What have you been up to in December of 2004?
1. Dec 2, 2004
Dec 2, 2004: Two new dreams have been added. I'm also working on a spectacular "logo" image for the blog (which is currently not there).
#1 Two more dreams added to the list: Well, as I had it, two more dreams were added to the list. I added one yesterday, but didn't bother to upload it to my site. This pushes the dream count to 105.
#2 Dream breakage - again: Again, I need to do another breakage with the dreams, but this time, fortunately for me, there really isn't much work to do. I took a quick glance at my dreams in the "other" category and noticed that some of those dreams should belong in the "travel dreams" category and more yet could fit a brand new category: weird dreams. This would only require a reworking of the other category and much of the rest is just copying and pasting.
#3 Satellite system - postponed: My mom cancelled the 2:00 PM thing on Tuesday (Nov 30) because she felt that I wasn't going to be awake. There was about a 10% chance I could make it. However, I was lying in bed for another two hours before I finally fell asleep. Then, I later woke up at like 12:20 PM (7 hours of sleep or so). I was still lying in bed trying to wake up, but it took 90 minutes for that to occur. I called mom at her work place and found out that she cancelled it. When she came home much later in the day, I've noticed that she just postponed the time to Dec 2 at 9:00 AM. I'm somewhat likely to be awake by that time, about 30% likely, but I would have been up for 15 1/3 hours by then.
#4 "Logo" for blog page: As almost every page on my website has, there's a special "logo" image at the top of every page. The blog pages don't have this yet, so I got into making one. The center part of the logo is the key of the whole thing containing a very pretty scene of a natural setting (no man-made stuff like cities). The left and right sides just contain dates in a sequence spanning 4 years.
#5 New monitor has rearrived: Well, I got my new monitor back again (a replacement), however, this monitor is also somewhat defective, but not as bad as the other one. From the very center of the screen, there is a strange, faint dark spot from about a half of the way to the left side edge to about 1/2 of an inch from the left edge. This dark spot spans almost all the way from the top to the bottom, but with about 1.5 inches padding on the top and bottom. To simulate what I'm seeing, open MSPaint and change the attributes to 320x240. With an all-white background, change the color (double-clicking the color on the color palette is usually faster) to about 247 for each red, green, and blue. Then choose the circle tool and the center-only fill style. Now make an ellipse so that it resembles the description. This is basically what it looks like when the screen is all white on my monitor. The other monitor has a gradual fade to a very light red on the corners.
#6 Windows screenshots document added: Though I've had it planned for about a week by now, I thought about adding my funny Windows screenshots that I've accumulated over the years. So, now that it's available (see category 10 for the shortcut to the page), feel free to browse through my screenshots. I've included 40 of them out of my over 250 I have. These are the best of my screenshots. Though some of them are 1152x864, I've used the width and height attributes to cut their dimensions by two so to prevent unneccessary left and right scrolling. Simply clicking the images will reveal the full size of them. I spent nearly 3 hours processing them and typing the captions for each.
#7 Goal reached!: I've finally reached the goal I've long been after with Winamp. What happens when I exceed 65,535 plays? Well, what happened is that the number exceeded 65535 without problems. This means that that variable is not a 16-bit variable. A 32-bit variable comes next and there's no way I'm going to listen to that song two billion times!
#8 Latest actions in my mind game: Lately, I've been playing around in an urban setting. I found a very high sky scraper, about 90 or so stories high (haven't bother to count them and it's quite tough). At the top of this building, I jump then use the flash attack immediately to head straight up. At the top, I use the stomp to rapidly accelerate. When I hit the ground, I bounce back up four times higher than I was before. Sometimes, I use that spinning board method is tends to be faster for repeating with greater speeds involved, but it's much more unpredictable. On my way down, I watch the windows carefully. At 999 mph (from using the board), I notice that the windows seem to become stationary (in 1/60 of a second (one frame) at this speed, you travel 24.42 feet. Since a standard floor is around 12 feet apart, I see the windows passing by as stationary. In fact, I'm going down (or up) two full floors in just 1/60 of a second. When I bounce, I'm heading back up at 500 mph or so (as from Super Monkey Ball 2) and I see the stationary windows effect longer and appearing to go up while I'm heading back up. It's a weird feeling, unless I'm watching a cloud above "grow" very rapidly.
#9 Very good extra solar planet website found: I've been interested in those extra solar planets I've heard about orbitting other stars. That website is extrasolar.net.
2. Dec 5, 2004
Dec 5, 2004: Busted! The satellite system thing was less of a deal than expected, however, there is still good news. Also, a new feature has been added to the dreams document.
#1 Deal that was a rip-off: On Dec 2, the last update, the installers of the new satellite TV service came and installed the network system. This all went quite well and a plan I had worked. That plan was to show the guy something I'm able to do on Super Monkey Ball 2. I just showed him a really long fall. I planned this the day my mother told me I was getting a satellite system. It worked almost exactly as I planned it and played it in my mind game. The bad news is, there were some hidden fees involved that my parents didn't hear about and we didn't get many of the good channels, especially the Science Channel and Boomerang (my top two favorites). I wanted to find out how much extra it would be to add those two channels, however, when I told them to speak to my dad about it, that was the end of it. In this rare moment, I think I just saved my parents a lot of money! Though you might think that I don't get satellite service in my room, well, there's currently a 90% chance that this will happen! What a surprise that came out to be!
#2 New feature for dreams document: Spending six hours compiling a new feature for my dreams document, you can now find the dreams as I feel are the greatest extremes in five categories. Also, some dreams from the "other dreams" section has been moved to the "travel dreams" category, and a few more have been moved to a whole new category, weird dreams. See category 4 below for the link to the updates.
#3 Three new dreams added: I'm really pushing that dream count lately. Just today, I've added another three dreams, a travel dream (5-21), another in the "other" category (6-15), and another in the weird dreams category (7-5). This pushes the dream count to 108, exactly 9 dozen.
#4 My first javascript: I wrote my first javascript by referencing two documents. However, currently, I'm waiting for someone to verify it and fix two major problems I don't know yet. Remember background scaling from my animations (section 3)? This javascript will let you control the speed, acceleration, and the scaling of three main objects while the animation scrolls along at 60 frames per second, just as I've dreamed for about 6 or so months. This script is currently in the alpha-testing phase (You've probably heard of beta-testing. Alpha-testing is similar, but it's testing something while writing a program. Beta-testing is where the program is fully functional, but buggy. It's as far as I know the difference.). Sooner or later, I'll be able to add a calculator for all those Status System formulas I've got so that way you can freely compute something as you wish.
#5 Snow it seems: Clear until early December, the ground has been without snow. Just over the night, snow came. I find it strange that, usually by Halloween, we've already got snow on the ground. This year, the ground has been bare for a very long time without any snow. It's just unusual.
#6 My script: I got a new reply relating to those letters I sent, however, all these guys did was just say that most of the film stuff is on the west coast, like in California. So far, I'm not getting any responses requesting my script....
Edit: Headline number 3 had "Two new dreams added" but I state in the main text that I had three added. This has been fixed.
3. Dec 14, 2004
Dec 14, 2004: Finally off my mind! Since, I think, October, I've had intentions on making an MP3 CD and boy what a story behind the whole thing. It finally came out quite well and I've set two new records as well. I'm also in great need of a system restore as my computer has become a little unstable. Also, three more dreams have been added since the last update.
#1 MP3 CD: If you've probably seen the list of songs I've got, and read the last section, you'll probably know just how long it takes to create the MP3s in an MP3 CD. If you haven't, it's about 7 hours (in this case, it was more like 10 hours). Why so long you may ask? I have to process gigantic WAV files. An MP3 CD can store 3 days worth of music and still sound good. The story behind it is very long.... If you don't feel like reading it, skip the next part until the number two item appears. First, I began by processing two of my songs taking about an hour to create those gigantic WAV files about 50 MB each (and there's like 35 or 40 of these). Then, I took out the copy of Music Match that came with my printer. I used the WAV to MP3 converter that it came with. However, unlike the old version I had (probably 5 or 6) that I couldn't find the CD to, it didn't like the format of any of my WAVs (most likely because they're 8-bit WAVs with odd frequencies, mostly the 8-bit part). So, I couldn't convert the WAVs to MP3's so I was out of luck. Since I needed to do a system restoration and having to reprocess all those WAVs again would mean another hour down the drain, I did some searches for WAV to MP3 converters but some of them just wouldn't take 8-bit WAV files. I was seemingly out of luck so I posted something on the How What Why forums and eventually got pointed to something very good. In fact, it's even better than Music Match's file converter with more features. The main thing I like about it is that I can pack another 30% more music on a single CD (estimated to be 90 hours instead of 70) because I can use lower bitrates. With the other features of choosing a base frequency and whether stereo or mono (all my songs are mono), there's hardly any detectable loss in sound quality, except the very high frequencies like around 6000 Hz. Usually, I'd have to use 24 or 32 Kbps bitrates in order to get good-quality sound, but I can often use 16 and still sound as good! The minus about it was that the first half second or so of my songs are cut off at the beginning and the last half to 4 seconds have been cut off on the end. This, however, to a 25-minute song isn't much of anything to worry that much about. That's still 24 minutes and 55 seconds of normal play.... Now that I got a better WAV to MP3 converter, I was off to making my MP3 CD I was after. I was barely even online during this time. On Dec 12, I finally completed making my new CD's MP3 files. However, when I popped the burnt CD into my MP3 player, I noticed that I had almost no way to tell what speed I had it playing on. There were a few songs that could use some redoing, some had speeds that sounded bad on my MP3 player and others could be expanded to include more speeds. During almost all of the time I was awake on Dec 13, about another 11 hours later, I reprocessed some of my songs and found out that the WAV to MP3 converter program had another useful feature: tag editting (as in telling the artist, title, album, etc. of the song). This used up probably around 2 hours, even with copying and pasting. I had to redo Target Zone, the only song that sounds good at over 3 times the true speed, because I used too high of a quality for the song and it was using 171 MB of CD space, about 24% of the CD's capacity. Doing a few quick calculations, I found out that I could save another 48 MB, the amount a whole 'nother song would use. I've also editted the file names so that the speed value came first, an essential part of my songs (I had the speed value at the end, where it is invisible in my MP3 player's display window). Realizing that I still had another 80 megs of free space left (a typical CD, the kind I have, has 702 MB. I had 624 MB at this point), I decided to add another song, one I forgot about when I made the "list of songs" (see category 10 for the link) that also sounds somewhat okay at twice the normal speed. This one came out so close that I couldn't tell if the CD had enough space available. So, I burnt the CD again and noticed that I had just 168 KB of free space left after adding all the folders! This means that, in a similar relationship, 4278 parts of 4279 available were used from the MP3 files and 1 part of this 4279 was free space. It was just so close, I had to get a screenshot of that (yep, pushing the count a little more over 250). The CD was then burnt and I was on my way. Currently, I'm listing to Target Zone at the speed of 86667 (173 1/3% of the true speed; know what I mean by odd frequencies?). I have been while typing this. In case you're wondering what songs I've included on the CD, the list is seemingly short, but keep in mind that I have about 15 to 25 different speeds per song. The songs are: Angel Island, Arctic Zone, Desert Zone, Mountains so Beautiful, Nature in the Rough, Oh What a World version 1, Oh What a World version 2 (I forgot about this one), Out Where the Lake Is (my top favorite of all my songs), Target Zone, World 7 from Super Monkey Ball 2 (an unnamed song), and Winter Land (no, not the Christmas song, Round 5-1 from Ristar). Below is a screenshot that I took showing how close to full my MP3 CD got. I've scaled it to 1/4 the actual size otherwise the 1600x1200 screenshot would be really crazy with scrolling. Just click the image to view the full sized version (opens a new window).
#2 System restoration needed: Starting since I installed Music Match, something has gone seriously screwy with my computer. Anything that goes into memory just stays in memory (or adds to the swapfile) and just isn't being cleared (I can tell from running sysmon.exe). I don't know how else to solve this besides wiping out Windows. It's not just memory problems either. Spysweeper is refusing to update (the definitions are over 50 days old and I've registered, but it's still saying that the definitions are up to date, which is extremely unlikely and almost improbable. Next, Winamp, after I edit a file to change it's speed, refuses to play the file that has been editted and it's never done this before. Firefox seems a bit jerky when there's a lot of images to display or something. It's not just one program, it seems like many programs are faulty. Text edittors like Notepad and Wordpad don't seem to have trouble at all. It'd take a few days to write 1 meg's worth of text and have meaning to it. So, for tomorrow's assignment: restore my system completely and start fresh. Don't worry though, I've done this many times before and have almost no problems doing it, except the fact that it takes like 7 hours to do so....
#3 3 new dreams added: Spanning since the last update, Dec 5, I've added three more dreams to the list. The new additions are dream 2-14 (collecting "WD" objects and playing in green, sticky slime), 5-22 (a fun one), and 7-6 (playing in trash; the weirdest dream of them all to this date). See category 4 for the shortcut links.
#4 New mind game animation: I've started an animation dealing with my mind game, but with my system's memory problem, it's hard to do more than 70 frames in one go without having to restart my computer. This one features something I've recently been up to in my mind game, using that spinning board to get thrown up into the air at supersonic velocity. It's about 650 frames and expected to be around 70 to 90 KB (random guess) after fully processed. It's extremely simple in design, however, but it illustrates a point. The current image, the one featuring the jump toward the clouds, won't be lost, however. It'll simply be placed in category 8, my image collection (magnifying it, however, seems to pose a weird problem: very slow refreshing time, half that of what it should be.... I may need to upload the 130 KB version).
#5 My Christmas list: My Christmas list is rather short. There are basically three things that I want. A book I heard about on TV (yeah, I know, I almost never read books, except my own creations, but this one is much different) called "Becoming like God". The second thing I'd like is more memory for this computer. 256 MB just doesn't seem like much, especially if you've seen how much "junk" I get in my task bar. Yes, the task bar of mine gets quite cluttered, especially when I'm online. I'd like another 256 MB memory "chip" (I don't know what the name is called for certain). The third thing I'd like is a computer program that allows you to write songs and be able to save the song as a WAV file (currently, I'm unable to). There is such a program, I think it's called "Fruity loops" and is about fifty bucks. Just finding it may be tough, except maybe if it was online. You can find practically anything online, no matter how bizarre it gets, especially true with Ebay. There was a fourth thing, but I just don't remember it. Of course, I'd like a trip to Hawaii or the Bahamas, however, but who's got the two thousand dollars for this? Care for a create spell to create a bunch of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies? Now, who's got the several terajoules of energy to do this anyway?
#6 Javascript so close to being in working order! Remember that Javascript that allows you to set the speed, acceleration and scaling of various objects and that you can interact with it and change the values? Well, I've currently got just one little error that I don't know how to solve. The test file is here if you'd like to see it and what I'm up to. However, this is in a folder named "temporary", so, when the script is in good working order, this file will get moved elsewhere under a different name and deleted from this directory. I've got two other versions of it, both of which are quite buggy and full of errors. Yes, I know this image is rather large and causes a scroll bar at the bottom (even at my 1600x1200 resolution). I don't know how else to fix this besides mass-editting that image. There will also be black areas to give a "screen" effect. It's a 640x480 image, so, at my site's minimum viewing res of 800x600, you'll have no problems viewing the image as a whole. The image appears to be stationary, however, the black areas are meant to hide the obvious effects. It's the best I can do. I could go with a lower resolution version, like 320x240, however, this would call for some small revisions on the script, mostly with the math (boy, hopefully I've got the math correct; once I find out how to fix the error and the image actually moves as it should, the math is next to being solved and fixed as needed). Don't worry, there's no math for you to do. All you do is just put in some numbers to indicate your speed, acceleration, and the scaling of the objects in the image, no math required for you.
#7 Starting scene 12: Remember my script's storyboard? Well, I sort of forgot about it so I started up scene 12, which takes you to the mountains and where two master monsters are dealt with. There are six planned images for this. After this scene is one of my top favorites, but hardly anything goes on besides character discussions, so it may get like two images (as in the first scene).
#8 My script: Well, I guess the letters method isn't seemingly going to work. I have almost no choice but to find one of those services in which you can mail a single query letter to a couple hundred or a few thousand companies. Hey, the more the better, but, unforunately, it's usually quite pricy, something like $100, but if my script could mean $500,000, it's worth it. Most for the least is my usual intent. Though a lot of math is involved trying to compute and compare ratios, it's easy for me to do so no biggie. Finding such services, however, that's a different story.
#9 Here it was, now it's almost gone!: Boy, it seems that, for the first time in a few decades, this Christmas may be a brown Christmas as there's practically no snow on the ground. The forecast calls for above freezing temperatures for a few days which means that all the white stuff will melt entirely. There's probably a 70% chance now that I'll have a Christmas without snow on the ground. It's so odd, but it does tell you of global warming. Maybe this is just a warm winter. Last winter, I was dealing with wind chills at -70 (air temp was like -25 or so with 30 mph winds)! With the way the weather is going, there's probably going to be a lot of record highs set, I just have a feeling on this. Average temperature is about 28 degrees or so, the forecast is calling for temps to get close to 40! Anyone have ice spells to get snow on the ground (well, ice anyway)?
#10 4.5 hours: So far, for the month of December, I've been out of my house for 4.5 hours. If this trend continues, I'd pass 9 hours by the end of this month. The time is just so varied, it's tough to tell what it'll be by the end of the month. Travel is practically unlikely, even though it hasn't been done in like 3.4 years or so and still counting. That's over a hundred million seconds.
#11 Finished reading it: Duller than dull could get! That's how boring the ending of that script is, the one supposedly used for my game. Just like the one available for the movie industry, I found it dull and boring. I just completely rewrote the story from scratch. I'm almost 100% certain that I'll have to rewrite this game story from scratch as well. I can't really use the story as it is, it's just way too dull and boring with a whole planet-load of nonsense. The only good part is the first 2/5 of the story, up to about page 160 or so in the written version. I'm now thinking about going through the old "Rise of Atlantis" script, but I just can't seem to make up my mind whether I want to do it or not....
#12 Sonic 3 and Knuckles craze: Since about the very end of November, I've been getting back into the Sonic games, mainly Sonic 3 and Knuckles, my top favorite. The one thing I tend to do a lot is toss that fox in the blue water and watch it endlessly jump up and down never reaching the surface, thus drowning. I have debug mode enabled practically every time so as to create special areas for the fox to drown in, get beat up by robots and stabbed by spikes, all at the bottom of the blue water. I have Sonic standing on a catapult just barely above the surface of the blue water and I keep luring the fox into it. I once created a special area in hydrocity zone that I really love and very well-designed. Just toss a couple of foxes in over the edge to go splash into the blue water and almost all the time the fox is flashing from injury (either by spikes or robots). I believe I have a screenshot of this somewhere on my hard drive.... I usually don't do much other than drown foxes. In Carnival Night act 2, I've designed an interesting area which makes it a challenge to drown a fox, but once it gets into the proper place, the fox will drown (or get stuck in a cannon and drown that way. I have two setups available, the first one is the best. If I ever get to it, I'll post the directions on how to set up what I'm doing. I practically have the layouts on both memorized, just haven't written down the coordinates yet.
#13 Mind game events: After seeing a show on the National Geographic Channel, about a group who went kayaking on the world's wildest river, I'm currently playing a similar scene, only without anyone there. Using the spinning board, I could get thrown up so high, I could see almost two dozen mountain peaks below me. Watching the speedometer accelerate from 0 to 999 while watching the mountains "grow" from decreasing distance is quite fun, in my case. I usually get around 1100 to 1700 mph with the spinning board.
#14 Wonderful Adventure or not: I'm seriously having some tough time deciding whether I should post my Wonderful Adventure series or not. Between a partial copyright (some parts were used in my current script "The Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters" which has been copyrighted), some things may be just tough to understand for you (if I were to keep everything exactly the way it was in my original script), and scenes that are just plain nonsense and "stupid", I just can't decide what to do. Either I use what's left in that script that I'd like copyrighted in another script that'll later get copyrighted, which may end up being like 3 or 4 years, or I gamble it and post it anyway, and since I'm not into doing that, this decision is just extremely tough to make. The story is somewhat boring, but there are plenty of funny spots to keep you involved, another seminegative thing on posting it. If I decide to post it, and since it isn't "strongly copyrighted", I run this risk. If I decide to wait until the parts I want copyrighted are "strongly copyrighted", it may be another 3 or 4 years yet, possibly more, possibly less, but the time is just too great.
4. Dec 16, 2004
Dec 16, 2004: Now passing ten dozen documented dreams, I've just added another 11 dreams, the most in one single update, 9 in just one day. Also, the mind game animation is completed, however, I rejected the idea of using it for the mind game logo. It's still available for download, however.
#1 11 new dreams recalled: Eleven new dreams have been recalled, the most ever for a single update so far which pushes the dream count over another milestone: ten dozen. Officially, the count is 122. Yet, I still have another two or three floating around in my mind.... If all the dreams were to be placed in one category but paginated in the way they are now, I'd be filling up page 13! One is another mud dream, seven more of which are travel-related dreams (one questioned on category), another two belong in the "other" category, and the final one is in the "weird dreams" category. Three of the dreams deal with beaches, two of which deal with tornadoes, two more deal with schools, two others deal with hill climbing, another was scary, and another deals with secret passages in a mansion. Dream 1-32, 5-23 through 5-29, 6-16 and 6-17 as well as 7-7 are the new additions. See category 4 for the update link.
#2 New mind game animation: I finally finished that new animation for my mind game. Though it lasts for over a minute, it illustrates another example of weird things I do in my mind game. However, I suddenly rejected the animation because it was too low of quality, so I posted it in the mind game videos page. I've got a different idea for the mind game report's logo, a scene of mountains and clouds and the character gliding between two peaks back and forth. Also, I've added a new feature to the mind game videos page and I'm likely to do the same with the spell videos page.
#3 It was here, now it's gone: Boy, what a warm season this turned out to be. We get snow, then it melts, then we get a bunch more, and it melts. This is probably the first ever Christmas I've had that doesn't have snow on the ground. Usually, by now, the driveway would've been shovelled like twice or three times!
#4 Christmas list update: Well, I've now got an update for my Christmas list. In addition to what I mentioned on the Dec 14 update (item 5), I'd like an improved and better quality MP3 player than the one I've got with more features, especially an equalizer. This might be the toughest thing to find, however. Also, I'd like to get the game Super Mario Sunshine (I once owned this game, but traded it for Super Monkey Ball 2). I loved this game because of it's realistic-looking graphics (I don't think I've seen any game with better graphics yet; Boy, I wish I could do that good on my game....) and there's two songs I'd like to extract from it, the one from Noki Bay, and one other one I can't quite remember the source. I also loved this game because you could get up REALLY high. I don't think it's as high as I've got in Jumping Flash, but it's close to that. In Super Monkey Ball 2, I've been about a hundred times higher. Better yet, I don't know of any bugs in the game yet, as far as I can remember. Yeah, I've once gotten 999 coins on a single level. Getting 99 lives, however, is a common thing I get in most video game. I rarely lose lives in just about any video game.
#5 Strange chest pain: Though I almost never get pains in general (my high defense of 194 is why), for some reason, if I get into the right position, a pain is noticeable at the very top of where my rib cage is about five or so inches above where the heart is. I've been having this for about three or four days now. I remember a few times that, when I woke up, I felt some strange pain. I feel that this is likely due to that. How it started, I don't know. Maybe I was sleeping in an odd ball position or something.... Sometimes, I just can't bend over or lean back without the pain. It only occurs when I get into the right position and/or angle(s).
5. Dec 23, 2004
Dec 23, 2004: System restored with a pinch of bad luck.... The memory problem I had got solved, I found a service to mass-submit a single query letter to over 3000 companies, six new dreams have been recalled, and out goes the monitor a second time for something brand new.
#1 System restoration and bad luck: It had to be done, so I did. My system is now restored fresh, however, upon doing so, I was bogged with bad luck. First, I forgot to include a backup file on my backup CD, a very essential one and I didn't bother to check the CD to see if it had everything. The essential folder I forgot to include on the CD was the folder in which my website stuff was in. Fortunately, however, I had other backup CDs containing it and my website's content was simply downloaded so there's minimal loss from this. The one thing, however, that I did lose, as far as I can tell, was that one story about the competitions as I do them in my mind game. It was going on 100 KB and still growing and it was 95 to 97% finished. That one video that I've done, the spinning board, I ended up losing, but if I didn't upload it to my website, I would've lost it for good so I lucked out there as well. The only thing I lost with that video was just the number notes, but since the video was already done, there's little to no need for the number notes, so again I lucked out. The only other thing I lost was the updates to the frequently accessed objects page. The only thing lost was a couple of links and stuff, but since I knew what two of them were of the three I think I might've lost, there's not too much of a loss there either. Two of those I hardly visited anyway and were only to be there temporarily. Other than this and a lot of backup from other sources, it seemed to have gone quite well, except taking about 9 to 10 hours to process. The only other thing I can think of that I lost was scene 12's story board HTML document, but I hardly did anything with it so it's not much of a big deal. The only problem I seem to have is that my hard drive keeps on rattling for no apparent reason. I don't have a clue what's causing this.... My script and it's new format, my story board, and all that other stuff was backed up because it was in a different folder which was. This is the first time this actually happened to me.... That javascript animation thing I was supposedly doing was, fortunately, uploaded to my website so I didn't lose anything with that, including previous versions of it.
#2 Found the culprit: Still having memory problems after restoring my system, I finally found the culprit: Norton. For some reason, Norton uses up 96 MB of memory. Once I uninstalled it fully and reinstalled AVG, my old virus scanner I was using, only version 7 instead, I noticed the problem went away. I now have about 96 MB free just after starting up my system. Also, the hard drive rattling quit as well.
#3 My script: On Dec 21, I found a service that allows you to mass-send a single query letter. This service is ten times bigger and about nine times better than what I used before. Before, I only sent it out to 300 agencies, this time, it was sent out to over 3000, ten times as many. It also comes with another feature as well that I don't know much about, yet. Now, the only thing I need to do is just wait for replies. If you remember from earlier before, I sent out letters, however, I only got two replies. That was just 17 letters. This is nearly 180 times as much! What a deal!
#4 Seven new dreams recalled: Seven new dreams have been added putting the dream count to 129. However, because this is likely to clutter up the aboutme category a year down the road, I may move them to another folder called "dreams". This means that if you've bookmarked my site on these, you'll need to change or update your book marks or you'll just get 404 errors. I won't move them until at least 3 days from now. The new dreams added, however, is another mud dream (dream 1-33), another travel dream (dream 5-30), and 5 more dreams in the "other" category (dreams 6-18 through 6-22). See category 4 for the links.
#5 Monitor replacement, again: Yep, that's right, monitor replacement. The new monitor I got, in which I've had for like two weeks now, is quite fuzzy and out of focus on the left side, especially with red. Though this monitor is a bit better than my last monitor, it's still not satisfactory. I've been afraid to redo this exchange stuff. So, the procedure of exchanging it is the same as before. The only difference with this exchange is that: the monitor I'm getting or looking at is brand new, but it's twice as costly. I think I've learned a key lesson: avoid things that have been refurbished and stick with the brand new. The monitor that needs replacement was manufactured in September or October of 2000. My original was from late 1999. This one is brand new so I expect to see it from 2004. The one thing I like about tigerdirect, however, is their customer support. It's of grade S (S is higher than A indicating from 98 to just before 100%; A is from 93 to before 98%). The guy I was speaking to was very friendly so, so far, that's the one thing that I like about tigerdirect. Product quality, however, I don't know truly so this is given grade X, an unknown. The procedure of returning it is the same as before, however. The last time I did it took longer than expected, but it was the Thanksgiving holiday that was the cause of slow speed and them stupid weekends.
#6 Game development resumes: Finally! I got started on working on the main character and so far, it seems to work out well, except for one small problem. After it's fixed, I'll then start processing the animation of the model including the various positions like the float run, jump, slow running, fast running, fall-glide, etc.. It may take a few hours to do all that, but since the positions and stuff is all memorized as I do it repeatedly in my animations and mind game, it won't be tough. I just need to figure out what Gamestudio calls "bones animation". Also, I've began writing the story for the game as well and already it sounds so much better than the version I wrote beforehand. It's already quite a few pages long, probably 10 as I haven't counted.
#7 My Christmas list - final: Well, my Christmas list is finalized. The items I want are listed in order of priority. Tied at top priority is a book called "Becoming like God" and the Gamecube game called "Super Mario Sunshine". Next is an optical mouse without the center wheel on top as I hate those with the ball and that center scrolling wheel. Third in rank is a program called "Fruity Loops" which allows me to write songs and save them as a WAV file. I'd like to transcribe a few of my existing songs as practice then start a few songs for my game. The second-lowest item in priority is an MP3 player with a tape deck and equalizer. My current MP3 player only plays MP3's and doesn't come with any other feature. The final item is 256 MB more memory for my computer. It'd be useful as my task bar gets seriously cluttered at times. If you've seen screenshot 4 here, you'll see an idea of a worst-case scenario. Usually, I try to keep my window count to no more than 10.
#8 Maybe a white Christmas: Only until winter started, the ground where I live has been without snow which is extremely unlikely and rare. The forecast for the next 7 days is calling for snow and just yesterday and this morning, the weather was saying about -35°F wind chills. Last year, the extreme was -70°F wind chills which was just crazy. July of 2001 was unusually stormy (lots of severe storm warnings in a short period of time), late July and early August of 2002 had heat indexes of 120°F, January of 2004 had -70°F wind chills, and December of 2004 had practically no snow on the ground. What, will the summer of 2005 end up having rainier-than-normal conditions? Warmer-than-normal conditions? Who knows....
#9 Recent mind game events: Recently, I haven't been doing much in my mind game, except as if I was playing the classic Sonic games and throwing the fox over the edge watching it go glug, glug, glug at the bottom of the blue water. I haven't been doing much else, however, though there was a time in which I was having Monster House remodelling a house and I was in that camper thing parked outside. In this case, I just did a quick jump followed by the flash attack. I actually was able to see what was going on from that extreme height I had, but things were rather small-looking, especially from the height I had of about 200 feet or so. After a bounce, I reached 50 feet and was able to see what they were doing. Nice way to get a sneak peak at it, if only you can figure out how to do the flash attack, let alone surviving the huge acceleration and fall that follows.
Edit on #4 made on Jan 04, 2005 - I had "six new dreams" listed, however, I forgot about dream 6-18 after noticing the numbers weren't adding up properly on an update made on Dec 24, 2004. This has been fixed.
6. Dec 24, 2004
Dec 24, 2004: It keeps on climbing and seemingly at an accelerative rate! Ten more dreams have been added to the list making the dream count 139 and it now includes a fifth all-time best-of-them-all dream.
#1 Ten more dreams: That's twice now in a relatively short period of time that 10 or more dreams have been added in a single update, more than 2 dozen in the last 3 updates alone (an average of 3 1/2 dreams per day). At this rate, I'm going to reach page 99 real quick (but still, it'll be another full year, even at this rate (meaning 1000 dreams which means dreams covering almost all of 4 years and it assumes that each dream was to be listed on one single category (which is almost impossible)))! The newest additions are dreams 2-15 through 2-18, 3-20 through 3-22, 5-31 (the fifth all-time-best), and 7-8 through 7-9. I've also spotted a weird problem that I caused. In the Dec 23 update, the last update, I noted that I had 6 dreams added. Well, I scanned through the dreams and noticed that I forgot to include dream 6-18, so the headline should've read "Seven new dreams added", not six. My mistake. I found this out as the numbers weren't making sense. I took out calculator just to be safe and to verify my numbers.
#2 Christmas day is near: Now so it seems, just a few hours later until Christmas. I wonder if I got what I had on the list. Well, I can only wait until tomorrow. I just wanted to add the dreams I recalled, especially dream 5-31. I'll give you an update tomorrow on what I got.
#3 Snow at last: And it was so close. Just all of a sudden, a strong cold front came through that drew cold air from the arctic. It's still way less than what I would've had this time of year.
#4 My script: Still no replies yet. I'm thinking that this could be due to the fact that this was requested right over the holidays and no one's there to check their E-mail. If I don't get anything by Dec 27, then my worries start increasing, but 270,000 seconds is a long time to wait anyway.
#5 Game development: Still having trouble getting the so-called bones animation to work properly, I'm sure there's a way to do it, I just don't know what.
7. Dec 30, 2004
Dec 30, 2004: Sort of got what I wanted, sort of didn't. I've also created another animation demonstrating the so-called "speed blast".
#1 What I got for Christmas: I didn't get a few things I wanted for Christmas, however, I might get it for my birthday nearby. What I got for Christmas is rather short. The first thing I got was a game from my sister called "Final Fantasy Origins". Currently, I'm stuck on the first Final Fantasy game as I can't find a key, but I keep on battling monsters, something I love doing. I tried FF2, but it seems unfair. FF1 is much better. Another thing I got for Christmas was a 20-inch TV that I have no room in my room for. I barely have enough space for my 14-inch TV I currently have. I didn't get Super Mario Sunshine, so I kept on begging my parents to get it as it was a top-priority item I wanted. I didn't get that book either nor the optical mouse. The others weren't of too high of a priority. I did, however, get Super Mario Sunshine and I've extracted the two songs I wanted from it. Though they're both only in the 700's for the rating, the one in Noki Bay is the most liked. My dad told me that something didn't arrive in time for Christmas and that he was going to give me it at my birthday, which is practically around the corner (just gotta make a few puffs then make that sharp turn and that's about it).
#2 New animation: I've created another animation relating to my mind game. This one, however, explains the speed blast, an ability that allows you to blast off forward at incredible speeds. Details are in category 8. Speaking of category 8, too much stuff is getting in there so I'm going to have to start paginating it, breaking it into two pages (three when another animation comes).
#3 My script: I'm now getting a bit suspicious about that service I used. I'm still not getting any replies about it, not one. Either it's because of the Christmas holidays (I registered for it on the 21st of December), or it's because of the sheer number of companies to send an E-query to (over 3000). It's most likely the first reason.
#4 Monitor replacement: I still haven't got that UPS label thing so I can ship the monitor back to tigerdirect and eventually get my replacement. I may need to call tigerdirect again and find out what's going on. Again, it's probably because of the Christmas holidays.
#5 No new dreams added: For a first in a long time, no new dreams have been added to the list. Though I've still got a few floating around in my mind, I haven't bothered to add them when recalled. Though the pages are going to be moved to different folders, this will occur the next time I have an update in the dreams list. It's likely that the travel dreams may be broken up into travel dreams (where I'm at new places and hardly any exploration is done) and exploration dreams (where I'm doing a lot of exploration). This may occur in the next update but will take quite a bit of time to process.
#6 New concept idea for mind game animation: Though I've been thinking of it for quite some time, however, with the creation of the speed blast animation, the whole concept for the mind game animation has changed. Instead of standard 2D scrollers, a real 3D effect will be used instead just like the mind game animation. I'm currently thinking of having the ocean in the background, either that or a large, single lake. Though 7 points means 14 columns of numbers, it's just one object that's having this. I'll also include some mountains and hills in the background making 18 columns of numbers for just movements. I'm going to have to recreate the background scenery, however. Fortunately, the only progress I have for it is just the old scenery, which looks rather dorky, and what'll happen in the animation (gliding back and forth between two peaks with a huge jump upon reaching the left-most peak gliding right (the peak other than the starting one)).
#7 Game development: So far, I've made little progress, but I've made some progress, mostly in the game's story. Though the human model has been made, I'm experiencing problems with boning the model, some weird ones. After fixing this comes the fun part: animation. Fortunately, I already know what the postions look like, they're used a lot in my 2D animations and inside my mind game. The troublesome part is swimming, as I hardly have it in both my mind game and 2D animation. I'm always in the high places or gliding above water and hardly in it (except if I can't stop in time and fail to jump or something, mostly from crashing into a cliff). The one thing, above all, in which progress is made is the story for the game. I'm just now starting scene 7 or 8 (I don't have the document open right now).
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