News & Updates in April 2006

Posted the character profiles of Kazuki Shikimori, Kuriko Kazetsubaki, Yuna Miyami, Elizabeth (from Maburaho).

Posted the anime profile of Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend. Posted the character profile of Sana Karuta (from Kodocha).

Posted character profiles of Minaho Masaki (from Tenchi Muyo! GXP).

Posted character profiles of Kazuki Yotsuga, Mitsuki Sanada, "D" (from Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure).

Once upon a time, I though Hewlett Packard was a good, high-quality company. That changed recently when I attempted to use my HP printer/scanner's software to determine how much ink was left in the cartridges. Every time I tried to do anything from the HP Director, the whole thing would crash. Figuring it was probably a corrupt installation, I uninstalled it. Since I could only find the Mac version of the software on CD, I went to HP's site to download it... and found it to be 364 MB!! As a comparison, Photoshop plus the Photoshop elements only comes to 256 MB. At any rate, I didn't have much of an option so I went ahead and downloaded their bloat-ware.

Once it was downloaded and installed, I ran into another problem. Whenever I would attempt to access the scanner settings, the program would lock up, my hard drive light would continually remain on, and when looking at the task manager, I would see a program called "hpqdstcp.exe" taking up a ton of CPU cycles. And this continued even after I used the Windows Task Manager to force the HP Director to close. I contacted HP support via email, but they were no help at all. After a lot of searching on my part, I finally found what was causing this issue. Get this, it's a bug in HP's software that has been known since at least 2003, and has been documented in at least three different places on HP's site:

• http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c00043788
• http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?cc=us&docname=c00457430
• http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?cc=us&docname=c00457223

So it has been known about for at least three years, and instead of actually applying a simple little fix to stop their program from recursing into directories, they instead just tell you to not put any shortcuts to drives on your Windows Start Menu. WTF!? It's my computer and my Start Menu, I should be able to put shortcuts wherever the heck I want! Why in the world does their program have to scan the Start Menu anyway? The only answer I could come up with: because it's crap-ware. Oh yeah, and the default directory that the software wants to install to is C:\Program Files\HP\, which is fine, but then it also creates another directory in Program Files called "Hewlett-Packard", which contains a few DLL files. Uh... so why don't they make "Hewlett-Packard" the default directory?

At the same time I initially reported my issue, I also asked what this "Overland" directory and program was that HP installed on my computer. This question was ignored several times until I flat-out sent a message only asking about this Overland thing, and the response I got was "Overland is a specic module which installs with the HP Software". No sh-t? Really? My follow up question of "Yes, but what does it do and is it safe to remove it from my computer?" was responded with an "we'll look into that and get back to you" type of answer. That was over 10 days ago and they still have not gotten back to me. Well, I deleted it, and so far haven't noticed any ill-effects.

Anyway, so my parents came to visit us this week. They arrived Tuesday, around noon, and stayed until Thursday. It was great seeing them again, as we don't get down to Vallejo very often. This was just one reason I haven't had much updates lately. The other is I've been emptying out all my closets looking for stuff to get rid of. Figured I might as well do it now while I have the time. Some things I've been selling on eBay, while others I've been selling locally. It's kind of amazing how much stuff you end up with when you have the space to shove it away. We would have never had this much stuff had we still been living in an apartment.

And speaking of trying to get rid of stuff, we just recently picked up three bookcases. They're oak colored, and have glass panels that slide out and flip down to cover the front of the display shelves. We've been looking at getting these for Treese's Lego/Megabloks collection so that they we could display them without them getting too dusty.

Posted the anime profie of Boys Be....

Posted my review of Roger Corman Early Films: Big Doll House.

Posted my review of Roger Corman Early Films: Caged Heat.