Let's Take a Walk 2010

A couple of months ago my co-worker invited me to join in on a long distance walk. Now, never having done any sort of long distance run/walk I figured a good place to start would be a walk rather than a run. I asked about the length of the walk, and found out it was 100km. Now, since at that point I was still new to the whole notion of the "metric system" I figured, "that can't be far at all" and decided to sign up, and make the conversion from kilometers to miles at a later time.

The official name of the event is Let's Take a Walk which in retrospect is a bit arrogant, I mean to call a 100km monstrosity of a thing [which I found out to be 62 miles] a "walk" and then not only are they calling it a walk but they're addressing it like you're walking to the store, "let's take a walk" the gumption.

The Start

Before the big day I decided I would do some "training" by walking home from work, which is about 9km. I figured, I'm a reasonably in shape, I play football from time to time, I should be good right? Wrong. Way wrong.

The format was pretty simple, 100km and there'd be 10 checkpoints. Now, before the whole thing started I was told that to complete the whole race would be 30 hours, but that wouldn't be a problem because before the race even started I had decided that I would only be doing half the walk, so my real target was 50km.

Everything went smoothly for the first leg of the event, since that was similar to my walks home from work, we reached the first checkpoint and I was confident that I would see 50km through. However, soon enough I realized the breath of my ignorance regarding the metric system, walking, and proper footwear.

As you get farther and farther, red light become your enemy. Basically shortly after leaving the second checkpoint, the only thing that was keeping me going forward was physics, momentum. Having to come to a complete stop and then keep moving was ridiculously painful. I must have looked like a zombie as I trudged along the sidewalk, doing less of a walk and more of a glorified shuffle. The leg between checkpoint 2 and 3 was the longest leg of my planned walk, 15km.

Halfway through we stopped for lunch and a rest. Again, after eating my meal I could no longer feel any pain in my legs, so I gained some confidence. Confidence that came crashing down as soon as I took my first step, I was not going to make it to the 5th checkpoint.

I trudged along past the third checkpoint, which was far enough north that we could see Malaysia. Something gave during the fourth leg and at the first sight of a vacant cab, I left my walking buddy alone. He would eventually finish all 100km.

I managed to collect three sad looking stickers and although my legs healed eventually, my pride remain damaged. I plan to try this again next year, if they hold the walk, and this time see the 50km through.

The Empty Spots Mock Me

Señor Burrito

My weekly hangout spot and go-to Mexican restaurant Señor Taco recently launched a brother store, Señor Burrito. Lack of naming creativity aside, I decided to give it a try during lunchtime since it's not far away from work.

The first challenge was finding the place, it's in the basement of Raffles City Mall, and I knew it was in the basement but since it's only a stall [there's no dining area] it was kind of hard to find. Undeterred, I walked around aimlessly until I gave in and looked at the directory, which had no mention of the place. Luckily a quick google search revealed the location.

The store front is pretty simple, and reminds you of a Subway store or for me "Felipe's" back in Boston. The serve two main dishes, burritos and nachos as well as drinks, and other small things. I went with the meal combo which is a choice of burrito/nachos and chips/drink. I decided on burrito and drink and was left wondering whether anyone would ever choose the chips. The two choices of drink are frozen margarita and sangria. Sangria, for the first time in Singapore I had found an agua fresca.

The Combo

After selecting your course you are given a choice of "filling" which again is very much like a Subway order, you can choose between chicken, steak, and ground beef. Then after you choose the filling you have a choice of lettuce, onion, sour cream, hot sauce, avoacado, etc. Each burrito comes with mexican rice and refried beans.

I finished up my order and took my meal to my desk where I could evaluate it in peace. One thing that stood out while they made my burrito was the small amount of beans and rice that you get. After the girl making my burrito had applied the beans I could still see the tortilla, which isn't right at all but I tried to ignore that as I took my first bite.

Steak Burrito

Compared to other food I've had in Singapore, this burrito was a solid 9/10 and compared to burritos in general it's still a respectable 8/10. The steak was tender and flavorful, the salsas [chipotle and jalapeño] are just the right amount of spicy, not so mild that they're glorified spreads but not spicy enough that you have to run your tongue under cold water. The $2 addition of avocado, although a bit steep, was a crucial move to make. In fact the only thing that was missing in this burrito was the thing I noticed while they were making it, not enough beans. I'm not sure whether they were good or bad, salty or bland because there wasn't enough of them in there, and while there shouldn't be so much beans in a burrito that they overpower everything else, you should still be able to notice them, even if just slightly.

They Make Sangria in Singapore?

Then there was the sangria, which by existing had already thrown my expectations out the window. After tasting it, I was torn between drinking it all in one gulp because it's good, or drinking it sip by sip so it would last me the whole day because... well because it's good. Either they're making it the good ol' fashioned way or they have their hands on some really good mix. Not too sweet, not too bitter and as refreshing as I remember it being straight from our fridge. Singapore, in it's perpetual heat and humidity needs Sangria.

Overall the food at Señor Burrito is good but a pit pricey. I paid $12.50 for my burrito and sangria combo which to me is about $2.50 too much. That aside, the portions are filling, the service is pretty fast and the food was fresh. I will definitely be going back and I doubt I'll ever deviate from my steak burrito and sangria. Now, if I could just convince the owner to start making horchata.

MG RX-0 Unicorn

So, after finally finishing Fallout: New Vegas I had a chance to build the Gundam that I bought at the Anime Festival in Singapore. I spent a good chunk of my time at the festival at the Ban Dai booth trying to decine which one [I limited myself to one] model I was going to buy. I decided to stick with the Master Grade models since I still don't have an airbrush [yet] to make the Perfect Grade models worth the investment and a High Grade model feels like a downgrade.

After weighing all my options I decided to go with the RX-0 Unicorn because the box showed that it could pull off some sort of transformation and I figured it'd be like buying two gundams or at least one and a half so it'd be the best value for money.

Instruction Booklet

The build was pretty straight forward. It didn't have any extra parts other than the plastic, no string or screws or anything like that. The plastic came in more than two colors, including semi-transparent pink which the manual referred to as the "psycho frame".

Selection of Parts

The build took a bit longer than the others, mainly because  of the detailing. As I build a model I like to do the lining on the individual parts because it's easier to do than once the model is completed. However because the RX-0 transforms I wasn't too sure which parts needed to be lined and which did not.

Just Starting

In the end, I was fairly happy with the finished product. The one downside was that a lot of the lining I did do ended up rubbing off on my fingers as I was transforming it from one mode to another. I still have to get better at applying the decals because there's a couple of them that aren't straight.

Unicorn Mode

In order to transform the model from one model to another you need to remove the legs and head, this means that these parts where made to be removed and attached frequently. As a result the model doesn't feel as sturdy as the other ones, especially the legs. It's very hard to stand it up straight as it tends to sag to one side.

Destroy Mode

With all the models I've built [and the ones I will build] I think it might be time that I start watching the series or at least one of the movies.

My Desk is Getting Crowded

KOSS iSpark Earbuds

iSpark Earbuds

My iPhone earbuds have been wearing out for a while now, so a couple of months ago I decided to buy a new pair. I didn't really care whether they were the original iPhone earbuds or not, but since I do use my iPhone for listening to music a fair amount I needed earbuds that had a "clicker" that little remote bit that lets you change tracks and control the volume.

So at the headphone store during lunch, I asked to see all the earbud that had this "clicker" and after being presented with all four, I went with the KOSS iSpark Earbuds. They're black, looked simple, fairly cheap, and had the clicker, so all good. Or so I thought.

I had never heard of KOSS but my co-workers assured me that they weren't a BOSE imitation, so I was happy with that. However, after opening them up and connecting them to my iPhone I tested out the clicker, and that's where it went downhill. The KOSS remote thing didn't have volume control, which is not a big deal since the iPhone has buttons I can get at even when it's in my pocket, but the big drawback is that the clicker didn't change tracks. Apparently, the clicker was only to answer calls, so disappointed with myself for not reading boxes better I stuffed them in my desk and continued using my old iPhone earbuds.

Recently I broke the clicker on the iPhone earbuds, I think I squished them with my laptop, which meant I didn't have a reason to use them instead of the new ones. So I pulled out the iSparks [is this a valid plural? I mean a pair of headphones comes joined together so even though there's two of them, it's still one item, right?] from somewhere on my desk and decided to give them a fair chance on my commute from work.

Now, the iPhone earbuds are supposed to be in-ear [I think] but the iSparks takes in-ear to a whole other level. They have some sort of foam that you pinch closed that then expands once in your ear. So once both earbuds are in and in place they basically turn my skull into a sub-woofer with decent bass. The sounds is so good with these, that I'm discovering new sounds in songs and games I've had on my iPhone forever.

Apart from making my skull a sub-woofer and giving me better sound quality than I'm used to, because they are so fitted they essentially make me deaf to the outside world. This is especially good at drowning out laughter when I break into my impromptu in-place bachata step on the train. However, I discovered a downside to this. Have you ever seen a singer put a finger to his ear? I think it's so he can hear himself better, which might be good for singers but now I have to hear myself sing along out of tune and probably out of pitch.

Still, these are some pretty good earbuds.

Konami Code

So after seeing more and more sites add the konami code, I wanted to see how hard it would be to do the same for this blog.

After doing a bit of googling, I found out that adding the konami code to your site is a lot easier than I thought because someone has done most of the work and is hosting it on google code. This means that all I had to do is write a link to the code and define what I want the "cheat" to be.

Originally I wanted to have the "yeeeaaah" sound from CSI:Miami to play since I figured it would be helpful to have for all the bad puns I make, still missing the glasses though. Some googling led me to an awesome site developed just for this purpose. I figured I would look at their source and figure out how I could make the clip the cheat for successfully entering the konami code. Halfway through the work, however, I felt that this wouldn't be as cool as I originally thought, so I was back to the drawing board.

As I stared at my browser for inspiration I noticed my kick ass bookmarklet. Essentially, this bookmarklet makes the site your visiting a sort of asteroids game. Since it all works on javascript I figured that it would load faster and be better than playing an mp3.

In the end this little project wasn't much of a coding exercise as a copy and paste one, but oh well. Go ahead and try it out though, enter the konami code and have fun shooting your way around my blog.

In case you don't know, the konami code is:
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Enter

Tomatillos Mexican Street Food

I discovered a new Mexican restaurant through a site that catalogs new places in Singapore. Their tag line "Mexican Street Food" intrigued me and I figured who better than a Mexican to validate that claim, plus the only picture I could find of the place seemed pretty good.

Note the molcajete

So on a rainy evening after work I walked over to the place, which turns out isn't that far from where I work. Tomatillos is part of "The Foundry" which is a collection of food stalls; the stalls only sell food and they share a common sitting area. The lack of drinks was a bit disappointing since I was hoping they'd have horchata.

The menu is simple but contains all the staples; quesadillas, burritos, fajitas. I was going to get a burrito but at the last moment another item caught my eye, chimichanga. For fillings they offered chicken, beef, and pork. I wondered whether the pork meant carnitas so I gambled on the hope it would and ordered my pork chimichanga. The menu said that the chimichanga would come with guacamole, lettuce, and beans. I was happy to have found a Mexican place that finally had beans, so I sat down just a tad bit hyped about my food.

My Food Arrived

I looked at my plate with mixed reactions. I could see jalapeños, but the pork didn't look like carnitas. I figured I was expecting too much and decided to dig in and minimize my bias. After the first few bites I was a bit disappointed, and not only because I was expecting to get something different.

A Real Chimichanga

A chimichanga is supposed to be a burrito that is deep fried, just in case a regular burrito isn't fattening enough. However, what I got was a couple of deep fried tortillas with pork, beans, and guacamole on top; it felt more like a tostada although not even quite that. The beans were also a big let down, they tasted like they came from the can and they weren't mashed enough. The pork was over seasoned and overpowered everything else. The guacamole was definitely the spotlight of the dish.

I wouldn't say that the food was bad, by itself it was actually pretty good. However, given the fact that I was expecting good refried beans and a deep fried burrito I was a bit let down. If I do go back I will probably get the burrito.

Looking back I realize that the logo should have clued me to the fact that this wasn't going to be real Mexican restaurant. If you see the logo above you can notice that the chiles are wearing Chucks, a real Mexican chile would have been wearing chanclas.

That Is the Question

To be or not to be that is the question
whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
or to take arms against a sea of troubles
and by opposing end them?
To die to sleep no more,
and by a sleep to say we end...

That's all I can remember from Hamlet's famous soliloquy, a soliloquy I had to memorize my freshman year of high school for drama class. Why do I still remember even that much? Well besides being famous, I remember it because I remember it. Let me explain.

I remember memorizing it on my walk home from high school, it was an hour walk and at about the halfway point there was a pupuseria that I used to have on speed dial so I could call them ahead of time and order [dos mixtas y un jarritos de tamarindo] and have my food ready by the time I reached there. I was also thinking about the food back then when I was memorizing.

I remember I had the first... stanza? memorized by the time I got to the self-service car wash that never gave you enough time to wash anything more than a hatchback. By the time I was ready to eat my pupusas I had it all memorized and I spent the rest of the walk home rehearsing it.

As it turns out, I was the only one who memorized the damn thing because as the teacher went down the roll call [in alphabetical order] only a few students could get as far as "the question". Tired of this the teacher asked, "who actually memorized the thing?" My hand shot up enthusiastically.

I know, I know, but I was young and impressionable. What did you want me to do? I looked around to see that my hand was up alone, like that annoying hair I miss when I shave sometimes.
I took what seemed like a mile walk from my seat to the stage [didn't help that I liked sitting in the back] and as I got up to the stage one of my friends screamed "eses mijo!" My voice shook, but I cleared my throat and recited the whole thing, probably badly.

After that I would randomly tell people that I still remembered the soliloquy I had to memorize freshman year in high school, and would start reciting it but I always stopped before I finished because... reciting Shakespeare doesn't exactly make you the life of the party. But every once in a while I still try it out and see how much I remember. So you see, I remember because I remember.

I can't recall much more than what I typed at the beginning, and at this point I don't even remember what the answer to his question was. However, what does make me scratch my chin is that Hamlet decided to ask himself these questions.

I don't feel that questions get the respect they deserve. Everyone is usually only interested in the answers, myself included. But if you belief that for life the journey is way better than the destination; shouldn't you also believe that questions are better than answers? That is to say journey:questions::destination:answers. Sorry for that, I just wanted to use an analogy.

The point I'm failing to make is that we shouldn't be afraid of questions we can't answer, and we should start paying more attention to the questions we do ask because they can help us learn a lot more than the answers might. For example, if you get home from a long day of work and ask yourself "what's the weather like in Tahiti right now?" shouldn't you be paying more attention to why you would even ask such a thing, rather than the fact that currently at the time of writing it is 24 C in Tahiti?

Oh, and I have no idea who I'm talking to.

Typical Day at Work

So recently I was made aware of this little program that will draw your cursor movement across your desktop. Since I'm in front of a computer for a majority of my day, both at work and at home I thought it would be interesting to make a little comparison. However, given my mac's recent problems I decided that I should maybe stick to the work computer. So after 8 or so hours of work I was left with this.

Cursor Movement at Work

The circles represent a stop, so the bigger the circle the longer the cursor was idling. The colors don't really have any significance [I think] other than helping to differentiate between stops. There is also an option to track your movement across dual desktops, although it wouldn't work for my setup so I tried to stay on one desktop as much as I could for best results. There are plenty of other option including overlaying your graph over your wallpaper. The program doesn't need any installation so I was able to run it on my work computer where I don't have install privileges.

The biggest circle in the graph is lunch, I left the program and my computer running so I could compare it to other stops. A couple of the other bigger stops are meetings where I stepped away from my desk, but a lot of them are due to me stopping the cursor to either type or read something. There is also probably more stops than movement in my graph because whenever possible I try to use keyboard short cuts, also when I read text on a browser I use the scroll wheel  instead of moving the mouse all over the place.

The majority of the action [or inaction] seems to be center around... well the center. I wonder whether this is true of all actions or only because I was doing work. It would be interesting to see a similar graph for me playing a computer game, or maybe just browsing reddit on the weekend. I recommend checking the program out yourself and seeing what you find about your computer use. It could make a cool wallpaper or printout and you could probably even convince someone that it's a piece of modern art, just give it a complicated title that talks about the "human condition".

Cowboy Bebop

Since I only bought the EPL pack for my cable, I don't have much actual TV to watch, so I decided to get to a couple of classics, that I haven't watched yet. I decided to start with anime, mostly because of my recent visit to the anime fest here in Singapore. The only rule I imposed on myself is that I would watch an anime series that was ended, that way there would be no waiting period for any new episodes which can get frustrating.

Rule in hand I went to good ol' google to find a number of "best anime" lists, and after reading a couple it became clear that "Cowboy Bebop" was high on a lot of those lists. The entire series is made up of 26 different sessions, each a half hour long. Having completed the series I have to agree with the many people who think that Cowboy Bebop is the best anime series of all time.

Cowboy Bebop is the story of a bounty hunter, called a cowboy, and his ship, the bebop. Each episode deals with either a job or goes into the backstory of the characters. The story moves at a good pace and unlike many other animes there isn't a single episode that feels like it is filler. The story is well written, and deals with concepts like: existentialism, belonging, and they gray of life.

Also, unlike other animes Cowboy Bebop is loved by general viewers. Within the series Cowboy Bebop refers to itself as "the work that will considered a genre" and although it's an extremely gassed opinion to have they might have a point. The series doesn't contain a lot of the things that puts people off from other animes, there's no magic, no teenagers, no big sweat drops or power levels, Cowboy Bebop could have easily been a Hollywood movie [and it might be]. Even the opening sequence feels more like it belongs more to a Bond movie than an anime.

Besides the iconic opening song, music plays a big part in Cowboy Bebop. The series takes influences from Jazz and Blues as well as Heavy Metal. There is an episode in particular with some mean blues harmonica, and another entitled "Mushroom Samba".

But what make this series so great has to be the writing and character development. The characters feel real and are given depth tot he point where you feel invested in their storylines. I could go more into the story but I feel like saying anything about it would be robbing the viewers from the full experience.

With the holiday season coming up, I think it's about time to start dropping hints that you want the Cowboy Bebop box set or just buy it for yourself, saying it's really good is being unfair and you are likely be lending it out to all your friends.

Review: Fallout New Vegas

Story

You get shot and left for dead and the beginning of the game, in one of the few cinematics the game has. You are the awakened in a small town where the town doctor tell you he's fixed you up after being near death. Here is where you get to choose your appearance and stats, which is done through some interesting psychology test, I especially liked the ink blot test. After these basics are taken care of you are tasked with finding out more about the men who shot you and left you for dead, and if you want to, get revenge.

It's a pretty basic story, however, it is not the only one. As you move through the wasteland you will find different factions who will give you side quests that will either have their own plots or contribute to the main story.

Gameplay

Gameplay is very similar to Fallout 3 with the only addition of a "grab" action that really didn't have much use for me. Your inventory is still limited by weight, which is determined by your strength, you still have the V.A.T.S. shooting, and you still have attributes like speech, sneak, and science. Shooting in the game is changed a bit by having the option of iron sights for weapons when you zoom in, but don't expect to be the shooting as refined as you would have on a FPS.

Your interactions in the wasteland are determined by your character's attributes and perks, which you gain upon leveling up. For example, the "sandman" perk allows you to instantly kill any character that is sleeping. Overall the game controls very well, although jumping is a bit iffy at times, and trying to jump onto objects can get frustrating.

A huge part of the gameplay is conversations with NPCs. These conversations play out through a typical dialogue screen, but your character traits can unlock different options. Have a high enough speech rating and you could sweet talk your way out of tough situations. 


The biggest drawback of the game are the glitches. There was a patch available when I bought the game so I can't compare and say if it made things better, but there were definitely times where the game either froze, shutdown my PS3, or my character was stuck in the background. However, considering that the game auto-saves whenever you enter a new location, the frustration of having to re-play a huge section due to a glitch is avoided. 

Presentation

The game supports 720p although there isn't much eye candy there. With very few exception the game will look post-apocalyptic: gray, desserted, and vast. The most prominent visually gratifying aspect of the game are the slow motion kills.

The music in the game helps add to the nostalgic atmosphere and you have the option of listening to the radio using your pip boy as well as from radios scattered throughout the wasteland. Although there are a couple of different stations, they are only differentiated by their hosts as the music will stay the same across the stations, perhaps only a few vinyls survived the war.

Aside from the music of the game, the sound effects are spot on. Carving into a large fire ant sounds real enough and there are parts of the game where the sound helps add to both the tension and horror of the situation. There is one section in particular where I had to mute the game to check whether the whispering voices where coming from the game or not.

Recommendation

This game is for compulsive side quest completers. While you can finish the main story rather quickly, it would defeat the point of this type of game. A large portion of the story content can be found in conversations, notes, and terminals. The game can move from being funny to making you regret playing it at night with the lights off, I can honestly say there where times where it made me jump and not because of a cheap startle scare.

Also, because of all the factions, characters and options, you can play through this game more than once and still feel like you're playing a new game. The game does a good job of making you weigh every option because you feel like they will have actual consequences.

Mac Down

This is not the post I was originally planning for today, but my Mac decided to start acting up. I got back from lunch and could hear a loud whirring noise coming from the direction of my cubicle, immediately I suspected it was coming from my laptop and upon confirmation I decided to shut it down. I let it rest for a while [not really sure why I thought that would work] but every time I turned it back on it sounded like I was turning over a really beat up engine, which although is kind of cool wasn't what I wanted to hear from my computer.

Naturally, I bought some tools [31-in-1 screwdriver thingie] and opened up my laptop. I'm pretty sure that the problem is coming from the fan, and while it doesn't seem like it's a constant problem [it decided it wants to be good right now] I still think I'm going to have to replace the fan. This is both good and bad, good because it means I have another blog post idea, but bad because I'm in no way certified to be doing this sort of thing. There is no better evidence of this than the fact that I already have an "extra part".

I've setup a twitter account for myself [@ramosisms] but for now I don't plan on doing much with it other than tweeting when I have a new post up, which I'm hoping will be two to three times a week.

Visualizing My Facebook Data

As I said in the intro to this blog, I started this blog as an alternative to my facebook account which I would be deleting. However, it seemed sort of anti-climactic simply to delete the account without some type of closure. The idea for this closure came to me after I found out that you can download all of your facebook data.

Remembering an assignment I had for my visualization class, I figured that a fitting end for my facebook life would be to sum up all the text on my wall in some sort of visualization. So, while I don't intend this to be a step by step guide on how to do the same, I will document the mini-project that was visualizing my facebook wall data.

The first step was to get all of my data from facebook. In your account settings you will see an option to do this.

Account Settings

After you assure facebook that you are who you say you are and that you want your data it will take some time to compile it all. Once this is done you will get an email with a link to your data. After downloading this file you will realize that it comes in HTML form. Basically, facebook will give you a  local version of your pages.

The file of interest here is wall.html, however, you can't really use the file as-is because it contains all the extra HTML stuff that you don't really need if you just want the actual text that you see on your wall. For example, for the simple status message "will be moving to ramosisms.blogspot.com once he deletes his facebook account" the actual html file will contain:

<div class="feedentry">
<span class="profile">Alan 'Salvacion' Ramos</span>
will be moving to ramosisms.blogspot.com once he deletes his facebook account
<div class="timerow">
<span class="time">November 18, 2010 at 10:12 am</span>

So in order to really start seeing what's been on my wall I had to get rid of all the HTML tags. My initial idea was to use python and RE to extract only the text from replies and posts. However, after much failure and insult to my coding skills, I decided I needed an easier solution. Luckily I had a light bult moment and realized that if I knew what I didn't want, I could use find and replace in TextWrangler to replace whatever I didn't need with an empty space.

TextWrangler does support RE searches which made my life a bit easier. I decided I wanted to remove all the tags, the time stamps, and the random special html entities using the following searches:

<.*?> - tags
&.*?; - special entities
\d\d?, \d\d\d\d at \d\d?:\d\d \w\w - timestamp

With my data file now cleaned up, I could proceed with making the visualization. IBM has a pretty cool site that lets you upload data and make a visualization using the styles they offer, and it's all free. Each visualization also has multiple options. For example, the one I used "word cloud" lets you remove common english words, which is very helpful. After customizing my visualization I had the following:

Words Appearing on My Wall

Originally I decided to leave in the month portion of the time stamp because I wanted to see which months were more active for my wall. However, after seeing the result, I thought that the months overshadowed everything else so I decided to remove them and create the visualization again.

Words Appearing on My Wall Sans Months

I was more happy with this result than the first. While I intended this to be more of a tech case study than an analysis of the results, I will say that the "alan" instance is the amount of times other people wrote my name on my wall since I removed all instances of my name as an author of a post.

I still think there is more value I can get out of my facebook data, perhaps next time I'll make a graph of the number of comments over time or something like that.

MG Musha Gundam Mk-II

I recently finished building this MG Musha Gundam Mk-II. Not being a follower of the gundam canon I have no idea what the backstory of the gundam is, because even though the instruction booklet comes with an explanation, I don't read Japanese [yet].

However, a quick search on the gundam wiki [whose existence isn't that surprising] informed me that the Mk-II is the Dynasty Warriors Gundam game variation of the regular Musha Gundam. Fascinating stuff.

Box Cover

I picked up this model at the "Gundam Roadshow" after I saw a version of it on display. The model on display had some cool looking kimono stickers thing, which I noticed wasn't pictured on the box. I figured I'd ask one of the salespeople there about this and would buy it if it came with the stickers.

Japanese Pattern Motif Stickers

The build was pretty straightforward, nothing too complicated. The one quirk in this model is that it came with some sor of rope, laces thing that is used to model hoses. I was really worried I would cut some section too short or too long and then screw the whole thing up, but luckily it all worked out well. Another thing that made this model pretty fast is that the plastic is all dark colored which meant that I could skip the lining. I tried to pose the model in a Samurai Jack inspired katana sheathing but posing these things is extremely difficult because of all the moving parts.

Constructed Model

I put off adding the stickers for a while because I thought they were decals and those are generally a plan. However, once I realized they were just stickers I cleared up an evening and got to it. I think I spent at least three hours adding the stickers. It took a while because I had to remove parts [carefully] and often I would be unhappy with the orientation of a sticker so I redid parts. I realized that while the stickers gave me some flexibility with redoing parts, it also meant that there would be obvious overlaps that kind of still bother me.

You Can See the Overlap

Regardless of that I think he's happy in his new home on my desk.

New Cubicle Decoration

Intro

I decided to start this blog as an alternative to my facebook account, mainly because as I see facebook getting more and more "features" it has become increasingly worrisome to me that facebook will pretty soon own my life, or at least a big part of it. Since I do not wish to be owned and packaged by facebook, I decided to stop complaining and do something about it, so here I am.

In the beginning, this blog [if it survives that is] will be very much a facebook surrogate. I'll post random links, pictures, updates on my life, etc. Eventually though, I hope that this medium will give me more of a kick in the butt to do some actual writing which might take the form of reflections, analysis, rants, or even prose.