植林 #2

I planted a tree in Inner Mongolia! ( ﾟ ∀ ﾟ )

My 2nd gremz tree was one of the 28000 trees planted in Inner Mongolia last month through Earth Breakthrough!

Apparently the type of shrub that was planted, Haloxylon, is effective in soil stabilization and able to withstand the extreme conditions of deserts. The root serves as host to a parasitic plant Cistanche deserticola, which is a valuable Chinese herb and is also known as desert ginseng.

Inner Mongolia is one of the natural habitats for Haloxylon, but the plant has been disappearing fast due to over-grazing from the nomad animals, over-harvesting of Cistanche deserticola, and being used as firewood (it's also known as desert coal).

With China moving to ban nomadism in the area in an effort to prevent further desertification, many local people will lose their means to support. The planting of Haloxylon in a semi-deserted area will not only help re-vegetate the land in an ecological way, it'll also help the local people in a financial way. The desert ginseng will be harvestable in three years, and the re-vegetated land can be used to raise livestock such as chicken or emu, and open a new path for the local people.

Looking forward to when my 3rd gremz tree gets planted! XD

ひとり吠え

I've always been wanting to just post short, random thoughts that go through my head, but have yet to find a suitable platform for expression. Since it'll often be just a few lines, it feels like a bit of effort (don't forget how LAZY I am) to actually blog it.

Twitter would seem like the perfect medium for this type of thing, but it doesn't allow for searching my own posts, so it's useless to me. I re-visit my own musings based on topics or keywords very regularly, so I must be able to sort through them easily.

I opened another Blogger specifically for it, but I still couldn't get the template to look the way I wanted after two hours or so, so I gave up.

I'm just gonna use this one and title the random posts ひとり吠え and label them with PawWow. Beware of future bombardments of randomness...

And it starts right after this post! XD

カンニング

The gremz keyword yesterday, desertification, successfully rendered a meerkat! :D

And when I went to save the snap shot of my gremz tree with the meerkat, I realized I can cheat instead of trying to figure out the different keywords!

The photo base usually shows three pages of the most recent snap shots, the newest one being my own. While looking at other snap shots, I can just click on the blog link of the ones that also display the keyword specials, then browse through the blogs to find the keywords they used. The only thing is, since the keyword only needs to appear in the title or the text body, if it's written as part of a post instead of labelled as a gremz keyword, I likely wouldn't be able to tell.

Of course there's also Google, but I'm too lazy to actually search online for them. As for the photo base, since I'd go there to save my snap shot anyway, it's not as much work for me.

So my new trick has told me this next keyword: 省エネ XD

環境キーワード

It seemed that my first gremz environment keyword, "recycle," had successfully put a snail crawling back and forth on top of the name sign by my gremz tree.

Let's try another one! XD

環境キーワード: 砂漠化

環境キーワード

I've been wanting to try it for a long while now but, being my usual lazy self, have been putting off the task of looking up the method and the actual keywords. These keywords often require some researching on my part, so I've been keeping the e-newsletters but never got around to find out what the keywords are.

Then I saw an easy one. I know this word for sure. Now it's just a matter of implementing the gremz keyword to make the special decoration springs up alongside my gremz tree!

This is my first time trying this. Hope this works.

環境キーワード: リサイクル! XD

植林 #1

I planted a tree in Indonesia! ( ﾟ ∀ ﾟ )

Actually, my 1st gremz tree was one of the 520 trees planted in Indonesia on the Java Island through Friends of the Earth Japan!　Mine was either part of the mangrove forest along the coastline to help protect against sediment erosion, or part of the agroforestry project to help recuperate and sustain the land for another village.

Looking forward to when my 2nd gremz tree gets planted, too! XD

紫お粥

That's right, your eyes are not deceiving you. I cooked up some purple coloured rice porridge last night, and it was quite interesting tasting...

It started when I acquired two cases of sour berries (more commonly known as blue berries) and was trying to think up ways to consume them. My first thought was to throw them into curry, but I didn't feel like making it without meat. So I went for my second option and cooked rice porridge with it.

The recipe (or the lack thereof) is very simple. Just slow boil half of cup of rice as if making normal rice porridge, then dump 2-3 dozens of sour berries in. After one episode of anime, purple rice porridge awaited to surprise me (yeah, I blinked and just stared at it when I saw it). Then I added more water, threw in some veggies and a preserved duck egg, and went back to watch another episode. Et voilà!

The end result had a rather interesting taste (still very edible, mind you), so I called upon my trusty shredded pork (past best before date) to the rescue. Not bad, if I do say so myself. I think I just need to re-adjust the amount of sour berries I put in the next time.

Of course I'm gonna try again. That's why I froze the sour berries. XD

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Since food is an integral part of my life in Ottawa, I figured I might as well make a separate label for it. This can also help me in documenting my cooking experiments! XD

二本目の樹

My second gremz tree! ( ﾟ ∀ ﾟ )

This one took 102 days, so I guess on average it takes about 90~100 days to grow a tree with daily posting.

Now I have two trees waiting to be planted. It'd be great if it happens this year! :D

Can't wait to grow my next tree! XD

Title!

My gremz tree has been growing gradually as I diligently write something almost on a daily basis. But its growth has halted since Dec.5 according to my gremz page.

I checked the Q&A section and found the three possibilities for non-growing gremz tree despite daily entry:
- post-dated entries cannot be read by gremz
- RSS feed is turned off or has a changed URL
- the blog entry's title field is empty

Orz

I've never had a title for my posts; that's why my gremz tree failed to grow for almost two years. A few months ago, I realized that gremz had somehow recognized my title field as empty and still read the entries. I was able to successfully raise my 1st gremz tree that way. I guess they probably found out about the 'bug' and fixed it, rendering my title-less entries to be unreadable to the bot.

So starting from this post, I'm putting in the title field.

面倒だな... I also need to tweak the style sheet to make the title looks presentable for my eyes. Haven't touched CSS in forever... orz

２本目のグリムスが発芽しました！( ﾟ ∀ ﾟ )

どんな形に成長するのかワクワクするね～

＊　＊　＊　＊　＊　＊　＊

今日もも色のうみねこカモメを見ました。

その白い羽を夕日に染めた、ちょっとメルヘンチック。

ｷﾀ━━━( ﾟ ∀ ﾟ )━━━!!

After almost two years and two months, I've finally grown one gremz tree! :D

Can't wait for the new bud and the actual tree planting! :D

Hopefully my next gremz tree will have a smoother and speedier growth~

There was a ten-day gap between my last two posts, and my gremz tree had a withered look and was bent down when I loaded the page yesterday. A quick trip to my gremz page showed the tree as brown.

After the post yesterday, the tree has returned its luster somewhat and stands strong today. It even looks a bit taller than when I last saw it! I guess persistency is key to keeping the tree healthy, while maybe volume makes it grow?

Judging from the other gremz tree pictures for other users, mine still has a long way to go... I can't wait to grow the tree fully and get my 2nd sapling!

I took down the gremz tree last year and have completely forgotten about it since...

Until I found out today that my tree actually grew, as can be seen on the right! （　ﾟ ∀ ﾟ ）ﾉ

I think the culprit might had been the lack of title for my posts, as it's listed as a possible reason for the tree not growing in the FAQ (the question wasn't in there when I gave up on the tree). Despite it still currently being listed in there, the issue might have been resolved since I still don't have titles for my posts, yet my tree's grown. I did notice, however, that the bubble over my tree in the "just posted" section on gremz used to be completely blank except for the name of the blog, now it shows "Empty" for the title and a snippet for the post.

Now that my gremz tree is back in action, I'm surely more motivated to write. Maybe I'll try a few gremz keywords to get the specials for my tree. Or maybe I'll even get serious with Saluki's Adventure Log and get another gremz tree there...?! XD

Eat lots and photosynthesize lots, so you can grow up to be a big tree for planting, my little gremz tree! It's probably too late for this year, but hopefully it'll grow enough to contribute one tree when they do the planting next year! :D

I've been pondering whether to separate "Games" from "ACG" for the labels, and I finally went ahead with it today. I also made a few other changes regarding the labels.

- Created "Games" to incorporate "NDS" and "MUD", as well as game-related posts formerly under "ACG"
- "Dramas" posts are incorporated into "TV"
- "Travel" posts are incorporated into "Life"
- Created "Sports" to incorporate "Baseball" and "Hockey"
- "Novels" is renamed "Novels/Manga" and contains manga-related posts formerly under "ACG"
- "ACG" is renamed "Anime"

Now that that's done, time to return to my attempt at the UC Gundam Quest, since I only less than one week before the deadline...

It's been a while since I last posted anything here. My busy *cough* daily life being one of the reasons, but the suspending state of my gremz tree also plays a big part.

I don't know why, but no matter how much or how often I write (notice the short burst of posts back in March?), the thing just won't grow! I've seen other people's trees flourishing just fine on their Blogger page so I don't think it's due to incompatibility with Blogger. Is it because I went in and changed too much of the layout code and screwed up somewhere? The possibility of this is actually rather high so I'm not going to probe further for now. Before I figure out how to properly make the tree grow, I'm going back to my previous habit of updating when I remember. Or unless I find some other blog pet to keep...

Oh, in case anyone noticed, I've updated the Vocaloid player on the side with a couple of new songs, including ones by Megumine Luka! :)

Now that's over with, let's get on with this month's summary post!

First off, GO CANUCKS GO!! XD
I doubt we'll advance very far judging from the first round performance, but I still want to cheer the team on. After all, I became a Canucks fan during the '94 play-off.

BTW, the last snow of the 2009 winter fell on April Fool's Day. How humorous is our God... XD

April marks the start of another new batch of anime and drama shows. Of course, I'm so far behind that I'm not even attempting to finish the last batch from January. Still, I've been busy catching up and re-watching various series. I haven't really started on the new ones yet, but there's a couple that I've been really looking forward to since the news of them came out. I'll make another post on this later.

(Why did I start playing Super Robot Wars J yesterday? I'll never get around to watch all the shows at this rate... orz)

I bought a whole bunch of stuff on my monthly ACG shopping trip. Unfortunately, the NDS Gundam game that I wanted was already gone... But I still managed to get quite a few items of choice, including Sound Horizon's Moira!

Here's a quick list of this month's loot:
[CD]
- Sound Horizon: Moira (with 1st press limited embroidered box, no less! No privilege goods, though)
- Kanon: Sanctuary
- ELISA: ebullient future
- Toradora OP1 Single: Pre-Parade (which bro at first suspected as Vocaloid singing!)
- Heroic Age OP Single: gravitation
- CLANNAD Anime OP & ED Single- Megumeru/Dango Daikazoku
- Kalafina: oblivious
- Okiayu Ryuutarou: Sora no Ashiato
- Hajime Chitose: Fuyu no Hainumi Kaze
- Natsugawa Rimi: Kaze no Michi
- Final Fantasy XII: Symphonic Poem "Hope"
[DVD]
- Kenran Butou Sai DVD box set
[Novel]
- Saiunkoku Monogatari: Ryokufuu wa Yaiba no Gotoku (彩雲国物語 緑風は刃のごとく)
- Kiri: Shishatachi wa Kouya ni Nemuru (キーリ 死者たちは荒野に眠る)

The Toradora novels are already at Iwase waiting for me to pick up as well. :D

I'm seriously thinking of starting the translation project I've been planning, especially with all the new books I've been buying...

I'm usually pretty easy going except on some occasions, where I can be stupidly stubborn. The グリムス(gremz) blog widget happens to be one such occasion.

Actually, I was about to give up the whole thing when I accidentally stumbled upon a Blogger blog with the gremz widget. Surely there has to be a way for this to work. So I filled out the web form (in Japanese) yesterday regarding the matter. This morning I got a reply from the gremz web management team (in English, since I mentioned that I'm from Canada).

It seems that Blogger is indeed not supported and the person referred me to FeedBurner. That's what I did and it worked! The only downside is that since I had to use the FeedBurner URL as the blog URL, clicking on the tree or the Paw Wow link on the gremz website takes one to the blog feed instead of the actual site. Ah well, it's not as if I'm trying to get people to come through gremz. *shrug*

So my little gremz tree has sprouted today! Hopefully it'll grow to be tall and strong. :D

There's also グリムスキーワード, where if you input グリムス and an eco-related keyword that matches the gremz database, there would be special effect added to the tree. I'm assuming the keyword to be in Japanese, though, so I probably won't be able to see the specials... :(

Blogger doesn't seem to be very popular at all with the Japanese, so I was forced to give up the wonderful グリムス(gremz) blog widget because it's not supported. I looked around for a bit more but couldn't find anything similar. Tsk.

As typical for me, I strayed after the futile effort and ended up bringing back a completely different widget. I present you, 真・フルみっくすプレーヤー!

This is my first time adding a blog widget so I was a bit nervous, but it was actually quite painless and easy to do. I only picked a handful of songs that I've heard from the list of available tracks. Apparently there are more songs on the way, so I'll update the playlist as well (if I remember).

To play, just pick a song and click on it. I think some of them are not full tracks, but the playlist should be enough to give you a sense of what the Vocaloids have to offer. #1-37 are Hatsune Miku, #38-54 are KAITO, #55-67 are Kagamine Rin/Len, #68-69 are Kamui Gakupo, and #70-71 are MEIKO.

If you had ever stumbled into this absurd corner hidden deep in the web maze before, be it by design or accident, you'll notice something different.

Yes, I abandoned the Asuran Theme and its variant which I had been using since 2003.

Yes, I upgraded the classic template and had to pick one temporarily. Didn't like any of the templates but didn't really have time to make one myself, especially considering all the reading I'd have to do.

Yes, I finally found a template which layout is simple enough for me to modify without going through too much hassle.

Yes, this is the theme I'll be using from now on till I get bored and have a lot of time on my hand. Thus I present you Paw Wow v.3!

No, I don't have a name for the theme this time. I didn't have anything particular in mind when I picked the colours out of whim.

Yes, I will be using this as a basis for the writing/translation blog that's been waiting for its debut for years. Only God knows (literally) when that will be...

Finally finished tagging all the posts. Such a tiresome job... Being the lazy bone that I am, I limited all labels to one word and had rather broad coverage for each label. Out of the 300 posts prior to this one, there're 116 tagged Life, 100 tagged ACG, 51 tagged PC, 17 tagged Blogger, 11 tagged Mozilla, and all other ones have fewer than ten posts. You can sort of tell where my interests lay. Of course, this isn't comprehensive at all, as I've been too lazy to write about a whole bunch of other stuff, not to mention the lack of updates.

I'm somewhat paving the way in preparation for the day when I'll be able to post regularly, hopefully within a month or so. Assigning labels is only the first step. Next will be re-designing the template. This will take longer so I don't know when I'll get to that yet.

On a side note, Paw Wow's archive was absent when I viewed the last post. Apparently, the script I used was dropped years ago, and the archive section broke when I switched to Beta. Koinu has no such problem 'cause it was created a little later. Since I have to change Paw Wow's scripts, I'm kinda using it as my experimental ground, as I have big plan for Sora. I can't wait to start writing Agion...

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吁, 終於 tagged 完所有文章了, 真是累人啊。懶人屬性的我很自然地把所有標籤都設定為一個字, 涵蓋的範圍也蠻廣的。這篇不算的話, 三百篇裡 Life 佔了 116 篇、ACG 佔了 100 篇、PC 佔了 51 篇、Blogger 佔了 17 篇、Mozilla 佔了 11 篇, 其他一些雜七雜八的標籤各佔不到十篇。大概可以看出我個人興趣的分佈吧? 當然, 有很多東西我都沒寫, 又常常消失, 所以這些標籤代表的並不完整。

這些都是為了近期內能恢復寫作習慣的那日(希望是一、兩個月內)而做的準備。加上標籤只是第一步, 再來是重新設計 template。這個比較花時間, 所以什麼時候會做還不清楚。

順道一提, 上次 post 之後看了一下 Paw Wow, 發現左邊的 archive 不見了, 查了一下才知道我用的 script 早在數年前就被遺棄, 轉到 Beta 以後就壞了。Koinu 是後來才開的, 用的 script 不一樣, 所以沒事。既然都是要改 scripts, 乾脆就把 Paw Wow 當成實驗場, 為以後的 Sora 鋪路。好想趕快開始寫 Agion 啊...

Gee... How long has it been? Something like half a year now?

Unfortunately, this post doesn't indicate the end of the update drought. I just decided to make an effort to churn out something this morning after discovering that both Coordinator and Little Black have adopted the Daylight Saving Time at long last.

On a different note, even though I switched to the beta new version of Blogger for Mozilla Links Zh, I haven't actually looked around to explore the new features yet. Maybe I'll do that...

Starting from this post, I'm hoping to present everything in both English and Chinese whenever possible. I consider this as practice for my writing/translating skill. Haven't decide whether to translate the old posts yet...

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呃啊... 好像有差不多半年沒出現了吧?

很不幸的, 這篇文章不代表我回來了。只是今天早上發現 Coordinator 跟小黑的時間終於跟 Daylight Saving Time 同步了, 欣喜若狂的同時也決定要逼自己寫點什麼來記念。

話說回來, 雖然因為 Mozilla Links Zh 的關係把帳號換到 beta 新版本, 至今倒是第一次進來。不知道有哪些新功能, 有空的時候看看吧...

發現了嗎? 以後如果有可能, 我希望能儘量走雙語路線。算是同時練習中英寫作/翻譯吧。舊的文章... 看情況再決定要不要翻。