I actually have a crapload of bottles put into garbage bags which would be ready for transport to a recycling depot, if only I had a vehicle to carry them. I don’t even have a driver’s license. Even though the bottles I have would net me a nice $50 or so cash refund, I have no way of making good on it. So, the only option I have is to put them in the bin shared by all my fellow apartment tenants. It sucks, but I’ve been putting it off for way too long. It will be a slow process, since I have many garbage bags worth of bottles, and the shared bin can only fit so much inside of it. Once a week, I will have to put just one bag into the bin.

My determination never lasts for that long (probably related to my suspected thought disorder). Nevertheless, it has to be done. I want to make this place clean. I wanted to be able to get it clean before the next semester starts, but since I can only move one bag at a time, I’m stuck. C’est la vie.

Another problem I have is the huge number of pizza boxes in my place. I tried giving up pop and pizza for a short time, turning to fruits and grains to eat with water to drink, but I quickly got sick (literally) and lost motivation. Even if I did give up pizza and pop, the remaining boxes and bottles would need to go. With the bottles, I can just move them by moving an entire garbage bag. With the boxes, I’m going to have to go through them one by one, dumping the remaining pizza matter and flattening them as best I can. It sucks. But since this is my objective, I need to do it.

I hope I can do it.

This will be a short entry, especially considering how long I’ve gone without posting anything, but that’s life. The big news of the day I suppose is that I’m recovering from a cold. Maybe it’s swine flu, but probably not.

The graphics were good for a MMORPG, and I enjoyed making characters. I shamelessly admit that I made a bunch of hot-looking females. It can’t be helped; I really do appreciate the visuals in Aion. I even tried to reproduce Suiseiseki from Rozen Maiden (yeah, I’m a nerd). I named her “Desudesu” because “Suiseiseki” was taken, as was “Desu”.

The gameplay is straightforward. You get skills, and try to use them effectively. A skill has a casting time and a cool-down time.

Like other MMORPGs, Aion has its own economy. People can sell stuff via a private store, or via the trade broker. People can create items by crafting them. Learning how to craft takes time, and can be expensive because of the cost of the materials needed. Personally, I like to spot good deals so I can pick them up and resell them for a more reasonable price given their demand. Although in real life this would be considered profiteering, it’s hardly a crime to do so in Aion.

As for how fun it is… it’s fun enough. Learning to craft is painful in every MMORPG because of the necessity to limit the number of skilled crafters, but Aion isn’t too bad in that regard. The different crafts have set “work orders” for different levels so that you don’t have to go searching for materials. You can just pay for the basic materials in the crafting area, and go on with it. And the price isn’t terribly unreasonable to do so. In terms of PvE, grinding can be a pain (a lot of the quests are grinding quests), but it’s bearable. In particular, questing with a group can be quite an enjoyable experience.

Another facet of gameplay (the most important part in fact) is the PvP. Although you have to reach level 25 before you can even set foot into the Abyss (the main PvP area), there are some times you get to fight the other side before getting into the Abyss. Rifts tend to pop up once in a while which allow you to enter the other side’s area (or allow them to enter yours). The PvP is the highlight of Aion, and I can’t wait to play some more. After I’m done improving my crafting.

There are three main branches of a democratic government (in some countries there are more, but three branches are commonly identified): the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.

Anyways, I’m a computer science student, so I tend to think about things in computer-related ways. So my novel idea is this: governments have three major functions – (1) programming (and debugging) code; (2) executing code; and, (3) handling exceptions. (1) is the legislative branch. (2) is the executive branch. (3) is the judicial branch. Of course it’s people who throw exceptions. Occasionally an exception thrown falls under a broad set of exceptions and is handled as all exceptions before it (common law). It is up to the programmers to make it so that certain things are handled with more specificity. Everyone’s run through the program called ‘governance’ – mwahahaha!

Yes, yes, I’m boring. I had a 100-level politics course, so it’s been on on my mind a bit.

A thin client (or dumb terminal) is a computer which has limited capabilities, instead leaving the heavy computing to remote servers. Thin clients use less power as a result of their lesser abilities compared to an average PC.

With cloud computing, you would use your PC’s web browser (or standalone web application) in order to use the capabilities provided by many (not necessarily powerful) computers working together for that purpose. I believe that this is functionally equivalent to the use of a thin client.

The similarity is apparent, but the difference is the more important aspect. With cloud computing, you don’t deny the capabilities of your own computer. There is no reason why your data must be stored remotely, on some unknown computer. Using a web application might require that the servers have a working copy of your data, but that does not imply that they need to store your data permanently. Supposing that one can rely on the organization providing the cloud service to keep the working copy secure and in tact, deleting it completely only when done with it, then the reliability issue is trivial. Of course there is still the need for a reliable connection.

Then again, the door is opened for true thin clients. What is a netbook? It is a limited capability notebook. To cut costs, the use of less capable OSes made sense for netbooks. After all, a netbook was meant to do but a few things: web browse, word process, email and very little else. Think about it; who needs a powerful PC when a cheap netbook can accomplish the same things by use of cloud services? Word processing can already by done online (e.g. Google Docs), and the only non-online aspect of email is choosing where you keep your messages stored (e.g. use of Outlook vs use of Hotmail).

Cloud computing really isn’t anything special if you already use email. The trust you place in a web service like Hotmail is considerably great, depending on the content of your email. It might not be that special, but it is an important part of our computing experience. To be able to access and modify documents where ever we are, whenever we want is a great convenience. A more professional entity (e.g. a private company) would most likely want its own servers handling its own special purpose computing, but the idea is the same, so long as some remote client is utilizing those special purpose servers.

In essence, cloud computing means that computing becomes more convenient. It also means that hardware requirements for the end-user aren’t a concern. Consider the idea of “cloud gaming” (OnLive). Imagine playing processor/graphics card intensive games without even owning a discrete video card. Of course, the main concerns relate to internet connection; how much bandwidth (speed), and how much bandwidth (caps) do you have? If the computing part of gaming is off-loaded, then that leaves the displaying part (relay of video/audio), and – depending on the quality – can be very bandwidth intensive.

I haven’t really said anything interesting, but it is satisfying to lay my thoughts out here. To sum this entry up (tl;dr), the concept of cloud computing isn’t anything special, but its implementation makes for interesting conversation.

Anyways, I want to talk about Windows XP again. I didn’t really see the need to clarify that I was using XP before because the only obvious alternative to that is Vista, and… well, why would anyone talk about Vista? But seriously, with 7 on the way (and the release candidate sitting on one of my hard drives as I type), I think it is time to specify my version. Perhaps I did specify before, but I can’t remember (it’s been that long).

What I want to talk about is partitioning XP. Just a quick warning: don’t do any of this unless you’re confident enough. I take no blame for any loss of time or data relating to what I describe here on in.

With any installation of Windows, you need at least one drive. It doesn’t have to be “C” so I won’t say it’s the “C drive”. I’d like to call it the “system drive”, but that’s not quite right.

Now, this might sound stupid to you (it certainly does to me), but XP itself calls that partition the “boot” drive (just check Disk Management in the Microsoft Management Console). When I installed XP on my laptop, I created three partitions; the third partition is the one that I chose to install XP onto. The first partition I created was 8MB large. (Yes, that’s MB, not GB.) The second was about 1.5 times the size of memory on my laptop.

Obvious the second partition was for the page file, but the first? You see, when I chose to install XP onto the third partition, XP couldn’t just use that one partition for its installation. It needed to place the boot loader (ntldr) in the first partition. That’s the so-called “system” drive.

So far, so good? First partition contains boot loader and is the system drive, second contains the page file, and third contains XP itself and is the boot drive. The two titles are swapped as far as I’m concerned. All three if you count the “swap drive”.

Now, when I got XP up and running, I decided that I wanted to create some more partitions for better organization. I made a fourth partition for temporary files (cache for internet files, temp and tmp folders, etc.).  My sixth parition was for my program files, and my seventh was for my documents and settings (well, at least the settings, but I keep documents elsewhere usually). The last partition was for my media files (videos, music, etc.).

Maybe you are wondering how I managed to separate my temporary file folders and program file folder from the “boot” drive. It’s quite simple, but can be very annoying if mistakes are made. Believe me – I screwed up the first time. The “trick” is to modify the registry. It’s easy to do, but many would perceive doing so as intimidating if not downright scary.

For the program files folder, the “obvious” way is to just copy the contents of the folder to the partition, and then make a change to the ProgramFilesDir value. The problem is that old keys and values with hard-coded references to the location of the old program files folder. Because of them, this simple change results in not being able to delete the original program files folder. Of course, the solution is to find those hard-coded references and change them to the new location. This is easy to do. Just export the entire registry, thereby creating a .reg file, then modifying that .reg file (which is really just plain text). Just use notepad or whatever and replace all instances of “C:\Program Files” with “X:” (if X is the drive letter). One thing to be aware of is that XP still contains 8.3 naming in some references. In short, instead of using “C:\Program Files”, it will be “C:\Progra~1″. In my desktop installation, there are still such references in the registry.

As for the temporary files folder(s), you should do the same thing using “C:\Windows\Temp” for your search. An interesting point here is that XP actually has registry values for both “temp” and “tmp” folders. There’s no real point in having two separate folders, but that’s exactly what I have.

The Documents and Settings folder can be changed similarly to how Program Files was changed. The one thing you might wish to know is that each user has a folder in the Documents and Settings folder, and in each of those is a folder for temporary files for that specific user. Why not relocate those to the temporary files partition already set up? That’s what I did. Wherever you have “%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temp” you can change to “Y:\Temp\%USERNAME%”. Just remember that the system temp folder should be something like “Y:\Temp\system” instead of just “Y:\Temp” so as to keep the system temp folder separate from the user temp folders.

I won’t flesh out the details because if you’ve managed to figure out what I’m talking about and are confident enough to try this out, you should have no problem working it out by yourself.

I plan on re-installing XP on my desktop so as to achieve a nice partitioning scheme similar to that of my laptop. Maybe you are wondering why I would bother. The answer is that it makes things seem neater. One thing’s for sure: my laptop’s XP partition has only 1.13GB of data (fully updated) and doesn’t need to be defragmented as often as it did before. Of course, I’m using a stripped down version of XP with some services removed (nlite is your friend), but I’d expect similar results even with a normal version of XP.

Have fun!

Anyways, I want to talk about wages since I’ve been thinking about what I want to do after (or before) graduation. Shall I work, or shall I go to graduate school? Shall I do co-op before my time runs out? If I go the graduate school route, I can hold off on thinking about where my money’s coming from some more, because graduate school will most likely be completely covered by the school I’m accepted to. But if I choose work, then wages will come into the picture. How much is enough?

I don’t think I need that much money in comparison to what I think I’ll be making when I get a job. Some would say, “if” I get a job, considering the world’s economy, but I’m not worried. Actually, I’ve been spending my money on electronics and more food than is necessary for myself recently. So, that got me thinking – if I can live just fine with the money I’m getting funded with now (enough to get by with, with the occasional toss in of money from my dad and digging into my savings account), then how much would I need if I weren’t being funded for school, and had finished my education?

This question is something that doesn’t apply to everyone, since most people have to take out student loans. I consider myself fortunate to be given as much as I am. But given similar circumstances, with no debt to speak of, how much money would one need to live a basic life?

My rent is affordable, and my housing (an apartment) is sufficient (nice size, nice location, nothing fancy) at $650 a month. Food and utilities for one person I overestimate to $650 (I order pizza a lot, so if I were to be more economical, I could surely save on this point). I don’t have a car, and currently don’t pay for transit (covered in education), but it would go for around $100 a month (for one zone, I believe). Throw in $100 per month for something special (not including eating out, since I’m pretty much paying for that already), and I’m sitting at $1500 a month. For 12 months, that’s $18000. That’s my overestimate of how a budget for one person could look given optimal circumstances (affordable housing and reasonable cost of utilities and transit). The actual number of work hours for a full time job is 37.5, and the number of weeks worked in a year might be 50. Then the wage required to sustain basic living expenses plus a bit extra is $9.6 per hour. The current minimum wage where I live is $8. Not quite enough, but take into account the extras I gave myself, and you have a decent living wage right there.

The problem then is the circumstances by which one reaches employment. If you had to take out a student loan throughout education, then you have to pay it off. If you didn’t get post-secondary education, having to support a family makes all the difference. The government needs to subsidize education and family expenses in order to make the living wage make sense for those people. Otherwise, to call it a living wage is a slap in the face.

My naive idea is to have the government directly subsidize parents’ wages. The employer will pay from its own pocket exactly what it would for any other employee, but throws in the 50% of that wage they received from the government to give to the parent employed. That is, an employed parent will make 50% more than a non-parental employee in the same job. Why 50%? Because if both parents are working, they’ll be double dipping for the bonus (perfectly acceptable). When one parent is working, it means that he or she is making enough to get by on one salary. Then instead of money, the parents benefit in having one of them always at home to take care of the child. Also, given that the one working parent makes twice as much one of the two working parents, then the bonus amounts to the same value.

The problems with my naive approach are many. What if the working parent is making far more than minimum wage? Then the cost of subsidizing someone who doesn’t even require help monetarily will be very high. The solution is to cap the amount they receive. Why not just give them the difference between their wage and the “minimum parent wage”? We don’t want people to intentionally take easy, low paying jobs which will not benefit their situation in the long run. After all, do they expect the extra wages to last forever? They shouldn’t, as the subsidies should cease when children reach a certain age. That solution of capping however affects the idea that one parent should be able to work and let the other stay at home, receiving the same bonus as both would receive totally for working for half the salary each. Obviously, the logistics of implementing any kind of social system is complex.

The case of the debt-ridden student is similar in a way: if the government can subsidize education through subsidizing universities, then that will help students in the long run (debt can be a chain that holds you down for the rest of your life). But where does the government find such money – taxes? Taxing is ironic, because they’d just be taking money from the people they’re helping in the other situation. On top of that, they’d also be taxing the single, non-parental worker. What I’m saying is that to tax the poorest that we’re trying to help is counter-productive. So then, this implies that taxes should come from those who can afford it.

I know there are rich people out there who think that the government doesn’t deserve to stick their fingers into the pocket of someone who worked hard to make the money the government is about to take away, but come on! I painted a picture before of how much one person really needs to have a living wage. So then, we can ask, why does anyone need the gross amounts of money that some people make? The excuse that they worked hard for it is ridiculous. Even if they worked three times as hard (which is unlikely), are they entitled to ten to thirty times the amount as someone else? To make the claim that they worked hard to learn in school is also pointless; after all, there are others who would have gone to school, but the only thing that prevented them from was the cost of education – such an excuse could not be used given the funding suggested earlier, but only if such funding is comprehensive and sufficient. If a wage is determined by the amount of sweat we produce, then we would surely expect it to be based on a linear scale, not exponential. However, that’s not the way it is. Therefore, to produce a result that is more in line with our expectations, it makes sense to tax more – slightly exponentially – proportional to the amount of money one makes.

When people stop working so hard because all of their money is being taken away from taxing, that’s when we know we’ve reached just beyond the right amount of taxation. Why work so hard if you’re going to make only so much more than the employees working under you? There needs to be a balance; harder work does justify higher wages, just not so disproportionately. If one high tier money-maker decides to drop down a level because the stress of the job isn’t worth it anymore, then let someone else step in. This is the way it should work. By then, perhaps the workload will be more balanced as well. Instead of having one at the very top, have multiple people at the top, for less money (each), less stress, and more thinking power. Sharing responsibilities is the ultimate goal in such a system. Why should one person be responsible for so much? Why does one person need to make so much money? Is it ego, or greed? Neither of those is a laudable attribute for any person. Pride is important and drive is valuable; ego is worthless and greed is too.

Obviously my opinion on these matters is naive and probably unrealistic from many aspects. I’d like to think that theoretically, such a system is possible, but who knows?

So, I started off talking about how much I’d need to live decently (not all that much more compared to the minimum wage right now), but then talked about how there are situations that change the meaning of a living wage. Then I talked about how there are those who are so far beyond “just living” that it makes sense for them to be the benefactors of the worse off of society. Even if they don’t agree, if they continue to work as hard as they do now, then obviously the idea wasn’t such a deterrent to hard work after all. Furthermore, what good is it to have an elite few controlling everything? In my opinion, my humble opinion, though important, is not necessarily useful; however, it is not worthless. Input from more people is a good thing; whether or not their opinions are accepted, they can be appreciated and understood for what they are.

There are a number of reasons why I bought this particular model…. Okay, that was a lie. The only reason I chose this model was because it was on sale (specifically the in-store only sale that NCIX has every Saturday). Obviously the price was right ($60 for 640GB > 10GB/$).

I have a couple reasons why I wanted a hard drive: (1) I was running out of space on my older drives; and (2) I need to take one of them offline in order to either send it to the manufacturer for fixing, or fix it myself. I was planning to wait for Western Digital’s new “Green” model with three platters (improved from four of the previous “Green Power”/”GP” version) totaling 1000GB, but who knows when it will become available? For now, I am content with what I’ve got.

Speaking of what I’ve got, the HD642JJ that I bought is the two platter model. In other words, it should consume less power and have better sustained transfer rates than the three platter model (higher density platters means more bits read per rotation). I couldn’t find any reviews of it, but I’m guessing it’s competitive performance-wise with other 640GB models. If so, the price is what made it a real value deal.

Speaking of deals, I bought some other items that were on sale at NCIX. I haven’t gamed in a long time, and Prey was on sale for $5. You do the math. Although my video card is old, it should be good enough for decent graphics for this game. I also bought a $10 mouse (back-up in case mine craps out on me – an event which seems very possible these days) and an 8GB MicroSDHC memory stick/card/thingie. I needed the MicroSDHC device for expanding my music collection for the journey I’ll be taking with my dad and brothers for Christmas vacation. We’re going to Las Vegas (among other places)!

For the trip, I need new headphones. My “old” ones lost an ear (which can only be remedied by holding the jack in a specific position). Since we’re going by automobile, I want to get something that’ll isolate well (even better than the IEM that I already have). I’m not exactly rich, so I’m aiming for quality that’s inexpensive. For me, this means I’ll be buying the Etymotic er6i. Apparently they’ve got the best isolation (in fact, that’s what the “i” stands for). I look forward to hearing the sound quality of them. They’ve been called “analytical” (vs. “musical”), but that shouldn’t be a problem; perhaps it will give me a greater appreciation for the original recording as it is intended.

With regards to the generic “X-American” descriptor, this is simple. Someone who is of Irish descent will have no problem with Irish-American, especially if he grew up in a primarily Irish-American neighbourhood. Since there wasn’t any particular segregation of white people, different European-American sub-cultures were merged into one large “white” American culture.

On the other end of the spectrum, black people were segregated from that “normal”, “mainstream” and “white” culture, and essentially forced to live in ghettos. Thus, they came to share a sub-culture together, and became known as “African-American”. As mentioned before, this type of sub-culture can occur in the same manner for other peoples given the same type of circumstances (an area in which the majority of people share some common descent; e.g. Irish-American). Obviously, if the different types of Africans weren’t mixed together, then there’d be more distinction given to which type of African one actually is rather than the catch-all term.

As for the general terms “white” and “black”, this was mentioned earlier. Although Europeans may find such a term offensive, Americans do not. This is for the obvious reason that the cultures are quite different. American is not so much a race as it is a culture (although Native-Americans would probably like it to be used for their own), so when describing race, the term white is used for that whole pool of people with some kind of “Caucasian” background (perhaps, I’m not an expert on the exact terms). Likewise, black is not offensive for the those who identify with it (that’s black people, duh).

For Asian-Americans, I think the distinction is made clear more often; one hears “Chinese-American” or “Japanese-American” since I’m sure there are those who have pride in being of their own specific race. It’s the same for Native people, since there are so many different peoples, to be lumped together with others may not be too offensive, but it’s a matter of pride to identify with one’s own specific people.

To summarize, race is a complex subject. Barack Obama may not be “black” in the sense that he does not “directly” share the history of the American culture of black people, but he does have the genetic qualifications as well as skin colour (despite being half-white, most Americans would visually recognize him as black). He is most definitely African-American, just as the son of an Irish man and an American woman living in America could call himself Irish-American (though he may choose not to). It’s just that there’s more emphasis on it (a point of pride of one’s background) if raised in a primarily “X-American” neighbourhood.

In reality, it’s better if people forget about these things, and just accept that colour should not be an issue in the first place. I’m happy Obama was elected and hope that he can do his job in garnering respect for his country (something it doesn’t get from other countries/people of other countries too often). Whatever his race, I hope he can do a good job.

I’ve recently been watching Dragonball Z again. The first time I watched it was when I was a kid of course, and by chance I found videos of the dub on Youtube available to watch. Yeah, I don’t like dubs a whole lot, but since I watched the dub originally, it didn’t bother me so much.

In any case, there’s always a controversy over naming conventions used by dubs for the original Japanese versions of words. The uncut version of DBZ was more accurate in terms of what the original intended, but there are some discrepancies due to Anglocization. There are also blatant renamings done in the non-uncut versions (“Hercule” instead of “Mr. Satan” for a very obvious reason).

One of the Anglocized (that’s “Anglocised” for non-North Americans) words is Saiyan. The word “Saiyan” was actually used on an official toy, but the Japanese say Saiya-jin because it makes sense for them (literally, “people of Saiya”). A similar term Amerika-jin (or “America-jin” if you want) means “person of America” (an “American”). You should see the obviousness of why Saiyan makes sense for an English-speaking audience. The only real complaint that could be used here is the pronunciation of the word Saiyan; it’s spelled “correctly” in terms of an appropriate Anglocization, but it’s incorrectly pronounced “Say”-an instead of “Sigh”-an.

This is really just nitpicking…it’s a dub that I wouldn’t be watching if it weren’t for boredom and nostalgia. However, it’s fun to point things out that others didn’t know about.

Another example is “King Kai” (in Japanese, you can pick any one of “Kai-oo”, “Kai-ou”, or “Kai-oh” apparently comprised of the kanji for “god” and “king”). Why not “God King” or simply “Kai-oh”? And that technique Goku (or “Son Gokuu”) learned from King Kai is called the Kaioken (in the dub, pronounced “Kay-Oh-Ken”; in Japanese, it’s obviously pronounced like “Kai-oh” with a “ken” attached), but the reasoning for it’s name isn’t clear in the dub.

Yep, dubs tick people off for silly reasons, but it’s also a pain when those same people don’t actually get their nitpicking right. Myself, I don’t mind “Saiyan”, as it’s a valid “translation”/interpretation of Saiya-jin… the dub’s pronunciation is surely incorrect, but at least it’s a valid re-invention of the term for an English audience.