Xegyn's Cyberspace

new post from N95

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:48:00 +0000

Here is a pic of the progress on rebuilding commons at USC.

Trip to Houston, TX (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 04:45:00 +0000

This past weekend I went to visit Jessica in Houston. I had a lot of fun and we ate a lot of good food. The first night I got there, Jessica took me to Sonic where I had my first Sonic burger. The burger tasted healthy but delicious. It reminded me of Fatburger, where the burger was not overly salty and had lots of veggies like lettuce, tomatoes, and pickles. We ordered classic drive-in style and ate in the car.

The Sonic Drive-In Menu and Credit Card Swiper

After Sonic, we went to a bar downtown called The Flying Saucer which, similar to Yard House, where they had over what seemed like 100 beers on tap. I tried the Texas sampler and the Colorado sampler. According to them, Colorado is "the Napa Valley of the beer world". One thing really cool about Houston I wish Los Angeles had was found on the freeway. In different lanes, they paint icons of what freeway the lane will lead to:

At a donut shop I got a kolache (or apparently the correct term is klobasnek), which is a delicious fresh baked bread bun with cheese and meat inside.

My Sausage Kolache

Hainan Chicken From Scratch

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 03:52:00 +0000

Back in January 2008, I made some Hainanese Chicken from scratch, and it came out delicious. The chicken is uniquely cooked by boiling chicken broth, turning off the heat, and dunking the chicken in the hot broth for 8 minutes, repeat 2 more times.
I wasn't sure what kind of dark sauce they use, so I used the Indonesian kecap manis, which is a sweet, thick sauce.
The rice was cooked with chicken broth instead of water, and mixed with half a stick of butter. Surprisingly, half a stick was the minimum to get the rice to taste how it should.

Gaja: Okonomiyaki in Torrance

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 03:15:00 +0000

This is from back in August of 2007, but Tony, Mike, Luis, Mary, and I decided to try a Japanese okonomiyaki (Japanese pancake) restaurant, and the closest one to Los Angeles was in Torrance, called Gaja. After a long drive, we spent about 2 hours eating here. Everyone but me got the okonomiyaki. I got the monjayaki, which is kind of like a watery version of the okonomiyaki. Their menu was enormous. I think there were around 20 pages. The food was was pretty good and it was fun to cook your own okonomiyaki at the table. Of course, to make this at home the ingredients wouldn't cost more than about $5, but the experience was fun.

Cooking Meat and Okonomiyaki

Front of Gaja

Full Album Here

Ebay is Old School

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:16:00 +0000

I just listed a few of my old games on Ebay, and I was using their WYSIWYG editor box, and then switched to HTML view so that I could attach an image. What I found out then was that Ebay still uses the deprecated font tag. This is what was there:

Okay, if they are going to create a span and attach a style to it anyway, why don't they just add a font-size declaration instead of using a font tag?

Post from my N800

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:13:00 +0000

This is a test post from my Nokia Internet Tablet. Included is a screenshot I took from my NES emulator.

Healthy Choice Honey Balsamic Chicken

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:57:00 +0000

Mmm, the cold air outside in the morning reminds me of..... SKI SEASON! YAYAYEE!

I know I'm a huge Stouffer's Lean Cuisine fan, but yesterday I had the Healthy Choice Honey Balsamic Chicken because it was cheaper. And oh my. The Honey Balsamic sauce was so delicious. It was of restaurant quality. If you haven't had it yet, I highly recommend it. I need to see if I can get a similar Honey Balsamic sauce by itself in a bottle.

AIM 6.5 & Windows Vista

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 20:54:00 +0000

The other night I decided to install the new AIM 6.5 on my Vista PC, since I haven't used AIM since I dunno...2005? My Trillian started crashing so it seemed a good excuse to install it and check out any new features.

Big mistake.

I was very careful during the install reading every step's instructions and disabling any unwanted crap that came along with it. After I finished installing it, I noticed a big red X on my Network activity monitor in the task bar. My internet was working fine, however. I double clicked on the icon and everything I normally see in my network config was gone, and instead displayed the words "Access denied" or something similar.

Around this time is when I realized my Winamp refused to play any sound file. It would load the file, display tags and what not, would allow me to seek to the middle of the song, but just would not play. Of course, the settings were all fine.

Seems like anyone who's installed AIM on Vista has had the same networking problem. There were over 14 pages on the Microsoft support forum, and by page 7 it seemed that the only solution was to reinstall windows or do a system restore. I could have kept reading the thread, but after page 11, I decided to give the System Restore a try. I have never used System Restore, even on XP and always have been a big skeptic about it. I started it up. I guessed that the last restore point would be from when I first installed Windows, since I have never configured System Restore. However, there was a restore point from the night before.

So that's what all the sound is coming from my computer when I'm trying to go to sleep!

I asked Windows to restore from that point, waited a couple minutes, waited for my computer to restart, and it was done already. I was pretty amazed by this point, especially because my network and Winamp were now working fine.

So word of advice: Don't install AIM on Vista; Stick to Trillian, Pidgin, or Meebo.

Caipirinha & Cachaça

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:52:00 +0000

I've never heard of Caipirinha until today. Apparently it is a Brazilian drink with Cachaça (kind of a rum made from sugar cane) and lime. Sounds and looks delicious. More details on Wikipedia
I might get myself some Cachaça next time at BevMo. Has anyone had either Caipirinha or Cachaça? Any suggestions on Cachaça brands? I might just go for the Double Gold Medal Winner.

Vista Disk Manager

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 06:47:00 +0000

A lot of people ask me, what's good in Vista? And I often don't remember a lot of cool features. Well here is one:
Just now I deleted a partition and added the free space to my Windows partition without a restart. In fact, I was ripping a CD and listening to music while it was happening, and it took no more than a minute.

Jack in the Box Sirloin Burger

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 06:55:00 +0000

I finally tried the (not so) new Sirloin Burger, and I have to say, it is probably the best Jack in the Box burger I've had. It had lots of veggies, the meat was good quality, and I got to pick Swiss cheese and grilled onions on it. Although not very cheap at $4.19 for just the burger, the biggest plus was I didn't have any cartilage or bone in the meat like I usually do when I eat at Jack. Definitely worth a try.

Bruddah's Hawaiian Foods

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 07:08:00 +0000

Since I missed out on getting Hawaiian food when I was in Hawaii a couple of weeks ago, Lino, Tony, and I decided to go to Bruddah's Hawaiian Foods in Gardena. I got the Saturday special which was about $8.50 for Kalua Pork, Lomi Salmon, chicken long rice, macaroni salad, and rice which I substituted with poi for $1.50 more. And MY were the portions generous. I had so much Kalua Pork at the end, but I had to eat it all. The location was interesting... I would not have expected a Hawaiian restaurant to be on that street.

The food was good, but not exceptional, so I give it a 3.5/5.

Wakasanchi

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 06:41:00 +0000

Last week my roommate Tony found on someone's blog a hidden gem of a Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles, so we went to check it out with Richie. The place was called Wakasanchi, or わかさん家, or Waka-san's House. Their menu consisted of one thing... Chef's Special. Before ordering, our waiter made sure with us that we are okay with this style or ordering. If we were picky eaters, we would be out of luck because there are no substitutions. Luckily, none of us are. The waiter told us that the menu changes every day depending on what the chef, Waka-san, decides to prepare that day. The food every day is supposed to be traditional home-style, Japanese cooking. The 13 course meal we had that night included:

Boiled Spinach

A Jellyfish Salad

Lobster Salad

Fried Fish (forgot what kind)

An egg custard with white fish inside

Sashimi

Crab Legs

Soba

Niku-jaga or 肉じゃが (Meat and Potatoes in soy sauce and sugar)

Wonton Soup

Tempura

Chawamushi

Green Tea Ice Cream

The best item was the sashimi. The tuna was so soft it melted in my mouth. The fried fish was my second favorite because it was very flavorful and soft. The plates are small, so don't worry if you think this sounds like too much food. If the meal wasn't $30/each excluding the pitcher of beer we ordered, I would actually be able to go back more than once a year... Don't get me wrong -- with the lobster, crab, and sashimi, I'm sure the $30 is justified.

Word of warning: Several websites incorrectly list the address as 929 Westwood Blvd, Los Angeles CA. The REAL address is 1929 Westwood Blvd, Los Angeles CA between Olympic and Santa Monica. The owner also does not advertise the place.

I give this place a 4/5.

Update:
I have to re-evaluate my score for Wakasanchi. In the last couple months after I ate there, I've been trying a lot of Japanese restaurants in Los Angeles, and what I found out was most places in the $20-$40 range are actually pretty bad. I feel that Japanese places are way overpriced here and they don't even serve great food. I would drop about $30 at some places and not even be full. I think I can prepare food that tastes better for half the cost. Anyway, the conclusion I came to was that compared to all those other places, Wakasanchi is actually a really great deal. It was all fantastic food and it made me really full. I update their score to 4.5/5.

Santouka and Cafe Brasil

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 05:57:00 +0000

This weekend I tried 2 new places to eat with Jessica.

The first was Santouka in Mitsuwa Market in Torrance. First of all the Mitsuwa Market's food court is pretty big and the pricing looked affordable, considering it was Japanese food. The market place also includes the grocery store, a bookstore, a video rental store, and several other smaller shops including a tea shop. I was also able to obtain a copy of Famitsu, the Japanese gaming magazine for $1.70 at one of the magazine stands. Pretty great place.

Anyway, the ramen. I can't say that I've had real ramen in so long so I was excited. Apparently, Santouka is the largest ramen chain in Japan although I've never heard of it. The ramen was pretty darn good. Jessica got the Shio (Salt) Ramen which I tried and I got the Miso Ramen. I liked the Miso broth a little more but they were both pretty good. The charsiu was also decently sized and pretty much melted in my mouth. The one thing that disappointed me was the fact that they did not have Gyouza. :( For those of you who don't know, ramen and gyouza are almost like peanut butter and jelly.
I give Santouka an absolutely amateur Xegyn rating of 4/5.

The second place, Cafe Brasil, winner of 4 or more Zagat Awards was in Culver City. We went for brunch, so we had the Carioca (Chicken Breast) and Havana (Steak) sandwiches. The sandwiches were okay. Not anything special. The appetizers we ordered were quite interesting. We got the Risoli and the Pastéis. Now, I'm not sure which one was which, but one was a fluffy burrito-sized shell with beef inside, and the other was smaller and denser like a samosa also with beef. Most other people around us ordered plates instead of sandwiches and those looked really good. I'd probably go back and order one of those next time.
For now I give Cafe Brasil another amateur Xegyn rating of 3.5/5.

Wii and DS Wireless Connectivity issues

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 01:15:00 +0000

Recently, I noticed that my Nintendo DS wouldn't connect to our Linksys WRT54G. It turns out my PSP and my roommate's PDA would also fail to connect to our router. My Wii and my roommate's laptops had no problem connecting. It was odd that portable devices could not connect but laptops could. After some research on some forums, I tried switching the router's wireless settings from Mixed B/G to B only. This fixed the problem, and I thought everything was connecting fine. Now it seems the Wii will not connect. After switching it back to mixed B/G the Wii was able to connect again, but of course the DS or PSP fails. It seems the Wii supports G, but what I can't understand is if the router is emitting a mix, why can't portable devices connect? Another annoying glitch -- I need to switch the wireless mode depending on what device I plan to use. Is this a Linksys issue? I would like to try this on another router to see what would happen.

Further testing: After changing the Wireless Channel to 1, (thanks to Nintendo's support page), everything can connect in B-only mode. I still can't understand why the DS won't connect in Mixed mode. Oh well, as long as I don't have to keep fiddling with the router settings...

Windows Vista Ultimate Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Xegyn) — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 03:58:00 +0000

This is my first post on my new blogger account, hosted on my own domain.

I've been running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition for about a month now, and aside from a few UI glitches and compatibility with pre-Vista software, the experience has been pretty positive. Some of the glitches I have encountered so far:

The Windows Vista Photos screen saver seems to use a lot of resources and crash every time it comes on. I have temporarily disabled my screen saver.

The new IntelliPoint 6.1 software seem to cause problem with the mouse scroll wheel. For example, in Opera 9.10, when I scroll up, the page occasionally scrolls up and then back down. In Winamp 5.33, when I try to scroll down through my playlist, there is a lot of resistance and I can't scroll unless I REALLY scroll the wheel which ends up in going too far down the list. I have a similar problem in Sound Forge when zooming in on a region, except it happens with both scrolling up and down.

The IntelliType 6.1 software also seems to take over the functionality of all special/multimedia keys on my keyboard and I can no longer map my multimedia keys to be global hotkeys for Winamp without a simple tweak every time I boot up.

The IntelliPoint software, however, comes with a handy new task switcher. I am not sure if it is exclusive to Windows Vista, but the default functionality of the middle click of the mouse tiles all my open programs and I can click on the program I want to switch to. Here is a screenshot: