Author Archives: admin

A year is short, and also long

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A year ago my best friend died.

He was at home in his room, playing video games. He would almost hide in his room most of the time, as he shared the house with his sister, his sister’s daughter (his niece), the niece’s two kids, and whatever person was his niece’s “friend” that week. He was no lover of chaos, so the room was his retreat.

Lest I make him sound like some kind of a loser, living with his sister, let me explain that the house was originally their parents’ home. My friend left his good paying job across the state to move in with his mother, when she could no longer quite make it living by herself, for health reasons. He found a new job in this area… but when the economy tanked, he had too little time on that job to survive the cutbacks. So while taking care of his mother, he worked what jobs he could. It was hard on him, and I had to help him out with short term loans at times — which I didn’t mind a bit, because he’d helped me in the same way earlier when I was between jobs.

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Off in a niche

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Well, the idea of trying to use a Bluetooth keyboard with my little iPhone to type on didn’t last long. It’s annoyingly small, the keyboard will lose sync with the phone if I pause to think (how could anyone expect someone writing something to pause to think), and the app I was using is quite difficult to get sync via iTunes so I can actually get the file onto my desktop. iOS is for content consumption, alas; to create something you need Windows. (Or a Mac, I suppose, but why do that when I have a Windows box already?)

So I dug up an old Windows netbook I had stashed away and nearly forgotten about. I’ve taken it into work and I’ll keep it there, and use a little USB drive to move files back and forth. No, I can’t post things from my work machine directly; they have our work machines so locked down and so blocked from internet sites that it’s nearly useless to have an internet connection to them at all. Well, I’ll see how this system works out for me. And of course all the readers out there that don’t actually exist.

I’ve noticed of late another way in which I fail to comfortably fit into the mainstream. Even of anime viewing.
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Communication Difficulties

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Well let’s see if this works…

I suppose it does.

Well, then.

Welcome back, Mythical Readers. Your favorite mad writer has been away for a bit. Sadly, he writes most of these missives at work during his down times. In the past, this was done on his computer, and he transferred his work to a USB drive, then later to his home computer, and hence out into the interwebs to be vastly ignored. Alas, his employer hath rendered all USB connections to all work computers read-only, as a way of blocking a possible avenue of release of “sensitive client information”. While leaving the DVD writer in my particular machine functioning perfectly, at least for now. Well, they employ a madman, so we can’t expect too much rational behavior from them, I suppose.

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Subs versus dubs

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In my occasional perusal of the Anime News Network (ANN) site, I will sometimes against my better judgement dip into the comment sections. Every time I do I am reminded yet again of several things: 1) I am dissimilar in tastes to almost all the usual ANN commentators, and 2) yea gods and little fishes do those motherfuckers hate subtitled anime.

I myself hate dubbed anime.

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Exercise in futility

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Should I write another post?

Eh, might as well.

First, in that last post, I should have stated that I was referring to application programers. System programming is a whole other world. I wanted to be a systems programmer, but at the time that meant moving to Mexifornia, and I wanted no part of that.

Anyway.

I’m less and less inclined to put anything up here, as there’s little point in doing so. First, no one reads it, of course. Second, even as a sounding board for my own ideas… what’s the point?

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Useless ranting

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I’m a bit burned out on discussing anime topics. So instead the Mythical Readers will be treated to something else I’m burned out about.

Computers.

It’s not what you think. I’m not tired of the Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Android smartphone wars. I’m not tired of the Nintendo vs. Microsoft vs. Sony game console wars. I’m not tired of…

Actually, come to think of it, I actually AM tired of all that. But that is not what I want to blather on about in this particular post. Because those, you see, are user concerns.

I’m a programmer.

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