My week of November 6th, 2013

I had a little issue earlier in the week, about my ISP and the Nintendo eShop for the 3DS. Long story short, my wireless carrier prohibited large file downloads, making Resident Evil Revelations un-downloadable. Yeah, don't ask why I'm using 3G internet to download it, but it's my only internet access method, so I had to.... use a proxy. Yep, I shoved a proxy into the wifi settings on the 3DS, and got the entire game thanks to a proxy. As you might imagine, this left me completely unable to play my 3DS, so I did what any sane person would do: marathon anime! I finally am current with a number of my shows, such as Arpeggio and Golden Time, first time in a long time I watched so many eps in a row :D

Which was a nightmare because I stayed up late at night babysitting the connection most of the time, as I had to let it run night and day. This of course kept me awake for many hours, many much more hours, leading my left eye to get very, very sore. So sore, that the second night of downloading the game, an eyelash was caught in my left eye, and I wasn't interested in letting it itch me up, so I used the old wash and rinse with water to get the hair out. I then went to sleep and woke up a few hours later with some pain in my head. I naively thought "oh no another headache", but it was much worse. This finally confirms it, I can't let a large amount of water get to my eye anymore, I ran into this problem last time when I found out I cannot cry anymore or else it's instant pain, but I thought that was mostly the tears, now it seems like any sort of liquid cannot come into contact with my left eye. If you're wondering how I even take showers, I had to change that too, keeping my head mostly down, and have the water come down my forehead or around my eyelashes, I've become so paranoid because I'm still traumatized by the unforgettable pain I felt in my left eye during the incident. Trust me, I really thought I'd lose it forever, that's not a trauma to easily overcome.

The reason why I find that worse than my spinal-induced headaches, is because when I have the pain in my left eye, it's inside my head. Back in I can feel this really throbbing pain, and because it's inside my head, applying Tiger Balm or any other ointment/painkiller never helped. Not even an icepack helped. This is now something I just have to avoid completely, because there's no painkiller that can soothe it now. The only remedy I found was wrapping my eye tightly, and leave it closed as long as I can, which also means lowering my rapid eye movement to a standstill. This is now at the top of my list of things to check on when I schedule a checkup at the hospital (whenever that will be).

I then came across some bad news regarding that Seagate Hard Drive I have been keeping alive, the one at 2% health (which oddly went up to 4% just recently). I have to finally retire the drive after 6 years of service, which it just accumulated too many bad sectors since I got my Desktop (went over 2000 bad sectors in less than a month). This drive served me well, if only for a short amount of time, but more importantly, this was the drive that held everything that I did in Germany, from my fansub work, the backups, and pretty much my entire usage history of my time in Germany during 2006-2007, I think it did well, considering it didn't take a dramatic major dump like my WD 1TB did.

Then that typhoon came by, which I hadn't known the seriousness of that until that wind, which was so strong, it slammed my window shut. I found that particularly interesting because it's a rusty window, something you need to put your whole body weight into just to close it, and the wind just boop, slam. I'm very thankful my area didn't get the brunt of it, and my prayers go out to those that felt it's full force, I've experienced many of the storms here over the past few years (particularly the flooding of 2009), and I know it's not a picnic. I've not really spent much time online during that weekend, but I did come across this link at Amazon, so if you can, give a donation, no matter the amount. I really think these folks in the Philippines who are homeless because of the storm need to at least know that people care.

http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=amb_link_356995202_2?ie=UTF8&node=1297793011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=right-csm-1&pf_rd_r=1JA8C2Y82H2FR3S9PP5E&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1656429182&pf_rd_i=507846

Trust me, it's not a good thing losing what little you have, so stay strong, citizens of the Philippines!

Let's take a break from all the madness

Well it finally couldn't take it anymore.

Last time we saw this drive, it had 66 bad sectors, and 632 weak sectors. I guess making it a boot drive was a bad idea :<

That... took it's time escalating.

Last Sunday was the first time since 2005 that I've drank wine. And it's as nasty as ever. Personally, I don't like wine, never did, don't mind me I'll just mix me some Tang and be on my way.

It's better up there :P

1 year later, has it changed for the better? My new computer, my health & more

Almost a year ago, my left eye was shot by some glue. That was a life changing moment as I was in the midst of saving up for a new laptop. After that, everything seemed to have fallen apart, my laptop plans were changed, then ultimately scrapped, then my 1TB hard drive went down, perhaps the most shocking thing to happen as I calculated it to be the least likely thing to break on me, especially considering I didn't keep it plugged 24/7. The glue thing had a higher chance of happening since I use almost one pack a month for my hobby, but after that hdd died, I had to change a lot of things. I put Anime aside, I tried to focus on keeping my health in check, and just when I thought it was okay, my left eye actually isn't, and now I can't cry without pain. That's when I decided I had to get myself back up again, and an idea I had for Android eventually happened, and I did it.

During that time I was also focusing on work, and I managed to complete 2 primary objectives in helping the company. That led to me being able to get my first new hdd, the 750GB. And thanks to some donations, I was able to finally get a new computer.

Specs are AMD A4-3400 2.7Ghz, 4GB DDRIII RAM, 600W PSU. I don't think I'm missing any details, it's my first time using a desktop since February 2006 so I'm just going by how cheap this thing is. A little over $100 USD, which is not including a hard drive, monitor or optical drive. Those were assembled from other areas, the monitor provided as the last solution in exchange for me to return the laptop I was borrowing, the hard drives I am surprised to be able to use my 2.5 inch drives, and the optical drive ripped out of an external ODD unit. Hm, technically, my desktop isn't really a desktop, I am using laptop drives and an external optical drive :P

I am surprised at how much this computer flies. Maybe it's not so much to some people, but I had just come off years of laptops, my most recent experience being an AMD Turion X2 Ultra 2.5 Ghz with 4GB DDRII RAM, which was slow apparently because of the hard drive. Or maybe it isn't, I think so because my 750GB has a nearly 80MB/s write speed, and that's a 5400 RPM drive. Of course, this being my first time with a Desktop in a long time, I've already encountered some problems that seasoned desktop builders would know about before hand: My 750GB, it parks. Er, I'm not sure how to explain it, but I know what the reviewers meant when they say "my hard drive parks", and I believe that is when the hard drive makes clicking sounds as if it is going idle, in this case it is "parking". Which made me realize I'm probably not supposed to be using it as a boot drive. So currently I am in the process of clearing my old external 250GB 3.5inch drive and shoving that into my desktop, even though its SMART health is at 2% and several files cannot be copied, I've become too paranoid to risk my hard drives for anything, and this 750GB wasn't easy to come by so I am going to put my all into using a dead drive for what its worth. Hopefully that will hold up.

Seagate FreeAgent 250GB 7200RPM Barracuda, if it was healthier I would consider myself lucky >_<

The other thing I hadn't known about, well, searching online, it's not even common knowledge, is that in order to overclock, I need a DVI cable. Which I don't have, it would explain why I tried to overclock, and while the desktop was booting, I didn't see anything on screen. I had no idea a simple change in video displaying could affect overclocking. Back when I last had a desktop, all I had to do was up the FSB in the BIOS and boom, higher temperatures :P Well, at least temperatures aren't a problem here, as this APU runs surprisingly cool (remember, I had just come from a AMD Turion which burns on load at over 80c). As for gaming, I would say it was considerably better than the Mobility Radeon 4530 that was in that laptop, but I'm not entirely sure as I was only throwing old titles at it (CoH, Crysis 1). I sure would like to try the newer titles, but that's for a later money happy time :P

AMD A4 WEI versus AMD Turion M620 WEI

Overall, the only thing left that perplexes me greatly is why did I not think of this earlier? I had been so fixated on bringing my work everywhere I go, that only a laptop would do, but I hadn't realized a desktop can also use a 2.5Inch drive, so if I need to jet, just put the drives back into their enclosures and away I go. And for less than $200, what else do I have to lose? I honestly wouldn't have thought of this desktop idea if I wasn't in such terrible shape last year. It's funny but, last year I learned that, a large amount of money doesn't solve the simplest of problems, it was only when I had my back to a wall with a wall right at my nose did I realize was, if I ultimately have to move around, my hard drives were more important than the computer itself. The computer can be replaced with just $100, but the hard drive not only has a price, it contains priceless information that cannot be bought. So I'm not all regrettable about how crappy my year was for 2012, because I have lived my life knowing that "only through pain are the most important of lessons learned for life", and this was a lesson I am glad to have learned. (to get an idea of my "grand" plan, it was to spend $300 on a laptop and import it over at the cost of almost $200, bringing that to $500. Yup, great plan >_>)

I also wanted to personally thank the donators for their contributions. I... would like to thank you by name, but I don't share people's real names without their consent and I have no idea who is who as I contribute to several fields at several forums, so I don't even know for sure, but you know who you are, and you have my gratitude. I look forward to continuing requests left over from last year, and hopefully I can fully get back into the swing of things. This year I have more glasses than I have eyes, and every time I use glue I am sure to have at least something covering my eyes :D

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: