Lunar Scribbles v2

The deadline has been set.

The deadline has been set. I have until Dec. 1st to decide whether I want to graduate this May or not. I think I will fill out the application to graduate, although I have to admit that I do have some reservations about it. I guess it's just because it'll probably be the last time I'll be in school for a while. Life changes after school, as you start going to work (life changes in many other ways too...as I've gotten to know this past year).

Thre was this huge thing in midtown when I went today. Right outside Grand Central was literally a swarm of NYPD cars and mobile command centers. I have no idea what was going on, but it didn't seem like something I would be interested in. Plus, it was cold and wet.

Just finished the first of four manga books to Azumanga Daioh. While there's no real plot to it, the comics themselves are pretty funny. I might get the DVDs for them. The comics are like strip comics that appear in the newspapers here. One my favorites is this one (hand annotated by me for your reading pleasure):

Two more DVDs into the

Two more DVDs into the collection! Strawberry Eggs #2, and Saber Marionette J->X #4. Haven't busted open the latter though. Met with my old project partner from last year. He's only an undergrad, so he still has to do all his liberal arts requirement and is only taking one CS class this semester. He's a really bright guy though, and shares the opinion with me that the teaching staff here needs a little help.

New wallpaper!

Finished! I just finished the

Finished! I just finished the entire Love Hina manga! At the beginning of the 14th book (last book), I was going off screaming at the book, calling Naru a b**** (I scream at the TV too, if you're wondering). She really was a b**** there. But I have to say that my favorite chapter was the epilogue chapter. So many clever lines...i.e. "I'm Maeda Ema. Whether you read it left to right or right to left, it's still MA-E-DA-E-MA." And of course, in the very last panel of the comic, Keitaro screams "I didn't mean that, Narusegawa!" and Naru comments "My name's not Narusegawa anymore." =) =)

School is so pointless. I'm

School is so pointless. I'm here cranking away at code for a project that won't even last until next year because it's so dumb. I mean, when I work on a web page project like my journal, it has lasting value, you know? Whatever I make, I can use indefininately. However, for a class project, the concepts that are required to be used narrows the project field by a lot. Plus, it's going to be graded by others, which means no creativity (else, they dock off points). Can't wait until I get out...

So for noon, I went to a dimsum place in Chinatown with a few friends. The place was crowded, but the food was good.

I'm currently listening to the soundtrack to Escaflowne and for a strange reason, I kinda feel sad and reminiscent (I'm listening to the soft vocals, not the energetic BGM). Hmm...

One more hour sleep! That

One more hour sleep! That hour will come in very handy, but not tonight since I'm going sleep early. I spent most of the day playing around again with video editing. I seem to be doing a little better since I know more shortcuts in the program to offset the relative slowness of my CPU. However, no more today. I am fried.

One of the blogs I read is Ken Akamatsu's little diary. Anyway, let me start earlier. I got this week's Shonen Magazine (weekly manga) and they started a new series called "School Rumble." The character design appeals to me and as I read it, I got more interested. It's kinda light and humorous about a high school girl and her ordeals with love. Then, when I read Ken Akamatsu's diary, I see that he also mentioned that same manga! Neat.

If you want to look at really good web site designs, take a look at a few Japanese web sites that emphasis design. I was looking for some Japanese Fonts and stumbled on a few of them and they look SOOOO nice... I'm jealous.

I've always said that my

I've always said that my 1GHz/512 meg ram Sony machine is good enough for my purposes. How quickly I found out that it wasn't. I started playing around with some digital video edition with Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects and discovered very soon that my computer is too SLOOOOOW. I guess that just means I won't be making any fansubs anytime soon. =)

What a crappy day! I

What a crappy day! I spent all today in my apartment working on stupid CS homework. It's not hard, but I had to make sure everything was perfect. On last homework, it was never mentioned whether we could use pre-existing code in our programs or that we would have to make it ourselves. So everyone used pre-existing code. Turns out that they wanted us to make it ourselves. The average grade for that problem was a 1 out of 10 (median was a zero). I hate classes like that.

What made the day worse was that it was such a cold day and my hands were cold as I was typing/programming. There's nothing worse than having to use the keyboard with cold hands (same goes when playing the piano).

Still can't sleep. Okay, so

Still can't sleep. Okay, so I've finished up Love Hina #12 tonight, but that's not really the reason. So I've been thinking about my midterms on Thursday. I know that I did horribly on one of them, Network Security. I mean, it was a 100pt. test and when I looked at the first problem, I couldn't do it. I didn't even know what it was talking about (note: I joined the class during the second week, so it might have been covered in the first week). It was worth 15 points right there. I managed to BS the others, but still...not a good feeling. The midterms are 20% of the grade. And then it turns out that the homeworks were handed back. Average was a 54. I got an 80 (highest in the class was an 88). Yeah, homeworks are worth only 5% of the grade each, but maybe I didn't do so bad on the midterm...relatively speaking. But by stating that probably means I jinxed myself.

Ahh! I knew being able

Ahh! I knew being able to read Japanese Anime Magazines would be the death to me! So just before I was going to sleep, I opened up Nov. issue of Animage and there was a little blurb in the "Front News" which mentioned that there was going to be a new Hand Maid May OVA titled "Hand Maid Mai!" Set to be released in December or January! How exciting! Now I can't sleep! I have a test tomorrow!

Hooray! I finished my first

Hooray! I finished my first manga series! No no, it's not Love Hina. I'm still midway through book #12 in Love Hina, reading about a chapter a night or every other night. I'm talking about the Mahou Tsukai Tai (Magic User's Club) manga I got last week. It's only 3 books long, so it's significantly shorter than LH. The first two books contains independent chapters, but book 3 is just one story. It's a fun, quick read...not too challenging in terms of vocabulary (and that's how I like them!). However, I think I'm getting sick. I have this huge headache and a midterm tomorrow. Must go to sleep now.

All that practicing has paid

All that practicing has paid off! With a friend and a few of her friends, we went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant near Rockerfeller Center. As expected, I arrived a little early so I could drop by the bookstore there and picked up two volumes of Azumanga Daioh. After dinner, they decided to go to the rink in the Center. It costs a total of $17 bucks to get in and rent skates (very expensive!). But yours truly was able to skate for all the onlookers there! They all cheered for me! Yeah right, I'm just glad I didn't fall so they couldn't laugh at me. =)

As you can see, the

As you can see, the theme has changed again here because I'm going to need Su's theme for Hina* in the near future, so I can't have two of the same themes floating around these pages. Hina* also got a change too.

The more I read about anime, the more I get sucked in. It's terrible. So last night, I finally got the October issues of Newtype and Animage. The magazines came late because they were held hostage by the protesting port workers on the west coast. On top of that, they also had the November issues out too, so I came out of the store with 4 magazines. I'm usually just an Animage reader, but the Oct/Nov/Dec issues of Newtype come with a bonus DVD, so I said why not. I actually like parts of Newtype, especially with graphs of current TV rating of various anime and the lists of what's popular that month. I also managed to scan the pull-out picture in the magazine and made it my wallpaper. Very nice. It's from Sister Princess: RePure.

I'm currently in the process of burning a lot of stuff I have on CDs for backup. I have around 20 CDs worth of information already arranged in folders on my hard drive to be burned. I'm currently on disc #8. I burn at 4x just because anything faster might not work on my other CD drives.

Three midterms tomorrow. There's only

Three midterms tomorrow. There's only a few times when I run my printer like crazy and those times are right before the midterm and finals of classes when I decide to print out the lecture notes that the professor posts on the web. The reason I don't print o....I just hand-swatted a pesky house fly! I hit it while it was in mid-air, it slammed against the wall, and I assume it died...anyway, the reason I don't print out the notes before class is that a lot of the times, the professor doesn't post the notes until a few hours before class. However, I'm already at school and don't really want to print it out in the computer labs. And if history shows anything, I probably won't even look at the notes that much. They're more like a sense of security for me I guess.

Anywho, I'm probably going to go sleep soon. Nothing ruins a day of testing like sleep-deprivation.

I've been thinking on whether I should make another anime site. I want to, but it has to be (techincally) better than Hina* in some way. I mean, switchable themes has already been done, so what else can I do to make it better?

WHAT KIND OF IDIOTS DO

WHAT KIND OF IDIOTS DO THEY HAVE RUNNING THE DATABASE CLASS I'M TAKING? So I'm trying to work my project, which is a better version of this journal. First, they use this database program that isn't widely used in industry, but that's okay. Secondly, I have to install PERL myself to use the database in PERL (and I don't like PERL, PHP is much better). Thirdly, I CAN'T EVEN FRICKIN' ACCESS THE DATABASE FROM A WEB BROWSER! The security on the database requires that you're logged into the system, and won't let you touch the database if you're administering it from the web. Pisser.

That "sniper" that's going around

That "sniper" that's going around shooting people is a sick person.

How annoying! In the past

How annoying! In the past 2 days, my Cornell email account has started receiving craploads of spam! In my 4 years there, I had at most 10-20 pieces of spam because I guarded my email address very very tightly. But for some reason, a spammer got my email address (probably someone's address book got taken over by a virus) and I've received 24 pieces of spam since YESTERDAY! Very annoying.

I spent the last 3

I spent the last 3 hours walking around the city wearing my contacts on the wrong eye. You see, my left eye is pretty good, with a correction of only -.50 (they usually don't prescribe glasses until it gets to be -1.00 or worse, but I got the contacts anyways just to match). My other eye is a horrendous -2.75. I wear my contacts and in the subway, I close my left eye and try to read a sign. I couldn't. So I conclude that I must have lost my contact somewhere on the road. But when I came back, I touched my right eyeball and whaddya know, there was a contact there. Stupid me.

On my 3 hour journey, I saw a bit of this Latin America parade they were having on 5th Ave. in Midtown. What I saw was a bunch of floats with live Mariachi bands and such. I also saw a store owner come running out of his store with a baseball bat chasing this punk kid. He didn't catch him though. Never a dull moment.

See the time? I just

See the time? I just finished Kingdom Hearts, the game. Fun game, lame story. It also has one of the qualities of games that I really don't like. That is, the final boss takes at least an hour to beat without having the possibility of saving. Luckily, I was able to beat it in the first try, but that's from tried and true experiences with these types of games (i.e. always level up as much as possible). I managed to beat the game in ~30 hours. The ending really sucks.

Joyce is here today!

Joyce is here today!

Just finished the Steel Angel

Just finished the Steel Angel Kurumi series a few minutes ago. It's 24 episodes, but each episode is only about 10-15 minutes, half of a regular episode, so that's why I was able to finish it so quickly.

Recommended. The series builds up very well and takes a lot of elements from other series that I like. The ending is only lukewarm though, and could have been a lot better given the natural progression of events. Although it doesn't crack my top 5 (Love Hina, Magic User's Club, Hand Maid May, Strawberry Eggs, and maybe Kenshin), it's was very enjoyable to watch. They could have easily made the show have the rating be less than a 17+, and I wish they had. The only reason it's rated 17+ is because of maybe 5-6 scenes where the women (they're actually sorta like robots) are shown topless in an anatomically correct way.

One of the perks about

One of the perks about real-time plane ticket booking is that when there's a special, you can check to see if you got the last ticket at the sale price. Such was the case with me. I booked a flight from San Jose to San Diego for Nov. 2 & 3 (round trip). I'm going back to California Nov. 1st to 5th because they have a holiday for Election Day. Anyhow, American Airlines had this discount, 68 bucks for roundtrip ticket. And after I placed my order, the choice disappeared from the list of available flights! Heh heh. I wonder if I screwed someone else over.

My (very) little DVD collection

My (very) little DVD collection just got 5 DVDs added today. =) Best Buy had a mistake on the price for 4 of the DVDs that I had some interest in. MSRP = $30, Best Buy price: $23.99, price I bought it at: $18.99 (their price mistake). Heh heh. The other one was on my list of DVDs to by for 10/8.

MICKEY: Your email box is full, so I can't respond to your emails!

I find it kinda ironic that I turn to the Japan channel just to find them having programs with people who speak in Chinese (Mandarin, which I speak), and then having the translator translate it to Japanese.

Freakin' A. I knew it

Freakin' A. I knew it was going to happen if I put it on the floor next to my bed, but I decided to take the chance. Usually when I go to sleep, I just throw the book I'm reading and my glasses on the floor next to my bed. I usually make sure that the glasses are close enough to the bed that I wouldn't step on them unless I really try. I had a near-stepping this morning when I woke up, but missed it. Then, when I was walking over to get the remote control, I felt this thing under my feet. Crap. Fortunately, only the frame was bent and it's a pretty flexible frame. Nothing that a pair of pliers couldn't fix.

Hoorah! I finished problem one

Hoorah! I finished problem one on the homework assignment: Implement a client and server which allows for the challenge-response authentication scheme. Took me a whole three hours for this stupid thing, simply because I had forgotten how to make a client/server with Java (really really easy to do). Stupid me.

It turns out that I got a deal on Amazon Japan! I was planning on ordering "Ground Defense Forces: Mao-chan" DVD Box/Lunchbox through CD Japan. Amazon Japan was cheaper, but only like by 5 bucks or so, which is a good tradeoff since CD Japan does a better job of packing the thing (shipping price is the same). But then, yesterday I saw that the pre-order price was discounted 15% on Amazon Japan. Knowing that it was an error, I immediately placed my order (along with 4 CDs to Strawberry Eggs, 2 Drama, 2 Singles and the new Final Fantasy I,II soundtrack). Sure enough, the price for the box set went up to the normal price. I just saved myself $20 bucks, but spent like $200.

You know how it is...a

You know how it is...a professor gives an extension on the homework and the only that comes out of it is that procrastination comes a few days later. Anyway, that's why I've been pretty busy the past week or so...reading...procrastination. I should start responding to emails soon as well as putting up a new version of Hina*.

I canceled my digital TV service, and opted for standard cable (60 channels, but includes all the major cable news channels, so I'm okay). However, in it's place, I got the premium International channel, TV Japan. No, there's no anime on it, but has pure Japanese programming. It might be boring, but I'm not really interested in the content. It's nice to have some try and understand what they're saying. It's kinda sad that I can't even understand the Japanese equivalent of "Sesame Street" in it's entirety.