The End
It’s been a while, but I thought I’d nail the coffin shut.
I will no longer be updating this blog- I will be focusing my blogging on Awakened Reality. EDIT: My blog is now at Raw Lantern.
I’m not much of a fanboy anymore, and I’m not into coding anymore.
Waking to the Real World
Today, I invite you to partake of my other blog, one focused on creating literature, and media in general. Unlike this one, the new blog is on paid hosting, and is collectively run by two individuals (including me), and has two additional writers at the time of this post. In total, there are four bloggers.
Do enjoy- AWAKENED REALITY.
Hodgman
Just recently, beginning a short while after 7:00PM, I went to a book reading for “More Information Than You Need”, by John Hodgman. For those of you with no clue about why and how this article ended up here, consider this. A man says, “I’m a PC.” While the man must sound like a blathering idiot for even suggesting that he uses a PC, remember the man behind it. He has a name, and tha name is none other than… Wait. Oh, right, John Hodgman. If you’re paying attention, you’ll realize that we mentioned him earlier.
Hodgman is a has a role in minor television, such as in The Daily Show. He uses, and has been using, several Macs. He is not one of those broken and ancient PCs, but rather, as he describes it, “A human being.” As of current, a writer of useless and made up trivia, and formerly a literary professional. Sorry, formerly, formerly a literary professional.
Dragon Age
I’ve been playing Dragon Age ever since it came out, neglecting my studies and even NaNoWriMo.
The game is really high quality, and I have yet to experience glitches or any game breakers. I picked up the Collector’s Edition, which came with a cloth map, in-game items, and a bonus DVD containing a set of wallpapers and the sound ltrack for the game.
The biggest problem for me was that the toolset install caused my Windows install to go haywire, which resulted in my upgrading to Windows 7. That, however, is a different slice of cake.
The game is rather well-built, and the graphics are pretty. With a little more work, it could even be a pretty good MMORPG. As is, it already feels like one with the expansive and attractive environments and gameplay.
College and Computers
It’s been a while since my last post on my party prior to starting school. At this time, I’ve finished moving into my new home for the coming year, and am in the process of getting used to the fast-paced life style of college. That means I’ll be busy.
The last few days have consisted of orientation and icebreaker events, so I have very few photos to show for my time here. Classes begin today, with Japanese, Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Expository Writing.
Cake the 18th
Holding a early 18th final birthday party event today, since I don’t want to bother with it during school.
square cake
I personally think that Round Cake is better than Rectangle, but apparently to person who decided to order the cake before I did has differing opinions. I didn’t even get to make/choose/find my own cake.
Amazon MP3 and Languages
I just bought one of my textbooks on Amazon, and they surprised me with this nice little “$5 Off Any Amazon MP3 Song or Album”. I’ve heard about the Amazon MP3 store for a while now, but I hadn’t had the opportunity, or the will to use it, since I was quite happy with iTunes Plus, which is still $0.99 for most of the songs I listen to. For this test, I picked up Shinskoku Dolce by Kanon Wakeshima. The quality is excellent, and I’ve been listening to the five tracks that I’ve selected for a while now. The service makes use of a downloader application available on Mac OS X (10.4.11+), Windows, and Linux. That’s a nice change from iTunes, which is only Mac OS X and Linux.
Despite how much I enjoyed it, there were quite a few major issues that really jabbed at me. First off is that the Amazon MP3 Downloader imports the downloaded MP3 into iTunes using the normal import process, so it doesn’t appear in my nifty “Purchased” playlist. The second would be that there is quite a small selection of music in Japanese. “Wait, Japanese?” One might ask.
I purchase most of my music in Japanese, since it’s a language that I can comprehend in music, more so than English. If it isn’t out there yet, my first language is Vietnamese, my second is English, my third is Japanese. Despite taking French classes in High School, it never really stuck. This may come as news as well, but my spoken ability to manipulate English has begun to deteriorate, despite using it 85% of the time. The other 20% being me speaking Vietnamese with my parents, and 5% Japanese that dominates my mental thoughts, and also covering my entertainment in anime.
Back on topic. I really would like to see Amazon offer the foreign language selection that iTunes has -I can even find Vietnamese music on iTunes more easily than Amazon. Amazon is a great way to save money when buying textbooks and looking to grab a few more songs for the school year, but would I recommend it as a dedicated store? Yes and no. It’s a great deal for someone who purchases English music a lot, but not so much for those of us who partake in “foreign” music and music in other languages.
The only confusing part of this is that Amazon has stated on it’s site (this page) that users will get a download free of charge to test the downloader. For me, it deducted from my 5USD credit.
A Week in West Michigan 2
A little behind on these, sorry.
My new Apple keyboard
Houses by the State Park
The Beach
At Panera's Bread with French Onion Soup in an Eco-friendly bowl
Productive Life
As pathetic as it may seem, just being away from a internet connection on my computer at the time of this writing is doing miracles for me. I’m able to devote more focus to doing some writing, and more focus on productivity. Provided, that is, all the people I’m traveling with are still between stages 1 and 2 of sleep, or are trying to return to sleep after being awoken by the sound of me entering the room, retrieving my laptop, and leaving. I am currently typing this in TextEdit.app, which has great support for word processing, especially with it’s ability to save in MS Word Document format, MS Word 2007 Document Format, Rich-text, and Open Document Format. Best of all, TextEdit.app is free with an installation of OS X.
Productivity is a major beast, thus it is locked away. Sometimes, the locks are hard to get through, and you end up procrastinating. I’ve seemed to be doing that as of late with this blog, and for the major part, my life. However, all that I really needed to do was to step away from people, and step away from the internet. With high speeds, and instant connectivity that comes from broadband connections, people begin to focus more and more one technology and less and less on that which needs to be done. This even applies to me. Back in High School, I had dreams on becoming a computer programmer, and that became my justification for sitting in front of the computer all day. Even now, my computer habits haven’t changed: Instead of programming or learning syntax and logic for software development, I am either surfing the internet, partaking in social networking, or typing blog posts such as this one. That was probably one of the reasons why the school blocked the instant messenger feature in Moodle, and social networking websites back in High School. Looking back on those days, and even yesterday, I cannot help but look down on myself.
To step away from all that, I’ve taken different steps. One of the first ones was to simplify social networking, but at the same time, opening up more opportunities through social networking. This process was simple. I was already using a handful of different social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter, deviantART, and SheezyArt. I also was a member of several different online forums and communities. My solution was to cut down on what I was doing between Twitter and Facebook. Using an application on Facebook, I set up my Facebook account to updated whenever I sent a tweet, even by SMS. That reduced what I need to only my cellphone. The next was to reduce the amount of clutter that I was creating by hoping back and forth between deviantART and SheezyArt. As I grew, I used my SheezyArt account less and less, until I didn’t use it at all. My art, if one could call it that, moved towards digital photography and rare scribbles with the tablet. In the end, deviantART became just a place to store photos, like flickr. The forums and communities? As I started my own site, FolornWatchers, I just stopped going to the competition.
That was when I took a turn with my life. Instead of laying around all summer and using the internet, I moved to a point where I ended up leaving home more often to be with friends. I was able to experience many new things that I had never thought I would do, swing dancing, sleep overs, even a drive in movie. I even managed to start enjoying rollercoasters, however I still don’t like going upside down at all. In the end, it was completely worth spending less time social networking and more time being productive and enjoying my life.
Hatena
School starting soon, and as a study guide, I’ll be blogging in Japanese at http://d.hatena.ne.jp/CocoaMac/.
Why is that? I ended up creating a Hatena ID through DSi Flipnote, so I thought, why not?
