nickchanger's blog

So I said I wanted to write more often, but of course I did not fulfil that promise - that is just who I am :P . But there is a good reason...

On the 10th of November I receive a package, possibly send from Sweden the day before so it got here rather quickly. Actually one day before it should.

I anxiously returned home and opened the package. Inside was a DVD, which I quickly inserted in to the DVD drive of my computer. An installation menu popped up and I clicked next several times, looking forward to the sweet piece of software that would soon be inside my computer. Then suddenly it gave me a weird alert box: "The game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim cannot be installed yet, because it has not been released yet." ... MothaF*

Finally the day 11-11-11 had arrived and I could start playing Skyrim! At first glance the world ... blows you away, and it continues to do so even after 50 hours of play time. I still have not finished the main story or even visited all of the areas or the largest cities. It is massive!

I have been in love with TES ever since I first played Morrowind almost ten years ago. Oblivion was maybe even better, and now Skyrim have turned TES to 11. Several of the annoying stuff from Morrowind and Oblivion have been removed or changed, such as the stupid Acrobatics and Athletics skills or the cursed "everything-around-you-follows-your-level". Man I hated running into roadside bandits wearing the insanely expensive glass armor.

Skyrim starts out, like every other TES game, with your character being imprisoned. This time you are heading for the block when suddenly dragons attack and you manage to find a way to escape. Skyrim is bloody as hell with decapitations, mutilated bodies and the like - definitely not for kids or the weak. Love it! :)

Other Stuff

I am using quite a lot of time on Skyrim and will continue to do so, but I do manage to sneak other stuff in to my daily life. One such activity were to join the forum at Anime Kita, an anime-community based in Aalborg, Denmark. They have a large meeting two times a year, spanning a whole weekend, which I just missed. They usually also meet IRL once a month, but I have yet to attend any of these. Maybe in January. This is basically my attempt to actually meet people in my area with some of the same interests as me - damn social stuff.

Other stuff this past month:

• Christmas dinner with my colleagues. I got an annoying headache, even though I barely touched the alcohol, and went home before the party got kind-of crazy (or so I have heard).
• My mom turned, uhm, well lets just say 35 and ignore the fact that my sister is then apparently half a year older than her mother.

Rest of this month:

• A Christmas dinner with my friends.
• Christmas Eve with my family in my apartment.
• New Years Eve with my friends.

Next month:

• Incoming packages from Japan containing a total of five figures! That means I will almost double my collection.

Hopefully I can soon write a blog entry about my trip around Europe ...

For two years and two months ago I released the previous version of this site. Only about four months later I started on a completely new site from scratch. I mentioned this over a year ago, but now it is finally here!

It uses a totally new framework, called 109framework, created by my self. It has several cool features which you probably will not notice as you are only seeing the HTML output :) . But soon I will release 109framework to the public so you can use it yourself.

For the frontend I have done a lot to improve its speed, "correctness" and coolness, including the use of HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery. There is one thing, however, I can do to improve it even more, and that is minifying the code (both HTML, JavaScript and CSS). But, I have decided not to do this so it will be easier for anyone interested to look at and steal it - as that is what the internet is all about! :)

I have spend the last three hours doing the actual release of the site. It should have been really easy but of course there were all kinds of weird bugs showing up - mostly UTF-8 problems :/ . Those should be fixed (or hacked for now), but there might be more. So I would be grateful if you would tell me about any problems you might find. You can use the comment system for this article - or send an email of the comment system does not work :P .

All of my previous blog entries will contain broken links to images etc. and I will go through those and fix them... some day. I have fixed the first page at least just so the page does not look broken on the first visit ;) .

The content of the site have changed a lot... well not that much actually but most have been rewritten. Some sections have been removed, others have been added and finally some have been moved.

When I designed the site I wanted some cool background images with a kind-of transparent content area and I succeeded. But, these background images uses 150-200 KB which is quite a lot. Therefore if you are visiting from a mobile device it will turn of the background images. It will also mean that every time you will see a new background image it takes just a bit longer before the browser have finished rendering the page. As soon as you have them all it will go pretty fast. You can use the icons at the top-left corner of the content to cycle through the background images. There are currently 18 background images of a total of 3 MB! ... and I will add more later.

It has been four months since my last entry. There were so much to tell that I could not find the time to actually write a post, and suddenly this release got really close so I decided to wait until after. So expect some "informative" blog entries in the future. :P

Now, enjoy! :P ... I better get back to the TV.

So much is happening atm that I have not found the time to write a blog about it or anything else, so what you are reading now is just your imagination.

Figures

I have of course received my "donation" figure, and I had ordered another one which I have also received. Here are some pictures:

Minami Shimada and her summoned creature from Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu

Yuri from Angel Beats!

I now have five figures which are all currently standing in my bedroom window as I have no where else to place them. I have free shelves but it cannot be too high up because of to much fanservice you know :P . I will not order any new figure for quite a long time as they are quite expensive, and I have no room for them.

Birthday

I had my birthday in all quietness and I'm now 27 years old...!

Company Summer Party

The company where I work had its anual summer party. We went to an outdoor go-cart track where we had a grandprix for two hours. Pretty damn nice to race with ~60km/h on a small track and at the same time beating my co-workers and bosses :D . Unfortunately I had gotten car sick before we even got there so my stomach was weird. Driving go-cart does not help and I had to go out of my last two races as I simply got too sick. I even puked a little which is not great when you are are wearing a helmet :P . After driving round-and-round we went to one of my co-workers house and ate some great food and had fun until late at night. I drew manga on the tablecloth.

Anime and Manga Presentation

Every Friday we have what we call Friday-15 at the company. One makes a short presentation about something they find interesting. We use this as knowledge sharing between the groups in the company, and it is specially good if one group have found a problem they have solved in a smart way. They can then explain what they did to the rest of the company and we can learn something new. On the Friday before our summer party we had a special Friday-15, where I made a presentation about something I find interesting. I called it "Otaku, a World of Anime and Manga" - so as you can guess it was not the usual kind of knowledge sharing. As I only had the night before to prepare, it did not become a perfect presentation. Some might even have become more confused about it, but whatever, I had a lot of fun explaining this stuff to my co-workers :) . I am thinking about making it into a blog post and this time do it properly :P .

Japanese TV-series

I have started to watch Japanese TV-series. The first I saw was the live-action version of Nodame Cantabile. It is Josei (for young women) but it was great fun and filled with great classical music. I can really recommend it. It ended with two special episodes (of two hours each) and two films (again of two hours each), and in the first of these films there was a scene that was so extreme that I just had to see it on YouTube... or more correctly, check to see if it was not already up there - but to my surprise it was no where to be found. So I uploaded it my self, my first YouTube video :P .

I recommend watching it in 720p and full screen! Currently it have reached 400 views in six weeks - uuhhh

Finding a new series to watch is, however, not easy. The only acceptable database I have found so far is the wiki on d-addicts. It does not have any neat search filtering on category or rating such as AniDB had when I started watching anime. This means I had to go alternative ways to find other shows, such as checking what some actors have also done. The actress behind the main character from Nodame Cantabile (Megumi "Nodame" Noda), Ueno Juri, was both cute and great so I checked out some of her series. I also found that her birthday is on the same day is mine :o - just two years later :P . The next series I saw was Last Friends which is completely different. It is hardcore drama with violence, gender confusion, childhood traumas, cheating wives, etc. Juri-chan, as she is often known on the web, played a boyish girl. A completely different character than Nodame, which just shows she has talents. So far I have seen four series and two films featuring Uenu Juri. Considering that I have seen 12 Japanese series so far I still cannot really be called a fanboy, but I am looking for more with her :P .

Brother's Hat

My brother have finished at his current school, HHX. That means he have finally received his hat! Although it is a lighter shade of blue than mine (as I went to HTX) I guess it is still OK :P . In his last three exams he got 12 (the highest grade possible). Congratulations to him ... now he just need to figure out what to do next!

Simon with his new hat

Bachelor Party

Since my friend, Ste, were going to get married we threw him a bachelor party. He thought he were going to chop chocolate for the wedding, but instead we caught him and he ended up running through the city of Odense drinking and giving candy to kids while wearing a bunny suit. Before grilling and drinking our asses off we played two hours of paintball which is great fun. I was lucky and only got hit by one hurtful ball. Guess our "protecting suit" took most of the power. On the other hand I was shot straight in the mask above my mouth. There is only a grid there which means a lot of paint flew straight into my mouth - man it tastes awful. At the end we let Ste run from one end to another while the rest of us fired the rest of our bullets at him. Lucky for him this was one week before the wedding so most of the pain should have gone away :) . We had great fun partying downtown with him in his bunny suit.

Ste in a bunny suit during his bachelor party

Wedding

So Ste got married, and it was a wedding with everything. A cute white dress, a black suit, lots of flowers, a church, two rings, a toastmaster, great food, great desert (!), speeches, songs, photographers, 70+ guests, wedding dance, cutting socks, rice, and me as the best man wearing a flower in my hair...!?

Ste is the first of my friends getting married and I were the best man. There is a high chance this will also be my last time in that role. I had made a speech for my friend and his bride AC (yeah, we are really lazy when it come to names). To do something different I went into one of the most girly shops I know and bought a hair band with a big flower and wore that while speaking. The clerk commented that "it looks like it is going to be a great Friday if it starts like this". In the same shop I also bought two simple and flowery ear pins (I think they are called). Before the wedding ceremony in the church I placed these in left pocket of the groom (that is above the heart). At the end of my speech I told him to take them up and give them to his wife. It was a reference to a Japanese tradition where at the last school day the boys would give their second button to the girl they like. The reason being that they have worn that uniform for the last three years and during that time, the second button have been close to their heart experiencing all of their emotions. So when they give it to a girl they are actually giving their emotions to her. Since I did not have a chance to mess up one of Ste's coats by ripping off its second button I decided to do it differently, hence the ear pins in his left pocket. Of course I messed up my speech so both the ear pins, the flower in the hair and other parts were confusing and I doubt even half of the guests got it :) . But, well, that is just like any other presentation I make :P .

The whole day, however, were really great, and a huge congratulation and wishes of best of luck or something like that goes to Stefan and Ann Cathrine.

Ste and AC in front of the church after their wedding ceremony

Europe Trip

In a week I will, again this year, go to a holiday house for a week getting drunk with my friends. A couple of weeks later I will go on large trip around Europe with my parents and brother. We will take our own car and spend two weeks in countries like Holland, France, Spain, Italy and Germany. At least those are some of the planned locations, as we still have not made any final thoughts on where to go. Therefore I would like to ask the Internet if they would recommend any places in mainland Europe south of the Danish border that we really should visit. Anything goes, even if it is just a small weird thing as it is no problem to visit it if we are driving by it anyway :) .

So far we have planned to see (just to name some):

• The Dutch Delta Works
• Pont d'Arc
• Rennes-le-Château
• Andorra
• Sagrada_Família in Barcelona
• Leaning tower of Pisa
• Venice
• Florence Cathedral
• San Marino

No doubt I well talk more about this - if not before then after the trip :P .

In 2001 a guy named Armin van Buuren started a radio show, focusing on trance, called A State of Trance, or ASOT for short. In 2011 the show had its 10 year anniversary and reached the 500 episode milestone. To celebrate this Armin van Buuren arranged five large trance events in five different cities on five different continents: Johannesburg, South Africa; Miami, USA; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Den Borsh, The Netherlands and Sidney, Australia. The Den Borsh event were the biggest with a around 20-25.000 listening to trance on five scenes! The event started at 21:00 and the last of the more than 40 DJ's ended his set at 07:00.

Every week I listen to a radio show called Trance on Demand. The DJ of that show, DJ Hilander, were supposed to go to ASOT500 in Den Borsh with his brother and friend, but the brother had to cancel. As there were basically no one else I got a chance to grab his ticket. So on the morning of 9th of April I first took a 2�½ hour train ride to meet with Hilander and his friend, and then went for a 10 hour car ride towards Den Borsh! We reached our destination a little less than an hour before the start. We have bought the Deluxe tickets in hopes of getting a better experience, and it was totally worth it. The deluxe tribunes were not as packed as the floor, and there were a railing were you could relax your legs a bit - 'cause damn it is hard to stand up for nine hours straight! :P

With five scenes and 40 DJ's it is not easy to figure out what to listen to and when, but the others had it all planned out, so I just followed them around. We started at the largest scene, A State of Blue, and listened to Mat Zo and Arty. Then to the second smallest scene, A State of Red, to listen to Estiva. Then back to A State of Blue to listen to Above & Beyond and of course Armin van Buuren him self. Finally we went to the third scene, A State of Yellow, to listen to the only Danish DJ in the event, Daniel Kandi. He ended his set at 06:00 and we were beat and headed out.

This is the first time I have ever been to an event like this. In fact it is the first time I am at a "real" concert! And to think I did this in a different country with two guys I barely knew! But it was awesome. Seriously awesome. Even if you did not like trance you would still be blown away by the awesomeness :P . The music was extremely loud. I know it usually is at concerts but this was just ridiculously loud. One bad thing about the event in general were the fact that the bass might have been to loud for trance IMO. This might be because I like uplifting trance the most where the cheesy piano melodies rules. Might also be the reason why Daniel Kandi had the IMO best set of the night as he is pure uplifting.

The Crowd at A State of Blue during Above & Beyond's set

The ride home was not easy. I had been up for over 24 hours by then and had trouble sleeping. I might have gotten around an hour of sleep when it was my turn to take the wheel. Barely had it for two hours before I knew I had to switch or else we would end up in the ditch. Slept for most of the ride home after that... 2�½ hours train, 10 hours car, 9 hours trance, 10 hours car and 2�½ hours train and only ate at Burger King and McDonalds - yeah, I was wasted.

During the whole trip down there and back we listened to trance in the car. I knew we would do this and feared a bit that I would be tired of trance before the weekend was over. But I was not. Not even close. I might just like trance even more now :S .

In the last two weeks of March HLJ, where I have ordered all of my figures so far, had a campaign where they raised all of their prices by 2%. These 2% plus another 2% of the normal price where then given directly to Japanese Red Cross to help the victims of the earthquake.

I used that as an excuse to order yet another figure. My order were only ¥6,116, meaning I have indirectly donated ¥240 - which is around $2.86, so almost nothing :| . HLJ have now announced that they donated a total of ¥1,940,000! That's $23,100! There is a big step from my order up to that :) .

Doing a bit of calculations and guessing I can conclude that HLJ have a "normal" revenue over two weeks of about ¥48,500,000, or $577,500! Which might be from around 10,000 orders in total. That is quite a lot :o .

Even though HLJ shipped my figure over a week ago they have not actually captured the money from my bank account until today - so technically my money where not part of their donation :P .