Josh’s Anime Blog

Here I am, enjoying a nice streak of posting 66 days in a row (last day off? February 27th), and then my cable internet and/or my cable modem and/or my wireless router decides to go kablooey last night and I can’t connect to the internet, blowing my streak.

My thinking is that it’s the router, since it’s been giving me problems recently, and I couldn’t even get an IP when I plugged directly up to it, but I’ll see if it works. But then again, my cable modem was sitting there blinking like it couldn’t connect either for much of the night (I did have cable. I did at least check that much). It would be my luck that both would go out at the same time or something.

At least if my cable modem still works I can still connect ONE computer to the internet.

And I have two episode reviews in the queue as well (and I’m sure that’ll increase soon) which I’ll post….sometime I guess.

Update:

Well, it must be the wireless router as I can connect by plugging directly into the cable modem and a) I can’t get an IP from the router via a direct connection and b) the router isn’t broadcasting.  I’ll try some troubleshooting stuff, but my bet is that it’s gone.

OK, I don’t know if anyone else who reads this blog has had this problem, but last year I got a new Dell Laptop with Vista on it. Everything seemed to work fine (putting aside my lack of RAM, which I have since dealt with), except for one thing: I couldn’t record the “Stereo Mix” sound - i.e. I couldn’t record “what I hear” coming from the computer.

This posed a couple of issues because a) for my podcast reviews, I usually use a short clip from the show I’m reviewing, so I need to record audio off of the DVD and 2) to grab OPs and EDs from shows, again for the podcast, I sometimes record them directly from a DVD or download.

I had wrangled with this over and over, without being able to find any way to make my computer record it. Downloading new drivers, or XP drivers, or drivers for other machines that seemed to work all failed. As a result, I’ve used my now 7 year old desktop computer, which is running XP, to do this job for me and then just transfer the audio to my Vista laptop.

Well, this has appeared to change today as I was once again trying to see if I could solve this problem. I once again tried a couple of drivers people had suggested online, but all that did was break my audio. So I restarted and allowed Vista to install the default driver as it usually does, reserved to the fact that I was going to have no Stereo Mix record capability.

However, a funny thing happened - when I went into my sound manager and looked under the recording tab, which I actually did because my machine didn’t prompt me for what type of input my microphone was supposed to be when I plugged it in like it usually did - Stereo Mix showed up as an option (along with Line In), albeit listed as “currently unavailable.” I couldn’t seem to be able to do anything to get it to say anything but “currently unavailable” but then decided “what the hell, let me set it as the default and see what happens.” Well, when I did that, it suddenly said that it was available and that my mic was unavailable. Apparently setting the “default” device in the sound panel is how you select from what source you wish to record.

Now, I still have an issue of it recording at a much lower volume than what my computer is playing at, but at least I can amplify that in Audacity to pretty much get what I want. Why these options suddenly decided to show up, I don’t know. Maybe when Vista was auto-installing the driver again, it found a new version online or something, or maybe it was able to install one of the versions I TRIED to install before but was unable to.

In any case, it looks like my Vista can now record it’s sound output, even if it is imperfect (having to go into the sound panel every time to switch from microphone to Stereo Mix is rather annoying), but at least it works in some capacity. Maybe finally I can start thinking about ditching this dinosaur which is sitting next to me as one of the last reasons why I was using it appears to no longer be an issue.

So Wordpress finally released version 2.5, and I’ve upgraded to that now. I’m still playing around and adding plugins and what not, and the site overall appears to be working fine, but if you run into something that doesn’t work, just leave a comment and let me know about it.

Update: I’ve now added two commenting features: the ability to (easily) add tags to comments and the ability to edit comments you’ve just added up to a half hour ago.  Now, I can easily tell that the first feature seems to be working fine.  However, being an admin, it seems I can edit everyone’s comments at any time, so I can’t really tell if the comment-editing countdown thing is actually working.  I assume it is (and I guess I could just log out and post a comment) but if you see that it isn’t working, let me know.

OK, so I wondered what an Anime March Madness bracket might look like, so I came up with one. Seedings are based on my review scores, taking my 64 highest scoring reviews (though that only meant that 7 shows were left out…). The shows were sorted into 4 regions: The Romance region, the Comedy region, the Fantasy region, and the Drama region. Just as any bracket, shows may not fit perfectly in any given region, but I did my best. I probably should have done this after my Great Review Posting Blitz of 2008, but by then it wouldn’t have been as fun or interesting (if it is anyway).

And no, I’m not planning on playing this out unless a substantial* number of people wish me to.

* Substantial being enough people making putting up polls on the matter being worthwhile.

In any case, here is a link to the bracket, since it’s too honkin huge to actually put on the page itself. Those who have images turned off, don’t want to look at a big image, or who otherwise can’t read the image, I have the match-ups below the fold.

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