tempest in a teacup

I’m not sure at what point I stopped celebrating my birthday. It might have been when I started college and realised that it occurred smack bang in the middle of Fall midterms. Whatever it is, at some point in the last…seven years or so I just lost interest in celebrating my birthday.

To anyone wondering what the relevance of my above statement is, I turned 25 on Sunday. And to mark the occasion, I, uh, worked on some slides for a presentation I have to give at work, and ordered some Chinese food.

Yeah…I’m not sure what’s up with me either.

About time for one of these posts, I think.

I’ve found a new place in downtown Seattle that I’ll be moving to next month. My current complex is honestly not that bad except for two problems:

1. The ISP choices are terrible (I currently have 1.5Mbps DSL, which is the highest speed available)
2. There isn’t really much of anything within reasonable walking distance

The new place has a supermarket on the ground floor (yay) and a few restaurants within walking distance. The ISP is Comcast, which may be dubious to some but I’m willing to go through the annoying setup process if it means I get a download rate from this century. The only downside is that I’ll either need to take a bus or a company shuttle to work, but eh, I need to start getting up earlier anyway. Getting all my stuff moved over is going to be a pain though…the number of my possessions has increased considerably since I moved to Seattle.

Speaking of Internet, I braved uTorrent a while back to watch some fansubbed anime, namely the first two episodes of K-On! I like it, but I probably won’t be able to watch the rest of it since BitTorrent basically nukes my connection (for reasons I haven’t figured out yet).

Still waiting for Sony to patch in PS2 support for the Madcatz SF4 sticks…I figure if it doesn’t come within another few patches I may just sell this to buy a HRAP3 (which does work for PS2 games). As it stands I need to use my old Tekken 5 stick over an adapter, and going from the awesome Sanwa joystick + buttons to the decent-ish Hori stick and buttons is…well, it’s like owning a Ferrari and driving a Honda instead, if you get my drift.

Installed iPhone OS 3.0 last week. My phone seems to be a lot more responsive now, so it’s obvious they’ve put some work into performance. I don’t use copy/paste much, but the push notifications have been very handy – I finally installed an IM client (Beejive) on my phone thanks to this new feature. Of course, if the damn thing supported background tasks in the first place this wouldn’t be an issue…

That said, I kind of wish AT&T didn’t want $400 from me for the 3GS. That new camera and faster CPU are really enticing.

I took out my guitar for the first time in months today, and all I can say for now is ‘wtf I suck.’ Hopefully this will change.

…

I fear for the future.

First leg of the flight was uneventful. The aircraft is a Boeing 747 so it has the older version of SIA’s inflight entertainment system…the one with Game Boy Color games.

I didn’t mention it here before I left, but I bought a new laptop in Singapore before I left, simultaneously dumping my five-year old Dell dinosaur. Before anyone asks, no, it’s not a Mac; it’s an HP Pavilion with a pretty decent graphics card. The last few days of my vacation saw many Outrun 2 sessions.

I don’t think I can use it on the plane, though…people have a habit of reclining their seats into your face when you do that.

Hopefully I’ll get some time to update again from San Francisco.

http://www.rajini.jp/

A fansite for a South Indian movie star in Japan.

WTF

Most people, when explaining a long gap in posting on their blogs, cite the problem of not having anything to write about. I have the opposite problem, in that there’s too much going on and I can’t decide what I want to write about.

Here’s a list of stuff that happened this week that piqued my interest:

1. The high-profile failure of Congress to approve the Wall Street bailout deal + my general anxiety at the economic climate
2. Cliff Bleszinski continuing to sound like a tool by saying stupid things like this and this
3. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood’s release (and subsequent evaluation by me)
4. My purchase of the original Fallout (1997) from GOG.com
5. Gintama being awesome
6. My falling sick and being kept sane by Qi clips and my DS
7. Sarah Palin proving herself to be a colossal idiot

In the end, I don’t even know if my next post will be about any of those things, because stuff that catches my attention just keeps on happening. Maybe I need to be more decisive…

So here’s a random screencap from Gintama:

Amazon is going to be having PS3 deals all day today (August 27th), starting at 12am PST for the big daily deal and then lightning deals every four hours starting at 6am PST. Just a heads up in case there’s some PS3 game or accessory that you’ve been on the lookout for.

And no, I don’t know what the deals are going to be in advance, so don’t bother asking. You can usually make a pretty good guess from the clues on the Gold Box page anyway.

EDIT: The list of deals is up – the daily deal is Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. The lightning deals haven’t been revealed yet, but here are my educated guesses:

6AM: Resistance: Fall of Man
10AM: Ridge Racer 6
12PM: Ratchet & Clank Future
2PM: Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
4PM: Devil May Cry 4
6PM: Warhawk

Looks like either games I have no interest in or that I already own. Urgh…

And now to pad out this post a little more, here’s what my desktop currently looks like (click to view full-sized version).

Why yes, I am rather obsessed with sandviches at the moment.

Somehow in the space of two hours I have managed to not only leave my cell phone at work, but fill my apartment with smoke. How did I manage the latter, do you ask?

Why, I cooked some instant noodles!

In the microwave.

Without adding water first.

Do you know what you get when you cook flavour powder, dried mushroom, dried rice noodles and oil in a microwave without water? You get a giant block of simmering carbon. And a crapload of smoke.

And my apartment STILL smells like smoke, 3 hours later.

Fun fact: this apartment I’m living is was refurbished after a fire accident prior to my renting it.

I really wish I could say that there was something important on my mind while I was engaging in this minor act of arson, but there really wasn’t…

Check out this neat piece of machinima that uses Team Fortress 2 character models (as well as a few other interesting ideas):

It’s not great, but there are a few funny bits.

Really good TF2 machinima has been in short supply for some reason. You’d think people would have had plenty of ideas by now…