Chasing After Rainbows

I was originally trying to fix the problem mentioned here by transferring the outline onto a new layer and removing the stroke fill, including those at 0px, so that the problem would be fixed, especially in Google Chrome. As my vectoring skills have improved since then (like bluring, colour gradient and overlapping), I have added a background image to one of the vectors that I did back in July this year. The old version was somewhat plain. No visible changes were made to the original, though the dpi of the exported version (.png) has increased. Old version: New version: Apart from this ( v0003 ), I have also make noticable changes/additions since the original completion date: v0015 (background colour, shape of book on the left, improving the face) v0018 (colour, rotated clockwise, added bottom half and right arm) v0020 (added white background) v0022 (used previous background colour as the shadow, white as the new background) v0023 (changed skin colour) v0028 (made hair longer) v...

Ever since I accidentally cloned myself (with that clone being in an accident later that day) everything around me has taken a different turn from my already-unfamiliar way of life barely a quarter of a year ago where things like my family house and even my body were completely different before, people have been staring at me (though at my wheelchair clone more) like something is wrong with me. During times like lunch, I had to leave my clone behind in class, because bringing her around with me would be more of a hindrance as, even though she is me, I can't really do the things I would normally do like to the restroom, running around the campus, or when I need to be alone. On top of that, most of the places have the staircase as only direct route to get around (and she's heavy to push. Am I that heavy too?). I know she would complain on how bored and lonely she would get, but what can I do? According to the director, my clone don't seem to need to drink or eat at all for...

(Yay! 300th post on this blog!) Youtube has recently allowed higher resolution videos and more recently increased the width of the page as to look fit nicely on a 1028x768 screen. In the past (around 2006), uploading a widescreen video would add black bars at the top and bottom to fit the 4:3 aspect ratio and would be in low quality. This is still present on old videos uploaded under the old standard and videos that already have the bars when uploading. This is quite noticeable when viewing full screen or re-size the video player. There are currently 3 video quality levels. The default would be the low quality mentioned earlier. The other two are high quality, though one is lower than the other. Unless the original video is low quality or uploaded a long time ago, selecting "watch in high quality" would give the second quality level. The highest is only available if the video it's uploaded from is in 720p (1280*720). Embedding the higher quality version however, requires ...

Just a few days ago, I witnessed several lightnings throughout the entire afternoon. It was like a thread of light from somewhere in the sky among the clouds to the ground with bright light. I don't know exactly where it struck, but I did hear the thunder several seconds after I saw the lightning. It was so loud that I can feel its vibration. I don't know if my house is strong or how long it can last, but it was built just a few years before I was born and moved in it when I was in the first year of primary/elementary school. Thankfully, there are lightning rods on top of almost all buildings and structures in addition to the street lamps along the roads.

As I had met my original self and, with help from her, rely on ourselves. I was soon discharged from hospital the following day, though in a wheelchair. (Someone seemed to have installed a radio speaker on it for me to talk via the airwaves and be able to move the wheelchair with just my mind, though the latter tires me out easily.) At home, I agreed with the me that was not involved in the accident to have me take up Mamiko (麻美子). The name Saeko (沙江子) wasn't originally my name anyway before I entered this dimension anyway just a few months ago anyway. I had also agreed to have a different hairstyle. What is even more strange is, unlike my original, I can live without breathing, drinking or eating at all. Well, I can't anyway, even if they fed me or put some weird contraption to aid me. Would I be involved in that accident if I hadn't played around with that cloning machine, with me being the clone? Well, there are so many possible answers to that question and the only...

Inside the elevator, an old man wearing a lab coat (do all the staff here wear that?) appear to recognize me, except that I don't recognize that face. Professor: Oh, Kobayashi-san! I haven't seen you since you were discharged last month. May I know who the bloody hell are you? Of course, not wanting to be rude, I instead said: Me: I'm sorry, I don't remember. We got out of the elevator at some random level that don't seem to be the ground floor. Professor: Well, I was the one who was present when you woke up in a coma back in February. When you arrived here back then your body was so stiff that we have difficulty straightening your body. Well, here's a photo that was taken on one of the first few days you were admitted here. I was shocked, but felt like laughing out at the same time: He showed a picture of me wearing the school uniform sitting in a chair in the hospital ward in front of the empty bed. It appeared as though I was wishing for someone...

As you might already be aware of, Friendster (and MySpace ) are declining in popularity with the favor in the rise of Facebook . After switching internet providers slightly more than a year ago for a faster connection speed and being with the previous for about 5 years after just switching away from dial-up modem. Well, everything seems to be faster, but when I navigate to a certain page or clicking on things like "save changes" after doing some editing, I keep seeing the following thing (or something familiar), even today, and it appears quite frequently on any browser on any PC in my home network (It also appears at the instant I click on a link): The odd thing about this is that this does not appear on other sites, my previous internet provider or even the computers in my school that is under the same internet provider (the latter being slow when everyone streams music and video, especially YouTube ). I would normally just continue on, but as this problem happens quit...

At the end of school the following day, Hirano-san approached me and Saeko, looking uncomfortable. Hirano-san: "Kobayashi- san, Saeko" Sakeko: "What is it Aiko?" Hirano-san: "I know it might sound strange to you, but the director of your workplace my father would like you to visit..." (there was a deafening silence) Hirano-san: Visit yourself at the hospital today. And Kobayashi-san, he has something to tell you too. Me: Me? What does he want with me? Hirano-san: He didn't tell me, but you would find out soon. Oh, I would like to tag along with the both of you, but I have a tennis tournament match with another school today. So, if it doesn't drag on for too long, I might be able to drop by later on. Saeko: Erm, yeah. See you then. Saeko looked even more nervous. To get to the hospital, we took a bus from a bus stop just outside the school and traveled for quite some time before reaching it. I'm not familiar with this ...

Today is June 6, 2 days after the night when I suddenly found myself in the bathtub of my house. I could have sworn I was in class of February 4 just before that. I was wondering where my parents had went to until I saw a note in their bedroom saying something about a large amount of cash under their bed for me. I looked at the luggage bag counting it: it seems that someone had grabbed a small amount of it. I looked at my blog: there were no new entries since that date, but there was an unpublished draft dated 22 May. ......... Huh? I typed that? It says that I am unable to move and my childhood friend who is residing inside me is doing so? But I can do so normally with no difficulties.... I don't understand. I then viewed the blog of that friend of mine mentioned. ......... It says that I fell into a coma and has taken control of my body since 14 May, the day after he got into an accident. Strange part is that the post is dated 2 weeks after the incident and he even h...

I opened up the original Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file of one of my drawings and saw what was in the following screenshot: (Background) Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 : Instead of the image, I see a very long list of codes. (Left) Google Chrome 0.3 : The black outline is very obvious. Bluring don't seem to work. (Center) Mozilla Firefox 3.0 : There is a rectungular box at a corner of it for some reason. (Right) Apple Safari 3.1 : The best among all the rest. Bluring don't seem to work too. All : My signature is missing (for IE7, it appeared as mojibake near the bottom) To fix the unwanted lines that appeared in the Chrome browser, I just need to select everything in the vector editor, except the outlines that are supposed to be there, and remove the colour used for the outline (labled as "stroke"). The problem is that vectors before v0015 , outlines are not seperated from the colour, so I used v0035  instead to remove stroke lines of non-outline parts that are ...

Since young, I had been exposed to a lot of language and pick up some of the things learned after seeing/hearing it repeatedly in certain situations. Frequency and interest plays a part in it too. Apart from the languages you would see me using , my parents, for reasons not mentioned, made me learn two other languages that I don't understand at all, rendering them useless to me. If you were to ask me in those languages now, I might have completely forgotten about it as it has been several years since I actually use them. But even back then, it might have been weak too. (I also find people asking me in another most of the time.) As mentioned back in June , the words I would use to write/type and speak are completely different. For example, I would write: With all their might, those exhausted children tried to prevent the incident from happening, but had failed to do so in the end. However, if I were to say the same thing out (unless saying the...

Wondering why one of my post has many views and how they got there, I searched for myself using "とらドラ OP 歌詞" (Toradora opening lyrics; words related to that post), and the results appear as below: (click on the image to go to the actual page I saw this in.) I checked the links before mine: some were recently removed videos (Niconico Douga) , some was just the reviews of the album it appeared it (wayohoo.com, but has links to 歌詞ばっかし.jp [no, seriously.the URL does not use Latin characters] that caused my Firefox browser to crash), while some actually have the audio with hidden lyrics, but appeared several days after mine (YouTube). So it seems that mine has more visible lyrics, with parts of it in a different colour to indicate the part used in the anime. I have also embedded a video from elsewhere alongside that of YouTube as the former is of better quality.

The best blog layout I have ever made! XD If you had been browsing through my blogs (especially this post ), you would notice that, despite having a lot of them, each one of them would have a different layout. Unlike most of my friends I know, I would pick a XML layout (difficult for beginners) and heavily modify it to the point that if you were to check where I got it from, it would look completely different. For example, the above screenshot is one of my first few attempts back in March/April this year to edit one of the default blogger XML layout of what you see on the left: Harbor. What I did then was to replace the image URL to figure out what each image is for and where and how it would appear. There are several reasons why I change. Some was because of the things that I had added/modified (espically the navigation menu), others are by the seasons, while the rest was because the previous was just a test, looked awful, or one of the default layouts. I have made changes to so many...

Almost two weeks has passed since then. Kyousuke, one of my classmates, entered the class with a big smile on his face. He seems to be talking about something happy with his friends. When Haruna entered the the class, however, his happiness turned into depression when she said that she doesn't remember what happened two days earlier. She also seem to be unfamiliar with most of the classmates. When she saw me, she suddenly had a smile on the face and sat at an empty seat nearest to me (which is actually hers, but she thinks it's someone else's) and talked to me. What does she want? She normally doesn't even talk to me since she was released from hospital. Haruna talked to me about how she was in February 4 and now it's suddenly June 6. She also added that she had also seem to have suddenly gain knowledge that only her overseas childhood friend would know. I don't know if I should tell her the truth, but there things about myself in this dimension that I mysel...

Please be reminded that this year's Japanese Language Prophecy Test (日本語能力試験) will be taking place on Sunday, 7 December 2008 (first sunday of december). A letter notifying on the venue of the examination should be delivered by the end of November. On the day of exam, please bring along a pencil and registration card. Registration is held every August.

The first lesson after lunch was English, so I was kind of looking forward to it with excitement until I saw the teacher walking in with a stack of papers. The teacher had planned a surprise test for today's lesson. Knowing that Haruna (sitting somewhere in front of me) just transferred in earlier today and had been hospitalized for 3 months earlier, he wants to exempt her from the test but Haruna insisted on taking it somehow. We received the test paper. Even though I can still do this, it is quite a challenge to do so. Let's see, the answer to question 3 is " I went for a holiday in Germany last month. It was great. ". Well, I had been taught that ドイツ (Doitsu) is Germany, but when I saw ジャーマニ instead, I didn't recognize it at first. Sheez, this paper is difficult to do. I completed the paper with 5 minutes remaining. Everyone else seem to be struggling to complete, but Haruna looked as though she completed it a long time ago. Did she give up? I can't tell....

Congratulations to Barack Obama on being elected the president of the United States. It may have been a long (political) fight, but one has finally made it through. Not only that, it has made history for a non-white person to be elected there with many people, from all over the world supporting him. What remains to be seen is if his party would do things as promised within the next 4 years. "Yes, we can!" Just to sidetrack a bit, he was in an Indonesian primary school, his late father was from an African country, and there's even a place in Japan called Obama (小浜). At about 7pm a while ago, I managed to watch a show on TBS following a guy who (tries to) look like him and watch his attempts to meet him in places like Chicago and New York. I managed to get some screenshots of the show.

With the end of my final year of my current school less than half a year away from now, before (hopefully) entering into a college of a course I want to take up, my schedule to do non-school-related stuff has somewhat eaten into my free time. I could not really follow what was being taught, even when revising them later on. I want to stay up late at night, but have to wake up early for school later on. Since school is quite some distance away, getting there and back home can range from 15 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the route I take and traffic conditions. If my sleep were to be uninterrupted, I would wake up at either 9am or 11am, which is quite late in the morning. It's been like that since I started primary/elementary school more than 10 years ago, but I can't stand it any longer. Combining school revision, long traveling times, crowded places, noisy environment, and lack of sleep would be a nice recipe to drive me crazy. May be worse if I were to take up a part-tim...

As mentioned about 22 hours ago , I have completed two vectors today (2 Nov 2008). One of which I had been doing since 30 October, and another right after the previous one which took me less than 5 hours. These have yet to be posted on the drawings blog , but here they are anyways. (If you have a slow connection, this may take a while to load) v0029 (997 kilobytes) I used the blurring effect for the clouds. Do note that the outlines are not in the usual black. v0030 (368 kilobytes) If you find this image familiar, that's because the source image was used in the previous post here.

I had in that hospital room for quite some time now. I don't know how long exactly I had been here or what day is today, because each day seems to be the same as the day before, apart from the people who visited me. There don't seem to be any progress with my frozen body since that hit-and-run incident on 23 May. Come to think of it, am I facing the same condition as Haruna back in February? But I don't recall seeing any doll or bright green light. The television in front of me is turned on to some random channel 24-7. There are times where I don't want to watch it, but I can't do anything about it since I can't switch it off or even close my eyes. All of a sudden, I saw myself on the TV, but this me is in casual wear instead of the hospital clothing and is able move around normally with my own will, like controlling a character in a video game. Previously, it only showed what I'm seeing. I tried to shout "Yay!" with my hands up in the air: well,...