Back in the distant mists of time, namely the mid-1980s, there was an animated series which ran on American television. And yea, it was good. And by “good” I mean “rather melodramatic, with uneven animation quality but a surprisingly compelling storyline.” This series was known to us as Robotech, though most diehard fans went on to discover that its origins were interesting and complicated.

The minds behind Robotech envisioned a follow-up series, one not born of Japanese content but instead wholly original while attempting to retain the storytelling panache of its lineage. Characters were drawn, scripts were penned… and music was composed and performed. Sadly, their efforts failed to bear the desired fruit, so the project known as The Sentinels only made it to print form and to a lone music track on a CD devoted to its predecessor.

Of the music that survives, one segment was to be used for a scene depicting the wedding of two of the principal characters from the first (and arguably greatest) segment of the original series.

I hope that answers yesterday’s question to everyone’s satisfaction…

Let’s have just a good old-fashioned roundup, shall we?

• When I put my Neuros on the charger last night, I expected it to actually charge the battery. Instead, I discovered this morning as I tried to turn it on at the bus stop, the battery had been discharged. Argh.
• GeoURL is back. Finally. Note the return of the corresponding sidebar linky goodness.
• Being one of the offices that’s cut off from the offices that haven’t been upgraded to the new VPN-based WAN sucks. A lot.
• Spending three hours cleaning particularly virulent adware off of a company laptop (that, of course, had never once been in my possession until now) sucks quite a lot as well.
• Backup Exec is really starting to annoy me. It refuses to actually behave in accordance with the settings I change, and it (ir)regularly gives a cryptic error when it tries to verify the backup. (If it would simply accept my “don’t try to verify the backup” setting change, I’d stop getting those errors, of course.)
• There just aren’t enough hours in the day to do all of the things I’d like to. (This isn’t specifically a “geeky” statement, but still. Ugh.)

Dear Apple:

I shouldn’t have to jump through so many damned hoops to reset an iPod, or to properly reinstall your iTunes-and-related software, nor should I be forced to re-disable all of the stupid defaults in Quicktime every time iTunes is (re)installed. It also shouldn’t be so damned difficult to convince iTunes not to start up every time any profile signs into the computer just because an iPod is attached (for the sake of charging).

After hearing all the raves and hoopla about what a great piece of music software iTunes is, and after actually working directly with it, I can only assume that most people don’t expect much from their software besides a shiny-looking interface.

Bah.

(This entry brought to you by one too many times spent wrestling Lil’s iPod and iTunes into submission. Ugh. And I’m the one who recommended the damned thing to her, so I have only myself to blame…)

It’s been bothering me for a while, but today I finally up and did something about it. I added “width” attributes to the entry editing template for this here journal rig (and the other two just like it that live on this server). This means that resizing the browser window results in a changed form width, which allows us to spot all of those annoying line-breaks in copy-and-pasted text.

This is a good thing. Trust me. It means that we can write better-looking entries, and as we all know, it’s all about the presentation…

A while ago, I set up a Teamspeak server so that Dawn and I could do voice chat while we’re playing City of Heroes. The idea is that we can communicate far, far more effectively with verbal cues than when we have to stop down the action to type our messages.

For various reasons, before tonight, we’ve been unable to make the system work to our satisfaction. Tonight, however, could be considered a qualified success. The mild feedback problem hasn’t gone completely away, but it’s far more tolerable than it used to be. Tonight, we managed to run through several missions, communicate and coordinate, and even whisper sweet nothings in one another’s ears. Not bad for a small investment in headsets and the installation of a free bit of server code, eh?

If you are in the market for a new chassis, you could do worse than to pick up the Antec Sonata. It comes with a 380-watt power supply, and boasts some of the smartest interior design around. The whole case is meant to be generally quieter and easier to work with, and it does so splendidly.

So I took my gaming computer apart today, and put it into the new case. The old case can’t accept power supply upgrades (stupid proprietary thinking, anyway), so in order to power my two hard drives, a Pentium 4 and my GeForce 6600, I had to upgrade. I took advantage of the opportunity to trade out the slow, stubborn old DVD-ROM for a regular CD-ROM drive, and upgraded from the Soundblaster Live to a Soundblaster Live 5.1. (It’s a subtle improvement, sure, but since I had the case open anyway…)

The good news is, it all worked the first time I powered it up. That alone is almost newsworthy all by itself, as it’s unusual enough to nearly be unique in my experience.

I also may have gotten to the bottom of the trouble playing City of Heroes. Even with the new power supply, I still had the weird game crash problem… but once I turned off the antialiasing, I was able to play for two solid hours without a glitch. I’m hesitant to claim victory just yet, but it’s at least a promising start.

Now I just need to clean up this mess I created during the chassis transfer… oops…