Packy Master Hayate

Posted by Ryan A - September 28, 09

PACKY

I was impressed

Congratulations! You Are a Champion

Hayate the Combat Butler, the second coming, recently ended. Overall, it was great, but the merit is restricted to a select number of episodes (let’s say 3-8, 10-13, 15-17, 18, 23-24)1. Hmm…

Wow, actually that’s a good 75% of the series being at awesome-level lovecom. Given, the general power of the franchise are the subtleties between the main quattro, Ayumu, Nagi, Hinagiku and of course Hayate, but this is precisely where the 2009 version brought out it’s A-game. Although…

As with most of these long-running series, the episodic nature offers a mixed bag of relevant and non-relevant material, but one thing I enjoyed with Hayate is the distinction between these episodes; it was easy to determine on and off-track episodes.

Comparatively2, the 2007 version was like a scattered slice/comedy affair with less relevant lovecom accentuation3. With 20 episodes left in my first season marathon, I feel I can safely say S2 was a delight. Despite the positive attributes, I do not think S2 can stand alone without most of the first 17 episodes of the season one.

Side stories and irrelevant episodes aside, Hayate the Combat Butler is quite charming4.

Liveblogged on Melative

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On Wordpress as The Ultimate CMS

Posted by Ryan A - September 26, 09

usagijen has an awesome post up about WordCamp Philippines 2009. There was a point that struck me about WP as a CMS.

I was talking to mellow bunny in the #melative freenode channel the other day about this, and I have to disagree with Wordpress as the Ultimate CMS, mainly because it is not “meta-coded” enough, or rather because it is a finite solution at the core; a system for blogging (entries, pages, comments).

Is a CMS an out-of-the-box blog?

If we take a step up and look at the concept of a CMS, it doesn’t really solve the blogging problem until it is instantiated/implemented, but because a CMS is a more general solution it is capable of becoming something Wordpress cannot, take Joomla’s LMS for instance1. From another perspective, if we look at the activity at Drupal, we see that there are blogging modules, but also a whole lot of other stuff.

In short, a fully fledged CMS is more like a framework than a specific solution; WP is downstream (more specified) in development stages. The added compromise of using Wordpress as a CMS for something other than the blogging problem would be that of using a db schema not built for whatever specific problem that needs to be solved (the ability to optimize without modifying the wp tables and without creating an entirely new subsystem is limited imo).

A good example I have interaction with, Melative. There’s no way WP could handle the inter-contextual linking of the backend (talking about the “encyclopedia pages” only). Okay, so that’s not entirely true, because WP could be used to get similar output, and possibly even the linking through plugins… but, by the time all this customization was done, it would have over-specified the solution. The fact that WP is handling page-data becomes pointless, because the page data is not static dynamic and also needs semantic linking to another general system. Not to mention that it would be a thicker codebase.2

So anyhow… just thought I’d share that opinion. Wordpress is awesome nonetheless, it is a role model in “method” for another project I’m on ^^ If considering it a CMS, I’d say it is more of a Static-CMS… maybe most CMS are used that way, who knows, but in my mind CMSs allow more auto/dynamic content and are capable of being adapted into a wider array of solutions, one being a blog3.

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Tokyo Magnitude 8.0

Posted by Ryan A - September 18, 09

tm8
This moment was felt.

Not a review, not a final thought, just some thoughts

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 was a dramatic ride over the course of 11 episodes, and having finished the series, I can say it was worth the experience. Much of the final story was focused around Yuuki1; he became a centerpiece in the last third of the series. In my opinion, his role is heroic in a sense, and at some point in the finale I thought, “Yuuki has reached the level of Densuke.”

An interesting factor which I felt played into my viewing experience, was a certain lack of identification, and I was able to watch from an outsider’s perspective. Some may find that a terrible feeling, but when we identify, we are more compelled to feel and empathize.

With little motive aside from the human condition, TM8 was able to hold my heart as I sympathized for Mirai, Yuuki, Mari, and their families; it felt natural. I feel this speaks very well for the series in what it accomplished, a human2 story of disaster.

〜悠貴が見てる〜

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Yes, That Is So

Posted by Ryan A - September 18, 09

From the Mellow_Bunny:

Zaitcev does it all the time. Yet others don’t seem to fathom how it works. Well whatever, I like the idea and it’s certainly more of a motivator to blog myself then leaving a comment is. I could spend years leaving comments on people’s blogs and never feel satisfied. My comments could get lost in the mire. I hate the mire. It leaves you with no control over your own words either.

Yes, indeed. I’ve probably mentioned somewhere in a post or comment long ago, that zaitcev’s format, is actually the standard on most blogs (not counting the disabled comments feature).

Blogger reads something, Blogger blogs it…. TRACKBACK.

Musical Spread

Posted by Ryan A - September 15, 09

The past 40 or so hours have yielded hellish issues interesting findings on my home server. Rather than go into that, here’s a nice little circle-chart (some call it pie).

CIRCLES
click for full

Image taken from Disk Analyzer packaged with various Linux distributions.

Pretty much don’t use most of that chart, and lately just stick around the Current/Burner/Burner-J directories. Now if I did the animu drive, I wonder what that would look like…

Dem Boots

Posted by Ryan A - August 30, 09

boots

Are just so cute! XD

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Methodical New Music

Posted by Ryan A - August 21, 09

Lately, there’s been a ton of new music1 to listen to around my abode, but it’s not such a simple matter; listening to unheard albums.

Perhaps the downfall to new album introduction is the passivity of listening. How familiar do we get after just one listen? Even with an active listen, I’d say it’s a very small imprint, and so I’ve devised some tips to deal with audible overload.

Album Selection

Grab 3-5 albums of the bunch, at random works, and plan to listen to the group throughout a single day. This is a good way to eat though mega lists. Also, it is recommended to NOT go by artists alone, just grab albums from different artists, without regard for who made it2.

Play-by-Album, Play-by-Track

Use a desktop-based music application and listen to an album from the beginning, with a catch. Put the player on single-track mode (play only one song at a time) so that you have to keep going back to the player and manually click the next song…. naturally, I’m assuming multi-tasking and a passive listen.

This helps with the pacing, so that an album doesn’t woosh fly right by. It isn’t always necessary to listen through an entire album (we know what we enjoy, right?), but listen enough to be able to categorize the album.

Tag and Rename

Meta-data is nice for organization, but I have my quips with auto-tagging (specifically genre). Anyhow, it’s a good idea to manually assign genre and/or style tags to tracks. Genre is great for overall categorization (ie. Classical, Jazz, Rock, Pop, Electronic…), but style allows definition of finer attributes, such as j-rock, experimental, fusion, indie, lo-fi or larger genre if the work touches, but doesn’t quite focus on it. For example, a rock album that tends to have jazz influences could be listed as, genre:Rock style:Fusion, Jazz-influence… etc.

Using style could be an entire post itself, but the main concept is organizing while or just after listening. Listening to the music and asking, “what genre/style is this,” makes it slightly more active.

Then rename. I’m sure we all have music organization preferences, but following with the genre-style tag idea, why not use them in the name? Generally, my naming format:

<artist>/(<date>) <album>/<tracknumber>. <track>

But let’s see that with categorizing tags:

<artist>/(<date>) <album> [<genre>,<style>]/<tracknumber>. <track>

The advantage of having genre as part of the album’s folder name is simple, it’s quite difficult to remember every artist/album and their sound. More than likely, the sound will be remembered, but then finding which artist it was will take playing songs from random album folders. With genre-style properly and personally assigned, filtering possible albums becomes a simpler process.

And that about sums the method. Sure it’s heartbreaking to listen to tracks that aren’t the current addiction, but working though many albums efficiently yields a good feeling and help avoid music overload3.

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