Monthly Archive for October, 2008

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Static X – Cannibal Killers Live

Published on October 16, 2008 in Culture and Review by risu. Closed

Wow!  A DVD/CD set with live concert footage from the “Cannibal” album tour, a pile of original music videos, and a CD with the audio from the live performance on the DVD.  You like Static X?  Then you better go out and get this right away!

Concert audio on the CD and DVD is reasonably good.  There is some ringing resonance and muddyness here and there.  There are apparently multiple camera angles, but I haven’t messed with that yet.  On the performance of “Black and White”, Wayne’s voice breaks up, and he can’t really hit all the high notes.  The speed-vocal sections seem to elude him also.  Considering that this specific performance was the best one taped from all the instances that the concert tour was recorded, this song must have been at the end of the set on a regular basis.  

It’s good to see Koichi Fukuda back, but it was a little disturbing to see Tripp Eisen in videos of songs that I was under the impression were recorded during the first Fukuda era.

The DVD is all-region, and for some reason is in 4:3 aspect ratio.

MSRP around $24 USD/street price around $17 USD

Recommended

Four out of four skulls

BK Mushroom Swiss Steakhouse Burger

Published on October 16, 2008 in Food and Review by risu. Closed

How can you go wrong with meat, mushrooms, and Swiss cheese? If this is in fact possible, then Burger King definitely doesn’t know how to do it. The new seasonal variety of the Steakhouse Burger is tops! Starting with the cornmeal “artisan” bun and oddly-shaped Angus beef patty that is common to the other Steakhouse varietals, they add a sheet of Swiss cheese, and sautéed mushrooms. This is then topped with fried, onions and thick steak sauce. In the sales information images, the layers are beautifully presented: In the actual example, everything sort-of melts and settles into a single layer, such that only the bread and the protruding meat are visible. This may be just a workmanship issue at the particular BK I visited (Beretania, which also had multiple empty soft drink cartridges on both machines – only Coke and root beer worked). The flavor is good, with all the constituent parts detectable, but all complementing each other for a good taste combination. Personally, I’d swap the steak sauce for some mayonnaise, and add some bacon to it and it would become The Best Burger Known to Mankind™. I couldn’t find any published nutritional information on this version, but it is probably between the 950 kcal Steakhouse burger and the 970kcal Loaded Steakhouse burger. The mushrooms themselves have few calories if any (or for that matter any nutritional value whatsoever), but whatever they sauté them in probably does.

About $8.05 USD as a large-sized value meal with onion rings

Recommended

Three-and-a-half grinning monkeys out of four

Half-Baked Manapua

Published on October 16, 2008 in Culture and rant by risu. Closed

Sorry – no. This manapua is raw, and nobody has any idea what to fill it with. At least with electric trains, there is the possibility of using any of a variety of renewable sources of energy, many of which can be fairly quickly implemented here. This ridiculous BRT idea relies on diesel, which is not specifically a bad thing – in fact diesel is probably the way things will have to be in the near future – but with the insistance of the current powers-that-be to race headlong down the dead-end street of E10 and E85 because of the Corn Lobby, development of biodiesel technology will be delayed about 10-years in the USA.

Once again, everyone who thinks BRT or Lexus lanes will solve the problem forgets the most important caveat: Where the F do you plan on putting all those cars and buses once you get them into downtown?

Death Note II

Published on October 15, 2008 in anime and Culture by risu. Closed

For those who will be on O’ahu today or tomorrow, the Regal Dole Cannery 18 theaters will have a special screening of the second live action movie from the Death Note franchise. There will be one screening each day, at 19:30.

Mr. and Mrs. Scat

Published on October 13, 2008 in bike and Culture by risu. Closed

Congratulations!

Jason and Tracy got hitched this past Saturday at a nice outdoor service at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Quick Run

Published on October 13, 2008 in bike by risu. Closed

Met Ckucke on Monday, 06 October 2008 for a St. Louis run.  We waited for Root to show, but long after the meeting time, he neither showed or called to tell us that he was late or was not going to make it.  I called him, and he was still on the job and was not going to show.  Thanks for the heads-up, Root!  We drove up to the top and dropped the trail, again running into Kevyn and his dogs along the trail and talking for a while.  At the junction of the taco jumps trail to the mainline, we paused while I called Root to have him meet us at Ckucke’s afterwards for food. An Xterra-type dude came up the trail from agave, and a half-naked oyaji came down the mainline. Xterra dude said that there was one rider behind him, and semi-naked guy went down mainline, so we had obstacles to deal with either way. We went down mainline and passed semi-naked guy in the turn just after the little double. He seemed a little perturbed when we passed him, but I don’t know what he expected us to do other than pass him: We were going in the same direction, and he was moving slower than us. Trail etiquitte aside, it wasn’t possible for us to dismount and push the bikes past him, since he was jogging on the narrow trail. This time, instead of taking the ridge right, we took the slalomy left to the hammock tree and went out the regular trail.

D = same as last time, Vavr = a little faster than last time, Vmax = way freaking faster than last time, T = about half-an-hour (I neglected to put the computer back on the bike after the previous week’s ride)

Jaw-Jacking

Published on October 13, 2008 in bike by risu. Closed

Dropped St. Louis after work on Monday, 29 September 2008 with Root and Ckucke. We bumped into Kevyn at the jumps, and Ckucke talked to him at length about the derailleur/guide thing from Wicked Racin’. Root and I hit the jumps in the meantime, then we took off down to the bottom as the light began to fade. We went down the Taco Jumps, then continued down mainline and took the ridge right out to the rock waterfall to the concrete road and descended the exit trail out to the street.

D = 7.92 km (4.92 miles); Vavr = 13.5 km/h (8.4 mph); Vmax = 42.2 km/h (26.2 mph) on trail, 43.5 km/h (27.0 mph) on road; T= 35-minutes

Pictures here

Well, It’s Not the Hard Drive Apparently…

Published on October 10, 2008 in rant by risu. Closed


After hooking the HDD up to Fabio’s magic emergency salvage wire harness, we determined that the issue was probably not the drive itself. It spun up and all the files could be accessed. I did a brief search online, and the “failure to boot” (heck, it didn’t even reach the startup screen!) issue in Toshiba Laptops was generally attributed to the power side – in particular, a bad connection between the power board and motherboard in machines with these separate, or a bad motherboard in machines with these functions integrated. Mine was the latter. I happened to drop by the repair facility’s website having not heard from them yet, and I found the above service information. Wow. That can’t be good…  Do Intel Core 2 Duo’s just go like that?

HDD Failure!

Published on October 3, 2008 in rant by risu. Closed

Kuso!  During lunch, I was prepping stuff to upload to the blog and my laptop suddenly locked up – like the cursor didn’t move, I couldn’t launch the task manager, and I couldn’t shut down!  Eventually, a long press on the power button shut it down, but after that it wouldn’t restart.  The power light would come on, there would be silence when the HDD should be spinning up, then the DVD drive would seek and the power light would go off.  Krap!  I’ll try and power up the drive outside the machine and read from it to see if it is really toast.  Luckily it is still under warranty, and the authorized Toshiba service center is right down the street from work!  I’m reasonably AR about backing shit up, so I think I only lost an MP3 that i just encoded last week, maybe an Excel file… oops!

Hayes Lever Fixed!

Published on October 3, 2008 in bike and rant by risu. Closed

Found an appropriate 7/16″ (11mm) inside e-clip at City Mill on Wednesday morning, so I was able to reassemble the master cylinder with no problems on Thursday.  Everything just snapped together nicely.  The brake channel bled fine on the first go, and everything went back on the bike with no trouble.  Hooray!  I even had enough time leftover to true the wheels on the Moment and switch out to winter tires!  Nama-biiru at Koh-no-tori here I come!