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I didn't watch Speed with as much devotion as Astro Boy when I was a wee squirt, but I watched enough to have all the salient plot points down, and to understand the general pattern of the show, it's 'story mechanics', if you will. And from those remote memories, I have to say that the live-action adaptation was pitch-perfect. It was not a slavish imitation. No, that would have worked less well than the current incarnation.
For instance, in the original American adaptation of the Tatsunoko Productions series, American voice actors adopted a frenetic style of delivery to keep up with the rapid Japanese scripts. There is a single scene in the live-action movie where the primary villain delivers a speech to Speed with that headlong machine-gun style, and it works well as a call-out to the original corny series. But the brothers do not attempt to sustain this dialogue style throughout the movie. And that was the right decision.
I won't start enumerating all the little ways in which the series was captured in the movie, or the ways in which the movie struck out on its own, but only observe that they did a great job of fusing the memories of my childhood with the more modern technological and pop culture elements of the world expected by the majority of their audience.
See it. Really.
]]>Yes, I was at Tom's place last night, where we had okonomiyaki (thanks to Tom for the raw ingredients, and to Lisa for the chef-ly duties). Tom and Alan had pooled their photos, and pared them down to a hundred or two. They could have had many more, I enjoyed them enough. Definitely makes me wish that I could afford to do a trip to Japan myself.
]]>Still, there are a lot of good albums in the given interval, and I picked up Let It Bleed, to which I'm listening now. Good stuff.
]]>Three more songs from Rodrigo y Gabriela: Diablo Rojo, Vikingman, Satori.
]]>While there are some strange lighting artifacts in a few of the pictures I took, you can nevertheless still get an impression of our new wood floors. I think they're pretty nice.
]]>As if that weren't enough, I've been looping over another mash-up album by dj BC, who made the excellent mash-up of Wu Tang Clan and New Orleans Dixieland jazz, Wu Orleans. The new album is actually a few years old, but given my recent kick on minimalist classical composers, it seems appropriate. The album is a mash-up of Philip Glass and various rappers, called Glassbreaks.
And finally, I've been listening to the free first volume of Trent Reznor's Ghosts I-IV. And while I haven't gotten the remaining three volumes yet, I'm pretty sure I'll be grabbing them, at the low, LOW price of $5. Sweet deal if the others are as good as the first. In fact, the first was worth $5 by itself.
]]>Anyway, I made time to go to Tom's this weekend, and had much fun as usual. He showed a HD (Blu-ray) screening of Appleseed Ex Machina. I'm not fanatical about the world, but have been following it casually since I first started reading the imported manga in Ohio some twenty-odd years ago, when it was published by Eclipse. So it's nice to know I'll be able to watch/read stories from this universe when I'm confined to a wheelchair.
Based on these two remembrances, though I've decided to use the fact that the entire album is available on eMusic to take the plunge, at relatively low cost. Who knows? Perhaps I will come to consider it one of my favorite albums.
]]>Now for the 'new' albums I've just picked up.
Unfortunately, I don't possess camera equipment sensitive enough to capture this in city lights, so memories will have to do.
]]>Guess Kevin J. Martin is doing his job guaranteeing that the free market gives us the best possible broadband choices.
The "Central Office" called yesterday to say that the problem was fixed. Of course it wasn't. Jean was home yesterday, and she called tech support again, did the hour-long diagnostic two-step, and finally got the answer, "your modem is failing." Again. After it was replaced seven months ago. Maybe if Verizon put a little more quality into their equipment, they wouldn't have to spend so much money on tech support.
Anyway, they're shipping us a replacement, which will probably arrive sometime next week. Only then will we see if the diagnosis is correct this time...
And, we're back. Got the new DSL modem, hooked it up, configured it, and encountered the annoying redirect to Verizon portal page. This has happened each time I've had a major problem. Just when I think I'm done, I have to call Verizon tech support again to have them walk me through the secret backdoor to turn off the stupid redirect. I think I know how to do it myself now, but it's just damned annoying that they put hurdle after hurdle in your way for a product you've paid for.
Anyway, hi alls!
]]>This morning I was awoken by cats, and the first thing I hear upon getting up is "my keyboard won't work." Jean has been trying to log into her computer in the dining room, but it doesn't seem to want to take input. So I wandered into the dining area, and began tapping on keys. It turns out that the 'escape' key and the caps lock key both work. So I rebooted in 'safe mode' (hold down the shift key while rebooting, to disable non-Apple extensions), and that worked, so I now knew that the shift key worked as well. But I was still unable to use the alphanumeric keys.
Now I decided to unplug every peripheral but the keyboard and the mouse (which coincidentally continued to work throughout the entire ordeal). One of the things I unplugged was Renee's graphics pad. Reboot, and magically, the keyboard began working! Jean guessed that the graphics pad was somehow interfering with the keyboard, and I'm happy to go with that for now.
Second experience, I went to my own computer and started up the web browser, which is set to go directly to www.terebi2.org. Instead it failed to find the page, and Verizon 'helpfully' stepped in with a search page saying terebi2 "does not exist or is not available!", instead of allowing the 404. I tried pinging the URL, and got "PING web2.fwd.easydns.com (66.150.2.134): 56 data bytes" with zero throughput. I did a whois, and yes, I still own the domain. I know I am paid up with the ISP who hosts the webpages, so I went to easydns to check. I can log in, and I'm paid up. But, they record that they've been under a Denial of Service (DOS) attack since yesterday.
They claim that they've mostly fixed the problem, but I know from experience that it takes awhile for the name forwarding to propagate again, hence Verizon's claim that this site doesn't exist. I only get to the article posting page because it links directly to the ISP. So I hope that this post will be visible before the weekend is out, otherwise I'll have to play hot potato with Easydns and Verizon as to who is responsible.
Hope you see me soon!
As noted in the first comment to this post, Mark Jeftovic, a techie for easyDNS, actually tracked down my post (I left no help message after figuring out what was happening). He actually left me an email explaining in greater detail what had happened. When I asked how he'd spotted my post, he told me he has a buncha search tools that look for mentions of easyDNS. Pretty neat.
Adam, thanks for confirming visibility. I'll have to log onto the IRC channel soon and catch up with you.
Lisa, you use Windows, right? Interesting to see that similar peripherals can give headaches on that platform and Mac OS X. Anyway, I am back online. Good to get feedback from all of you.