News & Updates in December 2006
- Wednesday, December 20, 2006
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Posted my review of Jet Li's Fearless.
- Tuesday, December 19, 2006
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Posted the character profiles of Kohaku (from Tsukihime, Lunar Legend), Hisui (from Tsukihime, Lunar Legend).
On Thursday I ordered a brand new digital camera from Amazon.com to replace our Canon PowerShot 2.0 Megapixel S200 camera — the Sony Cyber-shot 8.1 Megapixel DSC-W100. Now, I imagine those of you out there who aren't too familiar with me or my whole situation probably figure that I'm some rich dude with money to burn; while on the other hand, those of you who keep up to date with my goings on are probably a bit confused right about now, seeing as how I have been out of a steady job ever since Working Designs shut down and yet somehow have over $280 to blow on a new digital camera. No, I am not rich; and no, I don't have a new job yet. Allow me to explain....
Over the years, my wife and I had built up a whole load of Sony points from using our Sony-affiliated credit card. And over the past couple years we have also noticed a decline in the quality of Sony practices and products. Thus, we decided it was time to cash out our Sony points (while there is at least some good stuff still available) and start using our Amazon-affiliated credit card as our primary card to earn the much more useful Amazon credit. Unfortunately, Sony doesn't offer cash in trade for points, so we had to pick a Sony product from their rather limited list. But on the plus side, Sony does allow its users to buy the items from other stores by providing a form that can be filled out and sent in to Sony along with the purchase receipt which then applies the Sony points as credit toward the purchase.
And so we decided on this camera and bought it at Amazon.com, which was like $25 cheaper and also had free shipping. Normally when selecting the free shipping at Amazon.com, it gives an estimated arrival date of something like 5-15 days. So you can imagine my surprise when the package showed up at our doorstep on December 15th, the very next day! Talk about service! Sure makes me glad I didn't spring for the overnight delivery. Now all that's left in this little transaction is for Sony to credit us for the purchase, and we'll be all set. I just mailed out the Sony Card Points Credit Request Form today, so hopefully we'll see it on our next statement.
After unpacking the camera and getting the battery set to charge up, I went online to register it. Why? I don't really know. I don't usually register things. Not really sure what the point is. But for some reason I just decided to do it this time. So I went to the website, filled out the info, and hit the submit button. What came back was a page titled "Runtime Error" which displayed the lovely message "Server Error in / Application" followed by a whole bunch more jibber-jabber. Although I knew it wasn't a browser issue, I went ahead and tried both Firefox and Internet Explorer anyway, just to make sure, and sure enough the same thing happened on both. Mmmmmkay....
Being the nice guy that I am, I figured I'd let Sony know about this, so I headed over to Sony Online Support, where I finally decided on the Digital Video and Imaging support form, since they didn't seem to have a form for telling them that their website is jacked up. The response I received told me to remove the hyphen from the model number when filling out the form. So I did. And it worked. And just... wow... I mean, I know Sony is totally going downhill, but still, you'd think that form field validation would kind of be a given. Well, I guess not. Sony sure is full of surprises. It's almost entertaining. I think I'll probably miss that the most when they're gone.
- Thursday, December 14, 2006
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Posted the character profiles of Kurenai Yuhi (from Naruto), Gyasa (from Shinzo). Posted the anime profiles of Gintama, .Hack//Roots, Ape Escape: On Air.
- Tuesday, December 12, 2006
- Monday, December 11, 2006
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Posted the character profiles of Kuroro Lucifer (from Hunter X Hunter), Shizuku (from Hunter X Hunter). I was fooling around with the site today, trying to figure out why the left-side menu didn't stay put when scrolling in Internet Explorer 7 (if you don't see a left-hand menu, it's because your browser window is not wide enough). The "position:fixed" attribute is supposed to keep it in place, and though this was known not to work in previous versions of Internet Explorer, it is supposed to work in IE7. I never was able to figure out why it wasn't working, so I just applied the current hack that made it work in previous IE version. I did, however, stumble upon a fix to stop the menu from being jittery using that hack, which is just simply telling the page to keep the background image fixed. So now it looks and acts like it's supposed to in Internet Explorer versions 5.5 and up.
Treese and I went to see Tenacious D and The Pick Of Destiny last night, courtesy of Victor (what an awesome dude!). He had gotten free tickets from Fandango thanks to some promotional code which gave you like $10 off the purchase of a ticket, and since the total for one ticket was $8, it ended up being FREE! Don't ya just love those kind of promotions? As soon as he shared the info, I was online rushing to get some before it went bye-bye. Unfortunately, every attempt I made was met with the serine message of "we are sorry, but there was a problem processing your claim code." Figures.
Victor was lucky enough to snag a few before they discontinued the promotion (it's freaky, like he has a magic touch or something). The tickets he choose were for a showing of Stranger Than Fiction, but after I shared our experience with the drama-falsely-marketed-as-comedy, he took the tickets in and tried to exchange them for Tenacious D and The Pick Of Destiny. And apparently, it can be done, as the dude at the theater just crossed out the film name on the tickets and wrote in Tenacious D. Who knew that you could actually do that, let alone that it would be such a high-tech process? So anyway, that's how we got two free tickets to Tenacious D and The Pick Of Destiny. And it was pretty good. Totally silly, but still entertaining.
Oh, and we found out that very same night that my wife's car battery was drained. One of the icons on the dash indicated that one of the doors were still opened, so we think that must have had something to do with it. Thankfully, we made the discovery as we were about to leave for the movie, so we were able to just hop in my car and deal with it later. Later being tonight. After she got home from work, I yanked out the jumper cables, clamped those puppies up, and brought it back to life! We then drove around for about an hour to charge it back up, which is extremely fun to do at night in the rain.
- Friday, December 8, 2006
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Posted the anime profiles of Strawberry Panic, Robot Boy. Posted the character profiles of Kaito Domoto (from Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch), Molly (from Sonic X), Mayura Daidouji (from Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok), Scarlet O'Hara (from Wedding Peach), Munchlax (from Pokémon), Megumi Kannazuki (from Invincible Poster Girl), Miki Onimaru (from Invincible Poster Girl).
- Thursday, December 7, 2006
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Posted the anime profiles of Crusher Joe, Ray: The Animation. Posted the character profiles of Kino (from Kino's Journey), Izumi Lio (from Full Moon wo Sagashite).
- Tuesday, December 5, 2006
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Posted the character profiles of Lauro (from Gunslinger Girl), Milluki (from Hunter X Hunter), Might Guy (from Naruto), Django (from One Piece), Jordan (from Oban Star Racers), Hosuke (from Legendz). Started using a PHP footer file on all the standard HTML files... yep, you read that right, on my HTML files. I'm using the .htaccess file to make it so I can use PHP in HTML files. Cool, huh?
Hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving weekend, as we sure did. Treese and I drove down to my parent's house after Treese got off work on Wednesday, and we stayed until Sunday. I brought them my old computer, since their's was pretty slow and was still running Windows 98, which made it difficult to network with my mom's Windows XP laptop. I put the hard drive from their computer as a second drive in the XP machine, and figure I'll use their old computer to try making a DVD jukebox with MythDVD. All I need now is to come up with a spare hard drive. Oh, I also hooked up a flatbed scanner that my dad picked up from somewhere.
We had Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt's house, which was fun. Treese and I learned how to play 500 Rum. Treese started out getting a huge lead, but then by the end my aunt just barely closed the gap to beat her. For dinner, there was turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, various pies... a true feast, and truly delicious! Why can't they make frozen dinners taste like that? C'mon you braniacs, what do you think these frozen food companies are paying you for? Get off your butts and designs something that's quick, easy, AND delicious!
The next day, my mom and grandma took Treese out and showed her around Vallejo. I spent that time over at my grandpa's house, helping him with his computer. Mostly everything was in good shape since the last time I was over there, so this time it was hardware failures that we were dealing with. First, he said his printer stopped working and none of the troubleshooting tips would fix it. I looked at that and verified that it was indeed non-operational, so my parents gave him their old one which still worked fine, except we had to go buy ink for it.
The other problem we had was with the monitor. It would occasionally and randomly skew the picture for no apparent reason. Needless to say, this made it difficult to work at times. So we spent some time researching flat screens, first by going out and looking in the stores, and then later online. He finally settled on a 20 inch Viewsonic VG2021m LCD, which he then ordered from Amazon. It arrived about 4 days later and he called to say he hooked it up and really liked it.
On Saturday, we all went to see Stranger Than Fiction starring Will Ferrell. It wasn't nearly as funny as I thought it was gonna be, and it wasn't just me as everyone else seemed to feel the same way. It was much more like a drama than a full-on comedy, so although it wasn't a bad movie, I just felt disappointed due to my expectations. That, and it was slow. Very slow. Hm... yeah, so I guess it wasn't just my expectations. It actually wasn't a good movie. Well alright then.
We went out for some Fresh Choice buffet after the movie. I'm not a huge salad fan, but their salads are so good. Kind of like Denny's, except you can make them HUGE. Their pizza, on the other hand... not so great. Anyways, after we got home, we all played a board game called Pay Day. My Dad ended up winning, with me coming in second. And I was just fine with that, as I was just happy to not be in debt! The previous night, when I played with just Treeses and my mom, I started out getting huge bills which put me into debt right away. By the end, I was taking out loans just to pay the interest on my loans! How discouraging is that?!
- Monday, December 4, 2006
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Posted the character profiles of Loz (from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children), Seras Victoria (from Hellsing Ultimate), Firefly (from G.I. Joe: Sigma 6), Hosokawa (from Zatch Bell), Pakku (from Avatar: The Last Airbender), Kazuma Azuma (from Yakitate!! Japan).
- Sunday, December 3, 2006
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Posted the anime profile of Black Blood Brothers.