Eric’s Anime Pick: Ponyo

Without the support of John Lasseter at Pixar, I doubt Hayao Miyazaki’s animation would be as well known as it is in America. Miyazaki’s latest movie, ‘Ponyo’, looks fantastic on Blu-ray from Disney. The story is obviously based somewhat on ‘The Little Mermaid’. Maybe I can talk Eric into adding some comments. Here’s a sample.

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Obsessive tech note: This clip was converted from Blu-ray’s 24 fps to 30 fps, and from composite video to S-video,using a passive Y/C filter, so the quality suffers a bit from my usual. The subtitles read fine in HD, but they’re hard to make out here.

Turning Japanese

Some years back, Panasonic had an ISP business in Japan called hi-ho. They had a series of bizarre, addictive, animated commercials that Eric and I enjoyed watching. I remember Eric wasn’t even a teenager yet, so it had to have been a while ago. This one has a winter theme.

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Eric liked this one…

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…and this was my favorite.

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Tech note: these are the first videos I have made using CamStudio.

Plugging a leak product

A week ago I talked about the leak around the water feed pipe coming into the basement, and my clever way of getting the water to go into a bucket.

The seal around the pipe failed during an exceptionally heavy rain that fell on top of snow, so my next challenge was to plug the gap around the pipe. I used Loctite epoxy putty.

All you have to do is cut the amount of putty you need, then knead it to activate the epoxy. Once mixed, you have 10-15 minutes to mold it before it sets. I don’t know yet whether or not the leak is fixed, but if it is all it took was half of a $4 tube of putty.