I haven’t given an anime update in a bit. Mostly cause the last few days and over the weekend I wasn’t watching much. There have been a few things though:

• Hikaru no Go – Caught up on this show. In some ways it seems to be in a lull at the moment. Though they are doing a good job of addressing some issues between the main characters. I’m definitely impressed that they are still keeping things interesting after 49 episodes
• Figure 17 – I just watched the first episode of this. I’d heard it mentioned before, but never heard any details. It was pretty cool. I think i want to watch an episode or two more before I decide what I fully thing about it.
• Saikano – As usual, this show had me in tears a few times and left me curled up on the couch whimpering. I love it, can’t wait to get it on DVD, but damn I don’t know how often I’ll be able to watch it again.
• Tenshi ni Narumon! – Thanks to Pasiphae I think I have almost all the episodes of this finally. It’s still a fun show, quite silly with some interesting moments that are a little more serious. Hopefully I can work through the rest of it in the next week or so.

So that’s a snapshot of what’s been up with the anime. I keep thinking I should do a Wiki of anime stuff I watch so that I can post reviews of individual episodes. Though I should look to see if anyone else is doing something like that.

Plato. “They certainly give very strange names to diseases.” [Quotes of the Day]

Just in case you were all getting bored with this. Here’s some more:

• They Might be Giants – No!
• They Might Be Giants – Istanbul, not Constantinople (CD Single)
• They Might Be Giants – They Might Be Giants
• The The – Soul Mining
• The The – Infected
• Talking Heads – Remain in Light
• Talking Heads – Speaking in Tongues
• Talking Heads – Stop Making Sense: Special New Edition
• Superstitious Flights, destination USA
• The Sugarcubes – life’s too good

This was a fun set of CDs. I found myself listening to a few of them since I hadn’t in ages. Soul Mining is still such an old favorite.

I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight. A big spider just ran across the floor by my feet and now I’m trying to figure out where it went. I’ve got a book to throw at it if it comes close to me again.

Brrr. I hate spiders.

Some other recent stuff:

• Xeni Jardin has been invited to join the Boing Boing team. I’ve enjoyed a lot of her posts and links in the guest spot while she’s been there.
• The New York Times has an article about how a Rival to PokŽmon Keeps Market Hot, specificly Yu-Gi-Oh!
• The Haunted Mansion at Disney celebrates the Nightmare before Christmas (from Boing Boing)
• Ken Bereskin keeps posting cool things about Jaguar. The latest covers finding files with finder. I was quite impressed to see that it will index PDF files also (though this actually makes sense).

Catching up on a few days of being away and light blogging, here’s some things that I thought were interesting. First we have some comments to about Microsoft’s new design.

• Zeldman goes after Microsoft for their poor job on their redesign.

  When a W3C member company that helped create XHTML and CSS ignores or misuses those web standards on its corporate site, you have to wonder who didn’t get the memo.

• He also points over to dive into mark, who also has some comments on the subject.

  The new design also fails even the most basic accessibility tests; the home page contains 80 instances of images without ALT text. This is the same basic failing for which the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games was successfully sued in 2000.

As I’ve been learning more about things like CSS I’ve started to become more aware of things like accessibility and the correct ways to use tags. I’m sure that there are still issues with my own site (it’s actually one of my todo’s after I finish converting all my old pages to the new style). But for some reason I’d expect a company like MS to do a better job of things. It’s not like they don’t have the resources.

Wilson Mizner. “A fellow who is always declaring he’s no fool usually has his suspicions.” [Quotes of the Day]

One ‘good’ thing about not sleeping well is I can pop another CD in to be ripped when I wake up during the night. The bad thing is that it’s 9:30 in the morning and I am ready to crawl back into bed for an hour or two. I’m hoping to get a bunch of stuff done today, so can’t afford to sleep much longer than that.

I took a few pictures this weekend and am hoping to get Gallery set up to handle pictures. I downloaded it a week or two ago, but haven’t really had time to play with it.

CDs ripped since last time (in no real order):

• This is Techno – Volume 4
• This Mortal Coil – Filagree & Shadow
• Thompson Twins – Singles Collection
• Times Two – Cecila (CD single)
• Trio – Da Da Da
• Tones on Tail – Everything!
• 24 Hour Party People OST
• Pete Tong – Spring 1988 Essential Selection
• Sarah Vaughn – Sarah Vaughn
• Was (not Was) – What up, Dog?

As I’m re-ripping all this stuff it’s still weird seeing things I haven’t listened to in years that still hasn’t shown up on any of my shuffle plays. I’m also going through and ranking all the songs I can as I rip these CDs.

I realized I didn’t quite start at the beginning the other day, so here’s what I’ve ripped so far tonight:

• Yazoo – Upstairs at Eric’s
• Yazoo – You and Me Both
• XTC – Black Sea
• The X-Files: The Album
• X – Los Angeles
• X – More Fun in the New World
• Wham! – Fantastic

Oh yeah, and Ultravox has been on my Amazon wish list for a while. I used to have some a while back, before I lost a bunch of my CD collection. I’m also leaving out the mix CDs I’ve got, since in general I don’t rip those.

I was just reading up on a new anime show and discovered that the VA for Shindou Hikaru, Kawakami Tomoko, was also the VA for Sugar in Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar. Yikes, I can’t quite seem to wrap my brain around that.