Well, I was working up a post on FMP: TSR DVD 2, but I managed to hit the wrong key and lose the entire thing. Of course, I’d been working on it for over an hour without saving. Baka. Oh well, it was wandering all over the place anyway, not a good, tight article at all. I’ll try again tomorrow or Wed. Meantime, I’m bushed.
Some bizarre update bug struck my system this morning and wiped out almost all of my customizations, about half my registry, and all my shortcuts. I’ve spent several hours deleting stuff in general, moving crucial files, reformatting a drive, running system checks, and making sure it wasn’t a virus. At this point, my system is restored to about where it was last August, but I’ve added a lot of programs and things since then. What software is still installed has no registry entries. ALL my email and browsing records, including stored addresses, are gone. I’m stuck re-installing software, and won’t be doing much writing for a bit.
First off, I’d like to apologize to everyone who has been trying to send me email for the last two or three months, only to get a bounce message. I finally tracked down the problem tonight, with a mere 5 minutes of work. I kept looking at it, off and on for the last two weeks, but nothing clicked. I finally realized that the major problem with the mailserver was that the admin is a total idiot, and incompetent to boot.
Yes, I mean me.
You see, when I set up Houblog v.1 under Post-Nuke, I also got an e-mail account, administered using the host’s toolkit, and I tested it by sending an email to myself, using u#bu at ho#ubl# og. co# m (Sorry about the spaces and #, but I’m spoofing harvesters, of course) and I got it, so all was good with the world. Unfortunately, over the next two years, I also got more and more spam, and the tools included in the mailserver were totally inadequate — in face, the host admitted they don’t work at all. Joy. Since I wasn’t doing a whole lot with the site as of last fall, I was getting WAY more spam than I was legitimate e-mail. Finally, I got fed up with it and started digging through the tools. Found a lovely setting that would blackhole any mail sent to houblog.com. “Nah,” I decided. “Not mean enough. I want their machine to eat processor cycles discarding my bounce messages too! MUAHAHAHAHAAHAA!” So I set it to bounce instead.
And a funny thing happend. I stopped getting e-mail entirely. Now understand, I was only checking mail there about once every 3 weeks or so by then. I just didn’t want to mess with Houblog, owing to being stressed out. (hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe stressed out. I thought I was stressed out then… hahehehehehehshahahehehehaheehehheheaeahehheaheehehehehahehe *gasp* urk. Ahhhh, excuse me.) Ahem. So, it was quite a bit before I noticed I wasn’t getting any email at all. And I just shrugged and decided “what the hell, I guess everyone forgot about me, between the anime blogging and nothing interesting going on with the city.” I wasn’t getting much over here either, which I didn’t think as odd, because, I didn’t care.
And so things sat, until both Kevin and Tom started fussing that they couldn’t reach me. “Odd, I must have messed up a setting,” I thought. So I logged in and poked around, but never found anything amiss. The bounce is set properly…
If you’re an experienced site admin, you probably saw what went wrong at the beginning. Even if you’re not experienced, the obvious clue is two paragraphs back, and I should have twigged then. But no, I kept mucking around in the dark, when I could have solved the whole problem in about 1/10th the time it’s taken me to type up this article. What a maroon.
When I set up the mail account, I accepted only the default account, which used my site admin ID for the name. Needless to say, my administrator ID is NOT “ubu”.
All of the email I had ever recieved in that mailbox, I was getting, not because it was adressed to me, but because it was addressed to an invalid mailbox, and the default setting was to dump it in the administrator’s box!
What a fucking maroon.
But wait! There’s more! You see, when I set up this server, well, by that time I was an experienced and savvy admin, right? Well, sorta. I did remember to set up an account for ubu at this server, yessiree, I did.
Then I promptly forgot it existed, and have only ever checked the default admin account since.
Sigh. I raise brain-dead to a high art form.
It’s not my fault Steven fell from grace, and worse, chose poorly!
I am a sinner. I have sold my honor for a handful of lead coins. I hang my head in shame.
I tried to warn everyone away from Girls’ High!
When people have used the word “raunchy” to describe this series, they knew whereof they spoke. I feel soiled.
Yes. Yes we did. This series is, I think, the only one I ever chose to delete outright from my hard drive. Even Dokuro-chan didn’t get that treatment. It’s not just that it’s raunchy, it’s pointlessly raunchy. Inflict episode 5 on yourself if you ever want to make Dokuro-chan look good….
Well, here I am with one episode to go out of the first CardCaptor Sakura series. I have to say, I did not expect that. I thought of it…. But I went, “yeah, right! There’s something unusual there, but not that!” Sheesh. “There is no such thing as coincidence.” Heh. Completely blindsided…
If you have seen that much of the series, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, sorry, it’s as close as I’m getting to a spoiler.
But the second OP and ED are as bad a pair of songs as I’ve ever heard. The first opening grew on me after a while, and some episodes, I would listen most or all of the way through it. Not the second. Ugh.
Edit: and what gets me is that there were two really obvious clues, but they did have to be put together with the third, and I didn’t spot any of them.
Only a few hours old, the news from Anime News Network
ADR Director - Eric P. Sherman
Haruhi Suzumiya - Wendee Lee
Mikuru Asahina - Stephanie Sheh
Yuki Nagato - Michelle Ruff
Kyon - Crispin Freeman
Itsuki Koizumi - Johnny Yong Bosch
Ryouko Asakura - Bridget Hoffman
Tsuruya-san - Kari Wahlgren
It’s a very experienced cast, and they’ve all done a number of Bandai titles before. However, if you follow the link to Wendee Lee, you’ll see what has prompted complaints from some of the series’ fans: several members of the cast are a bit too experienced; in short, they’ve all done so many roles, they’ll sound like characters we know from other series. There’s something to be said either way for experienced vs. unknown VA’s. It will be interesting to see how well they work out, but I’m a sub, not a dub guy.
Wait, that sounded kinky….
Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it before. Work’s a bitch; I’m coming home brain dead. We’re trying to do 15% more job on 40% less employees. No, automation doesn’t make up the difference; in our case it’s backfired and made things worse. That 15% is more like 30% after you factor in the botched upgrades. I think that estimate is low.
I’ve started CardCaptor Sakura; will watch the fifth disk tonight. I figure I’ll do 1-2 per day for the next week or so, and work through it. Mildly interesting — it’s ok, but preteen mahou shoujo is not really my speed. If it hadn’t been for the insanely good deal, I’d have passed on it.
Some thoughts about the show: I have been convinced since the middle of the second DVD that her family knows she’s the Cardcaptor. For one thing, there’s the entire question of how the book came to be in her father’s study. And her brother has three times mentioned or displayed abilities which might be magical: he talked about making up ghost stories to scare Sakura, except he talked as if he really could see ghosts–and Sakura can’t. He definately saw his mother’s spirit in one episode, whereas Sakura didn’t notice it looking over her shoulder. And finally, Li hit him with a fire charm, and he just brushed it off. I’m therefore of the opinion that Sakura gets her magic from her father’s side of the family–I’d wondered if, thanks to his backstory, he’s actually from the Li clan. However, the real answer hit me today (though I wonder if I read it somewhere before and am just remembering it instead): Clow has to be Sakura’s paternal grandfather. It explains why the book was in the study, and why she is such a powerful sorceror. While it would be funny if Shaoran, Tomoya and Sakura were all distant cousins/in-laws, I believe that to be the answer. No, I don’t want spoilers.
Speaking of which, I thought it odd that Tomoya and Sakura never commented on the discovery that they are second cousins.
Then there’s Yukito: he probably knows something too, if not the whole story. The first meeting between him and Li was just too strange. (aside from the yaoi vibes.). I just can’t figure out if the show is hinting that the two guys have a yaoi thing going, or if it’s just CLAMP being CLAMP, or if they’re engaging in misdirection. I’m definately getting the “everybody has a secret” vibe from this show.
I can see why the WB cut it to ribbons though. There’s some really creepy sexual undertones, what with the one girl that’s got a crush on her teacher, Sakura’s mom marrying her dad when she was 16 and *he* was her teacher, the siscon references, and the parallels between Tomoya and Sakura on the one hand, and their mothers on the other. I cannot imagine this show airing uncut in the U.S.
Could we get through ONE episode without Tomoya and her weird Sakura obsession? Also, I definately skip the Kero segments after each episode. Pointless and unfunny.
Well, this isn’t much of a series review; not one picture even. Well, I said I was brain dead. (At least it’s +5 to save vs. brain-eating zombies, since they prefer the live variety…)
Update: Hahaha! I love Melin, after just one episode!
Update 2: And now a picture! I promised Steven I’d look this up. At 20:48 on the third DVD, Shaoran throws a charm at Toya that bursts into flame. Both he and Yukito witness it, but Toya just brushes it off. It’s presented ambiguously; so that they might assume he Shaoran threw a burning piece of cardboard. I don’t think they’re that dull though, either of them.
Oh and I forgot, Clow married into the Li clan, didn’t he? So if my theory is correct, Shaoran and Melin are distant relatives of Sakura and Toya, though by marriage.
Update 3: Well that was a short-lived romance. Melin’s “I can do anything better than you” routine got old quick. I’m finding her quite annoying now.