It's Miku Day and all she got from me was this lousy blog post ^_^;;. Actually it's even worse than that, Miku Day was yesterday!
Hatsune Miku is of course the insanely popular idol originally from Yamaha's Vocaloid2 voice synthesiser software, but she's since been serialised in her own manga, has games released, and has even appeared in Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei (of course!).
Ladies, gentleman and everyone else, as you sit here today reading this post (or walking around reading it on your smartphone, hey WATCH OUT for that pole!) I’d like to regale you with a tale, and this time it has nothing to do with Alan A’Dale. Alan A’Dale. This Tale, has nothing to do, with Alan A’Dale. The Tale. It’s a tale of 90s nostalgia, love and gadgets.
…or somewhere around then. I was 12-ish and my family had been living in Singapore for a few years. I was already interested in computing when my family got it’s first IBM in Melbourne, but Singapore’s mad obsession with gadgets and electronics had rubbed off on me to such an extent that barely a living moment went by when I wasn’t thinking about computers, reading about computers, talking about computers or, heaven forbid, actually using computers. Problem was I didn’t have one of my own and I was becoming increasingly unpopular with other family members for hogging the family machine.
During one hectic and busy weekend at a tech trade show (Singapore trade shows make the Tokyo subway look like a Zune display booth), we walked past the Toshiba booth where they were demonstrating their Libretto line of notebook computers. My jaw dropped and, as my dad tells the story, I squeaked.
The cheesy, ugly netbook was still a decade away and the only other small, handheld machines at the time ran the scaled down Windows CE, most with monochrome displays, so I was just awe struck by how ridiculously cute this fully featured little computer was. It was smaller than a VHS tape and its weight was measured in grammes not kilos, but it had a fully operational copy of Windows 95 running on a 120MHz Pentium CPU with a proper hard drive, a petite but full QWERTY keyboard and an interesting lid mounted pointing device. Unlike the netbooks of today, this was comparable in performance to typical machines of the time but it seemed to defy the laws of physics!
Never before had I instantly wanted a gadget so badly! I mean, this thing did everything I was using that hulking huge family computer with the gigantic but low res CRT monitor for, in a size that I could hug and carry around with me! Alas it’s price tag was huge and my dad reasonably enough couldn’t justify buying laptops when desktops could do the same thing for a third of the cost.
Later that year I finally got my own computer, a 200MHz Pentium MMX tower that to this day is still fully operational with FreeBSD, and as the years went on I got the PalmPilots and laptops, but I always had a soft spot for that cute little laptop. Toshiba ended up expanding the Libretto line by making larger versions with more conventional screens and form factors, but none of them had the charm of that old unit. I thought the original was a work of art.
Fast forward to 2010, over 12 years later. I had still not spent the $200 I’d been given by various folks around Christmas and was casually browsing eBay for something boring like a SATA adapter. Out of the blue, right here in Australia, was a guy selling the exact model Libretto I’d seen at that Singapore trade show as a kid, in near mint condition and guaranteed working order, for peanuts. Other people overseas were also selling them, but they were either the newer versions or they wanted a ridiculous amount in shipping.
I think there must be something magical about our childhood years, because the emotions surrounding our memories from that time are so vivid and pull at us in ways that very few other things can. When I saw that unit I was taken back to the late 90s with my mum, primary school, Michael Franks, Mambo No. 5, the Macarena, the Beanie Baby shop in Wheelock Place, my Olympus Trip film camera, Pokemon, Magic Cards, Sailor Moon, DragonBall Z, Lycos, GeoCities and… and I just had to get it!
I admit I’m a huge sucker for nostalgia, arguably it’s my greatest weakness :). The unit has since been upgraded with a 40GB hard drive so I intend to dual boot it with DOS/Windows 95 (again for nostalgic purposes) and FreeBSD; not to use with X11, but for some of the terminal ncurses software I’ve been writing. Just imagine sitting in a lecture hall with this tiny little machine writing up notes in Emacs or the IBM E Editor, people would think I’m daft and for good reason!
Was it a logical thing to do? Heck no! Was it something I had to do though? Absolutely! I always wanted that little machine, and now 12 years later I could finally get one. And I can hug it and squeeze it and call it George. Obligatory Loony Tunes reference… hey I watched that in the 90s too!
Have you guys ever bought something as an adult you always wanted as a kid, even if it was ridiculously outdated? Surely I can’t be the only crazy one doing this!
This post originally appeared on the Annexe.
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Because of my unexpected two day hiatus from blogging I missed two days of my seven day Whole Wheat Radio Artist of the Day experiment. I'm going right ahead and rectifying this by recommending one of my favourites, Johnsmith!
There's no point reinventing the wheel when someone else has already done a great job inventing said wheel, so instead of using my own mangled language I'll quote this part of his profile from his artist page which I wholeheartedly endorse with the Rubenerd Seal of Approval, if said seal existed.
Whenever you read or hear about the music of Johnsmith, certain watchwords always come up, regardless of the source. Words like uplifting, or integrity, heart, or soul. His songs and voice go straight to the heart, because that’s where they come from.
Given I know nothing about music and the language used to describe it, I feel as though I'm a wine taster using words such as "mmm tasty!", but Johnsmith's music is amazing, original, fresh, with great lyrics and an upbeat attitude, and as with Esther Golton it also helps that he's a really friendly person.
Well that endorsement was just terrible, please disregard! The first time I heard him back on the 18th of June 2008 (according to the page edit history) I felt compelled to add my Rubenerd Bagus tag to his artist page which even if I tag an artist with a bunch of five star reviews, I often don't do unless I've really found someone special. Was that a better endorsement? I think it was, let's pretend my attempt at describing music above didn't happen.
He also has an official website, on the internet of all places! Sometimes I worry I'm too funny, but that's okay because I'm the only one who thinks so.
This could be the greatest CD cover, ever! I don't know why.
Howard Hanson: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 7; Piano Concerto; Mosaics
Main performer: Gerard Schwarz
Time: 67:48
Release Date: 1992
Links shared from del.icio.us today:
This could be the first time I've ever downgraded an Apple OS.
As we speak I'm downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I'm at it, I'm finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I've decided to give up for now.
As I always say, I love Apple hardware and software, but I'm not afraid to call them out when they do something wrong or if there's a better alternative. This hardware may be old and crappy, and it could very well be a problem with third party software not the OS itself, but the reality is it's still my primary production machine and I need it working reliably. Leopard on this machine was solid as a rock.
Goodbye Menlo, I'm going to miss you :'-(
And as a pre-emptive reply to what I assume will be a few comments, I think it's great that Snow Leopard works so flawlessly on your machine, but this has no bearing on my own circumstances. And to those who may simply accuse me of using weird software or that it's my configuration's fault for Snow Leopard not working well not Snow Leopard itself, you obviously skimmed this post without reading it. Skimmed sounds like pasteurisation. Can you pasteurise blog posts?
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Part three in the Rubenerd Whole Wheat Radio Artist of the Day (try saying that really fast!) is Esther Golton!
She's perhaps a predictable choice for me given I've talked about her and her music so many times here, but when Herrie started playing Going to Shadu then The Unseen Visitor while running on random this morning I took it to be a sign.
I was a fan of Unfinished Houses (particularly for that first song linked to above), but her recent Aurora Borealis work is on another level entirely from most music, it's up there with Michael Franks which you'd know if you read this blog is very high praise! It's also a pleasant coincidence that's she's a genuinely nice person, something which doesn't really have any bearing on her musical talent per sé but it means I feel good buying her music. Does that make sense? It made sense in my head!
Visit her artist page and her official website for all you need to know, and request some of her music :).
For your consideration ^_^. If Tarale happens to come across this, she may want to avoid it because it contains a random list of confusing, disparate thoughts again!
If an anime character dresses up as another anime character, say for example Hiiragi Kagami from Lucky Star dressing up as Tohsaka Rin from the Fate/Stay Night series, is it still called cosplay?
Before you answer, consider this! If we've learned anything from Lucky Star and the adventures of Suzumiya Haruhi, it's that other anime and manga are viewed as fiction within other shows. What that means is Haruhi is able to point at the SHUFFLE manga and talk about it as if it were a book, and Izumi KanataKonata is able to collect anime figures. What I mean is these characters aren't seen as real within other shows, because the universes don't collide.
Still, even if an anime character dresses up as another anime character, is that character cosplaying or is that reserved only for people like me who are blond caucasians but dress up as Japanese people much to the second hand embarrassment of others?
Is cosplaying limited to the real world? What if an anime character dresses up as a character from the same anime, is that called cosplaying? Or is the fact the two characters are from the same universe mean they'd just be dressing up as each other because they don't see themselves as an anime?
Computers don't like anime, according to the spell checker I've made 25 spelling mistakes in this post. I think I might quit while I'm ahead and while I still understand my own point I was trying to make. Wait, I was making a point? I'm really confused. Never mind.
In a tip of the hat to Jim Kloss who was essentially driven off Wikipedia by trigger happy administrators as well as some recent adventures of my own, I've updated my Wikipedia user page.
Under the Worrying out loud title thingy:
While he finds the philosophy and mission of Wikipedia noble, he worries the resource is slowly being derailed by an elitist clique of power hungry administrators more interested in slapping indiscriminate boilerplate without further explanation on articles they deem unworthy before they’ve had the chance to be fleshed out. He firmly believes administrators who repeatedly have article deletion nominations rejected should have their privileges revoked in order to discourage such behaviour.
One tiny example out of a laundry list of potential candidates, the fact the Australian Central Credit Union article was nominated for deletion by this person because it “wasn’t notable”, despite the fact a Google search would have returned thousands of results and that the credit union is one of the largest in the country.
It is our collective loss that responsible editors like Jim Kloss have left because of such people.
For fun, I also borrowed the wiki template used for articles on people and added some pointlessness. For example I listed my ethnicity as White and Nerdy :D.
It seems Jim Kloss and I aren't the only ones having trouble. Recently Slashdot ran an article discussing quality issues with Wikipedia and some of the responders were pretty vocal. Darkness404 gave one of the better responses that addresses several of the exact issues I've been worrying about:
I think the main problem with Wikipedia is it went from “an encyclopedia where you -might- find something of interest” to “a place you can find anything!” to now “a place where you can possibly find some things but if we don’t like it, it gets deleted and we don’t want your help unless you feel like reading 22342342343 policies, follow them exactly and patrol “your” page constantly”. Seriously, Wikipedia 2-3 years ago was a lot better than Wikipedia now. Why is it that editors think deleting articles somehow makes it better? Especially since Wikipedia is online and a few new articles don’t translate to (much) extra load?
The Deletionpedia site shows a lot of fairly terrible articles that were worthy of deletion, but also a significant number of good articles. As I said before, that's the problem with basing notability solely on the number of mentions something has online, and vesting power in only a few individuals.
Part one of this post written last year shows one of my own personal experiences with some senior Wikipedia editors. For example, did you know war and a ritualistic bonfire are equivalent?
