2003 November
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Things are flaky. Have setup this blogger thing to publish to the fateback account (roytang.sinfree.net), seems to be working fine now. Ressurrected one of the older page layouts and added the pandaren brewmaster! Anyway, I'll also probably most of the website stuff from topcities to fateback, seeing as how topcities has gotten crappy lately with the FTP problem. That is all, back to work...
2003 August
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Well, not exactly. But I am now 25, in any case. Looking back, there are many things I might have regretted, but my life philosphy tells me that there can be no regrets. The past is past, and the future is yet to come. Somehow, I'm only a few steps closer towards achieving my lifetime goals, but my gut tells me to keep on dreaming. Such is the folly of a dreamer. In case you're wondering, my lifetime goals include becoming an accomplished indie game developer, and world domination. There are more, but these are the ones that are most
2003 July
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I installed Civilization III, and told myself, "Gee, I guess I'll try it out for an hour or so." I didn't stop for six hours. So much for getting anything done over the weekend. Luckily (or not), my being awake those six hours of early morning allowed me to catch some late-breaking news. Apparently, disgruntled young officers of the not-so-prestigious Armed Forces of the Philippines had taken control of some building in Makati, laying bombs and stuff around and with snipers on the roof and all. Not sure, what's going on, but hey, at least it's never boring in good
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Free time... that's something I haven't had in a while. Work is tough right now, as we've got a big deadline coming up in August. I've been putting in 10-12-hour days on a regular basis over the past couple of weeks or so, so I barely have any time to do anything. (Except for a few quick games of The Frozen Throne (yay!) before going to bed of course.) Of course, the other reason I haven't updated this thing in a fairly long while is that my PC broke down! And since it was past the automatic replacement period, I
2003 June
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Last Tuesday, I got a very rare treat (?). I was invited (under false pretenses I might add) to a seminar trying to sell me to the concept of network markets. It was by a group of people called "Network 21" who supposedly have a corporate partner in Amway. Now, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against these people, I'm sure they're enjoying themselves looking for sucke-I mean clients, and convincing them to buy Amway toothpaste and shampoo and vitamins and god-knows-what. I wish them well. What I'm particularly annoyed at is the guy who invited me there, a
2003 April
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Good plot twists you could see from a mile away. Unfortunately, we had arrived at the theater too late to catch the start of the last showing of Gangs of New York, so we had to settle with the second choice. The Recruit didn't get as much critical acclaim as Gangs, but what the heck, Al Pacino in a spy thriller? How could I lose? The story is simple enough. Colin Farell plays James Clayton, a young man just out of MIT, recruited by CIA agent William Burke (Pacino). Clayton is obsessed with finding out what happened to his father,
2003 January
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How's work you ask? It's going pretty well actually. Everything's still easy-peasy for me as I'm undergoing some training and stuff. I'm a bit worried about what happens after the training though, from the looks of it people put in a lot of overtime here. :( The best thing about the job is that I'm learning a lot of stuff. In two weeks I learned SQL, PL/SQL and Delphi. Starting tomorrow I'm gonna be training on Oracle Developer. The work itself looks easy enough — nothing I can't handle. Since most of the coding is done using high-level RAD Tools,
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Yes I do. I bought a new hard drive yesterday, a 40Gb 5400RPM Seagate. It took me a while to get the system up and running again after my plugging it in. First I had to wrestle with my PC's small case, trying to figure out where to place the thing. Then, given how old my PC is, it predictably failed to detect the whole capacity of the drive, insisting it was only 8 Gb. I went down to Seagate's website and did some Dynamic Drive Overlay thing that let me overcome the BIOS limitations. But the DDO installed a
2002 December
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Well, trying to make this a weekly format thing obviously fizzled out. What with me starting work on Friday, I just give up. I'll keep this site up and put up stuff of interest whenever I feel like it, just like before. So what's new? As I said, work starts Friday. I went to an orientation for the job last Friday and it seems like a tough and demanding job, but I rise to the challenge in any case. What I'm worried about is that the hour and a half commute might sap my energy too much. Maybe I should
2002 November
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Anyway, I've had a couple of days to think about it, so I'd like to share my thoughts on the matter. First, the facts: Enix and Square are merging. Square stock will be bought out for Enix stock at 0.81 Square per 1 Enix. The Square president will be head of Square Enix, the Enix board remains in place, they'll move into Enix headquarters in Shibuya. All currently announced releases will go on as scheduled. A FF/DW merger may be in the offing, but no definite plans, and probably only as a side release. No personnel will be let go.
2002 September
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The Bourne Identity A new action hero is Bourne I was a bit anxious to see this movie, as I had thoroughly enjoyed the book of the same name a long time ago, and I was hoping the movie would give me the same satisfaction. The Bourne Identity stars Matt Damon as rogue CIA agent/amnesiac Jason Bourne. In his quest to uncover his own identity, Jason travels all around Europe pursued by the CIA's agents and dragging along an innocent gypsy girl who just happened to be his best shot for a ride to Paris. Now, I haven't read the
2002 July
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I originally wasn't going to have a rant today, but while surfing the web I thought about one of the things I like about it: personal websites. That's right, personal pages. Some people might argue that personal pages are like the dregs of the internet. And they're probably right. Given that any random joe-on-the-street can get on Geocities and build his own website, (like royness.vze.com for instance) we're certainly bound to see all sorts of stuff (and accordingly, all sorts of crap) on the internet. See, that's the thing: "All sorts of stuff." It's pretty much the same way Forrest
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[Posted on the GameFAQs message board in response to endless whining about rushes. Last I heard, Battle.net had a competitive ladder system, meaning if you want to go up on the ladder, you have to win. If rushing is the means for that win, you should go for it. What does this mean? If you don't want to be rushed, don't play on Battle.net, because on Battle.net people play primarily to win and secondarily for fun. Get a bunch of friends together and hook up a LAN and play amongst yourselves, where you can have your own rules like "No
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Well I finally decided to start a full-blown web journal. I used to keep one some years ago — I think it greatly helped me develop my english skills. Or not. Anyway, I tend to run my mouth off for paragraphs at a time anyway, and so many things run through my head at any given time it probably makes sense to put down at least some of it on paper (or in a computer at least.) Anyway, I decided to make over this site because nothing much of anything else has been happening around here lately. With Mon in
2002 April
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So the ECE board exams are now over. Six months (okay three) of hard work and preparation (well alright, occasionally glancing at my books) and what do we get? A bunch of questions chosen seemingly at random. The Math and Electronics parts were good enough actually, and I felt pretty confident there. The second day was bad. The Communications exam might as well have been a random set of questions about cookie dough and displacer beasts. Me, Marc and Dennis went through at least a hundred questions in various topics an hour and a half before the exam but not
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April Fools day today. The Gaming Intelligence Agency says they're shutting down, but it's likely one of their famous AFD pranks. Board exams coming up next week, Tuesday and Wednesday. I need to borrow a calculator — the one I have isn't on their list. I really should study more but for some reason I'm really confident. promises to study more So I applied for a job at ASTI. Sure it's a government place, but I know a lot of guys there and it looks like fun. Interviewed last week, hope they call back. And so another Holy Week went
2002 March
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(Originally available on the now-defunct NFT Zu website) (2018 Edit: I found this in my WordPress drafts folder, not sure why it wasn't published when I first imported it. It's true it was on my old site, but I can not find a reliable indicator of what date it was published. So I will publish it with an arbitrarily chosen date of March 1, 2002.) Officially, this rant should be available upon the re-opening of the NFT Zu webpage, version 4.something. As much as I'd like to babble on about anime or fanfiction, several of my associates here at the
2002 February
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Website updates: New text files in features section! Ack... haven't been doing much lately. My time has been consumed by the evil monster that is Sierra's Betrayal at Krondor. It's an RPG based on Raymond Feist's Riftwar series of books. Haven't read the books myself, but the game is well done, and is still enjoyable despite its age (I think it was released in '92 or such). The game was released by Sierra as freeware to promote the sequel, and it can be downloaded at happypuppy.com The other thing I've been doing, is trying to catch up on my board
2002 January
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Updates: Added Square NES ROMs, Programming section, updated links. Went back to text-based navigation. While image navigation is nice, it's hard to update and slow-loading. Added links to funtrivia trivia quizzes. It's been a slow couple of days really. Some board reviewing, sporadic Japanese learning. Finished DW7 a couple of nights ago — finally! Currently playing on PS: Ehrgeiz Quest Mode! Kinda tough, tho. For the NES, a discussion on FFFade me download a whole bunch of Square NES ROMs! Also been playing a lot of Megaman! (finished 1 and 2 already, on my way with 3) Job fair next
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For some reason, I keep wanting to update this site. I'm actually doing this more often than studying for the board, studying game development, studying Japanese or writing anything else. I wonder why? Anyway, I added a humor page and a special "Who Am I?" page. Check 'em out. Also the Anime ROMs site should be fully operational by now. So I went and saw Lord of the Rings last Friday. As everyone expected, it was an excellent movie, and the theater was jam packed. We had to use all our mighty skills to get seats. Even my first brother,