Month: December 2008

I have Earthlink as my internet service provider. It’s been good to me (for the most part), but once in a while, I’ll have to run through hoops to get things working.

Namely, getting the DNS to work correctly.

Frustration knows no bounds when I’m trying to pay my bills and my web browser comes back saying ‘Earthlink can’t find that URL, maybe it no longer exists.’ Yeah, right! I was just there 2 minutes ago! Other sites that my web browser (read: Earthlink’s DNS) came back as not existing: LA Times.com, CNN.com, Yahoo.com. Hrmph. I’m sure Yahoo no longer exists. Maybe when Microsoft finally manages to buy Yahoo and nukes that site out of existence, then I’ll believe that. That’s why I manually inputted a DNS address.

And then I had issues trying to get onto FFXI on my PS2/PS3. Not a lick of trouble from my Xbox 360 though.

A call to Square-Enix customer support said my DNS sucks and that I need to fix that. *grumble* So I changed that and it seemed to have worked. Ah, but the side effect is that I can’t get to websites anymore (again). So I go back to my old DNS numbers.

Haven’t booted up FFXI yet so I don’t know if I’ll be able to connect. Crap, I’d rather have the internet than FFXI on my PS2/PS3. Since I don’t like FFXI on my 360, I’d be playing less of it. Probably a good thing.

Surfing the good old web found this: Good Earthlink DNS numbers. Which I vaguely remember as the numbers I was using before SE told me to change it… I would so change my ISP if it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t want to change my e-mail address of over 10 years.

Interesting story line so far. Unfortunately, the demo I played at TGS didn’t quite display all the HORRIBLE animations of the characters. I don’t think I’ve ever seen animation this bad. Over animation in some cases. It’s as if they hired a newbie animator who just learned the tools. What is with the weird hand gestures!

And the voice acting is a bit poor, too. :(

The story better make up for the animation and voices! I’m wondering this game looks in Japanese.

For lunch I thought I would make shumai again using the rest of the pork. I also invited Laura over to eat some. I also managed to get her to help me out. She initially only wanted to just come to eat and then go home, but I convinced her otherwise.

So off to Mitsuwa I went to pick up our Xmas cake and some shumai making supplies. Nothing exciting happened. I bought Tokyo negi to use in the gyoza instead of the usual ao negi simply because 1/4 of a negi seemed too little. Utsuwa-no-yakata was having a holiday sale. They had cute bunny themed plated for $10. Tempted, but I said no to myself.

It took me about 2 hours from start to finish. About 45 minutes of that time was spent cooking the shumai in 3 batches. While the shumai was cooking, I made more of the negi and aburaage hitashi using the rest of the Tokyo negi. I think I messed up on the ingredients, but my mom liked it better as it wasn’t as salty.

After lunch, we ate the cake. My mom had 2 slices. :x

Presents! Laura gave me a necklace, soap, lip balm, and $100 gift certificate to Whole Foods. She forgot to bring the Firefly blu-ray DVDs she got from her boss. ;_; My gift to Laura was the Battlestar Galactica DVD sets I gave her earlier. I gave nothing to my parents. :| Hey, I made them lunch! >.>;

Last night, I made shumai from scratch for the first time. I saw a recipe from the January 2009 issue of Kyou no Ryouri and I thought I’d give it a try. Shizuki always talks about making shumai and I was like, mmm, shuuumaaaiiiii…

Making it was easy enough. Making it look just as good as it tasted was quite difficult. When I wrapped the pork into the shumai wrapper, it looks alright. However, when I steamed it, the pork mix fell out of the skins, either because the shumai stuck to it’s neighbor and/or because the pork shrank away from the wrapper. I will have to practice some more. :|

I also made a green onion and fried tofu hitashi, which was also in the same issue.

It turned out a bit salty.

Tonight was the annual band christmas party. I thought I was going to be late to the caroling portion because I left my house a little before 6 PM (when it was supposed to start) and I still had to buy a white elephant gift. Lucky me, they were waiting for 4 other people. Once everyone arrived, there was more idling as they figured out where to go.

One thing I really like about christmas caroling is the people who come out from their homes to just listen to us. Never mind the fact that we’re all out of tune and it’s really cold outside. They clap, say thank you and merry christmas. It’s very nice.

Ok, so for the white elephant gift exchange I gave a box of Super Mario Bros pencils and a glow in the dark eraser. I didn’t get the perpetual gift, and as long as it’s not that, I’m perfectly fine with whatever else I receive. I got an emergency car escape kit. It has a knife to cut the seat belt, a pin to deflate the air bag, and a metal tip to use to smash the glass. Hopefully, I’ll never need to use it.

So cold right now that I’m wearing socks and a hanten to bed. Brr! >_<

Although, I think I prefer my winters cold like this. It makes me rather uneasy watching the trees start blooming in the winter because we’re going through a heat wave.

I told my coworker that I’d knit her and her sister a cap this winter. Her sister, you see, has cancer. Last year I knitted a purple version of the kitty hat. This year I thought I would make two. Something that matched as sisters. One will be a dark gray/black and the other would be a light blue. I think they would look very cute together like that.

But I’m very afraid that it might be too late.

Went to dodge ball practice again tonight. I went for only 1 hour though. Food was calling at home and I didn’t want to be eating at 11 PM at night.

I told my coworker that if any guy chucks a ball going 100 mph at my face that I would kick that person in the nuts. Luckily, no one got kicked. However, at the beginning of the 2nd hour I thought it would be a good night to go home when one of the guys on the other team started chucking balls at 100 mph at people’s heads.

Tadaima! I’m back from Las Vegas! Well, I got back on Friday. Stayed only one day because my sister only wanted/needed to go home the next day. It would have been nice if I was able to see some of the shows in Vegas, but oh well. Maybe next time.

Also, I didn’t gamble. However, I did drink copious amounts of free booze. Of which I will need to go to the gym this week and work off like crazy. :(

Company party in Las Vegas is tonight. Gonna dress up a bit (dressy casual is the aim).

Aaaand… I’m out!