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.

So the chatbar on the right is getting spammed. It's been targeted for quite a while, actually, but before I would check Charhut and see 5 or so in there. My custom control panel I wrote in Rails alongside the rest of the site lets me ban IP addresses and delete messages, so I usually just do that for all the spam messages. Yesterday though! I checked and saw like a hundred or so spam messages! I saw new ones come up as I refreshed the page, so the attack was on-going at the time.

So within 15 minutes or so I added to rails an auto-banning feature to the chatbar on the right. If you have a couple keywords in your post, it automatically bans you and doesn't post the message. Also, I wrote a script that would go through the database table and purge/IP ban all the current entries that had those keywords. Although I had to fiddle with the Ruby syntax for another 15 minutes, I implemented all that really quickly. I like Rails!

As for what I've been up to, I'm coming dangerously close to the end of the term, and I want to finish all my projects and milestones by then. I'm working on them at the moment.

Also, why don't cell phones have flashlights built into them?

Also the other day, I got a phone call and email from someone looking to fill a full time Android development position in San Diego. From what I gathered, it seems like they probably found me from my professional site, which has all the information they were referencing to contact me ( like my resume, cell phone and email. ) Looks like that's working! I should revise that site this break as well.

Also I had a thought - perhaps I should find all the original pictures I got the bubbles from to the right of the big "CHAR HUT" above, and make the bubble link to the full picture? Just an idea.

Time to leave now to catch the bus to head back home for Thanksgiving. Then I'll do that and camp out at Fry's for Black Friday, and hopefully I'll get a lot done on projects before I come back from the break. I want to at least get that 10 page report done, and get part of the subgraph matching system up and running.