Monday, April 30, 2007

Weirdest tennis court ever.....

For those who don't follow tennis, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are the current number 1 and 2 mens tennis players in the world. Federer is currently regarded as the best grass court player on the tour with his 4 Wimbledon titles, and Nadal, with his 72 match winning streak on clay, is currently the best clay court player. So who really is the best player? Well, looks like some sponsors came up with this interesting court to settle the debate in "The Battle of Surfaces", although I can't imagine playing with any consistency at all since you change sides every odd service game.

Hocking Hills

Over the weekend, a couple of friends and I took a trip south to Hocking Hills since the weather was suppose to be pretty good on Saturday. This also gave me the opportunity to test out the Sony DSC-T10 camera that's now in my possession. I wasn't too sure what to expect since I didn't do that much resesarch before going, but there were a ton of interesting rock formations that made me wonder "how the heck did this happen here?"

The Sony camera was much faster than my old Canon A-95 at snapping pictures, but as you'll see, the white seemed a bit oversatruated in some of the pictures on the auto setting. But overall, I was pretty happy with how the pictures came out, and the image stability feature let me keep a lot more pictures where I utilized the zoom.

Click here for the pictures!

Friday, April 27, 2007

Speaking of suspicious looking pets...

Following along the lines of the article Kabitzin talked about yesterday concerning poodles, check out what this poor dog in China has to deal with....

Some not so exciting credit card news...

About two weeks ago, a couple of my friends and I tried out an Italian restaurant nearby called Trattoria La Tavola. They had a wide selection of various Italian dishes, but the kicker was that you could order different sized portions, which allowed you to try different things at a reasonable cost (I ordered a Homemade Fettucine and a Bianco Pizza). Well, at least I thought it was reasonable at the time, but I got my credit card statement and somehow my meal got charged twice -_- I made a call to the credit card help line where a nice and overly-courteous customer assistant woman basically said I should first try to sort it with the restaurant first before they get involved. So I drove over a bit later and talked to the manager, who seemed to already know that this was a problem and said that he had talked to the credit card people last week, and the second charge would be removed from my account in about 5 to 7 business days. I guess I could have pressed him more about it, but the manager gave me his business card and told me to call him if I hadn't been credited in the next couple of days.

I can see how this could have happened since I pretty much use my Amazon credit card to purchase about everything these days, so the magnetic strip could be starting to wear out from the constant swiping.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions...I want them answered immediately!

In my daily reading of digg.com, I stumbled upon 20q.net, an online game of 20 questions, and I was sort of skeptical on how well it would converge to the answer you have in mind, but it managed to get 3 out of the 4 people I had in mind (the one it missed was the 3rd Hokage Sarutobi from Naruto, but I've submitted it to the list for future evaluation :P). So if you're bored, give it a try and see if it amazes you (or if you can stump it) :)

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Racquetball of Fury

In trying to keep up with resolution 3 of my New Years Resolution, I've been trying to keep myself active with various sports to counter the effects of sitting in front of a computer screen for 8 hours a day. David has also been trying to stay fit as he has some chronic back problems, so today we teamed up with our friend Ben and hit up the racquetball courts over at RPAC, Ohio State's newest and nicest gym available to students.

Having a tennis/ping pong mentality when it comes to playing racket sports, I had to adjust a bit to the fact that it's ok to have the ball travel behind you as long as you hit it back with one bounce, and the ball physics are also a bit different as there were times I expected the ball to bounce but it ended up dying and vice versa. And man....after hitting around for just 10 minutes, the racquetball room began to feel like a sauna even though there was AC being pumped in from the ceiling. Fortunately, I was wearing my imitation Under Armor shirt so the sweat evaporated pretty quickly. Also, having to serve from the middle of the court puts you in immediate danger as I got pelted 3 times, two on the back and once in the head -_-. But it's ok though...I ended up winning 2 of the 3 games we played :P

Speaking of Balls of Fury, check out the movie trailer here. Ping Pong meets Mortal Kombat!

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Haloid

Going along with the video game theme that Velius and Kabitzin have been rolling with, check out this cool video where Samus from Metroid and the Master Chief from Halo duke it out while trying to save the world. The ending is a little cheesy, but the action is pretty awesome :)

Friday, April 20, 2007

Early Exit...

I did a bit more practicing this time for the Guitar Hero 2 tournament, but it wasn't enough as I got knocked out in the 1st round playing "Message in a Bottle". It pretty much came down to a few notes here and there, and I ended up hitting 98% of the notes while the other guy hit 99% of them, so there wasn't much I could do there. One of my friend's brother was in the tournament, and both he and the other guy he played hit 99% of their notes, but my friend's brother lost by 3000 or so points. So the competition was pretty rough over there. Ah well, there's always next time :P

Type Type Revolution!

I don't know my J-Pop songs that well, but I still found this DDR-esque typing game to be pretty amusing...

Get ready...TYPE!

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Can you read what I'm doing now....

Tochi showed me the world of Twitter about 9 days ago. It's pretty much like an away message on AIM where you can post pretty much whatever you want, except it's web based and not tied to a chat client. Although I haven't found it to be that useful since I don't know of that many people using it, I figure it would be amusing to put it on my blog so more than two people (Tochi and Tochi's friend) would see it :P

Saturday, April 14, 2007

The IT Crowd

David got this TV series from his advisor which is a show about two British IT guys Roy and Moss and their new supervisor Jen. It took me a while, but the show grew on me after a while :) Even if you don't work with computers at all, you'd probably appreciate it. Here's a snippet of the first episode from YouTube.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

The Road to Wii-dom starts with the Opening Licks...

It looks like another Guitar Hero 2 tournament is just around the corner as I got an email today from the organizer about it. After the semi-disappointing 2nd round exit the last time, I'll actually try to do some practicing and preparation for this week up till the tournament, which is on April 20th. Now that I think about it, I haven't played GH2 since that last tournament :P

Here're some of the rules from the email.

1) The tournament is a single-elimination tournament.
2) You must register in advance. If registration is not full, we will take day of registration.
3) The game played will be Guitar Hero 2 on Playstation 2.
4) The game will be played in Face/Off mode on a difficulty level of Hard.
5) Songs will be randomly selected for all rounds except the final round. Songs are split up into tiers (easier songs will be used in the earlier rounds, harder songs will be used in the later rounds).
6) The final round will be a best-of-three. Each participant will choose a song and one song will be randomly selected.
7) Guitars will be available but you are welcome to bring your own.
8) The Prize for the Winner of the Contest is a Nintendo Wii.
9) It is totally FREE to enter (must be an OSU student)
10) Lots of pizza & pop will be provided.

Hopefully the 2nd time around will be better :)

Monday, April 9, 2007

I blame Kabitzin...

Thanks to Kabitzin's amazing powers, when I had my minivan checked out this weekend for the PA inspection, the shop found that it couldn't pass because the circuitry that regulated the exhaust has gone kaput, so my minivan can't pass the inspection. So I'm stuck at home in PA for an extra day as my dad took the minivan to another shop which actually has parts to replace the bad circuitry. Not that I'm complaining or anything since it's comfortable to be home, but I still blame Kabitzin since I had to drive past Pittsburgh on Friday :P

The one thing that sucks though is having to use dial-up for internet that goes at 24.0k -_-

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Happy Easter!


Image courtesy of I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

The NCAA Gods hate Ohio State :(

After seeing this and this, I figured our basketball team was pretty much destined if not just capable of coming away to win the Men's NCAA basketball championship, but our team picked a bad time to have a really bad 3 point shooting night going 4-23 (.174), and 2 of those came in the final 2 to 3 minutes of the game when the game was basically out of hand -_- The Bucks probably played as well as they could given their shooting circumstances (and Florida could have easily ran away with the game), but without 3 point shooting, they couldn't get over the hump of 6 to 11 points Florida had in the 2nd half. It reminds me back in the day when me, Ender, Velius, and Kabitzin were playing an NBA bball game on the PS2 and listening to the in-game announcers do analysis...

Video Game Announcer 1: "What was the key to that game?"
Video Game Announcer 2: "3-point shooting..."

Well, this national championship game was a good example of that -_- On the other hand, Florida would hit some big 3's when the Bucks were trying to make their run back -_-

Despite the loss, Buckeye fans should be proud of what the young basketball team has done this year. They only lost to teams who were ranked ahead of them (Florida, UNC, and Wisconsin), and even then, they played those game really closely. Freshman point guard Mike Conley Jr. said he'd return next year, but it's still up in the air whether freshman center Greg Oden will come back as well since many analyst predict he'll go #1 in the upcoming NBA draft. If he does come back, our bball team would be pretty darn good, but then again, it's hard to ignore the $$$. Ah well, time to look forward to Buckeye football now...