失くしたものすべて 愛したものすべて この手に抱きしめて 現在は何処を彷徨い行くの

Looking at everything that I've lost
And almost everything that I've loved
I'll hold them all tightly in my arms
Wondering where I am, so please tell me where to go

This stanza has always struck deep. Why, I do not know. But these days it seems to be pretty close.

Where do I wander off to now, holding in my arms all I've lost and loved?

Sometimes, don't you, well I don't know about you, but I do, wish .. Why can't I be a tad more popular? A tad more sophisticated? Have fifty billion friends in my Facebook? If person A can be so popular, why can't I be?

But of course, you know, deep down, that you're not that kind of person. Not the kind to maintain tonnes of friends, to say hi to everyone ... etc.

There is a Fortress of Solitude (not Superman's!), constructed long ago, during the Dark Times™, it has been years. Cracks are showing.

Too tired sometimes to think of walking alone. But we all do. Those who say they have friends, god etc are merely deluding themselves. At the end of it all, we are alone.

掌上明珠，去了哪儿?

It has gone, first, curled up in a corner, sad, as what Lu Ru Ping said (in the TV series), let me hide in a corner to lick my wounds, like an animal (well something like that). But now it has died.

Poor little sad thing, it'll never come to pass.

The Fort is failing, and there precious Angel who'd come has stayed away.

Can't keep like this for long.

XP.. BAH!

More of my angst filled posts..

Just when I clicked publish post, Resurrection BSOD-ed. WTH? Seriously.. What's WRONG with @*&%@$). My office Mac has been running forever (needing periodic reboots of course) but no kernel panics at all (except for once or twice but that was when I was writing my own nubby driver).

Stupid windows...

WTB more stable OS.

LOTRO and how not to do software

Well needless to say I'm hardly the definitive source for application design and stuff like that, but after using tonnes of applications, I think I'm qualified to say something.

.Net sucks. Simple.
The code looks quite interesting but somehow the framework does crazy things to your system.

Case in point, LOTRO. When it was released as a trial, I thought, hey! Finally the LOTRO trial! Now I can try it out and see if I should bother plonking down the cash for it or stick to WoW and wait for WAR.

Upon installing...

Hmm... it needs .Net..? Well sure I guess.

*installed* .. etc .. rebooted

*presented with login screen*

WTH? I thought I had Resurrection configured to log in automatically...? .. No matter... *updated the registry to allow auto login, rebooted. Ah that's fine..

Well, it's NOT fine now, auto login has kinda become a random flag which is CLEARED by some mysterious process or whatnot =_=

And it's all thanks to LOTRO (well, granted it's probably the .Net framework, but it was the main cause as to why .Net got to my system in the first place).

Speaking of LOTRO... It just smacks of unfinished. I can see UNFINISHED! UNFINISHED! screaming around. Granted, I didn't spend a lot of time at it, for the simple fact that it wasn't engaging at all.

1. Characters - ugly, the facial expressions are a hoot though
2. Camera - weird sluggish feel
3. Movement - buggy..? I set up auto run to target (or click to move, whatever it's called), basically my character was supposed to run to the target I clicked on and start swiping it. However, it didn't do that.. I'd click on my target, watch my toon run to it... and overshoot... I had to click again to get him back to whack the target. And it wasn't as if my target moved a fair bit during the time it needed for my character to get there. What gives?
4. Movement - weird jumping animation, for some strange reason, the animation sequence looks really weird, clipped when your character is jumping. The arm flailing just kinda .. skips to the next frame, like a badly drawn cartoon, and when you jump in a jump (ie press jump while in the air), the animation gets slightly weird.

Bah

That's it for LOTRO then.

Tried out WAR during GC-Asia, looks, feels good. High hopes for it!

Of broken dreams...

So there I was, wandering around bugs during lunch, when I went by the kiddie section, which was selling little girl dresses... You know, those princess like ones with the frills.

And I couldn't help but think, how many little girls wore those dresses, looking all innocent and wholesome, with hopes pinned upon by proud parents, and how many of these dreams were broken.

Kinda morose huh.

Then I wandered past the toy section and peeked in.

A Pokeball on sale. Supposedly you're supposed to (somehow) open the plastic ball and a little stuffed pokemon will appear. The pokemon had a rabbit like face, and looked kinda sad.

Next up were Power Ranger SPD toys. This time their intelligence levels had gone even lower; their uniforms had huge numbers on their chests, in case they forgot their designations I guess.

Why do they make such totally insipid toys?

I remember reading a long time ago, that some kids, mostly from western stories, have this little chest at the foot of their beds, a hope chest of such.

I made one too, put in all the stuff I didn't want to remember and tossed it into the sea, never wanting to see them again. From time to time though, it rises, like a rotten corpse, bloated from the sea, floating, never truly wanting to be put down.

Oh well, such is life I guess.

MSN

Well after a harrowing 2 weeks+ of counting packets and parsing bytes .. finally managed to fix my stupid 04 packet error. Now display pictures and emotes can be downloaded perfectly! woot.

MSN's a pretty well designed protocol imo, each client maintains 2+ connections. 1 main one is to the notification server which will send msgs when ppl invite you to sessions, change nicks, add you, etc. While the other one is for chatting. So if you ever tested and wondered why your initial message to someone is always slower, well that's cos both clients are negotiating with a session server for a session!

Heh.

Wanted to blog about other stuff one .. but mysteriously all is forgotten as I sit here.. So I shall just blog the last thought I had before opening this tab...

I have a friend .. well someone who's on my MSN list but I don't talk to at all... she prob doesn't even know who I am now. Anyways, she has a nick "Everytime I look up at the sky at night, I wonder if it's the same stars we're seeing"

Just feel like msging her and say, well, if you're looking at the same position at the same time every night, you're seeing the same stars. However, as the year passes by, the stars will slowly shift, so the same stars you see in Jan - June will be different from July - Dec. Somewhat like how you see Orion in the beginning of the year and Scorpio in the end of the year.

But I guess it doesn't sound as 'romantic' as the message huh.

Come to think of it, her nick reminds me of those rubbish you see in cheap bags/T-shirts which say something like "Time is memory" or some crap like that.. Sounds deep but actually doesn't make sense.

Maybe she took it from there =p