dracil

http://www.clean-your-screen-for-free-now.com - doesn't clean it well enough though.
Currently feeling amused

dracil

SSN card here. Bank card here. Fraud form here. Yay.
Currently feeling happy

dracil

They caught the bastard that stole my bag, wallet, etc. Was checking my Calmail account this morning and noticed I had an email from the UCPD saying that a detective at the Palo Alto PD had recovered my card. The person was arrested at Fry's Electronics (and apparently, it wasn't just one person, but this guy had my card). Unfortunately, they haven't managed to recover anything else but my ATM card so far.
Currently feeling okay

dracil

Been watching this. It's quite good I think. Not as many space battles as I'd prefer, but interesting nonetheless.
Currently feeling sleepy

dracil

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146438,00.html - don't ever treat this woman nice
Currently feeling blah

dracil

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/1/prweb202277.htm

It's funny how they try to pretend that they somehow missed the book being of sub-quality the day after the hoax is revealed, almost an entire two months after they accepted it for publishing.
Currently feeling amused

dracil

Oh yes, I guess today was the superbowl. Not that I care. Need to see if people have uploaded a collection of the ads online, since that's the only thing I'd wanna watch out of it.
Currently feeling blah

dracil

For some reason I've never been really good at the chess-type games, despite my generally being good at strategy games. By not good, I mean I can never beat the computer on the easiest level. Maybe I'm just too impatient. But spent two hours trying to figure out the chess problem at Games of Berkeley to no avail.
Currently feeling blah

dracil

Started playing Fate/stay night because of all the wonderful reviews I read about it. It's a visual novel, which means a LOT of text, and no voice acting either, which tests my Japanese knowledge greatly. I found an English translation of the demo here and after playing through that, seems like I can understand the main gist of what's going on rather well. Yeah, there were a couple areas where I misunderstood some things, and I missed some of the humor from not understanding it in detail, but overall, kinda good. Games with voice acting are still probably better for me for learning Japanese though, since I can hear the kanjis, which I cannot always read in Japanese (but still know from my understanding of Chinese). But it allows me to connect the kanji with some words that I hear often but didn't know that was the kanji for.

In any case, I think my biggest problem with Japanese is the grammar, not the vocabulary. Sometimes I can't understand the subject/object of a sentence, which makes a very big difference. e.g. in English, "girl hits boy" is quite different from "girl was hit by boy"

Went out with BST peeps to China Village for Chinese New Year's Eve. Afterwards, Chih, Diana, and I went to Au [something in French meaning chicken/rooster] where they had coffee and we just talked for a while. Tomorrow is hotpot. Yum.
Currently feeling okay

dracil

Interesting the two days are together. Good thing I'm not giving up meat this year, or else I wouldn't be able to eat much at the hotpot today. Mmm, lots and lots of meat with Laura, her boyfriend Chong-Shen (sp?), Sean, Hanlin, Jason, Eric (?), and Ean (sp?) came later. :D Went to Laura's apartment later, where her roommate Poto (sp?) was there too. Played several rounds of Mahjong. I would've lost money on the first game, I would've won money from everyone on the second game, and I would've won money from one person in the third game is basically how it played out.
Currently feeling content

dracil

French criticize music download crackdown - cool, at least one nation has their head on straight
Currently feeling okay

dracil

http://totl.net/VirusScanner/


Human Virus Scanner

The virus that have infected you will be show here along with thier cures, if known.
Viruses you suffer from:

Japan
Big is good. Small is bad. Giant robots would not make a good last line of defence for Earth.

Politics
Stop caring!

Conspiracy Theory
Face it, the elected government is in control. Actually that's quite scary.

Ultima
If you find one tell us.

Macintosh
Use a mouse with more than one button.

Viruses you might suffer from:

Pokemon (60%)
Pikachu! Use your hyper-electric-get-a-life move now!

Linux (80%)
Install the latest version of Microsoft Windows. Learn to love it.

Junkfood (60%)
Eat some real food. Something which you can identify the source of every ingredient, not the point of manufacture.

Religion (60%)
Read "God's Debris" by Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert guy)

Discordia (90%)
Buy a suit. Invest your money. Eat hotdog buns on a friday.

Free BSD (90%)
The GPL isn't that bad really. Adopt a penguin at the zoo.

Brand Names (60%)
Having a well-known name doesn't make it good.

Hippyism (60%)
Free love is passe and potentially dangerous, and patchouli smells like cat piss.


But I *hate* Macs!
Currently feeling amused

dracil

Site is at http://www.stumbleupon.com Nice little tool, and it works quite well. Rate sites as good or bad, and based on other people who rated sites similarly, you are given sites that they voted as good. Finding a lot of stuff I've visted before and liked. Just takes too long to become a full status member though...
Currently feeling okay

dracil

Some results from Stumbleupon

http://windward.nodalpoint.net/doc/media/liikenne.swf
http://web.okaygo.co.uk/apps/letters/flashcom/
Currently feeling amused

dracil

Woke up not in a very happy mood. Had been thinking of going to help BST, but ended up just staying at home on account of the antisocial feeling. Probably a result of the dreary weather.

In other news, I realized I'd completely forgotten about the Kouhaku Utagassen a couple months ago. It's basically a singing competition between male and female singers on New Year's Eve in Japan.
Currently feeling blah

dracil

Yeah, it's finally over (SAD = Singles Awareness Day). Got back a little while ago from a boba run with other single people (BST peeps! Maybe we should rename the club: Berkeley's Single Taiwanese? :D Ok, on occasion, there have been people involved in a relationship, but it's still rare )

Since it's kinda relevant to the day, here's something I found: Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend

But seriously though, I'm actually not really picky, despite what that quiz I took a long time ago said. But there's the fact that I'm probably not as picky because I haven't actually been in a relationship before, so I don't truly know what I really want. People have asked me before if there was someone I liked. Well, maybe. See, I can basically imagine scenarios with any girl, what kind of relationship it would be like, the kind of difficulties that might occur, etc. depending on what I know about the person. Now of course, the thing is, you don't get into a relationship unless both parties are interested. And frankly, I'm not interested in making the moves, based on the string of past failures as well as the reality that I'm currently simply not good bachelor material. So essentially, it's a passive search, not an active one. If I was actively looking into getting a relationship, I'd probably focus a lot more energy on making myself more presentable and all that. Then again, if someone was actually interested in me in my current state, the chance of the relationship being successful would probably be greater, since then they're interested even with the current flaws.

But then again, it could be argued that I'm actually *extremely* picky, and because I haven't found *the one* (whatever that is), I simply don't care enough to initiate the self-improvement phase. Maybe. Then it becomes a race between that and becoming really desperate.

Related tidbit about my life, there's only been one occasion where a girl's actually approached me. I believe it was in 7th grade (or at least sometime in middle school). I think the girl's name was Jessica, and that she was taller than me too. I ignored it, since my social status in school at the time was mainly that of an outsider/outcast/pariah (not in the in-crowd, you know the drill [FYI, my status improved in high school, although I still flittered around the fringes of the various social circles, but I did have what I could call a core group of friends I hung out with a lot, although they were made up of at least two or three different circles]), so I took it as a practical joke meant to make fun of me. I still think it was. But maybe I'm just too cynical. Besides, at the time, I was infatuated with some other girl in school.

And um, yes. I really do spend that much time analyzing my social situations with people.
Currently feeling content

dracil

That was the name of the documentary we watched at BST today. Then there was dinner. Then people went home.

Rain sucks when I have to go out. -_-
Currently feeling blah

dracil

http://www.vhemt.org

Candidates for the Darwin Awards, all of them! Those who choose not to reproduce won't pass their genes on to their offspring. Meanwhile, the rest of us normal people will continue to create a new generation of offspring with breeder genes. Natural Selection at its finest! Oh sure, they think of it as a meme. But one can argue they still have a genetic predisposition towards falling for VHEMT-like ideas. After all, people through the ages have chosen not to reproduce before VHEMT was founded. Recessive genes are hard to wipe out completely, even when they reduce fitness greatly because of carriers. And despite their rhetoric, those who choose not to reproduce viable offspring are genetically inferior by definition. And frankly, I'm a lot more optimistic about our future than they are.
Currently feeling amused

dracil

http://oak.psych.gatech.edu/~epic/

Interesting, but things aren't as ominous as they try to make it sound. The future it envisions, that of people segregating into narrow-minded communities already happens anyway, and happened before the internet too. The impact will also be mitigated by the fact that people still have to interact offline, where "EPIC" cannot hold sway.
Currently feeling okay

dracil

Remember that Tontie game from long ago? There's a new version out.

http://www.eyezmaze.com/

As you all probably know by now (those who care), Naruto's been licensed, but there's a couple groups still subbing it.
Currently feeling okay

dracil

Meh, still no results for grad school, although I believe I should be hearing from them by next month.
Currently feeling blah

dracil

Because of a delay in my uncle's visa, my grandmother isn't coming till next weekend.


Currently feeling okay

dracil

Link

It's very interesting to see the dance between order and chaos. Part of the fun is convincing everyone else in the room to try to create order, which is very hard. It requires communication without the means of a real language. You have to communicate your intentions without actual words, but the things that can be accomplished can be quite amazing. From piling all the letters into one corner, to separating them by color, to even putting them all out in an alphabet. The most impressive is creating actual pictures, a couple examples at the end of this entry.

Of course it's riddled with immature people who feel the need to spell out cuss words, and of course there's always a few antisocial anarchists who'll refuse to cooperate no matter what.

Heh, managed to do this with 9 people. When I went in the room, there was Chinese Korea and Chinese Taipei and someone was already making that thing on the right. I switched some things around and basically hid all the letters within the outline of that image when they tried to mess stuff up, like make "Taiwan sex" or adding a penis to that thing. Then I took this picture just before they cannibalized Taiwan as well. :D

Here's another image that I saw 22 other people make (I helped out a bit at the end).
Some people were taking apart a rendition of the "Scream" painting in another room, but I didn't take a screenshot of that one.
Currently feeling amused

dracil

*looks at list of topics to blog about and picks one from the list*

Fixed my website counter again. Since Roy insists on not fixing the removal of the in " in the template code, I have to actually enter in " in the code to get my counter to work right.

Also, because he was feeling anal about having the navbar at the top stretching all the way across the screen and with no space between the bar and the top of the browser, I removed the margin. I guess it's actually better this way. Gives me 20 more pixels in between to work with.

dracil

I've found Stumbleupon useful in another way. Too tired to think of something to blog about? Just randomly grab a site from my favorites there and write something about it. Even better, if I already wrote a review of the site, I can simply copy and paste that. Yeah, it's extremely lazy of me.

So... let's see, found http://www.thestone.com last night. I actually saw the thing being sold in stores before and thought it was a nice gimmick and the chance of finding someone who bought the matching stone is essentially nil (especially since there's a good chance it will never be sold anyway). How depressing. But seems like you don't really need to buy it anyway and you can just create a virtual one online. So is there really any value to the site? Well besides how much they've worked on the atmosphere, it's basically a puzzle site. If you like obscure puzzles.
Currently feeling okay

dracil

Bah, found aphids on my plant. At first I'd notice these little droplets of liquid on the leaves. Then I found these white things that I thought was just dust or something that had been stuck on the liquid. Then I decided to clean it and the leaves felt sticky, so I went to wash them and when I turned the plant upside down, I noticed these green bugs which I promptly cleaned off. So I guess the liquid was their honeydew excrement and the white stuff were their shed skins . Will be observing over the next few days to make sure they don't come back.
Currently feeling annoyed

dracil

Helped move some BST stuff today then we had dinner. Charlie needs some sex education classes.
Currently feeling okay

dracil

So my grandmother finally arrived, so I went to visit my relatives today. Didn't actually do much besides watching some DVDs that didn't work right. My uncle's going to Mexico again tomorrow then coming back in a week and then leaving with my grandmother.
Currently feeling okay

dracil

It has been released! Got get it!
Currently feeling blah