This is probably the last entry that will be in my journal for a while (I hope not, but not guarentee (gosh darn it, I could never spell that word). I'm packing up my computer now and will be disconnecting everything in my room. If there's a need to contact me, there's always the email link on your left. Toodles.
Man! In trying to procrastinate my packing, I have yet again searched the archives of the web and found out that my first Internet posting was not 1/8/96, but rather, 4/15/95! I know it's mind because I know exactly why I asked the question, and that email address is what I had back then, which was the dial-up prodigy service. Wow, stuff that you can find! I'll update the link on the side to reflect this new discovery.
I am cleared for taking a leave of absence this semester. No one there had any quips or qualms about my taking the semester off after the heard the reason.
I was pleasantly surprised today when I was riding the taxi. Usually, I take the bus or the subway, but today, I just felt extremely lazy and didn't want to wait for the bus to get to school. So I take a taxi there to get all my paperwork done and then come back. On the way back, I tell the driver "92nd and Lexington." However, he thought I said "92nd and Broadway" (he probably didn't hear the Lexington part). So we got to 92nd and Broadway and I told him he was wrong, and I was going to East Side. So we had to make this loop back to 96th street to cross Central Park, which added to the meter. Right before we reached the destination, he apologized to me about mishearing me. I said it was fine (I usually don't mind mistakes as long as the person takes responsibility for it, which this taxi driver did). The fare came out to $7.10, so I gave him $8 bucks. He then returned a dollar back to me. What a swell guy. Guys who are willing to admit to mistakes are rare now and I really do respect those that do.
As I promised, I'll fill in what has happened to me in the past few days.
I left Friday morning on the flight to San Jose. The plane stops in Las Vegas and I have to then transfer on the flight to San Jose. I got to Los Vegas alright and didn't get wanded or anything. It's probably because I didn't bring anything except for a few magazines. Usually, anything I need is already at the house in California, so I only brought some books and magazines. In JFK, I bought Wen Ho Lee's book about his ordeal two years ago being accused of being a spy. I got around to finishing it and it is very disturbing on how the government can do all this crap if they're out to get someone, even if it means lying and using the media. It's a quick read because it's just tells a series of events, but very informative. He really rags on the NY Times too, but he justifies it. Anyway, so back to my plane incident. I got off the plane from JFK and looked at the terminal. For some reason, I was thinking San Francisco at the time (probably becuase before this year, I've always flown to San Francisco...probably more than 10 flights to SFO), and so I looked at the San Francisco flights. Usually, if the departure time is different than what is printed on my ticket, I would see that I was wrong. However, the one going to San Francisco was at the EXACT same time as my San Jose flight. I comfortably wait outside the SFO gate and then when the rows were being called, I gave my boarding pass to them and they let me in. After getting comfortably inside the plane and pulling out my book, a lady who was checking boarding tix comes in and calls for me and tells me that my flight was to San Jose. So I grab all my stuff and see that everyone in the plane was looking at me. As we exit the plane door, she tells me that I held up everyone else behind me and again, I got those piercing, evil eyes from everyone there. However, I finally got on the correct plane. Stupid me.
I had this though while watching the news back home in California. There's this huge debate about Bush's tax cut and Bush is making a deal about democrats who oppose the tax cuts. He says those who don't allow the tax cut are actually RAISING TAXES! You know, he might be right
And on an impulse tonight, I decided to walk into the movie theater and watch "Black Hawk Down." Rather disturbing movie, since I usually don't like gory films, but I like it because it portrayed things accurately (or so I've read), as well as portraying the Somalis pretty well. It's amazing how a few people can screw it up for everyone.
Finally, I've decided to take a leave of absence from school for family reasons (that reason is also why I went back to California). Big decision, but I don't mind. It'll be a good breather in my hectic academic life.
Just got back from California a few minutes ago after having been there since Friday (hence the lack of journal entries for the past few days). But fortunately, I have a scrap of paper in my wallet with interesting things to write about when I have the energy to type (including my little own security breach at the airport where I got on the wrong plane and had to be "extracted" =)).
Sometimes it pays to be late. I arrived late in my class this morning, so I was left there standing for a moment looking around for empty seats. Of course, when you arrive late for a class, everyone looks at you. And so afterwards, I was accosted by someone who asked "Did you go to Cornell." It turns out that the guy was Matias, whose name I have heard of because he's friends with a very good friend of mine. And coincidentally, I just emailed that friend last night, who told me that Matias was going to matriculate in the fall, so I guess he got his information wrong. Anyway, Matias is in ALL my CS classes, all four of them, which will come in pretty handy because he's really hardcore. He worked in a startup that he and a few of his friends founded (it eventually bombed, but that's beside the point).
Nothing too eventful happened, except that my crypography professor is eccentric in a funny way. He's a visiting professor from Hahvahd, and is apparently really really famous for what he does with cryptography. The things he says are just sometimes hilarous. When he was trying to pull down the chalk board, he mumbled to himself (I sit in the front row so I can hear this), "I should have eaten my spinach!" Maybe it's just me, but I thought that was hilarous.
Someone remind me get calendars from gamemusic.com from now on. Since it's after new years, they're having a sale on import calendars (i.e. Ah! Megami-sama, CCS, FFX). The anime ones are 9.99 now, which is a real bargain since Kinokuniya in midtown still sells them for 26 bucks (although they have a 30% discount). However, I restrained myself from purchasing all of them and just got the FFX because I don't have any Final Fantasy paraphernalia besides CDs and the games themselves. On the other hand, I have about 5 POUNDS of anime posters already (including the 2002 Sailormoon calendar). I just don't have enough wall space! On a related note, I watched the ending again for FFX today, about 3 times because I just finished downloading the 600 meg encoding of it. Instead of having to spend an hour beating the last boss on the PS2 and watching the english version, I can just use my little computer and watch it at the click of the mouse; and it's in Japanese too! As with most, the original, untranslated versions are better. In fact, I think the Japanese version stirs up a lot more sentiment than the English one, even though they use the exact same video!
I had my first class meetings for the Monday, Wednesday class today, which was databases, and PLT, as well as the second class meeting of Japanese. Really got nothing to say aobut them, as they are just your usual honky dorie classes. But at least I was awake for these, unlike yesterday. But then again, my classes start at 1:10pm on Mondays and Wednesdays.
Oh oh, on the bus on the way home, two Japanese people sat near me and chatted away. It's not considered eavesdropping if you can only understand 20% of what they're saying, right?
Had my first day of classes today and Columbia is as Columbia does. My first class of the day was Natural Language Processing, which is the study of how to use computers to interpret and produce natural language (i.e. everyday English). The problem is, well, there are two problems. First of all, the instructor is ph.D candidate. Secondly, being an international student, her English is pretty bad. Now, this might just be a shot in the dark, but having someone who has broken English teach a class on how to teach computers to interpret and produce English correctly sounds a bit sketchy to me (hey, hush on your comments about that last sentence! I never said I would be a good replacement).
And then I was shopping around for more classes when I saw that I could take this advanced software engineering course. As a prerequisite, you had to take the beginning course, which I took last semester. However, an interesting thing on the homepage was that if you got an A- or better in the BEGINNING course, you could be a TA for the ADVANCED course without ever taking the ADVANCED course. That sounds even more hokey. Imagine, you'll be graded by people who don't even know the material themselves.
But good thing is that I got my shipment of posters today. Time to finally decorate my room!
One of the best lessons I've learned is that "Taxis are YELLOW," which is in reference to friend Dave's previous experience traveling in NYC. When I got off the plane and headed towards the taxi stop a few days ago, the line was really long for the regular taxis. So in light of this supply and demand, there were a few people in private cars who were asking people in line where they were going. Of course, I had just come from California so even though it was snowing, I had a light jacket on (although I had like 4 layers of clothing underneath). I guess I looked like a tourist or an person unfamiliar with the city, so I was asked quite a few times. All I had to say was that I was going to my apartment in NYC and they quickly backed away cuz they realized I wasn't dumb enough to be taken advantage of.
I hit the usual bookstores today, and none of them had any Animage magazines left. They had the NewType ones, but I don't like those for some reason. It's like how I am with Time and Newsweek. I like Time, not so much Newsweek. Although I might go back again soon because they still have some calendars that are marked down by 30%. I have the Sailormoon World 2002 calendar, but the Cardcaptor Sakuras look kinda nice too.
Just finished watching "The Family Man" on DVD (technically, it's my parents DVD that I copied on my hard drive since I didn't want to bring the disc). It was a pleasant movie, considering it is a spin-off of "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens. A money-grubbing man is shown another life on Christmas Eve and wakes up the next day changed. Tea Leoni is rather pretty. While it's pleasant, I can't really relate. That's how I feel about a lot of movies and hence, can't really like them much. I mean, if I were that successful, I wouldn't be pimping around. And if I found myself in another life, I would play along with it rather than being so much in denial.
I told myself to wake up at 8am this morning and ended up being awaked at 1pm with a phone call from my mom. I then got visited by a few people I know in my hall, and headed out around to buy some necessities. Stopped by Software Etc. expecting to buy #13 of Kenshin, but apparently, I think they've stopped stocking anime because the section was pretty skimpy. Maybe it was because they realized that they weren't making enough money on them selling the discs at 5 bucks below retail.
And then I stumbled upon this site:
http://stopthief.katgyrl.com/
(sorry for not automatically linking it...I could, but I'm currently working on a new layout for this page that would choke and die with embedded html). Anyway, it's a site that was created "to expose intellectual property theft, including images, layouts, and other copyrighted materials, on the world wide web." I must give them credit because unlike other people who rave on about how bad it is to steal their stuff, but post images of copyrighted material, these guys have their own stuff. But really, their mission statement seems too broad and makes them seem like self-serving evangelists. They choose their own battles to go against, which is when someone "borrows" their site design and stuff. Why they think the things they create are worthy of being stolen is beyond me. Arrogance is a bad thing.
I am finally at my place at school now after a 12 hours trip. Because of the baggage issue (inspecting all baggages), I got to the airport at 6:30 for 9am flight. It wasn't too bad, the lines were short. However, I was frisked and wanded as I passed through the security checkpoint. As I approached it, I took my laptop out of my backpack as instructed, put all my keys in my backpack and sent them through the xray machine. Then, knowing that I have nothing of suspicion, I walked through the security gate in a confident gait. I didn't sent off the alarm, but I guess my confidence was enough to warrant a suspicion and I was asked to step aside to be wanded. After being quasi-violated, the guy asked me to take off my shoes so that he could send them through the xray machine. So I was there in the middle of the airport with my smelly feet in the open. Wonderful.
I slept for the first leg of my flight from San Jose to Phoenix. In Phoenix, I paid some outrageous price for a personal pizza from the Pizza Hut place. I then got purchased a copy of the latest edition of PC Magazine. That's my good luck charm for flights, I suppose. Ever since freshman year when I flew to Cornell, I've always had a copy of a PC Magazine with me. I used to also always get a two item combo from the Wok 'n' Roll food place in the Pittsburg airport since that was always where I used to transfer, but I believe the place is closed down now, and I don't fly by there anymore since I don't have to just fly US Airways from a NYC airport, unlike Cornell. FYI: The food today was Chicken Burrito.
The neat thing was that the person sitting in the aisle seat (I like window seats) was also another Columbia student and we got a chattin'. Jeff was his name, a previously recruited wrestler that quit for academics. Good for him.
I forgot the stupid item for today. According to the Washington Post (boy, I feel so magnanimous by saying that), a newly retrofitted Boeing used as the presidential aircraft for the president of China was found to contain more than two dozen highly sophisticated listening devices. Since the retrofitting was done by a US company, care to take a guess at who's getting the blame for the riggings? Yup, the people who give "no comment."
I don't like killing things. If I can help it, I usually let things live either by displacing them (capture the spider and release it outside) or coercing them outside (i.e. turn off all room lights so it flies outside). But sometimes, there's no way to have them expire, such as the case with the housefly in the house. But rather than a messy and undignified death with the fly swatter, I chose something more quick. I took a big cardboard box (FedEx package box, the flat ones) and swatted the fly like a baseball bat (but the box has large surface area, so it only took me 2 swings). The fly died after the crushing blow, but it's body was still in its original shape when it went into the garbage. That's how you properly treat another living creature.
And I got a dollar bill from a "Hot Dog on a Stick" food store in the mall a week ago that had a "www.wheresgeorge.com" stamp on it. If you don't know, that site allows people to track dollar bills and such. I wonder where it could have been and how many hands it could have passed though. It looks pretty old, so I guess there must be a long listing? Texas? Ohio? Where could it have gone? And so I enter the thing into the site and get the result. Only one previous entry, and it was also in Santa Cruz. What an anti-climax. Well, might as well bring it to New York with me in a few hours (I'm leaving in a few hours back to the greatest city on Earth). Maybe then it'll become interesting.
I had two things written down for today. One was that the Metropolitan Museum in NYC will be closed for 3 years starting this May. The second is the incident where I returned a Firewire hard drive to Fry's, only to have the guy at the service center ask me what Firewire was (I love Fry's...). But I don't think feel like mouthing off tonight. The day of my birthday sucks. The Gulf War started on my birthday in 1991, the Northridge earthquake in LA struck in 1994 on my birthday, and now this (sorry, can't go into detail here).
Happy birthday to ME! Have you sent an email to me yet? Puhleez?
So, I don't like kids that come to the store. There's one type that I can forgive, but the other type is just asinine. The ones I can forgive are the 3-7 year olds who come to the store with a few coins in their hands and grab the biggest candy they can find and ask if they have enough money for it. Usually they don't, so then they choose the next biggest thing and ask again. They keep on doing this until they pick the one that costs as much as they have (note, all these candies have price tags on them). But that's okay, they're too young to know any better. I shoud adopt my mom's philosophy and just tell them what they want instead of being constantly inquiried. The second type of kids that I dislike are the ones in their late teens that come in and try to buy alcohol, and then make a fit when you want to card them. Jerks. And then sometimes when you find them out, they leave only to shoulder tap. Then the next guy that comes in wants to buy the EXACT SAME alcoholic beverage. We usually don't sell to him either, even if he's 40 years old cuz we know it's going to go back to the damn kid.
In the newspaper today, there was an article about 2 homeless advocates group who put Santa Cruz as the 12 meanest cities towards the homeless out of an 80 city survey, right up there with NYC, SF, LA and others. Sheesh, you give them and inch and they want to take a mile. Santa Cruz is one of the few cities that even allow homeless to stay on the streets. Off the top of my head, I can think of several cities like Scotts Valley, Palo Alto, and Pasadena that don't even allow the homeless to be in the city. They get picked up and driven to the city limits. How come those cities aren't included in the survey? I think cities that aren't as forgiving towards the homeless are "meaner" than those which are. Talk about a skewed survey.
In national news, apparently a plaque made for some group in Florida got messed up. The plaque was supposed to honor the actor, James Earl Jones (voice of Darth Vader, CNN...etc), for carrying on the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. Instead, it got engraved with the name James Earl Ray, who happen to be the person that shot MLK. Talk about stupidity.
You ask why I don't say much about my day? Because it's boring. I spent the whole day working at the store because my parents had to go someone in an emergency. Very boring. It's a bit of a pain for me since I haven't memorized all the prices for the merchandise...but it's okay. I usually make pretty good guesses (usually off by 10 cents, either way). I should be on "The Price Is Right!" Yup yup.
My computer has disappeared from the Internet! My desktop is currently in my dorm room right now and was connected on the Internet. I've left it there for almost a month now without a hitch, but now, I can't connected to it anymore. This can mean that my Internet connection got disconnected by Verizon or that someone turned off my computer (I get maid service in my dorm) or the computer crashed for some reason. Annoying.
Writing in this journal is so hard because during the day, I always think of things to write about, but then when I get in front of the keyboard, I forget what I was going to write. Arg.
But I do remember that there were two things I was going to say. First, the Olympic torch is coming up from Southern California as I type. When I left NYC in December, the torch had just past there. But the destination is in Salt Lake City, which is between NYC and California. Am I missing something? Why the heck are they running in circles? I guess it's for something symbolic (the run starts from Athens, Greece, right?) to trot around with the flame. But on last night's Larry King, there was an interview with Gov. Ventura of Minnesota where the governor said that the torch was not going to be run across that state as well as the Dakotas, but will be run/has been run through Texas and some southern states. He makes a good point since this is the Winter Olympics, and if the torch is going to be run through any state, it should be the states that actually send athletes to the games. I doubt that there are Texans doing cross country skiing. I already have no respect for the Olympic committee, because they put money and business over the emphasis of celebrating amateur athletics (like many sorry "colleges" and "universities" in the US). Remember how the city of Salt Lake City bribed the IOC? And then how about the exclusive coverage by horrible Bob Costas from NBC because they purchased the rights to broadcast the games? Corruption.
And on tonight's O'Reilly Factor in his "Ridiculous" segment, he points out that 80% of Ivy League professors voted for Al Gore in the previous election and scoffed it as a liberal bias among professors. While I like O'Reilly, I have to disagree. If 80% of those professors voted for Gore, then maybe they know something that we normal people don't.
Seems like my computer at school has been turned off or the DSL has been disconnected. That means my FTP server for my web site won't work and I won't be able to administer the computer until I go back this weekend. And then, I'm supposed to generate a visualization for the past month, but the code for it is on my server, which I don't have access to, so that's going to have to wait.
Two more comments about yesterday. One was that when I first saw Amy (after about 2 years, remember?), she appeared to look like someone very familiar. It wasn't until today that I realized that her hairstyle was just like Yuna from Final Fantasy X. While not brown, she had that bead braid action going on (not as long, but still stands out) as well as the length and the curliness of Yuna's hair. But whereas Yuna was a mature person, so much so that she was willing to put aside her personal feelings to complete her pilgrimage until Amy from yesterday. Secondly, I realize that when I'm annoyed, I say things that when written down, would have parenthesis or brackets around them. For example, yesterday when I mentioned that she didn't change, as a side note, I stated that it meant two things, her maturity and looks. I remember doing that a second time too, when I was asked if I knew on of her friends, Damon or something like that. I reponded, "yes, he's from Princeton, right?" The parenthesis part would have been "Yeah, of course I know him. When I visited her in DC two years ago, she spent an hour or so writing a frickin' email to him while she left me there to watch TV." Dunno why I do that, but I do.
I can't believe the media is spending so much time over the Bush choking on a pretzel incident. MSNBC spent the first 10 minutes of their newscast on the incident with an interview with Henry Heimlich (Cornell, '41 '43) of the Heimlich Maneuver fame. Isn't there anything else to cover rather than the stupidity of our president?
Joke of the Day. Louie, a regular at the store, dropped some change on the ground and was stuggling to pick it up. When he did, he turned to the next customer, who is a homeless and a regular too, and said "You sure have to struggle to pick up change." "Tell me about it," the other guy laughed out. Okay, okay, I guess you had to be there.
What a waste of a perfectly good day. Today was my first day off from work because my aunt and uncle come Sundays to help out. However, they were on a vacation last weekend to Tahoe or something so I had to stay here. But yeah, today I got the day off to travel.
First off, I guess I should admit that it wasn't a waste of a perfectly good day. I got to go to Japantown in San Francisco (which was my primary objective for the day) and got two Cardcaptor Sakura DVDs (DVD #4 and #7), as well as the 2002 Sailormoon calendar (the nice big ones imported from Japan). Yeah, I know I can get these in NY, but I wanted them now. Anyway, the calendar was on sale since it's past new years. After I'm done writing this, I'm going to watch CCS #7. I've already finished DVD #4.
Now here's why today was a waste. I had arranged to meet a long time friend, Amy (I can use her real name since there's almost no way that she would visit this site), at her place in San Francisco. The last time I saw her was in Washington DC about 2 summers ago when she was an intern at some UN thing for refugees. But that time, I was pretty pissed after the meeting because I had driven like 8 hours from Ithaca, NY to Washington DC to visit and didn't really feel welcomed when I got there. I felt like I was being ignored even though it was only us two. After that encounter, I pretty much thought that I wouldn't go out of my way to visit her again. And then during last semester, she seemed to want me to visit her when I came home for Christmas since my house in Santa Cruz is only like an hour and a half to San Francisco. I agreed to sometime during winter break, but was still a little hesitant because I remembered how it was last time getting the cold shoulder and stuff. Since I've been so busy this break, I told her that today was the only day I could see her. So that was arranged.
While I had hoped that she would be a better host this time, I still had my doubts so that's why I made going to Japantown the priority rather than visiting her. And that was a good idea since I got the cold shoulder again. She and 3 of her girl friends and I went to Chinatown where we met two other guy friends of theirs and we ate at dim sum. Since the only person I knew there was Amy, she should have been the one helping me get acquainted with her friends (as all good hosts do, such as buddy John from NYC/Connecticut). But no, she did none of that. As I commented to her friends, "She has not changed a bit," both in the physical sense and emotional maturity. Still immature when it comes to etiquette. At 4pm, when they were about to watch a movie, I decided it was time to excuse myself and go to Japantown before it closed. If my objective for visiting was to spend time with her, then I would have stayed, but fortunately, it was not.
My day could have been better spent being with another friend, Chris, who was in San Jose. I thought he had gone back to school, but he hasn't. Now I feel kinda bad. I came home a bit bummed about the whole incident, but I'm stronger than that. Just needed to get the rant out of my system.
The ridiculous: G. Bush faints after eating a pretzel while watching a football game. What a dope.
And speaking of the "I'm right, you're always wrong" thinking, there was an incident at the store today that just exemplifies it. One of the employees was doing the registers for this customer. The charge was a little over five bucks, so the customer gave the employee six dollars. And then when he got the change, he complained that he had given seven dollars and demanded that he get the one dollar back. Because of previous incidents, we know that when the customer gives us money, we keep it on top of the cash register and out of the cash drawer until the transaction is complete. And so, the employee counted the money that was on the register back to the customer. Instead of admitting that he was mistaken and sorry for yelling, the customer just said "F*** You" and stormed off. What the hell is that? What's so hard about saying that one was wrong? Why don't people take responsibility for their own mistakes?
Looks like I'm going to have to go through hell to get back to New York this coming weekend. My flight is on the 19th, and starting the 18th, they're going to start checking *all* checked baggage. Oh Boy, lucky I don't have much. Maybe it would just save me the hassle to mail everything instead?
The hockey dad trial ended today with Junta, the defendant, getting convincted of involuntary manslaughter. What a crock, in my humble opinion. It's harsh already, but that guy is out of control. The guy came *back* after leaving the first altercation. That's the same as re-loading the gun and firing again after having already shot someone (we've all seen "The Shawshank Redemption, right?" =)). If the fight happened only once, then maybe I can accepted some irrationality on Junta's part. But he left and came back. The guy's a murderer. And what was his alibi? Self-defense against a guy who was more than 100 lbs. lighter than he was? Hardly an excuse. What should have happened was that after he saw his kid being treated a bit too rough, he should have checked his kid to see if he was okay (which I believe he was) and just taken him out of the game and gone home. But no, society now tells people that an insult to self-pride is unacceptable and worth something to get physically hurt over or even killed. I'm right, you're always wrong.
On a lighter note, I finally got my hands on Mahou Tsukai Tai! DVD #4 today from Suncoast. Paid MSRP, but it was only $25 bucks. $25 bucks is my limit for any DVD. And consequently, I finished watching it all last night.
Survivor had it's last episode today and I didn't watch. From reading the local newspaper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel (aka Santa Cruz Senile), one of the last 4 remaining people, Lex, is a Santa Cruz resident. And having just check the news outlets, it appears that he didn't win. Whoop-dee do. There's probably going to be a front page article about him tomorrow, though.
And in other news, I got a guestbook entry from someone who commented on a non-anime section of my web page! It's nice to know that my pages don't exist just for anime downloads.
Opened a fortune cookie this morning to find the message "He who takes notes listens well." I have complaints. First of all, fortune cookies are supposed to contain prognostications! They're called "fortune" for cryin' out loud! This is more of a proverb than a prediction of the future. Secondly, this is false from my 16 and a half years of education. He who takes notes has his nose so far in his notebook and pencil/pen moving so fast that nothing is being processed. It's going from the teacher's mouth directly to the writing. The person who listens well is the one who is free from having to transcribe the teacher. That's what I say.
I realized that today was the second time that I went out driving by myself to go somewhere (and that somewhere today was to pick up my brother from elementary school). The reason I know this is because it was the second time that I got to hear the anime songs that I burned on to a CD for my car. Usually, when my parents are in the car or I have guests, I play the radio or even NPR, depending on the person. I only play anime when I'm alone and can sing by myself. Only two times in more than 2 and a half weeks at home. Kinda sad, but it can't be helped.
Loaded up Final Fantasy X and played the ending again today (and watched it too). Don't know why, but I felt kinda bored and just wanted to experience it again. It's still an incredible ending.
Should I be a nice guy or not? I've been noticing on my log file that someone has been direct linking a picture from my web page. Direct linking is a technique where person A uses an image stored on person B's web server to put it on his (person A's) web page. So when you load up person A's web page, it automatically loads up the picture from person B's server. If person A and person B consent to it, it's fine. But usually, people pay for data transfers (I have a limit of 10 gigs a month) and so when you load up person A's page, the bytes transferred for the image (which are usually big) are taken off person B's account. In this case, I'm the person B.
So to stop this guy from direct linking, I had three options, the first is just to change the file name of the image that was being directly linked. But I hate messing around with the structure of my web site. No good. The next option is the interesting one. Since I have access to the file, I could easily change the picture, but keep the same file name. Since he was stealing one of my anime images, I could easily replace that image with something objectionable (i.e. hentai =)) and let him deal with offending his visitors. That's mean, but think how funny that would be.
But instead, I decided to choose option three, the "live and let live" option. I read up on web server stuff, and it turns out that I can make sure that the only people seeing my image are people who visit my web page, and no one else. If someone tries direct linking, they'll just get a "broken" image. With that implemented, I checked his page, and sure enough, he gets a "broken" image. Maybe that guy will now get a clue.
Hmm, let's see what I should write about. Three days ago, I hung out with high school buddies Eric and Naveed around in Santa Cruz. After declining numerous times beause of family obligations, I decided to go that night because he was going back to his grad school, UCSD, the next day. So we first went to the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company to have something to drink. Of course, I'm already a Starbucks junkie, so I wanted to get a Mocha Frap, but in Santa Cruz, it's taboo to patronize any nationwide chain store. It's a mom & pop city, but I don't think it can hold out for long.
Afterwards, we went to the 99 Bottles of Beer on the wall bar. Quite a small operation compared to the bar I went to in NYC (Bar 89, was it called? in Soho, I believe). No mixed drinks, only beer. So we chill there for a bit and discover that there were some high school acquaintances, Bryn, Zoe, and Emily plus this other guy that I don't know. We chatted a bit, but it wasn't long. Both groups went our separate ways long long ago. Little in common now. When we planned to leave at 10:30pm, a few more people came in that we knew, Joe and Trevor and Trevor's girlfriend. That prolonged our stay until 12:30am and we just drank and talked (or more specifically, they drank and we talked). It was a pretty good night, but sucks that I can't do it more often. I was the only person there who goes to school out of state. Everyone else is within a few hours drive from each other.
That's about it, I guess. Still working on my anime pages. The templates are ready now, just need to fill in information and pictures.
Ha ha, I'm watching this advertisement for this years stomach exercise equipment. Last year, it was the ab-roller. The year before, it was those sit-up machines. This year, they've really gone off the deep end. They're advertising this thing that lets you exercise without doing anything! How incredible. You put this belt thingy on and your muscles contract by themselves, giving you a good workout. But you know what they leave out? That it works by shocking you with electricity. I can't believe how lazy and stupid people are when it comes to trying to look fit without exercising. And then they explain how that thing can be used to exercise face muscles too (the brain operates on electrical pulses too...can you say "brain-fry?"). Mmm...I think I'll skip on shock therapy.
I hate being sick. Woke up this morning with a very sore throat. Of course, when the sore throat hits I usually get some limes/lemons and just suck. It's painful at first, but it does wonders for the throat. Now I have to deal with the sniffles. Blah. I always get sick during vacations.