so since i’ve had tv capture set up for a while, i decided to finally try and encode something seriously for the general internet population :p. last night i was lucky enough to flick to NHK as popjam dx was starting.

the weather has been hot lately, so i wasn’t looking forward to the encoding session of the 1.5hour long show.

i actually fell asleep next to my laptop as it was encoding, and woke up in a huge sweat as the room temperature was well above safe levels :s. not only did i have my computer encoding, i also had the capture machine constantly chewing away at its 5400rpm hard drive transferring the raw data to mine. not so cool ^^;.

i was planning on keeping the torrent private initially, but as noone else uploaded to daddicts, i tried. its using psrv’s (barely working) tracker, and currently has around 23 seeds and quite a few more peers. began seeding with my poor 512kbit upload limited cable here, as well as psrv’s 512kbit upload back at home.

feel free to get the torrent – especially if you like def tech or dreams come true, as they both do some really cool live performing. b’z were kind of disappointing, only doing their single splash which i’m not a huge fan of.

torrenting is quite fun in short, and i hope to do a bit more if i can find some more interesting tv to encode . maybe i can figure out how to get cable tv to work without the stupid protection this capture device leaves on the video :/.

lack of sleep mmm. updating takes effort at times :p so i’ll be brief today.

this weekend was well planned to make the most of every minute. saturday morning was the day of the visit to the mogu shop! being about a one hour drive from himeji on the tollways, the trip took about 4 hours total, including a lunch at a cafe which was built on top of a pond :d. what to say; there were lots of mogus, and daniel was happy. i bought my fair share as well.

sunday was a trip to nara which began at 0800. early, yes. and i went to sleep at around 3 the night before, so the two hour trip there consisted mainly of sleep.

nevertheless, it was a nice day weather wise, so quite enjoyable. we visited the usual places in nara (the fourth time for me ^^;) as well as a few i hadn’t seen up until today. 特に, we strolled down a old-style street… i guess. it had old houses that looked like they should’ve already fallen down, and lots of houses turn shops monopolizing on the small flow of tourism down the street.

as it was only 1400 after we finished our nara outing, including a tasty mushroom noodle dish for lunch, it was decided we’d also visit rokko mountain in kobe. just like any other mountain it had a nice view, although the rendering distance was a bit low today, meaning we couldn’t see the ocean or islands off the coast. oh well. there were a couple of nice stores selling english foods and cool glass statue things (teruteru!).

end of day was topped off with a drink bar restaurant and cake when i got home. i feel like i don’t need to eat for a few days :s.

for anyone wondering what my host family looks like, i finally got a nice picture with everyone. the two younger kids are actually from over the road, but they pretend they are part of our family quite a lot. i just realised the sister isnt in the picture. failed?

i haven’t been using my laptop on battery much lately, but since i was planning on taking it with me to nara i had a play around to see how many hours i could push out of it. not a bad result imo. then again that was with no wireless and just word processing.

updated galleries: 060603, 060604

first of all let me say – the weather is kind of getting to be lately. highish humidity and temperatures . let me use that as my excuse for not updating in quite a few days :p.

soo with two tests in a row on wed and thurs, as well as an essay and a speech to complete, it was a busy week. hell, its not even over yet, but friday is friiiday right?

i somehow managed to fit a trip to himeji castle and the gardens too. that was pretty tiring. i was at first thinking how stupid the osaka castle was for having an elevator to get to the top, but i seriously wouldn’t have cared if i could catch one rather than walking countless flights of stairs with not enough head room for even the shortest japanese person ^^;.

i guess they build the castle with the intention of tiring out the enemy though. ill upload pictures later on.. camera is somewhere upstairs. stairs BAD. instead ill just rant about games i’ve used to procrastinate in those periods while collecting enough motivation to study.

i made a trip back to jRO a couple of weekends ago thanks to tencho kindly giving dodd and myself a 1day pass to use. this was quite awesome fun – we visited juperos and attempted to complete the quest to get to 3f, but couldn’t find the last item required and never made it there :s.

i really would like to play ro – if it wasn’t for the lack of time in my semi-normal lifestyle. i was considering joining everyone on iro but this would involve a gradual decrease in sleep hours at night, and inversely proportional sleep during uni classes. not going to happen in short. and besides – playing ro in english just isnt the same. nor is the community anywhere near as competent ^^; (although that’s sometimes for the best).

hitman blood money! awesome. i can’t stop playing – despite my real dislike of single player FPS games. the ability to have total freedom over how you go about completing a mission is really really fun, and makes for interesting gameplay no matter how many times you play the same level. since i haven’t had that much time to plan my hits, my rating is in the mediocre levels, highest so far being Hitman rating on the madigras election thingy level. i spent extra long on that level though :s.

bf2 with broken textures :d. quite fun for a change, albeit very hard to play with a ping of 450ms.

てるてる明日へ～