Category: Life

Well, Mangas (Japanese comic books) have invaded the big retail bookstores here in Canada. As I walk past the aisles of Chapters, the biggest book retail chain here, I see the first editions of classic manga such as “Love Hina!”, “Great Teacher Onizuka” and “Battle Royale” as they invade our shelves. First volumes to series that were completed a long time ago in Japan.

My feelings are mixed. Anime has been around North America for a while now, with titles such as Dragon Ball, Pokemon, Digimon, Gundam Wing showing up on television. However, the explosion really took off with Pokemon, and since then there’s been tons of kiddie anime appearing on TV (BeyBlades, Monster Rancher, etc.).

The problem was that what was appearing here was just that: “kiddie anime”. Nevertheless, since a few years ago, they’ve began to bring the more serious anime – Cowboy Bebop, Full Metal Alchemist, and the just announced Neon Genesis Evangeleon. In recent months, manga has also caught on. Stores are increasing their anime selection.

Japanese influence is in full force. My feelings are mixed because I don’t think it will last, and not only that – I also believe that this is a fad that will collapse. As a result, there won’t much of any anime or manga to purchase in North America in a few years, leaving those true to the genre destitute.

Well, Quinnware has released has released a new beta media player called “Quintessential Media Player” [QMP]. Quintessential Player [QCD], their standard music player provided on that site, is a very competent freeware Winamp-style music player. Heck, I even made a rather succesful skin for it [woo – 9000 downloads]. Personally QCD is my favourite music player out there.

Now, however, they’ve released a new beta player that’s more akin to Foobar/WMP, with a far more advanced playlist system, and a far more developped video player.

That said, the video player is still not anywhere nearly as fully-featured as dedicated movie players such as Media Player Classic or VideoLAN. It’s more comparable to Windows Media Player or RealPlayer in terms of its pretty-interface meets lack-of-features.

Another thing that I don’t like of this new beta “Quintessential Media Player” is the “music browser” system, which sends your tracks over to the Gracenote website, and then retrieves an information page on the album being played. I really don’t like this dependance on an internet connection, nor the commercialisation aspects of such an addition.

All good things must come to an end, and I suspect that QMP signals the end of an efficient, free, versatile, minimalist music player that was QCD. This is sort of akin to the jump of WinAmp 2.x to WinAmp 5.x for those who are geeky enough to know what I mean.

Update: It’s occured to me that maybe I was too harsh on QMP. It still is a decent player, the default skin is much prettier than the default skin for QCD, and I suspect that the plugins between QCD and QMP are fully compatible (same underlying engine).

It still beats WinAmp, and blows Windows Media Player out of the water, esp. since it adds support for external devices (ie. portable MP3 players) as well as a self-maintained rating system for your music.

Update: It’s been 3 months since I wrote this review, and QMP has become my main music player. In that time, I really haven’t been hindered by the programs intermingling with the Internet, and I find that the introduced tweaks and features make this player quite superior to its predecessor.

WASHINGTON — President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss “intelligent design” alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.

“I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” Bush said. “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”

To teach “Intelligent Design” in a science class would simply be unscientific.

Science is a philosophy in search of truth, not truth itself. It consists of theories, which must be scientifically proven. Then, the most solid theory is accepted by the community. Evolution is one such theory, but also one that has been validated/proven over and over.

Intelligent Design, however, remains a theory that cannot be proven. That in itself does not mean that it is wrong or non-existant, but scientifically it is a very weak argument. It is a case of two thousand year old scriptures vs. modern experiments.

If Bush wants “Intelligent Design” taught in a religion class, or in a class that is dedicated to studying alternative theories of the beginnings of life – that’s fine with me. But if he wants it taught alongside evolution in a science class as a theory that is just as plausible, then I have a problem.

Well, I tried Gentoo’s new experimental LiveCD. Its a fun variation – it now provides a fully functional X environment this time; as well as a GUI installer. The CD-based distro was pretty awesome – pretty much all hardware was recognized out of the box.

The installer though, left me amiss. I tried it, set it all up. I was informed within 0.5 second of me pressing the final “Install” button that the installation had failed. That in itself wasn’t bad. That is up until I went to the partitioning bit again, and noticed that this failed install also managed to wipe out my MBR. [The plan was to dual boot between Windows and Gentoo.]

Thus, my Windows install, and everything on my machine was wiped out. The good news? I did a full system backup 2 weeks ago, so I haven’t lost all that much. No lost school work or games to worry about either. So overall I’m quite happy.

I tried the distro 5 days ago, but with work only had time to fix my computer today (4 days of 12 hour shifts). Thus why I haven’t been online recently.

All I can say is “wow”.

FEAR is Monolith’s new FPS on the block. Monolith being the development house that brought us classics such as SHOGO and “No One Lives Forever”.

First off – the game engine. Monolith’s new engine is very impressive, seemingly merging the detailed characters from Doom 3, and mixing them with the visual effects of Half-Life 2. The game, thus far, has featured many cramped spaces “a la Doom 3”, though these levels failed to approach the amount of details found in the environments of Doom 3 or even HL2. That said, the graphics are sharp.

Now the gameplay, is scary, though its approach to how precisely to scare you is very mixed (for better or worse). At first, its all about random, scary, events (lights going out, flaps shutting). Then its about this freaky-ass girl that fades out of nowhere to provide scary taunts. And then, its these soldiers bursting out of corners when you least expect it. The final effect is one scary game, though the inconsistency might ilk some.

Lastly, I find that some game elements lack polish. The cinematics appear very bland. You can see your feet in this game, though they really do little to increase the realistic nature of the game – when you turn around, your legs stay straight as your body turns, seemingly making you appear floating about.

This game has potential. It’ll be interesting to see how it all ultimately pans out.