“Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi says, “Today, I formally acknowledge that the Dokdo Islets are Korean territory.” Behind the camera smiles actor Bae Yong-joon, or Yonsama to his legion of Japanese fans, who says he mediated behind the scenes.”

Source: http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200503/200503310027.html.

I’m just so damn sick of hearing about this story. First, I had to deal with it in Korea and now I have to see it every night on Japanese news. They make a huge deal out of it, but really no one cares. The government and the media turn it into huge nationalistic propaganda.

Anyway, that’s enough of my rant.

Oh yeah, I can’t stand Bae Yong-Joon/Yonsama…

CNN.com - Vatican source: Pope given last rites - Mar 31, 2005

So the Pope may die soon. Not really big news, dood has been barely able to speak or walk for the last 5 years. It is kind of interesting for me though because I have only ever seen one Pope in my lifetime and this could bring some much needed changes for the Catholic church.

Stay tuned… Coming up next: Countdown to the next Pope

So I’m watching Jay-Z’s “Fade To Black” concert documentary right now. It’s not bad, most hip-hop concerts are full of shitty interviews. This one has some good performances but there is one HUGE problem.

Jay-Z claims to the best emcee alive, which he may be but… not the best ever… and he proves it himself.

He decides to get the audience participation on some 2Pac and Biggie verses. They come through way stronger than any of his own verses, especially the 2Pac verses.

Jay-Z has made some great songs but he is no Biggie and he could never be 2Pac.

That’s just the way things are…

It’s been a while since I posted anything. I’ve been busy I guess and not much is new.

I haven’t been studying Japanese lately although I really should. I learned how to write most of my address in Kanji the other day: ?????????. It’s actually harder to type than it is write or say.

Oh, I got my iRiver H340. It’s great! The first thing I did with it was flash the firmware to 1.27 so I could play videos. Then I dumped a whole bunch of music, audio books, and teaching CDs onto it. Oh, and I also re-encoded a bunch of Japanese language training videos from the early 80’s so that I could watch them on the go. iriverter is a great app, it even keeps the audio in sync when re-encoding.

I went to the new ?????? store near my house on Monday to check out the crazy ferris wheel that just opened last week but the lines were crazy. The store was crazy too, there was a sex toy section right beside the kids shoe section. Pretty dumb if you ask me.

I’m gonna post some pictures now… Bye-bye.

I just figured out the best job for me: “Witty MSN Nickname Creator”. Unfortunately, I don’t think I could do it so well for other people, but for me? Wow… I can think up some preeeettty witty names. For example, my current nick is, “Intolerant Of Intolerance” Take that you not so witty people!

Hmmm. Even I don’t know when my sarcasm starts or ends. Damn, I’m bored and tired.

It’s amazing how I can impress myself after studying for only 30 minutes. Here is some of my Japanese homework I did tonight:

(Kanji lost in backup)

The funny thing is that I can’t even read a lot of that. The magic of the Japanese IME makes it so easy to type in Japanese and autoconvert to the correct Kanji. Hmm, I wonder if I can get away with doing my real homework like this when I start going to school. Although I guess it kind of defeats the purpose of learning the characters since I would never be able to read them that way.

Blah Blah Blah…

I have tweaked my Blogger template a bit so now it should be XHTML 1.0 compliant and CSS compliant. Although if you are looking at the page from www.vatoland.com instead of vatoland.blogspot.com then you will not see the results of the CSS validation button when clicked.

I had posted a couple pictures using the newest Picasa 2 and Hello. It makes it really simple to post pictures but the problem is that it generates 4 XHTML error for each file and I since the software just came out, it will probably be a while before they work on that. There is no way in hell that I am going to manually correct 4 errors just to upload a photo, I’ll just upload the entire thing manually instead. I need to get a good photo gallery working now…

So, I finally got my PC back up and running. I got a new (although old) video card because they apparently couldn’t repair my old one, I guess I burnt it out. It’s all good though because they refunded me the money I paid for the card and I bought a nVidia FX 5700LE because it was cheap and low profile so it won’t cause problems in my case. Also it doesn’t have a fan, just a big heatsink so I don’t have to worry about it using more power or burning out. I don’t play many games but I do a lot of TV-out so it seems fine so far.

In other news, I got my student visa so I can stay in Japan until March 9, 2007. I registered at the district office yesterday and my alien registration card should be ready at the end of the month. I didn’t even have to get fingerprinted although they could be saving that for later. I start school at the beginning of April so I don’t have a lot of time left. I’ve been trying to study more lately. Here’s what I wrote this morning:

(Kanju lost in backup)

It’s just some simple sentances about my daily routine. Mostly it was for kanji practice of numbers and time. Kanji sucks, I hate it, but I guess I have to get used to it. Bleh…

And finally… VDot is dead. I’m never going to have the time and energy to turn it into the wonderful piece of software that I want it to be. I feel like I am giving up, but in reality I gave up a long time ago. Thus, www.vatoland.com will from now on be a frameset for vatoland.blogspot.com. I will probably continue to run a webserver on my PC for a photo gallery and whatnot. That server will be located at vatoland.com. Really, it is a great sollution and I don’t know why I never thought of it before. I guess I was too hung up on running my own software. Now I just need to make a killer Blogger template.

Back to studying…

Well, it’s been over a week and I still have not heard from the store about my video card. I mean damn, its only a fan. It doesn’t take long to change a fan.

I really need my PC. This notebook only has a 40gb HD so I’ve had to dump some DVDRs to another computer so I can dl more on this one. Now these DVDRs are finished and I only have 2gb free now. Like I said, “I really need my PC.”

Since I am in Japan, I’ve tried to listen to Japanese music when it comes on TV. I’ve tried enough… I don’t like it, well at least not the J-pop that they play on TV. In fact, it’s really annoying. I can’t wait to get a new MP3 player, I think I am going to buy an iRiver H340 very soon. I’ve bought 2 iRiver players in the past and I love them. My old iMP-350 has gotten lots of use and I’ve flashed the firmware so many times that I’ve lost count. I bought it in Korea and I had to buy a replacement charger when I moved back to Canada. The Radio Shack power supply that I bought was iffy at best and now in Japan, it doesn”t work at all. My wife’s 128mb player is good, but it barely stores 1 album at 192kbps and I need way more than that. Plus, I am going to be starting Japanese school soon and I would like to record some of my lectures and the H340 has a nice external mic. I also need an easy way to transport all the audio for the English classes that I teach. So, if I get some small speakers it will be an easy way to get the audio I need to teach classes also.

In other news, I am getting used to blogger. I thought it had ads, but I guess I hadn’t used it in some time. I am starting to rethink my programming plans. I really need a good photo gallery that suits my needs since I have way too many digital photos. For that reason, I think I may end working on VDot and focus on a mod of nGallery. That would challenge me more and would serve a greater purpose I believe as there will always be lots of blogging scripts and services and as I said earlier, Blogger works quite well and seems quite a bit faster than loading pages from my PC. Don’t get me wrong, VDot isn’t dead yet but it is very close to being on it’s deathbed. Update: VDot is dead I spit on its grave! Haaaak-Twuuuuh!!!

More to come…

Well, the fan on my video card burnt out and I had to RMA the card so the main server is down. I have now changed to the domain to redirect to vatoland.blogspot.com when my machine is offline. I think that this will be a good substitute.

As soon as I get my video card back, the main server will be back up. This should be before March 11th, 2005.