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

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!

Christmas is over, but the fun has just begun! Still a week and a half left of nothing but messing around with what I’ve received. Got my graphics card back today too so I’m ready to do anything! Orange box here I come! Oh but let me total up what I’ve hauled in so far.

I was right on the money with the Wii. Finally in “next gen”… but I lack games. I plan to go out and buy Mario Galaxy today as soon as I’m done posting this. I was at Target the other day exchanging an extra nunchuck controller my mom had bought, then reminded myself to go buy a Wii points card and classic controller. Saving my Bestbuy gift card for game purchases in case you’re wondering. I own a lot of classic games, and “own” even more of them (that I play with an emulator). Sin and Punishment is pretty much the only reason I bought a points card. It isn’t emulated 100% anywhere else except on the Wii and I think it’s a great game to actually own. That and Blazing Lazers since I could never find(or figure out) a Turbo Graphics16 emulator for my PC. I kind of regret it, it’s not as good as I thought it would be. Even for a late 80s game I think Cho-ren-sha is much more impressive. Not to mention this now leaves me with a useless 200 Wii-points. WTF? Oh well, I’ll put it towards Wii-ware titles.

Another major gift(in my book) is a cell phone! Woo!
Unfortunately it’s very limited in terms of applications(damn you Verizon), but it plays music(yay!), with 2GB of internal memory accessed by a USB cable(yay!), and… sigh… output through a 2.5mm jack(what?!). Yep, same miniature “jack” my calculator uses to talk to other calculators. It’s weird, it’s small, and I don’t like the headphones earbuds(even worse) it came with. If it exists, I’ll buy the adapter. It has a nice long-lasting rechargeable battery at least.

Ok maybe I won’t total up everything I got.

Just one more thing.

Tis awesome. I got the “European version” apparently because it has an extra track on the main CD, and came with the first Disc of Ken Ishii’s Play, Pause, and Play. Which is awesome. Especially since it has my favorite track from Joris Voorn “Incident”.
Ah, some great driving music.

What a week, I knew it was getting down to the wire, but wow.

What the hell are you thinking?!

…Is what my English teacher said to me Wednesday(or was it Tuseday?).
You see I was behind in my work… very behind. So I took drastic measures to avoid…
*shiver *
…night school.
I planned what was basically a project-a-day plan where I would stay up all night working on a project to turn in the next day. Now you’re probably thinking the same thing she did. Yea I know it’s crazy, but it had to be done! My crazy situation also provided me with some material for my work. For example, this sonnet by yours truly:

Courier new is my font of choice
For creative writing it is preferred
You could say it gives me my voice
Otherwise my work would be deferred

I write too much about my homework
These poems must be very boring to read
I get it done though, that is one perk
After all these assignments are of dire need

Next year I know to do my work as it comes
Bite the bullet and get it done
These assignment points total to great sums
I really hate to do them all as one

Finally I’m on the last line
Too bad it is six hours past nine

Yep, I dipped pretty low on all some of these.

After I accomplished that amazing task of cranking out crap-tastic-hopefully-pass-worthy material, I was swept off to the bay area on Saturday to repeat what we basically did with Thanksgiving. It’s weird knowing there’s a new Nintendo office within 4 miles the whole time. Which reminds me, I took a picture of the top of the US Sega HQ coming back from thanksgiving.
…er… that’s right, I’m not on my computer. I can’t post it. Aw and I was going to set up a flicr account too. Newegg got my card and a replacement is in transit though. It should be here in a couple days, probably the day after Christmas. I’ll do an update once it arrives too, I’ll blog about whatever I get and post some pictures or something.

Ten bucks says I get a Wii. Just a feeling.

I hate it when someone says “oh snap”, it’s like they’re trying to be cool and at the same time conform by not say anything offensive. Just say “oh shit” people, it’s not that hard and no one really cares except for maybe the school principle himself. Well I used it as my title for this week’s blog entry simply because it’s a nice play on words with the latest in the world of NPC.

Rewind to friday when I was minding my own business, with my computer practically idle when I suddenly heard a loud “SNAP”. First thought was: Blown capacitors! Second thought: Sound card! Third thought: FUUUUUUUUCK! Forth thought: Turn it off!

After inspection it was indeed a blown capacitor, but not my sound card. No instead it was my graphics card. *whew*
…
*thinks about that for a moment*
…
FUUUUCK!

Luckily it is still under the standard RMA with Newegg. Just by a couple of weeks. Not 100% sure what caused it, but lets just say I know how I might be able to prevent anything from happening to my replacement. The wait is going to kill me, I’ve got a couple files I need for school. I’m going to have to take out the Hard drive and copy them to another computer(you know how many times I’ve done that this year?). Currently using my dad’s Celeron-based computer running win2000, it may be my main computer for the week.

At the very least, I’ve figured how to gain access to most of my music without actually having my computer on. Just go to last.fm–>listen–>select username–>type and search NPC82. Or i could just embed it.

Edit to DS-X2 readers: I can’t seem to get the embedding to work here, I probably need some wordpress plugins or something. sorry.

I’m always surprised at the collection of music available with last.fm radio. Only downside is that buffering sucks sometimes.

No post this week I’ve got too much homework to do.
…
Alright alright I will admit I’ve been floating around the new* insert credit forums - but come on I’ve been waiting for that forum to open forever!
…
Ok back to work.

I lived!(in reference to last week)
For now…
And to top it off last Thursday I finally got my drivers licence! To celebrate I went out with a whole bunch of Inanetalk.com members to the arcade on Saturday. I posted about it here. This is by far my favorite picture, and no, it’s not me(for those of you who don’t know what I look like - warning: I’m ugly).

My game-playing has been at an all-time low, it’s been: homework, eat, *coughsurfewebcough*, school, and sleep(not in that order obviously). That’s my excuse for the late blog this week as well. If I make it out of this semester alive though I have a feeling the second semester will involve more game time on hand. You never know. That’s the way school seems sometimes; either they give you tons of slack or none at all. Summer is really the only time of the year I’m able to relax. Then I find myself doing things on the side to keep myself in check, it’s weird. Wait, what am I ranting about? Lets focus on more important things!

Like this!

I was never a fan of Gerstmann, in fact for the days that I remember watching “On the spot” he was probably my least favorite Gamespot editor. What Gamespot has allegedly done to Gerstmann though is so bad that I find myself rallying behind all the other people supporting him. Even if it was a poorly written review that looked like one of my blog entires written on a late Monday night after consuming too much sugar via ice cream, M&Ms, and six blueberry muffins(holy crap I ate six?) - that still gives them no right to fire him the way they did. I doubt it was even a bad review though, it was merely truthful, and Eidos didn’t want to hear it. As “they” say: Credit travels up, and blame trickles down. It’s not right. He was just doing his job. A job which he obviously takes enough pride in to maintain his position, and stand by his judgment. I think he’s also gained some new respect from me in that light as well now that I think about it.

The eerie part is no one has heard from him yet. I wonder why he’s laying so low? Is it all just a big rumor out of control? Or are two Gamespot hit-men standing by, waiting for the moment he “sings like a bird” to the press? Perhaps their names are Kane & Lynch. …Time Paradox!!

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

An acquaintance of mine walked up to me on Tuesday and flashed an Initial D Arcade Stage 4 license. This could only mean one thing:

The Sega Lindbergh -was in town!
(to the uninformed: The new Sega arcade platform, think Naomi)

In case you’re wondering, yes, there are not many arcades around here. To compensate the arcade in “Sunsplash waterpark” doubles as my local “arcade”. It seems they get new arcade releases too so it’s not all that bad I guess. When my friend “chase” came over randomly yesterday I reminded him and we sped off to Sunsplash in the classic Miata. Quarters on hand and drifting in mind.

The Initial D Stage 4 cabinet was right at the entrance to greet us when we arrived. It’s a very nice cab, very. Padded seating, displays are WXGA(1366 x 768), and the steering wheels are well built and beautiful. Chase broke a 20 for… some reason…(gave him an insane amount of tokens) so for 20 tokens he bought me a license! Thanks Chase!

Hey guys? It’s not working in my E-reader!

He wrote up some nice impressions too, I’ll link and quote some of them:

The Physics are a little wierd, still. The car I was driving (Roadster, of course) wanted to slide every dang time I turned the wheel with the gas on. Although the “mystery-power-braking” is gone (you actually need time to stop, now), the car wants to automatically countersteer for you. And that “downshift-to-turn” trick still works to a degree, as does left-foot-braking. As NPC pointed out to me, there is a degree of weight transfer, but it is marginal. Overall, in the passes it still feels like youre riding a roller coaster and not driving a car, but less than the previous one.

I really like the license too, it’s not just for looks, it actually stores a good amount of data. It is essentially a 5 dollar memory card with a randomly generated dot-matrix avatar. Worth it if you visit the arcade enough.

I have this week off for thanksgiving! But I have a… *sigh*… insane amount of homework. To top it off I’m going to my grandmas for the holiday(Thursday) so I’m a bit jammed on time. I’ll try and take a picture of the bay though! Expect a really short blog on that one.

I really want “The orange box”. Hell I need the orange box(LAN next next fri in the works). It’s bad enough I’m falling behind the times(no next gen system!), but when I miss a release of three great games, for the price of one, on a platform I own(PC), it’s just sad. Sad it will be, since I’ll have to pass it up. Yes that’s right, I have to save up my money(read: very limited) for that blasted holiday. Sure I could spend it now all on myself and give nothing. However, capitalism class economics class(which I have been very busy with this week) has taught me to look at my opportunity cost. The way X-mass works is you give… and then receive. So the loss of spending all my money on myself and not others? Potential gifts baby! Gifts that would most likely exceed the amount of money that I have now - a value not worth even posting(though I’ve never actually withdrew money from my bank before… I might want to practice that one day lol). There you have it, NPC has a plan to get with the times! Woo hoo! I just won’t have the orange box until December or so…

Remember last august? Inane-talks birthday? Yea I lied, it’s actually tomorrow, here in November. I have a strange habit of mixing up the two months, and I’m aware how absurd that sounds but I’m just clumsy like that.

We’ve even got an Inane 2.0 thing going on since we moved from PHP to SMF. Funny thing is the new template was originally somewhat lighter but members said it was too bright for viewing at night (of all things) so we changed it. We’re looking to expand our membership everyday so feel free to join!

School has been kind of surreal lately, I think it has something to do with me being a Senior. Well… except what happened on Thursday. I was walking to my first class thinking about you-know-who, when all of a sudden she walked around a corner right in front of me! Freaky! We both kind of frightened each other and gave this “gasp!” look to each other. I don’t know what to make of it, I must admit I haven’t stopped thinking about her. Though I’m adopting the “Good things come to those who wait” philosophy for now. I figure the balls in her court now, it’s her decision to like me or not, I’ve done my part. “Though doesn’t she already have a boyfriend?” you might ask. I know her friends fairly well and I’m thinking about doing some investigative work by asking a few questions. Plain curiosity is forcing me too anyway. I have a feeling it’s someone not from my area because I never see her with anyone but friends.

Oh and I posted a story I wrote in English on my main blog. I think it may be too geeky for many people to understand.

I did a lot computer work the later half of this week, ending with today(hopefully). Long story how it started, but I took advantage of the situation and am now successfully dual-booting Ubuntu! This is what? The third time I’ve had to back-up and reinstall this year? I’m just totally immune to it now, really the piece(s) of data I value most would have to be my Firefox profile. For those of you who may not be knowledgeable about the inner-workings of Firefox, all your cookies, history, bookmarks, ect. are saved to a profile. You can actually manage more than one, but since I’m the only person who uses this(my) computer I’ve never bothered experimenting with that. So as long as I have that backed-up I don’t really care about what programs I loose(being that all other types of files can be easily backed up and retrieved - even some programs!). Besides that I’ve been very busy with school as usual. My Mom(ok, I’m aware how teenage I sound right now) has been ragging on me constantly to: “stop fixing your computer and get back to work”. But I can’t really work on her stupid laptop… with that lousy keyboard… uhg. Then I remembered she just so happened to have brought me another KVM switch that day(in addition to the one before), and I got to work!

Her work, Verizon wireless, gave it to her for free
- in case you were wondering

This was only temporary until I got back from school the next day and finished backing up my Hard drive(pictured). After that I was able to ditch the nightmare of multiple KMV switches and format the crap out of my hard drive. And format the crap out of it I did. Lets see if you can follow this:
-Formatted and installed windows
-Partitioned and installed Ubuntu
-Windows didn’t like booting from the partition
-Killed the grub trying to fix windows boot, and got some disk read error at post screen
-Reformatted yet again and installed windows on it’s partition
-Set up windows and booted onto the Ubuntu live CD
-Fixed the grub and got both booting - YAY!

Ok It’ not that hard, but it was a pain. I booted off of the XP disc at lest 8 or 9 times during the span of this whole ordeal. Ubuntu live CD though is quite nice, might I add.

*insert picture of hot girl here*
“Man, I’d like to boot off her live CD!”

I had to do that. Sorry.
I blame the delayed daylight saving time(kicks in tonight, finally).

Ubuntu is awesome, download it!