Cat Conversations (or I would like to think so...)

I enjoy talking to my cat. My dad thinks I'm crazy, but Comel does respond when I talk to her. While most would deem her responses as generic mixtures of different meow tones, the timing of her responses are amazingly accurate. So, I'd like to believe in my head that she does try her best to communicate. An example of our conversation this morning.

Me : Comel, I'm going off OK.
Comel: Meow. (I'm a Huuungrryy.)
Me : But you just finished a whole tin of tuna!
Comel: Meeow... (Well, I'm a growing cat...)
Me : You know the Dr. told you to watch your diet.
Comel: Meowrrr! (The Dr. can go and suck my paw!)
Me : I'm going to work. Chew on the rug if you're hungry.
Comel: Meurghh. (Whatevaaaa ugly man.)

She's cute like that.


-- Blogging off...

Warm Socks

You know what kinda sucks in the morning. Not being able to find a clean pair of socks. I was tempted again not to wear socks to work but thought otherwise, since words like discomfort, odor and foot disease kept nudging me in the head.

Out of options and desperate, I did the ultimate taboo and gathered the courage to rummage through my fathers wardrobe cabinet. Usually I wouldn't have the balls to do so, my father being very picky about people disturbing his stuff and all. But since he was away with my mom honeymooning at some distant land, he probably wouldn't even notice (Hell would ensue if he did of course).

Finding a pair of comfy Grey ones, I put them on and was hit with the realization that I haven't worn any of my father's clothes since my days in primary school. I remember every time he'd be off out-stationed, I'd go and rummage through his clothes looking for something to wear. Don't really know why, but I kinda enjoyed the feeling of his big clothes over me, the ends dragging on the floor when I walked around. The fabric felt comfortable and had my father's familiar scent, and was probably why I liked it so much. It wasn't long before my brother would do the same, and we'd end up being a pair of legless torsos skimming across our house parquet floor.

A warm fuzzy feeling enveloped me and made me realized how much we kinda missed our father when he was away. Probing further in to the memory, hoping to rekindle something more, a sudden chill jolted me. I suddenly recalled that my father didn't appreciate the idea of his favorite clothes being dirty, stretched and torn when he got back. The aftermath was usually not pretty. Feeling a lump in my throat, I swallowed and reminded myself to wash and put the socks back nicely as they were before he comes back.

-- Blogging off....

Rin', Mesmerizing Shakuhachi

Rin is a musical group that I came across when looking for modern hybrids of traditional Japanese folk music. The music they produce aren't a lot, but they compensate with extremely enjoyable to listen tracks. The Shakuhachi is a traditional Japanese flute which is very prominent in Rin''s music.

Here is one they are most known for: Sakura Sakura
Go ahead have a listen.

I suggest you listen while sipping a cup of hot green tea. Good for those stressful moments at work.

If you want to know more about the group here is a wiki about them in detail.

--Blogging off...

Kicked the sand castle

Well, I finally did it. Deleted my friendster account. Since making my move to facebook it didn't really make sense to have two different web apps spilling the beans on my life. Call me paranoid, but I try to keep my personal presence and information minimal on the web. Ever try putting your full name in google and seeing what pops out? You should, it'll give an idea how exposed you are on the web.

I've been using friendster since 2002 and so it makes the profile around 6 years old. I will definitely miss the extremely slow servers, incoming spam, clunky interface and constant down times that friendster adequately provided. Did I have any doubts before pressing the "cancel your account" button? Sure, a bit. Just hit by a pang of nostalgia by the people I've been able to stay connected with because of it. Which quickly dissipated upon realization that they are other much more effective alternatives to stay in touch, such as the good ol' phone call or the ever so convenient e-mail... and there is facebook. Haha...

Doesn't it bother you that having a personal profile on the web has somehow turned in to a required necessity? Oh well, here we go again.


Blogging off....

Digital me...

NXE (New Xbox Experience) update is out! The usual bells and whistles, however there has been a big revamp on the themes and gamer picture department. Now you are able to represent yourself with a digital version of you. Sure it's a bit cheesy, but hey it's fun, especially if you know your online buddies in person. (^_^)

Look mom! it's a digital me!

Blogging off....

Gears of War Party 1: Melaka Durian edition (part 1)

Date: 12th July 2008
Venue: Maxshinoda's home of residence
Activities: Gears, Bomberman, Durian consumption, Melaka Sightseeing.
Attendees: Maxshinoda (host), Friction, Ospe, Hasukyo

DAY 1
As planned (or more accurately, 5 hours after the planned time of departure... haha), we started to head off to Melaka to visit Maxshi and his promise of a truckload of Durians. The trip was uneventful, with nothing interesting along the way except a single incident where we mistakenly identified Maxshi as a motorcycle ice cream vendor.

After meeting up with Maxshi, he lead us to a nice condominium facing the beautiful ocean, where we would be spending the night. With Maxshi back off to work (and to pick up the durians), the three of us ended up walking 2 km to the nearest mamak for a bite to eat and drinks to quench our thirsts. After receiving peculiar stares from the table across (probably because of our discussion on whether devouring children would be beneficial or not: please refer to 'Bioshock'), we decided to leave the mamak shop and head back to the condo to freshen up.

It was a night of good food, delicious Durian, Gears extreme 4 player hosting matches, split screen headaches and Bomberman fun...

Good food:
Maxshi fiancee was nice to cook us dinner. The food was excellent, and I ended being the last one to finish (and Hasukyo the fastest as usual). It's been awhile since I ate 'sambal petai', I did have my fair share of them, but not to the extent of Ospe, who was feasting delightfully on them... haha... Maxshi also proudly introduce the other inhabitants of his home, which were a family of flying squirrels.


Gears:
After having a dinner, we proceeded to power on both Maxshi's and Ospe's 360. Using a router and split screen accounts, we did the unfair and started a room where all four of us had host advantage... haha... Complaints ran through out the games, with unfortunate visitors discovering that 4 local hosts resulted in more lag and more annoying hosts to cope with. Unfortunately playing in split screen proved to be quite a challenge and four of us ended up paying the price, especially in escalation. Overall, extreme fun, though split screen was slightly undesirable. Maybe one day we can have a LAN game with 8 Xbox 360s connected (Yay! no host advantage).


Delicious Durian:
Our Gears run was interrupted temporarily by the smell of durian, which meant that Maxshi had started cracking them open. The durians tasted great; my first durian in 4 years, it tasted as good as I remembered it to be. Hasukyo and Ospe joined shortly after we had our fill of as much durian as we could eat (as promised!).


Bomberman:
After we were burned out playing gears, Maxshi suggested that we play Bomberman. Surprisingly, Ospe never played Bomberman. At the beginning, most of us ended up on a personal suicide run, falling pray to our own planted mini explosions. Slowly we started to pick up on the gameplay, and honestly in my opinion, Bomberman was as if not more fun than the Gears session we had. Ospe was indeed at a disadvantage, being a newcomer and having no place to hide to chainsaw people, ended up strangely silent through the ordeal... haha... After a few rounds of rounds, everyone agreed that it was time to sleep and we headed back to the condo.

Next day we headed to Melaka (pics too) and a brief stop at PD>> Stay tuned for day 2 of the blog.

Blogging off....

Confrontation, facing it in the face

Everybody will come to a point in their life, where they consider themselves to have already achieved a certain level of satisfactory wisdom (by personal opinion of course). Symptoms of this disillusion are usually accompanied by familiar statements such as, "I can handle any situation that's thrown at me", or the familiar "I should listen more to myself rather than other people", or the more severe "My opinion is better than yours".

The biggest symptom of course, is when you constantly regard your opinions or thoughts higher than any other person's. Where your words seem to encompass the whole conversation and other people's words are but trivial. Of course to some degree, this is an exaggeration. But as a member of 'disillusion-wisdom-anonymous', I can tell you how warm and cozy it is to be in the 'I am wise' zone, and how much it is a strain and a pain to dip your toes in the cold freezing waters of anything else around it.

The disillusion, like most things that seem good, do not last. Rest assured, slowly, bit by bit, the zone will shrink, until one day you'll look over the edge, peer curiously at your own reflection, accidentally slip and drop face first in to the cold ice-like water. The sub temperature liquid numbing your senses. Your once warm lungs filled with frost. The realization of ignorance blinding your once sound judgment. Gone are the feelings of confidence, gone are the walls of dependability, gone are the mounds and hills of self-esteem. The only thing left is a husk, confused and lost.

Are things forever lost? Will the binds of confusion hold on?... Probably not. Fortunately, it is nature for people to persevere. Slowly you'll learn how to wade in the cold water, slowly will the vast span of water be more a blessing to you than and curse. Sure, you won't be as warm as you were before, but your strides will be long and you will be able to reach far. Farther than you thought you could.

The only regret going through your head being "Wouldn't it be great and a lot less painful if I could have dipped myself in the cold water slowly leg first".

Note:
I am lucky to have so many people around me to learn from (whether you realize it or not)... all I need to do is listen. If you happen to be reading this, thank you.

Blogging off....

Quotes of Character

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." -- Abraham Lincoln.

I bumped in to this while browsing some sites. It's one of those that are clearly obvious but hit you just as hard. I admit I'm not a fan of US presidents, but a few do deserve to be at the helm at the time.

Blogging off....

Discovering the beauty of Podcast (part 2)...

Back to the topic of podcast. The best way to describe it is, 'radio with choices' but with different content. Mainstream wave signal radio stations mainly runs the recent popular songs, with a bit of news and commentary on the side. However, Podcast content are rarely songs, but usually shows that involve a group of people discussing a topic. Imagine a talk show with a much more focused listening audience. Interest range from the usual news to the eccentric 'how to make your cats do tricks' topics.

Honestly, this form of material isn't that new on the Internet but what Podcast has done was integrate all this material to one common down loadable format and making it easily accessible without browsing through pages and pages of eye hurting, ad popping, turtle ass slow loading websites.

Which brings us to iTunes. All you need to do is download iTunes from Apples website (you don't need an iPod to use iTunes) and and go through the usual boring process of installing and running it. After that head over (click it!) to the iTunes Store which icon can be distinguished as a green shopping bag (bad choice of colour in my opinion. Never seen a green shopping bag before). Conveniently situated on the top right corner, use the the search field to look for any topics you like. Some are free, some are not, either way choose to download it by clicking subscribe. It's as easy as that. (Tip: click on the price field to lump all the free Podcast together for easy browsing).
It'll download the recent podcast for that show and you can get to the previous shows by clicking on the arrow button beside the title. To browse or listen to your content, just click the Podcast icon on the left bar. Here you can listen, delete and unsubscribe to all your podcast shows. Again, use the arrow button to access all the previous download and down loadable content.
The beauty of the iPod is that I can just sync it up with my iTunes and bring all these Podcast everywhere I go. Listening to what I want to, when I want to, where I want to, as much as I want to. It's excellent. Of course you don't need an iPod to get iTunes, so you can just use your computer to listen to all the downloaded Podcasts.

Try it out. For all those who want to learn Japanese, I suggest subscribing to 'JapanesePod101.com'.

Blogging off....

Discovering the beauty of Podcast (part 1)...

Honestly, I never liked Apple. Must be the engineering bone that's grown in me. I find no logic in the disgusting conduct of purchasing an overpriced PC for the sake of user-friendly set-up times (and avoid hours of fun struggling with drivers installations?*...where's the fun in that?), seamless user interfaces and overall product design that's suppose to lift you on the altar of unparalleled 'coolness'. And for the same exact reasons, I despise the iPod infestation spreading throughout the world.

Hence pops up a saying "without ability to afford, comes hatred", which I claim as my own.... Shamelessly taking it from another saying I care not to mention (hint: has something to do with lack of knowledge and fear).

Due to some stroke of luck or a faulty internet campaign, I was graced with a free iPod Nano with the registration of my broad band internet service (being a customer in Japan is full of perks). Not that I wanted one, mind you. They just gave it to me, and I had a devious plan of selling it of to one of the second hand electronic shops for a bit of cashola.

I stopped the urge, and decided to give the iPod a try. I mean if half of the mobile music listening community is using it, it has to have some good experience bundled in. Unfortunately, after 2 weeks of music listening I was left unimpressed. The sound quality, though not ear bleeding does leave something to be desired and the iTunes/sync mechanism was a bit too clunky for my liking. Another one of those "I own coz' I'm cool" items.... or so I thought.

I was ready to call it quits, pack and sell it off to salvage what I can, when suddenly I stumbled upon something called Podcasts...... (to be continued - I promised it'll take less than a week, cross fingers >_< )

*asterisks are scattered in my blogs to identify points where I express 'sarcasm'

Blogging off....

Designed Icon

Icon done by my creative Japanese friends (hats of to Tanechan), who is also the moderator for the upcoming leveling up site (no to be confused with the leveling up blog site). Probably will be used for that site as well. And yes, both (site and blog) are terribly behind schedule and have received less attention than i would care to admit. (T_T)...

Treading the unknown...

Have a few projects rolling. Might make it work if i put my head in to it, and other distracting elements out.

In any case, this blog has received as much attention as the unwashed rotting shoes on my balcony. I'll have to get this blog up and going as usual. I'll probably start by dumping away those shoes first... hmmm.....

Blogging out....

Degradation of E-mail Convenience

A few years back, I still remember getting my first e-mail account. Rocket mail... ah the memories. For the first time in my life, I'd be able to send a message with just a touch of a button. Sure in that time we weren't graced with rich formating, hyper links, I'm-gonna-send-you-my-whole-freakin-life story sized attachment, but it did what it was set out to do... Reach.

You send it, it gets there. Nothing more simpler than that. I didn't have to worry whether or not my friend was getting the junk (let's not ask what 'junk' is shall we) I was sending, or whether the girl I had a crush on got my heartfelt words (as convenient as it would have been at that time to blame the technology for the lack of replies (T_T))... Well not anymore, those sweet days are over. Without even knowing it, the words that you took hours to pour your heart in ends up being gobbled away by some cold-hearted spam filter.

The thing is these days, almost 70% of mail that comes to your inbox is SPAM. Earth defiling scum ridden SPAM. Since seeing 300 mails urging you to 'power up' or investing in some Nigerian con fund is hardly an attractive reason to check your inbox regularly, spam filters were created. Sure these things are a miracle, and without it life would be full of deleting-while-cursing episodes, but the thing is spams are getting more elusive and as response spam filters are getting much more aggressive. Too aggressive at some points.

Spam filters function on a basis of setting up blocking algorithms. Certain words, company names, flags, hyper links, not-so-friendly terms, length of mailing list, English only? (true for some japan mail servers), the list goes on and on. So long are the days of sending a mail to a long list of buddies about your recent exploits. There's always a chance one of your mail won't be received or simply pushed over to the abyss of bulk/spam box, where is will lie shivering lost in a stream of crap, doomed not be read till the end of time.

To know it'll definitely reach. It's a convenience I can't live without.

Blogging off....

Overconfident Asimo

Goes to show that even with 8 different sensors installed, its always a good idea to look where you're going when going up stairs. Pity the poor guy, maybe they should install some handrails instead.

Just in case you can't understand Japanese, it was still saying "see like a human i can balance and walk up stairs!" even after the face first fall. Brave lad, that asimo. Brave lad.

Blogging out....

I'm back!

Boy this sucks. The reason I ditched this blogger site, was because of the ammount of freakin blog spam you get. It bugged me SO much I had to desperately settle by blogging on my friendster blog account. I know... 'lame', but hey it was convenient and deleting blog spam is definitely not on my 'favorite past time' list.

Well after a tol-taking 15 mintues of comment blog spam deleting triathlon, I'm back (increase chances of calpal tunnel perhaps, but neverless back). I just wished this blogger service provided an option to delete comments in bulk rather than painstakingly doing it one by one.

Well I'm back on working on this blog. Wish I had one of those 'protect me from spam' amulets. Spam = Pure evil.

Anyway, just a link to my friendster blog. Nothing much. No spam at least.

Anyway, if you have any tips to share on how to handle spam let me know. I currently moderate my comments for the time being (which actually means blog spam -> mail spam), but at least I can delete it easier.

Blogging off....