Not dead, just doing some work

Hey guys, I know I haven’t posted recently, but I’ve been pretty busy. I got all A’s this grading period, some of them A+’s and some A-’s. I’m trying to keep my grades up, but the year isn’t over yet. I’m hopingn I can maintain these grades for at least the first semester given the usual problem: Arrogance + Laziness + Video Games > Effort.

As you may recall I am painting the walls of my house. We also took the time to put in hardwood floor laminate. That’s been eating up most of my time, but there’s another reason for my absence.

We had to take out the family computer out of the room we were painting/flooring obviously. However, we only have one Internet cord (ethernet? I’m shaky on the termonology) coming into our house, and we needed to move the router and etc too. So the Interent has been off and on for a while, and when you factor in the off and on Interent of a wireless Interent connection for an old laptop, you can kinda see the lack of access. However, there are some topics I’d love to write about as soon as we move the computer back and stabilize the Interent connection.

• Specifics about the hardwood floor laminate
• My SAT subject scores
• Cherry the Dog
• Things looking up in Multimedia
• College Applications and the noticable not started pile

So while I distract myself from college apps with Halloween concerns, let’s hope my Interent access window coincides with my desire to blog.

Timestamp – 1:23 AM

PSPs, Colleges Apps, and Pain. My weekend

It’s 5 days afterward, but I managed to finish the PSP CFW installation on the 14th, but I’ve been busy as heck. So on the 14th I managed upgrade up to 4.01 M33 2, which is awesome. Now I can run just about any homebrew application out there save for the ones that are specific to PSP Slims. I couldn’t really decide what to put on the PSP, so I settled for a .txt file editor and an alarmclock. I got this program called a UMDumper, which sound really weird until you remember PSP games are on UMDs. Then it just sounds weird. The UMDumper allows you to copy an entire UMD game to your memorystick so you can play it without the UMD. Now you may be screaming piracy (or not seeing as how no one else seems to mind but me) but I actually have a middle ground stance on this kind of particular piracy. I’m not going to download and keep any games that I can buy at a nearby store. I don’t want to import or deal with getting my parents credit card to buy games via the PSN store. I may download a game that I can buy at the store, but I do it to test out the game, see if its worth buying.

See, I’m a specific pirate. I won’t pirate things like PC games, manga I find super awesome (like Hellsing and Berserk), or movies. But I will pirate things like anime, manga that’s just cool, and music. I know it seems really stupid to be selective with my law/rule breaking, but it’s jsut how I do things.

Anyhow I ran into some troubles trying to get a DCv7 memorystick. DCv7 is the Despertar del Cementerio v7, and it lets you downgrade a PSP Slim whereas the original Magic Jigkick stick I have does not. PSP SLims weren’t meant to use 1.50 firmware, which is what the Jigkick brings a PSP down to. On the other hand, DCv7 bypasses this thanks to Dark_Alex and let’s you install 4.01 M33-2 right off the bat without all the slow stepping I had to do, from 1.50 -> 3.52 M33 -> 3.52 M33-4 -> 4.01 M33 -> 4.01 M33-2. I can’t get it to work, but I am still trying to research and figure out what I’m doing wrong.

One of the main reasons I’ve been busy is that the Santa Teresa Counseling Office wanted 3 mini-letters of recommendation, a completed college application via CommonApps, and a personal statement (and some other minor things) into them by Oct. 15, Friday. See, that is if and only if you need a Letter of Recommendation from the Counseling Office or a Secondary School Report. Turns out, Stanford, the school my parents want me to go to, needs a Secondary School Report. I tried busting my ass to get my teachers to write the letters, and filling out the applications stuff, and all this jazz, but I couldn’t do it. I had like, 4 days, and that is just not enough time. The good news is, the Oct 15th deadline was so that the Counselors can finish your Letter of Rec or Secondary School Report by Nov. 1st, Stanford’s deadline for Early Decision. Early Decision is the promise that if you get accepted to the school, you will withdraw all your applications from other schools. Stanford’s regular deadline is January 1st. I decided to cut my losses and focus on my English homework, which I worked on from 4 AM to 5:40 AM, then finished during first period that day.

Whoo boy can I cover a lot of material this blog post. Now that I think about it, this week has been pretty darn eventful for me.

On Friday we played our last game of soccer in PE. We had this little mini-tourny going, but because the kids on other teams weren’t actually trying, Ms. Becking cut the tourny short. The thing is, my competative nature overcame my dislike of soccer to net my team an undefeated record! BOOYAH! 2 wins and a tie lol. The last game kicked ass. The team we were going against cared too, so it was hectic. But we won 3-1. Now, to appease my confused friend Alan, I shall explain why I dislike soccer.

TOO MUCH RUNNING. That it in a nutshell. From bad experiences with school forced soccer games, I am tired of running my ass down the entire field, only to have that one person who either: A) is really good at soccer and keeps the ball from everyone else to play single handedly or B) happens to be standing at the right place at the right time to kick the ball super hard and make all of your running pointless so you then have to turn around and RUN the way you came. Perhaps if I was playing with people I knew and in a fun and competative environment I would like soccer more, but the ratio of fun games to hated games has let you tilt the scales.

Also, on Friday, I got a piece of the field stuck in my toe. The football field we have isn’t real grass. It’s fake grass with these bits of black rubber to simulate dirt I guess? Astroturf? I think so. Anywho, my shoes always get filled with these tiny bits of “crumb rubber” and I guess in the throes of soccer a piece of it became imbedded into my toe. I kid you not. There is a tiny piece of rubber in the big toe of my right foot. It hurts when I put my weight on it, so I have to walk around with my toes up. I was too busy over the weekend and ignored it not knowing what it was at the time.

On Friday after school I went to Ed’s hosue where he showed us some badass Metal Gear Solid 4 cutscences and we watched the first hour and 20 mins of the first Star Wars movie. This was because Ed, a big fan of Star Wars, was shocked so much to hear that I have never watched a Star Wars movie end to end that we planned a movie night to see them all, starting with the first trilogy. However, being realistic we had to cut it down to one movie on Friday, and Alan had to leave for TKD before we could finish the movie. Some other time perhaps. I had planned to go to Silver Creek’s nonfire (traditionally it’s a bonfire but you get the idea) on Friday after I got back, but 1) Martin had said “Homecoming” so I thought it was their Homecoming Dance and not the skits, 2) I got home with like, 10-20 mins to get ready, and 3) because of the earlier explained early morning English Homework I crashed.

Saturday we celebrated my sister Dianna’s (that’s the youngest sister for those of you who don’t remember) 21st birthday party. Technically her birthday is on the 21st, but we don’t have time the weekend after to celebrate, so we did it the weekend before. Oh yeah, before the festivities I had to open and empty 2 year old beer cans and dump them out. We are cleaning out the TV/Computer room to repaint the walls, this being the last room that needs painting, and we are going to replace the vinyl floor with this hardwood floor like thing we bought years ago but never used. So the first can I opened exploded in my face, it being a 2 year old beer can and all. So then I took to opening them upside down with my left thumb, to make the cans explode into the ground. 24 cans later, my thumb hurt like a mother. You know that feeling where your finger hurts like hell because you tried to pull something too hard with your nail and your nail like, pulls away from your finger a bit? Well that’s what happened to me <.<

Sunday, which is today, I had to go to the mall and pick up a new suit in preparation for my sister Julie’s wedding in December. Sunday was really my crash day so yeah. We ate pho for dinenr today, and being the idiot I am I squeezed the lime with my left hand, and the juice created this god awful stabbing pain in my left thumb. It didn’t subside for like, an hour. This pain was mind numbingly intense. I didn’t know what was casuing it, but the pain was excruciating. My mom said that some vessel or soemthing in my thumb had burst and now there was liquid in the thumb that reacted to the lime juice. After dinner she would get a needle and pierce my thumb to let the juices out. WTF!!!!!!!!!! I was shocked, but I remembered on Deadliest Catch a guy got his thumb smashed and a vessel burst, only for him it was super intense and his thumb swelled and turn purple. The solution? The captain got a safety pin, heated the needle with a candle, and pierced through the guy’s nail to let the juices ooze out. My mom said that she wouldn’t go through my nail, but she also said that while the pain would, the liquid would not go away by itself. So after dinner, she would try to help me get the rubber out of my toe and stab my thumb. : (

I was pretty unnerved at the idea of getting my finger stabbed by a needle, and while she was prepping the needle with alcohol to kill bacteria, she then proclaimed in Vietnamese, “That’s odd, I don’t see the bubble anymore.” She stabbed into my thumb (OMG this hurts jsut thinking about it) and was confused as to why the expected liquids weren’t draining. She then stabbed another spot before saying, “Well how things go tomorrow.” : (

She checked out my toe and said that by now it was too dark and she would try to get out the piece of rubber tomorrow. Of course she attempted to stab my toe with the needle before I asked her, “How is that going to help at all?”

I notice I have to explain a lot of things in my blog posts, but eh. This weekend was a rollercoaster in short.

Timestamp – 11:36 PM

Psp Get!

Finally, I managed to downgrade my PSP. For those of you who don’t know, PSP homebrew is a hard thing to get into if you went too far ahead into the Official Firmwares, or OFM. It is especially hard for PSP-1000 series, aka PSP Phat, users like myself to get into homebrew since nowadays everything is about the PSP-2000 series, aka PSP Slim. Where I was, I was beyond the old tricks of using Lumines or GTA to downgrade.  The only left open to me was the legendary Pandora’s Battery. It boasted of being able to not only downgrade PSP of any OFM, but also had the magic power of unbricking PSPs.

The name “Pandora’s Battery” is actually misleading since there are two parts to the trick: A Pandora’s Battery and a Jigkick Magic Memorystick (or was it Magic jigkick memory stick?). After doing a lot of research, I discovered that these components are actually made up of a regular PSP Battery and a SanDisk PRO Duo Memorystick. What turns them into Pandora/Jigkick requires a PSP with CFW, or Custom Firmware to run specific programs. So in order to make the stick that allows you to get CFW, you need access to a PSP that already has CFW. And, at the time, the Pandora/Jigkick conversion was permenent thing; you couldn’t use them for anything else than the unbrick/downgrade function. To my knowledge you can reverse the Pandora’s Battery, but the Jigkick isn’t reversable. Also, the PSP came bundled with a 32MB memory stick that was SanDisk, but not of the PRO Duo kind, so you needed to get and sacrifice a new memoiry stick to make a jigkick. Whoo boy, that’s a tall order.

I bought a spare, third party battery and a memorystick of the proper kind online, but then I needed a CFW PSP to run the correct programs. No one I knew had one, at the time that is (I got my PSP 4 years ago after graduating from Chaboya Middle School). I bought the things about two years ago, because I had read that there were people offering their services to downgrade/unbrick/Pandorify PSPs. I planned on sending in my materials and PSP to let the professionals do their work, but on all the forums I frequented for PSP info had people either charging money I couldn’t afford or people who lived way too damn far to trust the mail system.

Manish told me he had his PSP CFW-ified Junior year, but I never got around to asking him to borrow it. Senior year when I tried to ask him, he told me he had lost it. Only recently did he find it and let me borrow his PSP to create my own Pandora’s Battery combo. I was in for one hell of a ride.

I had looked up how to create the PB, but things had changed while I stopped checking the lastest news in PSP homebrew. The PSP Slim changed some things about the method, Dark_Alex (infamous PSP hacker who helped design the Pandora’s Battery) had come out with something called the “Desparter de Cemantaro” or something like that, and all this other stuff that confused the hell out of me. First things first, I jumped immediately on the PSP Pandora Deluxe thing, boasting that it came with everything you need. I figured out how to work the program, which only puts the files you need on your PSP. It’s a darn shame I couldn’t figure out what the hell to do with the files.

So, I defaulted to the youtube tutorial that I favorited way back before. I tried doing everything, but it didn’t work. It made a lot more sense to me, but for some reason Manish’s PSP would not run the programs. I was confused since the programs were simple homebrew apps and should be easily run. After all, Manish’s PSP already had SNES and GBA emulators on it. I hunted around for other tutorials, only in vain. Then it came to me in the video tutorial that I mentioned earlier, “you need to have the 1.50 kernel already flashed”. I looked at the video description and felt stupid for not seeing it before.

But then came the question, “What the heck is the 1.50 kernel and how do I ‘flash’ it?” Turns out, the 1.50 kernel is needed to run certain homebrew applications. After maybe half an hour of digging, I found out that Dark_Alex had been releasing “1.50 kernel add-ons” for each and every single version of his/her CFW (I’ve heard some places Dark_Alex is a girl, other places Dark_Alex is a guy). I find the 1.50 kernel add-on for Manish’s PSP, install it, get it to work, then I try the tutorial again. The program works this time, only the battery isn’t converting into a Pandora’s Battery. After some frustration, I decided to Pandorify the official PSP Battery instead and keep the spare as a battery. It worked. The Jigkick convertion went off without a hitch. I put them into my PSP, and voila, I could downgrade to 1.50. As much as I hate to say it, the story doesn’t end there.

I had the 1.50 OFM, which can, by itself, run homebrew applications. Then I tried popping up to 4.01 M33, the relatively lastest CFW. It didn’t work. So then I read that you have to go up to 3.52 M33, first, then you could go up to 4.01 M33. I tried it, and it didn’t work. I didn’t get it. Then after some more hunting, perhaps 10 minutes later, I find out the problem. The first place I read about going from 1.50 to 3.52 M33 said “if you have 1.50 then you can skip step 1.” Step 1 involved something called the kxploitpatcher. After Pandorifying my PSP a second time to try again, I couldn’t figure it out. Why couldn’t I move up?

Then I remembered that the Pandora Battery trick puts you down to 1.50, but doesn’t give you the 1.50 kernel, which is needed for just about everything. But now I was confused. I’m at 1.50 OFW, how do I do some sort of a 1.50 add-on? I keep searching and eventually discover, that you need the kxploitpatcher to fix your 1.50 PSPs. I was so frustrated, but it worked.

I’m in the middle of moving up to the 3.52 M33, just chatting with friends about the possibilites, when all of a sudden the PSP restarts, which is normal. I go to check the System Information, and it says I’m still at 1.50. I try it again. I keep talking on AIM and etc, the PSP restarts, and I check again. 1.50. I’m really confused, so I try it one last time, this time keeping an eye on what happens. The program starts up fine, but then: “You need at least 75% battery life to continue”. All the searching and tutorial browsing, and the trail and error and taken my battery life way, way down. So I plugged it in and stopped to write this blog post. By now I bet it’s over 75%, but I’m let it charge all the way. To rest. I’ve been wanting homebrew within 6 months of the getting the PSP. I’ve been trying to get it to work since I got home around 3:30PM. I think I can wait until after dinner to keep going, hahaha.

I’ll do a follow up on my PSP CFW adventures later. Also, my friend Alan, who had somehow magically read the previous blog post within 3 mins of my posting of it, was rather shocked to see that I hate soccer. I’ll probably explain that with the follow up post.

Timestamp – 8:11PM

I can feel the Internet culture burned into my head. Also flip-flopping Sheep.

I only recently started using the Pandora Radio thing, something that I decided to try out and expand my music awareness. So far though, I’ve just been using it to listen to some of my old favorites, mainly things I listened to growing up: Nsync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and other late 90s sort of things. Yeah sure, ridicule me, but I still like boybands, and I am actually hoping for a return of the boyband scene. So anyways, I was listening to it while playing Runescape, when all of a sudden As Long as you Love Me – Backstreet Boys starts playing. I like this song a lot. I start to mouth the words, only to notice that I’m not actually mouthing the right words. I realize that when I hear the song, I’m not getting a visual of the Backstreet Boys. Instead I’m imagining the Back Dormitory Boys doing their super weird lip syncs. It jolted me. I just thought, “Wow, has the Internet been that deeply ingrained into me?”

I mean, I’m no stranger to throwing out a lolcat-esque sentence, or the like, but I usually think about it. This time around it came out of nowhere. In case you’re wondering who the Back Dormitory Boys are:

One of the hallmarks of their videos is the third guy who just plays Counter-Strike in the background, seemingly oblivious to the other two guys. This has got to be one of the older “viral” videos I’ve seen.

Man, believe it or not, I start feeling really old from time to time. First off, most songs I like and end up humming to myself are songs from elementary and middle school years. Secondly, I have some serious DDR nostalgia. At DDR Club, we’re always playing In the Groove, aka, ITG. I don’t like ITG very much. They have all these fancy new note designs and gimmicks, mines, hands (where you have to use your hands to press some arrows), and over all, more difficult songs. But I just don’t like it. It’s so like, cold haha. I can’t really describe it, but when I’m playing the songs on ITG I feel like I’m exercising/punishing myself. The music is just something to help with my timing, and that’s it. And the same goes for the recent string of DDR games, especially with DDR Supernova and up. But when I play DDR Extreme or older iterations, I love it. I feel like I’m dancing/having fun. The music is just so much more lively. Forget “Hardcore of the North,” give me “Tsugaru”. “Queen of Light?” No, I want “B4U”. Give me some “Dynamite Rave” “Butterfly” “Dive” “Drop Out” “Dead End” “Rhythm and Police” and the list goes on. I just don’t feel any connection with ITG or the recent song choices. It’s weird.

————————————–

Switching gears completely, you know how there’s those people who are sheep? The mob mentality folk? Yeah they just frustrate the hell out of me. But, there’s also the people who, frustrated at the sheep, become sheep on the other side of the fence. They frustrate me too. For that matter, I also hate the people who jump back to a slightly more moderate first group because the “other sheep” group is too crowded. I chagrin when I see the “other side” sheep taking potshots at the “sheep”. It’s like, yes I get the fashion industry has created some bad disorders and etc, but do we need to take stabs at it every chance we get? “Oh no, the mindless fashion drones and f–ked up the world by increasing confidence problems and eating disorders, let’s all go be mindless drones that rally against them!” I just hate people who don’t actually give a damn, but act all smug when they know that that are on the mindless rebels side because it’s the “good” side.

During speech class a while ago, we had to watch this video of a college alumni give a speech to the current graduating class. To say as little as possible, there were some notable problems with style and delivery, while the ideas and techniques attempted were good. The teacher opened discussion to comment on “what did the speaker do well?” People started reaching deep into the deep crevasses of their rear ends for compliments, praising the speaker where she made mistakes. I asked if we could discuss what she didn’t do well. Then, the class just jumped up onto everything I had picked up on, and the people who had nice things to say had bad things to say. Then comes in the 3rd group o sheep, who go back to saying nice and pretty things, criticizing us for saying bad things. Some of these people were among the people who said nice things, and bad things. Their main arguement was, “You don’t know what it’s like to have to be in her situation,” or “You’re not an expert so don’t say anything!” Okaaaay. LISTEN UP NUBLETS, I DON’T NEED TO BE A MATH PROFESSOR TO SEE THAT SOMEONE HAS DONE AN EQUATION WRONG! I said this to a friend in the class, and then someone who overheard said, “There’s no right way to give a speech, jerk.” True, very true. BUT THERE ARE F–CKING WRONG WAYS PUNK. Effing flip-floppers really piss me the hell off. I don’t really care if you’re against abortion because you were brainwashed by your religion. But don’t go switching sides just because a rather appealing person starts preaching in a different creed.

I had wanted to write about my hatred of socccer and of my flailings in Dr. Lemco’s class, but I got to enraged at recounting the speech class thing that I’ve run out of steam, haha.

Timestamp – 8:41 PM

I can find a mine with no rightclicking. But I don’t want to.

So I’ve given up at getting a 90% winrate at Minesweeper. It’s too damn difficult. Remember how I said one lose sets you back 3 wins? Well that’s all fine and dandy at the bottom of the mountain. But the higher you get, the harder you’ll fall when you accidentally trip up. I was on a pretty awesome winstreak. I had a 89.70—something percent going for me. Three wins later I feel pretty good. One lose, then I check the calculator. I dropped down to 89.50%. It’s too much for me. Just too goddamn much. I’ll just stay at 89.5% and hope you guys will find it in your hearts to round up.

So the title of this blog post comes from the song, Handlebars by Flobots.

The song is a delightfully sad look into a dystopian world. It’s very 1984 (a novel by George Orwell) if you catch my drift. I haven’t actually read 1984, but I know about 4 people who’ve read and talked about it to me, and I edited a friend’s paper on 1984 for grammer mistakes, so I know the basics and the the ending at least. And believe it or not, I stumbled across this song due to a very lighthearted and funny song.

You need to listen to the lyrics and watch the music video. It’s very fun stuff. I had linked it to Alex A., and we were discussing it. He then brought up the song “No Handlebars” and told me to google it. He did, and it caught me by surprise. You need to listen to it, while watching the video as well. It just has that impact.

On a lesser note, I’ve decided to stop limiting my blog posts to be about a particular topic. Example, a Minesweeper post won’t have any extra information just because I didn’t feel like putting it in under Minesweeper. Well no more of that, haha.

So Multimedia 4 is starting to bug me the same way Multimedia 3 did last year. Mr Huynh is a good teacher and a skilled artist, no question. But he eats up a ton of time talking about things or lecturing things that don’t need to be talked about. For example, a few days ago he had us download a parent letter thing from schoolloop. He then had us “personalize” then by having us change the “dear parents” part to “whatever your parents what to be called”. Then he read to us the entire 2 page letter, adding in obivous explainations to what he had written in the letter. This happens a lot where he gives us reading or a powerpoint, and takes it upon himself to read/explain everything. It gets really annoying when we know what he’s talking about already. Also, even though its a “Multimedia Arts” class, we seem to be doing nothing but Logo Design in Adobe Illustrator and entering contests that lean more towards traditional art media: paint, oils, sculpture. We’ve been promised Flash Animation, Advanced Photoshop techniques, Video Editing lessons, and website design, but all Mr. Huynh ever does is go over the “concepts” involved with each thing.

We have this new thing we are doing, “The Art of Dairy” contest for the Lucerne dairy company. They give you a cow tempalte thing, and you are supposed to paint, draw, color in your design on it. Graphics design media is accepted, but here’s the real kicker. The “winners” will be sent a life-sized plaster cow for them to make an enlarged design onto. F–K THAT! I didn’t take Multimedia to paint and draw and pencil and pastel and testurize, and etc. Don’t get me wrong, those are legit, but I want to animate. I want to photo manip. I want to make an effing website. I want the individualized projects I was promised way back in MM3. So far we done the same watered-down, cookie cutter, bulls–t that we’ve alwasy been doing. It’s just an art class with computers and no serious graphic design. It’s pissing me off. I can’t draw a goddamn thing, and that’s my fault. But I can photoshop and program things. Don’t go forcing me into a project/contest thing where you say I can use my specialty but not really. “Oh sure, feel free to design something on the computer. Just rememebr you are going to have to do it by hand on a life-sized cow replica which thereby defeats the purpose of doing it on the computer in the first place.”

Another thing, would be the attempt to motivate us. There are some intense cash prizes to the winners. Like 20k+ to the school of the winner and somewhere around 500-5000 for the kid who wins. Yeah ok. FROM A F–KING NATIONWIDE CONTEST. Mr. Huynh made jokes about how he wants the money to fund the MM class. I respect that, but seriously. WE DON’T F–KING PAINT OR DRAW OR S–T. IT’S A MULTIMEDIA ARTS CLASS, TEACH US SOME NEW EFFING MEDIA ALREADY. DON’T EXPECT US TO WIN AT A GAME WE DON’T PRACTICE AT!!!!!!!

I want my indivivual projects I WAS PROMISED. I want to explore my video editing/filming skills. I want to animate something. I want to work instead of suffering/taking notes to HOUR LONG LESSONS. I kid you not. He literally eats away entire days with just talking over and over again, forcing us to “put your mouse on top of the monitor so I can make sure you’re listening”. I die a little, every fourth period. Slugging through the same old busy work, the same old uninteresting lessons, the same old pain of each day.

I’m going to end the post here just cuz I’m tired.

Timestamp – 6:35 PM