Cracking my spine, a nearly 4 hour CoH match and more

Last week I cracked my spine. Did you ever crack your spine before? I'm not talking about the Bane breaks Batman's back in Dark Knight Rises, it's just a simple cracking of the spine that was the most frightening sound I ever heard from within my body. Maybe for some people it's normal, but it really freaked me out. That's probably because of the circumstances of how it happened, and it happened when I was asleep. The nightmares have become more frequent lately and in earlier nights I would wake up in cold sweat or my breathing was too high, to the point when I cracked my spine, I woke up very suddenly and my stomach went skyward and I gasped for air quite loudly. That's when I heard the crack and I tell you, it's not a sound I want to hear again.

Thankfully, it wasn't serious. The first thing I remember doing was checking my limbs to see if I was paralyzed, and all seemed well. Now that it's been a few days, I noticed some strange things due to the cracking of my spine. For one thing, I've not had those aches and pains on my upper body, and because my right collar bone has almost no muscles linked to my neck (nearly my entire right shoulder is broken), I used to have severe neck pain but not anymore. One side effect I do see was my thinking had been erratic, there were times when the information flows too fast, and other times where I felt lost, as if I had to do something but felt no urge to do it. Some of you might have noticed my sudden increase in participation in the Vivid Red Operation thread at Animesuki over the weekend, which was linked to this. Searching online yields mixed results, to some it is a good thing, to others it is a warning sign, as much as it felt good, I don't really want to go through that again. I still can't think straight and I go to sleep paranoid of it happening again. Though I think it is unlikely, last week was too strange a week. The weather was a lot colder than I thought it would be, and I ran up a little cold, and my nose was stuffed for a few days, so that might have contributed to my inability to breathe properly.

As if my weekend wouldn't get any weirder, I was playing a casual game of Company of Heroes Skirmish, and if you ever wondered how scrambled my mind was during this time, this ought to give a clear picture:

That's a 3 hour 51 minute match right there against the AI. Sure, many folks will say the AI is easy to beat, but not when I played. For some reason, I was off my game, I could never hold my ground on the only road into my territory, and when the expert AI double teams you with 2 Airborne commanders, it's a miserable hell. They frequently did back-to-back bombing runs, they'd drop anti-tank guns as if it's all they got, and I had to use mortar fire strikes just to burn them out. That went on so long, I only wanted to play a simple session to see if my thinking power was affected by the spine cracking, but for more than 3 hours, I was totally embarrassed and I had enough.

I had to end it as quickly as possible, and with my AI buddy doing nothing but spawning StuH's and losing them, I had to Hummel smash the nearest enemy base as much as I could (above). The only other time I played a nearly 4 hours match was when I had my old Sony lappy, and it ended up that way partly due to the laggy graphics. Now I know I really ought to take it easy if my mind is muddy, and NO GAMING IF YOU HAD A SUDDEN HEALTH CHANGE XD

War against mosquitos

I don't like mosquitos. There are some bugs I like, and some that I don't like, but mosqy's are definitely in the "do not want" camp. And for some reason these guys just want to bite the heck out of me. There were jokes about these local mosqy's wanting some foreigner blood, but I've just about had enough of them. Armed with my trusty electric swatter and my hand, I set out on a holy war against these pests.

Even the committee in my neighborhood caught wind of the sudden rise in mosqy's, and they set out to gas the place. I don't know what it was they were gassing, but that stuff seemed to have worked. Unfortunately for me, the mosqy's sought refuge indoors where the gas was less. My swatter has no effect when I'm at my lappy, and in the magnified image above, that mosqy was killed when it invaded my personal space. What happened was business as usual for me, but that dude was buzzing around my hand. In my surprise I rolled my chair back a little and the dumb mosqy landed on my trackball mouse. In 1 or 2 seconds my mind was a speedy mess: I could make a break for my swatter for a sure kill, but it would notice my movement and fly away, or I could risk my already hurt right hand and hulk smash. The end result:

I had to smash it. I'm not sure how fast I am, I know for sure I'm a terrible fighting game player, but these mosqy's are smart and I wasn't going to take a chance, but what this particular mosquito did was freaky. It was the first time in my life I saw a mosquito walking. I mean it was walking with those dangly legs, desecrating my royal trackball with it's bendy legs, I was half furious, half awe struck at watching something walk for the first time in my life after having seen them be flyers for years. By the way I have been a trackball user for 13 years.

Let's go modding

I did mention in an earlier post about mods, so here goes one. HP designed some really bad laptops. Strangely, I only notice this in their AMD lappy's, I don't really see this particular design in Intel based machines, which did lead me at one point to speculate that perhaps there was a conspiracy where Intel paid off these manufacturers to cripple AMD machines with poor ventilation, because I seriously doubt a manufacturer would be this dumb to adopt this particular fan design that HP used for their DV7 AMD-based series.

What you see is a downward facing exhaust fan for one of life's most hottest mobile chips, the Turion 2 Ultra series. From this angle you can already see how stupid this design is for a chip that idles at 59c (800mhz) and gets as hot as 83c (2.5ghz). Explain to me how a chip this hot is supposed remain cool when the exhaust is not only thin, but pointing downward where, you know, the surface of where the laptop is sitting on. As you can see above, the grills are extremely fat as well, prompting me to cut off some of them, and then I proceeded to carve out from the chrome lined part to the rest of where the cut grills were connected to. I wish I did a before and after pic, but I was fed up with the heat this machine was spitting out, and with permission from the owner of this lappy I wasted no time in cutting it. It paid off too, heat is down at least -3c from the usual temps, and for the first time in my life with this machine I saw the green checkmark in Speedfan.

First time a green mark. It had always been a fire icon, indicating how hot the temps are.

I paid a price though: my hobby knife slipped on the first carving and drove deep into my finger. Till now this cut remains, and it hurts when I touch it.

I also have to clean the laptop regularly as dust gets trapped very easily in that exhaust vent. Before I cut the grills, I painstakingly pulled out big clumps of blackened dust that was caught behind the grills, very very poor design HP, and that time you were one of the biggest PC makers, I sure hope you didn't hurt AMD's sales by designing fan exhausts like this, AMD laptop reviews would always mention the heat. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if I have to replace the thermal!

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....