April 6th, 2007
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Before we begin…
The Spring 2007 Reideen is a remake of Yuusha Raideen from 1975, which has another remake called Chouja Reideen from 1996 Rah Xephon was heavily inspired by the original Raideen, which is why they are so similar.
We are approaching this as if we haven’t seen any of the previous versions, because…well, we haven’t. No spoiling the entire plot for us, now!
Episode Summary
Saiga Junki, protagonist and math genius, is having weird dreams about piloting a giant robot. When his long-time missing father is found dead, he and his family go out to the research site where he was found. While going through his father’s notes, he comes across something about “The Great Warrior Raideen”, and when checking out a cave on the site, he finds a weird hole, looks in, and faints. He wakes up with a gold bracelet in his hand.
That’s when a meteor crashes into the earth and beastly giant mecha shows up, smashing through the nearby dam. Instead of escaping on the helicopter with his family, Saiga runs back to the site to get his father’s belongings and gets caught in the massive rush of water escaping from the dam. His bracelet glows, matching the words his father had written, and Saiga says “Fade In”. He is now inside The Great Warrior Reideen, facing off against the beast mecha as he was in his dreams.
April 5th, 2007
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This is just a quick page to note how reviews will work on this site – at least for anime, tv shows, drama, etc.
Basically I have in place what I call a “6 episode test”. I watch an episode and I don’t outright reject it I internally agree to watch 6 episodes of it and give it a chance to, well, not suck. By the end of the six episodes, it not beforehand, I’ll know whether to stick with or drop the series.
That being said, when starting a newly released series, I’ll review episode 1, then let you know if it’s passed my 6 episode test and made it into my regular rounds. 
Later I will review the series as a whole when it is complete.
April 3rd, 2007
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Everyone else is making this post, so why can’t I?
This isn’t so much one to review, I’m not good at that, but I figured I could make a list and see what other people think they’ll look at this season.
Claymore – A mostly female cast of half-monsters that sacrificed their humanity to kill the full monsters, pretty much. It seems pretty dark based on things like, as the Claymore become more and more monster-like, they ask another to kill them, or will get sent on a suicide mission, and such. Despite what people are saying about it being typical shonen fare – I think they are sadly mistaken. It’s animated by MADHOUSE (Death Note, Chobits, Metropolis, Boogiepop, Gunslinger Girl), so should be pretty high in quality, too.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS – Season 3 of Nanoha, set 10 years after The start of A’s (and I believe 4 years after the epilogue in A’s). I’m a little worried with this one since everyone’s in the 18-20 range and I really don’t want them to still be acting like children, but I’m a huge Nanoha fan so I’m really anticipating this. I just wish she didn’t have that stupid side-ponytail. There’s an episode out that’s of dubious quality, so I’m waiting for a better one before I download it.
January 16th, 2007
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Sometimes reading Fanfiction (or heck, even blogs) on individual pages is a bit risky when you’re, say, at work and lollygagging around. People will have a lot of images, colors, etc that can make it obvious you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing. Not to mention that sometimes the color choices are less than desirable to read from.
This is where Plain Old Fanfiction comes in.
Plain Old Fanfiction is a Greasemonkey user script that recolors a page to have a plain white background, plain black text, blue/purple links, and hides all the images. You’ll have to set the included pages yourself of course.
Click here to install the script. If you have Greasemonkey installed, you should get a pop up detecting that it’s a user script and it will install automatically.
Revisions
- 1.1 – Now changes font to be 1em/1.5 serif, meant to improve readability of sites with small or strange fonts.
January 10th, 2007
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It really sucked to have to download freeware .ico makers whenever I wanted to make an icon, only to delete them when I was finished. Today I finally found a plugin so that I can save as a .ico from Photoshop!
Telegraphics
It comes with a version for mac and windows. Spiffy! Just pop the plugin into the File Format folder as directed in the readme it comes with and you’re all set. It’s also neat that it’s open source, so you can see how they did it.
There were also a few other links worthy of note:
- Photoshop .icns plugin (for mac icons) – IconLab
- Linux extract and convert icons – icoutil
November 14th, 2006
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I just did a bit of shifting about on my server. Everything should be back online and running properly, but please do let me know if you notice anything broken throughout my .net sites.
November 13th, 2006
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There are a lot of different tips, techniques, and cheats for installing multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a Windows XP machine. Most of them are a huge pain in the butt for the functionality, and even then, when you’re doing it without using a virtual machine, some things still are broken, like cookies and conditional comments.
Well there’s a new program out on the block – Multiple IE by TredoSoft.
The installer allows you to run other versions of IE (versions 3-6) next to your IE 7 installation. The cookies and conditional comments work right, too! There are still a few issues, but it’s clearly better than any other solution out there.
Essentially, you just upgrade your IE6 to IE7 normally so that everything works properly, and then run the Multiple IE installer.
November 6th, 2006
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Install | API Key | Issues | ToDo
If you use WordPress, you may have heard of a useful plugin called WordPress Widgets. It allows you to easily manage your sidebar, and there are many widgets for it in existence to help you customize your blog.
Based on the del.icio.us widget that came with the plugin, I have created a similar “recent bookmarks” widget for ma.gnolia.
June 29th, 2006
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This isn’t about rotating through alternate stylesheets or importing them, or even changing an inline style on an element through Javascript. Oh no. This is about creating an actually stylesheet element ON THE FLY.
The reason for this is because for a bit I was just trying to create a long string with the style tags and rules inside it, and then just pop it in the innerHTML of the body. (Hey, I’m no Guru, I have a lot to learn!) Needless to say, this caused a few issues.
June 29th, 2006
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At work some of my tasks have led me to fooling around with new interface ideas. I figured this is a good way to get up to scratch with AJAX and related ideas.
Now if you’re pulling in XML with AJAX you know that it can be a perfect pain to parse the file. You’ve got to make sure that the file is converted into a document element (and the methods for doing so are unfortunately not cross-browser), and even afterwards there’s no cross-browser method to finding the tags you want – at least not one that will give you clean code. Basically, your choices are:
getElementsByTagName() – it works, but the function is long, and you’ll have more loops and nests than you can shake a stick at. Also, you’re limited to tags.- Functions such as
firstChild and childNodes – which again, leads to long code and lots of nesting. Plus, using these you don’t even know what the tags are you’re messing with, and heaven forbid you change the XML schema a bit, if you didn’t well-document your javascript it could take you a bit to find the lines you need to alter.
- XPath and XSLT transformations – which are sadly not cross-browser and in some cases don’t even exist in certain browsers.
