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.

Posted by Ammon as play at 8:14 PM EDT

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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

Posted by Ammon as eat at 7:13 PM EDT

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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:

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.

Posted by Ammon as eat at 9:41 PM EDT

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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).

Posted by Ammon as play at 6:42 PM EDT

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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.

Posted by Ammon as play at 11:29 AM EDT

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