The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

What do I want to do?  What are my goals?  What are my priorities?

Starting Monday, I’m going to be attending Auto Tech/High Performance Powertrains classes at Wyotech, so that’s 7AM-4:10PM M-F covered.  I want to turn that into some kind of career building badass cars, preferably for racing.  If I can get into racing myself, so much the better, although I don’t think I’m ever going to be super-awesome at it.  I’m definitely going for trackdays, though, as much as I can.  I’ve got such big plans for vehicles to acquire and mod and drive the shit out of… but first, I’m going to spend the next nine months eating and breathing cars.

I think I’ve mostly decided that cars/motorcycles and motorsports are what I want as my main priority.  There’s still a shit-ton of other things I want to pursue, but at least for now, this is the big one that I’m choosing to focus on.  It’s going to be a tough road, because I really don’t have all that much experience or knowledge to start from, but I’m going to work my ass off.  I kind of see this as my chance to redo school… I never really gave a shit about high school or college, and so I managed to pass, but didn’t honestly get much out of either one.  My English Literature B.A. is a testament to just how easy it is to get through liberal arts undergrad.  This time around, though, I’m going through a program about a subject I actually really, really love and am passionate about, and which will actually help me in terms of tons of practical knowledge.  Time to kick some ass.

Interestingly, though, I still also need more focus in my choices of hobbies.  There are just too many things I love and want to do, and I often can’t get myself to commit to any of them enough to actually DO anything.  Especially with so much less free time, I’m going to have to really push myself not to waste my time sitting around doing nothing anymore.

It’s insomnia again, for the second night in a row.  Alice starts her fall quarter classes tomorrow morning, so we turned in at a relatively sane hour of 1:45AM.  After only three episodes of Heroes, too… responsible adults!  We started watching the series Saturday night, after making up from an argument (hi Ryan).  We ended up burning through about 12 episodes Saturday and Sunday nights, staying up until around 5AM each time.  Not good for our sleeping habits!  I’m starting at Wyotech this coming Monday, so I’ve got to get back on the regular path myself.  I hope it’ll be worth it.

I neglect this blog mightily, and I think part of the reason is that I’ve forgotten that I’m supposed to just be keeping a personal journal–albeit a public one.  I make too much of my posts, try and insert some meaning into each one, whether it be some meaningful idea, a review of something, or just trying to keep a regular record of something I do.  I forget that I’m not a critic or reviewer, nor is this the Great American Novel, nor do I really, really need to keep track of every push up I do.  I have this problem all the time… everything I do has to be meaningful, has to be progressive… and in the process of overthinking the thing and planning out how significant it’s going to be, I forget to actually do it in the first place.  Old cliches are sometimes best… just do it!

Pageant week is over, and life can go back to something resembling normal again.  If all goes well, I’ll be spending the upcoming time working on my vehicles, and possibly earning some money on the side.  October will mark the start of my time at Wyotech, eating and breathing cars.  Should be fun times!

Alice and I attended the wedding of an old family friend of mine last night.  It was interesting to see various people after 3-10 years (depending on the individual).  I think a lot of people didn’t know what to make of the fact that I want to build race cars for a living… hah!  Take that, Chinese engineering students!

Before pageant week began, I was playing a lot of God of War II and Super Paper Mario… hopefully I can get back to doing that now too.

I’m sad that the only comments I get are spam. 

Tonight :

• Hamburgers were made
• Munchkin was played
• Driving Lessons was watched
• Cookbooks were acquired

I really must :

• Pay Consumer Guide
• Read magazines
• Play Forza
• Write stuff

Upcoming :

• Pageant event(s) Saturday
• Live Free or Die Hard
• Big Basin hiking
• Lucy’s play
• Pageant week

I don’t know how much good posting there is going to be today… I want to talk about Harry Potter, and I’m supposed to start my France retrospective, but I’m going for go-karting and dinner again with Ryan and James, this time with Alice in tow, and the house still needs cleaning, and the mail still needs going through, and cetera.

In other Eug news, I am now officially moving to twice-a-week shaving.  It’s a glorious day for hairless Asians everywhere!

A month-long trip to France is, looking back on it, a massive shift in life.  I’m having a hard time remembering what regular life is supposed to be like, now that I’m back in Davis.  It’s been a good four days or so since we landed back in the US of A, and things still aren’t even close to back to normal.  The cats, luckily, forgave us pretty rapidly for abandoning them with friends for a month, so at least they’re doing their usual catty things.  The fish are still with a friend in the South Bay, and will be collected this weekend, when we go away from home for another few days.  Yay for fish and pageant events, I suppose.  We’ve spent these past few days taking care of a bunch of random things… money issues, food shopping, pet supplies and rehabilitation….  We did take a little time out to rent and watch Little Miss Sunshine (Lauren Shiohama, who plays the minor role of Miss California, deserves a great, big, hearty YO.), but that’s been about it for relaxation.  Aside from a three-hour stint of World of Warcraft and a go-karting outing with Ryan and James, for me.

I guess it never ends, really, having tons of things what need doin’.  We’re going back down to the South Bay again this weekend in order to see friends there, work a pageant event, and pick up the fish from Anne’s.  The house is still a mess, mail still needs to be sorted through and taken care of, a kitchen still needs to be cleaned and partially restocked….  We’re receiving a goldfish (set to be christened Lieutenant Tasha Yar, Chief of Security) who will need to be settled in.  After that, I can get started getting the motorcycles back up to decent running spec (new tires for Faye, new… uh… functioning for April), wash the cars and do some oil changes and other maintenance, read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows….

I’ve also got about 1100 photos from our France journey to sort through and upload and such.  I’m thinking about doing a daily retrospective on the trip, illustrated, of course, over the next month.  I was going to start immediately upon our return, but I think I’m going to set myself to start it on Tuesday.

Finally, a small administrative note… the blogs of Dani and James, both good friends of mine in the real world, have been added to the Links page.  Hi, guys!

Mrrr.  My sleeping has been really messed up for the past half-week or so, so I’ve been constantly tired… more so than usual.  I hope I get relatively rested before the trackday on Friday.

Trackday on Friday!  Thunderhill with Rosette… I hope she doesn’t throw me. 

I’ve been playing Disgaea 2 again (because I don’t have enough things taking up my time), and it is fun, as usual.  It’s pretty brain-melting for me, though… the more open-ended a game is with player choices, the more paralyzed I get playing it.

France in a week and a half… wow.  This is going to be the longest I’ve ever been away from home.  I hope the cats are okay with the friends we’re going to leave them with. 

Almost through with the stack of car/motorcycle magazines.  I also started reading the last Alvin Maker book, The Crystal City.  It feels like I missed a book, although the title list claims I haven’t.

Today I got Forza 2, and have been playing it for most of the day.  That is all.

Oh, except for this Tower Defense-style game that Ryan linked me to.

I can’t seem to concentrate on anything today… not Puzzle Quest, not reading….  My brain might have melted.  There was a slight lack of sleep last night… maybe that has something to do with it.

Pyrrhic (my desktop) is occupied with starting the task of backing up the hundreds of gigabytes of crap I have stored on his hard drives.  This is the first time I’ve ever burned a DVD, and I gotta say… good god, it’s slow.  An hour to burn a 4GB DVD at 18x?  Daaaamn.  Ah well, it has to be done.  I have about 600GB over four aging drives, and I’ve been too negligent for too long in my backups.  Of course, if one of them was to fail, with my luck, it would do so right now.  You can’t see it, but I am now knocking furiously on wood.

I marathoned the rest of Nanoha last night, while Alice was working on her paper.  In the end, it’s a fun series that uses its cheesy emotional string-pulling and cuteness to make you care about the characters, but also throws in some pretty okay action (relatively speaking).  I liked it.  Nanoha A’s and StrikerS are probably in my future, but not as priorities.

Puzzle Quest is pissing me off.  The AI cheats like crazy… it definitely cheats in at least one way: it makes moves that it knows will give it certain benefits (i.e. extra turns), even when the benefits are supposed to be determined by chance.  For example, if it has two identical matches it can make, but it knows the RNG will give it an extra turn for one and not for the other, guess which one it will take?  Whereas the player, of course, has no way to know….  I’m also fairly certain the game tailors gem drops for the AI to increase its combos… maybe to artificially increase the difficulty or something.  Bah!  I’ve had a string of 5 crushing defeats.  We’re talking about matches in which the AI is routinely taking 5 or 6 turns for every one of mine, and I die when my opponent still has 2/3 health remaining.  Of course, for all my whining, we all know I’m going to keep playing the damned thing….

This weekend was supposed to be pretty full of things, and well, I guess it was.  Alice and I went with friends to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End on Friday night.  For me, the movie was full of face-palm moments, cheap laughs, and predictable melodrama, but it was still damned entertaining, all in all.  Stupid movies can still be tremendous amounts of fun (as I predict the Michael Bay Transformers will be).  And it’s always nice to watch a movie with my wife in a starring role.  Good job, Keira honey!  Best of all, though, was the trailer for Live Free or Die Hard that played before the movie.  Yippee-kay-yay, motherfucker!

Saturday, we drove down to San Jose for the MAAP escort training at Andy’s place.  Good eats, good meeting, and good hanging out with my closest friends, who I miss terribly.  A load of laundry later, this theme was continued up at Mikey’s place in San Francisco.  I really missed the guys, and spending the day with them was great… especially hanging around towards the end of the night and just talking shit, like we used to do.

Of course, Alice and I didn’t get back home to Davis and get into bed until BFT in the morning, so it’s thrown our sleeping off up to and including today.  We didn’t get out of bed yesterday until mid-afternoon (which meant I missed going to watch AFM races at Infineon with the 530 crew), so we just decided to waste the rest of the day as well.  Star Trek: TNG episodes were watched, pancakes were made and devoured, books were read, and video games were played.  We then proceeded to stay up until about 3AM, which meant the sleeping-schedule-fuckup rolled over to today as well.

Today’s activities so far have been paper-writing for Alice and an advance segment of Game Night for me, with Ryan and Andy.  Titan Quest was played.  We’re now level 47, and we just got past Epic Egypt into Babylon.  My character, She-Legolas, acquired a new-hotness bow and a new helm with big stat boosts, but is now sorely lacking in movement speed compared to her companions, Dillios and Leonidas.  It is sad.

I really wish I could sleep less… sleeping is so wonderful, but I really don’t like missing the whole morning part of the day.  Sleepiness aside, I really love early morning, when everything is dim and cool and the world isn’t so crowded.  Early morning rides, drives, biking trips and runs/walks are always so great.  As well, I don’t like losing so much time that I could be putting into all my time-consuming hobbies.  I’ve got tons of games to play, movies, TV shows and anime series to watch, books to read… I’ve still got that massive backlog of car and motorcycle magazines, too.  And in three weeks, it’s off to France for a month… I’ve got to hurry up and pack my iPod full of tunes.

I’ve been reading more of the Alvin Maker series… Alice and I are both done through Heartfire, and I just ordered The Crystal City off of Amazon.  What I most admire about Orson Scott Card and his writing is his ability to create multi-dimensional characters.  There are very few flat characters in his stories, and he does his best to give everyone a fully fleshed-out personality and history, and one that makes sense, to boot.

Under the Tuscan Sun, on the other hand, doesn’t seem like it really has much of a story so far, but then, I’m not very far into it.  Despite the lack of plot development, it’s really putting its hooks into me.  It’s the kind of “classic literature” style that I really love, in which every sentence is a piece of poetry, regardless of whether or not they fit together into some epic tragedy or whatever type of story you want.  I think this is a style that’s becoming lost on people in general, since now all the popular materials depend on Something Happening every few seconds.  Plot development is king now, and I think we’re sacrificing something important for it.

I spent most of yesterday playing Puzzle Quest, and it is awesome.  It’s like Bookworm Adventures, but without the words… I could play this game forever.  Even if I do spend most of it cursing at the AI and its uncanny ability to CHEAT.  Oh well, it doesn’t break the game (and I’m not sure it’s really cheating at all, just analyzing situations really bloody fast, as computers tend to be able to).  I also gave Moto GP a try (finally, I own a PSP game!), and it’s pretty good too.  Hard to control, with the PSP’s stupid “analog disc” thing, so it’ll never really be a good racing sim, in my opinion, but it’s fun.  I gave up on being good and technical with it, turned on all the assists in the game (brake assist, AT, sim mode off) and just had fun with it.

On the anime front, Nanoha is turning out kind of fun… the last couple of episodes I’ve watched have changed the tone around from lighthearted and cutesy to moody and portentious, and I’m liking it.  Lucky Star is also doing me pretty well, despite what seems to be a massive backlash against it in the fan community.  I don’t get it, because the show is funny and cute.  Oh well, we all know I’ve never really been a great meter of public opinion.