Tag: english

That music freak

September 13, 2011
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So, in about two weeks, we’ll have the yearly autumn camp of the university light music club. I can’t wait. It was a lot of fun last year, and this year it’s gonna be even more fun. Last year i only had one band and we practiced plenty beforehand, so while everyone else were practicing in the camp, i was bored, looking for people to play pool with. This year i have two bands, i’ll have the honor of singing some Marilyn Manson songs (the Fight Song and one more, yet undecided) and to play bass-vocals for a Hi-Standard copy band. This latter is of course more challenging, as ever since the failure of our Sex Pistols band last autumn (about a week after i bought my bass) i never tried singing while playing. So far i think i can do it, but it’ll need plenty of practicing.

Then of course once the camp is over, we’ll be facing the auditions for the autumn live, where again i’ll have to do my best if i want to get on stage. No bands are decided yet, but most probably we’ll come up with stuff in the camp. I’d love to play the guitar again too, but chances are that’s not gonna happen. If i could get to do the vocals for some nice grunting metal like Heaven Shall Burn, Machine Head or Slipknot, that would be outright awesome. Problem is there’s hardly any drummer in the club who can pull off songs with twin bass.

We’ll see. (In the meanwhile, i’m nearing 150 thousand scrobbles on last.fm.)

Fun thing

September 7, 2011
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You know what’s a fun thing? When I play 1v1 in StarCraft 2 and random gives me zerg, and by some wonder i’m not rushed to death by a terran swarm or an army of dark templar and make it to the late game, and i hold roughly the half of the map, with creep tumors for visibility, 4-5 hatcheries/lairs/hives, all with queens, and i have a maxed out army at 200, and clash with the enemy, which results in both of us losing a significant number of units, and then soon the enemy tries attacking again with a smaller force to “rush” me before i could rebuild my army, and he’s bound to face an even stronger one already ready. Now, that’s fun.

Yeah, queens and their “spawn larva” ability rules the game. Also a huge economy. I really like the sight of 30-40 mutalisks born at once.

Typhoon and stuff

September 2, 2011
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US east coast gets a hurricane, it’s world news and stuff (though i’m glad it passed quickly since my parents are there visiting relatives), but when i get a huge typhoon over my head, that’s nothing. I mean, it’s not even here, but it’s loud, and the wind is so strong that even if i close the windows it blows through (loud). Today i didn’t go running either, because of the storm, i sweated like 20 minutes on the exercise bike. I’ve never sweated so much i think. I was literally dripping by the time i left the gym.

And the supermarket pissed me off, because when i got there all the bread and related products (baguettes etc) were gone, so i had to make myself omuraisu (japanese-style omelette-rice), just the problem was i only had four eggs at home instead of 8, and two of those were half-rotten (no idea how that happened, but happened). Surprisingly it could still fill me quite well…

Also, i 1v1’d for hours on the SEA-Aus server and got up to division 4 in the bronze league. Will get better. (If you play SC2 on SEA or NA, i’m always most of the time up for a game.)

Sleepy and stuff

September 1, 2011
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Going to the gym and running every day (or going for a fifty-k bike trip) is tiring. Playing StarCraft 2 in 1v1 on Battle.net for hours is fun, even if out of a dozen games i could only win like three. Translating stuff is fun, just when you have like 15 episodes to catch up to urgently, it gets significantly harder to get started with it.

Going to the movies with a friend to watch Harry Potter 7/2 is fun, so is annoying the hell out of the few japanese who came to watch the subtitled english version with our constant laughing and sarcastic comments. Hey, we’re in the Chamber of Secrets. Ron, i’m so wet. Insert lamest kiss scene of the year here. And though they put in the “crappy fanart” grade “19 years later” part in the movie, they left out the only appreciable dialog from it (our Teddy Lupin?!), bleh.

It just struck me that it’s already september, which means it’s already been a year since i visited Okinawa and China, and honestly i feel like i’ve done nothing in this one year. Then i realize that i had the toughest exams in my life so far and also (on the side note) translated like… I don’t know, a lot of anime. Really a lot. (I haven’t counted it yet, but it’s at least 100 episodes just to english.) And i read some books, not as much as i’d have liked, but still plenty, and some in japanese. And i’ve (more or less) learnt how to play the bass.

Also, i started creating a world.

Move, move

August 27, 2011
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I’m moving hosts. My site valerauko.net has been hosted at 27hosting.com pretty much from the beginning (if i remember correctly there was a few months’ time when i was still at a hungarian host), during which once they erased all my data and presented me with almost half a year of downtime (as apparent from the gap in the blog archives), and to top it off recently there has been quite a lot of downtime. I wouldn’t even mind if it was like five minutes or so every time, but often it lasts for hours and when i inquire about what’s going on, i maybe get an answer like “oh sorry we just had some problems restarting the MySQL server” or no answer at all. When last time the site was down for hours and i got no response, that was the last drop and i bought a hosting service at another shared host (iWeb). I know, i know, i should have bought VPS or something, but that’s more trouble than gain, as iPhantom and i experienced back last winter. I hope it’ll be all right now. The transition should go quite smooth too, i hope you won’t see any downtime.

Lightning

August 26, 2011
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Just now i had a short walk on the lakeside to get some ice-cream. The other day i bought myself one after training, and munching it down after dinner woke me up many times more than drinking any amount of coffee. So i guessed that my sugar intake is insufficient and that’s why my mind’s so numb so often. I hoped to get a wake-up jolt from this ice-cream too, but now i only feel plain sleepy.

At least i really enjoyed the walk. It’s fun to walk the empty streets and the lakeside, with music booming from my headphones at close-to-maximum volume…

The sky is really interesting though. It’s cloudy like on a summer day, you know, mackerel sky or however you say that in english, so between the clouds you can see the stars here and there, and the air is generally clean, so the towns on the other side of the lake are visible too. However, the clouds are flashing. It’s lightning, but you can’t hear the thunder, and it’s not raining either.

Also, the spiderwebs are damn annoying. One side of the walk is a rail (so that no one will fall in the lake, as that’s abunai), on the other are trees, and spiders love to spin their webs between. So if you walk there, you’re sure to get one in your face at least every ten steps or so.

Anyway, i was about to say that it’s fun to walk the empty streets almost jumping to the rhythm without anyone throwing weird looks at me.

England

August 24, 2011
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The other day it started raining just when i was heading for the school grounds to run for half an hour. Not that it stopped me, but the cloudy, wet, grey weather reminded me of England. It reminded me of the few times i’d been there before, my short homestay in Devon, the few trips to London and south England…

It reminded me that it’d be a lovely place to live, and i don’t care about all the rioting and stuff – people usually riot for a reason. I’m not following the news, so don’t come at me with all your political rage.

It’d be great if i could manage to go there next summer for the Olympics, though whether i’ll have money and other such minor questions still remain. I’d want to check out that certain pub with the “other beer” in Winchester that a guy told me about last year in China (which means, a british guy told a hungarian guy living in Japan about a pub in England in a guesthouse in Beijing).

I just applied at a few jobs, i’ll have interviews in the coming two weeks, if i get a job then maybe my finance will stabilize and i’ll be able to do all the above. I’d love that. It’s really annoying to have a close-to-zero balance on my account by the middle of the month.

Fonts and webdesign and all that stuff

August 23, 2011
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Recently I’ve been working on making a valid, semantic and accessible HTML5+CSS3 page out of a bag I’d seen in a local supermarket). I’m using Chromium most of the time, because it updates often and has support for the most cutting-edge stuff as well.

The problem is, other browsers don’t. So even though it looks all nice and nifty on my screen, if i reboot and check it on Windows, the situation gets complicated. Luckily IE 9 supports everything i need for the design (more or less), except for the text-shadow property, but that’s just enough punishment for people using IE.

However, across browsers there’s this troubling thing with the included fonts, that they simply don’t switch to the japanese font for the japanese text, but instead use the system’s build-in (and in the context of this design, ugly) defaults. It’s especially annoying because i even define the Unicode range for the japanese font… I guess i should just do the same with Museo, the other font used. But it’s effort, because i’ve to look up exactly what character range is covered in it. I’m afraid it’s not even a simple range… But if not even that could make the browsers use the japanese font, i’ll be really lost for clues as for what hack to use… (I guess some fancy JavaScript solution with character range regexes could do the trick, but it’d be an ugly solution for sure.)

The ticket and whatnot

July 28, 2011
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So, we had this family plan for a while to go visit the relatives in America and stuff, and yesterday i looked into plane tickets, and found a quite charming choice. It’s not cheap, oh hell not, 130k yen (which is more than a month’s income for me), but if i could buy it i could spend two weeks in New York with my family than another eight days in California having youthful fun.

All that remains just a dream. I submitted the reservation online, which returned with an error saying that my credit card can’t pay for this transaction. I guess it’s because i was foolish enough not to change the default 100k limit to the 300k when i applied for the card. Anyway, i hoped i could do a revolving payment (or however it’s called in english) and pay the sum in two or three parts, so i opted to pay not online but at a local store that offers such services. But of course when i tried it turned out this kind of payment requires cash. Which is out of the question.

So i guess unless someone lets me use their credit card for this purpose i’m not going anywhere.

Starbucks Gazebo blend

July 27, 2011
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Since the exams got near (and started), i’ve been drinking a lot more coffee than usual. Which means that the 250g pack that’d usually last two weeks or more now runs out in five days. All of it was out of Starbucks’ limited edition Gazebo.

Considering the insane heat, i never drink it hot, just brew the whole load (roughly 2.5 litres) from half the pack in the evening, so that i can have a not-warm (i won’t say cold though) coffee in the morning.

The thing is, there is a reason that yesterday i bought the third pack of it in two weeks. Just as there’s an iced coffee blend which is balanced to be made into iced coffee, this Gazebo blend was called Summer blend in other lands in other times.

When i bought the first pack, the cashier girl seemed to have some idea of how to interact with customers (unlike most part-timers), and told me some details about the coffee (with a wide smile). Fruity, mostly blackcurrants. Sure you can say it has the citrus touch that the label claims to be so characteristic, but i think the slightly sour yet sweet flavor similar to blackcurrant and other berries is more obvious.

I think i’ll be drinking this blend till the end of the summer, because except the ice coffee blend, the other roasts are better hot.