dracil

If Brazilians are "the friendliest people in the world" as they so often like to claim on Orkut, why are they so consistently unfriendly to non-Portuguese speakers? (Note: standard exceptions disclaimer applies).

I wonder what my roommate does all day... He didn't come back last night (although I did hear him come in and disappear shortly after), and I know he was here in the morning. But hasn't returned again since. Meanwhile, living room has become *extremely* cluttered with his stuff, I assume from his old place.
Book of the Moment: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Currently feeling blah

dracil

http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/sharing/

Finally, a database to show that file sharing does actually help sales. Go contribute!

However, there are some ways this database can be improved.

1) They really need a database to keep track of things you chose *not* to buy after you downloaded, which you would have bought, had you not downloaded it. Yes, that last part is important.
2) They need another database to keep track of those of us who deliberately have chosen *not* to buy stuff (aka a boycott), *because* of the various industries persecuting file sharers.
Currently feeling impressed

dracil

If someone was supposed to do something with you, and doesn't do it for several months, even with half a dozen reminders, but yet still has time to do stuff with other people, what does that mean?
Currently feeling annoyed

dracil

Hmm, seems my roommate's a bit of a neat freak. Or maybe not, but he did spend the day cleaning up the kitchen... In response, I scrubbed the bathroom walls again.

Then went to Latimer to watch Full Metal Panic Fumoffu with Karen and her friends. There were even snacks. Only bad thing was the last episode had terrible video/audio sync. But it was great otherwise. Big screen! Look forward to doing it again. Need a reverse stereo function too.
Currently feeling tired

dracil

Snoring, and the sound of saliva sloshing around in his mouth, whee....
Currently feeling blah

dracil

Blah, Tabulas keeps going down. This is starting to get annoying. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR SERVERS ROY?!

Oh, took this Virgin test. No, not a virginity test. It's a test for you to determine which 21 people amongst 21 pairs are virigins. I only got 57%, both times. First time I did better on the guys, second time better on the girls. Which puts me at like 45 percentile (below average!)

Sam Ou got 67% then 42%, so his average is lower than mine!

Karen did it once for 61%.
Currently feeling annoyed

dracil

Karen came by today to copy a lot of the music and music videos I have onto her computer, and we also ended up watching some stuff, including the most touching Futurama episode I've seen, and Blue Gate Crossing (again!!!). Got free Chilli Cheese Fries from IB Hoagies courtesy of her for lunch too (she refused payment...). But she left to have dinner with Anderson.

Had another big argument with Jenny again.

Looks like a *very* busy day tomorrow.
Currently feeling good

dracil

WTH, I wrote "Karen's Birthday" for yesterday's entry title... must not have been thinking clearly.

So lunch at Great China was only with Rosie and Diana. But their lunch special is good, since you get quite a bit of stuff. Soup, Fried Rice, and your dish, which comes with a spring roll and I think salad was there too.

Then I wandered around Games of Berkeley for 2 hours before going to the movie theater to find Rebecca on time, yay! We watched I, Robot. Big theater. 8 total people... that's a first for me.

Then wandered around some stores again till 7PM, and went to Beckett's Irish Pub to have the going away party. Fish and Chips was good!
Currently feeling tired

dracil

Some people have complained to me that I never seem to have any 8-gua (aka "gossip" for those who don't know what it means). That is true... so why don't you people create some for me. :D Don't wanna sacrifice yourself and become my victim? Then don't complain.
Currently feeling mischievous

dracil

Whee, here's something someone said on Orkut in response to some stuff about tattoos.

"First, to be entirely clear, I said that things which are not motivated by a desire to glorify God are sin.

Second, I stand by my statement: if someone does something that is not motivated by a desire to glorify God, it is sin. "Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." All our actions are to be done with the goal of glorifying God. Whatever we do that is not to glorify God is sin."

And this is my response to him:

This reminds me of a lecture given by Soseki about Japanese nationalism back in 1914. "But what a horror if we had to take that into account and eat for the nation, wash our faces for the nation, go to the toilet for the nation! There is nothing wrong with encouraging nationalism, but to pretend that you are doing all of these impossible things for the nation is simply a lie." Replace nation/nationalism with God/Christianity, and you have my response to what you wrote.

Please be honest. When you go to the bathroom, are you really thinking in your head that you are currently defecating for the glory of God?

In other news, more and more people have followed my lead in responding with non-English and non-Portuguese languages to the people who still speak in Portuguese in English communities. :D

In yet other news, the Brazilian population on Orkut has reversed trend and is actually getting smaller. Speculation is that this is due to the hoax going around that people who choose Brazil as their nationality on Orkut get slower surfing speeds. Gee, here's a thought. Original country on Orkut: Brazil. Surf around Orkut. (browser retrieves stuff from the Orkut servers). Slow... switch to some other country. Surf around Orkut. (browser retrieves stuff from the cache). It's faster! THE AMERICANS HATE BRAZILIANS, IT'S A BIG CONSPIRACY! ORKUT SUCKS! Yay, time to spam everyone on my contact list!

*ahem* -_- Bah, ignorant people. And yes, the above is just a caricature.

In unrelated news, studying for GRE = I occasionally notice words in the newspaper, and understand them, which I would otherwise have probably automatically glossed over and understood from context.
Currently feeling okay

dracil

Another anime watching session at Latimer. The thing of interest for me this time was Da Capo. Kinda weird, but there is some coherence to it.
Currently feeling tired

dracil

Dinner at Shen Hua, which means something more like "benevolent flower" instead of "legend" that I'd already thought it meant. Bad romanization. Food was nice, and I ate quite a bit, since I'd only had leftover chips and a cup of noodle for lunch.

Then we went to karaoke. For some reason, I had a lot of trouble getting my voice to the right pitch today for some songs... sang happy birthday to Diana when it passed over to Monday. Oh, and Diana's cousin also joined us for dinner and karaoke. She's around for a week.
Currently feeling content

dracil

This AlphaGrip thing looks cool, but seems gimmicky. Improve typing speeds by 200-500%? That means it better give me a 200-1000 WPM or it is false advertising.

Windows Service Pack 2 has been released. But I'm holding off on upgrading for now. Waiting for other people to find potential problems first, and a potential speed increase is the only real thing that will entice me to upgrade. Sure there's security, but I'm generally not *that* worried about it.

Ninja Gaiden Hurricane Pack 1 has also been released (yeah, slightly late news now) for those who have that game.

Wonder when my other roommate is moving in...
Currently feeling okay

dracil

While on IRC some guys were trying to translate some Chinese text, this led to a discussion about languages I knew, and then computer languages. Focused on assembly languages and MIPS. Was asked if I knew what 00000000000010000101100011000000 meant. I didn't at the moment, then I took out my 61C book and remembered it all in a couple minutes. Whee. Guess I can still recover knowledge relatively quickly as needed. Of course, not as good as actually remembering it without checking a book, but still, it's been 2 years since I've done assembly stuff.

So, as a challenge for those of you who have taken 61C, try to figure out what that string of numbers means. :D

Oh yeah, new KOTOKO single out! :D :D :D
of the Moment: KOTOKO - 覚えてていいよ
Currently feeling alright

dracil

What to write about? Hmm, not sure.

Need to go grocery shopping tomorrow.

Will probably update my blogjournal a little bit. Needs new icons, as well as an update of what I'm watching/playing/whatever now.

Seems like all my roommates through the years prefer the cold, while I prefer warmth. This gets annoying as they open windows and I close them later.

Coldness makes me sleep in...
Currently feeling blah

dracil

As promised, I updated my "Currently" list. Side effect is that it may help me with search engines. Unfortunately, couldn't add new usericons. Apparently the upload has been disabled since April. >_<
Currently feeling annoyed

dracil

Hmm, fun stuff. First is Audioscrobbler. It maintains a list of the songs you've been playing, which is then used to match other users so you can find people with similar music interests and what they listen to. Of course, for this to work properly, proper tags are a must. Which can be a lot of work. Click here to see my profile. Yeah, you'll see it's currently predominantly Porno Graffitti and KOTOKO. Speaking of which, two new Porno Graffitti albums have been released not too long ago! They're best albums, which means it's mainly old tracks, but popular ones, and they contain a couple unreleased songs. They're also doing real well on the Oricon charts. Taking the top 2 spots on the Weekly Album sales. KOTOKO is actually doing quite well too. Currently #12 for the Daily Singles.

Another thing I've been using recently is the Whatpulse program. It basically just keeps tracks of your key presses and mouse clicks. Useless data but fun to look at anyway. Here are my stats:


I forsee new antipixel buttons for these two services soon.

Might wanna make use of search and see just how much info can found out about you. Interestingly, I found that there's another another person with the same first and last name as me in Berkeley, albeit with a middle name and at a different address and phone number. But still.... my name's not that unique anymore.

In other news, my roommate cleaned the bathroom with chemicals. Much more effective than the simple brute force I've been using.
Currently feeling entertained

dracil

Worrying about whether or not I can successfully make it to Thomas's house for the farewell party. Once-an-hour buses = crap. Especially when Berkeley buses are not particularly good at following schedules... -_-
Currently feeling blah

dracil

ARGH, after an entire night's of messing around with PHP trying to get a "Currently playing" image signature I may have to give up for now. First thing I had to do was realize that OCF's PHP/GD library doesn't support PNG because of the way they configured things, which is a bummer. So I had to make to do with much less efficient JPEGs. However, now I've hit another snag. Unicode. Currently, my songs get displayed as garbage characters. I need to figure out how to get PHP/GD Library to display the characters properly as Japanese/Chinese. This one looks like it may be quite a pain...
Currently feeling frustrated

dracil

Curse the problems I'm having with unicode (or the lack thereof). >_<

After several more hours trying to solve it today, I still couldn't come up with a working solution.

But later, went to the Farewell party for Karen, Thomas, and Jenn. Of course, I didn't talk to Jenn at all. Although I didn't talk much to Thomas either. Original plan was taking the once-an-hour bus. But then there was the possibility that Anderson's roommate could pick me up. This was then replaced by Shong, who got another friend Anthony to pick me up instead 'cause I think he needed to go pick up someone else. Nice to meet someone who also had had issues with Jenn, which we realized from our conversation during the drive.

Oh yeah, I made the sausage+pineapple+toothpick suggestion gave me. It was actually finished by the end (minus some pineapples that fell off)! :D And I still have enough ingredients to make it again. ^_^

I ate too much there. Gave back James his San Juan which I accidentally took during game night. We played a game of Grass which we found at Thomas's place. Very similar to Milles Bornes, but not that fun I think. Way too few Market Open cards, leading to me not really doing anything during the whole game. Although I still won because of a misreading of the rules. Then played some Guillotine with Gabby, Ryan, and David, James, and Karen. Lost them all. Eventually someone set up the XBox and played a lot of Fuzion Frenzy (definitely a nice party game). I played a bit of Blood Wake (iffy controls) later and then people wanted to play Halo. Other people were playing fighting games and later a tennis game on a Dreamcast.

Spent the rest of the time listening/playing songs/music videos that I'd given Karen on Karen's laptop.
Currently feeling exhausted

dracil

I gave up and decided to stop trying to reinvent the wheel, and started looking into other forum signatures people have made. None of them worked. Until I came across Scrobbler Sig. Actually, it also didn't work. However, there were two important things about this script. First, it was an actual script that I needed/could run on my own server. Secondly, I noticed the garbage characters it produced for my songs was of a different nature. They were all rectangles. I decided to try one last time, and this time, it worked! And all I had to do was replace the font! Granted, the font I'm using is almost 23MB in size... then I messed with the script to add in all the other things I wanted. So I made two differerent versions actually, depending on how each forum handled their images. Since I hadn't received any response from the OCF staff about adding PNG support to their servers, I looked around for another host that did. Eventually settled on http://www.100webspace.com (only 1GB bandwidth per month though) then I tweaked the scripts again to re-enable PNG support.

So here's the final result! First is the transparent version.



The next one I actually used the unused part of my Whatpulse image signature so that it would blend in. And here they are together.




Other than that, I didn't wake up in time to watch Fahrenheit 9/11 with Karen, Matthew, and probably Rock(?).

My aunt also called me at night and we discussed about driving schools here and visiting each other. Currently, there's no real good way for us to visit each other.
Currently feeling happy

dracil

Aww, Karen has to reformat her computer. That means she lost all the stuff I gave her. I still think such a drastic measure was not necessary...

Didn't do much else today...
Currently feeling blah

dracil

Oh where'd the time go...

Went to bed early last night and got up early to help Karen move her books with Gabby and Ryan so that she could ship and sell them. Ran around the south edge of the campus in a car afterwards on account of that. Heavy heavy boxes... 2 packages of 69 pounds each, and one was over, but we had to remove quite a bit of stuff since the max shipping limit is 70. Then we had lunch at that ramen place. Food was good. Karen wanted to pay for us for helping, but we made her have us pay for her since she's leaving..

Borrowed complete The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from her and got some CDs back.
Book of the Moment: The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Currently feeling okay

dracil

Went grocery shopping. In less than 2 weeks, I will no longer have a bus pass. That means I have to add $3 to the cost of whatever I buy. >_<
Currently feeling blah

dracil

Ooh, headache.

Karen came by with Thomas, and unexpectedly, Linda too, to watch my anti-Mac propaganda (aka switch parodies). Thomas is buying a new laptop and needed some reasons not to buy a Mac. Showed them Elfen Lied, Ebichu, and a couple of short stuff. Then Thomas and Linda left, so I began transferring my files to Karen again. Leatha, my other roommate, finally came by today with her old roommate to move in some stuff and then left. Watched some Azumanga Daioh with Karen, and then she left to have dinner with Aubrey.
Currently feeling tired

dracil

It's my cousin's birthday today! Happy birthday Varisa!

Let's see now, Karen came by again today to complete the file transfers, this time armed with her laptop cooler and a power cable. Then watched around 5.5 episodes of Azumanga Daioh before she got sleepy and started deleting most of the Spanish songs that David Carlton had transferred over to her.

Then Thomas and his friend arrived, and then we all left to eat at The Blue Nile with the rest of their friends. After which I parted ways with them because I didn't feel like going up to the Big C this late at night.
Currently feeling okay

dracil

http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper - little program that sits in your systray checking gmail every 2 minutes for new emails.

Yay, got a response back from OCF staff saying that they recompiled PHP, so now their GD library is up-to-date and it has PNG support! :D Nice to be able to move back to OCF for my forum signatures.

http://weboggle.shackworks.com/ - 16 or 25 tiles with letters, create as many words as you can in the time limit, but each letter needs to connect to a previous letter used.
Currently feeling okay

dracil

Waking up relatively early on a Sunday morning means that no one's on my contact list. Decided to go to Andronico's and look at the prices there. It's a lot closer and convenient than going to Safeway. However, considering most of their stuff is not on sale, unlike at Safeway, and the fact that even the stuff on sale tend to be a bit more expensive, I don't think I'll be shopping there.

I was supposed to go to sleep earlier today too, but ended up futilely trying to properly tag all my I've Sound songs. The trouble with tagging songs properly is that many database just can't seem to agree with each other how the song should be tagged. And because I'm anal, I also want the exact capitalization and symbols.

Here's an example: "C-LICK", "C-LICK I'VE REMIX STYLE 2002", or "C-Lick" (from what appears to be the official site of one of the I've artists [does the music only], despite the fact that I can clearly see the cover capitalizing all the letters). The problem with I've Sound stuff is that there are a ton of people in the group, who sometimes go do their own stuff, and the same song appears under several different albums/singles. It's near impossible to sort through. http://www.ivesound.jp has almost everything, but not quite, and it also has some mistakes. KuruKuruDB's I've entry contains the main stuff, and has detailed info on composer, arranger, vocalist, etc. for each song, but it tends to conflict with that first site. Then there's the "official" sites such as http://www.product.co.jp/music.asp that also have minor differences. And this other database is pretty comprehensive too, but again, has differing entries from the other sites.

And there's of course, the underlying question. Do I tag the artist with the name of the singer, "I've", or "I've Sound"? And what do I do with the instrumental/karaoke tracks if I decide to go with the singer?

*grumbles*
Currently feeling aggravated

dracil

Cyber girlfriends for the lonely HK guy - talk about a money drain. Seriously, if you wanna spend money like that, much more worth it to spend it on a real girl. Of course, the whole point is that this is for the guys that can't get a girlfriend in the first place... what an evil concept.

Whee, had fun with Toogle. Do a search for "dracil." Look familiar? It should. It's my old desktop wallpaper in colored ascii text!

Yay, I can upload usericons!

Discovered Winny today. Well, I actually heard about the author's arrest in Japan awhile back, but only actually really tried to use the program today. Quite user unfriendly, especially if you don't speak Japanese, as nearly all the documentation out there is in Japanese. But it's great for getting stuff from Japan. Rounded out my I've Sound collection using this.

Audioscrobbler's back up. Sorta. Still no submissions, but the site is no longer down for maintenance.

Oh, and for those of you with Gmail accounts, check for new invitations. Looks like a new round of invites. Mine went up from 4 to 5. I heard some people got even more. Oh, do *not* ask me for Gmail invites unless you know me personally. Your request will be ignored, or perhaps even ridiculed.

In other news, the 8 piece fried chicken at Safeway has gone back down to $5.99. Dunno why they raised the price to $6.99 for like two weeks.
Currently feeling chipper

dracil

Leatha came by for orientation and is staying for the night before going back again.

Had an unexpected call to dinner with Karen, Ryan, Gabby, Lorie, and Kaye. It was at Sushi House somewhere far away. Pretty good food. Heh, Kaye eats a lot of wasabi too! :D I'm still the only person who'll eat wasabi raw though.

Laundry day, whee.

Karen's leaving tomorrrow!
Currently feeling mixed

dracil

Finally watched Kill Bill 2 today with Catherine. 4 months?

Hmm, spoilers!

(Click to read my opinion with potential spoilers)

After that, I went to dinner with Diana, Catherine, Joyce, David, Charlie, and Aaron, even though I'd ate several hours back (2 corndogs). I guess I just wanted to socialize a bit... and I still ate quite a bit. We ate at King Tsin on Solano Avenue! I remembered going there several months back with Jenny for the Solano Avenue Chocolate & Chalk Art Festival. :D That particular restaurant had fried chocolate (M&Ms) wontons that day. The people there are quite nice I think. Oh, I owe Catherine $5.

So Karen had to finish packing, so we didn't end up going out for lunch today, and she decided to treat yesterday's dinner as my birthday dinner so I didn't have to pay her back. Came by to drop off CDs, (I have Leon, Peter, and Matthew's stuff!), and two refrigerator magnets (thanks Karen!). She had to leave immediately after, as her Bayporter shuttle was at 5:30 and her flight at 10PM.

*sigh* So that means I've lost one of my better friends here at Berkeley with whom I was able to act and talk a bit more openly about stuff. Many factors for this, such as us living across from each other in the dorms our first year at Berkeley (which got me back into Christianity, although I've been flaking lately... and made me really anti-Creationist ), and we were both International students, and there was um... certain history that thankfully didn't ruin our friendship (I think the Nietzsche quote about things that don't destroy something makes it stronger applies here?). I think of all the people I know, she's also visited me the most often, despite living farther than most people here, and she also currently has the largest chat log on Trillian at close to 1.4MB. Random note: Need to return Karen's book one day. She should still be on the plane at the moment...

Good luck at MIT Karen! Don't worry, you'll do fine there!
Currently feeling a bit sad

dracil

Decided to go out for Calapalooza and all I got was some lousy poster . I stay home too much anyway in general. Wasn't actually gonna stay long, but I ended up staying till the end at the BST table. I also returned some library books in the meantime.

Lots of victims to sunburn. Diana got sunburned in spite of wearing a hat. Charlie had it worst, and it actually hurts for him. Catherine had sunscreen so was safe. I think I got lucky and don't really feel sunburned. Maybe 'cause I shifted position and faced away from the sun half the time.

On the other hand, I was standing around most of the time, and maybe that + the sun gave me a bit of a headache afterwards. Eventually napped it away.
Currently feeling okay

dracil

Game night at Cory today. Shen came to my place at 5:50, then we picked up his friend Kan-Wei(sp?) at the GBC fountain and found James already there. Eventually Matthew and Thomas showed up too. So we started off with Qwitch (finally won twice! lost several times), Industrial Waste (won), Guillotine (lost), Transamerica (won), Grave Robbers from Outer Space (James won), Bang (I was Sheriff, James was Deputy, and we did a great job taking out the Outlaws [Matthew and Thomas], who killed the Renegade [Shen]. That was also the seating order, counter-clockwise) Lunch Money (Matthew won), Battle Line (lost to Thomas badly), and Farkle (Thomas and I joined late, James won).

Thomas also introduced them to the Petals Around the Rose, which after possibly an hour, and writing stuff down on the board, James and Shen still couldn't solve. :D I've played it before, and Matthew recalled playing it before eventually.

So we began around 6:20 and ended around 12:45. Over 6 hours.

It's also been really hot here the past few days.
Currently feeling tired

dracil

Happy Birthday Aaron!

So yeah, our birthdays are next to each other, so technically mine has passed and it's his birthday now.

No one really made plans, so we kept switching around locations even while in the car. Eventually settled on Macaroni Grill. 14 people showed up for that. Diana, Catherine, Sophia, Connie, Jenny, Aaron, Charlie, David, Alex, and four of Aaron's friends, Nicole, and three others whose names I don't remember. An Amy? Anyway, I had their special steak. Cheese on it was pretty tasty. Asparagus was a bit too tough. The bread before the main meal was good. Ate a lot of it with the olive oil. Then Aaron and I got chocolate cake with whipped cream, compliment of the restaurant, which we shared with everyone else. Had a hard time finishing it still since I ate too much before.

After that, we went to karaoke. Diana and two of Aaron's friends left quickly. Emily showed up briefly and also disappeared. A few more Japanese singers this time, sort of. Alex and Nicole tried to sing some Japanese songs, neither of which I really knew. But I tried to follow their melody and sing the words they couldn't sing. Worked out decently I think. Chibi Maruko-chan with Sophia went quite well too. I sang the Japanese version while she sang the Chinese version of the song. :D

Thanks Catherine, Diana, and Sophia for the Games of Berkeley gift certificate, and thanks David for the Barnes & Nobles gift card! And thanks everyone for coming! (I think I got everyone, if I missed a thank you somewhere, let me know, and sorry! )
Currently feeling happy

dracil

http://gprime.net/video/crazyfold.php - apparently, a lot of people have seen this already, but I haven't! Wish I'd known about this method of folding clothes before.

Going to Safeway the Sunday before school starts is a BAD idea. Not only did I have to wait for the bus for 30 minutes both ways, but there were crowds of people.

Both roommates are back now.
Currently feeling blah

dracil

Helped out with some BST tabling today. Eh, hate the sun.

http://www.theblackforge.net - ever wished you could live your life differently? Well now you can!
Currently feeling blah