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Rei Ayanami Is Here!

Joy gave me joyous news today: Rei Ayanami has arrived from the land of the rising sun! After a long long wait she’s finally here! I lost no time and met up with Joy and Lem for lunch and, of course, to pick Rei up. But I didn’t open the box right away. I wanted to document the unboxing. And this morning I finally did.

So what can I say? She’s gorgeous… drop-dead gorgeous. She’s primarily vinyl with some ABS parts. Definitely, designed for mass-production. Molding and paint job is top-notch though. There is no mistaking her for anyone else.
As expected, she’s eminently poseable being equipped with Kaiyodo‘s Revoltech joints. To aid in more life-like poses, she has four spare hands. There’s also a stand for those unstable poses.

Sadly, she only has The Spear of Longinus as an accessory. But then again, if you’re Rei, do you need anything else? Go see the anime if you don’t know what I mean.

All in all she’s great. There are many like her (including Joy’s). But this one is mine and she’s the best :P

Thanks again Joy-joy!

Check out the photos here.

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Pain

Yesterday, I played badminton again after a long hiatus brought about by the holidays. And I didn’t just play, I played hard. So today when I woke up, my muscle were screaming in agony. Someone (Marcinko?) said pain is good, it lets you know you’re alive. Oh yes, I do feel so alive. Argh!

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Asus Eee

asuseepc.jpgYesterday, as I was heading out for lunch, I encountered Tessa at the elevator lobby. She was carrying this small black neoprene case that almost without a doubt contained an electronic gadget. From the dimensions, I concluded that it was an Asus Eee which I’ve heard and read quite a bit about. But to be sure, I asked her and she confirmed that it is indeed an Eee. We talked about it a bit but since lunch was waiting, I scheduled a visit with her for later in the afternoon. As soon as I got some free time, I went up to her office and played around with the Eee.

The Eee is a diminutive device. It is around an inch thick and about the size of A5 paper and quite light. But it seems well-built and quite robust. The screen is small but quite usable especially when applications are in full screen mode. The keyboard is also small but still quite usable. The 900MHz processor is not too powerful and the 512MB RAM not too big but the response of applications is quite snappy. The storage is a (surprise!) small at 4GB, but quite fast since it is solid state (i.e. flash-based). If you need more, you’ll need to use external storage via up to three USB ports. But then again, most everything are stored online these days. Speaking of online it has both wired and wireless network interfaces.

But here’s the killer: It’s Linux-based! I know what you’re thinking. That it would be a complex beast. But no, it is actually seems quite easy to use. It has two mode: simple mode and full mode. In simple mode you’re presented with a very simple tabbed menu with large icons that even a grandma would like. Full mode, on the other hand, is the traditional Linux GUI with access to the applications you expect including my favorite: ssh. Oh yeah!

Do I like it? Hell yeah! But being new to the market, it’s still a bit expensive for my liking. But if someone were to gift me one, I wouldn’t say no. The black one please!

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RAID Blues Continued

Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse. We were almost done with the restoring of files to the RAID server when two more drives failed. We had to hurriedly buy extra drives from Gilmore and rebuild the RAID server. This effectively negated one week’s worth of backup restoration.

And that’s not all of it. Later in the evening, as I was connecting the backup drive to the newly arrived Buffalo Terastation Pro 2, the drive suddenly started smoking! I was able to quickly disconnect the power. It turns out the AC adapter failed and was probably feeding a higher voltage to the drive.

I needed to see if the drive is okay so I tried mounting it on Windows. It can see the disk but since it has a Linux EXT3 filesystem, Windows couldn’t see the files. Still it was a good sign. I then tried mounting it in on Linux but it really can’t see the disk!

Why is this happening to me?

UPDATE: Hallelujah! It works! I brought Selene, my now-Linux-based Thinkpad X22, to the office to see if it can mount and read the drive.  And it did! I’m so glad and relieved. Whew!