Burrowowl

Sayounara Zetsubou Sensei is the tale of a teacher who lives a life of despair. Each episode is generally split into one or two short stories about an interaction between Itoshiki Nozomu and one of his homeroom class students, each of whom has some terribly-exaggerated characteristic, ranging from the perpetually-optimistic Fuura Kafuka to the vocally-withdrawn Otonashi Meru (who is horribly abusive via text message).

Each of the characters’ names are what amount to Japanese-language puns reflecting their personalities. For example, Itoshiki Nozomu is spelled 糸色 望. If you compress the first two characters into one, you get 絶望, which means “despair.” The cast, while individually quite shallow, make for a variety of great comedic gags when mixed together. When Chiri, the obsessive perfectionist, forces herself into a love triangle with the stalker-girl Matoi, the jealousy and moral indignation that follow are simply hilarious.

Production values are excellent, with a rather bold tendency towards switching up the visual presentation at key moments, replacing scenery with solid colors, dramatically altering lighting, and inserting photography to disrupt or enhance the mood of the scene. The production studio, Shaft, goes so far as to oscillate between soft sepia tones with fake scratches and dust to bold colors and high contrast mid-scene. The character designs lend themselves well to character close-ups, which is put to great effect when a character’s forthright attitude in a conversation is reflected by the camera shot: straight on.

On an unusual note: the opening theme song is actually a pretty passable tune. This flies in the face of my general impression that the Japanese should not be allowed near guitars.

I know it isn’t nice to pick on people about grammar when they are speaking without teleprompters and notes, but some offenses are hard to let slide. I previously poked fun at Mitt Romney for his repeated failings during a Republican forum, but now it’s Senator Joe Biden’s turn to raise the hair on the back of my neck.

I often hear people refer to something as being literally some metaphor-or-other. I understand that they are just trying to draw dramatic attention to a metaphor, that they meant figuratively, and that if they had a chance to write the same statement down they probably would have gotten it right. Senator Biden just couldn’t stop himself:

As we try desperately with a bare majority in the United States Congress to alter the course this president has set us on, a course that not figuratively [but] literally has us careening off the tracks internationally and domestically, there is one great big boulder that sits in the middle of the road: it’s Iraq.

What a travesty of a statement. What butchery of the language. In these days when the sitting President of the United States sounds like a nincompoop on a regular basis, we’re in danger of becoming numb to these kinds of shenanigans. Let’s tear this statement apart a little, shall we?
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On October 4th, 1957, the United Soviet Socialist Republic took mankind’s exploration of our environment into a brand-new phase. For millennia we had looked up into the night sky and wondered. For the past half a century, the moon, planets, and stars have seemed much closer to us than they ever had before. Fantastical stories of interplanetary and interstellar travel seemed much more plausible, more reasonable. It is my firm belief that active space exploration is one of the most optimistic, noble endeavors we have set our collective minds to. The innovations and inspiration we draw from this effort, as young people take interest in the sciences and technology is turned to purposes other than wanton destruction or sloth, far outweigh the costs in labor, material, capital, and even the lives that have been lost.

Man has his eyes in the front of his head so that he may always look forward. Let’s keep moving forward.

The Efficient Networks Speedstream 4101a ADSL bridge doesn’t really have a lot going on under the hood, which is generally a desirable trait for a little plastic and circuit-board brick that connects your computer to the Internet. Its inability to perform NAT and DHCP render it incapable of fouling up a connection in the way that a combo router/modem like a Zoom X6 or 2Wire Homeportal might. However, it is sometimes useful to use that dumb little brick for diagnostic purposes, mostly to answer the question “can my computer speak Internet at all?”

Considering the manifold components of a DSL line that can fail, being able to rule out your computer itself is frequently an excellent place to start. If you don’t have any other IP-aware devices on-hand, that can be troublesome. Here’s how you can get your Windows box to talk to your Speedstream 4101a:

• Connect the client computer directly to the 4101a
• Configure the client computer to use
  • IP: 10.0.0.5
  • Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
  • Gateway: 10.0.0.1
• Open a shell prompt (cmd on a windows box), and run the following
  command:
  • arp -s 10.0.0.1 speedstream’s MAC address
  • on Windows systems, you’ll use a dash to separate each pair of
    characters in the MAC
  • on Macintosh systems, you’ll use a colon to separate each pair of
    characters in the MAC
  • The MAC address is the serial number without the first character,
    e.g. a bridge with serial number 20018D564BB will have a MAC address of
    00-18-d1-85-64-bb
• Open the web browser of your preference and surf to http://10.0.0.1/
• You will be prompted to set an admin username and password.

Once authenticated, you’ll have access to some very basic
information about the bridge, including its firmware version and serial
number. From the admin interface, you can reset the bridge to factory
defaults. From some very limited testing, this doesn’t appear to break
anything (other than wiping out any admin password you may have previously
set).

More importantly, once you’ve been prompted for a username and password, you know that your computer can talk to other IP-aware devices via Ethernet.

Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann drew to a close this weekend, bringing to a climax Simon and the Dai Gurren Brigade’s quest for self-determination in the defiance of fate. Gainax did a laudable job of building up to a predictable but appropriate finish, avoiding what many feared would be a fall-on-their-face failure of a series conclusion.

There will be detractors, to be sure. Some people just cannot be satisfied. Bearing in mind that the story was at its heart a straightforward coming-of-age tale, all the pertinent loose ends were neatly tied up, the conclusion of the conflict was consistent with the over-the-top action that came before, and Simon’s eventual fate was appropriate to his character. Good job, Gainax. This was one of the better anime I’ve had the pleasure of watching.

Oh, and I was right about the brush-stroke titles in the end arc. Chalk one up for Burrowowl.