I've been something of a fanboy of Opera for a long while now. It's quick-loading, has strong caching and doesn't hog memory like Firefox used to. However, with FF cleaning up house for its 3.x family, by fixing all those memory leaks, improving performance by leaps and bounds and introducing those little features (page zooming for e.g.) that make things ever so friendlier, I'm of a mind to switch back to it.

I just finished watching Speed Racer, an adaptation of the anime and manga, Mach Gogogo / Speed Racer. Directed by the Wachowski brothers, Speed racer is, IMHO, the best live-action adaptation of an anime / cartoon that retains its original flavour and roots.

The synopsis of the anime is as follows:

I use SoundKonverter to accomplish all my ripping and trans-coding tasks. It's something of a front-end for all the command-line apps and is a serious time saver.

Anyone else notice the rising popularity of live video / TV sites and applications all over the place? In the last year or so, what was just a niche service / application has exploded into the mainstream and I won't be surprised if established sites such as YouTube also manoeuvre to get a piece of this pie.

Presently available offerings can be segregated into two categories:

The Song of Today is Def Leppard's Bringin' on the Heartbreak off their sophomore release High 'n' Dry. The song was the first hit rock ballad for the band and probably was fit the blueprint for rock ballads of the time - high octave vocals, melodious chorus, harmonies and piercing guitars, a format of which I'm an inveterate admirer / sucker.

While I hate Real as much as just about everybody else, I inadvertently downloaded an RMVB file today and was pleasantly surprised at the quality vs. file size ratio. At about 70MB for a 25 minute episode, the quality was - relatively speaking - extremely good.

To quote WP:

Today's Song of the Day is by the legendary German band Scorpions. While I am quite familiar with most of their tracks, I've not listened to many of their earlier albums in their entirety and going by the general popularity of tracks off their later albums, I was quite certain that I'd find some gems out there.

Shared editing is very useful for debugging / walk-throughs etc., and the Real-time shared editing plug-in, which is a part of the Eclipse communication Framework Project is nifty beyond expectations.

The following is a screencast taken from Mustafa Isik's blog:

Today's Song of the Day is from Marty Friedman's 2006 album - Loudspeaker - named "Street Demon".

This is legendary conductor André Previn (very unprepared apparently) appearing as himself in a 1971 episode of Morecambe and Wise. I haven't laughed this much in a long while :P