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.
If you can taste this surging discovery
This moment that ends this journey
Perhaps you wouldn’t destroy, perhaps you wouldn’t
Perhaps you’d tread more gently
If you can feel this breathless touch
Tremulous, trembling, exultant
Perhaps you wouldn’t destroy, perhaps you wouldn’t
Perhaps you’d be more reverent.
If you can know the triumph of a soul
An instant in time, an age
If you can fathom magic momentary
From your disinterested vantage
If you can see how one can adore
A simple thing like never before
Perhaps you wouldn’t destroy, perhaps you wouldn’t
Perhaps you’d care a little more.
Wow, you don’t come across Miku-chan singing a Chinese song all the time. Probably not at all in fact, given the drama that accompanied this one. But I really, really like this piece. It’s a beautiful song, very poetic, very melodically emotive, and very Chinese. I also really like the simple but effective video that accompanies it, but what surprised me most was how amazingly well Miku sang it. Her voice and tone quality was nearly perfect – just that right balance of detachment and engagement to bring out the song’s sighing, gently wistful quality. Damn, I think she did this song better than just about every Japanese song I’ve ever heard her do, though I admittedly haven’t heard many.
This piece does have a somewhat tragic story though. Apparently the author put it up on NicoNico and got flamed into eventually removing it by a horde of anti-Chinese NicoNico users. Seems like there are Japanese out there who hate the Chinese as much as some Chinese hate the Japanese, at least in NicoNico. If you have a NicoNico account you can drop by the now defunct video page here to have a peek at the carnage. Frankly, I think it’s plain ridiculous. As a chink myself I’m aware of the Sino-Japan history of conflict, and if people want to take that seriously, fine. But where is the rationale in getting hostile over a musical work – a good one at that – just because it is written in the Chinese language and performed by a Japan-invented Vocaloid?
Although I haven’t heard many Vocaloid songs I really like the Vocaloid idea and find the effects of its adoption into popular culture very interesting. And I’m very impressed at how surprisingly well a Vocaloid programmed to only pronounce Japanese syllables is able to perform a Chinese song. Of course, she doesn’t pronounce very well, but I won’t expect a regular Japanese singer to be able to do better. I’d really like to see more such experimentation with the Vocaloids. So Mr Author if you’re anywhere out there, I hope you don’t get too discouraged. And to the folks who flamed this video out of NicoNico, random kittens explode in violent despair whenever you do inexplicably unintelligent things like that. THINK OF THE KITTIES!!
Btw, yes, I haven’t walked off a cliff. I’m still battling my Final Year Project for my life and sanity though, but assuming I don’t get slain in the next one or two weeks, I have a couple of posts I’d like to write, so yeah, this blog isn’t quite dead yet :) For anyone non-chinese who might be interested, the name of the song translated is “Moon. Xi River“. I’ve contemplated translating the lyrics too, but decided against it. Poetic lyrics like these are nigh impossible to translate without completely mangling it in the process, not without some decidedly ingenious (and likely inaccurate) ad-libing anyway.
PS: yes, I do think she did this song better than Jay Chou did comparable songs.
Well, not quite. Actually not by a long shot, but I have finished a substantial amount of it, so that I should be able to finally start gearing back into blogging mode, reply to comments and push out some posts hopefully over the next few days.
Man has it been rough, but everything has turned out more or less fine. More on those in a future post. I hope ;)
Just a quick pop-in (since I appear to have been banned from identi.ca. Btw anyone knows who can save me or how I can save myself?). So after a really long time but fortunately well before the new semester, we finally have up-to-date Linux guides for connecting to SoC PEAP, SoCVPN and for printing in SoC posted on the official NUS School of Computing Document Repository! Big thanks to tech services for following through with this. Would have been ideal for printed copies to have also been made available, but this is still way better than things used to be :)
Here’s to hoping this’ll help existing Linux users amongst the freshmen keep their preferred operating system, and also make things easier for curious proprietary system users seeking a breath of fresh air :)
My Summer of Code application this year made it! Exultation! All the more sweet after the vivid bitterness of last year’s failure. So I shall be working this summer towards the conceptualization and creation of a sensible system tray for Plasma Mobile, and the excitement I feel, at being allowed the chance of contributing to the ongoing work to bring KDE to the mobile space, could hardly be overstated. Needless to say, this will be an awesome summer for me :)
Another cool fact: all the (othertwo) Plasmaters also landed their respective projects this year. Congratz guys! (Yes I spontaneously coined the term “Plasmaters”. I think I like it though)
And a final not so cool fact: Plasmate has been piling dusts of neglect ever since school started going crazy on me. Apparently the others have been busy too – I just went and did an update but it didn’t pull any changes. So much for a beta in April. I guess Plasmate’s gonna need a little summer love too alongside my cool GSoC project :)
I know I haven’t posted enough on the current season (and I would have, *grumble grumble*). But something else far more solemn in nature happened while my site was offline.
This song probably needs little introduction. Diamond Crevasse is one of the defining songs of Macross Frontier, performed by the venerable May’n in the guise of Sheryl Nome. The version I have here is part of the one popularly known as “Shinkuu” Diamond Crevasse – a particularly emotive version of the song performed by Sheryl Nome during the critical events of episode 20.
This one is dedicated to Tan Shyn Lyn, who took her life in the early twilight of the 20th of April, 2010.
Hit the jump for lyrics and translations, and hit F8 to play the song while it’s up.
If you’ve dropped by in the past day or so, you would likely have noted that my humble little blog had apparently run afoul of a couple of Syrian hackers. Yes, Between Linux and Anime was hacked, and all my hard-written posts and precious comments trashed. And I haven’t a clue why :( A random hit? Or could it be that I praised the iPad just a little too much? The truth is I don’t like the iPad either, my dear Syrians, so how bout you quit picking on poor and miserable little bloggers like myself, eh?
Anyway, thanks to the hosting fiasco that vaporised my old blog half a year ago, I have now become much more equipped to deal with disasters of this sort. This time I had a backup ready that had all my posts up to the “end of railgun” one, and the remaining two latests posts I managed to scrounge up from the depths of Google’s and my browser’s caches. So zero total post lost and minimal damage on that front. The comments front didn’t do so well though. Unfortunately, I was unable to salvage a good number of recent ones, in spite of my best efforts scouring the search engine page caches, so I’ll have to apologize if your comment is among the lost.
I hope that’s the last I’ll see of this in awhile :( Again – Dustin, RP, Keiri, and all the folks who had commented on my iPad post – I’ve seen and I appreciate your comments. Moushiwake Gozaimasen Deshita :(
Edit: somehow I managed to find all the comments to the iPad post on a Google cache, so those are restored! As best as I could anyway :)
So near the beginning of this semester I launched a personal project aimed at getting the NUS School of Computing technical help desk to make available printed Linux guides to the various essential computing services in the school. These services have a good amount of sophisticated machinery encapsulating them so it is really not trivial to figure out how to go about them on your own. In NUS SoC, there are neatly printed individual guides for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 each (as well as an obligatory one for Mac OSX). There is exactly zero official documentation for any Linux for any service. This was what I was determined to change.
I started out with authoring a draft guide and, with the help of several other volunteers, tested it with reasonable rigor on several distributions, refined it, then contributed the end result to technical services with an earnest note for their consideration. Perhaps non-surprisingly they rejected the request on the grounds that Linux is a very varied and fast-evolving platform that they are not equipped to support officially. I then offered to state explicitly in the guide that the guide is student-contributed, that Linux is not officially supported by tech services, and include external links to further Linux help that the help desk can direct inquiring students to, hoping to push for the guides to be simply made available as-is. For the past month or so I pursued the matter, battling various mysterious phenomena like emails that were successfully sent but were overlooked by both the ticketing system and the people managing the mailbox, and indeed – even emails that simply vanished altogether.
It is with great regret that I today pronounce The End. I had just been speaking with a nice but helpless help desk personnel during which she informed me that tech services is adamant about not making printed copies available, claiming that the act of printing the guides will implicitly imply that tech services is supporting them.
Not at all a reason I am happy with, but it is at least a concrete one. This is a bottom line that I see no way of discrediting or working around without being hostile, so this is as far as I will go.
Technical services has offered instead to make links to my guides accessible from their official document repository, towards which they will then direct any students who ask about Linux. So the whole effort was at least not entirely fruitless. I plan now to simply put/merge my guide up to the unofficial NUS Opensource wiki and then give them links to that.
I’ll post again with the links when the guides are done, if for no other reason than to hopefully boost their Google visibility.
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