all the more obvious given it was released so soon after Dragon Age: Origins. ME2 definitely wasn’t the 10/10 title many of the reviews suggest. Then again it’s by no means the first time professional reviewers threw similar accolades at flawed games (e.g. Grand Theft Auto 4). I’ve got plenty more to continue on with time permitting. Got a copy of Ace Attorney Investigations for the DS on the way, Heavy Rain is due late February, Dragon Age: Awakening in March, Persona 3 Portable in June. Bound to be others I’m forgetting.
There’s not a lot of interest in the current anime season. So far certainly nothing I can imagine wanting to pick up on Blu-ray. I’m sort of casually watching a few things to see if they go anywhere, but odds alone would suggest most won’t. Fine by me really as it’ll be nice to have a couple of months of smaller CD Japan orders. Well once the current series I’m picking up are done with anyway.
I was going to write some more personal stuff here, but the words aren’t flowing and persevering with it would probably doom this draft to oblivion so I think I’ll let it pass for the time being.
• Wednesday, September 02nd, 2009
I’ve really been feeling tired the last few days. The last month or so has been crazy busy and even thought it’s eased up now I’m still feeling really drained. Plans are looking a bit more relaxed for the next 2-3 weeks though so I think I’ll just take it easy as much as possible. Probably could do with a bit more sleep too. *looks at clock*
Been a bit preoccupied to fit in too many side activities although in my spare time I’ve been up to the usual shenanigans. Any gaming time has been spent playing BlazBlue on PS3 and Mana Khemia on PSP. I want to get back on to Persona 4, but that’s not a game casually when you have 15 minutes to spare. Anime-wise I’ve had a lot on the go although in it hasn’t required much time investment as I haven’t let myself fall behind. Umineko no Naku Koro ni, Bakemonogatari and Saki have been the favs, but even some of the seemingly B-grade shows such as Princess Lover and Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan have turned out much more entertaining than expected. I’m still importing discs directly from Japan for shows I like and it’s getting to the point where almost everything is getting a Blu-ray release. They’re all coming out region free so I’m happily grabbing them. The last disc of a few shows came out in August though and many from the next season don’t start until October so I’m going to enjoy a nice cheap September.
My Japanese language study has been going fairly well. I’m not making giant leaps or anything, but I’m pretty much constantly picking up new things and getting more proficient at the things I already knew. I’m am occasionally surprising myself too like how I recently found myself five minutes into an anime episode before I realised I didn’t have any subs turned on. Also been doing a little Manga translation on the side for practise. Incredibly slow going and there’s no way I’d put any deadlines on myself , but it’s all helping with the learning.
Installed the new MacOS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard) on my laptop. I may talk about it more later, but on the whole it’s about efficiency and speed. Everything feels substantially quicker. Most of the changes are under the hood and there’s some cool new technologies hiding in there.
• Thursday, June 11th, 2009
I think I’m finally starting to shake whatever it is that’s kept me sick for the last few weeks. I’m still coughing a bit, but on the whole have been feeling substantially better and my energy seems to be returning to more normal levels. One strange coincidence is that since I got sick the curries and other spicy food I’ve eaten have not really been hot enough for my tastes. For a few years now I’ve typically asked for “hot”, but lately I’m just not enjoying anything less than “extra hot”. There’s no pain, no sweating or any other negative effects. It just tastes right. I’ve found this to be the case from various sources including homemade food as well as restaurants and the like so I can’t just write it off as one food outlet skimping on the chili. I have no explanation for this whatsoever.
In the last few days I’ve made the jump to Telecom’s new XT Network which after switching my internet to Orcon a while back means I no longer have any dealings with Vodafone. It’s not that I like Telecom per-se, but I’ve had enough bad treatment and poor service (even total lack of service) from Vodafone over the years that I have no intention of giving them any of my money where it can be avoided. That makes Telecom the lesser evil so to speak as at least they . So far the new network seems quite impressive. Txt messages arrive in a timely fashion and I actually have full strength coverage at home. Voice calls are nice and clear. Not high expectations to meet perhaps, but it’s nice that they seem to have the basics working well. Porting my number over took some time (Yes, I’m now one of those evil people whose 021 prefix is not what it seems), but that’s to be expected really given how busy Telecom stores have been since XT went online. The cost for my usage is cheaper than with Vodafone too so it’s win-win.
On the downside I’m once again finding that my portable in-ear monitors (IEMs, aka earphones on steriods) don’t like winter. I’ve already had one pair die out of warranty due to the cables cracking in the cold, and now the older backup pair is heading the same way. I think this is the last winter they’ll survive. These are about 3-4 years old now so I’ve had a decent run out of them given most cheaper earphones break within a year. I’ve been doing running repairs with heatshrink tubing, etc to keep them going, but there’s a limit on what’s repairable. Supposedly the manufacturer of the pairs I own (Shure) has changed their cable shrouding compounds to something more robust now too, but I’m leaning towards going down a different path. I use my IEMs almost daily at work and home often for a few hours at a time so it’s not a hard thing for me to justify spending some cash on.
I’m actually looking at “customs”. In essence they take a mold of your ear and make a matching earpiece for an IEM that’s a perfect fit. Customs almost always sound better than universal fit IEMs according to those who have heard both. For years I’d been interested in Ultimate Ear’s UE-10 Pro and UE-11 Pro but that company’s founder, Jerry Harvey (he pretty much created the custom IEM industry), has now formed a new company JH Audio, and I’m leaning towards one of their models. Given the prices of these things though I won’t be buying any time soon. Hopefully the exchange rate will be more favourable by the time I have cash on hand.
I’ve really not been well lately. Had various symptoms for the last three and a half weeks now. I took some time off work initially when it was most infectious, but couldn’t really avoid going back sooner than I really felt was ideal. I almost shook it all off with antibiotics a week and a half ago but about halfway through the course some of the symptoms started coming back again. I did nothing but relax over the weekend though and it seems it may have been what I needed. There’s only a small cough and the occasional splitting headache remaining up at this point. I haven’t really felt up to doing an awful lot online over this time and have mostly just been sticking around a forum or two so if it seemed like I disappeared this will be why. Ended up mostly watching movies/documentaries/anime and playing Romance of the Three Kingdom’s VIII on PS2. That game is sedate enough to play comfortably while ill, but is still surprisingly fun.
Quite a lot has happened since I last posted anything here, but I don’t really feel up to doing a full recap. The most significant event is that I became an uncle again for the fifth time. Another niece. Needless to say I’ve been keeping my distance to avoid passing anything nasty on to her, but I look forward to getting to see her properly.
I can feel a headache coming on again so I think I’ll leave things here for now and get back to watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes. They really don’t make shows like that any more.
• Wednesday, April 08th, 2009
I’ve been having one of those days where I really should have just stayed in bed. I have no desire to relive it all in gory textual detail here, but I must say that it wasn’t just one thing in particular. It was more a general swath of suckiness. I’m glad I love tempting fate otherwise I wouldn’t be writing any of this since the day has still yet to come to it’s conclusion and I have to drive somewhere in 20 minutes. Actually in a moment of defiance against the day I bought a lotto ticket which is something I very rarely do. Spent my “tax cut” on it no less which was doubly amusing to me. Time will tell how well that idea turns out.
Otherwise things have been going okay though. My toe is not completely healed yet, but it’s much better than it was. My Japanese language study has also got off to a reasonably good start. I’m not pushing myself too much at this point, just getting used to making the effort again. When I want to read a small piece of text I manually translate it. When I’m watching some anime I actually try to understand the conversation rather than just falling back on the subs the way I have for the last 2-3 few years. I’ve also been surprising myself with how much I do actually remember from my previous studies. It’s a nice feeling when I find I actually understand something with no help from dictionaries, the internet, etc.
In other good news I finally managed to track down a transformer (the electrical kind) I needed to finish my adapter to connect electrostatic headphones up to a power amplifier. For well over a year I’d been looking for the correct part. I do already have one of these adapters (a STAX SRD-7 MKII), but it has some flaws in the sound quality and hopefully my design will remedy this. There’s been a pair of custom-made audio transformers (3Kg each) sitting here for what seems like an eternity now ready to go in this device. I’m looking forward to the last parts arriving so I can actually start building it.
I have been doing a lot video encoding lately. Still mostly for learning purposes rather than practical application at this point. For a while now I’ve been getting results comparable to what many others are doing, but I’m finding there’s still plenty to learn and improvements to be made. Lately I’ve been experimenting with Variable Frame Rate encoding (VFR), obtaining the perfect aspect ratio (to the pixel even if it’s an odd number) and finding that colourspace conversion is sometimes necessary in situations I’d thought it wasn’t. With all of this I’m now spotting quite a few situations where other people are doing their encodes incorrectly or in a suboptimal way. I just hope that continuing down this path it doesn’t ruin my ability to watch video uncritically any more than it already has been.
Current Mood: improving
Current Music: Trophy - Bat for Lashes - Fur and Gold
• Monday, March 16th, 2009
I’ve really been on the go for the last couple of weeks although there’s been too many things to give any kind of credible rundown. I did manage to break a toe in a relatively minor way three weekends ago which has been slowing me down a little, but it hasn’t been causing me any real trouble. It’s all taped up and seems to be healing nicely. The only time I really notice any discomfort is when trying to sleep oddly enough. When it happened I had visions of myself relaxing and giving it ample time to heal, but in reality I’ve not yet managed a single day at home. -_-
I had to resort to a bit of plumbing lately. The toilet cistern had been leaking a little lately and got to the point it was not only wasting water but proving an obstacle to sleep with it’s constant dripping. I’d been trying to find replacement seals and washers for it for sometime to no avail. For some unfathomable reason the one installed in the house originally was a brand unbeknownst to every parts supplier I talked to. In the face of this I ended up buying an entirely new cistern for $120 which happened to come with a new seat and cover too. While installation may seem to be a difficult task these things are relatively standardised and easy to install so screw playing plumbers a few hundred dollars. The install was reasonably painless and all is good now. No more wasted water and plenty of nice unbroken sleep. ^_^ Needless to say the cistern I bought contained widely available Caroma internals should the need for parts arise again in the future.
I’ve decided to actively start learning Japanese again. I did a few courses in my last year at uni which I found difficult, but that was partly due to being away in the US for the first 2 weeks of the first semester which meant I was permanently two weeks behind the rest of the class for the entire year. I originally tried to keep the skills up after leaving uni, but without any real discipline my efforts soon dissolved away.
Why pick it back up now you ask? Well I’m finding with age I’m more comfortable as to where my interests lie and with some of these (i.e. anime, games) I’m finding myself constantly pissed off at having to rely on others for translation and all the effort stuffing around with region locking, languages patches and subtitle files could be better spent working to bypass these problems entirely. Obviously this isn’t going to happen overnight, but I figure I’ve only one life to live (that I know of anyway) and this is a skill I want to possess so screw the obstacles and if I have to achieve it through sheer willpower then I will do so.
I should add that despite this new statement of direction, I’m not planning to abandon the DVD subtitle rendering software I’ve been writing. I still see that as being extremely useful given how many Region 2 DVDs I’ve been getting these days.
I don’t normally post relationship stuff here (well not for a few years anyway), but I will say things have not been going well lately. Not due to the lack thereof so to speak, but more the wanting to run a mile variety. It’s my own fault for letting the situation get to the state it has, but it’s not doing anyone any favours to prolong things.
Current Mood: steadfast
Current Music: Within Temptation - Jane Doe - The Silent Force
• Thursday, February 19th, 2009
Wow, this year is just flying by. Been planning to post here for a while, but it just kept getting pushed off. My summer holiday was the longest I’d had in a few years really with me being off nearly four weeks. I managed to fit a lot in, but there’s always things we never get around to at such times.
I recently (i.e. January) bought another car which honestly has taken quite a load off my shoulders. The old one was fast becoming a money sink and it was clear big repair bills were on the horizon. It’s a shame in a way because the motor was still in great order, but the body was coming close to falling off it. It’s so nice not having to worry about the car again for the near future.
I didn’t really get in much gaming over the holidays, but I did finally complete Persona 3 FES, Fallout 3 and Disgaea 2 since my last post. Thoroughly enjoyed all three and I’m looking forward to their next iterations. I already have Disgaea 3 sitting on the shelf and the local release of Persona 4 isn’t too far away. The only game I’ve really played in the last two weeks has been Mass Effect. Picked the Xbox 360 version up for $40 which I was quite happy with.
Facing the inevitable upfront costs associated with my new car and with the way the currency performing poorly lately (especially against the yen) I’ve been cutting back on expenses a bit. While I’m quite pleased with the results, the areas I’ve been focusing on may seem a little backwards. I mean with DVDs for example rather than cutting back on the more costly Japanese R2 discs I’ve instead cut back on local R4 discs and American R1 discs. Sure I’m getting screwed on the prices, but at the end of the day I’m still spending less money overall and getting a quality product. I’m a big believer in quality over quantity.
Most of the anime series I’d been collecting on DVD through last year have recently had their last volumes released so I’ve moved on to some of the newer shows. Ga-Rei -Zero-, Akane-iro Ni Somaru Saka and Maria+Holic being the main ones all of which I’ve been enjoying a lot. I’m still not finished my code for adding subtitles to these discs, but I have a fully working proof of concept and it’s progressing nicely.
I also recently switched ISPs. I had been with ihug (now Vodafone) for 11 years, and have always had good dealings with them, but since the Vodafone buyout it’s like they’ve just stopped trying to compete any more. I’ve now switched to Orcon and while I have to admit I’m not 100% happy with their service either (the connection is noticeably slower) I’m happy to put up with because for the amount of bandwitdth I use they are a whopping NZ$70 a month cheaper than Vodafone. With numbers like that I’d have to be stupid not to switch even if it means a bit less speed.
Current Music: Jóhann Jóhannsson - Melodia (Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device based on Heim\'s Quantum Theory) - Fordlândia
• Sunday, December 14th, 2008
The customer release mentioned in my last post is done. Numerous problems were had. Took about five times as long as it was supposed to, but I got there in the end. Seems I should write a help document on this clustering stuff since everything out there on the internet is rubbish.
*collapses*
*orders Japanese R2 DVDs for late January in anticipation of a good paycheck*
