Nodame Finale Promo posted
Friday, October 16th, 2009
This is another fun with HTML5.
A promo video was posted on the Nodame homepage. Here is a version with quick subtitle. The video quality is pretty bad, but hopefully it’s still enjoyable.
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Lupin vs Conan – finally released
Sunday, October 11th, 2009
It took six and a half months to get here. Translation was done on March 29th – 2 days after it was aired. I thought it might take three months. It probably was possible to release it faster. But bad lucks after bad lucks… and here we are.
So, what about the show itself? Overall, it’s an enjoyable show. It was pretty well made. Perhaps they spent way too much energy on this show, and maybe that’s why they didn’t make the Lupin annual summer TV special. Who knows? At first, I thought there just wasn’t enough Lupin appearance overall. But that really isn’t the case. I think he gets as much screen time as Conan. Because they had to split much of the screen time between them, everyone’s favorite series (whether it be Lupin or Conan) got less time allotted, and that might lead to initial dissatisfaction. I still enjoy watching it after umpteenth views I’ve had (I’ve long lost my counts… at least 20-30 times). That’s a good sign.
My favorite piece of this show is Mouri Kogorou’s speach. Actually, it’s Lupin disguising as Kogorou, and Conan voicing over him. That was a sheer beauty. The interplay between Kurita Kanichi (Lupin’s VA) and Kamiya Akira (Kogorou’s VA) is a work of an art. I don’t think it was conveyed perfectly well through the translation. But how Kamiya able to talk like Lupin, and Kurita able to talk like Kogorou… it’s simply awesome.
I suppose this would be the closest thing I’ll see to Lupin and City Hunter co-starring a show.
The survivor
Friday, October 9th, 2009
We knew this was coming since at least June. Our department just executed a huge restructuring. Two of my cubicle neighbors were walked out. That’s some scary thought.
The team I belong to had 9 people at the beginning of the year. I’m the programmer “H”.
By spring of this year, Project Lead “B” and programmer “E” retired, and analyst “D” and programmer “I” were laid off.
Today, they laid off programmer “C” and programmer “G”.
Within 10 months period, we went from 9 person team down to 3 person team. 66% job cut—that’s scary. But at the end of the day, I was one of the survivors.
Having fun with HTML5
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Yesterday’s post is the very first one on this blog that featured multimedia pieces other than images. As a part media geek and a part web geek, I converted the site’s underlying technology from XHTML1.0 to HTML5. It’s been fun exploring this area of technology that’s new to me.
My testing ground is same as always – Windows, Linux (Ubuntu), and iPhone.
Firefox 3.0, Opera 10, IE 7, IE 8
No support for <audio> tag. I heard Opera’s had <audio> and <video> support for two years or so in their experimental builds, but the support is still lacking in the public release. It’s a shame.
Firefox 3.5
<audio> tag is supported. It supports ogg vorbis playback. The interface features play/pause button, mute button, playback pasition bar, current time, and total time. It’s a bit of bleh looking.
When I tried to load mp3 file, this is what I got:
Google Chrome
Support is same as Firefox – no mp3 support. Maybe it does support mp4/AAC. I’ll check it out later. The interface is somewhat similar to that of Firefox, but missing the total time indication. Also, it has no indication that a particular media is not supported for a playback, e.g. mp3. When I tried to load mp3, the player looked virtually the same.
Safari on Windows
Safari does not support ogg vorbis playback. It does handle mp3. The player interface is nice and slick, but is missing any type of time indicator. It looks exactly like the QuickTime plug-in on other browsers, with different color scheme. Also, like Chrome, it does not have any indication about unsupported format when trying to load ogg vorbis.
Mobile Safari on iPhone
I was a bit shocked that Mobile Safari’s support of <audio> format. Just like the Windows version, it does not handle ogg vorbis. It does, however, have an indicator for unsupported content. The indicator was so tiny that I had to zoom in a LOT to be able to see the difference. When the button is clicked, the standard iPhone video player is opened, and music is loaded and played on that. I have better impression of <audio> tag handling on Mobile Safari than on Windows.
The symphony season starts
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Our local symphony orchestra started their 2009-2010 season last weekend. I invited minisylf to join me, but she turned me down. ○|￣|＿ It was still an enjoyable concert.
Barber of Seville by Rossini – one of the most popular classical pieces ever. I’m not a big opera fan, so this is just like any other piece. It’s still fun and exciting piece. It’s a nice season opener. I’m sure most people know this melody:
Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 “Scottish” – This is a piece that I’ve listened maybe once in my life time. There are some moments of excitement. Some sound resemblance to his Fingal’s Cave Overture was fun to notice. (No wonder, they both have Scottish theme in them.) But otherwise, this was a low point of the night for me.
Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 – Of four piano concertos that Rachmaninoff wrote, no. 2 and 3 are better know than the other two. No. 2 is more popular in Japan (I think that’s why it was included in Nodame). No. 3 seems to be more popular in many other regions (and that might be why it was featured in Shine). In fact, Shine was where I heard this piece for the first time. As I watched this, I was thinking of Nodame’s concert hall debut with Stresemann. Naturally, this pair of soloist and conductor were making this piece together too. Yes, the pianist’s technique was amazing (and it was so good to be able to see it from the 3rd row). But more than that, the whole ensemble was just amazing. Sound wise, it was a pitty that I sat so close to the stage – the blend between the piano and the orchestra wasn’t the best.
p.s. The excerpts of each pieces were taken from the orchestra’s homepage.
K-On! Chrome Theme
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Just couple of short months ago, I thought all the themes available for Google Chrome was generic, boring stuff. I went back to the themes page, and found K-On! theme as well as Hatsune Miku. Now I have some reasons to start using Chrome more often.
23 projects…
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009
As Frostii continued to pick up projects, chug through all the episodes, drop projects, complete projects, and plan more future projects, I’ve felt more and more need for a projects page for frostii.com. So I made one. Only then did I realize that we have flippin’ lots of projects already! And we’ve only been active for 9 months!
- 3 projects planned for future
- 8 active projects
- 3 dropped projects
- 9 completed projects
For now, I forgot to add 2 projects. Yoshimune – dropped; and Nanami – on hold.
But still, that’s quite a few. And I’ve been involved in 14 of those projects as a translator. (It’s really not fair to count Uraon as a separate project, but we’ll let that slide.)
Done with another show
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
Frostii finished another show. Ka-ching! This is only our third show to complete so far? No, wait… it’s already the eighth one. Geez, I can’t count. (Candy Boy, Dogs, Eden, Ippo, K-On, Nodame, Ride Back, and this.) Soon to be 9 (Tokyo M8). And 11, maybe. (Gosenzo, Natsu no Sora – I translated all outstanding episodes of them in past 2 weeks.) And soon enough, Black Jack too. (I just finished episode 53 recently. Episode 54 translation is 2/3 done. There’re only 7 more to go after that.) But beyond that, Frostii might be slowing down a bit. At this point, there’s only one show identified that we’re picking up this fall – Kimi ni Todoke. (ANN has the translation of the title as Reach You or Reaching You. Personally, I think it should be more like May It Reach You or something.) Maybe it’s for the better – we won’t drop any shows this season.
I downloaded the manga available so far last night. I flipped through a few pages this morning. It looks like this will be one of the easiest show to translate that I’ve done, right along with Natsu no Sora.
Mahoutsukai ni Taisetsu na koto
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
Over the weekend, I had another anime marathon. This time, I watched both season of Mahoutsukai ni Taisetsu na koto. The second season especially had a strong impact. And through these series came an ordinary, but strong reminder—whatever projects we handle, they must be done with its total context in mind. In the show, it was taken as understanding the requester’s true need and execute the most appropriate magic accordingly. By concept this isn’t hard to do, even outside of the concept of these shows.
But in practice? I rarely see it happen anymore. Maybe I need to reset my skepticism filter. But more and more, I hear some service providers say “This is exactly what you asked.” It’s easy to take a request literally, execute it literally word for word, and call it done. It is not easy to understand what the requester really needs, and accommodate it appropriately.
This somewhat reminds me of the story of the treeswing.
Damn the corporate firewall
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
Earlier, I went out to Google Docs to update my translation log… and got blocked by the company firewall. What’s funny is the categories that the firewall gave to Google Docs.
Mike Mason? WTF? Who the hell’s that?