Lunar Scribbles v2

Spare me the cheese! Star

Spare me the cheese! Star Wars movie was half and half. In order not to spoil it, I'll just mention it vaguely, but obvious enough if you did see it. I really liked the "finding the perpetrator" part of the movie. The other half really needed some help. It was boring, long-winded, and probably could have been done a lot better. Late in the day, time to sleep.

Finally went to NYC today

Finally went to NYC today with my grandma, aunt, and cousin to give them a tour of the place. After looking at my school, Columbia, we went to a restaurant nearby. Ollie's, which is a chinese restuarant. So go there and eat. At the end, our bill was $19.15. I handed the waitress $20 bucks for her to ring up. While she's ringing it up, I take out $3 bucks for tip (15%). However, the waitress never comes back with our change. So I tell my aunt that since they took $.85 cents, we should just give $2 dollars tip (I'm usually a nice guy). However, my aunt was pretty annoyed that they decided to give themselves a tip, so we took the money back that we had left on the table. Apparently, the waitress saw that we had money out and then when she went to clean the table, she couldn't find it. SO, when we had already left the restaurant, she runs outside and says that we are obligated to give a tip. Her reason was that if we left money out for them, it's rude to take it back.

I don't know what her definition of gratuity is, but I do not think it's required by law that we give them any. On top of that, gratuity is to show appreciation for their service. But if their service includes keeping the change from my payment without my authorization, hell, I really don't appreciate it and it's not worthy of a tip. They took their 5% gratutity ($.85 cents), so why should we give them more?

Yawn...here I am at 3am

Yawn...here I am at 3am in the morning, Eastern Standard Time, helping my sister pack. Double yawn. Have to wake up in 3 more hours to bring the stuff to storage before the graduation events happen.

Ahh, I love flying. My

Ahh, I love flying. My flight was at 6:20 this morning and I left home at around 5:10. Usually, it takes me about 30 minutes to get to the San Jose airport so I reached the counter at about 5:45. Being a seasoned traveler, even during post-9/11 (three times in fact, once in December and twice in January, all from JFK airport in NYC), I know that it doesn't take more than 20 minutes to get through the security check, especially at 6:20am in the morning. But when I got to the counter, the guy reminded that I was late and he was pretty certain that I wasn't going to make it on the flight in time. Note, there was still 30 minutes left until departure. I thought he was just being sarcastic and trying to scare me. I then proceeded to the security checkpoint and I understood why. There were probably 100-200 people lined up to get through the security checkpoint. What a dysfunctional airport! Even when I was leaving from NYC, the lines weren't even 1/4 this length. So I waited and did the drill of removing my laptop and walked nonchalantly through the magnetic gate. But this time, instead of some guy frisking me, the guy took my bags and used this swab and wiped the zippers on my backpack and my laptop for any explosive chemicals. I'm thinking he just wanted to touch my computer.

As I leave the security checkpoint, I hear my name being broadcasted on the PA system. I get to the gate and apparently, they were just about to let a standby take my spot. But just in the nick of time, they stopped the standby and I got on. LUCKY (for me, sucks for him)!

My first time getting sick

My first time getting sick all year, and it looks to be over! I started getting the uncontrollable runny nose Saturday night and so I popped a few pills and slept most of Sunday. During the times I wasn't sleeping, I was reading the Love Hina manga (finished the second volume!). I think part of it was that I told myself not to use the computer for the whole day. Usually when I use the computer, I forget about my health (i.e. staying up until dawn, not eating...etc).

But I have to say that I'm enjoying the Love Hina manga more and more, even more so than the Anime version. There's just so many more hilarious scenes in there and the situations are a little more believable than the Anime version. For example, on the night of the prep exam, Naru and Keitaro are at a party hosted by the other girls. They see a cognac bottle that has a Napoleon on it and they start giving each other pop quizzes. Keitaro asks "What was Napoleon's wife's name?" Before answering, Naru excuses herself to the bathroom and Keitaro excuses himself too. In the bathrooms, both of them were secretly looking up the answer to the question. When they come out, they both claim that the remembered it. And then Naru starts firing off more random pop quiz questions. Suu and Kitsune get involved and make them remove an article of clothing for each question they couldn't answer. Then Suu and Kitsune start asking questions. Maybe it's just because it's this weekend, but I nearly died when Suu questioned Naru asking "Who played the young Obi-wan in Star Wars Episode I" (yes, it's written just like that in the book). Naru couldn't answer it in time, and so Suu removed one of Naru's clothes (at which time, Keitaro gets a look at Naru's underwear and gets knocked in the head with a chair). It's Ewan McGregor!

Start volume 3 tonight.

I'm going to shelve the

I'm going to shelve the Naru design for now and make a new one. If there's one thing annoying, it's trying to make it work with all the browsers out there. See, I was trying to do some nifty stuff, but it doesn't work with all the browsers, so...I'm just going to do a plain site...no layers nor fancy stuff...just a plain site.

Some things are so predictable.

Some things are so predictable. If you look at anime web sites, you see that there is a certain style of web design that people call cute. It's almost like a formula. You put a nice, big, and sharp image of your favorite character. You put a pattern as the background and maybe put another picture as a screen. For the area that you put the text one, make sure it's somewhat transparent, so you can still see the design on bottom. Then make everything without much contrast or saturation, and congrats, you have a "cute" site. So easy. Oh, don't forget the tiny text. Check out the Narusegawa style.

Someone tell George Bush that

Someone tell George Bush that he needs a new speech. As I am writing, I'm watching his speech to the Air Force Academy graduation. He once again talks about the Taliban and how they thought we were weak and would file a lawsuit/sue. It was funny the first time I heard it, but this is like the 10th. Even the most clever lines get old after repeated use.

Hmm...do we have a hacker-wannabe?

Hmm...do we have a hacker-wannabe? I'm looking at my web error logs because I'm currently debugging a script, and I see that someone was trying to access my configuration file for my Love Hina pages. As you know, I haven't given public access to the Love Hina portion of the site because I'm still working on it. However, I see that the person was trying to access the ".htaccess" file in the Love Hina directory. For those who aren't that well versed in Apache Web Server software, the ".htaccess" is a hidden configuration file on a web site that tells the server what to do with the files. This file is part of the web site, so you can access it if you manually type in something like "http://blah/.htaccess" but 99.9% of the time, web site visitors shouldn't be even trying to look at this file. Unless the person really thought he/she was clever enough to hack into a system. Unless the web host is REALLY stupid and WILLINGLY changes the default settings, the web server will block all access to this file. I didn't know people wanted to see the site so badly. =)

Another thing about web sites is that the IP addresses are logged too. Guess what? A simple lookup of the IP address shows me that it was a person from my old college, Cornell! And because Cornell registers the IP addresses with the student's Netword IDs, a quick "finger" shows me the full name of the person who's registered with that address and their campus address. Just to let you know, it came from Balch Hall, which is quite surprising. Balch Hall is an all-girls dorm. Probably just a guy who's using the girlfriend's computer. As they say, despite being an all-girls dorm, if a fire alarm went off at Balch on any given night, half the people evacuated would be male. =)

P.S. to the person who tried to access the file. The way I locked the files up in Love Hina isn't even through the ".htaccess" file. The entire directory tree has guest/web visitor permissions OFF!

Frickin' California. Just had a

Frickin' California. Just had a nice little tremor up here. It's the worst feeling when you realize its happening and then it continues, and continues and you say to yourself, "please don't get any stronger." Much rather have blizzards.

So I was looking at

So I was looking at the competitio...another Love Hina site, www.anihina.com. I actually like that site a lot, but it does have its flaws, or at least, stuff that I don't think is proper.

First, there are banner ads everywhere, which means the guy is getting some spare change for posting the works of other people, which is a blatant copyright infringement. Heck, my site is probably blatant copyright infringement too, but at least I can claim that I'm not doing it for *any* money.

Second, the guy has watermarking on the images. As in, if you look at an image, he's altered the image so that it shows the address of his site directly on the picture. In a world where frickin' advertisements are everywhere (can you say pop-up, pop-under ads), the last thing web people should do is put more advertisement on pretty and cute anime pictures.

Lastly, the guy doesn't even exercise discretion and puts up scans of BOOTLEG Son May CDs. Enough said.

Just my little critique. I love the web site layout though.

As for my site, I'm finally finished with translating ALL MY LOVE HINA CDs! All the MP3s and videos I'm going to put up are also ready! After much though, I've decided to encode all the MP3s for the web site at 16Kbps/11kHz. That's because the encoder I'm using is a little better at making small files sound better (that sounded strange). Plus, it's half the size of my current encoding rate, which means that it's less stress on my DSL connection. Lastly, it might sound mean, but I REALLY don't want people to be keeping these MP3s. They're SAMPLES, NOT SOMETHING YOU LISTEN TO REPEATEDLY!

Just got "20020220 music from

Just got "20020220 music from Final Fantasy" which was the recording of the concert performed on 2/20/2002 (hence the title). It was just released two days ago in Japan, so I was pretty impressed that CDJapan got it to me so fast. Very incredible CD, I must say. It includes most of the popular songs from the series, especially the last four (7-10). It's a two CD set, with probably the milk white case as the "Initial Release bonus" (I hate those...if I don't get them. =)). Tracks are as follows:

Disc 1:
1. Tuning
2. Liberi Fatali (FF VIII)
3. Love's Theme (FF IV)
4. MC-1 (dialogue from the MCs)
5. FINAL FANTASY I~III (the tune that goes up and down the scales)
6. MC-2
7. Aeris's Theme (FF VII)
8. Don't be Afraid (FF VIII)
9. Tina's Theme (FF V)
10. To the Night of Deep Affection (FF V) (title uncertain)
11. Vamo' alla Flamenco (FF IX)

Disc 2:
1. MC-1
2. Zanarkand (FF X)
3. Yuna's Theme (FF X)
4. MC-2
5. Love Grows (FF VIII)
6. Suteki da ne (FF X)
7. MC-3
8. The Place I'll Return to Someday ~ Melodies of Life (FF IX)
9. MC-4
10. One Winged Angel (FF VII)
11. MC-5
12. The Man with the Machine Gun (FF VIII)
13. FINAL FANTASY (Anthem)

So my mom and I

So my mom and I were at Costco this evening, and at the checkout, some Korean guy that knew her came up to her (I was by the "food court" place, so this is all hearsay). Apparently, it was some guy who used to own a grocery store that went out of business and in the past, was very interested in buying my parent's store. Story has it that the guy had come into the store once and nagged my mom for 15+ minutes about selling the store to him. Anyway, so the guy comes up to my mom and in a loud voice says "I heard that your husband passed away." Now that off-hand is really rude. You do NOT blurt out the death of the family member in public area, especially to the widow. He then kept on nagging my mom asking how long it's been, despite the fact that my mom had no intentions of talking to him. GET A CLUE, SOMETIMES PEOPLE DON'T LIKE TO TALK ABOUT THE DEATH OF A FAMILY MEMBER. And then the very next thing he asked was, "When are you going to sell the store?"

WHAT A MOFO. He didn't even bother to ask how my mom was doing, offer help or even words of encouragement and sympathy. THE ONLY THING THIS FUCKER WAS INTERESTED IN WAS BUYING THE STORE BECAUSE HE THOUGHT MY MOM COULDN'T HANDLE IT ANYMORE. FUCKING GREEDY AND RUDE SON OF A BITCH. My mom said I was taking over, just to get the guy to stop talking. Later, I told my mom if that guy asks again, say the selling price is $25 million dollars. GOD DAMN PRICK.

In lighter news, I was eating out with my mom, grandma and bro this evening and noticed a bunch of kids walking in the restaurant in tuxes and nice dresses. High school prom season! My my, where has the time gone.

Hmm...this is going to be

Hmm...this is going to be kinda difficult running two journals at once. The main page for jupiterstar.com runs like a journal, where I can just put entries in. So I was tempted to post that I finished the pages for the Love Hina soundtrack (translating and having to type up the info for 79 tracks isn't too fun) as well as the Love Hina Osaka concert DVD. This includes creating the downloadable MP3 files and video files too. But by writing that here means that I don't have to write it there, ne?

Bah, visitors can't go into the Love Hina site yet anyway.

Must get rid of my "collecting" mentality. There's this single by Yui Horie I would like to have. However, it has a first pressing bonus (the CD has a picture label). But it turns out that they don't have the first pressing CDs anymore. Now I feel bad for not being able to get that. BUT IT'S ONLY A PICTURE ON A CD THAT YOU DON'T EVEN TOUCH MORE THAN 3 TIMES BEFORE IT GETS ENCODED AND SHELVED says me to myself. Sigh. I hate limited edition stuff. DVD boxes too.

Received my Love Hina Christmas

Received my Love Hina Christmas Special DVD and soundtrack today. I think the Fedex guys know me by know considering I've had a package from them once a week for 5 weeks already. All from the same place in Japan. =). Tonikaku, the Christmas Special was pretty good. The story is very heartwarming, as all Christmas stories are (i.e. It's a Wonderful Life and such). There were some parts in there that seem a little out of place and forced at times, but those were pretty minor. The character design is a tad bit different, and is probably because they might have had another studio do it. Motoko seems a lot different.

For the last hour and a half, I've been scanning all the covers to my Love Hina CDs and DVDs. What a tedious process. I'm going to try and get my site fully updated tonight (i.e. removing any trace of the old site...which means using my new front pages and such).

You say you want news outside of computer stuff? Well, I finished the first book of Love Hina, the manga. Only took me 2 weeks to read it. Rather proud of myself for reading that in Japanese. Only 12 more to go! At this rate, I'll be occupied all summer and fall.

You say you want news outside of anime too? Geez, demanding. Hmm. THERE'S ABSOLUTELY NOTHING GOING ON! I work occationally when it gets busy at the store, but for the most part, I'm stuck in my little computer or anime/manga world. Make hay while the sun shines, I guess. I doubt I can spend this much time on my hobbies when I'm back at school, so might as well get it out of my system.

Spent most of today making

Spent most of today making the Love Hina page and because of a suggestion, I'm going to keep my old page layout for my new page. See it here: http://www.jupiterstar.com/test/legacy.php

Neat, huh?

Just saw my credit card

Just saw my credit card bill. The companies in Japan that I order from don't charge the card until the end of the month or something like that. Now my 6+ bulk orders are coming back to haunt me! You know what? I believe I have spent MORE money on anime AFTER I imposed my limit in DVDs than I did BEFORE making my to-buy anime DVD list. Because I can't buy more DVD/new series, the money has gone towards music CDs of the series I own (i.e. Love Hina...all released CDs except for one) and manga, which are like 6 bucks a book for a series of 13 books. The positive is that I believe I'm really learning and using my Japanese now because I have to look up words myself in the dictionary for manga and do the translations myself for the music CDs. No subtitles allowed.

For one of the few

For one of the few times in my life today, I actually yelled at someone. There's this guy (around 40-50 years old, thin build, caucasian) who comes into the store and gets two ice cream bars, $.59 each. He comes to the counter and says "oops, I forgot my wallet." Thinking that he was going to put the ice cream back and go get his wallet, I go to the next customer. Then from the corner of my eye, I notice the guy just walks outside with the merchandise. My co-worker goes and gets him back in the store. Co-worker tells him that he has to pay for them and so the guy comes to the counter where I am and *pretends* to hand me money. And then walks out again. Of course he gets called back. My co-worker tells me to call the police. I didn't at that time because I thought two 59 cent ice cream bars was too little for the police. Plus, the guy was courteous...he just didn't listen to what we told him to do. So I'm getting annoyed now, so when the guy is at the counter, I tell him that he has to pay for it. He nicely hands me ONE of the ice cream bars, but of course, co-worker has him cornered so he can't leave. AND THEN HE JUST STANDS HERE HOLDING THE OTHER BAR. I yell at him saying "IS THIS SOMETHING YOU NEED TO THINK ABOUT?" He answers "no," but does nothing. After a few more seconds he heads towards the ice cream freezers and opens it up and just ponders, like he was shopping more ice cream. I then say "PUT THE ICE CREAM BACK IN THE FREEZER, SIR!" (always be somewhat courteous). I continue with some more verbal abuse, finally resorting to "WHAT PART OF PUTTING AN ICE CREAM BACK DO YOU *NOT* UNDERSTAND? DO YOU HAVE A BRAIN DISORDER?" Still nothing, except for a few calm responses to the question, which was a "no." Finally, I really did have to resort to calling the police and have them come for a frickin' $.59 cent item. After my call, the guy's wife comes in the store and says that she'll pay for the ice cream. She explained that he had an anxiety disorder or something like that. I tell her to explain it to the police when they came because I did everything in my powers, so I have to turn to a higher authority. Of course, I had my doubts about his "medical disorder" because he was FULLY aware of what was going on, and even answered my questions too.

Anyway, the police came and they explained their story and I explain mine. The policeman pretty much said that he wasn't a doctor so he couldn't excuse him because of the medical disorder ("That's the judge's decision" as he said). However, since his wife was here and had money, we could just let him go instead of having him ticketed. Since the ice cream he had in his possession had probably already melted, I decided to just let them buy it and leave. Arg.

Got my Love Hina and SM(J to X) DVD today from Amazon. Tomorrow will probably be Kenshin and MTT #7, the final one I believe.

Tired, will probably not work on web page tonight. Will continue reading Love Hina manga though.

Not bad, not bad! I

Not bad, not bad! I thought I wasn't going to get a lot done today, but it turns out I did. Last night, I had planned to spend all of today working on my web page, the page that I had a mock-up last night. This morning, I was awakened by a phone call to my parents. My parents weren't home so I told them to call the other business number. 20 minutes later, I get a call from my mom saying that she wanted me to drive her to San Jose so she can meet with the person who called. Boy was I annoyed (although I didn't really show it). There's nothing more anonying than planning to spend a day doing something and then having to scrap it for something unexpected and not an emergency. So I spent that time until 4pm in San Jose. Not that fun, it's more of an parent's meeting. I was just the driver.

So I come back and start working. To my surprise, I didn't encounter many problems today while developing the page. Maybe it's because I've done this stuff before for my journal (this page) as well as my guestbook. The only downside (or upside) was that I personally added a few thousand hits to my web site, according to my statistics log. Having lots of hits is great for the ego, but not when it's from myself.

Anyway, enough talk. Since I don't want Google to crawl the site, I won't put a direct link, but you can just cut and paste. It's "http://www.jupiterstar.com/test/" Of course, it's still far from final and I have to tweak with the coloring and fonts, but I think the backend is pretty much in place. Feel free to add an entry if you want. It'll be deleted when I finalize the site, but in the meantime, try it out.

K: Narusegawa, GOMEN!
N: Nani?
K: Ore, mukareteta. Mainichi, mainichi, mainichi tanoshikute. Sore de.
N: Nani yo, kore. 'E' hante datte. Kore jya mata gyaku modori jya nai.
K: Ore, mata toodai dame ka mo shirenai. Tabun dame daroo. Issyo ni gokaku suru tte yakusoku, dame ka mo shirenai. Da kara chisaii toki na yakusoku iiwake ni shite nigeyoo to shite ita. GOMEN!
N: Anta nee.
K: Ore, de mo akiramenai kara. Toodai mo, Narusegawa mo. Ore ni wa sore yume tte iu ka mozoo tte iu ka. sore shika nai kara sore kara nigetara nani mo nai kara.
N: Betsu ni. Suki ni sureba ii kedo saa. Atashi dattara, ichi-nen gurai wa toodai de mattete ageru kara.
K: Ima o? Nante?
N: Ikoo!
(The last dialogue of Love Hina...transcribed by yours truly. I love this ending...especially when it's accompanied by the song "Yakusoku").

I've come with a very

I've come with a very rough design/idea for what the front page of Jupiterstar.com will be. Photoshop is great for such tasks. Of course, this is going to be modified heavily because it's always a good idea to stop thinking about a design for a while and then get back to it later on. Here's the mockup. Time for me to go to sleep.

No, I did not draw that caricature, but it was a direct trace using layers in Photoshop of someone else's drawing from "somewhere." =)

I think I've come up

I think I've come up with a solution to my "displaying very high quality scans on my web site" problem. Instead of putting the whole image file in it's entirety, I'm going to split the image up into 25 sections (5x5 tiles) and use tables to make them seem like one image on the page. However, when someone tries to do a right-click "save picture" command, he/she will only get 1/25th of the picture unless they go and save all 25. And even then, I'm sure they'll have lotsa fun trying to put the pieces back together into one file. Evil, aren't I? >=)

Actually, it's a really stupid method of protecting content and can really really easily be overcome. But it does require an ounce of thought to figure it out (I won't say here). I'm not trying to protect my site from smart people, because they probably know it's bad ettiquete to just take pictures. Just the ones that just take on whim.

NO NO NO NO NO

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! I watched the summary episode of Love Hina on the Tokyo concert DVD. Reason being: I had to know if all these CDs I was buying was worth it. Despite only being able to understand 30%-40% of the spoken dialogue, I have to say "YES IT IS!" But now, it's going to be tortune to have to WAIT all these months just to see the complete series. Or...I could get the import DVDs. WHICH WILL COST ME $50 bucks for 2-3 episodes a DISC. Money money money money money.

Aww...FRUCK. Just ripped a hole through my sock.

Debate, debate. I'm thinking whether

Debate, debate. I'm thinking whether I should put high quality scans of my anime merchandise on my web site.

Optimist: It'll make your web site look really nice with lots of sharp pictures.
Pessimist: People will steal them and use it on their web site.
Optimist: You bought a scanner, why not use it.
Pessimist: I'm greedy.
Optimist: Visitors will come to your web site!
Pessimist: I'm paying for my bandwidth and pictures suck up bandwidth like a new vacuum.
Optimist: You're one of the millions of pages on the Internet. No one will come to the site just to take pictures.
Pessimist: No, they will come.
Optimist: You're so arrogant to think that.
Pessimist: If I do that, they'll all love my site.

Oops.

Yet some more of the same news. Got 5 more CDs today. Mahou Tsukai Tai Drama CD, the three Love Hina Triple Singles, and the legit version of KareKano Act 2.0. Ripping and encoding as I type.

My mom showed me a document that my dad's dad (grandfather) wrote way back when. It described where he came from, along with a hand-drawn map, and autobiographical information. In it, my grandfather said he hated the Japanese and that's why he became a soldier for the Chinese army. The Japanese had tortured and murdered (gouged out eyes, disembowed and such) my great-grandfather. I'd probably be shot right here and now if he were alive with my current infatuation with Japanese culture ne? Bad people did bad things in the past. No one's hands are clean, US, China, Japan, nobody.