Ijime.

We have a new child now. Her name is Ijime. She's pretty, she's fast at times, and she's very artistically talented. She's a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but once she gets something down, she's on it like white on rice. Of course, a little more memory and she'll be just fine. She's even learned to put away her childish baby toys and use things a bit more adult.

Oh... did I mention that Ijime is a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 from Gateway?

Yeah, I was up 'til 1 AM last night getting Z's new machine set up. It's been an experience - not a bad one, mind you - learning the intricacies of Windows XP. Fortunately, I've got enough Win2k experience to know how to administrate it somewhat. Now I just need to tweak it a bit to improve performance. You see, window redrawing is s-l-o-o-o-o-o-w. We think this is due to two factors:

1) Only 128 MB of memory in this box. We can double it tonight (going out to MicroCenter for some memory).
2) On-board Intel video that uses system memory for vid memory. Getting a new video card and more memory should fix that - assuming that there's even an AGP port in the thing. We'll find out when I put the memory in, neh?

Speaking of upgrades, I was flipping through the manual and I was just amazed by what I read. Apart from the screws holding the motherboard to the case, nothing's screwed in. It all snaps in with little levers and locks. It's like one of those old Snap-Fit model kits that I used to put together, only with computer parts instead of model plane wings...

Oddness. But Z's happy to have her own computer for the first time since her old shitty Packard Bell 486 in college. And I'm happy to have a computer I can tweak for her, and learn XP on, and to have my own computer again. Tadaka is mine, all mine!!! And the router's been happy, and the 'net connection's been happy, and life is good.

Kung Fu RoX0Rs!

Yesterday, I cracked open the 10-DVD set of Kung Fu films that Seth and Kim got me for my birthday. Flipped through them, and decided to put in "The 36 Crazy Fists", a films whose only claim to fame is that the fight choreography was done by a much-younger Jackie Chan. The production values on the DVD are terrible - it's a VHS rip, complete with distorted pics when the tape wrinkled in the player. The picture's a bit washed out, the aspect ratio is off (so people's heads are occasionally chopped off by the top of the screen)... and the movie itself has some of the worst voice acting ever, since everyone has varying degrees of British accents (including monks who speak in Cockney).

In other words, it's perfect!

I don't watch kung fu films because they're great examples of film making. I watch them because they're fun, and because I don't have high expectations, I'm not disappointed. It's perfectly watchable, and it has a lot of humor and action, like a live-action cartoon.

And it has bare Chinese breasts! BONUS!

See? It's all good. :)

Ijime: Addendum.

Apparently, a reboot fixed the slow redrawing problem, so Iji and her mommy are both happy and healthy now. Of course, some extra memory can't hurt, so we'll go ahead and get some more to throw in there.