News & Updates for January 2006

Posted my review of The War Within.

Posted my review of the RGT: G1 Light Gun from E-Real Games.

It looks like my experiment for snatching a free high-quality brand-name laptop is going well! I just checked the status page on the account, and it shows that I had successfully completed my one and only offer, and it didn't cost me anything at all. The offer I choose was "MusicNow- Free Trial", for which the only conditions I had to meet in order to complete the offer was sign up for a 7-day free trial with a valid credit card. After I signed up, I could have ended the trial membership right then, but I decided to try it out a little first, and wound up canceling it the next morning.

That was 8 days ago, and now my offer is shown as completed. So now the only thing left is to convince 20 other people that they could really get a laptop for absolutely free. Friends and family should be easy to bring on board, which means I probably need to convince about 10 other people. So go try it out! Oh, and I should point out that if you do sign up and are about to click on an offer to check it out, make sure you disable any pop-up blockers you may have running, because the website pops-up a little window explaining the terms required to complete the offer.

My bright-green G1 light gun from E-Real Games arrived today! It's been a long time since I've been able to play a light-gun game at home, so you'll have to excuse me if I don't do a whole lot of updates this week. I have four PlayStation 2 light-gun games that I plan on playing into the ground, both because I love light-gun games and because I want to be able to give the most in-depth review possible for this product. E-Real Games has links to a few other reviews, but after reading them I have to say that I don't really trust them. All they really do is go on about how awesome the gun is, while we all know there is no such thing as a perfect product. Everything has flaws, and any reviewer that doesn't mention those flaws isn't doing their job.

My wife and I went to see the first showing of Underworld: Evolution today. The theater was far from packed, but there were a good amount of people scattered about. So everything started out as normal, but then midway through the film the projector stopped and the lights dimmed up. After about a minute, all of in the theater began to wonder if anyone even knew there was a problem, and I believe someone near the back was actually getting up to go tell someone just as the projector awakened from it's slumber. So like half a minute went by with the movie playing from where it left off, and yet the lights in the theater were still on, making the screen very difficult to see. So now we were all wondering if they knew the lights were still on, and then pow, the projector cut off again. After another minute, it started up once again, right where it left off, and about a minute after that, the lights finally dimmed so we could actually see it. And what really sucks is that all of this happened during a major exposition scene, so we all missed out on a lot of important information. A little rewinding would have gone a long way to helping us figure out what was going on, but alas, that didn't happen so we had to try piecing it together from actions and information that came later.

Anyway, the film continued fine from that point on until the end of the movie, but once the credits started to roll, the lights failed to dim up like they typically do. Since we prefer not to walk down the isles in the dark if we don't have to, we decided to sit through the credits until the lights came on. Plus, we figured that the projectionist might know something we didn't, such as the film having an extra scene at the end of the credits. Well, the end of the credits came, and there was no extra scene, but more importantly, the lights still didn't come on, so it was even darker in there than it was when the credits were rolling, and thus we had no choice but to find our way out in the dark.

Now, we've had films mess up before, and we understand that technical glitches happen. However, in every other theater we been in where something went wrong during the movie, someone has always come out, apologized, and offered everyone free popcorn and/or soda refills. Unfortunately, since my wife and I rarely eat popcorn or drink sodas, we've never been able to partake in their generosity, but we still alway appreciated the sentiment. During the event today, though, not only did nobody come out and offer us anything, nobody even came out to apologize! It was almost like they figured hey, the audience already paid their money, so what do we care. I know that's probably not true, but we are really at a loss in trying to figure out why nobody said anything. It's not like this was an exceptionally busy time of day.

Added a little bit of info about some of my past and present friends. I'll write a little about my future friends just as soon as I learn how to time travel.

Posted the anime profiles of Anime Fiction, The Animatrix. Posted the cartoon profile of Winx Club. Posted the character profiles of Bloom (from Winx Club); Asuma Satutomi (from Naruto); Miho Shinohara (from Fancy Lala); Kimblee, Izumi Curtis, Jean Havoc, Colonel Frank Archer (from Fullmetal Alchemist). Added a new description to the character profiles of Konohamaru, Fourth Hokage (from Naruto).

Posted the anime profile of Haunted Junction, Gun x Sword, Eyeshield 21.

Posted the anime profile of Escaflowne: The Movie. Posted my review of Two For the Money.

Posted the anime profiles of Honey & Clover, Katsuhiro Otomo Presents: Memories, Gantz, Spring & Chaos, Final Approach, Younger Sister Juice, Remi the Homeless Girl, Rumbling Hearts, Hanaukyo Maid Team La Verite, They Were Eleven, Go! Machine Robo Rescue, Shadow Star Narutaru, Elf Princess Rane, Popotan, Ah! My Goddess: The Movie, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, Macross: Do You Remember Love?, Speed Racer X, Beast Wars: Transformers, Transformers: Masterforce, Shadow Skill (TV series).

Congratulations to the winners of the Napster Trivia Trek! You just won some free stuff (though I don't remember exactly what). Okay you four, now head on over to the forums and commence bragging!

Posted the anime profiles of Mighty Space Miners, NieA Under 7, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Xenosaga: The Animation, Xiaolin Showdown, Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok, Armored Trooper Votoms, Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid, Rune Soldier, Gate Keepers, Speed Grapher, Millennium Actress, Kakurenbo: Hide and Seek, Hyper Speed Grandoll, Bible Black, Ultimate Girls.

I saw something on a TechTV clip (view clip) recently that peaked my interest, and so I decided to try it out. Now I'm sure you've all seen those websites promising to give you really expensive free stuff just for signing up for "a few" online offers, where "a few" usually means something like 20 and most of the offers end up costing you money. Well, apparently there's this website does something similar, except that you only have to sign up for one online offer! And that offer doesn't have to cost you any money! Of course, there's one more step after that... getting your buddies to try it out as well. Normally, that would be the hard part. But seeing as how this is completely free, 100%, and you can end up getting a high quality laptop, 100% free, there really shouldn't be too much problem here.

Registering was easy, I just headed to the site, filled out my information, went through a stupid survey (just clicked No for everything), and selected my ONE and only ONE offer. The offer I chose was the MusicNow Free Trial. For that offer, all I had to do was sign up with a valid credit card (so that they can charge you if you don't cancel after the free seven day trial). Remembering to cancel was no problem, though, 'cause you can do it as soon as you sign up. Just go into the "My Account" section and click the "Cancel Trial Membership" link. No loops to jump through or anything! Now I just need to convince some friends that it's worth a try, and pretty soon I'll have myself a brand new Sony Vaio laptop and my friends will be well on their way to receiving theirs.

Posted my review of Streets of Legend.

Posted my review of The Return of the Pink Panther. Posted the anime profile of Video Girl Ai.

Posted the character profile of Timaeus Knight (from Yu-Gi-Oh!).

Posted the anime profile of Ghost in the Shell: Tachikoma Days.

On Monday, CircuitCity.com started a special promotion for a Lexar 1GB JumpDrive Elite USB Flash Drive where it would only cost $29.99 after rebate. Needless to say, I tried to order one. However, as is my luck, it didn't work. The site said that the product was in stock, but when I tried to add it to my shopping cart I received the message:

The quantity you selected for the following item(s):

Lexar® 1GB JumpDrive Elite USB Flash Drive

exceeds the number of items that we have available for shipment. We have
adjusted the quantity to reflect the number we have available.
Please click Proceed to Checkout to continue.

I only tried to order one, which means that they didn't even have one available... so why was it listed as being in stock? And what kind of error message is that? It would makes sense if there were still some amount that it could add to your cart, but if there are absolutely none available then shouldn't there be a specific message stating that fact? I'm also wondering exactly how many they actually had in stock, because the promotion started on the 9th, and I tried to order mine before it was even noon. I also went back late that night to try it again, and again I got the same message, even though the site still said the product was in stock.

So I fired off a message to CircuitCity.com's customer service, and received a response the next day stating that the item was out of stock and they just hadn't updated the website. Wow. So even though the site knows how much product they currently have, the people still have to manually tell the site whether or not something is in stock? The message I received also said to "let us know if there is anything else we can do for you", so I responded to it asking for a rain check. What I got instead was a bounced e-mail. Double-wow. So tell me, am I supposed to feel comfortable buying technology from a place that seems to be technologically challenged?

Posted character profiles of Juliet Douglas (from Fullmetal Alchemist); Operator (from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex).

Posted my review of Cry Wolf. Wow, first update of the new year! Happy new year everybody! Sorry I haven't done any updating in the past few weeks, but we were gone on vacation. I'm also sorry that I haven't been updating as much as I used to during these past few months. I've been a little preoccupied. Any hard-core Working Designs fans out there will probably know the basic situation behind that, but for the rest I'll go ahead and explain.

Working Designs is gone. The office has been closed and all the staff has been laid off. If you want to know why, go read the official announcement by Victor. Although I can't give out specific details behind the reason, I can tell you that I blame Sony 100%... and please feel free to do so as well. Anyway, my last day at the office came on Friday, August 26th, 2005, and with that my wife and I had to start planning out an uncertain future. The biggest question we had to ask ourselves is should we move? After all, the only reason we came to Redding was for the job. We had never even heard of the town before that. But alas, we decided to stay.

So that took place just over four months ago. Since then, Victor and I have teamed up to work on an independent project involving a cellphone game, whereby I had to learn how to convert code from the Java 2 Microedition (J2ME) language to Qualcomm's BREW language. That was quite a challenge, especially when trying to make it work with older versions of BREW for maximize compatibility. But I eventually figured it all out and am quite happy with the result. Hopefully we will be able to acquire more independent projects in the near future. The XBox 360 looks pretty cool. I wouldn't mind doing something on that. But until then, anybody out there need to hire someone to convert J2ME code to BREW? Anyone?

While things might not be great right now, at least they're not horrible either. Yeah, I'm currently on unemployment, but my wife is still bringing in a paycheck, and she just got a raise yesterday too. Congratulations, Honey! Victor is working on getting Goemon and possibly even Growlanser Generations sold overseas, so hopefully that will work out. I put a huge amount of time and effort into making Goemon as good a game as it could be, and am really proud of the final result, so I desperately want other people out there to have a chance to enjoy the game as much as we all have.

Anyways, it was only a few days after I finished work on the cellphone game that it was time to head off on our Christmas Cruise vacation. Yeah, I know what your thinking, you're like "hey, he just got laid off, is currently on unemployment, and yet somehow he finds the money to take a 10 day cruise down to Mexico?!" Well, you see... hey, wait a second, I never told you it was a 10 day cruise! And I never told you it was to Mexico! Who are you?! Ahh! No! What are you doing?! Ahhhhh! No! Let go of me! Help! Somebody! Mrphhh....!

Uh... where was I again? Oh yeah, the cruise was a lovely gift from my parents, so we didn't actually have to pay for it. All we had to do was come up with the money to do some of the shore excursions, and those weren't too expensive. We went on the cruise with my parents and my grandparents, so being able to just visit and talk was really great. The actual cruise itself on the other hand... well, lets just say that I don't think our future vacations will involve a cruise. But I'll write all about it a little later, after I've had a chance to get a photo gallery together put update our scrapbook.