I got bored while waiting for Penny to come rescue me and filled out a checklist with ratings and comments on Anime News Network’s encyclopedia.
I wish their format were more like AnimeNfo, but it is nice that they’re so much faster more open to community additions. I’ve never yet figured out how to add things to AnimeNfo’s list – am guessing I have to be signed on as a staff member.
The last few months have seen me becoming more and more evangelical when it comes to the wonderfulness that is Jabber. I’ve been running jabberd 2 on Hedwig for at least a year now, probably longer (although it looks like I am currently three revisions behind the most recent release…).
I’ve been using jabber slightly longer than that because when complimented by a good client like Psi, I am able not only to secure my communication with the server but with the help of GnuPG, I am able to encrypt conversations with actual people. I pretty much always encrypt conversations with Peter and have used it in the past to securely transfer bank information and stuff.
Peter showed me a releveant post from Drunken Batman’s Blog a little while ago while we were discussing our project for the PyWeek competition that we’ve foolishly engaged ourselves in 
The blog pretty much confirms everything I’ve been expecting over the last little bit. The commercial IM providers are looking to kill access to their services by old and third-party clients. They don’t like Google. Google is going to do nice things for Jabber, etc…
OSX isn’t doing bad by Jabber either. Their server release ships with ‘iChat Server’ which is an Applefied front-end for administration of a pretty stock jabberd 1.4 server. By default, all users on the server have jabber accounts. The only tweak I had to do on Alumni was to uncomment server to server functionality. (There is no gui for it, so I had to manually edit the xml config file) Without having done this, the server would have been only useful for internal communication. It is now possible for users to IM me on my personal account in stead of forcing me to log in to the mac.
Upon having fixed this feature, I sent out a huge email to all of our users. I am giving them the promise that if they take the trouble to start using Jabber, they’ll be able to get better response times out of me for their service requests 
I’ve also mentioned Jabber to Sarah again today. We’ll prolly be setting her up with it as well so she doesn’t have to deal with certain elements of ICQ yuckiness – such as getting through pesky firewalls at work 
Last night, I wound up getting to set up Kyle and Stori’s computer for the service as well – Dad popped up out of the blue and Dallin and I hed him get things going on the box they’ll be hauling out to her this weekend.
I’ve made sure that Penny’s using her account again on both machines she logs in to and we’ll probably be sneaking it on to her mother’s machine when we’re down babysitting Dallin
Was flipping through friends’ blogs this evening while waiting for Fugazi to reboot and found that Donna had posted links to a few silly little online quizzes. The one I took was especially great in that it asked one question, your name Yay!
Generate Your Anime Style:
| Hair: | Never stays the same style/colour for long. |
| Clothes: | Simple, comfortable, everyday clothes. |
| Powers: | Shape Shifting |
| Special Features: | Fox ears and tail |
| Sidekick: | Small dragon. |
| Attitude: | Cheerful, but calm. The voice of reason. |
| Weapon: | A ribbon dancer |
I would just like to say one thing… ribbons? Ack! Argh, ptooey! Please, give me pointy sticks or something at least vaguely masculine. Oh well.
Well, I have watched all of Shuffle that has been released so far and my initial opinion remains true. I like the show, it is cute and sweet and such. There is a bit more fan service than I normally tolerate, but oh well.
I think that in addition to these two new shows, I will go ahead and try to catch up on all of the latest releases posted on AnimeSuki – especially the ones that have proven themselves popular.
I figure if I wind up liking a show after one or two episodes it is worth looking into further. Besides, we have enough hd space to play with and now that the whole DVD offloading bit is working smoothly… we have plenty of permenant storage once a series is complete (I am guessing that we have 120 or so blank dvd’s lying around, that’s well over half a terabyte).
Well, it looks like I am finally back in form for a renewal of my hobby of anime acquisition. Our DVD burners are primed and the stuff is moving off of hard drives at a rapid pace. All in all, things are going well – it’s a good sign that I’m normalizing.
Prince of Tennis has apparently ended on us, and I didn’t find out about this until recently. So, I am hunting down the last remaining episodes – we already have 152 of 178. This is one of Penny’s favorite shows, so it will make her happy to have all of it.
We’re also behind on Bleach, but I have at least downloaded all of Lunar’s subs to date (45 eps). I’m pretty sure that I have seen into the early 30’s, but apparently Penny is behind me and hasn’t even been through the training episodes – but I expect she’ll be playing with them today – she got out of work and is going to be doing laundry.
I’ve been poking my head into random new series and have been rewarded with the latest two attempts.
Suzuka – 涼風 – looks like it gets to be our track-and-field romantic comedy (as opposed to tennis or baseball or …). AnimeNfo labels it as ecchi, but so far it’s cleaner than most shows I’ve encountered. Anyhow, after having seen 5 episodes, I’m pleased and expect to grab the whole thing (have all 7 subbed so far, #8 is airing this wednesday evening in Japan, and the site is hinting that there will only be 26).
Shuffle! looks like it is a member of the grand tradition of cleaning up H-games a bit and animating them. So far, having seen episode one, I am liking it. Then again, I might be something of a sucker for that sort of thing? I finally got around to watching Air last week and I liked Kanon… oh well.
Penny loves me anyways. If I can tolerate the 500 hour marathon I know she’s going to engage in once we have all of Prince of Tennis at home… she can tolerate my tendancy for romantic comedies with the occasional loser guy surrounded by short skirts.
Penny has been bugging me to try other Japanese places. The general thinking is that since Sushi Ten being the only place she’d ever really been to, she wanted to make sure it was really good stuff. And I agree with her, in theory, at least.
So, last week we hit Takamatsu. It has ads on tv and has apparently won awards. It’s in a nice building in a good location in town. I got their beef curry and she got their chicken katsu. I wasn’t feeling like sushi at the time and, for some reason, neither was she.
She is now pennitent for her infidelity.
The curry was completely uninspired and contained more peas and carrots than it did beef – or even potatoes. Oh, and it was expensive too, and not that large of a plate. The katsu was actually quite good, they did, however, label it as ‘chicken tonkatsu’ on the menu. For those of you just tuning in: 豚 (ton) – pork, カツ (katsu) – cutlet. This was my first clue that something was wrong.
Actually, it was my second clue. The first clue was that there was a sign posted on the door in all three of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese – with the Japanese last. Sitting in down in the back room of the place, near the bright and shiny sushi bar, we were given menus that contained one short page of Japanese food and four pages of Korean.
My third clue was that I did not see a single Japanese in the place with the possible exception of the sushi chef. The majority of the staff was asian, but I am assuming that they were Korean (probably not Chinese). I know I didn’t hear a word of Japanese and didn’t recognize any Chinese, so I assume what they were speaking was Korean
Fourth, the prices were fairly steep, and while the presentation on Penny’s katsu was really quite good (they cut an orange such that it looked like a bird’s wings), the overall expense was more than half again what I would have expected to pay for the quality. The clientele was mostly young white folks who seemed to expect to pay that much for their food.
All in all… I give them points for the chicken. And that’s about it. They gave me a carafe of Sprite to pour myself refills – not in order to convenience me, but so the underworked wait staff could sit around and chat. I might be convinced to go back there some day when I feel like eating only sushi… but otherwise we will probably be sticking with the much cozier place where the girls noticed when Penny got her hair dyed.