Difficult Games

This past weekend was a lazy, albeit good one. Since my discovery of the World of N64 emulation, I've dedicated many many hours to it. It's cut into my time for just about everything else - sleep (well, not really, since we got up at noon each day), exercise, eating, you know, the disposable things in life. No seriously, I still ate and slept and even exercised, but I did spend an awful long time playing Ocarina of Time. I've never finished a Legend of Zelda game in my entire video-game playing life, and after spending hours on end playing this one to beat just the first boss, I can see why. This game definitely belongs in the class of very difficult games, along with Chrono Trigger, which can only be beaten if you get lucky enough that Chaos (I think that's the final boss?) decides not to attack on every turn it has (which, unfortunately, is pretty much three times as often as your turn occurs). It might be as hard as Emerald weapon from Final Fantasy VII, not so much because the bosses are impossible to beat without some sort of guidance which let's you figure out how to repeatedly pummel with Knights of the Round, but because there are some puzzles in the game which are genuinely hard enough to where a players guide is probably warranted.

As hard as it is, I don't think it's in that class of Practically Impossible games. This distinguished list of games includes the Mega Man games (just about all of them), Super Mario Bros. 3, Contra (without the 99 life cheat code), and Super Mario Bros. These games are flat out impossible. There is no way to beat them. Mega Man, with all of his great abilities, simply is not athletic enough to not get hit by Lightning Man, or any of the other bosses for that matter. The second tank in Super Mario Bros. 3 is bristling with weapons, and you can't even use a P-wing to simply fly over all of it like you did the first. I've never even seen King Bowser in Super Mario Bros. 3! It's just so hard that you give up. You never really run out of lives because you've collected so many, but you can't save, and you've been playing for 4 hours, and you just can't get through that tank level. Contra is similar to that tank level in SMB3... how can you survive so much firepower when you can't even afford to get hit once? Even with the 99 life cheat, the feasibility of beating this game is very questionable. As for the original Super Mario Bros., maybe it was just me and my inferior platforming skills, but this game's difficulty is not quite the same as Super Mario Bros. 3. The problem with the original SMB is that there aren't enough lives for you to really "get the hang of the level" before you just die and run out of lives. Old games were like that - they probably weren't even that hard, but you just never got the chance to really find out. And you can't save to try again from the same spot next time.

An Interesting Article on 40-Yard-Dashes (Ed Read This!)

Dash of doubt The San Diego Union-Tribune

My brother Ed and I have wondered about the 40 times of football players for some time. A little while ago, Ed raced someone who reported a 4.8 second forty, and he linearly extrapolated that he runs something like a 6 second forty. Granted, you can't realistically extrapolate your 40 yard time from a 60 yard dash by simply taking proportions, but still, it sounded pretty dumb that 300+ pound offensive linemen run faster than us (Ed is around 200 pounds, I'm around 150). However, this article sheds some light about the truth of Football Forties.

A quick breakdown:

The Olympics today are timed at every 10 yards or so, for better accuracy or something. The fastest time ever recorded at the Olympics was 4.38 seconds. This was from a world-class track sprinter. Oh, and I forgot to mention that he was on steroids. How is it possible that all those defensive backs, wideouts, and running backs are beating out world-class, pharmaceudically enhanced sprinters, when they have little track experience at all?

The article goes on to detail hhe measurement done by the coaches at the NFL combines is, to say the least, very very gray compared to how track times should be taken.

So anyway, read that if you like. Maybe it means I'm not slower than those offensive lineman. Maybe not. Tune in soon for my next real post!

Air Grant!

Omigosh! Another lapse in posting! This time it was not really due to a lack of activity - I would say a main reason why I haven't posted in these past few days is because of my commitment to Mario 64. I've compiled probably around eight hours of playing time for this game in the past 3 days, which is kind of a lot for me. It's just as hard as I imagined it to be - I think I've mentioned that I've never been good at this whole newfangled 3-D thing, but also there's a lot of puzzle element that I didn't expect. So far, I've picked up 20 of 120 Stars. Looks like I'll be playing this game for a while longer!

Being able to play Mario 64 has led me to really want to play other games too - like finish Final Fantasy VIII once and for all - so I downloaded some other games last night. In order to maximize my playing ability, I even went out and picked up a new Logitech Dual Action Gamepad with the Best Buy gift card I got over the holidays to replace my Gravis Gamepad Pro so I could play games using a real Analog stick! I got Mario Kart 64, which works quite well, Goldeneye, which doesn't work so well, Legend of Zelda, which doesn't work so well either, Paper Mario, which had no sound, Madden 2002, which doesn't work that well either and which is a little more complicated than I care for, Starfox 64, which has this blaring sound that drives me crazy, and I think that's it. I'd really like to get Goldeneye (I played this game a lot in college, it's great!), Zelda, and Paper Mario to work properly... I think I have to adjust the settings of the program and pick up some plugins or something. Hopefully I'll have it figured out over this weekend!

Another thing somewhat related to this little lapse in posting was my little basketball game experience this past Tuesday. As it says in my profile, which I know you've seen, I stand at a towering 5'6", 5'7" on a good day with tall shoes. My lack of height, coupled with pretty horrible shot (possibly due to inevitably putting too much power in the shot - darn all that martial arts training!) means that basketball isn't really a sport that caters well to my abilities. I met up with Nick, Nick's roommate Chris, and Shawn at a park near their places where they were playing with a bunch of kids who were pretty good but also pretty cocky. The only thing I had going for me was my athleticism, which basically gave me pretty good aggressive defense. Nick and some of the kids commented on my Mario-esque jumping ability (just kidding about the Mario part - I'm still in video-game-enthused mode) because I would was flying around all over the place trying to block shots. I was able to block a few, but my blocking percentage was probably only around 30%. Still, it was a lot better than my shooting percentage, which was probably around zero, I think.

I guess I must have jumped pretty high - the ball of my right foot was pretty sore the next day, from impact with the ground, I guess!

Super Tax Day 64!!

It's getting pretty late, and I still have trouble waking up in the mornings for work, so I'll make this post short and sweet.

This Saturday, I tried using Turbo (pronounced too-rr-bo, roll the 'r', so that it sounds like you're talking about a Porsche) Tax for the first time ever! It was also the first time I've attempted to figure out my taxes on my own, and I was pretty impressed. I have to say though, it wasn't as easy as the commercials made it sound. I was like, what the hell is a 1099-R? How come I can't deduct my car registration? What are dividend freebies?! (I made that last one up). However, after wrestling with it for a few hours, I finally got something that had no errors and looked pretty good. Looks like I should be able to get some bucko bucks this year!

So, as you might already know from a few references I've made in the past, I'm really itching to get some new video games. So you might be able to imagine my disappointment when I read news about the Sony Playstation 3 being delayed until likely late summer and costing the treasuries of a few small third world countries. I then turned to read about the Nintendo Revolution, only to find out that that was probably not coming out until November! So, what's an old school gamer in withdrawal to do? Turn to the emulation wizards. I remember Ed telling me a while back that his roommate Shawn uses N64 emulators. I'd heard of these mystical programs before, but I thought they were just stuff of legends - myths with no facts to back them up. I looked into it, and lo and behold, they do exist!

So today, I downloaded the 1964 emulator, which got decent reviews (also because I didn't feel like looking any more) and a game that I have wanted to play since I was but a wee teenager - Super Mario 64! You can only begin to imagine the delight on my face! And in my actions! I was literally jumping around the house like Super Mario! Even more delighting was that it worked! Almost flawlessly, so as far as I can tell! Some of the graphics are a little pixellated, but I can only expect that because of the much higher resolution of my laptop monitor. But it worked! Another childhood dream fulfilled! Grant's childhood dreams fulfilled: 2 (playing Super Mario 64 and going to Busch Gardens over the winter holidays), Grant's childhood dreams crushed: 1 (not riding a single ride on that Busch Gardens trip - see January archives). Now, I can probably wait another year or so before I crave a new system, so hopefully, PS3 will be cheaper by then and part of my tax return can put itself to use!

Comcast IP Address 71.192.77.#

It's one of the stranger things I've noticed these past few days. I currently use Sitemeter to monitor the traffic statistics of Grant's Pad. It's a nice tool, although now that Google has acquired Measure Map, I'm going to be looking forward to switching to that. Maybe I'm just anal retentive or something, but I always like to use the same service/developer/provider for any given application, simply because I figure it should be smoother if it's all coming from one place, right? The more moving parts, the more possibility of failure - Rule Number 1 in engineering... or at least it should be in the top ten somewhere!

So anyway, Sitemeter gives you cool statistics like how many visits you get per day, how long they were there for (although I have my doubts on this one - most of them say 0.00, but I don't think that's right because I can show up and stay for like 1 minute and it won't register), how many pages they visited (each post has it's own little permanent link that you can use to directly link to from another page). One feature that I really like is that you can visualize where your visitors come from on a map of the world because it keeps track of your visitor's domain and/or IP address. Kinda scary, but it's still pretty cool.

But that's where the weirdness comes in. In the beginning, I got hits from all over the place, all the time. London. Barcelona. South Korea. Taiwan. Japan. California. Houston. South America. I still get those from time to time (as you can see from my latest World Map View shown above. But now, a large majority of visits come from one place - Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Why? Because that's the location of IP address 71.192.77.#, which belongs to a Comcast domain. On any given day, I usually get 10-15 visits. But anywhere from 50% to 90% of those visits come from this IP address! And that's not the strangest thing either! I would understand if this IP address belonged to one of my friends who might check on my blog very often. I do that too. But when I check blogs that I read often, if there isn't any updates, I'm in and out. No surfing around at all. But not mister 71.192.77.#! He/she will visit Grant's Pad five to ten times a day, and stick around for five to twenty-five minutes, visiting one to seven pages! And for those of you who regularly read my blog, you know I usually only update once or twice a day.

So anyway, I'm wondering the same thing you are now - who could possibly be either (a) so interested in the wonderful topics discoursed in Grant's Pad, or (b) have such an incredibly poor short-term memory.

Let me know if you get any leads.

ksshhhk - Grantis Mantis out - ksshhhk

Dan Jassim's LEGO Website : MOCpages.com

LEGO is so cool, but I always sucked at making original cool stuff. Ed was pretty good though. Maybe he should take another shot at building cool stuff.

This guy is pretty good though - check out his site here! Huge 30 lb. starships, complete with decks and quarters!

Dan Jassim's LEGO Website : MOCpages.com

Theme Music

A cool thing happened yesterday morning. As I was walking into the office, the guard (I think her name is Barbara) asked if I did Karate. I said, "Yeah, kind of - I do Kung Fu actually." She said, "I thought you might. You look like you should do martial arts or something." I thought that was pretty awesome. I must just emanate badass kung fu prowess! My power level must be so high that you can see it without that little scouter gadget used in Dragonball Z! Or maybe it's just because I'm Asian... can't ever rule out stereotyping...

Regardless, after that little exchange, the Crazy 88's theme from Kill Bill started blaring in my head, and I swaggered to my desk, quite appropriately sporting my brown leather jacket reminiscent of classic Bruce Lee attire.

I actually have moments like this quite often. I'm not just talking about people recognizing the sheer strength and battle aura that I radiate. I often run songs in my head when I experience certain things, or when I go to certain places. I like to think of them as my personal theme song soundtrack, kind of like in anime and video games. Some movies have it too, but not quite to the extent of, say, Final Fantasy or Rurouni Kenshin. In Final Fantasy, typically each major character will have his or her own unique theme song. I'm kind of like that, but I would say my situation relates best to Kenshin. Kenshin has several different theme songs, depending on what he's doing. He has "Wanderer-Mode" Kenshin, which is this acoustic guitar and flute number, "Family-Mode" Kenshin, which is light and happy sounding, "Romantic-Mode" Kenshin, which occurs when he's having a moment with Kaoru, "Melancholy-Mode" Kenshin, which is another guitar piece that happens when he has to go away, "Mission-Mode" Kenshin, which is an upbeat tune that pumps you up to go get the bad guy, and my personal favorite, "Hiten-Mitsurugi-Ryu" Kenshin, AKA "Ass-Kickin'-Mode" Kenshin, a fast paced rockin' instrumental that plays when Kenshin unloads with his ultimate techniques.

Like Kenshin, I have theme songs for when I'm driving around (or wandering, if you will), such as Dr. Dre's "Still D.R.E.", when I'm at home (Richie Ren's "我是一只鱼"), feeling romantic (WHAM's "Last Christmas" and the entire My Sassy Girl soundtrack), feeling sad (Jacky Cheung's "心如刀割"), feeling gung-ho (Wong Fei-Hung theme "男儿当自强" - yes I can steal other people's themes and claim them as my own), and kickin' ass (Rage Against the Machine's "Wake Up").

Aside from personal themes, I also have theme songs for different places. For example, when I hear the song "Lady" by Modjo, I automatically think of Europe (probably because I first heard that song on my first trip to Europe).

But no soundtrack can be complete without themes from the supporting cast! What songs can I use to represent you? Let me know!

58 Degrees Never Felt So Warm

I figured when I moved to Melbourne that the days of below zero nights and wool sweaters of Gainesville would be a thing of the past. Boy was I wrong.

Yesterday morning, it was around 30 degrees when I headed out for work. The day before, it was like 35 degrees, and I thought that was bad enough. This was the kind of cold that made your joints hurt and your appendages blue. In fact, it was so cold that I decided to drive to work wearing gloves! In Florida! In fact, I almost didn't get to drive at all because my car wouldn't even start for the first few attempts. Even when it did start, it was super cold inside because of the layer of frost that had encapsulated the entire car. I know, you northern people are probably probably saying "Stop being a little bitch and suck it up!" but I've lived in Florida for like 85 percent of my life or something, and most of that in the southern part at that!

So anyway, one of the great things about being married is that Valentine's Day is pretty similar to when you were single and nobody cared about you, except that you're not lonely. You don't have to get any gifts for your spouse for fear that they will retaliate by abandoning you. Well, most of the time anyway - assuming the relationship is a healthy one. So I didn't have to worry about that - I just sent an SMS message and a e-mail to Cherry and I was good to go (I love Crunch Wrap Supremes!). What I did have to worry about, however, was getting a crapload of work to resemble being finished as closely as possible. That kind of activity gives me headaches. I don't like headaches, even though I do like finishing work.

P.A.B.'s

So, as promised, the latest Real Post! I haven't blogged in like 3 days, but hopefully I can keep some sort of standard for quality this time.

This past weekend was pretty cool. My buddy Eric, who I met on my study abroad trip to China, drove down from Gainesville to visit me. Eric is one of the several white guys I know who speak moderately good Chinese, which is pretty cool. You can see photos of us and others from that trip in Tom's China 2002 Gallery here. Besides Cherry and my kung-fu brother Kir-Wei, I've kept in touch (see my previous post about keeping in touch) with Eric the most of anyone I met there, since we worked out a lot together while I was in grad school.

Speaking of grad school, Eric informed me that he is going to Texas for his masters in Transportation Engineering, and Billy, his roommate, got into Georgia Tech! I applied to Georgia Tech when I was applying to grad school, and didn't get in, despite getting accepted for my undergraduate studies (but instead I chose to go to Florida. Go Gators!). In fact, I never even got a letter back from Georgia Tech. I kind of wonder if they even got my application at all...

So anyway, we had a dinner reminiscent of the Super Bowl dinner we had last weekend, and then Eric busted out his PS2 and the Awesome Game, Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. I haven't played a whole lot of platform games ever since the whole 3D thing started to catch on... you know, like 10 years ago. Never could get a hang of that depth perception. Or lack thereof. Anyway, this game positively kicks ass. The gameplay is smooth as butter, the graphics are vibrant and clear, there's smartmouth robots, a bogus superhero, sucker cannons, plasma whips, gun turrets, skydiving, refracting lasers, death match coliseums... I mean, really, how can you go wrong with a game like that? We played Ratchet and Clank for something around ten hours. I haven't had this much fun with a PS2 game since I played Katamari Damacy for countless hours in 2004. Which is another great game that everyone should play, by the way!

Cherry, Eric, and I decided to go out to eat on Saturday night. We don't go out to eat often, so whenever the opportunity comes, I'm always at a loss as to where to go. Do you go with the chain restaurant (Chili's) that you know is good, but you can find just about everywhere? Do you go ethnic (Pho), to try to be more "international"? I bounced around from choice to choice until I finally pulled the plug, and decided that we would go local, and we went to the Harbor City Diner, a little local Melbourne restaurant that I have been wanting to go to ever since I got here. They always have signs outside that say "Brevard's Best Burgers!" Or "Best Food on the Space Coast!" That kind of punchline really works on me. The restaurant was pretty good! I felt shafted because they have all-you-can-eat fish and chips on Friday, which means they have no fish and chips on Saturday, so I went with fried clams instead. Cherry got the grilled Mahi-Mahi, which was some damn good fish for an American restaurant (I never get good fish at American restaurants). But Eric got the prize for ordering the 3/4 pound Greek burger. 3/4 pound? That's like three quarter pounders, but in one! You would think a 3/4 pound burger would have a wide diameter, but this burger was like the same circumference as a regular quarter pound with cheese, which resulted in an incredibly tall sandwich. I'm gonna have to get me one of those one day!

After dinner, we watched a Hong Kong flick that I had never heard of previously. It's called Tokyo Raiders, and I got it because it stars Tony Leung (who played Broken Sword in Hero and is otherwise a very respected actor in Asia). What I didn't expect was that it also starred Ekin Cheng, who isn't a very good actor (he has no facial expression), so when I saw Ekin appear, my hopes for the film came crashing down. However, a third un-expectation pleasantly surprised me! I had my doubts about Tony and Ekin's martial arts abilities (Tony didn't really fight much in Hero, and the last martial arts movie I saw with Ekin was the horrible Legend of Zu), but this movie had some really sweet fight scenes, with Jackie Chan-esque surroundings awareness. Maybe primarily the work of stunt doubles, but I don't mind! The story is kind of confusing - maybe I was focusing too much on the action and trying to see if I could understand Cantonese, but I would still recommend it anyway, if not for the action and comedy, then definitely for Tony's fine assistants in the movie. These past few months I've seen some pretty crappy Chinese films, like "Initial D" with Jay Chow...

After Eric left, Cherry and I decided to clean the house, do the laundry, and then go shopping for some food for the week. We decided to go to Super Wal-Mart. I hate Super Wal-Mart. Regular Wal-Mart is cool - nice and organized, space to walk, clean looking. Super Wal-Mart includes a chaotic supermarket, and is all in all just too damn big, too many people. However, it's got some pretty cool stuff - we got a beanbag chair and a little stool, which come in really handy for watching TV and playing video games!

I mentioned doing the laundry earlier. We washed our clothes at around 3:00 or so, in hopes that when we got back from shopping we could put them in the drying machine when we got back. However, it wasn't until 9 PM that I was able to finally put our clothes in a drying machine. It should be noted that the laundry room closes at 10, and that I didn't have any clean pants for work for the next day. All because some Punk Ass B*tches, or P.A.B.'s, a la The Princess Bride, decided that they didn't need their clothes tomorrow so they can just leave them in the machine. Oh, I forgot - when I didn't take my clothes out of the washing machine, maybe 15 minutes or so after the wash cycle finished, some P.A.B.'s took the liberty of taking my clothes out of the washer! Friggin' P.A.B.'s...

Well, I think this post has dragged on long enough... getting kind of hungry...

Weijun's DOMAIN: the TRUTH

Weijun's DOMAIN: the TRUTH

I haven't watched it all yet, but it looks like it is pretty funny. Check it out!

There will be a real post soon - and it's probably going to be long again. Busy weekend.

Yet Another Casualty

I really, really should be getting hazardous duty pay. Last Friday, I incurred another severe injury while wielding my soldering iron. It was actually the worst burn I have had from work, but I didn't write about it because I had already written about soldering iron burns before. But today, I can no longer ignore the perils of being an engineer.

Today, while putting a DSP card into a unit, I managed to traumatize myself again. This time, I had all of the connectors connected and the screws in place - I was just pushing the card down to secure the connections. Suddenly, two rogue pins on the circuit card plunged into my thumb! I quickly drew my hand back, and the blood began to flow everywhere. "Redrum" flashed before my eyes, as the blood gushed out. I should have taken a picture of the horrors that I endured, but needless to say, I had some higher priorities at the time.

I guess there just isn't that much blood in a thumb, because I only washed my thumb for a few minutes before the blood stopped flowing. I put a band-aid on it and got on with my life, but it still throbs. In fact, I think the greater trauma might be the fact that I sustained my injury on my thumb, rather than some other area. That's not just any finger, that's my D-pad thumb! And to hurt it on a Friday! It could really affect my performance!

Two consecutive Fridays. Two consecutive injuries. They say bad things happen in threes... I better watch my back!

Conspiracy Theory?

Nick gave me this link today. The articles and papers in it are really long, but if you have the time, I would definitely recommend taking a long hard look at it.

Scholars for 9/11 Truth

I like, totally don't know what to think anymore! It's just craziness. The arguments are so clear though, so it's really difficult for me to dismiss this possibility.

I've never been a fan of the Bush administration, but I don't think I can blame Bush on this. It sounds more like the work of some extremists who have significant power in our upper levels of government. I just don't think Dubya himeself would be A) smart enough or B) evil enough to destroy the World Trade Center!! I've always thought of Bush as being totally in his own little world, playing with his toy soldiers in a very real-time strategy video game. On easy mode, which explains his moderate success.

Speaking of video games, I am totally in Final Fantasy nostalgia mode. I can't find my copy of Final Fantasy VII anywhere, and I so want to play through that game again. I'm not even sure why I want to play it so much. It was an okay game, but it was just cool. And the graphics were so cool. A lot of people hate on the graphics, since it was kind of behind the times in 1997, but I really dug the blocky action figures look. Blocks for hands? Reminds me of a certain tight end named Jerramy Stevens that recently lost a very big game. I think my brother and I used to walk around the house with boxing gloves on our hands to emulate that look.

But that's as far as my video game fantasies went. Dubya's losing control of his game.

K.I.T. c/o 1999

Running off at the keyboard...

The problem with making late posts about things like my Super Bowl Sunday is, it results in horribly bad blogging, as per my Super Bowl Sunday post a few posts back. It really is my intention to avoid when at all possible to get into list mode, i.e. "First I did this... and then... and then... and then..." It used to happen all the time when I kept a paper and pencil version of a journal. Yes, I used pencil, because I'm an engineer and I need to erase stuff all the time, especially when I was doing circuit analysis. Also, when I use pen, I tend to drag streams of ink all over the place and it just makes a mess. Writing in pencil simply created the best product for me.

Speaking of journals, I was flipping through one of my old journals the other day, and an age old problem that I've dealt with time after time surfaced again. I realized how many people I have met and befriended (or be-enemied, even) in the past, oh, I dunno, ten years or so. Ten years! And to think more than half of those ten years of my life was in Gainesville! And the rest of it was in high school! I brought up my old high school yearbook from home a few months ago, and scanned through all of the signatures in it. "Good luck in college!" "Keep on drumming!" (I used to be in high school band as a marching percussionist. See the site I created for us here!) But the ones that I think I took the most seriously are the ones that said, "K.I.T. (xxx)xxx-xxxx".

Now, I'm not sure if many people have noticed, but I'm one of those people that likes to keep everything. Every postcard anyone has sent me, little brochures from my visits to cities and sights around the world, the boxes my cellphones come in... I keep everything, except "in touch". I never really kept in touch with many of my high school classmates. College life was just too damn exciting. In my first year of college, I lived at La Mancha, which was a popular apartment complex for international exchange students because of the availability of a single semester lease. I met friends from all over the world - Spain, Italy, Holland, Venezuela, Japan... the list goes on. Those first semesters seemed so long, because I was hanging out and sightseeing all the time with my international friends! At the end of their semester(s), we exchanged e-mails, and again, reminded each other to keep in touch.

I did, for a pretty good while. I even visited some of the Italian students from my first semester, on a trip to Europe the following year. I kept the postcards and little gifts that they sent me from time to time. But eventually, inevitably, I lost contact one by one. Now, I still keep in touch with some of the locals (the other full-time UF students like myself) who also befriended several generations of international La Manchans, but I very rarely hear from those first international college friends.

The past few weeks, I've been facebook-browsing, and I was pleasantly surprised to run into a lot of old acquaintances, even some from high school! I added them as friends, and exchanged a few e-mails, but still not much keeping in touch has taken place. Even so, it's cool to kind of know that those people are still out there, and that we have the option of keeping in touch if we really made the effort to. Probably, we won't ever really become great buddies again, but just kind of running into people again sure does bring back some good memories.

Keep in touch.

The Karate Chimp VideoClipstream trailer

The Karate Chimp VideoClipstream trailer

Mad Skillz. I should practice more =D

Super Bowl Sunday

Well, it's a little late for this blog, but my Super Bowl Sunday was a really good one, so I'm going to blog about it anyway!

It started out like any other Sunday, except that we woke up at like 10:30 instead of lunchtime. That's because Cherry wasn't feeling well the night before (in fact, she's still a little drowsy from whatever she has), so we went to sleep on a Saturday night at 10:00!!! I didn't even get a chance to play any video games!!!

Anyway, after breakfast, I made up for the lack of video game time a little bit by getting myself in football mode. That's right, I played good old Tecmo! Then, we started preparing for the game. I usually don't help out as much making dinner, but since it was my idea to invite Shawn, Nick, and Billy over, I figured I would help out some more this time. I cut up the pork, washed, peeled, and chopped the daikon radish (I found out that the word daikon is simply Japanese for "big root," FYI!), peeled and cut the shrimp, washed the nappa, and prepared the roast chicken. It didn't take long for the both of us together - maybe we should make a business out of this!

Anyway, Nick came over, followed closely by Shawn, then they went out to get some snacks and soda, and then Billy came over with Grant's Favorite Vintage, Coca Cola Classic. Oh, he brought chips and ice and stuff too.

The opening ceremony for the game was pretty cool - Phil Simms won a throwing contest against Joe Theismann and another quarterback who I can't remember for the life of me, but I was really impressed at their accuracy. I guess I never appreciated that kind of accuracy before, but ever since I started throwing again, I have a newfound appreciation for the skill of these guys. It seemed like one of the recurring themes of Super Bowl XL was old guys. They brought out most of the old Super Bowl MVPs, including Emmitt Smith (not that old) and Joe Namath (pretty damn old). And then, there was that Rolling Stones halftime show. I'm not even going to get into that.

Dinner was really good, and we made a lot so we didn't have to cook today even! Unfortunately, I forgot that Billy didn't eat a lot and gave him about twice as much rice as he really needed. I thought he should eat it anyway, to add some muscle mass. But we were here for the game. And I thought it was an awesome game, unlike the people that wrote up this petition. Yeah, sometimes the officials are pretty jacked up, and some of the calls were questionable (the low block by Hasselbeck on the ballcarrier comes to mind) but I think the Steelers would have won anyway. Maybe because I was rooting for them. Maybe I'll sign it after the Super Bowl victory sinks in.

Favorite play of the night? Antwaan Randle El to Hines Ward for 43 yards and a touchdown, AKA X-Reverse Pass. Randle El threw that pass prettier than Ben Rothlisberger threw all night! I guess that's not that hard to do if you Big Ben is going to have a passer rating of 22.6... but Ben is still awesome. So is Willie Parker, who blazed on an NFL record 76 yard TD run, and the Bus himself, who rumbled for 46 yards in his last game! Sniff...

Favorite commercial? Diet Pepsi co-stars with Jackie Chan, with Diet Coke as his stunt double. Have to give it up to Pepsi for that one.

Major props to Super Bowl MVP Hines Ward! Catching fifty percent of the team's passes and accounting for 80-some percent of the aerial yardage, and picking up some good ones on the ground as well, Ward was awesome. He also gets bonus points in my book because he's half Korean! Go Asians! And he supports Mickey Mouse!

I'm pretty sure I had more to say, but it's getting kind of late and my mind is getting not so clear, so I'm going to end it with that. Go Asians (again!)!

Super Mario Bros. DJ!

Another Wicked Cool Find. Go play with it. Now.

Epic Struggle with iTunes

Finally, I get to post again! Blogger has been kind of weird for the past few days. I think there was some mention of a server upgrade or something. But that seems to be over, so I'm back! I was starting to go into blogging withdrawal.

So, as the weekend started, the first thing I did was try to recover some of the songs that I wanted from Ed's library that iTunes slaughtered. He told me that he got a lot of songs from BaiDu.com, which is sort of the Chinese equivalent of Google (not the infamous Google.cn - it's a local company). It has a music search, which makes it damn cool. Granted, the music is mostly Chinese, since it's a Chinese site. In fact, it might be all Chinese - I'm not sure because I didn't really try to find songs that weren't Chinese. I did find about 90 MB of songs that I do like, including some of the ones I lost before.

My next task was to try to make the library in iTunes make some kind of sense. There doesn't seem to be any way to list the songs in the library according to the directory tree that I so painstakingly created when I first acquired all of the songs. So, I had no choice other than to add file information to all the songs. With two days worth of songs, this is no easy task. I don't understand how those people with 30+ gigs of songs do it, I only have like 3 gigs, and it's already friggin impossible to organize all of my music. I tried to anyway, for two reasons - 1) it makes it a lot easier for me to figure out which songs I want to put on my iPod, and more importantly 2) it looks prettier that way. So now, about half of my music has a proper name, artist, and genre! Hooray!

I'm trying to like iTunes. Really. But it's too smart for me. It reminds me of why I decided not to go into Computer Science. Oh wait, that's not right - I got out of computer science because I felt like I was talking to a retarded child every time I was writing in Java. Java makes you stupider. It's a scientific fact.

Super Keen Observation Skillz, Super Dull Analysis Skillz

I'm not sure if you've looked at my profile before, but if you have, you'll might know that I consider the South Korean romantic comedy, "My Sassy Girl", to be one of my favorite movies. My fellow study abroaders from Shaanxi Normal University, Summer 2002 (free shout-out here! Best recognize!), can probably relate to the appeal of this film, which has received mixed results worldwide. Yes, it's kind of sappy, but for all of the people who think this movie sucks, I got nothing to say to you, except, "Wanna die?"

For those of you who haven't seen it, you should. And don't worry too much about reading this post, there's not really any My-Sassy-Girl-Ruining-Plot-Spoilers here. From time to time, I have to get my hit of Wikipedia, to see what it has to say about the pop culture that I take for granted. Typical searches include Super Mario, football strategy, Project A-Ko, Lego, things like that. So today, I decided to type in "My Sassy Girl" and see what I could learn about this beloved movie.

I got the usual stuff, that it's based on a book that was loosely based on a series of blogs written by a South Korean boy about his relationship with his girlfriend. I also learned some interesting opinions, such as the old man's possible identity. Mostly, nothing that I'd never considered on my own.

However, I did learn one shocking piece of information. I've watched this movie several times, probably in the neighborhood of five, and the last few times, I noticed that one particular actor shows up as several different characters in the movie - the inn manager, the gangster in the jail cell, the subway security guard, the subway station employee, and another security guard. I always chalked this phenomenon up as a case of "Korean-cinema-is-too-cheap-to-hire-a-lot-of-actors-so-they-just-reused-this-one-for-minor-characters-since-no-one-will-notice-anyway-to-save-money. But how wrong I was.

There is a scene in the movie where the protagonist sees a newspaper on the wall of his hotel room, which has an old photo of five babies - five quintuplets, to be exact. I never knew what this had to do with the movie itself, but it had to mean something, because the camera zooms in on this.

Put two and two together, and you get five, apparently, because with these facts in front of you, it doesn't take much to realize that those five minor characters are each of the quintuplets! Next time I watch this movie, I'm going to look for this just to get another whiff of that "new-revelation-smell"! And you should too. Watch this movie!

Cute Overload: Pandog

Cute Overload: Pandog

Wow, this is bizarre, but cool. I also like the "Pocket Pets" category, especially the series of pics with the squirrel that apparently thinks it's a puppy.