Lunar Scribbles v2

It Only Happens Once Every Few Years

So, just to let you know, I've logged more than 30 hours in the past two days on X-2. Probably more than that because I did die quite a few times. I believe my characters are pretty strong right now (currently level 50, in FFX, I beat the game at level 42). However, due to my rather slowness in reading, I always seem to have a tough time with the bosses because I never have enough time to find the right potion or cure. Somewhat annoying, but it just makes me want to learn Japanese that much more.

The game was pretty slow up until the 50% story mark. Then things made sense and the story finally became deep and profound. Of course, your typical Square CG work and music added to the effect during the cutscene when you finally tie things together. Lucky for me I had my futon pulled up against the TV, so it was a "wrap blanket around myself, and absorb the story" type situation. I had a lump in my throat watching it. Man, like I said before, things are good only if they can reach you emotionally.

And yes, I'm up so late because I had to catch up on some homework due at 9am and 2pm today.

Half My Collection is Gone!

My sister had visited me for spring break and returned home today. Along with her went most of my anime DVDs, my Love Hina mangas, and an assortment of other anime/manga items. Rather than having to pay for shipping, I just had her stuff it in a suitcase. Boo hoo. But along the way, I did some clean up in the apartment, especially in my extra room where I keep a lot of junk, including empty boxes which I save because I'll be needed them to ship stuff back home soon. Can you guess what my favorite online retailer is?

I have temporarily moved my futon mattress to the floor next to the PS2. I have 13 hours logged into FFX-2, mostly from doing the sidequests, so not much in terms of plot. Currently, it's not scoring very high on my list of Final Fantasy games. As it is now, my favorite is still FFX, followed by FF7, then by FF9, and FFX-2 next, and finally FF8.

Mucho Gil!

(Note: Anything I say about FFX-2 will be spoiler free)

I found out a secret all by myself in FFX-2! (yes, I'm proud of myself for understanding the clues). So the deal is that you're supposed to pay this guy 10,000 gil for a hint that you can "re-sell." You only get three tries to find out who wants to buy it, but you get clues First of all, I had to sell most of my equipment to raise the capital. The first time I tried, I found the guy and he gave me 40,000 in return. For some reason, I didn't save that game at that point. So I re-played it and did it again...didn't find the person, so I reset. After 1-2 more resets, I found the person again (they're random each time). However, this time, the person only gave me 25,000. Knowing that I've gotten 40,000, I wasn't content with that. Finally, after a few more resets, I got the clue along the lines of "The person who wants it will make you think "no way!" Guess who it was? The same person who sold me the secret. And as a bonus, I got 100,000 gil. I think I'm set for the rest of the game. :)

That Was Embarassing

I just checked my links on Negima page and it turns out that one of my links had a little error. Rather than just a "http://www.blahblahblah.com" it was "http://http://www.blahblahblah.com" If you use Mozilla or Netscape 6-7, it'll redirect you to a porn site. Fortunately, it'll just show up as an error on IE. Whew. Still, rather embarrassing.

Currently 4 hours into FFX-2. Very very nice game, although the story now is pretty simple. Game seems harder than usual, but that's probably because I can't read as fast as English and always stumble in trying to pick out items and potions.

Bad Luck...

So here's what happened today. I went to go pick up my modchip from the postoffice. It's nice to see that they labeled the item as "computer parts" as their customs declaration rather than something more incriminating. I head over to Radio Shack to get some soldering stuff.

I come back and that's when luck starts to go downwards. So I got my package from Amazon Japan today with a bunch of manga and the FFX Theme song single. The single, much to my dismay, was not a first-edition anymore. Then, I find that they ripped the OBI on my Iro-Hina #8 completely. Sigh.

So with nothing else to mop about, I tried to install my modchip. First time, I soldered and put it back together. Plug it in, and this hideous loud whining noise sounds. I open it again and resolder. Second time, the drive light won't light up. I open it up again and check. Turns out I forgot to reconnect the drive. And then while I'm doing that, the joints of some wires broke. Damn. To cut the story short, here's the final result of my first attempt at modding my PS2.

Waiting, Waiting, Waiting

I have on my desk, Final Fantasy X-2 and the Ai yori Aoshi PS2 game from Japan. However, I have no machine to play it on yet. The USPS dropped off a card in my absence saying that they're holding the package that contains my mod chip. And so, at 8:02am tomorrow, I will be there to claim the key to my demise for the next few months. I then will have to head to Radio Shack to get soldering stuff, and then probably spend the rest of the day soldering. Hopefully my PS2 will survive the transplant.

Cornell Wins ECAC Hockey!

For most of tonight, I've been listening to the webcast of the ECAC college hockey finals between Alma Mater Cornell and Harvard. What a ride it was. Cornell scores quickly in the first period, making it 1-0. No score in the second, and then in the third, Harvard scores one. Then another with 4 minutes remaining. I was getting sick...but then with 30 seconds left, Cornell scores, tying the game. A few minutes (I believe 2 minutes) into OT, Cornell wins it!

The game is being televised now (time delay)...will re-live the experience. :)

3 Hours Later and $40 Richer

Here's my day on the return flight back to New York.

I leave at the schedule time of 12 noon from San Jose. Because it was just a short trip, I only brought my backpack. The line for security was long, but wasn't too bad. Probably took me about 20 minutes to get through in line.

So I sit on the plane. Ho hum. We first get an announcement about 40 minutes away that we're running behind because of tailwind issues. No problem. And then we fly and fly and fly. It turns out that the pilot had been circling the airport because of really thick fog. Or so he said. I have to admit that the thought of terrorism did cross my mind, and the pilot was only trying to keep us calm.

So, he said that it would only be 30 minutes of circling, but no. After the specified time, he announced that he was running low on gas, so he was going to fly to Pittsburg, PA to get a filler-up. So we take the 45 minute flight to Pittsburg (btw, that's one of my favorite airports because I have a lot of history there. When I was at Cornell, I would always have a layover there). We spend about 45 minutes on the ground at Pittsburg, and come back to NYC. So I finally land, about 3 hours behind the schedule arrival time.

But my saga doesn't end there. I come out of the airport, it's already 11:45pm, and I'm thinking...Taxi = $45, Subway = $1.75. Being the cheapass that I am (I only splurge on anime/manga/japanese stuff), I decided to wait for the shuttle bus to the subway station. I wait. And wait. Until about 12:50, when it finally came. I was going to wait until 1am before using the Taxi, and thus I was saved. I took the subway, which during late nights run local, so it was a rather long hour ride. But finally got home about 45 minutes ago.

And I open up my mailbox to find someone had forged my Jupiterstar email address as the "reply-to" email for their spam. Fruckers.

CLAMP Day

I'm going back to school tomorrow so I rather than having to lug my DVDs around, I decided to watch the stuff that came this week right now. I currently sitting through the last episode of Chobits, and before, I had finished the 15th DVD of Cardcaptor Sakura. I still think that I made the right decision in going with Ai yori Aoshi rather than Chobits for my R2 collection. Chobits is funny and cute, but there really isn't anything in there that affects me emotionally.

So we're at war. I really don't have an opinion on it now simply because I don't want to think about it. I do believe that something had to be done about Saddam, but whether going into a war (is it a war when it's so one-sided?) was the right idea. But that's as much as I'm going to say about that.

Copy protection on CDs is such a joke. My Kumi Koda CD yesterday had copy protection on it. It didn't work on my laptop CD player, but my 5 year old Plextor CD drive had absolutely no problems with reading it and ripped it at 8x-16x too. Given that professional pirates aren't going to have el-cheapo hardware, copy protection isn't doing crap.

Scratched CD

As I was looking around my desk here at home, I saw that there was a CD perfectly placed underneath my router that's sitting on my desk. It turned out to be my Cowboy Bebop OST that came with the box set. Upon closer inspection, I saw that it had SCRATCHES on the surface. This is what I believed happened. In January, before I left for school, I encoded the CD on the computer here at home. I must have left the CD in the drive, because then, my cousins and my little brother who use the computer a lot probably saw the CD, took it out and knowing them, decided to just put it on the table. It got pushed around a bit until it went under the router and sat there waiting to be discovered. I have to admit that I'm a little annoyed because that'll make it my first anime CD (out of ~130) that's seen a scratch. But on the other hand, it was a free CD that I didn't pay for and really don't care much for anyway. Had it been a Love Hina or Ai yori Aoshi, heads would be flying.

Besides that though, I got Kumi Koda's new CD. She's the singer for the new Final Fantasy X-2 theme songs, and her CD features both songs along with some limited edition goodies such an as orchestral version of one of the songs as well as a FFX-2 bookmark. I also picked up Final Fantasy International version today too from User's Side. The international version is the japanese version of the game, however, it uses the english voices (which I think are pretty good) as well as an extra bonus DVD movie with interviews, music videos, and such. I was going to re-purchase FFX when it go to the "Greatest Hits" price since my original one got scratched up, but since I have the international version, I guess I won't need to do that anymore.

As of tomorrow (later today), I will end my boycott on the news. Given that I already know we're attacking, the media will be focused more on us than the stupidity of a few European nations. Plus, it might be good to know about travel conditions, especially in the airports of New York.

Things are Sparse in the Journal

As the title says, nothing's been going on here. Spring break, I'm at home. I spend a lot of my time working and doing unit tests for one of my class projects. It's a redesign of the computer desktop that I've decided to call the "Aoi Desktop." Of course, when I'm presenting, I'm going to say that "aoi" means "blue" in Japanese and since the current prototype has a blue accent, the name fits it accordingly. But you know better. :)

640 Megs of RAM, BABY!

Notebook Naru got a nice little upgrade today. Being that I'm back in California, one of the first places that I hit was Fry's to get the chip. In NYC, I might have spent 150 bucks for this 512 stick (notebook comes with 128 built-in), but at good ol' Fry's, I got it for 100. Not bad, plus Naru's running a lot faster given that I'm doing heavy duty Java programming for my projects.

One Day Away

Here I am, just one day from freedom. I'm going to leave tomorrow night, going back to California for spring break. However, there is one thing that's currently, and that is a 10-20 page paper due for Web Info Mgmt class. As it is now, I've procrastinated and am only on the second page. But all is not lost! I have an outline that I had to do for the previous milestone, so all I need to do now is stuff the paper like a turkey on Thanksgiving. Procrastination...

Cold

I got a little arrogant on Monday when it was 50 degrees outside. Thinking that it was warm weather, I went out wearing only only a sweatshirt. Sure enough, I was outside a bit too long and the temperature dropped, so now I have a cold. My nose is going to fall off. But what's worse than having a dried up nose from all those tissues is the mental aspect. Having a cold really clogs up your brain processes, and so for most of the week, I really haven't been on the up and up with my school work. Whatever. Spring break is next week!

Negima this week was rather silly. It really was a lousy excuse to draw so many girls in the bath, some with towels on, some without. Not really necessary.

Watched Eva Episode 1

Such nostalgia. I finally got this month's Newtype and Animage magazines. In this month's issue, they include a bonus DVD that contains the first episode of Eva for their up and coming re-release of the series in Japan. For the first half of the episode, they have a split screen comparison of the old version and the new version. From the looks of it, the new version has better colors (more saturation) as well as less jitter in the animation. It should also have 5.1 surround sound, but I don't have that type of audio setup. In any case, I already pre-ordered the re-release DVD box a few weeks ago when it first got posted on Amazon Japan. Just gotta wait until June now.

I also got my package today and watched the first two episodes of Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto (What's Important to a Magician). I have to say that I really like it. Character design is good, music is good (got OST with same shipment), story is good (I already read the first volume of the manga). All in all, a very good pick. Having watched so much anime, I think I've developed an intuition and can pretty much pick out anime that I would like by just looking at character design, reading magazine articles and such without actually watching a single episode. I'm still baffled by supposed long-time anime fans who still have to watch EVERYTHING that comes out with the excuse that they don't know if they'll like it unless they watch it. You would think that after a while, you'd be good enough to spot "good" anime and "bad" anime, or at the very least, what you would like or dislike just by reading about it.

Must Endure...

Usually at about this time, my body decides that it wants to go into sleep mode, so I'm feeling extremely fatigued. My arms don't want to move, my head is a bit cloudy, BUT I have to get through this. I really can't deal with odd sleeping hours. If I go to sleep now, I'll wake up at midnight and not be able to go to sleep again until 6am. Gotta endure.

I was supposed to get my package from CD Japan with the first DVD and box of Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto, the soundtrack, Yoko Ishida's album, and Nanaka 6/17 vocal collection today. While I was waiting, I finished watching Mao-chan. Mao-chan has no plot what-so-ever, even at the very end. However, I still enjoyed it simply because it's a nice little cute show.

Well, I spent most of yesterday working on the new layout for the main Jupiterstar page as well as Hinastar (used from old 'scribbles layout). I made a minor adjustment to the main page this morning so that the layout stretches to the width of the browser rather than being locked into a particular size. I like how it looks now. Very functional.

I have put myself on news boycott yet again until March 17th. Let me know if we're at war.

Ah the Memories

Having read on Slashdot about the people bringing the Helm's Deep battle to Doom got me all nostalgic and I decided to download that game. I've been playing it for the past hour, not surprisingly, I remember most of the secrets in the game. I'm currently on the 7th or so level of the first episode of Final Doom. Will continue tomorrow...

Anyone up for some deathmatch? :)

Princeton (Still) Sucks

Finally got a chance to get out of the state tonight and went to Princeton, NJ to watch the Cornell-Princeton game. Needless to say, with the Cornell Big Red in first place in league and ranked second in the nation, we had a victory over the measly Princeton Tiggers who are dead last in league. It was a pretty good game in that the teams were pretty equal. The only thing pathetic for those rich boys from New Jersey is that half the rink was filled with Cornell fans like me. But in any case, it was still refreshing to go to a hockey game again and enjoy the atomsphere I experienced in undergrad.

As for the city, it's not much. I've always been told that it's a rich, upscale place. However, in walking around the place, it seemed no different that Ithaca (home of Cornell). Overrated school and town.

Got my package from Amazon Japan today with Ai yori Aoshi vol. 8 among other things. I liked the series pretty much until the end, where I felt they kinda had to finish it abruptly. It's okay in that it concludes, but since I'm biased in having read the manga, I think it could have been done better. Next will be some Saikano, Piano (more Ayako Kawasumi!) and of course, Mao-chan.

And while I was waiting for my package from DHL this morning, I took the time to rearrange my little collection to reflect current interests. Notably, Love Hina manga has been moved to the bottom shelf, and it's previous location is replaced by a girl named "Aoi."