Do you wanna ride in my rocket?

Please, get in. >=D

I promise I won't fly straight up 100 miles and then dismount and watch you plummet to your death.  I have nothing to do with the little pile of bones you see there.  Really. 

Troubleshooting

I've been working on my laptop for 4 days. I've done everything I can to try and see what the problem is with my ethernet port.

Since Sunday, I have:

1) Run a System Restore (2x)
2) Uninstalled my drivers (2x)
3) Tried 3 different cables off 2 different modems with 2 different laptops
4) Rebooted the system BIOS
5) Run a system wide virus scan
6) Scanned the system boot screen
7) run sfc /SCANNOW in cmd
8) Reinstalled my OS

And nothing has worked.  After I had done up to step 7, it was clearly a motherboard problem and NOT an OS issue, since I still had my wireless working AND my drivers were all updated and working.  So obviously the ethernet port wasn't connecting with my cable and wasn't reading its existence.   The worst thing is, after I told the Alienware technician guy that it's a motherboard problem, he told me that he wouldn't send out a new motherboard UNTIL I had reinstalled the OS. SERIOUSLY? What part of a motherboard defect do you not understand??

Basically he was accusing me of wanting a new motherboard. 

What an asshole.

So just to play their stupid game, the OS was reinstalled today and of course the ethernet port still is dead.  Now what?  Give me my stupid motherboard, you cheapskates!

This is so beautiful

Ahhh.... emails and work on the left, Gaming in the middle, and chatting on the right..... while watching TV on top if you wished.  How beautiful is this setup?

I can't wait to move back to the States so I can start setting up my dream "workstation."    This is exactly the way I would set it up.  That table is also from Ikea... I've wanted to buy it several times but I never had room in the house to put it.  But once I get back to the US..... this will become a reality.

My Alienware laptop's ethernet port broke.  Which is all kinds of fking FAIL.  This means I can't connect to the internet through cable.  WTF dude.  I have to use wireless, in a place where the internet is already slow as hell? REALLY? Wireless??

Especially for a hardcore gamer.... stable, plugged in connectivity is crucial. It's like the air I breathe. There is nothing more fail than your character raising an arm to do that final finishing blow... and then you get "You have been disconnected." Fking fail, wireless!!!!!!   And then that Orc with 200hp left turns around and starts healing himself... WORSE YET... attacking you. And you, in all your epicly overgeared glory, stands helpless with one arm raised... running in place... while a fail noob Orc whittles your 30,000HP away..... fking fail, man.

This must be fixed!!! Damn you, ethernet port. Damn you, Alienware, for costing thousands of dollars and still having shitty quality!! Damn you, Dell, for buying Alienware and using your crap factories that manufacture crap Dells to also manufacture Alienware components, which now also makes it crap quality!! Damn you alllllll!!!!!!!!!!

I am in the process of getting this fixed. And when I am back.... hell hath no fury like a woman and her laptop scorned.

Home Sweet Home

My family is moving so we are selling the house that I've lived in for many, many, years.  This is devastating to me even though I've been living abroad. I've always thought that I would go back and go "home," back to my room, back to that familiar street, back to that familiar city.  But even if I go home permanently next year... where do I go?  More importantly, since my parents are moving back to Taipei, how do I get my family members under one roof again?  Are our gatherings really only limited to Christmas and other holidays?  I can't go home just one weekend and see everyone anymore?

That city was my life for so much of my childhood.  And even adulthood.  I've never thought about not having a home in that city.  Even if I moved to another city, I always felt that once I stepped foot in those familiar boundaries I would feel like I belonged. 

My home will never be where I am currently living.  And I don't want it to be. 

It was a shocking decision that we are actually really going to sell the house.  We've talked about it for several years but I think we were all hesitant.  It's hard for me to believe that this is real, that the next time I go home, I will just be a visitor.

I feel that I've taken for granted all the time that I spent with my family.  I always thought that we would be "home" together, that it was good enough. And now that it's going to be gone, those minutes that we all shared under one roof seems so few and far between.  If I had moved home years ago, would things be different now?  I'm not sure.  But I feel like now the minutes and seconds that we spend together will be that much more precious, because there's no longer an endless pool of time.

Chinese Tea

If you go into a little Tea Store and they tell you your complexion looks bad and they say you need some special tea mixture to be more healthy, don't believe them, even if the tea they're trying to sell you costs 20rmb for 10 bags.  I don't know what got into me, I just felt like getting some tea and I think I was too lazy to say, "No."  20rmb for 10 bags, why not, right?  Anyways, I tried the tea today and the taste is so light I taste nothing but water.  I even brewed 2 bags at once. Now I have 18 bags of unflavorful tea.... at least the rose buds inside look pretty floating around.

Odd that I'm saying this, but the tea shops targeted at the foreigners here actually sell much much better tasting tea, and authentic as well.   Sorry Mom and Pop shops, I just don't trust you guys.  At least not in this country.

Kingdom Hearts, Birth By Sleep

I must get this. It looks amazing.

Usually I don't like to wait for the English versions because of bad dubbing, but when Disney is involved, everything is usually perfect.  And looking at the list of actors they have doing the voice recordings, I think I'll wait for this one. :)

http://kotaku.com/5540790/kingdom-hearts-birth-by-sleep-dated-detailed-and-psp-bundled/gallery/

Pirated DVDs

So we assume that the studio has a leak which is why someone in Russia is able to get a copy of the movie, copy it a few million times, and sell it for $2 on the street to developing nations.

However, where do the subtitles come from?
No, I don't mean the movies with the perfect english subtitles.  Usually they're only perfect if the studio also leaked a script, or the movie has been out for a long time already.

My question is, where do the half ass, 80% of the time doesn't make sense Chinese subtitles come from?  I'm talking about when I watch movies that just came out a few weeks ago, and there's the chinese subtitle on the bottom. But when you read the subtitle it's not completely translated correctly.  The actor could be saying something like, "Yeah, whatever you dumbass. You swear I would do something like that.  I'm not down with it."  And the Chinese would be translated into, "No, I won't do it. I don't do crime." (But in Chinese).

It's like, who sat there, and could only half understand the English slang, but decided to translate it like that for his countrymen?  Is there some dude who sits there in a dark room and watches all the movies and writes his own transcript of the movie?  How long does it take him to do it? Does he use urbandictionary? How much does he get paid?

And how does he introduce himself if others ask what he does for a living?

"I'm the guy that translates all the new movies from English to Chinese, except I don't understand all of it so I just translate it however I want by what I think they're saying."


Just curious.