Snowy and I

From Snow Day

So much snow. Really. I have never seen this much snow before! We had about a feet of snow over the last weekend. It was actually kinda funny because when I went outside last Sunday, my car was buried under the snow and had to dig my car out, but I had a fun doing it. When I was trying to get my car out from the snow, a couple approached to me and offered a help! I was like “oh hell yeah strangers!!” I thought that was so Minnesota-nice thing. It was like snow brought everyone together kinda thing, well, yeah kinda. And then, now it’s round 2. Less than a week, we are having another snow storm. Yeah, I really haven’t seen this much snow!! It’s white! It’s winter wonderland! My car is buried under the snow again, but, it’s okay! Snow emergency has been declared, but it’s okay!! I had a plan to go to Chicago and had to cancel the trip, but it’s okay! I must say I still get excited to see lots of snow. I still get excited having snow day!

I need to submit full abstract for the conference by March 16th, and I have no idea what I should put in the result section! My super brief abstract was accepted, and now, I need to submit not so brief abstract. Eh. Eeeeeeh!!! I even haven’t started analyzing the data! Good luck with me!

I got Virtua Fighter 5 several days ago. It’s good. I love VF series, and it’s freaking awesome to play VF5 on my PS3! I still need to get VF5 arcade stick (by Hori) or PS2-to-PS3 converter (I have VF4 arcade stick) to unleash my awesomeness, well, yeah kinda. I am a true believer that you gotta have an arcade stick to play VF. So, I think I am going to get one soon. I cannot play VF without arcade stick!!

I went snowboarding yesterday. I didn’t go to snowboard last season, so, of course, I had to regain my lost skill. One thing I noticed was that I got scared when I started picking up the speed. It was very sad because I was turning right-left all the way to the lift, so I wouldn’t go too fast! Sad. If you do snowboarding, you know this. Even if you slightly keep your board right-left (swing…I guess), you stay at the same speed, and it looks “cool.” I just couldn’t go straight because I was afraid of speed! Eh.

Mall of America (MOA) is the biggest shopping mall in the America. The mall is really big. In this afternoon, I was feeling getting a light jacket. For some reasons, I wanted to get G-Star jacket. I think I saw G-star jacket on TV (you know, one of makeover shows), and it really made me want to get one. So, I went to MOA. I searched for the jacket I liked, but I couldn’t find any. I was very annoyed by the fact even in this huge mall, I couldn’t find anything I liked. I was gonna go back to my apt, but I wanted to get a jacket, so I went to Macy’s (former Marshall Field’) in downtown. I really think I should go to this store first, because I knew I would find something there. I loved the Marshall Field’s in the Water Tower Place in Chicago because they had tons of lines I love. So, now, here in Minneapolis, they still have same lines of clothes, and I am loving it. I ended up buying Energie vest and G-Star jacket. Not bad eh? I wasn’t going to buy the vest, but I am such a sucker for Energie, so I just had to get it. Ha! Nothing really I had to, but it was better for me to buy this vest because it did make me happy in some degrees! I love Energie. But, a thing about Energie and G-Star is that they do come with very small size. I mean they fit well, but too well, I guess. It’s good and bad. You will know even if you gain 1 lb, but same time, you will be careful to not gain weight because you want to keep wearing clothes you spend hundreds of dollars!

It’s spring break. Yes, we are in the middle of spring break. Where am I? Well, it doesn’t really matter for me if it’s spring break or not because I gotta things to do in the lab. I finally finished writing the full abstract for the poster book for the conference for this summer for Japan. Ha? I am not sure neither. I was making pretty 3-D plot using matlab and editing the graphs in Illustrator. I like making graphs because it’s fun. But, it took so much time to get to the point I could plot the graphs... Anyway, it’s done! Or not. I guess it depends on my advisor cos he is the one doing final check before I submit!

Yesterday, we got 55 inch plasma TV in the lab. It was really heavy and huge. For some unknown reasons, the school paid for the TV. They bought TV at BestBuy, and they were tricked by the sales person there to buy HMDI cable! They were told XBOX360 has HDMI output which was total lie!! So, I told my professor that we do not need HDMI cable, but we should exchange it with DVI to HDMI cable, so we can hook up computer (the TV does not have DVI input! Nonsense!!). But, playing games on this huge screen is like super. The games (XBOX360 games, I mean) looked awesome. Too bad Wii cannot output more than 480p... It looked pretty bad. It was really cool to play games, but it did gave me massive headache!

I bought my PS3 about 3months ago, and I had only one game (Virtua Fighter 5). I do like my PS3, but there haven’t many software out there, and most of games aren’t really worth spending $60 for it. But, I finally bought another game, Oblivion last Wednesday. This game has been out on Xbox360 and PC for over a year. I always wanted to play the game because it looked pretty good. So, I had some expectations, but I wasn’t sure if it’s $60 worth (well, I bought anyway!). First thing I noticed when I started playing this game was that frame rate is kinda sucky. Graphics are really really good. NPCs are like really people, they talk a lot and even talk to other NPCs. It’s really beautiful game, but frame rate sucks!! It’s not terrible or anything, but it’s just not good. But, I think that’s only complain I have about this game. It’s annoyingly fun. I have played over 25 hours in the past 4 days. Yesterday was the worst. I woke up around 10am, and I kinda started playing around 10:30am, then, I finished playing 5:30am!! I mean I played non-stop. I didn’t stop playing it. When I finished playing, I still wanted to play more. Then, this morning I woke up 9:30am, then started playing Oblivion again!! But, I only played couple hours because I knew I would regret if I played the game all day today too. So, I went jogging outside because it was really warm and nice, but of course, I felt like a crap because I only had 4 hours of sleep! I do not remember when was the last time I played video game with 17 hours non-stop! Sad thing is I am still at level 3!! I was basically running around the towns to do side quests! I am so not going to play this game tomorrow (maybe)!