PSP 3.40 OEA

Aside: This is my first post on WordPress. It’s fitting that it’s got to do with looks, because I think this new page is looking pretty hot with the Blix theme (and my own header image). I can’t edit my CSS on the standard, free web version but with themes as clean and functional as these, it’s not a big deal.

I’ve been killing it on my custom firmware for the past month or so and honestly, I don’t understand how people can get by without it. I mean, yeah, the standard come-with Sony firmwares are fine and all (not to mention pretty) but there’s just so much you can do (i.e. not very much at all) in terms of customization. I mean, you can change the hue of the icons/ shadows/ text and the image used as a background but that’s about as far as it goes when it comes to the basic Sony-brand firmware. I’ve yet to install my own theme yet but I intend to once my PSP is done charging (I have a tendency to be a complete battery whore). So, did I brick up?

Geekdom

So today’s little trip down south was a fruitful one and my feet are effectively sore-ish from all the meandering. Anyway, one of the stops for our party of three lightly seasoned with a hint of otaku was the Silver Snail. This, of course, is a comic book store, but so much more! It’s located near Queen Street and St. Peter Street (southeast corner, if I’m not mistaken) and it’s full of all the things a nerd could ever ask for. There are busts (as in the “shoulders and up” statues, not fun-bags) of anime, movie, and comic book characters, modeling kits (Gundam, Evangelion Neon Genesis, and even a giant submarine), comic books of course, figurines, pre-built models for display, toys, etc… They even had a Samurai Champloo Zippo that I would totally buy if I had the money. Needless to say, the place left some of us in a mutliple geekgasmic state.
We saw a lot of stuff downtown and you can find the photographic evidence at my flickr. I’ve been using flickr for the last couple months and I’m quite fond of its convenience and clean look and feel. I especially like the nifty description and image name editing that are quick and simple (i.e. doing these things on other service providers such as Mediamax is a real chore). For image hosting (like the image you see at the start of this post) I use Imageshack. Queenie told me to use it and I finally got around to it (I never bothered to try it out for no reason before… FTW).
Anyway, flickr and Imageshack honourable mentions aside, destinations of today’s trip all over downtown include the three floors of the Eaton’s Center (the Coast Mountain Sports there had three floors worth of Nalgenes but sadly, not a single one that was pleasing to my eye), up and down Queen Street, Burrito Boyz, the Silver Snail, all down what I think was Neville Street, a closed Bay-Bloor Radio, and Ginger for dinner (a little Vietnamese restaurant beside a strip club). After dinner, we just started strolling along Yonge and walked off all the food we had (burrito was decently sized but dinner wasn’t super heavy). All in all, a fun day.
I don’t know why but I felt very anxious at times (mostly the quieter times on the subway) and it’s a stirring feeling. Fun though. It was funny when I received a 2007 calendar full of, what I think was, Hugo Boss or Calvin Klein (or something to that effect) male models as a gag gift. I didn’t bother taking a picture but I was genuinely relieved when Queenie busted a Shrinky Dink “bones fish” out of her purse. This one was to replace the one I’d made myself (and snapped accidentally months ago) and serve as the actual gift (or bonus… to the very homosecular calendar). Very sweet.

My Latest Look

I got tired of my Samurize dock and decided to tweak a little. I ended up making a whole other one from pseudo-scratch. That’s what you’ll see in the bottom left corner. As usual, there is the Winamp track progress bar (the larger blue stripe) and my CPU Idle percentage (I made two smaller semi-circular stripes that meet together at 9 o’ clock for this one). The overall effect is pretty sweet I think. There’s also the album art, current track number, and artist + title scroller. As you can see, my “dock” is mostly just a Winamp stats displayer replacement with an idle bar.
For the rest of my functionality requirements I’ve still got my tabbed Objectdock at the bottom of the screen and my invisible’d Vista start menu. A random thing I discovered about Vista (not sure if this works in XP) was that pressing Ctrl + Esc also brings up the start menu just as if I pressed the Windows key. Neato.

A "Do Whatever the Hell I Want" Badge

I went and saw Transformers the Movie today with Allen at the Famous Players/Cineplex at… I don’t know exactly, but I think it was around Yonge and something to the north. Anyway, it turned out to be a rather good movie for someone who is a fan (but not hardcore fan) of the stuff. Al had lukewarm thoughts about it all but that’s because he was more of the die hard fan. Anyway, I didn’t do anything else much today except go home afterwards and just relax in the comfort and the companionship of my trusty radiation bombarding computer set up. I chowed down on a few Bagel Bites and they weren’t half bad so I’ll have the other ones tomorrow for lunch. I’m still looking forward to practices for LoaH and retreat this Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
Speaking of movies, I got around to watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last week and there’s something about Emma Watson’s look that I just can’t place. She’s definitely not ugly or anything, but I just can’t decide conclusively whether she’s got a delicately amiable or ever so slightly annoying face. I mean, her character’s hair (I’m not even going to attempt spelling the actual name for you off of memory) Hermione is, by nature, quite a put-off, what with being long-ish and frizzy. But the rest of her (as in the way she looks, acts, and speaks) doesn’t really bug me all that much (I’d always imagined her character Hermione to be a real know-it-all while reading the book). At least, that’s how I felt until near the middle or so of the Goblet of Fire. That one shot of her all dressed up for the ball settled it for me: not annoying looking.
I also spent a good chunk of my evening listening to a lecture/workshop given by John Piper about living by faith in future grace. I regret to say that I had been slightly distracted while listening for the latter half of the message so I didn’t catch all the little gritty bits as I normally like doing but the general gist was quite stirring to say the least. I’m not even going to attempt paraphrasing or summarizing the message. If you’ve got the longing and craving for it, check it out for yourself here (whereas the larger set of links and pages of his work can be found here). It’s cool stuff to me, but in random bursts at best. Too much of a good thing (in this case, over-saturation with new ideas on divine matters) too fast is probably not the best–cramming such things all at once proves to be a bad way to really reflect, consider, discern, and internalize well and properly.

Gotta Love It

Oh the fun times never end when you’ve got weed… Gotta heart weed. I’ve never had any myself, mostly because I’ve yet to contract a serious and extremely painful medical condition or had the urge to blast my teenage brain to hell and back in a shopping cart (why aspire to what’s already been done?).

I blurred out everything since I need creeps prying into my private life like I need aneurisms. It’s not to hide the name of a secret pen pal or anything sinister like that though.

Let the games begin!

My last exam went down not without a hitch yesterday. What can I say, Math is a beast. It wasn’t difficult for the most part, I just did not know the formula for one of the questions at all which meant I spent a lot of time recreating the formula from scratch. The rest of it was fun. Anyway, English was also pretty smooth but I’m sure Olsheski will find one or two spelling mistakes worth >25% of deduction.

I spent a good two or three (if you include the morning session both the exam) hours playing Tekken yesterday as a sort of preemptive strike on summer, getting the juices flowing early. Of course, I don’t plan on playing games all summer… Here’s my unofficial to-do list of summer 2007:

• start/do/finish insurance classes for driving
• learn to drive from an instructor
• work on my extended essay
• read up on C. S. Lewis’ life (biographies)
• read works by C. S. Lewis (novels, apologetics, etc…)
• get in contact with an English professor at Tyndale who will be speaking about exactly what I’m writing about (sweet!)
• go downtown to Burrito Boyz with some friends from school for a feeding frenzy
• get a lot of practicing done for retreat worship
• get a crackin’ on reading through Romans twenty times**
• watch each and every installment of Lucky Star to come out
• rest and relaxation
• finish off the third season of House and get caught up with Arrested Development
• make some more shirts
• (to be announced once I figure it out/think of it)

** I did 1 Peter until around… seventeen times before I chickened out.

Kinetic Auto Re-P-lay

A while ago (it’s been at least a year I think) my Seiko Kinetic Auto Relay wristwatch died for no reason. This was a gift from my dear uncle Keith (my mother’s younger brother) and I’d never worn it when I was smaller for fear of breaking or losing the watch. Someone told me (I can’t remember if it was my father or my uncle himself) that the watch was very expensive. Anyway, it broke (as in stopped ticking) for no reason one day and I hadn’t gotten it fixed. Today, my dad came home after forking out $40 for repair fees with a ticking and reanimated Seiko. It’s now firmly attached to my wrist again.
It’s surprising how many of my favourite and dearest possessions actually belonged to other people before. For example, there’s my little bouncy blue ball which used to be Herman’s. Then there’s my green pencil case that used to be Keith’s. My old school clear plastic ruler used to be my mother’s and my Sony digital camera used to be my father’s. Even random items like my umbrella of choice was, incidentally, my uncle’s from HK. I’d say most of my stuff (including my PSX, the first gaming console I really played) belonged at one point to my uncle or some other person before. So here’s me saying, thanks family and friends, for letting me have your stuff.

Blueprint

…was the name of this year’s edition of the Vic Park yearbook. It was a long year of hard work and to be frank, I’m not sure it payed off. Before I go headlong into a rant about all the things wrong with it, I want to at least give congratulations to Amreet in particular since his sports section was nuts (in the good way). I also want to mention that the cover is pretty neat looking and some other pages (few and far apart) are pretty nice too. Now, let’s get into the heart of things: why does this yearbook suck?
First off, let’s just get this out of the way: not everyone on the committee/team was cut out for the job in the first place. When working on pages that are going to go into a yearbook, graphics and a good sense of design is very very necessary. I’m going to come right out and say that nearly everyone on the yearbook committee this year, honestly, had little to no experience working with Photoshop/digital image manipulation software. This isn’t coming from having to field questions about how to do things (which I did) or from having them admit the fact (which no one did), but from just looking at the kind work put out by some of the members.
Designing a page around the theme of “blue prints” is a little more than tacking on a graph-paper background and throwing text on top (well, at least not for every single page). I did that once, but the idea of the page was to keep things clean and simple (the page was titled “Basic Principles” and it was the principals’ page). This also happened to be the page I had to rush because the head editor “forgot” n times over the course of 6 months (while being reminded by me quite often) to get the photos and write ups I needed, not to mention losing the write ups once after finally getting them.
Lesson #1: Only take people onto the yearbook committee who actually have Photoshop experience. The reason those people (mostly Indian girls, not that that has anything to do with anything) even got on the committee was because they all happened to be Sheliza’s friends. Therefore, the blame falls mostly/completely on Sheliza for this one.
Next we’ve got the fact that many simple things went completely catastrophically wrong for no good reason apart from negligence on the part of people doing administrative work. The way we do things is as follows: first, pages are mocked up and then created as semi-roughs which are sent for “proofing” to the plant which sends us back what the page would look like in the book so that we can make corrections and send back the good copy with changes and extra info (such as spot colour hue and positioning). For one thing, I had pages with spot colouring that I didn’t even want to be coloured (thus effectively wasting the colouring we payed for) since it’d look better without it.
Whoever was on admin decided for me that these pages would receive spot colour treatment anyway. To make matters worse, the tones of blue chosen for my pages were completely off. For example, let’s take an example of graph-paper blue vs. a dark but not quite navy blue. Those two are both blues but the latter makes black text placed on top completely illegible and reading painful to do. To make things even worse, the positioning/shape of the colour (which is printed separate of the first B&W printing) was totally off/not quite enough, leaving blank white bits all over the place. Ugly.
Another thing that admin screwed up on was the submitting of corrected pages. After getting the proofs back, we make corrections and then send the plant finalized versions. I remember correcting and resubmitting a candids page (basically a page with loads of photos) to be resent to the plant. Well thanks to the awesome admin people we’ve got (who are still remaining nameless until I finish ranting about this) the plant never got the updated/fixed page because of, well, nothing. I’m guessing the person doing the collection and distribution of corrections just… never got around to it and sent out “corrected pages” (the same pages we got back with all the mistakes) without actually repackaging the final pages. Way to stay on task.
Lesson #2: Make sure your administration staff/person is reliable and knows what they are doing. I do believe this year’s admin person was mainly… oh that’s right, Sheliza again, the head editor. Thanks for screwing with my pages Shez, you’re the best.
One thing that was told to me and everyone else on the team by both Ms. Leung (the staff supervisor) and Sheliza our head editor was to make sure not to put loads of photos of ourselves in our own sections since that is generally frowned upon. I actually got told off for putting three photos from the yearbook camp/retreat of not only myself but other members too on my candids page (which had at LEAST 100+ small thumbnail sized photos). Then lo and behold, we find about a zillion pictures of certain people on yearbook in the final section of the book (which is devoted to messages from the yearbook executives). That wouldn’t be a problem since those pages ARE to recognize the committee members, but when 99% of the photos include either only the head editor (who is responsible for the section) or photos of the head editor and her friends, then we’ve got a huge problem. Can you spell hypocrite?
The messages themselves were all written up and handed in, but some people were given much more page space than others for no reason. Sheliza had tons, but she’s the head editor so she’s supposed to have lots of stuff to say. Mona, on the other hand, was just another editor but also had an ass-load of space to write up, whereas other people–who, in my opinion, did much more work–had to settle with very little. Simply astonishing.
I wouldn’t have too much of a problem with hypocrisy (since we are all tempted into doing it from time to time) if the rest of the messages from the committee were at least typed up properly. Scanning through the messages written, I found a few people’s messages (including mine) were completely screwed up. This screwage includes double typing some sentences as if the copy+paste went completely berserk or something, irregular text formatting (e.g. making some letters within a word black instead of white when failing to highlight the entire paragraph for formatting), and even cutting messages short, in mid-sentence! It’s almost as if… hm… the pages were done in the final minutes before the due date. Great work ethic, whoever was responsible.
Lesson #3: What can I say? Teams can only work as well as the heads. And when leaders are petty, sloppy, incompetent slackers who play favourites, well, you can guess at the kind of final product you’d get from it all. This year’s head editor was… Surprise! Sheliza! Let’s have a round of applause!
So all in all, I’m pretty angry about how this yearbook turned out (especially at how some of my pages look). The spot colouring was off completely–in my defense, I mentioned not having it on those pages because they’d look better than way but Sheliza ended up doing it anyway because “we paid for it” and what kind of reasoning is that by the way? The corrections I made weren’t even submitted. My message at the end of the book was one of the ones that were completely raped, hands down on the ground. This whole year’s worth of working under Sheliza has been by and large a huge hassle. At this point I’m pretty much miles past the line of diplomacy and I’m just bashing her but really, find one argument I’ve made that wasn’t valid. I’m sure I haven’t nailed everything in this one post but I doubt we need anymore to work with. This rant is ending here and I hope I never have to do this kind of thing again.
Final Lesson: Get rid of Sheliza. Really, just, do it. Get her gone. That is all.

NOTE: I’ll post some photo evidence/examples after Mediamax gets back online from maintenance.

EDIT: Here are the pics of what I’ve been ranting on about.
The Good:

• Alexander’s Cover
• Amreet’s Sports Collage
• Amreet’s Sports Pages
• Mustafa’s Division Pages

The Bad:

• the numerous “ZOMG HAND IN SOMETHING!” Filler Pages
• the botched Yearbook Committee Messages

The Raped:

• Candids Page
• Grade Nine Day (1, 2)
• Principals’ Page

I think that about sums it up. I’ve only got one or two pages that I am proud of in the entire yearbook, and one of those is the World Events Spread (click here for my original digital render). I’m pretty sure the only reason that one turned out the way it was supposed to was because I didn’t leave any part of it to anyone else to take care of. Sorry, but that’s how I’m saying it.

For Fear of Sounding Gay…

I’m going to say the only reason I’m posting this song is that a few of my friends at school happen to like this band… Oh what can I say, I like em too.

I asked her to stay but she wouldn’t listen.
She left before I had the chance to say
The words that would mend the things that were broken.
But now it’s far too late: she’s gone away.

Every night you cry yourself to sleep
Thinking: “Why does this happen to me?
Why does every moment have to be so hard?”
Hard to believe that…

It’s not over tonight,
Just give me one more chance to make it right.
I may not make it through the night,
But I won’t go home without you.

The taste of your breath, I’ll never get over.
The noises that you made kept me awake…
The weight of things that remained unspoken
Built up so much it crushed us everyday.

Of all the things I felt but never really shown,
Perhaps the worst is that I ever let you go.
I should not have ever let you go, oh oh oh…

It’s not over tonight,
Just give me one more chance to make it right.
I may not make it through the night,
But I won’t go home without you.
- Maroon 5 – Won’t Go Home Without You

As you soak in the mostly sad lyrics, check out this pic I took of my forearm while stretching it. You see those grooves? Those are killer aching right now.

ObjectDock 1.9

Lately I’ve ditched my XP partition almost completely (I haven’t used it for a month and the last time I did was yesterday to try and open a corrupted file). I’m not missing the clutter and crap of XP. Now I’ve got the clutter and crap of Vista! I got curious today and checked the List to see which docking programs were compatible with Vista and to see whether my (favourite) ObjectDock by Stardock was on the List. Luckily, it was and I promptly downloaded version 1.9 (some previous ones don’t work w/ Vista). I spent the next hour or so tweaking, making icons, disabling Windows functions (such as the standard taskbar) and just having a fun time with my new dock. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out (click the thumbnail for a full view of my desktop… in full resolution too!). I’d rather be running on 1280 x 1024 but my new monitor/my dad’s old monitor (I switched to a newer LCD monitor when my old one started showing ugly-coloured spots of pink and green…) doesn’t support that high of a res. Anyway, that menu collapses into the bottom of my window and the Vista icon/start menu button doesn’t show unless I press the Windows key (pretty neat actually). I still have all the functionality of the taskbar AND start menu, but a more clean look. The only downside to this all is that I can’t view my system tray icons unless I go into object dock’s preferences and un-check “Hide Windows task bar.” Then again, I don’t use my tray very much anyway…

EDIT: Rocketdock is part of Punk Software brand wares. There’s also Uber Icon (