Archive for September, 2003

Wow, now there’s a good movie! I watched “Ring” and “Ring 2″, the Japanese movies that were copied (some parts scene by scene) by the Americans to make a movie with the creative title “THE Ring” But first, I have to back up a sec.

Yes, that’s right. I didn’t post for a few days. Yes, for all of you who send me email, I’m still alive. I went on a last-minute (to me) trip to my grandparents house 4 hours away. I got back yesterday but didn’t find time to write. At the moment, I’m having my “lunch break” at work, about to start again in a few minutes, so I’ll make it speedy.

A guy came over yesterday to watch Ring and Ring 2. He’s seen the American “The Ring” (I have not) so I was curious as to his reaction. The first movie was familiar and predictable, since he practically already saw it. So we made jokes and stuff to lighten the mood. The second one was when it got serious. No talking, lights out, fan on low, surround sound on, woo! It’s hard to tell what people think about movies. I think he may have liked it. I liked it much more the second time. If you haven’t seen it, you should check out the Japanese one. It’s cool, because Ring 2 isn’t planned to come out in America. Ring 2 is a lot better than Ring 1, and it also makes Ring 1 better by building upon it. It’s cool, slick, nice, creepy, and enjoyable (afterwords). You should check it out. Ok, back to work

note: picture is of a boy in Ring and Ring2

Well, actually it is. Today I was captivated by the heartwarming story of a lonesome turd trying to find it’s place in the world. This korean claymation film’s title translates “doggy poo”. It’s about 45 minutes of breathtaking scenery and claymation combined with mild comptuer animated particle systems (for snow and leaves). Subtitles make it easy to know what’s going on, since the movie is in Korean. It’s interesting how lots of Korean films are sad. A line from My Sassy Girl mentions that “Koreans like sad stories” (all because of ’shower’). Well, this movie about doggie poo is very sad. 90% of the movie is crying. I cried. Well ok no I didn’t. It’s a very interesting movie though.
For those of you who’re thinking of nagging me about it – no – I am not serious. The movie is completely for comedic value, and I do not think it is lovely, touching, graceful, or any of those other girls words.
I watched a cool movie tonight. “Ring” It’s the 1998 Japanese movie that America copied (big time) and called “The Ring”. I haven’t seen the American one yet, but I’m told the Japanese one is 10 times worse. I find that hard to imagine because that Japanese one wasn’t THAT bad… I played it up too ^_^ I turned all the lights off, put the fan on low, and watched it in my room at night alone with surround sound on my tv. It was pretty scary, but not as bad as I expected. I’m going to try to get “Ring 2″. It’s already out. I started the download a few minutes ago. I’m not sure if it’s going to be re-made in America though, if someone knows, pleast let me know, mmk?
Well, no school until Tuesday. I have work tomorrow morning, I’d best be off. Thanks to everyone who added to my record-setting 27 comments on a single post! I’m outta here.

ps: to those of you who told me to change the way I write my blog to make it more interesting to other people, leave me alone.

Well this is a first. I’m writing my post in the morning instead of late at night. This is because today, I will be cleaning my room, and my main workstation will be unplugged for today and possibly still tomorrow. I have a rat’s nest of wires below my desks, and it’s starting to make it difficult to get things done. Plus, cleaning my own things, for me, is somewhat therapeutic and relaxing. It also brings that sense of accomplishment in actually getting something done. One thing I haven’t decided yet, is what to do with my bed. I’m timped to put it in my closet, since I haven’t used it in a few weeks (other than to pile things up on).
Well last night I watched another movie. However it wasn’t the one I was expecting to watch. I was expecting to watch “the last present”. As I sat down, I realized I forgot to download the subtitles. I put in a search/download for them. I knew it might take a little time to get them, so I decided to watch another movie in my evergrowing stack.
This movie was very interesting. I’d give it a 5 out of 10 though. It was fairly long and slow. It had to be to make the plot work, but for the casual viewer, it had little action, little emotion, little humor, little everything, and appeared somewhat empty. It had a plot that was very interesting though. It was another movie from Korea (I have a list of Korean movies a friend told me I should see). It’s a lot like the movie Frequency. 2 people communicating through time (3 years apart). However instead of a ham radio, this is a mailbox. And instead of father/son, it’s a single man and a single woman, separated by time. The plot only had one big twist near the end, and it led into the perfect ending. It was a pretty good movie, but I don’t know how many people I’m going to be sharing it with =o)
Today, I have to do some homework -_- I have that little string of exams tomorrow, and i need to finish up my reviewing! I think most of ‘em will be pretty straightforward. My US govornment test feels like the hardest. (probably because history is by far and away my least favorite and worst subject) Well, I’d best be off!

Today seemed to flow awkwardly . Things that took minutes seemed so long, things that I spent so much time on seemed to take minutes. I’m not sure as to why yet, however I know it has something to do with a lack of order in the things I do. I seemed to work randomly today. I went to a computer store to get parts to fix a lady’s (lighting-fried) computer…

Ugg it was a mess. Luckily, only the power supply and motherboard were fried. I got it home and started replacing the motherboard. I then realized “crap, she has DIMM ram” and I thought she had DDR… After a lot of thought, I decided to switch it with my own personal workstation motherboard. It has both DIMM and DDR ram support. I kinda got jipped though. The motherboard I gave up had 5 pci slots, an agp slot, an isa slot, and support for both DDR and DIMM ram. The one I bought today only had 3 pci slots, an agp slot, no isa slots, and DDR-only ram slots. However, I do have onboard surround sound, onboard usb and usb2, onboard video, and onboard lan that the one I gave up doesn’t. All in all, I gave up 2 pci slots and saved 3 from having those things onboard. I’d say it was a good trade at this point.

Ok, motherboards swapped, her machine powered up and started windows perfectly. I ran a ram/cpu stress test for 4+ hours on it and it performed beautifully. All is good! She’ll be happy. She even got a better motherboard than she payed for =o)

With her pc packed up and by the door, I decided I wanted to get back to my work on my computer. I put the new motherboard in, my chip in, my ram, all’s good to go. Power on. blank screen. Uhh, video must be shot. After 5 mins of playing with agp/pci video cards and onboard video, I realized it wasn’t video. The ram must be bad. I swapped out my DDR w/ other sticks I had. Uhh, ram’s good. Ram slots must be bad. But wait, both? New motherboard? After a long painful troubleshooting episode, I finally realized what the stupid problem is. The new motherboard is made for Athlon XP chips. My old one could take raw Athlon chips. My chip is a raw Athlon. well… crap! The lady’s good to go w/ her AthlonXP 2600 chip, and I’m here with my plain Athlon and it wont work with my motherboard. Oh, eww, 3v1l scott… Athlon XP 2600 clocks in at 1.4ghz. My Athlon is 1.4ghz. My chip wont work in my motherboard… but it’ll work in hers! Her chip will work in mine! So I swapped. That’s not jipping anyone, right? It’s the same speed chip, I dont know any disadvantages of the Athlon 1.4ghz vs the AthlonXP that’s 1.4ghz… I switched chips, everything’s cool. Her comp works awesome. Mine boots (that’s good for me). I don’t think I jipped her in any way, I don’t feel I got jipped (though I kinda did ^_^) but all is good and I’m happy this stupid computer is out of my life! woohoo! I hope she likes it.

I got my linux leeching downloader machine crankin’ the other night. I started downloading a list of movies. One of them is the one I watched today. It’s called “Lovers’ Concerto”. I was planning to watch a blood & guts movie, but it wasn’t finished downloading yet (that’s my escuse, retaining what masculinity I have) Anyway, it was a pretty good movie. I give it an 8. I can’t say much about it without ruining the movie for anyone who might see it. However, I will mention that lots of korean movies are sad, and this was one of them. It was a movie that had an awesome plot and a great ending. And at the end I thought to myself “was it sad? or was it happy?” It ended in a way that it was both. It was a pretty clean movie too, which was nice. I’d go so far as to say “completely family safe”, with one line of my subtitle .srt file edited slightly ^_^ Because this movie was so ‘emotional’ and had a plot that wrapped around a basic love story that twisted and turned (hence the name, “lovers’ concerto”) I think it could be referred to as a “girl movie”. Therefore, to maintain the all important social-status (I’m in denial that this post hadn’t already KILLED it) I’m going to say that this is a movie I would not recommend to my friends to see, rather it’s one I’d recommend to total strangers to see =o)

If you really want the movie, or any of the others I talk about, contact me and let me know. We’ll talk, and I’ll be more than happy to work something out. I really like sharing these hard-to-get foreign movies. People just don’t get exposed to them any other way. And, yes, the picture on this post is from the movie. And, yes, it’s the same male Korean actor that played Gyeon-woo in “My Sassy Girl”. It was interesting to watch him in this movie, he had a totally different personality and totally different facial expressions. It was a good movie. “but dont take my word for it!” da da da!

Today I found a small corner of an old hard drive that has lots of backed up information from lots of my old websties. Today and tomorrow I plan to spend some time going through it trying to recover what I can. I’d like to add a section to my site just about my old websites, and another just about old content, and one more to be a timeline of my life.

The old websites page will have screenshots of the basic layouts of as many websites as I still have. Back from my first aol-hosted page 8 years ago where I remember yahooing “how to make an image a clickable link” all the way to my most recent creations. I’d like to keep up with this project, so later, years down the road, I can look at my old creative projects =o)

The old content page will have a giant list (probably) on a single page of old news postings, writings, reviews, pretty much anything I wrote a looong time ago, i’ll put it in html form and dump it there. Not only is it a way to bring back the past, but it’s also a time capsule to preserve it for the future. I’ll have links on the top of the page for key events in time, and when clicked, they scroll down to the right posting.

The final idea I have is a timeline. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to do this, but I’d like to make a giant (vertical) timeline of my life and put key events in. It’d be cool if I could make it in a way that I could keep adding to it every few months. Start with birth, first computer, riding a bike, first built circuit (a radio, I made from a kit, in 2nd grade), then first website, first built computer, track team, misia, and all that good stuff…. misia… /pouts/

I dont intend for anyone to read thsee pages and get much enjoyment out of them ^_^; It’s mainly for me. I love bringing back these old thoughts and positive memories, and want to keep them to hold for my future. Who knows, maybe your comments about this post will last for as long as I live?

note: image on the left is Noir, a girl from a really cool anime series I saw about a year and 1/2 ago. I loved that image and used it in over 10 of my website layouts!