from the nfinite

roll out!

2010-12-19T18:11:00.000-05:00

Blog moved to my new personal domain! It'll still be a blog, but it'll have other goodies on it too!

I wonder if I'll ever be given the chance to snipe nfinite.com in the future...

flashcarDS

2010-08-20T14:57:00.000-04:00

Well, I managed to finish it... for better or worse. I feel like I've repeated myself a few too many times describing this project (in the forum post, the file post, and the readme). So i'll just post the links and I'm sure you can find out what it does if you're interested.

- File Hosted at FileTrip
- External Discussion at GBAtemp

I'm off to organize/pack for moving back to campus!

beat me to it

2010-08-16T14:19:00.002-04:00

While I was in Japan, one thing I wanted was some kind of device that could use a camera and recognize kanji and look them up in a dictionary for me. It was kind of a pain to open up the DS and write in kanji. I thought to myself, I should make a mobile app that would do this. The only problem is that I don't own any smartphones.

Well... looks like this kinda beat me to it. Though it's for Chinese and it's for the iPhone... but the concept is there, and I'm sure it's a simple matter of communicating with a japanese dictionary rather than a chinese dictionary. Still, if they come out with this for Japanese and for Android, I might have to drop some dough on an Android phone...

If they don't by the time I save up enough extra money for an Android phone, then maybe I'd have to take a shot at it. Though, you know the feeling when you come up with an idea that you think no one has done before and make these plans to try and follow through with the idea only to find out that someone else has done it? Yeah, it kinda ruins the fun. Oh well...

In other news, I'm about 1/3 of the way through making a flashcards app for the DS. After looking up the other SRS (spaced repetition system) alternatives on the DS, I wasn't really satisfied. Though my own version is going to suck hardcore compared to these other ones, it has one distinct advantage that I think is worth investing my own time.

The one that syncs with Anki is great because it uses the Anki system... but it requires wireless sync (at least I'm pretty sure it does). Which is kind of a pain b/c homebrew and DS wireless is kind of a pain sometimes. The other option was ndsrs, which didn't require wireless sync - you can copy over decks and even export decks from Anki.

But the one thing I wanted most, was the ability to create cards away from the computer. Wireless sync requires computer, manual updating requires computer. Since I suck at coding and don't have that much time left til school starts (or you can say I'm lazy) I'm going to throw away the advantages of the other two. I'm throwing away TTF rendering of the kanji. And I'm throwing away the proper Anki SRS algorithm (because I'm too lazy to see how it really works, I'm just gonna ballpark my own).

I will get the ability to make my own cards on the fly though.... seems like a lot of work just for this feature. Oh well...

Guess I'll update when I finish... which hopefully is before this Saturday... cuz that's when I move back to campus... this summer break has gone by really fast...

Kiyomizu dera

2010-07-07T04:19:00.000-04:00

Since all anime seems to gravitate towards Kiyomizu-dera whenever they go on Kyoto trips; me and Joe went as well. And also, to beat the crowds, we left the hostel at ... oh 6am. Well, we did beat the crowds -- by a lot. And it was pretty awesome. What they don't really show in the shows, is where the name comes from : kiyomizu, clear/pure water. Which you can drink. And that we did... and it tasted clean.

Pictures will maybe come, they might not until I get home to America. Yeah...

Ok, it rained today, so I came back to change socks...

arrival

2010-05-19T13:23:00.000-04:00

So this is written sittin’ at Haneda airport with no wi-fi. I’ve still got that bobbing feeling in my head from yesterday’s long plane ride. Strange how that happens isn’t it? It’s like that ghost feeling you get at night after you’ve been at the amusement park riding roller coasters for a day. Or is that just me?... Anyway, check-in for my domestic flight to Fukuoka doesn’t start for another two hours…

So the flight to Japan was a pretty interesting one, to say the least. Well, the beginning of the flight from LA to Narita was. Here’s what went down.

I had bought the airplane ticket pretty early – early enough to get a nice isle and bulkhead seat. Good legroom + aisle access. Anywho, of course these seats usually accommodate those with little children. And a few minutes after getting situated, I was approached by an attendant who asked if I wanted to exchange seats to accommodate a parent with a child. It would be in exchange for an aisle seat. Who am I to refuse that without looking inconsiderate.

Anyway, walking back to the other seat revealed a sticky situation – the seat was occupied and the people there were in the process of swapping people around so that families could sit together. I thought, whatever, I just needed a seat to sleep in. So I sat in the seat next to the isle seat, no biggie.

So later, the attendant who offered the swap came back and was like, why aren’t you In an isle seat? This isn’t good, I feel bad. After more searching, and not being able to find an isle seat, she said she would continue to see what she could do. Flight takes off.

After climbing to altitute, she comes back and says “We’re going to move you to 10D” and then she whispers “business class”. Hiding smiles, I gracefully accept. And so! My first business class experience was on a plane from LA to Japan. Unfortunately, I was too modest to take full advantage of the services – I dunno, something feels off about requesting a ton of food/drinks after being upgraded for free. What would you do? Hey, I did get a complimentary travel kit and slippers though…

Still, the reclining chair and fancier meals were fantastic – couldn’t have asked for much more. Though, the people next to me had at least eight glasses of wine… But then again, they paid for it, I suppose. No pictures from the flight though – I might have had I been in economy section, but I got more self-conscious from the fact that I was upgraded for free. You’ll just have to believe me on this one.

Since I arrived yesterday, and my flight to Fukuoka is today, I stayed at a hotel near Haneda airport. And you know what the first thing I did when I got in? Checked out the toilet. Heard stories and seen pictures of fancy toilets with water that shoots up your butt. This one wasn’t too fancy, but it certainly filled the water shower requirement… Yes, I tested it out. And yes, I was surprised at the velocity of the water stream. [SHOWER] is a bit misleading… It’s a… different feeling… unless you’ve been shot in the butt with a supersoaker before.

On another note, I already knew I was bad at speaking Japanese, but coming here further reinforces the fact. (Yeah, it’s a little bit harsh assessemtn – being my first time in a Japanese environment – but that doesn’t change the fact that I suck). So yesterday at the airport bus stop, after getting the courage to ask the bus driver whether or not it was the correct bus to my hotel, I went up to him and asked something along the lines of, 「これは「おとりいしんかん」行きのバスですか」And he replied, 「Yes」. I was like, man, my Japanese must’ve been really bad if he had to reply in English. And then today, I thought at least my listening comprehension was OK. But nope, the lady at the check-in desk talked too fast for me to catch everything. *Sigh. We’ll see how this goes over the course of the summer.

Until next time!

japan!

2010-05-13T14:54:00.001-04:00

So! I've probably already let a lot of you know about this, but I'm going to Japan this summer! Well, to be more accurate, my flight leaves Monday morning. That's... less than four days away! It's been quite the rush recently as well. People keep asking me if I'm excited about the trip. And honestly, I think I've been too busy to have built excitement in my mind. Though, if I sit down to think about it, yes, I've been looking forward to this study abroad for quite some time now.

Anyway, I proposed to keep a blog about the experience for one of the scholarships I received, and that's what took all of yesterday to create. At first I was toying around with my own design.

But I was never truly artistic, and halfway through, I decided it looked too amateur. That and I also thought about having to create the entire CSS for it and gave up. Instead I went around looking for templates to modify.

Oh but before that, I wanted to try out Wordpress.com instead of blogger. It looked more professional and I thought it would be a good feel for the blog. Unfortunately, I didn't know about how limiting Wordpress.com is in regards to javascript and extensions. I really like Lightbox (that image viewer that comes up when you click an image), but there just wasn't a good way of doing it at wp.com. I spent some time searching and found a workaround, but it required an advertisement module to be placed on the sidebar. Looked pretty ugly to me. But I really really liked the theme I found on there.

So, it was back to blogger, where I could use link external scripts. Luckily I found an adapted version of the same layout and modified it a bit. Right now, though, it has a random banner from my own picture collection, but I will be sure to update it with a pertinent image once I get to the host university (Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University) in Japan. Since it's basically on a mountain overlooking the shore-side city of Beppu, I'm hoping I can get a nice shot of the sea and city. Oh, here's the link to the LBAT Japan 2010 blogspot.

My guess is most of my updates over the summer will be on that blog, but since it's associated with my university, there might be some posts here that might not be appropriate for the other blog. No, no naughty stuff; but maybe more personal thoughts and observations.

DEE ESS ELL ARR

2010-05-13T14:53:00.000-04:00

Two posts in one day! Er, yeah.... Another one of my wishes from the past 3 years or so has also been granted! Yup, finally got my shaky hands on a nice D-SLR. At first I was going to give myself a little graduation present. But then my dad offered to help me out with it. And I was like.... kinda hesitant, so we settled on half. And then after more discussing with both parents, it turned into a full on graduation present from them! But then I felt bad, because the camera I picked out was kinda pricey.

I picked the beastly Canon EOS 7D. Good video features, pretty good image quality (I had to compromise a bit on this one for the video features - but I'm not pixel-perfect critical on my images anyway), and a fairly rugged body. Those 720p videos of our Senior Design project were filmed on that baby. And I also got some very pretty pictures of us completely trashing our apartment. Yes, we had a little senior design lab in our living room.

So anyway, I'm not graduating just yet. I will after the summer. But I got the camera early because of the Japan trip. (I keep saying trip, but I really have to remind myself that this is a study abroad program). But, there will be two weeks after the summer semester is over for me to trek around! There will definitely be pictures from that. So, I'll be vacationing in and around Kyoto and Tokyo from the 5th of July through the 17th of July. If anyone else is gonna be in the area, we could meet up and hang out - wouldn't that be awesome?

Speaking of vacation time ... I seem to be vacationing at the wrong time. Everything seems to be happening after I go home. It's quite sad. A lot of the big summer festivals are at the beginning of August. Something I am slightly disappointed about, it seems I went in the wrong year, because the Green Tokyo Gundam Project would've fallen into my vacation schedule... had I gone one year ago. But to make matters eeeeeeeeven worse! They're re-erecting this beast in Shizuoka this year. On July 24th. A week after I go home. I suppose it's a little out of the way of my vacation plans, but still! I'll have an unlimited rail pass... And to top it all off, the life-sized model gods are taunting me. This time, its a life-sized Evangelion unit. And it opens on the 23rd of July.

So, if I had stayed about a week longer, these would be a part of my picture collection. But unfortunately, 3 weeks is a long time for vacation. It would've been better if the summer study program had lasted another week. *sigh. Oh well. There should be some good landscape and scenic pictures though. Hopefully I can grab some good night pics of Tokyo.

ouch

2010-05-12T11:09:00.005-04:00

Before I get around to putting up my next post that was planned, I got an email today - along with all other kids at Georgia Tech - and I'm sure it's not unlike other institutions as well. Here's some choice excerpts from the email (and I promise nothing is being taken out of context).

These additional cuts bring the total reduction for Georgia Tech over the three most recent fiscal years — FY09, ‘10, and ‘11 — to $67.2 million, or 23.8 percent of our FY09 base. In addition, it is important to note that the federal stimulus funds we received to date are not expected to be available in FY12 or the following fiscal years.

In a separate but related action yesterday, the BOR also approved a $500 per semester increase in tuition for both resident and nonresident students at Georgia Tech, excluding those students on the Guaranteed Tuition Plan. For in-state students who qualify, this increase will be covered under the HOPE Scholarship program. This tuition increase will move us closer to the market value as determined by comparison with our peer institutions and will provide some limited flexibility in budgeting for Institute programs.

Seeing that first part just hurts - nearly a quarter reduction... add to that an additional increase in tuition... we've already been tacked with an extra fee on top of tuition (which actually got around the HOPE scholarship thing), but now it's getting officially added to tuition huh? At first they mess with me by adding a fee - not covered by HOPE scholarship. Now that I'm just getting into graduate school, they add to the tuition - of which I no longer have HOPE to cover. !!!

I certainly can't say that I'd have a better solution, but what does irk me just a little is the rationale statement. This tuition increase will move us closer to the market value as determined by comparison with our peer institutions. What's wrong with being cheap AND good? Either say: we're just as good as the other universities, but we cost less! Or... don't say anything at all. I'll accept the second part: [this] will provide some limited flexibility in budgeting for Institute programs. But us students are good at detecting BS. We write it all the time. And worse yet, this one deals with our money.

Anyway, I'm sure many of you are in the same situations with your respective universities, so all this is probably a moot point. Back to getting that original post done.

catsup

2010-05-09T19:00:00.001-04:00

Hello hello! I've been quite dead the past semester haven't I? No one's bothered me about posting either, so I was happy to oblige. Really though, a lot has happened, and I often found myself thinking of taking some time to relax and type up randomness on this blog. But alas, the call of coursework is just too strong... So let's play catch up shall we?

The last four months have been spent primarily on my Senior Design Project. Oh yes, that lovely course - the culmination of one's undergraduate career. The course that people 50% love and 75% hate and despise. Yes, that's right, that's over 100%. Hatred causes the laws of math to break down. Mainly it's because they require us to write reports and give presentations. And while, yes, these skills are necessary to some extent, that doesn't mean we can't hate its guts.

But, instead of /ranting, how about some background and fun facts about the project. Well, now that I think about all I have to catch up on, I think I'm going to break it up into separate posts so each has their own heading.

PACMAN

2010-05-09T16:48:00.007-04:00

Forenote: I make liberal use of 'we' in this post. This simply refers to the team I was in for the design project. It started off as just me and my roommate, but we managed to pull two others in from our section.So at the beginning of the semester, we needed some sort of idea for a Senior Design Project. Something that would show off all that we've learned over the past four years. Something that would show off our skilllllllz. Various ideas were thrown about:

USB Thumb Drive RAID controller: We thought this would've been an interesting project. After all, I'm sure we weren't the only ones who had a ton of random 1GB or 2GB flash drive lying around. Wouldn't it be hilarious to have a ton of these in RAID? The idea was scrapped because we didn't think it was encompassing enough. At its core, too simple. It looked like it would be more working with learning and implementing codes and standards.
Depth sensor in large barrels: This was something that was pitched to us - I don't exactly remember the details; something about monitoring oil or liquid levels in a large container. While technically challenging, I didn't enjoy the topic too much.
Passage Tone Analysis: This was a cool idea from one of the advisors (and another group actually did pick this one up). So in band or music in general, there are good tools for tuning a single note. But a unique twist is to analyze all the notes in a passage. Record a passage, process it, figure out which notes are sharp, flat, or trends in flatness/sharpness. Very cool idea; but we knocked it down. Reason being: it's almost completely software. We wanted some hands on stuff too.

So I happened to say jokingly, let's make RC CARS DRIFT autonomously. Wouldn't that be badass? Set it on a track, let it find the right lines, and watch it drift. Wouldn't it be even more awesome if we had multiple RC cars do synchronized drifting? Yeah yeah! We could use gyros to keep track of our momentum and head and tail and.... yeah this isn't going to work; we know jack crap about drift physics.

But all was not lost, we liked the idea of RC cars. So what we settled on was an autonomous convoy - a Path-following Autonomous Convoy with Multiple Asynchronous Nodes - PACMAN. And there was the inception of this crazy system. We got these wicked awesome RC cars. They were actually drift cars too! but no drift tires. Anyway, just go to the Hardware section of our website to see the awesome build. If you're software inclined, the Software page has details on our VHDL design. And if you don't care about any of that stuff, at least go to the Deliverables page and watch the Demo videos there. Especially the last one - I taped my camera to the front of one of the cars, and it's really awesome.

We were kinda being masochists in using an FPGA to control the car; hard to develop for, but a great exercise in logic optimization. But at the same time, it was a good decision in that we could customize all our input and output processing - concurrently running blocks - no fear of varying loop time or interrupts screwing up other parts of the system.

Anyway, just one small little anecdote from this project before I end this boring post: Let's set the scenario up. It's the midnight between Saturday and Sunday. The final presentation is in 40 hours. We are reconfiguring the vehicle for some tweaks to steering and throttle control. The power to the FPGA board is off. Push the button to power on. The board isn't turning on. What's thAT SMELL? Turn it off! It IS off!
Something on the board fried. And we still have no true idea how it happened. Only educated guesses.

At the time we were freaking out: what happened? what shorted? how did it short? dust? We left the windows open, and it rained earlier: air moisture?!?! HAS THERE BEEN ANY RECENT SOLAR ACTIVITY?! (I kid you not, I actually checked). Multiple voltage regulators on the board were gone - that was our best guess. As to how it happened we weren't totally sure. Ok, well we're not completely screwed yet, we still have an extra board. There's only one day left to tweak this thing, let's just get it good and then leave it alone. We can get an extra board from the design lab on Monday.
1 hour later, while further refining the control system: Lights blink erratically on the board; it dims; DUDE, what'd you just do? Nothing! wait, oh sh--. Yanks power jack from board. Did what I think just happen, happen? Yes. It did.

Second board fried. Ok, half fried. This board still had its 5v voltage regulator working, however, the 3.3v and maybe even the 1.8v were gone. It didn't matter. We only had one board left, and two cars in need of said control board.

Anyway, our best guess at this point was a bad battery somehow pushing current into the board and killing the regulators. How this happened, I don't really know. There are protection diodes on the development board, but they must've been after the point of failure. We searched online, and to our (somewhat) relief, we weren't the only ones who experienced this issue. It still didn't explain why this happened though.

And so we were depressed for a very long time. Decided to call it a night. We would have a very busy Monday morning. Get to Senior Design lab, profusely apologize for killing two boards, get a new board, install protection fuses on the connector from the battery to the boards, get footage of the system working, edit the footage, give the presentation. We somehow managed to do it, but it was a very nerve-wracking experience - Murphy's Law at its worst.

I hope that as entertaining for you as it was horrible for us. Time to move on to my next post - it might come out tomorrow, because well.... I'm reformatting my laptop - it's been at least a year and a half since she had her last wipe; and you can tell it's been that long.

miss me?

2010-01-17T14:17:00.004-05:00

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!

landmark

2009-12-07T09:32:00.003-05:00

Heyyyyy I've beaten record for posts in a year! (Besides the fact that the first year was only more like half a year, but I'll just gloss that over and look at post counts). And the year is closing up! For now though, my dry spell on the blog is gonna have to go for a little bit longer.

Finals week is upon us and I'm busy studying. HAHAHAH yeah right. *sigh. Well, let's just say I'm leaving time that can be used for studying.

Next post I plan on unveiling a little program that I recently whipped up. I personally think it's neat, but maybe that's just because I made it myself. Anyway, until then, good luck on finals if you have them! If not, you suck.

Happy Turkey Day!

2009-11-26T17:19:00.002-05:00

Suppose I haven't had much time to post anything, butttttt.........

Happy Turkey Day! Well, at least that gets rid of international discrepancies with holidays. It's not Thanksgiving, but Turkey Day!

adventures in the nfinite : part i

2009-10-23T15:02:00.000-04:00

Ok, so the title says 'part i', but there are currently no plans for 'part ii'. It is simply a generic title that I may be able to re-use again in the future. It's actually quite difficult to come up with an appropriate title sometimes! But that's mainly because many of my posts don't have one specific focus. So I'm cheating by using a numbering system on a generic title!

So it's been some time since my last post. And it's not because I didn't have stuff to talk about. I've just been busy with schoolwork. It's now a Friday afternoon. Classes are done for the week. And there's relatively little homework to do. So here I am.

First up! Windows 7 Wallpaper Rotation feature. A while back when I wrote up my first impressions on Win7, I said I was pleased with the integration of wallpaper rotation in the windows theme framework (framework?... w/e). I did not, however, complain at how absurdly difficult and finicky it is to select specific pictures from different places.

Issue #1: The GUI for adding pictures to the list of wallpapers is horrid. An interface NIGHTMARE. Allow me illustrate.

So the first issue I have is the selection scheme they have set up. Each thumbnail has a checkbox and a hover marquee/highlight. Now, if you check a checkbox and then check other multiple checkboxes, they will all stay selected. HOWEVER! And this is the dumb part. If you have multiple pictures checked off and you click on a thumbnail for a new picture (not its checkbox) ALL OF THE PREVIOUSLY CHECKED PICTURES ARE DESELECTED. How dumb is that? Checkboxes aren't supposed to clear until you uncheck them. What's the point of checkboxes if they get reset on an unrelated click event?

This issue makes it very frustrating because I have accidentally missed a checkbox and cleared my entire selection. This happened 2 times, since I have... a lot of pictures. And I was mad both times.

This caused me to research on how to do it manually. As in, edit the themes configuration file and manually put in image paths. This brings me to my second surprise! I don't know if these problems are just with my installation, or if this is how all Win7 versions are. (fyi mine is the RTM from MSDNAA).

So after some research, I found this link Creating and Installing Theme Files [MSDN]. Pleased with the simplicity of it, I decided to pursue this route of editing the themes file. And what I saw when I opened one up to edit..... surprised me. And not in a good way. In a WTF ARE YOU DOING WINDOWS!-way.

So if you didn't notice, there's TWO things HORRRRRRRRRIBLE about this. This is what was automatically generated by the system when I selected a bunch of pictures. (I chose about 900). The first should be quite blaringly apparent. WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THE FILEPATHS!

First of all, these file paths may be at most... maybe 120 characters long.
"D:\Pictures\2008.08.02 - EuroTrip - W120\06 Wednesday - Triomphe, Louvre, Eiffel\a - Arc du Triomphe\DSC00571.JPG" being an example. Take a guess at how long one of those Item lines are in the themes file.

1600 characters. The longest one is ~2000 characters. I don't even understand how this is possible. Wait, let me rephrase that. I don't understand why anyone would even think of doing it like this. WHYYYYYY! Now I'm not exactly an expert on text encoding, but even a unicode scheme might use 64bits per character. If somehow represented in ASCII, that's still only 8 ASCII characters per character. 120*8 is still way less than 2000.

I must not be smart enough to understand the things that go in the minds of Microsoft programmers. Feel free to flame me if I'm making fun of something that makes sense at a higher level. Ok, so that's the first thing I was astonished at. The second thing was the length of these lists. It looks like they can only count to 30. Well, 0 through 29. It creates a new section every 30 images. Beats me as to why they do this too. But there may be a legitimate reason for this - like randomization or something. So I'm not going to be too critical on it.

There's some more things I want to complain about, but you don't need to hear it I'm sure. Next up! This subject might be a bit more touchy, but for some reason I feel the need to discuss it.

Last week on campus there were some ... speakers? picketers? petitioners? Something like that. We have a free speech area on campus, I guess you could call it. And I could hear the speaker on the loudspeaker as I neared the center of campus. At first I thought, wow this sounds like a religious speech. For some reason, there's a specific tone and rhythm to these speeches no? Sure enough, as they came into sight, I told myself: I need to take a picture of this. And so I snapped two shots off.

It's almost too easy to tear into these people. It's like, false logic out the butt.. or up the butt.. nvm. Well, all I could really make out from the speaker was that God hates homosexuals. Also something about homosexuals not being saved or something. I know it's bad that I don't completely have their side of the argument, but I'm going to go off on a limb and say that it was probably full of holes. This next picture being evidence of one of them.

I wish I had blogged about this a little earlier so that I may have had some quotes from the speaker. Oh well. Let me make this clear. I have nothing against religious people. But pushing your own agenda through religion is a nono. Discrimination is a nono. Unfortunately, there will always be the intolerant. Anyway, I was curious as to what Prov 8:13 was. Maybe God really did say that he hates homosexuals. That's news to me.

...
...
...

All rights to free speech should be revoked from you people. I don't care, all people are not created equal. (Ok, let me clarify: I *do* believe in equal opportunity). That reference you have so prominently placed on your sign says NOTHING about homosexuality. The only thing remotely linked might be "perverse mouth" but we're not talking about blowjobs here. So that's rejected. Only unless you correlate homosexuality with evil does it mean God hates homosexuality. But you haven't addressed why homosexuality is evil. Lack of support -100points to you.

Anyway, enough of criticizing people. If you take away anything from this discussion, I want you to direct your attention towards their abbreviation of homosexuality to homo sex. Which could be re-translated to gay sex. I mean, I understand how you might think gay sex is unpleasant, but seriously, you don't have to picket about it.

Meh, I'm done. Have fun and keep an open mind! Til next time~

and what the past built

2009-09-29T20:28:00.001-04:00

In order to exercise my brain a bit, this post will be somewhat philosophical. I'm hoping that this will be a more structured entry. At least in relation to blog postings. My usual stream of consciousness style fits well with the blog medium, but I haven't had organized writing in a while. I take that back. I haven't had organized writing about a topic I'm interested in writing about in quite some time. Though I usually try to put at least one picture in my posts so as to break the monotony of text, I think this will mostly be one big wall of text. Apologies beforehand.

I have mentioned a few times in previous posts that I had wanted to do a little written exploration of consciousness. Perhaps consciousness isn't quite an accurate word for what I have in mind. I should add 'temporality' - if that's even a word - to be more accurate. The remainder of this entry will flesh out my opinions about the concept of 'time' and 'consciousness'. I hope I don't come across as pretentious. It's simply the exploration of things that tickle my mind.

What is consciousness? Once you sit down and think about it for a while, it's quite complex, no? Could a quick look at the dictionary entry shed light on anything in particular?

While the first half of the Definition [1] says nothing in particular, the second half is interesting. "Awareness of one's own existence" That's deep isn't it? Questions arise about what enables us to "be aware". Is it the concept of a 'soul'? Is it a God-given (by whatever God you may or may not believe in) trait? Or can chemical reactions and neural impulses produce a consciousness? Can consciousness be artificially reproduced? Although interesting questions, I certainly don't know the answer.

On a bit of a tangent, I thought I'd share a little snippet from my high school biology teacher. It can be stated that the co-existence of religion and science is difficult. As a foreword, the following quote isn't necessarily my own view. I simply found it an intelligent proposition to make. My teacher said something along the lines of, "While I believe in evolution and its development. It does not explain the miracle of life. I believe that God imbued this spark of consciousness." It certainly is a firm opinion. Who am I to dispute it? But should science be able to explain the concept of self-awareness, what will happen to religion? There's no answer to that, just think about it. I could go on to lay out my view of religion, but that would be veering too far off topic. Maybe another time.

Returning to consciousness, the mystery is: where does it come from? It's intertwined with the concept of time. A facet of consciousness is its understanding of the here and now. An unconscious person has no concept of time until they return from that state. Sleep can be thought of as being a state of subconscious. Again, the perception of time is distorted during this period. Sometimes the night passes in an instant; before you realize it, the alarm is chiming. Other times, it lasts a lifetime; an alternate time reference presents itself in your dreams. It's neat and at the same time it's scary.

Taking fear to its extremes leads us to the topic of death and its mysteries. We can only think of it as a permanent state devoid of consciousness. Who knows, it could be different - it could simply be an alternate state of consciousness. Transition into omniscience? If sleep is subconscious, could death be super-consciousness? I'm making stuff up now. But these are the points that can be made about consciousness when thinking of present time. That is, consciousness is based on perceiving the temporal immediate.

But that's not the only way we can view it. Another facet of awareness I find intriguing is our perception of the past. It's similar to the Heisenberg Uncertainty type dilemma. If you try to think about what you are doing at present, it immediately becomes the past. You can generalize about what you're doing, but this loses temporal accuracy. That's only the immediate past though. The most interesting part is the distant past - our memories.

We have vivid recollection of some memories whereas others are simply noise in the depths of our minds. When I first started college, I can recall thinking, This is going to take forever. Four years seems so far away. But here we stand in the present - nearing graduation. Remembering the past three or four years happens in an instant.

To me, therein is the paradox of time; perception of the present versus perception of the past. It never ceases to amaze me how time can both fly and crawl at the same time. As we consider the present and future, it often feels like an eternity. When will this class end... When will I graduate... When will I get a job... When will I have my own house... I plan to graduate in two years. But as with the previous example, once two years rolls around, it will be trivial to recollect the events spanning those years.

A duality exists between consciousness and temporality. Isn't it curious? Consciousness exists in the paradigm of 'now'. That is, consciousness lives in the present. But conversely, time exists because of consciousness. Awareness of the present creates the concepts of past and future.

I think that's all I wanted to say. Blogs aren't exactly conducive to structured writing. Also, spreading the writing over a few days didn't help with flow either. And I probably reverted into a stream-style writing with one topic sparking small asides. Hopefully I came full circle though. I'm too lazy to proofread (and I really should be studying for a test right now).

I have mixed feelings about types of writings like the one I just wrote. They don't seem to lead anywhere. They don't have any solid conclusion; by this I mean, there's no concrete final explanation. It's simply an exercise in explaining one's observations. On one hand, I ask myself, is it pointless to bother? There's no resolution to it. But on the other, I tell myself, if discarded for holding no conclusion, the ideas will never present themselves. And what is worse? Producing intangible concepts? Or holding back ideas?

Let's hear what you think. I'm hoping that this may incite some of you to do a post and not so much a small reply in the chatbox (though either is welcome). What's your take on consciousness, time, and even life? Maybe I'm just a huge conceited dork, but it's enjoyable sometimes to freely state your own thoughts. Hopefully the next post will be a lighthearted one. I don't know how much seriousness this blog can handle.

Until then, may your days be as bright and as wonderful as it was here in Atlanta today. Sunny, Blue Skies, with Refreshing Wind.

what the future holds

2009-09-26T13:19:00.014-04:00

So the first half of this post will be somewhat of a journal post. Though I tend to shy from posting diary-esque content, this will be the exception. Perhaps I just need to put what's in my mind out into text. When there's just so much you're trying to mentally digest, it's best to just have it all laid out in front of your eyes. If you, the reader, are not interested, you can skip to the second heading in this post where the content is more in line with normal "from the nfinite" posts.

And there it is, the resolution to the source of so much anxiety since the beginning of this year. I'm relieved that it's a good one, as many of the plans swirling in my head hinged upon this letter. But where does this lead me now? Of course into more studies for another year (or possibly two) of studies. And as the hinge is now in place, I must fixate on building the larger door that goes with it. Before this point, I made excuses for planning the door because I didn't have the hinges; but now I need to carefully plan the next few years of my life. That certainly does sound ominous doesn't it?

There are things I want to do, and there are things I've told myself I should do. I should get an MBA while I'm still in school - while I still have the mindset and malleability to study. If not, once I enter the workforce, there may be no going back to school. Now is the time to do it - now is the time to fight procrastination. If I want to do this, I need to take the GMAT, write some essays, and get three letters of recommendation... Looking at the dual MBA program offered by my university, that's 39 hours - 18 classes. In the worst case scenario, my Computer Engineering Major requirements are 30 hours - 10 classes. I find it amusing that I just might be spending more time doing stuff outside my main area of interest during my graduate studies. But that can't really be helped now can it... Just gotta hit it headfirst and hope my head is hard enough...

And then there are the things I want to do. I want to do the LBAT-Japan program - Language for Business and Technology. This takes place next summer and requires that there are at least 10 participants. I truly hope this follows through since I delayed my undergraduate degree just for this purpose. If everything goes well, I can tack on a Japanese minor to my undergraduate diploma. Truly, we are just pimping out our degrees. I suppose it's a sign of growth and ambition too...

Another goal I had wanted to achieve during my undergraduate studies was to participate in a work abroad assignment in Japan. We have a great program here at Tech, previously sponsored by JETRO, but has now grown on its own. I was hoping to have a dip in that type of experience. After all, opportunities like this might not be so easy to come by in the future. So, it's now been delayed to be a graduate school goal... Though there are some extra snags that have appeared. As most abroad assignments are scheduled for at least 6 months, it would cut one Fall/Spring semester from graduate studies. While not exactly frowned upon by the ECE graduate department, it's not exactly encouraged to cut out one of these important semesters as summer semesters have fewer courses available. I have to get permission from some important person to be able to pursue this path. We'll see how that unfolds next year...

So I'm probably just making things sound more dramatic than they are. We're all guilty of doing such things on occasion. I have 2 or 3 months to organize this stuff, so maybe it isn't so bad. But it certainly is a lot to consider all at once. I just hope that everything will go smoothly. If it doesn't, I'll just have to deal with it when the time comes... *sigh I'm so used to my slow pace in life...　でも忙しくなりますね。。。

THE GOOD STUFF STARTS HERE

Alright! ENOUGH OF THE WORRIES AND THE BORING. I talked about getting a Zune HD in my previous post, and it got here a couple days after that post as I'd been hoping! It's quite sexy, slim, and light.

I'm not going to say the Zune HD is the greatest. (Even though I am usually partial to the devices I own) It has many flaws. I should probably outline those first so as to end on a good note. I have two main disappointments with this device. First off is wireless connectivity. One feature missing is WPA/WPA2 Enterprise support is missing. In addition, many browser-based login internet services do not work. Big problems with many university wi-fi services. Luckily, a relatively long forum thread has developed since release date with the culmination of acknowledgment by the Zune development team. Hopefully this means a firmware update will be coming in the near future.

The second disappointment was the weak excuse for an "Apps" section. With the success of the Apple's App Store, I was hoping MS would realize it's quite the lucrative business model. Unfortunately, all we got were a few games and two apps. What's worse is that it seems to be just the previous Zune XNA development API with support for the accelerometer and touch screen. I'm not exactly sure how App/Game code is loaded and run on the Zunes, but it seems they didn't change anything from the old Zunes. Maybe that's OK for forward compatibility, but it does not take advantage of the more powerful hardware available in the Zune HD.

The main reason I'm disappointed in this is because I won't get to play with the Tegra platform just yet. There's an amazing amount of computing resources available on this device. Dedicated GPU, dedicated image processor, dedicated video processor... I want to play with those. But no, XNA development is still locked to mainly drawing 2D sprites. Absolutely no evidence of being able to use the power available. There's the promise of a proper app store once the windows mobile team does whatever. I don't care much for the details, I want an SDK that gives me access to the good stuff.

So my two main gripes will probably be resolved in the future. The latter probably much later though. When it does come out, I'll probably play around in it some. You may see a really cheesy scrolling shooter come out of it. ... and not much more.

Alright on to the goodies of the Zune HD. I'll try to make it short because I feel this post has gotten quite long. The OLED screen is beautiful. The contrast on this thing is straight up delightful to look at. The menus are pretty as well, it has a fun typography video-ish feel to it. I very much enjoy it.

Sound quality is great as people say. And hey, that's what matters right? This is first and foremost a media player. The audio better be good. The picture viewer is very responsive with pictures looking much better than they did on the old Zunes. (On the old ones, they doubled the native resolution of the display so as to have better image quality when zoomed in, but the scaled down and zoomed out view looked very aliased and ugly). I only wish there was a rotate image ability in this newer picture viewer. A feature I thought would be inherently intuitive, but apparently not. You can tilt the Zune, but it remains in one orientation no matter the orientation of the Zune.

Ok rushing on to the next subject (since I feel this post is becoming quite long). I was pouring some cereal the other day and was like... WTF HAPPENED TO LUCKYSeriously, what happened to his nose? It turned into a snout. I didn't know leprechauns had snouts instead of noses. If you don't remember what Lucky looked like, I guess you can google him up. But for those of you who do, doesn't that look... awkward? Or is it just me... This redesign of Lucky disappoints me =(.

I hope you have no disappointments like this in your future. Until next time, I hope you enjoyed this quite long post... and weren't bored out of your mind.

busybusy

2009-09-13T20:36:00.004-04:00

Hmm so it's been a pretty busy weekend with a pretty busy week to come. But this shall all die down fairly soon, if only to start up again in a few weeks again. Deadline for degree petitions are soon. I have to run around and see if my plan to go to Japan after graduating will be possible and if it'll affect the petition stuff. And also gotta go to the Co-Op office for certification in that...

In other news, I did some thinking recently and just today decided to drop some moneys on the new Zune HD. After winning that RAM and also getting a cheap Zune80 in the recent past, I figured I could resell some of my gadgets and be able to afford this new player. So before it goes on eBay, if anyone (or if you know anyone) who is looking to buy either: a 2nd gen iPod nano 8GB, a refurbed Zune80, or 6GB of DDR3, lemme know =) -- this is my shameless plug, yes.

Anyway, maybe I'll have some pictures of my new toy in a few days. There's part of me that's excited, since this will be my first pocket gadget with an internet browser. But the other part of me (the cheap and frugal side) is giving me a hard time - I'm just falling into the consumerism trap. I really don't need this thing and the money could be better spent in savings.

Too late, purchase made. Bought it from Dell b/c they have a 15% coupon... Even though it said shipping in 6weeks, I hope that's just a placeholder and that they will have them in stock on release date.

Anyway, I don't have much to say - haven't really done abstract thinking due to doing nothing but coursework and gaming... take care readers - until next time.

long post is long (maybe)

2009-09-02T09:19:00.005-04:00

Ok so it's time for another round of...... let's talk about random things! YAY!
First up on our menu is toilet paper. Maybe I shouldn't have used food imagery with toilet imagery...

...

Anyway, this is something I've noticed only since living in an apartment with a shared bathroom. And it leads me to this question: Which direction do you hang your toilet paper? Please excuse the following horribly illustrated image. I didn't feel like creating a sophisticated looking diagram, nor did I want to take a picture of the real thing. So you must opt for the final choice of mouse-drawn MSPaint l33tness.

This is something that truly bothers me. I do the latter of the two choices. I ask because I wonder if people really do intend on doing the former? or if they're just being lazy when they put on a new roll and don't check on its direction of unrollage.

The problem I get is, we have a trashcan in the vicinity of the toilet paper roll dispenser thing. Having the TP roll in the former position always causes the edge of the TP to extend from its center of mass. And by that I mean..... IT FRICKIN DIPS INTO THE TRASHCAN. I don't want something that's dipped in the trashcan (or even brushing the wall) to be wiping my buttocks. The latter orientation of TP protects the loose TP from extending past the immediate radius surrounding the toilet paper. It also keeps its separation from the wall. The former orientation often swings and brushes against the wall. Anyway, that's just me being a neat freak.

On the topic of bathrooms, while typing those previous paragraphs I had a hard time choosing the proper word for bathroom. The main subject was the toilet. But the word bathroom has the term 'bath' in it - which is not the main subject I wish to talk about. I could have used toilet - but this can refer to both room or physical toilet. Also using toilet too many times is no good. And then there's washroom. But I don't speak English (in its strictest meaning), so that would just sound pompous coming from me. I now end this paragraph with no conclusion.

What sounds cooler? "End of Eternity" or "Resonance of Fate". If you said End of Eternity, you are cool. Resonance of Fate sounds like they're trying too hard. At least, to me it does. Anyway, Resonance of Fate is the localization of the JRPG End of Eternity. I just wish they kept the original title in bringing it overseas. Is it some copyright issue? Who knows, but I think End of Eternity sounds cooler. I'm looking forward to seeing more about this game though. An RPG featuring gunfights is unique enough to warrant some attention (and hype if they make it fun).

Speaking of JRPGs, I still need to finish Star Ocean 4. I think I'm at the final moments of the game... storyline-wise. Myuria is the cool character in the game. And if you're unfamiliar, I must clarify that it is not because of her ... assets ... that I like her character. Which reminds me of a character from another game that I liked. Viola from Eternal Sonata was awesome. I think that's enough of my dork comments.

On to the nerd comments. So recently I added 4gigs of RAM to my computer (like I said I might in that Win7 First Impressions post) for a total of 6gigs of RAM. And I've yet to get over 4gigs usage (I got close while playing Crysis with a buncha background apps). But I now idle around 2gigs with all my usual background apps running. Of course a problem comes up... of course.

So it turns out Creative sucks. (I know this, and I've known this, yet I still use their products. Stupid silly me) My first problem was a long time ago with the SCREECH OF DEATH plaguing the Audigy line. I'm sure you can google it if you're interested. But anyway, I've had a newer Audigy 2 ZS for a while now. Aside from crappy Windows 7 support, the specific problem incurred is this: Microphone input is extremely erratic and can result in a robotic type of voice. It's hard to explain, but let's just say it can be difficult to understand at times. (Especially while playing FPS games and chatting).

What's the cause of the problem, you ask? (You did, didn't you?) There is a bug in the Creative drivers. It manifests itself on 64bit operating systems with more than 4gb of RAM installed. Lucky me. So for the past week I've been trying alternative drivers and all kinds of stuff. No luck. Today I stumbled across a quite simple solution.

Turn on my onboard sound card! No, I'm not replacing my Audigy - it has too many features that I like. But instead, I can just simply use the onboard sound microphone input! Output from the Audigy, input from the onboard! Problem diverted! Ok, I still want a fix Creative! DO IT NOW!

And now the direct stream from the nfinite shall be terminated. I hope none of that was poorly worded and confusing (as it many times can be). But I don't feel like going back to proofread.

Enjoy life! And I hope you can solve your problems instead of just diverting them!

short post is short

2009-08-24T13:29:00.003-04:00

Ah the amusing nature of university students and class attendance. I was going to comment last week on how many people there were on campus. I had been taking summer classes and campus was quite empty. But then the regular semester started and with it came a complete change in density of students walking around on campus. It felt strange, and it made me wonder if there were normally that many students on campus.

But I was only experiencing the "First-Day-Of-Class" phenomenon. The days immediately following that Monday resulted in a sudden drop of student presence. Funny how drastic the difference is between last Monday and today. If you've started classes already you've probably seen the same. If not, look for it... unless you're the ones skipping ;).

Ok that is all, time for next class.

Take care.

i can has printer?

2009-08-17T13:38:00.005-04:00

So after my desktop pc was moved into the dorm and I was sitting at home on my laptop, I had nothing to do. All my games and media are on my desktop as the laptop is now, for the most part, distraction free. (Distraction from school work). So I decided I wanted to play some old piano songs. I found some old sheets of Gundam Wing songs, but they were totally dumbed down and didn't sound as good as some user transcribed stuff. So I found some sheets, but then realized I had no printer, and I couldn't really find a place for my laptop to sit. Well, that's a lie, I eventually found a position for it.

Felt the desire to share the incredibly ghetto/dorky setup. It worked quite well, except that I couldn't see the entire sheet. But I just now thought of an idea to place the laptop on its side... Maybe I'll try that when I return home one day.
In other news - had two classes today already. Embedded microcontrollers and Japanese 2002. Currently waiting for some 4001 class... First project due this Friday in embedded mc's.... fun.

Ok that is all, take care dear readers!

Windows 7 First Impressions

2009-08-14T15:28:00.018-04:00

In the vein of bloggers who think their opinion matters, I present to you my first impressions with Windows 7. Be forewarned, this will be slightly lengthy (Ok, so it’s really long, roughly 5 pages in Word). If you want the quick hard conclusions, skip to the bottom and I’ll have a list of Pros and Cons. And like I said, I just think my opinion matters – when really, it probably makes no difference. I’ll try and keep it fun, but most of the stuff is just me being nitpicky with habits that I’ve built over the years.

So here are my impressions after one day of installing my first new Windows OS since XP came out. Before that was Win2000, Win ME (yes, I had that installed at one point, shush), Win95, and Win3.11. I never installed Vista because XP worked for me. Scratch that, I installed Vista once. But I think it was only for a day since I got frustrated in trying to set it up. I think it got into an unrecoverable state after I installed some drivers and restarted for the first time. So after that point, I said screw it.

I’m pretty stubborn and have a huge emphasis on speed and efficiency – as you might see from the rest of this write-up. I’ve been used to one UI for a good 10 years, maybe more: the basic Windows Classic Theme, I guess you could call it. Windows 95 started it, and it stayed, for the most part, unaltered through Windows XP (well, I suppose XP had themes, but I stuck to Windows Classic). Gray startbar. Rectangular start button. Collapsing task tray. Quicklaunch toolbar. So making the jump into Aero and skipping Vista is a big deal for me. I’m going to force myself to use this UI and see if I begin to like it or not.

Dislikes

Keep in mind these are my likes and dislikes about things I’ve stumbled upon while customizing the OS to my liking. Most of these dislikes relate to efficiency of workflow. Some of these issues will probably be resolved by daily use. However, some of the issues will always be less efficient than before.

Distance to Close

You’ll find that I have a lot of qualms about the start bar. This is the first. This is one issue with Aero that will never be more efficient than the Classic theme. Remember my blog post about closing items from the start bar a while back? Yeah probably not. But anyway, this issue comes up in the Aero theme and its gaudy framing of all windows - including the context menu for start bar items.

So while it may look just a tad fancier, the distance needed to travel in order to select close window is painfully obvious in execution. So, while I might be able to get used to this, it will never be faster than the Classic theme. Unfortunately, some of the Aero features are not available when selecting the Classic theme. Thus, I will just have to accustom myself to being less efficient. *sigh

Pin to taskbar

I love the Quicklaunch taskbar featured since… I don’t know what version of Windows, but it was there in XP. The main reason is because I liked getting to my apps in one or two clicks with minimal screen space taken up. See http://johnbokma.com/windows/quick-launch.html the end of that page basically has the setup I like. Quicklaunch rollout window that is organized by folders/category. Unless I’m mistaken (and I very well may be), they’ve thrown away the concept of this Quicklaunch toolbar in favor of pinning items to the taskbar.

Once an item is pinned to the taskbar, it becomes an icon. When the app is started, the icon morphs into the task item (like Firefox you see there). This results in, to my mind, a unorganized jumble of task items mixed with icons. I do not like. I want my icons grouped one one side and my tasks grouped on the other.

Don’t get me started on the default view though. I customized this slightly by setting Taskbar buttons to “Combine when taskbar is full” Here’s what it looks like when “Always combine, Hide labels” is selected.That tells you jack crap about what is open. Yes yes, there is the fancy-schmancy thumbnail preview when you hover over an icon. The problem is, this defeats the purpose of the taskbar somewhat. The taskbar, in my opinion, is a quick means of bringing up a specifically desired window.

Hovering over the icon forces the user to wait a few seconds before they can select the desired window. You may argue alt-tab might be faster – but that’s only if the tasks are placed next to each other in the task switching order. End result: looks fancier, fails at efficiency of workflow.

That was somewhat a sidetrip, but we’re still focused on the taskbar here: what happened to hiding icons! I don’t think this is possible anymore. You know how you could display only specific icons on the taskbar and hide the rest in the popup menu? I think that’s gone. And while I do now have a higher-res widescreen monitor. This has got to be taxing the horizontal space on 4:3 displays. If anyone knows how to hide items like the Quicklaunch bar used to do, PLEASE let me know.

Can only pin Executables.

It doesn’t look like I can pin anything other than executables onto the taskbar. This means I can’t pin folders – like I could in the quicklaunch bar. I did this so I could have categorized shortcuts, organized by folders. And I also can’t pin .bat files. I found this out when I tried to pin Cygwin to the taskbar but could not. I tried making a shortcut to the .bat file and it looks like shortcut files can’t be pinned either. Again, if someone knows a workaround, let me know!

I guess all my dislikes were about the taskbar eh? Well, I’m sure I’ll find some more dislikes down the road. After all, I’ve only been using this OS for one day. There have got to be more quirks in other places that will rub me the wrong way… But nevermind that. Now we move on to what I do like about Windows 7. Some of these things may be carried over from Vista, but since I never used Vista, forgive my ignorance.

Likes
Taskbar Rearranging

Previously requiring 3rd party software, Windows 7 now has taskbar drag-and-drop rearrangement. Now I don’t know if this was a feature in Vista, but this is certainly cool in my books. Being able to put similar applications next to each other on the taskbar is a definite performance boost.

You may say that this could be a possible method of grouping icons on one side and tasks on the other. But that’s a really crappy fix. I want my icons grouped and my tasks grouped with no hassle.

Keyboard Shortcut: Win+Tab

The new alt-tab! Except for alt-tabbing out of a game, I’ll probably try and force myself to use this shortcut because it’s visually nifty. Reminds me of some CompizFusion type stuff. [Warning, the screenshot is 1600x1000]

While I don’t know if it’ll improve my workflow, a little eye candy couldn’t hurt too much right? I just have to get used to recognizing window content instead of icon+title. However, windows that do not appear on the taskbar do not seem to get included in win+tabbing. Maybe there will be an update someday.

Keyboard Shortcuts: Win+Left / Win+Right

These two shortcuts now resize the current window to half of the monitor – left side or right side. I used to do this manually all of the time when writing lab reports needing text and spreadsheets. Now it does it for me! And with greater precision too =).

Automatic Wallpaper Rotation

This is one that I enjoy even though I don’t have my desktop in focus most of the time. Still, it’s a nice touch and I can populate it with my entire photo collection and have a slideshow for wallpaper. It’s a nice personal and dynamic touch.

Performance / Resources

With respect to memory usage, I think Win7 is using slightly more RAM than in WinXP – not surprised since it’s also rendering the Aero interface. At startup with all of my usual background tasks (messengers and such) WinXP used ~600MB wheras Win7 uses ~750MB. I’ll probably install some more RAM in the near future as I’m sitting at 2GB. After all, I did install the 64bit version, might as well make use of the extra addressing space!

I do indeed like the new resource monitor though. Performance monitor used to be hidden in some Administrative Tools in the Control Panel, but its now a button on the task manager.

Conclusion

So that’s all for now. It was quite lengthy indeed. I had to switch over to Word part way through to get my planning of this post organized. There’s still some things I need to experience on Windows 7. I have not gotten around to gaming yet. I also have not played with multi-monitor support yet either. I don’t think I’ll have time for either of these until I get settled back in to the groove of courseworks. But, I’ll be sure to come back and talk about handling those tasks! That is, if you care. Which I’m sure you have better things to do.

Pros

Taskbar rearrangement. Moving Excel to sit next to Word is now a cinch! No longer requires 3rd party apps.
Keyboard Shortcut Win+Tab: The 3D interface is slick, despite sometimes not showing all active windows. A nice alternative to Alt+Tabbing
Keyboard Shortcut Win+Left/Right: Resize to fit half the monitor. Great for working with multiple documents. Used to do this manually.
Rotating Wallpaper: Nice personal touch.
Resource Monitor: I like the presentation of this extension to the task manager. Resource usage in Win7, however, is more intensive (unsurprisingly) than WinXP

Cons

Close Window in Taskbar context menu is placed farther away due to Aero interface.
While not terrible in some respects, the Pin to Taskbar is messy.
- Not quite as customizable as desired
- Probably Gaudy on lower resolutions and less-wide monitors.
- Can only pin executable, can’t pin folders nor regular files (at least to my current knowledge)

Next time I blog might be further impressions on Windows 7, but maybe you’ll get a break from a really long post and I’ll write about “To: Mommy, Subject: My First Day Back at School!” … something like that.

Anyway, if you made it through that entire article, I applaud you! If not, YOU SUCK. Just kidding! I probably wouldn’t sit and read through this article myself either; I don’t blame you.

giving in

2009-08-13T19:45:00.004-04:00

So since I was bored today, I looked around for stuff to do. You know, other than watching anime and playing games. Hacked away a little on the piano, but teaching myself can be frustrating. Lack of finger speed, accuracy, as well as control in the left hand is frustrating. It's like: "Speed (4 SP), Accuracy (2 SP), Control (2 SP)" You have 5 SP to spend. Ah, I guess it's time to grind and get some more skill pointzzz. But anyway, I took a look at my baby and was like hmmm, she needs a little dusting.

Just imagine if all that dust was having fun inside the case! Well, there probably is b/c to have a lot of buildup on the outside most likely means stuff has gotten in. But my baby was on, and I was too lazy to open her up and clean dust the inside...

Anyway, that got me thinking I should probably get around to forming my own opinions about Windows 7. The ISO has been sitting on my PC for a long time. I keep hearing good things about it, but of course I am skeptical. I must experience it myself and only then can I join or refute the hype. Let's hope though, it lives up to its expectations. Thus, I shall be taking it for a spin in a few moments - the image is burning as I type. It's probably the wrong time to start testing out a new OS though - seeing as fall classes start back up on Monday. But I suppose it might be for the better. See how it handles my daily ordinary use - instead of my break usage consisting of movies and games.

On the note of games, the new Team Fortress 2 Classless Update came out a few minutes ago. Of which I'm sad I won't be able to play with until after Win7 is installed. Spy kinda got screwed, Scout got better in my eyes, and hopefully the new maps and mode will be fun.

Anyway, next time I shall be blogging from Windows 7 :o And probably my thoughts on how well the install went as well as how it performs in my hands. Until then, zip it up and zip it out.

whoa!

2009-08-06T17:25:00.005-04:00

I won something!

http://www.evga.com/decade/scavenger/default.asp

Well if that link dies off in the future, here's a screenshot!

Don't think I've ever won something online before... unfortunately, I have no DDR3 compatible motherboard... And I don't think I'll be upgrading anytime soon.

Maybe I can set them on my desk and stare at them...

Anyway, I felt the need to share.

Until next time, I hope you win something too!

small fix

2009-08-04T13:33:00.003-04:00

I just realized that the image mouseover opacity effect was no longer working in Firefox 3. Guess it's for the better that opacity is used and not -moz-opacity now. Anyway, that's been updated - I'm telling you for no reason at all, really. But maybe if someone has the same problem as me......

Anyway, grades were posted today. Yay for all A's! Makes me happy. Best wishes to all, and maybe next time I'll get around to that post about consciousness. I still haven't organized how I'm going to discuss it. I also don't know if it's worth it, b/c there's no point, really...

Until next time, take care dear readers!

no direction

2009-08-02T16:25:00.005-04:00

As the title implies, there is no purpose to this post. However, I feel the need to oblige my lovely readers in a prompt fashion ;). I usually like to have some kind of idea or topic that drives the writing. But as summer classes have ended, so too, it seems, has my brain. Grades come out in two days. Confirmed A in two classes, confirmed pass in the pass/fail class, but 1 class remains. If he curves then I'll have an A for sure. If he doesn't, then I hope he is generous with partial credit cuz i screwwwwwwed the first problem (of 5) over big time.

The end of classes also brings about another change, this one at home. My parents, being the caring and supportive people that they are, usually don't ask much of me during the school terms. However, now that classes have ended. "Oh, well I was waiting for you to have some free time, so go do this, this, this, that, this, and that". I understand it's perfectly normal. I'm just spoiled.

So ends my personal stuff, how about an observation on a few good anime shows. Last season's Higashi no Eden (Eden of the East) was quite a good show - despite them leaving the storyline for two followup movies. One of the last scenes is main character dude shooting down a missile - finger pistol style.

And then just recently I finished watching both seasons of Black Lagoon. As a side note, I highly recommend this show. It's dark, somewhat intellectual, and totally badass. I actually liked it because it's dark and stays so 'til the end. Sure there's tones of redemption or honor; I'm not being cynical either, but do you ever just wish some movies shouldn't have happy endings? Anyway, screenshot from the final moments of Black Lagoon Second Barrage. I'm glad the "new season" coming up will be OVA. I hope it means they can make it super badass with no restrictions that would have come from TV censors.

So now you must be wondering what the point of this is. I'm not quite sure either. But after finishing these two shows in, somewhat, close proximity to each other. I just thought, when's the first time Bang was used in this manner? And all I could think of was:

Anyone know of an older reference? I also found it amusing that three different "Bang"s had three different subtitles. "Bang..." "Bang!" and "Bang." I think that about covers all possible ways of punctuating it, don't you think? Well... maybe there's "Bang?" but that is not the cool way of saying Bang. Anyway, I presented to you three Bangs which were all a part of three highly recommended anime shows. Does that mean the key to success is to end with Bang? Or does it mean that good shows end with a Bang? Ok I've run out of ideas.

Until next time. Keep on Bangin! (ok that came out wrong)

lies, chipsticks, and the light at the end of the tunnel

2009-07-12T14:30:00.008-04:00

I'm afraid that my baby was mad at me. What did I do to her, you ask? I'm a guy; guys never know what they did wrong, right? *ahem....uh.. this baby I'm talking about is my desktop computer. But I seem to have gotten lost in the reference. Anyway, that picture is evidence that my baby was mad at me, because she was just straight up lying to me =(. But, after a good night's sleep and a fresh restart on our relationship. I think my baby is happy again.

On to chipsticks! No, chipsticks is not a new brand of fishsticks based on potato chips. That would be disgusting... Then again... french fries are called chips over there on the other side of the ocean. They are also in the shape of sticks. So maybe those are true chipsticks. But that wasn't the point! See recently I've been inundated with schoolwork deadlines and homeworks and exams. Thus, I have been spending much time, uncharacteristically, doing homework and such. (But really, I probably slack of 90% of the time and end up doing nothing except complaining about how much work I have)

In either case, snacks are the lifeblood of homework sessions, are they not? But the predicament is this: I like barbeque flavored chips. Barbeque flavored chips are powdery. Barbeque flavored chips' powder ends up on fingers. Homework requires either utilizing a writing utensil or the keyboard. Writing utilities do not like powdery fingers. THUS!, my solution is to use hardware finger extensions! BAM!

Ok, well *I* thought it was clever. So if you ever walk in on me and see me with some chopsticks eating chips, it is *not* ridiculous. It is a perfectly logical solution. So anyway, I have now adopted the style of eating snacks with chopsticks while studying. You should try it out too! It's positively great.

Ah, O light at the end of mine tunnel. Why must you be so fickle? The flickering is giving me seizures of hope and despair. Only 5 days of class left and 4 final exams. You are so brilliant in this regard. But only 2 weeks of vacation exists between the end of this term and the beginning of the next. Such a fleeting brilliance.

You can ignore that last paragraph. I never typed such a retarded thing, it can't be me blogging; it's my apathetically burned out doppelganger.

Row row, fight the power!

win or fail?

2009-06-25T13:00:00.008-04:00

I think I said something about discussing consciousness in my last blog post, but we'll save that for next time since this will just be a quick post about some amusing events that have happened.

Purposeful Depression

Classrooms should be as accommodating as possible right? So as to be conducive to the learning atmosphere. The probability/statistics class I've been taking this summer has been in a typical room. Lit adequately with those fluorescent lights that are so abundant in school and office buildings. It would be a dark room if not for those lights... or so I had thought. The other day, I walked in and noticed something a little different with the room:

Wait, we had windows in the room?! Why oh why weren't they open! Isn't that so depressing? To be robbed of sunlight, when it is a small tug of the curtain away... It's sad isn't it? That we've become used to unnaturally lit classrooms? What if all rooms were brightly lit by the happy rays of natural lighting? Would classes be less boring? Or would there be more daydreaming... Either way, it surprised me that I had never noticed the room actually had windows... but unfortunately, the room is to be kept isolated from the outside world *sigh.

Community is ... Interesting... Amusing... おもしろい ...

Some words are best expressed in another language? Community is both interesting and amusing at the same time. How did I come about this thought? I was headed home on MARTA yesterday and reached my station - end of the line. I got off the train and I saw a ton of GREEEEEEEEEEEEN. It was amazing how many Mexicans were present. I had never seen so many at the MARTA station before. There must be some kind of event going on, were my thoughts. But ... I didn't know of any Hispanic holidays going on... But then I saw the green soccer jerseys and the Mexican flags used as capes and the only reasonable explanation would be a soccer game.

As I left the station for the parking lot, there were even more Mexican families heading to the station. And then I remembered that there was also a Braves baseball game so I thought it would be amusing to try and find those families. I saw one family. I don't know why, but I almost laughed out loud (not to be mistaken with LOLed) when I passed them. It just seemed super amusing - amongst a huge population of the Mexican community was one small family going to see a baseball game. Community is strange indeed.

So when I got home, I looked up with game was going on: Mexico v. Venezuela. But even more interesting was the fact that Team Mexico hadn't been to the southeast since the Olympics. I guess that explains the huge turnout.

ORLY?

And finally, this was on my iGoogle homepage today. And the first thought that popped into my head when reading this title was "No sh*t". Honestly, if you believe that reading/typing does not affect driving, you don't deserve to be on the road. Eyes away from the road = not looking at the road. Not looking at the road = not driving.

Still, I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt - perhaps there was more to this article than the obvious. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. There were some charts and numbers, but ultimately, it's just common sense. Seriously, the things people waste money on for studies... I know there are many more cases of such "No duh." studies, but I can't think of them now. I'm sure you've seen them though...

Anyway, those were my observations of the week. Just random things I felt like I wanted to put down in type. I've been doodling a lot in that probabilty/statistics class... but nothing good ever comes out of it. I've even tried doodling a new blog layout. But they suck. So, don't suck like me, and be cool in life. Til next time!

Oh I forgot, if you haven't listened to Suzumiya Haruhi no Gensou yet, the first track is pure win.

buried in the sand

2009-06-15T15:05:00.002-04:00

The ebb of schoolwork is merely accompanied by an anxiety - an uneasiness stemming from being conditioned to the flow. Reflecting, reviewing, trying to recollect what it feels like to be truly relieved of all responsibilities, deadlines, obligations. There is anticipation. After being consumed for so long by the workload, you wonder, When is the next spike in activity?

And as you restlessly sit in the wake of the high tide, the question must be asked, What was the positive duty cycle of the wave? What's the period of oscillation? For these answers will reveal how long this apprehension will last...

wait, what? ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! i went from the beaches to electronic waveforms..... i'm so burnt out. I recently finished a long report on analog electronic relaxation oscillators... I think it's adversely affecting my brainz. I don't believe I've had all that much time in the past week or two to do much of anything aside from coursework. And even though the majority of it is now finished, there's still little things that still need to be done. But I always sit here wondering if I'm forgetting something big. And this continues until something big actually does come along, and the cycle repeats itself.

So on a completely random, and hopefully less depressing note: ice cubes are annoying little buggers. Even though our fridge says "Cubes" it still spits out those rectangular hemisphere type thingies. And then, after they've all populated the glass of water, all they like to do is get all up in your face - quite literally. Ever tried drinking, and then the ice "cube" pretty much blocks off all liquid flow into your mouth? Then you try to raise the glass higher so that water maybe run faster? But in the end you're just freezing your upper lip... sneaky bastards, those ice chunks are.

This morning I woke up and the first thought that came to mind was: consciousness is such a mysterious thing. So maybe next time I'd like to talk about consciousness, especially the relationship between memory and self-awareness... it certainly is an interesting thing to ponder, but whether its worth writing a blog post about is questionable...

Until next time, continue existing! (wtballs does that mean?)

failllllll

2009-06-03T13:32:00.009-04:00

This post will be full of fail. It seems occurences in my life recently have been full of fail. But they are the amusing type of fail - not the depressing kind of fail. But maybe it's a little bit of frustrating fail. Also, there's a little bit of lose-faith-in-humanity fail.

So let's start with some complaints about life; more specifically: summer classes. So one of the classes I'm in this summer is International Affairs (requisite for ethics credit). So last Thursday, we were supposed to watch a movie in lecture. But of course, technical difficulties with the VCR (yes, VHS movie) caused it to be delayed to this past Tuesday. So, this past Tuesday, the professor tells us the movie will be shown on a different date for 3 extra credit points. THREE points! She says she'll show it Thursday at 4pm and then asks if there are any conflicts? Of course, there's a conflict on my end (otherwise I wouldn't be sharing right?). But then someone asks if she'll have another showing for those who can't make it. She says no, don't worry about it. It's only extra credit. So what was the point of you asking if there are any conflicts?! So yeah, I don't find this predicament fair at all... but I'm too lazy to complain about it. Situation = Fail.

Fail #2

So this past weekend I needed to download an evaluation version of Cadence OrCAD. Little did I know that such an important product in the engineering world had such a failure of a web/file server. 945Mb download @ 10kbps. I left it to dl for the day, and at night it said 10hours remain. So I tried leaving it overnight. But the next morning when I woke up, it said it still had 8 hours remaining. miniFAIL. Then a couple of hours later, the download failed. I wasn't using a download manager, so I failed there. So I tried downloading it again (not learning from my mistake and still did not use a download manager). This time it downloaded more than it did previously ~800MB and then failed again.

So at this point I gave up on downloading it at home, and decided to test my luck with a campus edu line. The results are disheartening.
YOU FAILLLLLLL

Fail #3

So I had to turn in an application for a joint BS/MS program we have here. One of the applications stated I needed to go to a certain office. So I went to the receptionist/secretary lady person and the conversation went a little like this:

I honestly don't know if she didn't understand that Computer Engineering is an actual major or what. But that conversation was full of fail. At least she was correct in that I really needed to go to the ECE academic office instead. But I can't really say it was my fault since the application indicated the wrong office. Oh well, I still lost a little faith in humanity there too.

Fail #4

I was recently on Facebook (which is rare, because I have a deep aversion to it). But what I saw only added to my list of reasons why I despise Facebook.

Am I the only one who loses faith in humanity when I see a blaring and elementary grammar mistake such as this one? This is a public application. There's only two words that you could screw up... and well, you FAIL.

It's only been half a week and I've encountered so much fail. I hope that next week will bring me lots of win. But the fact that I have tests in every class doesn't provide very good prospects. On a random note, I was writing today's date, and 6+3=9! I'm so clever. If you get it, you are clever too! Continue being clever! Til next time.

exit strategy

2009-05-21T19:53:00.000-04:00

So two posts back I talked about that single/double space issue. Lo and behold, a few days ago, an exactly similar article was posted on Digg! I thought to myself... THEY STOLE MY POST! But then, their post actually had a picture of Typing Tutor from DOS (and the screenshot shows a double space between sentences! HA!)... so I guess they 1upped me. Oh well. Here's the link to the Digg FP article. At least that gives positive closure to where I learned the habit of double spacing between sentences.

Next topic! So, you know how stairwells sometimes have an emergency exit sign on them? Some of them confuse me - or at least their choice of words make me think about its meaning.

See, the wording makes me think: This door is only to be used in emergencies. Thus, "emergency exit only". But it actually means it is the only exit in case of emergencies. So should it say "Only Emergency Exit"? Maybe that has the same problem as its wording now! I guess this matter is more difficult than it seems!

know how there are some emergency exit doors that have the warning: "Alarm will sound if opened." Yeah, I'm always afraid that one day, I'm going to see an exit that says Emergency Exit Only, mistake it for a normal exit, and then end up being that person. The one who set off the alarm. Oh well.

Next topic! I see this a ton in class lectures and the student center. But before I tell you, let's begin building a mental picture of the matter at hand.

Laptop. What are the functions associated with laptop? What are its unique characteristics? Small, convenient, portable, mobility. No I'm not going to be bashing on monster beastly laptops. I do, however, see that the majority of laptop users will use their AC power adapter. They will try their best to find a seat closest to a power outlet. If this is you, yes I am criticizing you. I'm sorry, but this is how I feel.

This type of behavior contradicts the advantages of a laptop. Let me elaborate.

Convenience: Laptops are great because you can use them anywhere (mostly). Attempting to find a power outlet to plug yourself in, however, is very inconvenient.
Portability: You have to lug around your AC adapter. This decreases portability.
Mobility: This, I believe is the biggest advantage of a laptop. But, along with the inconvenience of finding an outlet, you become tethered to the wall. The power cord is only so long...

And these are the reasons why I think people scrambling to plug their laptops in ridiculous. I'm not saying its always a bad thing, I've forgotten to keep my laptop charged sometimes; but it kinda defeats part of the purpose of a laptop. Yes, there's also laptops that barely keep their charge, but that ultimately stems from two things: it's crappy or it's old. And by crappy, it could be the super powerful spec-wise, but sucks battery like a ... nvm yeah crappy. Or it's so loaded down with applications that it becomes crappy...
Uh, I'll just stop there. I feel that any more typing I do about the matter will be redundant.

Final topic! Haruhi Season 2 is finally under way!... I just have to re-watch Season 1 now to be re-acquainted with the timeline!

Ok, take care dear readers; until next time!

past

2009-05-11T19:40:00.006-04:00

That last post of mine got me all nostalgic and stuff. I went back and skimmed over some of my old essays (yes, I have archives of all digital assignments since 9th grade). My only comment is: wow, my writing sucked. It probably still sucks now too.

I read a persuasive essay that I had to write during junior year of high school and the topic was the flak that the video game industry was receiving due to violent video games. The good points were there, but they were horribly argued and explained. I'm not sure if it was because I was truly a bad writer or that I didn't try hard enough.

I guess part of the problem was that, in our high-school student mindset, we were fixated on the word count requirement of the assignments. It caused us to write as little as possible to meet the word count. Not to mention procrastination factor. It really makes you wonder how well you could have done if you had actually tried... I remember classmates (and probably myself too) complaining about poor grades on our essays; you know what? we were probably just being brats - we probably deserved those grades. Oh I'm not regretting anything, I made decent grades. It's just that, in retrospect, I'm a little disappointed in myself for being crappy. Oh well, what's done is done.

Switching tracks: I had a teacher in the social studies teacher in the 5th grade who, the only thing I can remember from her was two retorts she had. So like, the first, like, quote from her was "Don't say like. It's not 'like'. It is or it isn't." That absolutely killllllllled everyone back then. Like, yeah. It's a tough habit and I'm sure that we still use it in conversation today. I do wonder where the phrase came from though. Who started off the 'like's?

The second thing I can remember was:

Student: "Can I go to the bathroom?"
Teacher: "I don't know, can you?"

That killed everyone too. I don't really know why I'm sharing these memories, but those are probably the only two things I took away from that teacher. Social studies? meh... I don't even know what the curriculum was back then... But conversational precision, she definitely makes me think of word usage from time to time.

Uh, time for class now, next time: emergency exits... i think.

space space

2009-05-11T15:01:00.010-04:00

Ah, only 1 week after Spring semester finished, it is now Summer semester. Hopefully that one week was enough to refresh myself for this semester. I'm sitting here in a study room... and it's completely empty. It's odd because this room usually has at least one or two groups working on some project. Now that it's summer, campus is strikingly empty. I'm sure these observations are commonplace, but it takes up text space =). I'll need all the practice I can get with text space because I'm taking an ethics class this summer. Gotta rev up the nfinite BS engine©® and flex my typing fingers for non-technical writing. Oh and this post is long because Joy says long posts are win.

And by the way, that class is coming up next... 4:00 - 5:45 Mondays and Wednesdays. Nearly 2 hours of ethics. I truly wonder just how much discussion can occur in 1:45hr. It could go both ways -- it could be the most boring thing in the world. Or it could involve controversial topics that trigger thought-provoking discussion. Chances are it's the former though. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Speaking of taking up writing space, here's a question that I would like some feedback on. (No this is not some ploy to see who is actually reading my blog... ... ok maybe it is). How many spaces do you type after a period at the end of a sentence?

I hit my spacebar button twice (if you didn't already guess from my post title). I was recently talking with a friend about essays and they said something along the lines of "...and she puts TWO spaces after all her sentences!" To which I replied, "Is that wrong?" Of course the answer was, yes it is wrong. [For more information about this topic, I found this report about the matter.]

If you don't feel like clicking the link, here are some key points: Two spaces after a period is a deprecated rule from the typewriter days. It was necessary for readability. Since typewriters print fixed-width characters, two spaces after a period was a better visual cue for sentence breaks. Now that we use fonts with kerning, this double space is unneeded.

So, I am correct when it comes to monospaced fonts, but I am wrong with wrong fonts. (This probably means I'm completely wrong, but I'm being stubborn here).

Where am I going with this discussion? Well, at first I didn't realize I was double space-ing after sentences and so I went back to check on my essays from high school. Odd isn't it? That you don't realize how long you had some habits? Sure enough, all my papers had two spaces after all the sentences. My friend proceeded to say they had lost all respect for me because I have been cheating on all my papers. Just for kicks and to spite them, I went back to see just how much paper area I was "wasting" by double spacing after sentences.

A 5.5 page paper was reduced to 5.25 pages - roughly 5% less. Maybe that's not too much, but I can see it adding up on, say, a 25 page paper. You know what? No one has told me this practice is wrong. Until now, of course. I will probably keep double tapping that big button on my keyboard since its so ingrained in my typing habits. I'm not all that worried about fixing the bad habit either. No one has noticed (or said anything about) it. It also works in my favor for long writing assignments. The question is, where did I learn this habit?

I've been around PCs for quite some time now. Had an old 486SX my dad gave me. (Fun story about the DX and SX designations on the old 486s that I never knew until one of my professors was talking about it one day in class, but if you're interested just message me sometime) Then got an old Pentium-133. Then sometime in late middle school, I had saved up enough all-A money (report card reward for getting all As. Anything less would've been a beating) and I bought and built myself a rig with a P4 @ 1.7GHz and it was awesome. I forgot where I was going with this conversation. Let's backtrack a little...

Oh right, so I've been around computers for as long as I can remember and so my guess is that I learned how to type from old DOS typing tutor programs. My guess is that, since DOS was all a monospaced, text-based, with minimal GUI programs I learned the rules of typing within that paradigm. Coming into the GUI heavy operating systems and fancier fonts, I never learned from nor used a new typing tutor program and thus was never taught nor corrected to do a single space after sentences.

I find this development fascinating. I could say "When I was your age, we put TWO spaces after sentences!" Wait, that's not a good thing is it? Nevertheless, it's amusing to know that I carry a habit from a previous phase in computing. Well, let's see who all replies. My main curiosities are:

Did you know that we're only supposed to put one space after sentences?

How and when did you come across this information? - This could be from a typing training program, or word-of-mouth, or a formal typing class, or even a composition class.

And since we are quite the global bunch (we in references to those who I know occasionally visit this blog), it'd be even more interesting to see if there's some kind of trend in locale.

--post note
It turns out my ethics class won't have any essays. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since it's one professor teaching a lecture hall of ~120 students. So I can leave the nfinite BS engine©® in low-power mode for this blog.

lawl...tough times

2009-05-05T16:25:00.003-04:00

So grades came out a few hours ago. BAM! ALL As. So either I got above that 94 I needed, or the average did a whole lot than me... Either way, I'm happy now. Ok, that was my gloating time. I'm finished.

So I was raiding the pantry the other day - since, now that I'm home with no schoolwork, there's nothing better to do. I chanced upon a box of Gushers. Woohooo! Sticky candy! Behold, it also had a sweepstakes thingy on it too! I remember being younger and dreaming of the day I could win one of these prizes. You know, the ones where you win a lifetime's worth of candy, or ten grand, or a trip to all the amusement parks in Florida. Those were some awesome prizes. So check it, here's the prize on this box of Gushers:

Win CASH! Alright! So I opened the box and peeked inside to see if I had won. But the same words of disappointment greeted me from the inner dark depths of the candy box: TRY AGAIN.

*sigh. Rejected. I did, however, forget to check to see what the prize was. If you also didn't notice, check the picture again. Five bucks. Wait wut?
These must be truly hard economic times... the prize is five dollah.

I suppose I shouldn't be complaining, the prize pays for the cost of the snacks and then some. You could buy another box of snacks! And then the inevitable words of doom could be delayed until the next box!

Well, that's all I have for today. Hopefully this has been a short post. I never realize how long some of my posts are until I see it in the blog. Until next time, keep "Try Again"-ing in life!

a personal post

2009-05-03T10:28:00.000-04:00

Whoa, it's a personal post! I usually have some commentary on some subject that amused me. But today, I'm going to be even more self-centered and write up something like a journal entry.

So, I finally finished my finals for this semester. All that's left now is the wait until official grades get posted. I had two classes that I was worried about not getting an A in... but the professor in one of them posted up some grades on a web-portal system (which is total crap, and everyone knows it; but for some reason the university bought it and so all the professors have to use it... and everyone hates it). And so I checked it and was saddened because it said my final course average was 85.42. But then I kept reading an email that was sent to everyone and found out that there was another field given that corresponded to letter grade. Then I saw it said 4/5 and I was like, bah foiled. But then I kept reading the email and it said 4 corresponded to A. And I was like....... nowai! So apparently, the class average was totally worse than an 85. (He gives As to the top 10th percentile.. I think?)

So, moral of that story; read through an email to its entirety before clicking on relevant links. It will save you much grief and redemption. That's one of two classes off my mind.
Now the other one is a bit tricky. I figured out that I needed a 94 on the final to get an A. (Yeah I totally bombed the first test, but got over a 100 on the second two tests and I still needed a 94.. that just shows how bad I screwed up the first test).

And so, I actually sat there and tried to figure out my worst case scenario of what questions I got wrong and it turned out to be a 94.4. But there's always stupid mistakes compounded with that worst-case scenario, so only time will tell.

Now that you've read through all that boring stuff... and if you've gotten here, I've got a question to everyone. What's up with the similarities in blog design? More specifically, what's up with the menubar and how it has links to tagboard, profile, posts, archives, links all on SEPARATE pages. Is this some new trend going around? To be honest, it's kind of a pain to go from reading a post to typing a reply in the chatbox... but that's just me being lazy.

Does anyone else feel the same way? Or am I not cool enough to be on the cutting edge of blog trends >.<

Speaking of blog redesign... should I make a new layout too? "All the cool kids are doing it!" It surprised me, but this layout has been around for about a year and a half now...

Still contemplating whether or not I should spend the week of vacation I have on a new design. (That's a lie, I just have no creative talent to make a good looking one in such short notice)

Looks like I left this post in the draft state for too long, now I forget what else I was gonna write. Okay! Time to end the personal post.
Take care in life -nfinite

b+?!

2009-04-23T16:06:00.002-04:00

Recently I saw this ad on TV for Stouffer's frozen dinners... or something like that. I forget what type of frozen food package it was. Well that doesn't really matter. The narrator was from the POV of the mom of a household and how she was all proud of her son and they were going to have a *special* dinner.

Well, as special as you can get with frozen dinners I suppose; advertisements are an odd form of manipulating the facts don't you think? You know, creating fake scenarios and acting as if they are commonplace. Maybe they are commonplace; just not in my place...

Anyway, so the commercial proceeded with the family setting up dinner and the mom ruffling her son's hair - awww... And then at the end it pans to the refrigerator with the Stouffer's logo and some text overlayed on the video. And guess what was on the refrigerator? (I suppose I ruined the resolution of this story in my post title...)

Yes; an assignment with a big, fat, red, circled "B+".

...if I had ever brought home a B+ during grade school, there would have been a beatdown to be had. But it's so close to an A!.. yeah right, it's not an A - end of story.

So you see, I scoffed at the ad. If it had been an A+, I may have somewhat conceded to the ad - with all it's odd glorification of a frozen dinner. But instead, it made me sad to think that a B+ is considered acceptable, or even commendable. B+ means not an A. That was the truth of my childhood.

*sigh, difference in cultural value scales? Why am I criticizing the ad? Beats me... it was something to write about. And it seems, I've noticed, that people find complacency in finding the faults of others. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing... On one hand it allows growth. For, without criticism, one cannot improve as quickly. On the other hand, it just seems like a poor mindset to hold; poor form to fixate on the negative instead of praising the positive.

What do you think? Antagonistic or stimulation? Do you see yourself doing this as well? Or is it just the type of people I associate with. Being in a school of engineering, we always seek precision and improvement. But picking at the wrongs of things is a dual edge - reveals points of improvement but could it create a constant cynical mindset?

Just some things to think about - or not to think about at all. It's all just a big circular argument anyway. Well then, take care dear readers. I'm happy you read until this point =)

org

2009-04-21T23:05:00.000-04:00

So for those of you who know me, you've probably found out that I'm kind of a neat-freak. Not to the extent of OCD - and certainly I can tolerate stuff being messy - but I love the sight of organization. Even those of you who don't (which is hard to imagine b/c this blog sees no virtually no activity - from both author and visitors) may be able to pick it up in some of my posts. Seeing things tidy, clean, and sharp makes me happy inside. Sure, you could say outer appearance is superficial, but the counter-argument to that is: there are circumstances in which superficiality is arrogant, and others where it's ok. I'd like to group organization with the latter.

Anyway, back to the point. My folder and file organization on my computers is no exception. In fact, I said before that I'm not OC on organization. Maybe I take that back. File/folder organization is paramount in computers, in my opinion. There's the analogy of files on a computer being similar to your belongings in your house. Sure, you could just throw everything on the floor of your room. In physical space, this works for many people. You know, the "It's messy, but I know exactly where everything is!" argument. You could say, hey let's put a buncha files into one folder, it'll be like my room. This analogy breaks down when you account for the sheer order of magnitude difference between items you put in your room and number of files on your PC.

--See, I originally started writing this post in between classes one day. But, it's probably been at least 2 weeks since then.... and I forgot where I was headed with that analogy. I think it was somewhere along the lines of me trying to set up a background story so that I could justify my own file organization habits. And here I shall explain my habits (you know, it's bad form to announce what you're about to say in papers?, whatever.)

So, what brought on all of this talk about file organization? Well, I was recently organizing my hard drives and was observing that my "My Documents" folder was ugly. If it was my fault that it's ugly, I'd be ok with it and just clean it up. But the problem lies (mainly) with game developers. I'll get back to the "(mainly)" later.

What irked me was that game developers are now deciding it's OK to invade my personal space. What do I mean? Take a look at this screenshot:Stop putting save data folders in MY DOCUMENTS~! Don't think that you're all high and mighty and can invade my own organization space with your company names! I wouldn't be so mad if they put the a subdirectory inside the My Games folder (which some games do). But to blatantly put its own folder in the root of My Documents is ridiculous. I count 3 extraneous folders that could be collapsed into the My Games folder (Bioshock, GTAIV, and FEAR 2). These are all great games, BUT! they should not be cluttering My Documents folder. My directory list could be more compact, and more importantly, more precise.

Remember the old days when games used to save their files in their own installation directory? Has it become more user-friendly to now put them in My Documents? The people who will edit their saves and screenshots should be smart enough to locate the installation path of the game. Thus, the user-friendly factor has been rejected. I wouldn't have a problem with this if these save paths were configurable; you know, ask the user where they want their saves to be placed! Don't force us to comply to your save structure.

I suppose I've been saying the same thing over the past 3 paragraphs, so I'll give it a rest. If only all developers could ask us where we want our saves. Or at least place them all in the My Games folder...

Anyway, I think I've been beating a dead horse. Here's to a post a month or two after the last! Enjoy life

P.S.
Oh yeah, (mainly) was referring to the fact that even non-game applications do this. Some of the tools I use for class automatically generate their own stupid folder. But at least these applications have the ability to change the location in their preferences later.

snow in march

2009-03-01T14:54:00.004-05:00

Hello everyone. Looks like February went without any posts at all. If it's any consolation, I did jot down some topics that I thought would be amusing to share. So maybe those will come in this March.

But there is other news today! It started snowing! Yes, I found it strange that it was snowing - in March - in Georgia. Truly wacky weather. But I thought I'd just share a few pictures I took (from the warmth of the inside of my house of course).

So it's a few hours later and still snowing... I'd say a good 2in or 6-7cm has stuck - having snow stick is kinda rare here. If it's still snowing when I get back to campus later tonight, I might be able to get some shots of part of the Atlanta skyline when its snowing. It's times like these when I wish I had a better digital camera to grab the really nice details of the moment. Noise on my point and shoot can be an issue... ah well

Good bye for now, and enjoy life in its simple glory.

abbr (abbreviation)

2009-01-19T16:25:00.000-05:00

So I managed to complete all work needed to be done this 3day weekend. Finished projects, finished homework, organized some due dates and fun stuff like that /s. I realized that I'm now really bored; I was just about to go play DS or something, but remembered that this blog has been untouched for a while. There were also some notes I had jotted down for post content. So here we go fleshing those out.

Have you ever read posts/comments online that use abbreviations and then define the abbreviation? Even if its a one sentence post, they will use an abbreviation followed by what it stands for. To me, this seems ridiculous. IMHO (in my humble opinion), abbreviations are used to shorten a body of text. Thus, abbreviations should only be needed when the abbreviated term/word will be used more than once. Otherwise, AFAIK (as far as I know), if the term is used only once, what's the point in abbreviating it in the first place? Isn't that just more work? And consequently, doesn't that just defeat the purpose of abbreviation?

I can slightly understand the reverse order though, when someone uses a term/word and then specifies its abbreviation. When used in this manner, it seems like the writer is saying, "It's OK to use this abbreviation in the future." (Because many things should not be abbreviated [BMTSNBA]) So, should the need arise for the term to be used again, it can be. But doing it the other way around seems like a waste of time. Bah, what do I know about efficiency, right?

Moving along: I recently went back and skimmed some of my older posts - most of them quite absurd and meaningless, once you think about it. Something I've noticed is that I often ignore certain contradictions to my arguments for the sake of keeping a coherent argument. (Even though, technically it becomes flawed in doing so). And I was thinking maybe I should have a visual marker when I do things like that. Because, of course, I don't want people to think that I'm ignorant. I know very well that there are counter-points that would totally destroy my content. But if I acknowledged those points, I would have nothing to type.

So maybe I could like... mark any flawed logic in the future... a different color text? But that's kinda annoying. Italics? Bold? Those don't work because sometimes I'll need those. Maybe a special character like {BI} for.... Being Ignorant. Well, we'll see what comes to mind when the time comes and I need to use a marker.

Until next time, enjoy life.

Oh yeah, the presidential inauguration is tomorrow isn't it... I'm glad I'm back home and don't have to deal with DC/surrounding area traffic for work this semester... have fun with that peoples!

reflection

2009-01-02T13:06:00.000-05:00

It looks like I'll be getting to this post before next week after all! There is a lot of text and no pictures; just a warning.

With the new year upon us, I suppose people have or have been reflecting upon the past as well as making their New Year's Resolutions. This post shall be dedicated to my reflections - not so much on my resolutions. Well, let's first talk about my view on resolutions.

How long do you think the average New Year's Resolution lasts? How often does the resolution become the ideal of integrating into one's daily life and schedule? The biggest case in point: "I will exercise more/regularly!" I'm sure there are people who have the motivation, drive, and commitment to follow through with this resolution; but let's be honest, I'm sure the majority of people don't last more than a couple of weeks, maybe a month. I'm not being cynical, just realistic. If you take a look at the attendance at gyms for the first month of the year, I'm absolutely positive that there will be a huge declining slope of number of people working out.

So anyway, on to the purpose of this post - reflections.

Being the break between one of my working terms and a school term, I've had literally zero tasks to complete which therefore left a lot of free time (aka "nothing to dooooooo D:") So naturally, being the profound person that I am *cough*, there were times when deep thinking and cogitation were involved. One such point that I would like to share - because I'm sure many other thoughts occurred that should not be shared - was on the day of Christmas Eve.

I was thinking back on previous Christmases. I don't know why, but I always feel the need to clarify that our family isn't particularly religious, nor any denomination of Christianity, but we consider Christmas a family holiday to spend time together and give presents. Maybe it's because I don't want the religious overtone that "Christmas" might hold. Not because of an aversion to a specific religion, but to provide an isolation from the inherent societal biases of specific religions.

I think I got sidetracked there. Previous Christmases, right. Our family opens presents on the night of xmas eve, so as a kid I would be entirely ecstatic the entire day - from waking up early, to rushing through dinner, and attempting to rush through the obligatory pre-present-opening family pictures. Has Christmas lost some of its charm from childhood? Or have the conditioning over the years lessened the excitement in receiving presents - which is really a shame if this is true as all presents should be cherished. Or has maturity through the years dulled our inner child - apathy? All of these melancholy thoughts passed as I sat and reminisced on the past 24th of December.

The best conclusion I could come up with was none of these. These thoughts were too devoid of color - I needed an explanation that not only made sense, but also would not degrade the intensity of our emotions: the intensity we held as children anticipating surprises that would unravel themselves as we shredded through gift wrapping. I want to know that I still am in touch with that young spirit. In my view, if someone should call me childish, I would take it as a compliment. Maturity is overrated. Innocent joy is magnificent.

I think my problem is that the anticipation of before is different from the anticipation now. The main difference being knowledge of what's to come. Where we once anticipated what surprises would come, I now anticipate with better knowledge of what the presents are. Maybe as children we were more predictable in what we wanted and therefore the gift givers could totally surprise us. But now as we grow older, maybe we filter out what we really want when talking about what we want.

I would really love to get my hands on a D-SLR camera and to play with it. But I know that it is an absurd request for a gift - too pricey and it would be unreasonable to ask it of my parents. I can live without it. Had it have appeared among the Christmas presents, I think it may have restored some of the magic that presents hold. I'm just giving this as an example, I'm sure there are many items - even ones that have no monetary value attached - that would instill the same effect.

The solution? With my personality, there really isn't one - I can't all of a sudden begin to wish/ask for everything I want to play with. But it's nice to know that should something particularly special appear unexpectedly, I could anticipate Christmas as before.

I suppose I just talked in a giant circle this post. An observation of my mindset, a way to justify it, a way to change it, but not actually attempting to change it. Ha, it all comes back to New Year's Resolutions in a way, doesn't it? Still, having a goal - even if improbable - is better than brushing off the issue. So with that, here are my resolutions:

-Post more (ha, ok, the goal will be more than 28 posts this year, which looks like my current record)

-Master a few more songs on the piano (being self-taught, I always end up learning the majority of the song - maybe even the full song, but never able to string all the individually practiced parts together into a "full song")

-Set up a schedule for reading and coursework (I know for sure this will help with my studies, and as classes get harder, I feel this will be necessary. But how far can I go with this? I'm never too great with enforcing my personal schedules. I've done well so far by procrastinating, but I know that this won't hold up in the future. We'll see how far I can go with this resolution)

So the goal of a New Year's Resolution is that it will, in the end, incite some change in lifestyle/personality for the better. That's all we can hope for right? - the best outcome.

Until next time, enjoy life and good luck with your resolutions! May they all reach fruition.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T13:55:00.002-05:00

Happy New Year to ALL!

Wishing everyone the best and brightest for the 2009 year to come!

Until next post - probably sometime next week after I'm all settled back into university life - enjoy life!

a line is a curve

2008-12-06T15:21:00.002-05:00

Welcome to home stretch of the year! Just a little bit more to go until Presents Day! I mean Christmas Day. I just looked at my post count and observed that I posted more last year than this year. And this blog was only started halfway through last year! Sad. So sad. Then I realized that I've had this layout for about a year now. I guess that means you all should be looking forward to a new layout around the New Year. I don't have a single clue what the theme will be this time though. Suggestions?

So my post a few days ago about fast food got me thinking about eating hamburgers. And so in the spirit of this comic [Sorry I don't know who to credit] I shall now talk about methods of eating a sandwich/burger. So I'll let you collect your thoughts a moment; how do you eat a sandwich? To be more precise, in what order and in what way do you bite the burger?

I shall now present two possible ways of eating a sandwich. I'm not sure if there are more ways, but these two seem to be the most obvious to me. I shall also present the pros and cons of both methods. Unfortunately, I do not know of a perfect way of eating a sandwich to eliminate all cons. If you know of a way, I would be very much interested!

To be consistent, I will propose that the sub/sandwich/burger of interest shall be a round hamburger. (Why it's called a hamburger when there is no ham is something I still have not looked into.) The shape of the food item does not affect these techniques, however. But just so that we're all on the same page here, imagine, if you will, a round hamburger and not a square sandwich.

TECHNIQUE NUMERO UN
- Olde Fashioned War -
This method is where one eats in a linear fashion. To describe the stages of hamburger consumption:
Stage 0: Hamburger untouched.
Stage 1: A few bites have been incurred.
Stage 2: An approximately half-circle shaped hamburger remains.
Stage 3: The hamburger begins to take the shape of a half moon.
Stage 4: Very little, and soon, no hamburger remains. Straightfoward-eating-jutsu success.

TECHNIQUE NUMBER NI
- Guerilla Flanking -
This method is where one eats the burger around the edges, closing in on the meaty center for the final kill.
Stage 0: Hamburger untouched.
Stage 1: Begin trimming away outside perimeter.
Stage 2: Continue to do so until only the meatiest center remains.
Stage 3: Devour the remainder.

I just noticed that I zero-indexed the Stages. *sigh So anyway, those are the two approaches that I've come up with in my mind. I tend to prefer the second method. I guess you could say I'm the kind of person who likes to save the best for last. Now I shall present the pros and cons of these two approaches.

Technique 1 suffers from a lack of a satisfying finish. It is possible for you to finish off your sandwich with only bread left. I find this very unsatisfying. A sandwich is supposed to be meat encapsulated by bread and therefore meat should be the main event of the sandwich. Having no main event left at the end of the meal is poor planning.

Technique 2 alleviates this negative aspect of Technique 1. By first eliminating the possibility of ending up with nothing but bread, the center of the sandwich/sub/burger is left with the most ingredients in one place. (Unless people place their condiments in a circle around the center of their sandwich [but that's just traitorous]) However! in the act of alleviating the prior dissatisfaction, a new issue arises! The very fact that the center of a hamburger is the most dense in terms of collective ingredients, the issue become of how to neatly dispose of the final bite. Oftentimes the meat starts sliding around and the lettuce and the tomato and the pickles start to get out of alignment with the bread pieces.

That is to say: there is no longer sufficient bread to control the movement of the main event. It becomes difficult and can become very messy when dealing with large burgers that have all sorts of yummies placed in them.

There is a method I've devised to try to compensate, but it is far from perfect. Instead of eating from the normal orientation (bread on top and bottom). The final morsel should be rotated so that the pieces of bread become walls to the meat instead of floor and ceiling. This sometimes helps with keeping the innards from shooting out when one bites into the final moments of hamburger.

There you have it. This has been my opinion and musings about methods of eating a hamburger. Stay tuned, for in next episode, entitled "Apples", I shall discuss the approaches of eating an apple.

Yeah maybe not. But I would argue that the same two techniques could be translated into Apple Skills. Eating a full circle around the apple? or eating entire sides of the apple... anyway, I'm starting to get hungry.

Until next time! Enjoy food! And life! Because both are of utmost importance!

life is beautiful

2008-11-25T22:45:00.001-05:00

Autumn is ending and winter could already be here. I like the word Autumn over Fall. What do you think? 'Autumn' has more of a sophisticated air to it. I think it better captures the essence of the season. Sure, the leaves do fall; but they do so ever so gracefully in the wind. Autumn makes me want to sit outside and watch the leaves float in the wind. The rustling whispers of dry leaves can be so soothing, don't you think so?

Sure, the impending starkness of winter can be a downer - the falling of leaves could be seen as death and a loss of color from the world. But doesn't the color disappear in style? Radiant Reds, shining Yellows, brilliant Oranges fill nature; a complete contrast to its previous Green and upcoming White. I think Autumn fits this view better than Fall. I love all seasons and in a conversation with a dear friend of mine it was said that, indeed, all seasons have their beautiful moments. For me, I love Autumn the most.

It looks like those topics I had in mind a few posts back will have to wait some more. I don't wish to ruin the mood of this topic.

For those of you who celebrate, Thanksgiving is a perfect time to enjoy life. Yes, reflection and giving thanks may have become cliche; but that must mean it's important enough to be reiterated so many times. If not, I hope that you occasionally find the time to slow down life and take a break to breathe in, absorb, and enjoy life as it is - the bads, the goods, everything.

spiral

2008-11-22T22:43:00.001-05:00

Well, originally this post was going to have a title that would have been a continuation of the last post title... but let's just have a brief side-step from that line of thinking. (Extra points if you can guess what the next post title will be... points for what? I have no clue. But wouldn't you be happy knowing that you got points!)

So the topic for today's post shall be: fast food. Ah yes, the convenient and cheap(?) form of sustenance(?) that is Just Another Name for Corn [wired.com]. Why the "(?)"? <-- (doesn't that look amusing?... I thought so... nvm, back to the topic). Well, these are the things I feel like talking about. Fast food as a source of sustenance is questionable for reasons quite obvious already - mainly its lack of nutritious content. Anyway, this isn't the main topic. The main topic is the prior (?) item.

Fast food is toted as cheap by some. But I just can't see it that way. (I'm beginning to think this post is pointless because I'm just going to be highlighting the obvious).

At work, I often see people go get McDonald's or something every day for lunch. That gets me thinking... how do they do it? I mean, money probably isn't a problem for them, but isn't it such a waste? That's like at least $5USD a day. At least. Say they have it 4 days a week. That's $20. Looking at grocery shopping, I'd say $20 would last me an entire work-week for both lunch AND dinner. (But I suppose I'm taking certain things for granted, like rice and seasonings, but whatever).

Am I being cheap? Probably. Is this post completely unorganized? Probably. I guess I started off with the idea that I wanted to ridicule the human nature of defaulting to convenience over money (and even health). Would restaurants and fast food places go out of business if everyone were like me? Probably.

I'm sorry this post was a mess and hard to follow. Hopefully my next post will be better and more planned out.

Why do I care about organization on the internet - where poor grammar and spelling abound? Maybe school has really done its job of engraving proper (to a certain extent... I do take liberties with ellipses and fragments) writing etiquette into my brain.

Do you ever get the feeling that you're being pompous or cocky when writing in proper grammar in comments and forum posts? I can't help feeling that my comments will be conveyed as condescending sometimes. But is that really my fault? Or is it the fault of those who don't care about their grammar. i.e. Is it because I'm attempting to conform to proper grammar that causes this feeling? Or is it because doing so sticks out like a sore thumb from a sea of poor spelling and oftentimes incomprehensible "1337" abbreviations. Something like... you cannot understand the extent of happiness unless you know sadness; how can you measure the brilliance of a mind without knowing stupidity; when bad spelling and grammar are passed by as normal - as in the online world - even the shortest of comments stick out like a sore thumb when written properly. That probably didn't have anything to do with it - but at one point when the thought was forming in my mind, it did.

Look at how side-tracked I got there. I don't even know how I went from fast food to online comment practices. I think it's time for me to end this post before it gets any more convoluted. Hopefully my next post will be more structured and won't cause you to re-read any parts. I hate when that happens - reading something, and then realizing that none of it registered due to poorly formed sentences.

Oops, I almost got side-tracked again. Until next time - enjoy life to its fullest.

Oh I'd just like to say, that even though I complained about fast food - it's ok from time to time.

just open your eyes

2008-11-10T12:36:00.002-05:00

Hello everyone. I'm just going to post something as if this month or two never happened. And from the viewpoint of my blog (if it were a sentient entity), this is pretty much true right?

See, I just started typing this post, and I have a few bullet points I wanted to flesh out, but now I'm starting to get lazy and do not want to work it out. I want illustrations to go with some of the bullet points. So I think I shall just talk about one thing and then leave the rest for another post when I have more motivation to find/create the appropriate illustrations for it.

Let's talk driving to work. There are two quirky things I've found about driving to work. The first is the time at which I arrive at the office seems to be fixed no matter how I vary the time I leave the house. I usually leave at 8:10am and arrive at 8:30am. However, if I leave at 8:15am, I still arrive at 8:30am. On some days, because I, for some reason, feel productive and wish to get to the office earlier, I leave the house at 8:05am. Guess what time it is when I reach the office... 8:30! I will return to this subject somewhat after I continue with the next topic.

I have noticed that there is a certain volume of traffic that is related to which day of the week it is. Hump day truly is a hump if you would graph the volume of cars on the road as a function of time (day of the week). See, normally you would see a graph accompanying this... but I am lazy, so therefore you must use your imagination.

Now, I surmise that there may be a correlation between these two topics I just outlined. Perhaps days where I feel productive, others do as well and everyone leaves just slightly earlier than usual. This causes the time spent on the road to increase due to increase in traffic. Unfortunately, this does make much sense because that would mean people feel productive on Wednesday - the middle of the week - hump day. That seems counter-intuitive.

Maybe when people are feeling lazy, they are much more so than I am, and therefore leave their house later than I do. Thus allowing me to leave a little later, but not encounter as much traffic resistance. This may be plausible as it seems I see the least traffic on Monday and Friday.

However, an explanation for lack of traffic on Monday may be hangover symptoms from the weekend. And an explanation for lack of traffic on Friday is that people are taking a 3-day weekend; or simply do not have to work on Friday.

Yes many of these assumptions I've made are very nfinite-centric. i.e. It's all about me; but whatever.

I think I'm done just typing out whatever comes to mind. This flow of consciousness is now shutting down for the night - even though the time of this post does not indicate that it is very late.... and it would be correct. Because it is not very late.

Remember to enjoy life, no matter what it throws at you. Take care.

-nfinite

Things left on my bullet list:
- new coke bottles
- google screensaver
- autumn
- code indentation protocol

turkey spam

2008-09-02T10:06:00.004-04:00

So I checked my mail this morning and saw "Alissa is waiting for you" as a subject header - and I was like whoa... I have a secret lover? Wait... this is GMail, why is secret lover emails getting into my inbox! So just for kicks, I opened the email.I don't know about you, but this amused me. Especially the part that says "But you have to click!" Don't tell me what to do, you spam mail. You're not the boss of me. I don't have to do anything at all. You know what? I'll click something alright - "Report as spam." Good bye Alissa~

So then I came on to Blogger to talk about this random thing. And I see I've been spambotted on here too! Look! The Chatbox!

Ok that is all, Enjoy life!

unlucky

2008-08-22T17:19:00.005-04:00

Just a chain of unlucky happenings have occurred since the end of the great Europe adventure. Yes I had a ton of pictures taken - ~4100 images at about 7.5gigs from just my and my dad's camera. I have yet to get the pictures from my sister's camera. Anyway, I don't feel like publicly linking the album I uploaded, so just message me if you're interested; there are some very pretty pictures taken - some of them, I'd say, are wallpaper-worthy! And that's not just me boasting about my photography skillz (of which I have little).

Anyway, let's start off with the first unlucky thing that happened. So we got back to our house from the airport; a relative drove us home. My dad had brought the keys to one of our cars. This we could use to open the car in order to open the garage door. There was one problem. My dad had taken all the garage door openers and put them inside - for fear that someone would break into the car and thus have access to the house. What did this mean? We had the keys to the car, but no garage door opener! Panic! Didn't bring the front door keys either! Lame.

So what happened next? Well... I got to break into my own house. Busted a panel from a window, reached inside to unlock the window, lifted the window, and climbed in. So now we have a piece of paper taped over the hole in the window. This is very bad because it's been like this since Sunday. It's going to rain tonight. I'll update you with an after-picture if it does rain.

Misfortune #2: Before I left for Europe, I had wanted to reformat my laptop. Fortunately, after some research, I found out that Dell has a nifty Dell PC Restore utility - which is basically a way of re-imaging the disk through Norton Ghost. So I'm all for it! Backed up my stuff, and set it to do its thing. I come back later and lo and behold "Disk Read Error \ Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". Many expletives ensued.

Fine Fine. I'll reformat and reinstall windows and reinstall drivers the hard way. After doing that, I found the wireless internet to be slowwwwww as balls. So I wondered if I did something wrong. So I tried that re-imaging thing again - only this time manually. Had to find my boot disks, had to mess with the boot record, got into Ghost, everything is restoring just pea...ERROR 36000 INCONSISTENCY DETECTED... *crash*

... This resulted in many more diagnostics - disk consistency checks, disk integrity checks, ghost image consistency checks, ghost image integrity checks. Everything was fine. It turns out, it was actually the version of Ghost that was causing the problem, so I found a new version and everything worked like a charm.

WIRELESS IS STILL SLOW~! After troubleshooting this, I found out that a neighbor had recently set up a wireless network... on the same channel. It was causing interference. I changed our router's wireless channel. Problem solved. Still annoyed that it took 2 days.

Misfortune #3! I started up my Xbox360 today, popped in a game, 360 froze. *expletive* Turned off 360, turned back on, froze at startup Xbox logo. *expletive* Took apart Xbox360 (since it's modded). Saw nothing wrong. Started Xbox with case open. Freezes. *expletive* Puts Xbox back together. Turns Xbox back on.

*expletive* *expletive* *expletive* *sigh* I need to go to the store now to do the X-Clamp replacement. The 360 is such a difficult creature. On one hand, it has an amazing lineup of games and is a pretty good media center. On the other hand, from the hardware perspective, ITS A PIECE OF CRAP.

My misfortune rant is over. Maybe next time I'll have a slideshow of my attempt at fixing the RRoD and see if it works or not. Until then, Enjoy life and all the CRAP that it throws at you!

eurotrip!

2008-08-02T10:01:00.003-04:00

Ok, nfinite shall be leaving to go to Europe for the next two weeks... Not that it makes a difference to my posting schedule.... right? *ahem...

Sorry to those who I didn't get a chance to say bye to; I'll catchya sometime around the 17th when I return. Don't miss me too much now ;)

I shall return bearing pictures!
Until then, Enjoy Life!

{"PC" ∪ "Mac"} == { ? }

2008-07-09T20:43:00.004-04:00

Something that always irked me was that people seem to differentiate between a Macintosh and a PC. Think for a moment... do you see what does not work here?
If I'm not mistaken, PC stands for Personal Computer. Is a Mac not a Personal Computer? It is a computer. It belongs to persons. It must be a Personal Computer then! Still, when someone says 'PC', they are usually referring to something running Windows (or even a Linux based OS) - but not something running OS X. Funny how that works huh? Apple really knows how to market a product properly so that it becomes a class of its own. (like people replacing mp3 player with iPod - though I don't think it's nearly gotten to the prestige of Band-Aid or Kleenex, it's close). And then the price gets jacked up 200%+. *sigh, trendy stuff blows. (and yet I own an iPod, such a hypocrite I am)

There's another ambiguity that I never really figured out either... do you call a laptop a PC? In the strictest sense, it certainly is a personal computer. But saying PC seems to imply desktop PCs. I guess Macs have the same issue huh? When you say Mac, do you mean desktop? or laptop...

Oh yeah! You know when you have a serious brain block, and the word you're looking for just doesn't come up? It's like, you know there's a term for it, but the term is prancing away from you at a pace slightly faster than you can run... In the previous post, I couldn't think of the phrase "Off limits!" and thus I settled with "Out of Bounds" -- which sounds retarded.

That is all, I figured I needed to update and post something, so there you go!
Enjoy life!

awkwardness

2008-06-22T15:14:00.001-04:00

Summer school is so weird. The shortness of the session freaks me out. To think that there are only 4 substantial weeks left in the semester is awkward. Especially when you've only taken one major test in each class. Which leaves 2 or 3 more for the final 4 weeks. Which most likely means there will be a test or two every week from now until the end of the semester. Fun.

On to the main event: so let's talk public transportation. Specifically, the metro (or, as in the Atlanta area, the MARTA rail lines)... I have a few things that I've noticed. One of these niennerz pointed out at one time a long time ago (I think). If there's a newspaper laying on an empty chair, no one will sit in that chair. Even if there are three empty chairs around it, no one will sit in that general area until the train starts filling up. After which, the seats around it will become occupied, but the newspaper will still act as if it were a passenger. No one makes an effort to move it. They will stand rather than toss the paper aside.

I wonder what this tells us about human psychology? I think it all boils down to the fact that humans are innately irrational creatures. Despite all the advances towards becoming more rational, there are some things we cannot escape. No one makes an effort to move that newspaper in order to have a seat. Instead, they like to stand and do their metro-surf (where people wobble back and forth attempting to keep their balance) which expends more energy than if they were sitting down. Move a newspaper vs. metro-surf... I wonder which expends more energy.

The awkwardness factor. No one wants to be the one who's seen moving a sheet of paper just to get a seat. Why? Because other people might think them lazy! In order to prove they are not lazy, they will stand. Because sitting implies that you are lazy, right? Maybe... But I guess another thing is that it is always awkward to sit down directly next to someone (Same thing happens in bathroom stalls, but that's another story). The more subtly you sit down next to an occupied seat, the less awkward it is. To move a newspaper would immediately destroy any subtlety of trying to sit down. Automatically means that seat is off bounds. No longer shall anyone occupy that seat until the janitors come around.

NEXT TOPIC! Drifting walkers. No, not like a car drift, but more like a wandering walk. Let's first define this drift-walker. Have you ever walked behind a person who was traveling in the general direction that you are, but at the same time includes random lateral movement? Let's say you and this drift-walker are walking in a line, you behind them. The drift-walker will regularly stray from the line, either slightly left or slightly right. The problem is, unlike drunks who have exaggerated movements, these drift-walkers' lateral movement is so subtle that it becomes unpredictable. Do you now know the type? If you don't, it's you. JUST KIDDING! So why did I spend a paragraph explaining this? You shall see.

So every day I take MARTA to get to class. It's not exactly fun, but it's cheaper than using the car and gas these days. Here's the situation. Coming from the parking lot, I need to get to the stairs to go up (yeah, it's not exactly an underground metro, but an above-ground train system) to the platform. There is a lady in front of me. Issue #1 that I have with her placement. She is directly in the middle of the walkway. Do you ever have those moments when you are walking along and someone else is walking in the other direction and when you meet you're not sure if you should pass on the left or on the right? (I hate those situations too) Most of these situations could easily be avoided if people walked in the same manner that cars drive on roads. Directional traffic should be designated as either the left side of the walkway, or the right. Back to the situation. This lady walks kind of slow. And the MARTA train has been sitting at the station for a good while - meaning it should be leaving soon - I need to get to the train.

I need to pass this lady who is walking slowly to get to the train. The problem is that people have comfort zones (Have you met people who insist on standing completely too close for comfort? They're all up in your face and they don't seem bothered by it, but you are. They are making you feel uncomfortable) I try to respect this comfort zone even when walking - especially when there is no one else around (It'd be odd to walk right next to someone you don't know when there's a lot of extra space around). Thus, I come up in my mind the quickest and least awkward means of passing people when I need to. (Am I anal?.. I swear I'm really not, I'm just really bored sometimes. Lookie, I'm not the only one who does something like this!) Sure sure, everything would be absolutely peachy. Except now the Chekov's rule comes into play.

The problem is that this lady is a drift-walker. I can no longer predict where she will be going and thus I cannot assess the best possible path to take in order to keep myself distanced from the comfort zone. So, three things come together to form this awkward situation. One (1) She was walking slowly. Two (2) She was walking in the center of the walkway (whether that was by choice or if she accidentally drifted into this area - I don't know). And Three (3) The drift-walking throws off all predictions of where she may be by the time I start to pass her. Awkward situation alert! I have been obstructed and foiled. The only choice I had was to just pick one and go for it. I'm not even sure if it was a 50-50 chance of success or not. Is it? If any of the 3 factors was not in effect, this situation would not have occurred. *sigh

Sorry I wasted your time. I ended up taking the path on the right even though it was longer because I figured that she was heading towards the stairs as well, thus closing the gap available on the left. The right was the more rational approach to the problem. Until next time. Enjoy life!

gen

2008-05-20T14:15:00.015-04:00

So it's been a month with no update. I did think about posting to the blog - it's the thought that counts right? ...Yeah, I guess not. So anyway, many GTA IV sessions have passed, I'm now back home in the ATL with summer classes in session. It's actually not so bad (I say this in retrospect because whenever I'm actually in class, it really is bad, but I'll get to that in a bit). I originally thought I had classes everyday (which I will eventually) but it turns out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday classes are for the short summer session which starts in mid-June. THUS! I have 4-day weekends until then! It's quite amazing - 2 days of classes out of 7.

The only problem with summer classes is that they're SO FRICKIN LONG (insert "that's what she said" here). I can handle interesting subjects for 1hr 45min, but monotonous and uninteresting subjects are just that - monotonous and uninteresting... for an hour and 45 minutes. Take for example my math class Applied Combinatorics. I thought this would be an interesting class because of its description:

Elementary combinatorial techniques used in discrete problem solving: counting methods, solving linear recurrences, graph and network models, related algorithms, and combinatorial designs.

That sounds pretty interesting right? At least for a math class, right? No? I'm just a dork? Ok. You're right. The other day we spend half an hour on proving the existence and the uniqueness of a "Division Algorithm" aka we learned how to divide. Needless to say I lost interest 5 minutes in. I'm still hoping, however, that the course will become more interesting. Which leads me to the class following: History. This class has no hope of becoming more interesting. The prof talks for an 1hr45min non-stop. I kid you not. No breaks, starts on time, ends on time. It's unbelievably sleep-inducing.

Now that you've read about my school life, let's move on to the more interesting stuff? Like that kid and his male guardian figure I mentioned... a month ago. So I was at GameStop pre-ordering GTAIV and while waiting in line I overheard this conversation going on between this kid and this dude. It went a little something like this:

Dad: ....but you already have a two-hundred and fifty dollar gaming machine at home, you don't need this
Kid: but...
Dad: Do you see this price tag? It says one-hundred and thirty dollars . This is not as good as your two-hundred and fifty dollar one you have at home.

At first I was wondering what they were going on about, but then as soon as he stated $130 I knew what he was talking about. He was puttin' down my DS, my and our beloved DS, as inferior to the PSP on the basis of price alone. I felt like walking up and saying: If you're going to lecture a child, do it properly and with your facts straight. While it's good you're teaching the kid he doesn't need two portable gaming toys, the reasoning behind your logic is ultimately flawed. But I supposed I'm biased and partial towards the DS. BUT!, my partiality has logic behind it. By the following table, I shall support my reasons for knowing that DS > PSP.So there you have it, DS clearly is better than PSP. Even though the PSP is two-hundred and fifty dollars it is ousted by the one-hundred and thirty dollar gaming machine. Take that two-hundred and fifty dollar gaming machine! And take that Mr. Swayed-By-Price-Of-Unit. People who think they know things that they don't annoy me. You are distorting that child's mind! He shall never know the joys of a DS! But whatever, you bought him a PSP in the first place. He better be happy with that.

Onto the next subject! What's up with all these game journalists using the term 'next-gen' to describe the 360, PS3, and even Wii. This very much annoys me whenever I see it used to reference one/all of these consoles. The term is blatantly inaccurate.

next [nekst] Pronunciation Key
–adjective
1. immediately following in time, order, importance, etc.: the next day; the next person in line.
5. on the first occasion to follow: when next we meet.
Courtesy of Dictionary.com

What's this? 'Next' means coming up? What a concept! Wait, how are our consoles 'next-gen' if they're already here! This term may have been fine when the consoles were in development, but why has the term stuck? I dislike things that are inaccurate but become trendy.

Aside: Back in my Guild Wars days, there was a team build that was named IWAY. The build name was coined because its cornerstone key skill was called '"I Will Avenge You!"' Thus the name fit appropriately. Its amazing success however, had many other builds INACCURATELY mimicking the name. Builds such as Flare-way, Monk-way, hell, I even saw some people have the audacity to call Necro spikes SS-way (for the skill Shadow Strike) and many others (of which I've forgotten names, it's been a while...) that I didn't care to remember since they were so lamely copied.

Get a clue people, these consoles are no longer 'next-gen', they are 'current-gen'. I suppose describing the graphics in a new fangled game as current-gen-graphics doesn't have the same luster to it ("The graphics in [insert game] are very current-gen~!" vs. "The graphics in [insert game] are very next-gen~!") but next-gen-graphics falsely implies that the graphics are of quality that can't be seen today. I'm sorry for being picky, but the term annoys me. I suppose stating that the technically correct way of referencing this current generation of video game machines as 7th generation wouldn't get the same message across either... *sigh.

That is all for this time. Until the next, enjoy life!

night activities

2008-04-21T18:41:00.003-04:00

So I was in the shower yesterday (and other days too, yesterday was not a special occasion) and I turned on the water. The water flowed out of the tub faucet and I inserted my finger into the stream to test its temperature. Then a thought crossed my mind. I wonder how much water is wasted by people who do the same as me. All that unused "warmup-period" shower water just goes down the drain - the majority of which never gets the chance to grace your body. Poor water.

That's when ideas started popping into my head on ways to preserve this taken-for-granted water. At first I thought - maybe there should be a middle option on the faucet that let's less water out. Since, right now, there's either shower head or FULL BLAST WASTING WATER (unless you're about to take a bath - different story). They could design a 3-state lift arm on the faucet; all the way down means you're going to take a bath, midway means you are warming up the water, and all the way up means you are in the process of taking a shower.

Then I thought to myself, this would still waste water - thus, not completely dissolving the issue at hand. So, my next idea was a intermediate basin of some sort that can re-circulate unused water. This way, the unused water would not go down the drain, but simply get warmed up by incoming water. For novelty's sake, you would be able to stick your finger in the basin to test the temperature - yeah that's right, it could have a sensor to do this, but that would be too technical; some things are just better the old fashioned way.

Come to think of it, this could be expanded to sinks as well! Maybe it's not as big a deal though. Still, some people wait for water to get hot before washing the dishes, right? Dishwasher? What's that?

I guess this all boils down to older houses though since their water heating systems are not as snappy as new homes... All of these thoughts crossed my mind from simply waiting for the water to get warm for a shower.

In gaming news, approximately 7 days and 5 hours until I get my hands on Grand Theft Auto IV. I'm mega stoked and I'm devouring any article that has to do with GTA IV and it's frustrating me even more. How come they get to play it before us and then tease us with tidbits of information - marketing is such a devious operation.

Yes, I do not plan on sleeping Monday night - or Tuesday morning - or whatever you want to call it. I went last Friday to pre-order it at the closest brick and mortar store - it happened to be GameStop. I heard the most ridiculous conversation between a dad and his kid. That story, however, will be left for another time as I'm too lazy to write about it now. (At least that's my excuse to give me some time to carefully organize my plan of attack).

So, next time, look forward to Dad vs. Kid and also a look into what the phrase "next-gen" means to me. Until then, enjoy life.

be like sex machine

2008-04-13T18:05:00.007-04:00

I'm going to continue posting as if this last month and a half never happened. Whaddya say? We'll call not posting at all in March my April Fools joke that also extends a few weeks into April. Ha Ha! On a more serious note: I seem to have the mindset that something worth posting should be fairly lengthy. So every time something amusing comes up in my mind and I tell myself I might want to blog about it, the following happens.

Ha ha, that's amusing; maybe I should write something about it.
How much can be written about it?
Oh, I guess it wouldn't be very in depth at all.
Oh well, I guess I won't post about it.
That's generally how it goes. But I'm trying to see if I can make micro-posts now. So here goes:

My PayPal account information needs to be updated because there's been some kind of unauthorized activity, but I have more important issues at hand. Apparently, I'm no good in bed - most likely due to the fact that my penis is too small, or due to the fact that I have no weight at all. Thus, I need a guide on games in bed or I could be like sex machine.

Did I lose you yet? Awesome. Ever get these spam emails? I feel sorry for the people who take them seriously, but have you ever taken the time to sit down and actually examine these things? If you're bored and want to be amused, just take a brief read of them.

First up, my PayPal account is under attack! (Yes this is an old email, but my April Fools joke got in the way of sharing about it)
Step 1 of making a proper spam email: Have bad grammar and bad spelling. Well isn't this pleasant - they failed at Step One. This must be the real deal then. Still, they make a pretty bold comment to say there will be no more future problems with the service. Wow! But oh dear! I only have 2 days to update my information! Panic!

Wow, that link they gave me looks pretty official doesn't it! Even better is that official email address in the From line. It looks like PayPal doesn't have enough money and must use a free email service like Yahoo. Tsk tsk, I may have believed the authenticity of the email if it had been servce@gmail.com, but alas, I have seen through their ruse.

Now, we travel to my university email inbox. I have three emails that catch my eye!

From: Marty Perkins - Subject: No weight - no problems

From: Mel Tatum - Subject: Smart in bed games

From: Fritz Davila - Subject: Be like sex machine

Holy crap! I'm suffering from "no weight"! I need to check out this first email:
Never late to try.
Watch details attached and know more.
... this must be written in code. Never late to try? Is this their attempt to introduce colloquialism to make me feel more at ease? Ok, I guess I need to stare at the attachment and the solution to my problems will hit me. Or not.

Next email. I suppose I've been doing dumb in bed games. I need to learn smarter ones.
On top all night
Please look attached file and know MORE ABOUT THIS!
What does being on top have anything to do with games? What a let down, I was expecting better tips. Please look. Attached File. Yes, I see an attached file. "MORE ABOUT THIS." (Unclear Pronoun Reference -5pts). You fail email.

Ah, but I still have hope. Even if I can't do smart bed games, I can at least be like sex machine.
She wants you more now
Please look attached file and know MORE ABOUT THIS!
Wow! This must be a magic email! She wants me more now. Amazing! I wonder what the secret was that made her want me more. ... hey wait a second ... deja vu? Please look. Attached File. Yes, I see an attached file. "MORE ABOUT THIS." (UPR -5). You fail email.

For those who want to see the content of the attachments, I have carefully retrieved its contents. (Disclaimer: If you are susceptible to epileptic seizures, do not view the following image. Ok, just kidding, but seriously... wtf)

That's all I got for this post. But before I go, I want to share a video that made me smile. Some of you may have already seen this - as I found the video on digg - but this is just one of those videos that needs to be shared.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA
After watching that, I hope my usual end note can be more significant for you.

Enjoy Life.
-nfinite

conformity I say!

2008-02-29T19:35:00.007-05:00

Hey, it's the 29th of Feburary! I had to post on this day because it only comes once every 4 years right? This might be the only post *EVER* on this blog to have 29 February in the date header! Savour it! (Not to mention this gets me to the average of a post a week for this year thus far). じゃ、はじめましょうか。

You know what annoys me? Discrepancies between companies' touted specs and user-end interpretation. What am I talking about, you may ask? There are two prime examples of this: a) Internet Service Providers and b) Storage Device Manufacturers. First up, time to bash ISPs - aside from them screwing you in the butt with their prices.

Why do they still insist on using the bit representation of throughput speed? It's a capitalization issue as well! I hate it when people say "oh yeah, wellz, my internets is 5mb/sec! Uber fasts" Now you need to determine a few things:

What does the other person think is fast? This greatly influences whether or not they meant "Mb or MB"
Are they somewhat tech savvy? Do they know the difference between the two?
Using that information, which sounds more reasonable? "Mb" or "MB"?

I hate having to clarify myself on which term I mean when I'm chatting with people. There should be one standard that everyone should follow. I shouldn't need to say: Oh, I'm getting 6Mbytes/sec or almost 50Mbit/sec. It totally defeats the purpose of having an abbreviation "KbKB, MbMB, TbTB" for the concept of size. The only reason these stupid companies still use the bit scale is so that they can sound like they're offering faster services than they really are. They're targetting the average user who doesn't know too much about technological terminology. This pisses me off. 5Mb/s sounds much better than 0.64MB/s right?

Aside: It's like all of those $1999.99 TVs - it's not $2000.00, but $1999.99! That one cent makes a psychological difference to the audience. The same thing applies here, except much worse - at least with pricing, there's no conversion issue. It's like saying to an American that the TV is only £500. Even with this example though, it's not too difficult. Roughly multiply by 2 right?

With Mbit to Mbyte, the conversion is so much more "difficult" in that people don't normally divide or multiply by 8. This confuses some people when they see their service stating 15Mb/s service, but when they're downloading, the file transfer speed shows "only" 2MB/s. Abbreviations of terms should be consolidated. Don't get me started on the imperial vs. metric system.

Along the same lines of company specs vs. real world usage are those storage devices. 1TB SATA HDD! 750GB! 500GB EXTERNAL USB HDD! These manufacturers are even worse with respect to number manipulation. There's no subtle difference as with ISPs - no, no, when dealing with these companies, we don't get the luxury of deciphering the nuances of capitalization. These manufacterurs blatantly state their specs in large, bold, ^and misleading^ letters. I remember the *verrrrrry* first time I installed a hard drive into my computer - with the help of my dad, since I was probably 7 or 8. I can still remember him telling me "The red striped on the IDE cable will always be closest to the molex power cable". But I digress. At the time we were still in the age of the megabyte, so the displayed number on the HDD matched fairly closely to the one reported by Windows (95!).

Later on in life, when I installed my first 20gig hard drive (I was so happy: I went from a 1gig compressed to 1.5gig HDD to a 20gig (Does Windows have the option of compressing an HDD any more?)), I thought, "WHERE THE MONKEYS DID A WHOLE GIGABYTE GO!" So the next day I went to the school library to look up on the internet why this was happening. (Because school internet was faster than dial-up at home [remember those days too?, lego.com took forever to load at home, but it was flippin' awesome at school]). And sure enough, the answer was that the manufacturer was trying to screw me over.
1GB according to manufacturers is 1000MB
1MB according to manufacturers is 1000KB and
1KB according to manufacturers is 1000B

The only problem is (as brushed briefly before with the internet speeds) the computer uses 2^10 as the conversion factor between abbreviations. Now we've got metric versus binary. According to the manufacturer, their conversion rate is logical. According to the computer, its conversion rate is logical. According to the user, the manufacturer is manipulating numbers.

For every GB listed by the manufacturer, we're effectively losing ~50MB. Doesn't seem like too much?
For every 100GB listed, we're effectively losing 6.8GB.
This trend gets progressively worse with larger sizes. Each time you go up a tier, you're adding another multiple of 1000/1024 to the conversion.

Almost 70GB is "lost" in that translation! (I don't have a TB hard drive to know what real-life results are, but the numbers don't lie too much). That's just a little ridiculous dontcha think? This manipulation of numbers also applies to other manufacturers of devices that use storage: MP3 players, memory cards, USB-stick drives, ... if the device stores stuff, manufacters will find a way to manipulate the numbers to make themselves look better.

Consumers need to rally for a standardized system for manufacturers to adhere to when listing their product specifications. There's too much trickery and ... well I guess it's called marketing. I would glady support a company who reports their product specs in a way that conforms with practical and daily-use numbers. I don't care that the drive is "100GB" if I can't use in the "practical" sense - as in what I see reported to me by the computer - all 100GB.

This would ease confusion. I don't like being confused. I don't like it when others are confused. This is no excuse for not researching the product you are purchasing; but that doesn't mean manufacturer's should be free and able to distort the truth to their benefit. Perhaps I'm just fixated with organization and standardization. It's your call on what you think about my views. Have fun with life.

doodles of emails?

2008-02-28T19:05:00.008-05:00

So it looks like I won't keep up with my resolution of getting one post per week for this month of February. Whatever, we'll take a month to be 4 weeks and sum February and January's post together for a total of 8 posts. That'll even out to 4 posts per month right? Good.

Lately I've been running a lot of tests at work - it's all about making sure nothing is completely busted and observing all possible cases. That's what life is about right? You're constantly changing, but you always need to make sure you're on the right track and that you didn't screw anything completely. If you did, corrective measures are taken, right? So with all this testing, and a discussion with nien, a diagram was born.

This picture was designed in the ever so high-end application that you all should be familiar with. After being around for so long, this application has undergone surprisingly few changes! Come to think of it, Paint from way back in Win3.1 wasn't much different! For some reason I remember it even had a feature the current one doesn't: selective color erasing. Or maybe I'm confusing it with another application - I very well could be... I was, what... at most 8 years old when I was using Win3.11. Anywho, back to the topic at hand.

I was at work when this masterpiece was created; as you can see, it even includes transparancy of the two colors at the region where they overlap. Truly, MSPaint is a powerful application. This chart basically is concerned with Doodle Time - time at which one may constructively doodle without interfering with any form of legitimate work whatsoever. Thus, the diagram says. All code compile time is doodle time and all test time is only sometimes doodle time. I'll let the impact of that settle in.

What do I doodle? There's no real trend. Lately I've been imagining what kind of ofice/manroom/entertainment room I will have when I get a house. I began some rough sketches of that:But I didn't get very far. It's quite confusing, but I'm too lazy to go into explanations. Next topic!

This post deserves a horizontal rule line break because I believe this to be a fairly thought provoking matter - unlike the previous topic. Have you ever written semi-formal emails to people? The reason I thought about this was because sending emails around to co-workers / supervisors causes this issue. I do, however, encountering this issue when emailing my Japanese professor. I emphasized what type of professor due to some issues that I'm going to explore.

The body and the footer of these emails are the easy part. The body contains what you need to say, it doesn't truly need an introductory paragraph or anything because it's only semi-formal. The conclusory paragraph : same thing applies. The footer is easy, "Sincerely" is an accepted standard. If you're feeling like mixing it up, "Regards" will work as well.

(There is most probably a guidebook or handbook or set of rules that govern what I'm about to explore, but bear with me. This is just something that irks me.)

Now, the issue is... you guessed it, the header. What should the very first line be? Let's say we're writing a letter to Bob. I will now explore a few possibilites.

To whom it may concern,

Straight up wrong. You know who this email is directed towards. It's formal, but not useable.

Dear Bob,

This just feels weird and out of place in an email, don't you think? Plus, this is a person you know, and whom you see fairly regularly. It doesn't feel right to me.

To Bob,

Again, this is an email; the person already knows that it's addressed to them. After all, they're the recipient of the email! No good.

Hey Bob, / Hey Bob-san,

This works in cases where the recipient is on friendly basis with you, but this does not work with people who require respect - if only a little. Take the case of your professor - some may be completely fine with this address. Try it with the Japanese professor and you're in rude-territory.

Bob, / Bob-san,

This feels weird to me. I can't pinpoint why. But here's my attempt. These semi-formal emails are akin to talking to the person... in person. This is the best solution I have to my uneasiness about headers in emails. It works in the all the situations that a semi-formal email entails, but I still don't like it.

[Blank]

There's also the option of leaving the header blank and immediately starting the body. This... sometimes works, but I always feel uneasy doing so. There's the "rude-complex" that I have. It just feels rude to not address the person you're "talking" to.

With that said, there should be some kind of universal passive-feeling word that is not rude, but does not feel weird in a semi-formal situation. Something like... I dunno... "Fortu Bob," The only problem with that is getting the word into circulation and everyday use. The word needs to be instantly recognized as an addressal, but cannot be offensive at the same time.

I think I've wasted enough of your time. I do hope that the topic made you think a little. Until next time, take care and take it easy!

shrtct

2008-02-15T15:04:00.005-05:00

Not much along the lines of creative thinking for this blog has happened in my mind as of late. Guess there are just some days that are more conducive to random thinking than others - the past week or so has not been so. Still, I find myself feeling like I need to post something - no reason really. Not too many people read the blog regularly, so there really isn't all that much of a point to post. Still, it gives me something to do, I suppose.

On the computer, I'm all about the shortcuts and things that make navigation and manipulation easier. The right-click menu is awesome. What's not awesome, however, is unconformity with natural trends. -- That sure did sound like a load of BS -- What I'm trying to say is, different programs doing different things with context menus that one expects to be globally the same. Even though I said "what I'm trying to say is..." I still didn't get any clearer in what I was trying to explain - I'll need to work on that.

So, I like to use "Right-Click -> Close" from the Start bar a lot. It's very convenient, you right click the item and move the mouse just a tad and then left click. Simple! Yay! Window DESTROYED! Very satisfying. This kind of thing seems very standard, does it not? I would venture to say 90-95% of windows applications use this convention. By now, it just looks natural, right? Sure there are other weird ones that don't have a maximize button, or a downsize button. But the "X Close Alt+F4" option is still in the same place.

What gets me is those non conformers. I'm all about freedom of expression and creativity and all that jazz. But when it comes to something as structured and mechanical as a computer - some things are better meant to be universally the same.
What happened! AAAAAAH! Here are some examples of where things start to break down.

I'll go to close WinPAR: BOOM new selection list. What? No, that was supposed to remove things from my screen, not add stuff!
This next one irks me off very much and very often. (cygwin does the same, which I suppose is because it uses the same Windows shell interface.... or something) I go to close a command window, and whaddya know! A properties window pops up! Again, the opposite effect that I was expecting. Window close vs. Spawn window.
And then there's the old-fashioned Help windows. Yeah yeah, things have moved on to different types of help windows... Why do we need to know ABOUT the help window? It gives us help when we're retarded-imean stuck.
I don't have it any longer, but the old Creative Surround Mixer utility did the same thing as the Help window I showed. Information about the application - whoop-dee-doo.

That's all I have for today. I was going to talk about why single stall bathrooms still need a female or male sign on the door. Especially at a work office where the majority of employees are male. It just seems counter productive to have the same amount of "female" as "male" bathrooms when the inside of the bathrooms are exactly the same (Ok, so maybe half are the mirror image of the other half. big deal.)

Until I think of better things to share. Enjoy Life!

Command n Conquer. Cookies n Code.

2008-02-01T17:21:00.000-05:00

Parentheses (Is that how the plural form is spelled? It looks weird.) are destroying me today! It's like Left Parenthesis said, "Yo, Right Parenthesis, wanna screw with nfinite today?"

And Right Parenthesis replied, "Hell yeah!"

Ok, so they only screwed with me twice. They even had the nerve to call up Mr. Semicolon to aid them in giving me grief. What's all this about you may be wondering? I had a bad time coding today. I needed to change an implementation of a linked list into a circular buffer. (For those who know programming, you don't need those links, so I'm not trying to be condescending; just trying to educate). We started having memory leaks due to allocation and deallocation of each node. We knew exactly what was happening and why the leaks where occuring, but there was nothing we could do without restructuring a lot. To protect my employer's intellectual property, I shall now generate an extended analogy to the issue we were having - with COOKIES!

Let's say we have a queue of cookies. If we create this queue as a linked list, each time we add a cookie to this queue, we have to make a box to hold it. It's then placed on the conveyor belt and sent on it's way to YOU (yes, you, this is getting personal now. You are getting fed cookies, you should be happy!). Everytime you eat a cookie, you dispose of the box by means of recycling.

Now, sometimes you need to stop this conveyor belt for various reason (maybe you're too full and need a break from cookies... weakling). When this happens, a GIGANTIC MONSTRUOUS EPIC PENDULUM OF COOKIE STOPPING swings down and blocks the cookies. The problem now is that this GIGANTIC MONSTRUOUS EPIC PENDULUM OF COOKIE STOPPING occasionally swipes a box of cookies - resulting in the box to go flying into the depths of nowhere, never to be found. THIS IS BAD! We do not want cookies to get lost! (This was the memory leak that was occuring).

So instead, it was my task to go in and create a circular buffer. You can think of a circular buffer as an escalator (the linked list was the conveyor belt with boxes). For our purposes, the escalator is extremely sanitary. Each step of the escalator is a platform for a cookie. In this way, we don't need to make boxes for the cookies anymore. You are at the top eating the cookies as they come up, and the cookies are getting placed on each step starting at the bottom. The steps can be reused after they are cleaned of their cookies by you. Now, when the GIGANTIC MONSTRUOUS EPIC PENDULUM OF COOKIE STOPPING comes down, the cookie is small enough to avoid being swatted away. (See, the box was getting hit before, but since the cookie was in the box... ok my analogy is starting to break down here... but whatever! just know that there are no more memory/cookie leak problems with this approach).

Now that you understand the importance of ensuring no cookies are lost, I move on to coding the escalator - which is where Mr. and Mrs. Parenthesis start to toy with me. (They must not like cookies...). I hope I don't lose any of you at this point. It's gonna get a little more technical than eating cookies. Again, I am simply going to tailor this code to the cookie example. Take the following code:

That's basically the pertinent stuff. That should be straightforward except for (add_cookie_step+1)&COOKIES_MODULO. Each step is numbered 0 through 511 (for a total of 512 steps). This snippet says, if we go up one step and it's 512, the number will wrap down to 0. Basically it repeats counting 0-511 for us. So I compiled the thing and BOOM Right Parenthesis has an issue with me.

line 12: error: expected a ")"

I could not find a problem with it for the longest time. ALL THE PARENTHESES ARE MATCHED! There are the same number of left as right parentheses! I went to a fellow cookie-meister and he took a look at it and thought it was screwy too! What was the problem? If you found it right away, congrats. It's a lot harder when the code is ~1000 lines long. Apparently, Mrs. Right Parenthesis was having an affair with Mr. Semicolon. COOKIES_MODULO was defined as (MAX_COOKIES-1); This means that, to the compiler, line 12 said:

while ( (add_cookie_step+1)&(MAX_COOKIES-1); == remove_cookie_step )

That semicolon in there is a big no-no. It seems it didn't care about the following line though.

remove_cookie_step = (remove_cookie_step+1)&(MAX_COOKIES-1);;

Fine, fine, whatever. Problem solved.

I was going to explain the second problem that I had, but I would need to extend my analogy even more. I don't want to do that anymore. Just know that the code did not do what I expected it to do. I forgot to add that there can be multiple escalators. What happened, however, was that you ate only cookies on Escalator #0, but none of the others! "WHYYYY WERE YOU ACTING UP!" I asked myself.

if ( (Cookie->EscalatorNumber)&Escalators_To_Eat_From != 0 )

This line basically asks if the cookie is edible by looking at a designator of EdibleCookies (We can't eat bad cookies. We don't want to eat bad cookies.) Basically some order of operations mumbo jumbo happened. This line needed to be

if ( ((Cookie->EscalatorNumber)&Escalators_To_Eat_From) != 0 )

So when I didn't need parentheses, the compiler complained at me. But when I needed them, it didn't say a single thing.

I Hate You Mr. and Mrs. Parenthesis. Oh and Mr. Semicolon too (because I always seem to forget to add you to the end of lines, and then Mr. Compiler throws fifty million errors for the lines that proceed /rant).

Ok, I'm done, I hope you want cookies now. I sure do, but I don't have any. Sad day. Well, maybe Rainy has some cookies. She better, it's like a house-warming party. Since her blog is "reopening" (or something) she needs to give us cookies.

I know I said there would be pictures this post, but this post has gotten long. So I guess ya'll will just have to wait until next time! Stay tuned for sexy video cards, sexy keyboards, and sexy cars.
Stay sexy!

BOOBIES!

2008-01-27T20:33:00.000-05:00

I'm not dead yet, honest. I've just been lazy. Those are two different things you know! Unless, you're so lazy that you might as well be dead - but that's not me. I feel bad for not updating, but I'm too lazy to sit down for 45mins to flesh out the things on my mind.

When I first heard about the whole Mass Effect controversy on Fox news, I was going to go into a rant on the matter. I was going to take the entire debate with Fox vs. Keighly and break apart each and every claim and "rebuttal" that Fox offered. Everything they said was flawed, all of their evidence was skewed, and they had no idea what they were talking about. I was going to take each line and show why and how it was completely wrong. But, while I'm still perturbed by Fox, I'm too lazy to do it. Plus, the "expert" they hired to argue with Keighly offered an apology for her incompetence - er, I mean, lack of research. I'm not sure whether she was being sincere about it, or just trying to cover her butt - in either case, I'm just mad that there are people who watch this stuff and believe it to be true. If Mass Effect has full frontal nudity, then all beaches in the entire world should be off limits.

I've played the game; and I've seen both scenes in question. The first, I would never have encountered because it required following the "evil" track. The second was only through "hard work" of completing the love story with one of the other characters. To be honest, it's a very cinematic (in the plot sense) progression. You get to know the said love affection-character throughout the game, fight with them, and talk to endless NPCs with them. It's only reasonable that before the finale - the final battle - that your character and their love interest get a little something... But wait, what's all this fuss about! Mass Effect is rated M. The equivalent in movies is R. Both are for ages 17+. Take the movie 300. Just before the King goes to battle, he and his wife have at it - OMG BOOBIES! -- Mass Effect: NO BOOBIES! OMG THIS IS BAD!

I will venture to say that it is harder to play a game through to get to the "sex scene" (a very mild one in comparison to movies and even TV these days) than pop in a comparably rated movie just to get at some nudity. I guess I couldn't help ranting about the ordeal despite saying I was lazy. There's more to be said, but there is one point that completely shuts down any possible intelligent argument. Mass Effect is rated M. "but but! kids are seeing this!" ... Your point? Are they supposed to? Porn is meant for 18+. I don't have statistics, but with the advent of the internet... Hell, even movies depict kids with porn mags as if it's daily life. My favorite quote is, "I went on the website today. I clicked on a lot of different trailers. I tried to learn as much about it as I could before we did this... It's interesting: when you click on it, it asks you your age. It says you must go through a scanning process. So I though, ugh, this is going to take forever. Ok, so I put in my age; and then Boom you're in, no problem. So that is a pretty screen to get past."

Wait, was she trying to make a point of something? Wait, is she trying to say that a 10 year old could do this? Wait, let's up that age to 13. Wait, oh my god! Wait, she's saying that a minor could be getting into a restricted site! Wait, they're getting access to potential nudity?! Refer to one of my older posts about this age verification subject. I felt pretty good that I had already made her look stupid, before she put out the idea. There's free porn on the internet that's much worse than a video game site.

Anyway, I'm done with that. I got a new keyboard today; I'll probably share pictures next post. I also went to the Wash. DC auto show yesterday with some friends yesterday too. So stay tuned for those as well. Nothing too exciting though. I'm sorry there were no pictures in this post and it was just a long string of text. Tomorrow is Monday! Enjoy the new week. *cough*

little green man

2008-01-14T14:18:00.000-05:00

I know this is so last week, but I was too lazy to blog the moment I found out.

YODA IS GOING TO BE IN SOULCALIBUR IV FOR XBOX 360!

Now that I'm done sounding like a complete marketing advertisement, I'd just like to reiterate how ecstatic I am about the wicked green short guy doin' his thang in ソウルキャリバー IV. Doesn't he look badass? You know how you smiled the first time Yoda whipped out his lightsaber in Episode III? Yeah, this may not be a rehash of that moment, but it is still smile-invoking nonetheless. Oh yeah, Vader is on the PS3. But honestly, envision the fight between Yoda and Vader; it wouldn't last very long: Yoda would school him all while taunting him with anastrophes like "Suck, you do." and "Slow you are; Catch me, you cannot." So since I'm an owner of a 360 and I like to dish out the PS3 hate:

Yoda > Vader :: 360 > PS3.

Hopefully Project Soul manages to incorporate these characters into the game and maintain balance. (Because let's face it, if it were my choice I'd just say: Yoda enters match. Yoda automatically wins because he's Yoda). That aspect aside, another thing that bothers me at the moment is: Lightsaber vs. Metal Sword. I haven't followed the Calibur series nor have I played any of them, so if I'm wrong about the fighters' weapons being made of metal, I'm sorry.

I don't know about you, but that picture looks unrealistic. (Ignoring the fact that there's a Vader and lightsabers exist). I've read a few Star Wars books in my time, and from what I can recall, no material resisted a lightsaber. Sure there were huge thick doors and walls and things; those just took more time for a lightsaber to cut through. So, how are these fighters are going fight against lightsabers?

... Maybe their swords are made of mirrors. Or they're "mirror-plated" metals. Because, mirrors reflect light right? I just had a revelation. Why don't these futuristic people wear armor made of mirrors? It'd be like chain mirror-metal armor or something. That way, laser guns would ricochet and lightsabers would reflect off! Genius!

Moving on to the next subject without any sort of transition at all; and completely leaving no conclusions to the Yoda-SoulCalibur train of thought... I finally got around to playing Call of Duty 4. Got it Saturday afternoon and I beat the single player campaign today. Overall, an enjoyable experience though I was slightly unnerved by the disconnected empathetic atmosphere of the game. They tried to get the point across that war is a major pile of suck through random deaths of squad mates who you really don't get a chance to be attached to. I suppose that's the trade-off in having a short but intense game. If it was a longer game with more character development/interaction, the intensity would have faltered.

Returning to my point of disjoint empathy, this game is paradoxically humanistic. War should teach us to value lives, but this game throws so many enemies at you that you end up mowing them down without a second thought. "Man that mini-gun!" "Grab the detonators on the second floor!" The best example of this is the mission where you man the guns in an AC-130 gunship. The enemies show up on your monitor as small specks (in a sense), and the larger guns you fire send these buggers flying. The 25mm gun obliterates the enemies in a shower of black and white pixelated blood and dirt. The comments by some dude in the plane make it even worse. He has a very lazy manner of commenting. "kaboom." "Good kill, good kill." "Light him up." It just isn't right. Here's a link to a video on gametrailers to see what I mean.

It's a fun game. There's no doubt about that; but it unnerved me morally. The reason I was originally going to talk about Call of Duty 4 was that I was surprised at the number of invincible monitor screens in that game. I went around shooting LCD panels and none of them died. It just left a huge bullet hole in an otherwise unchanged still image. With so much attention to detail in other places, I wonder why they didn't short out the monitors when you shot at them. I took a picture of what I'm talking about, but I can't find it anymore...

I think I'm done yapping.

Enjoy hump day tomorrow!

-nfinite

settled in

2008-01-08T20:24:00.000-05:00

So I'm pretty much moved into my residence for this semester. Which do you like more: unpacking or packing? My guess is that you chose the former. Me too! Some parts of unpacking are actually pretty fun, right? You can call me a dork for this, but I get a feeling of accomplishment after unpacking my possessions in an organized manner - especially my desk. Scratch that last thought, I guess I should clarify that my desk is essentially the computer and peripherals. With so much moving back home, into the dorm, back home, into a different residence, back home, into dorm, etc., I think I'm gradually forming a routine to unpacking. (I only with packing was as streamlined) First is the monitor, then the PC, then the keyboard and mouse, then the speakers, then the router, then extra peripherals. The most important part would be organization of the wires.
As you can see, this part of the step doesn't go too well. At first, the wires are organized. However once you start adding more peripherals, it starts to get hectic. You try your best to use the twisties to keep the wires from being too long, but there are just too many wires! Still, despite how convoluted it looks, I still was satisfied with the result because I know how much worse it could be. *Smiles at self* - Ok that was depressing.

Time to discuss road configurations.

Let's talk about "WTF-inspiring" roads. Since I'm Vietnamese and since I'm near the DC area, I had to visit the Vietnamese niche around Falls Church - namely the Eden shopping center. It's located on one of the corners of this intersection/area called "Seven Corners". This place is confusing as balls. Take this from someone who lives near a highway group nicknamed Spaghetti Junction. At least spaghetti junction looks natural and symmetrical. What the heck happened with Seven Corners? It's like they contracted 7 different people to build 7 different portions of road and said, "Hey, let's meet in the center for fun!". Yeah, I needed to get to a left branch, so I was in the left lane. It turns out I needed to be in the right lane in order to go over and stuff. I don't even know if this could be called ordered chaos. It's just chaos.

This was pretty fun leaving too. I haven't seen this kind of road setup before. I needed to merge into the main road from a side road. The thing is, the side road was a 2-way street. It was a big game of "how did the chicken get to the other side?" Answer: By facing on coming traffic with a simple Stop-Yield sign.

Now for a complete change of direction.

I was sitting on the can today at work - couldn't hold it 'til I got home. And I was examining the toilet paper. What else are you supposed to do? There's only so much Staring-At-Wall I can take. You know how places that try to save money use that really crappy toilet paper? You know the kind that's thinner than hair and makes printer paper seem soft? Yeah, and then you end up reeling out the stuff so that you have enough paper that won't tear. To give my work office some credit, I think they went a little fancy on the TP. They had non-standard size sheets. They weren't square like most of the TP I've encountered in my life. I'd even dare to say that the individual sheets might even have been perforated to make rectangles with the golden ratio.

All of this, however, is background information. This leads me to my revelation. Why is toilet paper perforated into small sheets anyway? Do you use one sheet? If you do, I need to study on your wiping techniques - because I would surely end up dipping a finger through the TP. ... that's pretty sick actually... My first thought was, toilet paper designers should find the perfect length of toilet paper that can be folded into a sturdy wiping utility. But then, I brainstormed some more and thought: why don't toilet paper makers simply roll up pre-determined and researched wiping sheets. You could still keep it on a roll (to keep the essence of toilet paper) but make it so that each individual sheet is thick enough to withstand... pressure. But also make it the right size! Personally, my ideal sized TP is a square TP sheet folded in half. If the TP makers researched how to make the thinnest possible TP, I'm sure they could perform experiments on ideal TP size and thickness.

Too much information? ...your fault for reading it.

May you enjoy all the thinking time you have available to you!

Welcome to 2008!

2008-01-02T11:39:00.001-05:00

It's too bad that I didn't finish my layout, tweaks, and additions until this morning. It would have been nice to have this post on 01.01.2008! I hope everyone welcoming the new year in style and with good cheer! First thing's first; as I'm sure you have noticed, the blog design has been updated! This took me a good day of interspersed work to complete. These were the things I accomplished:

First and foremost: new banner and background!
Updated CSS template to go with the updated graphics.
Fixed an issue where line spacing would revert to no spacing after an image or list; This was a pain in the butt for readability since everything was scrunched together. I had been meaning to get it fixed, but never got around to it.
All pictures now have opacity applied to it with mouse-over effect. Simple, but sleek.
Incorporated Lokesh Dhakar's LightBox javascript so that images will appear in a popup preloader. I had always wanted to do this. Sometimes in previous posts I would make an image link appear in a new window, but I got lazy sometimes and it would simply load on the same page.

The first bullet point caused me a lot of distress. Wait, scratch that. It should not have caused me any stress. Rather: INTERNET FRICKIN EXPLORER caused me stress. The banner, as you can see (if you're using FireFox or IE7) is nice and transparent - 80% transparency. At first, I remembered that IE6 and prior had issues with alpha transparency (or opacity) of .PNGs. However, I needed the background to be completely transparent. A .gif would not do since it would be horrid trying to make the banner background (non-text) transparent. PNG it would have to be. So I set about setting the opacity of the image.

Great! Firefox worked! FAIL, Internet Explorer still rendered pure black.

So then, I made some modifications to the CSS and HTML. Great! Firefox worked! FAIL, I.E. had jaggies out the butt! Well, I'll give it just a teensy bit of credit; IE at least made the logo transparent. ...At the cost of the thing looking ugly as balls.

After much searching, I simply gave up. If you're still on IE6 or below, make the right choice and update your web browser to Firefox. If you insist on being a IE fan, I guess IE7 will have to do.
Don't get me started on the CSS Block and Float models... Still, despite how long it took, at least Internet Explorer is headed in the right direction.

That last bullet point took me the longest to do. Not because it was hard, but because I was dumb. I had done everything properly, but the image would not load in the LightBox. It would show the loading.gif image but image would never load. I tried all sorts of things. In the end it turned out that the automatically generated url path of the image when uploading to PicasaWeb by Blogger was a little off. Basically, all I had to do was change the image path from "../../s160-h/... .jpg" to "../../s160/... .jpg". Stupid '-h'. So basically, nothing was wrong with the lines of code. It was just a misdirected link.

So, with this new year, I have two Blogger-resolutions.

Post at least once a week. (This is more reasonable than my previous goal of 2 or 3 a week).
Keep up good formatting practices. Prior to this, I was too lazy and just left bad looking paragraph formatting as the browser tried to render it. Now, I'm going to try and make sure everything looks neat.

Onward to the main event!

So I found out that Picasa can integrate with Blogger now. So here it is, a guided-tour album of my entire holiday break. If you wish to see pictures of me, you'll have to message me in person. No way are those going public. Please don't turn off the comments since they provide valuable information into the album. Enjoy the full screen! (But don't click the 'X'!) Oh, and if it doesn't look like a slideshow, refresh the page. Sometimes the album and not the slideshow loads.

this is a test post

2008-01-01T21:58:00.001-05:00

this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens.this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens. this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens .this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens .this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens .this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens .
and stuff, right? and now a list that will screw things up:

hello
i'm a monkey

and i'm done with that list, now for another type of list and i'm done with that list, now for another type of list and i'm done with that list, now for another type of list and i'm done with that list, now for another type of list and i'm done with that list, now for another type of list and i'm done with that list, now for another type of list

I'm a double monkey
and I'm a triple
okay!

Back to lameness; this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens. this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens. this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens. this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens. this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens .this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens .this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens .this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens.this is a post to test some stuff that happens when other stuff happens that's kinda lame when that stuff happens

last post of 2007

2007-12-31T19:07:00.000-05:00

It's almost 2008! Kind of a cool year right? I mean, it's the number 2, followed by two zeros - which look like an nfinite - and then followed by an eight, which looks like a standing nfinite right?

2∞8 yay!

So, this will be the last post of 2007. Take your time to reflect on the past year, and look forward to the great one to come!

If you're reading this before I've updated the blog in 2008, then you may notice a missing banner. Well, I was going to create a new design today, but ended up having other more important things to attend to. So, I lost my banner in the process and forgot where I hosted the image. The original is on my PC so my laptop doesn't have it. Oh well!

Let's see, I'll try to have a new design made and implemented some time in...... 2∞8.

As for New Years Resolution... let's try for at least one post every week. That doesn't seem too out of reach right? *cough, even though I said I'd try for more posts when this blog was started, but we'll just forget about that one.

HAPPY NEW YEARS EVE! I'm off to PARTY!!!!!!!!.... in front of my TV.

back home

2007-12-30T22:26:00.000-05:00

EDIT: UNDERGOING RECONSTRUCTION, SORTA

This post is just a status update. Pointless, really. I'm not dead yet though. But it's been a busy vacation: left Tuesday night; drove down and got to Cape Canaveral, Florida at around 11am; went to the Kennedy Space Center for the day until 7pm; Boarded the cruise ship the following morning; immediately went to the food area for the lunch buffet; explored the ship and stuff for the day; ship docked into Nassau on Friday; spent all of Friday exploring Nassau; formal dinner on ship; ship was on the waters all day Saturday; disembarked Sunday morning; drove back to Kennedy Space Center since the tickets were valid for two days within a 7-day time span; drove home; got home a few hours ago.

So, our family has three digital cameras: I have one, my sister one, and my dad one. I remember when taking pictures was much less fervid. We were limited by those rolls of 34 pictures. Now with these memory cards, my mom piles on the photo opportunities. Left and right pictures need to be taken. It's very time consuming - to the point of being a chore sometimes too. My dad's camera was used for family pictures, my camera was used in taking scenic pictures, and my sister's was a mix of the two. In total this holiday season (Xmas, Space Center, and the entire Cruise) we took 1308 pictures for a total of 1.61GB of images. That's just crazy. And you know what the best part is? I'm going to sort them all out.

Speaking of sorting, I still have unpacking to do. So here are my goals before the next post - things for ya'll to look forward to... I guess.

Unpack
Sort through 179 Xmas pictures, 334 Space Center pictures, and 795 Cruise pictures
Pick some good ones for a web album
See if some of the scenic pictures I took were any good for a new blog design
Catch up on anime - one or two hours I think

Until then, keep enjoying your break!

technology as a teacher

2007-12-21T17:43:00.000-05:00

Before I get to the meat of my post, I'll start with an update from nfinite's alternate reality aka [Insert nfinite's birthname]'s life. So it's been exactly (in it's approximate sense) one week since classes and finals ended. I've moved all my stuff home; shifted and organized all of those belongings into different boxes and I'm halfway set to move to Virginia for my second co-op rotation. All that is left is clothes, and bathroom and laundry necessities. I've finished packing the kitchenwares and electronics. Yes, that means my computer tower is sitting in a box. Which essentially means no PC games for me as this laptop is strictly school/work related applications only. *cough* Except for maybe TrackMania and o2mania. I should probably just switch it over to Ubuntu and not be tempted by games period.
So I suppose I've been fairly productive this past week. I even managed to scrap together a "new" PC for my mom. All she really does is use the internet, but I didn't feel like an old eMachines with a 1.0GHz Celeron and 256MB of RAM certainly doesn't help with a newbie to technology (objectively speaking of course, I love my mom). As such, it's hard to tell whether the computer has frozen or is just simply being slow. So I searched around the garage, found some parts and managed to find a 2.4GHz Celeron. Oh snap! ... I guess. Still not too much of an improvement, but 512MB of RAM certainly does speed things up. Just for kicks I installed Ubuntu instead of Windows. Mainly because I couldn't find a uh, ... suitable copy of Windows. (I imply nothing here of course ;-).
So with that done as well, I spent most of my week playing Xbox.
"Altair, it seems my students do not fully understand what it means to wield the blade. Perhaps you could show them what you know?"
I decided to give Assassin's Creed another chance. I'm glad I did. At first I thought it was too repetitive. 3 types of investigation quests:

Beat up people aka Interrogation
Find benches where there's always two people sitting at opposite ends (all the benches in the entire game are like this) aka Eavesdropping
Grab people's butts aka Pickpocketing (now that I mention it, I'm surprised you never pick the pockets of women; I suppose that's for harassment issues huh)

Save the citizens side-quest - which consists of beating up soldiers who are harassing either scholars or women. Upon defeating all the harassers, you are rewarded by one of four or five praise-dialogs from the victim. They go along the lines of this:

Female: "Thank you, Thank you. Another minute and they would've made off with me. I'l be sure that the whole city knows of your bravery."
Female: "Thank you; Now don't think I couldn't have handled them myself. In any case, I'll be sure to let my husband know of your bravery."
Male: "Thank you, are they all gone? I hope so. I shall be returning home now; and don't think I'll be leaving it any time soon either. I'll find some way to repay you."
Male: "Thank you, I wish my sons were half as brave as you. They will hear this tale and know what it is to be a true hero."

I wouldn't be so intrigued about this if the same audio clips were repeated by the various citizens. However, these lines are reproduced with different voice actors! You'd think they'd have the money to change the script just a teensy bit even for a new voice actor. But nope, you hear the same lines uttered by different people of different accents. 'nough said.
And then there's the repetitive climb-tall-towers-to-view-surroundings-then-jump-off-tower. Again, the same issue arises with repetition. There are a total of maybe 6 or 7 different types of towers with around 30 towers in the entire game to scale. (The actual number of towers is listed in an achievement, but I'm lazy). Still, I suppose this is passable since multiple towers in a city could have the same construction plans. In any case, with all of those repetitive tasks and views, I thought it would be quite boring.
You know what though? The game is actually very satisfying. Climbing the same towers in different places turned out to be amusing. Saving the citizens was amusing because of the fighting system. And the investigation quests were short (I don't think I could've done them if they were longer). I guess two things make this game enjoyable: the fighting and the freerunning. I wish I could freerun like this monkey. The fighting is pretty epic too, with the camera adjusting to a cinematic view when you deal a killing blow. It's also pretty raw; I smiled in evil delight when I witnessed Altair stab a dude in the skull for the first time. I'm not violent, honest.
"And that, my students, is how we all should fight."

I do believe I went off on quite the tangent there. Now to the point of this post's title. Technology, namely computers, teaches us so much about life's lessons as well as how to approach life. Really, I only have two examples: one for each point.

Point A: Technology teaches patience.
Ok, so you may be recalling when I was talking about my mom's old Celery based PC. Back in the day... (who am I to talk, I'm not that old) ... Let's rephrase: Back when I was a kid, I had myself a kickin' 286 that was my dad's old computer. I wasn't really old enough to know how to use the darn thing, but who cares. When I lived to the wiser age of about 8, I got a spankin' awesome Pentium S, clocked at a friggin' awesome 166MHz. Man that thing could blaze through... not much at all. I kept that Pentium until I was in 7th grade. At this point, we were at the age of the Pentium 4; and I was stuck with a Pentium. This truly teaches patience. One must not be angry with the slow speed at which the computer is processing. This only leads to frustration. This frustration generated does not change the fact that the computer is slow. Therefore, one must learn not to be frustrated. Hence, the computer has successfully conditioned us to be patient.
One would think that this day in computing, with the advent of multi-core processors at 15 times the clock speed of its predecessors, we wouldn't have the issue of slow computers right? Well I suppose that there will always be more demanding applications, but let me point us to one specific example where slowness should not exist.
Installation and uninstallation of applications on a computer. This should be relatively quick and easy right? Depending on the size and scope of the application of course. Have any of you installed any of the Adobe products lately? That new installation wizard thing is slow as BALLS. I have absolutely no idea what the darn thing is trying to do. Installation took forever. Uninstallation - one would expect to be relatively quick right? I mean, all the other programs uninstall in under 10 seconds. But no, I was uninstalling the trial for Flash CS3. It took (and I'm not exaggerating) at least 15 minutes. Core Duo @ 1.83Ghz. 15minutes *uninstallation*. That's either a very thorough uninstallation, or a very crappy implementation.
Technology teaches patience.

Point B: Ultimately, succeeding in life is all luck
Maybe this is a little pessimistic, and maybe I'm just a little mad at this little thing called Minesweeper, but this can be so true. All the skill in the world gets you close to succeeding. However, more likely than not, there is someone with the same amount of skill as you - probably better as well. What does it all boil down to in the end? Whoever is luckier gets the cookie.
I hope everyone knows the rules of Minesweeper - clear out nonlethal squares and make sure that your :-) does not become x-(.

May I direct your attention to exhibit A. Okay, I did this one fairly quickly (by my standards only, there is always someone faster). I may have been able to win this one out. The upper left corner had hope of succeeding. It's too bad that the lower left destroyed my hopes of placing my name in the High Scores for Expert of my own laptop's records. Such a shame. This didn't make me so mad. After all, technology teaches patience right? A win will eventually come to me after waiting and not be exasperated.

New exhibit: Exhibit B. This one was slower by a minute or two, but still showed promise. UNTIL THE VERY LAST MOMENT! This, my friends, is the lesson that Minesweeper has to teach us. The game is so very simple. You can think of life as such. Simplify life to the cycle of acting, gathering data, and reacting : clicking, assessing numbers, flagging mines and back to clicking. No matter how skilled one is at life, the conclusion is simply a matter of luck. Do you turn into x-(. Or shall it be a win for your next reaction.
Minesweeper teaches that succeeding in life is just a matter of luck. It seems I'm unlucky.

My family will be going on a cruise after Xmas and we'll return in time for the New Year, but if I don't get another blog post in before Xmas and the New Year, I wish everyone the best over the holidays and cheers for a new year to come. I'll be back with pictures of the cruise - sans nfinite of course - just scenery and cool things.

Until then, Happy Holidays!

w00t - no word with numbers should ever be in the dictionary.

2007-12-12T20:41:00.000-05:00

I have to apologize ahead of time for the text formatting; I know its really hard to read, due to the text formatting. It's not well spaced and all that paragraph formatting stuff. I'm just really lazy to create my own CSS template for the blog. *sigh*

It's finals week and here I am stud....... playing games. So I just finished Eternal Sonata. That is one trippy storyline. The colors really help with the whole acid trip feel of the game too. In any case, I played the game with Japanese voice acting and subtitles, so all was happy and dandy. That is, until the end credits where the characters start lecturing you.... about ... something. Great, no subtitles in the credits. All I caught was something like, a "yume" here, "genjitsu" there, unknown verb+"shita" over yonder, all interspersed with "anata wa". I think they said something about themselves, and then asked me what I thought. I would have had a thought, if I understood everything they said. It made me kind of sad, my Japanese has a long way to go.

And that was quite incoherent. I guess my brain is shutting down for the break. Despite there being finals, the semester has ended in my mind. So, here are just some random things I had jotted down to blog about, but never had the time to blog because I was too busy... uhm "studying" - Yes.

I. Normal Conversation vs. TV/Movie Conversation
I don't really watch TV much, and movies are a once in a few weeks occurrence. But I'm absolutely positive there's a distinct line between what is normal conversation, and what hollywood/tvland thinks is normal conversation. This observation came to me while watching Heroes. So one dude is sending another dude a picture over the phone and he says: "I'm sending you a jpeg right now".
I have to admit, I have no experience in this area of phones since I rarely text message and never do anything besides ... talking on the phone (because that's what phones are for right?). So I've never actually send anyone an picture using my phone, but I know for a fact that not even a nerd like me would say "I'm sending you a *jpeg*" That just doesn't flow with normal conversation. The person I'm talking to would be like, "Jpeg, right; you're retarded for saying that, ya know?" What if the phone doesn't take jpeg pictures? What if it's old school craptacular and takes pictures in BMP? Would he say "I'm sending you a bitmap right now." Wow that sounds even more dorktastic. A map of a bit?
Anywho, I think they should've just stuck with "I'm sending you a picture".

Case #2 from Heroes.
Let's go to the tech-savvy kid of the show. Micah. He should know his stuff right? After all, he talks with computers and... tech... stuff; this means he should know what the ... tech.. stuff is capable of. So he hacked a cellphone to show the location of another cellphone. Ok, this could be plausible. You never know what kind of tracking devices they have in cellphones these days. And since he's Micah, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he can get into the phone system and pinpoint a cellphone location using its signal. Ah ah, it gets better. He explains what he did for the uninformed. (I forget the exact quote, but it goes something like this:)
"I'm tracking whatsherface's cellphone and displaying her location on this phone's GPS map. The battery in her cellphone emits a GPS signal that I can use to track her location"
Whoa, whoa whoa! Since when have batteries gotten GPS signal emitter thingies? So, what would happen if they took the battery out of the phone... uh... I know the writer's have gone on strike and all. But at least double check your sources when you attempt to write tech jargon. A GPS tracking signal ..... on a battery? You could've at least said GPS device located on her cellphone.... but battery?! That's just ignorant.
Oh and on a tangent, I love how some films have these l33t hackers just kind of slam their fingers on the keyboard and magically fifty lines of text are typed in. And then! to hack into the target system, they do this
[monkey@monkeymonkey]$ ls
and BAM! ALL ZE FILES HAS BEEN HAXXORED

Ok I'm done with that.

Next topic.
So I do a lot of walking around the campus Student Center after math lecture. I have 30mins to do nothing after dif eq class ends and the next class begins. So I noticed that some of the vending machines say $1.75 for a drink. WHAT A RIPOFF! You could buy a 2L bottle for that much - and that's pushing it still! And as if this wasn't bad enough, I had found a secret vending machine that sold the exact same drinks for $1.50! That's insanity. In the same building! Ok, so the 1.50 machine is a little bit hidden; it's in a hallway that a lot of people don't use. I thought to myself, harhar! if I should ever feel like wasting money on a soft drink, I will have beaten the system and hit up the secret vending machine! So one day, I felt like wasting money, but I was prepared not to waste 1.75. I went to that secret vending machine and behold !!! it was turned off and barred. FAIL!
But anyway, I think my brain waves must've caught up to someone. All of the vending machines across campus are now $1.50. It's still ridiculous.

NEXT!
Have you ever put on headphones with the intent of listening to music? Well, after I've typed that, it's kind of a retarded question. Of course, if you put headphones on, you're going to listen to something right? The only problem is: I find myself forgetting to press play on the mp3 player - or loading up a media player on the computer. So I end up having earbuds in my ears except there's no music playing. I've done it soooooo many times. I'll put 'em in, start walking/biking to class. I'll walk into class. Sit down. Reach for the Mp3 player to stop the musi.. Hm, it's silent already. And then I'll feel crunchy for not listening to anything. It gets worse with the laptop at home. I'll put headphones on. Then I'll get sidetracked by homework or something. Half an hour later I'll realize I never opened up my playlist and think monkeys, where's that music. But then I'll get sidetracked again. It's a vicious cycle.

NEXT
-fruit snack packs for adults
This was the bullet point I saved in this blog post's draft. I think it's pretty self-explanatory. I was eating a fruit snack pack for kids (I think it was Scooby Doo fruit snacks), but then it ended too quickly. So I grabbed another pack. Such a waste of packaging. They could've just put more into the package to begin with - that way I wouldn't have to eat two snack packs. I could save face and instead of saying "I ate two Scooby Doo fruit snack packs," I could just say, "I had a pack of fruit snacks".

Well, that was quite the incoherent post now wasn't it!

OH WELL! One more final to go and then it's home for the holidays! It will probably be spent trying to pass Through the Fire and Flames on Expert. Wait wait, I first need to get 5 stars on hard. Currently at 4 stars -_-;;

I'll just stop the post before I look more like a dork than I already am.

nfinite effect

2007-11-24T11:52:00.000-05:00

I hope everyone had an amazing Thanksgiving day with lots of good food - whether they be "a traditional Thanksgiving dinner of turkey or ham" or "an Asian-ized fancy dinner". In either case, I'm thankful for having you all read my blog for its amazingly average content. Here's to waiting a month for another big meal on a much grander scale! But most importantly, here's to waiting another month for... PRESENTS!

Speaking of which, yesterday was Black Friday right? Well, I have a story to share about this yearly event of mass awesomness. But before I do, perhaps I need to go into a little detour that will set me up better for the story. I was playing Mass Effect last week - this game is pure win by the way, as expected of a BioWare RPG. I'll have to admit, I stayed up one night until 4am playing this baby. In any case, at one point my character, who I named Nfinite Shepard since the last name is fixed for cinematic and cutscene purposes, was speaking to an advanced intelligent life form of sorts. The conversation went a little something like this (I really don't remember the exact dialogue. It's been a few days. I'm also not putting the NPC's name since it might be a little bit of a spoiler for those who might play it in the future. It will simply be referred to as Being.)

Nfinite: Who are you?
Being: You cannot fathom our existence.
Nfinite: Where are you from?
Being: We simply are.
Nfinite: Who made you?
Being: We have no makers.
Nfinite: I'm going to kill you.
Being: We have no end. We have no future. We are infinite.

This made me smile because I was thinking You bastard, you're not infinite. I'm nfinite, biatch. But my happiness was short-lived because soon after I thought this, I realized that I could not give the NPC this type of retort. I suppose BioWare can only be so good right? *sigh* I wonder if there will ever be a day when an adventure/rpg game will be able to hold this type of open-endedness. Remember back in the days of Zork when you could type in things? That would be amazing if in the future they could meld RPG and text-based adventures into one seamless speech recognition interactive RPG. That would lead to even more separation of gamers from society I guess.

I digress. Now that I have touched the subject of my conceitedness, I can further boast of my glories and accolades of Black Friday shopping. I'm not sure why, but Black Friday is very exhilarating for me. Getting up early in the morning, standing out in the cold, waiting in a very long line, freezing your butt and everything in between off. These things are necessary sacrifices for the emotional rush of being a ninja. Wait, ninja? Oh yes - ninja. A nfininja™®© comes prepared to his mission. He has researched the exact mission requirements in the form of an objectives list:

Split up and collect the items of interest (10/10 remaining)
Review mission target floorplan.
Side Objective: Keep a watch for free items not previously researched.

So, I was set and waiting in line at 4:30. Unfortunately, I was at the middle of the line that had formed. Not so bad right? Middle of the line? For the experienced ninja's, they know that "not so bad" is WRONG. Middle of the line means standing at the back of the side of the store. Only a slight setback. Nfininja™®© was prepared for this. 5:00am. Opening time. It would take another 5-10minutes for nfininja to reach the initial entrance checkpoint. Once this happened, nfininja was offered a shopping cart.

Screw the shopping cart. This is the nfininja characterization prompt. You know the one that makes you distribute your stat points? If you go for all mobility, you lose storage capacity. This means you reject all forms of carrying equipment and are able to dart around using only what you can pick up for inventory space. No good. If you customize yourself for full capacity, you lose mobility. The shopping cart allows for a functionally unlimited space for the required quest items. In the process of customizing nfininja in this manner, he would lose the very meaning of his name. Shopping carts destroy mobility and maneuverability, you are limited to travel only by avenues in which the shopping cart may fit.

Aside: This post fits so well with a post back in June of mine: the random game of life. Soon my theory of life and reality shall be complete.

The compromise? Hand baskets. If this customization screen had a presets selection, the picture on the right would be what it looked like. So with hand basket in... hand, I burst through the entrance gates at a speed walk. Those who run look are ungraceful. An nfininja™®© must stay cool under all circumstance, no matter how dire it may appear. Darting in, out, between, in front off, behind, u-turning, detouring, shortcutting across the store, I hastily grabbed everything that I needed, as well as things that were cheap. Everything is fair game with one rule of thumb: Grab first, decide whether you want it later. There is no room nor time for faltering. If it's a good deal, it will be gone when you come back for it. In a counter-clockwise motion, nfininja sweeped the grounds. At one point, there were tables set up with various loot. The tables were setup in front of the desk and office chair displays. Other citizens were in the walking lanes browsing the table; nfininja went on the other side of the tables - it did not matter the price signs were not facing this side, nfininja knows a free after mail-in-rebate selection when he sees it.

But wait, what was fatherinja doing? Why, he was sweeping in the clockwise manner of course. All-in-all, we landed plenty of free after MIR items, some webcams, some graphics cards, backup battery, laptop cooler, mice, keyboards, flash drives, TV tuner, and other fun goodies. I don't really know why we do it. Most of the stuff we don't really need. Maybe it's just a bad addiction. Oh, an $8 conventional oven didn't hurt to grab either - but that was after we realized we needed to level up and rearrange our point distribution to get us a shopping cart. We no longer required mobility after getting what we needed. It's just plain fun. Ninja'ing items off shelves before other people get to it. Watch as the inexperienced look dazed and attempt to find a store assistant who in turn looks overwhelmed with requests.

Oh, in your holiday shoppings, keep an eye out for these miniature RC helicopters; they seem to be everywhere! My dad ended up getting one for $10 because he thought it was amusing. We went on to other stores like MC and C---co (even when I went to the mall that day) and they were there! They're everywhere! I guess it's a quick stocking stuffer? Who knows, but I've never seen them prior to Thanksgiving at least. Then again, I don't go shopping. They don't look quite as big as it does in that picture. It's actually quite small - about 10cm long.

Anyway, that probably wasn't as fun a read for you as it was a morning for me. Oh well, happy holidays! Don't get run over while shopping!

LOAD Monkeys ........... STORE Barrel

2007-11-10T19:05:00.000-05:00

I think I've been staring at too much assembly code.

今週、毎日ラボにプロジェックトをしにいきました。ビデオゲームの時間がありませんでした。悲しいねえ　＝（

La semana pasada, cuando tenia tiempo libre, fui al laboratorio de computadoras para trabajar y... code-r una robusteza. Por eso, no tenia tiempo de jugar videojuegos. Estaba triste.

Tuan moi qua nay, luc nao ranh, toi di computer lab de code cai robot. Khong co thi gio de choi game het. Buon lam.

This past week, whenever I had free time, I went to the Digital Design lab room to work on the final project which involved coding a robot. Because of this, I had no time to play games the entire week. It made me sad.

Now that my brain has switched tracks from the logical computer and code side to the less logical language side, I think I'll be able to blog some. That was my attempt at very poor Japanese... I'll get to fluency eventually *sigh. Spanish is also rusty as well. My mom always says I need to practice it so that the four years spent in high school isn't going to waste. So that sentence was for her... the Vietnamese as well. The English was for.... no reason. Maybe I'm trying to redeem myself. I just read over my last blog entry, and the grammar and typos in that post are horrid. My apologies for making you try to decipher awkward sentence configurations and misplaced words.

Anyway, if you haven't gotten the general idea by now, I haven't played a single substantial game since last Sunday. I say substantial because maybe I played some Flash games in physics lecture. That's beside the point! Ok, I don't know how long its been since my last post. About a month maybe? Speaking of 'month', does it ever strike you as odd that "in exactly one month" isn't really *exact* at all? We can say "exactly one day" - and that means 24 hours. We can say "exactly one week" - and that means 7 days. What happens when we say "exactly one month"? Does this mean, the same date but increase a month? One month from today is December 10th? But wait, one month from December 10th is January 10th. How can this be exact? One is a period of 30 days, the other is 31 days. Not to mention February screwin' everything up. They need to make conventions for this kind of stuff.

Kind of like they need to make conventions for passing people traveling in the opposite direction. I know for a fact that every one of you has been in this situation:
You: Walking along sidewalk, eyes at the ground
Pedestrian: Walking opposite direction on sidewalk, also eyes at the ground.
You: Look up and notice that there is a person in front of you.
Pedestrian: Also looks up and notices you.
You: Lean towards the right to pass.
Pedestrian: Leans towards the left to pass.
You+Pedestrian: Awkward moment where you're not sure if the other person is going to correct themselves or if you have to take the initiative to go around them.

There should be a universal law:

If one finds oneself presented in a situation where one must move in order to pass another person...
a) If you are already slightly off center of the person, go in the direction that will result in the least side displacement.
b) Turn slightly right. If both persons follow this universal law, many awkward moments can be averted.

Wouldn't it be great if people actually did this? The issue becomes particularly troublesome when one party is riding a bicycle and the other party is walking. Bicycle person is paying attention. Walking person is not. Bicycle person makes clear intention of leaning to the right to pass. Walking person looks up and decides to jump in the way of the bicycle person. Bicycle person must then make hard swerve left because any further right would result in wipeout onto turf. Walking person gets mad and curses as bicycle person. Bicycle person thinks walking person is an ingrate. Personal experience? Mine? Surely not....

On a similar note, let's talk about road ethics. This is going to be short, don't worry. Have you ever been happily driving along in your car (ドライブをする) down a bi-directional highway with a middle turning lane and then the car in front of you indicates the intent of changing lanes into the middle turning lane. Of course you have, unless you haven't driven much. Soon, however, you realize that the car is halfway in between your lane and the turning lane and slowing down considerably. If you're going to change lanes, gtfo the way! Do the slowing down after you're in the turn lane. But no, cars aren't this considerate. The car is almost stopped, however it is straddling the lane line. You now have to quickly look to your right lane to see if you can simply swerve around it. If not, you now have to brake. Stupid braking for no reason... when it could easily be avoided if the other car had changed lanes properly. Again, personal experience? Of course not. Oh, don't get me started on people who slow to a stop just to make a right turn from a main road. Your car is not going to flip over; you can enter a turn *with* speed.

Well that was an amusing rant. I had more to say, but I'm hungry now. Maybe next time. I'll note it here so I don't forget: campus evacuation (that was almost surreal for a few moments) and silent headphones.

じゃね
Hasta luego
Chao
Later

CodeMindset: JUMP CodeMindset

confusion

2007-10-22T00:39:00.000-04:00

Ok, so maybe I've neglected to post to this as often as I originally stated I would. I'm not gonna lie - I'm so lazy. But I'm just going to proceed where I left off as if this past month or two(?) never happened. Sound good? Sure it does!

It's 12:40 now. I'm blogging tonight. But the weird thing is, it's already tomorrow right? So, is it tomorrow's night? Or is it tonight's tomorrow? This is why I believe in going to sleep before midnight; it eliminates confusion. When someone asks you, "When did you sleep last night?" - and you slept after midnight - the answer becomes complicated. Should you say you didn't sleep last night? Because last implies the preceding day. However, the nighttime of the preceding day did not include any activity labeled 'sleep'. So can you say "I didn't sleep last night, I slept this night."? That doesn't work because it seems like you've broken some kind of time-space continuum in the process. You can't say "I didn't sleep last night, I slept this morning" because that makes it sound like you started to sleep at 4am or something. (Unless you really did do so).

I realize that this all revolves around one assumption that does not necessarily need to be assumed. But for the sake of having something to write about, I went ahead and was ignorant of the fact that last night does not imply yesterday night. It must be trippy when you live somewhere in which 'night' is actually 24 hours a day. You know, those regions at the poles that have 24hour night-days and sometimes 24hour sun-days. Then you'd really be confused when someone asks you, "So when'd you sleep last night?"

I was considering racing games earlier. Just pondering the features of today's racing games. They seem to feature collision modeling. DiRT had pretty sweet car deformation, the new NFS:Pro Street looks pretty sweet as well with its touted procedural damage model on the cars. This leads to one huge predicament though (at least in my mind).

Racing and crashing are mutually exclusive in these games. Some games less so than others, but for the most part, this holds true. (I'm leaving out Burnout, but I'm taking into consideration that FlatOut, even if it has destruction modes, is affected by this predicament). Anyway, back to the paradox. These games have beautiful crashes. It's just *so* much fun to crash cars and watch them bounce around, flip over, break windshields, lose tailpipes, and dent large pieces of metal. The problem is... it's a racing game - the goal is to actually PASS the finish line... preferably undamaged since undamaged = faster. (Or something like that). So I was playing DiRT the other day. And the whole time I was cruisin' over hills and driftin' through corners, there was that primal desire to absolutely destroy the car and view the replay in slow motion. But alas, I needed to beat a best lap time. Taking a crash would be detrimental to that goal.

Why oh why must games tempt me to lose so much! I don't enjoy losing. I enjoy crashing, because they made the crashes look amazing. I don't enjoy losing. Life is so cruel.

That being said, racing games that have no damage system look dumb. So they have to implement a good one. But doing so creates the race/crash paradox.

Good night, it's not almost 1am. Nobody better ask me what time I went to sleep last night... this morning... this night...

[picking up noise]

2007-08-30T16:58:00.000-04:00

Prepare for random.

So I was sitting in Physics II lecture yesterday - boring lecture since he basically repeated what he said last lecture. I saw someone walk out the door. That got me thinking: I wonder how those people have the balls to do that. Just walk out on someone as they're talking. I, for one, am the type of person who can't really walk out of a lecture out of respect for the professor - even if the professor doesn't deserve it. I either show up, or don't show up - walking out on a class is extremely rude to me. In any case, it got me thinking... What if it was possible to just disappear out of the class. What if you could run out of the class so fast, that no one could see you do it. (mind you, maybe it was too early for me to thinking about teleporting out of the class, but rather, I thought about moving extremely fast).

Superman could do that right? He does do that in comics and movies and other forms of media, right? HALT! my brain shouted at me. There's no way you could open that door and close it in a split second. Well, is that so? (This is me contemplating the possibility of opening and closing a door in a very short amount of time). I guess I was also being influenced by the fact that I was sitting in a physics lecture: The door would have to travel a finite distance in a very very very short amount of time. Therefore, it's velocity would be extremely high. By the same token, it would reach this velocity in a very very short time, and thus acceleration would be extremely high as well.

Consequently, if you think about the two step processes of leaving a room, there is the opening, and then the closing of the door. Meaning that the same magnitude of insane velocity and acceleration will be observed - only in the opposite direction. This extremely fast change in acceleration from one direction to the other will cause an insane amount of jerk. Thus, my brain told me: if Superman were to leave a physics lecture without being noticed, he would blow the door to bits and pieces while trying to open+close it.

Then I questioned myself - made sure my inferences were correct - which I'm still not certain if this would happen. I'm pretty sure it would. And then I realized I'm a total dork.

NEXT SUBJECT!
Flat and sharp can have the same meaning. I found this thought amusing because in music they definitely don't. Flat - lower pitch, Sharp - higher pitch. How much more opposite can you get than that? b < #. Sorry 'b', but '#' is greater than you. You will never be able to win the race. But you can tie! In a round-about manner... I suppose. I'll be there at 9 o'clock sharp - which is in 3 hours 35 minutes 44 seconds flat. See there buddy! You're equal to sharp! Yay!

NEXT!
Gatorade, Powerade, and the like disturb me. Have you ever seen those guys in the university cafeteria's - dining halls if ya wanna be fancy - who have the two glasses of Gatorade? It's not hard to find them: Just follow the neon glow of their trays. What's up with that anyway? These drinks disturb me because I feel like I'm drinking radioactively infected water or something. They even have electrolytes! Super! Another term that makes me feel like they first put it through shock treatment, and then exposed it to a nuclear reactor. Do the colors need to be vibrant!? I always found it amusing that people would have one glass of blue neon water, another glass of red neon water, oh, and throw in another glass of yellow neon too! I know that the contents of [blank]ade is not that color... It's just not natural. I can understand cranberry juice being deep red. I cannot understand manufactured sports "thirst quenchers" to come out looking like that. Unless... they do treat it with nuclear byproducts!

I'm not ignorant, honest! You're simply picking up random thoughts that come to my mind.

nfinite anger

2007-08-24T12:39:00.000-04:00

Beware of rant that follows, if you don't like rants, don't read. I just want to type this sh*t out. I don't know why I'm *ing out profanity, it doesn't really make a difference when you read it. Maybe it's just to retain a little bit of my decency and maybe sanity. In either case, I usually don't use profanity; when I do, you can be damn sure that they are necessary to express my anger.

Last year we were required to buy these PRS (Personal Response System) transmitters. These retarded f*ckers were something like $25 or $30 to buy at the store. There was no option of buying used ones because each IR transmitter had its unique serial number that went along with it. This transmitter was necessary for ONE (1) class - Chemistry. There were in-class quizzes that required us to transmit our answer in order to receive participation points. Ok, Ok, I had to buy it because it was for my grade. Fine.

This semester, they (I don't know who this 'they' is, but someone decided to do it) decided to switch to an RF transmitting scheme. One that required a totally new line of PRS units. Their rationale for this switch was that RF transmitters are omnidirectional (an improvement over the directional IR transmitters) and that you receive feedback right on the unit itself since these new units have a built in LCD display. Whoop-dee-f*cking-doo. Price on these new units? $50. Well sh*t. And the only class I need this new retarded unit is in Physics II. Yet again, another mandatory piece of junk that's required for a portion of my grade. Why don't I just pay off the school to give me an A? It'd probably cost as much as I'm paying for books and sh*t right?!

Oh, *whew*, at least the Barnes and Noble of my university is allowing me to get a refund for my previous unit. They at least have some compassion, right?

WRONG.

No school supply company ever gives a damn about their students. They're only interested in the $$$ and think Rape the kids for all their moneys' worth... and then some! So today I had some free time in between classes to take a trip to the Barnes and Selfish on campus to buy the new PRS and get a refund for my old PRS (because, well, I have to for my grade). So I get the unit (which, by the way has been out of stock since the beginning of the week, and I called to make sure they had a new shipment of the damned units) and I walk to the register - which can also be thought of as an ugly prostitute: f*cks you for all of your money, and you don't feel any bit better when the deed is done. The transaction needs to be done in two parts. First, I buy the $50 blasted piece of plastic. Then I get money (but of course not all) back for the old PRS. Fine. Fine.
But wait, of course they're not going to let me go that easily, now are they? How much do batteries cost? Bear with me, this is pertinent.

Ok, $0.15 according to Froogle for some very generic pack of 2 AAA batteries.

The lady at the cashier makes sure that the PRS transmitter works, but of course, I took the batteries out already. She says that I won't get fully refunded for my PRS since the batteries are missing. At first I was outraged by this, but then I thought to myself, I guess that's somewhat reasonable since I bought the thing with generic crap batteries, they should get their full product contents back. So I replied, that's fine. She said, "You won't be getting two dollars back."

...
nfinite's brain
...

Wait, 2 f*cking dollars! Did I hear this lady right? TWO WHAT? TWO CENTS? No I'm pretty sure she just said DOLLARS. TWO DOLLARS? ONE AAA BATTERY IS NOW ONE DOLLAR? HOLY SH*T! I'm getting f*cked and I can't do a damn thing about it. Maybe I should have given her dead batteries. Wait, no, that won't work. She'd say the PRS is broken and can't refund me. I can't make a big deal out of this since Barnes and Retard could just as easily decide not to refund my PRS.

...
back to reality
...

I mutter this is ridiculous under my breath, but I say "... o...kay". I can't get mad at the cashier because she is just the messenger. I always see other people blow up in the cashier's face over something that's not the cashier's fault, and I feel sorry for the cashier. So I needed to be nice. After getting raped in the a$$, I walked away from the cashier and proceeded to bike back to the apartment.

Fifteen cents for two AAA batteries. 7.5cents for 1 AAA battery. They said 2 dollars for 2AAA batteries. 1 dollar for 1 AAA Battery.

1/.075 = 13.33
They're making a 1233% increase in profit - at the student's expense.

My bank account was raped, and I couldn't do a damn thing about it. Rape is such an appropriate description: helpless throughout the entire process.

settled in

2007-08-23T11:11:00.000-04:00

So it's been over a week since I last posted, sorry for the delay. I'm finally moved in and settled (almost, I still have a few textbooks to go before I'm truly settled, but I'll get to that in a bit) into my apartment room on campus. It's a pretty sweet place; having a room to myself is awesome and the commons area in the middle is pretty spacious - it even has a nice bay window overlooking into the grassy quad area. Pictures of just my room here: Before and After shots as well.

Classes this week have been pretty slim. I haven't had to go to any of my three labs since it's the first week of classes. But I can tell that after this week, it's going to be quite a workload with three lab courses. Instead of worrying about labs this first week, I get the enjoyment of textbooks raping my back pocket. My credit card, check card, and wallet are all crying out in pain over the exodus of dollars from their grasp. It's seriously disheartening to see receipt statements that say:Seriously! What the balls! 8% tax! I thought it was only 6% tax. But it seems they are further shafting us poor college students for all our money's worth. That's only 2.5 of my classes! I still have 3 more classes. (Yes if you add it together, that makes 5.5 classes, since one of them I have to buy an extra digital circuits kit - another $45 hit to my bank account). Enough of this, I know a lot of you are in the same situation and possibly even worse.

Speaking of getting shafted, why does being good in games always means you get screwed? Take for example: The Jedi Knight games (the ones where you had to choose if you wanted to be light side or dark side - mainly Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy though). The light side always got screwed with crappy force powers whereas the dark side had all the kickass skills. Light side had skills that would just absorb dark attacks, protect from laser fire, and see through walls. What's the fun in that?! Where's the incentive to be good when you could go around gripping baddies and throwing them against walls, force lightning the balls out of them, and going into a rage that made you super fast and strong at the same time! Light side really gets shafted in games. It's almost as if the games want you to follow the dark path. Tsk tsk on them, teaching kids that evil > good.

The only reason I thought about this was because I've been playing BioShock. (Okay okay, so maybe I haven't been that busy as to not get around to blogging...) I finally got my hands on BioShock at school (after waiting a week at home) for the 360. It's so frickin' awesome! But like I said, these games seem to tailor themselves toward evil being the cooler path. You have to make a choice to save these little monsters (*cough girls) or harvest them for the slugs that lie in their brains. (Pretty intense eh?) Well, you only get 80 Adam for saving them, and 160 Adam for harvesting them. The Adam is used for buying upgrades for yourself. Why wouldn't you want the full amount of Adam for the work you did to kill the little girl's body guard. Plot points? Blah, I guess I'll have to go back and play the game again once I beat it and be a good boy. *sigh, being good is so boring.

Time to go to math class. The professor looks like he's fresh out of college... from China. His accent's a little hard to understand (and thankfully I'm Asian and more accustomed to accents than others) and I still haven't figured out if he will be a good professor or not. He's really really young looking. Anyway, that's my short post for now. I'll try and be more active with posting.

streaming from the nfinite

2007-08-14T12:01:00.000-04:00

I realize that I have not posted in some time. What's today, August 14th, 2007; last post: August 06th, 2007. I'm behind on my schedule it seems. But I have a valid excuse this time! (Not really, but it's a better excuse than usually). It's been a hectic weekend.

Friday:
Finished my co-op term for the summer.
Packed my things after work and through until sleep time.

Saturday:
Drove/sat in a van for 10 hours driving home from Virginia to Georgia.
Got home Saturday night at 8:30ish.
Unloaded.
Ate.
Slept.

Sunday:
Moved some of the stuff I could into the apartment at school.
Got back at 11pm.
Slept.

Monday:
Organize.
Anticipate the night.
Meet with my special someone.
Get home at 1:30ish.

Tuesday:
Oh that's today.
Blogging.
Thinking that this blog will essentially be a stream of thoughts from my head.
There is no real structure to this post, no fore-planning nor ideas to talk about.

So to distract you for a few moments while I think of something to type about. Here are three pictures that I took in the van driving home. I thought the mountain landscape was pretty. Unfortunately, they plant trees to hide the view. When we actually got into the mountains to go down (on the Z-Axis) and down (the Y-Axis), it was my turn to drive. I didn't find it prudent to drive down a mountain and take pictures at the same time. But it was really pretty, looking off the mountain-side into the city below. I wish I had been passenger so that I could have taken pictures of the view.

I really enjoyed the clouds that day. They were very natural (if that makes any sense at all, because clouds should always be natural...).

It's very fun driving down a mountain. You only have to worry about one pedal. No, not the accelerator. But also, our van we rented had one of those consoles that showed various informations - odometer, heading, temperature, and (my favorite) the mileage meter thingy. (I wonder if it's called kilometerage when talking about kilometers per liter in standard units. Anyway, mileage in miles per gallon was fun to toy around with. It was especially fun on the mountain side; the reason: reset the tool while you're coasting down the mountain side. I wish I could have taken pictures of the console - I was doing like 900MPG! That's some good mileage. I could've made it home with that kind of efficiency in one gallon! Oh well. I averaged 26.9MPG in that van lugging all my housely possessions, so I guess I did OK.
Trip was ~700miles. Divide by 27. 26 gallons. Price for gas: ~$2.85/gal. = ~$75 for the trip home. Monkeys, gas prices stink.

Speaking of gasoline, that reminds me of this stuff that my parents put in my food for me to try yesterday. No, they didn't put petrol in my food. But it did smell a lot like methanol or some similar alcohol. The thing is, it's housed in this tiny bottle and applied to food with a dropper. Not only this, but the box that it's in states only to use 2-3 drops. Those 2-3 drops are rreeeeeeally potent. Because all I could taste after 2 drops was the stuff. So I asked what it was (after it was already put in my food of course). It's an extract from a bug. Cà cuống. That's all they could tell me - my dad clarified, the bug is in the same family as a cicada. The box says "Mangdana Essence" along with a lot of Thai characters.

All I could come up in my mind, though, was the Mandragor mobs from Guild Wars... Close enough right? So I looked it up on Wikipedia - Ca cuong.
*Skimmed it. [...Giant Water Bug...] ... [...bug's essence...] ... [...small glass containers...] ... [...bug is scarce...] ... [...demand...high...] ... [...mostly imitation...] ... [...is in fact a pheromone...] ... [...males...] ... [...attract mates...] ...
So basically, this meant three things to me:

It came from a bug.
The Thai text that we can't understand probably says something like: Imitation. This is actually methanol. (I knew it)
I'm putting sex liquid in my food.

Those things ran through my head when I finished the article. Seems like I'm complaining a lot about the additive. It's not necessarily yucky, but it's very very potent. The taste is unique and slightly sweet, but it's very overpowering. Two of drops was enough to basically mask any taste of the food whatsoever. I don't really like the extract for this reason; Additives are OK if they add to the taste of the meal. Just two drops of this, though, completely obliterated all other smells. No, I'm not attracted to bugs any more now than I was before.

In regards to my DS project that I've been brainstorming about, I believe I shall attempt to design some clone of either R-Type or Ikaruga. I think I'm leaning towards an R-Type clone. The thing is, I'm still brainstorming on how to creatively use the touch screen. Cloning a game is (relatively) easy. Reinventing game-play by using the DS's capabilities, however, is something that is truly difficult, but is the only way to make an impact in the community. Only time will tell if I can actually pull through with this "project". Art direction might be an issue for me since I'm artistically retarded. Maybe I'll give nien a nudge if this project gets anywhere.

I leave you with two pictures. This is all I need to survive - minus clothes and food and a house to put this stuff in.

Just the boxes, and stuff; the shelves and things are not my stuff that I moved.

Take cares! and enjoy the time left of your summer. For school starts in under a week for me! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

....man I started this post at 11:01, and its now 6:00; interrupted by dentist appointment and kitchen work - fail.

HHHHHHHHHHHHH!

time flies

2007-08-06T20:39:00.000-04:00

...when you're having fun. Was your summer fun? I hope it was. My summer was pretty good. I was very productive this summer - which is a change from the norm. I'm starting to feel cocky with my programming skills. Why you may wonder? So my co-op job has me dealing with code for pretty much the entire workday - with pauses to ask questions of co-workers about concepts that the code is implementing. The entire summer I've dealt with mainly JAVA and C code and I've learned a ridiculous amount about both languages. It's true what they say: real world experience and practical application is so much better than a classroom environment.
Classrooms may be nice for theory and stuff (that kind of thing is fine and all, I believe it's important to know how the language works) but you only really get to know the language once you sit down and code things that are useful. This may sound as if I know already what all classroom environments are like; but I only speak from the experience of two programming courses - both of which were tailored pretty much for n00bs. Those tasks they teach in class aren't useful. (Hmm, I've noticed this has turned into somewhat of a rant... so if you want to avoid being bored, skip down to the paragraph with Nintendo DS in it: no promises for excitement there either, but have at it anyway!).
Ok, so I had introductory courses in MATLAB and C. I'm only speaking for these introductory classes - it may very well be different in higher level classes. The examples and assignments they give in this class are ridiculously stupid. Let's introduce structures: Well, let's say a structure represents a person. This person has a boss. Let's say you were coding a program that looks for the hierarchy of bosses. Do it. I know I know it's meant to teach you what structures are and how to access them... but honestly, can't you come up with better and more realistic examples? It can't be that hard. Here, I'll think up one on the spot: You are making a character stats calculator for [Insert RPG]. Have the user input data for various stats: name, class, hp, str, agi, etc... And display this information back to the user in a suitable manner. The user is able to make multiple characters this way. Granted, it's not the best example. But hey, it's interesting and this would be a viable solution should you ever want to make a character stat calculator. But whatever, I digress a lot.
I started off the summer with very little JAVA experience and no object-oriented knowledge. My most recent task was generating an automated test application that interacts with hardware, and parses the debug messages received from the hardware in semi-realtime - in a JAVA app. Works like a charm! Maybe classes should take this approach. Class time should be devoted to the quirks of the language - things that are special and specific to the language, concepts, and general usage of things. And homework should be projects that are fun and challenging. There should be no guidelines for the projects, so long that it works decently. I hated the test scripts that the classes used to grade homework - it was too nitpicky. It pretty much tested for what the person who made the script wanted. It didn't matter that you got the code to work in a different manner, it was wrong if it wasn't they way they wanted it. I say BS.
This is a horribly unorganized post, so I shall attempt to redeem myself:

By wooing you with a picture of my DS bwahhahaha. Well, I just got a Nintendo DS. And this sweet little machine is the reason why I started this post. I was about to post my friend code for Pokemon, but uh... I decided it's better if you message me for it if you want it - don't want freaks friending me on Pokemon or something, being like, "Let's fight! Loser has to cyber"... or something... Nevermind.
So anyway, I also bought a Slot1 Flash Cart for my lovely pocket gaming device and I've been reading up on homebrew stuff. It looks like the language of choice (and the tools tailored towards) making homebrew stuff is C. This is where my cockiness comes in. So with all this newfound job experience in coding, I'm thinkin': piece of cake, I could write a DS app or even a game. With that thought in mind, I now wish to write something for the DS. The problem is: I'm horribly uncreative. And I have no idea what to design.
I want to do something not already done before, something that, should I succeed well with it, I can actually release to the outside world and say: Look at how cool I am, this is cool.
The problem is I have no ideas. Please help! If you could leave suggestions of things that you think would be interesting/fun/useful! Maybe in half a year I might actually finish doing it...
Anyway, this concludes my very boring post. Thanks!

the little things in life

2007-07-31T21:15:00.000-04:00

Ok, this is going to be a little post. Mainly because it's an impulse post. I'm just sitting here bored really, but nothing substantial has come to mind for a good post. Just another thought, I still need to design a true layout; but my uncreative mind can't think of anything fantastic just yet. Yes, it needs to be fantastic - just like the owner. I kid! I kid.

Right then. On to what I originally meant to post about.

So today I received my microSD card in the mail. Fairly large package actually. A full sized envelope. Why do they need to do this anyway? The thing is huuuuge for something small and simple like a package for an SD card. I'm sure you know the size, it's about the size of your hand. In any case, it's fun to get big packages, because they make you feel important. When you come home and see a package on your front porch, it makes you all excited. It's like Christmas every time you receive a package. Looky! That might be for me! Unfortunately, it's also like Christmas in that not all the presents are for you. ... Well, you can't win them all.

So upon bringing it into the house - excited the entire way to my room - I greedily opened the package. Fun stuff, the opening process. I'm sure if you were calm when opening a package, things would go much faster. But that's never the case; you're always trying to tear it open even if you don't have the proper tools. I don't need no stinkin' knife; I shall rip it open! So that phase passes and you look inside to find the item you were eagerly awaiting. Then, you admire the packaging of the little bugger for a few minutes. You don't open it up yet because you want to savor the newness look of the item still in its manufacturer's package. Wait wait, scratch that. You don't open it up yet because the manufacturer's packaging for electronic accessories are always a major pain in the butt to open. They use that ungodly difficult plastic and seal it off on all sides. There's no where to pry open with your fingers. There's no possibly way to tear it apart with your hands. They even deceive you. You'd think that after one end has been cut off (through much toil with the scissors) that you could simply just peel one side of the package from the other.

No.

It always starts morphing and bending and you end up partially ripping it. Then the hard part comes in because you don't want to try harder for fear of cutting yourself on that newly created rift in the package. Instead you think to yourself: that should be enough of an opening for me to pull it item out. And so you do. You try and bend the package this way and that way so that the opening is large enough for you to pull off the item. And they even make this hard to do because the item is always embedded in the plastic somehow.

Back to the SD card. This thing is TINY (i guess putting tiny in all caps is a bit counter-intuitive). This thing is teeny. Not even the size of my finger! And what's more, this thing is 2GB! To put it in perspective, here are two more pictures:

Oh it looks like I need to cut my nails. Hmmm... Oh right, tiny. Yeah, look at that! It's so cuuute. It's as if two SD cards had a baby or something. That got me thinking, that microSD card is about a quarter of the size of a regular SD card. The microSD's capacity is 2GB. 2GBx4 = 8GB. That means 8GB SD cards should be pretty easy to make right? I even know there are 4GB microSD cards - meaning 16GB regular SD cards should be a cinch! Apparently I'm wrong, and there aren't that many 8GB and 16GB SD cards to choose from. And they're monster expensive too.

Oh well, time to cut my nails.

uber lulz

2007-07-27T17:15:00.000-04:00

Facebook is cruel. If you read my complaint about Facebook, you already know I don't like it. What makes it worse is that if anyone contacts you using Facebook, there is no escaping touching the site. Sure sure, they'll send you an emailing telling you that someone PM'd you... or "wrote something on your wall". But it will not let you in on the secret unless you log in to the site. That's just stupid. They could just as easily send you the message posted or PM'd to your email. But no, instead, you have to log on to your Facebook account just to read a useless PM that says: Come to my birthday party! ....... in New York!.... No thank you. You waisted my precious time. Wait wait, backtrack a bit. What exactly is a "wall". Why do you want someone writing on your "wall". Isn't that called vandalism in some states? It's more like "someone has graffiti'd your wall". Because graffiti is sometimes good, but mostly useless. "Happy birthday!" I would never have known it was your birthday today, but oh well!
Authors note: Facebook is a source of lulz.

What do you spend the most time touching in a day? Aside from your bed. And get your mind out of the gutter, kthx. For me: computer keyboard. I was just thinking, I spend a big amount of time in front of the computer, and for most of that time, my hands are on a keyboard. So anyway, I'd like to discuss the four different types of keyboards (maybe even five) that exist in my mind. Ok, so my two favorite types of keyboards are the classic really really old ones. And the ones that are like the ones on laptops.

I. The Really Really Old IBM Keyboards
The picture I found from Google Image Search summed it up the best. The image name was: ibm-clicky_keyboard.jpg If you've ever had the enjoyment of using one of these keyboards, that filename about describes it perfectly. I love those keyboards so much that I wish I had one right now. It feels so good to type on it; not only is there tactile feedback because of the distance the keys have to travel to be pressed, but there's also auditory feedback. The satisfying *click*click*click* as the smooth plastic keys hit the board really says "I'm typing, and I'm cool". Maybe I'm just weird, but I love the feel of these keyboards.

II. Laptop keyboards and the like
These keyboards are fun to type on because they are speed demons. Not quite as satisfying as the old IBM keyboards because sometimes you're unsure of whether you really typed something or not. But the fact that they're soft is fun. Seems kind of counter-intuitive that my two favorite types of keyboards are on opposite sides of the spectrum in regards to button depth, but oh well.

III. Generic Keyboards
These are the kind you get for $5 at Wal-Mart or something. They don't look fancy, they don't have any fancy buttons, they just type. But you know what? They do the job, and I commend them for that. Despite being generic, at least they don't malfunction (that often). You know what? I bought a generic-keyboard to play o2jam. Do you want to know why? My old multimedia keyboard didn't have n-key support. Meaning, I couldn't press all 7 buttons at the same time. It would just say, "No, screw you, you're not really pressing 7 buttons, you just think you are. Therefore, I am better than you and will not send the computer those keystrokes." My generic keyboard, however, isn't that smart. It simply did as it was told. (Okay not really, but I like to make up things).

IV. Natural Keyboards
I like to think of them as very unnatural. For a true-to-the-definition touch typist, maybe the keyboard is natural; however, for me, someone who was influenced by computers since I was a wee little kid (I think I have a picture of toddler-me crawling around a 286 somewhere), I learned how to type by doing what felt right. It was only after I was comfortable with a keyboard that I used typing programs. But even then, it was only to see how fast I could type and not necessarily the "correct" hand position. So anyway, these natural keyboards annoy me as I attempt to push the letter 'b' with my right hand.

V. The Keyboard That Really Isn't There At All
I've never actually seen this one in person, nor do I know if it even exists. But I don't think I'd like this type of keyboard. I mean, have you ever tried to type without a keyboard in front of you? The physical feeling of the buttons is what aids you in moving from one letter to the next right? Try just typing on your desk in front of you. At first you think you're doing fine, but I don't think that it would be as easy if you were actually trying to type something. Who knows, this keyboard could be ultra-sweet! It sure does look like it. But looks are deceiving, because IBM keyboards look old, but despite this, they're really cool.

Speaking of imaginary things... how about them hand-brakes in a car. You know, those things you pull to keep your car from rolling downhill? Aren't they also called emergency brakes? e-brakes, hand-brakes, park-breaks, etc... Anyway, I think they are mislabeled. It's a cause-and-effect misnomer actually. You see, emergency gives rise to panic. I think these brakes should be called panic brakes. Why, you ask? Have you ever driven off with the parking brake on? There are only two possible reactions when you do this:
Hmm, my car is acting oddly today. It accelerates just a little slower than normal.
or
What's that smell?
There is never the realization that, Oh my word, my parking brake is on! Because you *don't notice its effect at all*. Maybe it can be labeled correctly as a parking brake since you do put it on when you park. HOWEVER. It should not be called an emergency brake. Emergency brake implies that you should use it in emergencies - you know, when your normal brakes fail. That would be all and dandy IF IT WORKED. But you see, it doesn't work. I don't know why, maybe I've ridden in only old beat up cars, but I'm sure you've had experiences similar to what I'm saying.
My ride and I were in the his car and his brakes have been acting up so he decided to test out the e-brake as we were parking in front of the house. Alright, let's do this. *pull* .............. "Dude I think I just sped up when I put that brake on."
This is why emergency brakes should be renamed to panic brakes. In the event of an emergency, you reach for your emergency brake. But you fail to remember that it is no longer an emergency brake. The moment you pull that "e-brake" you realize your mistake. You just pulled the panic brake. Time to panic: it didn't slow you down.

Here's to hoping your e-brake is truly a brake for emergencies. Enjoy life!

this is unfair

2007-07-22T17:08:00.000-04:00

I don't know six people that well on blogger, not to mention, I don't even think six people read my blog. But oh well, this post will only be the game, I haven't come up with anything worth typing yet for a normal post:

Rules of the game:

Each player of this game starts off with ten weird things or habits or little known facts about yourself. People who get tagged must write in a blog of their own ten weird things or habits or little known facts, as well as state this rule clearly. At the end you must choose six people to be tagged and list their names. No tag backs!

I don't watch TV. I personally don't find this weird, but some others do apparently.
I have a weakness for speakers. In the past few months there have been amazing deals on tech stuff: plenty of low latency 2 x 1GB RAM for under $100, 400GB+ SATA HDDs for under $100, Nintendo DS for ~$100; but I said no, I will be strong and I will not waste money. But then these speakers came on sale... retail $100, after sales and rebates ~$30... so I bought them.
I look forward to school. (But then when school actually starts, most of my classes end up being not as cool as I had anticipated)
I haven't seen a movie at a theater in about 3 months.
I can't refuse someone asking for help (though I need to learn how).
I take a stance against drama. Therefore, my personality is set up to avoid conflict. I avoid being an enemy at all costs, it's the best solution to be free of drama.
I want a badass looking trench coat... and a mask... nevermind. I think it'd be cool to run around and dress up like this: Picture 1 / Picture 2
I guess the weird thing is that I could probably pull it off if I wasn't such a lamer.
I get the urge to jump off of things a lot. Maybe I've seen too many free-running videos
Most dogs make me nervous. To me, they seem a little unpredictable. Also, you don't know when they're going to lick you. And that whole licking thing is a no no for me. I have no idea what else that dog has gotten in his mouth. I mean come on, they smell each other's butts - who knows what happens with their mouth.
Sometimes I shake uncontrollably. It's not a huge flail thing. But it's a constant shudder - I think it happens because I'm nervous, but sometimes there's nothing that I need to be nervous about. I also thing that being in an awkward physical position triggers it too. This one time I was at a restaurant and the table was a little high. And while eating I started shaking and it was annoying. So I had to sit back to eat to stop from shaking. I don't really know when it started, which bothers me as well.

That's what you get for making me post so soon. Crappy quirks. But, anyway, now that that's done... time to choose six... Why's it gotta be six people anyway? Is this some kind of remnant of the Pokemon days? You know, only getting 6 Pokeballs? I choose you.... six!

Rainy
Nienners
Xian
Polarpuff
... who else has read this blog
I guess I will have to go into battle with only 4 pokemans.

good for the heart

2007-07-19T22:02:00.000-04:00

I think this shall be another short entry as I'm running out of stuff to say... maybe. So for those of you who know me, you've heard the phrases, "monkeys!" and "Oh balls" quite a bit I'm sure. Used in the right situation, it can turn any disappointment into an instant smile don't you think? Don't monkeys make you smile? Doesn't the word 'balls' just have a funny ring to it? No I'm not a homosexual nor a homophobe, but balls is just a funny word. And Monkeys are just funny! So the next time you mess up something, instead of saying " Oh *@!#" , try "OH BALLS!" You'll instantly feel better because balls is a funny word. If balls aren't your thing, how about monkeys? Everyone loves monkeys, and they're just funny! So, instead of "!@#$", try "MONKEYS!" and that should alleviate some of the frustration. Expletives tend to throw off a bad aura, makes you feel more frustrated. You mess up, !@#!, and saying that only makes you more frustrated.
Don't look at me like that, I'm not that weird for my phrases am I? Ok ok, if neither monkeys nor balls floats your boat, think of a funny word. Something that rolls off the tongue easily and make it your own exclamatory phrase. Let's brainstorm some good words: puffbombs! cheesemonkeys! balls! oh wait... ok ok no more of those... muffins! I'm not good at this brainstorming thing; I keep returning to monkeys. Go to nien's blog, there's a monkey on there that will make you happy! Yay! They're good for the heart, those creatures are.
Also good for the heart is exercise. I personally enjoy bike riding. Well, I suppose I only like half of bike riding. The best part about riding a bike is going downhill. The wind through your hair (scratch that, safety first ladies and gentlemen, always wear a helmet), the thrill of keeping out for random people on the street, random cars. Oh and I love turning when going really fast, because then you can imitate those MotoGP racers that lean all the way down to the pavement on their turns. So hardcore. The feeling that your center of gravity changed positions is so awesome. Why am I talking about this? I don't really know. But now that leaves the other half of biking and that is going uphill.
See, riding a bike is all about looking cool right? ... right? So going uphill, you can't be caught doing the cheap way of standing up on the pedals and shifting your weight - plus that applies too much pressure on the pedals .. or something like that. You need to sit, pedal, and look like it's effortless too. But on the inside, you're just thinking, oh dear, when will this hill ever end. I don't know if i can make it to the top without looking tired. Hm.. maybe I'm unfit. No that's not it. I will blame it on the hills being ridiculously unrelenting.
Wouldn't it be cool to have a perpetual downhill ride? Like the infinite staircase you see in optical illusions - the ones that keep going and going. How sick would that be if there was an infinite downhill slope. Imagine the speeds you could pick up going down that thing.... zoom zoom.

Ok, while my imaginary self is cruising down that nfinite hill I shall impart upon you some final thoughts of mine. I was studying a bottle of whiteout today at work. I thought to myself, white-out is so paradoxical:
Item: White-out
Usage: Paint over mistakes
Purpose: Make errors disappear
Actual real-world effect of using white-out: Highlighting the fact that you screwed up
The way I see it, you use white-out for things written in pen. Usually things written in pen are important documents. What if you're turning in an application or something. White-out basically says to the person reading it: Hey, I can't properly fill out a form. Look, I'll make it even more apparent that I screwed up and was too lazy to fill out a new form.
White-out should hide the fact that you made an error, but in reality it only highlights it... and makes the paper bumpy. So from now on, I shall name white-out bottles "paradoxical eraser." Oh oh, and I love how sometimes it's called correction fluid. What's up with that? Putting it on my paper doesn't correct jack - all it does is ... well nothing. Imagine if it did correct things... I bet they'd be banned from test environments....

I'm done

your numlock is off

2007-07-15T17:29:00.000-04:00

Made ya look!

I think this entry will be sort of short, since it's not so much a planned out post, but more of a "I just thought of something, I might as well jot it down since, a) I'm bored, and b) I might forget. I've always wondered about those age restrictions at websites. No not porn websites, get your mind out of the gutter. Let's say... a trailer for a movie that's rated R or something; or maybe a site for a game that's rated M. You know the ones where it asks for your birthday? It always amazes me when I see the default setting as:
| January |▼| | 01 |▼| | 2007 |▼|
Wait... 2007? I knew that as a species we should be getting smarter and all, but seriously, that's not even 1 year old yet! That's amazing. You know what I think? I think if someone enters an age under.. 2 or 3 years old, they should be let in the site or view the video, or whatever. Hell, why not just give the person a million dollars! That'd be the smartest baby the world may ever know! Is it really that hard to set the cutoff to say, 3 years? I honestly don't think any 3 year old is going to be browsing the internets - and even less so: be able to understand that you need to be 18 or older AND put in your birthday. If the 3 year old can handle that, I say, give him/her the content.
This leads me to my next point (well it doesn't really lead me, but I thought it'd be a good transition point as I was just repeating myself). I never understood what's to keep people from just putting in a random date. Yes, yes, formalities and law and all that jazz. But do you really think teens are going to abide by it? You might as well have a button that says:
"If you're under 18 GTFO. If not, press continue. Have a nice day!"
It would save both the designers and the users some time. Designers wouldn't need to code 3 stupid pull down boxes and a function that checks to see how old it would make the person. And the user wouldn't need to select their day, month, and year from those stupid dropdown menus. It sucks even worse when your day is in the middle of the month and you need to scroll down some distance. (and it gets worse when the dropdown boxes are in Flash and instead of just typing the number, you actually have to select it). A [Proceed] button would make both lives much easier - it's essentially the same thing. If the user wants in, all they need to do is turn themselves into a 107 year old. You know, bottom of the list kinda stuff. The internet is a wonderful place. I think, though, putting in an age older than the oldest person alive should raise a red flag. But,... nevermind, you know where that was going.
It just boggles me that someone could be so gullible.. or innocent. Speaking of which, I don't think any commercial for products (I'm excluding movies and games) has ever made me want to go buy it. It's interesting to think that there are people in the world who are influenced by cheesy commercials. If I'm talking about you, no hard feelings eh?

Ok I think I'm done. Time to make dinner. Have a nice day!

13teen

2007-07-14T00:08:00.000-04:00

So I was walking through the hall of my workplace - an environment full of various computer and electrical engineers - and another employee is up the hallway, walking in my direction. It's interesting to note, that, unless we know each other, the moments leading up to and during passing each other in the hallway... are very awkward. What's running through my head is probably the same thing running through his; Oh crap, I hafta pass some one. This is going to be awkward. Where do I look? Down, yes, down at the ground. But what if s/he's looking at me. I'll take a peek upwards. ... Nope they're not. OK, look at the ground as we pass. Awkward... Awkward... Awkward, OK relax, I'm past them.
This is usually the order of events. Realization that you need to pass an employee that you don't really know. Trying to figure out whether or not to look occupied, look down, nod at the person, or even *gasp* say 'hello'. Usually its the first two. Nods get awkward if they don't nod back and then you feel stupid. Hello is pretty much out of the question since you might end up saying it too quietly and the other person can't hear - then you feel stupid. So both people pass, looking at the ground in front of them so as to avert eye contact as much as possible. The amusing thing, is that it happens with pretty much everyone in the halls. It's a wonder how certain professions attract certain types of people. I guess the saying form follows function applies to personalities and people as well... I wonder what it's like at say... an art firm... artists are pretty much the opposite of engineers right?
Well, at first I noticed this awkwardness at work; and so I went home, eager to watch the Microsoft E3 2007 press conference from the night before (it started at 11:30 EST, lame). And then I noticed... some of those speakers seem really awkward too! Them too! Or maybe it was because the audience wasn't included in the sound and therefore made the speakers sound like they were talking to nobody. Speaking of E3 (how is it that I always seem to return to the subject of games), what's up with all of these franchise continuation games? Now all people gotta do is flaunt a number in some fashion and you immediately know what's coming.
IV - GTA
3 - Halo
5 - Resident Evil
13 - Friday the
Hm... I think I've lost my train of thought for the night. That is all. Sorry it seems this post is uncharacteristically short, and very devoid of deep thoughts. I've been watching too many 2minute trailers from E3 I suppose. It's affecting the time span of my thoughts.

boom boom rockets!

2007-07-05T19:53:00.000-04:00

So yesterday was US Independence Day, holiday in the middle of the work week, sleep-in day, fireworks day, however you want to name/describe it. Yesterday was July 4th! So I think I'm going to recap my July 4th holiday for you to enjoy - or not enjoy, it's your choice.

It was pretty sweet because having a national holiday right smack in the middle of the week meant I only had to go to work for two days then get to stay home. And now, I only have one more day of work left for the week! How sweet is that!? This should happen every week - that would be awesome. Screw hump day; it would turn into ... well, maybe it'd still be hump day for some, but in a different sense. Anyway, I digress.

The only problem I find about having an established sleep schedule is that no matter how much you tell yourself, "Sweet! I get to sleep in tomorrow!", you end up doing this:
The eyes open. The eyes drift towards the alarm clock. 7:46. Balls, I suppose I can go back to sleep. Sleep manages to successfully reoccur. The eyes open already staring at the alarm clock. 8:32. Lame. I still can't sleep in, might as well get up. So in spite of the fact that you could have slept in, you can't. And that makes you grumpy for that first 5 minutes that you're awake. At which point, I simply tell myself, "It's okay man, you still woke up after you normally would" ... and then I feel better.

So I after that, I did my normal morning routine of turning on the computer, checking mail, checking if there's anything new to download, checking if there's any sweet deals on geek toys, etc. This is when the boredom starts kicking in. *see post about boredom.

Anyway, time went on. The sun disappeared before it should have. Thunder started happening - wait, crap it's raining? Nooooo, the fireworks! Check news! The National Mall has been evacuated... monkeys! Tornado watch in effect for Fairfax, VA... well, that's really close by...
After weighing the odds and some more research, me and the housemate decided to go into DC anyway. I mean, the worse that could happen is that the storm gets worse and the fireworks are canceled right?

So to the metro we travel. At one point along the trip a middle eastern or Indian family boards the metro train and seats themselves behind us. Now, I'm not racist at all, but I suppose there's a reason stereotypes are what they are. The B.O. just a *ahem* tad strong coming from one of them, or maybe a few, I'm not sure. But, it would have been rude to get up and go to another seat the moment they sat down. So, being self-sacrificing, I sat there; my nose didn't quite get accustomed to it, but it's fine now. We did meet some *excuse the language* total fucktards on the train we had to switch over to in order to get to DC. These are the stereotypical wear-your-pants-lower-than-your-boxers, walk-and-hold-your-balls-as-if-they-were-going-to-fall-off-any-minute, taunt the people in the other train cart because they sure as hell won't be able to do anything serious to you through the doors, grab your balls and pelvic thrust because it amuses their little minds, swear and giggle in public. Ok I'm done with that. It just amazes me how useless some human lives really are.

Anyway, we really didn't know where we were going. We were hoping the crowd knew where it was going and we would just follow. Quite fun stuff trying to listen on people's conversations, hoping that you can pick up on some direction. Anyway, by using this method we reached the DC monument, wandered our way around the lawn there, and plopped ourselves down in anticipation of darkness.

Here's the album of pictures I've uploaded for your viewing pleasure of the fireworks show. Oh, and in that album, the last item is a video of the fireworks show. Me and the housemate both had our digital cameras so we did video recording of segments of the fireworks show. About 3/4 of the way through, I thought to myself. He's taking videos, so I'll just take continuous pictures of the fireworks. So I just pieced together my clips and the finale from his camera. Enjoy the fireworks!

July 4th, 2007

The fun didn't stop there! Oh no it didn't! With so many people at the Mall, you can imagine that there's going to be equally as many people trying to leave DC. The problem is, coming in, the people were spread out in time. But now that the fireworks are done, the rush to the Metro stations commenced! There were HUGE crowds/lines at the nearest Metro station. So my housemate and I decided it'd be more fun to walk to the next station - it'd probably take the same amount of time, and at least we wouldn't be standing still. Onward! Next station comes into view. Same issue. Huge crowd. Ok, let's walk to the next station! Wait... where's the next station? Oh well, we can just go with the flow! Anyway, that got us walking around in circles. And we ended up heading back to the DC monument. A nice complete walking circle we did. So by guy's intuition and guessing, we knew that there were more Metro stations in the other direction. We already knew ahead of time that the Smithsonian Metro stop (the one that was actually the closest to the fireworks) was closed for the 4th. But no worries, we would continue past it to another Metro Station. Anyway, we managed to walk for a good 30 minutes, maybe more. But it was amusing! and that's all that matters; I got bored and traced out our route that we walked on Google Maps.

I hope you enjoyed my recap of my July 4th. How was yours? I hope if was relaxing. Until next time, enjoy life!

monkeys!

2007-07-02T19:17:00.001-04:00

HAHAHAH Monkeys

Video Link

I love monkeys hahahah!

Just thought I'd share the awesomeness - whaddya know, these monkeys are smarter than some of us will ever be! Take the camera-person for example. Just kidding!

a.d.d.

2007-07-01T13:22:00.000-04:00

In my last post, I discussed how RPGs were like real life - or perhaps real life is like an RPG. In any case, I think they went wrong in one regard. Drops.

Scenario: Hunting for rare itenz
Location: Some high level map
Mobs: ..... uhm, let's say... spiders... yes high level spiders, ugly and nasty critters eh?

What did they deserve to get mercilessly killed? They're just protecting their home right? We're the ones picking fights here... they're not really [Lv150 Evil Spider]... they're just [Angry Protective Creature]. Anyway, I digress. Ok. You succeed in killing a couple thousand. And you're starting to get bored. And then it happens. *Holy light shines down upon the ground next to a freshly hewn mass of green blood and legs. The [Insert grandiose sounding adjective] Ultima Reaving Sanguinary Powerblade of Darkness and Destruction ©. The rare drop of the map. A sword whose splendour exudes from your hands. In town, it hovers upon your back, restless. The hilt within grasp at your head's side. The blade send sparks behind the ground you trod as it stretches and tapers to a victorious point behind your feet. Somebody asks you: "Zomgoamzog, where'd you get that?!"

Then you falter. A... spider. wtf, you'd think that something that big would rip the spider in half. How did the thing get that item anyway? Did it eat a giant? It's stomach must be in some other dimension as it surely would never fit in the belly of a spider. Your aura of reverie is shattered as your realize you're playing an unrealistic game. So anyway, all of that was just to say: drops are amazingly illogical. Oh, and... why didn't the spider just pull that thing out and start whacking you with it? That always confuses me too. When mobs who could very easily destroy you with the weapon they have stored in who-knows-where on their body (maybe in their back-pocket). But no, they choose to use their dinky generic sword that barely scratches your glorious armor. (Or in female character's cases, lack thereof).

Drop size also perturbs me sometimes. More so in first person shooters than in RPGs. I love how the gun models on the ground are smaller than your foot, yet it still manages to look big when you're holding it. Surely you're not that tall for items to start looking small in perspective. And isn't it also amusing that most FPS games have you wearing magic boots? What magic boots? Oh, you know, the one that allows you to strip the ammo from the gun, put it in your reserves, and send the physical weapon into another dimension - because you certainly don't just discard the gun. Those magic boots.

I'm not bashing games. I'm merely observing how such ridiculous concepts are in games and a lot of the times you just take it as it is.

Anyway, the main topic of my post this time is disorganization. Though, I think I'm gonna end up bashing Facebook - because it's the best example of what I'm about to type about. I think our generation is A.D.D. by design. Maybe by design isn't the right way to describe it, but here, let me explain.

We get so much information thrown at us in our everyday life and we are forced to digest it all. Whether we like it or not. We have developed manners of streamlining this process of digesting this information given to us. It works fairly well (more so than our elders [simply by being more accustomed to it]). We are able to ignore the unimportant, and grab multiple different pieces of information at once. Take a look at a news channel. Sometimes they'll be talking about news and they'll be running a streamer of text at the bottom. Couple this with maybe some stock quotes in the lower left. You've got yourself a pretty busy image thrown at you. Still, we manage to scarf down the information fairly successfully.

Here's Facebook bashing time. Take a look at my homepage:
I can't even remember what Facebook used to look like anymore. I know it wasn't this garbaged up. I never did use it much anyway. Still, once you manage to process all this mess of *USELESS* information into your brain. To me, it feels like my brain is getting fragmented, with no hope of ever being defragged for the next hour.

Now, here's why I say we're getting A.D.D. If you manage to find a way to consume all of this information quickly, your brain will be set up to expect this kind of display of information. I think our attention span is getting seriously stunted due to this effect. We expect information to be displayed curtly and for all of it to be thrown on us at once. I don't know if this is a good thing or not. We certainly are better at multi-tasking (nah, multi-threading is a better term) than our previous generation, but it is at the disadvantage of losing our concentration for long periods of time.

What ever happened to the simple and straightforward? Everything has to now be flashy, showy, and "look cool". But in my opinion, a lot of these new trends are awfully ill-conceived and ill-executed. Maybe that's why Google does so well. We have the desire for simplicity, but we see too much complexity these days.

I truly don't know whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing - having the ability to process such amounts of information in one go. But I do think that it certainly does play a major role in our attention span. I wish I could stop to slow down my thinking process sometimes. I feel like I'm racing to get things done and get things into my brain. It can easily get overwhelming. This kind of frightens me, wanting to slow down, but not being able to.

I miss LEGO blocks. How many of you have played with LEGOs when you were a kid? I'd expect probably everyone. Such simple things, those pieces of plastic. So much could be done with such a simple building block. I was such a huge LEGO fanatic when I was a kid. Makes me nostalgic thinking about... maybe when I get back home where all my LEGO bricks are neatly arranged and packed away, I'll bust them out and have a session with my inner and previous self.

I kind of wish I had kept all the boxes to the LEGO sets I got when I was a kid. You know, as a collection kind of thing. Sadly, my kid self didn't think this far in the future and threw the boxes away and the instruction manuals are probably strewn across the house in various and unknown locations. Still, I did organize all my LEGOs into containers ... and I still remember too.

Flat pieces (1/3 height) that are 1 dot wide
Flat pieces that are 2 dot wide
Flat pieces that were smooth at the top
Flat pieces that were greater than 2dot wide
Bricks that were 1dot wide but less than or equal to 6dots long
Bricks that were 1dot wide and greater than 6dots long
Bricks that were 2dot wide
Bricks that were 2x2
Forward slanting bricks - where the dots were located on the shorter plane
Backward slanting bricks - where the dots are located on the plane
Special small pieces - ropes, the (1)x(1)x(1/3) pieces, lights, guns, sticks, etc.
Special large pieces - like boat bottoms, walls, etc
Windows and doors
Body parts
Technic pieces (I wasn't too much into the Technic sets - but I did admire the expensive ones... like the red race car with pneumatic doors *drool*)

I also wish I had pictures of my creations. I suppose at the time, we only had those 35mm cameras (pre-digital camera) so taking pictures would have been costly. Still, I wish that I had some kind of memento from those days. I had so many cool things! Spaceships, houses with working defenses that shot LEGO bricks from invaders, forts with trap doors, ultrasonic speedboats, hovercrafts and hoverboards of all types, airplanes, jets, super-sleek cars... I miss LEGOs so much. I think my prized item is my Star Wars LEGO 7181 Ultimate Collector's Edition TIE interceptor. I begged so long to get this thing when I was a kid (I guess it'd be 7 years ago since the set was released in 2000). I finally got it for Christmas and at $100, it was insanely high for any single item I'd ever gotten for x-mas (that I can remember), and I was ecstatic. It's so sleeeeeeeeek. Call me a dork; I know it and embrace it. Here's the only picture I could find on my computer of the set.

It's a shame my Heavyarms Custom is taking a nap. 'cause he's hardcore too. Apparently, my TIE Interceptor is one of the more rare of the collector sets? I could be wrong and just boasting.

Makes me happy thinking about being when I kid. Anyway, I think I'm done for now. Until next time, enjoy life!

... i'm sure i forgot something

2007-06-26T22:16:00.001-04:00

Don't you hate it when you get the feeling that ...
a) There's either too much to do; or
b) There's nothing to do
... and you can't figure out which situation you're in

It's like, there's too much to do, so you don't know where to start; and thus it feels like there's nothing to do, since you don't want to start;
or it's like, there's nothing to do, but there's something nagging you that makes you feel like there is something you should be doing, but merely can't figure out what that is.

It's so weird; perhaps it comes from disorganization. Usually I try to be as organized as possible - I try to keep in mind what I need to do. This usually works, my mental notes work for the most part and I can remember pretty much what needs to be done. The problem, however, comes into play whenever something disturbs that state. Like too many requests from different people. That tends to screw things up. One person I know will want to play a game, another wants me to watch some video, another wants to chat, another wants to play something on the Xbox 360. All of this is good and dandy... IF NOT ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Because then, my brain goes into organization mode and tries to come up with ways to please everyone. Ok, I can play the game, and chat at the same time; I can watch the video later. But only after I have done some 360 time. But the instant that the brain organizes this, everything prior that was organized is thrown out the window- oh I was supposed to set up the rice cooker; monkeys, I forgot to put the meat out to thaw; need to phone someone!

After typing that, it's kind of odd. I sometimes feel like there's no one available to talk to and go into semi-depressed mode (since I can't really stay depressed for long - shame really... maybe); But when I am busy, I wish I wasn't so busy. It's odd - it's even scary how things can so easily be taken for granted. As cheesy as it is - the things you take for granted are the things you miss most when they aren't there - is so true. I suppose its a hand-in-hand thing rather than a cause-and-effect thing.

Speaking of the Xbox 360. I'm really glad I dished out the effort to get one. But one thing is haunting me: there is a killer line up of sweet games coming up. The problem? They're all coming out after school starts. No, they're not getting released in the summer when a good portion of the gaming population (aka students) has more free time . Nope. They decide to release these wonderful games after school starts up again. Not even at the beginning of the return to school - you know that period where classes just kind of go over syllabus and you get to know people in the class. Nope, not even that luxury. It's stuff like August (and whenever they tell us a release month, it's better off just to consider it either the last week of the month, or the middle of the month after) and September. That means, it's already mid-terms or the like.

- aside: why do some courses still insist on the usage of mid-term. Have you ever had classes where there were 3 or 4 mid-terms? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a *mid*term?

Anyway, I keep talking about awesome games, and I'd like to share my thoughts on them - because I have nothing better to do than waste your time that you've given me.
First of all, the PS3 has no appeal to me whatsoever. Sure it has the power to do better than all of the current consoles on the mass market, but what good does that do when barely any games prove it? Right now, it seems only Lair and Heavenly Sword are peaking my attention. Not enough compared with how the 360 line up is looking. For those of you who talk to me, I don't bash the PS3 because of the hardware. No doubt it's more powerful. But pretty graphics don't quite mean as much to me and really shouldn't for a gamer. I think games emphasize looking good too much these days. Take the PC for example, games are starting to take a toll on my rig. It's as if a good game needs to have good graphics to be good. I went back and played Final Fantasy VII the last few weeks of school during Spring term and it was fun! So many jaggies, but fun! Anywho, that was a major tangent. Back to the upcoming 360 games that I'm looking forward to... I somehow feel like I'm advertising these games, but whatevaH!

In no particular order:

Blue Dragon (ブルードラゴン) : I'm lookin forward to this mainly because it's an RPG and was a hit in Japan. And I could use the Japanese practice eh? And also, the Xbox doesn't have any spectacular RPG's yet. It's going to be on 3 DVDs... that in itself is insane. An RPG on 3 DVDs... I remember the days when Final Fantasy was like 4 or 5 discs but ever since larger media has come out, we haven't really seen multi-disc games. This makes me hope that this game is going to be massive and ton of goodies. Still, it saddens me that something so massive should come out DURING SCHOOL
Eternal Sonata (トラスティベルショパンの夢): Another RPG; I might as well list them now that I'm on the subject. Anyway, the premise for this game is thus (from Wikipedia): "The story takes place in a dream world which centers around the piano composer Frédéric Chopin who died at the age of 39 due to tuberculosis. The plot centers around the concept that three hours prior to his death, Chopin dreamed of a fairy-tale land, in which people with incurable diseases have great magical powers."; music is a pretty prominent in my life so the theme of the game sounds very unique - and I love to try new things out. And from what review sites are saying, it seems like the game will be a sleeper hit.
Mass Effect: Well... BioWare is developing it, so it's gotta be good right? I played through Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and loved it. I started playing Jade Empire - and I suppose the game elements and story were good .. but they didn't quite hit the mark on character art. A friend and I were discussing it; maybe it's because we're Asian and have a more refined perception of what an Asian should look like, but.... those characters weren't pretty. So now BioWare is going back to space and back to aliens and Caucasians (perfectly fine with me) and it looks pretty spiffy so far. I haven't looked much into the battle system - saw some vids and stuff; what interests me is the speech system they have going - emotions instead of lines of text to choose. Hope it turns out well, I'm sure BioWare could be able to pull it off.

Ok so that's 3!!! RPGs How will I ever find the time to play these!... continuing on:

BioShock: This one looks intense. An adventure/psythriller/FPS game. I remember playing System Shock 2, but I don't remember it much... from what I read in retrospect, it was a good game. So with BioShock following a similar vein of game essence, I'm looking forward to getting creeped out and blowing up baddies... all the while wasting more of my very little time available
IV: Grand Theft Auto IV that is. I don't think this game needs much explanation as to why I want to play it. GTA3 was ground-breaking, GTA:VC kept it going, GTA:SA was amusing because it was centered around the gang wars. IV looks very pretty and immersive (I get the feeling I'm going spend at least 5 minutes standing in one spot in the middle of "New York" and watch what the people do. We shall see. Oh, new trailer coming out tomorrow!
Halo 3: Again, just like GTA, I need no explanation as to why I need to play this game. Halo was an average game on a console that lacked a good game of the genre. Ended up building an insane community. Halo 2 turned out not as well as expected, but still an above average shooter. I played the H3 multiplayer beta and found it to be pretty smooth, so I hope the campaign will be smooth as well. I guess this may sound harsh to Halo, but I still enjoy the campaign and multiplayer and am looking forward to it. Being a PC gamer from the start, it's kind of amazing how the right game in the right place can make all the difference in the world. (*wink for the fellow pc gamers)
Assassin's Creed: I played and beat all three of the new Prince of Persia games (oh and the original PoP if we're talking about PoP here). But anyway, this game looks to be sweet because a) Assassin's are cool and b) freerunning is cool. I hope this game turns out well! Har har, my descriptions are getting shorter as this blog post lengthens

Ok I think I'm tired of doing this because there are a few more games; I guess they're not as high up on my "OmGz I needs to play" list... but here they are:

Project Sylpheed - Square Enix doing a spaceship shooter? Interesting)
John Woo Presents Stranglehold - John Woo and Chow-Yun Fat... interesting
Medal of Honor Airborne - MoH. 'nough said
Project Gotham Racing 4 - Guess I'm not really really excited about this one, but weather sounds interesting... I guess... maybe just a gimmick, we'll see
Skate - Really interested in this competitor to Tony Hawk games. Control scheme is new and hopefully will work
Time Shift - I guess I just enjoy shooters - and you can warp time in this one - why does that sound familiar hmmmmmm
Too Human - I'm actually quite looking forward to this... however it's getting dwarfed by the others. There just hasn't been enough hype for me to really notice Too Human. I am interested in the fact that it's story is heavily influenced by Norse mythology though..
Naruto: Rise of a Ninja - cool, a Naruto game that's not a fighting game - oh wait, and best of all original Japanese voice actors! the english dubbed naruto voice annoys me... though I guess the Japanese voice actor can be annoying too.... even if she's a female...
Stuntman: Ignition - I always wanted to play a Stuntman game, but never had a console... maybe now's my chance

Ok I had more to talk about, but I guess this post has gone on long enough. Next time on from the nfinite, more talk about organization, and LEGOs! Or wait, what's the plural of LEGO?!