So.. Yoroi invited me to his house to rock out on Guitar Hero 4 : World Tour. I decided to play the drums cause I didn't like the feel of strumming a fake guitar. At least with the drums I can just keep hitting with no remorse.

And no remorse I did.. as I was playing I had this creepy feeling at the back of my head that whenever I missed and hit something other than the drum pad, like say.. the edge of the pad, the screw head on the snare.. the plastic board of the drumset. I keep wondering if I would break anything.

Then after a stop for some food and we started another gig, I brought my right drumstick down on the green pad and instead of the *pof* that it normally makes, that was a loud *snap* followed by the sound of a small bit of plastic hitting the floor.

I looked at the pad and.. seems like after the food break I forgot to fold the drumstick holders back into the base so I hit the right side one in deployed mode and.. I broke it!

Frantically I tried to repair it the best I can and thus this was the duct taped result.

It still works.. though it'll never fully park back into the base.. and it feels flimsy when you fold it in and out of the set. And Yoroi has gained an instant conversation starter whenever other people plays the drums.

"Dude.. why does the drum stick holder looks like it's bandaged?" "Yeah, cause dumb ass Marauderz decided that it was in his way and smacked it with his stick!"

I knew I was gonna break something that night!

For they were left without a voice. Majel Roddenberry has passed away. I wonder if she had the chance of seeing how Gene’s vision and story is raped in the new Star Trek movie? But then again… Brenna and Braga did that a long time ago anyway!

A new release of the Windows Live Apps Beta has been released. Or as the Windows Live team likes to call them the Windows Live Essentials!

Everything looks smashingly great, Live Writer is as good as always. Though I wish they didn't enable all the smart quotes and other character replacements by default. I feel that'll cause some amount of grief to some people.

Live Messenger looks spiffy! But they removed the signature sound which allows me to set a sound to be played on my friend's system when I get online, I liked that feature even if I did get scared by it sometimes. Hope they put it back in as a setting that can be switched on or off.

Live Photo Gallery... works, interesting point to note is that now the autofix tries to straigthen you photo as well. Somehow I don't think that's a good idea since the problem is that the program doesn't know the intent of the photographer's angle. Or actually understands the subject being photographed.

And then there's Live Movie Maker... oh god... what have they done to the Movie Maker name? I really LIKE Movie Maker, in my opinion it's a very underappreciated program that comes with Windows. It just works! you can easier trim and create movie clips, add captions, etc. etc. You can even customize your own encoding profiles so you can make WMV files for any usage. In the name of simplification.. They've redesigned the whole UI, and basically removed everything that gave Movie Maker it's charm previously. The team mentions that the engine powering Windows Live Movie Maker is capable of great things, and I WANT to believe them, I WANT to believe that there's a program capable of being as good as the old Windows Movie Maker. In it's state right now I call attention to this old Mac vs PC ad.

If you asked me how bad does the output of Windows Live Movie Maker looks right now? It's WORSE than the PC movie being depicted in the Ad! Come on guys, make me BELIEVE that Windows Live Movie Maker works!!!

Other then Live Movie Maker, everything else in the Live Apps suite works great!

So the new year is coming and what better way to start the year than by learning something new? There’s a Technet MSDN technology summit that’ll be happening on 15th January 2009 over at the KL Convention center. And there’ll be demos of the MS Virtualization platform, and more interesting to me would be that there’ll be sessions on AZURE, yum yum indeed.

Oh there’ll also be a demo of Windows 7 for those of you who like me haven’t bothered to acquire the preview released during PDC.

And maybe… just maybe.. and this is just ME saying this.

We *might* actually get a new Beta of Windows 7.

Just remember.. operative word here is *MIGHT*… with asterisks too!

Here comes a NEW CHALLENGER!

So with the purchase of the Revoltech Chun Li I can safely say I'm done buying figures for the next few months. Note again how they choose to make left and right parts non symmetrical so it looks natural. Still feels weird to me!

Short posing stand once again limits off the ground moves.

This time I took my shots by using a large white colored piece of EVA foam as a backdrop, then I mounted my flash on the tripod and setup for Wireless High Speed Sync flash on my camera so at least there's a background to the photo instead of the dark void you see the last time I tried doing this. Still not perfect, so I guess the next thing is to built on actual light box or a diffuser for my flash.

And of course would a Chun Li shot be complete WITHOUT a spinning bird kick?