My left eye

I cannot cry anymore. That's the sad discovery I made last month November, and I believe it has to do with the tear duct in my left eye.

It started when I was watching the Strike Witches movie, and I was so happy, I had no idea it was going to be released last month and after the grueling 2 months of worrying about my 1TB hard drive, I was in desperate need of something to be happy about. And I was really happy to see the girls again, so happy I shed tears of joy, I missed the girls, I missed their pantsu, and when we first see Micchan, I was waiting, waiting and I cheered when her crotch came on screen, oh I loved it :D

Strike Witches means so much to me, when season 2 aired back in 2010, it was one of my most followed that Summer, and the girls make me so happy. But when it was all over, and I wiped those tears, I felt something was wrong. I was having that feeling whenever I feel a headache coming on, that all to familiar feeling I've felt many a time before, but this one was different. The pain was concentrated on the left side of my head around my eye, and I thought maybe I am having a headache, and I took it easy the rest of the day. Until the next day came by, and I still had the pain, I thought maybe it's one of those 2 day headaches I used to have, and I was watching less anime and sleeping more. This is when I went out that weekend, and the following week of my great Android kernel milestone I knew something was dead wrong. This pain was persisting. It was getting so bad, my eye started to hurt just like how it did back in April, and I then I knew right away, that it was my tear duct.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but when the glue sealed my eye, it was a very intense pain, it was the most painful thing I ever felt while conscious, and the one thing I'll never forget: I was crying my eyes out. I think it was a normal reaction the eyes do should a foreign substance come into contact with the eye, but my eye was really pouring those tears as if to eradicate the glue in my eye. And it hurt, I remember clutching my head and I wanted to scream, but the pain was too much to even say anything. And somehow, maybe I became traumatized by that incident, in that whenever I cry again, that pain I felt in April come haunting me and severely demoralizing me. After I found this out, any attempt to form tears in my eye yields the same result; the pain in my eye. So that time when I bought my 750GB hard drive, I was looking, searching the nearest drug store for an eyepatch, I thought if there's one thing I can laugh at about this whole ordeal, if I can find an eyepatch like that girl in Chuunibyu, maybe I can take a pic of me twirling my fingers while wearing that thing. But I couldn't find any. In fact there was nothing for the eyes, they had all sorts of bandages imaginable, but nothing for the eye! What the hell kind of drug store/pharmacy is that that doesn't have medical care for ones eyes? (it's Watsons by the way)

This hit me hard, as I'm a rather emotional person, and it is one of the reasons why I don't like to see a girl cry, because it makes me feel real bad. And now, I have to learn to crush those emotions so that I never shed a tear again. That's impossible, the only way I can do that is to become an annoying bastard who takes pleasure in giving other people pain, completely the opposite of my nature. I don't want to do that, and not to mention there is anime with great drama enough to make me cry too, now I can't watch those?

I can no longer spend more than 14 hours awake. I can't do those 18 hour days I so loved to do a few years back, my life has changed. It's this experience that gave me an immense amount of respect for those people out in the world who lost a part of their body, be it an arm, or a leg, and people who need to wear an eyepatch for the rest of their lives, I have mad respect for you folks. You don't ever let it weigh you down, and no matter how painful the pain is, you're still alive, and that's the most precious thing I am very appreciative of right now. I may need to change the way I live my life from now on, but at least I'm alive. I can still enjoy seeing the things I love to look at, and even though it's a lesser amount than before, I'm happy to at least see something instead of permanently losing my eye.

Nov 23 - Dec 9, two weeks of Happyness and despair

On the week leading up to Nov 23, I was going to return to full form and resume my bloggyness. Unfortunately, my cold was getting worse and if there's one thing I hate, that is letting my health spiral out of control. November 23rd was supposed to be my celebration, which so happened to be Thanksgiving Day as well, but being the mangatron is not a rosy life.

My down times started when I went out that weekend before Nov 23, and my main purpose of that trip was to see prices of external hard drives out there so I can make plans for the end of the month. My destination was SM Megamall, and I was horrified to learn of the pricing there. In all the shops I looked in at their Cyberzone (a collection of electronics stores in one place), the average prices for a 500GB drive was PHP3999,99, simply speaking that's $100. One hundred one's for just 500GB? That's pathetic, and the reason why I was surprised was because in CDRKing's website, that's the price for a 1TB, and the CDRKing at SM Megamall had 320GB's over php3000, and I saw one person buying that, my god I felt sorry for them, being ripped off at that mall. I know for a fact it's that particular mall, because CDRKing wasn't alone in those exorbitant prices, other shops selling Buffalo drives had the same ridiculous pricing.

Me not being able to speak the local language makes things harder (yeah not every store speaks english), as I was not sure if they have a "price guarantee" like in the USA. I thought of showing them their site and get the prices down to it, but they didn't have any bigger than 500GB >__>

When the month came to an end, I later knew why it was that particular mall with inflated prices, as I sought out my local CDRKing and their prices were the same as their website. I didn't get any donations (despite hurrying that Android fix ~__~), but I could not pass this opportunity much, I needed a hard drive now as 2 months went by with me stagnating with my 1TB, it was either I end my contributions to the online community or I take the chance, and thankfully I was able to borrow enough for the Toshiba 750GB hard drive (not exactly my proudest moment asking for money >__<).

It didn't take me long to open the enclosure. Full size 2.5inch drive detected! Eat that, WD and your proprietary trite.

Since my Expresscard only has 1 USB3.0 port, the Toshiba drive had to go USB2, which wasn't bad actually. The difficult part was getting whatever data I could get off the 1TB drive, and that took a mother loving 4 days, 2 days at only 12 hours, the latter 2 days I went round the clock copying via SuperCopier, a nice proggy by the way. That was when my new found happiness was starting to turn sour: I had an elaborate plan, see: I couldn't afford a new 1TB drive, no way was I going to sacrifice my health again, and since all I could get was 750GB, I was placing my last bit of faith in WD and their data lifeguard tools to write zero's to the drive once I copied what I could from it. My first problem was I was losing free space fast, 750GB wasn't going to cut it, and I needed backups fast, I hated playing triage with my data and "luckily" I was able to acquire 2 company drives at 60GB each. One drive died when I started to copy to it, and the other one was Mac formatted. My troubles kept piling up when I found out I couldn't copy Windows Mobile ROM kitchen's from the 1TB drive, and I had to say my final farewell to Windows Mobile development, at the hand of Western Digital and their defectively designed [external] drives.

Investigating my 1TB drive, 2 months later

Earlier this month I finally got my USB 3.0 ExpressCard... card. I say finally because it took over a month to finally get to me, from the time I ordered it to the time I realized something was wrong, to the eventual inquiry to my post office and what do you know, they had it and didn't notify me. Which is weird, they know who I am, they know my M.O., and it wasn't held at customs, they just... fell asleep I guess.

After plugging it in, setting it up, the big result is what you see below. Here's what the test intended:

Phase 1 Android development complete

Well it took 2 months, but I finally got Android to consistently fully boot on the LG Fathom VS750 phone.

Was a rather bumpy ride actually, not only was I a complete noob, not to mention the ongoing problems with my 1TB drive, but I've got no C programming skills, I don't know jack about Linux, and Android, on a Windows Mobile phone? The last part isn't a surprise but my oh my did I learn quite a bit from this.

My problems started when the source I am using, the only source on the net, was half baked. It was using code from Linux kernel 2.6.32 and 2.6.35. Now I, a complete noob in all things Linux, had some left over mentality from my Windows Mobile cooking days, which dealt with dll's for drivers and registry lines for the rest of the OS. So if say for WM, you wanted to cook an HTC program into a Samsung phone, one thing to keep in mind was dependancies, that is the files a .exe requires to run. It's not like that with Linux. In fact, if I had to sum up Linux kernels as short as possible, I would say a Linux kernel is made up of a whole bunch of text. I'm not kidding, we're not talking about dll's, exe's or large files, it's practically files with a lot of text in them that basically say "this is the power driver" and "it uses this much voltage" and so on. I was rather surprised by this, and the fact that it took me 2 months to get where I'm at now shows that that's a lot of text I had to read, and watching terminal compile my kernels was also important as it spews out errors and warnings which are critical to compiling a working kernel.

It's a fun process though, and, which is actually kind of easy, to be honest. I mean, during the Windows Mobile days, it was very hard to find drivers for a particular chipset, CPU and such, all I have to say is "HTC class action" and old WM'ers would know what I mean. In a way, this is what Android is about, open source, and it makes things quite easy to solve oneself should they require better video drivers, or more CPU customization, etc. I know things would have been a lot better if I learned C, and maybe it wouldn't have taken me 2 months if I wasn't having space problems, and heck, I'm still bitter about Ubuntu's usability, but at least I made progress.

While shunning some other projects. But now that I got the meat of the problems solved, it's back to Photoshop XD (as soon as I do something about this cold I have >__>)

Oktober has to be my strangest month yet...

Since my last post, my life has been a weird ride. Which is rather funny, every month so far has been a typical life for me, overwork myself, then get overrun by anime in my free time, except for this month...

Every other battery I've ripped open has been green except this HP one...

 For the last week and a half, it was half fun, half miserable. On the one hand, my laptop battery finally died, leaving me with no back up power option. The worst part? It was during this time when this country decided to do not one, not two, but 3 blackouts within 3 days, with the third one being a ruinous 3 hours. One of these blackouts occurred when a tropical storm passed by, leaving me on edge for the most of the time, as I lost work, had downloads cut off, to the point where I just said screw it, I had to postpone not only work, but play as well (had to halt Android development as well as really falling behind on the current anime season. I never considered getting a UPS before because hey, which travelling fellow even has one. I don't care if I have to toss it when I leave this country, but I really have to get one now.

This is what happens when I've got nothing else to do... my first time seeing a square donut, by the way. I seriously need to think of something better to do when I am at my utmost boredom.

 Nothing's all bad about it, as I actually managed to convinced myself there's more to my life than anime and work. That's when I spent more time than I usually did at manga sites, hey, if a download ever occurred, it'd be small files right? Good for the phone too, so blackout or what, I don't waste any of my precious bandwidth. And quite some stuff I missed during my Android days, which I post later in my recommendation posts I plan to start doing from now on. Also, I found myself playing games more often than I had hoped, so many I stockpiled over the past few years, it's one of the reasons why I haven't played much (if any) recent games, as I still am trying to control my habit of buying anything that has a cute anime girl in it XD (biggest regret: I couldn't afford Max Payne 3, the game I waited years for. Not like my lappy can play it anyways...)

One of the finest pics I've ever seen of Gym Leader Elesa

 Which brings me to Pokemon Black and White, which I've recently been playing after finding out there's a sequel. Man I gotta say if this series ever has anything going for it, it's the increasing amount of cute girls, and the best part, pixiv is heavily into them. From Elesa(Kamitsure) to Cynthia(Shirona), I especially like B/W's ponytail girl and B/W2's twintail. I tell you there's a lot of great art, and it really actually got me to start getting used to their Japanese names (I thought "Hey, that girl looks like Cynthia, but her name is Shirona?" :P)

999, one of the DS games I should not have put down last year. How dare that guy grab the twin tail cutie...

I've gotten back into other games as well as finally playing the PSP for real this time. Remember how I had to dump fighting games after my wrist injury? Well, I've tried it out again, much to my horror the PSP has quite the badly designed d-pad. I came up with a proper fix that isn't like the one online, which I'll probably post later on. I did find myself modding things as well, anything to get my mind of impending blackouts.

One thing I was fortunate to hold in my hands recently was an iPhone4. It's not mine, it was for a client, but one thing I wanted to talk about was this is the first time I actually really held such a premium-feel phone (in a non-shopping experience). Strange that I didn't want to have anything to do with it back when I did that iPad thing at the mall, but this was the first time that I actually liked what I was holding. I gotta say that phone has a really nice feel to it, it's too bad the rest of the phone didn't like me, to the software, which I absolutely hated due to the inability to actually dig deep into the specs out of the box, to the capacitive screen, which is not really a gripe with the iPhone, but rather all capacitive phones out there, as these screens do not like me at all. I don't know why, I had theorized that the times I was electrocuted prior to using a capacitive screen for the first time might be the culprit. Other than that, I have no idea... sucks too, I've given up on my iPhone 3G, and the HTC HD2. I've not pursued a capacitive screen since (it's really bad, what takes a person one tap, takes me 3-4. Imagine the typing horrors)

I don't fullscreen much, but OniAi is one series this season that I just have to :D

Fun times, tough times. I almost had a second headache the week following my first meltdown. Heck, can you believe someone hijacked my thread at XDA posting a site with warez while claiming the work of another was their own? Strange world we live in....

A week in the life of me

To say I am tired is an understatement. In fact, I'm so mind wiped right now it's schway man. So what did my past two weeks consist of? Well, since I can't access my 1TB hard drive for now, I wanted to keep my mind busy. Anime, well, this new season is starting pretty slow, but there are some good apples here and there. But it's not helping, and when I think about the other Summer shows I kept on my 1TB and have yet to watch, kinda puts a damper on things. I figured if I have to sell my phone some day, why not do something with it first before I have any more regrets.