And today is a photoblog day!

Back on Friday, I decided to go into the city (New York City) by myself to go to the Japanese consulate and hand in my paperwork for my visa.  For those that don’t know, I’m going to Japan next semester to study abroad.  Anyway, it’s not that I don’t trust the USPS with my passport but…I don’t trust the USPS with my passport.  Do to a range of circumstances, I ended up at a train station I don’t usually take to go into the city.

So I got to penn station and decided to walk to the consulate.  The consulate is at 299 Park Avenue, between 48th and 49th I think.  It wasn’t that killer of a walk, but being that it was 22 degrees outside – it was a little longer than I would have liked it to be.  It’s certainly winter!  I was going to take pictures inside, but the building felt so official that I was kind of scared to.  Anyway – I liked the decorations in the front though.  Everyone’s in the spirit now I suppose.

And speaking of the spirit, since I was nearby, I decided to stop by the Rockefeller center to see the Christmas tree that they put up every year.  It’s hard to make out in the picture, but the lights and everything made it seem really nice.

And of course, you always have people at the ice rink.  It was certainly cold enough to have it too.

So on the way back, I happened across Bryant Park.  There were kiosks and stands everywhere, so I decided to stop and see what was going on.  Apparently they setup this every year as well.  Another smaller christmas tree and an ice rink, as well as shops and whatnot all setup outside.  A nice little spot to stop and take a respite.

I figured why not stop and get a bite to eat while I was there.  Found a teriyaki stand where I got some rice, chicken, and vegetables.  It wasn’t very good.  Probably one of the worse 5 dollar expenditures I have done in New York.  I ate it all though – the fundamental problem that it solved was that it was hot and I was cold.  Afterwards, I hurriedly ran back to penn station where I ended up spending 2 hours trying to get home – which is usually only a 1 hour endeavor.  Overall, I’d have to say that the day was good though.

Oh, and speaking of christmas tree stuff, I set my family’s up yesterday with my mother and younger brother.

Naked Tree.  Just unwrapped it and such, so it looks kind of awkward.

And here it is with ornaments and lights and such.  It still looks funny, but it’ll get fuller as the branches begin to go back to their original spots and such.  It’s hard to see the ornaments, but there’s plenty there.  I have yet to perfect the art of taking pictures in the dark and make them look good.  I realize that shouldn’t be hard…but meh – I’m a nub.

I do love macro shots though.  This one still came out kind of bad…

Got the idea to do this from a lifehacker competition that happened recently.  I can’t wait to get my DSLR for christmas.  I really want to play with all the settings and such to see if I can get better shots.

And it also snowed last night.  About a foot.  It was still snowing out when I took this shot, but my camera couldn’t take pictures fast enough to capture the snowflakes without sacrificing the lighting.

And then I went to bed.

Day 1:  Traveling and Late Night Eats

So I borrowed my dad’s car because my car had a side-view mirror broken.  So I had to go all the way back east to New Jersey and then start heading west and north to Rochester.  Added 2 hours to my drive =_=.

Ran into tons of traffic at the beginning of the trip because it was rush hour.  Sucked.

Apparently you drive through Russia on your way to Rochester, NY.  Or so says the GPS.  After this, didn’t really take anymore pictures because it was dark out and driving while picture taking is dangerous >_>.

So upon arriving, I think the only thing on my mind was getting some proper nourishment.  I had eaten dinner prior to leaving, but being that the drive was over 5 hours long, I was hungry.  What better way to satisfy my late night hunger with some innutritious Denny’s?

Chicken finger burrito.  ‘nough said.

The final activity of the night.  Record Danny, Sherman (danny’s housemate), and myself try to name all 150 of the original pokemon.  Needless to say, on later inspection; we learned we failed miserably.

Day 2: Dibella’s and RIT

So the next morning, I awoke because of a ring at the doorbell.  Apparently Jehovah’s Witnesses were wandering the neighborhood.  Sherman’s brother answered and I could barely stifle my laughter from the other room as they tried to convince him to see the path to god.

Needless to say, upon waking up, I quickly got comfortable since it was still pretty early.  Browsed the internet for a while until I got tired of waiting for Danny to wake up (I woke him up about 2.5 hours after I woke up).  We decided to head out shortly after.

Before leaving, I snapped a shot of the place Danny lives while at RIT.  It’s so much nicer than my current lodgings.

The first order of business was food.  So Danny took me to what is known is the best sub place in Rochester: Dibella’s.

The place was arranged pretty well – they had a system where they could shuffle customers to the counter to order quickly and then away to pick it up later.  It also had a nice vintage feel to it, which I enjoyed while eating my sandwich.

Here’s the remaining half of my capicola sub.  It was very tasty.  Thanks for treating me Danny.

After lunch, Danny brought me to RIT.  All of the buildings are pretty boring to look at since the entire school is actually pretty modern.  I think it’s only like 50-60 years old.

The hallways kind of reminded me of high school for some reason.  Narrow and long.

RIT boasts the largest video gaming club in the US.  Trademark of a nerdy school.

Inside of every building were places to eat or get snacks.  These places are even open on weekends.  Lehigh should get more places open on weekends and more food areas in general.  I mean, literally EVERY building had at least one place to buy food – ridiculous.

On-campus computer store.  Handy in a pinch I guess.

Rawr.

There’s nice shrubbery around all the buildings I guess.  Nowhere near as aesthetically nice as Lehigh, but it was nice to have everything FLAT.

Some hardcore editing equipment for the video majors I assume.

I do give RIT credit though.  There were a few nice park areas and greenery around.  Definitely fall now – it finally hit me as I realized there were tons of leaves on the ground here.

This is where Danny attends classes.

And with Danny’s lead, we dared to enter the abyss.

Was instantly greeted with comfy-looking chairs and a carpeted hallway.  Packard Lab seems so far away…(the building I go to most of my classes in at Lehigh).

A server room that’s apparently simulating black holes and whatnot.  Has a giant fan keeping it cool, along with a thermometer giving the ambient room temperature.  It was kind of awkward how most of the rooms had class windows that looked into the hallway instead of walls.  There were also tons of computer rooms as well as classrooms in this building, but that’s about it.  Typical of a college building right?

After touring that building, we decided to head back.  It was already pretty late – as you can see, there’s tons of cars missing from when we first arrived.  From here on out, we returned back to Danny’s place to fail miserably at making an intro-video for chenzen.  So much wasted time…Oh well – after that, just played some Street Fighter 4 (SF4) and went to sleep.

Day 3: Xacti and Rochester

So apparently the day I left, I didn’t take many pictures.  It’s probably because all I did was play more SF4 and eat some Chinese food with Danny.

This is Danny’s Xacti.  It takes up to 2 hours of 720p HD video @ 30fps.  As I mentioned before, we were trying to do a collab intro Vlog for chenzen, but failed miserably.  We came up with good ideas after the fact of course.  The camera seems pretty nice.  Compact and handy.

Look!  It’s Rochester!  It didn’t really give me much of an impression as a city though…

Well, we ended up at the Chinese restaurant which served up some good noodles.  Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of the food or the place.  I have no idea why, but this is the only picture from the chinese place, so yeah.  I think it’s cause I had just realized how dumb we were for making such a lame video for chenzen that we weren’t gonna use.

Anyway, after this, I basically got back to Danny’s place, packed up, and headed home.  Overall, I’d say I had a lot of fun though.  It was a nice trip, albeit a bit long, but nothing impossible.  On a good day, I can get to Rochester in about 4 hours and 40 minutes.  I got to relax a bit and chill with Danny and Sherman, so yeah – good times.  I hope to take more trips like this in the future.

That’s all for now!  Later

My cousins live in an apartment in the village.  This is the view from outside of the front door.  I went to the city on Sunday because my uncle who lives out in Portland was in visiting his grandchildren and whatnot.  I met up with them, my dad, and my younger brother for some lunch and then we went over to my cousins’ place.  ‘Twas a good day since the Giants, Jets, and the Yankees won their respective games.

Afterwards, I took some pics from inside my dad’s car.  For some reason I kind of enjoy the look of cluttered buildings so close to each other.

And the infamous city traffic is holding us back from returning to New Jersey in a timely fashion.  I think it’s quite obvious that New York’s traffic lights are coordinated.

And there’s the sign for the Holland Tunnel.  It seems as if 6 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon is a time when a lot of people are trying to travel back to New Jersey.  Have no idea why though, since Sunday is not a workday.

After this picture…I fell asleep, so I don’t really have anything else to show for the ride home.  I was going to try to touch up these photos a bit, but I got kind of lazy; so you can tell that it wasn’t very bright outside.  They would look a lot better if I did though.  Bah – whatever.

At Lehigh University, we have what are called 4 o’clocks.  Basically, instead of having midterms, we have 2 designated periods during the semester where a lot of classes (mostly freshman classes) have tests at 4 o’clock (big surprise!).  There are also finals at the end of the semester, but that was pretty much expected (so 3 test times in total basically)  As you get into your higher level classes though, these tests end up happening mostly during classtime.  So even if the test doesn’t occur at exactly 4 o’clock, the time at which you have many of your tests do is within the week or two when 4 o’clocks are going on.  (What you see above are some of my notes sprawled out and messy.  I haven’t exactly been studying as much as I should have though…)

So, while I have never been fond of test-taking, I don’t actually think they’re as bad as some people make them out to be.  Sure, some may be excruciatingly challenging, but there really isn’t a better way to gauge whether or not a student has been keeping up with learning the material in class.  And while test-taking situations are never realistic (you don’t have access to any material during it, unlike the real world where you can solve problems using any reference), as long as your professor isn’t a douche, the tests are usually pretty reasonable.  And trust me when I say I’m no study-nut or super-genius cause I’m not.  I rarely score 100’s and I never pull all nighters – I think people who do are kind of silly (or just really smart if the do the former without the latter).

Oh – on a last note, the only tests I do have problems with are the SAT’s, GRE’s; basically any standardized test that isn’t administered for a course.  These tests are just unreasonable and don’t give a measure of true intelligence at all.  And if you think I’m just bitter cause I didn’t score well on my SAT’s, that’s wrong because I scored pretty fairly in my opinion.  I just don’t like those kinds of tests or their formats at all.  And that’s that.

So the first part of the process?  Of course, since this was my first time making apple pie, I went to look up a recipe (By the way, this is my friend’s macbook, not mine).  Allrecipes.com provided me with a relatively fool-proof one:

• 1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
• 1/3 cup white sugar
• 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• 1/3 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 7 1/2 cups peeled, cored and sliced apples
• 1 cup raisins
• 1 recipe pastry for a 9 inch double crust pie
• 1 egg

So I omitted the raisins.  I don’t think that screwed me up too much though.

Went to the store, bought all the ingredients, and 16 apples; 8 granny smith and 8 red delicious.  I had no idea how many apples to get for a pie, so my friend and I asked some random lady in the store.  She said about 8-9 apples per pie.  Oh boy – mistake #1 right there.

So I went through the painstaking process of peeling and slicing the apples up.  So you can see the apple pieces floating in a pot of water right now.  Something I picked up off lifehacker is that if you leave apples in water right after cutting them, it prevents them from turning brown.  Since it was going to take a long time for me to cut up all of the apples, I decided to implement this trick.  This could have been mistake #2.

And now comes the mixing!  Basically you just have sugar, sugar, flour, cinnamon, some lemon juice, the apples, and sugar.  You mix it all up together so the apples are coated, and bam!

This is a lonely pie crust waiting to be filled…

and this is a bulging pie crust with too many apples inside.  I could NOT fit 8 apples into this pie.  I think about 6.5 got into it, and it still looked about ready to tear this pie crust up.  Mistake #3: I forgot to cut slits into the top of the pie crust.  Probably the biggest mistake I could have done.  The next pie, I only cut up 4 more apples and used the leftover ones from this pie.  This still filled the second pie up a good amount.

And so pie #1 looked like this.  Eww…The crust actually wasn’t that bad though.  It looked like this because the egg I used to coat the top crust was not spread evenly, so the black is just where there was too much egg.

The second pie looks much better, no?  Well enough of that for now though, because the appearance was the least of my worries when I let the pies cool and decided to take a look inside.

I think a combination of putting the apples in the water and not cutting slits in the crust caused this outcome.  The delicious gooey filling of the pie was instead just sugar water!  And the apples themselves were not dried out the way they should have been.  As a result, I conclude this apple pie making a complete failure.  After refrigerating it overnight though, it doesn’t taste half bad; but as a cook – I have failed you, apple pie.

Anyway, I realize by now that most of you are snickering at me because I have failed probably the easiest pie recipe in the book, but hey – we all learn from out mistakes, right?  I plan on re-attempting this apple pie again very soon and I hope for much better results.  Until next time!

So school life here at Lehigh University has started again.  This means classes have started, endless nights of parties have started (I have so much homework already), and (well at least for me) working has started again.  What does this entail?  Well continue to find out.  Or don’t in case you don’t really care – which I’m sure most of you don’t.  *tear*

I think as many of you may have already guessed, I work part-time with the Library-Technology Services (LTS) on campus.  They have a specific program called “WIRED” (Worldwide Information Resources in Every Dorm).  The name is actually a bit misleading, but we do, in fact, provide technological services to every student at Lehigh in (or out) of their dorm.  The program is run by 2 staff of Lehigh who are then in charge of around 50 consultants.  The consultants are all Lehigh University students (that includes me).  The consultants can be called upon to work individually with the student who needs help, or they can be found working at a general help desk.  The WIRED desk is a place where they can drop off their laptop to be worked on.  Today, I happened to be working at the WIRED desk for 4 hours.

What you see here is the queue of laptops that are waiting to be worked on.  At the beginning of the semester, it’s particularly busy as students who are coming back to campus are finding out that their computers aren’t working in the way they’re supposed to.  If you refer to the first image, you can see the bench where we put laptops that are currently being worked on.  It’s a general rule to not work on more than 4 at once.  For the most part, nowadays, students at Lehigh almost exclusively use laptops.  I feel like this is pretty much true at any campus.  I’m probably one of the few who has both a desktop and laptop.  Incidentally though, I rarely have any computer problems myself.  Maybe it’s cause I actually maintain my systems and keep them healthy?  Nah – it’s probably cause I’m reformatting my operating system every 6 months.

The papers here pretty much give you the general idea of how the desk works.  The desk operates on a first come, first serve basis (self-explanatory).  That means that if there’s a huge queue like you saw, it can mean waiting up to a week to get your computer back, depending on how long it takes to get through everyone else’s.  People still tend to leave them there after learning this though, so I guess a lot of them don’t really miss having their computer.

This is where we communicate with people who need help with their computers.  When we accept someone’s computer, we put their username into the database, their computer type, what’s wrong with it, and what they left with it.  We put all of this information into a database where notes can be left about what kind of work has been done on the computer, along with user contact information.  If the problem is small enough though, we take care of it right there.

And here, you can see all the laptops that are waiting for their respective owners to come pick them up.  They have already been worked on and been given the OK to go back home.  I actually put two or three there myself tonight.  Ran into some nasty problems with the machines afterwards though – the next consultants to work the desk will probably have to reformat the current machines being worked on.

And with that, you basically have the functions of the WIRED desk at Lehigh.  Checking in laptops, putting them in queue, working the bench, and putting them on the pickup shelves is about it.  It’s not the most glorified job, but hey – a job is a job.  To be honest though – I wouldn’t want to do any of this kind of work outside of right now.

Here’s a picker of a hall in the Asa Packard building on Lehigh’s campus.  I currently go to Lehigh University and today was the first day of the fall semester in my junior year.  I’m studying Computer Engineering at the moment, so most of my classes revolved around electric engineering and computer science.

This is one of the classrooms I was in today.  It’s fairly basic with desks, a chalkboard, and a projector.  I actually took all of these pictures much after when all the classes on campus end.  Didn’t want to take a picture during class in fear of getting reprimanded by my professors.  Had my first CSE 216 (Software Engineering) lecture here today.  Software Engineering – doesn’t seem like too bad of a class.

Had a lab in this room today, but the door was locked.  Electronic Circuits lab.  Lots of expensive equipment in this room, so I can understand why they lock it up.

Lehigh is currently building a new “STEPS” building, which stands for “Science, Technology, Environment, Policy & Society.”  I think it’s going to be mainly an environmental science building with multidisciplinary stuff in it as well.  Constructions been ongoing since my Sophomore year.  They sure have been taking their sweet time finishing it.

This is the inside of Maginnes Hall.  It’s where the Modern Languages all are.  It’s where my Japanese teacher’s office is.  I have had quite a few of my engineering classes in here though – I guess it’s just convenient to put the classes here cause it has a lot of rooms.  I had my Electronic Circuit’s lecture in this building today.

Almost all of these seats were filled when class was going on.  This is on the bottom floor of Maginnes.  It’s actually underneath the floor of the picture previous to this one.

Some notes that were left on the board.  Easy math is the best math.  Unfortunately I doubt all the concepts will be explained this easily for my Electronic Circuits class.  Thevenin-Norton equivalency?  Mehh.  Hmm, so yeah – since I’m in college, I actually haven’t been to all of my classes yet.  Tomorrow I will pretty much see what the rest of my classes are like.  Except for Japanese.  Unfortunately I have a time conflict with Japanese, so I have a lab on Mondays that overlaps with my Japanese class.  That means every Monday, I miss my Japanese class.  I won’t have it until Wednesday now.  It’s one of the few classes I really like to go to though.  So what’s everyone else’s experience with their first days of classes?  Do you hate it?  Enjoy it?  Impartial?  For me, the anxiety quickly passes and I try to get momentum into the semester since I know I still have 15 weeks left.

So Danny and I have been working basically non-stop on ChenZen the past week or so getting the site up, writing posts, publicizing, talking to people, and trying to stabilize our server space, among many other things as well.  So I officially declare that every Saturday, starting from this Saturday, to be “material gathering day.”  What this means, is that instead of posting everything we find immediately, like we usually do, we’ll gather as much content as possible to help smooth along the rest of the week.  Of course, if something huge is happening, we’ll try to keep you up to date, however, you will definitely notice that Saturdays will be much slower.

Anyway, so why am I posting all of these cute sleeping animals?  Well, when I’m not updaing this blog, playing games, watching anime, reading manga, checking updates, or sleeping, I’m usually…wait, no – that’s basically the story of my life.  I guess you can throw in work, school, friends, and the occasional outing, but other than that I don’t do much of anything.  This has inspired me to ask though, what each one of you do with your free time.  Everyone has different hobbies and whatever, so I’m kind of curious as to what they are.

Recently I’ve actually been trying into photography a lot more – a lot has to do with this blog and keeping up with photo articles, but it mostly stemmed from an interest I’ve had long ago.  Now I finally have an excuse to develop this hobby more and pursue it.  I currently have a [Canon Powershot SX100 IS], which isn’t a bad point and shoot camera, but I’ve been hungering for something better.  Looking at budget/beginner DSLR cameras, I’ve found that the hardest decision is between the [Canon EOS Digital Rebel T1i] and the [Nikon D5000].  I was also considering the [Olympus Pen E-P1] for its superior HD video capabilities, but threw out that idea since many reviews say that it’s lacking as a camera.  Right now, leaning towards the D5000, but we’ll see – probably won’t be buying it until the holidays anyway.

On a last note: Who thinks squirrels are cute?  I want a show of hands after you tell me what kind of hobbies you have.

So Danny took me, Riceboy0019 (Sherman), and a few other of our friends to a Japanese Buffet near Menlo Park Mall in New Jersey last night called IchiUmi (or One Ocean if I’m right).  To be honest, I wasn’t expecting too much from a buffet, but was going to try to eat more than my share since I was spending the money.  Unfortunately because of the weather and a lack of food all day caused me to enjoy it less than I should have, but nevertheless the food was delicious.  Quite a surprise from a buffet style restaurant.  The picture that you actually see here is already my second dish.  My first dish consisted of sushi, eel, eel, eel, eel, and eel.

This is Kaisuri’s dish.  I swear that this kid has a bottomless stomach.  I think one of the biggest draws of this place was that it only served Japanese food.  Usually you expect to see Japanese buffet food accompanied by American-style Chinese food or something, but not here.  IchiUmi actually delivered only Japanese food.  Despite this though, their selection was in no way hindered.  Instead, I believe that this turned out to be one of their greatest strengths.  Fresh sushi being prepared at all times (which wasn’t bad! – very unlike the quality of other Japanese buffets I know), soft-shell crab coming out in the dozens, and eel out of nowhere made my stomach go into bliss for many moments during the night.

Another thing I was very impressed with, was the aesthetics of the place.  It didn’t really have a huge Asian feel to it, but it was inviting and gave just enough hint of its oriental roots.  It was clean, organized, and wasn’t cluttered like some places make you feel.  There was always enough space for me to get the food I wanted and whenever people were there, they didn’t get in my way for very long.  Once you have your food, you keep moving – people didn’t stay in one spot for very long.  With the selection, it was hard to since everything was so good.

As you can see, just rolls and rolls of sushi.  Awesome.

I guess as a scare tactic, IchiUmi tries to warn you that leaving extra food and rice on your dish is very offensive in the Japanese culture.  I’m not exactly sure if this is true or not (at least I haven’t heard of it), but if you abuse their system and leave tons of food on your plates, they will charge you an extra 35% surcharge.  It’s to their own discretion though, so as long as you aren’t too wasteful, you’ll be fine.

So I guess as a final note, I’d like to say that I’d very much recommend this buffet.  If you live in the area, try it out soon, since from my experience, the quality of a buffet can drop dramatically from when it opens.  I at least hope it doesn’t.  Dinner was on the pricey side ($32 on weekends), but I think it was pretty worth it.  Being that I had a massive headache, I regret not being able to eat more, but that’s my own fault.  But yeah, definitely worth checking out: IchiUmi

I don’t ride the train too much, but when I do it usually is to New York City, so wasn’t too unfamiliar with the process.  Bought a ticket via the ticket machine and hopped on.  A roundtrip from New Brunswick to Penn Station costs a whopping $18 dollars.  The train runs pretty regularly during the day, so didn’t have to wait for too long for it to come.

The NJ Transit trains are fairly basic.  There are a lot of seats and room overhead to store luggage if you have any.  There isn’t much leg room, but it’s not too bad.  At least not for me since I am fairly short.

The view outside of the train isn’t exactly exciting.  You can see tracks, other stations as you pass by, and the towns as you go through.  Other than that, it’s pretty boring.

Took about an hour to reach Penn Station in New York.  Penn Station is pretty large – you have trains coming from various states along with a lot of the subways.  There are a lot of places to eat, a few places to browse, and your random musical or talent entertainers.  We actually ate in Penn Station before heading off to the subway.

Using the subway costs money too.  $8 dollars gets you 4 rides with a discount.  We bought 2 subway cards with 4 rides to get us to the stadium and back.  This trip already cost me about $60 dollars for the ticket, transportation, and food.  And food was pretty cheap since we ate at Taco Bell (blehh).

I took a picture of the subway map.  We had already taken a subway from Penn Station to a different station, where we would take a last subway all the way up to Yankee Stadium.

We arrived at the Stadium about 40 minutes before the game actually started, which is why the Stadium seems fairly empty.  We were in the bleacher seats in the far back, which is why the tickets were fairly cheap (at least cheap for Yankee Stadium seats).  You can see that there was still practice equipment lying around.

There are huge billboards and displays behind centerfield that constantly displayed advertisements or information about the game.

Not too long after arriving, there were workers moving all the practice equipment off the field and into storage somewhere I assume.

The workers even rake the dirt in preparation for the game.

…and then they water it.  Maybe it’s for better traction or something when the players are running.

After waiting a little while longer, the game finally started!  Joba Chamberlain was the opening pitcher for the Yankees and started out pretty strong.  He did let 3 easy runs in during the 3rd inning though and his innings afterwards seemed kind of shaky.  He did manage to pitch the remaining of his innings without letting anymore in though.

Forget when, but after a certain inning, a team of guys comes out and smooths the dirt out with some type of dragging equipment.

While this is going on, the stadium plays the YMCA song and the guys smoothing the dirt dance along.  I thought that was pretty entertaining.

Was hard to get a good close up pic of a player batting.  The first reason is because my camera’s zoom isn’t the greatest and second would be its capability to take fast pictures.  This is probably one of the only ones that came out decently.  Too bad it’s a picture of Derek Jeter getting a strike.

The Toronto Blue Jays were actually winning the majority of the game, 4-3.  In the bottom of the 8th though, a homerun from Hideki Matsui began some momentum where the Yankees would go on to score 4 runs, making it 4-7.  This means Mariano Rivera gets to close up the game.

Rivera actually let the Blue Jays score a single home run, but other than that, he cleaned them up pretty well.  While Rivera was pitching, my group of friends and I began hustling towards the exit to avoid the rush.  If you get caught up in the huge amount of people leaving the stadium, you can be stuck there for a long time just trying to get out.  We luckily got out of there and on the subway back to Penn Station within 15 minutes.

Got back to Penn Station in time for an 11 o’clock train ride home.  Train is slightly different than the one before as you can see.

The baseball game was overall a very fun experience.  Outings like this can get pretty expensive though; ended up spending about $80 dollars on the day, and that’s spending pretty conservatively.  The fact that it was a good game helped, but just going out, being with friends, and having a good time is worth it though.  I feel that everyone should do something like this every once in a while.

As you can see, they have an In The Groove 2 machine.  This is basically the American version of DDR.  I actually think the songs and modes on this are a bit harder than DDR extreme used to offer me.  Haven’t really played any of the newer versions of DDR though since I stopped playing a lot after my sophomore year of high school.

They also have old Initial D3 machines.  I actually used to play this a bunch with my friends.  I even still had the old card that you could buy with my car and everything on it.  You were able to buy these cards straight from the machine by paying an extra dollar, pick a car and whatever, and save your status from I guess the campaign mode.

And as any good arcade should have, 8 on the Break has its fair share of pinball machines.  I, myself, have never been a big fan of pinball, but I know that a lot of people love to play them, whether just for fun when the opportunity arises or a little more seriously.

And I guess I’d have to say last, but not least is that they had Tekken 6 set up to play.  (Sorry about the random guy in the picture)  They even had custom controller ports ready for people who wanted to bring PS2 controllers!  This picture is actually pretty terrible, so here you are with equally terrible video that I took with my digital camera.

I don’t know who the two people playing are, but they at least seemed to know how to play the game well enough.  Also, sorry about the sound quality, it’s terrible I know.  Maybe one day I’ll get a really nice camera to carry around with me.  I really don’t know too much about Tekken 6, but it seems like everyone knows what Tekken itself is.  I’ve played some Tekken 5 before and it can be pretty fun.  Never took the time to get into it seriously.

And I finally bring you Misfire (left) and Kaisuri (right) playing Tatsunoko vs Capcom.  They’re pretty bad. This game came out not too long ago itself.  Basically like all the other “franchise vs Capcom” series, you get to pick characters you  know and love from each one and use them in tag team style of play.  Also the sheer amount of specials and everything else you can use is ridiculous as your special meter fills up absurdly fast.

And that about concludes the trip to the arcade.  We went for Taco Bell afterwards, but I think you can read more about that experience from Kaisuri’s ‘There’s spicy, there’s hot, and there’s volcano hot.‘ review.

We had a pretty flat surface already made for us by one of my cousins, so all we had to do today was lay down a matte that would go over the wood and keep it dry.  This will hopefully keep the wood from rotting for a number of years.  We actually put together another shed before and found out that it was a lot of trouble putting it up because the ground we were on was not perfectly level.

The matte had adhesive on the bottom, so there was no need to nail it or anything.  It was pretty painless to put it down except at the very end when my dad accidentally let the adhesive side stick to itself.  Getting it apart again was a pain.

Next we laid out all the parts for the shed.  This came in 4 big boxes that was a pain to move.  The entire shed weighs about 600 lbs (272 kg), so that was where most of the heavy lifting came in.  Laying out the pieces and separating them into similar piles makes the construction process a lot easier.  Even when I have to put together things that are small, I like to lay out all the pieces before putting it together.  I used to do that when I built gundam models.

After everything was completely laid out, came the flooring.  Building from the bottom up is probably the only way to construct something.

And a short while later, where there was nothing before, is now something that resembles a roofless, empty shack!  The walls were actually really easy to put up, but were kind of annoying since they were able to give so easily having no support on top.

About half the roof is done already.  We added doors, steal beams on top for support, and a few other things that aren’t very clear from this shot.  You can see two step stools and a ladder here.  Despite only 2 people involved in this construction, I had to get the ladder out cause I was too short to reach some things even with the step stools.  I’m only about 5’5″ tall…maybe 5’6″ – haven’t checked in a really long time.

A shot from inside.  You can see the nice foliage off to the right.  There are a lot of trees in my backyard – it’s really pretty when it’s Autumn.

We didn’t actually finish making the shed today cause my dad had to leave since he, my mom, my sister, and my sister’s boyfriend were meeting some family friends in New York City for dinner.  I got stuck at home eating takeout with my younger brother.  Oh well – there isn’t really too much left to do though; we actually only have one part of the roof left and that’s about it.  This shed was nice since you didn’t need many tools and everything is provided for you.  10′ x 10′ is actually pretty spacious, despite how small it looks.