Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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Steve posted a list of his favorite animes, here are my favorites in order of recommendation, only Hellsing and Initial D are series. The links and images are from San Franciso based GreenCine which carries a lot of anime titles for rental which might help Steve avoid his big budget allocation.

Please see description at GreenCine or Netflix as some are graphic in nature, nothing on the scale of extreme movies like Seven, etc. It is on the leve of CSI or less.

1. Spirited Away (2001)

A fantasy story of a girl getting lost into a parallel world. Has Dragons, flying, Heroes and Villains.

2. Memories (1995)

Three short films, each different in it’s exploration, time and world.

3. Ninja Scroll (1986)

A samurai tale, pretty graphic (violent) in nature. Very well made

4. Akira (1987)

Most difficult to classify even for anime category, a mix of growing up tale, spirituality and energy (Chi), bikes and action.

5. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1998)

Hellsing Vol. 1: Impure Souls (2002)

Perfect Blue (1997)

Ghost in the Shell (1996)
Animatrix (2003)
Vampire Hunter D (1985)

Initial D Battle 4: Miyogi’s Downhill Technician (1998)
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001)

Dare writes quoting Charles Miller and adding

Like most iPod users, I don’t have a ton of music that was purchased from the iTunes music store but I still don’t want to end up losing that music once I switch devices. Thanks to proprietary DRM, a portion of my music library is forever tied to Apple’s family of digital audio players.

Why not just burn the tracks one buys from iTunes as a audio CD. Then rip it as mp3, etc.
There is the loss of audio quality, but how many of us listen on audio systems that show the difference.

Microsoft DRM is equally bad or worse from a consumer standpoint, it will run only on any WMA system (lock in with Microsoft and it’s OEMs), the rip to CD option will vary from title to title (like it does for the EAudio service, Overdrive of KCLS) instead of being standard as for iTunes.

That’s why nothing beats real CDs yet. DRM is not a reason that makes Zune more attractive.

Update: I do not have or had a iPod. However over the last 2-3 years, I have purchased around 30 singles from iTunes, it is either something catchy I hear or something from way back during my school days. All of these are burned onto a CD and ripped as mp3 for my current MP3 only music player.
Technorati Tags: iTunes iPod Zune Microsoft Apple DRM

Update:  Two articles from Roughly draft on Zune and iPod\iTunes: Why Microsoft Can’t Compete With iTunes and The Secret Failures of Microsoft

While exploring the web 2.0 phenomenon that my friends at MSN (Windows Live) and Amazon talk about and exploring the housing market to decide whether to buy a house, I came up with an idea. Thanks to the Zillow API and the Google Gadgets API, it was possible to realize it and also to make it available for general public. The result is Google Gadget for Zillow ZIndex graph.

Thanks to Drew Meyers at Zillow for his support and notes on ensuring terms of the Zillow APi agreement were met for the gadget, Zillow’s to allow permission to publish this usage and Robbie at Seattle’s Rain City Real Estate Guide for his tip on setting graph duration type.
The rest is from the main Google Gadget for Zillow ZIndex graph page.

Google Gadget for Zillow’s ZIndex Graph
This gadget allows adding a graph for ZIndex (which is derived from median prices of homes sold) for a specific location such as All of the USA, any state (WA, CA, etc), any city or zip code. I found this to be nifty way to track home prices in a location of interest. It can be added to the Personalized Google Homepage, Desktop and Pages.
A screenshot is below, you make click on it for a larger version.

Try it out (shorter version):