enjoyed my thanksgiving muchos. the four of us spent it at my sister's. and the whole day was simply full of us enjoying each others' company, which is all to rare a thing nowadays. as always, we started out with a huge offering of lunch. which put everyone in a food coma, but i surprisingly didn't nap at all the whole day. we simply put on movie after movie and just chilled. MJ's This is It, Up, Star Trek, Big Bang Theory, The Office, Glee, and New Moon (although no one was paying attention to new moon).


our thanksgiving lunch/dinner


my mom's cakefail. Harry Trankssiviililil... ?

my thank yous
like i tweeted, i am very thankful for what i have. my loving family. which is still broken, but i'm thankful that we're able to suck up all the drama and just BE US every once in a while. my wonderful friends who are with me, supporting me and simply being there for me when i need them, which has happened to be a lot recently. my previous years on barkada and bMod for generously offering me friendships and experiences one can never duplicate (esp. kuya/lilbro/ading): my kuya up north, always encouraging me and making me want to improve (and will be down here this weekend!). my lilbro in sd, who i dearly miss but i'm glad i've been able to call my little brother, in which i will stop at nothing to help him out in any way i can, which might be limited due to distance restrictions heh. my ading from sd, who is thankfully still here but has turned the tables, helping me out in more ways than he probably thinks he has or gives himself credit for - and i can only hope i've done even a fraction in return. and to those who i've come to call best friends, families, brotherhoods, cliques (and trust, i haven't forgotten!) etc. basically everyone who has made a difference in my life, thank you all very much.

ps: and im thankful for the fact that almost all my friends have disneyland passes. woot. son.

black friday
i made it a point to sleep right when i got home so that i'd be able to wake up in the weeeeee hours to get to Target so i could jump on a deal on a 2.5" portable external hard drive. Target had a Western Digital 500GB for only $60. my only other previous experience with the morning of black friday was two years ago at Staples. but that didn't really count because they did it in a way that no one had to rush to get anything, instead they gave out guarantee tickets for certain items. Target this year, on the other hand, just let everyone run in as a free-for-all. i was about the 200th person in line since i got there 30mins before it opened at 5am, so things weren't looking too great for the deal i wanted, but alas, i walked straight to the hard drives. and lo and behold, there was one left. grabbed it, got in line at the electronics registers, bought it, and walked out of Target all under 15 minutes. now i can carry all my important info with me without lugging around the huge brick i have at home and at the same time, keep my laptop free of clutter. woot.


wd elements 500gb

for the rest of the day, i chilled at rooted movement with some beers. then bert, gigz, and i headed over to buffalo wild wings for dinner. and i'm very sad to announce... that bww is no longer serving the limited time Desert Heat dry rub. sadness TO THE FREAKING MAX. ah well. i then headed over to gigz' to play CoD:MW2 spec-ops.. then watch his brother jay play the campaign.

stumbled upon the TweetStats website. pretty interesting tool to graphically visualize your twitter behavior and trends. here are my graphs that it came up with:

my general twitter timeline

so it looks like my tweets have generally been increasing over the past two years.. which makes sense considering twitter kinda blew up along the way.. there was literally almost no one on it when i first started back in Jan08.


my tweet density (time of day i usually tweet)

my twitter-ness seems to be pretty freaking dead between the hours of 4am-9am. blowing up by noon on most days. i tend to tweet later in the night on sundays and tuesdays, and earlier in the night on other all other days.


aggregate daily and hourly tweets

i seem to be pretty equal in the days that i use twitter, but for some reason Tuesday has the least of the week. hourly, i tend to be most active early afternoon. usually tweeting about what i just ate for lunch, haha.


@ replies, and retweets

self-explanatory. i'm guessing my top @ replies are the people i have most conversations with on twitter.


twitter interfaces

this one actually surprised me. echofon/tweetie makes sense in being a bit low considering i just got my iPhone two months ago, but i would have expected i used text more than i did web.

try your hand at TweetStats! Note: you will have to temporarily make your tweets public (not protected) in order for it to get all your information. but you can re-private-ize them after.

why is it that when I earn money (and that's saying a lot considering I do not have a regular job) something has to happen or something has to break and in turn, make me spend said money?

I knew my HP TX1000z laptop was going to die but I didn't expect it to die so quickly. it started about a year ago when my wireless Internet stopped working. after extended research I found out that a good number of the laptops under the same model were manufactured with a faulty Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). the GPU would run too hot for the motherboard to handle. first on it's way out was the wireless. check.

I sent my laptop in for warranty (which was about to expire) and they fixed it after about a month. got laptop back and it worked again for a good half a year. the wireless cut out again. it was no longer under warranty, so I went out to buy an external wireless card for my expresscard slot. the GPU did it's damage again and burned the components for the expresscard. so I've had to use a USB wireless dongle since then.

upon further research, I've found that after the wireless stops working, the next to go is the display. and that finally happened the other day. I was converting a movie to be able to play on my iPhone, which is very graphics intensive, so my GPU was running pretty hot. everything starts to error and my computer shuts off. I turn it back on to find that the GPU itself had burned and no longer works, leaving me with a laptop that has literally no screen.

while still able to access my laptop remotely from my desktop via VNC, I was able to back everything up onto my external hard drive. I was also able to disable the GPU remotely. so now my screen works again, but it can only run at 800x600 resolution with the GPU disabled. everything seems bogged down. and I can't really do any designing work on it. having a visual again, it makes backup up of files a lot easier.

what makes me mad is that HP will not accept fault for shipping out units with faulty GPUs. they say that the amount of people with this problem isn't large enough compared to the units sold to count for a recall. so pretty much, once the warranty is up on these units, they simply don't care because they already got their money. google the words "tx1000" and "gpu" and "faulty" and you'll get pages upon pages of this exact problem that HP will not fess up for. while their products have most likely proved since then, I will never buy HP again because of their horrible customer support and the unprofessional decisions they have made regarding this issue. i will not support a company who won't take fault for such a failure of their own product. that is not acceptable.

research has taught me that after the GPU dies, people have experienced a failure to even boot up the laptop. no thanks, im not about to lose everything.

I've since then started looking for a new laptop. my budget was about 800 dollars since I have no job, and the laptop would have to be pretty strong in graphics so I can continue designing graphics for JayVee and if I might possibly pursue it in the near future. I can safely say I've grown out of the whole sub/ultra-compact sized laptops as well as novelty features like the touch screen that I didn't really use too much. with the help of mr Chadwick, he found me a laptop that seems to be compatible with my needs and requirements. a Lenovo IdeaPad Y550. custom built with an Intel Core2Duo P8700 Processing Unit and a dedicated nVidia GeForce 240m GPU. the total came out to under 800 dollars, and just under 900 after tax and shipping. the machine will be severely lacking in RAM, but that is easily upgraded along the way. I shall have it in hand within a few weeks so I'll have an update and review then. let's hope for no more problems.

Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

my birthday has come and gone. and despite a very dramatic entrance into the day, it turned out pretty awesome.

started out with lunch at home. then I was off to disneyland to meet up with Kat and Zugey. but before meeting them, I made a quick stop at the ticket booths to redeem my birthday gift card. then used the gift card to add parking to my annual pass. finally met up with Kat and Zugey. explored the Innoventions "House of the Future" for a bit then rode Space Mountain which had almost no wait whatsoever. after watching the two girls eat, we headed to the Rivers of America to sit down and wait for Fantasmic! to start. Froi, Rodney, Kevin, and Lauren joined us wet after riding Splash Mountain. we were lucky to have been one of the first people to finally see Murphy the dragon breathe her fiery breath! it was nothing less than epic.

I had to head back to Chino Hills to make the dinner at my sister's. they presented me with tacos and cake and a new iPhone! got it up and running and fully synced with my laptop in a matter of minutes. woot!

headed over to bMod practice to visit the kiddies and to see how practice was going. chilled in the parking lot for a bit then finally headed home.

the day before my birthday and the day after proved to be quite the dark clouds surrounding my big day, but I didn't let them affect me in the least bit. I got to see Murphy for one, hot to see her breathe fire, my fam got me a technerd device I've wanted, and spent it with some awesome people.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

torrents are what i use to get 99.999% of all my stuff: media, movies, tv shows, software, games, and music.

when i get something new, people ask me "zomg where/how did you get this!?" i tell them it's downloaded. they ask "what website?" i tell them i use torrents. they ask "what website is that?" i tell them it's not a website. they ask "oh so what kind of program is it?" i tell them it's not really a program, but sharing through a website. then they look all confused like o_O?

the torrent system works in a way that can be divided in four parts: the tracker, the torrent itself, and the swarm (broken into two: seeders and leechers).

the tracker is the service that holds the torrent and keeps track of the locations of the users in the swarm. the torrent file itself simple holds basic information about the file you want to download. the swarm is made up of all the users who are currently running that same torrent file. seeders are those who have already finished the entire download, but are staying in the swarm to provide a base for new users who want to connect to start downloading the file. those new users are called leechers, who trade different parts of the file to get it completed. once they get all parts of the file, they become seeders. if there are no seeders connected to that same torrent, then all the leechers risk not ever completing that file, being stuck at a certain percentage.

that's how the system works, but here's how you actually do it.

* * *
Step 1. Download a Torrent client
The torrent client is what opens the torrent file you downloaded from the tracker. The client i prefer is called µTorrent. Once you have it downloaded and installed, you can now go any torrent website and open the torrents you download from there with the uTorrent client.

Step 2. Register at a Tracker/Service
The tracker i'm registered at and prefer is bitsoup.org. a good ratio is required at all times so everyone is always seeding leaving a lot of torrents with a lot of seeds. the only catch with this tracker is that they have a 100,000 user cap limit every month. they purge all unused/dead accounts once a month so if you can't register now, you can keep trying within the month to see if any spots have opened up. Once you have an account, you can start downloading torrent files.

Step 3. Download a *.torrent file
Let's do a random search for the wolverine movie. if you were able to register at bitsoup.org, go ahead and hit the "browse" button at the top of the website, and type "wolverine" in the search box. if you were not able to register (i think it's capped as i write this, try isohunt.com. it's a free public tracker so things might be a little slower). like i said in the description of how the torrent system works, the fastest download would be the torrents with more seeders than there are leechers. the columns you will probably pay most attention to are: Name, Size, Seeders, and Leechers. the one i'll be working with is called: X.Men.Origins.Wolverine.2009.R5.LINE.RERIP.XviD-SilentNinja. Click the torrent to get to its info page. Once there, click the torrent name again right next to the word "Download" and save the *.torrent anywhere on your computer. Find wherever you downloaded the *.torrent and double-click it. Most likely it'll open your client (we're using uTorrent). it may ask you what parts of the torrent you'd like to download, and 99% of the time you'll need the whole thing, so go ahead and just choose where you want to put the download and hit OK if a window pops up. once you've opened a *.torrent file in your client and it starts downloading, you can go ahead and delete the *.torrent file you double-clicked, it has pretty much done it's job already.

Step 4. Wait
depending on how many seeders there are, or how fast the seeders are. your download can be really fast or really slow. if there's only one seed and hundreds of leechers, you might want to leave it downloading the whole night. or if you have something like FiOS and the seeder has a fast upload speed, you should be good. Right now, as your watching your download progress bar slowly get to 100%, you are a leecher in the swarm. you are downloading from the seeds and other leechers for the parts of the file you don't have, and at the same time uploading whatever part of the file you've gotten to other leechers. once you reach 100% of the download, you become a seed.

Step 5. Complete!
once your torrent has reached 100% and you are seeding, you can open up the file! but i wouldn't remove or close my connection with the torrent just yet. you want to AT LEAST keep a 1-1 ratio on all files you download to all files you upload, just for web and torrent etiquette. on uTorrent, you can simply right click the torrent and click "Open Containing Folder" more often than not, the movie we just downloaded will be separated into a bunch of *.rar files. simply open one of the *.rar files and drag whatever is in it somewhere (like your desktop). the zip program will extract all the files from the other *.rar files automatically.

* * *
now your desktop has the file you just extracted! if you have a capable player (vlc player plays almost EVERYTHING), you can go ahead and watch the movie.

warning. this is a very nerdy entry.

... and super warning. this is a very long entry.

google chrome has a feature that when you make a new browsing tab, it shows your top 9 most visited websites. i've used the program for quite a while now, so whatever it put as my "top 9" i guess is as accurate and true as it can be. gives me kind of a reality check as to what my online habits and routines are.

9. byronface.com [ link ]
haha shameless plug? no.. full of myself? hm.. maybe.. haha; but in actuality. i guess this made it onto my most visited because i'm always checking to see if i have any new blog comments, or any new followers, or maybe i just want to watch my header images change whenever i refresh the page. also, whenever i post a new blog entry, for some reason i go to my website to see how it actually turned out. byronface.com was and is my first personal website. it's actually pretty fun to keep one. the networld needs more personal webspaces. so many times people say they have a 'website' when they're really just referring to their facebook or myspace page.

8. gmail [ link ]
oh gmail how you've changed the world of email. i remember back in its olden days. everyone freaked out about how you get a whole gigabyte's worth of e-mail storage. even i was amazed. i thought, "who needs a whole gig of email storage??" but i just had to have an account anyway. it was THE new thing. at the time of its release, gmail was an invite only service. early adopters of the service only had 6 gmail invites to give out. i believe i got mine from marvin (@sketch678 on twitter). i think around a year after its debut, on april fool's day, they announced that they'd be expanding email storage to 2 gigs. everyone thought it was a nasty april fool's joke, but it was real. and to this day gmail storage has expanded (slowly) to over 7GBs. it's fast web interface and it's IMAP support (for my Outlook) has made my life in email much easier.

7. flickr [ link ]
yet another website that i adopted early from a referral from marvin. he sent me an invitation to use it back when i still had all my photos stored at Sony's ImageStation (which is now dead, Sony pulled the plug on the service). when ImageStation decided to shut down, i can't say i was very happy.. all the time i took uploading photos is wasted. but then i took up the offer that marvin sent me quite a bit before IS shut down. tried it out. and fell in love with flickr's approach at imagery+community. the interface was also very straightfoward, simple, and very Web 2.0. after uploading a bunch of my pictures, i noticed how limited flickr is with a free account. it is VERY limited. almost to the point that it is practically unusable for the average picture-happy user. so i went ahead and bought a year account for $25. and it is well worth it. anyone on flickr can tell you that buying a PRO account is the only way to go.

6. YouTube [ link ]
i don't even remember the first time i saw a youtube video. that must mean my first experience with it wasn't great. i probably thought, "great.. another video website like ebaumsworld" where it would just be a collection of people doing stupid things, scare videos, people getting pwn3d, etc. but it has developed into quite the video community. people now have video blogs, video tagging games, video responses. i thought it was nothing less than AMAZING when they first introduced the High Quality mode on videos. that was magical. but then i was really taken aback when they introduced the HD videos. quite an evolution that website has seen.

5. twitter [ link ]
oh man, marvin has referred me to a lot of my most visited website/services. and here's another one. i'm not gonna lie. when marvin first sent me the invite to twitter, i was like WTF IS THIS? it's so lame and NO ONE's gonna ever use this regularly. but i kept my account anyway. i was only following a few people and only a few people were following me. but oh man. this thing blew up like a hydrogen bomb that was thrown down a tunnel to blow up a huge electromagnetic energy force (ref. Lost). everyone started getting one. and in no time i was following a bunch. and a bunch were following me. i turn on a good handful of people to my text notifications. and many the same for me. so when i update while out, i see a handful of people grab their phones and check.. Gossip Girl status. haha. but in reality, i've found twitter to be such a help as far as keeping updated (in real time, mind you) with what my friends are doing. also helps when i need a quick bit of info - "just ask everyone on twitter!"

4. barkada modern [ link ]
this needs no explanation except for the fact that i'm always checking up on this site for the shoutbox. pretty much a chatroom on the bmod site. but i have to moderate it as well. there is a curse filter, but sometimes people leak out information that the general public just shouldn't know.. i.e., "OMG I'M SO DRUNK I LOVE YOO GUYZZ OmgGFgggg" kind of shouts.

3. bitsoup [ link ]
bitsoup is my torrent heaven. if you dont know what a torrent is. yeah. i dont feel like explaining it. but its a p2p sharing network. this is where i get 99.999% of all my music, tv shows, movies, games, and software from nowadays. and now that i have FiOS, i've turned into a seedbox. it's pretty awesome because tv shows that air in the east coast are made available to download before it even airs here on the west coast. bitsoup has a 100,000 user limit. so at times registration will be closed. new users are only accepted when bitsoup makes their monthly inactive user purge. the better the upload/download ratio a user has, the less the user has to wait to start downloading new torrents.

2. MySpace [ link ]
blah myspace. i'm not gonna lie. i used the heck out of this thing. but... recently i've found myself using it a lot less. only logging on to post bulletins, or a quick check up on friends. i dont leave anyone comments anymore. and my inactivity has shown as i dont receive many comments anymore either. boggles my mind how much i still go on myspace even though i don't really participate much.



and my most visited website is.....
1. facebook [ link ]
facebook!!! this actually comes to no surprise. i'm always on this site. funny how it happened though. about three years ago, Jenny made me a facebook account because i refused to give in to the hype. but it didn't work out and i just signed on once just to deactivate the account. little did i know that deactivating a facebook account does NOT delete it! so about an entire year later, i was talking to Charmane at work, and we brought up facebook. i told her that i'd still never make an account. then i was bored that same night and made an account. BUT! i was surprised to find out, that when i attempted to make my 'new' account, i had simply reactivated my old one. shortly after i (re)joined, facebook went through a facelift. everyone was complaining and crying about it, but i was happy because i hadn't really used the old interface at all. and just recently they made another interface change. again, everyone griped about it, but i accepted it nicely. while others say it was confusing, i found it more organized. i've loved every update facebook has gone through. and it's so much better than myspace.



so judging from that top 9, i'm quite the online social networker. blogs, twitter, online social networks.

what SHOULD be in that top 9?? um. monster.com, careerbuilder.com, craigslist.org, etc. haha.

speaking of the job search, i have a story to share regarding a job search related experience i had yesterday. but till then. goodnight!

if you hadn't already noticed, whenever you go to my website (byronface.com) the image above changes randomly each time you visit! woot! i've wanted to integrate that somehow when i first made my website about a year ago, but couldn't figure it out.. then yesterday, i randomly tried again and got it to work in only 3 minutes. go figure.. i'm only cycling between 6 images (all of which were taken by me) so there's not much randominity (and no, that's not a word) just yet. that just shows how NOT many great pictures i've taken.. bah..

oh yeah, might i add what a GREAT collection of songs that is the Can't Hardly Wait Soundtrack?

my fios went on a short hiatus due to an incompetent contractor who decided to pull the plug on our service and replace it with the wrong cable..

but after calling verizon tech support (which went a LOT smoother than many stories i've read online regarding their tech support), they dispatched a technician the day after. after a couple hours of fiddling with our ONT and BBU, he finally found the problem that the contractor messed up on, and had to manually search for our cable, which was almost impossible because of the mess their contractor made.. and a little bit after that, our FiOS was back up and running. phone, internet, and tv-on-demand now works great. so a +1 for verizon tech support!


how i missed thee

2.3MB/s download. woot. a movie in under 7 minutes. dont mind the upload, it was slow since no one was downloading from me..

verizon's premium fiber optic service. blazing fast internet speeds and crisp hdtv. i am finally a subscriber.

time warner cable (we'll refer to that as TWC or incredibly slow and unreliable piece of crap service.. but let's pick TWC cuz it's shorter) was getting on my last nerve. i was getting annoyed, especially within the last few months, at their unreliability. they were getting time-of-day dependent. where my internet would only be fast from the hours of 1am-3pm. between 3pm-8pm, it would start to show some slowdown.. then from 8pm-midnight, it would just come to a frustrating crawl. our tv picture would at times jumble up into a bunch of colorful squares.. which i guess isn't a bad thing if you enjoy watching mosaics all day. but those are problems no more!

the verizon fios van pulled up a couple days ago and the installation took about 3.5 hours. the network terminal was installed outside next to our electrical switches, and we now have a modem/router in one so i have a linksys wireless g router up for grabs sale. hooked up the set top box to the hd input of our tv after the guy left. so now we have super clear tv. and we signed up for the 20mb/5mb fios internet. downloading movies in minutes is quite awesome. and uploading as fast as i downloaded on cable on a good day is just as awesome.

but someone out there decided "this is too much good stuff for byron.." and decided that the day i get fios installed, the wireless on my laptop should break... AGAIN. f'ing sh!t. this is what happened less than a year ago when i had to send in my laptop for warranty repair, and it took over a month to fix. but now there's nothing i can do to fix it since it's out of warranty. f'ing sh!t, indeed. some quick research ensues.. and i have my eyes set on the Belkin N Wireless ExpressCard Adapter. i'm not down for a USB adapter because it would just leave a huge gaping protrusion out of my laptop. so i pack up the Targus HeatDefense Pad i bought with Alex a few days ago, since that didn't work up to par with my expectations, and head over to Best Buy in Glendora again. i returned it for a full refund (to my gift card) with no questions asked other than "is something wrong with it?" find my Belkin Adapter for $60 bucks, but only $15 after the gift cards. head back home, install drivers, plug in the card, and it's working awesomely in under 2 minutes of opening the box. but it's just frustrating that i actually need an external wireless adapter when the one from HP should work.. especially after having it sent in for warranty already. i guess it's not too bad considering i still have wireless on my laptop.. and a recent speed test gave me results that were faster than my last test with the built-in wireless card.. but it's footprint outside my laptop is still a bit larger than i'd want.. i'll just have to deal.


belkin n wireless ExpressCard adapter
a bit protruding - more than i'd want.. but still smaller than a USB adapter..
and i woke up sick today.. the day before our ultimate brawl hell week starts.. not a good combination!

fusion x was this past sunday.

bmod had a pretty good performance, but for me.. the event itself wasn't too enjoyable. i dont know.. the whole atmosphere backstage felt like it lost all sense of the dance community, especially in comparison to last year. it's not saying too much since last year was my first fusion experience.. but that experience just felt so much better. the dance teams backstage were mingling like no other. i felt like we were all there just to have fun and dance. but this time, it was lacking in so many ways, but at the same time in such a way that i can't put my finger on what was missing.. i thought it was a personal issue, but after talking to some people about the event as a whole, they agreed that something was missing from fusion this year. but i have to put some recognition on our runner, Angelica. she was so welcoming and friendly and our entire team loved her! one of the best runners we've had at any event!

much love and congrats to COMMON GROUND for placing third!! so proud of them! their set was amazing!!

aside from the weird/awkward/something-missing-but-i-cant-put-my-finger-on-it experience at fusion, the road trip down to san diego as a whole was awesome! after saturday night's practice, we all got our stuff together/ready and finally headed out to SD. our car consisted of: alex (driver), brittany, nick, jay, albert, jowena, karl, and myself. had a blast with my Catchphrase game that took up a good hour of the ride there. finally got to alex's house. once everyone arrived, we got settled and all fell asleep. the entire house was a huge hotel room pretty much. woke up to an awesome breakfast compliments of the manucal parents! loved their hospitality! finally headed out to fusion after a few group pics in front of the house.


in front of the manucal residence

oh yeah, i also got attacked by alex's maltese. :( :( :( sadness major. it sucks because the night we got there, Charlie loved me. would not leave my lap, and kept hopping on me to lay on. then the day after, i try to pet him and he bites the hell out of my hand. and alex is amazed because charlie never bites anyone!! and up to now, three days after, i can still feel a bruise-like pain where i was bit. bah.. alex and i are now even, because when alex visited me while i house-sat my sister's place, he got bit by kobe.. haha.

after fusion, we all headed to rigoberto's which turned out to be a huge fail because everyone and their mom was there and we didn't feel like waiting, ended up going to roberto's to eat, then finally heading back to pomona. alex almost falling asleep multiple times on the road.

a couple more pictures from fusion/ucsd:


alex and i at fusion doing our looking into the distance/sky emo pose


a sign in the UCSD parking structure. check out the dude's legs!! ahhaha

* * *
monday, the first day for what seems like a long time that bmod didn't have practice! alex was bored, so i picked him up and we headed to best buy for some random somewhat-shopping. i bought a cooling pad for my laptop. at first i thought it didn't work very well.. but that was because it was almost 90 degrees in my room.. but under normal laptop usage, i think it might work pretty well. a full-fledged review on the product in a later entry.

anyways, after best buy alex is hungry, so we go to in&out. i get something simple: fries and a milkshake. but he ate the world with a burger and fries.. and a few minutes later another TWO orders of fries. bro's a monster.

we then met up with kat, neil, and paul.. and head out to buffalo wild wings to end the night.

* * *
so can the hot weather stop already?! it's like spring just got skipped and the world went straight into summer! not enjoying it at all. but hope is nigh! today's high is supposed to be 79! which is almost 20 degrees cooler than these past two days. then the rest of the week (and even next week) will be in the lower 70's again.

random.. but as i typed this entry, my Time Warner Cable cut out and reconnected at least three times.. that's unacceptable! good thing i'm ditching this crappy internet service on thursday and replacing it with verizon FIOS. the deal we're getting isn't too much faster than what i have now, but it's still faster nonetheless, as well as cheaper, and hopefully a lot more reliable than TWC. goodbye TWC!!

the world is in an imbalance right now. a lot of bad things are happening to people close to me.. hopefully this bad spell passes soon...

this is a NERD entry. dont read if you dont care.

i have officially switched my default web browser from firefox to google's very own chrome.

i've had it installed on my computer for a while now, but the lack of extension support (which is the heart of firefox's awesomeness) kept turning me away. but then i took a look at what extensions i really use in firefox. and the only one i really couldn't give up having was AdBlock Plus (does REALLY well at blocking ads). the other bunch of extensions i used were more interface related, to make the firefox interface minimal.

all chrome needed for me was some way to block ads and i was set. tried a proxy program using Privoxy. but this kept blocking things that weren't even ads, and left an ugly empty space where the ads were supposed to be. i then came across Adsweep. works almost as well as adblock plus for firefox, and is run alongside chrome as a user script. awesome. im set!

although considering chrome is still in development as a public beta, it is lacking in some features that i learn to live with. i dont like how i cant download a file and open it right away from its temporary download location. instead, the file has to be saved somewhere, then opened from there.

copy+paste is all weird with chrome. when copying and pasting simple text from a website into an HTML source, it adds a bunch of useless code.

example. copying the text "Hello, World!" and then pasting it into an HTML enabled doc/program would return this:

<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px; text-align: justify; ">Hello, World!</span></span>

notice all that useless code with the actual copied text barely even visible near the end of the code?

i have to work around this by pasting it into Notepad (which doesn't recognize any of the excess code), then recopying it.

another thing that lacks in chrome's development is the simple integration of smooth scrolling. i find myself getting lost sometimes scrolling down a webpage unless i can see the text/content scrolling smoothly with my mouse's scrollwheel.

but despite these very small (but nagging) drawbacks, the minimalistic interface and speed of the browser is enough to sell me. it is THE fastest browser i've ever used. opens instantaneously right when i click its icon. webpages download lightning fast (as long as my time warner cable is performing as it should, which hasn't been much lately, stupid TWC..). i'd compare its speed to that of mac's safari.

screenie:

try out Google Chrome here!

my mouth hurts. i've been eating sour skittles like nothing. haha.

i house-sat for my sister this weekend while she was at mammoth. got to spend some quality time with kobe, solid snake, and some good friends.

saturday night, alex got back from san diego and rounded some people together for a quick bite for some buffalo wild wings with him and brittany. i got my long awaited mango habanero fix. later, a few met us up: nick, jackie, april, and eric. after eating, i headed back to my sister's and ended the night there.

wake up sunday just in time to make myself a pizza and hash browns. head over to ma's house for a team meeting. off to in&out afterwards. then practice after that. after an early-ended practice, alex, jowena, and kat come with me to my sister's to keep me company, and so that they could study. they all meet kobe, who loved them. but they were allergic and i had to trap him in jamie's room. during a study break, i put on Planet Earth: Ice Worlds for them to be fascinated by. they left around 3am.

monday morning, i just bummed it out with solid snake. defeated Laughing Octopus before i packed up and left.

anyways, gg just finished downloading. woot. new drama tonight!

peekaboo! how creepy paparrazo do i look.. meh..

so bMod had a performance at the 2nd annual dance community awards this past saturday. it went great! i haven't felt that kind of a rush in while. thank you to the great hospitality of v.ent dance team. it was nice sharing the stage with mavyn and abdc's team millennia. after watching our performance video numerous times and noting all the many changes we could make to get our set better and stronger, i could tell the team is getting hungrier. only good can come out of that.

CHECK OUT THE PERFORMANCE HERE!

speaking of bMod, the barkada modern website was recently hacked into. that website is like my baby. the hacking culprits didn't do too much to the website though; all they really did was change the main page to a plain white html page with text reading something like "owned by -=M.O.B.=-" all i had to do was log in, get the files back in order, and change the account password. and everything was back to normal..

until the next day, when our website was suspended do to misuse and overuse. i contacted HostPC and inquired about the issue at hand. they told me that every website under the server that bMod's website was hosted on was hacked into and all the websites (probably thousands) had to be shut down. i just had to request a ticket to get our website moved to a different server. i chose New York because they would have lesser natural disasters than Texas and Florida (our website has experienced downtime when Florida was hit with hurricanes). a few hours later, our website was up and running, but rewinded back to February because it was the last backup that HostPC made of the website. so nothing important was really lost, except the shoutbox had a bunch of 'happy valentine's day' messages.. haha.

anyways that whole thing probably made no sense to many of you.. so here's to something that DOES make sense:

on my way to chad's house to get an XP install disc to repair jay's computer, i was driving on the freeway and my air conditioner was blasting (it was randomly hot that hour). and as i'm driving on the freeway, something flies out of my a/c vent towards me. my first reaction is.. "BEE!!!" so i'm trying to keep control of the car while darting around and contorting my body in weird ways trying to get away or find the bee that flew at me. and when i get a chance to look down, i notice that whatever-it-was landed on my shirt. and then i noticed it was just a piece of foam.

fail.

kbye.

let's hope that another day as frustrating as today never happens again. ever. there was good.. but the little annoyances of today added up to the point that i barely even consider it a good day.

started on some important video editing at 3 (!!) in the morning.. but adobe premiere is VERY sensitive to *.mpg videos with a single glitch or dropped frame in it (i choose mpg cuz it renders the fastest on-the-fly) .. so i was having a hell of a time trying to import a video into premiere for editing.. come 6am.. i finally gave up and went to sleep.

wake up super late.. past noon.. and go straight to more video fail. after numerous hours and attempts, i finally thought of this: what if i convert the original HD *.mov to a non-HD *.wmv, THEN into the *.mpg that premiere for some reason likes... this HAS to work.. but then the final and triple-converted *.mpg file still had those same dropped frames.. FAIL.

so, i took the HD *.mov turned non-HD *.wmv again.. and imported the *.wmv into premiere.. it worked fine of course, but the *.wmv just lags like crap while editing.. so i had the bright idea of exporting the *.wmv out of premiere into an *.mpg rather than using a video converter. few minutes later, i have a fully working *.mpg that premiere actually likes! i was able to finally get on with video editing. granted, the file i needed was converted at least three times so the quality took quite a step back, but whatever. it was the only way i could get it to work. but alas, all my video editing is almost finished! man, all that crap gave me a headache though...

my sister calls and asks if i can visit her house since she wasn't going to be home till late so i can feed kobe. i'm fine with that. plus there were plans of some friends going out to chill later on so it would help if i was already out of the house. get to my sisters', feed kobe, play a little bit of metal gear solid 4. then all plans started to crash down. we had stuff we wanted to do, but had no place to do it; was kinda left confused and hanging till 8pm because of circumstances, people (person..) not answering calls after confirming to go out and not telling anyone they weren't going anymore -- i'm super annoyed. that's the last time i arrange my day around other people's plans. end up getting some food at alberto's and chilling a little bit at the campus village. good food and good people.. but i'd have been fine just staying home or at my sisters the whole night. when plans are made and dont fall through, it just makes me feel like the night is wasted.

and to end the night i'm left with a little paper prize on my windshield. if anyone knows a 'kalem' from parking services, give him a nice 'i hate you' hug for me. and tell him how much i appreciate losers who have no friends on campus so they have to find a job where they can get back at the world even though it's their own fault that they have no friends and are socially retarded.

in all honesty, nothing today was even that horrible.. but added up, it just frustrates the hell out of me.

i've noticed recently that i've been digging myself into a hole that's hard to recover from.. but here and there shows little glimmers of hope. and i'm waiting for one of those glimmers to shine down on me.. yup, i'm talking about money.. let's just say times are tough right now..

i've noticed that i'm getting closer to some while drifting away from others. not in a bad or intentional way, just the way things are working out i guess. i've had some issues in the past separating 'friends' from 'business,' but now that i've mastered it fairly well, i feel like i'm losing my fun side at practices. it's probably a good thing though, and i'm glad that those i've gotten or getting close to realize that i can turn that off outside. for a group i'm so fond of, i'd like to retain that friend/family/comrade-relationship. not in place of, but alongside my leader-relationship. while on the subject, check out our performance of our "OZ" set at arcadia high school's charity show: CLICK!

i've noticed that more and more people are falling into the twitter addiction. makes me feel like my network of friends are better connected. much more than an online social network like facebook or myspace, cuz its more of a real-time thing.

i've noticed that since i've been able to take a step back in photographing bMod events and such, i've taken a step back in photographing anything in general. that's very unlike me! i guess my camera has been such a vital tool in things that i considered 'work,' that i've forgotten that i initially bought it to record my personal events and memories. i'm sure you've noticed that my entries have become less picturesque. with that, i pledge to myself to take my trusty camera along with me more often.

my thanksgiving was intimate. thanksgiving day consisted of us (mom, dad, sister, myself) of going to my sister's new condo in chino hills and cooking. we had turkey for once, which is very untraditional for us since we all pretty much prefer chicken. we had canned cranberries, cornbread stuffing, beef, mashed potatoes, candied yams, apple pie, ice cream, veggies, fruit, wine, and beer.

but since my sister's place is brand new and there's not really much in it yet, so the four of us had nothing to do but eat, listen to music, and talk about random things.. even had a random discussion about columbus and trying to remember his three ships.. which we couldn't.. and we didn't have internet to look it up.. we had nowhere to sit/nap because it is pretty unfurnished.. haha. but before the night ended, we made a quick stop to our house and got her one of our spare couches. yay for something to sit on! to anyone else, it would have been a boring failure of a thanksgiving (other than the food), but i loved it.. spending time with the family is something i've learned to never take for granted.

the next morning was black friday.. i had no intention of buying anything since i'm 1) broke and 2) not really looking for anything in particular.. but my sister on the other hand, with the new place, shopped. we'll just say after a very full and tiring day of shopping (best buy, bed bath & beyond, great indoors), we managed to get: 52" Sony BRAVIA lcd tv, Playstation 3, RockBand 2, and a chandelier.

got back to the place and didn't hesitate to hook up the tv/ps3/rockband2 combo. but first testing a blu-ray disc and ogling at the crisp picture-ness. man.. no more dvds for us, haha! my dad came by and helped us get the chandelier up. was a lot harder than we expected considering we had no equipment or mounting kit. got the tv mount on the wall. and the rest of the night consisted of us playing rockband, eating, and drinking beer.

now my mission is to find someone with metal gear solid 4: guns of the patriots who would let me borrow it for a bit now that i can finally play it. hah!

and tonight is..... bMod thanksgiving dinner for more fattyness!! and then locust lounge afterwards for more drankness!!

on one of my few accesses to the internet...

from my previous entry, you'd know that i should have gotten my laptop back on the 7th of october.. but alas, on that day, i got a call from HP, saying they would be holding my laptop hostage for even longer due to backorder of parts.. upon hearing this, i was kinda ehh.. shoulda seen it coming, i guess i can wait a couple more days.. but then she goes ahead and says, "but you should be expecting your laptop to be delivered on the 21st of october" wtf!! that's like an entire month away! argh.. anger much? yes..

so all my historian-ness is still being put on a nasty hold.. i'm able to upload pictures still, but not as often.. bmod website is hard to update without my laptop.. etc.. and it sucks that i wont have my laptop the day auditions for bmod starts..

with all the tech talk aside, my mom left for a mexican riviera cruise on the 9th.. and she'll be gone for a bit.. and after that i think she's going to vegas with her friends or something? and then after THAT, she's going to chicago.. so she's going on a crazy trip haha.

the bmod and grv broomball social was last night.. it was crazy fun. i fell quite a bit going for the ball resulting in a couple bruises on my knees. which doesn't help since they were already hurting from bmod's hell week that we just went through. but last night was a nice break from dancing. before the social, a chunk of bmod headed to bubba gump's shrimp co. in anaheim. good times there. after the social we headed to big jeff's new place in west covina. chilled with patron and vodka. grv is awesome.

well goodbye for a bit. back to my non-laptop-ness..

no update for a while.. which is what happens when i have limited computer access!!

it is wednesday today.. which means it is about the 6th day without my beloved laptop.. it has definitely changed my daily routine.. my access to the Internet has drastically been reduced.. which is crazy weird.. because i pretty much live on the Internet.. haha. i shipped the notebook out on friday before leaving for World of Dance and HP received it yesterday morning.. and according to their website, i'll be getting it back on Oct. 7th. the bmod website updates have come to a stop because any attempt i make to use dreamweaver on this crappy desktop results in a long hang and a crashing computer. same thing when im simply trying to manage my flickr photos online. or when im converting videos to put on my ipod.. so yeah, definite change.. it's as if the Hatian from Heroes is living in my house and all my powers are taken away.

world of dance was awesome. the drive up there felt pretty long though.. we got there around 7 or 8pm i think? checked in.. then me gigz neil and danny headed out to hooters right next to our hotel for dinner while we waited for bert vince carissa jackie and some sheroes to get there.. and since it was pretty much too late to do anything else, we just went on a drink run and chilled in our room for the rest of the night. the radisson in dublin was the 'official' place to stay for all the WoD attendees.. so there were dancers all over the place. i was a goob and forgot my toiletries bag at home.. so i had to buy a toothbrush/toothpaste thing from a vending machine.. no one in my room wears contacts.. so i had no contact solution to borrow. found out that Sheroes were staying in the room above us so we went up there and i asked to borrow matt's contact case and some of serena's solution as they were having some kind of mini-meeting.. quite embarrassing.

the next morning, me gigz danny neil carissa and bert headed out to the city and had brunch at fisherman's wharf. headed to World of Dance right after. and ok.. i love going on road trips because our destination usually has weather that is better than anything pomona can offer.. but in Alameda (where WoD was), it was pretty darn hot and humid as if we were in pomona. but as far as the event goes, i enjoyed it much more than last year's WoD at the pomona fairplex. most likely because i was able to roam around and watch the event rather than work at the rooted table the whole night. although, i'd wish for larger venues for future WoD's.. a lot of people are left standing because the seats fill up so fast. loved the Sheroes set.. they totally killed their performance. choreo cookies won the event, and they deserved it. they took control of the audience and it was dead silent because of awe during their closer. that night, we lightly afterpartied (since we had a long drive home in the morning). alexis and matt came down to our room for a little, then some of us headed over to kaba modern's room (didn't get to meet the whole team though, only the Americas Best Dance Crew reps were there). headed back and everyone ended up sleeping for the night.

woke up in the morning, got ready, and checked out. our car stopped by a subway before we left dublin. which turned out to be the longest stop ever with the most complicated non-english speaking employees. drive home went a lot faster and smoother than the way up. i was trying to sleep as much as possible so i wouldn't die at practice that night. we got home safely, and thus ended a pretty fun trip to the bay.

"Could we see when and where we are to meet again, we would be more tender when we bid our friends good-bye.." - Marie Louise De La Ramee

i was recently reminded of this quote because i witnessed someone who still values the "goodbye." living in a spoiled world, we never expect anything bad to happen. we casually bid farewells, sure to see our friends soon.. but how sure can we be? so eager to move on to our next daily, routine, and robotic task, that we forget and take the time we spend with each other for granted. just something for you to think about..

* * *

last night's backup session for my notebook failed.. because we forgot to bring Acronis.. but tonight, with the power of uber-nerds vince and myself united, my backups should be complete!! and then my notebook and i will finally part ways on friday morning!!

this weekend is World of Dance.. im excited.. but not really.. im going to be excited once we get all the ride situations sorted out.. it's all out of whack right now because curveballs are being thrown left and right.. of who's going, not going, when they can go.. so we really cant tell if we need a rental car or not because everyone's all confused, and most are just expecting everything to fall into place magically forgetting that things need to actually be planned out. ehh.. it'll be taken care of tonight at practice..

so i've pretty much backed up all my valuable files on my laptop.. and tonight vince and i will be using Acronis to take an exact image of my computer at its current state (so that if HP has to reformat my computer to factory settings, i can use the image to make an exact replica of how my computer is today when i get it back). then tomorrow i get to pack my lappy in a box and ship it out to hp.

and that will render me laptop-less.. and pretty much useless for the next 2 weeks or so.. AHHH!

what will happen to me? will i somehow go on a trip to find myself? have a self revelation? have a more broad and positive outlook on life? or will i waste away with my non-laptop-ness and shrivel up into a tiny ball of self-loathing and get blown away with the cool fall breeze?

either way, HP is covering all shipping and repair costs under warranty (which is up today i think.. but since i opened the case before it expired, im good)

aaaaand office premieres tomorrow night!

the bay this weekend for world of dance!!