m00- thoughts, rants, and stuff - |
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FYI |
| Just in case anyone is still looking here, I've finally made the move to LiveJournal, mostly because everyone I know is on there. Rantyblog! will likely still be developed, just (as is the norm) when I feel like it. |
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Blah. |
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So normally, I wouldn't post something I'd consider to be... angsty, because so many blogs out there consist only of teen angst of major proportions. But today, I just haven't been able to do anything. Slept in until 9:30 this morning (my alarm went off at 8, but my boss was not online yet, and I'm pretty sure he considers me part time again since my contract expired on December 31). I've mostly been playing old games through emulation today, games which long ago got stale in my mind (though rarely, something is good enough that you can play it every year and a half or so without it being stale, such as Chrono Trigger). I tend to do this when I'm depressed, it seems, when I could very easily (and in the case of today, really should be) doing something much more productive. After I post this, I'm going to be working on my VB project which I need to get done for Monday (effectively an entire semester's amount of coursework, since I'm trying to make the course up... I'm about 75% of the way through it). Luckily I have a good source of caffeine, so I should be able to get through it pretty easily, regardless of the dullness of the material (VB w/SQL server... feels so Microsoft-locked). It seems every time I have to come home from seeing Samantha, this happens to me (and to her). And I know it's obvious why it's happening, but I still wish I could find a way around it. I miss her more than I've missed anything or anyone in my life. Just now, she was talking about how a friend of hers was saying that she missed her boyfriend because she was at work, and how Samantha had absolutely no sympathy for her... I tend to feel the same way. Knowing that you've discovered the one person in this world who makes you whole, and having to be torn away from them for month-long periods at a time is a feeling I cannot adequately describe. It is, quite literally, like having part of your life taken that you know you can never replace or substitute. And while we talk on the phone as frequently as possible, and "see" each other via webcam, it is simply not the same. I usually try to be the strong one (though we both are strong for each other), saying things like how we'll be together soon, and how we'll get through it (and I know we will), but the effect that being apart from her has on me is something my brain cannot fool itself into forgetting. I miss you, hun. The thing that keeps me together is that I know that at the end, when we're finally together, we will have each other, and that's something I would go through hell and back to have. I had to put that down somewhere, sorry if it's overly cheesy for anyone reading. |
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Purity Test Thing |
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Saw this on Jeremy's blog, figured I'd try it. I wonder if this works here...
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The Standard Two Month Ultralong UpdateMood: Bored Music: Fatboy Slim - The Rockafeller Skank |
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Getting close to Christmas, and I (surprisingly) don't have anything to work on at the moment, so I thought I would update my blog. A lot has happened to me in the last little while. I once again went back to Texas, though that was quite a hassle; US Customs and Border Protection (a.k.a. Homeland Security) refused my entry the first time I tried to get across, citing that they needed documentation. Basically, they wanted to be sure that I'd get out of the country when I was supposed to. Some details: When I go to see Samantha, I take a Robert Q Airbus to Detroit Airport as it's the cheapest way to get there (flying out of Toronto has all the hassles of an international flight, and flying out of London is ludicrously expensive, mostly because they'll just fly you to Detroit anyway). Once again I booked a Northwest flight as they remain the cheapest (and service has been decent for me regardless of their "bankruptcy"). However, the problems started at the border in Windsor. The driver said that we were taking the Detroit - Windsor Tunnel, which I had not taken previously. Usually they'd go over the Blue Water Bridge, and I've never had a problem at that crossing (examination would take a minute at most). But when I got there, they were skeptical from the start; my passport apparently wasn't good enough, they wanted a letter from my employer, evidence that I owned a residence in Canada (regardless of the fact that I live with my parents, which, according to the officer I was speaking with, was never good enough to even just cross), and evidence of financial stability (including at least $500US in cash or provably in my bank account). I still have the checklist they gave me when they said they were returning me to Canada. (And while I don't want to go too far into it, the officer I was speaking to seemed to have a huge stick up her ass...) Two and a half hours (!) later, after fingerprinting me and taking a photo for my shiny new FBI file, they escorted me to a nearby bus stop and put me on the "tunnel bus", which then took me back to Canada. They don't even let you have your passport back; they give it to the driver to give to you when you arrive back in Windsor. And so began my journey to try to get back across; I called up Northwest and was told there was a standby flight I could take if I reached the airport by 7:00 PM that day (Northwest tickets for the fare I chose were non-refundable, and changes cost $100). Looking at the checklist, I figured I could get most of the documents either through the internet or by my parents faxing them to me here in Windsor, because I *really* didn't want to have to go back to London (nor did Samantha). I got the following: - a statement by my father stating that I lived there and that they take care of me - a photocopy of my parents' original mortgage agreement on the house - my bank account statement (which had ~$3000 in it at the time) - a faxed copy of my contract with Cartmods - my Travelocity roundtrip ticket (which I had in the first place) None of the above were sufficient. I tried crossing twice more with additional docs each time (they took two hours to send me back each time... slow as hell), but eventually (at around 6 PM) gave up and called Robert Q to take me back. This, of course, invalidated my Robert Q ticket, so I had to get one of those once I tried again a week later. And that I did; this time I got a letter from my boss stating that I was on vacation and slated to return when my trip was over, an affidavit from my neighbour (who is a certified accountant and also gave me my first job) stating that I lived with my parents and have for about twenty years, more bank statements (unfortunately I couldn't get an official letter in time, but I printed off pretty much every page I could find on the online banking interface for PC Financial), and I withdrew and converted $500US to take with me in case they didn't like my bank statements. By the time I arrived back (I was told I *had* to come through the same port of entry, so back to the tunnel), US Customs had flagged me, so they were just as skeptical. For some reason, the officer at the road booth said that I needed a "K3 visa", which I later looked up and found that it had nothing to do with me (it is for nonimmigrants who are visiting while their immigration papers are being processed... I was only trying to visit and had no intention to immigrate to the states). Edit: Also, it should be noted that when they called Samantha's mom, she yelled at them for a good five minutes and said that they must be getting kickbacks from the airline. It was awesome. :^D They FINALLY let me through this time though, after stapling an I94-A to my passport and stating that I had to return it by December 20th or I would be deported. I swear, I was never so happy to be in an airport. As usual, we had a great time while I was there. I know I'm going to be with Samantha forever, as cheesy as that sounds. The fact that she is in my life has made it so much better that I cannot really put it into words. People always ask when I get back what we did while I was there, where we went, what did we see... and I always have very little to tell them, because I'm there to be with her, and that's pretty much it. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else anyway. We did see the Harry Potter movie while I was there, as well as Narnia; both great movies if you haven't seen them yet. But mostly I worked while she went to school, and we just enjoyed being together. We did drive around a lot though, as well as hung out with some of her friends. Just nothing really "touristy". I had to come back on Saturday, which of course sucked greatly. Before I left, they had a sort of mini-Christmas gift giving; Samantha gave me Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time for the Nintendo DS, which I pretty much know my parents are going to get for me for Christmas. I had already given her gift: a tattoo of a heart, which a friend of ours, Elly, drew; it was kinda cool because it's linked to all of us. That, unfortunately, got infected, and she'll have to get it touched up later on. Sam's mom got me a pair of Family Guy boxers, and a t-shirt with "30 things not to say to police officer" on it, which I love. Recently I heard from a person who two years ago wanted to start up a business with me; apparently there's a meeting on January 7th now, so we'll see how that goes. Given the amount of time it's taken to just get everyone together, I have my doubts, but hopefully something will get started. I can't go into the details here as to what it is we're going to be doing but it's a very good idea and something that's been needed for a while. I've also been looking through a bunch of Canadian immigration documents in the last few days. We're pretty sure she's going to try to move up here, and my parents and I will likely sponsor her. I don't think we'll have that much trouble, though we'll either have to have lived together for at least 12 months or have a marriage certificate in order to apply, but luckily from what I've heard she should be able to visit for up to 6 months, and we have the option of applying for permanent residency once she's here and applying to extend the visit (which I've heard, in those circumstances, is rarely turned down). So a definite possibility, especially if my parents co-sign the sponsorship. That's about it for now, I think. I'll probably post some time during Christmas if I get bored, so until then ;^) |
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Quick Update |
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Three things: 1. Gzip compression is not a good way of protecting PHP source code. 2. "Hacking" Gzip compression source-obfuscated code can get you a raise. 3. I rule the following: Spades, Hearts, Treasure Drop, and apparently Swordfighting. (I'm also quite hyper right now for some reason, hence the posting. And now I shall try to sleep. Or will I?) |
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StuffMusic: Pearl Jam - Better Man |
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Sooooooo... what's up. Nothing much happening with me at the moment, just finished work for the day and Sam was asking if I was gonna update this so here I am ;^) Samantha was over here for a month or so, once again making my life 200% better just by being her. I can't express how much I love her. But yes, onto things less likely to make anyone other than the two of us vomit, we pretty much just hung out at my house most of the time, as I didn't have a car (our second car broke down a few days before she got here, and my dad was usually at work with the other one). It was still very good to be back with her though. I did just happen to get a much larger bed before she got here which proved to be quite useful :^P We did go drinking with Jeremy and some friends a couple times, and we were going to go to a party at Matt's two weeks ago but nobody was at the house (can someone fill me in on that?). All in all, it was awesome, I can't wait for when we can be together and not have to worry about being split up by one of us having to go home, and as usual I'm slightly depressed again now that she's gone. I do have tickets there for November 10 however so it's all good ;^) Let's see, what else... I started working full time at my job, with a decent raise. I should definitely be able to pay my tuition in full again when the time comes in January. Unfortunately I also started working full time a week after Samantha got here, which was kinda annoying, but eh, we dealt. (I tended to have several "breaks" throughout the day, an advantage of working at home ;^) Apparently they're supposed to be getting offices soon, but my boss still knows I'll be going to Texas so that's not a problem. Small company++ Other than that it's pretty much same ole same ole. /me returns to playing some Metroid Prime 2 :^D |
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StuffMood: *pounding headache* Music: Foo Fighters - End Over End |
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So yeah, I'm bored, and I have a bit of a headache, so I figured I'd update this for once (rather than go to bed, go figure). Let's see... first and foremost, my life now is about 200% better after meeting Samantha. She truly is my other half, and she's coming up here soon :^D Only for three weeks (or so says her parents) but hopefully I can convince her to extend that. Huh? Huh? *nudge nudge* Anyway. Been really busy this week with a mod I've been developing for work for the past month or two, it's good to have it finished and to have a bit of a break. Hmmm, what else... I had to send my lappy (its name is Uber and it owns you all) off to California for repairs a few days ago. It was just spontaneously shutting itself off, I'm getting Uniwill to take a look at it and possibly replace the motherboard as I couldn't fix it after taking it apart a few times. I am also quite heavily addicted to Nethack, an ancient text-based game that I had the spontanous need to emerge on Uberm00's new server (more on that later). Random levels + possibilities for anything + insane, insane, INSANE difficulty = awesomeness. We need more people on the high scores list though so if you'd like to play on my server, give me a shout on IRC or MSN or something and I'll set you up an account so you can SSH in and play. As you might be able to see on the Uberm00 home page, I also upgraded Uberm00 from Win2K Advanced Server to Gentoo Linux. And what an upgrade it is; everything on the server is at least two times faster, I don't have to deal with random bluescreens (it's been running stable for about a week now without any intervention), it automatically updates itself and all apps on it (simple cronjob with emerge --sync; emerge -U world), and I don't have a million random services running in the background doing nothing (though there are quite a few on there, they're all used for something). In closing, I will leave you with a disturbing IRC quote. * loddie pokes spoom twice in each eye «loddie» in my thorough studies, I have found this the most effective technique «loddie» followed closely by poking my mom, in the butt «Spoom» you poke your mom in the butt? «loddie» only when it's completely necessary |
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Quick Update |
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Current status: In Austin, Texas spending the time of my life with Samantha who is absolutely the most amazing person I have ever met. So yeah, you won't be able to reach my cell or my home numbers but I'm online as usual as I brought the lappy. |
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Gameloft and why DRM doesn't work |
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So recently I've been messing with my cell phone a bit and since I'll be going to Texas to stay with Samantha for a while on May 3, I decided to get a Terminator Cable and unlock it so I could use it down there without huge roaming fees. Unfortunately, this process required me to reflash the phone with a new GDFS, meaning I lost some of my cell phone games, including the free one I got from Fido when I got my phone at Christmas, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. Enter Gameloft, the developers of this cell phone conversion. Their policy is that a purchase of one of their games allows you one download of one game for one cell phone. If you delete or otherwise lose the game for any reason, your only recourse is to buy the game again. Luckily this policy doesn't mean much to me because I know some sites where I can obtain the game again should I want to. I was, however, looking to get one their games, Might and Magic, because it looked fairly cool and worth the paltry $3 they charge. This time, however, I wanted to backup the game first in case I wanted to reflash my phone again. Gameloft doesn't make this easy. In fact, they'd have you believe it to be impossible, considering they only allow you to download the game straight from your cell phone, and 99.9% of cell phones (including mine) won't let you send games TO your PC though bluetooth or any other connection for copyright protection purposes. So my idea was to get the game on my PC first, then send it to my cell phone, thus allowing me the opportunity to resend it later should I have the need. Having gone through this process before, I knew that Gameloft has two ways of sending the game to your phone, a WAP push message, and a direct download link you can access with your cell phone should the WAP push message not get there. So I bought Might and Magic, got the WAP push, and postponed it so I wouldn't have to download it to the cell phone. Examining the WAP push message got me the download URL, which (not surprisingly) didn't work when I plugged it directly into Firefox (I got a message saying the bookmark was incorrect or something). So I thought to myself, how is the cell phone identifying itself to Gameloft so they know it's not a PC? I mean, WAP is just the web using WML instead of HTML. Then I figured it out: the http_user_agent string. So with a bit of PHP I setup a small script to output some WML with the user_agent shown, and it came out to some long string with T610 in it. Using the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox, I plugged that in, tried the download link again, and voila! It downloaded the JAD file, which upon inspection in Notepad had a URL for the actual JAR game file in it, which I also downloaded through Firefox. I then sent the .JAR to my phone and the game worked like normal. Now, here's the interesting part. The JAD file also had a MIDlet-Install-Notify URL that the phone was supposed to access upon downloading the game. Not having accessed that myself (as I downloaded the file directly), I checked on my downloads page on Gameloft, and as I suspected, they didn't know I had already downloaded the game, effectively giving me unlimited downloads. So yeah, maybe not all that exciting, I still paid for the game, but another good example why DRM in any form simply does not work as there's always a way around it. |
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So. |
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So I haven't posted here in a while. It's not like anyone reads it anyway. But yeah. A few things have happened, the first of which is the person who is always on my mind now. I could go on at length but I'll just say that Samantha is amazing and a perfect match for me and leave it at that. This leads into my next plans which are to use the four months off that I have coming up to live and work abroad for new experiences(TM). Or to be with Sam. Take your pick ;^) Seriously though, Texas? Why couldn't you have been in, you know, Toronto or something? But I digress. In conclusion, I'm happy. So there. Now I don't have to post for another two months. ;^) |
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