Shoddy Internet Service

Geez, over the last few days, my internet at home has been ghetto! It will work decently for a minute or so, but then it will basically be so slow you can’t even surf the web. I got disconnected so many times last night while playing FFXI, and poor Chiriri is stuck on the airship right now. I’m not sure why there’s this major slowdown, but I can barely even use blogger, since it never finishes loading before timing out. If this keeps up, I might have to go harass Verizon, even if just to vent.

In good basketball news, my NCAA bracket is 14/16 at the moment, landing me in first place. In bad basketball news, my NBA Fantasy team got spanked last week, falling to third (Jason Kidd and Kenyon Martin injuries) and I am getting beat pretty badly again this week. I guess you win some, you lose some.

I’m still feeling sick and sluggish. With practically no internet, I’ve been catching up on reading King of Torts. It’s kinda cheesy, but still enjoyable.

Not Cool

Bleh, adding to a string of mechanical problems that have plagued me recently, my refrigerator doesn’t seem to work. It’s on its coldest setting, and has been trouble keeping anything cool for more than 2-3 days. I probably have calcium deficiency now, and it’s hard to cook anything. Hopefully the landlord will replace it soon. I also think I caught a cold on the plane back from Michigan. I’m kinda sniffly, and phlegmy, but mostly I’m kinda tired all the time (more so than usual). In other bad news, it seems that Lotus’ blog was taken down recently. Hopefully it will re-emerge somewhere soon, because that was some damn fine reading.

It’s not all bad, though. Yesterday, I was in a really skilled party in FFXI, and we were consistently pulling off Level 2 Renkei chains (Fusion) with double magic bursts at the end (Fire)! You know it’s good when the bottleneck in the experience treadmill process is the pulling, and not the fighting or the downtime from resting. Giants and wights were literally piling up at our feet. I was cheating though, and just watching for when the Black Mage starting casting fire to begin my own fire casting ^__^. The rest of the party thought that we were either uber, or totally in sync, haha. Our White Mage consistently had the most MP after every fight, since he was basically doing nothing. BTW, I found two interesting FFXI flash animations here, while browsing GameFAQs. I think Velius and I should get together to code up some simulations and linear optimization stuff to see what the best experience-gaining strategy/party really is in FFXI. W00t, ORIE for-evah!

I’m thinking about getting a (second) job at Princeton Review as a SAT teacher. It’s pretty flexible since it’s only about 10 hours a week, during evenings and weekends. I want to get ready for GMATs, and I think this will get me in test-taking mode. Especially for the verbal section. Plus then I get access to all of Princeton Review’s GMAT material for free or something. The pay is also pretty good, and will be going towards an expensive purchase for Bunky. I did quite well on the SATs, and barring any flub-ups on the short teaching audition, I think I have a pretty good chance at getting a spot on their staff (plus it would be only a 10-15 minute drive to work part deux). I plan to do my lesson on how to trim cat claws, even though I have never owned a cat. We’ll see how that goes.

In other site news, Sea Slugs! Anime Blog is doing very well. According to our CQ counter (CQ is awesome and free), we’ve been averaging about 50 hits a day and have shown double digit positive growth in every single week so far. We’ve got 12 series that are consistently reviewed, and one finished series so far. This project has turned out way better than I had originally hoped for, thanks to diligent work from Kungfucius and Ender. On the down side, my art site has kinda been languishing lately (ever since the Dell died). I really need to finish the Azumanga Daioh lineart so that I can start updating the site more often! I am pretty pleased with it so far (although I’ve since found out that Anko is not really a very important character in Naruto), so if I can just finish up the outlining, the coloring should be a breeze. A slow breeze ^__~.

Oh yeah, Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all!

Photoshop no Jutsu

I don’t know why, but I have this fascination with Photoshopping various FFXI screenshots. I’ve been experimenting with ways to render lightning and how to use various blending tricks, and here are the fruits of my labor:

– Ichi: Chiriri experiments with some lame fire jutsu. This one didn’t come out as cool as I would have liked.
– Ni: This one isn’t a copy. It’s Chiriri’s original technique. I’ve heard that gathering the chakra for this technique makes a noise like a thousand birds.
– San: When you’re really short, sometimes the only way to get people to recognize you is to dress in orange and become Hokage.
– Shi: Finally, Chiriri weighs in on this Naruto-Final Fantasy madness.

I wanted to do a Mog silhouette with a picture of those chakra paths, like how Neji sees people with his Byakugan, but I figured this might be more trouble than it’s worth. Nenene could have been a Tarutaru too, now that I think about it.

The Suspense!

I really should have had more faith, but I was starting to worry about Naruto. However, I simply can’t wait to see this animated. Even the seemingly unimportant characters are so important, and now I keep hearing that sad theme play in my head =(. Shikimaru is teh roxxor without a doubt. The manga is SO GOOD, and yet the anime is just as important (especially that music, sooya!). Too bad you don’t get the coolness of the hand seals in the manga. What’s the deal with pet pigs? Just like in Peacemaker Kurogane…

My legs are kinda sore so I’ve been hobbling around all day. It’s a good kind of sore, though. Playing massive amounts of Final Fantasy XI helped heal my eyes. I’m starting to get to the point where soloing isn’t an option, due to the downtime needed to recharge mana. Yesterday, I finally took down a Yagudo ^__^. My group member (a level 1 white mage) got all the items, though!!! Then on my way back a bunch of Crawlers ambushed me. It was like I was a monster and they were a group… Chiriri is at level 7 now.

BTW, in case anyone was actually wondering, Britney’s latest album is WEAK. What can I say, Napster is addictive when it’s legal (and Bunky pays for it).

Happy Veterans Day

I didn’t realize that we had today as a day off till late yesterday when my supervisor broke the news to me. There really is nothing quite like a pleasant surprise, especially when it’s a paid holiday. Although I mostly did housework and chores, it was still a change of pace, and I enjoyed it. I had a lot of raking to do today, and I was reminded of a professor from one of my Statistics classes telling us to take a moment to reflect on just how many leaves a tree had. I couldn’t figure out the exact number, but I’m guessing that it has to at least be in the tens of thousands, because there sure were a lot of leaves that needed raking.

I did a lot of ironing today as well. I never realized how easy silk was to iron. No wonder everyone loves it. I think I got starch overdose from spraying all the shirts. I find it curious that starch makes the process so much easier, but since it’s cheap and plentiful, I don’t ask questions. Ironing, like cleaning, really seems like a thankless task. If it didn’t make clothes look so nice, I don’t think I’d ever do it.

I finally got a chance to watch episode 6 of Fullmetal Alchemist. Apparently it’s “Fullmetal” and not “Full Metal”. That or it’s the other way around… I think everyone should blame Full Metal Panic (and its sequel) for all the confusion. This series is really starting out strong, and I hope it doesn’t disappoint. The birth scene was hilarious, and the story was still profound. I really like the mixture of seriousness and humor. Al’s face during humorous scenes is just wonderful!

Speaking of humorous, looks like someone cracked the e-taco. Just when you think your product is so poor that at least you won’t have to worry about security, something like this happens. Poor Nokia…

Finally, in Final Fantasy news, I’ve reached level 5. I’ve added caterpillars, various orcs, and some funky fish things to my list of creatures whose boxxors I’ve roxxored. I finished my first quest, too. I like how quests give the game much more direction (instead of just go out and kill everything and then make uber stuff with their remains, eww). While tedious, it had a pretty decent gil reward, and gil is very hard to come by in the early stages. I’m hoping to get Chiriri a new set of clothes soon.

CS

I restarted work on my Azumanga Daioh cosplay picture, and this time I was working in the new Adobe Photoshop CS. I haven’t really seen anything that would differentiate it from Photoshop 7 yet, but I don’t use it for much photo editing at home, only at work. Not that it would matter since the main strengths of the latest iteration (I guess it’s supposed to sorta be Photoshop seem to be color accuracy and I’m working on a LCD at work with a mediocre color contrast ratio. The only noticeable difference I have noticed so far is that the icon is a feather and this confuses me to no end when I look for the eye that is usually the Photoshop icon.

I’m not sure how, but the archives on this blog site have been updated to match the new formatting. I had tried to do this a while back (those colors… and the design… *shudder*) and my attempts were all dismal failures. Figures that I managed to do it accidentally without any planning or effort at all…

Oh yeah, in a moment of weakness I broke down and bought Final Fantasy XI from Amazon. Woo, free shipping. I’m already planning my TaruTaru red mage…. I am intrigued by the idea of a FF7 movie, although I did feel the game was rather overrated. Omnislash!