(2004-07-13)
 
Second day of being unemployed.  Still feeling good.  Yee ha!!!
 
But frankly, it was not too productive yesterday, as I only did a few things.  I know I shouldn't always judge my life by the tasks I accomplish, which is a common pitfall among men, but ... the heck.  If don't watch out, I may watch the best moment of my life in some wasteful activates.
 
And as a second thought, it was really not that bad.  I mean, I picked up my plane ticket, brought 2 power extension chords for mom, had praise team B band practice, shopped around Golden Shopping Center for Emily's 256 Mb MP3 players and taught my nephew Ho On some alphabets.  That was not too bad for the first day.
 
Speaking of my nephew Ho On, he's so cute but can be distracting when he's around you doing work.  Like right now he's in my room messing with my guitar. 
 
I figured out that if I grow mustache, I will look more like I am wasted.  Must keep that in mind when needed (to get sympathy from others for whatever reason) :-E
 
 
Video and audio codec on Windows can be very messy these days, particularly when there are multiple variation for even a single codec like Divx.  And recently I found some very mysterious about video codec of videos that I downloaded from BT: somehow the Divx codec I downloaded from the official codec site is NOT as good as the Divx and Xvid Codec that come with the Nero 6.3.1.13.  In fact, the official Divx codec gave me some strange JPEG compression error kind of problem, while the Nero codec (kicked in after I removed the Divx official codec) doesn't seem to have any problem.  Strange indeed.
 
 
Things that I couldn't do for a long while can now be done!  I finally spent sometime to watch a Japanese animation called "Paranoia Agent".  It's from the same director of a nice animation "Perfect Blue",  And just like "Perfect Blue", "Paranoia Agent" has some strange and interesting character, with the same suspend and weird atmosphere that made "Perfect Blue" so juicy.  I got 13 episodes from BT, and very much looking forward to consume all of them very soon.  (I am still watch the Episode 2 by the way).  You can find more information about this animation at http://www.mousou.tv/ .
 
Today's theme my day seems to be "play, play, play" (hey, sometime I just have to loosen myself, right?  I've been too uptight with my schedule for too long anyway).  I just spent sometime (1.5 hours I guess) trying to figure out how to make the GameBoy Advance ROM "Mario VS Donkey Kong" to work with my GBA Flash card.  I was stuck for almost a month, but then when I read the Emuboard (http://www.emuboards.com/invision/index.php) a while ago, I found that there's tool called sRAM-it 2.31 (http://gbatemp.m4d.sm/index.php?act=ST&f=13&t=17695), I tired it and it worked great.  And it's also very easy to use.  After download and install it, run the application, select your ROM and select "Auto Detect" from menu.  Finally, save the patched ROM.  Now the ROM will have the "[P]" mark on the file name, and it will totally work on my F2A GBA Flash card.  The key here is to pick the right Save type, and so far the Auto Detect Works pretty well.
 
 
I did do something productive today.  A lot of time I was spent on trying to find some education software for my 2 year 4 months old nephew.  I found a freeware that teaches him alphabet with voice.  He seemed to like it a lot.  The only problem is that he kept randomly slamming on the keyboard, and that caused the education application to either quit or hidden by other windows and applications that my nephew accidentally triggered.  The worst part was that he might hit the power or sleep mode key on the keyboard, and suddenly the system went to sleep mode.
 
After exploring a while, I found a simply solution: I pull out all the special keys like Power, Windows, Sleep, ESC and so on from the keyboard.  That way, no matter how randomly he hit the keyboard, he will stay in the educational program.  Based on my observation in the last half an hour, it worked out pretty well.