Category: My Blog

On Saturday I attended the festival. Just like any other festival it had live music, dancing, and tons of food and drinks. It was located in the middle of Downtown San Jose. There were thousands of people enjoying all it had to offer. It was my first time to this festival, and I had fun even though I don’t listen to Jazz, Blues, or Salsa music much. The festival lasted throughout the weekend. I took pictures and should be posting them shortly. If not today then definately tomorrow.

There has been a serious lack of movie reviews. I’ve been quite busy and the last movie I’ve seen was War of the Worlds. I should get in the mix within a week or two. I’ve been watching a few on Netflix DVDs that I’ve gotten so expect to see some reviews from older movies as well as new ones. That’s if I have the time to head to the theaters.

I got a parking ticket at work today. This totally sucks. I have parking permit through my work, but there’s never available parking for the permit area. That the one of the bad reasons for working this particular shift. I’ve gotten parking tickets before and this is by far the most expensive; $50! I’ve been getting away with by parking in the 2 hour zones for the past 3 months and this is the first ticket, so I guess it evens out.

Wait a minute… I take that back. The most expensive parking ticket I’ve gotten cost me $300. I parked my motorcycle in an area that was designated for handicap use. It was such a bullshit ticket because it wasn’t blocking any sort of access area. It was just near it. Anyway, I don’t really care much about it. As long as you learn your lesson. In my case, I got a second lesson, and it cost me $50.

It finally arrived in the mail this morning. Four and a half years of college life and all you get is a peice of paper with you name on it. LOL. It’s all worth it. I’m pretty excited because if I didn’t get it in the mail by the end of summer I was afraid I had missed or failed a class somewhere. I’m officailly a college graduate, with the papers to prove it too.

I haven’t had a graduation party. Maybe I’ll try to throw something in a few weeks to celebrate.

This weekend was a much more eventful probably because I had it off from work. Yesterday I ran the 5K race with only three hours of sleep. I did OK, given that I was sick. It turns out my week-long cough was caused by bronchitis. Immediately after the race I spent the rest of the day swimming with friends. The lack of sleep and constant activity was tiring. On Sunday, I finished this weekend off with a hiking trip with several friends at Mt Diablo state park.

We woke up early in the morning and drove for an hour to the site. From the maps and online information the trail we were taking is about 5.9 miles. What we didn’t know was practically half of the hike was steep up-hills trails. With the scorching sun beating on our heads and back we hike off trail to Rock City where we climbed to the peak. We had a great view of the valley and enjoyed the nice cool breeze.

After our rest on the rock, we found a campsite to refill our water bottles. The campsite was a life-saver because the hike back around the other side of Mt. Diablo was just as tough, and we had drunk all our water. And at that point we were extremely tired. The hike back was full of ups and downs. It had seemed that we were lost and we didn’t know that trail that we were taking was going to take us back. Luckily for us a mountain cyclist road by and helped us with directions. It turns out that we were on the right trail, but it was a long ways back to our car. About a mile and a half one of my friends started to cramp up. He had run out of water and so did I. He persevered the last mile, and we made it back to the parking lot. Overall, the hike was really tough and we all had a lot of fun. We probably hiked more than 8 miles. Now I know what I’ll be doing for the rest of the week; recouping from the hike and getting some rest to rid this bronchitis.

It’s been two Saturdays in a row where I didn’t get to do anything at all. Well, I’m still running and playing Final Fantasy. In fact, I have a race coming up next Saturday. It’s a 5K race. The event is called the Kids Count. It’s a fundraising event to build a Youth and Children’s Center. For $20 bucks you get to help out children get their center, and you get to run 3.1 miles. These races are fun. Most of the time you get a T-shirt along with your registration, and if you place in your age category you get a prize, which isn’t much but its nice to get something. Last time I got a digital clock and a coupon for a free car wash.

Back in the day when Super Nintendo ruled the video game consoles, I was a video game addict. The SNES had awesome role playing games (RPG). The ones I remember fondly was the Final Fantasy series. The first Final Fantasy game I played was Final Fantasy II. I remember playing it for months; leveling my characters to the max and beating it over and over again. The story was great and there was tons of magic spells to cast. Then in 1994, the most awesome game was released, Final Fantasy III. The Final Fantasy games are not sequels but rather a new and different story per game. Final Fantasy III was in-so-many ways better then its predecessor. The story was captivating and each character had their own personality. It had a great system of leveling up each character specifically; strength, defense, magic, or speed. I’ve beaten the game so many times. I use to have the game emulated on my computer. I played it from time to time, and again, beaten it several times more.

I’ve played many RPGs, but I don’t play as much as I use to during the SNES days. The last RPG was Diablo II on the PC. It’s a great game, but the game didn’t grab my attention as much as Final Fantasy III. A couple of years ago I browsing around the internet reading up on classic video games news I saw a poll listing people’s favorite RPG. Final Fantasy III was listed as the best RPG. I did some more searches and found another poll which had many more votes. Listed number 1 was NOT Final Fantasy III, but Final Fantasy VII. My game ranked 2nd. I was surprised. I’ve only played Final Fantasy VII as demo on my Sony Playstation, and I didn’t like it much. Maybe because it was way too short and the demo was made only to show off the graphics and in-game videos. I went and looked around on related forums and saw that many people in the RPG community agreed that Final Fantasy VII is the best RPG ever made. Final Fantasy VII was release for the Sony Playstation in 1998 and a PC version was released a year later.

The PC version is no longer being sold, and on the downside it doesn’t work with the latest Windows XP operating system, which was why I never bought the game to try it out. All my computers run Windows XP. Just a few days ago, I found out that someone had a patch to fix Final Fantasy VII to run on Windows XP. I was able to download the whole game online. (Yeah, I know it’s illegal, but I’m planning to buy a copy if I see it for sale in one of those dollar bins at Frys or Walmart.) Since last night I’ve been playing the game. The game is definitely out dated and the dialogue is cheesy as how old games are. I’m looking past it and hopefully beat the game before summer ends. Then I’ll see which RPG is the best. So more news will come about this when I beat it.