Firefox 3.6.9

Ha! Excellent update! The new Firefox version 3.6.9 has shed the "glacial slowness" that plagued it the last three iterations. Page loads seem snappy now, even new uncached pages. I'm happy.

The only issue was the warning after installation to also update Adobe flash to 10.1. However, Ubuntu uses a flashplayer-plugin package (re)installable through Synaptic, so the warning seems to be superfluous and perhaps aimed at other distros, such as Gentoo or Suse or RedHat.

In any case, the Adobe site has no Ubuntu-specific version of the program you're supposed to install, and if you manually download and run the Debian version, you learn that Adobe's version 10.1 flash conflicts with the flashplayer-plugin already installed by Ubuntu. I checked to make sure flashplayer-plugin is version 10.1 (it is) — now ignoring the issue altogether. Everything seems to be working ok — YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

Interestingly, my daughter did not see the warning on Ubuntu Karmic, but I got it on Lucid.

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The thing I hate about technology is its coyly symbiotic relation to art, to the point they create virtual worlds more realistic, but less real, than this one. I blame it on Gutenberg and the invention of Monopoly money. Not that I'd mind spending a year or two in Rabanastre.

Lv. 74

Gilgamesh bugs me.

Nailed that Humbaba Mistante in T.N.O.N., though.

Bahamut... and beyond

Actually, there is no beyond; Penelo's denoument is all too short. All you get is a movie and several screenfuls of memorable names (Final Fantasy XII fans will memorize these, of course), followed by a plain old English-language owari.

Some of the cheat sheets to the contrary, it is not foreordained that Ktjn will become, wants to become, or must become "a warrior like her sister." Far from it. In my version, she becomes a shopkeeper apprentice at Migelo's and seems happy about it. The Japanese have a name (or is it a verb?) for this nascent, "just watching" stage, but it eludes me at the moment.

Also, I never got the whoop-de-do "Zodiac Spear" or "Zodiac Escutcheon", nor did I need that stuff. In fact, I never even found a shop that sells Ether, for that matter. Apparently, I got the Syphon spell instead, and that plus walking around and Save crystals seems to be all you need.

Oh, well. I missed about half the beasties list, the whole Bangaa hunter killer subquest, the Archades Hunt Club payoffs, the entire (but beckoning) Barheim Passage sidequest, a good chunk of the Zertinan Caverns, and roughly all the optional junk in Giruvegan and Pharos. Maybe I'll go back and have a little fun before essaying Bahamut again. Later.

Vayne is a cupcake at level 65 with six (mostly) useless espers plus a levelled-up B Team. A couple of points on that:

• Gambits are a programming language roughly as sophisticated as some of the table-driven industrial process controllers I've seen (or written).
  
• Also, as Nebraska well knew in its Big Red glory days, it pays to have a little thunder in your second string.

Yarr, maties, the wise, they be lavish with they lucre.

The Road to Giruvegan

Dorothy Lamour with bunny ears? Now that's what I call eldritch!

Judge Bergan

Piece of cake, oddly enough. I've been wiping out on Rocktoise, Ring Wyrm, the thing in the Wyrm Nest, Orthros and White Mousse (not to mention the plague of flans on the ceiling in the Dying Soldier switch room in Henne Mines) for days on obdurate end. This evening, by dint of sheer fleetfootedness, I've made it to the Tchita Highlands crystal. That's a long itinerary for teleports. How much longer does it get, I wonder?

Next up...

The Elder Wyrm seems to be there to force you to level up the team. Classic.