ZeroXR’s blog

I bit the bullet last night to buy a domain and also get myself some private hosting for the time being. I am with Dreamhost, so I can spiff anyone who wants a domain and site package with discount codes.

It's been a bit rocky so far with Dreamhost, but their staff is rather helpful.

I plan on uprooting and transferring my entries from here to the new domain possibly tonight.

The new blog will have a fresh face and be powered by Wordpress... it will mainly be personal with maybe some affiliate links to generate a little bit of revenue to "self-maintain" the site.

The purpose of this endeavor is the following

1. Establish a professional presence on the web
2. Allow for my friends who do not wish to become members of blog communities to comment on my work
   
3. Possibly expand the blog into a fusion of personal and professional entries
4. Keep myself "conscious" and writing, especially with things like a fitness blog or rants
   

I would be surprised if this leads to something different, but I won't hold my breath. I would love to do freelance writing for a journal or paper at some point, so we shall see.

Thanks for those who have me on RSS and have pointed and prodded me with plenty of ideas and suggestions.

I have had a terrible week, this week and basically lost my inspiration to fight. What I assumed was well and good was only to be thrown in shambles. I am confused how to proceed but limitations on my fate constrain me to darkness. I will probably take a "meditation" from my works here to focus on rebuilding myself... When I return, I hope to write more about some more Linux musings and maybe some funny rants.

Merry Christmas to you readers out there... and may you have a better season that I am having.

The last question I leave is... "Where's my GameCube and shit?"

-ZeroXR

Last night, a dear friend died... The details are not disclosed with respect to her family. Her name was Kate and I can say she was a wonderful person. She had a critical eye for detail and a splendid artist. Her heart was unsurpassed in the greatness of care in her art. She died at only 21 years old... Deprived of the many joys that she may not have gotten to experience. To say she never got a fair chance in life would be an understatement. I loved seeing her at her studio working just painting her art, that was a joy to see her just forming a picture that was incomparably great. Her smile was something that no one could even capture. She was a revolutionary for her time, but I wish she had more time to blossom and really evolve as an artist.

Kate, may your soul reach heaven and touch the stars. I pray you will find eternal happiness in a higher state of life... You will be missed in my heart and even more so to those who loved you most. God bless and may you rest in peace.

-ZeroXR

I have been a bit disappointed with how male grooming care is almost frowned upon in America, unlike say the United Kingdom or Japan where proper care is seen as a sign of being a gentleman. The concept of shaving in the states for home use is either cartridge blades or electric razors. Barber shops rarely do the "classic cutthroat shave" as the concern for hygiene and shady establishment became an issue... Sure men have shops like the barber spas from The Art of Shaving, but other than that, men are a tad out of luck unless there is a barber shop or spa that specializes in that vector of care. For the do-it-yourselfer, there is the option to buy into the shaving gear and embrace the roots of gentleman's care. It's pricey, but it is not without benefits. The skin is not so roughed up, as with proper technique, the user is not shredding as much skin as let's say... a Gillette Fusion with 5 blades. There is less chance to have in-grown hairs, clogged pores, and eliminates razor burn. Sensitive skin folks will find that their skin panics less with straight razor shaving, as I found out. It was nice not to have puffy, itchy irritated skin unlike the results after a cartridge razor shave. But enough on the shaving tangent...

Clothes, I find the same issue... I mean, nothing wrong with folks who like the rugged look. I just can't find the justification of why folks from that camp give flack to those who like to dress well or take care of their selves better. Is it wrong for a man to want to be polished up from a shave and shower smelling like invigorating eucalyptus and spearmint from using better than normal bath soaps, shampoos, and moisturizers? Why is it frowned on to desire nice clothes tailored from designers out in New York or Italy? It makes little sense to say that dress style can be an indicator of one's sexual preferences. That was one debate that I have commonly heard by passerbys skipping past shops saying "Who buys into that whole "looking good" crap?!" I don't frown on those who like to buy on a budget, because that's one way to skirt off the high prices of the designer boutiques.

I am not trying to slam anyone from any camp, but I would like to state that it shouldn't be shunned. Some of the major cities all over America are quickly becoming metropolitan fashion capitals. My city of Dallas is quickly becoming one and I know New York City is being one that known around the world. Electronics are getting a sense of "fashion" and plenty of people carry these devices, but we're supposedly ashamed of men dressing and caring for themselves well? That could be due to the homophobia stigma that America carries which may still take time to shake still. If guys out in Japan and the UK dressing well are gay... then you may as well throw in the rest of Europe and Asia to that mix to that very poorly conceived stereotype.

Aurelia got my Christmas present early in the form of a Dovo Straight Razor with the replaceable blade. Her main reason for the purchase was she couldn't find a local dealer who sold the Japanese made Feather brand razors and she didn't want to wait for shipping. The razor is pretty simple to reload the blades... It just uses Merkur safety blades that are snapped in half and then loaded into the blade holder. After the blade is loaded, the user slides it into the razor and it's set to go.

The blades are plenty sharp as they are from old fashioned safety razors... so they don't forgive quite as much as a true straight razor from what folks like the people at "Straight Razor Place" forums mentioned on some of their guides that have been archived. This is one shavette razor that patience is to be emphasized... I ended up getting some cuts and nicks here and there from it. For a beginner and this blade, one cannot fear the blade and prudence must be exercised as they will minimize the cuts. I recommend having a styptic pencil or a block of alum on hand in the case of cuts to minimize bleeding from their hemostatic effect.

Although I like the blade, I feel due to the size of the blades in use... it holds back the learning potential of the user. True, there's no need to learn about sharpening blades... but when your cutting edge is half of the size of a standard blade, you have to do more to clean up the facial hairs. I will definitely be looking into getting a Feather branded razor, as their blades are full sized and disposable, the sharpening will not have to be done. The main debate really will be if I will buy the Pro Guard blades (with a guide wire) or the the professional blades.

Here are the images below of my shaving gear for those who are wondering what in blazes I am talking about.

The Razor

Dovo Shavette

Shaving Essentials

I really learned the value of patience Saturday night. It comes with the territory of the phrase "live by the sword, die by the sword". Tempting fate is never a good idea, even more so when you try to do things without trust in mind. My thanks goes to Aurelia for the next product review because it's actually quite nifty. Though I can only say that she may have created a monster out of me due to it. To leave a teaser... I will leave this "ad-lib" for the readers:

It's all fun and games until _______ ________ causes someone to get hurt.

I will begin by saying I'm not one of your hardened shoppers who stalks and waits for the deals and such... I just went mainly as I wanted to gift Sol and Aurelia their presents early for Christmas. The line was terribly long... We all waited in line by the loading docks at about 4:45am in the chill cold. Personally, I regretted not wearing my wool coat out as I froze pretty quickly. We all were talking about some of the old times in our lives and trying to laugh to forget the bitter cold. Once 5:00am hit, the store opened the flood gates... What I witnessed was pure animal-like shopping chaos. People shuffling, mass hoarding items, waiting like cattle to get claim checks for high demand items... It was something that would get companies like OSHA concerned.

The art of Black Friday shopping has seriously evolved since the advent of new consumer technologies. I saw many people with mobile phones trying to have other family members triangulate items together to rendezvous at a central point to ensure they would get the best sale items. Some power shoppers had their Bluetooth headsets on so both hands could focus on grabbing items... Of course with human nature, you had people yielding to their territorial instincts of hoarding items and fighting with others over a single material item because it was the last one on sale. The local police were on hand to handle things like major riots, which I didn't see any of those luckily.

My main purpose was to try picking up a 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo ($29.99) for my PSP for movie purposes but well, that was a failure as they changed the deal to a 2GB model for $17.99. Though my main purpose was to to get Bluetooth headsets for cheap to give to Aurelia and Sol for an early Christmas. They are two people who are on the phone quite a bit with their friends and complaining about how their hand or neck hurts from all the talking they do. Sol ended up getting the exact same model Bluetooth headset as me for his phone. He was a bit limited in his choices due to his phone being an older model Sony Ericsson P910i, so I got him the HBH-V705 which is a nice, sleek model with a very professional polish to its look. I managed to snag that for 50% off which was an awesome kill! Aurelia was hoping for the slick Jabra headset she had her heart on, but well she found a Plantronic MiX tower that had more female oriented headsets there. She would get the MiX 330 which is a remix of the original Plantronics Explorer 330 with a white and silver body color and adorned with Swarovski crystals. The MiX 330 ended up being $20 off so it was not too bad. They both were stoked for me to front for their gifts, which ultimately made me happy.

I was not about to leave empty handed, I wanted to see if I could pick up a PSP title for cheap. I found the last copy of Guilty Gear Judgment (with the bonus Guilty Gear XX #reload) and a screen protector for normal price, but it should be plenty fun for when I need my "fighter" or "beat-em-up" fix. While the game was not popular, it beats the imported edition from Japan where Judgment and Guilty Gear XX #reload were both separate game UMD's at $30 - $40 a disc.

Everyone walked out happy, which I was thankful for. Sure, we waited in bitter cold for about close to an hour to get in the shop, but the "spoils of war" were grand. The expensive part of my gifting is done, but the last will come in 2 weeks when I go shopping at Strapya World for everyone else. I just want to put some good karma in the pool for all of those who've supported me when I was down. Not all things can be had at Black Friday, however...

This year, I have noticed that the deals were mediocre rather than spectacular in the paper/in-store ads. The online shops are finally getting better with their "ads" or Thanksgiving sales. Apple did their sale online with slashing prices about $300 here and their on their machines. Newegg has continued on with their tradition as usual. Some shops like Best Buy and Target has some "ONLINE ONLY" specials that you simply couldn't rush to the store for. I feel the next step forward will only be a fusion of both sorts of sales for places that have a physical store front... But at the same rate, they need to make sure the servers can handle the loads of shoppers pounding the servers. I was unable to get in on a deal at Frys.com for the 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo as the server kept timing out, but on finally being able to... the server had a MySQL error preventing the transaction from going on any further. Oh well, there's always next time.

Ringtones: What's yours and how often do you change it? 
Submitted by enrico.  

Right now, I am using the Metal Gear AC!D 2 Codec sound as my ringer as a tribute to my love of Konami's great Metal Gear franchise. Metal Gear almost duels another one of my favorite Konami franchises (Castlevania) for the top spot with how dynamic the story is. With ringtones, I like to use electronic or video game influenced ringtones as they show my love of mixed music or games. I don't change ringtones too often and when I do, it is not without good reason. Personally, I have been fond of Motorola's ringtones as they have brilliant artists to mix their default ringtones. I have found early on that using pop music is a bit cheeky for a ringer as a song can quickly fall out of style and you may get sick of it. With good default ringers, there's not much chance of it going out of style anytime soon.

Show us your favorite word, sentence or quote.

This quote was one I had found in deep meditation over myself... It struck me like a bolt of lightning, simply from how simple and great in magnitude it is.

In ira illic est verum - Zero

From Latin, it becomes "In anger, there is truth". We all take our words for granted. We really do. Often times, we freely speak as nothing will be held to us sometimes. In the heat of things, like a hot debate or an argument full of ire, sometimes we let our emotions take the best of us and we say things that radiate from our subconscious. Feelings that we may have harbored in silence suddenly explode like a volcanic eruption.

This eruption can sever relationships or even cause great schism between people. We can even collapse to shambles from doing something that cannot be undone. But from becoming a pile of fallen ramparts, we finally learn to appreciate the power of our words. Words can maim and kill, period. It's disappointing when people can just make an excuse of "I didn't mean it!" or "I was just mad", because truth of the matter is... from that madness, we are deeply honest to ourselves.

I can still recant the day that I sold my original first generation PSP... It was a hard day as I had grown to like some of the system's nuances, but at the same time Sony had hit the brick wall with lack of good games. When Sony was just selective on approving titles to come out to the American market, that was when I simply had enough. The DS was enjoying a lot of niche Japanese games and Nintendo of America was eager to approve almost anything to market. So from that, the DS flourished with fans of all ages buying the system. The PSP in America? While Sony of America was barely approving games, they were in bed with Hollywood to try to save the dying UMD Video format from becoming quickly obsolete from one matter of fact: American users found that ripping from a DVD, then transcoding the video to MP4 format to load on a Memory Stick Pro Duo lead to a far more better quality with regard to sound and picture quality. The best part was battery life was even longer as the system was not spinning the disc drive to read the disc, as you could watch almost four 2-hour movies rather than one 3-hour UMD movie.

The irony in selling my PSP was about a month later, Sony finally "pulled their head out of their ass" and finally opened their doors to approve a wider library of games. One of those games happened to be quite possibly the two best games of the Castlevania franchise ever. Konami named it "Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles" with the primary aim of the game to be a more updated 2 1/2 D remake of the PC Engine game Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (or Turbo Graphix 16 with a CD drive, for you American folks). The kicker was that in the main game, you could unlock the ORIGINAL versions of Rondo of Blood AND Symphony of The Night. The news of a Symphony of the Night remake really hurt me, because I had my "Greatest Hits!" version (with the cheeky green packaging) stolen from me and the culprit was never found. After my hopes for a Gran Turismo Mobile were broken by yet another delay, this news of a Castlevania remake and bundle made me bitterly hate that I sold my PSP to the auction block. I vowed one day to get a PSP again so I could regain what I had sorely lost...

Over last week, I managed to get a bit of a surplus of cash due to pulling max-out shifts for my weeks and hitting near overtime so I scored a PSP Slim core package (system, charger, battery, manuals) and Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles for myself. For once, I am seriously impressed with what Konami has produced. Before I go on to that... I would like to link to pspZine's blog archive for those who are unaware of the PSP Slim's differences: pspZine - PSP versus the PSP Slim. Over all, I like the the reduced weight and the slightly improved ergonomics of the device. Though Sony of America has me waiting in desire as the "Photos" portion of the Cross Media Bar (to be abbreviated to XMB) has a "camera" icon. This icon looks like the Japanese "Chotto Camera" or European "Go!Camera" but Sony of America has not announced when they will release this peripheral. Almost counter productive of the new 3.72 firmware release to have this feature but lack the peripheral itself. The XMB interface is finally customizable, which I remember that being a big complaint that the PSP community harped on the most. It's not a big deal, but for some... it was a part of the software that they wanted to customize to their liking. Though going slim has its disadvantages... The battery life is significantly shorter, as the PSP Slim's battery is a 3.8v 1200 mAh batter compared to the original's 3.8v 1800mAh battery. The accessories are still sparse for it, with the "best" one being the component display cables which allow the game play to be displayed on an HD TV. For those who are not HD TV owners, the composite cables (aka RCA cables) cannot partake in the same joy of playing games on the standard definition TV's, although they are still able to enjoy movies and images on their TV. Accessories are still not here for the PSP Slim, even though the system has been out for close to 2 months. One would have expected Sony to make some, but apparently they haven't yet. Enough on the geeky and mundane verbal hardware pornography...

(Zero's Note: For those wondering why I didn't opt for the Vader White value pack or the Daxter Silver value pack, it's because I didn't like the bundled games nor did I like the Vader graphic on the white PSP. I have plenty of Memory Stick Pro Duo's because my phone uses them as well.)

Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles has a very unique intro movie... The narration sounds like it is in German, if I am wrong, feel free to correct me. The movie shows a very unholy ritual that reawakens Lord Dracula from his slumber with by anointing him with fresh blood. Even though this game follows the more old fashioned Belmont whip carrying lineage adventures, it refreshes things by using new skool technology with the ability to save automatically at end of levels, give the user the ability to level select, and the ability to do a "quick save" in the middle of a level. That is a good thing with consideration that no one likes passwords and that whole mess anyways that was remembered from the earlier Castlevania games from the early 1990's. For things that have "changed", there's quite a bit. The movie scenes are now changed from anime cut scenes to 3D computer generated ones with really crisp detail. The art goes more in favor of the "antiquated" drawing/painting style with more respect to the same sort of thing that emblazoned Symphony of The Night's art. If you are a fan of the Castlevania art movement that was more biased towards the anime look, you may be disappointed with the art for this game. The levels "pop" a bit at you, not like in Symphony of The Night or the two DS titles where only the graphical effects from combat or magic stood out. Some of the things within the levels were changed however to incorporate the "secrets" within the new Dracula X Chronicles packaging. We'll discuss this later on the review.

The games controls feel a tad stiff like a traditional whip user Castlevania game, so the movements are not quite fluid as say a more modern title like the DS title Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. For the nay sayers who may say "The controls plain suck!", they are just failing to realize the demographic of this game. Play Castlevania III on the NES, Super Castlevania IV for SNES,if you want more support on the "stiff controls"... Compared to those two, the game is a little more fluid. The game is a "one difficulty fits all" sort of game... So if you are not down with a challenge, this game may enrage or even frustrate you to insanity.

I will issue the disclaimer for those not used to older, traditional titles with short tempers to either wear your PSP wrist strap or avoid this game.

While the game is not sadistically hard like say the "Ghouls and Ghosts" franchise of Capcom, the levels seem to be challenging and one needs to have good timing at times (like with stages chock full of pitfalls and Medusa Heads flying around). Compared to the original Rondo of Blood which was unlocked, this new "remix" is actually pretty damn close to the original save for the graphics, sound effects & music, and minor level changes to incorporate the use of game unlockables. Dracula X Chronicles would be what I would deem a VERY faithful remake with respect to the original. This is something that would surely make any purist, true, die hard fan of the older Castlevania sing with joy, especially because it was better than the Super Nintendo rehash released in America as "Castlevania: Dracula X" with a lot of things were sacrificed or changed due to the limited abilities of the Super Nintendo.

The unlockables is where things get fun. In the main game, you can find the ORIGINAL versions of Rondo of Blood, Symphony of The Night, and "Peke" (A system card error mini game with regard to Rondo of Blood). There are particular criteria to get these games and when the condition has been fulfilled, the game is unlocked and may be played in the "Original Game" option on the title screen of Dracula X Chronicles. From Rondo of Blood (PC Engine), I would imagine it keeps true to the original Japanese title with respect to what I have played or read on reviews from sites like GameSpot or users on GameFAQs. Symphony of The Night was a real big treat to me, as it combined some interesting aspects from the Japanese Sega Saturn version with parts from the original Playstation release. The big treat I enjoyed was if you had the language set to "Japanese" for the audio dialogue in Dracula X Chronicles, that is also applied to Symphony of The Night. The dialogue is much more refined in this rendition, especially when you consider that the American release had terrible voice actors and a poorly translated to boot. If you remember the prelude level "Castlevania: Bloodlines" with the dialogue of Richter and Dracula on the American release... this line probably made you laugh:

Die monster!!! You don't belong here! - Richter Belmont.

The American voice actors are actually pretty good and I give them credit for being so much better. There are a few changes on some sound effects, but no changes in game play. The "changes" with respect to the Japanese Sega Saturn and Playstation version include the incorporation of 2 more familiars (the sprite and nose devil) and the ability to play Maria being the most notable ones. Truly a treat for those who cannot quite afford to purchase the original American release of Symphony of The Night but already own a PSP. As far as the "Peke" mini game, I have not unlocked that yet.

(Zero's Note: Yes, I am well aware that the XBOX 360 folks have the ability to purchase Symphony of The Night from XBOX Live. I encourage any person who owns an XBOX 360 with no interest to purchase a PSP to buy it.)

I can say that Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles is a good buy IF you are into traditional game franchises. If you're open to buying this remade classic gem, I advise that a good temper is required as well as wearing the PSP strap to avoid game induced rage. If you love Castlevania, this is one game you will not regret buying.