Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Archive for 2002

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  • Well, trying to make this a weekly format thing obviously fizzled out. What with me starting work on Friday, I just give up. I’ll keep this site up and put up stuff of interest whenever I feel like it, just like before. So what’s new? As I said, work starts Friday. I went to an orientation for the job last Friday and it seems like a tough and demanding job, but I rise to the challenge in any case.

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  • Square Enix

    Anyway, I’ve had a couple of days to think about it, so I’d like to share my thoughts on the matter. First, the facts: Enix and Square are merging. Square stock will be bought out for Enix stock at 0.81 Square per 1 Enix. The Square president will be head of Square Enix, the Enix board remains in place, they’ll move into Enix headquarters in Shibuya. All currently announced releases will go on as scheduled.

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  • The Bourne Identity A new action hero is Bourne I was a bit anxious to see this movie, as I had thoroughly enjoyed the book of the same name a long time ago, and I was hoping the movie would give me the same satisfaction. The Bourne Identity stars Matt Damon as rogue CIA agent/amnesiac Jason Bourne. In his quest to uncover his own identity, Jason travels all around Europe pursued by the CIA’s agents and dragging along an innocent gypsy girl who just happened to be his best shot for a ride to Paris.

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  • Birthday #24

    I turned 24 yesterday. Generally uneventful birthday, as usual. I’m glad I got the whining done in the last post. Spent the night before at David’s (whose birthday is a couple of days before mine). Dave, Mon and I played approximately seven hours of CvS2, watched a Jet Li flick then played around eight hours of Warcraft III. WC3 is the bomb! (And it further highlights my craving for a new computer) Anyway, went home the next morning, got some sleep.

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  • I’m pissed off. Today I went to Ortigas for a job interview with a nameless IT company where my cousin Rachel works. I was quite optimistic too — the position was for a “Java Trainee.” I was more than willing to be trained, and a trainee position meant you didn’t have to be proficient in Java right? Turns out I was wrong. =( Apparently they needed someone with some experience in Java, preferably with a project or two under his belt.

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  • 27 Jul 2002

    Don't that just beat all? - Rei, Breath of Fire III I recently had a talk with my uncle. Tito Ferry is the head of ePeople, an IT consultancy that handles projects for the government. My mom had me meet with him hoping he could give me some job-hunting advice. He says that the best thing to do would be to specialize in something like network engineering, 'coz that's where big bucks are, or something.

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  • I originally wasn’t going to have a rant today, but while surfing the web I thought about one of the things I like about it: personal websites. That’s right, personal pages. Some people might argue that personal pages are like the dregs of the internet. And they’re probably right. Given that any random joe-on-the-street can get on Geocities and build his own website, (like royness.vze.com for instance) we’re certainly bound to see all sorts of stuff (and accordingly, all sorts of crap) on the internet.

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  • Cheap Rushing

    [Posted on the GameFAQs message board in response to endless whining about rushes. Last I heard, Battle.net had a competitive ladder system, meaning if you want to go up on the ladder, you have to win. If rushing is the means for that win, you should go for it. What does this mean? If you don’t want to be rushed, don’t play on Battle.net, because on Battle.net people play primarily to win and secondarily for fun.

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  • Sometimes my still being unemployed depresses me greatly (Although my periods of depression typically last no more than thirty minutes.) The biggest problem in my job-hunting woes is the fact that the type of job I want varies greatly from what I have training in. I want to be involved in IT or programming, but I don’t have a lot of the skills necessary to succeed in those fields. I will probably always regret not shifting to Computer Science or even Computer Engineering early on in college.

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  • Well I finally decided to start a full-blown web journal. I used to keep one some years ago — I think it greatly helped me develop my english skills. Or not. Anyway, I tend to run my mouth off for paragraphs at a time anyway, and so many things run through my head at any given time it probably makes sense to put down at least some of it on paper (or in a computer at least.

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  • Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth

    First off, I haven’t finished the game yet, I’m somewhere in Chapter 5. I stopped playing the game a month or so ago out of sheer irritation. For the uninitiated, H:RBE is a tactical RPG for the PSX, released during the last year the PSX. The game is similar in some respects to games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre, with an emphasis on turn-based squad-level combats. Unlike FFT and TO’s similar Active Time system, H:RBE uses a system called RAP, where each character can perform as many actions as he wants provided he still has the RAP gauge to pay for it.

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  • I stood there wordlessly, inching my way through the unending mass of people. There must have been several hundred people crammed into less than two hundred square meters of mall area, interspersed with some twenty cubicles filled with various displays and banners. What madness is this you ask? What product could be so enticing that hundreds of otherwise sane people to participate in such a gathering, jostling for space and risking being elbowed, stepped on or maybe even pick pocketed?

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  • Snorks are underwater smurfs.

    Hey, we have cable again! Okay, so we never actually _lost_ cable, but it felt like we had, back when the Star network withdrew its channels from Home Cable around six months ago. Now they’re back, which means I once again get to watch Simpsons, Futurama and Whose Line Is It Anyway? =) In other news, I’m still unemployed and cashless. =(
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  • So the ECE board exams are now over. Six months (okay three) of hard work and preparation (well alright, occasionally glancing at my books) and what do we get? A bunch of questions chosen seemingly at random. The Math and Electronics parts were good enough actually, and I felt pretty confident there. The second day was bad. The Communications exam might as well have been a random set of questions about cookie dough and displacer beasts.

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  • Do it to Julia!

    Four days before board exam. Will borrow calculator from Switch. Holiday on Monday. Edsamail is no longer free. That sucks, and now I have a new e-mail account: roytang (at) softhome (dot) net. Looks like The Gaming Intelligence Agency is really dead.
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  • Beavers and Ducks

    April Fools day today. The Gaming Intelligence Agency says they’re shutting down, but it’s likely one of their famous AFD pranks. Board exams coming up next week, Tuesday and Wednesday. I need to borrow a calculator — the one I have isn’t on their list. I really should study more but for some reason I’m really confident. promises to study more So I applied for a job at ASTI. Sure it’s a government place, but I know a lot of guys there and it looks like fun.

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  • (Originally available on the now-defunct NFT Zu website) (2018 Edit: I found this in my WordPress drafts folder, not sure why it wasn’t published when I first imported it. It’s true it was on my old site, but I can not find a reliable indicator of what date it was published. So I will publish it with an arbitrarily chosen date of March 1, 2002.) Officially, this rant should be available upon the re-opening of the NFT Zu webpage, version 4.

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  • 12 Feb 2002

    Website updates: New text files in features section! Ack… haven’t been doing much lately. My time has been consumed by the evil monster that is Sierra’s Betrayal at Krondor. It’s an RPG based on Raymond Feist’s Riftwar series of books. Haven’t read the books myself, but the game is well done, and is still enjoyable despite its age (I think it was released in ‘92 or such). The game was released by Sierra as freeware to promote the sequel, and it can be downloaded at happypuppy.

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  • 12 Jan 2002

    Updates: Added Square NES ROMs, Programming section, updated links. Went back to text-based navigation. While image navigation is nice, it’s hard to update and slow-loading. Added links to funtrivia trivia quizzes. It’s been a slow couple of days really. Some board reviewing, sporadic Japanese learning. Finished DW7 a couple of nights ago — finally! Currently playing on PS: Ehrgeiz Quest Mode! Kinda tough, tho. For the NES, a discussion on FFFade me download a whole bunch of Square NES ROMs!

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  • 07 Jan 2002

    For some reason, I keep wanting to update this site. I’m actually doing this more often than studying for the board, studying game development, studying Japanese or writing anything else. I wonder why? Anyway, I added a humor page and a special “Who Am I?” page. Check ‘em out. Also the Anime ROMs site should be fully operational by now. So I went and saw Lord of the Rings last Friday.

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  • 06 Jan 2002

    Hopefully, the site is now Netscape-safe… Uploaded more stuff today: I put up an ECE Board Exam Reviewer — it’s a software that helps me review for the upcoming ECE boards. It’s in the files section. I really should add that to the list of resolutions: WILL STUDY FOR BOARD EXAM! I also decided to renovate and re-use the geocities site so I put up an Anime ROMs site there. I wanted to put up the Anime ROMs before, but I was worried about what Topcities might do, since Ihaven’t heard anything about what they do to copyright violations on member sites.

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  • 04 Jan 2002

    Well… you learn something new everyday! And today I learned that Netscape is very strict about HTML coding. Unclosed tags will screw up even the simplest of web pages! Spent quite some time rewriting the HTML to be Netscape friendly…
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  • 03 Jan 2002

    Changed the layout even more! Added a start page containing the menu only, so that visitors wouldn’t have to listen to me ranting all the time. Uploaded some stuff, since my COMPUTER IS PROBABLY GOING TO DIE SOON! It’s on its last legs… I can feel it. Over the next couple of days I’ll probably be uploading stuff that I don’t have backed up elsewhere. For now the only new upload is a bunch of high school pics.

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  • 01 Jan 2002

    New Year’s Resolutions: Write more. Fanfiction, original works, whatnot. I need to shape up my writing skills. Devote more time to game development. My interest sort of waned after a certain group project I was on fizzled out, but I’m gonna get back on track.
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