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		.: thursday 2.28.2002 updates be damned (day 3) ... i'm not sured when the damned'ness will end, but i'll hopefully be working on more substantial stuff over the weekend. so anyways, just cause i wanted to here's what my current desktop looks like as of 21:10 pst. enjoy, the wallpaper isn't all too inspiring, but i like it for the time being. and did you notice how there's only 2 mircs running? that's cause with mirc 6+ you get that multi-server feature thing that's really nice, so with one of them i'm on like 5 different servers, and that sure as heck frees up quite a bit of my memory, and that's a good thing. currently on the list: hal's 'the starry sky' .: monday 2.25.2002 updates be damned (day 2) ... randomly yesterday late night, ray asked me if i ever played any d&d, and of course like any geekish sort of person, i have. and question lead on to me somewhat flexing my probably incorrect recollections of that game and other role playing games. all i can say is that i played ad&d when i was in elementary school, circa the 3rd to maybe the 6th grade. and as a youngin' i didn't really care for the role playing parts of the game, all i wanted to do was hack some stuff up and make my character buff'dly cool. and to further that illusion that me and my friends could enjoy role playing, we would somewhat cheat and have some nice super powerful characters that started out maybe level 3 or so just because it takes more work and patience than a 10 year old boy has to actually build up a weak, weak character. i fondly remember (well try to remember) my level 5 ranger, probably appropriately named nick, who would run around decapitating monsters with a vorpel sword +3 (memories subject to change). and i never really went through any real quests, i think we tried to do a couple of modules but they didn't quite finish, so it was just kinda lets go randomly fight some insanely hard monster and beat it anyways cause we're cool and we control the game so we sure ain't going to lose ... it was all rather light-hearted fun. and why, oh why would i ever even play ad&d? well i thought it was a thing people just somewhat did. my brother played it and friends' brothers played it, so it can't be all that weird of a thing, so why not join in on the fun? and am i am (or used to be) one of those bandwagon sorts of people, that's why i have magic cards (i started when the legions expansion pack came out for those of you in the know) and why i got a n64 (my friends are nintendo fanatics). anyways, during those formative later elementary school years i think i also tried playing a couple other role playing games. i think i made a teenage mutant ninja turtles character (i think i was a mutated platypus or something cause i thought those things were cool back then) and maybe a gurps character too (my memories of this are really hazy). one of the cooler rpg that i tried, and think it might be still cool to try, was rifts, which is kinda a cyperpunk future thing that seemed pretty cool though impossibly complicated for a elementary schooler. well that's a look at the late elementary school years of nick, kinda eerie, isn't it? anyways, it's been a long, long time since i've even seen people playing any d&d (well i do like the bioware ad&d games), i hope it isn't too out of fashion, it's really a pretty decent thing to do (aside from the fact that it has even worse connotations of geekiness than computer programming). oh and did anyone actually watch that movie? now back into nvoltuae news, this news page for february is getting freakishly long. as i was trying to write the above missive, i ran into the size constraint of notepad so now i have to use wordpad (evil ...). well, february is almost over, so it'll be a nice clean slate in maybe a couple of days. currently on the list: our lady peace's 'clumsy' .: sunday 2.24.2002 updates be damned ... i finally got around to trying winamp 3, and i have to say that i was disappointed. even though i did read about people having performance problems, i really didn't think that it would apply to me. maybe it's just cause my computer has been running for 5 days straight, but it was not even close to slick. about 2 seconds to load and the visualization was all laggy looking. and on top of that it didn't have an always on top function which is how i always use normal winamp (nicely minimized and placed in the top-left corner). but mp3s still played ok even if everything else seemed to be in shambles, so i went on and tried messing with the various settings. for skins the alpha blending thing was pretty cool and you can make the basic winamp skin look more acceptable that way (blue is still my favorite color and as such, it makes things look nicer). so then i went and downloaded what i thought would be some pretty decent skins from a site, a couple wouldn't load (i think it was because i'm running winme, so maybe they just don't work if i can't do transparency), and the rest didn't look all that nice. the one nice concept i saw was a 'corneramp' which would rest above the start menu and take up a little bit of the corner of it, however since i don't have transparency when i load it it blocks out everything in that corner with a grayish-black border which is completely unacceptable. though promising, the skins were quite the failure, maybe i'm just too biased as a fan of the simple things (can't get much nicer than rectangles), so i stuck out the rest of my testing with the standard skin. one of the new features that was added in the new beta was video playback, and i was thinking that would be pretty nice (i'm always looking for something to replace the windows media player that i'm using right now, plus it's one less program that i have to worry about installing/keeping up to date). but either i didn't set it up right (well i didn't set it up at all, but i don't think you should really have do anything, should you?) or my computer is just too messed up but it wouldn't play any movies. i tried some divx stuff first, it'd get maybe a couple of frames then stop. then i tried some mpegs (they're supposed to be less cpu intensive aren't they?), a little more success, i would get maybe a couple seconds of play before it'd stop. so it was another failure, but i won't exactly rely on winamp for my video playback needs, though it would be nice (the problem with wmplayer 7+ is that it's bloated crap that shouldn't be used by anyone, the problem with wmplayer 6.4 is that it doesn't have a playlist feature). so rather discouraged and my machine struggling a bit more than it should, i uninstalled winamp 3 after an unauspicious hour of use. i'm still looking forward to winamp 3, it should be pretty nice hopefully (and if it isn't they had better still offer downloads of the 2.xx series), but i dunno i'm not looking forward to it as much now that i've seen it. sure, a lot of it is cause it's a beta, but it really didn't seem all too functional, maybe i just require too much refinement, which it sorely lacked. ah well, another hour of nick's boredom sated, but with dubious results. currently on the list: joydrop's 'sometimes wanna die' .: friday 2.22.2002 i finally got around to putting up my 'supposed' playlist. that is all. currently on the list: something corporate's 'punk rock princess' .: friday 2.22.2002 another couple of days another updated view. this time it's extra special because i did it all while on campus in the labs. i'm stuck here waiting until 3 or so, and i was bored enough indeed to waste time on updating some views. so don't be too sad if the newly updated view doesn't seem as refined as i've made my other views, the tools for spell checking and grammar are a bit more limited on the school's lab machine than my normal pc. also, there should hopefully be a song list up, but i dunno, i'll whip one together when i have time for it and am at home. and i'm rather pleased right now too cause i finally got my subbed read or die, it took a couple days of feverish searching, but i feel more complete now. now all i need are for the rest of all the anime series i'm following to finish up (the depth of my sickness is disturbing is it not?). oh and if you remember from last month me plugging the band something corporate and me almost wanting to buy their cd but not because it was ~$10 for 6 songs, well i got it today at the low low price of $4.32, and it is brand new too. stupid tower records and them selling the cd for $10 last month and $4 now, ah well i guess i can let it slide, i'm just happy enough to have gotten a new cd. currently on the list: sophie b. hawkin's 'as i lay me down' because 'it felt like spring time on this february morning' .: wednesday 1.20.2002 ah ... the only thing that spurs me to work on updating the site's content is me wanting to wax on about random things. pretty sad, eh? ah well, i didn't want 2 'no updates' posts in a row, so i updated another view. now to the main point of today's post, rod sadly enough was licensed (well as an anime fan i'm supposed to be happy, but that's only anime fans who spend money on anime [well money spent on stuff other than cd-r's]). sure licensing is good and all, but still i'm not going to buy that stuff (i don't have a dvd player, and the only tapes i have are disney movies). there is also more speculation that x is in fact licensed, but since there's nothing concrete, it's all good for now. so evil of me to be so proud of my leeching (i do have that leeching guide that i'm supposed to finish up sometime or the other). but back to rod, so indeed it was good of me to go to the anime club and get my view of the last episode, otherwise i would really be going crazy by know with frustration and speculation. and i do hope that i would support licensed anime stuff if it actually benefited me, but it doesn't so fansubbed stuff (licensed or not) is the way to go ... which brings me to my next point, i'm pretty sure that rod 3 is going to be subbed either way (in fact one group did finish fansubbing it this morning and didn't distro it, but it's still slowly getting around, hopefully), just because it's insanely popular and there's got to be tons of leechers like me who want to see it (well i have seen it so i'm a tad more special). but then if x is licensed, though i'm sure it has it's fan base as well, i don't know if a rogue group is going to do all that good of a job (should i even care as long as it's watchable?) with the last third of it. see that's the difference, it's a third of series (7) to sub compared to a single episode, and while i'm sure it would also get finished up, it's just more waiting. and like all leechers, i don't like waiting. but that's enough of my whininess about licensing and anime. i uploaded some more random stuff that most people don't care about but i think are somewhat nice. you can get mikuni shimokawa's 'tomorrow' and a pretty decent real video encode of the rahxephon opening (it's where that maaya sakamoto song that i posted is from). oh and an extra note about the mp3, it's an insane 320kpbs encode which kinda pisses me off since it's so huge, but at least that insures that it should be error free. stupid people who don't know how to encode shouldn't encode, or at least shouldn't distribute the stuff they have ... ah well, it's getting real late, and i still have all my homework and reading to do, so this was a nice waste of time i suppose (i'm still coping with the completion of the megatokyo archives that wasted so many nice hours). currently on the list: mikuni shimokawa's 'tomorrow' .: monday 2.18.2002 another non-substantial post, sorry all. the main reason that there aren't any updates is because i just blew away the last couple of hours reading megatokyo (it's just too addictive). but pretty soon i'll finish up the archives and then just have to deal with it as it comes out, so it'll only be a couple more days (probably less) of no work. i'm feeling rather liberated, as of today i almost have a sizable amount of free space (hmm ... maybe this is my chance to archive all those megatokyo strips ...). so i get to go willy-nilly about downloading stuff again, good times are here again (well for at least a couple of days, hopefully). on somewhat site related thoughts: i really wonder if i expect people to wander onto my site every day or at least every couple of days. i mean it'd be cool if people did, but i really doubt it, there really isn't anything to keep people coming back and again (maybe if my brain is suddenly overcome by creative juices for a month or so i would solidly crank out interesting material that would make that people want to visit my site). but then i'm not really doing this to be read by a lot of people (if i really cared, i would really learn how to do things super nicely, right now i'm still happy enough with readable plainness). it's like the whole blog, a diary but not and public too, which is what i guess these semi-daily news flashes are being reduced to. and that's what i guess i feel like doing nowadays, so whatever, until the creative juices start flowing this is about all there's going to be (various sighs of disappointment). oh and if anyone feels like telling me how to code (or maybe just coding for me) a script to make it easier to do these news updates, that'd be real cool. currently on the list: vanessa carlton's 'a thousand miles' .: monday 2.18.2002 this has probably been one of my least productive weekends. though i did meet with my cs group for 7 hours yesterday, that wasn't really all that fun. saturday i spent all day doing nothing and not really enjoying doing nothing either. but ah well, there's been some updating if that's what you care about. what's new in the site world? 1 more measly updated view ... it should be as much as you people could've hoped for. recently i stumbled upon megatokyo, and have somewhat been burning through it, and i deem it nice enough to get both a link and a banner. also i uploaded maaya sakamoto's - hemisphere for those of you who are interested. i imagine it'll be sitting there for a long, long time. it's pretty nice, i think it's one of the nicer new anime openings (it's from rahxephon). so yeah give it a listen, the mp3 is kinda screwy, but that's beyond my control. oh well dishes are looking pretty scary now, so i guess i'd better do them. currently on the list: ozworld's 'invasion - the chariots vii' .: saturday 2.16.2002 version history is all finished up for those you wondering why this is considered version 3.0. not much else aside from that, hopefully i'll get some more done over this 3 day weekend than i usually do. lately i've been thinking of address people 'ho's. so if i were to meet myself walking around campus i would go 'ho nick' and then nick would respond with 'ho nick'. i'm thinking that this would sound pretty weird though, so i will continue to refrain from using it. but it's pretty random of me to even bother trying to think of different ways to greet people. anyhow, i've been feeling really tired, so i think i'll maybe sleep. but must finish web site ... currently on the list: noriko mitose's 'radical dreamers' .: wednesday 2.13.2002 happy chinese new year! it's a tad late, but my updates don't follow any schedule, so this is the closest i could get. in site news, only 1 updated view this time, i'm heading into the 'm's so there's only so much more to do. i think i might get around to doing the 'about me' and 'v.3.0' pages soon, the fact that i haven't done them yet is starting to annoy me. my first cs project of the semester is going to be starting soon, so that might deter any work on this site, though hopefully it won't be too killer. besides i always have free time, it's just how i choose to use it (more often than not it's wasted surfing the web when it should be spent sleeping or studying, so taking a little less sleep and getting in some web work time won't be too horrible). i've been thinking about learning how to use vi, even though i am an emacs fan (by the way i use notepad to do all my html work just cause i use windows and ported emacs sucks quite a bit), just to lessen my ignorance of things; but like most things i feel like doing this will probably only be a half-hearted attempt (i've already given up on mirc scripting, but that was extra hard). i am a tech enthusiast (or at least i like to think that i'm one) so it should be require education or something like that. anywho, in nick world things are going ok if somewhat boringly and there probably shouldn't be much change there ever, but we'll see ... currently on the list: maaya sakamoto's 'hemisphere' .: monday 2.11.2002 no new updates, sorry ... today it's just some randomness that i felt like spouting. well to start the day as most of my days start i had to walk up the horrible hill that dominates the path from my apartment to the engineering buildings (it really is a horrible hill, especially cause it's only really steep where i live, not on the sides of it, only in the direct path that i take) and i just really couldn't walk up it today. i dunno if it is just because i came off a weekend or something but my legs were really killing me as i was walking up. so that wasn't all too nice of a start of to the day. well enough of that whininess, i went to my first anime club meeting of college life. it's probably not something i will really go to unless they really do offer something compelling like they did today (nothing less than subbed rod 3 before it has been fansubbed and released onto the net, apparently some dude in the club spent the weekend subbing the thing, so i thought that was pretty cool/impressive). i can usually, and usually do, get anything and everything that they do show way before they bother to show it and i dunno i don't like watching stuff in a classroom (so little legroom for my intense slouching). and overall i thought it was kinda cheesy how they just had some dudes computer play the episodes (though i guess that's better than video sources nowadays, and they are perks like in-house fansubbing, but it still seems to take away from the experience of just watching dvds or videos that i was expecting). so anyways, it seemed pretty ok overall (there was quite a bit more people than i thought there'd be), but it doesn't offer all that much. but rod 3 was very much so worth it all. i really can't wait until somebody does release it onto the internet, just so spiffy. more of the same and just so much so cooler than the previous 2 installments, it was just really nice. well that's it for my news of no substance. hopefully there won't be too many of these at least until i get all my views updated. currently on the list: course of nature's 'caught in the sun' .: thursday 2.7.2002 well it's that leisurely time of the week again, so the updates resume. and in store today is another 2 updated views (one was so appallingly badly written, that i'm surprised i didn't notice it before), and maybe more later today. if you didn't already know, there's a new mirc out (v.6.0) that's pretty nice. it's got multi-server support, which is all i really care about because now i don't have to have 5 or so mirc windows running at the same time. and with this new version i've been trying my hand at scripting stuff, but i'm pretty sure i'll get frustrated about it pretty soon and give up without accomplishing much. i'm somewhat happy on the random downloading front cause more interesting things seem to be coming out everyday. true most of the stuff that's coming is already licensed over here, but they're not yet released and i'm really not going to but that stuff anyways (so i'm not really robbing them of profits am i?). anyways, things i'm looking forward to: more rod, more furuba, more sos (hopefully), more fmp ... (congrats to those of you who could follow all of that) now with some more encouraging news, anime-daisuki has indeed relocated to a new server, so it's all nice and online again. currently on the list: abba's 'sos' .: friday 2.1.2002 my paper cut still hurts, but i don't feel so bitter anymore. another day, another update, things are rolling again aren't they? most of this is due, in part, to my schedule, which has panned out to be a total of 5 hours of school combined for thursday and friday, so i'll have lots of random time to do work on this poor little site. i also somewhat tediously spent some time bringing my html more up to spec, so everything should be pretty good according to the w3. and, as you should be able to note, i cleaned up all the old news and archived it away. on a sadder note, one of the sites that i visit semi-routinely just shut down (maybe temporarily?). to anime-daisuki i bid farewell. currently on the list: do as infinity's 'tangerine dream' old news