Google makes me careless on spelling!

It seems like Google search and most of their related properties (like Blogger, iGoogle) are so good at guessing my misspelled words to a point that I don't even care about double checking my spelling. It really it that bad :-P .

Went to Blockbuster

I went to Blockbuster today mainly because .... I wasn't there for many years. Beside, I was looking for the Taiwan movie Splendid Float, and couldn't find it there nor at Blockbuster's web site. To be fair, I cannot find the movie at NetFlix neither. Eventually I found the movie at YesAsia. So now the question becomes whether I am crazy enough to order that movie online.

No more buying iTune song

I just brought my first iTune song, and it will most probably is the last. I already brought it, but now I cannot play it on any of my mp3 player because it's not a MP3 file.

And then I found out that the iTiune on my machine does not recognize the cd burner.

So now I am stuck listending the song on my computer and computer only.

So long, iTune purchase.

My first iTune purchase?

I was very much enjoying practicing and playing with the morning service team. The music they picked, the energy of the team members and the arrangement we used totally reminded me the good old days when I was playing drum set at Bridge Community Church.

Speaking of the Sunday service, I was trying to find the CD version of song that we will do this coming Sunday morning since I believe the arranegemnt expection the team made was based on some CD recording on some praise and worship music CD. I have to admit that after trying to find audio sample with no luck on Amazon.com and some CD purchase site, and turned my way to look for the song in Google using terms like "download mp3", "torrent" and such. Still no finding.

Then I suddenly remind that I have an iTune account, which I never used it to purchase anything except downloading some free TV shows and songs when they have special promotion. So far I mostly use iTune to download Podcast to listen while I am on the road, so the idea of PURCHASING something from iTune was actually pretty new to me. Nevertheless, I enter "You", which is the songs name, in the search dialog box.

Boom.

Song Title: You
Album: Live Vineyard Worship: Winds of Worship - Come Now Is The Time
Singer: (she's also the writer too) Rita Springer
Cost: $0.99

Cool! I should have try this in the very beginning! But just before I pressed the "Buy Song" button, I suddenly remember the REASON why I never brought anything from iTune before.

DRM. Digital Right Management.

In order to listen to the songs I purchase from iTune on my Pocket PC PDA, or my Nokia 5300 music phone, or my iRiver 40Gb MP3 Player, I have to burn the song to a CDRW disc, and rip it back into MP3 again, thus lowering the quality of the music. I don't have an Apple iPod, so the only way to enjoy the music file that I brought is to play it on my PC. And I hate that.

Nevertheless I want to listen to that music a few time before tomorrow's Sunday service, and $0.99 is not bad a cost to just do that job.

Still, I have that some day these music sellers will drop this DRM thing. I mostly blame record companies because it was THEIR idea that this DRM will help them to make more money in long run. It's not. It only encourage buyers to skip legal digital music download and go for either illegal download (as they are all DRM free) or buying the physical CD (since there's no DRM on CD, as even the rootkitted Sony CDs were being replaced with regular CD).

Until then.... sign... buy song, burn and rip again.

Too much sleeping maybe

What will you do if you have all the time in this world? You do nothing. At least nothing useful.

I feel like I am lazier these days. I got a job which doesn't require me to be totally punctuate every day. The stress level at work is low, and I feel good about being able to learn stuff everyone. But somehow I sleep more than I used to be, and feel like having less incentive to instantly being productive right out of the bed.

Don't get me wrong. There's tons of things that I need to do and want to do. It's just that the ignition that starts the engine doesn't seem strong enough these days.

My blog is actually quite a good ignition in that sense. Like now that I wrote a little bit stuff, I start to feel like I am ready to take on the things that piled up in my to do list. That's a good thing.

Here comes the roach again...

I saw a roach dead on the floor today. Interesting enough, all the roach that I saw was found at different location. I never need seen a roach showing up at the same place before.

May suspect that it's because of the rain that they came again. So before I left home, I once again sprayed around the edge of both front door and backdoor.

Cassette Tape ... what cassette tape?

It's possible that after 10 years, kids won't know what the heck cassette tape is. But back when I was a kid, it was a big deal to have a cassette tape recorder. And since then I spent a lot of time recording stuffs: songs, radio shows, audio production that I created by myself. It was was era of my creativity budding. Cassette tape recorder, just like computer today, was a platform of expressing myself.

And the time of cassette tape is about to end, and so are my collection of cassette tapes. I am in a long and consistent process of converting cassette tape content into MP3 format so that I can store them in DVDR disc. Here is a bunch of cassette tape with French and Japanese language tutorial radio program recorded in them. I listened through the Japanese program and was benefited from it. The French program was, on the other hand, not as attractive to me. However since Alice mentioned that she was interest in it, so took some time to process them too.

Speaking of processing cassette tape, there are two applications that definitely need to mention. I would not be able to complete my project until I have these two applications: MP3Gain and MP3DirectCut. They are both freeware and they both allow me to enhance and edit the converted MP3 (I use my iRiver to do high quality 320kbps Mp3 direct through the hardware) lossless. In fact, I was stuck for a while and had to suspend my conversion process because I couldn't seem to find a way to see audio gain level with the 320Kbps Mp3 I captured. Finally I decided that I don't give a damn as long as the trimmed file seems fine. And then mp3Gain flawlessly pumped up the volume. They are definitely critical for my work.

Blog wrote during Sunday service

I needed to play drum set for two sessions of Sunday service today, so I spent the second session doing the stuff that I could do while not interrupting the others and not creating a scene: I wrote blog on Pocket PC, and the following is the result:

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I wonder how will iPhone provide Chinese support. The fancy AI soft keyboard feature on iPhone won't work on Chinese input. Let's hope that Apple invest as much money on Chinese input as on English input.

無論試了多少次，用Pocket PC 中的Block Recognize, 依然覺她相當不寧光，自從我離開Palm OS, 我便沒法用PDA 高速地作英文輸入，我想，下次當我要轉用另一個PDA OS. 那新的系統一定要比我現有的更加方便輸入。

蟑螂大戰也許算是暫時告一個段落。自從用Alice的門蓬殺蟲水噴霧計劃在上星期三晚實施以來，暫時沒有發現任何蟑螂的屍體。希望和平能夠維持下去吧。

已經不再忍受Vista了。自從用了以後，系統時常無故進入發呆的境界。今天我要載入XP，跟發呆說再見。

Finally a day without see a dead roach in the morning

Enough said.

A few dreams

I started with having a dream about working in my mom's electroplating factor, and then I had dreams about .... oooop , too bad I already forgot it. But I knew for sure that there was some other dreams.

The Sega Dreamcast that brought out from store room was working fine except one problem: it kept asking me to set it's system clock everytime after I turned it on. I have it connected to a power socket that has power constantly supplying, so I shouldn't deal with that crazy problem. But well, it's an old gear, so what can I say?

Roach problem put me into sleep

I was so frustrated by the roach problem (or maybe so scare about cleaning up the dead roaches on the floor at the ground floor) that I went straight to sleep last night at 9:00 pm without having any dinner. In fact I woke up at 5:30 am once, but not dear to wake up until 6:50 am. And then I realize that I simply have no choice but go down to face the music. I picked up 3 dead roaches this morning.

Again. I am thankful that all the roaches I saw in the house so far are the dead ones, and that I haven't seen one at the second floor so far. But this really is fustrating. I mean, I've seen more roaches in one week than all the roaches I've seen in a year at my old apartment at Riveraine 6 years ago. I am just desperations.

Sigh. I still need to throw away the garbage bag full of roaches, and then may be I will have appetite to have breakfast.

interview, more roaches and heat

I just had my interview a few hours ago. One of the interviewer was my old colleague, so I asked him was I going.

"You really need to work on your interview skill."

Yeah I think it's pretty much the case. I was never good at talking after all. And I tend to talk way too much than I should be.

On the bright side, it pretty much certain that I will at least have two more months extension on the current contract job that I am working on. And then they were talking about to possibility of turning to perm position. But then there's always possibility of change. We should see.

My battle with roaches just keep continue.

I just saw yet another two roaches laying on the floor. One surely dead, and one 98% dead. I was so frustrated that I sprayed tons of roach killing spray on both the dead one and the almost dead one. And then I practiced what Alice told me to do: spray along the door and so that roaches won't (hopeful come in). And man, the huge amount I did spray.

It was pretty frustrated, and made me feel very uncomfortable staying home. In fact I am still feeling the chill right this moment. This roach thing must be stop ..... too scary.

Roach: why do I always see you in the morning

This morning I need to get to work earlier so that I can leave on time and attend an interview. So I did all the usual (shower, brushing and so on). Just when I was about to put on my shoes, I saw a big roach next to my shoe. Surprisingly I was not scared. I just found it annoying.

So I found a roll of advertisement paper, stick some tapes at the end in order to stick it up. And that's when I found out that it's alive!

However, it seems it be on drug or something, and still just staying there. And then my instinct kicked in and use one of the shoe to shame it into a big burr or brown substance. I used the roll of advertisement paper to pick it up, cleaned up the brown ooze, and leave home. It's 8:13 a.m. already.

And I started to feel scare while I was in the middle of the commute.

Why do I always find roaches in the morning. First 2 dead ones at home. Now this drugged living one. It's just insane.

Sleep sleep and sleep

I simply cannot believe how much I sleep these days. Yesterday I went to bed at 9:30 pm because I felt very tired. My plan was to wake up at 3:30 am to set up my home recording studio. And guess when I woke up this morning? 7:00 am.

On the bright side, I feel extremely energetic now.

Lyrics and video game

I finished a lyrics for a friend. To write lyrics effectively I had to first draft a lot of content and sample lines on a paper and then formulate the song from all the fragments. So picked last Saturday to do so, and although I have a whole day to mess with, it was not too productive as I kept having writer's block.

In order to relax my brain I took the moments to play Nintendo Wii. As the result I got some good progress in games like Zelda for Wiii and Warioware for Wii.

Speaking of Zelda fot Wii, I have to say that I wasn't too enjoying the game, mostly because I didn't like being as a wolf for so long at the current storyline that I was at, and I didn't like the alien who was riding on my back neither. And control was also pretty odd from my perspective. Nevertheless, the game seemed to be pretty well designed and I will continue playing it ... every once in a while.

I also played Space Channel 5 on Dreamcast. It was such an old school and the graphics were very much dated, but I still enjoy the style and the simplistic "simon said" kind of musical game style.

Strange dream never ends

I just woke up, and vaguely remember some strange dreams that I had a while ago. They were all .... very strange.

It started with me in a Dollar Movie theater trying to watch some round movies. "Which movie worth seeing?" I asked someone at cashier. A young man spent some time to introduced a few movies to me: there was a drama about a design who were bright but had a twisted sense of beauty in the 20s who also happened to be the designer of Playboy bunny suit (the what?). And then there's a movie about friendship among several female friends. All these movie had some very think and colorful promotional books at the lobby.

"Can I take these books" I asked.
"Sure. One per cusotmer." the young man said.
"One booklet each movie per customer?" I wanted to clarify.
"Yeah, you can have one for each movie," he said while taking the books on my hand and put them in his backpack (where the hell did he suddenly yanked a backpack out?).

I found it very odd that he put my books into his backpack. I pointed it out, and he was kind of embarrassingly giving the books back to me, saying "oh, I was worrying that you might forgot to bring them with you so I kept them for you." I found that totally awkward.

I also asked the show time for one of the movie, and he kept suggesting me to see the movie at another theater.

The more I deal with guy the more I found him strange, and almost creepy.

The suddenly the scene of my dream changed to some street dinning place in the night. I was minding about the booklet in my backpack, and also trying to find my mobile phone so that I could call my friend and asked about their preference on the movie pick.

"Sir, I think you are using my mobile phone." An OL told me. I looked at the phone and found that the phone was indeed not mine, and in fact that bag that my searched was not my bag either. I apologized and walked a bit away from her table.

She was not mad, mainly because she was busy discussing some issues with her boy friend. (This is not too realistic, because in reality her boy friend will beat the crap out of me for checking around his girlfriend's handbag.)

And then there was another OL came and sat on the table that I was at.

My dream was then sort of ended by that time.

Strange dream that was, but at least more entertaining than some of the dreams I had a day before. My brain was so lazy that I had dream about me having a dream and woke up! So back then my brain was so tired that it didn't bother to come up with storyline!

Bad haircut ... by myself

"What in the world is going on with your hair?" Alice asked yesterday after Sunday Service.

She was pointing at the spot which I had a segment of my hair cut by myself. It was Wednesday morning last week, and I was in a hurry trying to prepare myself for a job interview. I saw a bunch of hair at the back of my head that kind of irritated me. So I simply grabbed a sharp scissor and snapped a few segments of hairs by myself. I was really good at cutting hair, and cutting hair at the back of my head without even clearly seeing the spot didn't help neither. Thus here I got that nasty spot.

Being the bad guy in a dream

I was usually a victim, a survivor or a hero in my dream. This morning, however, the table turned around.

In my dream, I was going back to a university that I was in (however the surrounding doesn't look much like University of Houston at all), and I went to seek for an old professor. Interesting enough, the professor was also a clown. I went there and ask some question that triggered him to ask me "when was the last clown gathering". I didn't know the answer but I had an urge to cover up my ignorance. So I lied about a after gathering which tons of people were singing and such. And the professor instantly said, "Liar! You were lying!" I was embarrassed but was also pretty angry, so I kept cursing him while he was continuously putting clown makeup, and left after a while.

Strange dream indeed.

Padding my notebook

I was complaining about the heat problem of my laptop for quite sometime. Today, I took the day-off opportunity (JUly 4, dude) to deal with the problem, and the result was very nice. You can see from the photo that I add some pad at the wrist rest area, and then I add some insulation at the back. Now I can actually use my laptop on my lap, and this mobile device becomes truly mobile.

mess

很少在主日崇拜負責打鼓的日子，出現連自己也覺得打得一塌胡塗的情況。今天也可說是個經典。有趣的是其實今早自己非常精神，令今天的一塌胡塗更加莫明奇妙。

回想昨天，時間過得有點胡裡胡塗。最大的成果就是在 Home Server 設定好 .Net Framework 2.0 和 SQL Server 2.0. 這樣我就可以在家裡執行一些自創的軟件，在學習ASP.net 2.0 的同時，也能將自己的資訊用更新的方法去接收。例如在工場上也能看到家中的情況。

昨天也用了很多時間玩Wii. 主要的原因不是自己忽然非常喜歡打機，而是因為在極慢的Home Server 安裝軟件，有太多等候的時間。