wafblog v3.0

This has not been a very good start to the year. I was coming home yesterday after the gym, and I don’t know what I did, but I snapped the frames of my glasses. So now the whole right arm has detached and obviously, I can’t wear them. This is rather annoying as I am quite attached to my glasses. Luckily, I had bought a new pair before I went to Europe, so I’m wearing them now. They weren’t meant for day-to-day wear though – I only intended to use them when dressing up. The lenses are thicker because they’re rimless frames, so the light refracts into the lens differently. Plus, the light reflects on the edges making them much more obvious to me. This pretty much means that my glasses are giving me a headache from wearing them for too long. I’ll be going to the optometrist tomorrow to see if they can be fixed (soldered) back together, but I kind of doubt it which means I’ll have to fork out like $300 for a new pair.

So, during my 10 days off I went to see the doctor because my eczema was unmanageable and I was having lots of trouble sleeping. He gave me prednisone, which I’d expected, and since taking it my skin seems to have calmed down a lot. I’m hoping that it’s broken the cycle and if I keep putting cream on it it’ll be ok. I’m going for a blood test on Sunday so hopefully that will shed some light onto what I’m allergic to so I can avoid it like crazy in the future. I’ve also cut a bunch of foods from my diet now, ones that are well-known allergens and I could have an intolerance too. It kind of sucks, but I suppose I don’t have much choice.

I’ve become somewhat addicted to this lemon-scented tea from Twinings. I drink it at work, and originally I was drinking like one a day. Then it became two a day… now it’s like three a day. It’s rather nice by itself, no need for sugar or milk so that’s cool. I’ve also taken to drinking camomile tea at night before bed. It is rather soothing and helps me to sleep so I’m quite impressed. Admittedly, it doesn’t taste that great, but tolerable enough.

Oh yes! In other news, I got tickets to the Big Day Out. Which is totally AWESOME. There’s no other word for it but AWESOME!!! After Homebake, I’m quite excited about seeing Eskimo Joe and The Butterfly Effect again. But the band I’m most stoked about seeing has got to be The Killers. Wooo. I’ve even listened to some of My Chemical Romance, but I don’t really like them on first listen. This time I’m going to remember a camera, and will definitely post up good photos afterwards :D

Started playing Tekken again, hoping I don’t get RSI this time. I’m getting better with Jin now, although he has this 10 hit combo which I don’t think anyone can pull off. It is kind of fun to customise your characters to play against the CPU. I did also try out Lemmings, but I think Mike enjoyed it more than I did. They are very very cute and hopefully I’ll get enough time to sit down and have a proper go at some of the more challenging levels. Must try to finish a game.

I was also looking on some of the PSP sites – seems they’ve released a custom firmware (3.02 OE-B) which allows you to loads PSX ISOs from the memory stick and play them on the PSP. So I can d/l the ISOs or buy some off the Sony site. I’m quite interested in investigating it, and M1ke e-mailed saying that he had got it working and it was pretty cool. To be honest, I’m not really sure what PSX games I’d want to play on the PSP considering the number of games I have at the moment that I haven’t played, but the possibility of having that entire library available to play – awesome.

We’ve also started playing Guild Wars again. Prophecies, not the expansion. Seems silly, but we never finished the game, and well – it did kind of get boring playing by myself all the time. The NPCs are complete idiots and never heal you properly so unless you’re heaps buff you’ll usually die. So yeah, playing about an hour a day is slow progress, but still fun. Not sure I could play for hours everyday anyways, but I do enjoy completing quests and getting items and things like that. Not sure what specialty I’ll make my necro yet. Most likely I’ll level the attributes for raising bone horrors and that sort of thing – I don’t like the curses much but maybe I haven’t got the good ones yet. I’ll be adding elementalist as my second profession so hopefully that’s a good combination. At the moment just waiting to get out of this ‘n00b’ part of the game.

So, of course, as soon as I say that I doubt there’ll ever be a chess game for the PSP, I’m digging around on GameSpot and find out that Konami are releasing “Chess Battle”. From what I can see, it literally is “Battle Chess” for the PSP, but all trumped up and 3D looking! So I’m definitely going to get it when it comes out (this month IIRC). I also saw that they’re releasing Lumines II sometime this month I think. So two new games for me to look out for and hopefully will be able to play soon. This causes a little bit of a conundrum as I counted yesterday and I’ve got 15 games. I think there’s about 5 I haven’t played (GTA: LCS, Lemmings, Tokobot, Gottlieb Pinball and Lego Star Wars II) And another 5 that I haven’t played properly at all (Frantix, Mercury, Loco Roco, Koolumn and Gripshift). I’ve played Lumines, Burnout Legends, SSX, DJ Max Portable and Tekken: Dark Resurrection like crazy at some stage though. But I haven’t finished any games yet. So I probably should not buy any more games until I’ve finished the ones I’ve got. Which could easily take me a year or something. I think my main problem is that I’ll play and play and then I’ll reach a stage where I’m not actually getting any better. Happens with me for most games really. Or I start to lose interest because the games become repetitive. So I’ll pull out something else and be content with that for a while. Maybe I’ll finish Tekken though, there’s so much replayability there. But, argh… Lumines II!!!! Apparently they’ve released Lumines for XBox 360. Although I’m more interested in the old XBox… but I don’t have a TV in my room so there’s no point thinking about that yet.

Anyways. I have new music! I got Badly Drawn Boy’s “Born In The U.K.” which I hope will be as good as the soundtrack to About A Boy. Also picked up The Scissor Sisters’ “Ta-Dah” which is an awesome name, plus the ‘I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’ song is rather addictive in that can’t-get-it-out-of-my-head kind of way. I’m hoping Evanescence’s “The Open Door” will be good because as much as I like them, their songs all sound the same after a while and that becomes rather boring. Lastly I got The Killers’ new album “Sam’s Town” which I listened to on the way to work this morning. It sounds rather disappointing on first listen, but sometimes you need to give it a few goes before it grows on you. I’m hoping that will happen with this album, I’m just finding that none of the songs have grabbed me yet. Like, I remember when I first heard ‘Mr. Brightside’ I just instantly went “that’s awesome!!” and listened to it over and over. They sound different on this album - a little more mellow, a little less energy. If I don’t end up liking the album so much I guess I won’t be so disappointed I didn’t get tix to their concert or the BDO. Which reminds me, tickets for Homebake arrived yesterday! W00t. So excited!!!

I’ve been pretty happy lately, which is a nice change. I don’t think I’m one of those people that can stay happy for long periods of time. Not sure if that’s because I’m overly critical or it’s just some odd personality defect. Anyways, I find that I’m pretty content at the moment. Most aspects of my life have resolved themselves or are at a stage where I can’t do anything at the moment.

Mike and I are doing well. It’s still all a bit new, I guess. Obviously there’s familiarity there – considering how long we dated before. But it’s also very different. I can see we’re both putting more effort in, and we’ve both matured a bit during the time we spent apart which makes it much easier to communicate and put things into perspective.

We went to see ‘Children of Men’ on the weekend (I LOVE Clive Owen… he’s not like uber-hot, but there’s something about his gruff voice and the accent). It was a pretty good movie. Different from most futuristic movies. I think because of the way it was shot, it felt very gritty and realistic. In one of the fighting scenes, some blood splatters on the camera lens and they keep it there whilst Clive Owen is trying to not to get killed in crossfire. I thought that was a nice touch. It was kind of obvious what was going to happen at the end, but I did think it was a different take on the future. Usually there’s some sort of view that all babies will be genetically engineered a-la ‘Gattaca’ where as this explores a world where no babies are born. Scary. I like Alfonso Cuaron, although I have seen that movie that made him famous (I will…), he is the one that directed HP: POA so I think he’s brilliant.

Work’s pretty ok at the moment too. I’m still worried that I will become disenchanted with the rat race and after 5 years of slogging it out I’ll just quit and move to the country. Except I can’t move to the country because everywhere is drought affected. Anyways, work is alright. Nothing to complain about as such and I am looking forward to next year as much as I dread it being too challenging.

Parents have been pretty good lately too. It’s been good since I finished uni. I think they’re just relieved that I’ve finished and I’m now on my way to having a career and all that sort of thing. They can sort of sit back and relax. Which they are, as they’re planning for retirement now. (Gosh, retirement seems like a lifetime away from here…) I think they’ll start berating me to clean my room, play violin, go for more driving lessons.. etc etc soon but I kind of accept now that they’re just like that and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Met up with Manda for a coffee on Monday. Felt like a yuppie, but neither of us really felt like drinking. Or maybe that was just me. It was definitely great to see her though, catch up, check out her short hair :o and see how well she survived Animania. I was a bit worried things would change, but they haven’t and we easily just slipped back into our usual chat-chat-chat. Going for drinks tonight at the Arthouse so that should be fun too.

I thought I would really miss LJ, e-mail, ICQ and the like while I was away. Which I did, but I’ve found that since coming back I haven’t really felt the urge to go online much. It’s kind of odd. Like, I’ll go online to check my mail but I don’t read any of the groups that I’ve joined and I skim alot of the community posts on my friends page. I don’t think that I’m losing interest in them or anything, I’m still as avid a fan of x, y and z as before just that reading fanfic for hours on end isn’t very appealing at the moment. Maybe I just need a break from all the fanbitching and fanboying. In any case, once I get back into VM, GA and OTH we’ll see if I go scouring for stuff. I also have to make time to watch the ORIGINAL SW trilogy, cos the DVDs arrived while I was away. I have already recruited Mike to watch them with me, but maybe I’ll see if I can convince people to come and watch a marathon of all six.

I’ve decided that Tekken: Dark Resurrection is the best game on PSP. I haven’t played it since I got back but I was playing it religiously in HK. Unlocked a few bonus games like Tekken Bowl (ten-pin bowling with your Tekken character) which is rather hilarious. Trying to only work on one or two characters, and become proficient in them, before trying others. It’s too hard to remember all the combinations otherwise. Also finding it hard to use the directional keypad in fighting, but I don’t like the analog stick on the PSP, it’s too small and in an awkward position for my thumb. Plus my thumb muscles hurt a lot if I use it for too long. Current fave character is Steve Fox. He’s a boxer, so he can’t kick, but he’s amazingly fast at repetitive punching. It’s cool that you can buy different clothes and things for him with the points you accumulate.

Went to the gym yesterday. I’m not particularly unhealthy after my trip, although my legs seem to have lost some strength. That or they’re not used to being stretch the way my trainer stretched them. I was doing some lunges (2nd set) when my right leg caved in. It was a bit scary trying to walk down the stairs at Central station, cos I kept feeling like my knee would buckle and I’d fall down but I managed to get home in one piece so that’s ok.

The categories on here are very easy to use, so in the next few weeks I might be adding a few more just to make it easier to tag my entries. We’ll see. I don’t want to add too many though as it might become unmanageable.

So, I formatted Tichondrius yesterday. He’s all shiny and FAST now. And IE doesn’t give some stupid error when I close it. Not that I use IE much – but it’s nice not to have that anyways. The taskbar also doesn’t disappear randomly when I try to open Windows Explorer now. LOL. It’d been like 42 weeks or something since I’d last reformatted so it really was time for it. What shits me though, is that everytime I reformat there’s always *something* I forget. This time, it wasn’t really that I forgot, more that I didn’t back up thoroughly. Normally I archive all my e-mails and contacts… This time, I did that but didn’t check that it had got all my e-mails. It seems it only archived up to 19/09/05 and not to yesterday (which is what I told it to do). I really should have checked it. So yeah, if there’s an important e-mail you’ve sent me in the last 6 months… I don’t have it anymore. You’re more than welcome to re-send it :P In fact, I’d probably really appreciate it *slaps head*.

Hrm, to add to my memory woes, I left my wallet at home today. This was slightly annoying as I had no money for the bus so I called my dad to pick me up. More annoying than that, I couldn’t buy a drink at lunch. No sugar!

I’ve been playing DJ Max Portable (as previously mentioned) and I’ve been able to get to Stage 4. Completed a few songs at 5 difficulty, so I’m pretty happy :D I’m having a lot of trouble with the combinations that require one button to be held whilst tapping two others – it just requires too much co-ordination that I don’t have. Recently I talked to ConMan about DDR and how you could possibly follow all those steps with a difficulty of 8 feet. Anyways, he was explaining that you don’t really see the arrows and think “have to press right” or “have to press left”. You sort of just see combinations and the stuff streams. I think I understand that more now, having played this game, because I’m no longer just looking at one note as it’s coming down the screen, I’m looking at 4 or 5 notes to see what’s coming next.

I’ve also found an alternative use for this game. Yesterday, I went for a run in my local park. Normally I bring my Neeon so I’ve got music to listen to. But it was out of batteries. So I thought, no worries I’ll my other USB MP3 player. Except that needs AAA batteries and luck would have it that I have none at home. So what did I resort to? My MD. My MD!! Gosh, MD technology. Anyways, it’s still working fine :D and that mix disc I created is still good :P Certainly made my run pretty fun listening to all these old songs I haven’t heard in ages. Anyways, as I was mucking around with DJ Max Portable last night, I found that it has an “OST” and “Vids” mode, where you can listen to and watch the videos of the songs that the game uses. This is pretty cool, and seeing as the PSP was the only thing that was charged I listened to cutesy pop music on the way to and from work. Not bad at all.

Other than that, I don’t have much to say. I haven’t felt very social or talkative lately. Not sure why. I haven’t been very happy, and that’s understandable I suppose. I know that I’m bottling or whatever, but I think it’s more just that, I don’t have anything good to say. And moreso, I know that whatever I’m going to say is probably something I’ve said before, or just re-iterating how I feel so what’s the point? That feeling hasn’t changed and going on and on about it is only going to bore those who are willing to listen anyways. Partly I think it’s also because sometimes I’ve really wanted to talk to someone, and the response I’ve gotten was “yeah, yeah” and then *big long rant about their problems*. And that’s fine – I get that other people have their gripes too, but at least acknowledge mine. I guess when that happens you just sort of think, why should I bother trying to express how I feel if you’re not even listening? I don’t expect you to fix my problems, or even tell me a solution. That’s for me to find out. But if no one’s listening, then I’m not talking.

So I finally decided to upgrade the firmware on my PSP. I got sick of having 5 (legit) games that I couldn’t play… there’s no point forking out the money for them if you can’t actually play them huh?

So yeah, I upgraded to v2.0. I figure that if the homebrew scene ever really takes off, I’ll be able to downgrade and go back to it. Considering I’d tried a few of the new game loaders that supposedly work on v1.5 for v2.0 games and they didn’t work… not much of a choice there anyways.

First game I tried out was DJ Max Portable. This is a Korean game, apparently has been released on PS2. It’s basically DDR but for songs. Unfortunately, even the Easy Mode with 1 difficulty is amazingly hard. Either that, or I’m rhythmically challenged. Or my reflexes are amazingly slow. I finally finished two of the stages at 1 difficulty. The ONLY two. Now I’m stuck – I can’t play those on 2 difficulty and when I complete the ones on 1 difficulty it goes to Stage 2… which only has songs from difficulty 3 and up. One day, I’m going to try the 6 button songs…..

Having given up on that for the time being I thought I’d try out Koloomn which is also known as Ultimate Block Party. Another puzzle game of course, it reminds me of Puyo Pop Fever, although it’s more complex because of all the specials. I’m still getting used to it, but it’s pretty fun.

Games left to try out:
- GTA: Liberty City Stories
- Gottlieb Pinball Classics
- Frantix

In the mean time, I shall try to stop buying any more games.

Uni’s not really as fun as it used to be. I’m not sure if that’s because most of my friends have graduated and there’s no one doing the subjects I am or I’m just sick of it. Admittedly, the subject I’m doing isn’t *as* bad as I thought it would be. I actually managed to complete the tutorial today. It was pretty hilarious though, my lab partner and I spent ages designing this schematic plan of some circuit thingy and then we thought we hadn’t drawn the wires correctly so we went back and make them all “connect”. Later the tutor was like, “they’re not meant to look like that… that little dot is a ‘join’”. *sigh*. So we had to change them all back! At least we know for next time right?

Met up with Manda for ‘lunch’. It wasn’t really lunch as such. Just a celebratory beer for St. Patrick’s day. There was green (mostly) and orange everywhere. Didn’t get to have any ‘guinness stew’ although it was the union meal of the day. Not sure if I really missed out on anything special :P

I tried installing Ubuntu onto Mephisto, which I screwed up. I forgot I’d removed small 10MB partition I’d made at the front of the HDD for the MBR. So I told GRUB to write over my XP install. LALALA. *Sigh*. I’m not exactly devastated, I wasn’t using that comp anyways, even after installing a DVD burner. Think I’ll install Fedora Core 4 instead. Except that I need to download the damn install. I could go with Fedora Core 3, but it seems a little ‘old’. I’m not having a good time with technology lately it seems. I tried to use that new MPH Game Loader on my PSP, which didn’t work. I then tried to install v2.0 firmware only to have the damn machine tell me it was ‘low on battery’ and ‘could not proceed’. What the fuck is with that? So yeah. The decision has been made. I’m going to upgrade the firmware. I’ve bought like 3 games recently and I have another two sitting there because I can’t play them. So it seems utterly pointless to keep with 1.5. Plus, I figure I can downgrade later if I really want to.

In any case, I’ve decided eBay is the devil in disguise and whilst retail therapy is good for the soul, it’s not good for the hip-pocket. I really must stop. It’s not like I have the time to play all these games or watch DVDs. ):

Anyways, back to trawling for icons/avatars. No kidding. I’m really hoping I’ll get the time to make some of my own.. some of them are utterly hilarious :D Not sure how to do the animated stuff. Might give the “Animation Shop” which comes with PaintShop Pro a go. I have no idea how to use Photoshop (anybody want to teach me? :P) *sigh*. Too much to do. Not enough time…..