DP’s Sincerity Tracks
March 4, 2008
Originally Written on Friday 29th February 2008
I like to think that sincerity plays a significant part in my personality. I actually don’t like posting about it because in my opinion a part of being sincere and considerate is doing so without acknowledgment. In anycase I try to be sincere and also considerate to everyone I know. I guess in particular to my Chinese friends (whom are all exchange students) or my female friends.
Just double thinking that last part most of the people I see these days are either my Chinese friends or female (which make up most of my Uni friends). Anyways, I do this because I have the belief that if someone (or when someone) takes into consideration how I feel then I feel very thankful and quite special. So in turn I think that it is important that I take consideration for other people and their feelings etc.
Something that I have been thinking about is how some of the music I listen to really captures that side of my personality. So I wanted to post up some examples and links to download streams.
How to Save a Life – The Fray
Babylon – David Gray
Don’t Dream It’s Over – Crowded House
You Get What Give – New Radicals
Iris – Goo Goo Dolls
Save Tonight – Eagle Eye Cherry
Blow Up The Pokies – The Whitmans
Changes – 2Pac
The Little Things Give You Away – Linkin Park
On In Five (Bonus Track) – BoySetsFire
Crickets – Alien Ant Farm
The Movies – Alien Ant Farm
My Sacrifice - Creed
Thousand Mile Wish – Finger Eleven
Bright Lights – Matchbox 20
Talk Tonight - Oasis
Thrilloilogy - PowderFinger
Love Your Way – PowderFinger
Ever the Same – Rob Thomas
On Your Own – The Verve
Lucky Man – The Verve
Green Eyes – Coldplay
Cookie Jar – Jack Johnson
Protection – Massive Attack
Unfinished Sympathy – Massive Attack
Fly With You – Pete Murray
Check the Meaning – Richard Ashcroft
Set The Fire To The Third Bar – Snow Patrol (Featuring Martha Wainwright)
Half the Man – Jamiroquai
The Best is Yet to Come – Konami
Takin’ All Day - The Cruel Sea
High – Lighthouse Family
The Impression that I Get - The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Father and Son – Cat Stevens
People Get Ready – Human Nature
Fall at Your Feet (Acoustic) – James Blunt
Absolutely (Story Of A Girl) – Nine Days
Damn I was only expecting to post about 10 songs and now I have already posted 37 songs and I was still holding a few back! Damn.
I have bolded the most significant tracks.
Tags: Life
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Goal Setting for Second Year Uni
Originally Written on Saturday 23rd Feburary
It looks like the long summer holidays are drawing to it’s inevitable close. Man it really has been a long break, I feel as though I have made so much progress and had so many great moments. I want to keep the momentum rolling right through the year though. Which means that it is time for me to set some more goals.
I’ve been thinking about all of this goal setting business in the past few days and have concluded that I should have a tight, relevant list of only a few select goals. I only have a handful in mind but they are all very important.
Now because of my lack of part time work this puts a greater emphasis on my Gamer Blog as well as these upcoming new projects. Last year even with University, weekend work and going out I still managed to fit in about 8hrs a week of additional Chinese practice with my Chinese friends. Looking over this years courses I feel as though this can be easily maintained as long as I am peak performance.
So here is my list:
Chinese
Write, Write, Write! Writing more Chinese essays and articles is the key to putting most of the important things into practice. I need to write more to accommodate the plentiful speaking opportunities that I now have. So I want to focus on writing and getting my friends to check up on it.
Relationships
There is a saying that has been on my mind lately and it goes something like this: surround yourself with great people and you too will feel great. Thankfully I feel as though I am currently surrounded by great, supportive and influential people. As a side note even though I have never really thought much of online friendships etc I have made a great selection of blogging friends via my Gamer Blog. Which I am also very pleased about.
I guess this year I’d like to further advance friendships and network out with more unique people.
Websites
This goal just requires only one thing from me and that is to continue the strong work flow of previous years. What I have discovered recently from my Gamer blog is that I DO have the skills to write some really great articles, my site looks great and is functionable so I don’t need to worry about that anymore I just need to write. So with this, Chinese and Uni I will probably be doing a lot of writing this year. ^_^
There is actually a second part to this which is my new projects. I’ll need to get those out this year. Really this is a time issue. Once the CMS is finished, the design coded and the domain name bought, all I need is to add content. Which isn’t really that difficult, rather it will take a lot of time.
Gaming
Pretty simple this one, I only have two objectives. Buy and finish Metal Gear Solid 4 and attempt to clear up some more games on the huge pile of games to finish.
Tags: Life
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The Long Holiday Overview
Originally Written on the 18th Feburary 2008
One of the reasons why I write for this blog is to keep an account of what I am doing for previous reference. I think that this post is one of those which fits this bill perfectly.
In the past hour I was looking over my Rainlender calender app. For those whom aren’t familiar with Rainy its one of those small calender desktop applications which you can pin dates to etc. I use mine quite a bit and mark down any important dates on it. Because I reformatted my laptop several months ago Rainy goes back to just about when I believe that my holidays started.
Cut to the chase, I was looking over what I have done over the long holiday break and decided that I should clarify a lot of it. You see I love looking back at who I was at various dates etc which is partly why I have this blog. For me the holidays are a huge opportunity to make a lot of progress across the board. So I want to run through how my holidays have progressively played out:
Prelude
I like to think that my holidays started on the 5th of November 2007 and will finish the 3rd 2008. So I have (had) 4 months up my sleeve which is huge. There are two reasons why I have such a long holiday firstly because I am a Uni student and Uni holidays rock and secondly because I started mine earlier. You see on the second point, most Uni students probably finish up from around the 12-25th Novemeber but I consider that my holidays started on the 5th.
I wanted to start my holidays as early as possible which I could do and did end up doing. You see, the majority of my courses don’t have an exam but instead major assignments. Fortunately with the help of fore sight I managed to plan out my assignments well enough so that I would be basically finished by the 5th which is actually the earliest possible date. Otherwise I might have finished u two weeks later.
I started my major linguistics essay as soon as possible because well it was the most dreaded and dull assignment that I had to finish. So I finished the essay maybe a month or more early. This left me with design and Chinese work left and although Chinese is hard work and design takes a lot of time but they were easily much more painless than the linguistics work. So once I finished all of those all I had was a Chinese, two man presentation and the final Chinese exam. My presentation finished on the 5th which is where I want to start the holidays.
Now you are probably wondering about that exam right? which was about 12 days later..I think. Well It didn’t really bother me because I was going to be studying Chinese over the holiday period anyways.
Beginnings
This long holiday period is simply so generous. I’ve never had such a long holiday period before. I’d been hanging out for the holidays for so long that I wanted to make the most of it.
This meant that I started setting goals and planning what I was hoping to do right from the start. The day after I’d finished my Chinese exam I spent the day catching up with my friends from high school. We’d all finished our exams in the last 2 days. That weekend was my last shift at work as well. 3hrs on a Sunday. It had been about 3 weeks since I had last worked and they had rearranged the department I was working in. It was a terrible final shift which showcased the lack of communication and relevant in store training from other staff members.
The following week I finally got to meet up with my Chinese tutor. To provide some context, my Chinese teacher before the exam sent an email out to the class asking if anyone was interested in being tutored by a fellow Uni student fro China. Only two students decided to take it up. Not sure about the other student but I’ve been practicing with my tutor almost every week. Its the usual he helps me with Chinese and I try and help him with English.
It was election week as well which I tried to follow in the news. The two people that I voted for both got in. Yay. I also continued my Chinese revision throughout this time and up until now. My first goal was to cement last years(2007) grammar, I’d already been working on this before the exam so it was a natural continuation. That Friday I had the new gaming blog up as well.
The next week I spent doing the same thing; practicing with Chinese friends, catching up with other friends, tweaking the new blog, and revising Chinese. I believe that it was around this time that I was eBaying quite a lot as well.
In December I got to catch up with one of my favourite Chinese friends. Originally we had planned that over the holidays we would catch up and practice almost every weekday. Unfortunately he was taking on additional work (he writes for a Chinese basketball site) which was messing up his timetable and sleeping patterns.
Video Editing
Up to the 10th it was usual business. From then until almost Christmas I was spending a couple of days a week trying to figure out how to capture, crop and edit video for upcoming video reviews and video content for DP.com. You see my capture card only captures in Mpeg2 format. Because of the PAL letter boxing in our games I had to crop out the ugly black border. Just figuring out how to do this for free was god awful and so damn frustrating. Basically my production flow runs like this:
Capture video at I dunno about 576i in MPEG2 format. Then convert and shrink to 480 resolution thru Cyberlink Power Director. From there load Windows Media Encoder and alter the crop dimension to crop the frame. From there I can export it and use the video.
I’d been speaking with my mate Matty Jay about doing the voice work for all of this stuff. He decided to take it up and w were discussing ideas regularly. I did this for two reasons, firstly my voice just does not work well for recording. It sounds too muffled and unclear. I really would like to do the voice work but it just doesn’t sound as clear. Also Matty Jay has always been interested in doing some voice work, so I threw this opportunity his way.
Anyways heres the rest of my work flow:
- Choose a game to review
- do any further research if necessary
- finish the game
- write the review
- send review text to Matt
- gather the appropriate images and media
- capture the video
- crop the video to the correct size
- record the voicework with Matty Jay
- work with Matt to output the best voice
- take all of the recorded files and stick them together and tweak the levels and any slight niggles with Audacity
- now I can start producing, import the video and media
- edit the video to match the voice work and flow of the review (this takes a few hours)
- export, get some critque from my brother
- upload and review strengths and weaknesses
Matt and I recorded on the 21st and I did all of the editing that night and the following day. The video was uploaded on the 23rd. Matt did the whole 5 minutes speech in one take which is why it didn’t sound that great. Unfortunately doing it all in one take was my idea which is why I defended his voicework because he did a stellar job.
Christmas Period
Because Christmas was on the way I was also organizing what to buy people and did the usual bit of shopping. By early December I had made my way onto writing a few Chinese essays, all of last years grammar was much clearer so the essays allowed me to further improve my writing. I think that I wrote about 5 essays that month ranging from 500 -2000 characters each. This, my video editing, planning with Matty Jay and buying Christmas gifts were taking up most of my time.
There is a gap for the Christmas week on my Rainy calender which is a little confusing. I think that I had decided to calm down on the work load. I had already got the new blog up, done heaps of Chinese work and was building up my video game collection. I also had a week off from meeting with my Chinese friends. So I think that this was the week in which I just relaxed, built up a few blog posts and was reunited with my old friend video games.
New Year Week
My new year started off really well. I spent New Years Eve with my high school buddies. It was a great bonding session. The day after we went into town and also went to the arcades for a few hours. I beat all of them at air hockey which I am very pleased about. That Friday we also caught up again.
Mad Season
The next three weeks were tough but necessary and because of them I have made a lot of wiser, smarter decisions for the future. The second week of January was dominated we me enrolling into my Uni courses, it sounds like a lot, to spend one week to enrol but unfortunately this is basically what it is like. I had to first figure out what I wanted to study that year based on the year’s default template (my program is extremely flexible and not just set in stone). Then I had to figure out which tutorials and lectures to enrol in so that I wouldn’t end up with a clash (I have two clashes in total). Then I have to enrol cross institutionally for Chinese. Which means running from one University to another to fill out forms and stuff.
That weekend we had a party we was a relief. Umm yeah after enrollment I had been brainstorming ideas about releasing a new site. It had seemed as though I had basically lost my job at work so I needed to think about the future. I spent a series of days pondering what to do when eventually it hit me. Once I got the idea I straight away planned and designed the site and started working on content. Unfortunately all of this was brought to a halt as I had to and am still waiting for my brother to program the content management system. I need a special system to deal with this new site and it is something that I am going to have to wait for.
Throughout this time I was still doing the usual Chinese studying and tutors. In January I had moved onto intensive reading, I was going through my additional readings book and ensuring that I full understood every sentence. If I ever had any problems then I would write them down for vocab and grammar lists. Which I have produced a few of so far.
Throughout this time I had decided to step up my bloging and see what I could do with it. I went on a long hunt for other blogs to read and affiliate with. I nailed down which forum communities I wanted to be a part of and started posting. I was basically on a complete blogging blitz. I also was tweaking like mad, adding tags to all of my posts, tagging images, reworking the design.
The Wind Down
I was grinding myself against a wall and needed to apply the breaks. So one day I decided to get back on track. This was at the start of January’s last week.
I cut down the blogs in which I was reading to only the essentials, from 60 RSS feeds (mix of blogs and other sites) down to about 35. I put all of this work for this new game website on hold (because I couldn’t really do anymore anyways). I finally decided to go for my drivers license and finally quit my job at Myers.
It sounds like it wasn’t all worth it but I have to say it was totally worth it. My blog subscribers jumped up substantially. I now have a strong list of blogs on my Blogroll and my Alexa rank has gone way up. I have produced some excellent articles which I am very proud of. Many of which have been praised by other bloggers which I admire. With some continued dedication I have a promising website in the pipeline which is almost all set up for me to just do the content and upload it. This site (and possibly my video game blog) I believe should also supplement the lack of a ‘real’ job. And my Chinese is continually getting better and I had enrolled into Uni.
Chinese New Year
I realized that because of all of this work I hadn’t seen two of my special Chinese friends for a while. I was still doing the usual weekly sessions but only with one of my friends. So I started trying to catch up with my other friends. One of them had actually gone home for the Chinese new year so that wasn’t possible. But it was okay as I was busy as it was.
I had actually forgotten but the week after was Chinese new year so I celebrated with my friends. One of them did a traditional dance thing and the other had a group meal. I’d also been practicing with them more. I also nabbed my L plates.
Conclusion
Well that is almost all of my holidays. I still have 2 weeks left and haven’t written a full entry about last week which was very exciting.
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Some Reasonings and Stuffs about the Scribble Pad
Originally Written on February 18th 2008
There are a couple of main reasons why I post in my personal blog. If I had to be selective I would say that my three main reasons are to:
take a freeze frame of my life or what is on my mind at the time for future reference or interest
- I’m always interested in back tracking what I have done. Sometimes it is to understand how I felt at the time, other times for reference to see what was good or bad about what I was previously doing. So that I can look at what I was doing and then improve on it.
- to organize my ideas in my head so that I can make the best decisions
Every time that I am unsure of what to do in a particular situation and want to make the right decisions I usually let it out on the blog. Generally this starts with me trying to write a certain mold of story. For example I might want to write out the pros and cons, more often than not I get frustrated with this and write about something slightly irrelevant. From there I slowly lure into what I really want to talk about and as I write ideas are bouncing back and forth. Then I’ll hit a point where I know the answer and my problem is solved which leaves me with a page of unfinished writing, irrelevant to what I really wanted to talk about of which I don’t know how to finish. Which means that I awkardly try to conclude on something which I have already lost interest in myself.
So its not about the writing itself but rather what I get out of the writing.
- to write for me, to express myself in a language that directly speaks to me
Its good writing for myself because occasionally I’ll hit a streak and just be pumping out sentences in which I myself can’t get enough of. Its like writing to impress yourself.
I also wanted to add that;
There is a trend that I have always had since I started personal blogging. I usually write up my thoughts and then leave it in the Word document until I feel like posting. I never write an entry and then post it up on the website once I am finished.
Now today is the 18th of Feburary and as I scroll thru my long journal file there are 3 posts in which are pending to be published from about two weeks ago to now. Then there is another 4 posts in which I won’t post up on the website.
Reason being because they are unfinished or just articles which I want to keep to myself. Theres nothing really interesting within them but they bear a significance for myself and will stay that way. You know, it isn’t actually very often that I don’t post something on the website, just seems to be that way recently.
Tags: Life
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