I was kind of MIA this weekend down in the basement working on crazy inventions and such. It took me Friday and Saturday to finally get my xbox modded and working with the new bios. Then unfortunately I had some problems doing the gentoox install. At this point everything is working except I don't have a working connector so I can attach a keyboard to my xbox ... once that works I should be all set to compile mythtv and have my frontend all up and running correctly.

There was also a fiasco with my ipod ... somehow I fucked it up by disconnecting it while it said "do not disconnect." Like sure, I need to listen to that ... right? Anyways ... it fucked up my ipod partition and left me with only 8.6 GB of space to use on my 15 GB ipod. To reformat it I plugged it in to my mom's laptop which has windows and that was just a stupid thing to do. I turned on her laptop and it reported that my ipod partition had errors and started scandisk. Yeah, so I thought that was a good thing at first, but then it ended up running scandisk for 12 hours and then not even fixing the problem, stupid windows. I tried again ... just this time I plugged in the ipod after windows booted. After that I was able to reformat the partition and fix the problem ... so now my ipod is indeed working perfectly =)

I played ball on Saturday, but man it wasn't my day. I played like sheeite ... bleh. I'm looking forward to a chance to improve on that performance. Saturday I saw L'Auberge Espagnole which was pretty neat reflection on traveling. On Monday I went to see the US vs. Whales soccer exhibition match. The game was totally brutal with penalties practically every few minutes. The US came out on top after one good goal and a penalty kick which came with a red card.

I have been sadly neglecting updates to the website and writing reviews lately. I've been trying to make some changes to the site that will give me a chance to make updates easier. Hopefully once thats all in place I will have a bit more to show.

Well ... thats whats up for now.

-- AG

Who's driving this crazy thing anyways?

I've been a bit tired from staying up late playing with new toys the past week, but I guess I should start by talking about the weekend first. Saturday started of great with a long custom version of Saturday morning cartoons ... basically I caught up a lot of my recordings :) After that I went out to play basketball and ended up playing for a good 3 hours ... full court! I came home from that totally zapped ... bzzzd, nuuhhh. Luckily I had the perfect topping for such a day, Winged Migration ... and hour and a half of just watching birds. It was easily the most enjoyable film I've seen so far this year. Sunday was recovery day, since I was sore and still tired, plus I had some drawings to organize and finish for my final portfolio.

Monday was the day of days because I finally got my new iPod ... spiffy! Once the box was in hand I tore it open frantically yearning for the musical bliss contained inside. Box open, packaging discarded, setup complete, and guck! It no worky ... yet :| The frustration quickly mounted as I tried accessing my iPod from my computer, linux of course. After a short battle with the firewire drivers, me being victorious of course, I got a sinking suspicion that the error message "unknown partition table" meant that my iPod had not been correctly formatted with Fat32 yet. So I had to jump through some hoops and rearrange some hardware to get firewire on a different machine with windows, but it worked and the iPod was reformatted for windows. After that it was a piece of cake and I was able to access my iPod from linux, despite some lame firewire drivers that would hang every other time I loaded them, thus causing me to need to reboot. ugh. But once again I claimed victory the next day by compiling some new drivers. Swigga-sweet! iPod on linux!

I figured .. why stop there? So then on Wednesday I went out and finally got the Xbox I have been planning to get and mod for quite a while. This story not so good though. I ripped the thing open just fine, but right before I installed the chip I remembered I have to program it first ... duh! So i whipped out the programmer and tried programming it real quick ... thunk! Yeah, that was a brick wall I just hit. I battled hard for a number of hours trying a wide variety of tactics, but obviously my modchip kung-fu is lacking and thus far I have only met defeat ... *whimper* :( Hopefully this weekend will provide better fortune.

Man this has been an eventful week ... and I'm not even done yet. geez! The other big news is that my life drawing class met for the final critique last night and the class is now over. I am pleased to say that I got an A, but I suspect so did everyone else. This is of course a sad moment, but I'll now have a bit more free time and a chance to try some more stuff on my own. And of course next semester isn't that far away.

So ... huh. Well thats where I'm at on this fine friday morning anticipating the long memorial day weekend. Now if I could just get some sleep!

-- AG

It seems as if days have been coming and going like minutes lately. The best part though is the fact that I am finally drawing on a more and more regular basis, so that is a good thing. I am on the verge of getting the whole gallery software system going so that I can actually have galleries to use on the site, and that will mean I can start adding sketches to a gallery. I like drawing on 18x24 newsprint, so it may be a bit of a challenge getting the sketches scanned, but I'll figure it out.

I am extremely stoked that I finally ordered my iPod earlier this week, but I am bummed that it still hasn't even shipped yet. Hopefully it won't be long 'til I have that baby in my hand and the tunes will never stop :)

Now after waiting a little extra while for the XBox price cut it turns out the price drop was basically negligable, so I probably still get a refurbished one. Hopefully I'll have time for that project this weekend amidst all the preperations I will be making for my final art portfolio.

Should be an eventful weekend.

-- AG

This weekend came and went in a strange and inexplicable way.

Friday was a nothing night. I had some good Indian food for dinner, but everything else was just poking around with things at home. Saturday morning I spent watching cartoons ... no, I won't let the legacy die!! I then hit the drawing board for a while before heading out for some afternoon hoops. That night it was Dan's bday, so we all got together for dinner and celebration.

On Mothers Day I went with Mom and Dad up to a fancy brunch in Santa Cruz. We got home early afternoon and hung out a bit before going to see The Dancer Upstairs at night.

I feel cheated out of a weekend somehow. hmmm.

So Friday was night out with the gang, its always so much fun grouping with your friends. We met up for another CPK dinner before going to see the midnightish showing of X2. I thought the sequel was pretty good, and of course I loved the fact that it was much darker in nature. Review when I get to it :/

Saturday I put together all the brand spankin' new hardware for my dads cad workstation. He's got some pretty crazy modeling software for designing houses, so he needed a bit more than a pII 400. Strangely, this was a zero problem install really. I just hooked everything up right off the bat, then booted the Windows XP cd and let my dad take over with software install. The only hitch was that stupid Windows mistook the zip drive for a hard drive and labeled the zip as drive C and the HDD as drive E :| rofl. So we had to unplug the zip and install over again, but that was the only prob.

After about an hour building the new comp I retreated to my room to hibernate with my new game. yipee. I logged a very respectable 9 hours on Saturday, including some breaks for computer stuff and anime. Sunday was a repeat of Saturday, bringing the weekend .hack usage time to a wopping 18 hrs. *clap* I even managed to go out to dinner and a movie as well. We saw Raising Victor Vargas, which was an uber sweet movie.

game on!

-- AG

Not much free time lately ... I guess thats a good thing.

Its funny that when you have nothing but free time, all you can think of is "I wish I had something important to do." Then that something comes along and takes up all your free time and you find yourself thinking, "Gawd, what I wouldn't do for some of that free time back." Oh the irony.

I went to the Giants game at Pacbell Park on Wednesday with my parents and my aunt. It was a really great time ... the weather was nice, Bonds hit 2 HR ... 1 splash hit, it was my first time in the park ... so i took the grand tour, and of course ... beer, nuts, and sausages :) Unfortunately the game went rather quick since the Giants shutout the Cubs, but any later and I would have ended up sleep walking at work the next day.

I also had an excellent week in drawing class ... I just love the feeling when I am able to actually completely shed my fear and inhabitions and really dive into my art freely. This was especially relieving because I had been having a bit more of a tough time the past couple weeks, and so I needed a good run to rebuild some confidence.

Now I just can't wait for Friday to end and the weekend to start ... X2 baby!!