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April 22nd, 2007

07:59 pm - I ATEN'T DEAD Meh. It's been a few months since I posted... and I have no new job yet! o(>_<)o I've been to Egypt with my parents and a few friends. It was an awesome trip. Visits to the Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx, Memphis, Sakkara, the Valley of the Kings, Hatshepshut temple in Deir El Bahari, the temple of Karnak, Luxor, Kom Ombo, Edfu, Abu Simbel, the bazaar of Khal El Khalili... We slept in a floating hotel, which took us along the Nile river during the nights, and spent the days visiting the ruins. There were a lot of things that impressed me on that trip. The way of life they have there, how they dress, how they speak, even how they drive, everything was so Different(TM). Honor mention to the traffic: basically they drive as they want, and there are no traffic lights. But the most shocking experience were the monuments. Surely you have seen them dozens of times in pictures, movies and documentaries. But they're bigger than that. Take the temple of Karnak, for example. The columns are massive; you can hurt your neck trying to look at the top. There are dozens of them. They all are completely covered with reliefs. Even now, you can see these reliefs were colored. It's not hard to imagine that when the Hypostyle Hall still had a ceiling, the tops of the columns could not be seen from the ground, giving the impression of dissapearing in the darkness up there. It's like a cathedral. You have to be there to see it. I heartily recommend going there at least once. Oh, I almost forgot. I'll give you a piece of advice in case you go there. Of the three pyramids of Giza, the biggest one (the pyramid of Keops) is limited to 300 visitors per day, and you have to be there before sunrise to get tickets, so it's quite likely you won't see it from the inside. The smallest pyramid is not open to the public. But the pyramid in the middle (the pyramid of Kefren) is open all day to the public. If you go, do not enter the pyramid, because walking crouched along that passage will give you stiff legs for 5 days straight (as myself and two other people that went with me can attest). We called that "the Curse of the pyramid". At least, wait until the last day of your stay in Egypt if you really want to enter the pyramid, unless you wish to spend the rest of your stay walking like C3PO while visiting monuments. I'm not kidding. Current Location: Home mood: impressed music: Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan OST - Road of Major - Taisetsu na Mono Tags: egypt, trip

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November 21st, 2006

07:10 pm - So many things have happened... ...I think an update is in order. First things first. My 2-month teaching period is now over, thankfully. It came out really well, all things considered; the girls were all very nice, and I think everyone learned a lot (yes, me too). They even gave me a couple of gifts when the course ended (a scarf and a compact travel razor set) and we had a nice meal together. I honestly hope they find really good jobs; they deserve them. Good luck, ladies (^o^) However, I still think I'm not cut out for teaching. So it's time to go job hunting again. I have in mind something like technical support for a small office. These days I found myself missing that time when I was traveling around the country. This is weird because back then all I wanted was for that job to end. And I still miss it. Maybe it's the fact that I didn't care much for the problems that arose then (e-mail not working, equipment arriving too late or never, etc) because they weren't my responsibility: if everything worked, I did my job, and if there were problems all I had to do was report them and wait for someone else to do something. And a teaching job is much more demanding in terms of responsibility; maybe what I miss is that feeling of carelessness. Or maybe I have wanderlust. I still haven't figured it out. I'll kick a few trees and see what falls I'll apply for a few jobs and see what happens. On to the next thing: At the end of October I went to the XII Salón del Manga de Barcelona 2006. This was my 3rd consecutive year attending that con. I was there for 2 days, wore my FullMetal Alchemist steel vest for a day (sore shoulders for a week), met some friends from ElOtroLado, took some photos, bought a ton of manga, and got Masakazu Katsura to sign me the first volume of Shadow Lady. One more thing. Kuro-chan now runs Ampache instead of Jinzora to stream music. Jinzora was too buggy and every time I updated my music collection I had to reinstall it. But Ampache worked very well. The only thing from Jinzora I missed in Ampache was the embedded flash based mp3 player, so I wrote a quick hack to add it. It seems they have officially included it (with some tweaking) in the latest SVN release of Ampache (^_^)y Next topic: my father needed a new computer for his shop. They had been using an old one I built about a year ago, a PII 400MHz with Win2k, enough to get some paperwork done; but now they are planning to get an Internet connection so they wanted something more powerful. I built them a new rig (PIII 1GHz) and this time it runs Ubuntu Linux. Since all they're going to do is some web-browsing, light text-editing and a few spreadsheets, Firefox and OpenOffice will do just fine, they won't be able to break something even if they wanted to (they won't have nor need the root password) and I won't have to be there every week installing updates or cleaning viruses and spyware. And the last thing. I have a something for computers - no surprises there. Right now there are 5 of them around me and I'm not in an office, but on my room (-_-). So I found this little jewel and I couldn't resist ordering one through eBay. I'll tell more about it on another post. Current Location: Home mood: mellow music: Rozen Maiden träumend ED Single - Kamp (via Ampache ^_^)

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September 7th, 2006

11:24 pm - Mahou Sensei Nephiel I was just offered a job as a teacher at the centre I am attending for that HTML course. This morning, the principal told me they needed me to teach an Office 2003 course for unemployed people. The course would begin next Tuesday, and would last 2 months, 5 hours a day. The pay is quite good for a 5-hour-per-day job. The centre is a 10 minute walk from my home. And I would have 15 students. All female. I accepted. Holy God. What have I gotten myself into? I haven't used Office very much, really. And I prefer OpenOffice... but the principal seemed very interested in me for that job, and said I won't have any trouble because they're very basic lessons. I saw the tests the students made to check their level of knowledge before starting the course. Most of the answers were left blank... I'm scared about this. I have never taught before, not even a single student. I'm a shy person, specially with people I don't know, to the point of getting nervous enough to stutter and make stupid mistakes (when a stranger asks me for directions for a street, for example). And even more with girls (maybe because I've never gone out with a girl yet - not that I'm asking, thanks)... On top of that, I am a bit afraid of public speaking... and next Tuesday morning I'll have to talk in front of more than a dozen girls I have never met before. I'll have to teach them. Office 2003, no less... ...Know what? After writing that out, it suddenly doesn't look so scary. They seem stupid things to be afraid of, too trivial, when they're written down like that. Or perhaps it's just too late in the night and I'm tired. I'll better get some sleep. I guess I'll take these 2 months as a shock-treatment for my lack of self-confidence. Current Location: Home mood: nervous music: E Nomine - Die Posaunen Von Jericho

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July 30th, 2006

10:59 am - Kuro-chan Reloaded I tend to procrastinate updating this... since my last entry, there have been a few things going on. A few changes took place in my computer harem. Yuka has been retired from service as my main server and download manager. She is not broken, though, and got a processor upgrade from AMD K62-300 to K62-500. She no longer has the cube case (for storage space reasons) and instead she has a standard Mini-AT case. She's now sleeping peacefully in a corner of my room until we find a new job for her. Kuroki took over for Yuka-chan as my main server. For that purpose, apart from the processor upgrade from Duron 1.3 to Athlon XP 2200+, she has been fitted with a new power supply (LC Power LC6420 420W - Black Edition Ver 2.0), a new processor fan (SilenX IXtrema Pro 80mm 14dB) and an Antec P180B case. The P180 is an awesome chassis. It contains three 120mm fans and is soundproof. The drive racks and power supply are mounted on silicone pads to avoid vibration, and the side and front pannels are 3-layers of aluminum and plastic instead of a simple plate (if you knock on this case you don't get the *clanggg* cheaper cases make, you get a muffled *tump* instead). All of this makes the P180 a very quiet case. It's also a pleasure to tinker with, the internal distribution makes it very easy. And now Kuroki runs Linux! I finally got Ubuntu 6.06 Server up and running, with thermal processor management (athcool, lmsensors) and UPS software (The manufacturer of my UPS, Salicru, provided the software for Linux less than an hour after my request via e-mail - now that's customer support). Now, she does all these chores: -Web server (Apache 2) -PHP and MySQL -FTP -SSH -Remote BitTorrent (TorrentFlux) -Remote eMule (aMule) -Remote music library with streaming (Jinzora) -Remote desktop (NoMachine NX Server) I've also been attending a "HTML Language and Server Administration" course I was offered, since I am currently unemployed. That gave me some ideas. I follow quite a lot of fansubs from manga & anime series, so it's hard to keep track of which ones I have already downloaded or seen when a new episode or chapter is released. Until now, I had been using a spreadsheet in OpenOffice for that purpose. Now I've changed the spreadsheet for a MySQL database kept by Kuroki, and managed via a PHP application I developed for the ocassion: NoMAdb (Nephiel's Online Manga & Anime Database). All of these services are integrated into Kuroki's web interface, developed during my HTML classes. I added frames for easy navigation and a bit of CSS to spice it up. Of course, if Kuroki is now on server duty, that means my main computer job is vacant. That's where my laptop, Naoko, comes into play. I still have enough parts to build another desktop machine, but that would be kinda pointless because Naoko can do that job really well (she's a desktop replacement laptop, after all). Now she has Ubuntu 6.06 as well, and performs admirably. She has a new look, too: More info about that here. Current Location: Home mood: geeky music: The Black Mages - Matoya's Cave

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June 11th, 2006

01:34 pm - What goes around... Wow. It's been ages since my last entry o_O In the meanwhile, I found a new job for a private bank which involved traveling a lot around Spain, replacing old computers with new ones. I've been traveling to a new location almost every day for the last month and a half; fortunately the hotels I was assigned were really nice (I've got here this big load of tiny gel bottles and hair combs :P). Plus I had the chance to spend a few days at my uncle's in the Canary Islands (thanks for everything, guys ;) ) The work in itself was exhausting. Somehow it was edificating as well, but... man, I'm glad it's over. I have to go tomorrow to collect my last payment and that's all. A couple of months ago, when I was still working in Madrid, I was walking back to the office from lunch, and found another computer sitting beside a waste bin on the street. It had no cover, no hard drive and no peripherals, but it had an Asus A7V8X-X board with 256 MB of RAM, a Yamaha CD recorder, and a Matrox graphic card with 2 DB15 monitor outputs. Needless to say, I picked her up and brought her with me (chiiii... ^_^) I was surprised because it was very clean, only a bit of dust on the heatsink, and no visible damage to any parts. I feared she might have been thrown away because she had been burnt by a power spike, but we fired her up and she booted right away OMG AN ATHLON XP 2200+ PROCESSOR @ 1.8GHz! (for the record my other desktop machine is Kuroki and she had a Duron @ 1.3GHz). Of course we didn't get past the BIOS self-test because she had no hard drive, but that was enough. The power supply worked. I couldn't believe it. My coworkers slapped me on the back, and we all wondered why anyone in their right mind would throw away like that such a fine piece of hardware... After that, I used her at work for a few days, to format some drives and such, and she worked perfectly. Finally I took her home and left it behind my bed, where she has been laying untouched and forgotten... until yesterday, when I took her processor and put it on Kuro-chan, and the power-up is very noticeable (can finally watch x264 HD video with no frame drops or audio lag! Yay!) Now, let me think, what could I do with the Duron and the rest of the parts? Ah, by the way, that laptop I ordered months ago arrived shortly after. She gave me quite a few headaches to get everything working under Linux (and as of today, still has some quirks) but afterward she made herself very useful for me while traveling. Too bad I didn't think of updating this journal until now. Current Location: Home at last mood: exhausted music: Madonna - How High

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December 22nd, 2005

11:29 pm - Thinktanium, yay! :P Yo. It's time to update this. I'm too lazy, my job contract finished on December 2nd and I've been goofing off since then... but next week I have another contract to sign, to start January 2nd, so it's OK. I had been thinking about it for a some months... and this afternoon I ordered one of these. IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad Z60m It's going to cost me a lung, but Christmas is almost here so... what the heck... yeah, I know it's quite bigger than that Vaio I had considered - but still, it's not like I'm gonna move it a lot, and it has like 4 times the power. I like IBM laptops; they're built to last, and they have that professional, meant-for-business look I find quite appealing. Plus, thanks to a nice guy I knew at Diageo I am able to get this model before it's released here, and apart from the standard specs on a laptop nowadays (WI-FI, widescreen, 1GB RAM, etc) and a 2GHz processor, 100GB SATA hard drive, and dedicated video card (ATI X600 128MB), it comes with all the lace & frills: FireWire, Bluetooth, integrated fingerprint reader, memory card reader, and a polished titanium lid. At a reasonable price. My goal is to mainly use Linux with it. That ATI X600 and some other quirks like activating DMA on the DVD drive are going to give me a couple of headaches, though. If everything goes well maybe I'll be getting a custom laser etch on that titanium cover... mood: Thoughtful music: Vanessa Mae - Contradanza

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November 2nd, 2005

05:52 pm - Back from the XI SMB'05 I arrived yesterday from the con. It was great! Today I've spent the whole day spreading all over the net the photos I took there... and I'm kinda tired, so I'll just post another pic... (click the image for a larger version) ...and you can find the rest here.

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October 25th, 2005

11:32 pm - FullMetal vest It's been some time since I posted. This is what I've been doing in the meantime: Click here for more pictures... This vest is made out of stainless steel wire, hand-wound and cut into rings, and then woven into chainmail mesh by hand, ring by ring, using 2 pairs of pliers. The red logo is from the FullMetal Alchemist anime series, and was made with red anodized aluminum rings, the same size as the steel ones. It has about 15000 rings, it took me approx. 6 months to make, and it'll take about 2 more weeks for the calluses on my hands to heal completely. I'm gonna wear it this weekend at the biggest manga & anime convention here in Spain: the Salon del Manga de Barcelona. Agh, my knuckles hurt when I type... I'm off to bed. mood: drained music: Yuki Kajiura - mezame (My-HIME Original Soundtrack vol.1)

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July 17th, 2005

10:02 pm - Yuka is complete Yuka is complete. She is here right now. With me. And she's up and running. Finding and bringing everything I ask her. Working. For me. Day and night. Ain't she lovely? Okay, let me explain something. She is a computer (a zombie computer, but that I will explain later on). I built her mainly with junk, but she came out quite pretty after all, I kinda like the result. ¿Remember that old AMD K6-2 500 I was tinkering with? And her case was built with some scrap. A quick and dirty job, I might add. She has 196MB of RAM right now, and it seems to be enough; once started, she runs quite happily. Oh, and she has no monitor, neither keyboard nor mouse directly attached. I made her share Kuro-chan's console via a KVM switch, so both of them use the same monitor. And I installed a LCD display, just like Kuroki's, to see her stats (temperature, free space, etc) and news headers. Very nice. But ¿what does she do? Simple answer: Download things 24/7. Long answer: Yuka-chan runs mainly P2P apps, and she has remote interfaces for all of them. That means I can tell her to search, start, resume, pause or stop a download (from eMule, BitTorrent...) from anywhere on Earth with a machine connected to Internet. I can also see the progress of current downloads and assign priorities to them. A few days ago I was spending the day at my uncle's house in the country, and I was able to manage Yuka's torrents, using only my mobile phone (a N-Gage QD). Now that's progress. Some people just use eMule and leave their computer (a normal, standard one) on for days. These computers tend to have hardware problems in hard drives (due to overheating) and power supplies (due to blackouts or current spikes). Yuka is different. She was made to be running all the time, well refrigerated and powered by an UPS so blackouts or power spikes aren't an issue. Since she has no monitor, she's using only 8% of the UPS capacity. After some testing, she's been running and downloading smoothly for 10 days straight, day and night. I get most of my fansubs the very same day they are released. And there's the joke with her being a zombie. See, she was made with parts from a machine long time dead. She has no will (well, not yet, not that I know of ^_^U ). She does what she's told. And in hacker lingo a zombie is a computer being remotely controlled. There you have. BTW, I'm getting used to my new job, looks fine so far. I can manage Yuka-chan's downloads from there... mood: pleased music: Yuki Kajiura - Colours of a Faint Stir (Erementar Gerad OST)

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June 24th, 2005

09:50 pm - Weeeeeell... I got a job ^_^ Last Monday, IBM hired me through Pullservi for the "Falcon" project, to update the intranet at Diageo, which is the world leading company in alcoholic beverage business (yep, they make, promote and distribute J&B, Baileys, Tanqueray, etc... all around the globe). And I don't drink alcohol, pity me. Mark the irony. Anyway, Diageo's offices are nice, the work is not very hard, and the payment is quite good, so I'm pretty satisfied with that for now. If only I could get past that g'd4mned proxy they have there... I could use Java to do that. I'm off to install the SDK. Oh, and Yuka is awakening... mood: cheerful music: KOTOKO - Agony (Kannaduki no Miko ending theme)

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May 29th, 2005

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April 15th, 2005

07:09 pm - New LCD pics... and more. Sh1111111t- my iespana webhost suddenly decided to erase ALL the files I had there. That included all my photos, images and forum signatures. Fsck. Oh well, iespana is so frikkin' sloooow anyway. It sucks. It was time to switch. So now I have a new host for my images and stuff, I've re-uploaded the most 'vital' files, and to celebrate it, here are some pics from that new LCD display I got for Kuroki two weeks ago. My lovely Kuro-chan ^_^: LCD, main screen: LCD, Winamp screen, with and without flash (check out that spectrum visualizer): LCD, RSS info from Frozen-Layer (it shows the latest fansubs and releases as they come out): The photos don't do it justice, though; it's a lot clearer. Some lines appear garbled in them because they are scrolling text. Finally, here is a teaser from that AMD K6-2 I was working on... mood: crafty music: Blind Guardian - Theatre of Pain

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April 10th, 2005

07:28 pm - Expomanga 2005 I just came back ^_^ The l00t: -A really nice mousepad from Selecta Visión featuring Evangelion, Akira & Ghost in the Shell (I got it for free along with the ticket, which was 3€) -Mahoromatic #5 -GUNNM Last Order #12 -Dominion: Conflict #2 (I thought I had #s 1, 3, 4 and 5 at home... now I realized I haven't got #3 either...) There were a lot of cosplayers, and quite a few people were singing at the karaoke when I left. Overall I think this edition of Expomanga was a lot better than the last year one in Chamartin. mood: calm music: Mp - "Castlevania": Midnight Slayer (www.ocremix.org)

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April 7th, 2005

03:37 pm - grimorum terminus est Finally, the grimoire I was making for my friend is done! It didn't came out exactly like I wanted, but still... I'll put some pics. Judge for yourself. Here, before sewing the eye patch (you can see the 5 pins I used to keep it in place): Final shot: Man, that leather was hard! I can't feel my fingers... mood: exhausted music: Basil Poledouris - Riders of Doom (Conan the Barbarian OST)

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April 1st, 2005

03:58 pm - haak-sh00! D4mn. I caught a cold (yeah, another one). This time I'd bet the culprit was my mother. Ah well, it can't be helped. Last weekend I found an awesome Hitachi HD44780-controlled green-backlit LCD display in a junk stand at a marketplace. It looks a lot like this one (it's just a pic of a similar display I found online. Sorry it's rather crappy :P): For 5 euros it was dirt cheap, and fsck1n' big, too: 4x40 characters. It looked perfect to replace the old 2x16 I built into Kuro-chan a few years ago (which is about five times smaller). They had several, so I bought three, just in case. I got a graphic one, too, but I decided to put that one aside for now and store it for later use. Lucky thing I got three 4x40s, though: I screwed one (damn those bl00dy 16 pin connectors and their bl00dy solder), but I managed to get the other 2 to work. The first one is reserved for the AMD K6-2 300 eMule machine I am building, and Kuro-chan is playing with the second one right now to test it. She seems to be quite happy with it, but... Wait, the green backlight still flickers a bit. I must adjust that... *tinker-tinker* It's wonderful to see it working. Finally I have enough room to show the Winamp equalizer!!! And RSS feeds from Frozen-Layer.net, Megatokyo, and Elotrolado.net... now I don't need to open a web browser to get the news and see which new fansubs are out. Heck, I don't even need to turn on the monitor! Heehee ^_^ I will post pictures when both Kuro-chan and I are happy with the results. Oh, I almost forgot. I had a job interview today for this big online gaming store franchise. Let's see what happens... mood: cold music: Yoko Takahashi - Tamashii no Rufuran (Death & Rebirth)

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March 26th, 2005

09:38 pm - There and back again Yo! I'm back. I hope there still are bittorrent seeds out there for that Maison Ikkoku series I was downloading... I finished reading the manga of Maison Ikkoku this week, and I liked it a lot, even more than I''s; so I'd like to watch the anime too. Now it's time to do some serious cleaning. I got hold of an old AMD K6-2 with a kick4ss Asus mobo and I'm planning to use her as a sub-machine for downloading with eMule and BitTorrent 24/7. Therefore I need to make some space in my room, otherwise the junk will end up eating me alive... mood: geeky music: Ghost in the Shell Tribute cat. Techno Style - Big Sky City

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March 19th, 2005

12:45 am - Going North I give up. I have no time to get that laptop up and running the way I want, so I just installed Windows 98 and all the drivers, and placed a bid on eBay. When I need a laptop I'll buy one like this Sony Vaio TR1MP (it's so d4mn small and k3wt, yet powerful, I can barely resist the urge to get one right now). Oh, I forgot, this Monday I'm going to Galicia to spend the holidays. I should be back next Sunday... mood: Quite tired music: Michiru Yamane - Reincarnated Soul (Akumajo Dracula X OST)

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March 11th, 2005

08:24 pm - Aaawright! It's so nice to have a bit of free time again! I totally nailed that exam; the Java course is over, and the job interview ended with the usual "we'll call you". Now, to keep on looking for a job. By the way, I got a free laptop from a friend, yippee! ^_^ I built her a desktop PC, so she no longer needed her old laptop, and gave it to me. Let's see if I can cram a decent OS in there. mood: happy music: Shinkichi Mitsumune - Shukuteki (Rozen Maiden OST)

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March 8th, 2005

10:58 am - Phew, that was close... Phew. I managed to dodge that aquarium thing... See, my father is trying to start a business of his own (he works with glass -windows, mirrors and so on-) and my mother and I convinced him to put the aquarium in his shop instead of our home. That means he will take care of it and not me. Of course I'll still have to help him to install it, and do a bit of cleaning every now and then, but I don't mind that. I finished watching Ghost in the Shell S.A.C. 2nd GIG up to episode 16, and finished reading the manga of Bleach up to chapter 169. I'm finally up to date with them. But there's still Rozen Maiden, Ah! My Goddess TV, the GUNNM OVAs... I wish I had more free time... On the other hand, this evening I have my final Java exam. And tomorrow morning I have a job interview. I hope everything goes well... mood: hopeful music: Michiru Yamane - The Sinking Old Sanctuary (Castlevania OST)

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March 4th, 2005

12:52 am - I'm off to bed. OK, I finished nearly all the things I had to do today. I even built (out of some scrap sheet metal I had lying around) a case I needed for a portable hard drive. I would post a pic of it, but it looks like a piece of junk. Anyway, it works and was cheap to make. As for the Java exam, I'm pretty confident. I'm gonna nail it. The only thing left now is to get Mahoromatic and Last Order. Fine, I thought, I'll have free time tomorrow morning to go shopping, have dinner out, and then go to the university, right? Free time my a$$. My father got home today with a weird-looking machine. It was the size of a bucket, and looked vaguely like one, with a handle and everything, but with a lid and a couple of tubes coming from it. It was a pump. An aquarium water pump. He said a friend of him gave it to him, along with the aquarium itself, the neon light and all the accesories. He left everything but the pump in the trunk of his car, and told me to carry it upstairs tomorrow (we live in a third floor). We already have an aquarium with a few guppies. It's nothing fancy, 40L, about the size of three shoe boxes. We clean it a bit once every month or so, and it seems to go quite well. It's not a burden. But it seems my father thinks that the shelf it's on is too big. Now I'm trembling in fear just imagining the size of the monster awaiting me in the trunk of the car. I mean, that fsckin' thing needs a pump the size of a bucket! Guess who will end having to clean that aquarium. My father even said something about natural plants. T3h h0rr0r. Bugger it. I'll deal with it tomorrow. For now I'll just sleep like a log. mood: scared music: E Nomine - Die Schwarzen Reiter

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