2010-11-21 19:27:00
So... I finally gave the whole Vocaloids thing a shot, starting with the 39's Giving Day Concert of which I showed a clip yesterday. After liking quite a few of the songs from the concert I started digging around a little bit to lear more about the Vocaloid concept and the music that's out there. It seems that there are dozens if not hundreds of musicians out there, using the Vocaloid voices to create their own 100% original music.
I've bought a bunch of albums which are published by the biggest Vocaloid label KarenT. Would you believe that they sell all of this on iTunes? And that it's pretty damn affordable? Hooray for indie music :)
If you're curious, the following are the albums I bought. All of them have excerpts that can be listened for free on the linked page.
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2010-11-19 22:19:00
By now I'm sure many people will have heard of the Vocaloid LIVE concert tour, featuring the virtual Vocaloid singers and their accompanying band. The concerts started in 2009, but for some reason only now do sites such as Reddit seem to pick up on it.
Either way... I do in fact like the sound of most of the songs, with the above shown "Double Lariat" by Megurine Luka being one of my favourites. It's also pretty awesome to see what can be done with some creative lighting and a good screen+projectors. Sharon Apple is this much closer to becoming reality! I really wouldn't mind visiting one of those concerts one day ^_^
"Double Lariat", like many of the Vocaloid songs, can be downloaded for free. I like the album version even better than the live one, which can be downloaded over here.
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2010-11-18 22:43:00
We're all aware of the fact that Japan could be considered the WTF-capitol of planet earth, with all manner of crazy sh*t emanating from that country. One of the foundries of this wonderful craziness is the famous studio Gainax, known for their mindfscks such as "Evangelion", and "FLCL". And now they're upping it to a whole new level with "Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt".
"Foul mouthed" doesn't begin to describe it, nor do "racy" and "dirty". It has to be seen to be believed. In the words of one of the production staff (from Wikipedia):
The theme of the anime is 'vulgar and indecent jokes', with Imaishi saying, "If we are going to do this, we will try it thoroughly."
And oddly, I'm loving this show ^_^
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2010-11-15 14:59:00
Aww man, my back fraggin' hurts ever since Saturday's exam. Three hours crouched over a low desk has done bad things to my shoulders. Luckily I'm getting some help with that tonight. I also stayed at home today, suspecting that I may have caught a nasty stomach bug. There's no sense in accidentally infecting my colleagues. Hopefully tomorrow'll be better...kilala.nl tags: Body,
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2010-11-14 09:31:00
A few weeks ago Dotorg started a thread about about.me on the Ars Technica fora. At the time I thought the concept looked alright so I signed up for the beta. This morning I finally got my account activated.
About.me is a new, though not highly original, website that aims to be a portal website for personal profiles. Other sites have done this before, but I must admit that I like the "about.me" domain name best of all. It's their intention for members to use their page to link all of their online presences together. In my case my profile links to the website you're reading, to my LinkedIn page and to three of the volunteer organizations I'm part of.
kilala.nl tags: internet, geeky,
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2010-11-14 07:40:00
It has been a very long time in coming, but yesterday I finally took my CISSP exam. I started preparing for my exam five months ago, but reading the big 1200 study guide from cover to cover. I've followed online classes and went to a week-long review class. And finally I took a few practice exams, both the ones included with the Harris book as well as those at CCCure.org. And finally, in the last week before the exam I read through an excellent CISSP summary, written by my colleague Maarten de Frankrijker (awesome work Maarten!).
All in all I felt pretty well prepared for the exam.
Yesterday I left home at seven and because I arrived at the exam site 1.5 hours early I quickly went to the market in nearby Nieuwegein to pick up some stuff and have a chat with old acquaintances. I arrived back at the exam site half an hour early, at 0830. While other people were still rifling through their study guides and summaries, I instead opted to simply read "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" ^_^ I mean, if you don't know the materials an hour before the exam, all the cramming in the world isn't going to help you :)
We started the exam at 1005 and I finished at 1310, so it took me almost exactly three hours including breaks. My strategy for the test? I divided the 250 questions into ten blocks of 25. For each block I answered the questions in the booklet, did a quick double check and then copied the answers to the answer sheet. I then took a one minute break, stretching, yawning and having a drink after which it was back to the next block of questions. After a hundred questions (so twice in the exam) I take a longer break, to walk around a little, to do some more stretching, to have a sandwich, etc. All in all, I made sure to remain relaxed at all times, assuming that pressure would only make me screw up questions.
Could I have used more time? Sure. Could I have gone over all 250 questions to see if I had made any mistakes? Sure. But I didn't. I felt right about the majority of questions I'd answered and figured that, if I -did- make any mistakes, I'd play the numbers game. How many questions would I have accidentally answered incorrectly? I feel that the chance is small. So, I was the first one to finish the exam and walk out of there.
I'm very curious what the results will be! Unfortunately it'll take a while for the results to come in, a few weeks I'm told.
kilala.nl tags: work, sysadmin,
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2010-11-11 20:04:00
Today's the holiday of St. Martin. In many dutch cities young children and their parents take to the streets with lanterns, going from door to door to sing songs and gather candy. We didn't go out with Dana just yet, planning to do that in either one or two years. And my $DEITY I was glad we weren't out there. Those poor, poor sods! From 1730 to 1930 it was pouring with rain and the wind was awful! All in all we saw roughly thirty kids pass our door, with some fifteen parents tagging along. And they were wet. WET!
And you know what's ironic? Now that it's 2000 and the kids have gone to bed, the weather is perfect! It's dry outside and the wind has died down.
Poor, poor sods... I'll join you in two years. ^_^
kilala.nl tags: life,
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2010-11-08 23:59:00
Well this doesn't happen very often: I've been forced to re-install my Macbook after two years of trusty service. The laptop was still functioning normally, but had begun to show glitches in file saving dialogs. A quick check with Disk Utility showed that there was corruption in the file systems's inode table and that (sadly) a format and restore were needed.
Took me four hours in total to run a full backup, then perform a clean install, then return all my files to their original locations. Not too shabby, but I would've preferred to spend those four hours programming. Oh well...
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2010-11-04 18:52:00
This week I finally got the chance to practice something I've been wanting to do for a long, long time: teach.
For the past four days I've been teaching a group of seven the ins and outs of FoxT's BoKS security software. It was my first time working with materials created by someone other than myself, so it was an interesting challenge. Luckily I had the month I spent taking care of Marli and Dana to prepare. I studied all the materials and made plenty of adjustments and improvements to both the slides and the lab exercises. Still, as it turns out, no amount of preparation leads to perfect results, so we had a number of challenges.
First off the virtual machines used for the training labs contained a few glitches and configuration mistakes, which led to delays. Most of those were rather easily solved. The bigger problem however is that both FoxT and myself assumed that any and all people studying BoKS would have at least a passing knowledge of Unix. An assumption which this month to be problematic on two occasions, both during my training and one given in the US. Case in point: my class had two people who have zOS / Mainframe experience and two folks from application support. The prior had never seen Unix before, while the latter knew enough to get about and manage their own applications.
It certainly has been a learning experience!
Putting that aside, I loved this week! On Monday I was quite nervous going in, but all the nerves were gone within the hour. After that everything was golden and I felt very comfortable both teaching and aiding in the lab exercises. I did learn that a class of eight is the maximum that I could manage by myself, when it comes to the practical labs. Any more people and I wouldn't be able to provide enough guidance while the students learn to work with their new product.
After the second day of talking, talking and talking my voice started to give out. By the end of the third day I'd only have ~20% of my voice left and this morning I started off with <10% :( So the first hour of class was spent whispering. I'm glad we had a small room today :) Oddly (miraculously?) my voice came back to ~40% after that, which is what I'm left with right now as well.
I don't think I'll be answering many phone calls tomorrow :D
kilala.nl tags: work, sysadmin,
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2010-11-04 06:59:00
One may recall that in 2007, one of the things I set out to do on my trip to Japan was to buy a watch made by Haruo Suekichi. Back then the trip was exciting and after a few hours traipsing about in Tokyo I managed to buy one of these works of art. Since then I've been keeping tabs on Suekichi-san on-and-off, so I could keep others informed about how to buy these watches. At Anime 2010 I also used the story of my search as a case study for my presentation called "Hunting for rare, Japanese collectibles".
I guess I've let my guard down the past year because apparently Suekichi-san travelled to Europe earlier this year. How the heck did I miss this?! Some of his watches were exhibited at the Oxford Steampunk Museum Exhibition. The expo got his name out in the open again! Since 2007 interest had tapered off a little bit, but with two big articles on popular websites he has gotten popular again.
Hopefully, next year we'll be traveling to Japan again and with any luck I can meet up with him again.
kilala.nl tags: haruo suekichi, japan, geeky,
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2010-11-03 19:37:00
Just a small blip to let you know I'm still alive and that I'm enjoying the hell out of an old web comic which I've recently discovered: Lovelace and Babbage. As the title suggests the main characters of the comic are historic figures and the supposed grand parents of modern computing: Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. Obviously, in reality they never fought crime, nor built robotic women (to fetch drinks), nor fought street musicians with mathematical formulae. But I don't care, because I really enjoy it all :)
Besides, it surely helps that the comic's author also adds a lot of post script with information and little tidbits about the actual Babbage and Lovelace :)
EDIT:
Hahahahaha! This is fscking priceless! Lovelace and Babbage build a model of the economy, which confirms that over-stimulus leads to hyperinflation :) *KABOOM!* Hilarious :)
kilala.nl tags: comics, reading, geeky, steampunk,
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All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Thomas Sluyter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.
