Been a bit since I last updated. Many things have happened since. Last week was nothing unusual. It went by really quickly. There's been a lot to do at work, because one of the big projects at work finally got some more funding so they've been going full speed ahead and they've got a lot of web work for me to be doing. I usually tended to do things slowly or not at all, so there wouldn't be days where I wasn't working. But now it's pretty crazy. I've been working most days with zero breaks until the end of the day, or I'll work until 4:15 or so, and just leave for the day, rather do my lunch then haha. It works though, I'd rather just get a lot done, so I feel accomplished and then have a nice break or leave early.

emilie  and I hung out on Thursday. We've started playing World of Warcraft. We're humans on Turylon. I'm a mage and she's a paladin. We're definitely having fun with it. We sing the Billy Maclure song, mostly because we are questing in a mine (Jasperload and Fargo Deep) hehe. We're so silly. We both bought little cat pets too, to match the ones we have in real life :) I think we'll be shortly going to Westfall since we're pretty much done in Elwynn Forest. I'm having a blast with it. I could work on my 56 Orc but, I really just don't have time at the moment.

I've been watching Death Note too. It's fantastic! I really really love it! I think I might buy the manga at some point too. It's really really great stuff! :)

Today, not much happened, I watched some Death Note, and hung at the barn. I am going to be sponsoring one of my friends classes at the big Morgan horse show in Massachusetts this summer. That's really great, she's a really good rider.

Tonight, my plans are study Japanese and probably more Death Note, I really like how I am starting to understand some of the words written & spoken in anime, TV and movies. Hehe.

Had a really nice weekend. But before I go into that...

Thursday, I hung out with emilie It was our CSI night, of course it happened to be the NCAA basketball crap so we ended up watching Bedtime Stories instead. Funny movie.

On Friday, I got a bunch of work done, I had a quick meeting, rather almost consulting appointment in-which I got paid my normal shit pay to go over some really super basic OS X stuff, and then some questions about procedures and how things work at UVM. It only lasted about an hour which was really nice, because I had like 50 other things to do before my afternoon meeting. My afternoon meeting was lovely as usual. I really like my functional supervisor, she's awesome. I also like the guy who works with her, he's really great too. Very cool people...I wish I worked a lot closer with them rather then where I am now, but whatever. So Friday...night...nothing really special happened. I think I worked on some coding, but I really can't remember.

Saturday, I pretty much worked on the computer all afternoon, it was so nice out too, I worked outside with my MacBook. Then Emilie called and we got together. She was just going to come over to pickup the futon but we ended up umm yeah, well we also got some Chinese food and watched Ace Venture: When Nature Calls. We love that movie haha. So then I stayed up late after she left just working on a couple things.

Sunday, emilie and I met up in the AM and we drove up to Matusuri which is this Japanese Cultural Festival (which I assume they hold annually, but I am not sure). Got there, check things out, they had tons of cool things, paper crane folding, bonsai trees, fish rolling, food, tea ceremony, demos, martial arts, antiques, tons of things! Anime, DDR, manga, etc...We bought 3 packs of origami paper. Then we went out to lunch at the Asiana Noodle House. She really wanted to try it out since I had told her how amazing it was. So we ended up getting beef, udon, and a Japanese Soy broth. It was WICKED good haha. I love the stuff there. Then we came back to the house and started getting World of Warcraft installed on a couple computers so we could play. Of course it ended up that I needed to download like 4GBs worth of patches, so we just got that going and then I brought her back to her truck and we parted ways. I head to barn to get my chores done and she headed home. Didn't do too much that night, just relaxed.

Today, I woke up, finished up the Warcraft patches, and headed out to get my chores done at the barn. Then Emilie and I met up (she had another job interview this morning, which seemed to go well from what she told me) and grabbed some food from the general store. Came home and played like an hour or so of Warcraft. We went with humans, she's a paladin and I am a mage. We're on Turylon (I think that's the spelling haha). Then we kind of had a mini nap, and then she headed home.

So I guess the rest of the afternoon, I might practice some more paper cranes, maybe some Japanese, and then I might work on some coding and/or Dirty Jobs :)

I've been downloading massive amounts of anime since getting access to that new server. For $5/month you cannot go wrong. It's already paid for itself 50x over. I hit a pretty good road block though when it came to converting the MKV files.

After trying out literally 20 different video conversion tools, I finally found a decent yet painfully long string of applications (which also span over multiple operating systems) to get the job done. First I convert them to an MP4 format using Visual Hub in OS X, then I take the original MKV files and bring them into MKVExtract (on Windows XP) to get the subtitle files extracted. So far they've been .ASS files (ha ha, laugh it up, I have no idea why they chose that file extension, they just did...). Then I bring them into Subtitle Workshop which is also in Windows XP to convert them into SRT subtitle files. Then I bring them back into OS X and into a program called ViddyUp! along with that MP4 file and then I stick the MP4 and the SRT together and get my final result. It's definitely worth the time and effort though.

Yesterday we got snow tires on Emilie's car. it's a good thing cause she got stuck in the most simple places the day before. Very sad...We went out for breakfast to this great little dinner (quite packed though). Delicious food! Then we came home and I took a nape for a bit. By the time I woke up it was time to go back out and get her car. Then we went to dinner at the pizza place in Montpelier. As usual great food. Then we went to this little toy story right near the pizza place and got some magic rocks and this pirate treasure archeological dig thing.

Came home and did the magic rocks (haven't done those in so many years, I love em!) and Emilie and I unearthed a skeleton hugging his treasure. Believe it or not we both got wounded, even with the wooden dowel they provided to dig the guy out. Funny. But we eventually got him completely unearthed. I will post some pictures of it later.

After that I tried to get Emilie setup in Parallels to play Rose Online or Maple Story but both failed, probably because the video drivers in Parallels are crap. So we basically just watched some Chobits and went to bed around 2AM.

I woke up this morning around 9AM, emilie got up around 11:30AM. Ha. I worked on setting her up with a real PC while she was sleeping. Unfortunately the video card in the real PC is crap so we ended up getting a BFG 7300GT 512MB card and that worked great.

So I taught her to play Rose Online and she seems to think it is cool. I like it, it's different from World of Warcraft, I have a lot more fun with it right now. I actually setup my own server, I dunno if I posted about that. I do wish they had Linux code though so I could run it from one of my "live" servers.

So we also hit up PetsMart, got kitty some more food and kitty litter. Also got some batteries and another CD binder for my XBOX360 games. A nice big Lego castle too, and since it was open box we got a nice discount on it too! I've been building it all day long, it's done now. I'll post some images later.

I've not had much time to play Maple Story or Rose Online myself, but maybe tomorrow night when I get home from class, or maybe a bit tonight, although I feel like relaxing and watching some more Chobits. I did bring Unreal Tournament 3 and Riding Star 3 over from the Moretown server so I want to play those, especially Unreal Tournament 3.

I think I am getting Super Mario Galaxy for Christmas from my grandparents, so I'll hold off on purchasing it myself. Ryan at work got it and said it was awesome, so I cannot wait!

Back to work and class tomorrow, how fun...blech! At least I don't have to go into work on Wednesday since my car is going to be in the shop. I do have to give my presentation on Social Networking though, at least it is only to the professor though...it won't be that bad and I don't have to sit through 10 others since it'll just be me!

Alright, I'm out.

We're on our short little vacation now. I had today and tomorrow off. I won't complain one bit cause it's really nice to have any time off from work. Today I woke up around 9AM, got to sleep in a bit.

I played through most of FEAR in the morning and until about 12. I got to like chapter 8. It's a really good game. I wasn't one for how they used the burst fire more in the guns, but after I got used to it, it was okay. They had some really cool weapons in the game. One of them vaporized people into dust which was awesome. There was also a grenade launcher-like gun and a rocket launcher. The story also got more interesting as I went along, the ending was really interesting and it definitely makes me want to play the expansion pack. I actually tried to install it but it gave me some error. I think I might end up reading about it on Wikipedia instead. It'll take less time, and I have so many video games in queue that need to be played that it might be better choice.

After that, I had a shower and got ready to go to my parents. We got there and had a pretty good time. Lots of good food and stuff. My younger cousins have stepped into the world of video games. They both have Nintendo DS.

Tonight I finished up FEAR. I already talked about what I thought of it a few paragraphs up...I started in on this MMORPG I had been wanting to try for some time. It's Maple Story. I did take a few screenshots while in game. It's a pretty fun game. It's like the 3rd-4th MMORPG I've played. It's definitely different then World of Warcraft but pretty similar to Ragnarok. I do enjoy types, I just wish I had started in on them when they first started up so that I could better understand it all...I guess I just have to play it a lot more. I am a level 7 or 8 now so I have a better grasp of how the games works and stuff.

So I got a lot more anime episodes, I downloaded Death Note, Ah! My Goddess and I am getting Ai Yori Aoshi right now. Poor little Mac mini is burning up on video conversions haha emilie and I are watching some more Chobits right now. I absolutely love it. very funny stuff. Quite interesting too.

Tomorrow I've got to get Emilie to work after we drop her car off at work, after that I might go for a ride since it'll be on the way back from dropping her off. Then I'll probably work on Maple Story some more, or I will start Resident Evil for Gamecube. I've actually never played through the game. I remember my grade-school "girlfriends" Dad playing through it and I got to watch various parts, but I've never really played it myself.

Okie, I think I've said enough for one night, time to focus on Chobits!