Send in the 2009

(tags blog)

Greetz and howdy. Happy New Year to all y'all. \(>_<)/

The post counter at blogger.com says I'm at 850+ posts since inception, despite my whimsical throwaway title, "we get signal". I don't see myself changing the address or machinery any time soon, but I hope I can improve the tone and manner. Seiyuu and novelist Masumi Asano (浅野真澄) wrote her heartful New Year's Resolution, which reminds me to be positive in words as well as actions and reactions.

2008 was pretty much collect instead of play, solo instead of online, DLC instead of packages. Not much of a review, I know.

2009 will stick to the same formula, if I don't run out of closet space first, ha.

It's all sweets, all the time.

Colony Drop

(tags blog, anime)

Colony Drop. This is a Gundam-ism where the ultimate warfare technique in collateral damage is de-orbiting (inhabited?!?) space colonies onto (inhabited?!?) planet-bound cities. Well actually I don't really know but Gundam is about war with mecha, and I see a picture of a space colony crashing onto urban skyline with explosive results. It sounds epic.

Colony Drop. This is an epic blog title. Okay I understand the blog aims to be "hard anime blogging dropped onto your cranium with a fiery explosion". But when the blog's "enemies" include "moé", and yet one of the writers is "burning fever #1 Haruhi otaku", I feel like I'm only going to be reading this blog when I'm in a mecha funk. I still impassively skip over the Gundam merchandise spreads in Akiba Blog, though.

Still, a review of a Gundam (Shot) Bar in Akihabara. Epic.

Coming back home to Google Reader: disappointing FastLadder evaluation

(tags blog, application, online, failure)

I was motivated by the Planet Emacs resident antipop's post about FastLadder, a web-based feed reader, so I gave it a week. Fastladder has some good ideas and great performance, but I am totally used to post-based read marking, so now I'm back to Google Reader for good.

Here is the list of advantages and disadvantages I see.

• + Unbelievably fast for moving from post to post, feed to feed. Almost as fast as your key repeat (Google Reader cannot do this)
• + Natural keyboard shortcuts+ Pin the interesting posts then open them all with one key stroke (Google Reader cannot do this)
• + default can be set to sort oldest first (Google Reader cannot do this)
• - Cannot mark individual posts as read, forcing you to read the whole feed at once
• - "Mark as read" link only at the top, not at the bottom
• - Formatting of pictures not preserved (no centering)
• - no keyboard shortcut to mark feed as read.
• - clicking on a post body does not move the page (a Google Reader feature)
• Not evaluated: Open ID compatible (Google Reader does not have this)

Basically the deal-breaker for me was the first disadvantage. I often like to go into a feed, but then skip it. It's the "why did I walk into this room?" syndrome? Or, you know those heavy photo-expose feeds like Engadget? I like to jump in and out so that the read items are purged from browser memory. With Fastladder I would go into a feed, but then by default it would mark the whole feed as read. I turned off this function but then the manual way to mark as read made me scroll all the way back to the top. Dumb dumb dumb.

Coming back to Google Reader feels natural, but I miss the speed. I am now going to memorize the keyboard shortcuts.

A slice of life, Birth of Venus

(tags blog, book, news)

There is one feed on my blogroll that I let accumulate. It's as if I dread reading it. Dread is more appropriately associated with my finance and/or productivity feeds: You should be saving more, stop procastinating! Ugh.

This feed though gives me the most perspective. It's the Christian Science Monitor All Stories feed. Some stories don't appeal to me, but there are always some gems, like language learning through girlfriends or first name basis criticisms. Plus I like the slice of life stories, like dad dealing with the three-second rule or middle-aged volunteers.

I can't stop thinking about getting an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, but I must wait until this Friday, so I am also passing the time with a book: The Birth of Venus by Susan Dunant. I read it in bed and it puts me to sleep. Historical novels? About or related to striking women depicted paintings? It must be historical literature moe.

Adding labels to my blogger posts?

(tags blog, tagging)

I dragged kicking and screaming from the old Blogger to the new "Google Account" Blogger, but as you can see from the previous posts, I'm trying out the "Labels for this post", but I suppose I still have to work out the difference between tags and labels.

I have about 350+ posts on this blog so I suppose am very satisfied with Blogger. I do have the wierd "(tags xyz, abc, 123)" structure at the top which I thought I would use later. Anyways, it's now good blog sense to catagorize your blog posts by labels or tags, not by time archive, according to this blog.