HYDN Designs

I thought I'd start off my new blog with the obligatory Morning Musume Ranking post that just about every H!P fan blog has. Since it was Jacky that introduced this H!P goodness to me, this post is dedicated to her.

It has always been in my character to like the underdog, so that manifests itself in my tendency to choose the less "pushed" idols of the group. I'm a bit unconventional in that instead of becoming acquainted to the current generation, I looked backwards and worked from there.

After having completed 345s, I have a newfound hatred of interconnect cables "optimized for digital." It's such bullshit to sell us a cable that costs $75 that won't perform any better than a cable my dad bought from RadioShack 20 years ago for a buck fifty.

A 1 is a 1, a 0 is a 0, it doesn't matter how clean or ripple free that bit comes out, the bit value is determined by a threshold anyways. Even if you are placing some sort of modulation on the cable where the analog component may matter, you could always apply channel equalization to it. This is a moot point as no audio/video interconnect protocol uses any modulation to begin with, all data is transmitted serially via Biphase Mark Code or TMDS. The only benefit these "optimized" cables may provide is slightly longer cable runs due to less ISI, but the difference is negligible unless you live in some electromagnetic wasteland.

I've been seeing a lot of posts recently on International Wota about this group, and I finally succumbed to curiosity. I gave them a listen, and WOW! I can see why everyone is talking about them.

Their sound is just so refreshing, it's a nice fusion of electronic and pop but with more electronic. It's quite nice to listen to because their sound isn't as repetitive as other electronic types. The beats switch from house to trance to pop. Unlike a lot of other Jpop groups, there is quite a bit of English (read not Engrish) in the songs so that's a nice touch as well.

If you like Japanese music, this is a must. Even if you just like Western electronic music, it's worth getting because it's a welcome departure. I'd recommend starting out with the GAME album. But some older singles that are good as well are Electro World and Computer City.

Comments have been added! There is also an RSS feed as well. Some theme changes have been made, including the rotating banner. Keep coming back for more updates!

Update: I've changed the playlist for the jukebox, and I've made some changes to the CSS to simplify the layout, what do you think?

Please comment below features you would like added!

Even although this has been seen before on episode of Haromoni@, I just couldn't resist posting this screenshot from mashup!MUSIO.

Apparently Gaki-san has no feeling of pain in her cheeks, and the host is just having a ball pinching her cheeks. It's so cute that she's just laughing and smiling through it all.

Ikimono Gakari - Kaeritakunatta yo

Another band I found on International Wota. After hearing SAKURA, they're major label debut single, I couldn't stop playing the song over and over. Kiyoe's voice is so soft and soothing during the verses, but during the chorus the true power of her voice comes out and just sends shivers down my spine. I've uploaded a few tracks into my jukebox. I highly recommend it.

Ok, so that title is a lie. I really couldn't care less what the actual program itself brings to the table because as an end user it will never affect me.

First of all, I love Firefox. It's much easier to use and offers greater extensibility than IE. The Firefox 3 beta 5 uses less memory and renders much quicker than most competing browsers. However, although I may not benefit directly from the release of IE 8 (because I'm a Linux user), as a Firefox user, I still stand a lot to gain by Redmond's release. I do quite a bit of web development. Dealing with the headache of trying to make pages render correctly in older versions of IE and standards compliant browsers is enough to make oneself consider a change in profession.

Honestly, I don't know enough of the idiosyncrasies between how the browsers render CSS, but I do know enough about their Javascript differences. And while it's possible to do almost everything in old IE that you want to do in a standards compliant browser, it affectively means your code doubles because you end up writing another copy of your code that uses ActiveX specific functions. Also some versions of IE don't garbage collect correctly when a variable goes out of scope, so you have to write extra code to handle those cases as well.

Microsoft's new push for standards compliance as well as trying to set the next standard is admirable. Since this is Microsoft we're talking about, the IE8 beta still shows some minor non-standard behavior (at least from the screenshots I've seen) however with a standards compliant web page, it will render similarly enough to other browsers that it won't make me rewrite all my code. (this happened to me recently when I forgot to check this page in IE; most standards compliant browsers support SHORTTAG despite SHORTTAG not being in the XHTML standards)

So this brings me back to my title. As a developer, if I don't have to rewrite all my code so that it'll work on IE, then it gives me more time to make things look and work better for all browsers. As much as I love Firefox, a good majority of the world still uses IE (albeit, there's still a huge percentage of IE6 users which is a bit discomforting) and developers spend most of their time getting pages to work for IE rather than the other browsers. With IE becoming standards compliant, developers will start to code their pages to be standards compliant, which will benefit me as a Firefox user.

As a side note, I managed to get my page to pass the W3C validator so my page is now standards compliant!

Lately I've been having a lot of problems with compiz memory leaks. After a few days I'd check the system monitor and it says that compiz is using over 500mb's of resident memory. I have plenty of memory, but the more memory a program uses, the slower it tends to be, and alt-tabbing runs dog slow once compiz passes the 300mb's mark. Anybody else have this issue and is using Gutsy? I think if I switched to Hardy the problem might go away, but I plan to upgrade my storage solution soon (to RAID 5) and I really don't want to install twice...

So I started my summer internship today. I have a really big cubical and a really big monitor for my workstation. Oddly enough however is that the thing that struck out the most to me is the chair.

In the past, I've always had some really cheap and generic office chair, but this summer my "office" (if you will) is decked out with a super pimp Herman Miller chair. It has so many damn controls I don't even know what to do with it. For example, I like to lean back in my chair. At home my chair can lean back and forth, but it can only lock in place in the fully upright position, which is fine, but this chair I can control how much I want it to go back and forth and I can lock it in place at like almost any angle.

As you can tell I'm quite a bit bored at work right now mostly cause I still don't have all my IT related stuff set up with yet, and my mentor already left for the day. I guess I better get back to reading the reference manual...

You know it's bad when the vending machine has a credit card reader on it...
...you know it's worse when you're probably gonna use it all the time because of this.

So I was getting pretty tired today at work, and I had passed this vending machine a few times on my way to the restroom so I decided I'd get myself some "liquid motivation" and when I approached this machine I noticed something special... it had a credit card reader. At first I thought, "How convenient!" because I barely ever carry cash. (I did happen to have cash at the moment though.) But then it hit me, I'm gonna be wasting ~$1.30/day. In the past, the lack of cash stopped me from getting drinks, which is good for my wallet, but even more importantly, good for my health. Now, nothing is stopping me other than my conscience, and well I'm admittedly pretty weak-willed when it comes to these kinds of things. It's little things like these that make Americans so damn obese as a nation. Oh well, at least I won't fall asleep on the job anymore (hopefully, *knock on wood*).

Yes, I know you get free drinks at work, Doug; I don't, so get over it. At least the coffee is free, I should probably drink that instead.

So I used to be saddened by smaller pay and less "perks" that Freescale used to offer compared to companies like AMD, Motorola, and especially Centaur, but no more!

The Senior VP of our division hosted a meeting and provided catering and even more importantly, provided free beer! Nothing like raising morale like a little alcohol at the end of the day. I suppose that's the perks of working for a division that actually makes profit for the company.

I have to admit... it's growing on me.

I think the initial radio rip was so poor that my audiophile side of me wouldn't accept it. However, the rip is better this time around so the song is slowly growing on me. I've only been able to identify the voices of the Momusu members and Maimi. As much as I like Saki, I don't listen to Berryz enough to know her singing voice, so I can't distinguish between her and the egg.

I didn't like it much at first because I'm not a huge fan of the composition, the rhythm of the beat is not one that I take a liking to. The song also sounds a bit too hip-hop for my liking, and I'm not a fan of hip-hop music at all.

There's something about the harmonizing that I do like. And if there's one thing that H!P knows how to do, it's making catchy songs. (Not as well as Perfume does though, I just can't stop listening to them...) My opinion of this song is opposite from my opinion of typical H!P songs; typically I like the chorus but I like the verse much more in this song because the "Na na na" of the chorus is a bit lame and too hip-hop. But the switching of solo lines between the members for the verse kinda keeps things interesting and well I'm really starting to crush on Maimi's ...voice. (Well, with one of the best thighs in H!P, it's hard to not like her for her other... assets, man that was corny. In case you don't know she's the second on the right.) Overall, I'd rate the song somewhere around a 6.25/10 but it does make me kinda interested in seeing the musical.

If at first you don't succeed, try again. When I heard Cinderella Complex, I didn't like it much, but that's a whole different story with the c/w track.

I've been playing Kioku no Meiro on repeat ever since I downloaded it. It has everything that made me musically like Hello! Project in the first place. It's catchy, it has a nice electronic beat and melody. Listening to this song is like listening to all that is good about Perfume without all the electronic voices and the best vocal talent H!P is capable of producing.

I'm really enjoying this song, I know I should stop playing the song because I might get sick of it too quickly, but it's just really fun to listen to.

On another High King related note, I decided to include the video of Cindarella Complex:

For a video as hyped up as this was, it was a bit of a disappointment. And the other insult to injury is that there is a lot of Reina in it... and she doesn't look as good as she has in other videos. The biggest downer of them all is that, you could tell that they easily spent the most amount of money on this PV compared to all the other PV's released this year, but it's just a gigantic letdown.

I personally thought the dancing was ok, but it wasn't as technical as they kept hyping it up to be or what these girls are capable of. (Come on Tsunku, you have Saki and Maimi, these girls know how to dance, they were your backup dancers for years!)