DUI.

Dawdling under Influenza.

With all this time at my fingertips these past two days, I've come back in touch with the geeky side of me...My desktop was long overdue for an overhaul, so here's the tally of things I went through:

Then, one of the widgets I downloaded, [Otacon's Clock], which featured a pixelated Otacon from the Metal Gear Solid universe, inspired me to create my own widget, a LucasArts clock, featuring all those similarly pixelated characters from the old classic LucasArts adventure games. Yeeeaaah, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, the Monkey Island series, Full Throttle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, The Dig...now THOSE were truly awesome games. So now Bernard, Purple Tentacle, Guybrush Threepwood, and all the likes are all immortalized on my desktop :). Now what I need to do is to find all those games at home again and extract quotes from the speech files to put into the widget...

So this is how my new and improved desktop looks like!

(That box with the image inside is a viewer for livecams images, which I modified to pull images from Vienna :P. Also, credit for the awesome awesome wallpaper goes to [vladstudio]).

So the last couple day, while still waiting for my cold to finally go away (almost there, only a slight dry cough left), I loaded up [Guild Wars] again, one heck of a well-made game that I've been playing on and off since last fall. You can follow the link to find out more about it, or read the [Gamespot.com review], but basically, it's a game where in the big towns it's a MMORPG, allowing for user interaction, but as soon as you step out of the town area into the open world, the game creates an instance of the world for your party. In other words, once you're out in the open, your party is all you have (plus any in-game NPCs).

Which makes for some amusing moments. The other day, I was in a party with 5 other people attempting to complete a rather lengthy and difficult quest. One of the players had gotten his high level character to help our party get to where we needed to. But as we reached the last area before the area we were supposed to, he suddenly said "I have to go" and logged off. So here we were, the remaining 5 of us, stuck in the middle of digital nowhere, not really strong enough to proceed with the quest, the only option being to return to a town (which one can do anytime instantly) but losing all hard-earned progress since the last town visit. "So what now?" Then, a brilliant idea. "Let's have a little concert before we go back." See, Guild Wars has these emotes, which allow characters to do things like laugh, taunt, dance, sigh, sit down, even play rock, paper, scissors - and so, we had the four male characters play a band of violin, flute, guitar, and drums, and the female character dance in front of us. I suppose it's a bit hard to appreciate not knowing the game, but at that moment, it was just ridiculously funny. We let it go for several minutes until we finally broke up the party, heading back to town.

[Evidence]!

It's 11:30am, and I'm about to head out to the concert venue for my quartet's concert today, 1pm at the New School, 55 W13th st., 2nd floor. I'm told that the concert is supposed to be broadcast live on the internet, but googling it turned up nothing but archived concerts from last semester...Oh well, I guess I'll post the link (of the archived recording) once I find out.

But quartet concert, yeeeeeeea! Yesterday's run through went really well (so much better in terms of musicality and musical flexibility!), and my left big toe tells me today will be good too. I'm soo excited! :-P

Resume of the quartet concert: musically much more mature and successful than our first concert...out intonation kinda sucked, though, it was a tough venue to play in (very dry, hard to hear each other). Plus, there was this old guy sitting in the front row, right next to our violinist and - since I was sitting in the center facing the audience - in my viewfield, and everytime there was the slightest of mistakes or out-of-tuneness, he'd move around in his chair or lift his hand to adjust his glasses or something...very annoying. But, after the initial disappointment regarding intonation, the more I think about it the more I think it was a pretty decent performance.

I've decided to try some new strings again. I'm currently using a set of Pirastro Evah Pirazzi's, which I like for the most part, but on some days (especially, it seems, when it's dry) they really sound shrill and brassy. After some research on various sites and forums, I ordered some Pirastro Eudoxa's for G and C and Aricore for A and D, plus some Kaplan Solutions A and D strings...My cello has a naturally bright sound, so I figure I'll aim for strings that are described as having a darker sound quality. And I'm kinda curious about the gut G and C - never tried that before. But the bill came out to $140 - ouch...

The list of things that I've had to miss due to my recent illness keeps growing and growing. Yesterday at my quartet's violist's graduation recital I bumped into I-ting - awesome violist, colleague at Mannes, and kinda like the older sister I never had - and was subtly reminded ("Come here so I can hit you!") that I had missed her big night last Friday: playing a chamber music concert with the [Orion String Quartet] as this year's winner of the Orion String quartet student chamber music competition (yeah, she's THAT good). And I missed it! Freakin' flu...making me miss that concert, a day's worth of teaching, former [Midnight Quintetter] Lisa Huang's 1st birthday party in 10 years on Saturday...blah.

Speaking of birthdays - it's birthday season, it seems. Lisa's last week, Mike Cho's this week (party this Saturday in Philly, yeah!), and my brother's next week...Gosh, my brother is turning 21!

My webhost cjb.cc went down. Apparently, someone with an account attempted a phishing attack and the webhost's server shut down the webhost's account without notice. After several days of hard work, the awesome people behind cjb.cc moved to a new server and got the hosting service started again - mad props to them. Unfortunately, I have come to rely on the tools I created to avoid having to create stuff offline and upload to the server manually too much - most of my stuff has been created automatically or manually edited online, and my offline copies are rather outdated (my last backed up journal entry goes back to september '05 :-\\\\). But, I managed to save all my journal entries via the google and msn cached copies. Hooray! But alas, I have to reinsert them into my journal, which will happen over the next few days I hope. Until then, you'll just get error messages when you try to read those entries. Some of the other stuff on the site may also be broken, like the flickr photos section...(I've found and fixed quite a few bugs over the months. To think I have to rediscover and refix them...*sigh*).

Bear with me, folks...

Kim Kashkashian is amazing.
Kim Kashkashian is amazing.
Kim Kashkashian is freakin' amazing.