I did it! I have successfully managed to punch out 50,050 words in this month of November! This makes 2007 the third year that I have successfully crossed the 50,000 line out of the four attempts I have made thus far. Now I can finally rest my fingers. :)

It’s been one hell of a ride (as it always is with NaNoWriMo), but I’m glad that I gave it a shot once again this year!

It looks like we’re going to be moving forward with the main plot from this episode onward. Pheles’s name being dropped and the mention of Yuji moving on to manipulating his vast storage of power of existence for a fuzetsu are telltale signs that we’re stepping into material from the original light novels.

Of course, it would be rude of me to completely comment on the future episodes and not talk about this one at all. The brief fight that we had was pretty good although it’s difficult to rank anything too high after you’ve seen the movie. I rather liked the music that they played at the end of the episode and I’m hoping that that one’s going to be in the soundtrack.

I actually went into this episode thinking that the flashback was only going to last one episode, but I guess I was proven wrong. I was worried the whole time over how they were planning to conclude this episode properly with the limited amount of time remaining. At the end, I got the ending credits instead of a real conclusion, it really kind of took me by surprise. In hindsight, I guess I should’ve expected it all, but whatever.

I know I haven’t been blogging much about my novel, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I currently have 40,088 words down. You are supposed to have 41,675 if you’re playing the “average” game, but due to various circumstances, I fell behind last week. The amount of writing that I’ve put in this weekend has helped me get back into the game although it’ll probably still be very difficult to juice out ten thousand words within five weekdays, we’ll see how that goes. More to come later this week.

I picked up some 5.1 speakers from Canada Computers today. I don’t have my Audigy 2 NX on me but I’ll just swipe it from my brother’s place the next time I head over there. Getting it to work properly on Linux is probably going to be a pain though, we’ll see how that goes.

Please note that I’m working with this based on the raw since a subtitled version hasn’t been released yet. I’m noting this since I had said that I’d only write reviews after a subtitled version has been released. However, since the raw for episode 8 has been released and I’m going to watch that once it’s done, I wanted to get my thoughts of this episode down before then. Note that I have no plans on rewriting a review for this episode after the subtitled version gets released.

To put it quite simply, this episode was absolutely hilarious. I think that even people that don’t know any Japanese would be able to get some good laughs out of this one. The dialog was great and while the scenes that were in this episode was what you’d expect from a typical “amusement park trip gone wrong” scenario, the execution of the content was just absolutely brilliant.

The art quality was very nice and consistent in this episode and the music selection was very smart. It was appropriate for the scene in a way but it also made it even funnier once you recall what other scenes they had used that particular music track for in the past as you then realize that the two don’t actually align.

In conclusion, I would highly recommend this episode to anyone out there that wants to laugh some hearty laughs. There were practically no flaws with this one, simply a complete episode of non-stop awesomeness. We’ll be having a flashback episode with Margery next episode. I don’t know anything about this backstory, so it should be a good watch.

Markus and I was talking about some API stuff just now and he sent me a link to a video presentation by Josha Bloch on how to design a good API. The presentation is an hour long but it is definitely worth watching. Thanks for the link, Markus.

This episode has been a huge improvement over the ones we’ve had in the past. I hope we can keep this going and I don’t really see it as a problem now that the jealousy issue has been resolved. The way Margery advised the girls was really quite surprising. It’s amazing how mature she can be as you really wouldn’t expect it from a drunkard like her.

The art really hit the gutter this episode, I don’t know what was going on. The scene with Margery talking to Ogata and Kazumi was particularly notorious. It’s as if they just skipped the “Quality Control” step completely. In terms of music though, I really liked the part when Satou was talking about treasuring the moment they had together now. Playing Ce qui fût suavé then was a great touch.

From the previews, it seems like we’re going to be getting an Ike episode next round. I’m not going to be expecting any tomogaras to jump out of nowhere but I’m going to be hoping for some decent humour. This episode was pretty good about it and it was a rather serious episode, so I’m hoping that the next will be better. That’s not to say that an Ike episode can’t be serious, but come on, let’s not kid ourselves, we all know he doesn’t have a chance.

Creating the project is as simple as can be. An Eclipse plugin is available making Android development a snap. You’ll need to have Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) or higher installed, and you’ll need to install the Android Plugin for Eclipse. Once you have those installed, come back here.

If you were thinking about using the ADT on 3.4M3 (since it says “or higher”), don’t even try, because you can’t even get past the first step of the ‘Hello, Android!‘ tutorial since the wizard won’t even open.

At this point, you might try to click on the ‘OK’ or the ‘Details >>’ button, but this will not work. I don’t know if it’s because I’m on Fluxbox (which isn’t a real desktop environment,) or not, but if it doesn’t work for you, you should Alt+Tab off that window back to the ‘New Project’ wizard and close that dialog. Once that’s closed, you can now go back to the error dialog and close that with the ‘OK’ button.

If you look at your workspace logs, you will find something like the following…

!ENTRY org.eclipse.jface 4 2 2007-11-12 23:20:50.557
!MESSAGE Problems occurred when invoking code from plug-in: "org.eclipse.jface".
!STACK 0
java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: JavaProjectWizardFirstPage_NameGroup_label_text
at com.google.android.adt.project.NewAndroidProjectCreationPage.createProjectNameGroup(NewAndroidProjectCreationPage.java:230)
at com.google.android.adt.project.NewAndroidProjectCreationPage.createControl(NewAndroidProjectCreationPage.java:202)
at org.eclipse.jface.wizard.Wizard.createPageControls(Wizard.java:170)

So it seems like Google is using internal Eclipse APIs or something of that nature (as they appear to be accessing JDT’s externalized strings directly) which got removed in the 3.4 stream. This should be no surprise since the top portion of the two wizards look the same.

This is absolutely despicable, on my part, of course. I kept putting it off and now it’s no longer showing at Galaxy Cinemas! From some googling, I’ve found that it’s still on the run at some small theatre in Elora, but who knows how the hell I’m going to get there. I think I’m just going to have to play the waiting and praying game and catch it if it happens to go up at the Princess.

Well, this episode certainly didn’t do much to advance the plot, if at all. We had a few good laughs here and there but that was really about it. I also enjoyed the scenes we had with Wilhelmina and Chigusa. It seems that my hopes were a little too high though since I was actually expecting the dish to turn out half decent…but that didn’t happen.

It’s a little surprising to see that Yuji still hadn’t caught on to what’s been bugging Shana and Yoshida even after Ike tried to hint the problem to him. I wouldn’t really have bought this density if I didn’t consider the fact that Ike had to have Yuji talk to him before he realized that he had feelings for Yoshida. I guess people are just more shrewd about things that concerns others over those that concerns themselves.

From the preview, it seems like the next episode should spell the end of this jealousy business. While things have been going rather slow this season in comparison to the first one, we are after all still only five episodes in, so I can tolerate this. I’ve watched quite a few shows that did nothing of interest until the episode count rolled into the double digits so…meh, whatever.