Not just another NPC - (ds-x2 ver.)

(California Poppy)

Ah spring, my favorite time of year here in Northern California. It’s warm, but not too warm. Weather like this makes you want to go outside and get some exercise. Cycling is my preferred method of recreation, along with inline skating, but I got tired of being called “fruit boots” so I got rid of them(that and I outgrew them). Yea I’m actually brave enough to type that, mainly because I actually find it humorous myself.
You know what though?(rant about skates in 3…2…1… )
I love skates. I miss them so much I might just go ahead and buy myself another pair despite the negative reputation. Screw the haters. The feel of gliding across smooth cement and asphalt is unparalleled. I remember I used to play roller hockey for a couple of years too, that was loads of fun. The program fell apart though: One city stopped competing, our coach went on to do something else(ice hockey I think), and I was left being the oldest one around(at 14 or so). Still wanting to skate I tried to get into “aggressive” skating. For various reasons I grew bored of it, at least the skates looked cool and performed well.

(great skates)

I never posted about my bike, have I? For summer school last year my mom bought me a really nice bike to transport myself - bittersweet obviously, but I’m not complaining. It’s a beautiful bike, probably the most (single) expensive thing my mom has ever bought me. Check this beast out:

It’s a sweet ride, don’t think I’ll be selling this thing anytime soon. I’ll spare you the specifics, just go here if you’re curious.

On a gaming note, I’ve been honing my SSB:Brawl skills with my local Smash Brothers champ. He’s crazy good, I don’t think I’ll ever be half as good as him. I’m (sadly) going to be busy with homework this spring break. If I can catch a break I might try my hand online. Maybe hand out my Friend code here and there… we’ll see.

New years day I beat portal. A great way to start my new year. With not much happening in the way of news, or at least nothing I’m aware of, it seems I’ve used this winter break almost exclusively for gaming.

I tried playing Team fortress 2 and Half Life 2 after I beat portal. Both programs kept crashing about 5 minutes in though. I thought it had something to do with page-filing and sure enough it seemed to be the case. I had it disabled due to lack of space on my windows C: partition. My own fault really, I reversed my intended values when I set up the partition for Ubuntu(whoops). Anyways my dad suggested a SCSI drive dedicated to just page filing. Uh, sure dad. I don’t have any SCSI drives lying around like he claims to at his work though. On second thought maybe I’ll have him “borrow” one for me(gotta watch what I say on teh intarweb ). As a temporary solution I set up a dedicated USB hard drive with some extra space on it just for page filing. It worked actually… just not to the extent I needed it to. Only got about 380-something megabytes out of it for some reason. I’m going to need a plan B. Besides the SCSI drive I’m thinking about maybe buying some more RAM. 184 pin RAM shouldn’t be that much nowadays…

This reminds me! My computer should be turning 1 year old this month. Wow it seems like I just put this thing together. Oh wait I just did. Haha, yes this thing is very maintenance heavy but I think it has taught me a lot in the process and that’s what is important. A year ago I was clueless on how to start putting together a computer. Now I can do it with my eyes closed(well, not really).

With Portal beaten and the rest of my Steam games acting up I logged some quality time with my Wii. Lots and lots of Mario Galaxy with some Metal slug 6 on the side. My parents keep wanting to have me relocate the Wii downstairs to the living room TV. As much as I would love to get them into games(well I doubt that would ever happen) I know this would cause problems. Back in the days of the Genesis, the living room TV was the one and only available TV for me to play on. They always needed the TV for things such as - get this - watching TV, and it limited my playtime. No wonder I never beat Sonic 2.

Aaaanyways, I think I’ll save most of my Mario Galaxy impressions for… a later date. I will say that I wish I could play it with a Gamecube controller. Waggle? Not really my cup of tea. I’ll give Super Mario Galaxy a break and blame myself however. Who knows, by the time I finish off the rest of Galaxy I may become accustom to the waggle controls. In an experimental twist I plan to play Super Mario Sunshine for a bit immediately after I finish Galaxy.

One last note for the night morning, Tomorrow my winter break finally ends and I go back to school. Should be fun - but we know it probably won’t.

Still a couple hours until the new year and I just want to make one last post. Starting with that flickr album I’ve been meaning to start. The first picture I uploaded was of today’s sunset since it’s the last sunset of the year. Taken on top of one of the many hills in Rocklin(more specifically for locals: “backside” Park Dr. by the Water tank).

I rode my bike thinking I could use the exercise, but wow it got hella cold after I took that photo.

I plan to upload more later. I seemed to have gotten into taking pictures for the blog this year for some reason. I think I’ll get my own camera sometime this year(er… next year).

Sometime in the past - maybe last year, or the year before I can’t remember - my good friend Tyler and I celebrated the new year together playing games all night into the wee hours of the morning. It was fun, but this year he wanted to celebrate it with his Girlfriend(I don’t blame him). So Saturday(I think… man I’ve lost sense of time thanks to this break) he invited me over to play some games. I didn’t stay over too long since it wasn’t a planned sleep-over like before but we played a good variety of games. Everything we played on the 360 somehow seemed too dull for that evening. It could’ve been the size of the TV, plus the split screen. Or maybe it was that every game we played was either not my type of game, or not his type of game. We needed some variety, or more importantly something we could evenly compete in. I ran back home and threw the Dreamcast in a back-back and ran drove back. Ah, now the Dreamcast is quality entertainment. Soul Caliber saved the day, so did some other off-beat games like Tech-romancer, and Ikaruga. An acquaintance from school and I discuss and joke about Ikaruga a lot in front of Tyler. He had never played it before so I showed it to him and… um… blew his mind. The thing about Ikaruga is that it isn’t based on reflex more than it is knowing what is simply going to happen next. Probably should have stepped him through it more. Now that I think of it we didn’t even give two player mode a chance, that would’ve been ideal for teaching him the ropes. Or at least as much as I know about the game, there are people out there that play Ikaruga in ways far beyond my capabilities.

Good times were had, so I have no regrets sitting at home this New years eve.

One thing I forgot to mention the other week was this Dutch Electronica blog I stumbled across a couple weeks ago. Yea, I can’t read it worth crap. But every now and then they post a set from a DJ I recognize and it’s good stuff! Reminds me of a typical Gawker blog. So hey, if you run out of things to listen to go check’em out.

Speaking of electronic music, I stumbled upon a Roland Tr-909(drum machine) emulator for my DS. It’s quite awesome, I’ve been playing around with it on and off today and I love how hands-on it is compared to something on a computer. Now I just need a synthesizer and I could compose something of my own.
Ha- no. But it is fun.

Happy new year!

On a scale of one to ten on how dead I am, I would put: 9.9987654321
Why? Because I have lots of unfinished homework and when I go to school on Monday I’m pretty much toast. It’s not like I haven’t been working this past week that I’ve had off. Just a lot of things got in the way… and I’m not very productive to boot. On the other hand I can’t wait to get back to school, see all of my friends, talk, socialize, and of course learn something in class(right?). Thanksgiving wasn’t that great, I just wish I didn’t have so much work to top if off. At least the weather was nice in the bay area.

uncropped original here(in case you were wondering why I got so much sky̷