This weekend sees the start of the MotoGP season.
I'm rather in two minds about whether to follow the MotoGP season this year. The problem I've got is that it's going to add quite a few more hours of stuff to watch this year and I'm not sure I want to expend that time.
I've sorta been hoping that this summer would represent a bit of a "turning point" in terms of my unwatched DVD pile. I was hoping that I would roll on my new found desire to get stuff done that I've been putting to good use for the scanning into watching these DVDs.
I have actually been trying to watch some DVD stuff in the evenings and I've been doing okay, but my hope was that when it gets round to summer and interesting telly stuff dries up, I'll be able to use that time to make some sort of impression on it.
This hope is further boosted by the whole crunchyroll thing. Now that I've been tackling most of the new anime via the legal and paid for route of crunchyroll, I'm hoping that has a huge knock-on effect in terms of the DVDs or buy. Or rather, it will massively reduce the number of anime DVDs I buy (indeed, it may eradicate them altogether).
Of course, this will help me financially too - not only will I be able to sell stuff I've watched on e-bay, but crunchyroll only costs about £60 an entire year, and I can easily spend that every month on DVDs.
To this end, I've already been getting into quite a brutal mindset for the telly I watch at the moment. Once a week I like to set up all the stuff I want to watch on pre-record. This then allows me to take a look at the list and see how much of it there is and what stuff there is. If it's too much or there's some things on there I perhaps didn't like enough to keep them going, then I'll delete them.
Comedies in particular have tended to got the chop. I'm not sure if I'm becoming less tolerant, or I used to be overly-tolerant, but I've even found myself dropping things without completing the first episode.
So I think I'll suck it and see with the MotoGP season - give it maybe a couple of races and if it proves too much of a time burden or isn't that interesting, then I'll probably drop it.
Friday, 18 March 2011
Thursday, 17 March 2011
weight loss
Some surprises for this weekend's weigh in.
The first was that, despite the extra pancakes on Tuesday and a gnawing fear that the previous weekend's "curry and chips" episodes would catch up with me, I actually lost 3 pounds.
Well, I say I lost three pounds, one of the other surprises was that my scales suddenly started weighing in fractions, so actually it was apparently telling me I'd lost 3.2 pounds.
This actually took me below 20 stone, which I think is what triggered the inclusion of the decimal point.
I'm not explaining this well.
Basically, when I got on the scales on Sunday morning, they gave me a reading of 19 stone, 13.8 pounds.
As I read the display my initial surprise was that I apparently now weighed under 20 stone, which meant I must have lost more than 3 pounds, because I weighed 20 stone 3 pounds the week before.
Then, as my eyes continued to scan across the display (it's a digital thing), I couldn't make head-nor-tales of it, since it seemed to be saying 19 stone 138 pounds. Then I realised there was a decimal point between the 3 and 8 so it was actually saying 13.8 pounds.
This puzzled me, since the scale has never shown decimals like this before - it's always been full stones and pounds. I therefore initially assumed it was an error, so I hoped off, reset it and hoped back on - same reading. Wow.
It then occurred to me that the decimals might have been triggered by the fact I'd gone under 20 stone - perhaps it starts rounding off when you go above that. Certainly this would explain why I'd never seen it before.
It then also occurred to me that if that was the case, I didn't actually know how much I'd lose, since I could have weighed anything from 20 stone 2.5 pounds to 20 stone 3.4 pounds and it would have still shown 20 stone 3 pounds.
In other words, despite apparently going below 20 stone, I'm going to be on shaky ground if I now start operating in decimal places, so rounding it takes me back up to 20 stone.
Still, it's nice to finally hit the 20 stone mark, and I'm now only about a stone off of my Birthday/Easter target, which is good.
The first was that, despite the extra pancakes on Tuesday and a gnawing fear that the previous weekend's "curry and chips" episodes would catch up with me, I actually lost 3 pounds.
Well, I say I lost three pounds, one of the other surprises was that my scales suddenly started weighing in fractions, so actually it was apparently telling me I'd lost 3.2 pounds.
This actually took me below 20 stone, which I think is what triggered the inclusion of the decimal point.
I'm not explaining this well.
Basically, when I got on the scales on Sunday morning, they gave me a reading of 19 stone, 13.8 pounds.
As I read the display my initial surprise was that I apparently now weighed under 20 stone, which meant I must have lost more than 3 pounds, because I weighed 20 stone 3 pounds the week before.
Then, as my eyes continued to scan across the display (it's a digital thing), I couldn't make head-nor-tales of it, since it seemed to be saying 19 stone 138 pounds. Then I realised there was a decimal point between the 3 and 8 so it was actually saying 13.8 pounds.
This puzzled me, since the scale has never shown decimals like this before - it's always been full stones and pounds. I therefore initially assumed it was an error, so I hoped off, reset it and hoped back on - same reading. Wow.
It then occurred to me that the decimals might have been triggered by the fact I'd gone under 20 stone - perhaps it starts rounding off when you go above that. Certainly this would explain why I'd never seen it before.
It then also occurred to me that if that was the case, I didn't actually know how much I'd lose, since I could have weighed anything from 20 stone 2.5 pounds to 20 stone 3.4 pounds and it would have still shown 20 stone 3 pounds.
In other words, despite apparently going below 20 stone, I'm going to be on shaky ground if I now start operating in decimal places, so rounding it takes me back up to 20 stone.
Still, it's nice to finally hit the 20 stone mark, and I'm now only about a stone off of my Birthday/Easter target, which is good.
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
kiss kiss bang bang
I'd always though that Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a nickname the Japanese used for James Bond.
According to Wikipedia, however, it actually originates from an Italian movie poster for a Bond film, although I do know the Japanese use it. The point is that it's for Bond, and so I'd assumed this film would be some sort of secret agent thing. I mean, I knew it was a comedy, and I was right about that, but it turned out not to be a secret agent thing at all.
In fact, it's more of a film noire thing.
It also turned out to be a rather black comedy. And a surprisingly good one, as it raised more than a few chuckles from me.
One other thing that was interesting is that the film kinda plays with breaking the fourth wall. Basically, the narrator is aware of the audience and talks to them directly, but it's more like you're watching the film with him at home and he's chipping in with some comments.
So in other words, it's mostly as if he's on our side of the fourth wall; however, occasionally he'll interact with the film in such a way that he's both in the film and kind of like an omnipotent being as well. Basically, this is best demonstrated when he asks a couple of extras in the film to move out of the way so the camera can see something.
I've always been a sucker for that kind of stuff, so I really enjoyed this aspect of the film.
I also particularly enjoyed the way it plays with film noire conventions. I can't confess to knowing that much about film noire, but most of the tropes and clichés are sufficiently familiar to most people that it's understandable what it's doing.
But it still essentially plays it straight - the plot twists and coincidences aren't done in a jokey way, it's just that the film acknowledges they are things familiar to us all from years of watching movies.
The film is also a good length and is very well paced - you never feel it's bogging down or getting stuck and it manages to juggle its main plot and a whole bunch of subplots very well. Perhaps the only thing I'd have liked would have been a bit more about Val Kilmer's character, as he tends to turn up only when he's needed to advance a particular element of the plot, but that's not really a bigy.
About the only thing I didn't like about this was a complete lack of any extras on the DVD - there wasn't even a short featurette or trailers.
According to Wikipedia, however, it actually originates from an Italian movie poster for a Bond film, although I do know the Japanese use it. The point is that it's for Bond, and so I'd assumed this film would be some sort of secret agent thing. I mean, I knew it was a comedy, and I was right about that, but it turned out not to be a secret agent thing at all.
In fact, it's more of a film noire thing.
It also turned out to be a rather black comedy. And a surprisingly good one, as it raised more than a few chuckles from me.
One other thing that was interesting is that the film kinda plays with breaking the fourth wall. Basically, the narrator is aware of the audience and talks to them directly, but it's more like you're watching the film with him at home and he's chipping in with some comments.
So in other words, it's mostly as if he's on our side of the fourth wall; however, occasionally he'll interact with the film in such a way that he's both in the film and kind of like an omnipotent being as well. Basically, this is best demonstrated when he asks a couple of extras in the film to move out of the way so the camera can see something.
I've always been a sucker for that kind of stuff, so I really enjoyed this aspect of the film.
I also particularly enjoyed the way it plays with film noire conventions. I can't confess to knowing that much about film noire, but most of the tropes and clichés are sufficiently familiar to most people that it's understandable what it's doing.
But it still essentially plays it straight - the plot twists and coincidences aren't done in a jokey way, it's just that the film acknowledges they are things familiar to us all from years of watching movies.
The film is also a good length and is very well paced - you never feel it's bogging down or getting stuck and it manages to juggle its main plot and a whole bunch of subplots very well. Perhaps the only thing I'd have liked would have been a bit more about Val Kilmer's character, as he tends to turn up only when he's needed to advance a particular element of the plot, but that's not really a bigy.
About the only thing I didn't like about this was a complete lack of any extras on the DVD - there wasn't even a short featurette or trailers.
Tuesday, 15 March 2011
scanning or not
As with most weekends recently, I had "do lots of scanning" on my to do list.
However, actually I only scanned three things, although I did spend an awful lot of hours working on the scans. Basically, I realised I was rapidly running out of hard-drive space, espcially since I try to keep multiple copies of things, in case of drive crashes.
I therefore attached the stack of scans that I need to run through photostitch in order to stick them together. This is something I've not been looking forward to, although I think now I have a strategy for doign them that is about as efficient as it gets.
Basically, I run through them all, trying to stich them together as they are, with no processing at all. This is one of those tasks that becomes mechanistic, as in, click this button, type here, click that button, wait a moment, check the result, click here, type there, rinse and repeat.
The key part is that I've now managed to work out a way for the checking to be done as quickly and simply as possible. However, it's still the case that the bit where it's processing the scans is still too short for me to practically whatch anime, like I do when I'm doing the scanning. Also, it's not the sort of job that I can do both pretty much simultaneously as the checking does require my full attention.
Anyway, point is I run through the scans liek that, which succesfully sticks together probably 80%. One thing I did discover is that I appear to have missed a few scans, so I had to scan those. This was made slightly difficult as I did them a while ago and couldn't remmeber the scan settings I was using - I've been experimentign with the settings to see what reults I liked best.
With the remaning 20% the results can be very random, which has been the source of my main frustration, because I just can't work out why it's stumbling over them. And the degree of stumble seems utterly random as well - sometimes it will align things not quite right, but then other times it will horribly distort everything so that it looks like some sort of weird piece of modern art.
What I usually do at this point is close photoshop down, so it clears out the RAM (I've noticed it tends to fill up the RAM with junk like a total bastard). I then restart and give the remainder another go. This usually gives me good results for aroudn half that are left - for some reason if you give it a second go like this on some scans, it will make a much better go of it.
The remainder that are left need manual intervention and thankfully I seem to have now hit upon a method that works consistently.
It can roughly be summed up as consistent cropping. Essecnailly, what I do is pick a particular edge (so along the right side of the magazine, for example) and crop the images such that this edge is consistent and parrallel across the two images. I also try to trim off the very edge of all of the scans where the pages break across the page.
For some reason, this manual lining up combined with giving the program a "fresh start" seems to consistenly give good results. Of course, when you think about it I'm actually doing half the job of the program for the pictures, so it's not surprising it works, just surprising that the program falls over then doing it on those images, but not the rest.
I managed to process 4 Nyan Types and 3 animages over the course of the weekend. Now to be fair, if I'd been scanning I'd have speant more time doing it and I had alreayd processed a chunk of the scans for those magazines, but I think it takes roughly a third of the time to stitch the scans as it does to scan them in the first place.
That's adds quite a lot, but is better than I feared.
However, actually I only scanned three things, although I did spend an awful lot of hours working on the scans. Basically, I realised I was rapidly running out of hard-drive space, espcially since I try to keep multiple copies of things, in case of drive crashes.
I therefore attached the stack of scans that I need to run through photostitch in order to stick them together. This is something I've not been looking forward to, although I think now I have a strategy for doign them that is about as efficient as it gets.
Basically, I run through them all, trying to stich them together as they are, with no processing at all. This is one of those tasks that becomes mechanistic, as in, click this button, type here, click that button, wait a moment, check the result, click here, type there, rinse and repeat.
The key part is that I've now managed to work out a way for the checking to be done as quickly and simply as possible. However, it's still the case that the bit where it's processing the scans is still too short for me to practically whatch anime, like I do when I'm doing the scanning. Also, it's not the sort of job that I can do both pretty much simultaneously as the checking does require my full attention.
Anyway, point is I run through the scans liek that, which succesfully sticks together probably 80%. One thing I did discover is that I appear to have missed a few scans, so I had to scan those. This was made slightly difficult as I did them a while ago and couldn't remmeber the scan settings I was using - I've been experimentign with the settings to see what reults I liked best.
With the remaning 20% the results can be very random, which has been the source of my main frustration, because I just can't work out why it's stumbling over them. And the degree of stumble seems utterly random as well - sometimes it will align things not quite right, but then other times it will horribly distort everything so that it looks like some sort of weird piece of modern art.
What I usually do at this point is close photoshop down, so it clears out the RAM (I've noticed it tends to fill up the RAM with junk like a total bastard). I then restart and give the remainder another go. This usually gives me good results for aroudn half that are left - for some reason if you give it a second go like this on some scans, it will make a much better go of it.
The remainder that are left need manual intervention and thankfully I seem to have now hit upon a method that works consistently.
It can roughly be summed up as consistent cropping. Essecnailly, what I do is pick a particular edge (so along the right side of the magazine, for example) and crop the images such that this edge is consistent and parrallel across the two images. I also try to trim off the very edge of all of the scans where the pages break across the page.
For some reason, this manual lining up combined with giving the program a "fresh start" seems to consistenly give good results. Of course, when you think about it I'm actually doing half the job of the program for the pictures, so it's not surprising it works, just surprising that the program falls over then doing it on those images, but not the rest.
I managed to process 4 Nyan Types and 3 animages over the course of the weekend. Now to be fair, if I'd been scanning I'd have speant more time doing it and I had alreayd processed a chunk of the scans for those magazines, but I think it takes roughly a third of the time to stitch the scans as it does to scan them in the first place.
That's adds quite a lot, but is better than I feared.
Monday, 14 March 2011
running costs
I think I mentioned the other day how I don't tend to focus on current events in this blog. Generally it's a fairly light blog about the boring stuff I get up to. However, since I count watching anime and reading manga amongst my favourite past-times and tend to think of myself as a bit of a Japanophile, it seems churlish not to at least acknowledge the horrible-ness that was last Friday's Earthquake and Tsunami.
Earthquakes are pretty horrible, but Tsunami's have to be one of the scariest natural disasters you can imagine. I mean, many other disasters you can protect against, or there can be sufficient warning to evacuate, but something like that happening so close to the Japanese coast meant a heck of a lot of people have unfortunately lost their lives.
Anyway, back to me and the petty concerns of my life.
Last Friday I put my car in for a service and MOT. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the car, so it past the MOT, but I did need some new brakes, which meant the total rose to a rather eye watering £440.
However, this is only the start of a couple of months of car related expense that's really going to hammer my wallet. Next up, I need a new set of tyres. This wouldn't be so bad, except that apparently my car is the only one that uses this particular model of tyre. That makes them slightly more expensive, but also really difficult to find. Really I need 4 new tyres and they're likely to be about £140 each with the higher VAT rate.
The next expense will be my insurance. This will cost me about £500. I could get it cheaper, but it would mean things like abandoning my no claims protection and increasing my voluntary excess. From experience, these are all things that sound un-necessary, but then if you have an accident it means it ends up costing you five times as much in the long run.
Lastly will be my car tax. This is the one I resent the most - why the hell do I have to pay a separate car tax, given the amount of tax there is on petrol? It's absolutely ridiculous. Especially with it being a flat fee. I mean, it is reduced depending on your carbon emissions, but the reality of carbon emissions is that it's actually more to do with how you drive, rather than the numbers in the brochure.
I mean, someone I know has recently got a hybrid, so has far lover car tax, yet he's only been getting about 43 miles to the gallon. I don't think I've ever gotten les than 45 miles to the gallon, yet my car tax is higher.
I can't remember how much my car tax is, but it's somewhere in the region of £150, so when you tot all that up, it's all going to set me back the best part of £1,750.
This isn't cheap, but a big part of the problem is that I've made a rod for my own back. See, the car I own is actually what was the top of the line, and that's a big part of why it's so expensive. If I'd had the bog standard model, the tyres would be at least 1/3rd cheaper, and the brakes would be drum brakes, which last a lot longer and are a lot cheaper. Also, the official carbon count would be lower, reducing the tax, and because it would fundamentally be a cheaper car I'm sure the insurance would be lower too.
Earthquakes are pretty horrible, but Tsunami's have to be one of the scariest natural disasters you can imagine. I mean, many other disasters you can protect against, or there can be sufficient warning to evacuate, but something like that happening so close to the Japanese coast meant a heck of a lot of people have unfortunately lost their lives.
Anyway, back to me and the petty concerns of my life.
Last Friday I put my car in for a service and MOT. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the car, so it past the MOT, but I did need some new brakes, which meant the total rose to a rather eye watering £440.
However, this is only the start of a couple of months of car related expense that's really going to hammer my wallet. Next up, I need a new set of tyres. This wouldn't be so bad, except that apparently my car is the only one that uses this particular model of tyre. That makes them slightly more expensive, but also really difficult to find. Really I need 4 new tyres and they're likely to be about £140 each with the higher VAT rate.
The next expense will be my insurance. This will cost me about £500. I could get it cheaper, but it would mean things like abandoning my no claims protection and increasing my voluntary excess. From experience, these are all things that sound un-necessary, but then if you have an accident it means it ends up costing you five times as much in the long run.
Lastly will be my car tax. This is the one I resent the most - why the hell do I have to pay a separate car tax, given the amount of tax there is on petrol? It's absolutely ridiculous. Especially with it being a flat fee. I mean, it is reduced depending on your carbon emissions, but the reality of carbon emissions is that it's actually more to do with how you drive, rather than the numbers in the brochure.
I mean, someone I know has recently got a hybrid, so has far lover car tax, yet he's only been getting about 43 miles to the gallon. I don't think I've ever gotten les than 45 miles to the gallon, yet my car tax is higher.
I can't remember how much my car tax is, but it's somewhere in the region of £150, so when you tot all that up, it's all going to set me back the best part of £1,750.
This isn't cheap, but a big part of the problem is that I've made a rod for my own back. See, the car I own is actually what was the top of the line, and that's a big part of why it's so expensive. If I'd had the bog standard model, the tyres would be at least 1/3rd cheaper, and the brakes would be drum brakes, which last a lot longer and are a lot cheaper. Also, the official carbon count would be lower, reducing the tax, and because it would fundamentally be a cheaper car I'm sure the insurance would be lower too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)