This morning I woke to find five identical messages from Microsoft informing me of an Important Security Update for .NET Messenger Service. Thanks for the information, but I don’t need you to be spamming my mailbox ever hour to tell me about it. Especially since it doesn’t apply to me.

One of my favorite shows of recent past, Witch Hunter Robin, is coming to DVD. The folks over at Bandai have put up a swanky website to promote it. Warning, it’s a very flash heavy site.

Here’s an official announcement for anyone reading this blog. Spam isn’t welcome here. Please don’t post ads to the comments. If you do I’ll have to get mean. And if I catch you doing it I’ll find some way to force you to watch all of Sailor Moon. Dubbed.

The folks over at Anime Blog Muyo! are sporting a swanky new look. Go on over and check them out. They also ask the question, “how you feel anime has changed in the past year?”. Damn, I’m going to have to update this place sometime too aren’t I.

My friend Jeff was telling me about GLTerm for OS X and how it was a great substitute for the Terminal application that comes with OS X. So, last night I finally grabbed a copy of it and started playing with it, after some tweaking of my configuration on the remote systems I connect to everything was working great. It uses X11 fonts, which means the window ends up looking kind of like an xterm. Also, it has options like copy on select, which just plain rocks (I guess if you had a programmable mouse you could set the mouse wheel to do paste when pressed). I give it a big thumbs up. I just have to pay for it so I quit getting nagged.

This is partially for my benefit. I’m always trying to find a link to this post about why csh programming is considered harmful by Tom Christiansen. But if you haven’t read it before it’s pretty good reading, especially if you are one of those people who does program in csh (tsk tsk).

I woke up a few min ago and of course couldn’t fall right back to sleep. I picked up my remote and started flipping through channels when I noticed something wasn’t quite right. It wouldn’t change correctly to anything that had a six in the number. It just wouldn’t accept the code for a six. I scratched my head a moment, since this was odd. I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t still asleep. I grabbed the old remote to test things out and the six that got sent by that was received by the cable box. Then, I started looking through the TiVo setup menus and decided to fiddle around with the remote settings. One way the TiVo works is by sending remote control codes to the cable box. When you set up the TiVo you get to choose what kind of remote to send a bunch of test signals to it. In the end I found a setting that not only worked perfectly, but worked even better than the old settings. Now I am able to watch Comedy Central. Btw, if you’ve got the General Instruments cable box from AT&T/Comcast and live in the Cambridge area you might try setting 10006, that’s the one that worked best for me. It even changes flawlessly on the ‘fast’ setting.

Dude, you are in the zone.

David T. Wolf: “Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.” [Quotes of the Day]

I just wanted to make a quick post about this DVD that just came out. After watching the very first episode of Twelve Kingdoms when it came out and finding it not to my liking I recently watched the second two episodes of it and found myself getting more into the series. When I saw the first disk was out I decided to pick it up because it was on sale. I have to say I really enjoyed it and am now wanting the second one to come out. This is also a fairly long series, checking in at 68 episodes. Here’s the description from AnimeNfo.com:

Based on a novel with the same title written by Ono Fuyumi released by Kodansha, the story focuses on Yoko Nakajima. She was a girl who had pretended to be the honor student in her school and also at her home. One day, a man named Keiki showed up suddenly, and Yoko was called “Lord” by him. Her destiny began to move greatly from that time.

She was led by Keiki, and the place she had reached at last was an another world where 12 countries existed. Moreover, she lost sight of Keiki, and didn’t know where even to go. An innumerable specter has obstinately attacked such Yoko. Furthermore, she received harsh treatment from the people whom she met. Through the survival in the another world, she regains “Strength to live” which human originally has. [AnimeNfo.com]

If you like fantasy shows you just might find this one pretty good. The main character was a bit too whiny for me at first, but she seems to be growing out of it.

This is mostly first impressions, but the other day my new DVD player arrived. I bought the Panasonic RV-32 from JVB. JVB is a nice company that sells DVD players as well as mod chips to make them multi-region. I’d heard decent things about them from over at AnimeOnDVD.com, so I thought I’d give them a try. This model also seemed to get good overall reviews.

So far, I love it. I’d owned two Pioneers before this and I had liked both of them for the most part. This Panasonic though, is already working its way towards being my fav of the three. One feature I liked right out of the box was ‘Quick Replay’, which jumps back a few seconds. While in general I don’t skip back much, if I’m rewatching, or watching a commentary it’s most useful. It will also play CDs with mp3s on them, but I haven’t played much with that feature yet. Setup was trivial. The player has a very clear and easy to use tabbed setup screen, which you can bring up at any time. On my old Pioneer, you could only do it when the system didn’t have an active DVD in. It also seems to have an auto-shutoff if you leave the player idle for too long.

So far, picture quality looks at least as good as the Pioneers I had, but I’ve only watched about one and a half DVDs. If you’re looking for a multi-region player and are looking to not spend a ton of money, I highly recommend this player. If anything major goes wrong with it, I’ll be sure to post here whining about it.