Aleph - Fly To Me

Found this on a Japanese blog

LOL. That is Dave Rodgers(!), in the 80s. LOL. Yeah, this is the beginnings of what will become Eurobeat. Look at the hair style, and the guy playing the guitar... LOL. Alas, the video is not complete.

Go-Onger Ep38 + Kamen Rider Kiva Ep40 Funnies

All the guys in Go-Onger cross dressing. LOL. Hiroto blinded me with his pink dress.

Kamen Rider Kiva Ep40 brough IXA back to Nago, and he's cool again, at least for a moment. I hate Kengo, and I'm glad Nago got IXA back. However, this episode ended with a cliffhanger. Will IXA survive Saga's finishing attack? I hope so, I hope they don't kill Nago.

Kamen Rider Cosplay

Okay, I'm a Kamen Rider fan, but these guys are more than just fans. I found these pics on a forum, some guys cosplaying Kamen Rider IXA, Kuuga, and Hibiki. Their costumes are quite awesome! Anyway, whoever you guys are, those are really cool, especially Rising IXA. LOL

Family Guy

I'm not really a fan of American cartoons in general. They're usually unoriginal, poorly drawn & animated, have lifeless characters and no story, and the supposedly comedies are hardly funny. Most people are familiar with Family Guy. It piqued my interest when the Blue Harvest DVD was advertised during Apple's Macworld 08 keynote. It's a cartoon about the Griffin family, taking cues form the Simpson. There's Peter the father, Lois the wife, Meg the daugther, Chris the son, Stewie the baby, and Brian the dog.

Peter is the standard idiot, kinda like Homer Simpson. Chris is also dumb, probably more than Peter. Lois and Meg are normal. The episodes and scenes that focus on anybody other than Stewie and Brian are rarely funny and the typical brainless American cartoon. What makes Family Guy interesting is Stewie and Brian. Brian is the family's dog that can talk, walk on 2 feet, and is very cultured (he always reads newspaper, drinks martini, etc). Stewie is the family's baby, but able to speak sophisticated English, with an accent, and has an evil plan to rule the world. What makes him hilarious is his vile mouth. Although most of the shows are boring/not funny, Stewie and Brian always give me a chuckle or two.

Watch Stewie clips in Animation  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Kamen Rider Kiva Ep39

Oh yes, things are getting more interesting. Wataru (Kiva), after being revealed to be a half Fangire, wanted humans & Fangire to live together. He confessed to the Aozora organization that he's Kiva, now Shima ordered everybody to kill Kiva. Taiga (King), apparently Wataru's half brother, wanted Wataru to rule over humans together with him as Fangire. Mio (Queen), Wataru's love, now wants Wataru to kill Taiga so she can be together with Wataru. Wow, what a complicated turn of events. Kengo is still an annoying emo brat, and I can't wait for IXA to return to Nago. The previous King/Dark Kiva is kicking ass in 1986. After Bishop turned Kiva into a bad guy, the episode ended with a cliffhanger (damn it, just like Gundam 00). Still, Kiva looks more of a bad ass this way.. :D


I really wish they kill off Kengo's character. He is really an annoyance, acting all emo yet contributes nothing to the story, and his henshin move is pretty lame (pushes the IXA Knuckle on his boots).

Overall, Kiva seems to take cues from Faiz (555). Wataru is Fangire, while Takumi is Orphenoch. Both has to fight their own friends (Taiga in Kiva, Kiba in Faiz). Heck, Mio is in both series (she's Mari in Faiz). Can't wait for the next episode.

Time Machine problem

After installing the recent update to Safari on my iMac, suddenly Time Machine gave me errors that my Time Machine drive is read only. WTF? I checked the permission, it said I can read & write, but on the Get Info pane of the Time Machine drive still said it's read only. I restarted my iMac, no difference. I fired up disk utility, did a verify disk and canceled it (because it's taking too long), and suddenly Time Machine is okay. I restarted my iMac again, and Time Machine gave the error again. Finally, I ejected the drive, unplugged its cable, and reconnected it, and everything is fine so far. Weird.

This is an issue with MacOS in general. Most of the time, the OS is great without issues, but then there are times when weird things like this happened without a definitive solution/answer. I googled the issue and various people pretty much tried all things that I did above as trial & error in solving the problem.

Kanro Tsukemen

Kanro Tsukemen, originally uploaded by pika2000.

Kanro Tsukemen

EVDO, Back to my Mac, Tweaking Remote Desktop Connection

I just subscribed to a EVDO data service, so I can use a laptop and have internet access wirelessly. The USB dongle works out of the box on my Macbook with some configuration help I found here. On Windows, it's the typical installing driver and setting up a dial-up connection. Now that everything works, the fun begins.

I want to access my iMac from my Macbook over EVDO. Luckily, I have .Mac (MobileMe), thus there's back to my Mac. Despite plenty of horror stories about Back to My Mac, it just works for me. No need to deal with port forwarding and stuff. The only thing I find is that I have to enable Back to My Mac on both Macs, not just the one I'm trying to get access too, despite Apple's description on System Preferences. It works, albeit sluggish since Screen Sharing transmitted all OS X's eye candy, including all the dock animation, wallpaper, etc. Unfortunately there's no setting to reduce the quality setting.

Now, how about Windows? I want to see if I can access my XP Media Center PC from an XP Home machine over EVDO. Microsoft offers Remote Desktop Connection, which is free (vs the paid service of MobileMe). However, with XP, you can only setup remote desktop connection to an XP Pro or Media Center (On Vista, only Vista business and Ultimate, another reason why I recommend people NOT to get Home Basic/Premium). You can, however, use any OS that is compatible with the Remote Desktop Connection software as the client. I've been using RDC to control my Windows PCs from my Mac. Combing google, I found a way called Remote Desktop Web Connection. The idea is you use RDC within IE, useful for doing remote desktop on any web-enabled PCs with IE. However, it involved installing IIS web server on the remote machine, which has security concerns. I tried it, and I can never get it to work. Silly me, I forgot about the Remote Desktop Connection client software that already comes with XP Home. I thought it only works only on local network, but it actually works over the internet too! If you're behind a router, you have to forward port 3389 (the default port, you can change it) to the remote PC. It works if you only need access to 1 remote PC. I haven't figured out what to do if you want to access more than 1 PC.

So, everything seems to be fine and dandy, until I found this article. This article is a great read to secure your remote desktop connection (forcing encryption, limiting users, etc). The only catch is when I removed Administrators from the Local Policies-User Rights Assignment, I couldn't log-in via RDC anymore. I have to add the username directly on that policy list, despite having the username already on the Remote Desktop setting screen. Remember, enabling remote desktop means you're allowing outside connection to your PC, thus increasing the risk of attacks.

So there you go. Setting up RDC on Windows is not as simple as Back to My Mac, but it's free, so can't argue with that. Another point for Microsoft RDC is that it can adjust the quality setting of the display by disabling themes, wallpaper, and other screen effects for more responsiveness. RDC over EVDO is very smooth, only a bit laggy, in contrast of the sluggishness of Apple's screen sharing. Back to My Mac is dead easy to setup though, and I believe it is more secure, as long as nobody knows your MobileMe login and password.

Kamen Rider Kiva: My impression so far

When I first saw the promo video of Kamen Rider Kiva, I thought this is going to be one cool rider, especially after watching the OP. The show itself started kinda meh. The main rider's character, Wataru, is not cool at all. The actor is so scrawny that the fighting scenes are hardly believable. The henshin belt looks too toy-ish. The story, however, is quite interesting, flipping back & forth between 1986 and 2008. The 1986 side is the most interesting, featuring Otoya, whose character is much more interesting and funny compared to Wataru. The 2008 side became more interesting when Nago showed up as IXA, whose character has some personality issues related to buttons and hatred towards Kiva. Things are picking up on both sides, with the introduction Maya in 1986, and Mio in 2008, both as Queen. 1986 still holds the candle for slapstick comedy and hilarity thanks to Otoya. The downturn IMO started with the introduction of Emperor form. The problem is that the Emperor form is way way overused (probably mainly to sell the toys), the other forms of Kiva seemed to be forgotten. On the recent episodes, the focus has moved to 2008, with Taiga as the new king, and also Kamen Rider Saga. At this point, there is less and less scenes from the 1986 side. The story becomes pretty much like a dorama, a love triangle between Mio, Wataru, and Taiga, and how each of them are reluctant to tell the truth of who loves who. Boring! Even worse, Kiva got a new weapon, the "masturbating" sword. The sword has a slider, supposedly to control the power of the sword that can overwhelm and control Wataru. In order to use the power of the sword, Kiva has to move the slider up and down for almost every attack, thus I refer it as the "masturbating" sword. Not impressed. Not only that, Nago lost IXA, given to Kengo, an emo character that is really annoying. The worst part is that Nago, used to be a cool and tough character, now becomes the comic relief. *sigh. I hope the story will become more interesting with the revealing of the King in 1986 as Dark Kiva.

Animated GIF taken from TV-Nihon. Like I said, the "masturbating" sword.

Go-Onger Ep35 & 36

G12 formation:

Okay, this is just getting ridiculous. In Boukenger, 10 vehicles combined into Ultimate Daibouken. Now, Go-Onger beats that. 12(!) vehicles combining! It looks like a mismash of the toys glued together. Even the villains couldn't believe it! LOL.

Go-Onger new ending (Ep36):

The new ending, featuring Miu and Hiroto dancing. LOL