TheLeong.com

So I’ve been looking at and playing with Flickr lately, and it seems to be a really awesome system for storing, looking at, commenting on, and sharing photos. I’m considering using it as the photo system for this site, in part because it will be easier, in part because then more people can see it, in part because then you’ll be able to comment on individual pictures, and primarily because the way I do it now, editing HTML code, is a huge pain in the butt.

I think I’ll be able to make my Pictures pages look pretty close to what I have now, with Flickr providing the strip of images on the column of thumbnails. I could even be nice and copy the descriptions into a second column so it will look almost identical to the current setup. The big difference will be, when you click on a thumbnail, instead of opening a window with the larger image, you will be taken to a Flickr page. What do you guys think of this (all 1 of you reading this)? Does anyone think I should keep doing it the way I do it, or should I go with the fad and use Flickr? I’ll probably do a Flickr-based pictures page sometime this week. You guys can tell me what you think then.

Oh ya, if you’re on Flickr, my user ID is SkullCorp. Add me as a friend if you have a Flickr account.

After driving through what seemed like a typhoon, I am now back in Bloomington. Started off a pretty lazy day, ate lunch with the fam (Cecil Whitaker’s pizza), then packed up and got ready to hit the road. Would have left earlier but there was some show on G4 about the history of MegaMan, which was sweet so I stayed and watched. Left my house around 4PM central time, and things seemed to be smooth sailing from there. About an hour or so passed, or the time it took me to listen through most of Ludacris’ Red Light District, it started to drizzle. OK, I can deal with that. Then it started to rain. Then it started to pour. Oh, and add that to the effect of any car or semi in front of you spewing water towards your winshield at 80 mph, and visibility was now cut to almost naught. The greatest moment was when I was behind a slow-moving semi, who was exactly side by side with yet another semi, both of which were spraying water at me. My winshield wipers couldn’t keep up; this was no longer a fun drive on highway 70. It reminded me a lot of my brother Alex’s common complaint in high school, when you’d have 2 or more HUGE fat chicks slowly walking down the hallway, blocking not only any hope of passing them but all artificial light as well. As if the two non-passable semis in front of me weren’t enough, soon after yet another car gets up in my space, and starts tailing me. This one was a weird looking bronze car that had a handicap tag hanging from the rearview mirror. Great, just great. I’m flying down the wet highway with a pair of semis in front of me, and some jerk handicapper (yes, just because you’re handicapped doesn’t exempt you from being an ass) decides it would be a great idea to tail me. Great idea PAL.

As fun as the highway party was, I pulled off in a nice little town called Casey, Illinois before the cars ended up doing a roadway mosh. I ate a McDonald’s cheeseburger while I waited out the storm. The rain seemed to let up and the sun was starting to come out a bit, so back onto 70 I went. Drove for about a half hour until I realized that the storm must have been following my eastbound path, and I had driven back into it. Luckily it wasn’t as bad this time, so I made my way from Casey into Indiana and to the town of Cloverdale, where I turn off of highway 70. Nothing really interesting happened during that leg of the trip; no fat high school girl semis to block my way, and no handicappers to tail me. As I started driving down 231, the rain pretty much let up and I was home free. Nothing like speeding down a 1-lane highway in the peaking sun. By the time I got back to Bloomington (around 9PM eastern time) and unpacked the first load of stuff into my abandoned-smelling apartment, I opened the door to get more stuff. Somehow in the 15 or 20 seconds it took me to set down 1 box, re-open the door and look up, the huge storm had found my apartment and did it’s stuff. The Japanese term 雨男 seems oddly appropriate here.

Too lazy for a real post right now, but I wanted to put up here that for all of us who will be in Japan, the Tokyo Game Show is gonna be the weekend of September 23-24, with Friday the 22nd being “business day.” Of course I’m going to try and get media passes to get in early and/or for free. The location is Makuhari Messe, about a 10 or 15 minute walk from Kaihim Makuhari Station on the Keiyo Line. Normal admission is 1000 yen in advance online, or 1200 at the door. I went to this show back in 2004, and it’s def worth going to. Not as ridiculous as E3, but awesome either way. Last time I waited in line for an hour or two to watch a long chunk of Advent Children before it was released. I think this show, Wii and DS stuff is going to steal the show. Everyone play Wii if you get a chance, even if you have to wait in like for a few hours. As long as it’s less than 4 hours of a wait, you’re better off than the saps at E3 who waited in line.

Tokyo Game Show site

I just posted a few short paragraphs of a blog on Mixi. It’s all in Japanese, of course, since it’s a Japanese site. Should I copy the content from my Mixi blog onto this (my main site), or just leave it as a separate entity?

Overall the trip back home to St. Louis has been productive. And by productive, I mean a good amount of playing video games, sleeping, watching TV, and reading. It’s been a lot of the same stuff I would be doing back in Indiana, except I don’t have to make or buy food, and I don’t really leave the house that much here. I should probably get on that this week, since there are a good number of people in town that I should hang out with.

My parents are pretty into video games, but only of the puzzle variety. When I got home, the Super Nintendo was brought up from the basement and sitting in the living room, all set up to play Kirby’s Avalanche, which is pretty much the same as Puyo Puyo, but with Kirby characters instead of the weird Japanese monsters. I’ve also been playing a good amount of Puzzle Fighter on Playstation with the fam, which is an awesome game except for the slight problem that I am a bit colorblind (or something), and can’t tell the difference between the green and yellow jewels that well. Either way, I am able to destroy my parents and I’m working more and more on regularly beating my younger brother Joe. Both my mom and dad only play as Sakura on Puzzle Fighter, since they say she’s cute. They of course don’t know any Japanese either, so all the things that the characters say when you’re playing get misinterpreted into something weird. They’re convinced that “Hadouken” is “Hello Garrett.” Haha.

Speaking of video games, I cracked this afternoon and decided to purchase a DS Lite. After the fact, I have to say that it is a beautiful system, and I’m glad I bought it. I didn’t have a regular DS, so it was about time to buy one. This of course is all part of how I am justifying dropping $130 on another toy. There’s also some kind of massive Pokemon game coming out in the future (Diamond?), which I would most likely want to play pretty bad, so I figure might as well buy one now, and enjoy it in the meantime. There are a good number of other games that I want to play, or would want to play later, so I guess this isn’t a complete waste of money. I also realized that for how much I play video games, I haven’t really purchased any games or systems for the past year and a half (thanks to modern technology, haha), so this isn’t so bad. Yes, I am over justifying this, but oh well. It’s a fine system and a lot of fun; I’d recommend it to anyone who likes sweet stuff.

Luckily, I was browsing online this morning before I went out to buy the DS Lite. Kotaku posted an article that had coupons to get a free copy of Brain Age along with the DS Lite, so that’s like a bonus $20 there since I was planning on buying Brain Age anyway. Oh, and if you’re going to buy a DS Lite, here are the coupons (Best Buy and Circuit City). I also went ahead and bought the New Super Mario Bros, and it is a great game. I went to Circuit City first, since they also had a deal in their weekly ad to get a free carrying case or something, but they were out of Brain Age so I went to Best Buy instead. There were a lot more DS Lites than I would have thought (there were at least 15 still on the shelves), so maybe the predictions of DS Lite being sold out on release day were pretty off.

I haven’t been completely (only mostly) unproductive this trip home. I interviewed with a company here in St. Louis last Thursday, for the prospect of getting a summer internship/job doing some market research and stuff. The company is looking to start distributing their products in Japan, so they need someone to start doing research and translating online, then possibly heading over there later this summer to do some first-hand research and looking for distributors, etc. Free trip to Japan, plus the possibility of getting paid? Hell yes. Sounds like I might actually have a “summer job” now, so get off my back about being so lazy. I’ll find out the details and everything for sure tomorrow. I’m pretty sure I’m going to have it though, so I’ll likely do it.

Back to Bloomington probably Friday, give or take a day or two (yes I realize that is a very vague estimate).

I’m back at home in St. Louis now, for a week or so. The drive back was pretty uneventful; I was able to make it in a little under 4 hours, which is good time. There was some middle aged guy in a purple Toyota minivan on I-70 who really liked tailgating me, so of course I had to show him what driving is all about. Unfortunately, we did not get into a Tokyo drifting race, but I sped way ahead of him nonetheless. I haven’t been back home since I left from winter break in January, so it’s nice being able to see the fam and relax. Apparently, one of my uncles is in town from California as well, the one that I haven’t seen in a few years. I’ve never met his wife either, although they’ve been married since before I was born. We might be having a huge Leong family dinner on Friday night, so this should be interesting.

In other St. Louis news, I have a “secret interview” tomorrow, but I’m not going to talk much about it yet. We’ll see what (if anything) comes from it.