Recently, a friend of mine told me about a game named Okami, which I've gotten a copy of and so far has been a fairly interesting and very beautifully made game. While I've been able to find a few glitches (mostly related to invisible walls), it's been a fairly solid experience and I've been trying not to play it too much - I've limited myself to only an hour or two per day so that I don't finish it too fast. I also appear not to be the only one who thinks there are similarities to Zelda in this game - I think my sister may enjoy playing this game as well, so perhaps next time she's around I'll introduce her to it :) I've found the music score to be so beautiful that I've written and highlighted the OST on my wishlist (Which, by the way, has lost most of it's items due to the database loss previously described.). I've already found a download for the whole OST and gotten it, but I'd much rather actually have those five CDs... as well as the game itself. Normally, I'd also back this up with And hey, I'd be supporting the company!, but it turns out that Clover Studio, the creator of Okami, will be dissolved by it's parent company, CAPCOM. I've got a digit up at 'em. Speaking of music, though, I've been finishing some uploads at Jamendo, and the music is pretty sweet. I'd recommend having a listen to Simon Slator and/or Saelynh, depending on your music tastes, or perhaps just browing by tags. It's too bad there aren't people as interested as I am in choruses*. Hard to find, that. Moving on to more technological things: My mother recently decided to have VoIP installed at our house, though I've no idea why. She must've gotten an offer in the mail - I thought I threw that thing in the recycling! - and decided to go for it. Sigh. Though I've not had the chance to verify yet, I think this means that my bypass method can't be used anymore - Mereo, care to test this with me? Anyhow, I'd forgotten that I'd split the TV cable and run it to my room (without Rogers' permission... I guess that's where they make their money) at some point to test something out. So, the guys (Yes, there were three Rogers techs here to install the damned device!) decided to cut every cable except one TV cable, the internet cable and the VoIP cable. This might've been fine, had they picked the right TV cable... so we had to get someone to fix it the next day. The recent downtime of my server was caused by me shutting down everything so as to completely upgrade and recompile everything. (Technical details: gcc & glibc update, you see; While C programs are actually mostly unaffected by such an upgrade, C++ programs usually all need to be recompiled. The problem is that you can't really tell one from the other, so you pretty much have to recompile everything that's C-based.) Thankfully the process wasn't all that long. Also, on the subject of the server: Since I've been forgetting to do the changes on the gallery, I've been thinking of allowing access to it right now, but to still exclude the albums I haven't done the work on yet. And one final thing: It seems more spambots have found me and decided to try to plague me. Although this one, while it gave me several spam comments (~8-10), was using pretty much the same URL each time so I only had to add that to the filter list. It seems even diabetes medication has made it to the spam market. One of my cousins is supposed to visit near the end of November. Joy. And finally a local event: Municipal voting has begun, and once again I wasn't on the voters list. I suppose it's not all that surprising, but anyway, I found it amusing that I didn't even recognize the names of most of these candidates, nevermind knowing who they are or what they're planning. I only know two because one of them keeps getting talked about (though he's apparently not the current mayor?), and the other I saw his ads on the bus about lowering bus fares. Hah. * A particular type, I should mention. I'm very picky on the subject for some reason, and it's not even a steady mood.