Chasing After Rainbows

You don't see these buses anymore as at end-March 2008. It has been around since 1988. This picture was found on a New Zealand website dealing with vehicles. 2 other bus models with bodywork somewhat identical to the above are being phased-out with 1/3 of a particular model already done with the last ones in 2010. I have finally figured out on why the width of this blog is so annoyingly narrow if you were to view it at 1024x768 or wider. While I was playing around with the images, figuring out the best position of images, I saw a "page structure" section and saw a maximum width as around 800px (min is 500px). I increased that to 1280px and can already see the difference. Due to the new maximum width and the fact that some of my post titles goes beyond 1 line, I have created a new one that can support 3 lines (at the current font size, which is big). I was supposed to put this up on Monday afternoon, but I had a lot of work to catch up with and stuff I had to do that is me

The image I was trying to put up in ASCII on the previous post . Under the current blog layout, the VLC Player looks nicer, but it's too big. TCMP fits in nicely, but you can barely see it. The ASCII in both players are supposed to be in colour, but when I copied it as text and paste it in the compose mode here, all the colours becomes black. When I put the 2GB micro-SD Card (with adapter) into 2 of the card readers (via USB) lying around, it says that the card is not formatted and asks if I would like to format it. When the format dialog appears, the memory behaves like it's a 1GB (962MB) card. However, when I put it in my mobile phone (without the adapter) or the card reader built into my laptop, it detects the actual 2GB (1.86GB) capacity with the contents displayed. As there was nothing on it, I decided to format it with the 962MB limit imposed. It works, even when I put it into my laptop card reader (though as 1GB, but can format as 2GB).

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D.Gray-man is one of the most boring anime series I had ever watched. Other boring series include Neo Angelique Abyss (rated as one of the lowest on anime review sites, some as low as 0.5/5.0) and recent episodes of BLEACH. I don't get how they even became popular somewhere. Must be the lack of better shows aired there. I have just bought a USB (Universal Serial Bus) to LAN (Local Area Network) device as the one built into the mainboard is not working. I don't know whether it's the hardware or the drivers. Since it's connected to USB 2.0, it can only transfer up to 12Mb/s instead of 100Mb/s that it's capable of. As the PC unit was bought secondhand some years ago. Finding the drivers for it was not easy as the company that made the LAN part (Intel) does not provide the dirvers but point out to the company that made the entire thing (Compaq, now part of HP). I went to the manufacturer's website. What made it difficult was I had to provide the model number (which

For once in a long time, I actually reached home from school before 3pm. I normally reach home in late afternoons or early evenings. Rarely late at night. If I were to bring more than 1 bag or carry something that won't fit in my bag, I would take the most direct and the least walking distance to get back. I would also avoid going to other places along the way. If I were to go home around evenings, I would take the least crowded route, even if it means taking 4 buses instead of 1 bus/train to get back as the most direct route is also the most crowded. Travel time ranges from 1-2 hours, depending on traffic conditions and how soon the bus I can take arrives after alighting from the previous ones. On those rare days where my father doesn't send me to school, finding a route that is not full of people in the mornings is difficult until recently. It's the opposite direction of the one where I had to take 4 buses mentioned in the previous paragraph. Just head to the bus stop be

I am tired and sleepy. Was helping my grandparents (along with my aunt, uncles and cousins) to move the large amount of furniture onto the truck.

"Kokoro wo Kaiite" (Open the Heart) I was one of the ushers in the lecture hall controlling the massive crowd yesterday (Friday), who are a year before me / my juniors, for a talk by the section head. During the talk, she mentioned that my seniors had been to places like Perth (Australia), Shanghai (PRC), Beijing (PRC), Guangzhou (PRC), Ho Chi Ming (Vietnam), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Osaka (Japan) and so on. This year she did said that my section could be going to Hong Kong (SAR) in December. (She told my juniors, "Sorry, this is for your seniors. You might be going next year.") However, she also said that 25% would only be able to go, without specifying the reason. Could it be because of the cost? Limited places? Matters like family and (part-time) jobs to attend to? Not interested? Guess we never know... I have signed up for another two clubs, Photography and Library, bringing up the total to 5. This was partly because I didn't like 2 of the existing ones. The

Q: Who in this picture is me? A: None of them. The media box at the bottom of my Friendster profile 's HTML would also be copied onto this blog as a backup should something go wrong. This has happened before as some malicious software would cause it to be modified after viewing an infected profile. Fortunately, I had offline backup done each time I make changes to it (at that time). Seeing that I would access from another PC, puting it online would be more pratical. I could use removable storage devices or online storage such as gmail (Google Mail in European countries), but it's troublesome to find it, wait for it to load, may be infected by viruses/spyware, and prone to file corruption or drive failure. By putting it up here, they (Blogger) may also point out to errors in the HTML such as a missing forward slash (/) at the end of tags such as "br" (at the beginning of the end tag if it has a start tag). Major changes made to the media box include: font size reduced

It's a train station if you didn't know. I found this book lying around the house. >>Was weißt du von k önniglichen Gem ächern?<< >>Du bist noch nie zuvor in einem solchen Zimmer gewesen.<< >>Vielleicht doch.<< >>Nein!<< >>Erinnerst du dich an die Kr önung des jungen Verence?<< >>Man pudern mu ßte, sah ich eine offene T ür. Tja, da bin ich hineingegangen und habe das Bett ausprobiert.<< >>Das ist Hochverrat<<, sagte Oma streng. >>Daf ür k önntest du im Kerker landen.<< >> örgen: >>Wie hat sich's angef ühlt?<< >>Oh, es war sehr bequem, das Bett. Margrat ahnt nicht, was sie ver äumt. Und außerdem hatte jenes königliche Schlafzimmer weitus mehr Stil als dieses<<, f ügte Nanny Ogg hinzu. (I was bored. I could have type the actual thing if the tempreature in my house wasn't 35 degrees celcius with high humidity even though it's night.)

Image is recycled from 113rd post The earlier post on the JLPT has pictures but only described on me doing the exam and the way back on that day and not the other events in-between and leading up to it. Anyway, here it goes. It actually started back in November 2006 when I saw a full page ad in the classified section on the location of the exam. That was when I first heart about it. To my disappointment, I found out that the regerstration ended in August. So during the months leading to the next regrestration day (done badly for 'O' Levels and posted to ITE with almost everyone else to JC or poly. I wonder if those jokers who were making faces at me on a moving double decker bus on my way to collect the results cursed me and how many who were elegible for poly ended up in ITE due to lack of places?), I kind of forgotton about it until I come across a forum talking about it and cross checked the info with the offical website . By then, there were only 2 weeks left to the closin

Today was a long tiring day. I didn't sleep the night before (unless you count the nap beteen 6pm and 11pm) after puting up yesterday's post . The food my mother cooks don't relly apease me. In fact, it's now rare for my family to sit down and eat mainly because mother goes to work in the evening on weekdays and my father and sister come home close to midnight on most nights, including public holidays and weekends from school, work or somewhere. There are barely any food in the kitchen, save for a few instant noodles (not the type where you just pour hot water and wait for 3mins). Speaking of food, during the so-called fasting month , which happens about every 10-11 months, I would easily go crazy. Now that I am in some college located an hour's travel away from my house and have to travel past downtown or several towns to reach, I can actually skip fasting completely without people who do so without suspition (except for a few that know me) in addition to the situ

This image is intentionally posted in a low resolution and enlarged afterwards. I know I just mentioned about a new layout just 3-4 days earlier . If you were wondering what happened to it, I used it on my japanese anime blog (the english one still uses the older layout). If you happen to visit my blog regularly, you may be thinking: "What? Again?". Well, since it's the school holidays (until this coming monday) and am stuck at home with nothing to do, I might as well do some mp3 info, HTML & image editing and organize the files on my PC(s) that on normal school days would not have the time/mood to do so. Anyways this layout (as at 11 Apr) is based on "Harbour", one of the default blogger layouts. I have done some modification of the same layout earlier on another blog , but kind of abandon on it and replace it with one of the default layouts without editing as it got kind of messy and confusing with all over the blog. Of course, back then, I didn't k

Yes, that is a 24hr McDonalds on the left It seems that there is a problem with the portable hard disk (Samsung 2.5" 80GB). I bought it back in September 2005. The casing is falling apart due to the plastic parts of the casing snapping off and screws securing it gone missing. It's been like that barely months after buying it. Because of the falling casing, I rarely unplug it from the main PC, let alone bring it around to places like school. Sometimes, when I notice an unusually long for transferring with the bar not moving and the time it would take to transfer increasing like crazy or remain the same after a long time. That also cause the explorer to not respond when I tried to cancel it and have to hard reboot the PC. I first notice the most serious case when I tried to burn a DVD iso when it failed when it barely started. It said something about the rostrum (or something like that) timeout. When I eject the disc after a cold reboot [tried a normal one, but nothing seemed t

One of the buses I was talking about in the previous post . The electircity bill (which my parents pay) has been going up. it was less than 9000 cents some years ago. Now it's at 18000 cents . Well, oil prices per barrel in USD have increased like crazy and is more than double than compared to just 2 years ago, though the weaking USD could also contribute to the rising prices. It could have been higher if I turn on all of the lights at night and leave the radio and tv on the whole day. I should start turning off unnecessary things like unplugging the PC after turing it off and appliances that are never used for a long time, shower around mid-day without using the heater when possible.There is an old digital clock in my bedroom that runs AC/DC current with an unknown electrical consumption. LCD monitors uses lesser electricity than CRT or Plasma of the same size. I wonder how much of the electricity bill would be able to save... Oh, since the ceiling fan is faulty, you can't tu

!!! My house is quite warm and there's no air conditioning. The recent rain doesn't help. School starts just next week. Besides food that I don't like to eat, school and IT/electrical-related products, the stuff lying around at home are quite old or not of my taste. The walls have not been painted (let alone washed) since 10-12 years ago. And it's that plain boring white colour. The sound quality of the 32" LCD TV bought at the end of 2006 is like crap. So had to connect to a component system (suceeded by the Toshiba DVD player) that has everything faulty except the audio input and raido that is now more than 10 years old. Speaking of old eletrical equipment, I have 4 PCs. One of them is from the Pentium 2 + Windows 95/98 era connected to mouse, keyboard via PS/2 and 15" CRT monitor via VGA from around 1997. I've since added more RAM (from 128MB to 384MB; more if there are slots) and a hard disk (16GB added to an existing 8GB) from another PC that has brok

If you have all the correct things installed, you should see what you would see in the screenshot above in Apple Safari 3.1 @ 1280x800 For the fonts used on this blog it's "Optima LT Std Macron", which you have to download. If you watch Code Geass R2 (soft-)subbed by ggkthx , this would be one of the fonts used. The following are used. If more than one of the listed fonts are installed, the first available listed font will be used. Here they are: Optima LT Std Macron (mentioned earlier), Segoe UI (comes with Windows Vista), Myriad Pro (also used on various Apple ads), Osaka (Mac OS X font), Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet MS PS. I am thinking of removing that scrolling title. It's annoying. 8 April 3:00AM edit: Made changes such as changing the background and adjusting font size.

"As you enter the church, a godzilla appears in front of you." There was an event at Woodlands Drive 50 at an open field not far from the interchange where I failed to take any photos and sweat in the (indirect) sunlight. Reached at the site at 8:30am and I already say a crowd, mostly children. Ate a bit. At around 9am, had to prevent the crowd from entering the food area until around 10:15am. During that hour many people came and we had to stop them from entering with many people asking me in (mandrin) chinese, which I don't understand. Anyways, after the crowd control, I help out with the food. It consists of some thin orange strings, some small square green things, some light brown spongy things, eggs, and some brown liquid added. They call it "Mee..." erm... I forgot the name. I just dump most of the ingredients into a cup and let everyone else do the rest for the next 2 hours. Ah, I'm so tired. And it's not fun... P.S. I hate camps.

お兄ちゃん！ (see my anime blog or this post for a full list of new spring anime) Don't take is as an overall thing, but the new anime on those days don't seem to attract me. On Wednesday, there is/was "Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's" and "Macros Frontier". (Existing shows on this day include "BLEACH".). I didn't watch them because I don't find them interesting. If you have watch any episode of Yu-Gi-Oh and you would know what I meant. For the other one, it involves too much fighting involving gundams and the fighting+destruction itself. (Same goes to any of the Gundam Seed series. Maybe it's because it's too long and too many episodes to catch up too; Code Geass was an OK mix.) Thursdays is "Kure-nai", "Allison & Lilia", and "To LOVE-Ru". "Allison & Lilia" had an interesting storyline, but it fails on the visual quality and the opening and ending makes you feel like going to sleep. "Kure-nai&quo

In the original post dated 1 April , I made a list on what anime would come in the coming weeks. "Neo Angelique Abyss" happens to be the one that would be airing on arts central, the one that I list as "not likely to watch". "D.Gray-man" is another one that would fall in the same category. The closest that actually interest me is that airs there is "Azumanga Daioh", but that is the stuff of 6 years ago. At least something like "True Tears" would be decent enough. Comparison of the 2002 and 2006 version of "Kanon". Anyways every Wednesday to Friday, there would be no one at home but me. Mother would go to work around 5pm and back the following morning at 8am. Father would be back close to midnight. Sister back shortly afterwards. The same would happen between Saturday and Tuesday. So, between 5pm and 6am, I am actually alone at home with nothing to eat or do. My mother does cook for me around 3pm. If I come home before she goes

[The previous post was an April fools joke! :)] (originally posted here yesterday) As I am lazy to list everything and the fact that complete information can be found online, I'm going to just list what I am going to watch. This post wont appear on the anime blog and it's japanese counterpart , though the links for those listed below can be found there. The finalized version would appear on the earlier mentioned blogs and my friendster profiles Not likely to watch: Allison & Lilia ( it's war themed ) Macross Frontier (the characters looked ugly and uses too much use of gundams) xxxHOLiC Kei (not my type) To LOVE-Ru [pronounced as "trouble"] (too much fanservice, as displayed in all of it's trailers) kure-nai (storyline don't seem interesting, character design not good) The Tower of Druaga ~the Aegis of URUK~ (medieval themed) Itazura na Kiss (don't know much about it, website don't seem appealing) Blassreiter (zombies=horror/scar

I know I have been saying a lot about Japanese things like animation, technology, culture and language and not anything else, but I am moving to Santa Clarita, California, United States of America (where Los Angeles (pictured) is) quite soon as the difficulty living there is better, with better opportunity for jobs and stuff. Also, with tighter security and crime rates lower than it was earlier, it's better now. On top of that, I feel that I can get along with the people there than here, partly because I can understand what they are saying. I will be leaving for there as soon as my stuff are prepared and the necessary arrangements are done. Going to miss you guys. :( Do you think I would actually move to there at this time?! Look at the date of this post!!! April fools!!! I can't believe people would actually read this hidden part. I'm going to say it briefly in the next post anyway. Seattle, another possible American city.