Samurai X

WOW.....Both of the OVAs (Trust and Betrayal, Remembrance) are very powerful emotionally. The first one takes place before the events in the main anime and describe how Kenshin became a ronin and gave up killing. The second OVA takes place after the events of the main anime and detail life after Kenshin and Kaoru are married. The second OVA is slightly confusing in the storyline since there is a lot of flashbacks involved, but the first OVA was very well done. Trust and Betrayal definetly is at the top of my list of top animes to watch. However, it would be best to watch the series, then the OVAs.

Cleveland Kendo Tournament

Wow, another long reprieve from posting on this blog... Anyways, this past weekend we just hosted the 18th Annual Cleveland Kendo Tournament. The turnout was great - there were over 200 people in attendance. I competed in both the mudansha, and to my surprise, the junior division. I did not do very well in either and went a total of 0-5 for the day without scoring any points. The fifth match was fought in the team tournament in which I went up against a Purdue guy who was pretty good. I managed to keep him to only one point. My first match of the day was against a big guy named Goodall who managed to score one point on me. The second match was against a 17-year old named Yuichi Kawashima from KEIO Academy of New York. I fought against two other KEIO kids in the junior division and was beaten by all three. KEIO is pretty much a completely Japanese school of around 400 kids and includes High School and College. The tournament was a lot of fun and was very tiring. The bento was not very filling, but the banquet afterwards was very nice.

Well, back to school stuff. Classes this semester are not very good for me as I am doing poorly in terms of grades (mostly Bs) and it will be tough to bring those scores up. I will try my best to do well on all of the finals since they constitute around 30-40% of my grade in most classes. I've been playing too many games this semester - DOTA and CS:S are taking up too much of my time. I really need to cut back on all the gaming and concentrate more on my work.

Interesting weekends

So, classes have finally started up again, meaning homework and labs and other shit to do. Labs suck so much, especially physics labs (both Mechanics and E&M). So...last weekend was definetly very interesting, at least Saturday night/Sunday morning. I just finished a game of AOE3 and was using the restroom when I heard a girl's laugh from my left. At first I thought it was Eric and his girlfriend, so I checked the shower to see if there was anyone in there, and there wasn't. So I was washing my hands and I saw the stall door open from the mirror and I see Lisa Lam of all people. I was so surprised and had a little talk with her in the bathroom; when she was about to exit, the ResLife people came and lectured her how she shouldn't be in the guy's bathroom and stuff.

About 30 min later, she decided to go spray (Tag) some stuff outside with Josh's Blue-Kote, which is an antiseptic for livestock. So we went behind Cutler and she sprayed initials of us (her, Josh, Guo, and I) and then ran off to spray a rock. Right at this time an RA from southside (we later found out) came and approached us and asked us to stop, told us that we were breaking rules and asked us to give him our IDs and get stuff to clean up the "graffiti." We obliged, but also checked the posting policy for the school and found that he had nothing on us, so we printed out the policy. When we saw him, he was like, "Well, I don't think I'm gonna do anything to you guys." So I busted out the policy and was like, "Yeah, the policy only applies to paints, acrylics, and latex, and we were not using any of those since we were using antiseptic." Then he was like, "Well, I wasn't gonna do anything but now I will." After a while we convinced him that there was nothing he could blame on us since we did not technically violate any part of the policy so then he let us off with just pouring some water on the sprays.

Went out and partied tonight, had two beers but didn't really feel anything. Later, I talked to Josh and found out that he did in fact like Lisa, so I think I'm gonna just back off for now...

Winter Break

Well, winter break is almost over for me. I go back to school this Saturday, school starts next Tuesday and then its gonna just suck. Anyways...break hasn't been too bad. I went to two magnet events, the MSTC winter party and a little New Year's party. Pretty much all I've been doing over break is working about 40 hours a week and hanging out with all my friends (Amir, Eric, Geoff, and Rui).

I haven't really accomplished all I had hoped for over break - watching all my anime and working on my Gundam models. I have, however, started working on my 1/100 HG Tallgeese III courtesy of Rui. It's been slow since it's my first Gundam model and I want to do it right. That includes removal of seams, puttying, and painting. I bought an airbrush the day after New Years since there was a 50% off coupon for Michael's so I used it. Now I just need to get the model done so I can use that airbrush.

One thing that ticks me off is that I lost most of the data on one of my external hard drives. The first couple of days when I got home, one folder became inaccessible. After transferring a movie to the internal and disconnecting the external and coming back to it 2 hours later, the entire drive was inaccessible. I ended up having to just reformat everything...

Outlaw Death

I found this hilarious headline on CNN.com:

BIRITIBA MIRIM, Brazil (AP) -- There's no more room to bury the dead, they can't be cremated and laws forbid a new cemetery. So the mayor of this Brazilian farm town has proposed a solution: outlaw death.

Check it out here.

Anyways, Art History 101 final today was pretty easy, considering that I spent about a total of 2 hours studying for it, including the 1/2 hour right before the test. I definetly BS-ed some of that stuff, especially the cultural significance part.

Finals Week

Arghhh...turned in a paper earlier, and I've got a final in about 7 hours. Luckily it's only Art History. This is about it for this week for me, other than revising some papers for Thursday.

Oh yeah, I went out drinking on Saturday night. Had a couple to drink - Kamikaze, Painkiller, and a 7-and-7. I started feeling dizzy when I looked at things moving fast, especially when there were a lot of people crowded together. But the important thing is that I didn't get drunk or turn that red.

It just doesn't stop snowing up here in Cleveland! We've been getting almost non-stop snow for like the past week. Well, at least I had a break earlier in the night where I went to help USG make cotton candy for the Study Over at Thwing from 8PM - 1AM (I was there from like 9 - 10:30). It was great fun, except for the cotton candy getting all over my hoody which I just washed this week. Grrrr...

Scheduling and Battlefield 2

It started snowing again last Thursday night. By Friday morning there was like half a foot of snow on the ground. Friday was not a good day since I didnt get that much sleep - scheduling for next semester's classes started at 7:00AM. About 600 people tried to all get into a system that only allows like 10 or 20 people in at a time. Anyways, when I was finally able to log on at 8:15, the PIN number was incorrect because I used the one at the beginning of the year. However, our advisors (also seminar instructors) were supposed to give us new PIN numbers. I ended up having to walk around and hunt him down outside his office. Going from there to class, I slipped right outside the library because I had been walking around outside too much and the bottom of my shoes were covered in slushy snow. I had my hands in my coat pockets, so I couldn't really stop myself and ended up hurting my left hand (I think I strained the 4th and 5th finger joints). I think the only person that saw me that I knew was this one girl in my seminar class (luckily only 2 people saw me, lol).

I definetly skipped the two classes in the afternoon and ended up just playing Battlefield 2 with guys from our floor. I ended up playing that game for like more than 12 hours over the weekend, especially a lot on Saturday night (from like 9PM - 6AM).

As far as scheduling goes, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, although it might be a somewhat difficult semester. I'm taking Physics 122, BME 202 (Pysiology), Biology 126 (Genes and stuff), Math 233, and a seminar class.

I was having a lot of trouble today trying to encode this DVD that I got. The movie is Charade; one of the actors is Thomas Chelimsky, whom we interviewed for the seminar interview project. He's like 7 in the movie, but I was trying to encode it to XviD just so I could keep a copy and share it (I also ripped the DVD directly to an ISO). I couldn't get GordianKnot to work properly since it kept on skipping so many frames during video encode that the length of the movie was reduced to 5 min. Also, other programs I tried didn't work well. I ended up having pretty good success with AutoGordianKnot, although I couldn't get it so that "no subtitle" is an option when having the avi made (there are currently two English subtitle streams - widescreen and fullscreen). I think I'll play around with video encoding some more if I have time.

Thanksgiving

Well, I had a pretty good Thanksgiving break, although I think it was short compared to the breaks some other schools give (Stanford, Vandy). The ride home was pretty bad, with Greyhound being delayed some hour and a half due to getting stuck in traffic getting out of town. Got home around 11:30 when I left at like 3:00 in the afternoon.

Anyways, lots of good food on Thursday, took a nap in the afternoon and went shopping for electronics. This year, CompUSA opened at midnight, but they didnt have that much good stuff. I got a 200 GB hard drive at Staples the next morning for about $30, a 512 MB flash drive for $3, and some other stuff. I wasn't able to purchase the $20 DVD burner, although it might not be that good. I later looked up online why my laptop's burner is having problems burning DVDs, and found out that it only accepts "good quality" DVD+/-R and not just the really cheap crappy ones. I'll have to test out some more DVDRs from home...

Saturday our family headed to Cincinnati for the showing of "Legend of Shangri-La," which was a dance performance starring Yang Liping, one of the most well-known dancers in China. She's famous for her Peacock dance, which she did in the performance. Some of the dances were really odd, including the "Snuff Box" one, which was some "mating dance." In one part of that dance, a guy and a girl come on stage with the guy walking on hands and knees, and the girl with her hegs wrapped around his waist and hands on his ankles. When they got to the middle of the stage, the guy lifted his right leg like a dog and they dropped a doll of a baby on the ground. Anyways, it was pretty interesting and I got to see a lot of the Chinese School people there.

Well, that's about it for now since I actually should do homework so I can get more sleep at night.