Bowl of rice and a blog...

OSX86 Log

2009-01-02T22:08:00.005-05:00

This is just to help myself out for future reference.

Inspiron 9300 Guide
9.5.0 Voodoo Kernel (Need for SSE2) **
NEVER Install NVIDIA $$
Chipset: ICH6-M (Need to read SATA drives)
Audio: AC97
Ethernet: Broadcom 440x
RT2500 doesn't work, Zydas most reliable, IPW2200 needs open network

Extra iPC options:
Patched USB
GenericCPUPowerManagement
Dual Boot Time Fix (needed?)
** Seatbelt 10.5.5 (NEEDED)
PS/2 Device Fix (keyboard/touchpad break otherwise)
Apple SMBIOS ToH

$$NVIDIA

Titan seems to be the only thing that works.

1. Download Titan

2. sudo cp Titan.kext /System/Library/Extensions/Titan.kext

3a. sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/Titan.kext
3b. sudo chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/Titan.kext

4a. sudo nano /System/Library/Extensions/NVDANV40Hal.kext/Contents/Info.plist
4b. Change:
0x004010de&0xfff0ffff 0x00f010de&0xfff0ffff 0x022010de&0xfff0ffff 0x014010de&0xfff0ffff 0x016010de&0xfff0ffff 0x009010de&0xfff0ffff 0x01d010de&0xfff0ffff 0x039010de&0xfff0ffff 0x029010de&0xfff0ffff

into

0x00c810de

REBOOT. DONE. FINALLY.

Summer Log 3

2008-11-21T22:59:00.007-05:00

"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!?

Files & Folders

2008-09-12T19:12:00.004-04:00

Well, I've been using so many cool web apps and what-nots lately that I decided it was time to update this ghost-blog!

Due to University, I find myself looking for many file sharing services to help me out for things like:
Sending scanned documents to classmates
Sharing pictures with people
Saving my own work so I can take it home
etc.

Fortunately, the web had many services at my disposal, and so I'm gonna share a bunch that I use. First off, I'm gonna throw Imageshack.us out there. This site is my go-to site for quick, single image uploads. However, just today for instance, I find that after scanning some documents I need to share multiple images at once, and uploading one by one would be way too much of a hassle. So, that's where Drop.io comes in! Although not limited to pictures, Drop.io has a nice feature where everything you upload is put into one "drop". That drop, if it contains images, will show up as an album, showing thumbnails of all the images, and allowing download of the full sized versions with a click. My last little online sharing page would be FileDropper, which is like Imageshack, but for actual files (they give you a 5GB limit! That's pretty sick!)

Recently though, DropBox opened up their services to the general public, and my wait ended as I installed the client on my machine (in Windows and Ubuntu). This program is looking sweet, and I suggest you watch the video on the site to see what it's all about. Simply put, DropBox creates a folder, which gives you 2GB of free, online storage which automatically syncs files between all the computers you've installed DropBox on in an incredible simple, hands-free method. Not only that, but this thing saves revisions of your documents automatically, creates albums out of uploaded images, and allows you to create Collaborative Folders that you can share among your friends! I can't wait to use this stuff to its full potential!

Now, moving away from files sharing and images for a bit, another free app I'd like to share is Rainlendar. Although I paid the $14 to register the "full" version of the app (and to support its creator), the free version contains just about everything as the Pro version does. This program has helped me remember all my homework and exam dates in a non-obtrusive and clean calendar that floats on the side of my Desktop. With a right-click I easily add tasks to my To-Do list, set the progress on those I'm working on, mark off as complete as I finish them, and also set reminders to the next exam that comes up. It's as simple as Google Calendar , except with cool icons and stuff. However, I've also attached my Google account to the program so my online calendar syncs up with my desktop one! :D This would also allow me to share my calendar with classmates so they remember their work too!

That's all for now. I'll try to remember and make another post as I know I have a lot more apps to share...

Summer Log 2

2008-06-30T17:25:00.004-04:00

Yay, more blogging. Well, continuing from where I left off, I've made awesome progress on my Japanese and can now read the whole Hiragana alphabet pretty well. Of course, I will need to practice until I stop second guessing what letter it is I'm reading, but at least I can start reading stuff. Next up is the Katakana alphabet, which is the exact same thing except it uses different symbols. I don't really get that, but whatever, it looks like I'll need it since sometimes when I'm reading different things I see there are symbols I run into that I don't recognize (and I don't mean the weirder, complex kind. They are just simple symbols I haven't learned yet). For instance, my name in Japanese would be pronounced: BU-RA-I-A-N which using Hiragana would come out to:

ぶらいあん

and in Katakana would look like:

ブライアン

(you might not see the above if your Windows doesn't have the Oriental text fonts installed).

Anyway, you can see they are quite different styles, with the first one leaning to what appears to be Chinese. Either way, I'm looking for programs to help me out with this. The best one I've found is this game for the DS called Japanese Training. It looks great and the exercises are fun, but the thing crashes very 5 minutes so it's VERY annoying.

Besides learning Japanese, I've also been learning another "language". Lua! This is a programming language used in a variety of different games and stuff, and in my case, is used in my regularly played Spring. The language is a LOT like Python, and has been pretty easy for me to catch on to. Unfortunately, in my adventure of making a "Ferry Widget" for the game, I've come across quite a lack of documentation on all the functions provided. This doesn't help since I'm stuck doing trial-and-error tests, and when I get stuck, no one helps me out, since most don't know Lua (on the Spring forums). The ones that do are to elite to talk to a noob like me I guess.

Also I've met a really cool client thanks to Scope who hired me to do a web template for him. I've done that work, and he was pleased, saying he'll contact me for future work too! So it's really cool that I'm finally starting up my business. Interestingly enough, it's this type of thing that makes me wonder why I'm going to college in the first place. I mean, am I not studying and paying vasts amount of money to eventually do what I am already doing? I mean, I won't even "learn" any computer stuff (be it web design, Photoshop, or whatever) until 4th semester, meaning I gotta wait another YEAR. Just watch, when that year rolls around, I'll probably end up correcting my teacher on faster methods to create this or that effect in Photoshop.

In other news, I bought Team Fortress 2, have been using Twhirl a lot, and didn't get to see Ghostbusters that last time. It was ending, and my sister just called me to hear the ending song apparently. Though I did get to see Jurassic Park (the first one) again the other day, and I think some friends are gonna go out to see Hancock on Thursday.

Summer Log 1

2008-06-20T19:38:00.004-04:00

All right, so I've burned around 2-3 weeks of my "summer vacation". As usual my summer's consist of 100% more computer time, sitting here in my house with little contact to the outside world...you know, besides the internet. X-D

Actually, I don't mind it, and prefer it that way sometimes, but geez. You start to realize that despite the fact you are from Florida (you know, the hot and humid state, where temperatures are usually above 80's, 90's in summer, and humidity makes it feel like the 100's) when you are indoors those large numbers are easily maintained at a more comfortable level by a little something called a Centralized Air Unit. Which, practically doesn't exist here. :P

Each room in the house has 1 AC unit, which we only use at night because electricity here is ridiculously expensive compared to the States. We probably pay more using these 3 units at night then maintaining our old (and large) house back at Tamarac at a nice 77 degrees 24/7. I feel more sorry/worried about my computer than my actual comfort, because this type of ambient is what can kill it easily. :( Good thing the case has large fans, but I've had to keep the case side open since it seems every time I close it up, I start getting some funky errors with the hard drives.

Anyway, besides burning up in my chair, I've also started up another chapter of my webcomic, Just Deserts. I've also been reading a lot of Manga online, currently having finished the latest of Eyeshield 21 and School Rumble (both of which are a bit more than 270 chapters long, around 4-8 pages a chapter).

It has also finally pushed me to point of learning Japanese, reading these mangas. So I've started practicing the writing first, memorizing the supposed 46 main symbols of Hiragana. So far I got my vowels done, and the ka, ke, ki, ko, ku syllables as well. There is no real alphabet, it's a syllabic alphabet, and then there's the Kanji symbols, which are full words or phrases. There are thousands of those, so they will be last on the list. :P Though you don't have to memorize all of it to read manga and stuff. Anyway, Ghostbusters is on TV, so I'll write down everything else I was thinking about later. X-D

Graphic Design Competition

2008-06-09T11:28:00.004-04:00

This is something I posted about a while ago on my comic blog, but I think I should move it here to avoid any future problems. ;P This was posted 5/9/08.

So, my group won the competition. It was extremely nerve wrecking as they went down the list of all the entries, which were e-mailed to the director to be judged by a group of professors and herself. First half were the entries for the concert, second was ours with the Communication and Design entries. They showed ours second to last, so the whole time I was worrying whether I had e-mailed it wrong or something. Anyway, let's go back to the beginning.

We started on Tuesday with 2 speakers, Guillermo Valverde and Germán Barreneche. In the evening we began brainstorming the ideas for the poster we had to make. My group was really enthusiastic, and they were throwing ideas around everywhere. I sat back and doodle the following in my book:

So I showed my idea to the 1 or 2 people sitting by me, but I never presented it to the group. They had their own idea going, and weren't really paying attention to my sketchbook, so I didn't really care about anything at that point. They had asked the 2 guests for help and advice. On one of these discussions, the guest through out an example for us (as it seemed he wasn't really into any of the previous ideas). The idea he drew, was pretty much my second doodle, a speech bubble with a scribble (in my case, a blob of paint) in the middle. When he drew that, I pulled out my sketchbook. He looked at it and seemed impressed, asking if I had presented this. Admitting I hadn't, he told me not to stay quiet about anything, present everything. Anyway, we continued the brainstorming.

By then, seeing as how my idea didn't seem unanimously received, I got bored and was walking around checking out the other groups' designs. Near the end, I was outside talking with friends, almost ready to leave when they called me inside. They were talking to the second guest (Germán, I believe) who had a speech bubble with the appearance of a paint palette. The group told me to show him my book, so I did. He was really impressed as well (something to note, is that both of them pointed out my first doodle, the one with the pencil. They seemed to have liked that one a lot as well.) He congratulated me for the idea, and told me that I just needed a little bit more effort to have reached the palette idea. My group cheered and that day ended awesome.

Unfortunately I wasted that night Photoshopping some images of the idea I last heard we were gonna use (as the group never told me, ok, let's use yours). Oh well, Wednesday came, 2 other dudes spoke (mainly on urban art), and once again we started working in the evening. This time I busted out Inkscape and started working on the actual design of the palette bubble. By the end of the evening I had a cool vector style drawing. However, Germán suggested we try a more realistic approach, by Photoshopping a palette into a bubble. At night, I finished up a set of the final designs to choose from:

So, Thursday came, final day to finish our work. We decided to use my photoshopped palette, but the various teachers we asked recommended different backgrounds. The group decided on black eventually, and I had to edit the darn JPEG manually to fix it seeing as how I left the editable PSD at home! :P The end result is below, once again. So, it was definitely an interesting experience. I apparently won a tablet (getting it Monday) but it's probably the lesser-known Genius brand, one that doesn't really compare to my current Wacom. ;) So I'll be selling that. Lastly, the Germán dude told me to stand up, and I was actually complimented as a "serene intellectual" in front of all the graphic designers at the University! (At least, the ones who were still left in the auditorium, some had left since they lost ;P) Congratulated by all my class, we then watched the University's salsa dancers show off their moves, and here I am, feeling great. Back to work on all the finals I have left!! X-P

Mayed

2008-05-19T11:47:00.004-04:00

Oops. Forgot I had a blog to update. :P Well, about 1.5 months have passed from my last post. Let's see what I have...

I finished my first semester this Friday. I have finals from Wednesday-Friday, with 5 classes left. My grades are nice, with only that darn Expression Workshop class giving me another 3 (3.6 this time). >_> Everything else (including, surprisingly, the language class) has a 4.2+ so that's good. Art History is kind of scaring me as the professor couldn't find one of my last reports, and I don't know how well i did on my final exam so...I should pass, but if he doesn't find that report it could be a severe hit to my note.

So now that classes finish, what do I plan on doing? Well, I bought www.mastastealth.com and plan on opening my own Freelancing graphic design site to start earning some cash (mainly, for next semester :P). Any extra will probably go into the Get-Myself-a-Cintiq-Fund. It costs about half as much as 1 Semester of my career. -_-

Mmm. I have been dabbling in some interesting sites that have helped through out classes. Quizlet.com is a nice site for flashcard/self-quizzing. Skrbl is a useful collaborative online whiteboard, for when you need to help someone in math or something, and words just aren't enough. Also, though it doesn't have to do with school, I have signed up for Twitter, an addictive little micro-blogging site. It's kind of like an advanced version of Facebook's status messages. You can follow more up to date info about me if you subscribe to my feed. Also, I've been using Google Reader the past few days as my my main RSS reader. A swap from Thunderbird, seeing as how I've heard it's awesome, and really, the only reason I use Thunderbird is for RSS (not e-mail, as it's mainly designed for :P) So with all of my e-mail accounts being from webmail services, I might as well swap my RSS reading to something in Firefox, and have one less program to be opening every morning.

Gaming has been sparse these past weeks. I've mainly been screwing around in Trackmania Nations Forever, completed another mission or 2 in Rhondo of Swords, and got the new Drone Tactics as well (the last 2 are DS games). Hopefully I can get back to owning my 21CW buds in Spring during summer.

Marched

2008-03-10T17:45:00.003-04:00

Well, another month sneaks by, and yet a peep out of me! So what's the latest? Hmm...how about THIS:

OMG your eyes! Surprise! Yup, I cut head apart. Too bad, gotta wait some 6 months or so to get it back. ;)

What else...so far so good in college land. So far I have grades of the first "parcial" (Period? there's 4 of them in a semester) for 3 subjects:

Art History: 3.5
Design History: 4.1
Design Theory: 4.2

That's out of 5. Design Theory I almost nailed perfectly, if it wasn't for a little report I screwed up and should of handed in properly the first time 'round. Fortunately the professor let us (it was a team job) hand it later, but it lower our perfect 5 for that project. If you haven't seen my project, check it here. All that remains are my math (next quiz is this Thursday, then we combine the notes from the last and get the grade), Competetive Communication (Final project done, grades expected soon), and Expression workshop (No clue 'bout this one). So I think I'm doing pretty good overall, with those lower notes in classes I expected to not do so well in anyway. You need a 3.2 to pass, so I'm in the clear for now!

Now for more important things, I got and finished the short and sweet Apollo Justice: Attorney at Law. Capcom sure knows how to make some good story, these games keep me hooked until I finish them. Unfortunately it seems this one was a bit shorter than the Phoenix Wright games, with only 4 cases to enjoy. Oh well.

Yesterday Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out, and if you have a Wii you will have to buy it, or give up your rights to own that console. I'm praying that Tronixweb will have them in stock tomorrow so I can get me some 3-Day Fedex and that stuff and get it in time for "Holy Week". I will have all next week off school, and with none this Friday, or the following Monday, I have a total of 11 days to unlock everything in Smash, assuming it gets here in time. ;)

First Semester

2008-02-04T13:01:00.000-05:00

Wow, haven't posted anything since Christmas Eve. Well, time for another nice long post for you to enjoy or burn some time with. ;P

So, since December...let's see. New Year's was...nothing special really. In fact, due to my boredom, I started playing a DVD I have, and was watching this stupid (but hilarious) clip:

If your brain didn't melt after that, you can go find Part 2 somewhere on Youtube. ;)

Anyway, it was pretty funny because while watching this I asked what time it was, and it was already past midnight. So...we kinda missed the countdown because of me and the movie. I say, what better way to start the New Year but with KLAY PEOPLE!

Let's jump forward 2 weeks(ish) and we get to January the 17th, the day I finally entered University. Of course, this was on a Thursday, so the 17th and 18th were really for all the new people to get an introduction to their class and the campus. So, I'll be studying Graphic Design here at the Universidad del Norte from now to see how things go. ;)

Other than that, not too much has happened. If you somehow remembered those games I ordered back in November, I'd like to inform you I finally received the first package! :P Geez, the box is even stamped as shipping November 20th, I get a coupon inside that expired the 14th of January, and I get it the 29th or something. Talk about a crap postal service. So, I now have Super Mario Galaxy and Battalion Wars 2 in my collection of Wii games, so far almost 1/3 done with Mario (maybe 4/5 if you talk abuot just "finishing" the game, but I'm going for a 100% type of deal.) The game looks great and is super fun. Definitely the perfect sequel to Mario 64 (never played Sunshine). BW2 is also a cool game, but a lot more complicated and I'm still getting used to commanding all my units in third person. I prefer the usual Advance Wars turn-based strategy play over it, but it's ok. Speaking of which, Days of Ruin is also excellent.

MERRY NAVIDAD

2007-12-24T15:35:00.000-05:00

Finished Metroid Prime 3 at 95%, finished Phoenix Wright 3 as well, great stories in both games I must say. Had to e-mail Play-asia to ship me my 3 new Wii games again. So I guess I won't get them till next year. Oh well. "Ate ice-cream" for the first time with some friends. Never did like it, and with the few bites I took I'm still not impressed. Yogurt is better. Anyway, Feliz X-Mas! :D

CRAPTOID!

2007-12-04T18:18:00.000-05:00

Aw man, I just finished playing Metroid for about 3 hours due to a GAME OVER. I am now at 67% which is actually LESS than what I should of reached (I got a message saying I unlocked a special ending because I reached 75%) but stupid me did not save and lost about an hour's worth of progress. Freaking crap...

I also finished the 3rd case in Phoenix Wright. On the fourth one, which is usually the second to last if I remember correctly. So, that would be 60% with that. Mmmm...Contra 4 is hard as heck and I've only been up to the 2nd level...

My other games have not arrived, and if they don't come this week, I'll have to wait about 3 more so I can e-mail Play-asia to send them. Again. Let's see if my other shipment (ordered ANOTHER game and cable separate from that other double game shipment) arrives on time NEXT week. I'll probably end up e-mailing them saying send me BOTH orders again. Geez Colombia sucks...

Web Design

2007-11-22T17:41:00.000-05:00

Well, in the past few days I have been doing quite a bit of work on setting up various things on the interwebs. The week starts out innocently enough as I post my comic up and decide, "Hmm. You know what, I wonder how easy it is to update the site's look by swapping to another template." So, I opened up the layout tab, BACKUP the site's current configuration, just incase, and start looking through the templates. After a couple tweaks and what-nots, I decide that none of them are close enough to what I want, so I attempt to revert to the original state.

Nope. Blogger starts spitting out some errors, and in desperate attempts to copy-paste and tweak the page back to how it was, I completely destroyed the site's layout. -_- Colors are all different, boxes are where they shouldn't be, and my eyes were bleeding as I stared at my new ugly site. So, I had to do something.

Fortunately for me, I already had my real site designed and awaiting launch. I had a test page setup here, to see how it all looked. Designed in Photoshop, and hand coded by yours truly (with A LOT of help from Mr. Phillips, Justin) I decided that if I was gonna fix the site, I might as well go all out and make it look like it's suppose to.

Tuesday comes, and I'm about 50% with the restorations. After plenty of copy-paste the basic layout of my site is finished, and I had 3 main tasks to setup. My navigation bar, footer, and my Archives page. Navigation bar was already made on my site, but for some reason something was getting messed up. It was probably the heavy Javascript used in the table of links I made, so I had to look for an alternative. CSS is what everyone is using nowadays to make sites. It allows for your website to have a consistent and clean look throughout all your pages. It seemed that navigation bars are also recommended to be designed with CSS, but I wasn't completely sure how. However, after following some links I found a nice program called CSS Horizontal Menu Generator, which as the name implies, generates horizontal menus in CSS. :P

So cool, that's done, and now I have some added rollover effects and everything for my bar. Next came the footer. The footer (and the main post section of the blog) have a nice little Javascript that applies rounded corners to the box. Niftycube was the script, and my previous attempts with it worked out fairly well. Unfortunately, when I tried adding the rounded corners here, the footer was splitting up. I never know why that happens, but as it happened before, I knew what to do. I copy and pasted straight from the example page, and slowly tweaked that second footer into my main footer. Turns out, it was the Paypal button that was ripping open the footer (at least in Internet Explorer and Opera, Firefox looked fine). Oh well, took it out and put it up somewhere better.

Last came the nasty section under my comic, which contains my archives. Blogger has these widgets that you add to your blog. One of them, as you can see on the right of my blog here, is the Archive Widget, which has every year, and month in a neat drop down style menu. In addition to THAT, my comic blog has a small section with the Chapters individually split up as well (A simple list of links). My problem was trying to get these things OFF the main site and into their own page. Unfortunately it seems Blogger does not support widgets in your average post. So it was time to look for some more Javascript that would hopefully be able to hide the section, and toggle it on and off with my Archive button in the navigation bar.

Well, right now I have a working toggle button, unfortunately, the section is NOT hidden on page load, which kind of defies the purpose of the button. >_> Oh well, I'm sure I'll figure something out, but for now I am glad to see the page has come along quite nicely. Now, if only ComicCMS would come out with their new version so I can use my actual site for everything instead of depending on Blogger...;)

T-Minus 7 Weeks

2007-11-19T17:55:00.000-05:00

7 Weeks till this year is over, and we are marked for 1 year of living here in Barranquilla. Time sure flies when you think you're gonna die. LOL...just kidding. ;)

Anyway, as usual I am overloading myself with a bunch of games I just can't finish. I've progressed some more in Phoenix Wright, I'm in my second case.

I also got Contra 4, a really cool side-scrolling shoot em up with this Rambo type dude. It's frustratingly hard, and I've failed all attempts to pass the first level, but it sure has me intrigued. :P

Haven't played Metroid in a bit, but I think I'm about 1/3 done with it. That's been without about a month of having the game. :P So I gotta do some major catch up and finish before year's end, as I got a copy of Battalion Wars 2 and Super Mario Galaxy heading over here! :D

College in January...-_-

Super Post

2007-11-10T22:46:00.000-05:00

Oh boy, I've been postponing this post since I got back from the US...so excuse this extremely long post. :P

Ok, so...the United States was awesome. From what I remember the things I missed most were the foods, seeing as how my sweet tooth has not had it's share of stuff while being here. Donuts, sugar cookies, and gumdrops. God how I miss those delicious sweets! Gumdrops here suck, sugar cookies don't exist apparently, and I've only found ONE store here who sells IMPORTED donuts. What the heck...

What else. It was nice to see all my friends again, I've uploaded most of my photos (of the youth group) in Facebook. Interestingly enough, I only saw my friends 2 days out of the 2 weeks I was there. That kinda sucks...but then again it's not like it was an actual vacation. We were doing so many errands, it was pretty boring actually. Oh well, one day I will save up to visit by myself. I wonder though if I should visit FL for a week, or perhaps to do some semi-cross-country trip going state to state seeing friends from my tournament in real-life. HMMM. Thing is, I can't expect my Floridian friends to come and hang out everyday since they have lives. (A good thing ;P) Which kind of sucks since despite me being able to drive and everything over there, I believe that's the main reason I never saw many of them. :P OR I could totally be an anti-people person and not even know it.

All right, so on to my usual video game chatter. I am now in possession of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Also, while in Georgia, me and my dad bought Wii Play. That, and a nunchuck at Brandsmart so we are now at a complete 4 Wiimote+Nunchuck set for the Wii. I'm about 30% done with the game, it's really good. Graphics are slick, I'd say past Halo 2, gameplay is great with a lot of puzzle solving and shooting mixed up, and a great storyline too. Wii Play on the other hand sucks. Though it came with a Wiimote so it was like paying $10, which it just might be worth. My favorite game on their is a game where your Mii is racing with a cow made of some apparent woven material. Video here below:

On the DS side, I'm still stuck at Mega-man, and I have the new Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations to keep me busy, and also Call of Duty 4 if I feel like shooting stuff. Call of Duty 4 is not that great. So far the only good FPS I've seen has been Metroid. Oh well.

Last but not least, I'd like to share this cool podcast I've been listening to for a while now. The God Journey, which as the sites states:

facilitates a growing conversation among those who are thinking outside the box of organized religion. One listener tagged it as "two real brothers talking about life," and you can also view an introductory video that captures what The God journey is all about. By sharing their own journeys, searching the Scriptures, interacting with their listeners, and examining current events and cultural trends, they hope to encourage others on their own spiritual journey. Their purpose is not to attack people who see it differently, but to inspire those whose spiritual hungers cannot be met in the conventional expressions of Christianity and yet want to live more deeply in Jesus and be part of the church he is building.

Every Friday you can check out a new one, they are awesome! :)

USA #2

2007-10-20T09:09:00.000-04:00

Uh...just more summarization. I don't seem to have enough time to type everything out right now! :P

Tuesday - Arrived, crap, stayed at Inn
Wednesday - Sent bad RAM, Publix and Steak & Shake, saw Michael and others
Thursday - Embassy stuff, got my Colombian ID now and went to Grandma's house.
Friday - Did some errands with dad, left ladies at mall all day, hooked up Wii again, went to see the Youth Group :)

Today will be a family reunion on my mom's side. Also, Giselle is also going to the mall with Jacqi (Smitty's mom) and BABY DAN. So...I gotta see the man Baby Dan again. Baby Dan. Baby Dan. Yea!

USA #1

2007-10-18T08:53:00.000-04:00

Well. First day came and went (thank goodness), and it sucked. I will elaborate later on that. :P
Yesterday though was a lot better as we came to my aunt's house and I was able to hang out with my old buddies Michael and Justin. I guess I will elaborate more on that later too...>_> Today it seems I gotta go get ready to go to that embassy and get some of the "work" part of the trip done.

Descansar

2007-10-11T19:17:00.000-04:00

Phew. Finally took a break from leaving the house today. Seeing as how I can't elaborate too much on the fact that I played a lot of Mario Strikers this morning/afternoon, I will roll through my day yesterday...:P

So let's see. Somewhere around 2:30 my parents and I went off to a hair salon for my mom. The salon we went to was actually around the block of the hotel we stayed at when we first arrived in this city.

Although the plan was at 3:30, my dad didn't waste the trip and dropped me off at the Sisters' house a half hour earlier. A bit embarrassed, I approached their house, which was getting a new roof installed. After talking to their mom a bit, and after the sisters took their showers (-_-) I did my usual "computer maintenance" work as we waited for Jose to arrive.

So after hanging out, talking, walking, and eating with them (Carolina, Adriana, and Jose), it was time to go. Jose had to go home, and Carolina had choir practice. Seeing as how there was a birthday party for Alfonso later that night, I went with Carolina to choir practice, where we met up a few more from the group and took a taxi to his house. That was the first time I ever took a bus. Later at his house was more of the same, a little bit of talking and eating (cake). I took 2 bites and left it, as the bread was apparently soaked in some liquid. Marcos apparently loved it though, so he ate his, mine, and some leftovers as well. :D

After we sand and prayed over him, everyone went home. I walked to my house, about 4 blocks away and got home around 10. Yay.

Triple Dose

2007-10-10T08:34:00.000-04:00

Hurray, another post.

So, yesterday we went too Jose's house. Nothing to exciting happened, we just hung out and talked, played some Parchessi, some Wii, and talked. I felt bad leaving a little early (around 7:45) because he really wanted us to stay later, but I was getting HUNGRY. That and I need to pop up in my tournament at least once this week since I won't be there for the next 2. :P Oh well. Today we complete the triad of visits by going over the Sisters' house. So...

Sunday - My house, some other people from the group, Carolina and Jose
Monday - Again, but just Carolina and Jose
Tuesday - Jose's House, just me and Giselle since Carolina was occupied.
Today - Carolina's house, hopefully they remember to call Jose, since it planned last night. :P

What else...how about my checklist for the visit?

-Bring and Use my Gamestop giftcard
-Send RMA Request to Newegg before leaving, ship my bad memory ASAP.
-Order USB key off Newegg for Lisette.
-BUY JUNK FOOD. Need to buy bags of Gumdrops, box of sugar cookies, and Donuts.
-EAT MORE FOOD. Visit Cici's Pizza, Vocelli's, Steak and Shake, and Dairy Queen once again.
-Drive. I need to speed on 595 or down Flamingo again, haven't touched the wheel for almost a year now. o_o

...and of course, visit the Youth Group. Something I really regret is the fact I didn't take (or bother my sister) to take more pictures of everything. I mean, the group here is incredibly photogenic (in the sense that, they love to be in front of a camera) so I got plenty of shots to show my friends in the US of them. However, the same is not true the other way. I can't find any photos of my old youth group, or even of MYSELF. Then again, I'm pretty sure I can blame all that on Giselle, since she was the only one with a camera at the time and seeing as how she's the worst person to rely on to share the photos...>_>

*adds bring Camera to the list

Lastly, here's a video I promised of the group dancing to that crazy Rednex song, Cotton-Eye Joe:

Week to Departure

2007-10-09T14:11:00.000-04:00

Goodness my posts are getting huge and frequent...

So yesterday, Jose, Carolina, and us (Giselle and me) met up at the mall right by our house, the Buenavista. We walked around, looked at some clothing, took some funny pictures (that are in Giselle's camera, so don't expect to see them anytime soon :P), and at the end I treated them to some ice cream.

We then walked over to my house (2 blocks away) and hung out there for an hour or 2, mainly playing my finally-arrived-OMG copy of Mario Strikers Charged. Here's the intro to the game:

In other news, I forgot to mention that on Thursday I finally signed up for college at the "Universidad del Norte" (University of the North). I will be studying Graphics Design sometime in January. I went to get a blood test before we went, which really sucked...

When we flew over here, I already had my blood taken at a little office where I got my passport picture. The lady took one of those tiny needles, pricked my finger, splattered some solutions into my blood, which was rubbed into 4 separate boxes. 20 minutes later, she tells me my blood type. HERE? Geez, they wrap my arm with a rubber string, stab me with your average sized needle into the veins where your "elbow-pit" is, and then have me wait an hour for the same results? Such crap. Worst part is, I had to get the test again because we couldn't find that paper from when we came, and of course after I got my blood test taken, my mom called up to say she found it. -_-

So anyway, I'm leaving to the US in a week. Yea.

Paths

2007-10-08T11:59:00.000-04:00

Aww man, I need to write stuff on paper or in a document since I had about 2 huge posts worth of stuff to talk about...but I forgot all of it. :P Let me try and remember.

Well, first off here's a map of the city, and the path I took to go to the house:

After a little ruler measuring, looks like it was 1.5 miles to go, so 3+ total (since I got lost). Not bad eh? :D

What else. Well, I guess with mentioning the following 2 things, I will fil lthis post so:

Played 2 new games (Megaman is on hold). One, nice but short, Sonic Rush Adventures. This RPG tries to stay true to old school Sega Genesis style platforming. Problem is, there's about...7-9 islands with 2 levels each, and a boss. The game was quite easy, and I finish within 3-4 days. So...I don't recommend it, even though it has plenty of "side" missions I guess. But I like when those missions are PART of the game, and not some optional thing. I mean, it's not even like I'll get a super cool prize for it. At least for something like Metroid, if you DO get more items and faster times you get better glamor shots of Samus. :P

Second game is Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Awesome game. A sequel to Wind Waker, this game really takes every feature of the DS into use. I was never a Zelda fan, but this game looks great and has kept me hooked on it for days now. Lemme explain how far I've gone (WARNING. SPOILERS COMING!)

********

Ok. So, like I said this is a sequel to Wind Waker. Copy and pasting from the Wikipedia article...

At the start of the game, Link, Tetra and her pirates are at sea looking for the phantom ship rumored to ply the waters in that area, taking sailors and residents of the nearby islands. Tetra, convinced that the phantom ship is simply a bunch of trouble-making pirates, is determined to teach them that pirates have rules, too. When a mysterious ship appears in the middle of a dense fog, Tetra jumps aboard to explore. Almost immediately after, a shriek is heard. As the ship pulls away and begins to vanish with her on board, Link attempts to leap over and save her only to fall into the water himself.

After having a vision of Tetra being surrounded by darkness and calling for his help, Link is washed up on Mercay Island and meets a fairy named Ciela, whose appearance is similar to that of Navi from Ocarina of Time, even possessing the same voice. The fairy has lost her memory and decides to team up with Link. On Mercay Island, Link meets an old man named Oshus who provides him with a sword. Link travels to the far side of the island and rescues Captain Linebeck from the Temple of the Ocean King.[9] In doing so, Link secures the use of Linebeck's customizable steamship to travel throughout the overworld (initially restricted to a single quadrant, but expanded as he acquires more sea maps).

In the first half of the game, Link must rescue three colored spirit fairies: the red Spirit of Power, Leaf, from the Fire Temple; the blue Spirit of Wisdom, Neri, from the Wind Temple; and the yellow Spirit of Courage from the Temple of Courage. However, upon defeating the Courage Temple's keeper, a giant lobster known as Crayk, the rescued fairy is colorless and appears just like Ciela. Ciela wonders why this is, but cannot remember anything due to her amnesia. As Link and Linebeck are about to leave Molida Island, Oshus then arrives, using his magical walking stick to fuse Ciela with the colorless fairy to become a yellow fairy, revealing that she is the Fairy of Courage.

Linebeck and Link then set off to pursue the phantom ship. After rescuing four sisters from imprisonment onboard, it is revealed that they are in fact phantoms themselves. Defeating them, Link obtains the key to where Tetra is being held, but he discovers that Tetra has been turned to stone. The old man Oshus then arrives and reveals that he is in fact the Ocean King himself. According to him, a few years ago, an evil plant monster named Bellum appeared, hungry to eat life-force. He used this absorbed force to create powerful monsters, including the dungeon bosses and the phantoms in the Temple of the Ocean King, and used them to seal away the three fairies of Power, Wisdom, and Courage. Ciela, the Fairy of Courage, was able to split herself in two to flee, but in doing so, she also lost her memory. The Ocean King tried to fight Bellum but failed, using the last of his power to clone himself, born again as Oshus. He then created the Phantom Hourglass so that someone could use it to venture through the Temple of the Ocean King and defeat Bellum.

Oshus then reveals that the only way to defeat Bellum is by obtaining a weapon known as the Phantom Sword. Oshus asks Link to visit the smithy Zauz on his island. Zauz asks for three pure metals as necessary ingredients for the sword; the Crimsonine, Azurine, and Aquanine pure metals are on Goron Island, the Isle of Frost, and the Isle of the Dead, respectively.

Link sails to Goron Island where DaiGoron, the tribe's chief, asks him a quiz to admit him as one of the Gorons. Link defeats Bongorongo in the Goron's Temple and saves Gongoron, a child Goron that became Link's controllable sidekick throughout the temple, receiving the Crimsonine in return for his efforts. Link then sails to the Isle of Frost where he resolves an ancient bloodfeud among the Anouki and Yook. The two races lived peacefully on either side of the island for 100 years, until recently, a Yook invaded the Anouki's village and disguised itself as one of them. Link defeats the Gleeock in the Ice Temple and receives the Azurine.

So that's how far I am. One more pure metal to go. That's enough for now, I'm going bowling this afternoon, hopefully. ;)

Bike

2007-10-05T23:27:00.000-04:00

Well. I'm pooped. This morning I rode my bike (haven't used one in a LONG time) and decided to ride around 2 miles to visit the Sisters' house. It was a nice trip, as most of it is going down hill, but I arrived very tired at their place. After fixing their computer stuff, eating, and waiting for the rain to pass, I rode back home.

OMG. I really pushed my body to the limits, I almost couldn't make it. I was dead tired by the time I was even in visual range of the mall (I live about 2 blocks from the biggest mall in the city, so if I see it I can find home.) The fact I got lost twice didn't exactly help with the much needed energy I was in need of. Interestingly enough, I took a break a few blocks from the mall, and actually saw the Sisters' dad walking down the sidewalk to catch a bus! :D Once I regained a little energy, I pedaled over this long curve, and was able to catch a break as I rode down a huge hill in front of this "Home Depot" (called Home Center here. :P) I was going fast...it felt so good. By the time I got home I was dripping in sweat, pink, and very thirsty. My legs feel fine right now, in fact, my hands hurt more which is odd. It's like as if I had been drawing hours upon hours consecutively.

Anyway, after a nap, I woke up to Giselle screaming, as she was stung by a bee (first time for her, never been bitten myself). After my nap, I had my second lunch (the lunch my mom made while I was gone) which was awesome, since I was able to eat it all. Then Miguel came over and we played on his modified Wii. He showed me Metroid Prime 3, which looks great, and we had a short game of Mario Party 8. We also played Need For Speed: Carbon, which didn't look that good, or play as well as I remember from the PC versions. His mom also cooked a HUGE plate of Spaghetti. In fact, with 7 people eating, we could only finish about half the plate/dish/tray thing. o_o

Overall, today was interesting. Definitely not my average Friday.

Socializing Spurt

2007-09-24T12:34:00.000-04:00

Well, this past week or so has been fun. I've been over the sis ters' house about 3 times now. First one, being the first time entering. :P Then another to fix their computer (which is dead), and yesterday once again to set up a new computer so that they can get their internet set up. The new computer is actually Giselle's old one. I had her switch computers, taking my old Dell (which has been replaced with my mega-awesome rig) and giving it to her, so that we could lend that old rig to someone who needs it.

Unfortunately, it appears there were situations this morning with the internet tech guy who went to install, and the computer. See, the graphics card is a little loose in that machine (crappy Dell PCI lever thingy) so...apparently it got loose and everyone was freaking out because the computer "isn't working". The card is simply loose and therefore isn't outputting to the monitor. But...despite personally telling that to the tech dude, and trying to get one of the sisters to do it herself, it seems their internet installation will be delayed yet again. >_>

Anyway, yesterday we went over Javid's house. It was cool, except we had soup for lunch. I was able to drink about half by dipping my small plate of rice in it, but I gave the other half to Palito, since I don't like soup. I'm sorry, but if I'm gonna eat food, I would like to CHEW IT, not drink it. Drinking is more sodas, juices, and water. You can see some more photos here.
I'll probably get a video somewhere soon, of a bunch of Colombians dancing to that Cotton-Eyed Joe song. Man...they repeated it like 5 times...I don't like it anymore. >_>

I'm still waiting more a non-humid/rainy weekend to play American Football with the group. This week is scratched off because we'll be having a little party for "El Dia de Amor y Amistad". It's pretty much the Colombian Valentine's Day. It was actually a week or 2 ago, we are kinda late celebrating it. ;P

Because of this, and a lot of other things (my sig request thread, commission work, etc.) I've gotten extremely behind in my comic duties. Not that it's super important...but I know how it feels when one of your regularly read webcomics isn't updated on time, so I don't want to do that to my few readers as well. :D And I still need to register for University, now that inscriptions are open...

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that this country sucks, as it "lost" my copy of Mario Strikers, that I had patiently awaited 5 weeks to arrive. I had to send an e-mail to Play-asia and it seems they've sent me another one, which should be here in 2 weeks. If this one gets "lost" again, I'm seriously screwed. It's almost like Colombia WANTS me to buy a mod chip, because doubling the prices for the FEW games that arrive here directly, taxing the imports to crap, and making it an insecure nightmare with their unorganized shipping methods, my choices are limited, and the Internet is there with its usual easy methods...:(

Drawing

2007-09-05T14:19:00.000-04:00

Boy. I've been nothing but abusing my tablet for the past weeks! Since the beginning of August I've been doing some commission work, drawing animations, comics, and I'm doing sigs again and a few other commissions! I've made about $100 in the past 5 weeks (not including the job from my dad, which I've yet to hear about my payment) which is pretty cool. Especially since I needed it this holiday as a bunch of games I need to buy are coming out. Have I mentioned which? Let's see:

Battalion Wars (in Sept.)
Supreme Commander Expansion? (maybe. Also in Sept.)
Super Mario Galaxy (Nov.)
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Dec.)
Frontlines: Fules of War (Jan. 08)
Mario Kart Wii (Jan. 08)

That's the list I have in my head, I'm sure there is something coming out on the DS as well. Either way, the holiday is gonna burn holes in my pocket. :D

ABA Games

2007-08-31T16:08:00.000-04:00

Just put up some videos of me playing some awesome games from this dude.

Fotos Plz

2007-08-30T12:39:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I uploaded a bunch of photos over on Facebook. There are a couple more on my Picasa albums that I shall link to now...

Seminario Pictures:

Youth Group Miscellaneous:

...and my copy of Mario Strikers still isn't here. I doubt I will ever order anything directly to Colombia again.

3 days.

2007-08-27T13:42:00.000-04:00

I am gonna have one massive photo dump to put up after Wednesday. Not just from the seminary, where all of my network will be dressed up all fancy-office-like, but from a bunch of photos I got off Giselle's camera that she never shared. Geez, they go back to the first weeks we were in the youth group. I'll probably have to split it into 2 parts, I'll start ASAP.

Super

2007-08-23T18:36:00.000-04:00

What the heck. My copy of Mario Strikers STILL hasn't arrived. My mom fears it has been sent to Bogotá (capital of Colombia) to go through its usual inspection. This country seriously sucks when it comes to shipment. I wanted to send my busted RAM to the US remember? $60 to send something incredibly light inside one of those bubble envelopes. Not only that, but they would tax the receiver. Incredibly stupid. With shipments heading INTO the country, this seems to be the same problem. In fact, there are few cities that you can even visit, without first taking a frickin' detour to Bogotá first. Geez this place sucks. Anyway, I'm estimating another week for the game to arrive, and if it doesn't, I'm gonna have to contact the companies or something. >_>

Anyway, on a happier note I beat that Excite Truck game on my Wii. I hadn't played it in a while, but I beat the 2 last tracks I had to unlock the final 2 trucks. Monster Truck and Super Monster Truck. They're pretty much your prize for winning the game perfectly, since the Super Monster Truck has the best stats in everything (minus the grip :P) and has the Power mod on all the time. That means I can run through trees and instantly smash cars by touching them. It's quite fun.

My monitor is still awesome.

And I was voted best potential Father by 2 people on Facebook it seems. Yay? o_O

22

2007-08-21T20:24:00.000-04:00

Check the album for more. :)

So

2007-08-19T00:15:00.000-04:00

All right, so here's another little update.

I've gotten a couple other suits in Megaman. One is some sort of phantom suit which I assume has some sort of special power, but I haven't figured it out yet. Even the radar on the lower screen doesn't seem to work. I also got a fire suit, which is pretty much two huge guns on both arms, that with some upgrades can be given some specific path (like, I can make it go forward one space, up one, and then turn again). I also figured out some special abilities with my previous suits. The flying suit has a special air-dash. The ice suit is great underwater, as he can float however he likes (instead of sinking, like the other suits). His spear also seems deadlier underwater, as he does a full circle instead of a slash.

Anyway, the story continues as I defeat a couple more bosses, and eventually have 2 guys board the Guardians (the group that is trying to stop the evil Slither Inc.) HQ airship. These 2 intruders were with the Slither Inc. boss, Serpent, earlier when Giro died. Anyway, I had to fight one of them (learning a few tricks, and noticing that I have to learn to use multiple Megaman suits while fighting) and got them off the ship. Eventually we find out that he was involved with something that Prairie's Sister (former leader of the Guardians) had made (the biometals, i.e. the Megaman suits). Also, turns out Prairie is actually a robot, who has been fighting for hundreds of years against the mavericks, ever since robots decided to fight with humans back in the day. So my quest continues as I look for more biometals to stop Serpent from activating some Model W, which apparently will give him some mega powers. These bosses get harder and harder I tell ya...

Anyway, my monitor should arrive Monday, as should my copy of Mario Strikers Charged (a.k.a Mario Soccer). This will be sweet! I just hope they actually deliver Monday, since it's technically a Colombian holiday type of day. But shipping companies don't pay attention to that...right? :P

Mind Dump

2007-08-15T13:13:00.000-04:00

Boy...what is on my agenda? Let's see...

Work
Commission sigs
#500 coming soon to my comics
Website which probably won't be ready for #500
Getting ahead in strips
Seminary coming at the end of the month
Sig requests thread
Campaign starting
Megaman ZX

And probably a bunch of crap I can't remember right now. Hmmm.

Anyway, my monitor finally shipped, and so has my order for Mario Strikers Charged (for my Wii) so next week will be awesome.

Choked

2007-08-10T13:51:00.000-04:00

Here's a funny story:
Last night I had a dream. I can't remember the whole thing, but the important part was I walked up to a table that had some Hawaiian Bread. This bread doesn't exist in Colombia, and I miss it sooo much. The "butter breads" here are nice, but these are even sweeter. Anyway, I think in the dream, when I grabbed one I found a bunch of ants on it. Probably because this has happened multiple times in the old house, where the ants would find the breads and cereals in the kitchen, which was extremely annoying. Anyway, right after that, I shot up out of my bed, waking up because I began to choke. It was really weird because while coughing, I didn't feel any itches (like when you have a cold or something), so I got a glass of water, and went back to sleep. I woke up choking again a little after, but I can't remember what that dream was about, though it was probably related to the first incident...

Anyway, in the morning I told my mom about what happened, and then she said something that completely made sense:

I choked on my own spit. :D You know how that sometimes happens just randomly while you talk or something? Well, after thinking about it, here is my conclusion...

When I saw the bread in my dream, after missing it for so much my mouth automatically started salivating. The thing though, is that my actual body was apparently in that stage of sleep where they can communicate with each other, so I was actually drooling for real, while I was sleeping. Now, as everyone knows you don't swallow while you sleep. So, what most likely occurred was some excess saliva trickled down my throat and into my windpipe, where my body woke me up, gagged, and tried to cough up the offending object (my own drool) from entering my lungs. :P What I assume happened the second time was yet again, some left over saliva.

So yea. Great way to wake up.

Nourishment

2007-08-09T10:53:00.000-04:00

After weeks, maybe months...after eating a small piece of some type of bread and a glass of Orange juice or water, for breakfast and dinner, since we've moved here and even earlier...I finally had some eggs. Yes!

They seemed to finally have finished the kitchen. At least, they have the essentials (stove and sink) installed, so my mom can start feeding me properly again. :P

Also, I forgot to mention that 2 weeks ago I had my first fast. It was extremely painful, and I'm not sure if anything resulted from it, but I hope God appreciated the effort. :P My network leader, Hugo, thought I was gonna pass out as he noticed I was going in and out (I think more from sleepiness, and the added hunger while we're praying made me nap while I was sitting), but overall I made it. However, the following days of that week were an extreme pain as I apparently caught some stomach virus (perhaps from a glass of water he offered me, could of been tap or something ;P). But...I think I'm better now, and this Saturday is the next fasting (I had to skip last week's since I knew my stomach wasn't up for it after all that). Wish me luck. :D

Also, I have work again. Supposedly. Ok bye.

Megaman ZX

2007-08-06T17:15:00.000-04:00

So. After my DS failure, I was able to start over and clean out my DS from games I never play. The list was narrowed down to:

Advance Wars - Dual Strike (I didn't finish this game. Will have to start over -_-)
Mario Kart DS (Finished, but have to enable Cheat mode to access all my tracks and characters again)
Metroid Prime Hunters (Was half-way done, but got stuck. At least I can try and kill that guy with the red gun again, as I think I screwed something up anyway)
Clubhouse Games (Cheats enabled to unlock the games I already earned)
Planet Puzzle League (Simple game, one of those for when I'm bored)
Brothers in Arms (Will probably delete soon, but it was new)

Anyway, in addition to these games, I got a new one (which is in fact, an old game from '06 I believe) which is Megaman ZX.

Now, I never played one of the old Megaman games as a kid. I did watch the show though,(which looked cartoonier than this Youtube video from what I remember. Oh well) and have check some of the old games through emulators (mainly the SNES ones). So, why not try the DS game?

So I'll probably use that and some other games as an excuse to update my blog, as I post my progress. Anyway, here's what I've gone through in Megaman:

Vent, a transporter meets up with his boss Giro with a package. They are attacked by Mavericks, some evil robots who are apparently attacking the city and are responsible for the death of Vent's parents. They attack Giro and Vent, with Vent's motorcycle blowing up and Vent being thrown off a ledge with the package. The package opened up, and inside was this "Biometal" which possessed the power of the old Blue Megaman (Model X). Combined with the biometal, Vent is transformed into the main dude, Megaman.

Anyway, he eventually is able to deliver the biometal to this group who is trying to figure out what's happening with all the Maverick outbreaks in the City. He had apparently saved the leader of the group when he had fallen off the ledge, a girl named Prairie. After discussing things on the HQ airship, I believe another attacked occurred in the hometown of Vent, so he decides to take action, since he doesn't want more people to die. Giro goes off with him, as they are allowed to use the Biometal. Giro dies, and leaves behind the other biometal that he was using, Model Z. With Vent near death, the Model Z combines with the model X to unsurprisingly form, Megaman ZX :P

So that's the main story. I've completed about 3 missions already. The different stages are labeled via letters. A-1, A-2, B-1, B-2, etc. I'm currently on I-7 or something, and am stuck against this really hard boss. I've already defeated 2, and got the Model L and Model...something. An Ice and Air suit, that along with the ZX. So...there you go.

Busy Woodchuck

2007-08-03T22:11:00.000-04:00

Ugh. My DS memory failed today. On that memory were 25+ game saves, all of which are lost. CRAP. On the bright side, most of the games were simple Pick-up and Play, OR a game I already beat. Some others though, like Big Brain Academy and Metroid Prime Hunters did have some important save info, so I'll have to start over. :( Oh well. I'll be making a script for the new memory so every time it's plugged in, it will automatically back itself somewhere. The old memory is completely screwed as Windows (and Linux) have too many problems detecting it, and I can't reformat the card at all. :\

Anyway, I've been fairly busy this week. Worked on 2 animations for a publicity announcement of a seminar that our Network will be presenting in a few weeks. I got 2 more to finish, and probably will help out with anything else.

Over in my tournament, we just finished Campaign 6. That means in a few weeks I'll start that sig request thread, the one where I draw some 30 images for some dudes to put in the forums. Looks like I'll also be Captain of my company (highest rank in company level) so that's pretty cool.

Uh...what else. I already posted about my LCD. Mmmm...today after church I hung out with some people from my Network, we ate lunch together, hung out at the mall, and then they dropped by my house to look at some photos (and drain our water supply ;P). Overall, very fun. :)

Oh yea, pics of the new house are on my Zooomr page. SO click on that icon over on the right sidebar, with the camera. :D

LCD

2007-07-25T12:39:00.000-04:00

I just bought this. Pray that it will arrive safely and undefective. :P

Moved Again

2007-07-25T00:10:00.000-04:00

All right, so I haven't posted in quite a bit, but let me try to recap what's happened in...apparently the last 21 days since my last post. :P

So, first off, I couldn't get into the college I was planning to go to, because they didn't accept the SATs. However, next semester I will be signing up for another (I think better) university that should accept it, although it's a little more expensive (though they seem to be more technologically advanced than the other colleges). Looks like I'll be going for Graphic Design right off the bat, instead of my original plan of studying a small technical career for a few years. If I'm gonna spend some years, it might as well be on a complete career and with something I really wanted to try, not just a course that I think I'd be good at. ;)

What else...I probably have a bunch of stuff on Facebook (where, I was recently able to find a lot of my old schoolmates from Elementary School! :D) that would talk about anything that's happened lately...except:

I saw Transformers Sunday. It was awesome. Robot action is awesome. Optimus Prime is awesome.

Lastly, we just moved in to the new apartment (a few blocks from the old townhouse) and so far we've only encountered these major problems:
AC Pains - The way AC works here, is you have the small AC box in a hole in a wall in each room. Unfortunately, the socket for my AC in my room blew up, my sister's wall opening for the AC was too small for her old AC, and my dad's NEW AC blew up too.
Entertainment Center - It didn't fit. We are on the 4th floor, and the elevator here is tiny, just enough to fit about 5 adults. The only other option is a small staircase that is about 2.5 feet wide, so to twist a 5 foot wide center up is impossible. For now, it sits in one of our 4 parking spaces. ;)
Internet - It seems our DSL is not set up yet, HOWEVER we are taking another Wimax trial (search my blog for Wimax for an explanation and story on what happened last time) but to summarize (and conclude, so I can get to bed), this is awesome. The speed is exactly what is advertised, I miss this type of speed.

Anyway, I'll get photos of the new place soon. Good night.

Red

2007-07-03T17:08:00.000-04:00

Whoa. Haven't posted in almost a month. Oh well, I come back with PLENTY of photos to make up for it. Have a look HERE and HERE! :D

Let me sum up a little:

So we've been going to a youth group for almost 2 months now. It is a BIG youth group, I'm guessing around...100 or more. Anyway, it's big enough that there seems to be little "networks" over here, or what we attempted at one point with the "accountability groups" in REEL, except these groups (at least mine) has around 25 or more people. :P

Anyway, the first week we went to the youth group, we were greeted by some of the group members, some of which have become our closer friends. So, here we goes...

Here are a couple of the members. The 3 girls sitting down are sisters. From left to right are Adrianna, Lisette, and Karolina. Karolina and Adrianna were some of the first people I met at the group. The first 2 weeks, me and Giselle left pretty quickly after the youth service ended, but on the third one, Adrianna and Karolina caught us, and were able to talk to both of us (mainly Adrianna with Giselle, Karolina interrogating me). Anyway, these sisters have become some of our closer friends here.

As for my fellow males, I've also met 2 funny gringo-wannabes. Here, on the most right, is Cristian. He is a master butcher of the English language, and now greets us (and purposely annoys Giselle) with a loud "HALLO!" all the time. X-)

Another dude who was within the first group I met is Alex, a.k.a Palito (meaning "small stick"). Palito is even skinner than me, and also seems to like and dabble in some English. He likes to sing and dance, and he is very quick with making jokes out of the conversation. He also seems to be quite the ladies' man, but he probably has nothing on Michael. ;P You can see him above, the first one to the left of me.

Last but not least, the leader of our little network group, Hugo! Small in stature, but big in heart (kinda like Jose! :D), Hugo is a really cool dude, with a mysteriously unknown age, and a lot of youthful energy. Anyway, we've been hanging out more and more over the past weeks, and just last Sunday they all invaded my house, so you can go check out the small albums on my Facebook.

Hair-be-gone-salon-athon Store.

2007-06-07T17:43:00.000-04:00

An hour ago:

Now ago:

Supcom Battle - 5/22/07

2007-05-22T15:07:00.000-04:00

So, I'm gonna layout my battle this morning with some dude in Supreme Commander. Here is an overview of the map we played, Emerald Craters. I'm the red team on the North, and he's the Green on the South. A basic thing you should know about the game is that there are 2 resources. Energy, and Mass. Energy, is easy to get. You just build different generators. You have different levels of technology (3 of them) so you start out building level 1 generators. Eventually you upgrade one of your factories to build a level 2 engineer, which in turn can build a level 2 generator. Then again for level 3. There is also a special type of way to get energy, and that's through that yellow lightning bolt you see on the map, which you build a Hydrocarbon Plant on.

Mass, on the other hand, is a lot harder to get. All those green patches across the map are your mass deposits. You have to build a Mass Extractor on them to get any mass. Thing is, being a large map, my engineers can't get to all of them quick enough, so I mainly grab all the ones near my base, and upgrade those. An alternate method to receive mass, is through a fabricator. The fabricators (only level 1 and 3) use up a LOT of energy to make some extra mass. For every Lvl 1 Fabricator you should have 2 Lvl 1 Generators. Hopefully, you caught all that.

Here's my base a few minutes into the game. Already got a land and air factory up. I wish there was some indicator that let me knew when a factory finished, many times I losing valuables seconds/minutes because I didn't realize one was done. I could of started building something earlier...-_-

Here's an overview of my scouts (those 3 diamonds across the center) doing their recon work. Just to make sure they (the enemy's armies) aren't there. I should of built a small base on that eastern (right-side) mound, but didn't, and eventually lost it to my opponent. :P

Here's his base after 5-10 minutes in the game.

And here's my base. Not bad either, but maybe a little less organized.

Here is his little army, he set them up in a line in front of the base he started constructing near the center.

At his main, he built a LOT of fighter jets. :P Later to destroy all of mine, protecting his gunships.

Dundundun! I send my first wave to his little, yet quickly growing base down near the center.

Here is the closest I got to winning. Our first armies meet, but interestingly enough his Commander was out there in the open, ready to build something. however, he quickly retreated as my first wave gave attack. They were all destroyed as his little defense line was bigger than my attack was.

Here you can see our respective bases so far...

Here's about the best I was able to get my base to. Right now you see a Level 2 Shield being built in the top-right. I was able to get about 4 all around my base at the end. However, that whole section in the top-left was taken out by a surprise ground+air attack. He had sent about 20 gunships across the left of the map, and then attacked from the North, but even worse was the fact that he had loaded half of those Gunships with a tank underneath! So I had about 10 tanks eating away as a bunch of Gunships attacked from above. I lost a lot of my power plants and fabricators (they turn energy into mass) which I had to rebuild later on.

My problem: I did not have any of this at my main. After that attack I was left rebuilding what I already had, which was older level 2 technology. He already has level 3 shields, power generators, and fabricators running his main base.

Here is a final overview of the map. As you can see, I did a fair job on expanding, however, the key is inside the enemy's main base, down in the south. That's where all his power was coming from, and from there he was able to amass an army near the center.

Here is his final wave, the army that eventually destroyed me. Noticed how he strategically position a bunch of shield tanks throughout the formation, as to give maximum coverage to all his bots and tanks.

Here you can see his huge army eating away at the south of my base. I'm in trouble...

See that floating ship near the top? That was a transport. I tried to build it as fast as possible to fly my Commander out of my base, but they shot it down quick, so you can see my Commander (the robot on fire :P) running away...

but they caught him so...I died. :P

Blurbizitation

2007-05-22T13:05:00.000-04:00

No, that word does not exist. Oh well. Here goes my random thoughts for the day (and throughout the past weeks :P)...

I really suck at the large maps on Supreme Commander. I've been playing this one, called Emerald Crater. A huge green map, with one big circle in the middle, and 4 smaller circles on each cardinal direction. Then there's also a nice chunk of land with some resources on each corner on the map. Anyway, I can't seem to expand fast enough, which leaves me with low resources, and with my enemy able to build his army ALL around me. I just finished a game, this time I did a lot better at expanding, but I hit another problem I have which is advancing my technology (level 1, 2, 3). So he had these HUGE power plants (Level 3) before I did (though I had quite a bit of Level 2), so he was able to build larger armies than I was able to counter with. I saved the replay to check out how he worked his stuff. I'll make a separate post showing our battle, since describing it is a lot harder, than staring at some of the beautiful screenshots I could be taking instead. :P

I've been finalizing some stuff with my website, and thanks to Justin's help, I've been able to get my layout completed! I'm testing out some stuff with the scripts and junk for my comic system, so that's what I'll be working on for a bit. I set up a test page here. here you can see my original mock-up for it, I got it pretty close eh? :D

School. It rears its' ugly head once again. I have a week to decide whether I'm gonna sign up for Graphics Design at "La Universidad del Norte" and start in June (or July) the classes. Ugh...I'm gonna have to pray hard for this one, because if I miss it, I'll be schooless for another year, which isn't necessarily bad but...you know. It would be better to get in school again...I guess. I wish God could send me an e-mail, to let me know what he wants...

We'll be visiting a youth group on Saturday, checking it out to see if we like it. We finally were able to check out the small youth service they had on Sunday, not a lot of people, maybe about the size of REEL, but with a couple more little kids. :P

I'm hungry.

If I didn't mention this already, we bought an apartment. After we move out (I think next month, or July) we will be staying at an apartment for a while (few years or so, unless we find a nice house or something :P).

Pixtures

2007-05-11T17:51:00.000-04:00

Here you can see some of my huge base. There's my commander there with the name tag "mastastealth" on it.

Here is on of MY races' experimental units, the Fatboy. It's pretty much a mobile factory (which I used to build all those anti-air tanks next to it). You can see the wreckage of one of the enemies' experimental units, the Monkeylord, A huge spider bot, in the background.

One of my little Anti-air points. You can see the guns firing at some of those enemy green planes on the right.

Here comes one of the biggest, baddest experimental units in the game. I believe it's called the "Czar" and it's pretty much a UFO with super laser beam underneath.

And here you can see that UFO blown up. I had to send every fighter I had to take that punk out.

So that's Supreme Commander. Here's a picture I drew for a contest on Deviantart:

I'll get screenshots of my Linux desktop later.

Squito Chart

2007-05-11T13:01:00.000-04:00

Call me obsessive, but I've added a little flash "chart" (right sidebar, on bottom) where I will keep track of my mosquito bites from now on. You can believe it or not, as you will see it's just an unreal amount of bites. The red ones are "officially" recorded bites. When I made the chart, I looked in a mirror and marked every bite I could still see. The dark red ones, are older ones I had scribbled on a pad, but only go back a month or 2. So there are still about 3+ months of bites worth that I'm not even showing! PLUS that doesn't include the small bites that might of disappeared fast enough that I forgot to record them that day.

Click on the pink face to show my face bites, click the face to make it disappear again. That "green zone" is where I hope I never get bit, and shouldn't, because I'm wearing pants you know? ;) So no bites from my waste to above my knees.

That is all. I still need to get some photos of something from some days ago right? Bleh....

Geeklog

2007-05-04T16:07:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm gonna share some of my recent PC activities, which may be a nice change from my usual "I hate mosquito rants". Although, FYI, I got bit 12 times in the past few days, in odd patterns. It's a line of 3 bites each, going up both cheeks, a line down my neck, and then a line across the middle of my forehead, each one consisting of 3 bites. Really weird stuff. Anyway...

...

You know what? I think I forgot most of the stuff. :P You see, I wrote that above paragraph one day, and had to save it because I had to do something...and now, 3 days later, I try to finish this darn post (which I know was gonna be pretty big) and can't remember what the heck I was gonna say...darn it.

So, I'll start with:

I've been playing some more Supreme Commander lately. I bought that game a while ago, and had played a couple times, but now I play about every other day. It's really awesome (and works so beautifully on my new machine) and I've won a couple multiplayer battles. Although in the past few days I've been trying to finish the campaign (single-player) mode. I probably shoulda taken a screenshot...:P

I've also been doing some WINE work in Linux. WINE creates a type of translation layer to Linux, converting Windows functions and calls to use native Linux ones, so that it can run programs. The developers have done an amazing job at getting DirectX stuff into the code, and I've been able to get Battlefield 2, Total Annihilation, and Soldat to run in Linux quite well, though Supreme Commander gets an error during install for some reason...

I installed the new Ubuntu Feisty 4.07 on a spare 80GB I had, so it has plenty of room. I have it all nice and setup now with Beryl and everything. I should get a screenshot of that too...;)

I also am working on some art stuffs...but I will post all those pictures (and some more stuff on a recent trip we had) in another post...

Farm

2007-05-02T13:10:00.000-04:00

We went to a farm Saturday. Check out my photos!

Other then that...I've won a couple games of Supreme Commander, but I'm still a noob at it. The game rocks though.

Face Feast

2007-04-20T13:54:00.000-04:00

More bites...from this little punk:

Here you can see my ugliest bite, on my elbow, which is a few days old. You will also notice my eyes have bites (although my left eye could just be my chalazion :P) Also next to my eye, and next to my lip.

I also found this at the foot my bed, when I woke up to these bites.

Income

2007-04-16T15:42:00.000-04:00

So...I haven't posted anything interesting lately about how I've personally been doing here. So, let me take some time now before I get bored of typing. ^_^

First off, to the all so common question of: "So how is it over there?"

The answer is, it sucks. To further detail that simple response...
Colombia (and when I say Colombia, I will mainly refer to the city I reside in currently, which is Barranquilla) looks kinda crappy. Not that I care much, but it makes the place look poor. The closest thing would be if you go visit Miami. Similarly, both places have there good and bad neighborhoods. And like any place, there are some sections where you can check out the mansions, and a lot of these Colombian mansions are gorgeous. I'm sure Giselle has pictures, whether they're online or not, I don't know, but if you want to see them, go nag her. ;)

Colombian food is great. I love eating the meats and chicken. It's not so different because my parents are Colombian, so the food I ate at home was mainly Colombian anyway. :P

The people...are people. I don't know what people mean by "how are the people there" since I don't really interact with strangers. :P I've already posted about the annoying beggars. Most people are friendly, but it's simply because they want your money! :P

What sucks? Well, if you've been reading my blog for any amount of time, you should of come across a post about electronics, something which Colombia is incredibly crippled with. Import costs are sick, shipping costs are disgusting, taxes and prices on stuff here is way too high to justify and there is not much I can do about it. :(

There are no computer shops like Bestbuy over here. There are no famous brands from the computer industry like you can get off of Newegg.com, just a few, and so if I plan on buying anything electronic, I'm gonna have to buy some hefty shipping costs to get it from the US. If you know me, you know I'm a computer geek, and this really hurts.

Anyway, to explain the title of this post, I wanted to let some people know we are getting closer to getting some sort of income. I think my dad got some deal with his job or something, seems like it's getting more serious. Also, my parents are heavily considering starting an internet cafe, and so they have been researching on that quite a bit. Please keep us in your prayers as we've been burning through our savings for about 5 months now, and we need something to recuperate it. I hope God shows us why he brought us to this country soon. I still believe he did, and it's the only thing that I can use to not go haywire living here. :P

Feast

2007-04-15T16:48:00.000-04:00

Well. I got bit again. A couple of times too. First off, both of my EYES were attacked 2 days ago, one on my right eyebrow, and the other smack on the left eyelid. This morning I wake up to:

2 bites on the edge of my right palm
1 bite on the edge of my left palm
1 bite on my left index finger
1 bite on my left ring finger
1 bite on my right ring finer
1 bite on my right elbow
1 BIG bite on my left elbow
1 bite on the back of my left leg
and lastly another bite under my right eye, near the top of the bridge of my nose.

Can you believe it? Probably not, but it's true. I have not gone ONE WEEK in this country (which I've lived in for almost 5 months) without being bitten by a mosquito.
Goodness gracious.

DOA?

2007-04-05T19:31:00.000-04:00

One of my memory sticks is bad. I guess it was "Dead-on-Arrival", or rather, "critically wounded" since it worked for about a day. :P Either way, I'll need to spend about $36 on shipping, fortunately Newegg will replace and ship it (to my aunt's) for free. So I'm stuck with 1GB for now...>_>

Computer

2007-04-04T22:57:00.000-04:00

Check my photo page for more!

GEEZ

2007-03-28T18:53:00.000-04:00

I just got bit on my left foot 5 times by a mosquito, within the last half hour. How do they get me!? So stealthy...

65

2007-03-26T15:59:00.000-04:00

That was the total weight of my comptuer parts...65 lbs. What did it cost to get here? $215. Ouch. Should be here around Saturday/Monday.

Custom Robo Arena is an awesome DS game.

Facebook is pretty neat. I don't know why more people don't use it. Myspace is ugly as crap and is limited. Facebook is so clean and has a lot of cool features, and feels so SAFE. No spam from a bunch of crazy people I don't even know. Great privacy features. I was also able to get it to import my blog posts, so now I don't have to manually type them into Facebook as separate posts. Now if I can figure out how to get Xanga to just mirror my actual blog...:P

I'm hungry. Feed me?

Mailtime

2007-03-20T13:22:00.000-04:00

Well, my aunt will be shipping my PC to me soon, hopefully by tomorrow, but probably in the next few days, MEANING it should be here by the end of next week. Awesome.

I finished another campaign in my tournament. Our division won, like usual! ;) The last battle was intense, but it was awesome.

Anyway, not much else to say...or at least, I can't remember anything. I don't know if I mentioned it, but I "beat" Rocket Slime. There are still some things I can do, but technically I finished the game. ^_^

I also downloaded a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game for my DS, based off of the new movie coming out. It's not that great, I wouldn't buy it.

There are a couple of games coming out for the Wii (Cooking Mama, Medal of Honor Vanguard, and Super Paper Mario) that I can't afford right now, but would love to get! X-D

Amigos

2007-03-15T15:43:00.000-04:00

First off, let me say, colloidal silver is the best frickin' medicine on Earth. I woke up with a nasty sore throat, and a weird one at that. Just in the back of my mouth, not exactly in the neck area like usual. Anyway, after eating breakfast and lunch, it gets a little better, but then my mom gives me a cup with a little colloidal silver, and MAAAAANNN...instant throat-cleanser. Of course, it's not a miracle healing liquid, and the soreness comes back after a while, but it's awesome because in the multiple cases I've used it, it provides an INSTANT relief and then also helps take the soreness away. Something about silver and how it kills bacteria. Anyway, I just love that stuff...

Anyway, the topic of friendship has popped up quite a bit in my head. Paula recently posted something about a couple of her friends, I recently talked to my cousin Victor and the topic came up. I mentioned something that he agreed with, and that was that there are not enough synonyms in English to describe the different levels of friendships.

You see, most people call anyone they know relatively well, a "friend". I've recently (as in the past years :P) have noticed this is an overly used word. You see, friends should be people you are close to. People you talk to quite a bit, hang out, stuff like that. I think it takes a certain level of bonding between 2 people to consider each other as friends. So here goes my list of levels:

Acquaintance: These are people you have met in this past few minutes. You know their name, maybe age, and another detail or two, but that's it.

Personal Acquaintance: This type of person, for instance, is one that needs a specific word for. I'll refer to them as a "Perquaint" for now. A perquaint was an acquaintance that you got to know. You know a little more than a name now, and you can talk to them about different things. You are probably just learning about their interests, and maybe what they plan on doing in the future/already working as. A perquaint can also be used to refer to a friend of your friend. Like, you don't really know them, but you can discuss things you saw on the news or whatever if your friend leaves the room, leaving you two alone. After a while it may get awkward (unless you really get along quickly) and you need to call your friend back.

Homies: Homies, for a lack of a better word, are probably a majority of what people consider "friends". For instance, I would consider half of my old youth group "homies". You can talk to any of them, maybe even about some personal stuff, but really your relationship is a bit shallow (not in a bad way, just, it's not a deep friendship). You probably don't call each other, only see them every once in a while (weekly through monthly) but you know quite a bit about them as well, and probably leave each other Myspace messages. You should also have an idea of what month their birthday is in.

Buddies: Buddies near the level of "Friend" but are not quite there yet. You probably hang out sometimes, chat up on instant messengers a bit, but private matters normally aren't revealed too much between each other. I would consider online friends right around the "buddy" level. For instance, I have a bunch of buddies from my tournament in 21CW. I talk to many of them almost everyday, we play online together, and we make jokes about each other without taking offense. Sometimes, we even learn some personal things, a little about their family or something, but it's usually not something you discuss to often. Anyway, I think "buddy" should replace friend as the common word. Why?

Friend: Friends...these are people you talk to all the time, have such a close bond you share secrets with each other, you got too many inside jokes, etc. The Bible has an example of friends, David and Jonathan. I believe it mentions something (if not there, then in Proverbs) that a good friend, can be closer than a BROTHER. Wow. Can you really use "friend" on as many people as you probably do? I can tell you right now, I've only had 2 real friends. Malcolm, who I use to go to School with from 2nd-4th grade, and Michael, who anyone in youth group (or Cornerstone ;D) should know. And yet, even though they were friends at one point, prolonged lack of contact can still lower them in the levels of friendship. I wouldn't consider it as a bad thing or anything, friendships aren't just any little thing. Right now I wouldn't consider Michael less than a buddy, and Malcolm, seeing as how it's been more than 5 years since I've even spoken to him, I'd consider a homie, both of which, with some time, could rise back to "friend" level quickly. Also, though probably dealt with different, a girl/boyfriend would hover around this level as well. Also, even if, for example, you had a girlfriend, you could still have another "friend" who is a girl as well. Being friends requires TIME, without that the bond is easily weakened. Either way, a "friend" is quite an important thing for someone, and I think that it should be used a lot less than it is. Finally:

Spouse: This about the ultimate level, which you can obviously only have one of. A spouse is your best friend in life. I mean, you're gonna be with this person for some 50+ years about everyday right? Of course, not every married couple has their level of friendship where it should be, but a good couple tops the list of "friendshipity".

Anyway, hope none of my buddies who somehow find this post get mad or anything. Especially now being in a different country, I doubt anyone would be able to consider me a friend. A buddy? Sure. Nothing wrong with that. Less? I don't mind. If we talk enough we can climb our way up to buddies as well. As for friends, I sure hope I can find some down here, but I'm sure it'll be a while. :P

Oh yea, and I finally finished coloring this.

Sync

2007-03-12T09:31:00.000-04:00

Ooh boy! Here comes a round of updates, reviews, and random junk...

Check out the title: "Sync". With a funny misspelling that would be a cool name for some social network site right? "Keep in 'Sync' with your friends..."

On Saturday morning, I have successfully emptied my bank account by buying a brand new computer. Well, you know, a bunch of parts to make myself a new computer. I'd give you specs, but you probably don't know what they are or what it means. So let's just say it's awesome and cost a lot of money.

But I guess, incase you do know...
Intel Core 2 Duo e6600 (2.4Ghz dual-core)
eVGA 680i SLI motherboard (this and the above processor bundled gave me a free copy of Supreme Commander!)
2GB DDR2 PC2-8800 (Memory)
250GB Seagate Perpendicular SATA Drive (Harddrive)
320MB Geforce 8800GTS (out performed it's 640MB brother, a graphics card, comes with Call of Duty 2)
Creative Audigy X-fi Sound card (for sound)
Corsair 650W modular Power Supply (Yay, modular cables)
and I guess that's it. Case, DVD drive, and I'll use my current keyboard/mouse/monitor for now.

Speaking of which, one of my main catalysts in buying a new rig was my recently purchased copy of Supreme Commander...
The game, is just like Total Annihilation, except prettier. The graphics however do take a BIG toll on my machine, and so I'm buying a new one to get this game running silky smooth (which it probably won't, but it'll run way better than it does now, which is just acceptable). Although, I still need quite a bit of practice on multiplayer, as I've only won 2 games against really new guys, and 1 because my opponent disconnected from the game. Here's a screenshot (not from my machine, just from the game) so you can see how it looks like:

Another game which I just spent my weekend on is a DS game called "Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime". This must be one of the first RPGs I've ever come close to completing.

Rocket Slime is a strange little game , where you play as a blue slime, whose city "Boingburg" gets owned by a bunch a group of platypus called "the Plob". They kidnap just about everyone in the city and you have to go find all of them. Along the way, you find a hidden tank that you can summon with a flute, and you battle out other bosses' tanks with it. The game is very fun and some of the slimes are just awesome.

Laslty, I just registered an account on Facebook. So if you've finally gotten tired of the UGLY, spamtastic, ad-invaded Myspace, come over here.

YESSS!!

2007-03-07T17:56:00.000-05:00

Patience

2007-03-05T19:02:00.000-05:00

My aunt is coming on Wednesday for some dental work. And she is bringing my copy of Supreme Commander. I've been waiting since Feb. 22nd for that sucker. How I hope I get it in 2 days...-_-

Anniversary

2007-03-01T18:43:00.000-05:00

My parents have been married for 22 years today. Wow...go them!

School'd

2007-02-27T11:11:00.000-05:00

Weeeee...excuse my little rant here, just something I'd like to share.
Every time someone mentions something about college I get to wondering...what's the big deal? For instance, some people in my family have asked repeatedly what I think about doing about college now that I've moved over here. My answer, "I guess I'll go to college here." For those who don't know, I plan on studying Graphics Design. That or maybe something with animations, or as a last resort, some sort of computer technician course. That's if I go to college in the first place.

Suddenly, gasps are heard everywhere! "What you you mean IF you go?" Well, I'm not sure if I need to go or not. You see, I'm very laid back about this college situation, maybe too much, but I think I have logical reasons. First off is the obvious international transition that has just took place. if I were still over there I might have been applying already, but since we moved, I'll be delaying any of that junk until I know we are staying for good.

Secondly, I don't see the big deal. I know people who are entering and are stressed to their limits because of college, and I feel so sorry for them. I don't see why it's gotta be like that. What do people go to college for? To study something they'd like to have as a career in their life. Why do you want a career? Well, to have a good life, money, and get a nice piece of paper certifying you for that career. Uh...what? You see, some people, like my grandmas for instance, want their grandkids to get a career simply for bragging rights! That's absurd. Some people do it because their parents pressure them to. That sucks. Me? My parents have one priority in my life, and that is that I have a close personal relationship with God.

Nothing else matters. Am I saying "DON'T GO TO COLLEGE, ITZ WASTE YOUR LIFE!"? No, by all means, do whatever God leads you to do, not what family, friends, or society wants you to do. God probably could care less if you got a career or not, as long as you were doing it in his will. Maybe you were called to do something else besides waste a couple of years learning something you are not meant to do? Which leads me to another point:

I think colleges are really only good for "officializing" whatever it is you are studying. For example, I plan on learning graphics design right? No business would really take a look at my work unless I had a "degree" or some little special thing like that, even if I'm just as good, or BETTER, than some dude that does have one. That's lame, and I see that as a flaw in society. You know how much I've learned about computers over the past 10 years? Then I see these "Geek Squads" and crap like that come up, and hear the stories of how idiotic they diagnose problems. But does it matter? They probably have some certification, while I don't. Too bad for their customers. So pretty much, all I'm going there for is to spend months and months of mostly useless work, to get a paper saying, "Look at me, I can do this!". Seriously, most of what you learn will be on your own time, throughout your life. (unless of course, you get one of those "specialized" type of careers, like a doctor, who will spend years learning stuff) That's what I think, and have read. Programmers for instance, will learn more during their teenage years, hacking away at programs or making viruses (:P) than learning a bunch of junk at college that businesses won't even USE! It's also too generic sometimes. Jose has told me about his studies, and one day he's learning stuff in Flash, another day stuff in Maya (a 3D application). What the heck? if I want to learn Flash animation, I sure as heck don't need to learn about 3D modeling or animation. There's really no way to study a very specific thing...at least, it doesn't seem that way in any of my fields of interests.

BAH! What a waste it seems to me. That's why I'm wingin' it (I guess I'm wingin' life too :P). I have my plans, but if God decides something else, heck, I'd gladly change my plans to suit his. Not that it'd be any easier than going to college, but atleast this will get me some "eternal diplomas", if you will.

Business

2007-02-26T16:28:00.000-05:00

Meh. Another week gone by without a fridge. We finally got one though, I believe one of my mom's friends is lending her one.

Anyway, not much has happened over the past few days, at least nothing news post worthy that I can remember! :P However, something interesting has bloomed over the weekend.

Talking with Miguel (remember? Mom's Classmate's Son) we have come up with a small little business of selling parts for the Nintendo DS. I'll be selling memory, cartridges, hopefully games and maybe other electronics as well depending on how things go. I also started another blog specifically for those people who want the latest in DS news, of course, in Spanish. O_O So we'll see how that goes...I've spent some $300+ on products and I need to sell them to get my money back! X-)

Return

2007-02-21T17:39:00.000-05:00

Giselle and my dad come home today. They should be here any minute. They apparently have their luggage loaded with stuff, a lot of it bought by me! X-)

I got 2 Wiimotes + Nunchucks, 5 Slot-1 DS carts, 5 memory cards, and 2 bags of gumdrops coming my way! WOOO!

Busted

2007-02-17T10:26:00.000-05:00

The fridge broked. They need to get a unit from Bogota. Them punks won't return our money either, so Mom is gonna find a mini-fridge for now.

I got Battlefield 2 to install and run under Ubuntu. Pretty neato, but I can't play on most online servers due to Punkbuster issues.

My Pa and Sis are over in FL, buying me gumdrops, cookies, and Supreme Commander. Hopefully...

I can play Commodore 64 and Sega Genesis games on my DS now. Though the Sega Genesis emulator does not have sound (yet) but it runs at a nice speed, while the C64 is a little slow (due to sound I guess) but atleast it works. Ghost 'n Goblins is harder because jumping with the D-pad is more of a pain. I have to have my thumb at a more extreme angle, so when I'm running up, I can hit Up at the same time to jump to the right. Otherwise, I only jump straight up, and I get stuck next to a tombstone or fall off the edge of something.

Lastly, I've been attacked by mosquitoes again. One of my fingers got puffed up, another not so much. I got a line of 3 dots on my foot, 3 recent ones on my arm, it looks like a huge vampire bat bite (they are separated) but apparently one of them has a smaller bite right next to it. Geez...and I got one on my cheek and some on my legs. In total, over 20 around my body. Boy do those 'squito ladays love me...

Valentines?

2007-02-13T16:32:00.000-05:00

Well. Here are my random thoughts/blurbs for the day.

I've updated my photo page with some...well, photos...of the past couple days. We played at this college campus some days ago, and I got burnted. I didn't even notice till the next day when I looked at my face in the mirror. Though I did noticed my skin was a little more irritated than usual. Although I thought that was due to some large mosquito bites and/or rashes I might have gotten from foliage. :P

Our fridge is on the fritz. And my mom has a cold. My dad and sister are leaving tomorrow to the US (so my dad can sign a contract to start working)...I'm scared.

I drew this:

and this:

...the other day. And I've finished coloring both of them recently.

I'm almost done with this really cool animation I've been working on. I'm fairly pleased with it, as it has a nifty scene that I drew frame-by-frame. It was pretty time consuming, but went quicker than I thought it did. In fact, all I need to do now is color those frame-by-frame frames and I'm done. ^_^

And lastly, I've found the holy grail, and it is 45 kilograms (100 lbs.) of awesome.

RSS

2007-02-09T16:16:00.000-05:00

So, you're interested in RSS ey? I'll explain what it is, and how you can get my feeds (and any others you wish to get).

Ok, to keep it simple, RSS is a cool little web technology that allows you to receive updates to a website instantaneously. I would call it a "virtual newspaper" type of technology. You have a program on your computer that contains feeds you've added to it, and it will fetch all those updates for you! For instance, if you read a lot of websites that do daily articles and such, doesn't it get annoying checking every website, everyday? Well, you probably don't have to.

Most websites nowadays have RSS feeds. You should look out for a symbol like this, or for the terms
"subscribe", "feed", "RSS", or "Atom". For instance, on the bottom of my blog it says, "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)"

Anyway, you'll first want to get a program. A really simple one I found would be Feedreader. Download it by clicking this text, and install it. during the installation, you may want to have it startup during Windows (which would be a nice option) and it'll ask you if you want to add any feeds (it has some already set, you can choose to add some or choose none). Anyway, once you're done, open up the program and go to the menu "File". Then add a new feed! You'll have to put in a link, here are some of my RSS feeds:

For this blog: http://stealthbarp.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Feed for my photos: http://beta.zooomr.com/bluenote/feeds:rss/people/stealth

Feed for my comic: http://just-deserts.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

And there! Feedreader will fetch all the latest posts I made for you, so you don't have to come visit the site manually all the time! :P Of course, you can add other websites too, so start using ze technology!

Zooomr

2007-02-09T14:58:00.000-05:00

Just a heads up, I am now gonna host all the pictures I take on Zooomr. If you notice THIS:

Little icon on the right now, clicking on it will take you to my Zooomr page, where you will find everything (that I deem worthy, some shots don't come out good obviously :P) I will take with my camera from now on. I'm currently uploading the ones I've taken so far (most important ones I've already put on my blog anyway) so just a little notice. There's an RSS feed for it, if you know what that is. If not, I'll explain it in another post, and how to get it set up so you won't have to come here to check for updates, but the updates come to YOU! :)

Oh yea, and here's a video of me play Excite Truck (remember that game I talked a lot about?)

Me

2007-02-08T19:51:00.000-05:00

Hi. Remember me?

Geez...check out my "desk"...:P 2 boxes and a tablet stacked up. AND LOOK AT MY HAIR! It's long again. I like it at this length. Same thing with my goatee, they are at maximum length before they start to annoy me. too bad it seems people are scared by my goatee here, I've had many little kids just glare at me. At least, I think my goatee scares em, maybe it's my Americano-looking face!?

1.5

2007-02-07T10:40:00.000-05:00

So, we've been here for about 1 and a half weeks. We're pretty much settled down now, except I still don't have a desk. :P But mostly everything is unpacked and put where it should be, and most of the stuff around the house has been fixed...as far as I know.

Not that I would know much, as a guy came into my room yesterday, tweaked and did something with my AC, and left. I didn't even pay attention to him, but around the evening I went to get a fan as I was getting hot in my room, and noticed an extra socket, which the AC was plugged into. Turns out the guy was the electrician who apparently fixed the power overload in the second story. you see, everything on the second story was on one fuse, so if you had all the computers on, and turned on an AC, POOF. Lights went out. Anyway, he fixed it.

I've installed Windows Vista on my laptop, and am not that pleased with it. but I don't plan on wiping it out and reinstalling XP as this is the future Windows, so I might as well get used to it. I also have Ubuntu 6.10 on dual-boot, but MAN...what a PAIN it was to try and get Mac OS X running on my laptop. OS X is not suppose to run on regular laptops, and although this version released has been installed on it (according to reports) and stuff, I don't think my efforts are worth getting that frickin' operating system on my machine. i guess I'll just have to buy a Mac to use its OS. :P

Yea...my eyes hurt. I've been reading a online manga called Megatokyo. It's hilarious, and has a great story line, plus the guy is a great artist. I read the first 820 when I found the site. In fact, my eyes still hurt...geez...

I procrastinate too much on my drawings, I need to be less lazy. :D

Vortex

2007-02-02T12:45:00.000-05:00

Snap! I haven't posted here in a while. Anyway, we have most of our stuff unpacked now, all I really need is a desk for my PC, but I have made a temporary one with 2 boxes and a wooden board! X-D Uhm...tomorrow is Giselle's 16th birthday, so drop her an e-mail if you can. Don't tell her, but WE'RE HAVING A SECRET SOLDAT WAN PARTY....that she planned...ok fine. you are all invited, download the game WILL YA!? ;)

Metrotel

2007-01-27T11:32:00.000-05:00

All right! We are in the new house! Even better, the DSL guy came like...5 minutes, after we brought the last of the stuff from the place we were renting. All that's really left is for those punks with our cargo to come. They were suppose to be here early in the morning, but nope. Anyway, I'm hungry.

Settling

2007-01-26T08:33:00.000-05:00

We're moving tomorrow morning. Yay.

Victory

2007-01-22T08:59:00.000-05:00

Yay we got a house again! It's definitely not as big, but it's nice. We will be moving in by week's end, hopefully all our stuff from the warehouse will be moved in as well (my bed! My computer! WEEEEEEEEEE!) and our internet should be setup next week too (from another provider with DSL, not the Wimax, which we canceled today). I'll get pictures up once we move in or somethin'...

Rights

2007-01-18T11:07:00.000-05:00

Interesting article I just found here. A little snippet here:

"Despite what you might have heard about "separation of church and state," the expression of religious beliefs remains a constitutionally protected right, even in public schools. Many school officials need an education on this point."

I guess the only problem would be the fact that we may not have constitutional rights anymore due to the Patriot Act? Kinda segwaying here, but I saw a little brochure on it and terrorism or something. It was interesting because there was a list about those you should keep an eye on, and considered a "terrorist group". One of them on the list were "religious fundamentalists". I guess that means "hardcore religious" and I'm sure that term can be applied to a true Christian, which in turn, makes us part of a potentially dangerous terrorist group? I'll try to find the brochure online, or see if I can get a scan of it once we get our stuff back.

I''m not very knowledgeable in politics, law, or crap like that, I'm just putting pieces together of what I've heard and seen, so don't rag on me. :P

Wimax

2007-01-17T14:49:00.000-05:00

Hey guys, yesterday my dad got an 8 day trial for internet via Wimax. For those who don't what it is, well...look it up. :P Basically, instead of DSL and cable that use the phone line, or cables, Wimax just sends it wirelessly. So your modem has an antennae and picks it up that way. Then you just connect your computers like usual.

Anyway, it's not as great as I thought it would be. Here is my list of observation:

Wimax is suppose to be symmetrical, unlike DSL for instance which is asymmetrical. What this means is that the download and upload should be the same (unlike DSL, which has a very low upload, and normal download). We asked the guy who sold us the Wimax, and he confirmed it. However, it's not. The internet company, Orbitel, rips their consumers off according to a Spanish forum I was reading.

The main problem is really that consumers here have no interest in bandwidth apparently. Like I might've mentioned previously, when we asked about the 2MB service in Bucaramanga, the guy was quite surprised, and said we were the first to even ask about that speed. So people here in Colombia just don't seem to understand much about speeds. 1Mbit here is a big deal, while over there it's actually quite a low DSL speed (Comcast offers 6-8 Mbits, and Verizon is actually selling 50Mbit fiber optic in the northeast!)

Anyway, apparently Orbitel chops up our upload, which should be at 1Mbit like our download, but is at some 300Kbits. Less than 1/3, which is crap (for what they guaranteed we'd get). In fact, this trial we are taking is suppose to be satisfaction guaranteed! I'm not satisfied...here's another problem:

Wimax has a 7km range. Signal is affected by your environment as well. We asked the guy if our speed diminished if our signal got week (e.g. we were at the edge of that 7km radius). He reassured as that as long as we were in the coverage, we'd have our speed. He obviously does not know what he is talking about, and my assumption was correct. It's quite the opposite. It's just like a regular Wi-fi network, how can you guarantee full speed on 1 bar of signal? That's crap.

Lastly, Wimax is a little more expensive than DSL or Cable, and with the 2 previously mentioned problems I don't really see why we would stick with it.

That is all.

Chicken

2007-01-15T17:23:00.000-05:00

I ate the biggest chicken of my life last night...and I ate ALL of it.

Even there, you can see I ate a chunk out of the left side, which was also dangling off the wood tablet it was served on by about an inch.

TADA!

Nags

2007-01-14T16:57:00.000-05:00

Ouch. Here I am, in the new temporary apartment that we are renting, for who knows how long, holding my laptop in the air in an attempt to get a signal to a wireless connection somewhere in the distance. It has internet (albeit VERY slow) but you gotta do what you gotta do. I'm at the moment holding the laptop on my knee, which is taking a toll on my back, so I should make this quick. :P

House hunting is quite the amount of work, it's really stressing out my parents, but we continue praying and hoping God closes and opens doors as he sees fit. Hopefully we can get all this resolved quickly enough...

A little off topic, I woke up today to the sound of some birds screeching (or a child, I don't know) and a guy screaming, because he's selling stuff. There are a bunch of beggars around here and it is extremely annoying. Thing is, you can't trust anyone as my mom's friend has already given stories of how she gave money to a dude who was asking for money for a trip or something, months later, he's still there asking for the samething. There are also the ones that are just ANNOYING. A little boy, STRUTTING ok, all arrogantly in his jeans and bright red hat and shirt goes up and asks my mom for money. The heck? What for? You could see the pride oozing out of his face as he walked by, staring at his reflection on the store windows. My goodness, I wanted to whack him with the water bottle I was holding. Fortunately for him, I didn't. But people here really are so unashamed about asking for money, it sickens me.

Another thing that I've seen around here are children with the wheels on the shoe. Remember that came out a couple years ago? It seems it only started catching on in the past year, and over here I'd say more than 50% of kids in the mall have em. OMG, so many little people rolling around, doing that lean-back kick thing to glide on their heels. You just wanna trip em and be all like, "You have FEET, USE them like a normal person!" -.- Geez, they even have velcro add-on wheels for those unfortunate kids with regular shoes, who want to be all "cool" like the others. And these have LIGHTS too! >_<

Anyway, on a happier note, I beat the Super Excite mode on Excite Truck, and now unlocked Mirror mode. :P Whoopee...

Here, I leave you with these 2 pictures of a sunset...

Piñitas

2007-01-10T18:20:00.000-05:00

Hey guys! We're getting real close to a decision on the buying/renting a house/apartment thing. Kinda...:P The thing is, we need to find a good place to stay at, and we want to rent for a year (in case it doesn't work out here) but renting is expensive. Buying a house is an option, but you just can't find a house that doesn't need repairs. So we'd have to rent (like a hotel) for a while...that's the situation.

Anyway, the title has to do with a yummy little bread they have around here. "Piñitas" means "small pineapples" I guess, but it's really just a regular looking bread with a layer of sugar on top. LOOK!

Also, here's an iguana.

And lastly, I finally got the S ranks on all the tracks in the "Super Excite" Gold Cup. I unlocked my last car, and it's pretty much the best one in the game (DURR). I recorded a video, which I'll have to upload later, as it's big and I'm out of time (laptop has 2 hour battery life, 20 minutes left, upload on slow connection wil take who knows how long...) soo...that is all. Goodbye.

Nada

2007-01-08T12:03:00.000-05:00

Hey guys and gals. I don't have much to update on, still no house, despite my parents visiting so many. I should probably jot down what I want to blog on a notepad, because I'm sure I wanted to put something up today, but I forgot it...X-)

Coast

2007-01-04T19:39:00.000-05:00

So, here I am in Barranquilla. Lots of photos, some updates, little time, and no internet! X-D Well, at least I can use this mall Wi-fi till my laptop battery dies...

I took quite the amount of landscape photos, which look great if I do say so myself, on the 8 hour trip it took from us to drive from Bucaramanga...

Here's me and the fat, wind in my hair, about an hour or so into the ride...;)

and the last one for now, I took it today while eating dinner...

As for updates, to keep it simple, we've moved to Barranquilla, we are staying at an apartahotel for now, and are looking for a house, with so far no success...that's about it. We got our stuff back, stored at a warehouse for now though...BUT I HAVE MY COMPUTER WITH ME NOW! YAY...

Standby

2006-12-29T09:07:00.000-05:00

Our internet supposedly goes out today. So my blogging will be a little sparse for January, unless of course I find an open wireless network wherever we stay next...

EDIT: Ok, make that another day. All the business closed early today, and dad couldn't get there in time. Yay? Let the agony be prolonged!

Baranquilla

2006-12-28T15:20:00.000-05:00

Looks like it's decision time. We are probably gonna move to Baranquilla, as things in this house just haven't worked out properly, and there isn't much left in terms of "good houses" in the area anyway...

Please keep us in your prayers, we could really use some guidance and stuff!

On a lighter note, I was able to order 2 Wii controllers from Newegg. If I ever get them, I don't know...but I ordered them! X-D

Camera

2006-12-27T17:57:00.000-05:00

My camera finally came. It's a Canon Powershot SD600 Digital Elph. Check out the main site, or the Newegg page for images of it, as I'd feel like a complete geek taking pictures of my camera...with another camera...X-)

Mountainous

2006-12-27T08:17:00.000-05:00

Yay, pics for you! We visit that Mesa Campestre (actually, a bunch of people were calling it 'Mesa de Los Santos', so I don't know) for a day. Here's some pics Fatty took during the climb:

Here's one of me, with my hair all nicely styled by the wind...

Here's some house my sister must've taken a picture of, I don't remember seeing it! :P

And here's the house we stayed at, which belongs to the neighbors in the back...

Huge front garden...

Here's a cave we visit up there...

And lastly, a picture of some docks where we hopped on a small boat for a ride around a lake (a lake in the mountains, crazy...)

Here's a video:

Hopefully I can find a picture of the neighbors that I'm allowed to use or something, so you can finally see them! :P

Holidays!

2006-12-23T18:10:00.000-05:00

Happy Holidays everyone! :D

December blew by so fast, I didn't even notice that Christmas was in a few days. I also didn't get to give out a birthday shout-out to that Mike and Shane guy, who both turn an old-but-not-as-old-as-me 17...;D I'm telling you, these arepas severely damaged whatever internal clock/calendar system I had...

Well, the people are looking for the gas leak. We are still here though. I'm not sure if we're going to Barranquilla anymore, but I heard my dad talking to the neighbor in the back about going somewhere...I think he said its called "Mesa Capestre".

And the Gold cup (in Super Excite mode) in Excite Truck is so frickin' hard...geez. I haven't gotten any S's yet! >_<

Trouble

2006-12-19T10:15:00.000-05:00

Uh oh. We just got some very bad news today...

We had a gas inspector or something come and check out the house. Turns out, there's a leak somewhere. The people who sold the house were getting bills as if people were living here, before we even bought it, and the house was empty. It was as if 12 people were cooking 3 times a day with the stove and taking showers (both are run by gas here). So today, they had to shutdown the gas.

Now we are left with cold water, which isn't even like the cold water in the US ok, this is like water that you had in your refrigerator. Frickin' crazy cold. And we have no stove to heat up the water or to cook on...

And so, we have to make a decision, of whether we leave this house completely, or once again rent somewhere temporarily. Obviously me and Giselle opted for the latter as we are just starting to make new friends, but either way this really sucks. Keep us in your prayers. -.-

Neighborhood

2006-12-18T09:46:00.000-05:00

Well, after some says of meeting the neighbors, one night they decided to bring just about everyone in the neighborhood (or rather, the neighborhood wanted to) meet us. :D

There were some...15-20 people there. 4/5 are girls. There's only one guy my age, the others are 13 and 15, if I remember correctly. Same goes for the girls, I think just about all of them are between 13-16. I'm slowly learning the names, but it's a little hard as a lot of girls here are named Maria, and a lot of guys named Juan. ;)

Well, that's about it. We ate some amazing steak yesterday. Mmm...

Neighbors

2006-12-15T10:41:00.000-05:00

I suppose I should do my "every-other-day" post...

Well, it only took a whole month, but Giselle (specifically, you will see why) finally made some new friends. There was a neighborhood meeting the other day, and my mom and Giselle went. Me and my dad went to check out the Clubhouse in the back, as we had heard it was women only. Well, apparently it wasn't (though it was mostly a bunch of women :P), but either way, Giselle became good friends with the neighbors in the back. Like, literally, you look out the window in the back of the house, and you can see their window. Maria (14) and Cesar (15) are there names, and they go to a bilingual school. They are freakishly similar in likes and dislikes to me and Giselle. I met them 2 days ago too, but Giselle, being the one who went to the meeting, seems to have grown on them already. X-) What a fatty...

I mentioned to my sister she was lucky to have gone, as I wish I could be as friendly with them as well, but she made a good point. They are still young, and I forget I'm 18. Not that it's a "HUGE" difference, but obviously it's a lot easier to be friends with someone your age. I'm 18. I need to write that on the back of my hand or something. (I also forgot when I wrote that post about the age of girls here, and my theory has yet to fail so far. The 14 year old neighbor could've said she was 18 and I'd believe it. So it looks like a good overall summary is "A girl who looks your age...isn't.")

Turns out, that was the last level of Red Steel. I beat the sword master, only to have it finish as well. Guess I didn't miss much except a different ending cut-scene.

Also, I've unlocked 2 more cars (there are actually some 10 more than I thought, due to Super Excite mode) in Excite Truck!

Lastly, I'M RUNNING OUT OF PANTS!

Media

2006-12-13T11:29:00.000-05:00

Some pics and vids for you! First off, the obligatory "me" picture.

And a funny plant on the "front lawn"...

And then our car!

And Wii gameplay footage!

Red Steel

2006-12-13T09:14:00.000-05:00

All right, here's my Red Steel review:

The game is about this guy, an American named Scott, and his fiancee Miyu. You're gonna meet her dad, but she gets kidnapped. You meet up with him, turns out he's head of this huge clan and so you are fighting against this Japanese mafia, eventually finding their leader, Tokai and getting back the girl.

The story is all right, the dialog in game isn't the best, but you can stand it. It gets really annoying when you start a level with dialog, and then die a little after it, because then you have to listen to the same thing over and over.

The mouth movements and stuff aren't great either. The whole game is visually a little better than Halo 2. The mouth movements and stuff for instance, are just open and close the jaw. There are many levels with great lighting however, but the graphics overall are nothing "amazing", but good.ou

One thing I did like were some of the songs, or background music that plays when you get into fights. Some dramatic Japanese stuff, or some funky Japanese rock...very neat. They use a lot of the Wiimote's built-in speaker, which is cool and adds to the game's atmosphere.

The game can be a little difficult to control at first, but you get used to it quick. I did find myself spinning in circles because I wasn't pointing at the TV correctly quite a bit. You use the remote as your gun, or as a sword. You use the nunchuk for moving around and doing some moves like opening doors, reloading, or blocking sword attacks.

The sword fighting is okay. It seems to detect the motion of the swipe fine (e.g. you swing to the left or right) but doesn't angle it perfectly or anything. The sword fighting gets increasingly difficult throughout the game. In fact, in the second to last level you get into...some 15+ sword fights, it's crazy (with ninjas nonetheless!) and the last 3 fights are very hard.

Speaking of which, I beat the game, but I don't think I completed fully. I was suppose to protect a guy from dying, by sword fighting his attacker. I lost, and he killed the guy. And the guy who killed the guy died as well. A lot of dying. But I saved the fiancee! X-D So I'm gonna do that level again...

Again, I haven't been able to try multiplayer, but it'll be interesting to see because of the type of movement you must use with the controllers, to cram 4 people on one TV.

I wouldn't recommend the game unless you really want a first-person-shooter. It's a nice long game, but it's nothing super-awesome. I'd like to try Call of Duty 3 and see how that compares...

Blurbs

2006-12-12T16:25:00.000-05:00

ZOMG! I'm on the second to last episode of Eureka Seven! Awesome...

I've noticed that novelty tee's don't exist here. That sucks. Apparently people are to cool for them or something, I really don't get it. I was at a restaurant and this little kid and his older brother seemed to have been staring at my shirt. That or they were laughing at my hair. ;) Either way, people seem to be to "old" for these silly shirts. Too bad for them.

Another thing I've noticed is that girls seem to be/look older here. :P In the U.S., I've always thought, a girl from 14-20 something can look like a 16/17 year old. Here, a girl from 14-20 something always seems to be 20 something! Ok, maybe not 14, but definitely a girl my age. She will always seem older than me. It's like puberty all over again. Snap.

I think I beat Red Steel, but not completely. The guy killed the other guy with the sword, I was suppose to protect him. Either way, I failed that little mission. LOL, gonna have to do that stage again! >_< (Review in a following post...later)

I should probably call some friends. I have plenty of minutes on my Gizmo account.

I bought a Canon SD600. My aunt will hopefully ship it to me. It's tiny.

Wiiviews

2006-12-11T07:24:00.000-05:00

TADA! Time to post some more in-depth reviews of my games for my Wii!

First up, Wii Sports:

Wii Sports comes prepackaged with the Wii, as game to pretty much show off what the Wii is basically about. It gets all the sensitivity, gyroscoping, motion sensing stuff going, and ALSO shows what a fun, family/friend game should be like. Wii Sports comes with 5 games. Tennis, Baseball, Bowling, Golf, and Boxing. All the games are very fun, though I personally seem to enjoy Bowling (and recently Golf) more, while my sister and dad love Boxing (dad also likes Bowling).

With Tennis, Baseball, and Golf, you can safely assume how they use the remote with it. It's as simple as swinging it around. Of course, in Golf, for instance, how hard you swing will determine the strength of your in-game swing. In Tennis and Baseball it's all about timing. With bowling, you hold down the back trigger on the remote, swing and release the button, to simulate actually throwing it. And for boxing, you get to whip out that nunchuck controller and get to the funny punching. You actually have to hold up the 2 controllers up in your face and punch! It can also detect (though it does get a little funky at times) your uppercuts or swipes.

I think Nintendo should release a sequel to Wii Sports, with more advanced gameplay. As it is now, Wii Sports is very simple, and I understand as it's the first game that anyone will experience for the Wii. It's very easy for parents to play, and that's the whole point. BUT, for those gamers who find it to simple, the advanced version could add a couple of things. For instance, in Tennis, all you get to do is swing. Your character moves back and forth by himself. Also, the power of your swing doesn't determine anything, it's just the timing of it. With the nunchuck controller, and advanced Tennis could use the analog stick for movement, and perhaps they could add the power-sensing on the remote. Or in golf, add a couple more clubs and options for a course creator or something. Baseball, perhaps they could let you play an actual 9 innings, and sense the power of your swing as well? Or even let you throw a curveball by turning the remote instead of just holding a button. Things like that!

All in all, the game is very fun, and has nice graphics and sounds as well. One of the coolest things though, is how you are able to create your own character for the Wii! They are called "Mii"'s and everyone in my family has their own. So far, the only other people we've made are Jose and Zarster (Danish friend). Eventually we'll probably fill it up with all our friends! :D

Secondly, Excite Truck:

This game's best comparison could probably be Burnout. However, it does focus more on the racing part instead of the crashing (though there are 3 minigames, one of which is a crashing arena). The game looks great, and the speed of it is quite exhilarating. The rock music adds a lot to the intense racing atmosphere, though some tracks seem to get repetitive. Speaking of tracks, there aren't that many of them. Despite you doing about 20 races in the first level (there are 2 levels, Excite and Super Excite) the 20 tracks are actually based off of a core 5 or 6 tracks. There's the Desert, Green Castle, Snowy, Island, and China tracks, and from there the other tracks just mess with that basic core (for instance, one Island tracks has a different path than the other, or could be backwards with some terrain differentiation).

There are about 15 cars or so, 3 of which you get on the start, the rest you must unlock. Most of the unlocks are pretty worthless though, atleast...I only use 2 of mine (one which has amazing air, the other great speed and turbo). The rest are just slightly better at something, and slightly worse at something else (each car has a vertain level of sped, turbo, air, and grip). You can also unlock a different paint job for each car, depending on how many times you've raced with it.

As mentioned earlier, there are 2 levels, Excite and Super Excite. As I've also mentioned in a previous post, each level has 4 cups, Bronze up to Platinum. Each cup has 4 tracks you race in. Each race will be graded, from D up to S grade, and by getting all S's in every track, in all the cups, you get to unlock Super Excite. Super Excite is an even FASTER paced version with an extra cup, Diamond. So far, i've only just unlocked Super Excite mode...

There are also 3 minigames (or Challenges, as they are called). One involves you driving through 2 pillars of light, through out the track (which gets harder as they narrow down the further you go). Another is about Rings. In the game, you can hit these switches throughout the track that change the terrain or add rings at the end of a ramp, and if you fly through all the rings, you get special bonuses. That's pretty much what that minigame is about. The last one puts you in a track, but an arena version of it, and is about smashing the other cars. I haven't played much of these, as I've been too busy racing! ;)

I'd definitely recommend buying Excite Truck, I'm sure on multiplayer it would be even better.

Phew! I'll write a review about Red Steel, a first person shooter game later. And perhaps get some pictures too...

Arepa

2006-12-09T19:57:00.000-05:00

Mmm...another arepa for dinner! I tell ya, I've had more arepas in the 3 weeks we've been here than I've had in the past 3 years combined, no joke.

In other news, I got pants yesterday! AMAZING!!

Excite

2006-12-06T21:27:00.000-05:00

Not much happening now, as we settle more into the house, I return to my indoors-only habits and so there's less stuff to blog about...at least, stuff that actually would be blog worthy...:P

What has happened...

I have left my laptop on for 2 days straight, so I could download 11.27GB worth of an anime series, called "Eureka Seven". It's pretty interesting (I'm 14 episodes in so far) and has a lot of mecha/drama in it. I also downloaded this movie called "Shaolin Soccer", what I could say is my new favorite movie. I laughed my head off when I saw it with Spanish subtitles...

Also, I finally got S's on all tracks in Excite Truck, so I've unlocked "Super Excite" mode. I've yet to actually try a track in that mode, more info later or something...

BLAAH!!

Nerdy

2006-12-04T16:46:00.000-05:00

WARNING! WARNING! GEEK POST!

Anyway, so I've been playing my new Nintendo, especially Excite Truck. That game rocks. Anyway, you get ranked on every course, A-D (maybe F, but I never got one), but there is also S, which is better than an A. Ok, and so there are 4 cups, Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Each, has 4 tracks. Now, if I complete all 4 tracks in a cup with an S grade, the cup turns into this star thing. I've unlocked some cars and such, and so I'm at the last cup (Platinum) with one track to finish, and another to get an S grade (I can't get past an A). ALL of this, is one the normal level "Excite". I suppose once I finish this, it'll unlock the "Super Excite" level, and I'll do it all over! :P

Also, I've been playing with my laptop quite a bit. I decided to install some IDEs and libraries, all in case I feel like programming something. In addition to that, I was just trying to compile DSLinux for my DS. Problem was, it failed...why? I ran out of space on my Linux partition (I have Windows and Ubuntu on my hard drive, I think Ubuntu has 9GB). So I shrank my Windows partition a bit, and in an attempt to resize my Linux partition, I ran into some problems...

First, I can't resize the partition backwards! I don't know why, and the programs I'm using (all based off of one called Parted) won't move the partition either! GAH! And when I tried to do some deletion and stuff, I apparently screwed up the numbering order of the partitions, and I had to reinstall GRUB (my boot loader). Now, I am currently backing up my Ubuntu install onto my portable drive, and getting ready to reinstall it.

I don't expect you to understand what I said...just smile and nod. :D

2006-12-02T18:20:00.000-05:00

Ok, so the week and a half or so that we were gone. What happened? Well...

First off we moved into our new house. You can check out some pictures of it here, as usual.

It's crazy because it's so empty. Check out my bed!

I've been sleeping pretty much like that for...the past...well, since I disappeared. :P Actually, after that night I used a tiny little mattress that was inside the room, that's inside the wall. Here's a video so you know what I'm talking about.

Still no car, though dad has his license (which hasn't come yet, but he passed the test and stuff). Here's me eating chicken from Imix Parillla (that place rocks)...

Also, thanks to that crazy guy, Jose (you gotta love that dude!) I have been able to enjoy my new Nintendo Wii!

I'm like a little kid when I get new electronics...

That's about it for now, once I remember more stuff I'll blog some more! X-D

Darn

2006-12-01T22:36:00.000-05:00

I was posting my blog thing when my browser crashed. I just wasted 20 or more minutes of typing. I don't feel like doing it again, so I'll post it tomorrow when I'm less mad. I almost kept my promise...:P I'll just leave you with this image...

Interweb

2006-12-01T14:19:00.000-05:00

YES WE GOT IT BACK! I'll make a full post update thing later...promise! ;)

Jung

2006-11-23T17:59:00.000-05:00

I was just reading Justin's myspace, saw a blog post about this test he took, so I took it as well, it told me to copy this, so here you go:

ESFP - "Entertainer". Radiates attractive warmth and optimism. Smooth, witty, charming, clever. Fun to be with. Very generous. 8.5% of the total population.

Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs/MBTI)

Does that sound about right? I'd sure hope so! :P Let's see what else it said:

outgoing, social, group oriented, dislikes science fiction, does not like to be alone, feels at ease around others, conventional, talkative, modest, does not like to be alone, good at getting people to have fun, values relationships and family over intellectual pursuits, open, likes to dance, spontaneous, underachieving, at times unprepared, emotional, values organized religion, suggestible, at times easy to impress, not analytical, disorganized, prone to crying, likes to be center of attention, happy, trusts others, can be influenced more by others than self, can be touchy feely, feels the emotions of others, likes teamwork, guided by moods

So there I italicized all the traits that don't fit me. I love science fiction, or atleast...you know, robots, future stuff. TOTAL ANNIHILATION! I don't like to dance, and am pretty sure would never attempt unless a girl got me to do it. :P I don't believe I am underachieving, but I can be known to settle for "good enough" on certain things. Prone to crying...ha! I've cried once in the past...YEARS. You know, I've teared here and there, but actually cry? Nope, I don't really do that anymore (I don't know if that's good or not, and I'm not bragging, I'm just sayin'!) I do NOT like being the center of attention, I very much like to blend into the background as I've said before. And I don't know what being guided by moods means, but that sounds like something a guy shouldn't do...;D

favored careers:
public relations manager, school teacher, radio dj, customer service, emt, hair stylist, event coordinator, pediatric nurse, child care worker, makeup artist, personal trainer, public relations, human resources, travel agent, massage therapist, physical therapist, interior decorator

disfavored careers:
bookstore owner, author, researcher, painter, artist, scientist, philosophy professor, art director, computer programmer, freelance writer, history professor, web developer, paleontologist, book editor, cia agent, aerospace engineer, archeologist, webmaster

Something happened here, as none of my favored careers appeal to me, however, the bold'd disfavored ones do!

Oh yea...house pictures...maybe...later...:D

MERRY TURKEYS!

Mucho

2006-11-22T17:56:00.000-05:00

Phew! Lot of pics for you today!

First, tomorrow we should know whether we get the house or not. If so, we'll probably get our internet service ASAP, but it will take 8 days for them to set that up. Also, in 8 days (or less) we get our brand new Chevy Vivant.
Anyway, I've been attacked by mosquitoes quite a bit. I guess they can't resist me. Here are some yummy pics! Here's one I got on my elbow...

But as you can see it got better. Then a few days ago I got bit again. This time on my hand!

That one has also gotten a little better, but they both still itch a lot. I also am amused by the one on my hand because as you can see, if I close my hand, I can make it puff out more, and it looks scarier that way. X-D Frickin' 'squitos, they hit the jackpot! Darn my over-sized veins, or lack of fat...probably both.

But enough of my insect endeavors...here are some more pics! First off, the front patio thing of the house, second is the kitchen, third is...me, in the living room, and lastly me being choked by a little fat girl (my sister). ;)

As for today, we've been in the house all day. Uhm...a lot of stuff...that I already forgot about probably happened, too bad for you. Tomorrow I'll try and get some more "scenery" pics and maybe more of the house. And now, I leave you with the best soda you can have, the Red Stuff, Colombiana!

Casa

2006-11-20T12:29:00.000-05:00

Well, we're probably gonna buy (or actually rent) a house today.

My dad also went...somewhere, to try and get his shofar back.

I just realized a Friday went by and we didn't go to Youth Group. GASP! Hopefully nobody noticed, being as quiet as I was, it shouldn't have been much of a difference. (my online nick is Stealth ya know...) Except maybe a lack of bass during worship (unless Jared played! PLAY JARED PLAY!) ;)

The weather here is just like Florida, except maybe a bit breezier or cooler at night.

Uh...what else? OOH! I forgot to mention a little scare we had from the start. When we arrived at the airport, the lady who stands around the front of the line said we were late, and had to "authorize" us to get on. We almost didn't make it. o.o

K, bye.

Stuff

2006-11-19T20:14:00.000-05:00

We saw a house we might rent for a year. It looks great...

We are also looking for a car. Which will be interesting seeing as how my dad doesn't have a Colombian license, and my mom, who dislike driving more, has one...except highly outdated. Perhaps my American license could come in handy...? :D

My allergies are a little better.

The Wii costs $477 here, and there are only 3,000 in the whole country.

That is all.

Extras

2006-11-18T16:52:00.000-05:00

Random thoughts/blurbs here:

I can't stop sneezing. I think I'm allergic to this apartment. It's extremely annoying and I think my lungs will come out soon...

I'm about half-way done with Yoshi's Island DS...

Advocate is a noob...

We found Rice Krispies! I thought I was doomed. Last time I remembered, we had the same problem and could not find my favorite cereal.

I feel so American. In fact, I'm still speaking in English. I want to make some Spanish friends, but wonder how to go about doing that when I'm not in school. I guess I'll have to wait till we move into a neighborhood, or find a church. Either way, when I do make friends, I will still speak to them in English, whether they like it or not! X-D Hey! If those immigrants in Miami can do it, so can I...

The chicken here is great, but I have had a lack of rice intake, and I think that's probably why my immune system has weekend and has caused my allergies to become so powerful. I knew it...

Plus photos...