Fuck IE7 and it’s CSS support (or rather lack thereof). Having discovered Greasemonkey and some other useful Firefox extensions, I see less reason for anyone to use IE than ever.

Watched Fate/stay night. Not going to deny that I didn’t go into it with the expectation of liking it (based on how much I loved Tsukihime), but nonetheless I liked it a lot. The story is interesting, the character designs are very much to my liking (Type-Moon is batting 1.000 when it comes to creating “main” heroines I like – first Arcueid, now Saber), the visuals are nice, the music is pretty good (as mentioned earlier, especially love the OP “disillusion”, and the first ED is good too), and did I mention how cool Saber is? Though I guess that she’s a bit similar to Arcueid helps… anyway, 8/10.

Before Fate/stay night, I watched, or tried to watch, Kokoro Library. And… I couldn’t finish it. Everytime I try watching it, I end up falling asleep, so in the end I only made it through like 7 episodes in a week and a half. It’s like Haibane Renmei, but with a more pointless story and more generic characters (Hi there, Belldan.. er, Iina!). I mean, OK, yeah, it’s a “slice-of-life” show, but a teenage girl taking test for librarian license? WTF do you need a license to be a librarian anyway? The show is just boring… 5/10.

And finally, saw 300 last night – had to buy tickets about 2 hours in advance, go eat, and then wait in line for half an hour before being able to go inside, and then suffer through some of the worst previews ever, but in the end, it was worth it. A lot of people/critics apparently thought that it was too much like a videogame, but I neither see that being overtly the case, nor what would make that such a bad thing if it were true. Yeah, it’s bloody, yeah, it isn’t exactly politically-correct (though I have to say calling the Athenians “boy-lovers” was kinda funny), and yeah, some of the story elements are just plain-out weird (having never read the comic, only have info on the actual battle to compare it to), but it was still a highly entertaining action movie. 8/10.

Coming up… currently watching the Ah! My Goddess TV series, and probably gonna watch Initial D Fourth Stage (don’t ask me why, I’m not completely sure).

3 of them, in fact. First, a song that appeared in Daicon IV, the video that really put Gainax on the map. The Daicon IV short, in turn, was the inspiration for the anime scene that featured the same song, which was part of the opening for Densha Otoko. Anyway, it’s an interesting song from a bygone age, when synthesizers were new and novel:

Twilight – [192kbps MP3]
Electric Light Orchestra

Second is the opening theme to my latest anime pleasure, Fate/stay night (more on that in another post) – it’s actually a remix of a song from the FSN game, but in this case I think I prefer this version:

disillusion – [128-192kbps VBR MP3]
タイナカ サチ

And lastly, a song that I had actually enjoyed for a while without really just how much I liked it – another fantastic piece sung by the wondrous-voiced Maaya Sakamoto:

a happy ending – [128-192kbps VBR MP3]
坂本真綾

Lyrics to Twilight and a happy ending available after the break – still searching for disillusion lyrics in kanji =/.

(more…)

I’ve decided: Netgear Sucks.

The cable modem that TimeWarner provides is unbranded, but if you look into it, you discover that it’s made by Netgear. It also randomly stops working, so I seem to have to power-cycle the damned thing once a day. Now, it’s possible that it’s actually a problem with the internet connection, TW’s fault instead of Netgear’s, and I would agree, except…

We also use a Netgear WPN824 “RangeMax” 802.11g router. One of the features of this model is that it has a translucent circular “window” that has a bunch of LEDs in it, which apparently is what they decided to focus on instead of more important things. Like, you know, having it work properly. I set up the router’s DHCP server to assign a specific IP to my Ubuntu machine, but wouldn’t you know, somehow it seems every time the IP gets renewed, it ends up not being the IP that it’s supposed to get. The MAC address is right, the device name is right, but it just won’t give it the right IP. So I end up having to configure the computer to always request the bloody IP that the router’s supposed to assign to it automatically.

Why is the static local IP important? Because it’s my webserver, and any requests on port 80 is forwarded to that IP. Which is fine… except the router randomly stops forwarding it, and I have to go into the router admin page and refresh settings to get it to work again. In fact, I had to do that while typing up this rant.

I wish I could say this was an isolated case, but this isn’t the first time I’ve had problems with a Netgear router either. =/

I guess all I can do is make sure I never buy another one… but I still have to ask, WTF is so bloody hard about making a router? The technology’s been around forever, and I know the costs are falling, but god dammit, I’d gladly pay twice as much for a router that just always worked.