Archive for June, 2007

Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

I’ve been listening to this song over and over again. A lot of old English songs are very good. And I think they are a hundred times better than most of the English songs you hear nowadays on the radio or television.

From googling, I found a supposedly true-story that inspired the writing of this song:

The song was based on an actual incident that occurred aboard a southern bus bound for Miami. One of the passengers explained to the driver that he was just out of prison, having served three years for passing bad checks. In a letter to his wife, he had written that she didn’t have to wait for him; but, if she was still interested, she could let him know by tying a yellow ribbon around the only oak tree in the city square.

As the bus rolled down U.S. 17, nearing the man’s hometown of White Oak, Georgia, the driver was asked to slow down so that all could see whether the ribbon was in place. To the man’s tearful relief, it was. The driver pulled over and phoned the story in to the wire services, which spread it all over the country. Songwriters Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown read it in the newspaper, then put together their million-selling ballad.

Source 

Click here for youtube video of this song.

Lyrics:

"Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree"

(As recorded by Tony Orlando & Dawn)
IRWIN LEVINE
L. RUSSELL BROWN

I’m comin’ home I’ve done my time
Now I’ve got to know what is and isn’t mine
If you received my letter tellin’ you I’d soon be free
Then you’ll know just what to do if you still want me
If you still want me.

Woah tie a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree
It’s been three long years, do ya still want me
If I don’t see a ribbon round the ole oak tree
I’ll stay on the bus, forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don’t see a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree

Bus driver please look for me
‘Cause I couldn’t bear to see what I might see
I’m really still in prison and my love she holds the key
A simple yellow ribbon’s what I need to set me free
I wrote and told her, please

Woah tie a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree
It’s been three long years do ya still want me
If I don’t see a ribbon round the ole oak tree
I’ll stay on the bus, forget about us
Put the blame on me
If I don’t see a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree

Now the whole damn bus is cheering
And I can’t believe I see
A hundred yellow ribbons round the ole oak tree

I’m comin home, mmm hmm

Tie a ribbon round the ole oak tree
Tie a ribbon round the ole oak tree
Tie a ribbon round the ole oak tree

Tie a ribbon round the ole oak tree
Tie a ribbon round the ole oak tree
Tie a ribbon round the ole oak tree

(c) Copyright 1972 by Tridem Music. (c) Copyright assigned 1973 Five Arts Music.
(c) Copyright assigned 1973 Levine & Brown Music, Inc.

some male FFXI players…

Monday, June 25th, 2007

Out of boredom, I levelled WHM on my smithing mule. It’s a female character by the way and I’m a guy in real life. And three things happened in a single day.

2 of which were male characters trying to hit on me.

1 of which is an elvaan male trying to sexually harass me.

wtf is wrong with you guys.

Finally!!

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007

After 3 Haubergeon synthesis sessions, I finally HQed! I’ve broke tier 1 so it’s a 10% HQ chance. Out of 13 synths, 1 HQ, which is pretty much the same as the 10% rate.

1st session: 0/4
2nd session: 0/4
3rd session: 1/5, HQ on 5th synth

I stayed up because it was new moon, and decided to wait for lightningsday afternoon vanadiel time before I begin the 3rd Haubergeon synthesis session. It’s almost 1am now and I can’t sleep! XD

Play! A video game symphony

Monday, June 18th, 2007

:D

Well, in the end I wasn’t very impressed. Some pieces that were played felt weird, and some parts of the music sounded like a different note was played by mistake. Maybe it’s just me.

Here’s the program for that night that I can recall:

  • Play! Fanfare – Specially written for Play! by Nobuo Uematsu
  • Super Mario Brothers
  • Shenmue
  • HALO
  • Castlevania
  • Metal Gear Solid
  • Lost Odyssey
  • Sonic the Hedgehog
  • Blue Dragon
  • Legend of Zelda
  • Chrono Trigger / Chrono Cross
  • World of Warcraft
  • Kingdom Hearts
  • Daytona USA
  • Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
  • Final Fantasy 6 – Dancing Mad
  • Final Fantasy 7 – One Winged Angel
  • Encore piece: Shinobi

I didn’t play most of the games so some of the pieces didn’t sound good or I never felt anything.

When they played the Zelda theme, I felt my eyes tear a little. Probably because I’ve played most of the Zelda games on the NES, SNES, GB consoles since I was a little kid.

Metal Gear Solid and FF6 – Dancing Mad are good too. These are the only 3 pieces I enjoyed.

Takenobu Mitsuyoshi, the composer for the Daytona USA theme song was present during the performance. He played the song on the piano solo, and was singing at the same time!

At the end, when everyone cheered for encore for the second time, I could see that some of the symphony members were pretty annoyed, haha.

Official Website here

I tried to take a few photos but the usher came to remind me no photography is allowed. I asked what if I didn’t turn on the flash? Still not allowed. :(

The Tarutaru Times Online

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007

This is what my so called "secret project" was.

The Tarutaru Times Online 

Basically, it’s a blog directory. I’m trying to build a FFXI blogging community here.

I couldn’t come up with a good name so I used the name of a place in Vana’diel, Tarutaru Times. Even the picture above was taken there! 

Registered blogs with RSS feeds will have latest entries from their blogs showing up on the main page of the site. There, with one glance, we can all see which blogs have new content to read.

I’ve also allowed blogs with no RSS feeds to be added. It is a "blog directory" anyway.

For bloggers, it’s a one-time setup. After you’ve added your RSS feed, everything is automatic. When you make a new post on your blog, give it about 20~60 minutes (configurable) and when TTTO picks up the new entry, it will be displayed on the main page. However, bloggers will have to get a registration key first from me or any other existing bloggers.

For blog readers, you can register an account and subscribe to your favourite blogs. There’s a "My Subscriptions" page where you will only be shown the latest entries from the blogs you’ve subscribed to.

I welcome any suggestions/comments. You can leave a comment here or email me!

I wonder if anyone has noticed that I don’t have an RSS feed for my own blog. Ironic eh? lol. I’ll work on it soon. ( >_<)

LG GSA-H62L

Monday, June 11th, 2007

My previous combo cdwriter/dvdrom drive runs fine, except it leaves some sticky substance when it reads a disc. My original CnC3 Kane Edition DVD is now damaged because of this. That sticky substance is hard to remove. :(

So time to buy a new drive. These things are so cheap now. Years ago, cd writers sell at around SG$200 (US$130). My new one costs only SG$79 (US$50).

A lot of people gave good comments on this drive in the local hardware forums, which is why I chose this without much consideration. Max write speed: 18X, and it doesn’t run on those old fat IDE cables but the thin SATA cables.

This drive also has the lightscribe function. Which means your drive can "print" onto your DVD. But your DVD too, must be made for lightscribing.

Here’s a picture I downloaded from the lightscribe site above, and I added a few lines of text of what the disc contains.

Here’s the result:

My first 3 burns on the new drive failed. I think the bundled Nero Express software is buggy. I had to use a full version of Nero and burns were successful.

Problems problems

Friday, June 8th, 2007

Bought a new SATA DVD writer that supports lightscribe, but it seems to be having problems and I’ve wasted 3 DVDRs.

UPDATE MySQL SET version=’5′ WHERE version=’4′;
SQL Query executed successfully.

In layman terms, I’ve upgraded my MySQL database server from version 4 to version 5 successfully. The MySQL Administrator tool helped a lot in the backing up and restoring of databases.

Next, I upgraded PHP from version 4 to 5, and a lot of things broke. Particularly the mbstring support, that makes the input/output of Japanese text possible. I may revert back to version 4 or upgrade to the latest version 4 releases.

I’ll post some pics up of my new DVD writer over the weekend after I’ve sorted out all these problems!

Australia

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

Boss told me he may send me to Australia to give training on the CRM project I’m developing at work, to our clients over there.

I’m not trained, no experience, and don’t like to give trainings/presentations. :(

However, I don’t mind going to Sydney, Australia.

But… I don’t like to give training….

But…….. I want to go to Australia……

blargh!

I’ll see how it goes. 

Dissector

Monday, June 4th, 2007


A gathering at night for tea.

Did KS30 BC, Double Dragonian for a Subduer. Out of 6 runs, we got 3 dissectors and 3 heart snatchers. orz

We had a few deaths in our first 3 runs. But zero deaths on our last 3 when we got used to it.

PT Setup: PLD/NIN, MNK/NIN, DRK/THF, RDM/WHM, BLM/RDM, SMN/WHM.

BLM kites while the other 5 attack the WAR dragon. Goes down easily. Only irritating thing is Chaos Blade, which gives strong curse effect. Sometimes reduces my HP from 1400 -> 700, sometimes down to 300. BRD dragon is a little harder but still defeatable.

After this, helped an LS friend with Soboro Sukehiro NM. We didn’t have a lot of people. About 8.

PT Setup: PLD RDM BLU BLM BLM THF MNK SMN.

First run, tank(me!) fell at 3~5% but we managed to kill it because our SMN used astral flow. We got the drop. Second and third run we wiped. If we had 2~3 more mages, I’m sure we would be fine.

Levelled NIN with my weekly static PT. Got it to 50! I still suck at utsusemi timing. :(
Friends tell me to cast Ichi when my Ni has 1 shadow left, and when I do this, there’s somehow a high chance I evade/parry the attack rendering my Ichi cast useless.

While working on my project, I decided to seek on DRK just for fun. Since I’m coding on my second computer and FFXI is running on my first one. Surprisingly, I got an invite. Unfortunately, it was 12am.

The PLD sucked. He would go AFK without saying anything. Provokes slowly. But seem to play better when we pull one of those huge wyverns (forgot the name) outside Mamool Ja Staging Point.

I think it ended at 4am with me being very very sleepy.

And with a few more besieged battles, I now have 8 merits ready to be spent after SE increases the combat skill maximum with the upcoming June update. I intend to increase Scythe from 4 to 8, and then shield from 0 to 4.

Until then…

It’s been a while since I last felt this…

Friday, June 1st, 2007

My motivation to finish my secret project is very very high at the moment. I find the concept interesting and fun.

It was a public holiday in Singapore yesterday. Vesak Day. So there’s no work.

I woke up early, logged in to FFXI and checked AH and stuff, saw besieged was coming soon and prepared my character in Al Zahbi and went to work on my project.

I literally spent the whole day coding from morning till late night with very little short breaks in between.

I had fun coding and when you have fun doing things, time flies really fast.

I’ve finished the front-end of my project (I think). Did a little bit of back-end side before I called it a day. I have a few more core features of the project that must be finished before I start looking for people to test it.

I’ll reveal more when I start releasing it for testing! :) 

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