ZARD has always been one of my famous Japanese bands (or singer, if you will) and a frown immediately appeared on my face upon hearing this news from my cousin. She may be gone from this world…but her songs will always stay with us. May she rest in peace.

Wow, this episode was great. Some questions that I posed last time around seems to have been answered this time. So we find out that Aono was turned by Matsuri some time ago and they’ve both apparently grown up…although one has to wonder what’s up with Mayuko. I guess what I theorized last episode may be incorrect and that she’s actually not a yakabito but something different. Maybe a yakabito’s blood or something can…do something about her? Who knows.

So now what’s the deal with Yorito? Could Matsuri and Aono both have thought he died (given Aono’s words at the end of this episode) but that he actually didn’t and has somehow managed to recover? Aono seems so certain that Yorito is her brother despite Matsuri’s doubting expression during the train cart conversation. Could he have died but am now being manifested in the real world because of Aono’s and Matsuri’s feelings? If that’s the case the aging thing with Mayuko could be explained since it seems heavily implied that the flashbacks are events that occurred centuries ago. I actually didn’t have this theory when I started writing this entry, but I guess it could be plausible since Matsuri mentioned that the yaka are born from people’s hatred and all that good stuff, so Yorito may have been spawned from the two’s more happier thoughts? Maybe.

With Matsuri gone off somewhere, who will Takeshi be attacking next? Is Aono going to leave the hospital soon? If Takeshi comes looking for Matsuri instead and finds Aono, I presume he wouldn’t really mind taking her out instead, though one has to wonder whether Aono will be capable of defending herself since she says that her powers have not returned completely yet. In the manga it seems to have implied that Matsuri did something to hurt a girl (presumably Mayuko) some time ago, so will Takeshi just ignore Aono? Does Takeshi know about Aono? Perhaps with Aono’s suppressed powers, Takeshi hasn’t been able to pick up the scent that there’s another yakabito lurking in this town. Oh, there are so many questions that needs to be answered, I can’t wait until I can find out more.

Well, it’s either that or biking thirty minutes to commute to work is a strenuous task. At any rate, it’s a good thing that the place where I’m living has an air conditioner that’s tweaked at the right temperature. Good lord is it cold at work! I have to bring a jacket along just in case it’s not really right…which it almost never is.

Life’s tough and you never really have enough time to do all the things you want to do and all the nothing you want to sit around and do. Of course, since there’s never enough time, you just have to try and prioritize and put in your best effort into the things that matters and hope that the half-assed effort you invested in the other “supposedly less important” things somehow works out alright. Anyway, let’s see what’s on my plate (in no particular order)…

• work stuff
• read this book on Lisp/Scheme that I got from McQ
• open source
• anime
• blogging

There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be read and researched for work in the hope of making an educated decision on what our project should do. Beyond the technical feasibility, there are also business considerations to be factored into the equation. All this planning business certainly isn’t my strength so I’ve been keeping pretty quiet throughout all of our meetings. I think I say less than three sentences in a meeting and often only when someone is addressing my directly.

I’ve always been intrigued by Scheme ever since I first heard a software engineering student from the class of 2006 mention it at CUSEC in 2005. The book itself is spans a respectable 500 or so pages. I can’t say that I’ve actually planned it all out just yet as to how much progress I’ll make per day, but I’m hoping to get the book finished. I mean, it’s only right for you to finish a book that someone has lent to you, right?

The Europa simultaneous release for Eclipse beckons day after day. There are some interesting problems that need to be tackled in ECF and some of them are at the API level. Due to our heavy usage of interfaces, this can all get pretty dirty since there’s not much you can do about bad API design once you’ve released something since you can’t just change interfaces around (minus deep analysis of the problem and superinterfaces and subinterfaces) without breaking API. It’s tough. It might look good during the design phase and all, but once it’s out in the wild, who knows how someone will implement it.

I’ve got a lot of shows to watch. I could easily finish a series or two every week, but it’s of course questionable as to whether I really want to do that since it eats up a lot of time. This is certainly the most relaxing of my tasks but is probably also the most useless since I’m not really doing anyone any favours besides myself. Could my time be better spent on IRC answering questions on #eclipse? I don’t know.

Blogging takes up a lot of time too, surprisingly. If you don’t blog you obviously wouldn’t know, but it actually does. For long entries like this one, I can easily spend well over thirty minutes on it since I don’t usually have a direction for my post before I start writing my post (well, minus the anime blog entries since they all follow the same format of three paragraphs’ worth of text embedded within four sections of images). I end up doing a lot of deleting and rewriting, actually. Prior to posting I’ll read it over once to check for mistakes, and then again after I’ve posted to make sure I haven’t missed anything. It’s amazing how many mistakes slip by, really. Or maybe it’s sad how many mistakes slip by?

This episode was definitely a lot better than the last one as it is not a filler and actually revealed some information about the antagonists of the series. It was a little hard on the eyes in a few scenes but since they weren’t really that important, I suppose I can let it slide (or not). Given the events of this episode, it wouldn’t flow too well to have another filler episode so I think everything from here on out should be all on the main plot train track, which is good news to me. I can’t wait to see how Yorito will deal with Aono now that she knows about Matsuri.

There was a fight scene in this episode although it wasn’t really much of a fight since it was essentially completely one-sided like what happened in episode one. It didn’t feel as urgent as the action wasn’t as fast-paced despite the fact that the situation was a lot more dire than before (since the sun was shining brightly outside and all). I have to say that I didn’t really get the last bit of the fight where Matsuri just dissolved Takeshi’s dart. I mean, if you could do that in a weakened state, why didn’t you just do that from the get go when you were physically fit? Maybe she can’t use her powers to their full potential unless she’s in a darker place? Nah, if that was the case, she should’ve been dissolved some darts in the first fight.

With this episode, we can practically confirm that Mayuko is a being like Matsuri. Alternatively, she could be from some rival sect and have similar characteristics but actually not be completely the same. We’d need to figure out how one exactly turns into these things or if they’re just born with it before we can draw further conclusions. For starters, Mayuko’s stature is a lot smaller than Matsuri’s, though this could be an age thing if you’re just born this way. If they don’t age after they’ve changed, they’d be following a formula similar to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.

Remember those items I was talking about last time?

As you can tell from the image above that was retrieved from this link (or not since onloy a few of you are capable of reading the Japanese text in question), the Matsuri edition has been sold out. So, if you take a hundred and multiply it by 500 USD, you will find that the result is 50,000. Now from there we multiple by two since it is only a matter of time before Aono’s edition is sold out and our end result here is 100,000. So you have a revenue of 100k USD right then and there before the series is even over.

My brother puts it all nicely with the line “well played japan”. Well played, well played indeed.

It should come as no surprise that Blizzard Entertainment will be releasing a sequel to the award-winning real-time strategy game. No release date targets has been announced though that should come as no surprise. Also, given Blizzard’s record of delaying their products, you’d have to factor in at least a 12-month delay to any date they provide as far as I’m concerned. Yes, I’ll be buying this because I presume many of my family and friends will want to play this on Battle.net in addition to the fact that I am interested in StarCraft’s plot.

While my anticipation level is “high” it’s nothing bloodthirsty, so don’t expect me to blog about it too often since there are other games I am more concerned about. One must also consider the fact that there are a ton of other fansites that one could go to for news that you really shouldn’t be resorting to reading my blog for the latest updates.

Well, today’s end marks the end of my first work week. Things have been pretty rough and not everything has been going our way, but I guess everyone that’s signed up for this program were well aware that this wasn’t going to be a ride in the park. I’m going to be doing a bit of research this long weekend (it’s “long” since we get Monday off because of Victoria Day, as an aside for my American readers) in hopes of being prepared to completely flesh out our project idea, scope, and direction by Wednesday.

Due to the nature of our project and the technologies we are dealing with, I am obligated to not disclose as much as I’d like to since a fair amount of what my team is working with is confidential. How long they will remain in that space is questionable since I obviously don’t know what is the next thing that IBM is planning to go public with. I merely ask that you, my readers, be understanding of the fact that when I am vague about something I am doing at work that it is not my intention to tease and poke fun at you but is because I would rather not say anything than say something that might violate my non-disclosure agreement. Of course, when in doubt, you can always talk to me directly for clarification purposes.

As aforementioned, I have been typing these blog entries on my brother’s notebook since my notebook died. I am flying to Ottawa today at 1230 and is expected to arrive at 1330. I am expected to report in at work at 0830 on Monday but it is not known to me as to when we will be receiving our notebooks, so I have no idea as to when I will be back online.

Please email me directly if you folks need me for anything. While I (obviously) may not be able to reply if I cannot get access to a computer with Internet by borrowing someone else’s computer when I arrive at my housing place in Kanata, you can be assured that I will get back to you as soon as I get my hands on that Thinkpad and have some leisure time to check my email. Peace, folks.

This news is actually about two weeks old, but for those that are unaware, they will be bringing the tenth novel over to the manga reading community. The art is very well done in my opinion and, appropriately enough, has a more serious feel to it then the current manga that’s being drawn by Ayato Sasakura.

I hope that this work will not mean that the original manga will simply skip over the events of the tenth novel as that would rob me of seeing how Sasakura would’ve depicted these characters in addition to preventing me from enjoying an unedited version of the series in manga form. Well, sure I could just read this upcoming version by Shii Kiya, but I think you know what I’m trying to get at here.