vism.net

I woke up at 1 pm today. I had a ton of things to do for school so I set off to my friend, Lee’s house to get started. We spent half the day working on our group project for our Software Engineering class. I bought a ton of chicken mcnuggets to eat (dollar tuesdays woo!). We also have a final tomorrow, so we set up our cheat sheet for that. We are allowed a couple pages of notes to use, so we really didn’t actually study, just made sure we have the stuff we’ll need. After that we got together with my other school friend, Long. He finished up a little bit more, then we played a couple games of DotA. By the time we finished it was 1 am. I went home and finished up the project for another class. Now I’m going to sleep.

Spent all day studying for tomorrow, er today’s final. But we got most of the bases covered and decided to head out and enjoy a movie. Caught The Brothers Grimm. It was okay, not bad. Not as good as the surprisingly great 40 Year Old Virgin. Why was Europe so filthy back in the 18th century? The best part of The Brothers Grimm was Monica Bellucci. Although, it had a few good scenes in other places as well.

I thought the EBgames bundles were crazy, but check this out:

http://www.gamestop.com/product.asp?cookie%5Ftest=1&product%5Fid=B020253D

http://www.movies.co.jp/sayuri/

Japanese trailer for an American made film based on an American written novel about the life of a Japanese geisha with mostly Chinese cast speaking English. I have never read the book, but I hear it’s good. Spielberg wanted to make this film awhile back, but now Rob Marshall (Chicago) is at the reigns. The lead actresses are Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh. Although they are decent actors, they are probably the least Japanese looking ones you could find. But I suppose most Americans don’t know the difference, and they just need lead actors that people will recognize. Another thing is the majority of the film is shot in Los Angeles. What’s funny is, if you ever been to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, you will recognize their Japanese garden in the movie.

With this cast and crew, I know the Japanese essence will be lost somewhere. After all, it’s a story seen through the eyes of Westerners and retold for a Western audience. I am curious how Zhang Ziyi’s acting in English will be. She’s been in a couple American films and has had a total of 4 lines.

My DSL Internet access at home had been down since 1 p.m. yesterday. I finally am able to get back on right now. I was going through withdrawl without my net :(. I don’t know what the deal was, but I guess the whole area’s DSL was out, because my friend couldn’t get on either. I called this morning after waiting the whole day yesterday to find out the deal. First thing I told the customer representative was “I think there is some kind of DSL outage because my friend’s is out too, when will the issue be resolved?” The rep continued through the routine of asking all the information regarding my setup and modem, and proceeded in giving me pointless tasks as changing DNS servers, cycling the power, rebooting, etc. This went on for almost 30 minutes. Mostly because they have to guide me to every icon and click. Even after I said “you want me to go my tcp/ip settings right?” The rep still continued reading the script and said stuff like “click on the Start button, then click on Control Panel, then click on Network Settings… ” etc. In the end, the rep told me “Your loss of connectivity is due to a recent outage in your area.” And I’m thinking to myself, “well no crap, that’s the first thing I told you.”

But for whatever reason, my downloads are now 30 kbytes/sec faster. I used to get 230 kb/s now it’s 260 kb/s. Hey I’m not complaining, now I have 2 Mbit connection. (1 byte = 8 bits for those that aren’t tech savvy)

Edit:
Funny story, my friend Tac’s DSL also went down when mine did as we live a few blocks away. When I called him to let him know my DSL came back on, his power just went out. Good times.

Today was the first final exam. I made very stupid mistakes on it, which I realized after turning it in. It’ll cost me big and I’m so angry at myself for it. The rest of my finals are next week. I have a ton of work to finish before then, and then study for those exams. I have 3 others to take, I’m not too worried about my math, but the other two cover a lot of material. Hopefully, I pass everything. It’s so sad, that I no longer hope for a ‘A’ or ‘B’, I just hope to pass. Oh well, I just want to finish school…

It appears EBgames.com is taking preorders for the next generation video game console from Microsoft, the Xbox360. It also appears they are really sticking it to those die hard gamers that want it immediately. Only preorder options available are two bundles: a $700 “Ultimate Bundle” that comes with four games and a bunch of accessories and the $600 “Core Bundle” with the same games but fewer accessories. EBgames isn’t giving you any other option to preorder it. It’s a new era in gaming and it’s expensive.

After migrating my blog to Wordpress about a month ago, I did really little with the way it looks. I had a whole day free today, so I took a crack at it. Of course, I’m way too lazy to do everything from scratch, so rather I scour the net to find inspiration. Since Wordpress supports themes, I thought I ‘d start there. I came upon this one called Gespaa by Phu Ly. I made the title banner a little shorter and replaced the small print with “vism”. All other modifications are mostly for content moving/adding stuff to the top navigation bar and sidebar. I learned some CSS from my first blog so it was pretty easy. Editing this stuff in Wordpress was so much easier than it was in Movable Type.

Next was to get some Wordpress plug-ins to suit my needs:
RunPHP by James Van Lommel so I can process PHP code that I write into posts.
Latest Posts by Fauzi Mohd Darus to simply display the latests posts on the side panel.
Addictions by Joey Brooks for the stuff you see on the side for the leisurely things I have done recently.

I actually wanted something better for the Addictions thing. I saw a snazzy one at http://jasonsantamaria.com/. If you look at his Current Leisure section, it has a really nice layout and keeps track of everything over the months and archives it. I really wanted something like that but couldn’t find anything like it for Wordpress. I’m guessing it was all custom work with Movable Type as it supports multiple blogs. If anyone knows of any let me know please.

Was really bored today, so was looking around for something to keep me entertained. I strolled around and found this flash game set in the Starcraft world. Well, I used to play Starcraft all the time, so I gave it a shot. It’s pretty fun, and a little difficult. If you ever played the Warcraft III custom game, Tower Defense, then it’s the same idea. Give it a shot.

http://www.flashplayer.com/games/starcraftfa3.html

Gunslinger Girl exists in a world much like our modern day, except they have technology that can turn a little girl into a super cyborg assassin. Very young girls are “saved” from terminal illness or near fatality to be enrolled into a “institute” where they are trained to be assassins. But first they are fitted with mechanized bodies and brain conditioned to do as they are told. Their brainwashing gives them certain restraint on their decisions and also an unconditional attachment to their supervisor. Every girl has a supervisor assigned to them. Each supervisor treats their girl differently. Regardless the girls long to be with their supervisor, even if they are poorly treated, due to their conditioning.

Having first heard of this series and seeing some images, I thought it was going to be an action packed series. However, it is mostly an emotional drama. You find out about the girls’ pasts, what they have to deal with now, and how they carry on. Having watched the entire series, there doesn’t exist one episode where you don’t feel sad. That is not to say there isn’t any action, there is quite a bit.

The series is well done in style. The story works well in having you really care for the characters and not being totally unbelievable. My major gripe with the series is that it ends too quickly. The series contains 13 episodes, and I feel this is one that should have gone to 24 episodes. You would think the first 5 or 6 episodes would be enough to introduce all the characters, but even by the 9th episode you are still meeting new characters. By the time the series pulls you into this world and presents all the characters to you, it’s already over. It’s like you see the character and the problems they have, and wonder what’s going to happen to them later, and never get the answer. My feelings are just like how I felt watching the TV series ‘Firefly’. I loved that show, but as many of you know it was canceled. Watching the last episode, of course you feel unresolved. That’s how it is with Gunslinger Girl, it just felt incomplete. It lacked a bigger overall story arc and closure to some of the characters. It also had more characters than it had time to dedicate to.

If you can’t tell, I really enjoyed the series, that’s why I wanted so much more out of it. I really recommend it, just keep in mind that it ends too soon.

Buy it on DVD