Okay, I made it through Comic-Con 2010. Technically, Comic-Con ended Sunday. It took me this long to recover from all the walking, waiting, and flying.¹

For those of you that don’t know, Comic-Con International is one of the largest comic/sci-fi conventions in the world. It’s a magical place where you pay money to stand in lines for hours and wait to see famous people talk and answer questions for fifteen minutes.

On the first day I decided to try and get into Hall H, the biggest conference room in the San Diego Convention Center. Here is a picture from the very back of the line at about eight in the morning.

The line goes to the end of the grass field, turns a corner, goes down the other side, then across a street into another winding line before finally getting to the building. If I had to guess, I’d say there were several thousand people lined up.

After about two hours, I made it to the part of the line that had tents. It was roughly another two hours before I finally made it into Hall H, where I camped for the rest of the afternoon. I totally missed the Tron Legacy panel by about two hours, for which I had lined up in the first place.

It wasn’t all waiting in lines. Don’t get me wrong, it was a LOT of waiting in lines, but I sat in on some really interesting panels. The two best panels I attended were the ones on Penn & Teller and Blood Factory. Penn and Teller were hilarious. The Blood Factory is a project to produce short (5~10 min) horror films by Danny DeVito, amongst others. The films are extremely graphic, bloody, and funny. Plus, as was stated during the panel, they do have messages. Although, those messages may be obscured through blood and vagina monsters (don’t ask, you have to see it when it comes out). Let’s face it, if you’ve been watching anime for any period of time you’ve seen some type of vagina monster. It shouldn’t be anything new.

I also saw the first episode of the Iron Man anime. It wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t that good either. Judging by the trailer for the show, it should get a bit better later, on the action front. Who knows about the story?

San Diego was fun. I’ll have to visit again someday. There was talk about moving Comic-Con to another city because San Diego’s convention center doesn’t have the capacity for the current crowds at Comic-Con. I can attest to this. It was packed all day every day of the event. The longest waits were for the big name panels like Burn Notice, Tron Legacy, or just to get into one of the big convention rooms like Hall H or Room 20 where they had the best lineups. The smaller panels usually didn’t have huge lines, and in most instances were more entertaining with more unique subjects.

Also, I got a sunburn.

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1. No, that’s a lie. I’m just lazy.

As some of you may remember, I did not do a Merry Christmas post last year.

I refused on the grounds that it seemed to be required of anime blogs, or blogs in general. Just because I have a public forum in which people are suckered in to reading my musings does not mean that I should exploit it whenever possible.

It’s just plain disrespectful.

Who am I to offer you warm greetings in this, the final days of the year? It’s not like it will actually make a difference. Me saying, “Merry Christmas” isn’t going to change your life, or mine. Hell, most of you probably didn’t even read this far down into the post. See, I could write anything now. No one would ever know because they stopped reading around, “I refuse.”

They thought that this was just another post along the lines of the one last year. Well, it’s not. I’m just in a bad mood because I got in a fight the other day, and mom got scared, and said, “You’re movin’ with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air.” I whistled for a cab and when it came near The license plate said fresh and it had dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare, but I thought, “Nah, forget it. Yo, holmes to Bel-Air!” I pulled up to the house about 7 or 8 and I yelled to the cabbie, “Yo holmes smell ya later!” Looked at my kingdom I was finally there, to sit on my throne as the prince of Bel-Air.

It’s been nearly a year since I last moved to a new apartment. I had forgotten to setup the DVD player in my bedroom when I last moved. Its lonely, powerless, form has been sitting on a shelf gathering dust for the last twelve months.

One of my nightly rituals, a year ago, had always been to pop in one of my anime DVD’s in order to watch an episode or two before I went to sleep. It was the primary reason I bought videos. I suppose it was simple laziness that kept me from taking the five minutes of work I would have had to endure to get the components connected.

I gather that the simplicity of the endeavor is the reason I had felt I could put it off until I actually wanted to watch something. The fact remains that there have been many times I’ve wanted to view a show before drifting off to dream land, but the thought always persisted that I could setup the player the next day or in the morning for the next night.

That night would come, and that night would go. The sun would rise and set, as seen in the lights across my room beaming in from my window. Yet the DVD player sat, unplugged, unconnected, but not unwanted. I did want to connect my lonely DVD player. I so wanted to watch and enjoy some love story or adventure.

Even now, I could simply walk over. I could give life to the device that had brought me such joy, only a year prior. But, just a moment ago, I told myself that I would do it tomorrow and blog about it today.

Virtually all bloggers have to deal with it eventually. Virtually every website will eventually have to take some type of action. Some call it theft, and others call it ignorance. In reality it is a bit of both. After all, the web is supposed to be a free and open place. It’s supposed to be a place where information, ideas, and ideals are shared openly. That’s why many people don’t really give any thought to linking directly to images and other content on differing websites in order to display that content on another.

The concept is called “hotlinking,” and it is well known to almost every blogger and web developer. It’s not really a problem for most of us.  For that matter, it isn’t too much of an issue for this blog. However, I was a bit bored so I decided to dust off my PHP skillz and see if I could get something that would reasonably benefit all parties concerned.

Goals:

1. Allow linkers to retain the image.
2. Display a “watermark” or marker of some kind on the image.
3. Reduce the quality to conserve bandwidth.
4. reduce processing cost as much as possible.

Basically, I created a few processing scripts that will allow people to view images in their high quality PNG format while on my blog. Everyone should see images in PNG format, like the one below, when surfing around far away no where blog.

When not on my blog, the images will (should) appear as below. They will have the address banners across the top and bottom with a reduced JPG quality. On average, reducing quality and increasing compression with the JPEG file format allows me to save about 80% on bandwidth that would normally go to hotlinkers.

Lastly, these down converted images are cached and served on subsequent requests. This saves me processing overhead, since I’m on a shared hosting plan.

None of this is really too complicated, or new. I managed to get a working model done in a little over two days of spare time. I’m still working out all the details and looking for bugs. I’ll share the code once I’m sure everything is working well enough.

My test confirm functionality in: IE , Firefox, Opera, ??

The purpose of this post is to get feedback about any problems visitors are experiencing. If you seem to be having a problem with viewing images, please leave a comment or email me using the contact item in the sidebar.

Thanks,

- j.valdez

I ordered the FMP TSR box set last week. I’m a regular renter of DVD’s, but recently I haven’t found anything I really wanted to buy. That changed when I came across this while just browsing around some online distributors. I don’t usually blog about the stuff I buy, unless I’ve got nothing else to do. In this case, I was pleased with my purchase to such an extent that I thought I would share it with you guys.

First off, Full Metal Panic is a very funny and entertaining series. On the off chance that anyone reading this has not watched the series, just go and buy all the box sets now. If you can afford it.

I have the FMP and Fumoffu box sets already; so, this completes my set. I was a bit surprised by the amount of stuff that was included in the collection. My other two sets are thin-packs with nothing but a fairly good collector’s box (thick cardboard). This pack does away with the cardboard collector’s art box and replaces it with a booklet folder. Included in the collection are “Mithril Reports,” which are standard story introductions, character bios, and equipment specs. The whole thing folds up into a plastic sheath that has some additional art on it.

For some reason I hadn’t expected them to include the hilarious Tessa OVA. It’s on the 4th DVD as an extra.

What a nice surprise.