Chasing After Rainbows

As you might already be aware of, Friendster (and MySpace ) are declining in popularity with the favor in the rise of Facebook . After switching internet providers slightly more than a year ago for a faster connection speed and being with the previous for about 5 years after just switching away from dial-up modem. Well, everything seems to be faster, but when I navigate to a certain page or clicking on things like "save changes" after doing some editing, I keep seeing the following thing (or something familiar), even today, and it appears quite frequently on any browser on any PC in my home network (It also appears at the instant I click on a link): The odd thing about this is that this does not appear on other sites, my previous internet provider or even the computers in my school that is under the same internet provider (the latter being slow when everyone streams music and video, especially YouTube ). I would normally just continue on, but as this problem happens quit

At the end of school the following day, Hirano-san approached me and Saeko, looking uncomfortable. Hirano-san: "Kobayashi- san, Saeko" Sakeko: "What is it Aiko?" Hirano-san: "I know it might sound strange to you, but the director of your workplace my father would like you to visit..." (there was a deafening silence) Hirano-san: Visit yourself at the hospital today. And Kobayashi-san, he has something to tell you too. Me: Me? What does he want with me? Hirano-san: He didn't tell me, but you would find out soon. Oh, I would like to tag along with the both of you, but I have a tennis tournament match with another school today. So, if it doesn't drag on for too long, I might be able to drop by later on. Saeko: Erm, yeah. See you then. Saeko looked even more nervous. To get to the hospital, we took a bus from a bus stop just outside the school and traveled for quite some time before reaching it. I'm not familiar with this

Today is June 6, 2 days after the night when I suddenly found myself in the bathtub of my house. I could have sworn I was in class of February 4 just before that. I was wondering where my parents had went to until I saw a note in their bedroom saying something about a large amount of cash under their bed for me. I looked at the luggage bag counting it: it seems that someone had grabbed a small amount of it. I looked at my blog: there were no new entries since that date, but there was an unpublished draft dated 22 May. ......... Huh? I typed that? It says that I am unable to move and my childhood friend who is residing inside me is doing so? But I can do so normally with no difficulties.... I don't understand. I then viewed the blog of that friend of mine mentioned. ......... It says that I fell into a coma and has taken control of my body since 14 May, the day after he got into an accident. Strange part is that the post is dated 2 weeks after the incident and he even h

I opened up the original Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file of one of my drawings and saw what was in the following screenshot: (Background) Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 : Instead of the image, I see a very long list of codes. (Left) Google Chrome 0.3 : The black outline is very obvious. Bluring don't seem to work. (Center) Mozilla Firefox 3.0 : There is a rectungular box at a corner of it for some reason. (Right) Apple Safari 3.1 : The best among all the rest. Bluring don't seem to work too. All : My signature is missing (for IE7, it appeared as mojibake near the bottom) To fix the unwanted lines that appeared in the Chrome browser, I just need to select everything in the vector editor, except the outlines that are supposed to be there, and remove the colour used for the outline (labled as "stroke"). The problem is that vectors before v0015 , outlines are not seperated from the colour, so I used v0035  instead to remove stroke lines of non-outline parts that are

Since young, I had been exposed to a lot of language and pick up some of the things learned after seeing/hearing it repeatedly in certain situations. Frequency and interest plays a part in it too. Apart from the languages you would see me using , my parents, for reasons not mentioned, made me learn two other languages that I don't understand at all, rendering them useless to me. If you were to ask me in those languages now, I might have completely forgotten about it as it has been several years since I actually use them. But even back then, it might have been weak too. (I also find people asking me in another most of the time.) As mentioned back in June , the words I would use to write/type and speak are completely different. For example, I would write: With all their might, those exhausted children tried to prevent the incident from happening, but had failed to do so in the end. However, if I were to say the same thing out (unless saying the written text out), it would turn o

Wondering why one of my post has many views and how they got there, I searched for myself using "とらドラ OP 歌詞" (Toradora opening lyrics; words related to that post), and the results appear as below: (click on the image to go to the actual page I saw this in.) I checked the links before mine: some were recently removed videos (Niconico Douga) , some was just the reviews of the album it appeared it (wayohoo.com, but has links to 歌詞ばっかし.jp [no, seriously.the URL does not use Latin characters] that caused my Firefox browser to crash), while some actually have the audio with hidden lyrics, but appeared several days after mine (YouTube). So it seems that mine has more visible lyrics, with parts of it in a different colour to indicate the part used in the anime. I have also embedded a video from elsewhere alongside that of YouTube as the former is of better quality.

The best blog layout I have ever made! XD If you had been browsing through my blogs (especially this post ), you would notice that, despite having a lot of them, each one of them would have a different layout. Unlike most of my friends I know, I would pick a XML layout (difficult for beginners) and heavily modify it to the point that if you were to check where I got it from, it would look completely different. For example, the above screenshot is one of my first few attempts back in March/April this year to edit one of the default blogger XML layout of what you see on the left: Harbor. What I did then was to replace the image URL to figure out what each image is for and where and how it would appear. There are several reasons why I change. Some was because of the things that I had added/modified (espically the navigation menu), others are by the seasons, while the rest was because the previous was just a test, looked awful, or one of the default layouts. I have made changes to so many

Almost two weeks has passed since then. Kyousuke, one of my classmates, entered the class with a big smile on his face. He seems to be talking about something happy with his friends. When Haruna entered the the class, however, his happiness turned into depression when she said that she doesn't remember what happened two days earlier. She also seem to be unfamiliar with most of the classmates. When she saw me, she suddenly had a smile on the face and sat at an empty seat nearest to me (which is actually hers, but she thinks it's someone else's) and talked to me. What does she want? She normally doesn't even talk to me since she was released from hospital. Haruna talked to me about how she was in February 4 and now it's suddenly June 6. She also added that she had also seem to have suddenly gain knowledge that only her overseas childhood friend would know. I don't know if I should tell her the truth, but there things about myself in this dimension that I mysel

Please be reminded that this year's Japanese Language Prophecy Test (日本語能力試験) will be taking place on Sunday, 7 December 2008 (first sunday of december). A letter notifying on the venue of the examination should be delivered by the end of November. On the day of exam, please bring along a pencil and registration card. Registration is held every August.

The first lesson after lunch was English, so I was kind of looking forward to it with excitement until I saw the teacher walking in with a stack of papers. The teacher had planned a surprise test for today's lesson. Knowing that Haruna (sitting somewhere in front of me) just transferred in earlier today and had been hospitalized for 3 months earlier, he wants to exempt her from the test but Haruna insisted on taking it somehow. We received the test paper. Even though I can still do this, it is quite a challenge to do so. Let's see, the answer to question 3 is " I went for a holiday in Germany last month. It was great. ". Well, I had been taught that ドイツ (Doitsu) is Germany, but when I saw ジャーマニ instead, I didn't recognize it at first. Sheez, this paper is difficult to do. I completed the paper with 5 minutes remaining. Everyone else seem to be struggling to complete, but Haruna looked as though she completed it a long time ago. Did she give up? I can't tell.

Congratulations to Barack Obama on being elected the president of the United States. It may have been a long (political) fight, but one has finally made it through. Not only that, it has made history for a non-white person to be elected there with many people, from all over the world supporting him. What remains to be seen is if his party would do things as promised within the next 4 years. "Yes, we can!" Just to sidetrack a bit, he was in an Indonesian primary school, his late father was from an African country, and there's even a place in Japan called Obama (小浜). At about 7pm a while ago, I managed to watch a show on TBS following a guy who (tries to) look like him and watch his attempts to meet him in places like Chicago and New York. I managed to get some screenshots of the show.

With the end of my final year of my current school less than half a year away from now, before (hopefully) entering into a college of a course I want to take up, my schedule to do non-school-related stuff has somewhat eaten into my free time. I could not really follow what was being taught, even when revising them later on. I want to stay up late at night, but have to wake up early for school later on. Since school is quite some distance away, getting there and back home can range from 15 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the route I take and traffic conditions. If my sleep were to be uninterrupted, I would wake up at either 9am or 11am, which is quite late in the morning. It's been like that since I started primary/elementary school more than 10 years ago, but I can't stand it any longer. Combining school revision, long traveling times, crowded places, noisy environment, and lack of sleep would be a nice recipe to drive me crazy. May be worse if I were to take up a part-tim

As mentioned about 22 hours ago , I have completed two vectors today (2 Nov 2008). One of which I had been doing since 30 October, and another right after the previous one which took me less than 5 hours. These have yet to be posted on the drawings blog , but here they are anyways. (If you have a slow connection, this may take a while to load) v0029 (997 kilobytes) I used the blurring effect for the clouds. Do note that the outlines are not in the usual black. v0030 (368 kilobytes) If you find this image familiar, that's because the source image was used in the previous post here.

I had in that hospital room for quite some time now. I don't know how long exactly I had been here or what day is today, because each day seems to be the same as the day before, apart from the people who visited me. There don't seem to be any progress with my frozen body since that hit-and-run incident on 23 May. Come to think of it, am I facing the same condition as Haruna back in February? But I don't recall seeing any doll or bright green light. The television in front of me is turned on to some random channel 24-7. There are times where I don't want to watch it, but I can't do anything about it since I can't switch it off or even close my eyes. All of a sudden, I saw myself on the TV, but this me is in casual wear instead of the hospital clothing and is able move around normally with my own will, like controlling a character in a video game. Previously, it only showed what I'm seeing. I tried to shout "Yay!" with my hands up in the air: well,

actual size (800*600) Using the same browser I had always been running (Firefox 3.03), but in a different operating system (Xubuntu 8.04) and resolution via a x86 virtualization software, I find it quite disturbing to see the above for one of my blogs . Sure it display stuff correctly, but some of the stuff are hard to see or either get cut off when it reaches outside the allocated area or spill into neighboring areas. I normally view my pages in 1280*800 and 1024*768 resolutions, but VirtualBox (unlike Virtual PC ) would somehow not allow me to view at resolutions larger than 800*600. It also seems like I need to revamp my navigation menu again...

As mentioned in the previous post , I am still feeling sleepy but had more sleeping time. The thing is that I am feeling even more sleepier. I couldn't concentrate in class with all that tiredness. To make matters worse, there was physical classes today with running. I then reached home in the evening, dead tired. It's a good thing I took the bus home instead of the subway: I find it hard to find a place to sit on the train these days from the crowd and all that tiredness, even during off-peak times or the least crowded parts of the train. I think I better start sleeping earlier and watch recorded late night anime later on. Seeing that I sleep for 9 hours (2AM to 11AM) on days I have nothing until mid-afternoon onwards, I think I should start sleeping from 9PM onwards. P.S. It seems that Yukari didn't like the new layout I put up on our drawings blog earlier. Hmm...

[actual date of post: Wednesday, 29 October @ 22:37] After spending the whole day (Mon, 27 Oct) doing stuff, including the most recent vector trace , I head to bed an hour earlier than normal (1:00AM). Well, sure, my body would be sleeping by then, seeing that I find my body hard to move and that my eyes are trying to shut close, giving other people the impression that I really am asleep. The problem is that I remain mentally awake, so I had to endue unknown amount of time in boredom, the itches (if any) and noise from the outside. By then, it would be time to wake up for school as it's quite some distance from home. I could leave later, but the buses and trains would be full of people that I may have to stand. To tell you the truth, earlier on in the day, I visited my uncle (whom I hardly know of) who was hospitalized the week before and was diagnosed for diabetes. I don't know much about the details behind that, but I went back home and to sleep somewhere in the aftern

I woke up and opened my eyes, but it doesn't seem to make a difference: I can't tell if I had gone blind or if the room I'm in now is pitch black. I hear nothing but deafening silence. I was also unable to move any part of my body as earlier. Where am I? What is this place? How did I end up here? That was one of the few questions I asked myself at first. Well, I'm certain that I'm not lying on the road in front of the train station I was at. All of a sudden, the lights came on and I heard familiar voices in front of me. I can't see who it was though as the light was blinding me and my hearing is kind of muffled for some reason. When my vision got clearer, the friend I saw after I was knocked down was standing next to the director of the company I work for quite closely, though the former looked younger than the former. Do they know each other? Looking at the screen behind them, I saw myself on some kind of bed, appearing as though I had died after being kno

The shower heater at home broke down for quite some time now. If the heater were to switched on when using it, sparks would fly off from the side and a strong burning smell would be produced. Not that I'm bothered by it, but with the end of the year in slightly more than 2 months from now, the water would be very cold, especially in the morning. I don't know when it would be replaced; it's was there 12 years ago...

When it comes to being on time, I would either arrive early or on time, but never late unless I knew of it later or are beyond my control. If the event did not start at the stated time and was not informed of delays, I would wait for a while before leaving. How long I would wait depends on how early I arrived, purpose of the event, location, time, and the people I'm waiting for. I have a low patience level, but I don't like things to be rushed either. Speaking of which, anime that seems to go on forever , might attract my interest at first and is popular too, but I would get bored with the pace of progress, amount of filter episodes and stuff that I didn't like which happened later on.

I ordered food and then joined my group of friends shortly to have lunch together. We talked about various stuff, like exploring the various areas of the school like the other day. The tallest hill in the campus has a nice view of a lake, the entire school, and the greenery around it. We went there and lay down under the tree. Since the tree is large, the area beneath it is large enough for children to run around in the shade. The air there was so nice that my friends had easily fallen asleep the moment they lay down against the tree trunk. As they were sleeping, I took out my notepad out of my skirt pocket and wrote down notes about everything I observed about Haruna until a while ago and put it in back in to show the people at work later on. I wanted to write this earlier, but the cafeteria had too many people and who knows how my friends would react if they saw it. I woke up my friends when lunch was about to end. It seems like they weren't even aware that they had fallen asle

The technology blog was the placeholder for creating new blog layouts before it was applied to another blog it was intended for. It was chosen because it had the least amount of widgets added. Not too long ago , I used it to create a layout to look identical to the one I'm replacing at a blog as that has a lot of problems that I can't fix since I created it a month ago . After I was done with the replacing, I decided to fool around with stuff, picking random colours, images that had been "gathering dust" on the image server and hard disk. As it turns out, it actually looks quite nice, even nicer than all my other blogs. In fact, I'm thinking of using this at more places. Here are some screenshots of this blog I had taken some time ago before I made changes that made it look horrible: This format is still being used on my Japanese anime blog , though images had changes. Header image is used at the URL mentioned . Taken earlier. Same as above but with the sides sw

Well, the layout I made slightly more than a month ago for the English version of the anime blog does look nice, but there appears to be problems as when I try to fill it to the entire area of the blog, it would bring problems in other areas. That's the main reasons why I didn't apply it to the Japanese version and only changed the background images and colour. Speaking of that area, if I were to put a widget below the post (not at the very bottom of the blog though), the first widget would mysteriously appear in the empty space of the topmost post below the title of that post. The same might apply to the link to post a comment. Other problems includes the content appearing from the right of the header, especially text/HTML widgets. I tried to fix it, but I can't seem to find the cause of the problem or more problems would happen. I'm thinking of using the current layout of this blog and modify it somewhat: the left sidebar would be removed and the other would be wi

Well, the Nodame Cantabile: Paris (のだめカンタービレ　巴里編) I had watched has nice songs, but unlike Toradora! , finding lyrics for it at this point of time, before the albums of those songs becomes on sale, is next to impossible. Typing ' nodame ed site:wordpress.com ' or ' のだめ 巴里編 OP ' would produce stuff like names of the people involved behind it or some mention of the keywords without them related to what I'm looking for. The next best thing I can find are fansubs at places like YouTube, but those are not clear and may be inaccurate. I also had to type all the text from scratch. Anyways, below is a draft of what I managed to get. It's not yet finalized, but when it is, it should appear on my anime blogs. OP (Sky High) Format: Kanji Romaji (English) Sky high! 僕らは舞い上がる風を見つけた bokura wa maiagaru kaze wo mitsuketa (We discovered the rising winds) 感じる君のメロディ kanjiru kimi no melody (I can feel your melody.) 奏でたら夢がめぐり合う karadetara yume ga meguriau (and when you

Even though my country has one of the lowest crime rates in the world, I still feel uncomfortable when walking home from the bus stop or the train station. Sure, it's not that far and the area in-between is well lighted with mostly houses along the streets, but the dark skies, the eerie silence, the uncertainty and sometimes dogs barking at me loudly when walking past a house, are enough to make me feel scared. Thankfully, nothing bad happened. Well, I know that this is kind of late to post this, but I have created a new story as you can see from my recent posts. Apart from what was already mentioned at the bottom of this post , you might have noticed some similarities on the setting and timeline of the earlier story . It wasn't really intentional. As mentioned, this story is loosely based on the Suzumiya Haruhi light novel series by Nagaru Tanigawa (谷川流) or more specifically, the book called "The Disappearence of Haruhi Suzumiya" ( 涼宮ハルヒの消失 ) which is t

On the way to school the following day, I can't help but to overhear people talking about a blog from last night that they had believed to be haunted. Some felt scared, while others say that it could have been typed in advance or by someone close. Others don't seem to care about it. I arrived in class earlier than usual today, but my friends seemed to have reached there earlier. It seems that almost everyone here is talking last night's event, but has no clue as to who is behind it. Homeroom session is about to start. Yukari Takahashi, one of the few classmates who was in the same class as me last year, rushed in as though she was running madly not too long ago. When she saw that the teacher has yet to reach the classroom, she let out a sigh of relief and walked calmly to her seat with a smile on her face. But then again, I had never seen her sad or angry face before. Speaking of feelings, I seem to be able to tell how they really feel, but not what they are thinking, e

If you had been to my Facebook profile, you might have noticed that I have a bunch of notes that if viewed in full mode, it would have at least 19 pages long worth of it. On top of that each post is quite long. While I do try to get rid of duplicates, it still seem quite long. In this screenshot, you can see that I post almost everyday on at least one of my blogs, with several on 10 October. When importing, stuff like colour, text next to the image, font type and size, and whatever non-text/image-based things would be lost when importing. Posts with Japanese text becomes a bunch of numbers for some reason. Since it imports from the RSS feeds of my blogs, some of the formatting might have been already been lost in the RSS version before it is imported into Facebook Notes. That would also mean that the most recent posts (about 20) of each blog would only be imported. Well, a while ago, not long after the above screenshot was taken, I got so caried away that I received a warning mes