sugardeath

I think I just got hit with the biggest wave of apathy ever. Here I am up at 4AM, class in eight hours, and I don’t feel the need to go to sleep anytime soon. Just finished the new Futurama movie (The Beast With a Billion Backs, out Tuesday), and I have to say that it’s pretty good. Definitely some sort of message thing going on there, will have to rewatch to pick up on it all. S’all about love. With a tentacle. Who’s a polygamist. Also the League of Robots.

I’ve been having some troubles with Sovereign (formally Frank(enstein)). I copy over the console only debian live install to a USB drive, boot from it, but I am unable to find an install script. OK, fine, we’ll do it the easy way: copy a gnome version to the USB. “Failed to load kernel: linux.” What a jerk, eh?

It’s definitely my graphics card, as Sovereign displayed low resolutions perfectly on my monitor. Well poop.

Did some math while talking to Jason earlier: At twenty-four hours a week, ten dollars an hour, I should be pulling in four hundred-eighty dollars every two weeks pre-tax. That’s nine hundred-sixty a month pretax. That’s… maybe I can finally start thinking about replacing my ailing computer.

Wordpress is saying “Draft saved at 2:05:05 am” even though the timezone is set to UTC-5 and it displays 4:05 am just fine there. Weird. I wonder what it’ll say on the main page when I finally post.

Caught the last forty minutes of the program on National Geographic about Lakshmi, the girl with eight limbs. Neat stuff. Apparently the other limbs belonged to a partially developed, parasitic twin. And right after that? The Science of Dwarfism. This kind of stuff intrigues me immensely. I am so glad we get NatGeo. I don’t think we did last semester, or maybe fall semester.. I remember there being commercials for stuff that I was sad I couldn’t watch because we didn’t get the channel. The Science channel has also had some cool stuff on it, specifically How It’s Made. The glove making process was especially badass: they had a hand glove inverting machine!

I FINALLY found an mp3 of the american Pokemon theme. Kinda lame quality, though. Now to find the japanese opening. Actually, I just found a better quality one. It’s itunes m4a, though. Conversion time!

Done. Much better.

Played some Audiosurf the other night because Casey’s playing it really made me want to. Good stuff. It’s really neat, I’m rediscovering some of the songs I have in my collection.

Sovereign won’t see my second 120GB for some reason. That’s the one with the backup of all my movies and such. This is bothersome. I’ll have to whip out my ide->usb controller card and see if I can’t read it on AndrAIa. Problem is that the USB cable is on my printer currently and that’s an awful lot of work (not really, I just don’t feel like unhooking it because my printer is under my desk).

POKEMON OHHHH YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND
IN A WORLD WE MUST DEFEND

Perl script worked perfectly once I figured out how the XML libraries were parsing Microsoft’s shittastic XML.

Seriously, what is this?:

<media src="C:\Music\The World Ends With You OST\01 It's So Wonderful.mp3" albumTitle="The World Ends With You OST" albumArtist="Square Enix" trackTitle="It's So Wonderful" trackArtist="Square Enix" duration="99082" />

Shouldn’t it be more like:

<media>
  <src>C:\Music\The World Ends With You OST\01 It's So Wonderful.mp3</src>
  <albumTitle>The World Ends With You OST</albumTitle>
  <albumArtist>Square Enix</albumArtist>
  <trackTitle>It's So Wonderful</trackTitle>
  <trackArtist>Square Enix</trackArtist>
  <duration>99082</duration>
</media>

It’s almost like they’re trying to embed the song in a webpage or something.

Nevermind that the time is soooooo ridiculously wrong. Is it in milliseconds or something? I’m pretty sure m3u uses plain old seconds.

But yeah, the perl script worked perfectly on all my Zune playlists. The only problem is that I now have two music libraries (one in Windows and one in Linux) and changing “C:\Music” to “/home/satoshi/Music” ended up with a couple of missing songs… enough so that I edited the script to “/WINDOWS/Music.” Kinda lame… I really need to consolidate my music libraries, but putting it on one drive or the other… Actually, why do I even have them separate? I remember there being some trouble with colons and that the Zune didn’t read all of my linux directories? But I could be making that second one up, and the colon thing affected a whopping three directories (perl scripts are fun). What I really need is a third harddrive formatted FAT32 dedicated soley to my music. Good thing WinXP allows one to mount drives as directories (though the process is sort of contrived), so there’s no need to change anything in either OS. Huzzah. Now to find another drive :/

Ugh, the sky is lighting up: the first rays of day. Time to hit the hay.

Last edited by Tony on June 23, 2008 at 04:29
Draft Saved at 2:38:33 am.

What could that possibly mean?

I’m debating whether to go to sleep or just pull an all-nighter and go to sleep at a normal time for work on Tuesday. I’ve had a terrible sleep schedule this weekend and this would be a good way to right it out.

Probably going on a trip to the Apple Store today! Not to buy anything, just to look around. Should be fun. Went to Best Buy the other day, those new Apple keyboards are damn nice.

Though I should probably sleep just a bit, my tonsils started hurting more around 1AM or so. They had been fine all weekend too. I highly doubt it will develop into GRAY GOOP COVERING EVERYTHING this time, or even just ew little yellow guys like the first time.

Yeah, sleep it is. I am getting tired.

Casey had a friend over Friday and Saturday. Margie, I believe. Tall, about Casey’s height, I’d say. Totally didn’t expect her to sound and basically act just like Alyssa. Like, personality and everything. It was the weirdest thing. Cool gal (well, she’d have to be if she’s basically Alyssa’s clone).

Things are kinda sad socially. Two breakups last weekend, one this.

Yay Xbox Live! demos. Armored Core 4 is a must purchase, even though we don’t even own the Xbox I had so much fun with AC3 on the PS2, and from watching Casey play the AC4 demo it looks to be even better.

It was light out when I started playing. Went dark. And then it was light again. What am I doing with myself?

…Bioware makes some of the most immersive RPGs. I am just sad that Mass Effect doesn’t have the same D&D feel that KOTOR did. Sure, the elements are still there behind the scenes, but I’d rather have direct control over where my stat points go each level. If I want to up Charisma to help my Intimidate and Charm skills, I should be able to. I was allowed to do this in KOTOR. Some of you may remember my post from last summer where I stated that I lied straight-face to the Jedi Counsel and they believed me. I want to feel like I have the same type of control in Mass Effect. The stuttering and load times, elevators all over the place, and texture pop-in kinda also knock the game. Other than that, though, this game is amazing.

[Translator’s note: Keikaku means plan in Japanese.]

The COM syllabus told me that first round presentations were going to start last Wednesday. I emailed Gehrs and he told me the same thing. Apparently he decided to push it up a day and first round was supposed to start today. But the projector was broken. First round starts a week later than I originally anticipated. I can easily attend class on Wednesday, see what’s expected of my presentation, and then spend the rest of the week conforming. This… this takes a LOT of pressure off of me right now. And here I was thinking I was two presentation days late. Goddamn. I am so glad that we just happened to sit near Shavonne’s (acquaintance from COM) group of friends at dinner tonight.

Hit the jump below for lots of text. (It’s my quick little review of Mario Kart Wii. It’s long. You probably don’t want to read it. Don’t click it. Seriously.)

Mario Kart Whee

I am in serious need of some sleep. Lately I have been listening to the Piano Collections of Final Fantasies 4, 7, and 10 while working on my paper stuff. I also have 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10-2, but I have not played any of those games and thus do not appreciate the music as much. Sleep, however, has come quickly the past couple of nights with the aid of the FFXI and FFXI: Rise of the Zilart soundtracks. The music influences my dreams.

I must also make up serious hours at work. I skipped again today to work on my paper. That’s a total of six hours that need to be made up. I’ll squeeze ‘em in no problem.

Is not what we have right now. Weather.com says that we’re at 69F with 75% humidity. Either give me about twenty percent less humidity with the same temp, or give me about eight degrees cooler with the same humidity. Actually, I’d prefer the latter. The humidity makes the air smell nice. Also, keep up the gusts. I think I might go wander around downtown sometime today, perhaps.

I need to work big time on my COM paper and presentation this weekend. I can start working on my precalc paper after COM on Monday. Precalc is due on Friday, though, so that should be fairly easy to pull off.

I upgraded WordPress again last night. It has neat features here or there. That’s not why I upgraded. I upgraded because I couldn’t use a certain admin theme with the old verison I was using. This new admin theme is great compared to the old one I was using, which was broken (but still tons better than the original WordPress admin theme) when I last upgraded. WordPress now has native support for Globally Recognized Avatars, which is neat. I’m having trouble getting them placed properly in the comments without breaking formatting. I think they’re semi-OK right now, but I’ll get them perfect when I start work on a new theme this summer. If I start on a new theme this summer. I really suck at design and aesthetics. I would like to be well rounded when it comes to HTML+CSS stuffs. I can generally do the code part fine, but the making it look good is where I need to advance. Take this theme, for example, it’s pretty simple and gets the job done, but it doesn’t particularly stand out and make you go “Wow, he knows what he’s doing.” And I don’t even mean over the top themes, just something simple that looks good. Kinda like good ol’ Oliver here.

Man this new admin theme is amazing, I wish you guys could see it. It’s similar to the old one I was using, but less OSX inspired and more streamlined. Plus it incorporates a lot of the layout changes made to the default admin theme which is fairly nice. No longer do I have to scroll down to hit the publish button, it’s on the right. Categories were moved to below the post entry, which kinda sucks because I’ve started using them again.

This definitely feels like one of those Saturdays where I’d be at Paul’s house (just about every other weekend, because on the other weekends he’d be over at my house) playing Uniracers on the SNES or Donkey Kong 64 on the N64 and his Dad would have all the doors and windows open and be cleaning up the house. They did this every (other?) Saturday or so. Sometimes he had us wash and wax his car, too. I never complained, it’s always fun to play with water on a warm day. Mind you, this would be during elementary and junior high school.

Man does the air smell good. There’s also supposed to be incoming thunder storms. We were supposed to get some last night too, but it was just a simple rain. And the night before was supposed to be pretty wet but all of the green and orange on the radar just went north of us, which reminds me of home where storms have literally split up before Shelby Township / Sterling Heights and then joined back up after they passed over us. There would be a little open pocket between all the green if you looked at the radar. It was so damn annoying.

I think I might skip work today and make up the hours next week (which will be no problem, I’ve gotten used to pulling six hours on Fridays) just so I can enjoy the day during the day. I’ll be on AIM for a bit if anyone wants to hit up the outdoors. Anyone, IN CHICAGO! Hahaha Michigan people (laughs)

And by “be on AIM for a bit,” I mean that I’ll be on for the next several hours playing PSO. Paul took my mag to raise it so that I could work on leveling the right character (the mag I’m working towards can only be evolved correctly on certain characters, plus Paul is on more than me anyway), which is at level 60 now! Just twenty more levels until Ultimate. Or I could go to the Chinese ship and play ultimate now, but that would just be a massacre. I fear that at level 80 (the normal level requirement for the Ultimate difficulty) it would still be the same. Too bad most of the good rares which would help me out are in… Ultimate and the later levels of Very Hard. Both of which are tough for me.

Maybe I’ll run some low levels through some quests or something, that was fun the last time I did that.

So I found this while I was sick and it definitely helped my mood quite a bit. It’s just too damn awesome.