What follows is a long, tedious list of things I need to finish.

By Console:

Nintendo DS

• Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan *
• Moero Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2
• Taiko no Tatsujin: Touch de Dokodon!
• Meccha Taiko no Tatsujin: 7-tsu Shima no Daibouken!
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Justice For All
• Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja
• Front Mission
• Super Collapse 3
• Lifesigns Surgical Unit –aaaargh. Nearly as boring as one of the other surgery games I played, and not clear on some procedures.
• Cooking Mama
• Cooking Mama 2: Dinner With Friends
• The World Ends With You
• Scurge: Hive
• Trioncube *

Microsoft Xbox 360

• Call of Duty 3 — Was stolen from a friend I loaned it to. I refused to let him replace it, since all of his games were stolen at the same time.
• Rez HD
• Gyruss
• Ikaruga
• N3: Ninety Nine Nights — Traded this via Goozex.
• Project Gotham Racing 3 — Traded this via Goozex.
• Need for Speed Underground 2 [Xbox] — Traded this via Goozex.

PC

• Anarchy Online **
• Treasures of Montezuma
• Peggle Deluxe
• 洞窟物語 ,(Dōkutsu Monogatari), also known as ‘Cave Story’.

Sony Playstation Portable (PSP)

• Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary Edition
• Wipeout Pure
  

Notes:
* - The game has been finished once, but it may have been on easy, or the game has a ‘new game +’ like mode.
** - This is an MMORPG. You don’t really beat them.
Emphasized entries are added since the last update of this list.

I spent all day Sunday, parts of Monday, and all of Wednesday morning haranguing him about where we’re going, as well as the rest of my friends who were around him and either knew or had an idea of where we were going. No one would tell me, and I was getting rather angry at the time, since I hate suspense like this.

On Wednesday afternoon, all four of us pile into a taxi, with a destination I’m not entirely sure of at the time. All I knew was we were headed down to Howard and Swann, which only told me we were going near where Steve works at. Steve changes the directions at the last minute, bringing us a few blocks up from the intended destination. We all pile out of the taxi, and with a little misdirection, I almost didn’t see where we were going until I looked again.

On a door, the words “Ararat Hookah Lounge” were hanging from a sign, at which I swore, “Oh, you son of a bitch! :D” and started laughing as we walked up.

What threw me off was the fact that Jason was with us: Jason is a rather professed non-smoker, stating he doesn’t (didn’t? :)) like tobacco in any form, just like he normally will not drink beer as well.

We spent a couple of hours, gathered around the hookah that afternoon, just enjoying each other’s company, and the mellow smoke of the hookah. Sure, nothing’s good for you, and this certainly doesn’t qualify as something super-friendly to your body, but the amount of relaxation I got out of this was seriously sublime, and well worth my time that day.

If you like a little smoke, then this one’s for you. Cheers!

Almost all of our meals that are away from home start with a walk or a taxi ride. I figured that it was closer than my mailbox, so we’d walk it, and work up an appetite. When we get downtown, it took us a good minute to find the restaurant, since Google Maps wasn’t quite the benefit we wanted it to be (Google Maps puts the user about a half block past it in a vehicle, forcing the user to circle around for the safest option to come back to the restaurant) .

As we walk in at one in the afternoon, we notice that the place is packed with many diners, and it would be a challenge to get a spot to sit and eat together as three. Waiting in line, we’re asked by one person what we’d like to order and handed a card that we can hand to the crew preparing our meals.

Shortly thereafter, the staff there are putting together boats of pho and beef rolls that remind me of spring rolls — not fried, filled with veggies and a hint of beef. I also picked up the Vietnamese coffee that day, since I was in a caffeinated mood.

Steve and I had both opted for the beef pho, while Chris chose the three beef rolls and the chicken soup.

The pho was served just the right way, with slightly firm rice noodles, flavorful broth, bean sprouts, basil, mint, thin sliced beef, and a serving of hoisin sauce on the side. There was also a lime wedge included, for those who like the bitter taste. I couldn’t help but savor the taste three times, first without anything added. The beef broth carried a light, but rich note when combined with the rice noodles and bean sprouts, making the dish quite enjoyable. 

After several mouthfuls, I moved on to adding the hoisin sauce, which just added a deeper flavor tone that is hard to describe. It was as if it drew the flavor further out of the noodles and broth.

I’m also one of those people who like adding lime to my pho, so I was more than delighted to squeeze my lime wedge over my boat, and re-experience the delicious contents of what was left in my boat.

Steve enjoyed his boat faster than I enjoyed mine. Perhaps it was because I was too busy savoring the flavors erupting in my mouth that I took so long in finishing. Chris enjoyed his chicken soup, and offered me one of his rolls, citing that he couldn’t finish it all (He didn’t, even with only two rolls and the soup — one roll went home with him). The roll was pretty good, as well, but its flavor was much more subtle than I expected it to be.

Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed in the iced Vietnamese coffee — it was rather bitter, as if it were overbrewed as a hot coffee, then stored to be poured over ice. I don’t know if this is actually how it should have been done or not, since I only have one base to compare it to, and that was a cup at my local Cafe Hey.

Either way, I wouldn’t mind dropping by Bamboozle Cafe again, and indeed, I already have, at least once — I needed a picture of the pho bowl while it had pho in it.

Would you get arrested for lewd behaviour if you were caught peeing in your gas tank?

I just get in the kitchen and whip up a tasty meal the night before, or, with my new schedule, in the morning when I get up, since I now work from noon to eleven at night on four days a week. It means I rely less on the vendors, who are almost always gone when I’m ready to go to lunch, and I don’t have to rely on the wheel of death or fast food to fill my belly at five in the evening.

This box is my saviour, in a delicious sense.

Here I am, ten-forty at night, hungry, waiting to leave work, and I hadn’t eaten my food (company had burgers and dogs earlier). I popped open my bentō, heated it up on my break a little earlier, and get to enjoy lemon chicken with roasted salsa, rice with veggies, and creamed corn (which hardly spilled at all during its rough day — just a little in the rice, and a little in the empty slot next to the corn is all it did). 

I think I understand a little about why the Japanese carry bentō boxes now. It’s great to eat food that is prepared with love. I loved cooking food that I knew would go into this box, and I am loving how it fills me up late at night with nutritious, healthy food (except maybe the corn :)).

In that time, I’ve become the proud owner of a bentō box.
I enjoy spending time the night before, preparing a wonderful box to take with me each day to work. It means that I’m usually eating healthier, since I know what’s going into my bentō, how it’s being seasoned (less salt is great!), and whether it’ll appeal to me when I’m ready to devour its content.

The box itself cost me $16, which seems steep when you look at it from the outside, but, for a multi-compartmented tray with cover that can be heated up in a minute’s time, and can keep everything in place, it’s a great price, especially since I paid no exorbitant shipping cost.

The greatest thing is, with the bentō box, I also got my hands on a rice cooker (shared between friends here). Therefore, I can have real, fresh rice with my meals, especially since I figured out how to use the thing.

I’m also eating my veggies more, as a result, which is yet another perk.

I’m feeling pretty cool about this.

It would need some kind of bizarre psychic link of some sort to relay the results of proper sleep from a well-rested body to our body that is staying up later. It would need to have some sort of diminishing return to keep people from having a ’sleep slave’, and therefore never sleeping again.

Perhaps something like this:
One’s ’sleeper’ could sleep six hours for themselves, and a maximum of six hours for ONE person in a given day. This six hours that is slept for someone else will give that person a maximum of four hours of energy if it is their first ’sleeper’ that they received in a 36 hour period, and simply subtract 10% of the resulting energy thereafter. However, because the body will know it’s being shorted on sleep, even if someone were to chain-absorb sleeper energy, it wouldn’t be a rolling 36 hour period. A person would need a minimum of nine hours of real sleep between all these to-go sleepers.

On top of that, the technology would not be available for minors, the elderly, and those deemed to be in bad health, unless some sort of extenuating circumstance shows that they can benefit from it.

Fun things to go with that is:

• Your designated sleeper must have been asleep for at least 2 hours before energy extraction can happen.
• The rule of diminishing returns says that by the time you’re on your 10th sleeper in a single waking period, you might as well not bother.
• The project would need to be priced so that it could be affordable to those who benefit the most from it, which would be the lower working class. Their days are too short to get important things taken care of, sometimes. I’d know.
• Certain failsafes would have to take place to make sure that the sleepers are getting natural sleep, augmented by no more than what their bodies produce.

I know this’ll never happen in my lifetime, but hey, if it does, I want something to mark the day I wanted this.

Now, in the meantime… Sleep.

Now to send myself a note about bringing a 360 controller and PGR3 with me tomorrow.

This was causing Gallery 2 to have explosive memory usage on the server, using as much as 150 MB of memory to execute the main Gallery page, if it even executed it. I got a pair of text messages from Gushi last night, reminding me of said explosive memory usage (again. Sorry, Gushi. :)), so I logged in and had a look. Sure as hell, I’m still using Gallery 2.2, and not the latest version of Gallery. I manually updated Gallery to 2.2.4, remembered to make Gallery 2.2.4 use PHP 5 instead of PHP 4 (Gushi, I’d rather default everyone onto 5, and make them enable 4 if they want it, heh heh heh), and tried again. I no longer seem to have processes that have no end to them to this point, which is good, and quite reminiscent of why everyone should stay on top of their upgrades.

Guess I better get myself back into the routine of updating stuff, right?