Summer Log 3

"It's not summer!" you say, "Hahaha, oh? BUT IT IS!" I respond. There is no such thing as autumn or winter in this city. :P Anyway...

The semester is coming to an end. My grades are beautiful and my average *should* be higher than last semester. Unfortunately that means not seeing most of my friends for 2 months, but...at least I can get to work on some projects I have in mind.

Well, first off I can get back to daily updates at my "Just Deserts" comic. However, I've been thinking about it for a while and I'll probably get to it sometime next week, but I'm planning on starting another "side" comic. Actually, it could easily convert it to a "main" comic, but I don't plan on dedicating incredible amounts of time to it. I'm sure the craze is just as bad in the US (and worse) as it is here, but a certain series of books has been getting a lot of attention lately (though it seems its a couple of years old already), especially now with a new movie out. "Twilight" seems to have 80% of my female classmates in some mentally altered state, with the disease slowly infecting more and more. I think it is my duty to bring the light to these people, and plan on starting a parody comic called "Twinight". Technically, my goal is to piss off every Twilight fanatics out there, and hopefully amuse the "normal" fans as well. This comic could actually become a stream of revenue for me seeing as how the target audience is huge. My Just Deserts comic has always been a more personal comic with a very small audience of my old tournament buddies. Anyway, we'll see how that whole thing works out. :D

Learning more Japanese, creating a work of art in Photoshop, making a Spanish version of my mastastealth.com site are all small goals I plan on completing during my vacations.

Another interesting tid-bit of news from my life is the fact that I have touched my bass again in the longest time. Been playing with it for the past 3 days or so, just listening to my music library and playing tunes by ear. It's an interesting thing; I don't consider myself a musician at all, and I'm not good for heavy practice sessions or anything, but oddly enough I do have a knack for the play-by-ear thing, don't know why. Sometimes it feels like I subconsciously know the notes, and I actually nail the notes before I even start listening to the song. It makes me feel all awesome inside. Normally, I have to move my fingers around quite a bit testing to see what note I need to play, but those few times I just get it instantly is just a wonderful feeling. I have 2 nice bubbles in my right index and middle finger now. ;P

Looking at my last post, I was suppose to share some apps so...here goes some more:

Shrink-O-Matic is an interesting and quick image resizer I got. It's pretty boring having to open up a big photo editing program like Photoshop just to resize an image. I also don't like going through the hassle of opening a quick app like Irfanview and going through the menus to do it. This app does it nice and quick, thuogh it has a file limit size of 2600 pixels or something. That's pretty bad as most of my photos are at a higher resolution (and are normally what I want to quickly resize), but there should be an update soon that fixes it.

Two websites I want to recommend are tr.im and is.gd. Pretty cool names right? These 2 sites are URL shorteners. You know when you have a huge link to an image in the middle of a forum post or something, maybe a facebook album, or some strange google image you want to share? These sites give you a tiny link to pass on to friends! Just enter in the URL you want to share, and it will create one for you to pass out.

Lately I've been messing with a lot of music apps. Winamp starting to mess with my explorer and stopped updating properly for some reason, so I had to find an alternative. Songbird was one of my first choices, being a popular new open-source player. It's quite nice, with its iTuneseque interface. I think my only gripe with it at the moment is the lack of audio output customization. I have 3 sound cards to choose from (USB headset, integrated, and Xi-fi card), and normally make my music apps output to the integrated sound (I can barely tell a difference from the Xi-fi, and the Xi-fi won't work in linux yet, incase you're wondering why I'm not using my card :P) and leave everything else through my headset. However, in Songbird I have to open up the Windows sound settings, change default sound device, open Songbird, change back and close. Kind of annoying. Foobar2000 is a sweet player, the thing starts up in 2 seconds and the UI is fairly customizable. It's main problems for me are lack of podcast support (Songbird doesn't have it yet either, but will soon) and the playlists. There's no recently added, now playing, or recently played playlists like in Winamp, and apparently I really like to use that feature.

Currently I'm trying out Media Jukebox. Another iTunes looking player, looks nice but it also has 2 little niggles. There seems to be no customizable global hotkey support, and its probably slower than most of the other players (maybe even more than Winamp). I also gave Windows Media Player a whirl but quickly stopped because of it's crappy library browsing. Ugh, why Winamp? Why did you have to start misbehaving!?