[i]I wrote this a while ago (i.e. before the PS2 party), but for whatever reason, I didn't get around to posting it until now.[/i]

Sorry about not updating in a while. This week has been pretty busy for me. We've got clients from the West Coast, and to accomodate them, I have to essentially work 3 hours later than normal.

About a week ago, Thursday I think, I met up with Elias and told him I lost my mojo with respect to DrumMania. I think I did 万華鏡 and got an A or B or something. Basically, worse than usual, but a lot better than on that day. Anyway, over the next 4 to 6 games, I start getting better and I get S on Agnus Dei twice in a row, and pass Model DD5 twice in a row, the first time being the first time I've passed it in Montreal.

Then Friday, I do some more DM, and I full combo Black Sheep for the first time, and I pass The Least 100 Sec auto-cymbal for the first time. I've tried it again maybe 3 or 4 times since and haven't gotten it again.

I bought an MP3 player. It's the iRiver if-p795.

It's merely decent. I had originally wanted the Rio Karma, but it looks like they don't make 'em anymore, and I can't find anywhere in Montreal that sells it. All the places I can buy it online either only ship to the states, or it's a used/broken model going on eBay.

Good parts: It plays OGG, has 512MB of space, and claims a battery life of 40 hours; I haven't even owned it that long yet, so I don't know if it's true, but I've played about 4 hours worth of music, and the battery meter is still full at five bars. It has an FM tuner which I haven't actually used yet, but supposedly I can listen to radio stations here in Montreal. I can also record what I hear on the radio stations directly to MP3 format. It also has a microphone and a line-in jack for recording from various sources; I haven't tried those features yet either. It also seems to have full kanji support; that is, it actually displays the tag info as "鬼姫 - 鬼の子合唱団" and not "?? - ??????" perhaps it even has full unicode support, but I don't have any bulgarian Mp3s to test it. The packaging is nice too. It comes with a carrying case, a wrist band, a nylon strap, earphones, batteries, a male to male audio mini jack (for the line in recording), and a USB cable. The player also comes loaded with 8 songs from artists who support the free distribution of their music.

Bad parts: I had trouble getting my computer to recognize it, and based on forum postings I've seen on Google, I'm not the only one. Apparently, you need to install all the software from the included CD before the first time you connect the player to your computer (or else you have go to through the windows registry and delete the USB entries it creates there; pretty messy). Also bad is that it requires you to use their software. I'm actually pretty pissed about this, because while I was at Futureshop considering this device, I specifically told Kilree about my concern that I want to make sure that when I plug the player in, it'll show up as a USB removeable drive so I can just drag and drop mp3 files from windows explorer, and he told me all mp3 players are like that. Well, apparently he was just bullshitting again, because this one requires you to use the "iRiver Music Manager" to load songs onto there. Also, for "copyprotection reasons", you can't take songs on the player and put them onto the computer, so I've lost the 8 bundled songs forever when I deleted them. Also, the "shuffle" feature sucks; I put 150 songs on the player, but the "shuffle" seems to be stuck choosing among only 20 of them, which I hear over and over again, and never get to hear the other 130 songs. Also, it doesn't have a lithion ion battery that I can recharge just by plugging it into a craddle or something like that. Instead, it takes an AA battery which I'll have to change every so often. Yes, I have recharable AAs, but it's still less convenient to open the player, and swap batteries than to just dock it to a cradle.

While at Futureshop, I was asking the guys there which of these players were capable of playing the Ogg Vorbis format, and none of them had heard of the format before, which is understandable if you're a random person off the street, but somewhat unacceptable if you're an employee of Futureshop who is supposed to answer questions the customer may have about the products. The first guy was really unhelpful; basically, he said he had no idea and left it at that. The second guy said he's surprised that there was an audio format out there 'cause he's a (self proclaimed) audio freak and he hasn't heard of it. So I told him a bit about it, and he said he prefered Apple's lossless format instead, and we sort of "hit it off" in that geeky sort of way. Anyway, so he took me over to the computers they had so that I could look up on the Internet which one of the players supported Ogg, and pretty much the iRiver was the only one (amongst the products at that store anyway). The player normally costs $170 CDN at FutureShop, but he offered to knock off $20 if I took the $50 3 year warranty. In other words, he was selling me the 3 year warranty at $30, which I decided was not too shabby ($10 per year), and, as he explained it, would allow me to get my device replaced within the next 3 years no questions asked, no need for a receipt. So I took it. With tax, I ended up paying $230.02, which makes me feel like a bit of a sucker after I've done some comparison shopping online, but on that day, I really felt like I wanted an mp3 player right then and there. I'm not used to coding with no background Drum'nBass music playing.

Meiko's back, and she brought a bunch of PS2 games with her. I haven't actually had a chance to play any of them yet, but I'm particularly looking forward to the IIDXes. Songs now available to me include Paranoia Survivor Max, Bag, Max 300, Abyss ~The Heavens Remix~, and probably some other really good ones I can't remember off the top of my head now (is 桜 on 7th or 9th?) Anyway, there's gonna be a Japanese PS2 Game party this weekend. If you're a hot girl, show up.