The Zoo over Ambuscade Street

My iPod just arrived. It is wonderful. I, however, have firewire but not USB 2.0 ports, a situation that needs to be rectified. So, ten hours or so from now [/exaggeration] I may have all my music loaded on it.

It is so shiny.

And others, too -

Columbia House, that den of evil, has a bunch of FUNi discs available as enrollment discs: 1-5 of FMA, all of Spiral and Gunslinger Girl, 1-4 of Burst Angel, 1-2 of Samurai 7, and I'm sure there are others. If you use a code like C7M or C7L, you get six DVDs at $.49 each, and an option to buy a seventh for $9.95 (also an eighth, but don't). Then, you have to buy two more at $19.95 + shipping to fulfill your membership before you can cancel.

This works out to about $6.40 a disc. $6.40! Plus, they have other things I want like Cirque du Soleil, Ran, and Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And you can cancel and create a new account as frequently as you like, and have up to two accounts active at once.

If you're interested in signing up, drop me a line - I can email you a link, and it gets me two free DVDs. ^_^ I think you get the same awesome offer, too, but I'm going to try a little experiment to find out for sure. For some reason, this isn't working. C'est la vie.

What would be really awesome is if they continue stocking FUNi titles, and get in Moon Phase, Basilisk, Speed Grapher, Trinity Blood, etc. No Kodocha, though. ;_;

I don't know why I doubted - when given a choice between Dai-Guard and almost anything else, Dai-Guard wins. Maybe. Most of the time. What's an arm or two between friends?

This show should be required watching for anyone who's ever had to deal with office politics and mountains of paperwork, not just anime fans. I work for the freaking DoD, why can't I have a giant frickin' robot?

Also, the last class I had to take, the one where we spent two days engineering a paper airplane, has warped me badly. I'm watching this show, and wanting to apply the various aspects of Systems Engineering to Dai-Guard. *twitch* Hopefully, this will wear off in time. Clearly, I need this break to relax, recuperate, and watch giant frickin' robots get their arms ripped off. Also read lots of books (although that didn't happen today) and play with t3h shiny. Which, I might add, is still only two thirds of the way synched. Maybe my exaggerated estimate earlier wasn't such an exaggeration...Transferring almost 25GB of music over a USB 1.0 connection is bad.

Not as bad as some of the connectors I have to deal with at work, though. Every time I go into the labs (well...not the display labs, those are freaking neat), a little bit of my geekish soul shrivels up. The toggle switches and big red buttons are neat, the hex keypads for programming the damn things are sort of nifty, but the serial connectors they use in lieu of a real network...*twitch* And when I say "serial," I'm not talking about the sort of thing you could still find on PCs five years ago. I'm talking about massive cables thicker than my wrists, sprouting out of the back of large metal cabinets like alien tentacles. A whole suite of various sorts of systems, all connected to each other by these huge, serial, point-to-point connectors.

It gets even worse when I look at what actual network equipment they do use. Vampire taps. Vampire taps! And FDDI. And thicknet. And thinnet. And 10base2. Most of you damn kids (who may or may not actually be older than me) probably don't even know what I'm talking about there. It's better that way. It's horrific and terrifying to behold. And they wondered why it took me almost a year to engineer a distributed sniffing system for one of these labs.

Oh yes, I relate to the fine (fictional) folks in Dai-Guard all too well. My people!