On mastery of the English language and the expression of love

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

I love you like a fat kid loves cake.

-50 Cent, 21 Questions

Short story submitted to three prestigious literary journals

HUZZAH!

I just finished submitting one of my short stories to three prestigious literary journals.

I’ll probably spend an hour or so tomorrow planning out the second wave of submissions so I can be better prepared for the rejection letter if and (most likely) when they arrive. At the least, if I have a plan in place, there won’t be as much time to dwell on the sting of having a story rejected.

Have no fear; I’m not basing my personal assessment of my writing skills exclusively on whether or not three of the top literary journals in America reject my story. Of course, if the story is accepted in any of the three journals linked above, it will do wonders for my confidence in my writing skills (and serve as cause for joyous celebration).

Excerpt from Section 137, On Different Points of View

From The Miscellany of a Japanese Priest (Being a Translation of Tsure-zure Gusa):

All this medley of beauty and magnificence coming and going allows me little time to look at (the procession itself). But at sundown where have all the lines of carriages and ranks of people gone to? In a moment hardly any are left. The rattle of carriages is heard no more, the blinds and the mats are all cleared away, and while I watch nothing is left save solitude, reminding me touchingly of life itself. Truly indeed to watch the high road is as good as looking at a procession.

Wii Homebrew Browser “Unable to initialize network” error solution

If you are receiving the “Unable to initialize network” error when launching the Homebrew Browser application from the Homebrew Channel, press the Home key to return to the Homebrew Channel, wait for the globe icon in the lower-right corner of the screen to stop blinking and remain solid, and launch the Homebrew Browser again.

The globe icon in the Homebrew Channel indicates the network connection status. If the icon is blinking, the Wii is still trying to establish a network connection. If the icon is lit and solid, the Wii has established a network connection.

If the globe icon continues blinking after 30 seconds or if it is grayed out, check your Wii’s network connection settings.

Postcard from 1956 discovered in book sale purchase

I recently purchased a copy of The World’s Great Letters at a local book sale for $1.50. The book was published in 1940 and contains the text of letters written by:

  • Alexander the Great
  • Saint Jerome
  • Christopher Columbus
  • Leonardo da Vinci
  • Michaelangelo
  • Henry VIII
  • Benjamin Franklin
  • Thomas Jefferson
  • George Washington
  • Thomas Paine
  • Napoleon Bonaparte
  • Ludwig van Beethoven
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley
  • John Keats
  • Robert Browning
  • Edgar Allen Poe
  • Dostoevsky
  • Charles Dickens
  • Abraham Lincoln
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Emily Dickinson
  • Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
  • William Randolph Hearst
  • Mark Twain
  • George Bernard Shaw
  • Lenin

As if purchasing a collection of such letters for $1.50 were not already a bargain, I found a postcard advertising The Sporting News. The text of the postcard reads as follows:

DON’T MISS THIS!

You can have the next TWELVE BIG ISSUES of The Sporting News for only $2.00.

You will receive coverage of all developments in all pennant races in the minors as well as the majors, including World’s Series Games. Mailed direct to your home or office for just $2.00.

Send remittance within five days and receive THIRTEEN issues instead of TWELVE.

C.C. Spink & Son

2018 Washington Ave.

St. Louis 3, Mo.

Click past the break for scans of the postcard.

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Japanese voice cast for Persona 3 FES

Main Character: Akira ISHIDA

Yukari Takeba: Megumi TOYOGUCHI

Junpei Iori: Kousuke TORIUMI

Mitsuru Kirijo: Rie TANAKA

Akihiko Sanada: Hikaru MIDORIKAWA

Aegis: Maaya SAKAMOTO

Ken Amada: Megumi OGATA

Shinjiro Aragaki: Kazuya NAKAI

Fuuka Yamagishi: Mamiko NOTO

Takaya Sakaki: Nobutoshi CANNA

Jin Shirato: Masaya ONOSAKA

Chidori Yoshino: Miyuki SAWASHIRO

Pharos: Akira ISHIDA

Shuji Ikutsuki: Hideyuki HORI

Igor: Isamu TANONAKA

Elizabeth: Miyuki SAWASHIRO

Kurosawa: Hirofumi TANAKA

Takeharu Kirijo: Kouji TOTANI

Eiichiro Takeba: Masashi HAMANO

Ryoji Mochizuki: Akira ISHIDA

Natsuki Moriyama: Yuka KOMATSU

Metis: Chiwa SAITO

Purchased video capture hardware

A friend of mine is selling some of his old hardware. Among the phat l00t available were two video capture devices: the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350 and the WinTV-PVR-USB2. Since both allow for recording from RCA inputs (read: video game consoles), I decided to purchase both.

After I pick up the items and install the WinTV-PVR-350 in my desktop computer, I plan to record videos of rare and import console games, including Puyo Puyo Box for the Playstation, Super Puzzle Fighter II X for the Dreamcast, undub versions of Persona 3 FES and Persona 4 for the Playstation 2, and Tatsunoko v. Capcom for the Wii. When I record the videos, I plan to upload them to my YouTube channel.

I don’t know when I’ll be traveling to pick up the items, but it will likely be around late May or early June. Watch this site for further updates.

Port forwarding configuration for Unreal Tournament 3 co-op campaign play

Unreal Tournament 3 shipped with a campaign mode that was pretty meh if played alone, but much more fun if played with friends. Unfortunately, configuring one’s router to allow hosting of online co-op campaign games can be frustratingly complex. Epic has provided no official documentation on the subject, so UT3 owners have been left to figure out which ports to forward for themselves.

There are already several great guides with instructions on discovering your computer’s IP address, changing your router’s configuration, and forwarding ports, so I won’t cover that in this article.

You could place your computer in your router’s DMZ, but that opens all ports on the computer to the Internet and presents a serious security risk.

Instead, here’s a list of UDP ports (not TCP) you’ll need to forward to get online co-op campaign play working:

  • 6500
  • 7777
  • 8767
  • 9989
  • 13000
  • 49152-65535

I need to conduct further tests to determine whether all ports listed need to be forwarded to allow for online co-op campaign play, but I have personally tested these settings and they work for me when no other configurations I found during my long search worked.

Games appear overly bright, washed out on Dell Studio notebook computer

If you recently purchased a Dell Studio notebook, you may have noticed that games like Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Unreal Tournament 3, and other graphics-intensive games appear overly bright, faded, and washed out on default brightness settings.

DON’T PANIC!

There are steps you can take to alleviate, if not entirely eliminate, poor in-game image quality issues produced by the Studio’s default settings:

  1. Turn down in-game brightness settings. Brightness controls differ for each game, but are usually located under an Options or Settings menu.
  2. Set your monitor’s brightness to two-thirds power (10 steps up from the lowest brightness settings). Use the Fn+Up and Fn+Down key combinations to adjust your brightness.
  3. If your computer features an ATI video card:
  • Download the latest drivers for the desktop equivalent of your card directly from the ATI web site. For example, if your notebook features an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650, download the drivers for the ATI Radeon HD 3650.
  • Download and run the Mobility Modder tool from DriverHeaven on the downloaded drivers.
  • Install the modified drivers.

I hope these steps help alleviate confusion for new Dell Studio owners. Dell provides no documentation on image quality issues, ships Studio notebooks with screens set to full brightness, and hosts outdated drivers for video cards on their support web site.

Thanks to my friends who recommended Mobility Modder.

No thanks to Dell, who last updated their drivers for the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 on Jan. 14, 2009. ATI released version 9.3 of their Catalyst Suite, which includes drivers for many ATI video cards, on March 18, 2009. Upgrading from stock drivers provided by Dell to drivers modified using Mobility Modder made a visibly significant difference in game image quality.