*End of journal*

My mom has cancer.

I went on a quest yesterday.
Visiting every campus cafe.
In all the little refrigerators
stood the little soda bottles.

White caps! White caps!
They all have white caps!

I went to stewarts and walmart and a few other shops.
There was even more soda in even bigger bottles.

White caps! White caps!
They all have white caps!

So discouraged and heart broken I sit in the 2nd floor of the library today.
Peering out of the window, what do I see???
W00t!!! A PEPSI TRUCK!!!

They've come to refill the vending machines!
On my way to class I see him stacking the machines with those special yellow-topped bottles.
Oh happy day! Only fifteen days late!
After class, I visited that very machine and put in my dollar and what do I get??

A white cap! A white cap!
OMFG!!! It has a white cap!
That asshole put all the new soda in the back!

Yea....this sux.

To The Evil One,

It has been almost 2 years since you decided to make me the guinea-pig for your psychological experiments. Do you remember this week? Tomorrow will be exactly a year since the most traumatic day of my life. I started to trust you, and you led me into a trap and punished me. I hate you. I hate all your evil minions/friends too. I have decided to forgive you; exactly one year from that day. However, I hope I never see you again. Please tell them all to leave me alone. They are not helping. I have said it that you are wasting your time. I will not play your game. I won't change because I don't want to and I shouldn't have to. But even if I did have to in order to get what I want, that is *My* business/problem not yours. You're always making things worse. Go the hell away.

Heyo! Okay, time for an update:
Graphics card:I'm running a new and recent driver (released a few weeks ago) from nVidia and everything works perfectly.

Interplay: Yeah, they went out of business a long time ago. In fact, it was shortly after their license agreement with Paramount to allow Interplay to publish Star Trek games expired. Why am I mentioning it now? Because I just reinstalled Star Trek New Worlds. Anyway, since you probably didn't know, New Worlds was released before it was finished and was so buggy that you couldn't even complete the federation campaign.. Yet I bought it anyway (because after 2 months the games was selling on ebay for $20 AND I had been hanging around the Interplay New Worlds message boards for almost a year in anticipation of this game).. Needless to say I was incredibly disappointed that they didn't fix the bugs in the game before it was released. Anyway, chucking the game on the shelf and fast-forwarding to 6 months later, they finally released a patch that made the game "completable". (Note, there still exists some very serious difficult-to-avoid-and-happens-all-the-damn-time crash bugs in the game even after the patch). Of course PC Gamer and other game review sites had already evaluated the game and I recall PC Gamer or Gamespot giving it a rating as 28% ("Terrible!").. Why am I going into all of this? Well because I need the patch for the game to get past the "defend the Talbot base from the Klingon Bird-Of-Prey" objective crash bug on the 8th level of the federation campaign. And I can't find the patch anywhere. This *really* sucks. The demo of the game is available at 3D-Files and FilePlanet, but I can't find anyplace to get the patch to fix the objective bug. *sigh*

C&C Renegade (First Person Shooter): Now this is a great game. I've had this sitting around on the shelf for almost a year and never got around to beating it until a few weeks ago. I'm glad I waited to get an awesome graphics card before really getting into the game. The graphics are absolutely gorgeous cranked to the max with 8X Anisotrophic filtering and 4x Anti-aliasing. Two pictures from the web that really don't do the game justice:Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2
.. The ending of the game was short but awesome. Shooting yer way through hundreds of these Tiberium enhanced warriors to save a girl who is strapped down to a table undergoing the treatment by that evil blonde Russian-accent speaking Doctor chick (who is also a traitor for leaving GDI to do nasty Tiberium mutation research for NOD). It soooo reminded me of Final Fantasy VII when Tifa were chained down to that table and you (the main character) had to dress up as a girl and go rescue them from that fat horny guy in the mansion.
So after beating C&C Renegade, I've been playing it online for a while. There has been some unofficial fan-supported patches for the game that fix some bugs, takes care of some exploits to prevent cheating and adds a few new maps and features. Pretty cool stuff, but I'm starting to get a little bored of this game. Playing any First Person Shooter on the Internet with a 56k modem really blows.

Warcraft III:I'm finally starting to get bored of this game as well. I stopped playing Defense of the Ancients a few weeks ago (my favorite multiplayer custom map). All the multiplayer custom maps are starting to have the same flavor. Even though they are very different. Kinda tough to explain. I've been hanging out on the Asian server a little bit more.. Its funny that the game names that they use are usually very short like "..." "come" "foot war" and "TD...". Yes, I do have Japanese support for Warcraft III enabled, so I can view Japanese characters, but people simply don't use them for game names. Also of note, On the U.S. servers, the game names are always long, for example "DOTA 3.8 Join Fast!!!", "TD NO LEAVERS/LAGGERS/FAGS!", and "BattleShips come git Ownt!!" I found that facinating.
Anyway, I'm runnning out of games to play, but thats a good thing because school starts Monday and I'm not going to be doing any slacking this semester!!

I think I'll pull out the Dreamcast (haven't played on it in a while) and play some Soul Calibur, today I accidently got DOA aka. "Dead Or Alive" confused with DOTA (Defense Of The Ancients)... wow... They have nothing in common.

Ah! My Goddess: The TV Series Okay, now for the REAL NEWS!!! The Ah! My Goddess TV Series started airing on January 6th (DAMN!! How could I have missed that???) and they have already aired 4 or 5 episodes!!! You can torrents for it ALL OVER THE WEB!! I can't wait until I get back to school so I can transfer them to DVD-RWs (I'm going to SSH into a Linux box in the computer lab tonight and download them hahahah) this is freakin awesome... This is the kinda thing that could really and seriously screw up my "no slacking this semester" gig... Getting back into this series will really pull me into my Japanese studies again at the severe detriment of my school studies. That's not even the half of it... On top of that, I'm also taking a Japanese Art & Culture Revolution class. This is shaping up to be one freakin awesome year!!!!

Yeah, I've got a lot of stuff to do, so.... Tootles...

P.S. "Tootles" is what Tpunge, the System Administrator of the best Renegade server says when he signs off for the night (Note, by "best" I mean the only server where *I* get a ping less than 400ms!!)

UPDATE 12/21/04: My issues with this card were resolved over the weekend, as it turns out, it WAS just a driver problem. The card doesn't work properly with nVidia's generic All-In-One driver package or the card manufacturer's branded version of the same. I finally found a driver (6 months old though) that works perfectly and passess all the DirectX tests. So I decided to keep the card. Also, I was having troubles with system crashes in WinDVD, but that was resolved (with a little bit of help from the card manufacturer) with the generic Hyperion "4in1" driver package from VIA. The driver package isn't signed by Microsoft though, *mumble* *grumble*. I also need a BIOS update to take use of 2X AGP (since the singal integrity on the Irongate chipsets when running at 2X AGP causes system crashes. I had this problem with my Radeon 7000 in Linux also). I'm never going to do a BIOS update though because the last time I did it (4+ years ago), I had to buy a new mobo after.

Old post below:

Wow, this card is awesome for gaming. I'm able to crank the graphics detail all the way up in Quake 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, C&C: Renegade, and even Warcraft III. The graphics look absolutely beautiful, who could ask for me??

Me I guess. Today I subjected it to my first round of DirectX 9.0c compatibility testing and I was rather disappointed. Here is a summary of the results:
1) DirectX 7 Compatiblity [failed completely in dxdiag, (no spinning cube)
2) DirectX 8&9 compatiblity passed in dxdiag, but further testing shows that the card really isn't 100% compatible.
3) OpenGL compatiblity, 100%.. As far as I can tell, in OpenGL 1.4, this card can do EVERYTHING.. Except now there is an OpenGL 2.0 and nVidia hasn't made this card compatible with it yet. Not a good sign.

There's a Toms Hardware logo right on the box. How could they endorse a card that fails such tests??? Well, my guess is that Tom's Hardware doesn't check for this kind of stuff, they just run the benchmarks. I wish they did check for this kinda stuff, then I would known something before I bought the card.

Why am I so nit-picky?? Partly because the nVidia slogan is "The way it's meant to be played" and then they don't even make cards that are DirectX compatible. This is absolutely hilarious if you think about it. nVidia was in bed with Microsoft for 2 years or so developing HLSL/Cg. Why the heck can't they make a DirectX compatible video card? What's going on here?? I can't get a great development card from the company that BUILT the High-level programming language for shaders??? Well..On the bright side, this card does shaders wonderfully. In fact, it handled just about every pixel and vertex shader effect I had (from both ATI and nVidia with the exception of the motion blurring effects)

So anyway, my Choices: 1) Sit on my butt and pray that they release a driver update (since DirectX 9.0c came out Summer 2004) that fixes the issues with the card.
2) Take it back to newegg.com, get an 85% refund, and take a chance with an ATI card that actually says "Full Support for DirectX 9"

I really don't like option #1, as a DirectX developer, you need to have quick driver updates that have full DirectX copatiblity. **PERIOD** It's essential, no "ifs" "ands" or "buts". Besides, its too risky. If they never release a driver update, I might have to buy another graphics card next year just so I can develop DirectX 10 programs.

The ATI card I'm looking at getting as a replacement gets *OWNED* by this card on the benchmarks, but thats not as important to me as full DX compatiblity.

How bad can these DX compatiblity problems with this card be?!?!
Bad... real freakin bad...
Future games will be built on Direct X 10, if yer card can't even do DirectX 9 properly, the DX 10 application/game sure as hell isn't going to run properly (even though DX 10 is backwards compatible). Its as simple as that.

Ok... So the card is going back next week if I can't find some way to fix these problems (I'm working on it nearly 24/7, tried different drivers from nVidia, and the card manufacturer, I tried nVidia's generic driver, hell, I even tried installnig the "Runtime" version of DirectX instead of the development version.. So far, I've had no luck.. Honestly, I'm a little sad to see it go, on some levels, I was getting almost 90fps in Return to Castle Wolfenstein (with 4X Anti-aliasing on). Pretty damn impressive since my CPU is only 600 Mhz. Unfortunately, this card is not a development card, and I wanted to do some DirectX programming over the winter break.

So I'm *very* glad that I started testing this card early. I only have 15 days to return it, if I had waited till Christmas to test it, I'd be screwed.

Holy crap I think I just flunked DirectX... Like 50% of the test was on Pixel shaders.. Which could only be completed if you had your vertex shaders written properly first. omg... the horror. I did soooo bad It's not even funny. 2 hours and 24 minutes I was there. Last one to leave. The whole final was on material in the last 2-3 weeks of school. That sucks. No, that REALLY sucks. I'm going to go home now and pray for the rest of the night that the teacher will give a curve. From the looks of things thus far (Post-Mortem in the Lab room right now hahah), a *lot* of people did better than me. Its not fair.. When asked by someone in the class, he hinted that the final was going to have everything from the whole semester on it (10 weeks) and well. ... It freakin didn't... He was freakin bluffing.. This sux.. I luv DirectX.. Its my favorite class.. But its not fair.. I mean hell.. I don't even have a graphics card that I could program pixel shaders on (though I just ordered my GeForce FX 5700LE earlier this week and it should get here by Friday). The computers at school have crappy built-in-to-mobo Intel graphics chips that can't even do Lighting properly. Of course you can still write pixel shaders using the Reference device (software rendering done entirely in the CPU), but then you need a fast CPU (2+ Ghz). My computer doesn't have that kinda hardware, but the computers at school do.. But it sux using the reference device, because you
1) Reposition a 3D wireframe of the object
2) press space bar
3) wait 5 sec.
4) Result is rendered

As opposed to a card that supports pixel shaders where
1) Reposition the fully rendered 3D object
2) Result is rendered real-time

Ok, I've calmed down a bit now. and I'll admit to a bit of exaggeration. I didn't do as bad as I'm saying I did, but I know I did't get any higher than an 80 on the test...
Can't wait till I get my graphics card this week.. I'm gonna freakin own at coding pixel shaders.

So I decided to fill out some stuff (thx to ff9bibi for the template)...

I have been a bad bad boy. . .

(x = yes)
[ ] been drunk
[ ] smoked pot
[ ] kissed a member of the opposite sex
[x] rode in a taxi
[ ] been dumped
[x] shoplifted
[ ] been fired
[x] had a job
[ ] been in a fist fight
[ ] snuck out of your parent's house
[ ] been arrested
[ ] stole something from your job
[ ] celebrated new years in times square
[ ] went on a blind date
[ ] smoked a cigarette
[ ] gone on an airplane by yourself
[ ] broken a bone
[ ] had sex in a car
[x] white lied to a friend
[x] had a crush on a teacher
[ ] celebrated mardi-gras in new orleans
[ ] been to europe
[ ] made out in a movie
[ ] taken caffeine pills
[ ] been to disney land
[x] had a crush on someone you hardly knew
[ ] been to california
[ ] been skinny dipping
[x] regretted something
[ ] peed on someones lawn
[x] skipped school
[ ] thrown up from drinking
[ ] lost your sibling
[ ] been butt naked bangin on the bathroom floor
[ ] kissed a member of the same sex
[ ] had sex with a girl
[ ] had sex with a boy
[x] been in a car accident
[x] partied for days and days straight (1 0nCE B0UGHT 4 BuncH oF 2-lITeRS 4nd c3Le8R@T3D +He ENd Of tEH $choOL y3@r 8y dRiNK1nG 50D4 @nD pL4YIn9 KW4k3 3 B4+TL3 0F +H3 53X35 MoD (u$3D t0 Be a DevEL0P3R f0R i+) FoR N3@rLY 5 daYS STRA1Gh+... ph3Ll 45l33P 4t +3h k3YbO4rd @Nd h4D a 5orE NecK PH0R AboU+ h@LF @ M0NtH. 0H +HE P@IN!!)
[ ] had a family member die
[ ] played 'clue'
[ ] had a sleepover party
[ ] went ice skating
[ ] dropped x
[ ] been cheated on
[ ] had a boyfriend/girlfriend

Wow... my form has a LOT of emptys! Guess that means I haven't been a bad boy! ok... on to the next one

THREE NAMES YOU GO BY:
01. Dave
02. Sidicas
03. l33t C0De M45+ER!!

THREE SCREEN NAMES YOU HAVE HAD:
01. Sidicas
02. Sidicas2
03. Sidicas3

THREE PARTS OF YOUR HERITAGE:
01. Mom from Florida
02. Dad from Ohio
03. Sisters from Jupiter (cause their so much stupider!!)

THREE THINGS YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND:
01. Girls
02. OpenGL's shader programming language (at least not yet anyway...)
03. Why is it so difficult to combine plain-text and HTML on Slashdot??

THREE THINGS THAT ANNOY YOU:
01. When my dad looks over my shoulder and tells me how to play Warcraft (damn back-seat player!!)
02. When my little sister asks me to fix her computer and then after I do so, goes back to treating me like crap.
03. When my mom says something bad about Japan or the Japanese people (I think she's still pissed about Pearl Harbour or something)

THREE THINGS THAT SCARE YOU
01. The presumed fact that somewhere in this world, there is a girl that plays more video games than me.
02. The presumed fact that somewhere in this world, there is somebody who is more lonely than me.
03. That boss from "Marines in Hell" [Warcraft III Frozen Throne Mod map]... omg... the horror.... Eight of us made it all the way through the map and died in like 2 seconds at the boss.. (3000+ damage a hit)... I was like.... "shit.. that sux"

THREE OF YOUR EVERYDAY ESSENTIALS:
01. Bishoujo-Games (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishojo_game)
02. Soda
03. The Internet of course (heh)

THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW:
01. "Got IT?" T-Shirt.. Get it? I got to SunyIT for college... IT? get it? haha.. ok.. its funnier than you think, you dumbo!
02. A Pacific Trail Outdoor Wear Coat
03. A Timex watch that I've had since I was little and it just keeps on tickin!!!

THREE THINGS ON YOUR DESK:
01. A Tesla Trooper Pewter figure (from the collectors edition of Red Alert 2)
02. The CD Case of Warcraft III (yes, unlike everyone else in the house, I actually make an effort to prevent my discs from getting scratched to hell)
03. A nice well cleaned and polished place to put my Ah! My Goddess figures when I buy them for myself on Christmas

THREE THINGS YOU SAY THE MOST:
01. u sux
02. Damn my crappy handwriting!! My save code won't freakin work!! [S3 Marines, Warcraft III Expansion mod]
03. Sidicas: Go pussy Kats!!!
[Run Kitty Run 3, Warcraft III Expansion mod] (interesting note is that in this mod, they play a song from linkin park at 200% and the only words that are understandable are "I won't be denied!!!!"... hahahahah... It's funnier than you think, you dumbo.

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE BANDS AT THE MOMENT:
01. Tanpopo (http://www.helloproject.com/tanpopo/)
02. Dido (http://www.didomusic.com/)
03. Whoever made that song for the new Sailor Move Live Action series

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITES SONGS AT THE MOMENT:
01. Theme song from Sailor Moon Live Action series
02. That #1 single from Tanpopo
03. That #1 single from Dido
[I don't deal with song names anymore! I use iTunes!]
THREE PEOPLE YOU SPEND THE MOST TIME WITH:
01. Me
02. Myself
03. I

THREE THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOUR CLOSE FRIENDS:
01. They don't annoy me
02. They generally don't talk to me much(see #1)
03. I don't have to "down-speak" or stop and explain things.. *almost* all my friends know their way around a Linux box..

THREE THINGS YOU WOULD WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP:
01. All my computers (if they can't be part of the relationship, then the deal is OFF)
02. Companionship
03. Something in common would be nice! Why am I the only 20 year old on earth who obsesses over Sailor Moon?

(note, I changed this question just a tad!)
THREE THINGS ABOUT JAPANESE WOMEN THAT APPEALS TO YOU:
01. They, (unlike most American ladies) *really* know how to be playful. (Learned from them reading all that tainted Shoujo-Manga!!) HAHAHAHAHAHAHHA (I said its funny you dumbo!) [Note: Shoujo-manga are comic books that have been writen to appeal to girls, I suggest that they have been 'tainted' to get the girls to behave in ways that appeals to boys {As a particular boys shounen manga suggets} ]
02. The eyes... love the eyes... I once got to spend a bit of time examining the eyes of a Japanese girl who was going to MVCC... Sooo pretty... Its like the area around the middle part (thats all black) is so dark that it makes the middle of their eyes look huge... The huge illusion was something that illuded me until then.. Damn... She was so pretty... long dark curly hair like ramen noodles... Dammmmmn... I think I miss her... She hates my guts I think. She thinks I'm a real Computer Otaku! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku)... I think she doesn't like me because of the Otaku thing... Now I'm at SunyIT surrounded by fellow Computer Otaku boys&girls... Damn this sux!!!!!
03. Just....being foreign (hahah)

THREE THINGS YOU CAN'T DO:
01. Get a girlfriend!
02. Code good DirectX shaders in assembly language... My gawd... wtf ATI!?!?!?!? 100% Efficient.... riiiiiight... Thats nice, but now you gotta spend half a year devoted to writing the damn thing!!
03. Get the courage to speak Japanese to a Japanese girl (I tried once and failed miserable, I choked up 'cause it felt like I was talking jibberish, but I knew it was correct... Felt awkward...Such a queer feeling. Never felt it before, and I've recided word-for-word all the stuff in my Learning Japanese audio books.. I then read about a "sub-concious monitor" in a book on learning languages (read it very recently) that it can be the biggest obstacle, because it will always destroy your confidence half-way through a sentence.. Combined with the fact that you don't get any assurance that the person has understood you until *after* your done speaking... it just messes ye up! DAMNNN! I wish I knew about that a year ago... I kept stopping half-way through the sentence trying to be sure they understood the first few words of the sentence (even tho I was soooooo certain that it was correct)... DAMMMMMN!!!

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE HOBBIES:
01. Coding
02. Collecting rare posters and putting them on my wall (sometimes even ordering them from Japan and paying almost $40 total after shipping)
03. Collecting DVDs of Anime

THREE THINGS YOU WANT REALLY BAD RIGHT NOW:
01. This night elf chick

http://www.blizzard.com/war3/wallpaper/wallpaper23.shtml

02. Free Software 4 ALL!!!
03. An iBook!!!

THREE CAREERS YOU'RE CONSIDERING:
01. 3D Programmer
02. Artifical Intelligence Programmer
03. Working at Dolphin Technologies (griffis airforce base) writing "Guardian" systems for the U.S. Federal Government (yea, an internship there for me is becoming a real possibility)

THREE PLACES YOU WOULD GO ON VACATION:
01. OKINAWA!!!!![http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa]
02. Shinjuku [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjuku]
03. I dunno, maybe some place in California near Comdex or something.

THREE THINGS YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE:
01. Get laid by an Asian girl
02. Contribute more to Open Source than Linus Torvalds
03. Speak Japanese fluently (hell, I don't even speak English fluidly(sp??))

From highest to lowest priority:

1. A book on Real-Time Rendering
2. GeForceFX 5200 Graphics card (a little old, but they're real cheap now)... PCI version 'cause I want to go multi-mon like that Bad-Ass Displays article!! This card supports Vertex and Pixel Shader 2.0!! Ooooh the fun I could have with DirectX, RenderMonkey, and "nVidia's FX Composer!!)
3. The new Ah! My Goddess figurines
4. MegaTokyo Reading Gear
5. "Fear the cute ones" poster
6. A new Ah! My Goddess Calender for 2005. I'll probably buy this from that same shop in Shinjuku where I got my 2004 calendar from.. They seem to really *know* how to ship stuff.
7. Final Fantasy XI (presuming that the new Graphics card will make my computer pass the benchmark)
8. Halo, I just played the demo for PC (on ultra-ultra low graphics mode since my computer sux) and at the end, the commander dude told me I was so kick ass that I should go buy the game.
9. Command and Conquer Generals (naturally).

Note: I already ordered and received the MegaTokyo stuff... Present for myself hahahahah...

Its like... Today was a regular day... Until I checked my e-mail.... Awesomest part first: Hi everyone,

I hope everyone is enjoying one of the best years ever for PC gaming.

On the eve of one of our own major releases, The Lord of the Rings(TM), The Battle for Middle-earth(TM), the one thing we've grown to understand is how important the community - our most loyal supporters - is for industry....

......(BLAH BLAH BLAH *SNIP*).......

Having said that, we have a MAJOR announcement to make and we are making it exclusively to our long time C&C fans. This announcement is not going out to the press and it won't appear on the EA website or anywhere else online. We are very proud to announce that the team that brought you Command & Conquer(TM) Red Alert 2(TM), Command & Conquer(TM) Yuri's Revenge(TM), and Command & Conquer(TM) Generals has officially started work on our next project set in the Red Alert universe!

....(BLAH BLAH BLAH *SNIP*!!)....

Thanks again for all your support over the years. This entire team is incredibly excited to work on the next Command & Conquer chapter. Look for an official announcement soon and have a wonderful holiday.

Mark Skaggs
VP and Executive Producer
Electronic Arts
FREAKING AWESOME!! Another C&C game coming out.. I guess it might be time to seriously upgrade my comuter

Also interesting, I get a lot of fan mail, and I just chuck it all into one Open Office Text document (now easily exceeding half a meg) and I stopped in my tracks when I got to this one:

From : Brandon McCormick
Sent : Friday, December 3, 2004 5:41 PM
To : sidicas2@hotmail.com
Subject : Final Fantasy VII- DIDO Thank You (Music Video)


Dear Sidicas:

I am asking your permission to use your Final Fantasy VII Music Video in my power point presentation.
Email me back A.S.A.P. I have to turn my priject in by tomorrow.

Thank You!!


WTF?? Using my video in a power point presentation.. ahaha I thought this was a joke... But I e-mailed him back today (yea, I know I'm late haha) and he said he went ahead and used it anyway.. What an ass.. Anyway.. I told him... whatever the heck the presentation is on... I don't think he should put a music video in it... Well... He did anyway... oh well.. what a freakin weirdo.. If he doesn't fail, there is something seriously wrong with the world's (does he live in US??) educational system!!

Software Engineering
Software Documentation
Artificial Intelligence
Japanese Art & Culture Revolution
Total Credits: 16.00

• After a bit of research, I've decided not to take Chinese! I don't think I'll be able to find the motivation for continually studying it like I do Japanese...

Also, I've got my fingers crossed that the Anime club will be able to get the school to teach a Japanese Language class... After all, they were able to get the school to put up the Art & Culture class. I expect the school will take them more seriously (since the Japanese Culture class is 100% full already (35 students) and there's still several weeks left to register for classes)

From highest to lowest priority:

1. The new Ah! My Goddess figurines
2. MegaTokyo Reading Gear
3. "Fear the cute ones" poster
4. A new Ah! My Goddess Calender for 2005
5. GeForce FX 5200 Graphics card (supports Vertex and Pixel Shader 2.0!! Ooooh the fun I could have with DirectX, RenderMonkey, and "nVidia's FX Composer!!)
6. Final Fantasy XI (presuming that the new Graphics card will make my computer pass the benchmark)
7. Halo, I just played the demo for PC (on ultra-ultra low graphics mode since my computer sux) and at the end, the commander dude told me I was so kick ass that I should go buy the game.
8. Command and Conquer Generals (naturally).
Oop! My ride is here! Gotta go! More to come soon!!

I spent my entire Thanksgiving break playing Warcraft III. It took about 24 tries to beat the 'Resident Evil' custom scenario map (Frozen Throne). 'SexyStephie' was the host, and quite possibly the best player the whole time.. One hell of a leader too... I think I talked her into adding me to her friends list! Yahoo!... After that, I played 'Life Of a Peasent' for a while.. That's a lot of fun if you know how to play it right.. 5 sec. into the game, a girl (player character) started beating on a police officer (chief of police is a player character). So then this dog (another player character) starts attacking her ("I'm a POLICE DOG!! GRRRRR!")... So then I ran in and casted some cure spells on her so she wouldn't die.. So we run off together, but eventually, the police van (controlled by player) came up and grabbed her.. So then I started banging on the police van (funny stuff, you'd have to be there to understand).. After that, I got arrested also and we both ended up in the same jail cell... The rest is even more funny but too silly to write here. Lots and lots of fun.. After that I played some (ok, I mean a lot!!) of sheep tag. I saw a player named 'Sailor_Saturn' (hey, when you're playing with 300+ people a day, the odds are greater than you might think!!) and we played together a few games. That was cool.. Sunday night I played a game with ff9bibi, he's one hell of a good sheep! Unfortunately I was playing *against* him (as a wolf) and I lost.. Oh well...

I gotta go do something productive for once...

Sister and dad brought home throat drops... The good Halls fruit breezers ones too! Yay! No more swearing I promise :-P

I'm sick today... I guess I shouldn't have eaten the left-over food on the serving dishes after all those old people were breathing on it at that art gallery.. You know.. punch, cheese & crackers, etc. I've got a huge DirectX homework assignment (port a game from C# into C++) and I only have until Monday night to work on it. Very not cool!! My Thanksgiving break starts on Wednesday. I haven't even started my Information and Knowledge Management project yet, and I need to study for the next test in that class also. Also, I'm working on a 30 page paper with 2 other people from my OS class, and they haven't done a single damn thing really. I've got barely 5 pages double space, and it looks like I'm gonna have to write most of it myself. They've been slow to answer my e-mails, and don't care enough to proof-read what I've written thus far. I'm kinda project leader so I guess it's time to kick their ass.. (I'm in a bad mood 'cause I'm sick + I'm starting to 'wear out' the high I get from listening to J-Pop by playing the songs too much...) Only a few more weeks of school.. Yeah, I'm in deep sh*t right now...

Next semester, there is an "Arts & Culture Revolution" class.. According to the fliers, the topic of the class changes every semester. This semester, it is on Modern Japan and how it has influenced American culture (Anime/Manga movement). Apparently, this is thanks to the Anime Club! Yay! Too bad I can't get into the Anime club 'cause they meet at 10:30 pm at the dorms lobby on Mondays... WTF?? Why can't they make a reasonable meeting time/place? Guess I can't be part of that... I e-mailed them and they're basically don't give a damn and think the time/place is fine. They're not really much of a club anyways. CS Club has over $1500 in the bank and we're doing a 17" LCD monitor (already purchased) Raffle to earn more dough.

So next semester the only 2 classes I'm taking is Chinese and that Modern Japan stuff... That's partly because I plan on getting a job so that I can get the money to purchase a 14" Apple iBook for Fall 2005.


Most interestingly, I feel like crap!