Another scene of nature burned into my mind

I witnessed a beautiful sky the other day, just got off the bus, walking home.


The sky, blue canvas, shades of light blue to blue, from top to bottom.
Clouds, bite size bits of cotton candy scattered far apart from one another over the wide canvas. Glowing bright orange with a little drop of pink.
Setting sun, hidden from my view, blocked by a fucking HDB flat. Could only see an orange glow emanating.


Scenes like this make me yearn for a digital camera! [:(] So much stuff I want to immortalize…


The more I listen to Kotoko’s Hane album, the more I grow to like her songs. Even better when the lyrics are written by herself. I might go hunting for her album at HMV, the only place I know. Other shops only hold albums of popular singers/band like Ayumi Hamasaki, Do As Infinity, Speed, etc. I want more of Angela, Ali Project, The Pillows, Kotoko, CooRie, Asian KungFu Generation, Maaya Sakamoto (I’ve seen a CD of her’s but it’s still not enough!).


The first song of each above-mentioned singer/band that grabbed my attention most…
Angela – Ashitae no Brilliant Road (OP of Uchuu no Stellvia)
Ali Project – Aka to Kuro (One of the OSTs of Noir)
The Pillows – Ride on Shooting Star (ED of FLCL)
Kotoko – Shooting Star (OP of Onegai Sensei)
CooRie – Taisetsu na Negai (ED of Nanaka 6/17)
Asian KungFu Generation – Haruka Kanata (One of the EDs of Naruto)
Maaya Sakamoto – Birds (One of her albums titled Easy Listening)


If you’re interested in any of the above songs, you could PM me in IRC. The only way I do file transfers. And I may only have APE format for some of the songs. APE format uses lossless compression techniques I believe, at the price of bigger file sizes which does not concern me since bandwidth and harddisks aren’t expensive. OP to me means the opening sequence of an anime. ED, the ending.


Currently listening to Neverland by Love Psychedelico from Love Psychedelico III. Yes, I finally ripped 320CBRs from the CD and listening to it for the first time after keeping it in my bag for 25 days since day of purchase. The lead singer has a good voice!

Need Vitamin C!

Just when I thought the weather has started to cool down a little, it could be me that’ve warmed up. I’m starting to feel a little feverish and my nose is running amok. Good thing is today’s Friday and I could use the coming weekend to rest. I believe it’s the dust from cleaning up my room yesterday. It’s sad to have a dust sensitive nose.


Right now I don’t really have the mood to work with this running nose and my mind blanks out every now and then. Can’t wait to knock off…

Where did all my time go?

The last 2 weeks went by fast. My thoughts have been the next upgrade for my computer. At first I wanted to get an Athlon64. Then after some posts in HardWareZone forums and research, I decided on an AthlonXP 3200+ instead. Then again, someone pointed out the fact that I could have gotten myself an Athlon64 with that amount of money which brings me back to where I started. Should I give in to Desire or Budget?


And then, technology moves on fast enough to keep you waiting forever. When a new tech arrives in the local market, some people will say wait again for an even better tech that they’ve read on the news. And when that better tech comes, news of an even better one gets published and us consumers will be waiting again for that tech to come. [X(]


Right now, I think I will wait for just 1 more month. I’m waiting for this cool ThermalTake Tsunami PC chasis to reach Singapore. Meantime, I have downloaded the Ragnarok MMORPG and will have to rely on the 15 days trial period to see me through till I get my new system to play Final Fantasy XI. [X)]


So far, the only thing I dislike about Ragnarok is the camera view. Perhaps I don’t know the controls but I can’t get the camera to move down so I can look into the distance. I feel kind of restricted.

Escaping

Everyone must have a their ways of relaxing from work, destress. Most gamers escape reality and by indulging in various games especially MMORPGs. Anime fans have anime and perhaps, manga.


This may be a repeated topic but I want to write on the things that have fascinated me since birth.


Ghost in the Shell – The idea of accessing the “internet” directly via plugs behind one’s neck is cool. People can replace their senses with machinery for superhuman reflexes. My interest in Batou soared after watching the visually impressive trailer of the second movie, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence. I thank Mamoru Oshii for bringing us this provocative world of Japan in 2029.


Final Fantasy – Each episode in the FF series contains a world of mystery and adventure. The apocalyptic world after Kefka played around with the three statues in the floating continent in FF6 shocked me. The sudden death of Aerith under Sephiroth’s Masamune in FF7 saddens me. I’m moved by Squall’s love for Rinoa in FF8, the scene where he goes out in space to rescue her. Nobuo Uematsu has done a great job with the soundtrack. The Final Fantasy Prelude music that appeared in most games was most enchanting.


Final Fantasy 11 online – I have the game right now but not a good machine to play it well. I’m saving up for one now and I can’t wait to explore this new world in 3D, form hunting parties with Americans or Japanese, complete various missions. Tempting… Damn you SquareEnix for always providing entertainment on a new level.


Lineage 2 – This mass multiplayer online role playing game has been to me, the most absorbing game I’ve ever played. I’ve participated in a raid of the Queen Ant at her lair. About 50-60 Japanese and a few english-speaking players. It was quite enjoyable teaming up with people from far away to kill a boss monster. I love Lineage 2 too but too bad the Final Fantasy series has already captured my heart years before Lineage existed.

Hello Mister Roboto

When I first started hosting my own webpages, I noticed many requests for a file called robots.txt on my machine from the log files kept by IIS. Here’s an example but it was generated on a Linux OS, Apache web server.


255.255.255.255 – – [02/May/2004:05:34:56 -0700] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0” 404 – “-” “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”


So I paid a visit to the link and learned how google and other search engines get their results from. Automated programs to scour the net for webpages. The link also teaches you how to setup the robots.txt so as to control how googlebot indexes your webpage.


Because I’m running off a low speed connection and was using one machine to do all my tasks, I can’t afford too much traffic coming in especially when I’m gaming. So I setup a robots.txt file to tell all bots/spiders/crawlers not to index anything from any of my websites.


Reasons being they suck up my bandwidth and they brought visitors who are searching for content I do not have. All those unneccessary traffic eats up my precious CPU cycles.


One of my websites, the IRC Quotes site, contains a name of a Japanese song with the .mp3 extension. Google indexed this and I had about 20-30 visits, over a long period of time, from people who came from Google and their search string was the same songname with the file extension. I wasted their time and they wasted my CPU cycles.


Lastly, here’s a link to the site that inspired me to write this entry. It also contains interesting information on Bandwidth and Data Transfer on webhosting providers and why you might want to create a robots.txt file to manage the crawlers. stargeek – Bandwidth and Data Transfer – Which is which?