It's Friday, already?  I thought is was Thursday at that latest.  Oh, well.  I guess I have no complaints about that.  What a day it's been.  I should say, what a 24 hour period it's been.  It doesn't occur often, but tonight I just feel like unloading some things.

  First off, I've been trying to wrap my brain around VCD's.  For those who don't know, you can burn video files onto a cd that can play in most current DVD players.  You have to actually burn them with a VCD making program: you can't just make a data disc.

  Anyway, I've been making VCD's for a while, but I'm still trying to conquer the resolution issues.  The dimensions for a VCD video are 352x240 (width/height).  The problem, at least with all the DVD players I've used, is that some of the sides gets chopped off, as if the image is too large for the screen.

  What I've been doing is first reducing the dimensions of the video to 320x224 and then increasing it again a certain way to effectively put a border around it.  Basically, it's the boarder that gets chopped when played.  The problem is that not all players show the exact same way, and not all dimension changes behave the same way.  That's a very vague statement, by the way.

  On one DVD player, the image was always a little too far to the left.  I made the video off-center, and that worked perfectly... for that player.  The player I'm currently using is properly centered, but the boarders are seemingly unpredictable.  On one size video, I have a boarder width that is way too thick, but I use the same boarder width with a different video of the same width, and it's like the sides of the boarder were not there at all.

  I just don't know what the problem is.  If anyone out there can help me out, I would really like to hear from you.

  In other news, I really wish I knew Japanese.  Two of the more recent Japanese music groups I've developed an interest in are L'Arc~en~Ciel and Ayumi Hamasaki.

  L'Arc~en~Ciel is an all male group.  It's unusual for me to care anything about male singers, these passed years, but I enjoy their sound.  They are not the pop that Japan typically has.  They are more a refined heavy metal, in my own opinion.  I also find the singers voice oddly comforting.  He face also has a unique look about it.  I kind of wonder if he's actually Japanese, genetically speaking.

  The more recent singer of interest to me is Ayumi Hamasaki.  She's also not the standard pop... at least not entirely.  She does have some songs that are pretty standard sounding, but she also has some that are more alternative.  A few even combine the two.

  I'm not really as into either of them as I am Puffy AmiYumi, however.  L'Arc~en~Ciel and Ayumi Hamasaki have certain songs that I like, but most of their music is stuff that doesn't really grab me, and some doesn't even manage to touch me, much less grab.

  Puffy AmiYumi are very different.  I do not currently have any conscious memory of any song of theirs that I do not like to some degree, and since American Andy Sturmer, formerly of Jellyfish, joined them as a producer, they've only gotten better.  Incidentally, I know practically nothing of the band, Jellyfish.

  They've become rather well known in America.  Perhaps you've heard of the cartoon The Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi Show on Cartoon Network.  I've never seen any episodes, but I hear they're not that good.

  Maybe they should stick to music, because they are fantastic at that.  FYI, they also do the theme song for the Teen Titans cartoon, and that one is actually pretty awesome on its own.

  But I don't want to leave this topic without mentioning Faye Wong, who is Chinese.  I heard something about her retiring, but I don't know if it was just a rumor.  No matter.  Faye Wong is amazing.  She's got the best voice I've ever heard from anyone.  She's got a whole lot of songs, but in my opinion, about one disc's worth of amazing songs.  Understand that I've not actually heard most of her songs, so take that for whatever it's worth to you.

  She's also done some acting.  Probably most well known, in this respect, for her role in Chungking Express.  There are times when descriptive words fail, so I'm not even going to try.  I will say that, like the movie, Hero, Quentin Tarantino really wanted it to be brought to the attention of American audiences.  FYI, Chungking Express is a love story.  Not really something you'd expect to be promoted by Quentin Tarantino.

  Anyway, she's great in the movie and intensely cute.  Seriously... freakin' cute.  I'm a little ticked that I could not find a picture that does her justice as her character, but then I don't want to suggest that the cuteness was all about her looks.

  Here are some other movies very much worth mentioning.  House of Flying Daggers, from the same director as Hero.  Amelie, if you're interested in a very delightful film.  And then there's Fallen Angels, from the same director as Chungking Express.

  If you read the linked review of Fallen Angels, you'll notice the person mentions, in his/her own words, a similarity between the two films.  What the person probably did not know was that there was originally going to be an additional storyline in Chungking Express, but the direction felt is was just too much.  He later decided to give it life, and so was born Fallen Angels.

  What was that other thing I wanted to talk about?  I keep forgetting.  It was something music related.  Well, I'll work on the HTML for this, and maybe I'll remember it.

  Oh, yeah. Tim Curry.

  One of the Myspace sections is who you'd like to meet.  Well, there are a number of people that I would theoretically like to meet, but I would not make any efforts to actually meet them, because I wouldn't really have much of anything, at the ready, to talk to them about.  Slight tangent here: I'm also not really into autographs.  I'd rather shake your hand than have your autograph.  I'll pick this back up later.

  I was at a local trade shop a number of years ago (I'll say 7), and I was looking through the vinyl records for anything interesting, and imagine my surprise to find that Tim Curry had actually made a regular music album.  I thought to myself, I... have to buy this.  I can't not buy this.  The album is called Simplicity, for the record... no pun intended.

  So, going back to the first paragraph, I'm later (still years ago) thinking, if, for any reason, Tim Curry ever knocked on my front door, I would absolutely ask him to sign that album.  BTW, he definitely needed to stick to novelty songs for things like Rocky Horror and cartoons.