November 2005 – Page 7

November 3, 2005January 21, 2006

Ending of Fable

So I finally beat the game. ungsunghero beat me to it though. I actually beat it yesterday, but was too tired to make a post last night. The game was really fun and they actually let you continue finishing your quests after you defeat the last boss, but they put you through a torturous 15mins of credits. One thing interesting in the end where it was like Lord of the Rings, was you had to decide to throw away the mask or wear it. By wearing the mask, like the ring, it would give you tremendous powers, but you’ll turn evil. I threw my mask away, but I’m really itching to replay the game where I’m always evil. I’ve been always good this time around.

So I’ve only spent 20hrs and 57mins in this game. Though I thought it was closer to 30, but oh well. One thing I noticed was that the other NPC (non-playing characters) never got old. Whisper was always pretty young. So was my sister. Even my wife never got old and I married her when I still had black hair! Now I’m age 50-something and all my hair has turned gray, and they’re still so young looking. Ungsunghero also pointed out the Village People somehow got into the game too. How? You’ll just have to play to find out.

I found some cool looking fable drawings while searching the web:

Random Crap:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CARI!!!

火垂るの墓 – Grave of the Fireflies (from MSDL) is having a new movie, with REAL PEOPLE. I wonder how it’ll turn out. The pictures look pretty similar to the anime. I can’t wait to see this!

Flash Earth (from MSDL) – lets you switch between Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth. For some reason, it’s A LOT FASTER than either of those two and I spend a few minutes playing with it. hehe.

House With Bride for Sale for $600,000 – Deborah Hale, 48, has placed an ad on eBay offering to sell her home in the Washington Park area to a compatible man who wants to spend his life with her. She also has her own Web site outlining the deal.

my four dollar exhuast (from deadlock) – pretty funny video where his car exhaust is whistling.

Ultrasonic Songs of Male Mice (from /.) – Previously it was shown that male mice, when they encounter female mice or their pheromones, emit ultrasonic vocalizations with frequencies ranging over 30–110 kHz. Here, we show that these vocalizations have the characteristics of song, consisting of several different syllable types, whose temporal sequencing includes the utterance of repeated phrases. Individual males produce songs with characteristic syllabic and temporal structure. This study provides a quantitative initial description of male mouse songs, and opens the possibility of studying song production and perception in an established genetic model organism. Check out the music they make modularized to the human ear.

Friends Forever (from ladydevilot) – although this is a chain mail type of link, I thought it was sweet. This goes out to all my friends from Berkeley and Mark Keppel. =)

November 2, 2005June 11, 2006

My Date with Drew

So I just watched My Date with Drew. Starting the movie, I wasn’t expecting much. It sounded like a interesting documentary that was just had an interesting idea, but that was all that it had going for it. The only reason I even gave it a try was because it got a rating of 6.3 on imdb and usually things with a rating of 6 or higher, I’ll give a quick skim. But guess what, I manage to watch the entire movie and enjoyed every bit of it! It’s been a very long time since I’ve had this much fun with a movie. I was excited and actually squeezing my chair arms as it got to certain parts where the anticipation just kills you. I think my heart was beating really fast because I’m still trying to catch my breath. Truly an inspiring movie and there’s a ton of stuff to get you laughing. There were also points I felt really sad and my heart really ached, though no tears came out this time. You can watch trailer here (Click “Watch Theatrical Trailer” and then select a size).

Spoilers:

It starts out with some guy telling you how he just won a gameshow playing some sort of variation of taboo and now has $1100. The word he won with was Drew Barrymore. Then he goes and tells us how he’s had a crush on Drew Barrymore since he was 10 years old and actually joined the Drew Barrymore fan club when he was small. So he decides to take this journey and use the money that he won with Drew Barrymore being the answer to get 1 date with Drew. However, no one had a camcorder and the camcorder itself was going to set him back probably most of the money. But then they came up with the Circuit City plan where you can return any item within 30 days. So that’s why he has to get a date within 30 days. And the journey starts off! They whole movie consisted of following different leads and different connections and how many degrees of seperation Brian (our main character) is from Drew Barrymore. Tons of interviews, tons of hope and also tons of disappointments. The amount of stuff he got for free was also amazing. One of the hilarious parts was they put an ad to a have a test date with a Drew Barrymore look-a-like. Haha. That scene was so hilarious! When almost all hope was lost, Drew was there again to inspire him to continue. A really touching and inspirational story. I don’t want to spoil too much, if I hadn’t already, but I have to say, I OWN ONE OF THOSE SNOOPY SNO-CONE MACHINES!!!

November 1, 2005June 11, 2006

Fatboy Slim – Weapon of Choice

Fatboy Slim – Weapon of Choice is one of the top 5 videos downloaded off of iTunes. Not exactly sure why someone would pay $2 for it when it’s free on the web. Though maybe the quality of the iTunes release is a bit higher, but not by much. You can watch the music video here. The song’s actually pretty catchy and Christopher Walken busts out some cool moves. Not sure if it was all performed by him though…

You can check out the album: Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars or listen to a sample of this song

November 1, 2005February 8, 2006

Happy Halloween!

H A P P Y H A L L O W E E N ! ! ! !

Was invited to a Halloween BBQ, but I had to decline because I had some catchup to do at work. Though this Halloween was quite interesting. Many people on my floor brought in candy because little trick or treaters would come in between 4-6pm to go trick or treating in the Microsoft buildings. The little kids in their little costumes were super cute. Tekman’s twins came as Thing 1 and Thing 2 from Dr. Suess’ Cat in the Hat. I also helped myself to a sample of candy. hehe. What else was funny was because of the security inside the building, all the little kids had a sticker on their costume saying visitor. Dan was talking about how when he was small, when he went trick or treating, his parents would be paranoid about people poisoning candy, so any candy that wasn’t completely sealed was thrown into the trash. THAT EXACTLY HAPPENED TO ME TOO!!! My siblings can vouch for it too. Haha. Just found the coincidence to be shocking. Anyway, if my kids got candy from Microsoft Employees, I’m pretty sure I can trust all of them to not poison my kids, assuming that 1 day I’ll have kids.

Random Crap:

One of the pya! images I posted yesterday included a Skull Helmet Creature:

Apparently it’s Cubone from the Pokemon series (thanks to deadlock):
cubone

CustomizeGoogle (from /.) – CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhance Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam). Looks like a pretty neat tool.

Features:

Use Google Suggest (suggest words while you’re typing)
Add links to competitors
Rewrite links to point straight to the images in Google Images
Removes image copying restrictions in Google Print
Secure Gmail, switch to https
Remove ads
Anonymize your Google userid
Add a result counter in search result
Filter spammy websites from search results
Add links to WayBack Machine (webpage history)
Remove click tracking

According to /., A new feature in CustomizeGoogle (Firefox extension) modifies the Google Cache urls so that they are no longer blocked by the Chinese firewall. This feature is only available in CustomizeGoogle zh-CN, found here. This is how it works: All links to Google Cache, from the Google search result, are slightly modified. The Chinese Great Firewall doesn’t recognize the new links as Google Cache links, and therefore they are accessible for everyone.

Oh well, the Chinese Internet Patrol probably caught on to this already and patched their firewall.

Lenovo ThinkPad X41 Tablet PC: Closing the Mobile Gap – another review of this sweet notebook. Not exactly sure why suddenly everyone’s doing reviews on these, but the X41 has been around for quite some time. Maybe Lenovo is sending out sample machines to different websites to get the word out?

November 1, 2005November 1, 2005

Blood+ Episode 4

Blood+ Episode 4 – Dangerous Boy

Another exciting episode of Blood+. More gets revealed as Saya gets closer and closer to awakening…

Spoilers:

If you saw the last episode, you’d have noticed that Kai ran off at the end of the episode. Apparently he was so angry, he ran home, took the gun and went searching for Forest, the one who attacked his father. Apparently the dad didn’t die, but there is a possibility he might be contaminated, which I’m guessing will happen since the story must continue and what better story than to have one where the daughter has to kill the father because he’s becoming one of them. Kai goes investigate and Saya, Rick, and Moe are always 1 step behind. Saya finally begins hearing stuff, and follows their calls. Rick for some reason begins to hear things too. In this episode, we learn that the mysterious man is named Haji and is Saya’s servant and only obeys her orders. So are Chiropterans vulnerable to bullets? Welp, guess you’ll have to watch the episode to find out!