Page 153 – Krunk4Ever!

November 16, 2005November 16, 2005

Bleach Episode 57

Yet another exciting episode with several good fighting scenes. But the next episode is going to be SO MUCH BETTER!!!

Spoilers:

This episode delves into the past of Sui Fong and Yoruichi. It turns out Yoruichi was some princess of some really high clan and Sui Fong was from a clan that has sworn to protect Yoruichi. Sui Fong was an excellent student and Yoruichi even chooses her as her own bodyguard. Things were going really well, until one day when Yoruichi suddenly left without saying goodbye. So she’s been holding that grudge for over 100 years swearing to excel herself and be better than Yoruichi one day for betraying her. Don’t want to tell you how the fight ended, you can watch that for yourself.

One of the questions I always had was people in Soul Society seem to stop growing after a certain point. I’ve had this discussion with Liam before but we couldn’t really come up with an answer. The perfect example was shown in this episode with Sui Fong and Yoruichi. Yoruichi has not grown much at all from the flashbacks, however, Sui Fong had grown from a little girl to teenager, to her 20s now, maybe? Between the teenager look and the 20s look, over 100 years has past. Why did Yoruichi stop growing? Do they just grow slower once they reach past a certain age or do they fully stop?

The camera then zooms back to Ichigo and Byakuya. Neither is wounded at this point, but everyone in the court of souls is feeling their battle. Ichigo demands Byakuka to release his Bankai, but Byakuka replies that he’s 1000 years too early to be killed by his Bankai. Sound familiar? It’s exactly the same speach he gave to Renji before Renji made him fall on his knees. Welp, the episode ended there, but we’re finally going to see Ichigo’s Bankai vs Byakuya’s Bankai in the next episode!!!

November 16, 2005November 16, 2005

Black Cat Episode 5

Black Cat Episode 5 – The Cat That Made A Decision

Spoilers:

In this episode, Train decides to leave Chronos and the elders and the other Numbers were disappointed in him, especially #1, who is the captain. Train even gives up his gun to that cute sweeper that he shares his milk with. However, Chronos couldn’t just end it like this and sends Creed to try to persuade him to come back. Who knew Creed was actually starting a coup d’état because he didn’t believe Chronos should have so much power and control over 50% of the world’s economy. Creed uses a sword instead of a gun like Train. In fact, so far outta the Chronos I’ve met, they’ve all used swords. Train was the only one I’ve seen that used a gun. His gun actually has a name: Hades. So #1 comes after both Creed and Train, and the episode ends with her about to attack.

November 14, 2005January 21, 2006

Yahoo! Mail now has advance Firefox support!

I just noticed Yahoo! Mail is supporting advance edit controls in Firefox:

Before this, these advance controls were only available only in Internet Explorer, which really sucked because whenever I hit reply in Firefox, it’d create the following ugly reply patterns for the message:

>
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>

Now it’s just a blue bar like Outlook and how it’s suppose to be. Other functionalities it has includes spell check, font face, font size, bold, italic, underline, color, highlight, emoticon, hyperlink, text alignment, list creationg, indentation, and stationeries. The only thing I really cared about was the ugly > > > >. So I’m happy.

Random Crap:

Google to offer web traffic analysis services – Google has officially launched Analytics, a robust new web analysis system that provides site owners with traffic metrics and massive amounts of useful marketing data. Based on technology originally developed by a Californian company called Urchin that Google acquired in March, Analytics integrates with Google’s popular AdWords system, and will vastly improve the quality and quantity of data provided to existing AdWords users. Those of you that don’t use AdWords can still use Analytics by adding a simple javascript snippet to your web site. I just implemented this on both my blog and gallery. We’ll see how well it does. I was working on KLAWS if you remember correctly, but that project sorted is still somewhere in midair and I accumulated way too much data to process.

Beating speed cameras (from deadlock) – apparently > 170MPH is the speed you need to aim for to bypass speed cameras.

Berkeley High’s condom club – A student can get a 12-pack, free food (from esca):

Now after I read this — and after I stopped laughing — my first thought was not about the offer of “free food,” presumably made to induce the students to join club. My mind did not linger over the sticker that gets attached to the back of a student I.D. (wondering, like, what’s the logo look like for the Condom Club?) What stopped me, what left me pondering the ingenuity of high school administrators, was the number of condoms on offer. Please, read this line again, slowly: Show your ID at the Health Center and receive 12 free condoms a week.

Where did they come up with the number 12?

Twelve condoms a week! I don’t know sex workers who need that many condoms. Certainly none of my middle-age friends need 12 condoms a week. High school students do?

Google Answers (from deadlock) – Ask a question. Set your price. Get your answer. More than 500 carefully screened Researchers are ready to answer your question for as little as $2.50 — usually within 24 hours. Your satisfaction is completely guaranteed.

November 13, 2005November 13, 2005

Saw II

Watched Saw II with stanman today. You can watch the trailer here. I thought the 1st one was better compared to this one and stanman concurs. The first one had methological planning and things took some time to figure out. This movie went zooming through most of the ‘works’ and didn’t really give time for the audience and the actors to figure stuff out. Also the original hint was too easy to guess.

Spoilers:

So the story begins with a detective and a son, who aren’t really in good terms. The son just got arrested for stealing and his dad came to bail his butt out. So the story continues, this time instead of having just 1 or 2 people, the jigsaw collects I believe 6-8 people and put them into a house (not a room this time). They’ve been poisoned with nerve gas and will die within 2 hours. The son was one of them that was caught. Among the people who were caught, one of them was the girl that actually survived one of jigsaw’s previous games. The cop busts jigsaw’s hideout and finds out that his son has been caught. Jigsaw demands to play a game and all he has to listen and his son will be okay. However as the 2hr limit approaches, you can realize what usually happens with cops in that situation. However, going back to the house and the ones inside (major spoilers coming up) , it turns out that the others beside the boy, were people who were set up by his father and sent to jail. Some deserved it, while others didn’t, but all of them hate the father. Does the kid survive? What happens to the dad? Why was the girl caught a 2nd time? Guess you’ll just have to watch it to find out.

November 13, 2005November 13, 2005

Patent Office

Found an really interesting quote from /.

So why does the patent office keep on granting so many obviously stupid patents?

It is not primarily because the patent examiners are incompetent, as is often suggested. Instead it is the economics of running a patent office that make sure that it becomes like this.

Nowadays most patent offices around the world are “self funded”, which means that they are funded by the fees that the collect from the patent applicants. This may perhaps seem like a sensible idea at first sight, but unfortunately it invariably leads to lower and lower standards for what is patentable.

A look at the USPTO Fee Schedule explains the underlying math.

The initial application fee for a patent is $300. In order to collect that money, the patent office has to do quite a lot of work: set up a file, do an initial formal examination, perform a novelty search, and quite often engage in correspondence with the applicant to sort out various issues. It seems reasonable to assume that initial applications “as such” do not cover their own costs for the patent office.

But once a patent has been granted, nice things start to happen to the patent office’s profitability calculations.

In order to keep his patent valid, the proprietor has to pay maintenance fees at regular intervals. $900 is due at 3.5 years after it was granted, $2,300 due at 7.5 years, and $3,800 due at 11.5 years.

For a patent that is renewed throughout its full term, the maintenance fees add up to $7,000, compared to the $300 for the initial application.

And the renewal fees are the good part of the patent office business, since the PTO doesn’t actually have to do anything for the money, except make a note in the file that the fee has been paid. So for those patent offices around the world that are funded in whole or in part by the fees they collect, there is a direct incentive to let the standards slip to the lowest level they can possibly get away with.

The result can be seen at a patent office near you.

November 13, 2005November 13, 2005

Honeymooners

Saw The Honeymooners a few days ago. Storyline wasn’t that great, but it was a funny light movie. You can watch the trailer here. I’m still not too sure what the title is referring to. Does honeymooners have some adjectives associated with it?

Spoilers:

The movie is about a bus driver that always has big dreams which always fails and has a waitress that has a simple dream of owning her house. They fall in love and eventually get married. The husband keeps wasting money on ‘his dreams’ of getting rich quick and they end up never having enough money to buy the house. This is a comedy movie, so the storyline doesn’t really mean much. They find a dog one day. The greyhound was really really fast, so they try enlisting it to race and they go through some hoops and stuff which forces them to waste money training and getting ‘papers’. While this happens, there’s a house that goes on sale which everyone really likes. However, the money’s no longer there. What will they do if the dog doesn’t win?

November 13, 2005January 21, 2006

Daylight Saving Time

So I was thinking when I looked at the clock in my car today, regarding our time system and the many many faults it had. I had always wanted a single time system, no matter where in the world you are. No more PST, no more EST, no more PDT, no more China time, no more England time, no more etc etc, just 1 system. No more remember how many hours difference between here and Tokyo is. 8am in Seattle = 8am in California = 8am in New York = 8am in London = 8am in Hong Kong. That might mean going to work between 11pm and 8am, not like many of us geeks don’t already, but the time system should not dictate when you go to work. With a system like this, you will no longer get confused when you enter a different time zone. You don’t lose or gain hours anymore when you fly half way around the world. Setting up meetings across time zones becomes way much easier.

That system would fix a lot of problems, but there is oen problem that it will not fix: Daylight Saving Time. No matter how I look at it, Daylight Saving Time is going to be causing some trouble. In the system I suggested, Daylight Saving Time will no longer work, unless you can get the whole world to follow and shift time 1hr forward or 1hr backward. I agree to the benefits of Daylight Saving Time. In this case, we’ll need to shift the responsibilities onto the companies themselves, which probably over half won’t follow due to complications, so we end up losing the benefits of Daylight Saving Time.

How would one solve such a problem. Would it worth it to give up DST and use a World System? I personally think it is.

Random Crap:

pya! Flood:

(img) (ﾛﾅ)ＬＥＧＯ – Lego Ronald
(img) ぞうきんがけするnya – Cute Kitten on Towel
(img) 乃 – Chairs on a Hill – Seems like two chairs like each other better than the other.
(img) shall we dance? – Beauty and the Beast sculpture
(img) 静馬 – Flip
(vid) 鳩にエサをやらないでください – Agitated Pigeon – I miss Trigger Happy TV.

Full Metal Sonic (from deadlock) – Another Full Metal Alchemist parody opening, but this time instead of Final Fantasy XI characters, we have Sonic the Hedgehog characters including Sonic as Al, Tails as Ed, Amy as Windy, and several others which I didn’t want to compare. hehe.

The Madagascar Penguins – In A Christmas Caper (direct download) – found this and thought it was a pretty cool short animation. Not on par with Pixar’s, but definitely cute. It’s a little Christmas story starring the penguins from Madagascar.

Riya – Photo Search (from /.) – here’s the article from Wired News. I’d love to check out this software when it becomes available for the general public and see how good it is at recognizing people. I think the ultimate test would be able to tell identitical twins apart.

NES Sniper Rifle (from deadlock) – G4 engineer David Randolph shows Kevin Pereira how he constructed the world’s first Duck Hunt sniper rifle. Apparently the light gun works just as I explained previously. When you pull the trigger, the screen goes black with a white box appears where the duck is. If the gun picks up on black, the duck doesn’t die. If the picks up on the light, it’s a miss. The Snapper (Snipe Zapper) looks pretty sweet.

The “yes” man – A hilarious student film (I’m assuming). You’ve got to wait for the punch line. Only hint I’m going to give is that it has to do with some telecommunication service provider. I

Wanted: Mate for lovesick giraffe in Mexico park – “He’s driving us crazy,” Juan Aragones told Reuters in a telephone interview. “He’s mounted a tree, a fence and even a shed.”

Apple Mac OS X on x86: a first test – Steve Jobs might not approve, but Apple’s latest operating system can be installed on any x86 hardware. How well does it function? Read our preliminary labs test to find out. photos here. The test machine was a Toshiba Portégé M300 notebook equipped with a 1.2GHz Pentium M processor and 512MB of RAM.

November 11, 2005January 21, 2006

Image Border

My alarm went off this morning at 9:20AM. I didn’t get out of bed till 12:30PM. Haha. I love days without meetings scheduled. Though I did work till 9:30PM this night, so it’s been quite a long day for me.

So I spent some time adding a border around images with links whenever your mouse goes over it. I thought it was a nice visual addition and that’s step 1 to start customizing my page layout, though who knows when the next time I’ll have time to actually work on the layout is. CSS is quite fun. I did hit some problems earlier in the stylesheet. I was actually going to code my images as:

<a href="test.html"><img src="test.jpg" style="border-color:orange" onmouseover="javascript:border='2px'" onmouseout:border='0px'"></a>

Then I googled some CSS references and playing with different settings, I finally ended up with the following which I liked:

a img { border:2px solid white } a:hover img { border:2px solid orange }

At first I only got firefox to work, but after googling some more, I realized that for some odd reason, IE required a specific order of things. But that in way made me realize there were some syntax errors with my CSS style sheet.

I hope you’ll find it as visually pleasing as I did.

Random Crap:

Iowa Woman Finds Dead Turtle in Coffee – Morris, 77, of Ainsworth, found a dead baby turtle in the 2-pound package of Folgers coffee last Sunday. …Morris, who has kept the turtle, said she would continue to drink coffee, but that she is now a more mindful consumer. Sounds like the turtle was still alive! I want to find a turtle in my coffee! For some reason, I’m imagining a very extremely cute turtle. *blushes*

Man buys virtual space station for US$100,000 – Jon Jacobs, a director of independent films who hails from Miami, FL, has purchased a virtual space station from the Swedish software company that owns and operates the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) Project Entropia. This is believed to be the largest single purchase of virtual real estate by an individual. So after we learn about someone buying a virtual island for US$26,500 which I posted about yesterday, some other person buys a virtual space station for US$100,000. Those programmers at Project Entropia are making bank!

Cemetary Telemarketer (from deadlock) – Comedian Tom Mabe records incoming telemarketing calls. This is one of our favorites. Cemetary telemarketer gets owned by Tom Mabe.

Tom: This is so bizarre. I was sitting here just contemplating suicide and I was praying, asking God for a sign. You don’t understand, just 5 minutes ago I was praying God for a sign, and you called. Something’s in control, but you’re the angel of death.

What’s so funny, is after awhile, the telemarketer tries again to get Tom to buy his services and even tells him to hold off killing himself until he fills out the paperwork.

Tom: Do you do financing down there?
Telemarketer: Mr. Mabe, you know you just got done saying about taking your life. Do you have a credit card or a checking account?
Tom: Hold up. *sniff*
Telemarketer: Let me ask you this. If I got the paperwork out to you say this afternoon, do you think you can hold off till tomorrow.

The Promise (無極) trailer (from fuzzywuzzy). The trailer is really high quality and 11 minutes long. At first I thought this was computer animation, but it turns out to be real people. hehe. Would that be a compliment or a criticism? Not really too sure what the movie is about yet, but it seems to be set in ancient China and some war is going on between the civilized and the uncivilized. There also seems to be a love story involved. I couldn’t find the official movie site, but I found a Japanese site and also MonkeyPeaches has a page on it. The movie looked pretty but the choreography didn’t seem too impressive.

Vincent (direct download) – A very nice short animation by Tim Burton. Got this off bittorrent. Somewhat dark like all his movies, but quite enjoyable. It’s about a depressed little boy and how his real life constrasts with his imaginary life.

November 11, 2005November 11, 2005

The Unsaid

The Unsaid was quite an interesting movie. You can watch the trailer here, but I personally think it revealed a bit too much if you’re planning to watch the movie. It’s a suspense thriller type of movie, where you try to solve what really happened before the movie ends and reveals it. The storyline was pretty typical about psychopathic patients who repressed their memories, but I found it rather close when it started to show similar behaviors to myself. As the title suggests, the most important things to ourselves are the things left unsaid.

Spoilers:

Movie’s about a psychiatrist named Michael Hunter who long has given up his practice, but instead now writes books and gives seldom lectures, but he’s still quite renown in his field. A old student of his, Barbara, which has become a rather good psychiatrist herself requests the help of her old professor to look into a boy. This young boy saw his mother get killed by his father when he was 6 or 7 years old. He’s turning 18 in a few weeks and she believes that he’s not ready to leave the nest yet. He’s shown no signs of being affected by the incident at all and she believes that he is repressing it all and requests the help of Mike.

Mike initially rejects the request for help. He himself gave up practice after his own little boy died. It was quite shocking to find out why and I could’ve never guessed. But somehow that boy reminded him of his own son in some way and he decided to go help him. Then there’s this long story between Mike unraveling the past and the relationship developing between Mike’s own daughter and this boy Tommy. What I found odd, was that what Mike did wasn’t really spectacular and how he was able to start getting Tommy to crack while no others did was somewhat unbelievable. Tommy actually cracked quite easily. However, do note, I was able to guess exactly what happened midway through the movie so I’m feeling quite proud.

Though both the reasons for Kyle’s, Mike’s son, death and what really happened with Tommy were quite disturbing… though that itself may have revealed too much…

Repressing emotions is a really bad thing, but it’s the easiest way to escape feeling down.

November 11, 2005November 11, 2005

Detective Academy Q Episodes 28-29

Thanks to Shinsen-Subs for realeasing more Detective Academy Q (also known as Tantei Gakuen Q). Anyone know why their titles of their episodes are mixed with 2 different colors (red and black)?

Detective Academy Q Episode 28 – Underground Cell SOS

Detective Academy Q Episode 29 – The Murder Collector

Spoilers:

Yet another 2 exciting episodes of Detective Academy Q. We last left off with Kyuu and Meg trapped inside the cell and Meg got bitten by a pit viper. Kyuu does the honor and tries to suck most of the poison out, though he did acknowledge not all the poison is out. One thing I remember about snake bites is that you’re NEVER suppose to try to suck the poison out because you yourself is very likely to intake the poison into your body. Kinta, Ryuu, and Kazuma hears they haven’t gone home yet, and starts to get worry. They go to school to investigate and by the clues left behind, it turns out that Kyuu and Meg are somewhere on campus. They find their backpacks in the trash along with the container that held the viper. After learning this Kinta immediately rushes off to get the antivenom and hopes he’ll make it back in time.. Kyuu on the otherhand frantically tries to figure a way to get out. He finds a water pipe and starts banging on it and creates a hole and starts flashing his flashlight in SOS patterns. Like fiber optics, the light travels through the water pipes and comes out the other end and Kazuma notices it flashing. Somehow Ryuu manages to find door behind the shelf and crack the puzzle almost immediately (just like Kyuu). When they unlock the door, Kyuu rushes up to them and tells them they need to hurry and get the antivenom. Before he finishes his sentence, Ryuu assures him everything will be okay and at that moment Kinta rushes in with the antivenom. Kyuu falls onto his knees exhausted.

It was quite an emotional episode. You really felt that Kyuu was going to regret for his entire life if Meg dies. Even afterwards, Kyuu apologizes big time to Meg for getting her in danger. At the end of this episode, the truth is finally out. Ryuu aparently is part of the Pluto group and is only attending DDS according to his grandfather’s wishes, but he demands that nothing happens to Class Q or else…

The next episode talks about Meg and Ryuu getting assigned to impersonate high school students to investigate on a Snuff Video Collector. Snuff videos are videos of actual people getting murdered. There’s a girl that has gone missing and on the school message boards, rumors was that she was killed in a snuff video. Before leaving, Kyuu begs Ryuu to take care and watch over Meg because he felt the last attack was purposely trying to kill Meg. Soon after infiltrating High School, they start following leads. However, this ended up Meg getting kidnapped by the Collector. What will happen now?