Madobe Nanami, Jim Raynor, and Negima

In other words, “Random Post on Decidedly Unrelated Things”. Basically when I haven’t blogged in a long while I end up with a little growing pile of things-I-could-blog up somewhere in my brain, and at some point I get the lazy-man’s urge to just make a simple brain-dump post and write a summary of the entire pile and call it a day.

I have only partly succumbed to temptation here. Some stalwart part of me has successfully convinced the whole to hold back on talking about the current season’s anime offerings in inevitable haphazard fashion and instead save them for, hopefully, full posts. So let’s cross our fingers and hope for an eventual post each for OreImo, IkaMusume, and To Love Ru (yes, you can tell the state of my brain over the past semester from the anime I picked) – when I finish getting my new computer set up.

Yes. I got a new computer. Let me show you my desktop.

I gotta admit, Nanami-san looks great on a wallpaper ;) And before you stare in shock at my blog name and back at my Windows 7 desktop, let me hastily assure thine confused heart that I’ll soon be planting Linux into this baby. I am however a little lazy now and will soon be leaving on a little trip, so I’ve decided to just try living in Windows a couple of weeks and see how it feels.

Ohandbtw, if you’re wondering what evil thing made me blow this enormous hole in my moneypouch, here’s your answer:

It is evil. If you have a somewhat weak, inferior but comfortably working machine, never come within 10 metres of this cursed thing. You have been warned.

So anyway about Windows 7. Doesn’t feel too bad to use it really, outside of the usual complaints. I instantly found myself sorely missing virtual desktops and tabbed file managers when I started working on my final year project whitepaper. There are a few nice touches though, like how the taskbar and start menu are so smooth and responsive compared to KDE’s more or less functionally equivalent ones, and how nice and hassle free the desktop search is compared to our ol nepomuk. Of course, the list of complaints is decidedly longer (hey, look at what I call my blog). Like how minimalistic and surprisingly keyboard-unfriendly the default photo viewer program is, how the file manager inconveniently hides file extensions with no easy way to disable that behavior (and when the OS relies almost exclusively on file extensions to identify file type), and how there seems to be no natural way of opening multiple locations in file managers at once – no tabs, and the taskbar launcher merges with the file manager task after I open the first one, preventing me from opening subsequent file manager windows in one click. In the end I just got used to hitting Ctrl-N.

But enough on that. Another interesting thing I noticed though is that my brand new Windows 7 seems to take almost the same amount of time to boot as my old one on my vastly inferior previous machine. The key difference I think is that I installed a stock Windows 7 Pro on my previous computer from a downloaded DVD image, which is pretty pristine compared to this one which is loaded with some HP-specific modifications and with extremely annoying antivirus trial programs that just.won’t.go.away. God I hate antiviruses so much nowadays. Anyway, I think that hardware vendors are actually doing Windows a disservice by pre-installing all these random crap in the machines they ship. I wonder if my pre-Linux days might have been much less miserable if I had been working with pristine Windows installations instead of the bloated stuff the hardware folks ship. Hmmm.

Starcraft.. is evil. Do not poke with a 10-foot pole if you’ve got important work to do. And Raynor is a much more interesting character now. And Force-fielding is so bloody much fun. And Mutalings and Cloaked Banshees are so hard to play against as Toss. And.. just don’t poke with a 10-foot pole.

Incidentally, I’ve finally gotten down to reading Negima. It’s pretty engrossing! I am however disturbed by the question of why is it so engrossing? (for context and so you know what spoilers to avoid, I’m at ~ chapter 90) There are so ridiculously many characters…

…that even at 90 chapters most of them have not yet seen too much development, not even Asuna and Negi. And yet, I find myself inextricably fond of almost all of them. It’s witchcraft I say! I guess this is just one more proof that stock characters can nonetheless make an extremely lovable cast if well deployed. The cast in Negima is really quite diverse, and they each manage to be awesome in their own unique ways. Their number of course necessarily means they each get smaller slices of screentime (uh, pagetime?), but each one entertains consistently, and you can’t wait for them to show up again even as you eagerly move on to the next chapter. I guess it also helps that Ken Akamatsu draws extremely attractive girls – and also knows how to make crowning moments of awesome hit home. Negima may be a shopping cart of common love-comedic tropes and characters, but it is quite the feast for the senses thus far. Very nice. I have about 30 more chapters loaded in my N900 for consumption during my trip ^^

Anyway, think I gotta wrap this up now. Haphazardly-put-together, tldr post, but hopefully there’s something worth reading in there somewhere :P Till next time.

PS. I am sooo out of touch with KDE-verse nowadays – since my insane final year project started setting in =( time to catch up.. Wonder how Plasma-Mobile is doing now..