Random Crap

Today’s Japanese phrase is: 化け物 (bakemono) – goblin; apparition; monster; ghost; phantom; spectre; specter
Sometimes also used to describe a person who has no morals or ethics.

It’s been a while since my last Random Crap post, so this flood may continue for a few days.

Click image to start the animation or view it in the gallery.
Final Fantasy VIII – Chibi Squall and Rinoa (from Lsimyle)
Text: 只要能和你在一起, 失去一切都不可惜.
Translation: If I can only be with you, losing everything else won’t matter.

They’re so cute!

24 / 6 (from MsticAzn) – a parody video of 24 (Jack Bauer) done by some college friends of MsticAzn. Only lasts 4 minutes, but pretty funny and cheesy at the same time. The video effects were hilarious. They did borrow MGS3’s soundtrack which was a bit jarring at first.

What is a “Name Brand” laptop? (from AT) – Virtually none of the “Name” brands manufacture their own laptops, with the about the only exception being Asus. … The Dell Latitude and the Sony Vaio are made by Quanta, who also makes many of the IBM laptops, and the now-discontinued PowerPro C 3:16, and the new PowerPro G 3:8. Quanta is well known as one of the best and highest quality laptop ODM in the world. I wonder if Quanta still makes parts for the Lenovo Thinkpad.

My Personal Trading Chart (from MS newsgroup)

ccmexec.exe and inventory.exe – what are they and what do they do? (from Belldandy) – I referred to these two processes tangentially in Microsoft laptop gripes, but based on referrer hits and email they deserve a post of their own. Systems Management Server pushes out patches and keeps your software updated via an agent that’s installed on your PC. This agent shows up in task manager as CcmExec.exe (where ccm stands for change and configuration management), and in the services list as the SMS Agent Host. Normally ccmexec doesn’t do much, but (depending on your setup) it may periodically kick off an Office update process called inventory.exe. Doing an inventory involves a lot of disk seeking, and unfortunately SMS isn’t smart enough to notice if you’re actually using a laptop on battery power.

Interesting comment from /. (#15419111):

The articles hints at two forms of addiction.

1. One form is simply that a game player likes the computer game. The player might spend hours on playing the game. A good example of an absorbing game is Netrek of the early 1990s. Many geeks at UC-Berkeley spent hours on playing this game instead of working on their Ph.D. dissertations.
2. Another form is a means to escape an abusive household. The article at the “Washington Post” states, “‘I can understand my son’s suffering,’ she said. ‘He could never satisfy his father and was failing at school. But when he plays his games, he becomes an undefeatable warrior.'” When parents physically or emotionally brutalize their children, the victims try to flee to safety. In a Western nation, most people oppose child abuse and would offer to help the victims of abuse.

   In Korea, the story is quite different. In Korea, you would consider someone with different blood to be inferior and to be not worthy of your help. The overwhelming majority of adopted Korean orphans are adopted by Westerners. The typical Korean could not care less about orphans — or abused children. In this kind of cold, brutal environment, an abused child has nowhere to run. So, the child escapes into on-line gaming: a fantasy world where the abused child can have the wonderful childhood that he cannot have in real life.

The first form of addiction is probably acceptable, but the second form of addiction is not. The second form is a terrible cry for help.

I for one can speak of the amount of pressure Asian kids are typically under (especially if they’re parents have left their home country in order to find a better living for his descendants).

Top 10 Strangest Gadgets of the Future (from /.) – some of these gadgets are pretty cool (i.e. Scarpar – The All-Terrain Motorized Board and Heliodisplay M2i), while others make you think what the heck (i.e. Transparent Toaster). That Scarpar really reminds me of Detective Conan’s solar-powered skateboard.

3G phones banned in anti-porn drive – Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has banned 3G mobile phones after a complaint from his wife and her friends about receiving pornography on them. Sigh… people can be so ignorant. Maybe they should be banning email too with all those enlarge penis spams.

Lovesick swan falls in love with swan paddle boat – A swan has fallen in love with a plastic swan-shaped paddle boat on a pond in the German town of Muenster and has spent the past three weeks flirting with the vessel five times its size, a sailing instructor said Friday. I thought this was a sweet article and shows that animals can fall in love with inanimate objects just like humans can too (hugs iPod Nano).

Should three-year-olds have televisions in their bedrooms? – How do you feel about letting young children watch television every day? If you’re like most parents, you feel a vague sense of guilt over the practice, but you do it anyway. That’s the conclusion drawn by a new study out from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The survey of more than 1,000 families shows that most parents have absorbed the message from their pediatricians that extended television time in a child’s earliest years should be avoided. Many Americans lead lives that are so busy, however, that the TV becomes an almost essential parenting tool. An interesting article I must say. I didn’t really get to watch much TV in my elementary school years. It wasn’t till Jr High or High School where I started watching more TV. When we did watch TV when I was young, it was mostly Chinese drama, so I miss a lot of cultural references that Family Guy often brings up today. But nowadays, I hardly ever watch TV. Anything I really want to watch, I can watch it on my computer (i.e. Animes, Movies, 24, etc).

The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time (from /.) – These products are so bad, they belong in the high-tech hall of shame. #1 and #2 are held by AOL and RealPlayer. Windows ME comes in #4. However, saying IE comes in at #8 is debatable. IE has its share of faults, but I’d use it any day over what Netscape Navigator has become over the years. The Iomega ZIP drive comes in at #15. I loved my ZIP drive. It was that or floppies back then and we had a great deal of “sharing” games (i.e. Duke Nukem 3D) back then. Though the death click of those disks were pretty bad. The IBM Deskstar (Deathstar) and DigitalConvergence CueCat comes in #18 and #20 respectively. Free PCs comes in at #23. My dad actually got one of those free PCs filled with advertisements. My poor sister had to endure it because that was her computer. I had an Acer and my brother had a Packard Bell.

Chicken and egg debate unscrambled (from /.) – Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg. Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal’s life. Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.