Burrowowl

A new order is coming. On November 24th, Meng Weng Wong released a helpful treatise on how the ISP and software vendor communities can band together to make things really quite rough on spammers. Too long have MTA administrators suffers the depredations of UBE. SMTP shall rise up, and purge itself of the cancerous growth that is spam.

In our quest to restore our former glory, end-users will embrace port 587 StartTLS or be consumed by the cleansing fires of progress, rogue mail servers shall be put to the wrack, and senders shall participate in web-of-trust extortion schemes or face expulsion from the community. SPF and SES uber alles! Tanks shall roll through Warsaw! The Rhine will be re-militarized! The purity and majesty of our mail system must be defended!

Okay, now that I’ve flipped out a bit, I’d like to say that I welcome changes that make it harder for spammers to thrive at the expense of ISPs and consequently the expense of the public, but am concerned that the proposed measures are extreme in nature. Amongst the system administrators that makes sure that your legitimate email is delivered, there appears to be a simmering radicalism. Well-intentioned folks like Meng Weng Wong should be careful, lest they jostle the end-user too harshly.

About a week and a half ago, Silver Dragon Manga released chapter one of the Grenadier manga. This title is a frequently-silly series that takes place in a bizarre incarnation of “ancient future japan” in which banditos with machineguns square off against six-gun toting gunslingers and sword-swinging samurai.

The main character, Rushuna, is on a quest to perfect the ultimate battle strategy: to break the opponent’s will to fight without fighting. She is cheerful, naive, and excellent markswoman, really enjoys a good bath, and is built for fanservice. If the manga continues as I suspect it will (I’ve seen the first two volumes of raws), expect a lot of cool fight scenes, some silly humor, and lots of non-threatening cleavage shots.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and folks are flocking ot the malls to spend money they don’t have to purchase gifts that their friends and families don’t need. Don’t participate in the melee. Keep yourself above the fray. Demonstrate your self-control by buying nothing today. Spend not a penny. Don’t get me wrong, generosity is noble, and charity is a key symptom of being a good person, but today isn’t the day to show how magnanimous you are. Today is when large companies gauge how much they’re going to be able to fleece the public this year, so in the interest of keeping the robber-barons on their toes, please don’t play their game.

After much waiting and gnashing of teeth, the Mozilla Project has reased Firefox 1.0 to the public today. Go get yourself a copy. For the uninitiated, Firefox is the browser-only version of the Mozilla browser. It doesn’t render pages quite as quickly as Internet Explorer, but is currently far less prone to malware exploits and handles CSS and other W3C standards far better, and has a very small footprint compared to other browsers. I’ve been running the pre-release of Firefox 1.0 for a while now, and it has worked great for me for work and play. So what are you waiting for? Ditch IE and use a real browser, you ninny.

This weekend I sat down and started watching what can only be fairly described as the greatest Giant Robot series ever devised by man: Giant Robo. I had loaned my cassettes of this title to a buddy several years ago, and was overjoyed to see them finally returned. Giant Robo has everything you can ask for from a Giant Robot cartoon: a young boy entrusted with the care of the World’s Most Powerful Robot, an international cabal of terrorists bent on total world domination, a cast of characters that are simultaneously over-the-top and subtle, background music that oscillates between the Warsaw Philharmonic to classic 1970′s tokusatsu battle anthems.

Giant Robo is a seven-episode OAV that chronicles the seven days when Big Fire, the aforementioned international terrorist organization bent on world domination, uses the legacy of the Shizuma drive and the tragedy of Bashtarelle to wreck havoc upon the Earth. Interpol’s elite Experts of Justice, accompanied by Daisaku Kusama and Giant Robo, struggle to thwart the efforts of Big Fire throughout the series.

The craftsmanship behind this story are excellent; at the beginning of each episode we are re-introduced into the bold world of our future, where the Shizuma drive has brought clean, recyclable power to the world. We are reminded time and again of the many perfections that have been brought to humanity through this marvelous invention. Of course, Doctor Shizuma and his creation have a dark history which comes back to haunt the world; the Bashtarelle Incident, in which an entire nation was catastrophically destroyed during the final stages of the drive’s development. The attitudes of the cast towards this technology and their reactions as the terrible truth comes to be revealed is truly wonderful to behold.

If you get an opportunity to, rent or buy this classic. It has comedy, action, romance, tragedy, redemption, hope, honor, betrayal, vengeance, and forgiveness all bundled up into a few hours of stylistically-executed cartoon format. Heck, even the English dub isn’t that bad. EX has a more comprehensive review available, but reading it is a waste of precious time that could be better spent watching Giant Robo.