Hello dear readers, did you miss me? Judging by the activity in the chatbox, probably not right? I hope everyone had a great holiday season and a superb start to the New Year. I'm a little late, but welcome to 2010! I give my best wishes to everyone - regular visitors and those passing by as well - for a productive and happy new year. Some say a decade has passed, with '10 marking a new decade. Others say this isn't true, because there was no Year 0, and so this decade isn't over just quite yet. I'm satisfied with it just being the end of one and start of another year. Reflecting too far back makes my head hurt - so to speak.
Looking back on 2009, I'd have to say it was probably one of the more crucial points in my life. (Though how significant it will look further in the future is unknown). Big forward looking decisions were made - mostly related to school; but that's what our life is now, right?
- I worked hard to have a sufficiently high GPA to apply for a graduate program. The feeling of relief of finding out I got A's in all classes that Spring semester was amazing. The Summer that followed involved the application process. It ended with receiving a letter of acceptance during the Fall semester.
- With Fall semester came a decision to petition for graduation or not. Would I graduate "on time" in Spring of 2010? Even with doing the co-op program? Or would I take a chance and bet it on the LBAT Japan summer study program? I didn't (and still don't yet) know if this summer study program will have enough people to launch. But, I decided to delay my graduation until the end of the Summer instead of Spring. After all, I won't get another chance like this ever again.
How was your year? I hope that it was equally and more important than all those before. I hope that it will continue to be so, year after year after year. Gathering experiences, building character, and always improving. (I think I'm being melodramatic here; the soft piano music playing in the background probably isn't helping).
On a somewhat related note, Rainy's new blog has me under the 'muse and inspiration' section. I wonder if it's more muse than inspiration or the other way around. Either way, I feel a little special =).
Oh, I did talk about a little program in my last post didn't I? I guess I should say it's in the alpha stage, but working quite well. Have you ever wanted to watch a video with someone online? Like, in concurrency? You know, have both people load the movie or episode and count down on MSN or AIM to press play? Isn't that quite a ridiculous looking activity? I always thought to myself, I'm sure this can be automated.
I did some searches online and found only services that would play online clips (from YouTube, or Hulu, etc) in synchronization with other people. Or I would find applications that would stream video to many people at the same time. But I didn't like either solution. The first relied on webhosted videos, and the second would degrade the quality of the video watched. In my case, I wanted everyone to be watching original DTV quality anime.
So, I whipped up a little app I generically named 'Peer Media Player'. It uses Media Player Classic's web interface to send play/stop/etc commands to a bunch of people at once. I also incorporated a small chat window that can sit at the bottom of the screen when media is playing. So basically, anyone can press play or pause and all people connected will have the same thing happen on their computer!
I say it's still alpha stage because it's not exactly synchronized, I still have to decide on a method of overcoming connection latency. And there's some small connection bugs that I need to work out. But it works better than I anticipated; so if you wanna try it out, send me a message. Here's a screenshot!
So anyway, it's a three day weekend and I should be working on scholarship applications, but I ended up pacing around the house instead. Do you ever do that? It's not that I don't know what to write, I have ideas and snippets of sentences that I think will sound good. I just can't start putting them together into a cohesive passage. And so I type out random sentences, trying to put them in order. But then it looks messy, so I get up and look for food. Even if I'm not hungry, I'll walk to the fridge, open it, and realize I don't really want anything.
Well, I did that and then I sat down again. And then I thought to myself, I should put up another blog post. Just to let people know the blog isn't dead yet. Oh, and I thought maybe the free nature of blogging would kickstart my typing chops so I can churn out those scholarship essays afterwards.
Eh, we'll see about that. I hope that was a fitting post for the new year, complete with the abstract stuff, the technical stuff, and the random stuff. 今年も よろしく お願いします。 I wish everyone the best and look forward to this new year!
