RIP Jazz

To describe 2014 as a bad year would be a gross understatement. About a month ago, my father and I noticed one of our cats was having health problems again. Jazz was afflicted with periodic bouts of upper respiratory infections since his birth and usually managed to shake them off. This time he lost a lot of weight before getting over the bug, but he’d always been a very strong animal.

The weight loss continued in dramatic fashion and we took him to the vet two weeks ago. From the symptoms and sky high calcium in the blood, it was surmised he had a tumor hidden somewhere in his stomach. Such irony, given my father’s lymphoma in the same location.

Refusal to eat followed and he began to decline rapidly. What’s amazing is that he held on to the point of being in absolute misery. With no other choice, I had to put Jazz down today.

Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C3 Review

At first glance an obvious attempt to pander to anime fans by combining cute girls with guns for comedic effect, Stella Women’s Academy aspires to be more than just another cute girls show. Filled with kinetic airsoft gun battles, teen girls being silly, and meditations on self worth, this little anime teaches the lesson that one should never judge something by its cover – including the series itself.



Rather than reviewing anime series episode by episode, tackling them one season at a time will be the new approach on the blog. So please bear with me, since this is something I’ve only attempted once before and the review will be a little rough around the edges.

First off, I need to present a disclaimer.

I really don’t like the cute girls doing nothing subgenre of anime. Aimed at otakus without social lives, the rise of these moe dominated series are my bane along with jiggly T&A ecchi fests. Mindless and irritating, I can’t stand them. This will color my review.



So why am I reviewing a cute girls show, you wonder?

Well, I’m gun owner and enthusiast, so giving the first episode a shot was mandatory, if distasteful. To my astonishment, the show was funny and hinted at hidden depth which made me stick around for the next episode. Before I knew it, the emerging serious themes in the storyline combined with well written characters to hook both me and my senior citizen father.

General Conference

I know it is October because it is time for General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints again. It used to be that Halloween candy displays would alert me to the year waning, however they showed up early last month.

The second talk of the first session that just wrapped up is going to be hard to top. “Which way do you face?” was the question asked and challenges those faithful to Christ’s teachings to stand by them in the face of increasingly hostile peer pressure. If the last two General Conferences could be characterized as being defenses of Christian standards, the tone of the first session feels a bit more feisty.

Another thing that caught my personal attention was the first time a speaker used his native language rather than English to deliver a sermon. My complaint is a minor one: I wished it had been subtitled on the English stream rather than verbally translated. This was done for ease of comprehension, but I like to hear the inflections of the speaker.

Also of interest is the new Church move to embrace social media more completely. Now they have set up a way to easily share to Twitter, Facebook, Google +, and other services along with a page showing messages that have gone out. While not a fan of the Web 2.0, I can see the younger folks using this a lot.

I wish I was feeling a little more alert while watching the stream for the cold weather has made rest difficult and pain high. Thankfully, I will be able to download the talks later and listen to them as many times as I want to gain further insights into the Gospel. As President Uchtdorf said in the conclusion of the session, “the process of gathering spiritual light is the quest of a lifetime.”

Not only do I love his talks, I’ve grown to love that man.

As always, General Conference is open to everyone to see, not just members. Check out the October sessions here.

Return of the Russian Spam

A familiar pattern of false referrals has shown up in my September 2014 Blogger statistics making me wish there was a way to exile them to Siberia. Featuring a bevy of webpages originating from a site previously encountered, the spam is dedicated to parting you from your hard earned rubles.

While I don’t have any rubles to lose, precaution was taken in exploring the links. Firing up my trusty VirtualBox installation of Ubuntu 14 and using the TOR browser for anonymity I keep spam sites from looking at my real computer. Don’t try this at home unless you know what you are doing! It is best to never click on strange links.

Oh the irony of the first spam to hit my blog. http: // detective01 . ru / offers private investigator services of all kinds and would be somebody to hire to find out where spam is coming from in Russia. There’s just the small issue of them being spammers. Like quite a bit of spam from that country, it is connected to St. Petersburg and in this particular case the agency is based there.

Testing the FujiFilm HS25EXR, Part 2

More fooling around without a clue in order to see Fuji’s camera can do. As will become obvious, there is a lot to be learned yet. More photos and even a video only scratch the surface of what this far too capable mid-sized digital camera is capable of.



Ever behind on the times due to a lack of money, I feel like I’m constantly reinventing the wheel. It doesn't help I've forgotten everything about photography in the past five years. Due to dependency on automatic settings, pictures are never quite what I hope for, so expect to do better than this if you get your hands on the HS25EXR or one of its close relatives in the HS family.

In my previous post, I mentioned how post processing is needed to get good results. Spoiled by my Canon’s producing great results straight out of the viewfinder makes this a new experience. The two unaltered (other than resizing) shots above are a good illustration of why EXR mode is threatening my sanity.

Testing the FujiFilm HS25EXR, Part 1

Or a complete amateur’s fooling about with a new used camera in hopes of replacing his well out of date travel camera.

After failing to make a decent video of a once in a lifetime swarm of tens of thousands of dragonflies flitting around the property, I came to the reluctant conclusion my trusty Canon S1 IS was truly out of date. A newer used camera with HD recording was needed – hopefully one that took good stills as well. Hunting on eBay netted me a steal in the form of a FujiFilm FinePix HS25EXR 16 megapixel “bridge” camera capable of true 1080P video at 30 FPS.

Rave reviews online of this intermediate between snapshot and DSLR classes convinced me this would be a massive upgrade in capability. However, first snapshots had me wondering if I’d taken a step backward. Equipped with a bewildering array of settings, the HS25EXR was far more exotic than anything I’d used before. Of course that didn’t stop me from trying on my own.

Frayed or Fried?

Since I’m not getting anything done in the way of reviews, a report on why is in order. Simply put, things have needed doing and they have exhausted all my energy while absconding with my brainwaves. The trigger was having to mow the lawn, which is not good due to depleting my limited stamina along with the fact I’m allergic to grass. Not just grass pollen, but the plant itself.

A week later and the itching is finally gone, but the sinuses still hate me. Can’t say I blame them.

Dad may finally making some small progress. For the first time since March there are indications of fluids (water in this case) making its way from the stomach to the intestine. Cheap no calorie drink mix with very potent red dye revealed this when his feeding tube in the small intestines became tinted pink. Having spilled this stuff on white clothing, I can say it was a positive match.

Also, he has been measuring oral intake in milliliters in comparison with what he drains from the relief tube in the stomach. In the past few days, more than one hundred milliliters of water has gone missing with the implication that they have passed through the gastric outlet.

Too early to get really excited, but hey this is something that hasn’t happened before.