Food Experiment #1

I decided a while back that I’d broaden my horizons on the food I ate. I decided at least once a month I’d learn to make something new and try it. Then I’d try to make it my own. This isn’t really my first experiment but it’s definitely the bravest so far, and one I don’t think I’m going to attempt to improve on too much. Last month it was Gazpacho, which I’d tried before at a Jason’s Deli, this month it is something a bit braver than that.

This month it is a Limburger Sandwich. For those who aren’t aware it’s a kind of sandwich from Germany and Belgium. It consists of two pieces of rye bread, a thick layer of limburger cheese, and a thick slice of raw onion. Definitely braver than Gazpacho.

First off I’d like to say that I’d never even smelled limburger, much less tried it. I’d just seen on cartoons as a kid that it was terribly smelly, and probably not very good. It is the cheese jokes are made of. But I decided, what the heck, they’ve been eating the stuff in Europe forever so it probably wouldn’t kill me.

I also had some trepidation about an onion sandwich. That’s just not something I’d ever thought about eating, much less being palatable to someone who hadn’t grown up eating it. I do like onions, and again they eat it in Europe so it probably isn’t going to kill me.

Pictures and Comments

Here are some pictures of my ingredients. All this stuff is more or less local, except the cheese which was imported from Germany, and the mustard I believe is from Ohio.

This is pumpernickel bread from United. Locally baked, and pretty good. I don’t think this is exactly the kind of rye bread that they use traditionally but a lot of people seemed to prefer it when I read up on this adventure. It’s also the only fresh baked rye bread I could find at United. It’s about $4 a loaf.

This is what it looks like sliced. Pretty good stuff. I toasted it before eating. That was kind of a mistake, I’ll explain why later.

I cut the onion about half an inch thick.

Bayerischer Limburger. This is imported from Germany, made from pasteurized milk. I don’t know that they use pasteurized milk to make it normally. I think it’s illegal to sell products made from raw milk in the U.S. though, so it might not be terribly authentic. This was $7 at United. I researched Limburger online and developed a respect for the cheese. This was especially true after seeing how they package it. It was double wrapped in cellophane. Each wrap was about four to six layers deep. Underneath the cellophane was a foil wrapper, and beneath that was wax paper.

Here is the cheese unpackaged. I was surprised at the smell actually. Because it’s been refrigerated, or maybe it’s made just a touch different for sale in the US, or maybe because I was determined not to let this stuff hit room temperature, the smell wasn’t overwhelming. The smell isn’t hard to describe. It smells like human body odor. I don’t mean it smells reminiscent of human body odor, or like it, or reminds me of body odor. I mean the smell coming off the cheese is that of human body odor. Like the high school boy’s locker room. Like feet. If you want to know exactly what this smells like, work out for an hour, don’t wear deodorant, then smell your armpits. That’s what Limburger cheese smells like. I assume if I let this get to room temperature it would have been stronger. In fact what got on my hands got pretty strong fairly quickly. The actually use this stuff in places with malaria carrying mosquitoes to draw them away because the bugs can’t actually tell the difference between the cheese and a person. The reason is they use Brevibacterium Linens to make it. That is exactly the same bacteria found on human skin and produces our distinctive body odor.

This is what it looks like inside. I got some mixed information online. Some said the rind (the orange part) is inedible, others said it was perfectly fine to eat it. I didn’t particularly care to try it so I cut it off. The cheese is a little firmer than Brie, but not much. Definitely tastes nothing like Brie either. It’s got a fairly strong taste, but it doesn’t at all taste like it smells. It’s milder than I thought. I’d expected something a lot different. As it warmed up it got stronger. You’ll note the glass jar in the background. I had to wrap the cheese in cellophane and foil and put it in the jar to keep the smell down.

I read that in the US the onion sandwich is usually served with a strong brown mustard. I thought I’d try with and without. So I got some stone ground mustard, but decided to put it on with each bite rather than spread it over half the sandwich.

All the ingredients together.

I read that this is best eaten with something strong to drink. Most sites recommended a dark beer of some kind. Since I absolutely don’t drink, I decided to go the strong coffee route as some suggested. That’s Peet’s 2010 Anniversary Blend coffee made in a French Press.

My Thoughts

I thought the sandwich was surprisingly good. I wasn’t a big fan of there only being a big chunk of onion in it though. The onion was fairly sweet with a bit of a bite in the aftertaste. The cheese complimented it quite well. It was a bit bland though. Just wasn’t much to it. Definitely an acquired taste.

The half of the sandwich with the mustard was definitely better. The mustard brought out the flavor of the cheese a bit more and subdued the onion. It might have been that half of the sandwich had warmed up as well so the flavors were a bit stronger. Might have also been that half had a bit more cheese, and a bit thinner onion.

I kind of expected it to make my stomach upset, Brie has a tendency to do to that to some extent. The Limburger really didn’t. That surprises me but since it’s a bacteria and not a mold that produces the flavor that might have something to do with it. Since we all have this bacteria on us and in us, I guess that’s why. I’m mildly lactose intolerant so I am guessing the bacteria broke the cheese down enough it doesn’t cause a lot of issues for me.

I can definitely see why this would be a popular sandwich in some areas. It’s relatively inexpensive, a lot of flavor at room temperature or just a little cooler. It’s one of those things that might be a local favorite especially if you were raised eating it. If I were somewhere that served this and I wasn’t worried about the inevitable smell, I would order it. It’s not going to do pretty things to your breath at all. Kind of a guy’s “I dare you” foods.

On a scale of one to ten, ten being “Awesome”, I’d give this an easy four. It’s not terrible. Overall it doesn’t sit with my tastes very well.

My Ideas

The first thing I’d do is not toast the bread at all and cut it a little thicker. The pumpernickel is pretty airy and with even just a light toast it is very fragile. Maybe use a denser bread.

I’d treat the cheese a little differently. I’d either let it warm up so it spread easier, or I’d slice it up. Kraft or some other company supposedly makes or made a processed limburger type cheese that might be more acceptable to American tastes. If that’s still available somewhere, it might be a better alternative.

The onion was probably the weirdest thing about the sandwich. I kind of wanted something meatier than just a big slice of onion. Perhaps a different kind of onion, and a strong sausage of some kind would be better. It wasn’t unpleasant, but there’s room for improvement there. I might have got the onion to cheese ratio wrong after looking at some pictures online.

The mustard stays.

As just an onion sandwich, I’d make it smaller and serve it with a meat of some kind. Again sausage or something like that would be excellent.

I’d also have yogurt for dessert to deal with the breath problem. Preferably greek style yogurt (Like Oikos, although I make my own). Then follow that up with a mint. Or two. Or a whole box.

Variation

A neat variation might be a wheat bread with apple and labneh cheese as a sweeter, healthier variation.  Would probably fit most people’s palate a lot better, especially Americans. Maybe have honey or olive oil in place of the mustard.

Limburger has a LOT of calories and a crapload of cholesterol. If you have issue with that it’d be a good idea to avoid this particular sandwich.

Social Insecurity Part 3

The subject matter here is something that hits pretty close to home for me. This is on the topic of online gaming. My boss recently asked me how hacking World of Warcraft accounts was a money making business. He didn’t see how, of course most non-gamers wouldn’t think about this. Unfortunately a lot of gamers don’t really either.

Here’s the run down of why cybercrime involving World of Warcraft and other MMO’s have become a money making business.

1. Lots of people play MMO’s. WoW (World of Warcraft) alone has several million players worldwide. Last I saw WoW had over ten million players all over the world. Of course the vast majority of these players are American. If just 2/3 of all players are Americans that means that roughly 2% of all Americans play WoW. To put that in perspective, if you are American and know fifty people at least one plays WoW.
2. Online gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. If you assume all players of WoW pay on average $15 a month, that means Blizzard’s gross income per month is about 150 million US dollars. That’s 1.8 BILLION a year, just on subscription fees. That’s not including other income like character transfers, merchandising, comics, licensing and other things. I don’t know what their overhead is but 1.8 billion dollars is a lot of money regardless. Many people who play likely have enough spare cash to spend a little extra on point 3.
3. There are some people who will pay a little real money to get ahead in the game. Underground sales of characters is fairly profitable. Look up level 80 characters on eBay or one of the numerous WoW auction sites. It’s ridiculous. In game gold also goes for a fair amount of money. I get spam advertising a thousand gold for $11 on some servers. People will even pay other people to level their characters. This isn’t limited to “Chinese Gold Farmers” either. I’ve bought gold from people in Canada, and the US. Eleven dollars isn’t a lot of money, and a lot of these transactions take place through legitimate services like Verisign and Paypal so there’s little risk of identity theft.
4. Hacking an account and stealing gold, and items and such is the quickest way to gain these things. If you were to play a character and just farm gold it’d take a while to get a decent amount. So why not let someone else do the work? Write a virus/trojan, get it on a person’s machine. Get their account steal their hard earned in game stuff, clear out their guild banks. Delete characters to make it look malicious and you have spent 30 minutes getting what many hours would do. Best of all there are basically no repercussions for this. Your account gets hacked, you call Blizzard, they get your stuff back, hacker gets away clean and you are only mildly inconvenienced. They sell gold which probably isn’t tracked as much as Blizzard claims and everyone is happy. What I just described would cost a person maybe $8000 and a ‘guy who knows a guy’ to set up. Used to you could get the tools to do it for free.

So there you have it. It’s basically gamers willing to ‘cheat’ a little to get ahead or make things a little easier on themselves. This can be justified as “enhancing the enjoyment of the game”. If you don’t have to worry about gold, you don’t have to worry about a lot of things. New players are probably bigger targets for sales than veterans as most of us have a fair amount of gold laying around among our characters.

If you don’t think my points are valid, check out the validator device Blizzard sells. It’s basically an RSA key fob. If you haven’t seen these before, they are used for other things than gaming. They’re essentially a number generator that comes up with a new key number every x number of seconds. This key number is the only way to get into an account of some kind. It might only be good for 10 seconds. This makes things fairly hard to hack (but not impossible). I’ve worked with guys that sold pharmaceuticals and various equipment where privacy was a huge concern that carried these things. They’re selling these fairly high security type devices for a GAME, and for about $6 USD. That should tell you something. I spend more than that a week on comic books.

If you follow a few basic things to secure your account you can avoid a lot of this. The most basic thing is do not use the same e-mail address you use for your Facebook account as your WoW login. If you do, and I can’t stress how much you shouldn’t, then use a different, strong password. Six letters, one capitalized and two numbers or one number and one symbol should be secure enough for a WoW password. Don’t forget to change it fairly often too. Don’t make it something anyone could possibly guess either. I’ve used the names of friend’s children, long dead relatives and ancestors, and various other things as bases for passwords.

A good trick is to pick a couple of base passwords and then change the numbers and rotate through them. That way you don’t have a lot to remember, you can spread them out among different accounts, and if you use about three of them you can avoid a lot of lockouts for bad passwords. Make sure you change your three base passwords occasionally too.

A validator is also a good tool to have. Personally I don’t have one, but if you are concerned, it’s $7 of anxiety relief. It isn’t a perfect solution but it might deter a lot of things.

Here are a few tips for your gaming accounts to remember:

1. If the game uses an e-mail address as your login name do NOT use the same e-mail address as your Paypal and Facebook accounts. Have two, if not THREE e-mail addresses, one for gaming, one for Facebook, one for Paypal. GMail is a good choice because you can easily forward multiple accounts to one inbox. In fact getting your own domain and signing up for google apps standard is a really good idea, and really inexpensive. Then you can have wow@mydomain.com, paypal@mydomain.com, and facebook@mydomain.com or some variation and have them all point to yourname@mydomain.com. Ten dollars a year, and you have a really secure set of login methods for your accounts. I suggest changing this once a year too. WoW at very least allows this. If your game uses a normal username make sure it’s a strong username. Plus hey, cool e-mail address. wow2010@mydomain.com for this year, wow2011@mydomain.com for next year and so forth are ideas.
2. Do not under any circumstances use the same passwords for any social networking site as you do for PayPal or your game. Keep three separate strong passwords. The reason for this is, if one of those accounts gets compromised, they all use e-mail address/password combo for login credentials, it’s a pretty safe bet you use the same e-mail/password for all three. I can verify this from experience. The last thing you want is to find your WoW account hacked, then huge charges on your PayPal account, and then find out your Facebook account has been spamming people. Not a good day.
3. Change your password often. There’s no magic number for this but once a quarter is definitely not too frequent. Once a month is better, but I highly doubt it is necessary. Again if you use the Password12 method you can just change the numbers. Change the base password every so often too.
4. This one is obvious, but don’t give out your password. Do not use leveling services either. If for some reason you do, refer to points 1 and 2 and don’t complain if you get cheated out of your money. Change your password after services have been rendered.
5. Don’t use dubious add-ons or download any ‘cheats’ for WoW. These could be trojans or keyloggers, or who knows what else. Run an antivirus scan often. If you have Windows 7, contemplate doing a full system backup once you have your gaming machine like you want it, and then do a system restore to make sure you’re working off a clean hard drive a couple times a year.
6. Make sure your username and password are not things that ever come up in conversation.
7. Use a validator if you can. It’s just one more layer of security to have.
8. Keep up with your games security changes. It’s boring stuff but it’s good to know what they’re doing and why.

None of this is a 100% surefire bet you won’t get hacked. I’d say the first 4 are definitely the most important, but they’re all important and good practices in general. If you do get hacked, it is not that hard to recover from.

It is just a game, but for a fair number of people that is their main hobby. If you collected gold coins you’d keep them under lock and key. If you play games online, you should do the same!

Pre-deployment of headsets

This isn’t unsafe for the product at all. We found Sennheiser VMX Office wireless headsets are not only half the cost of Plantronics but actually work better with Shoretel.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:W 7th Ave,Amarillo,United States

Social Insecurity Part 2

Twitter is a pretty cool web application. In 140 characters or less you ‘tweet’ about what’s going on around you. The service can be used on phones, your PC, from web pages, and dozens of other innovative solutions. The feed can be seen with practically all methods used to post to it. It seemed like a dumb idea to start with, but it’s really taken off. There are countless imitators and a lot of do it yourself kits to make your own site that does essentially the same thing.

You can find a lot of apps for the iPhone, Android and other smart phones that make use of Twitter and similar services. It’s become popular enough that Google has come up with ‘Buzz’ and there’s another service called ‘4Square’ that makes the idea into more of a social game. As a computer geek I see some pretty awesome applications for all this and some annoying side effects of the system that one should be aware of.

First of all I want to talk about the idea of smart phones and geo location. A lot of phones are equipped with some kind of GPS or location capability. Many times this is simply triangulating off of a cell phone tower or towers to give a rough estimate of where the phone is. This method is the most common and can be accurate to several city blocks. Some claim the phone can be located to within just a few meters. So we can reasonably say this method can be used to figure out what part of a town the device is in.

Other phones, including the iPhone and many Windows based phones have true GPS recievers in them, which can potentially be accurate within inches of where you are actually at. I’ve seen and read ‘within three meters’. For us Americans you can guesstimate that being just a little over three yards. This is a really precise location method that can be easily translated into exact longitude and latitude. With some phones I’ve been able to see what part of a building it was in. We can say that true GPS can show the exact location of a device, sometimes within mere inches of where it’s located.

The other less talked about method will actually work on a lot of computers too. By taking information about a person’s IP address on the internet, and some router information it’s not particularly hard to figure out what city the device is in. You can’t trace it down to a specific building very easy but you can get a good idea where it’s at. Google also has a database of wireless router MAC addresses all over the U.S. which CAN be cross referenced to a specific building. This type of location is fairly similar to the cell phone triangulation method but not nearly as accurate. Depending on what city the device is in and several other factors this can be used to locate the device anywhere from a city in general to a specific building.

What does that have to do with Twitter? A lot actually, especially if your phone has the location features turned on. Twitter itself isn’t a huge problem as it doesn’t always store geo-location information, however Buzz and 4Square do. As a demonstration to some friends of mine in the Dallas area I opened buzz up and looked some people up. I decided to single out a young woman I saw since that’s what your average sexual predator would do.

Within minutes I knew the girl’s name, what she looks like, and where she hangs out. I deduced she was either a college student, or someone who liked the lifestyle of a college student. I figured out what her habits were, what kind of coffee she drank, how many pets she had, how many children she had, the genders of those children and the fact that she was a single mom. Had I kept looking and cross referencing her ‘tweets’ to locations I could have probably figured out what park bench she sat at, who her friends were, and probably even where she lived. All from my phone in the span of about twenty minutes. I wasn’t even on her friends list, these were just public tweets!

To me that just screamed potential rape victim. Or victim of any of a number of other crimes. Now what I do want to point out is that Texas does have concealed handgun laws and a very loose definition for self defense. This woman might be extremely capable of defending herself and her children. If so I applaud her. 

So what’s the deal? Anyone can just find anyone who uses social networking like that? Pretty much yes. Granted one would have to have a minimum amount of technical savvy and some reasoning skills that not everyone is really in possession of. So how do you prevent this stuff?

Again tightening your security settings, being careful about who you let see this stuff and using common sense about broadcasting your life to strangers. Sites like 4Square and Google Buzz are particularly annoying in that they are supposed to be public, so if you’re worried, don’t use them.

Sites like 4Square and Buzz can be used in a relatively safe manner by only checking in at highly public locations and not posting a picture. Really popular places can serve to give you some anonymity in real life if no one knows what you look like. It won’t guarantee you won’t have a stalker but it might cut down on the chances.

All that being said, most people who will stalk a person or commit a crime are not going to use Twitter, 4Square or Buzz as a primary means of targeting someone. However, in this day and age it is absolutely not out of the question.

Social Insecurity Part 0

With some of the security changes people keep talking about at Facebook I thought I would put my thoughts and advice up here.

I have some credentials that make me at minimum ‘knowledgable’ on the subject.

I have been working in the IT industry in some capacity for over ten years. I have been a denizen of the net for nearing fifteen years. Since day one I’ve been using it as a social tool. I’ve been around since the early days of the web when AOL was still the thing to have.

Social networking sites have changed the whole landscape of the web. Microblogging and status updates are here to stay and with them come a whole new set of things to be careful about.

Social Insecurity Part 1

A friend of mine related a story to me, that for reasons you’ll be able to see below, I can’t go into. It did get me thinking about a similar situation that I had gotten myself into over a year ago involving a rental car and a mailbox. I was visiting some friends in East Texas and happened to hit a guy’s mailbox with my rental car mirror on the way to church. I won’t go into much detail but suffice to say I didn’t know I knocked it off the post until I had already parked my car at church. Aggravation ensued soon after. Now I had paid for the insurance so it wasn’t a big deal and I was able to buy the guy a new mailbox so it worked out, no charges were pressed and we went on our merry way.

It got me thinking about what could have happened to me if I’d not cooperated or if no one had seen me knock the mailbox off and the sheriff had been a little more annoying. I paid for the mailbox even though I’m sure he had it stuck too far over the road and had this been my home town I probably would have won in court. But say I hadn’t paid for insurance, no one saw me and I just thought it was funny.

One of the first things I might have done was posted about it on Facebook, or in my blog here. Maybe not right away but later. Then say the owner of the box had found the pieces of the mirror and the rental car company discovered the damage after I’d already gone home. Now, being me I probably would have just admitted to the damage, but I could have easily said that someone smacked the car in a parking lot, or just denied even knowing about it. It was hardly noticeable and on the passenger side.

The rental car company might have investigated further but under normal circumstances likely would have never found the police report about the mailbox. Even if they did, drawing a conclusion that involved me would have been a  real stretch. The town I was in was not exactly anywhere close to where I’d rented the car.

What really would have been an issue though is if the car company had decided to go ahead and take me to court over the mirror. I know for a fact that in my own hometown of Amarillo that there are people in our DA’s office that do nothing but check out people on Facebook and other social networking sites. They just search for people on the internet and look for stuff they wrote. This is a town of under 200,000 people and even we have lawyers that do that. Our law enforcement has claimed to have figured a lot of stuff out and caught people just using Facebook.

Now if we have people smart enough to do that, I can reasonably conclude that the lawyers for Enterprise or Budget rental cars do the same exact thing. So they look me up on the internet and manage to find me, not a terribly easy task but hey, I was the one renting the car, not my boss so they even had my social security number that I gave to them like an idiot. They find this nice, well worded story about how I knocked a mailbox off a post in that East Texas town. Maybe I was smart enough not to say the town’s name. They knew where I was that week though so it wouldn’t be hard to start asking county law enforcement about incidents. Then they could see from my Facebook page that I do in fact know a few people in that town.

I could deny it all I wanted, but the pieces of mirror, the fact that I was in the area, and a whole church full of people that would have no reason to cover for me would be pretty damning evidence. The pretty much written confession on Facebook would have not helped me either. There would have been a whole lot of laws broken there and the ensuing fight over the mailbox would have been ridiculous once the legal system was involved. In short I would have been in a lot of trouble instead of just settling the damage like men.

The conclusion I hope you’ve come to from reading this is that social networking and blogging like this can be a very dangerous thing if you’ve broken the law or are involved in a lawsuit of some kind. I hope that no one is, but stuff does happen. You have to understand that law enforcement and the legal system do have people that search you out on the internet. They do look at Facebook pages, they will use deception to get access to your stuff, and they will use it against you. There is no need for a warrant to use something against you that is public knowledge. The Miranda rights are there for a reason when you get arrested. This should be extended to your internet life too. It’s pretty simple and I think any defense attorney would give me a standing ovation for saying this: Keep your mouth shut!

If you are suspected of doing something illegal, or are involved in a lawsuit, you should probably cancel all your social networking accounts. Delete any posts that could be incriminating. At very least lock your privacy controls down so that the prosecution can’t easily snoop into your life. Don’t write about what you did or didn’t do. Do not talk about the incident online, whether you were actually involved or not. Don’t talk about a case if you are on the jury, don’t post about it and don’t write to the paper. Do not make it easy for them to find something that could convict you or get the case thrown out.

Some would argue that it looks suspicious just like it would look suspicious if you didn’t talk to the cops. That is your right to do so though. You not talking can not seriously be used against you in the United States legal system. I don’t have the academic credentials to give legal advice, but I’d have to conclude that removing your presence from the internet so that the prosecution would have to subpoena the account is along the same line of reasoning. They can’t just walk up to the phone company and get your call history for the last several months. They have to get a warrant to search your computer. They would need likely need a separate warrant to access your e-mail account (especially if it web mail and not on the computer). Why let them into your Facebook account without a warrant either?

That’s not to say that law enforcement, lawyers and judges are the enemy and should be subverted, but the whole social networking scene is a relatively new layer of stuff that can be used against you in court. Even if you’re involved in a civil suit it’s possible that a thoughtless Facebook post could get everything thrown out. Or worse yet, someone who might be guilty of a crime against you or your family could go free because the case was dismissed due to recklessness on your part. Why take the risk?

With any of this you should definitely consult with your lawyer first. I tend to think most would agree with at least locking it all down as quickly as possible though.

Streaming Anime and Podcasts

I’ve been listening to the Anime Pulse Podcast for a couple of months or more now and I have to say I’m pretty impressed with it. I like the Manga Pulse better, even though I don’t read huge amounts of manga in general, although I do get cravings. I find Tim and Weltall to be a lot funnier and informative than Ichigo and Batou. So if you read this, you should be listening to Anime Pulse. I’m not a subscriber yet, I don’t find getting the podcasts two weeks early to be a huge benefit, but I may in the future should I want to win some contests or something. It’s $5 a month, so not a big deal there.

Can check them out here: www.anime-pulse.com Of course, I found them on iTunes when looking for some long involved stuff to listen to on the way to Dallas. Listening to music makes me irritable for some weird reason.

I am a subscriber for Crunchyroll.com. A site I thoroughly enjoy. Lots of anime there, and they apparently simulcast stuff as it comes out in Japan, so they have new episodes of several series that are on currently. Naruto Shippuden in particular. So for $6 a month you can get pretty well current episodes of anime as it comes out. I have been able to find a few shows I like pretty well during the two seasons or so that I’ve been a subscriber. Worth every penny. Plus it’s ad free.

Of course not being a subscriber gets you the episodes about a week after they come out, with ads. They’ve got a ton of archived stuff too that you can watch too. So I usually pick a few new anime that look interesting, and then casually watch some older shows.

In particular I’ve been following Naruto Shippuden, Omamori Himari, Hanamaru Kindergarten, Durarara, Chu-Bra, and Tagami Bachi. Last season I was pretty into Tagami Bachi, Girls High, Charger Girl, Happiness, Sora No Otoshimono, and Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu – Purezza. I’ve watched a few episodes of other stuff here and there, but the only thing I could find myself coming back to was Fist of the Northern Star. Lots of great stuff, just so much to choose from. A lot of ecchi titles I know, but Girls High in particular had a good story, as did Nogizaka Haruka.

I found out Crunchyroll has an iPhone app. I haven’t played with it, but that’s really cool. Get some streaming video I assume in 3g enabled places.

Hulu has been another great choice. They don’t have near the Anime selection Crunchyroll has but they do have a fair amount of Funimation stuff, as well as Naruto if you need another way to keep up with it. I’ve watched some Death Note, and finished up Samurai Champloo on it. Some of their stuff is even the english dubs, so if that’s your thing (some anime just seems better with it honestly, especially if done well) Hulu is the place to look. They’ve got some english versions of Naruto there too, and from what I’m told the captioning and translations, especially on the song is a far cry better than Crunchyroll. Gotta be careful on Hulu though, they do have some uncensored stuff so if you have kids watching anime, it’d be a good idea to check that out.

Media Center PC

Just put the finishing touches on my Media Center PC. Was going to market these things around but decided with an $850 price tag, it didn’t matter how awesome it was, gonna be hard to get people to buy it. Even if a device that does everything this thing does would cost about $1200 or so.

Finally got the blu-ray player to integrate within Windows Media Center, and if the Crunchyroll plug in for Boxee would actually work, I’d be set.

Social Networking Sites

I saw yesterday that Google had finally released its take on social networking with their Buzz service that integrates into Gmail accounts. I think it’s pretty cool, even if I don’t have much use for it. I’ve been with Google Apps since day one and they haven’t released Buzz for Google Apps yet and it looks like it’ll be a premium feature. I could have REALLY used that for my family’s domain. Would have made a fair number of things much easier for use, especially the media sharing potential it has. I guess I’ll have to come up with my own private social site for my family and our friends or something.

Social networking sites are something I never really saw coming, at least not in the form they came in. My first foray into the internet was on AOL in 1995, if you can really call AOL the internet. At least in the early days it was pretty cool, I have no idea how it is now. Never really did the BBS thing or any of that but as far as I can figure AOL was the social networking service of its time. Tons of chat rooms, places to go for every interest. Eventually the started providing instant messaging. I’m not sure if they were the first or not but I know at one point ICQ and AIM were the only messaging clients out there.

That’s what I saw social networking as. AOL-esque chat rooms, forums and messaging. The whole status and comment thing that Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and others do just never appealed to me as much as the AOL chat rooms did. Would rather talk to people over the phone or instant messages and e-mail or even in chat rooms then what I consider to be a regression back to the old BBS’s of the 80′s and 90′s. That’s really what it boils down to, giant bulletin boards with our lives posted on them for all to see in bite size pieces.

They aren’t exactly the same but the idea is pretty similar. Instead of the longer posts of the old bulletin boards, we now make more, smaller posts that are more about what’s going on or what’s on our minds at that point in time. Certainly you can meet new people that way. Just doesn’t seem the same to me.

Anime on Blu-Ray

I’ve heard two sides of the argument on blu-ray disks and players in general. The arguments are as follows:

1. The disks are overly protected, you only get the full benefit of them if you use HDMI, otherwise you are throwing away your money. To play it on a computer you’ll need one of only two licensed players and Sony won’t license anyone else, harming the open source ideal. While none of the disks currently in productions actually have the restrictions for analog signals like they say, Sony can flip a switch and turn these restrictions on at any time. They only want to use digital signals, you have to have specific compatibilities to play them and so forth. Basically evil film companies are infringing upon the rights of the people and are basically forcing people to buy a lot of unnecessary new TV’s and such to enjoy high definition. Blu-Ray should be boycotted. Buy DVD’s instead because their protections are easy to bypass.
2. The movie companies are well within their rights to protect their intellectual property and try to prevent piracy.  Other technologies have virtually forced people to buy new equipment as they’ve come out. No one is forcing anyone to use Blu-ray and DVD sales are still pretty strong. Get it if you want, wait a few years and it will be cheaper and easier.

I agree with both sides of the argument, honestly. That’s a topic for another post though.

What does it have to do with anime though? The whole high definition thing is a pretty valid argument for not buying anime on blu-ray or HD in general. As cartoons they’re easier to upconvert and have a higher tolerance against pixilation when stretched out higher than their normal resolution. So the cheaper DVD format is quite sufficient for the purpose of storing anime. Theoretically there should be little difference between an anime on blu-ray and one on DVD. Except price, the blu-ray is probably more expensive.

In my experience that’s not entirely true. I found box sets of Basilisk and Witchblade on sale on Amazon for a few dollars less than their DVD box sets. I have a home built blu-ray player so it worked out really well.

The quality of the anime was noticeably better on the blu-ray than it was on the DVDs. Quite a bit sharper than it was on a TV similar to mine at my parents house on the normal 480p resolution. Fit the screen better, and the sound was higher quality too. I don’t know if the anime was the full 1920×1080 or not but it was definitely better.

Another good thing was that each set only has three disks for twenty six episodes rather than six, or eight or twelve like some box sets have on DVD so there was much less switching of disks. A full ten episodes fit on the disk, which is very cool if intend to watch more than about two or three hours of anime at a time. Not having to store a lot of disks is a real bonus too. If I get the Naruto sets, I’ll be getting them on blu-ray because of the sheer number of episodes involved.

The only drawbacks I see are a slight lack of bonus features, and the disks don’t have a lot of the extras that other blu-ray movies have. Some titles have games, interactive features, and other extras. Other companies may add these to their anime, but the two Funimation titles I have did not. No offense to fellow Texan, Clarine Harp (who produced at least Basilisk’s disks), but come on, have your crew pick another template for the menus. Other than that, they are excellent and do have one feature that you don’t see much on other titles: they work with the mouse on a computer. So excellent thinking there!

So, my mind has been changed about buying anime on blu-ray. It’s definitely worth a few dollars more, or in the case of some, significantly less, than the DVD sets.