Orange Planet

A couple of days ago (and hence my reason for not posting - well that’s not the only reason, but whatever) I ran into a weird problem, which I believe is caused by µTorrent. I had set µTorrent running overnight, but after I woke up from a deep sleep, my internet was completely broken! TokyoTosho refused to load, Google loaded after like a minute, etc etc. The same thing happened two days ago and I powercycled my router and all was fine. At first I thought it was Comcast doing the shit that the do, but apparently every one else in the house was a-okay with it.

What happens is this: µTorrent torrents like usual, but I think it eats my bandwidth too. Upon quitting, it doesn’t seem to release it, but Windows isn’t mentioning anything about this either. So all I can do is IM, since browsing the internet is broked. Come to think of it, it has happened before too. It’s just a long time ago, and I think I switched to Vuze/Azureus. I’ve downloaded Vuze/Azureus and will probably be using that for a while, and see if it’s causing any more trouble. I sure hope not!

You know, I might as well put an (NT) or (EoM) at the end of the title and be done with it, because the title does a very good job of summing up the contents of this post.

It actually started raining a bit early than the meteorologists on KGO predicted; I felt a good number of drops on Thursday, and it really picked up that night. Friday mostly pretty tame, but it started picking up in the evening. Since then we’ve had a pretty steady flow of water (though not necessarily a huge volume) with only a few breaks here and there.

So at about 3:30 today (after not getting any work done at all), I climbed into my bed with my E6400 and opened the window. Then I proceeded to watch Ef, A Tale of Melodies 4, Clannad After 5, Akane-Iro 1, Akane-Iro 2 - well at that point, I was feeling kinda drowsy. And I kinda paused the episode. And I kinda fell asleep.

By the time I woke up it was about five something. So I climbed out of bed with my computer and left the window open.

Yeah, that’s the end of the story. I’m srs.

Zomg! I timed the PV =O

Get it here!

Next Step: Kara! (That should take a while, actually =P)

I QC for Live-Evil. A couple of weeks ago tly taught me how to use Aegisub for karaoke, and I practiced on the OP for Detective Academy Q (Pipo Angel’s “100% Pure”). I figured that I need some more exposure, and I found out that Remioromen is releasing an album called “Kaze no Chroma“. Boy I was hyped - they hadn’t released an album for the longest time, and I instantly got myself a PV of a song called “Tsubasa” (”Wings”). I went to http://music.goo.ne.jp and got myself a copy of the lyrics in kanji.

Now I needed to romanize it. At first I was like “I’ll just use WWWJDIC” but that wasn’t very feasible because I figured that if I were to do this at places where I have no internet access, it’ll be totally worthless. So I started hunting for dictionaries, and I came across The Wakan Project, and got myself that. It’s really cool, except I couldn’t search by plugging in the kanji in the search box. Only romaji worked. That kinda sucked. Then after looking around some more, I heard that Eijiro was great, but it wasn’t free. I’m not paying 1980円 mainly because I’m too cheap. But I still wanted to try it out, since I was curious why it was hailed as “the best”. I was unlucky though.

Then I had an epiphany. Polarcloud’s Rikaichan! At that moment I felt so dumb and stupid. I could’ve just loaded the text file on Firefox, and used Rikaichan to “hiraganize” the kanji, and romanize it myself, instead of going through all this offline dictionary mumbo-jumbo. Now that I was enlightened, I went off to romanize it myself.

The romanized lyrics:

Ah, jinsei wa tabi da to iuwareru
noruka soruka no sakaime wo dou ikiru
Aa, kokoro wa uchuu da to iuwareru
imegi wo katachi ni suru tame nani dekiru
semai tokoro de wa mayoi ga megutte shimau
hiroi sora no ue ja mayou koto sae dekinai

ikeba wakarusa to dareka ga itte ita
sore mo soudana to tashikani omotta
bokura wa huan no mukougawa he tobikomu
saisho no ippome no yuuki wo tsubasa ni shite

Ah, tatakai ni mi wo okuhito yo
katsu to makeru no sakaime ni nani ga aru?
nigedashite shimaeba kaeru basho ha nai kedo
ikidomari made ikeba modoru to susumu ha onaji

michi ni mayotte ashi ga tomattatte
kokoro no mado kara aozora ha mierusa
shippai ya seikou ni hurimawasareru toki ha
saisho no ippome no junsui wo omoidashite

usotsuite shomoushite honne no touto sakizuita
honne ni kizutsuki tsukarehatete jibun wo damashitakunatta
oikakekko
doko he ittara nani ni nattara
mitasareru ka wakaranai kedo
doko he ittemo nani ni nattemo
boku ha boku de irarete irukanatte huan ni narukedo

ikeba wakarusa jibun de kimeta michi da
mayotta toki ni ha kokoro no ashiato he
nandomo nandodemo tachikaereba ii
sokokara honmono no yuuki ga waite kuru kara
kokoro no ashiato ha uso wo tsukanaikara

Next step: Timing to the PV!

P.S.: If anybody comes across this post, and sees something wrong with the romanization, do let me know! Without your input, I’m totally incapable of improving. I’d also like to translate it, but there are a lot of things I don’t get (artistically speaking). I may give it a shot, but it’s too bad that a lot of the effect, the essence and the feel gets lost in translation.

So I like to do some art on the side and about nine months ago I bought myself an HP TC4200 for a scant $450 on eBay. I had previously been using a 9 x 12 Wacom Intuos3, but I was looking for something more portable and a small tablet PC even gives you a free PC with your tablet.

The TC4200 is a really nice machine, but it was already getting old by the time I picked mine up. Unfortunately, anything newer, faster, thinner, lighter, better was way out of my price range, including the new (at that time) Dell Latitude XT which sat a price point of nearly $3000. Now maybe I’m just a Dell fanboy, but I really wanted an XT and I had really hoped that Dell would come out with something affordable, but that just wasn’t the case…

So fast forward nine months and suddenly I get an XT at the Dell outlet for a mere $650 (after discount, before shipping and taxes) and I’m considering replacing my trusty TC4200. Because the XT is newer, faster, thinner, lighter, better. Because the XT uses a Dell power supply. Because all my other laptops are Dells. Because the XT is a Dell. Something like that.

Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but there’s a big problem with the XT and it’s the same problem that convinced me not to buy an IBM ThinkPad X41T instead of my TC4200. The XT and the X41T both come standard with 1.8″, 4200RPM hard drives. The hard drive is already the biggest bottleneck on most computers and these dinky things are among the slowest of the slow hard drives. So I’ve gotta fix that.

An XT option is for a 32GB SSD which is generally quite fast, but costs something in the range of hundreds of dollars and none of the outlet machines ship with that 32GB SSD. So I decided to test out a relatively common  SSD improvisation on my TC4200. I bought a Transcend 4GB Compact Flash card and paired it with a SYBA Ultra IDE to Compact Flash adapter for ultimate Compact Flash win.

Windows XP Tablet Edition installed in a relatively quick 20 to 25 minutes and I had all my drivers installed within another half hour or so. I moved some utilities onto the drive and at this point, I was down to just under one of my original four GB, even without a page file. Windows bothered me about my disk space so I pulled out my secret weapon, an A-DATA 16GB SDHC Flash card, plugged it into the card reader and BAM!

Nothing happened. I thought there might be something wrong with the card (though I have never tested the reader, as I don’t own any SD or SDHC cards) so I plugged it into my main comp, a Dell Latitude E6400, and it showed up just fine. I thought about it for maybe half a minute before I thought of something bad, and Wikipedia confirmed it.

According to Wikipedia, SDHC cards were introduced in June of 2006. The TC4200 was introduced in mid-2005. Devices that do not specifically support SDHC do not recognize SDHC memory cards. That’s ghey.

Obviously the TC4200 wouldn’t specifically support SDHC since SDHC didn’t exist when HP released the TC4200. So that’s the end of my ultimate CF win for now, as I don’t really want to full up the 4GB CF card and I don’t like Windows’ annoying little space complaints. I might get a standard SD card, but I don’t really want to shell out any more, especially if I’ll use just end up using the 16GB when/if I buy an XT.

I guess it could be worse. The CF card could have been incompatible too…

I was up decently late last night, checking out the bands over at TADA Music, and after that I decided to watch an episode of Bounen no Xamdou. Sadly, I found myself constantly falling asleep while watching (it was 3am, and I was stupid). In the end, I gave up trying to finish the episode and went to sleep. I woke up at 8:45, cursing myself. But then I figured that there’s no use rushing to school now, since by the time I get there around 9:45, the class will already be coming close to an end. So I decided to sleep a bit more, and I woke up at 10:15. That was when I realized that my class started at 10, and not 9. I have no idea why I thought my class was at 9. No friggin’ clue. This is depressing stuff…

So here in California we aren’t really known for our load and loads of rain. This is quite unfortunate since I really do like a solid number of rain; this hot and dry crap that we know so well just doesn’t cut it for me.

I was in my car this morning listening to KGO and they were like, “yeah, it’s gonna pour this weekend” (not an exact quote, but that’s the idea). Whoo! As far as I know, the last time it rained around here was sometime in September - I had hoped it would pick up, but hope doesn’t seem to do much these days - and that was quite a while ago.

The best thing to do on a nice day - for me that could a really nice sunny day or a really nice rainy one - is to open a window, get in bed, and watch my anime. And that’s exactly what I intend to do this weekend. Not the whole weekend, of course, but a few hours at the very least. I’ve been waiting for this since the last rainy season (”rainy” is honestly an overstatement) season ended.

Try it out sometime.

This is one story where I pwnt an old hag. I work at a computer lab in a college that will be called Lambda for the sake of privacy. Yes, it’s a community college. So this old hag comes in, and stares at the screen of the computer which is used to for signing in to use the lab. She obviously doesn’t know what the fuck she has to do, so I decide to help her out.

Me: “Hello, do you need any help?”
Hag: “No, I’m fine. I just forgot my sign in ID. I’m old, I forget things. I’m older than you, at least”
…Uh oh, this isn’t going too well…
Me: “Have you been to this lab before?”
Hag: “Yeah I’ve been here before. I just forgot my ID, that’s all.”
Me: “Have you used this lab this semester?”
Hag turns to me.
Hag: “Didn’t I just answer your question? You know, sometimes I think you guys have thought processing problems. I just answered your question. What did I say?”
Man, what a bitch. I’m getting really annoyed.
Me: “Well, you told me that you’ve been here before.”
Hag: “See, I just answered your question and now you go ahead and answer the same question in a different fashion?”
You know what bitch, fuck you. How dare you fuckin’ insult my intelligence.
Me: “Actually, I asked you two different questions. The fact that you have been here in this lab before, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve been here this semester.”
Hag: “Thank you, young man.”

Hag rolls over to my boss, and mumbles to him. Later on, I found out that the conversation flowed something like this:

Hag: “I need to talk to someone who speaks English.”
Boss: “I’m the last person you want to see when it comes to talking English.”
Hag: “Oh I didn’t mean it that way… I think maybe we can communicate.”

Y’all can sure communicate alright, coz y’all a buncha niggers.

• It’s my first time in this Chemistry 1A class. 4 days of summer school has already passed, and I’m hoping I can add.
• Aluminium is the British spelling. I used to spell it like that all the time, but then when I came to the US, I saw it spelt “Aluminum” everywhere, to the point where I was convinced that my spelling is wrong. But today, as a response to some dude’s question (thanks dude!), the Prof. said,”We spelt it “Aluminium” back in the day, but when the uses of the metal(loid) became so popular, the trade name they decided to use was “Aluminum,” and since America has this tendency to stick to the trade name when referring to the actual stuff, the spelling “Aluminum” stuck (E.g.: Any bag that has that easy close, easy open thing is referred to as “Ziploc,” even if it ain’t a Ziploc).
• I hear the prof yells and directs insults at people who are late. Someone came in late, and he didn’t get yelled at!
• Wow, I didn’t know the noble gases had names like these:
  1. He: The one from the sun.
  2. Ne: The new one.
  3. Ar: The inactive one.
  4. Kr: The hidden one. (Or was it “The strong one”? Maybe Derek can correct me =p)
  5. Xe: The strage one.
  6. Rn: The radioactive one.
• Another late guy manages to sneak by without being noticed
• There’s apparently a quiz today which is not even as complicated as calculating the volume of a sphere …what?
• I’m bored =(
• Eww, the prof is drinking Diet Cherry Coke. Ew.
• The dude next to me is hella sleepin’. Doin’ it for the lulz, as you shall find out
• This feels like middle school
• OMG He’s explaining how to use a calculator and type in exponents. “Press 1, then press EE button, then 5…”
• Haha, I got offered a Rubik’s cube to kill time.
• Whoa, someone’s 40 minutes late, and the Prof. doesn’t say anything!
• I’m hella bored. I’m gonna see if I can write all the hiraganas. It’s been over a year now, since I’ve tried writing something.
• Finally, new lecture topic. Solving homework problems for an hour, eh?
• OMG I has handout!
• Okay after trying to write hiraganas, I’m missing 7. That’s like ~14% D:
• Plumbers are called Plumbers because back in the day they used to work with pipes mead out of lead. Latin for lead is Plumbum. Hence the name.
• Damn the textbook is hella heavy. My friend borrowed his text from another friend, and a lot of the words have been underlined and their phonetic spelling written over it. Wow.
• They need a Moya-like anime, but it deals with chemistry, and not agriculture. I’m sure the JP can do it!

Okay the class was actually yesterday, and what I covered so far was just one half of it. Yes, I just typed out all the “notes” I took in class on Friday. Fun, wasn’t it? :p.

If you’ve taken a look at the splash page at o.rangepla.net, some of you might notice that it’s really screwed up. Those some of you are probably using a browser other than Safari or Firefox and should refer to the aforementioned browsers if you want to see it working.

The problem is that neither of us actually know anything about the css that forms the basis of the splashpage, we just kind of looked around and copypasted what was applicable - which wasn’t a whole lot. The first version was originally written up in - and I quote - “ganky” old html and can be seen here. The second version was written with some css and some ugly greys and rainbow images and can be seen here. The second version probably won’t work in non-khtml based browsers either.

Anyways, the current getup here is a pretty big improvement from version 1 and still a step up from version 2. Both me and Amol were pretty impressed with how it turned out considering how we kinda meandered around simply trying to avoid that sixth hour…

Anyways, I’m taking an intensive japanese course at Stanford and at Amol’s request I’m posting some japanese vocab.

… and there’s a tad bit more but it’s all pretty blah expressions and this is taking forever. Anyways, pretty basic stuff. All the uhhh… objective pronouns in the beginning are for like “[objective pronoun] wa nandesuka” or “[objective pronoun] [noun] wa [question pronoun (dore, doko, dare)] [noun] desuka”. Ok, that’s it for this one.