November 30, 2008 at 9:43 am · Filed under Lifestyle
I’ve been playing Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time on the DS. The game is fun, but it’s been slow going. I usually play about 4 times a week for an hour before I go asleep. I’d like to get through it, because Chrono Trigger was re-released this week. Although I have about 10 games in queue, I really want to play this for nostalgia sake and I never saw the cut scenes from the PS version.
I’m upgrading this blog to the 2.7 beta. It should be relatively stable for the simple tasks which I use it. Gawd. The dashboard is so much better in terms page real estate and posting.
Winter vacation is approaching next month at my school. It’s a month long, and I dont know if they’re going to throw some kind of winter program at me. They might as they’ve said (not to brag), I’m the best foreign teacher that they’ve had. Maybe it’s because I give a shit. From what I’ve heard, the previous teachers sounded unqualified, narrow minded, and (probably) incapable of dressing themselves.
If I have no classes, I’m looking for things to occupy my time. At some point, I’d like to take a trip to Japan. However, with the current economy, the exchange rate is terrible and I haven’t accrued enough money yet. The weather would be another deterrent. I’d much rather go when the weather is warm and cheery.
Last year, I was looking for authentic Korean t-shirts. Clothing WITHOUT English text. Finding a hangul t-shirt is like finding good tea. But a teacher pointed me to Goinsadong. It has some stylish calligraphy T’s.
I was going to dedicate a blog post to review YamiPod, but I’m too lazy. In short, the program works fantastic. I can easily add and remove songs from my iPod Nano without iTunes. It has tons of features for editing, deleting, and organizing your songs and ID3 tags. I think it’s a MUST have for your iPod. And since it can run off your iPod, you don’t need to install anything. It’s everything I wanted it to be and it’s FREE.
In these last few weeks, I think my alcohol tolerance has spiked. Over the summer, I used to get buzzed on 2 beers. That has changed with the re-introduction of soju. Drinking with Koreans really ups the ante. I’ve also been testing out soju cocktails with tomato, orange juice, and carrot juice. OJ is by far the best.
A week and a half ago, I ordered 2 kilos of yerba mate from the US. It’s being sent to my school, and it hasn’t arrived yet. I’m hoping it will find its way to me soon. If I remember correctly, it took almost a week for my Korean documents to go from my Seoul recruiter to my school. (Seoul is only an hour away.) Or maybe the government saw these 2 kilo bags of grassy shit and became suspicious. UPDATE: Grrr. I tracked the package and it said that it left NY on November 29. My supplier shipped it on Nov 15. WTF, USPS!
November 15, 2008 at 11:15 am · Filed under Lifestyle
Clear is right. Watching movies and shows on a laptop is no fun.
If I had a Cowon O2, I could just use the TV out for playback. I think it would be a better alternative than having the computer and cables sit on the floor.
November 13, 2008 at 9:48 am · Filed under Music, Techy
I’ve told you how I felt about the standard music players and their restrictions. So, let me tell you about what got me on this train of thinking. It was my modded Nintendo DS.
The modded DS works using a homemade operating system (OS). The Nintendo DS starts up like it normally would. Then you go into the OS like you would start a game. It utilizes a soft mod, so there is no hacking of the DS involved. You cant break the Nintendo DS. It boots and now you can run the DS like a media center. The two key features are playing backed-up games and the media player. With the media player, you can read e-books, view pictures, and listen to music.
Watch this video for a visual walkthrough.
When I didn’t have my PC, I was using the music player quite a lot. It utilizes the DS speakers like a boom box. When playing music, it will go into standby mode, so that it will use less battery. Pretty slick. I’ll use it in the mornings when I stretch or to listen to my Korean lessons out loud. I use the e-reader for game faqs. I’ll load text files onto the DS and revert to them when I get stuck in a video game. Therefore, if I’m on the train and I get stuck in a game, I can find the answer right away.
But, here’s the icing on the cake. Adding music, games, pictures, and text files to the storage is simple. The memory storage is a microSD card. I bought a 4GB card for cheap. Slide the microSD into the provided USB adapter, and it will function like any thumbdrive.
The thumbdrive will work with any computer, and everything is drag and drop. Simply copy your music from a PC to the memory and whooop there it is. There is no iTunes or Zune software necessary. I know where I store the music on my computer. I don’t need iTunes to build a library for me.There are no restrictions to music files it will play. (Well there are a few, but they’re moot). If you want to copy your music and files to another computer, once again, just drag and drop them off. Simple.
Why can’t my iPod or the iPod Touch work like this? (Well, I know why, but nevertheless…) I dont want to install iTunes or any chunky software. I want it to play any music or video format, so that I dont have to re-encode anything. Any PMP, should be this easy and I think there is: the Cowon O2.
I’ve read a couple reviews, and the Cowon O2 appears to have everything I would want. It will play a plethora of audio and video codecs. It has a big touch screen, built in speakers, upgradeable storage, and drag and drop file transferring. How cool is that? When my iPod nano dies as my primary mp3 player, I know what I’m stepping up to.
November 10, 2008 at 10:36 am · Filed under Lifestyle, Techy
Over the weekend, I went back to Daegu and visited some old friends. I brought back my desktop PC, and I set it up last night. I’m still going to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux on it. However, I need to get the internet in my apartment up and running. Then, I’ll be satisfied.
I think I’ll be buying my beerkit soon. Apparently, my Daegu friend has already tried one of the Korean kits. He made me a list of the things I’d need to puchase with the kit, and he told me about his tribulations.
Also, I’m wondering “What happened to this guy?” When I first met him in Korea, he was planning his Tran-Siberian trip. He loved exploring. He was blogging. But since he returned to Korea, he seems so institutionalized (if that’s the right word). He has no real desire to try anything new or break out of his daily routine. He doesn’t blog anymore. He wants to change jobs, but he doesn’t want to leave the neighborhood. He has a girlfriend, and I know she’s a factor. (The way he acted around her made me gag.) For some reason, the flame is burning out on him.
I may have found an iTunes work around. (You remember my previous gripe about the mp3 players.) The solution may be YamiPod. It’s a small application that will run off the iPod and allow you to have functional access to your iPod library. I’ll test it out tonight.
I finished playing Sonic Chronicles on the Nintendo DS. Man, that was brutal. I finished playing the game for the sake of finishing it, but it wasn’t that fun. The gameplay, the battles, and story were all weak. Time to try something new.
I can’t wait for the new WordPress 2.7 update. This is the blog software I use. The new dashboard looks cleaner, more efficient, and functional than its current state.
Today, I’m going to hit E-Mart or Lotte for some pepero. I’ve heard stories of Korean teachers seizing pepero in the classroom. But I’ll hand some out to the cool kids.
Lastly, I was watching a TV program, and they were baking a large cookie. Or I thought they were baking a large cookie. They were putting cookie dough in a pan, but actually they were putting cookie dough on top of a cake. It was cookie dough for icing! Why didn’t I think of that? Cookie dough icing, YUM!
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