Today is the 31st of October, also known as Halloween. To be honest, this is probably the one day I have no idea what on earth is going on. It seems like a day companies made up so they could sell halloween costumes and decorations and candy. Its silly how we fall for it and waste our money on these things. Its not like Easter or Christmas which have a greater purpose than Chocolate and Presents. I decided to get the Wikipedia to tell me a little about Halloween. This is what he said to me.

Halloween is a holiday celebrated on the night of October 31. Traditional activities include trick-or-treating, Halloween festivals, bonfires, costume parties, visiting “haunted houses” and viewing horror films. Halloween originated from the Pagan festival Samhain, celebrated among the Celts of Ireland and Great Britain. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries embraced the holiday in the late twentieth century. Halloween is now celebrated in several parts of the western world, most commonly in Ireland, the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom.

In my city, we don’t do any of that. I haven’t had any trick or treaters, festivals, bonfires or people dressed up in silly costumes.  They do however have some Halloween programming, especially when the day fits in with a weekend. I suppose it is mostly celebrated overseas, in the United States, and not in the small country of New Zealand. I would one day like to see what the fuss is all about and got play in the US on this day in the future.

Well I didn’t get to go trick or treating for candies, actually, I have never been trick or treating in my life. I ended up going virtual trick or treating on some random server with Ketsueki and cowy. I dressed up as a Little Ghost and they dressed up as a Big Scary Monster and a Psycho with Chainsaw. It was fun and we were doing it for an amazing one and a half hours. Now that s a long time to be doing it online, especially when you don’t get real candies. Ketty and Cowy were so nice and I thank them heaps for taking me e-trick-or-treating. I hope we do it again next year!

The past week, without a laptop, I have been playing Pokemon on my PSP. You are probably wondering how it is possible to do so, but it is simple. Just like for the PC, there is a GameBoy Advance emulator for the PSP and it works very well for the popular GBA titles. I have been using it to play Pokemon Emerald.

I really like PSP homebrew because it allows me to do this, and many more things. gpSP is an amazing emulator, even though it is still in beta. It plays the game perfectly fine, but the only issues will be with trying to use cheats because the system isn’t quite done yet. But that is not an issue anyway, who cheats in GBA games, especially pokemon. Not me.

Pokemon Emerald is too easy. My starting Pokemon is at  level 60 whereas my opponents Pokemon are generally around level 30, half my Pokemon’s level. What this means is that generally, I can take down an opponents Pokemon using only one attack. It is silly they have done that for it allows me to zoom fast through the game without training, or even capturing other Pokemon.

Anyway I still enjoy playing Pokemon on the PSP and reminds me of when I was seven playing Pokemon Yellow on my GameBoy Colour. Weren’t those the days.

Just a few days ago, a new Mozilla project came to my attention, Prism. Prism is an application that lets you take web applications out of the browser and run them directly on the desktop. You may wonder what is the point of running websites, or web applications if you rather, out of the web browser.  When using it, I mainly concentrated on the Google Suite of web applications, iGoogle, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook and Google reader. These ran exactly the same as they normally would in a browser environment.

My first impressions of this were that it is simple to set up and works just as I would have expected it. I eventually questioned the need for having this. I eventually worked out why this is something for me. When using the browser, I always have at least ten to fifteen tabs open at a time, right from when I start the browser, right to the moment I close the browser. My default tabs are always there displaying websites I commonly use. If I am connected to the internet, this application does seem somewhat useless but if you needed to say, view your email and/or calendar without opening a browser and loading a dozen or so tabs, it is much more efficient to just open up the desktop app.

Another thing that this will be aiming for is offline web applications. Using the same conditions as before, instead of opening your browser and having all you tabs come up with the “page not displayed” error or having to even have all your tabs open in your browser, it is easier to access offline capable apps using Prism. I feel that the two main reasons they are developing something like that it to combine those two aspects, having the web application in its own environment out of the browser and to enrich the offline aspect of future web applications.

I can see future potential in this application and can see it being greatly linked with Google’s web applications as well as their Gear’s Offline application. All three of these things linked can make functionality of web applications greatly improve and be more accessible and useful when disconnected from the internet. What I personally would like to see is Google embrace this application to create a Google Web Suite application using Prism with tabs with access, online and offline, to all its web applications in its own environment out of the clutter of the browser and other websites. I can’t wait to see Prism blossom into something great and very useful.

As you should know, my laptop has gone back to the repair shop to get the wireless fixed. Its been gone for three days now so I presume they are either lazy, or waiting for parts to come or something. I really miss my laptop and would trade this desktop in anyway, just to have it back. Lucky I am not going to have to do that and can have both. Here are a short list of things that I miss about her. Don’t worry, its not a top ten list.

I really miss Vista. Some people will think I am crazy but there are heaps of little things in Vista that I wish they had in XP. One of the things is the quick search. Finding applications in “All Programs” is a tedious task and is becomes very easy to miss just typing in the first few letters on an app and hitting enter. Not only that, but I miss the stylish black bar and the blue Windows orb. XP looks so square and unclean, if you know what I mean.

I also miss the smooth video playback this temporary computer doesn’t offer. I have had to suffice with jumpy, poor video playback. I assume it is due to the crappy video graphics this computer has but I wouldn’t know to be honest. Video looks great on my laptop, its also in nice widescreen so there are not huge black bars above and below a video. Also the glossy screen makes the video look so much better, not really but it makes me feel better about watching TV shows on it.

Another thing that I miss about my laptop is it being portable. I can use it anywhere, in the living room, in the kitchen, in the bedroom or even in the bathroom/toilet if I please.  I miss being able to snuggle into bed with my laptop on top of me watching a few TV shows to finish off the day before I go to sleep.Its a luxury I wish I had but obviously this desktop computer can’t provide me with that. Being stuck to this desk with and uncomfortable chair is annoying, I just wanna hop into bed and watch some shows.

The thing I miss the most about my laptop is that fact that it is mine, all mine. No sharing, no one else’s grubby mits on it, no one else’s hard drive space or anything. Its 100% mine and I can do anything I want with it.  Not having to worry about losing other peoples files or having stuff running that will slow down the computer for other people is great. This desktop is so slow and if I lose my families documents, or pictures like I have in the past, I’m in trouble. Everything that happens with my PERSONAL computer is my problem and I will be the one to suffer any consequences.Too bad that it feels more like HP’s computer than mine at the moment with all the problems as well as the stupid junk software that got loaded onto it when they reinstalled Windows.

Hopefully my computer is back to working order every soon. It will probably Tuesday if the problem isn’t too deep. I really miss the little thing. To be honest, I wish they could have just replaced the whole dam thing with a nice working one. We all know that that is never going to happen though, haha. They don’t wanna lose money, which is why they wanted me to attempt a stupid system recovery to reinstall Windows  so they hopefully didn’t have to pay for repairs. Sucks they they are paying for it twice. Come home soon lappy, I miss you

This time next month, in 30 days, I will have sat my first exam. I hate exams, but then again, who doesn’t. I really have no idea how to prepare for exams. Last year, I did absolutely nothing to prepare and I suppose it reflected in my average grades. Teachers and parents keep harping me to study but I have no idea what that means. I hate reading over my notes, especially since I have no real notes that I would consider acceptable to read over. Only my Maths teacher actually gives sufficient notes and the other ones just write crap on the board that you copy into your books somewhere between answering activities and preparing for tests and such. Even if I try to read over notes, I always end up falling to sleep, or even get distracted by some technological device, aka the computer. If I was to leave the computer, it would take me a month to catch up on everything I have missed, something which I am not prepared to do. I guess I will do another “Jonathan” and do absolutely nothing and get worse than average grades this year. I think I am going to be screwed!!!

I watch a few television shows a week, twenty two be be precise. Product placement has been apparent in a few of these shows that I have been watching. One show has their sponsors product plastered all over the show where as the others jsut have everyones favourite new phone on the block.

One bad show at the product placement is Heroes. I love Heroes but the advertising of the Nissan was extremely obvious and made me cringe at the fact they let that scene air. They said the brand and the model of the car, and the thing is, they are the company that sponsors Heroes. The second time they shows the car was less obvious but they still made sure the Nissan logo was on the screen long enough to subliminally take it in.

I am also seeing a quite a bit of Apples bundle of joy make its way into television shows, especially the CSI’s. Whenever I see the iPhone, I laugh that they have had to put it into tv, and also that the person using it looks like a total tool. The thing doesn’t look that nice when you see people use it as a phone. It looks like they holding a thin block of cheese to their face. Its quite unappealing. Its nice that in one of the shows where you saw the actually screen of the phone it didn’t even have Apple firmware, it was some random one they whipped up for the program.

I don’t really care about about product placement as long as they don’t make it too obvious. If it is just there and they don’t mention the product by name or make the product the subject of the shot, I’m generally fine with that. I also think its funny that even television producers have to jump on the iPhone bandwagon. I don’t think it would have killed them to leave if for at least half a year or so

I spent an hour of the afternoon cleaning out the turtles tank. This is not an easy task and it time consuming. Lucky I only have to do it once a month. The tank requires to be clean for the health of the turtles, they can get sick if you leave them in dirty water, water full of their rotting food and their faeces. You wouldn’t like to be swimming around in that would you.

First you have to remove the turtles from the tank. I put them in a tub with a little of the water from the tank. I put them in the living room where it is warm so they don’t freeze and get sick. I then slowly remove the water from the tank and put it down the drain. This consists of me holding a tube for ten minutes that sucks out the water from the tank and transfers it to the sink.

After the water is removed, I wipe the tank down with a sponge. I make sure that the glass is nice and clean on the inside so there is no dirt to make the clean water dirty and also make sure the glass is clean on the outside so we can see the turtles swim and play in the water. I also have to clean the dirty from the heater and the filter that is in the turtle tank.

Cleaning the filter is the best part. I generally go outside with the hose and put it on high pressure and blast the filth out of the filter sponges and in the gaps on the filter case. The water sprays back everywhere, including my face and my clothes. I am usually soaked after hosing the filter. Also there is a small river in the backyard because I have used so much water and it can’t find a place to escape.

After the everything is cleaned, it is time to fill the tank with nice, clean warm water. The mixture is 8 parts cold, 2 parts hot. Waiting for the water to boil is the most time consuming part of cleaning the tank. The jug takes about 5 minutes to boil and I need to boil it about 6 times. I do that and fill the tank so far up. There we have it, a nice clean tank.

We generally wait about an hour or two before returning the turtles to their clean home. When that time comes, the tub of water where they are temporarily smells horrible. They have went toilet in there and the water is disgusting. I put the turtles back in the tank slowly so they don’t hurt themselves and then I watch them swim around happily in their nice clean home.

The silly thing is, that as soon as I put them in, thats when the nonsense starts. I think it is an animal law to dirty when you have just been cleaned. One of the first things the turtles do when they return to their tank is go soil it. The water is only clean for half an hour before they dirty it with their faeces. Also the two mischievous turtles like to swim around and move the filter. The filter ends up in the middle of the tank on an angle. We end up sticking our hands in to fix their home.

Well cleaning is one of the disadvantages of having pets. Its a small price to pay for the fun and happiness they give you, even if my ones stay in their tank most of the time. At least they are fun to take pictures of