Another One Bites the Dust

LokiTorrent, another popular bittorrent site, has been taken down. MPAA and other organizations are really putting their foot down.

Bridging the Gap

I found time to start watching the anime that sweatdrop traded to me. As with the title of the post, I finished watching a warm and wacky series: Great Teacher Onizuka (GTO). Its about a legendary 22-year old gangster who had the calling to become a teacher. Using his brute strength, contacts, street-smarts and tons of dumb-luck, he proves to everybody that he is as he proclaims to be, a great teacher.

Eikichi Onizuka is an incredibly consistent character. Consistently insane, deranged, perverted, grouchy, stupid... the list can go on and on. Yet he is always looking out for the welfare of his student far beyond his own.

GTO gets a rank in the "Super Ugly Face" category, right beside Hajime no Ippo (aka Knock-out/Fighting Spirit). So much so that during Onizuka's grouchy moods, I can't help but remember the teacher in "Battle Royale" or Zatoichi.

A notable character is Nomura Tomoko aka Toroko(translated sometimes as Big Tits). As corny as her story goes, I found it quite moving.

Some facts:

Eikichi Onizuka's seiyuu also did "Leap-frog" Aoki(Hajime no Ippo)
Toroko's seiyuu also did Aoi Sakuraba(Ai Yori Aoshi), Mahoro (Mahoromatic), Rurippe (Gatekeepers)

Crouching Kitty, Hidden Bear

I ferociously quested and contributed to the betterment of the land to finally reach level 30, where I got my 5th form, Travel Cat. It can travel over open spaces at 140% of normal walk speed, which is a great blessing since most quests require traveling very long distances on foot.

DVD: Today my DVD writer slowed down like hell with 1 hour per DVD at 8x. Why? Coz XP turned the DVDRW drive's DMA off. After a few DVDs I finally got pissed and googled around a bit. I found an article that solved the problem and explained why it happens. In short, when XP gets sick of receiving errors trying to read scratched/erroneous CD/DVDs, it tells the system to fall back to PIO. The solution, though a bit barbaric, is to delete some registry values that were written due to the errors. After rebooting, I was burning DVDs again at less than 10 mins :D

fururut note: imagine the losses incurred by turning off DMA, 10 mins became 1hr. That's not to mention that PIO hogs a lot of resources so everything slowed down to a crawl.

"This and That"

Has been a phrase I've been using quite often. It sort of says that:

There's so many things that I'd like to tell you at this moment, but it seems that neither you or I have time to spare to talk about such things. Therefore when we part, I'm hoping we could sit down and have a nice chat someday.

WoW update2: I've reached level 28 and may have to cut down on playing time because the signs of addiction are really showing :D.

Here's a screenie of me and my guildmates/party/friends:



This is my normal interface. See how many herbs I carry around? I could beat any of the Quiapo "pamparegla" sellers.


DVD stuff: I've burned a few coasters on the premiums, but I loathe the Premium 4x DVD-R, probably half of them were coasterized. But the worst part is they can only be written in 2x! Oh the humanity! It takes forever to burn and is probably screwed. I tried the -Rs because the +Rs were out of stock in Quiapo. Good thing I had to go to makati and had the opportunity to buy more +Rs(they have a full shelf of it :D )

On the other hand, no Ridata coasters and just a negligible amount of premium +R.

Famous: Clair had her share of the spotlight due to the clamor about the digital pinay thing. Read about it in blog or here. Congrats clair! That'll teach them :D

Unexpected Sighting: I saw this couple at sm cybermall/carpark. congrats!

Ah! My Goddess TV: I've just watched episode 4, and I'm liking it more and more. (hey that rhymes)

WoW update, by request

First of all, a big "hello" to all my avid readers (meron nga ba? ^_^ )!

I've ditched Nardangputik and started on another character, Tuwaang. He's also a Night Elf Druid and currently at level 22. The druid class in warcraft boasts of the capability of multiple modes of game play. Spellcaster/Healer in human form. Warrior/Melee fighter in bear form. Rogue/Sneaky techniques in cat form. Infinite breath and increased swim speed in sea lion form.
At higher levels there is also Dire bear form (better fighter) and Travel form (fast land run speed).

A friend of mine who has a level 60 (max level) tauren shaman said that he has trouble killing 2 classes: paladins and druids. long live druids!

Side Note: "Tuwaang" is a character in the Rock Musical "Manhid". "Kaibigan ng lahat ng hayop" is his description and has the power to communicate with animals. Fits a druid, neh?

character selection screen


Bear Form




Cat Form



Sea Lion Form

Liteon SOHW-1653S 16X Dual Layer

Today at last, after almost a month of waiting, I picked up the dvdwriter I ordered from Rising Sun Computers at Taft. It is a Liteon SOHW-1653S 16X Dual Layer and priced at P6,500. Included in the bundle is Nero Express and PowerDVD 5.





The first thing I noticed as I took it out of the box was it size. It's around an inch shorter than older optical drives. After installing it on Tsunami(name of my pc since 1998), Windows XP didn't complain and so I uninstalled the older nero and put in Nero Express.

"This ain't Nero!" I heard myself say. They moved around a lot of the "oohh so familiar" features. But after a while it seemed usable enough :)). But it suddenly hit me, "why is Nero restricting me to 4,400MB?" So I searched the net and found that 4.7GB is a marketing thing. They say that 4,700,000,000 bytes is 4.7GB when it is just 4.3 something GB.

I passed by CD-R King in Quiapo on the way home to sample some of the dvd media available. I bought 10 pieces of a brand named "Premium" which is 4x DVD+R at 9 pesos each and 10 pieces of Ridata 8x DVD+R at 35 pesos each.

Its actually weird that the "Premium" dvds are labeled on top as 4x, whereas its is actually 8x at the bottom and as detected by the drive. I have burned 5 and all of them were perfect. I'm still to try the Ridata media but I have long trusted them with my 'precious' stuff.

I have written anime that has been clogging my hard disks for ages but soon enough I'll be doing avi->dvd and other interesting tricks.

A is for Alcohol, B is for Brymac

Q: How much alcohol is needed to make brymac reach a drunk state?
A: "I losht count ehh...."

Beer is a traitor: you wouldn't know that its already stabbing your back.

Brymac should remember to avoid Red Horse or similar strong beers. The "sipa" actually leaves a horseshoe mark in the forehead. He was massaging his temples like fat Baron Harkonnen.

Brymac doesn't have a hang-over when he wakes up, even if it is just 3hrs of sleep. It used to show up after he sleeps again, but 12hrs of sleep can eliminate it.

Alcohol does seem to shatter some inhibitions as brymac turned pretty talkative, though he recalls to be still quite himself only with a sloshing brain and toddlers balance.

Ah! My Goddess TV

Five years after the movie and 12 years after releasing the original OAVs, they wanted to keep the magic of Ah! My Goddess alive by lashing out a TV series. They kept both the voice talents and staff intact, which should be of some comfort to die-hard fans and skeptics as well.

I grabbed and watched episode 1 via bittorent, which was fansubbed by [solar]. As far as the story has unraveled ... I prefer the OAVs. Yes there are more info, better setups and introductions, but at the pace that it is going, people who watched the OAV will end up drumming their fingers in impatience. That's just episode 1 though, there is still space for it to pick-up (25 more episodes in fact).