The Chrispy Bongo Chronicles

June 21st, 2008

03:09 pm
You can visit JapaneseMascots.com, but be careful not to drown in the cute.
Current Mood:

amused

February 9th, 2008

09:31 pm - new favorite anime
I've watched quite a bit of anime over the last week. This turned out to be a good thing for my illness, since one of the shows I watched, ef - a tale of memories left me blubbering at the climax -- thus clearing out my sinuses and allowing me to breathe freely for the first time in days.

The show is a high school romance tale following three (potential) pairs of boys and girls, one of whom has a short-term memory disorder a la the movies Memento or 50 First Dates: she can only remember the time before her accident, and the last 13 hours. It does a fabulous job of exploring her feelings and those of the boy who falls in love with her. The other plot line, involving a more traditional love triangle, is more straightforward.

The direction (by the same guy who did Pani Poni Dash!) is... umm... "artistic"--some would call it "post-modern"--maybe the best way to describe it is like an animated Andy Warhol painting. I think it works really well. Two scenes in particular stand out. In one, a girl maxes out the voicemail on her boyfriend's cell phone (like Mike in Swingers or Brian in the Family Guy Bachelorette episode based on the Swingers scene); as each message is played back, the transcript of each message is showed on the screen, eventually overwriting each other until it's nothing but a big mess, which mirrors the emotional breakdown of the girl leaving the messgaes. The other is an attempted breakup call from a phone booth where they cut back and forth from a shot of the booth to the time left on the calling card counting down from 90 - great sense of suspense as the audience knows that the guy is running out of time to plead his case to stay together).

Another technique that I found interesting was used for a couple of scenes where you might traditionally see characters' silhouettes against a background. Instead of going that way, the director swapped the "fill" for each, leaving a black background with a character silhouette containing the background. I found this very effective for a moonlit night background: instead of having your attention divided between the outline of the character and the shimmering moon elsewhere on the screen, it really focused you on the single area with the two interesting design elements.

Anyway, it's a fantastic show and currently my favorite of all time, bumping Haruhi Suzumiya down to #2 (at least until she finds out and recreates the universe with her back on top).
Here's a link to the opening sequence (well, when it was used as the ending sequence for the second episode) which gives a flavor of the directorial/art style techniques that are used in the show.

Current Mood: blown away

December 23rd, 2007

04:05 pm - clinch time
I love this time of the NFL season, as teams jockey for playoff positions. I'm the kind of guy who likes figuring out all the scenarios for who clinches what if they win and 5 other teams lose. (Helps that the Vikings figure into this year...) The best time for this kind of thing is usually the 3rd and 2nd to last weeks of the season, when you have situations complex enough to make for interesting scenarios, yet not so complex that it's completely up in the air. Then, towards the end of Week 16 (as I'm typing this) the pieces of the puzzle lock into place one by one.

If the Vikings don't pull off a miracle and make it, I'm hoping for a Cowboys-Patriots super bowl, so they can talk up the face-off between running backs Maroney and Barber (who played together here at the University of Minnesota).

Watching football is a great way to pass the time, all cozy in the house while a raging blizzard coats the world outside in a thick layer of white.
Current Music: TV - Dolphins vs. Patriots

November 24th, 2007

02:36 pm - sesame street latin lesson
Here is a partial conjugation of the verb elmare ("to be a cute furry red monster"):

Present Indicative
	Singular	Plural
1st person	elmo I am a cute furry red monster	elmamus We are cute furry red monsters
2nd person	elmas You are a cute furry red monster	elmatis Y'all are cute furry red monsters
3rd person	elmat He/she/it is a cute furry red monster	elmant They are cute furry red monsters

Perfect Indicative
	Singular	Plural
1st person	elmavi I was a cute furry red monster	elmavimus We were cute furry red monsters
2nd person	elmavisti You were a cute furry red monster	elmavistis Y'all were cute furry red monsters
3rd person	elmavit He/she/it was a cute furry red monster	elmaverunt They were cute furry red monsters

Current Mood:

silly
Current Music: TV - Ah! My Goddess

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September 19th, 2007

11:42 pm - they might still be giants
Went to see TMBG at First Ave on Monday night. Still a lot of fun in concert, although it seemed kind of uneven - some of the songs felt like they were phoning it in. But most of the time it worked, and some songs really rocked, especially "The Alphabet of Nations". There were a few good songs off the new album The Else, which I am somewhat ashamed to say I have not yet acquired.

The opening act, Oppenheimer, was really good and I'd recommend them to anyone who liked "old school" TMBG. They are a duo who uses MIDI backing to fill out their sound (think White Stripes with keyboards, or John and John from the reel-to-reel tape days). They had one song I really liked but haven't figured out the title yet.

Only saw a couple of friends there, Scott and his newly acquired wife, and my old officemate Brooke and her guy. It's always more fun with more friends (but there is a limit, as I learned when TMBG played the State back in '94 and I was the one who bought 20 tickets for all my friends... I lost a chunk of change on that show...)

August 1st, 2007

11:44 pm - my famous former abode
It is strange to see my old apartment building on CNN.

I used to live at the Seven Corners apartments, located in between 35W and Cedar/10th Ave. at the south end of where the bridge collapsed. My apartment overlooked the very span that fell. Maybe that's why I feel a connectedness to that bridge despite not having had to travel over it much in recent years.
Current Mood: disturbed

08:22 pm
If you haven't heard yet, the bridge for I-35W over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed this evening. All my immediate family are accounted for. It's scary - I've seen footage of some of the things that happen to freeway bridges in earthquakes in the parts of the country that have them, and it looked an awful lot like that. We're lucky, too, as that is a stretch of road over which it is quite possible that we could have been traveling on.

Hope everyone is OK tonight...
Current Location: parents' house
Current Mood:

scared
Current Music: coverage of bridge collapse on all stations

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May 7th, 2007

10:29 am - out of "site", out of mind
You know you've been around the 'net a long time when you google for mailing list archives and your own "bookmarks" page comes up as one of the first page hits.

April 23rd, 2007

11:40 pm - kid language update
Ally has a saying she came up with that I haven't been able to track back to a source. It's something like "goops and beams and gobbledybops". She just seems to enjoy saying it, and will start in on it just about any time. The closest I've come is that it might refer to a series of unpleasant or dangerous things a la "lions and tigers and bears" or "closed source, .NET, and DRM".

Sophie likes to babble a lot, with a lot of "dada" and "baba" type noises. She responds to her name, and likes to clap and wave a lot. I think she uses clapping as a means of communicating "I'm hungry, gimme something to eat".

11:39 pm
( Accent quiz: my accent is... )

March 30th, 2007

01:00 am
( My nerd type... )

12:13 am - classmate published
Today on the way into work I stopped off to deshaggify my head at Fantastic Sams. Faced with a few minutes wait, I scanned the rack of magazines for something that might interest me. I settled on Twin Cities Spaces, an interior design mag (though I tend to be more interested in the architectural features of the photographs than the design).

The back pages were basically all ads, but on the very last page there was a little interview piece on some author who had recently "wrote a book, built a house with her husband, and moved there". OK, whatever.... then I read the first answer to the first question, which was "Being blind, I..." and for some reason I did a double take at the picture. I hadn't recognized her at first, but after closer scrutiny and a similar double-take at her name, I realized that I knew her.

It was Jane Toleno, whom I had shared a class or two with during my undergraduate days (geez I feel old) at the U. She always had her seeing-eye dog with her in class, and I'd seen her on the bus occasionally since then. Now she has written a book, BlindSight: Come and See. According to Amazon's product description, her book is "filled with good humor and vividly describes living with blindness in an often short-sighted world."

It was fun to find out what an old classmate was up to, much as the recent YouTube hype has been fun since one of the cofounders, Jawed Karim, used to hang around IRC channels I frequented when he was doing PSEO at the U of M.

And on top of that, my hair is no longer a scraggly mess!
Current Mood:

curious
Current Music: DVD - Shakugan no Shana v.2

March 27th, 2007

12:12 am - bands and outdoor food
We went to see MC Chris on Sunday at the Varsity Theater in Dinkytown. It was a three act show with Piebald headlining, but we were really just there for the nerd rap. He puts on a pretty good show. High energy, though towards the end I thought I started to see some weariness creeping into his eyes.

The first band, Streets to Nowhere, was really good. They sounded really tight (or maybe the sound engineer expertly deployed lots of gates), and their music, while it seemed to have a punk structure to it, was pretty clean and pleasant to listen to. The audience, most of whom it seemed were also there for the MC, listened politely if not eagerly. I've been to shows where the openers get heckled and that's never fun, so it was nice to not have to put up with that.

If you get a chance to see a show at the Varsity I'd definitely recommend it, as it has a wonderfully cozy/retro atmosphere and has lots of risers, chairs and beds(!) to sit on if you don't feel like standing up the whole time.

Tonight we had an impromptu picnic dinner on our front lawn, catered by Jimmy Johns. Sophie kept trying to roll around all over and didn't want to sit still. Ally had a blast, especially after dinner when she got to run around outside for a while.. I think being cooped up all winter sort of led to an explosion of spring fever around here due to the record warm temps. I definitely regret having worn not only a warm sweater-shirt to work today, but also a windbreaker (and having to walk over to WBOB in that). That's what I get for failing to check the weather before leaving for work.

Speaking of outdoor food, the world's largest pizza (hand-tossed by giant robot) in Code Geass episode 21 had me laughing out loud, as well as C.C.'s reaction when things...went wrong :)
Current Mood:

amused

March 17th, 2007

12:00 am - tivo surgery success!
So a couple weeks ago our bedroom Tivo (a Philips DSR6000 DirecTivo) stopped working with no warning. It wouldn't power up anymore - when plugged in, absolutely nothing would happen. First checked the obvious: blown fuse? Nope, fuse looked OK. But something smelled burnt in the power supply area of the electronics. So we decided to grab a cheap working (at least power-wise) Tivo off Ebay and do a swap. Jess put her skills to work and landed us one for about $30 or so, and it finally arrived last week.

Unfortunately, we've all been sick the last couple weeks, so it wasn't until today that I was able to actually perform the operation. Based on my prior reconnaissance, it looked like all I needed to do was unscrew two ground screws and straighten four metal lock tabs, then pull it out. When I finally went to try it, there was a big surprise - it was exactly as I had figured. Two screws and four tabs. No hidden glue or fasteners, no tricky maneuvering. It popped right out with no fuss. I was actually surprised; it seems like normally when I try something like this it ends up being a huge headache. But for once, things worked out. Plugged it in and up came the "Welcome, powering up" message that had eluded us for weeks.

In the process I also replaced the front panel (the tabs that secure it to the front had broken off so it was just hanging) and added a missing power supply fan that was likely to have been the culprit for the original failure. So when all is said and done, it is actually better now than it was before the failure!
Current Mood:

accomplished

Tags: tivo

March 1st, 2007

03:55 pm - she's calculating...
Birthday Girl Ally (3 today) woke up from her nap. I'm home mostly because of the massive snowstorm that is burying Minnesota. Jess told Ally that while she was sleeping, guess what happened - it snowed the whole time! Ally rushed to the window to see. I asked her how much snow was out there. The answer?

"44."

(Snowflakes, that is.)
Current Mood:

amused

February 26th, 2007

10:07 pm - Sesame Street Personality Quiz
( I am... )
Current Music: TV - WCCO 4 News

February 6th, 2007

08:34 am - more miscellany
Jess and I had a brief exchange in Japanese the other day as we were leaving a restaurant:

Me: ikimashou! (let's go!)
Jess: hai! (yes, let's)

It may not have been completely on purpose but it was fun nonetheless.

The other day on Unwrapped (a show on Food Network that basically shows a bunch of "how they make that food product" segments like they used to show on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood) they did a little featurette on "the O", a restaurant I encountered on my trip to Pittsburgh.

Ally is getting mouthy, as expected of a nearly-three-year-old. She's also developing some politeness skills, though I wish she would use them more... Her vocabulary and intellectual skills continue to increase by leaps and bounds. Jess does a better job of chronicling them than me. It's fun to let her read the stories to me now at bedtime. She's still on her space kick. For example, during bathtime she'll put her rubber ducks on the tub ledge, then give them a "space helmet" (bubble bath suds) and they'll take off in their rocket ship (the large pitcher we use to rinse her). She also likes role-playing with her ducks and dollies. The other day I caught them repeating a "fight" she had just had with Sophie (that's MY toy!)

Sophie will sit and play for 20-30 minutes at a time, if given enough toys. And with enough stimulation, she'll laugh out loud.
Current Location: dining room
Current Music: ally gobbling up her breakfast

Tags: ally sophie japanese food travel