Why am I up this late with a few rants?

I guess from time to time I'm going to rant on stupid commercials.

DirecTV (which thankfully gives us the Cleveland Locals feed instead of
Youngstown which Dish Network was going to force on us in spite of still
being in the same damn zip code) has one that annoys me to no end. 3
guys on a couch. Trying to watch a football game. The middle guy has
cable, while it took me a while to figure out his friends on either side
have DirecTV and are annoying him while the game plays on in the
background, belittling him about still being a cable subscriber.

What does it matter how he gets the signal into his TV? The arguments
fail epically. I mute that SOB commercial anymore.

Another commercial that deserves a big fist in the face is one for
Campbell's Chunky Soup. It's being eaten by a football player. But he
can't just eat it like we do. He has to blatantly open his big mouth so
wide we can see the dude's molars. AND I MEAN WIDE OPEN! Nobody freaking
eats soup like that, nobody needs to open their damn mouth that wide
just to shove a spoonful of Chunky soup in. I mean, WHY do we need to
see that? "Oh hey, better open that trap of yours as wide as you can,
because people might not see all that Chunky-soup goodness going in.
They won't believe it's actually _our product._" _I_ Don't eat like
that. Nobody does. It's rude and disgusting. I make sure NOT to have to
do that. Who is that in the commercial? Why can't we see him eating soup
normally? Is he trying to make sure he doesn't slop any of that on his
jersey? I mean, what's the deal? I just want to shove some brass
knuckles down his throat while his yap is wide open, and then kick the
director in the nuts for asking for such a performance.

Another organization that also needs an iron pipe to smack their
decision making area of their brains is the programming staff at WKSU.
They recently changed their Saturday programming schedule to put Wait
Wait Don't Tell Me on at 11 AM, and thereby shortening Whadyaknow to
only an hour at Noon. Then they added a show called "The Splendid Table"
on at 1 pm. That show annoys me a lot. I hate it. Sure, it's about food,
but the slogan is "The show for people who love to eat." Problem is I
don't like that show!! I've had to endure it for the last few weeks. I
don't care that much for it. I'd rather have 2 hours of Michael Feldman,
and then Wait Wait after it. Then put This American Life after that.
And Marketplace Money? Oh My GOD NO. I get enough bullsh!t about money
off CNN as it is. I HATE THAT SHOW, TOO. WKSU - ARE YOU LISTENING?? GIVE
ME BACK MY 2 HOURS OF FELDMAN'S SHOW DAMMIT!!

If I was any of the people who sent in money in support of the station,
I'd be angry right now and demand that I have my money back.

Car Talk is still on at 10 am. Sheesh, they know for sure not to screw
with that at least.

Note to Self: Find Hell Girl's website, post the names of Rick Seigal,
Debbie Laurie, and Ron Holiday and wait for the lulz. Epic Winrar!

MKVToolsnix nixed the derisive comments

Last night I finally got that MKVToolsnix installer put on that one
lady's XP system. After some poking around, I finally got:

mkvextract tracks this.mkv 3:subs.ass

MKVinfo told me the video is track 1 in mp4 format.

Track 2 is Japanese audio in AAC format.

Track 3 is subtitles, text, in SSA format.

When extracted, the subtitle file is pure text which you can open and
edit in Notepad.

All the comments by that idiot fansubbing group that were not supposed
to appear were surrounded by {} aka braces. It was a simple matter of
deleting the first few, then Find and replace the rest. If the VLC
developers could issue a simple patch for one of the subtitle rendering
options, it would make that point of putting in derisive comments like
that obsolete.

Now, here's the rub.

There are fonts included in the Naisho no Tsubomi Ep.1 MKV file. I don't
know how to not include them as they appear as "attachments" and not
tracks. I think their issue with VLC is that I didn't find a way to
change the color of the subs, and the first sub that translates the
title is supposed to appear somewhere else on the screen, and VLC
doesn't seem to know how to work with that.

However, VLC does have some options for subtitles, but I have not
experimented with them and I'm not sure what they offer.

OK. Upstart of extracting the subtitles? Edit them and then play the
file back with them because VLC can use external subtitle files, even in
SSA format. It will appear as a 2nd subtitle track to the player, over
riding what may be included in the file.

I had converted the OVA into an AVI with Super(c) and experienced no
problems with playback when I then added the external subtitle file. I
did have to tell VLC that the aspect ratio is 16:9 to display it right,
and then tweaked a time code in the subtitle file (saving a 2nd copy as
a result), so that the title sub and then episode name sub didn't appear
at the same time.

The first time I played the original MKV with the external sub file went
OK, but a few attempts after that caused stuttering video playback. On
the last time I was playing around, I disabled the track so see what
would happen, and the video appeared to go back to normal, and then I
turned on the sub track and they came back on and the video was OK.
Dunno what was going on there anyway.

DVD FLICK Can use the external subtitle file for soft subs if making a
DVD. You can tell it to use the AVI file and that it's 16:9 aspect ratio
(or use the original MKV because DVD Flick won't work with the included
subtitle track in the file anyway), but for some reason it thinks the
sub file has overlapping time codes and that it would try to fix them,
with an advisory that the resulting DVD could be truncated. (?) I wish
there was an option to tell it to not worry about that. Maybe that would
require more tweaking? I'm up for that.

mkvtoolsnix is another utility I found through Sourceforge. Latest
unicode version is very available.

More figured out from my Mystery CD

Had a 2nd go at stuff on that mystery CD. I still don't have answers for
3 of them, and a 4th... Anywho...

Track 1 was finally identified as "Machibuse" by Matsutouya Yumi from
her album "Cowgirl Dreamin'"

Track 4 has the English words, as I hear them, "Dancing Door." but
nobody seems to have heard and put lyrics for it on a page.

Track 7 is still unknown. It sounds like an anime song. "mou sugu haru
desu" and "suteki na koi wa shimashou" are 2 lines from it.

Track 11 was also finally identified as "koibito mo nureru machikado"
aka The streetcorner where even lovers get wet (in the rain presumably).
This is probably a cover, because I found 2 singer credits. The original
was done by Nakamura Masatoshi, but a relatively recent cover was done
by the group TOKIO.

Track 13 - I still can't get this one. I can only figure it's "Wedding
Veil" but I guess nobody's heard this one. The lyrics are sung quite
fast. I can pick out words, but nothing comes up when I search them.

Track 14 turned out to be Hold Me Tight by Ueda Masaki.

Track 15 is Kamome ga Tonda Hi but I have no singer's credit for it.

Track 18 - The first words in the lyric are "mizuiro no ame", but it's
not from Utadoki and has nothing to do with anime. Also another group of
words I get are "ai no katachi" but even a quick search will tell you
that's a pretty common phrase as well. There seems to be several songs
called "Mizuiro no ame", but I can't find info on the one I have.

Anywho, that's about it.

DA PUMP CD is no longer mystery!

A friend had identified 3 tracks from this CD already, and I just
finished getting titles to the rest. This one was surprisingly easy.

No.1 - Purple the Orion

No.2 - If...

No.3 - Stay Together

No.4 - Gokigen da ze ~Nothing but Something~

No.5 - Rhapsody in Blue

No.6 - Come On Be My Girl

No.7 - Joyful

No.8 - Crazy Beat Goes On!

No.9 - We Can't Stop the Music

No.10 - I Wonder...

No.11 - Love is the Final Liberty

No.12 - Come On Be My Girl - this is the same song on Track 6, but a
different version

No.13 - "If..." remix version

No.14 - From Summertime... It's All Right

Now to work on the final 9 from the mystery CD! I don't know why I
didn't do this years ago.

na no da!

My Mystery Morning Musume Music!

No longer a mystery anymore!

After a couple hours or so Googling shtuff, I have finally Identified
the unlabelled Morning Musume CD. Of course, album names, years, track
numbers greatly appreciated. I remember sending a couple of cassette
tapes to someone in the hopes of getting help IDing these songs, btw.
Sent off 2 tapes, not heard a word at all since.

tonikaku...

Track 1 - Love Machine from Love Paradise (one of 6 favorite tracks on
my mystery CD btw)

No.2 - Daite Hold On Me! from 2nd Morning (there's a few versions of
this so I don't know which one I got.)

No.3 - FURUSATO from 2nd Morning (This one and the one next have a
Chinese flavor, so of course I like them)

No.4 - Happy Summer Wedding

No.5 - I Wish

No.6 - Koi No Dance Site from Love Paradise

No.7 - Ai no Tane (Seed of Love) from First Time

No.8 - Memory Seishun no Hikari from 2nd Morning

No.9 - Morning Coffee from First Time

No.10 - Night of Tokyo City from 2nd Morning

No.11 - Love Revolution

No.12 - Say Yeah! Motto Miracle Night!

No.13 - Jankenpyon - I found the title from just the "pyon" in the lyric
that I was hearing and including Morning Musume in the search. Fun
bouncy tune. ^_^

No.14 - Chokotto Love (I like this one, too.) This is also a DDR tune.

No.15 - "Otome Pasta ni Kandou" This one proved to be the hardest of all
to identify! I think the artist is Tanpopo? so I couldn't use Morning
Musume as a search term, though one Hello Project fansite had the lyrics
to it.

And finally No.16 - Last Kiss

If people can help me with the other bits of info I can pull them off
the Data CD I made (I have these in MP3 format after ripping them over a
year ago) and plan to use Audacity to update the ID3 tags in the files.

Identifying the songs on those mystery Jpop CDs we found years ago

Back in 2004 when friends and I were up in Toronto for Anime North that
year, we found 5 Japanese music CDs on the floor at the parking garage
at Dragon City and were completely a mystery except for some of the
markings on the CDs.

One person correctly identified HIRO's Brilliant CD.

One marked Da Pump had a few tracks identified by a friend.

Morning Musume - only track I know is #6 on the CD, Koi no Dance Site
after seeing it used in part of a music video featuring Digi Charat
clips.

There's a complete mystery CD as the 5th one, no markings at all. No
Idea. I finally loaded a bunch of them on an MP3 player, and hope to
find a resource of lyrics - like I did for the entire Koyanagi Yuki CD!
Well, Track 6 is in English, and all I can figure out is it's a cover of
Air Supply's "Without You."

The rest of the tracks are off her Expansion and Freedom (with singles)
CDs. (sorry about double spacing them but it's hard to tell if the
formatting I have in email is going to be retained when posted.)

CD Track 1 - Aijou - Expansion #5

CD 2 - Feel the Destiny - Expansion #1

CD 3 - Be Alive - Expansion #11

CD 4 - Can't Hold Me Back - Expansion #8

CD 5 - A Gap of Heart - Freedom #8

CD 6 - "Without You" - don't know which album yet

CD 7 - I don't Wanna Be Crazy - Freedom #7

CD 8 - Infinity - Freedom #9

CD 9 - Legend of My Love - Expansion #2

CD 10 - Melodies - Freedom #4

CD 11 - Orange Love - Freedom #2

CD 12 - Prove My Heart - Expansion #6

CD 13 - Shinin' Day - Freedom #6

CD 14 - anata no KISU w(o) kazoemashou - This one is either Freedom #1
or #12 the Opus II version. I don't know how to tell which version this
is, except that it's 7:44 long.

tonikaku...

So I did a little sleuthing with the lyrics from the 18 tracks on my
mystery CD, trying to listen to the song and see if I can pull out a
phrase that when I romanize it the way I know how in the generally
accepted method, google it and see what comes up.

Problem is even if I think I am romanizing what I hear, two problems
happen. I may not be hearing the words right, and even when I do, the
data against which the searches happen may not be spelled right anyway.

Anyone who knows for sure, let me know if I get any artist names right,
and offer possibly album / track / year info as well. One thing I do
realize is that when someone makes a song popular, a load of other
artists will cover the same song, as was the case with a Chinese pop
song I discovered called "lao shu ai da mi" which if I had remembered
that right translated roughly to "The old mouse loves big rice," the
kanji of which were on a 25 cent cell phone charm sold in a
gachapon-type bubble machine where I used to work.

Let's see... (I think I got 10 out of 18 in case you were wondering.)

Track 1 - I don't think I was able to pick anything out yet. I will try
again soon.

No.2 - This turned out to be called "Olivia w(o) kiki nagara" possibly
by ANRI.

No.3 - "omoide ga ippai" by H2O and it's not the Ranma 1/2 song either.
This one sounds like it was recorded from a speaker playing the song, so
it's crap.

No.4 - I don't know yet. This might be one of those where they sing too
fast for my skill level.

No.5 - "Matsu wa" by Chiyo

No.6 - "Haru na no ni" by Showta

No.7 - I don't know yet. Snippets of the lyric include "mou sugu haru
desu", "suteki na koi wa shimashou."

I guess if someone hasn't romanized it yet or correctly, I can't find it
from a web search.

No.8 - "Ihoujin" by Acid Black Cherry (?)

No.9 - Shiroi Parasoru aka "White Parasol" by Seiko Matsuda from the
album "Kaze Tachinu".

No.10 - "FUREAI" - no idea on the singer. This is a guitar piece with a
male vocalist. Might be on Youtube.

No. 11 - I don't know yet.

No. 12 - "moshimo Piano ga hiketa nara" I am not sure of the artist's
name. Itsuki Hiroshi or Toshiyuki Nishida?

No. 13 - Argh! This one is nice, possibly a female duo. First words I
hear are probably "Wedding Veil" or "Wedding Bell". It's fast so I have
trouble picking out enough for one line of lyric. I try to find enough
to make it a unique search and probably get a hit on google.

No. 14 - Don't know, male vocalist. The first line of the song goes
"niji no machi no hi wa futari mite ita" Something like The day of the
rainbow (of the town?) we saw it. (don't have my PDA out)

No. 15 - Don't know. Has the words "minato no sakamichi" in the lyric. I
will try again sometime.

No. 16 - "Kuchibiru yo, atsuku kimi w(o) katare" by Watanabe Machiko.

No. 17 - "Mayoi Michi" by Watanabe Machiko

No. 18 - Don't know. Lyric snippets include "yasashii hito ne" "anata de
hito wa mirai furi" I think. No hits on any of that.

I find that you have to be very specific on a piece of lyric since some
phrases are widely popular or frequently used, like "genzai kako mirai."
and when that happens you get a lot of search results.

I just thought of something like including the snippets of the lyrics
that I figured out that led to my search results being fruitful. Oh
well. I'm tired, so gomen nasai.

I hope to compile the lyric results into a small booklet thingy to tuck
in with this mystery CD.

I'm officially done with this weather

I've had it. I don't know how much longer I can hold out. We had 2 days
of some nice warmth and melting going on. Ice cicles knocked off and
all. Then this past week we got a major dumping of snow. But it didn't
just come as snow, oh no. We got freezing rain. So now it's like this
outside...

Frozen ground. Anything ground level, like the puddles of water in our
driveway, is frozen solid. The freezing rain came in and as I was
finding out tonight, there's like an inch of frozen ice, a whole layer
on top of the ground. Then there's the layer of snow on top of that. But
I don't find out in that order. First you shovel the snow away, then
find out about the 1 inch thick layer of ice. I hurt my hands using some
implement of garden destruction trying to hack it away so I could at
least shovel it to the side.

It's been 3 days since I last went out, and I should have gotten more
water then. We're down to like 2 gallons of drinkable water. I have to
get out tomorrow or we're going to go nuts. The car still has a layer of
snow and probably ice on it. I have to try getting out.

I have to fax some things to BVR and I missed seeing my guy for things
Manga on Wednesday. ARGH!!!!!!

Good thing I don't have to go to work right now.

Yes, it's finally cold enough for me

For the past hour or so, our outdoor thermometer has been showing 6
Degrees F BELOW ZERO.

I don't want to think about it.

Recent DVD recorder stuff

I've begun backing up my VHS subtitled tapes of Ranma 1/2 to DVD with my
Maggie. I've been using the 2 hour mode and the results so far are
impressive and acceptable. The resulting video is not grainy like Viz's
DVDs they made from their material. And I'm able to squeeze 5 episodes
on each disk with about 9 minutes left over. I'll need about 33 or so
disks just for the TV series alone.

I also did something last night that I shouldn't have - I was up until
almost 3 am recording the Star Wars Holiday Special on a DVD, utilizing
the video fixing capabilities of the Magnavox MWR10D6, from a tape a
friend did for me that I had not realized he did until I found it again.

I'd say the result was 90 to 95% fixed. The picture doesn't suffer from
the odd bending due to the speed fluctuation of the Betamax source
produced during recording and showing up during playback. It looks like
the show was taped in its entirety and possibly edited to another tape
later, because how are you going to know when they're going to run a
Star Wars toy commercial just by pausing out the commercials during the
broadcast anyway? It was shown only once!

Also mostly resolved was the odd off-coloring of the video. I had done
some pages for a friend with some Snappy captures which I adjusted the
color using Paint Shop Pro 4 on a Win95 laptop. Most of those were
fixed, but some were unable to be color corrected. It seems my Maggie
recorder can fix incorrect colors up to a point. Instead of overly green
hues, it came out with more browns and yellows instead, but you get the
idea it's more like how it should look.

I also added chapter marks in places so that you could skip the
ridiculous songs if you wanted to. Those probably won't make it into a
processed copy of the disk unless there's a way to rip, edit, and then
burn that.

I was very surprised by how much the video was corrected and realized
the limitations how much it was able to be restored, but the result I
got is pretty good, and the only other way to get it any better is to
get a DVD recording off the original tape which isn't going to happen.

I wonder if Sean Kelly knows about the video restoration capabilities of
the MWR10D6 recorder? He's got loads of video game commercials on other
people's Betamax tapes (collected through discovery at thrift stores
from what I remember hearing) that need help.

Not the end for VHS tapes

Just within the past day or so, there has been wide misquoting of an
article that explains that one store that sold pre-recorded VHS tapes
has finally sold the last in its inventory.

This does not mean VHS tapes themselves have stopped being made. Casinos
use wall banks of VCRs with their in-store security cameras. They are
the biggest users of VCRs and the tapes they use. so blank tape
manufacturing obviously will still continue.

And I'm also sure that mastering decks for digitally mastered VHS tapes
still are being used, as well as home use. VHS-Compact, a tape size used
in videocameras, are still on shelves.

VHS isn't dead. They said that about vinyl records, and those are
experiencing a come-back in popularity.

Even in spite of all these Digital video recorders and the like, unless
those same recorders will burn your programs onto a DVD Recordable,
you'll probably end up taping it. I wouldn't buy one of those units
unless the listings service was free and I could make a copy onto
removeable media. No sense in getting one if it doesn't do that, and
it's just as easy to hook up a VHS VCR and make a tape anyway - and
process it through GoDVD. Heh.

And another thing about these Hard Drive DVRs - why don't they use the
standard NTFS file system on the drives? It would be handy to plug in
your drive, let the DVR put stuff on it, then pop the drive onto your PC
and make an edited DVD from the content. Has someone figured out how to
do this anyway?

Anywho, VHS isn't dead. One store may have sold the last it's selling -
it just means you'll have to look other places.

If you're going to quote a news story, you don't mis-quote it to make
something up.