Picture from my deck on Lake Tahoe

Deck with cool morning fog

Tree in Robin’s place

Tree using cool Sepia mode

Pictures of Squaw Valley, where we skied and Robin ski patrols

Group shot snowshoeing at Donner Lake (Right to Left: Me, Robin, my mom and her boyfriend)

Group shot at the River Grill in Tahoe City (Left to Right: Robin’s roommate Kendra, random guy, me, Robin’s roommate Iris, Robin)

Robin and her boyfriend Andrew

Robin and I at Emerald Bay

The teahouse out on the only island in all of Lake Tahoe.

Panoramic stitched from photos taken overlooking the lake just south of Mt. Rose

It was a great trip, hope you like the photos.

I sat down on Saturday night to start the book around 10:30pm. 3:30am rolled around and I still couldn’t put it down. I finally passed out with the book still in my hands. I somehow managed to make it through Sunday and finally got back to reading it at 8pm. 2:30am I finally finished it. It has been years since a book so demanded to be read.

Summary:
The National Firearms Act of 1934, enacted in reaction to gang activities during prohibition. On the surface that’s what it was. But if you look a little deeper you find other reasons. BATF, which is a division of the Treasury department (tax men), finds itself facing the need to drastically downsize it’s workforce. Why? Because prohibition had just been repealed and they weren’t needed. So there needed to be something new to enforce. The NFA34 was a tax law. It basically said that machine guns, rifles/shotguns below a certain length, silencers, etc. had to be registered with the government. The registration fee was $200, payable at the time of initial purchase as well as any subsequent ownership transfer. Think about that for a second. A $5 shotgun that was too short, or a $100 BAR, or a $175 Anti-tank rifle were all subject to a $200 tax each and every time the ownership transferred. In today’s dollars according to the CPI that’s equivalent to ~$3000. Luckily the tax was a fixed amount, so in 2008 it’s still $200, but for the time it was potentially a 4000% tax. And since it was a tax law the BATF was responsible for enforcement. It was also a fundamental violation of the 2nd amendment to the constitution. The 2nd amendment eludicates that there should be no infringement on the fundamental right of every citizen of the US to have and carry arms suitable as a member of the militia. The generally accepted understanding of a militia (see Switzerland for a textbook example) is the civilian populating having the basic weaponry of the military, so that they are not only able to rise up in defense of their country (see the revolutionary war), but in defense of their own rights. Every genocide that has ever been committed in this world since weapons were invented was preceded by taking weapons away from the population to be exterminated so that they were defenseless. Now you may say, “the same as the military, so you want people to have nukes?” No, the basic weaponry in the civil war was the muzzleloader, in WWII it was the Colt and S&W pistols, M1918 BARs and M1903 Springfields and Thompson submachine guns, and today it’s the Colt M-9 pistol, the M16A2 rifle, the M-4 carbine and various other guns. That’s what the civilian population should have the right to own. But FDR was a socialist, and thought the federal government should have a free hand.

Henry Bowman grew up in the ’60s. His family and relatives had been involved in WWII. He grows up like a lot of American kids, myself included, shooting guns. But Henry really likes guns, especially large guns. Prior to the Gun Control Act of 1968, you could order machine guns and anti-tank guns out of the back of catalogs, not to mention all the guns that soldiers brought back from WWII and WWI. Henry is also very intelligent, he remembers almost everything he reads, and he quickly becomes an expert at guns, doing his own modifications as well as loading his own munitions. The GCA68 now put all kinds of limits on who could own weapons, age restrictions, background restrictions, mental health restrictions, as well as dividing weapons into classes and requiring licensing to sell, make and import any controlled weapon. Now all of a sudden you had to have letters of reference to buy a handgun. This was also a tax law, and the craziest part of this law is the following: After 1968, any NFA gun that hadn’t been previously licensed could no longer be licensed. So anyone who missed the memo was now a criminal for life because they could not legally register weapons that might have been in the family since WWI.

Henry grows up watching the slow erosion of the rights guaranteed by the 2nd amendment, but does his best to keep in line, he gets his class 3 license so he can deal in NFA weapons, and continues buying and shooting his weapons.

He watches in horror as poorly trained TAX agents shoot women and children without provocation over a suspected unpaid $200 tax (Ruby Ridge). Randy Weaver was a Aryan separatist. He didn’t want to live around black people, so he moved out into the wilderness away from most people. There was an Aryan Supremacist settlement nearby, but he didn’t want anything to do with them. The BATF approached him to see if he would infiltrate the settlement and spy for them. He refused. So they sent him to court for a suspected $200 tax evasion on a slightly too short shotgun. Only problem was, the BATF wrote the wrong date on the summons. So he missed his court date and they put a warrant out. So what do they do? The BATF spends more money than the intelligence efforts in Haiti in surveillance on his house for the next 18 months, and then moves in with a number of “tactical forces”. They approach in stealth on a random day, When the dog detects something they shoot it, then Weaver’s 14 year old son to death. Weaver’s friend Kevin returns fire with the rifle he’s carrying, seeing as they’re out in the wilderness, killing a marshal. Note that at this point there have been no announcements of who these people are, just a surprise attack out of nowhere that just killed a 14 year old boy. Kevin runs back to the house and as Weaver’s wife opens the door to let him in, a sniper shoots her in the head. She was nursing her baby at the time. Then a 14 day standoff occurs, with Weaver finally surrendering because Kevin was injured. All this over a suspected $200 fine.

Waco, Texas. 80 people are burned to death over the same thing, a suspected $200 fine. It was only after it was all over and BATF and the FBI realize they had a media nightmare on their hands that they invented the story about Koresh having sex with kids, etc. It may have been true, but the people who knew were all dead. Again it was a surprise attack, giving the people no chance to surrender or notification of who was attacking them. 80 people including women and children were killed. Again, by TAX agents.

Henry lives his life as best he can, until finally, in the present day, he and two friends are attacked by BATF agents looking to plant evidence of wrongdoing, counterfeit money, drugs, etc. so that they can shut them down. They are 3 of the biggest licensed class 3 NFA dealers in the US. Henry fights back, in the process beginning a guerrilla civil war to restore the right to bear arms and the defense of the person to the citizens of the US.
End Summary

Review:
I grew up hunting, fishing and shooting guns. It was a natural part of life, but after moving to the lower 48 I saw just how draconian gun laws were becoming. Take Missouri, where only the police are allowed to carry concealed weapons. I’m sure all the criminals are happy to know that anyone they attack will be unarmed. While I am not as involved in the “gun culture” as Ross terms it, I like guns, and I firmly believe in the right to own and carry them. This book codified a lot of thoughts and beliefs that I had been tossing around for a number of years into a cohesive picture. I don’t think a civil war is the way to achieve what is needed, yet. But something has to be done. Since 2001 we’ve seen our rights eroded away at a increasingly faster rate, similar to a river bank being undercut, and soon we will have no way of defending ourselves from our own government if needed. Everyone, whether you like guns or not, are pro or anti gun control, should read this book. No matter what your beliefs, I think you will gain something from reading it.

So I get home and put it in my 360, and it won’t recognize it. Hmm… So I try a CD, no luck. Damn. I’ve had my 360 for months and didn’t realize it was broken. So I called Microsoft and told them the issue. They sent me a box to ship it to them in, and 2 weeks later they sent me back a new 360 free of charge. I have to say, other than the 30 minute conversation with the Indian support tech on the front end, it was a painless process.

So now I can witness the full power of this fully functioning Death Star.. I mean XBox. Viva Pinata is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I can’t believe it’s not more popular. Cute little pinata animals that you can breed or kill, as you decide.

Then I went and picked up Tenchu Z and Overlord. Overlord seems fun so far, I’ve only played 30 minutes or so. Tenchu is amazing, it’s a lot of fun, good graphics and sweet stealth kills. It’s also got a great co-op mode via XBox Live where you can run any mission except the secret ones with 1-3 friends. One of my friends rented it and we’ve been playing some co-op the last few nights. Nothing is cooler than moving steadily through a village killing everyone without being spotted once. I’m choking someone, and just as someone comes around the corner my friend is dropping from the roof behind him and stabbing him. Brilliant.

So final verdict. The Wii is great from a concept POV, but has yet to live up to it’s potential other than party games and virtual console. The 360 is all around great. Good arcade games, live functionality, and solid console games thus far. It’ll be a long time before I buy a PS3, at least until the next FF game comes out. And I may very well be in Japan by then.

Saturday:
8am - get up, have breakfast, watch Anime.
11am - Play StarCraft.
12pm - go over to friends house, teach him some C#, play some Guitar Hero.
5pm - swing by the video store, pick up “Stranger than Fiction”.
6pm - each dinner, watch Stranger than Fiction.
8pm - play some StarCraft (because I’m in the mood after the SCII announcement).
9pm - watch “Nobuta wo Produce”.
11pm - early sleep

Sunday:
8am - get up, have breakfast, finish Nobuta wo Produce.
11am - Play StarCraft.
12:30pm - start watching “Ace wo Nerae”.
2:30pm - Play StarCraft.
5pm - Order Pizza,watch more Ace wo Nerae.
9pm - Play more StarCraft.
11pm - sleep

Monday:
9am - get up, have breakfast, finish Ace wo Nerae, start watching “Attack No.1″
12pm - Play StarCraft
2pm - Watch more Attack No.1
5pm - Play StarCraft
7pm - Watch more Attack No.1
10pm - Play StarCraft
11:30pm - sleepytime. (Only 2 episodes of Attack No.1 left!)

So, it was the ultimate RTS/JDrama weekend. After watching Azumi and Attention Please I have become a big fan of Ueto Aya. I’m becoming a girly man as I’ve cried multiple times (sometimes per episode) in all of her drama shows. She has a way of conveying emotion, especially sadness, in a way that really touches me. I’m not exactly sure what she does that is different from other actors, but it’s probably a combination of the following. She gets a lot of roles, especially in her sports shows, where she is the stupidly optimistic underdog who has to go through a very painful development, both physically and emotionally, in order to grow into an amazing athlete. When I can see the idealism she portrays being confronted by the cruelty of reality, the tears she sheds coupled with the quivering lips, and the look in her eyes, it just starts my tears going without me even realizing until one falls down my cheek.

I also really appreciate the amazing ability she has to convey a different level of maturity in each role she plays. I have watched on of her works from each of 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. This corresponds to her age of 18-21 respectively. In these years she portrayed an assassin, a high school tennis player, a high school volleyball player (who seems younger than the previous role) and an adult becoming a flight attendant. While most of the roles are close to her real age, the amount of maturity the role calls for is different for each one, and she pulls it off flawlessly. Most striking is that the earliest of the four roles listed was in Azumi, where she plays an assassin. She shows the most maturity in that character. The other characters call for an immature but lovable character who perseveres through all obstacles who grows by the end, much like a Miyazaki movie. While the character progression remains similar for most of these shows, she has the ability to take the story and the role and really bring it to life.

In these two sports shows, she has an interesting foil in Sakai Ayana, who plays her coach’s previous student/sister and rival to Aya in Ace, and plays friend turned rival/enemy turned friend in Attack. She is a very talented actress who hasn’t been in enough shows. She played a small role in Hana Yori Dango, and has done a couple other shows, but not near enough.

Anyways, enough of me gushing about Aya while I look at my office desktop 2007 Aya calendar. I know, I’m a dork. Ah well. It was a good weekend.

The Twelve Kingdoms (Juuni Kokki) is an epic set of novels written by Fuyumi Ono back in the 1990’s. It consists of seven novels thus far. An Anime adaptation was created in 2002 that ran for 45 episodes. The Anime is brilliant, but incomplete.

The series consists of several stories spread around this world consisting of eight kingdoms in a diamond shape, with four islands around the sides. In the center is an island that is the province of the heavens. The basic premise is that the gods created creatures known as the “Kirin”, one of which is assigned to each kingdom and selects the ruler of the country when the previous ruler dies. The title the Kirin hold is called “Taiho”, and they are named after each country, with the name of the country as the first part of their name, and the “Ki” or “rin” from Kirin as the 2nd part, depending on the gender of the Kirin. The only person that the Kirin will obey is the true ruler of the kingdom. The twelve kingdoms are named Hou, Ryu, Tai, Kyo, En, Han, Kei, Sai, Kou, Ren, Son and Shun. The rulers of each kingdom become immortal, as do their servants. The ruler can be killed, but will not die of natural causes. Only if the ruler disobeys the edicts of heaven will he/she fall from power. The main edicts are to be a just ruler and not to interfere with other countries. If a ruler violates these then an affliction known as Shitsudou strikes the country. Weather turns bad, demons appear and the Kirin becomes sick. If the ruler mends his/her ways, all will be ok, but if not and the Kirin dies, then the ruler dies.

This world is occasionally connected to our world via tears in the dimensional walls. These tears are called “Shoku” and are accompanied by storms. When this happens people from our world can be transported into the world of the 12 kingdoms. These people are known as Kaikyaku and have many difficulties, depending on the country in which they end up. The world uses Chinese characters for writing, but the spoken languages is completely different, so Kaikyaku can’t communicate effectively. Also, since they are brought by Shoku, which can cause violent storms, they are sometimes looked upon as curses and persecuted.

The world is a very low-tech world, with no electricity, technology, etc. Instead there is the divine powers of the heavens, and spirits and demons. Another major difference is that children are not born from women, they are grown on trees as pods. The parents pray for a child, and tie ribbons to the special tree, and if the gods bless them, a pod will grow on the branch they chose to tie the ribbon to. It takes about 10 months, and then the child hatches.

The shoku is one-way, from Japan (known as Wa) or China (known as Han) to this world. There are a couple exceptions. Kirin and rulers can travel both directions, and occasionally a child pod is caught in a shoku and taken to our world. The pod comes to rest in a womans womb and the child is born. These people are known as Taika and are never truly at home in our world.

Spoilers Follow

The first novel released in the US follows the story of a girl named Yoko Nakajima. She is a high-school student in Japan, and constantly feels left out and never quite comfortable with her life. One day she starts having nightmares, of creatures in the darkness coming after her. After almost a month of this nightmare, a tall man with gold hair appears in front of her in school, says she is in danger, and swears fealty to her. He says his name is “Keiki” and pulls her onto the roof of the school, where they are attacked by a giant raptor called a “Kochou”. Keiki gives her a sword and tells her to fight. She refuses and he attaches a spirit called Joyou which is a “Hinman” to her, which fights through her body. She then is taken on a flying creature through a Shoku to the world of the 12 kingdoms where she is separated from the creatures and left on her own. She finds that she can understand everyone just fine, and her body has also changed. Her hair color has changed along with her face and body. The story then follows as she crosses the country of Kou, continually fighting the demons who pursue her, and comes close to losing her humanity and ability to trust people in the process. She is saved, both literally and spiritually, by a half-man/half-beast “Hanjyuu” known as Rakushun. Rakushun appears as a waist-high rat that is very intelligent and walks on hind legs. Rakushun saves her from near-death, and accompanies her on her journey. Yoko finally finds out the truth about Keiki, herself and her destiny.

Spoilers End

This novel was a very enjoyable read. It was well written and well translated. I encountered very few editing errors. The novel is hard-bound and the size of a manga. It runs over 400 pages, with medium size font and approximately 1.5 line spacing. Interspersed with the text are occasional full-page line-drawn pictures. It was very well done. I am extremely pleased with this novel and eagerly await the others. Tokyopop released this novel, but unfortunately has no future release dates listed.

Go buy this novel now!

http://www.tokyopop.com/S-1787/1.html

EDIT: I emailed the Press contact at Tokyopop and was informed that Volume #2 will not come out until 2008, and a volume a year afterwards… Lame.

So, what happened?  You might be wondering that.  Well I’ll tell you.  It all began Friday morning.  I was at work, doing my work thing.  I had just finished patching my work machine for the DST fix.  I thought to myself, “self, you should patch the AP server so that the forums will have the correct times”.  So away to ssh I went.  I ran a yum update, but seeing as I was distracting, being as previously mentioned, at work, I wasn’t paying too much attention.  So I ended up doing a full update of every package on the system.  It seemed to work fine, so I went on with my day.

Fast forward three hours.  I see Deathgod reporting that the emails seem to not be working on the forums.  I go to look, and sure enough.  I ssh back in and can’t even ping Google.com.  Slight panic sets in.  I do some snooping and find out that the update broke name resolution.  I manage to get that fixed, and then I’m getting an error with the tls encryption that gmail requires.  Apparently the update also broke openssl.  Slightly more panic sets in.  I go to try and do an yum remove for openssl so I can install a previous version, and get an error.  Why?  Because the yum update broke yum.  Now full blown panic sets in.  I start trying multiple things to see if I can get it working.  Nothing works.  It’s 5:40pm and I’m supposed to be at dinner at 6pm and then “300″ afterwards.  So I head out.  Chatting with Chigo and Batou at dinner, having a large headache because I had broken the emails as well as other things, I realize that because emails were broken, so was registration.  Eek!  Of course I could have just changed validation to none or admin, but I didn’t think of it.  So I call Rangi asking her to change that if she has a chance.  She’s not home so I leave a message.

300 kicked ass, and helped me to relax a bit.  That and sushi.  So I get home about 11:30pm and change the validation.  Then I decide to get up in the morning and see what I can find.

I get up in the morning, and give the dog a haircut, have lunch with a friend and change the oil on my motorcycle (Suzuki GSX-R1000).  Coming off those successful things I’m feeling confident.  So I start working again at like 3pm.  I come to realize that there is really no fixing what I broke.  I’ve got most of the files backed up locally, and I can get database backups, and the last image (read OS) backup I have is back in August. (Mental note: do image backups more often).  So I take backups of all eight databases and then disable the forums.  Then I pull down all the files and restore the image.

So now we have a functioning site again, but it thinks that it was last used in August, so I disable the forum again, and start copying all the files back up.  Then I start restoring the databases.  It works fine for the first couple small databases, but fails on the important ones (read main site and forums).  I mess with that for an hour or two and get more and more frustrated.  Rukia asks how it’s going and I say “I can’t get this stupid web based database interface to work” and then stop and think.  Of course!  If the web based interface sucks, just copy the sql scripts up to the site and do it on the command line!  So I do that, and find out it’s erroring because the mysql server buffer size is set to 1mb.  This is very stupid.  So I do some research to figure out how to set that value, get that set, and then get the databases restored.  So now the files are pretty much back up, and I’ve got this site working, as well as the forums, wiki, galleries, and the rangiku files, but the main site is failing.  So I leave that for a minute and try to confirm that the forum is working.  I do a post, no problem.  I do a 2nd post, and get an error. Wha!?!  Turns out my backups, which were supposed to be complete, left the autoincrement attributes out, so I have to go through every table in every database that uses an incrementing identifier and add it in manually.  Then stuff starts working fine.  So I’ve got everything working now except for the main site.  I can’t figure out why it’s not working, so finally I try running the index.php file from the command line in ssh, and figure out that there was one shortcut file missing from one plugin.  I create the link and it starts working, as if by magic.  It’s now about 11pm.  So the last thing I need to do is fix the template for this site.  So about another hour and it’s all back running.  Then I just have to get the the remaining 1GB of files copied back up, most of which are the AMV’s from rangi’s site and all the files/logs from our Datte bot for Chigo.  So I leave that running overnight.

So that’s what happened.  That’s also why theOtaku.com show and our show didn’t come out until Sunday, because I wasn’t going to work on those until the site was fixed.

So it was an issue that wouldn’t have happened excepted I wasn’t paying enough attention while doing an update.  And what have I learned?  Leave stuff alone if it works and make sure to update very carefully.  and most important of all.  Before doing a major update as I did, take an image backup first.  Had I done that I could have just restored it and lost at the most three hours of forum activity.  Well, lesson learned.  Sorry for the downtime and hopefully it won’t happen again.

That would have been fine except for one thing. I forgot to make sure that the feed still worked. Well, guess what? It didn’t. I got up at 6:30 and saw Deathgod’s post on the forums saying that the feed wasn’t validating and I checked it out. Turns out there was no feed, which would explain a lack of validation . So I spent an hour rewriting the feed file to work correctly and managed to get that done before I went to work. Then on my way back from Japanese I had a light-bulb. I’m not talking some dinky 100 watt bulb here, I’m talking Sports Arena, Alien Ship floodlight. The main page loop had changed from a “foreach” loop to a “while” loop. But in my tiredness last night I had only changed the loop delaration, but I forgot to change the “endfor” to an “endwhile”. I got back to work and made that quick change and viola, we had a site again. I did a quick upgrade of podpress, and some tweaking and we were back in business. It was much faster upgrading this site, as the theme was done, I just had to tweak it for my site. It makes me wish I was more diligent in setting up a test environment to verify upgrades before rolling it out live. I know that if AP gets bigger then I will have to do that to avoid downtime, but at least this time I had the default theme to fall back on, otherwise I would have had to roll back the upgrade which is always a good time.

Anyways, I thought I’d better check back in as it’d been a while since my last post. I’m working on an advertising deal through Kiptronic that should come through in the next couple months. Nothing huge, but it could be lucrative for us. A host’s work is never done.

We here at Anime Pulse will be doing an interview with Adam, the head of theO, in the next day or two, so hopefully we can get some tasty tidbits for all of our listeners. But my heartfelt condolences go out to everyone who was hurt by this farce of a convention and it’s organizer, Jeffrey Borncamp.