So I've been keeping rather busy. This will be no lax quarter. It's my second to last quarter here at UCSB. Next quarter I'll start looking into game development companies, preferably in the Bay Area. Some people here and there are talking about looking into finding work after they graduate even this quarter. But that's so long! I don't really get how that's viable. Are there companies that want you to apply to them and then wait 4-5 months for you to finish with school? I don't see how that works, but I guess that's probably because I haven't really been following the norms that other people have been subscribing to regarding this sort of thing. Been busy working on stuff.

This quarter I'm taking a class on Java based Cluster & Concurrent Computing. It's been a lot of work, and I probably haven't been working as efficiently as I could - some playing around with games and such, some being sleepy, some getting distracted by talking to people here and there. Everything gets done on time but I need to step it up. I'm currently implementing a system not unlike Cilk that allows a job to be decomposed into short non-blocking threads in a directed acyclical graph that get distributed over a compute cluster using work stealing. Neat stuff!

It is taking time away from working on my research though. This weekend I should be finding out if our position paper is accepted to the Sketch workshop at CHI, which I'm sure we'll then talk about at a meeting we're having next week. Whenever I get time to work on my research project I make a lot of progress. It's going well! I haven't, however, had any time at all to work on From Dusk into Twilight. I was designing ships here and there but that's about it.

Also on Tuesday I'm going down to LA to see Tenacious D in concert! It's also a Haiti relief concert, which is cool. But I mainly just want to see The D. Also the Lynette figure I ordered some time back was shipped the other day. Looking forward to having that!

I'm making better progress on things than I was projecting. Stuff is debugged! Stuff is implemented! It's kind of working! But I made a 1/2 cm scratch or so on my 24" Dell monitor last night. Was twirling my scissors and it hit the monitor. Balls! I'm not having much luck with monitors lately. Try VGA mode didn't fix the 19" monitor - I'm going to actually have it fixed.

I beat Katamari Damacy and Monkey Island Special Edition since I got back to school. Both of which didn't take too long. I only waited this long to play Katamari because I lent it to Cydney a while back and hadn't got a chance to play it... I got it back during winter break :D Fun game. I'm finally playing Assassin's Creed now and it's great. It really does setting well, the most important part of a game or movie to me. Lets see where the game goes.

Also I pre-ordered Nodocchi and Yuuki figures! They should be awesome! Nodocchi is even supposed to be like a foot wide! I still have those Yoshika and Lynette figures I preordered as well to wait on... so this makes 4 relatively expensive figures that I'm waiting on. Haven't pre-ordered anything like this before - lets hope it's not a painful process I'm going to need to do 4 times.

On friday I had the option of going with the Pep Band to a basketball game with the prospect of a free T-Shirt and tote bag, or goto Anime club. I chose the latter and it was the right choice :D We watched Summer Wars which was fantastic, one of the girls taught us to play Hanafuda afterwards ( namely the Koi-Koi varient that was played in the movie ). They showed the Legend of Koizumi short beforehand, which gives me an excuse to continue the Japanese board game learning next week for me to bring my Mahjong set :D Perhaps I could teach people to play who would want to play a full game! At least one girl knows how to play. Also I went to see The Princess and the Frog with some people from club the next day, which was great :D

I'm also going to be following this live blog of the Proposition 8 trial being held currently in San Francisco. From what I've seen so far, things are going amazingly.

Happy new year! I was watching a 3-Day/Single Cycle Majora's Mask live stream on Backloggery when midnight hit. I ran into the other room at 11:59 to see the ball drop, and then ran back to see the thrilling boss fight the guy was on - beating the last of the four dungeon bosses, finished with less than 20 in-game minutes left on the clock! It was make or break and he managed to pull it off at the last second. I certainly found it fun :D

Also the list of banned IP addresses is at 942. Beat the spammers! It would be nice to do a little more web development for Charhut, I guess. Oh, did I mention I reworked the design of my professional site? Check it out - click profile on the top bar or just click here.

I'm nearing the end of winter break... and there's still quite a bit to do! I'm not satisfied! I did even really get anything done yesterday. I'm not done with my project, I have several things I need to go out and do, I have people to see and need to somehow get myself to Santa Barbara and ready to go for Monday. I don't know! Also I'm not fully registered for all my classes because the seminars haven't been made register-able yet. The plan was to finish putting my schedule together when they were up. They did the same thing for Fall quarter - I had to wait until the first week. But now the seminars aren't even showing up on the CS website! What the deuce - that doesn't help me out any! I'll just have to hope they show up again both on the website and on the system used for registering for classes. Otherwise I'll need to figure out what to do.

I didn't really finish any of the games on my backlog here during break. I did manage to complete nearly 3 costumes in 3 weeks though - not half bad at all. Three pleated skirts, two sailor blouses, a big giant cape and an amulet are what I constructed. The rest I got together or bought or planned - although there's still a few needing doing. That I didn't get my checklist 100%ed is another element of stress. Get it done!

I also forgot to do stuff with my smaller monitor which is now not working. I got the 24" Dell monitor replaced but as soon as it came back my 19" ViewSonic monitor stopped working! Maybe tomorrow/today I can run out and buy a small VGA cable and test if the problem is only with the DVI connection. It's a possibility. If so I can just use VGA and it should be fine! I have a little DVI->VGA adapter ( the kind that comes with video cards ) handy.

What else... it's late/early because I was laying in bed not tired at all just being frustrated at having stuff to do. So I figured I should try to fix my sleep schedule and get stuff done by just working on things more. Make up for not getting anything done yesterday.

Also Christmas was good and Riverdance was super good :) I like being home and having a tree and the decorations and stuff. It's very warm. I got a good haircut and I got a jacket which I think should be pretty stylish in a good casual way. I hope! I'm not good with fashion but I think it will work! It's not unlike an M65 jacket which is recommended in the SA men's fashion thread. So yeah.

So funnily enough, because of this blog and how the Facebook updates stack on top of each other like the way they do, if I were to update my status more often than I post on this blog, they all stack up and make it look like I'm ignoring this blog more than I should in favor of Facebook. The result is that I avoid updating my status in order to make this blog look nicer! The alternative is to just make blog posts more often.

I just finished Guitar Hero 5. Finally! There's just so many songs, I would keep sitting down and say to myself that I'm just going to plow through them all and get the game off my to do list. But I would always burn out after playing a lot and realizing there was still a long ways to go. The defining was Do You Feel Like We Do? by Peter Frampton. Long, long classic rock song. Just great and awesome. A lot of the other songs are forgettable, but there are memorable ones like this one. World Tour still has a much more memorable collection of songs for me.

I made Louise's cape. It's very big and long and kind of heavy because it's no slouch - this is one hell of an awesome cape. I guess I need to try and make the blouses now, but I'm not 100% confident I know what I'm doing. Lets do it anyway!

I'm back home from UCSB for winter break, for 3 weeks or so. Well, I guess 2 more weeks now. So did I do it? Did I finish everything? Not quite I guess. I didn't finish implementing the subgraph matching, as it's pretty complicated. Lots of stupid little special cases. I finished everything else though. So I guess it's okay if I just finish that by the end of break. Hopefully I can manage that! I've worked on it a little bit this last week, fixing/implementing a few bits and pieces. Did a big refactoring of this one complicated function that does quite a few things, for instance.

My biggest problem is finishing things I've started. When it comes to schoolwork and such it's no problem - if it involves other people I rarely disappoint. No, it's the stuff like maintaining a big stack of unfinished games, unwatched movies and shows, and projects I want to do stuff on. Maybe it's just because I pick so many things to do that take a long time.

Speaking of big undertakings that take a long time to complete, I'm making three costumes for Fanime, which I might have mentioned - Louise from Zero no Tsukaima, Someya Mako from Saki, and Fukuji Mihoko from Saki. Should be great! I have Louise's pendant and Mako's skirt done. The skirt took like two days. They both look great! I need to wait another two days before I can take measurements to make more progress. Aces! We're on schedule.

Also, the current count of banned IPs is 736. That's a lot of spambots!

I heard that Throwback is coming back on the 28th. Awesome! I'm seeing Riverdance on the 29th, which is also good! At some point I need a haircut really badly! I got Dell to replace my 2407WPF-HC with one with working power button! They didn't replace it with a refurbished 2408 like I requested though. That would have let me do 1080p with my 360 and PS3. Oh well - at least the refurbished 2407 I got is in prime condition.

I haven't played any Mahjong online for a little while, as... I don't know why. I've been dicking around enough anyway. I think I'm still on track on getting everything done before the end of this week but yeah. I played a game shortly ago hoping that some epic times would be had, and they sure were.



So at the bottom of the screen is me, SakiTaco. Playing against banaoooo, ba026062 and KYOGIKU. So I start the game as dealer, and proceed to win 4 times in a row. It's like I could feel everyone saying "someone stop this guy!" I was prepared to completely wipe them out in the first round of the game, I was somehow kicking a lot of ass. Of course, it doesn't last forever, as banaoooo hit me with a Ron with something for 5100 points. A lot of that was from the bonus from my reign as dealer. Hopefully that wasn't the end of my luck, I was thinking...



Ah, shit, look at those discards. My hand is okay but it would have been a lot better with those 4 doras down there! ba026062 as dealer wins twice. He has a rank 9 I see...



Oho, would you look at this! Kokushi Musou is coming together! If I could get a yakuman here on a Ron, that'd end the game there and cinch a total victory only in the 2nd East round!



No! With me needing to get rid of some of my doubles so I could wait on the 1 of characters and West wind, I choose to get rid of my 9 of characters. banaoooo, however, was waiting for that one on a riichi! Jerk! He gets me with a riichi and ura-dora for 3200 points. If he didn't hit that ura-dora he would have killed my yakuman with a cheap 1900 point hand, which would have sucked more, I guess.



banaoooo kills another awesome hand of mine by ronning on KYOGIKU with a riichi tanyou hand. Look at that hand I gots though! Triplet of dragons, 1 dora, 2 red doras, and a pair wait! Could have been 8000 or 8300 points if I got a tsumo. Is this the end of my luck?



Nope! KYOGIKU made an open kan, which made the 2 of circles a dora. Thanks! I forgot that mirror sequences only counts for closed hands, so I goofed a bit there, but oh well!



Once I'm dealer again, I get my revenge on banaoooo for messing up my awesome hands from before with a single wait on a dora. Thanks for discarding that!



ba026062 isn't out yet, though! He stops my boring riichi hand with his own boring riichi hand, and hits an ura-dora for 3900 of my points. He doesn't stage a comeback on his dealer round, though, and KYOGIKU even comes back from the dead a bit with a sweet honitsu, straight, and 1 red dora hand.



I goofed at the end and pon'd on the 8 of characters when I probably should have just went for riichi with my two doras. Oh well though, that was the last round and ba026062 finished it off with a cheap one. Decisive victory! But I could have lost it at any time just as fast I as I took it in the very first round. Missed chances for some sweet hands too, and almost got that yakuman. Good stuff.