A lot has happened in the past three weeks.

• In Real Life ™ : I bought an Tascam HD-P2 portable audio recorder (more accurately, it is my parents’ final investment in me). It’s a great piece of hardware, believe me. You can visit Tascam’s website for more info, but here are some of the key features: records up to 192KHz/24bit stereo on Compact Flash cards, 2 XLR mic inputs, 1x stereo line input/1xoutput (cinch), built-in limiter, timecode and video clock input, digital (coax) in/out, firewire, PS/2 keyboard input, can be DC/Firewire/battery (8xAA) powered. I’ve had it for two weeks now, but I’ve done only a couple of tests since I didn’t have a proper microphone to test with. Now I’ve borrowed two Shure’s: SM57 and Prologue 14L and we’ll see how it goes in the next couple of days.
  I’m currently playing keyboards (Korg Polysix, woot!) in a band with a couple of friends and we’ve recorded two of our practicing sessions with those mics linked — it sounds excellent. I’ll try to remember to do a mini-review of HD-P2 soon, since I haven’t found any (reviews) on the net and people seem to be looking for it.
• Internet-wise, the biggest surprise for me was Blue Security’s announcement that they’re backing out and giving up the battle against spammers. Couple of days ago, they even advised their users to uninstall the Blue Frog software because spammers might try to use it against them. In the end, it all introduces us to a new kid on the block — it seems that P2P networks can be used to fight spam, with Blue Security’s project SourceForged. It’s called Black Frog (aka Okopipi).
• In the gaming world, there was Nintendo Wii, effortlessly destroying all competition. After the announced name change, all seemed to go uphill for Nintendo — the name got accepted pretty quick, the controller kicks ass in every possible way, there will be plenty of games available for the console at its launch, and it’s going to cost a mere ~$200. People waited for hours at E3 just so they could play with it.
  And what about PS3? The announced $600 (for the premium version) price tag doesn’t look that attractive at first, but if you consider the hardware you’re getting for that money — it’s too cheap, really. A couple of game screenshots that I’ve seen look very promising, the pre-installed Linux is definitely a plus, there’s the Blu-ray drive (who needs HD-DVD anyway?), a 60GB hard disk, Wi-Fi, MS/SD/MMC/CF cards reader, USB, wireless controller (with, err…some motion and tilt sensitivity), nice and easy to use interface (similar to the one on PSP), HDMI, 1080p — it’s a perfect home multimedia system. And also a gaming console. Not such a bad deal after all, huh? That is, unless you live in the U.K. where the price won’t be $600, but £425 (~$800) . And probably €600 anywhere else in Europe. I never understood the laws and taxes in these cases, but, for example, to me it seems awfully wrong that I could buy a PSP for $195 in Japan almost a year ago, and here in Croatia the price is still over $300.
• Joan of Arcadia
  That’s just another great show that got canned last year because… I think the reason was that the average age of viewers was — 54? How is that possible? It’s practically a teen show, and one of best educational series I’ve ever seen. So how come the percentage of young people who watched it was so low? I really don’t know, but I think it’s sad.
  Wanna know what else is sad? : “Charmed” is still on air. “OC” too. And many more crappy TV shows. Yes, we all have different tastes so I won’t go on, but JoA was just one of those shows that I thought would last for a while, because it talked about God in a non-religious way, it wasn’t a catholic/jewish/muslim/buddhist/whatever propaganda, it didn’t force anything — it was simply about choices and faith. And it was good.
• I’ve watched the pilot episode (“War zone”) of “Crusade” (Babylon 5 sequel from 1999) last night. The series got cancelled even before the whole first season aired in full. And for a good reason: this pilot was probably one of the most embarrassing moments in TV history. I’m a really tolerant person, but I couldn’t force myself to watch another episode.So, that blurb above, I wrote it before reading the following text on series’ IMDB page:
  The show was canceled before it even aired. It was not canceled because it was bad, but because TNT made it bad. They did eventually air it, but totally out of order. If you ignore “War Zone” and watch the other 12, it’s a great show. The show clearly has an arc, and it was about to begin when the show was canceled. Hopefully the SCI-FI channel will pick it up in the future and continue this great series.
  I might give it a chance yet, 6.9 score on IMDB equals to that of Joan of Arcadia. It better be worth it.
• Deftones are coming to play in Zagreb on June 27th. Oh, it’s going to be a beautiful day and I can hardly wait for it :D Reminder to self: go buy the ticket already.
  I’ve been listening to Chino’s “Team Sleep” for the past 2-3 days. It seemed a bit “shallow” at first glance, but there’s a couple of tracks that I really began to love. It’s a good one, in the end..
• Four Eyed Monsters intrigue me. Go pay a visit to their website and watch the video podcasts.
• I’ve finished reading Bukowski‘s “Notes of a dirty old man“. I loved it.