TGIF!

Updated 4:14PM: Back from my little computer job. Same older lady as usual, this time having e-mail issues. Seems someone accidentally sent her the same e-mail like 10 times or something with a 1MB attachment, so on her slow dial-up connection it'd take forever to download so she probably thought nothing was happening. Accessed webmail (after she found her password, thank goodness), deleted duplicates, problem solved. After that, it was off to Olive Garden for lunch with my dad, one of my two sisters, and crazy little brother -- I swear, he'd be right at home with Fine and Milky from Futago Hime since he's always thinking about food. Barnes & Noble is right next door so I stopped by and did a quick 立ち読み of Shojo Beat. As I said before, the manga in it are targeted a little bit above my usual shoujo reading of Nakayoshi, etc., so I don't know if I'll be keeping up with it. Also took a look at Full Moon wo Sagashite. Interesting that they left the Japanese titles in there. Anyways, it looked pretty good to me. Y'all better have gotten it already ;)

---

After actually being up during the day for a couple of days I'm back to my nocturnal ways for the most part. Well, I tried :P I will have to get back on a normal schedule soon since school starts in less than a month on August 18. Oh joy.... and I need to call the music school office and get them to send me the audition music for band so I can get started practicing and not completely suck ;)

Anyways, it's Friday, so it's time for some random interesting stories and such I've found during the week not necessarily related to anime (and also since I don't really have anything else to do right now...)

---

Betaplayer becomes The Core Pocket Media Player

Betaplayer, my preferred application for playback of media files (it'll play just about anything out there) on Pocket PC has gotten a new name, The Core Pocket Media Player, or TCPMP for short. There's a noticible increase in performance on my Dell Axim X5 Advanced running Windows Mobile 2003 (not SE, just plain 2003) compared to the previous Betaplayer version. Pocket PC... and Palm types, too, though who uses Palm these days? ;)... can grab it from the TCPMP project site.

btw, you can grab the pocket-sized version of the Ichigo Mashimaro OP pictured above here.

---

Lance Armstrong riding towards 7th straight Tour de France title

Can we all agree that Lance Armstrong is the man? ;) I'm watching the live coverage of stage 19 right now on OLN. Plenty of good videos and commentary from the OLN people on their Tour de France site. Lance seems to be taking things pretty easy, same as the past few stages, as he's got the win pretty much sewn up. I really started following the Tour a couple of years ago, actually getting up to watch the coverage that started about 8:30am every day. Even my dad's interested in what's going on, so that says something about how big Lance has gotten here.

---

Does onii-chan want to learn how to trade stocks?

Continuing the moe theme from yesterday...

Have any of you onii-chans out there wanted to try your luck at making some money doing stock trading, but have no idea what the people on CNBC are talking about? Well, the same people that brought you Moetan to improve your English now have the solution, Kabu de ikou! (another site about it here). By changing hard to understand 株 stocks into cute 妹 little sisters even the most hikikomori of otaku can learn how the stock market works. Main characters Erika and Arisa guide the totally clueless Koutarou on his fight to save the world from a future where moe doesn't exist -- by trading stocks. A sample from the first chapter for those interested is here.

....I think most of the onii-chans who buy the book would be more interested in looking at the 200+ moe illustrations in it ;) Here's an entry from the Akiba blog with some pictures of in-store advertising for it, and another with some shots from the book itself.

---

Microsoft Longhorn gets an official name

And the official name for the next version of Windows is... [insert drum roll here]... Windows Vista... one of those marketing things, I guess (^^;) The Windows Mobile people are still sticking with the usual year names (2003, then 2003SE, then 2005 due out soon), though. Anyways, News.com.com.com.com.com has a story on it. On a related note, supposedly a public beta of IE7 is due out around the same time as the release of Windows Vista beta 1, so I'll be checking it out to make sure everything works right here.