• Try to spell several words wrong on your resume just so you can see how good the hiring manager is at catching mistakes.
• List every job you have EVER had; it is just an unfounded rumor that most companies only care about the last three or so.  They need to know how proficient you were at flipping hamburgers in your teen years and will likely attempt to contact this employer, regardless of how long ago it was.
• Try to keep your resume as long as possible; most employers print them out before going through them and imagine how impressed they will be with the thickness of yours compared to the others.
• You never know what skill an employer might be looking for, so put down absolutely everything that you can do.  This can range from proficiency with office software to being able to drink a fifth of Vodka at one sitting.
• Rate yourself on your skills so they don’t have to bother asking you about them.  Give yourself so-so ratings on most things so that they will think you are honest.
• Try to schedule interviews for Fridays so that you can get in on their Casual Friday action by just wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
• Always keep your options open, so make sure to feverishly search for other jobs in the middle of your interview.
• Keep friends and loved ones up to date on how you think the interview is going by texting them and updating Facebook / Twitter in the midst of the interview; it’s perfectly acceptable to ask the interviewer to hang on for a second while you do this.
• If they ask you what the worst thing is about yourself, say that you like to masturbate into the water cooler, then laugh uproariously while explaining that was just a joke (whether it was or not.)
• If they ask you what the best thing is about yourself, say that you don’t masturbate into the water cooler (follow-up jokes go a long way.)
• Most companies like to get a feel for how you handle high pressure situations, so when they ask you how you’d respond to a massive outage of some sort say “I’d start looting.”  This shows initiative.
• Salary negotiations can be tricky, so try to give yourself some bargaining leverage by saying that you have a huge meth habit and gambling addiction.

Hopefully this guide will prove very useful to you and by following it you’re bound to find the perfect job in no time!  Good luck!

Before leaving I gathered up some things that I might want with me, videos, manga, some documents for school to study and set about putting them on the iPad.

• Video was no problem since I already had a lot of it for the iPhone; I didn’t bother reripping it to a higher resolution and the video scaled for the iPhone looked fine.
• Manga was downloaded and this is where things started getting fun.  I had a directory of Yotsuba (which I have read but you can never read enough) and Skip Beat (which I have never read.)  The Yotsuba directory, after several minutes, was converted to iPad specs by iTunes (you can’t just dump the image directory straight onto the iPad) and transferred to the device.  The Skip Beat directory, being larger, was not as happy.  The first message iTunes gave me was that there wasn’t enough free space for the images.  600mb directory with 6GB free and not enough free space?  I broke the images into two different directories thinking iTunes was just stupid about handling so many images and was proven correct as it managed to convert and then put both directories onto the iPad (this took nearly 30 minutes.)  Great, let’s see how it looks.  I opened up photos on the iPad and…the images aren’t in the correct order.  Time was ticking away before my flight while doing all of this, so I didn’t have time to look into it thoroughly, but upon further investigation the iPad sorts images by date modified.  There is no way to change this.  Looking around people say you could either right click each image and choose ‘save as’ to change the modified date (thousands of images, no way) or make a new album in iPhoto and change the sort there, then sync it through iTunes, then the iPad will display the images in the correct order.  Either solution is pretty silly when you should just be able to change the sort order on the iPad.
• Office documents so I could study for school….well, after fighting with the image thing for longer than I had hoped, my time was nearly at an end.  I download the Apple apps to view .docs and .xls and … umm… how do I view these?  They’re saved to my harddrive but how do I get them on the iPad?  The only way to get them onto the iPad is by selecting them in iTunes and then syncing it, then opening the app on the iPad and importing it.  How convenient.  Sadly as I was out of time I wasn’t able to sync my documents to the iPad, so this was another loss.

Fine, so I have movies and out of order managa and no school work on my iPad on the plane, which was fine as it was fun for watching Doctor Who.  I figure I can mess with it more when I get to the hotel, only to find out the internet at the hotel in Vegas is wired only, there’s no wireless nearby to borow and the iPad doesn’t have 3G.  I guess I could use it for taking photos off my camera, but you need to have a dongle for that.  I could force my in-laws to watch Birdemic on the one of the widescreen TVs but you need to have a different dongle for that.  I can’t download anything through iTunes to put on it, because my Mac laptop was back home and my netbook can’t sync with it.  So I can pretty much watch just watch videos on it, or play the same apps I have for my iphone.

The iPad is a pretty neat piece of hardware, but having to funnel everything through iTunes is very cumbersome and I don’t really see the point.  Why not just let it mount as flash storage and have Movies, Documents, and Pictures like my home directory on OS X that you can browse to using Finder or some other file tool?  The iPad is very good for some things, very annoying for some things, and convenient as I didn’t have to take it from my backpack either time going through airport security.  But is it a complete replacement for the laptop like Apple is saying? No, because you have to keep going back to your laptop/desktop to put things on the iPad and if you plan on taking a vacation with one, make sure you have the 3G model.

Moverload

Being that this is the internet, there are always a lot of really pointless arguments going on about really pointless things; one of the discussions that seems to pop up a lot recently is whether Moe and every anime that has it is garbage.  The answer is no, but there is a disturbing trend where Moe is involved.  The way I see it, Moe is to anime as computer animation is to big-budget Hollywood movies.  You have movies like Lord of the Rings where the animation really helps the movie and many of the key scenes could not have been accomplished as well without it.  Then you have movies like Transformers 2 where they obviously spent more time rendering the special effects than they ever spent working on the script or finding stars who could act.  Computer animation is merely a tool and the way it’s used can leave you with either a clever, brilliant piece of work, or Jar-Jar Binks.

By now you’re thinking that’s nice, but what does it have to do with anime?  The recent trend with anime has been to take a very thin story with substandard animation and characters, slather a thick layer of Moe on top and serve it up to hordes of squealing otaku.  If it’s Moe enough, everyone will talk about how Moe this and that is and never once mention that the show doesn’t have a story at all, or that the characters are fresh pressed from the Moe-Mold.  Yet, here is where a lot of the people arguing this are getting it wrong…it really doesn’t matter.  There’s still plenty of really good anime with awesome stories and characters (Hatsukoi Limited for exmaple) being made and the Moepocalypse hasn’t affected this at all.

The other portion of this Moe argument is people complaining about what others are watching; it really doesn’t affect you at all and you aren’t being forced to watch it at gunpoint, so shut up about it.  On that same note, it would be nice if the people who watched those shows didn’t have to mention the word Moe every five minutes and talk about how Moe everything is in the show ad nauseum.

All in all, they make different kinds of cars and different kinds of music because not everyone likes the same things.  One person’s K-ON is another person’s Gundam and you the amount of negative input you should have on what someone else is watching is zero.

1. Come up with a good, simple idea for people to get /stay in touch with each other
2. Get a lot of users because people like this good, simple idea
3. Notice that you have a lot of users on your site and start tossing tons of ads and additional features at them to try to gain / keep even more users and make a ton of money in the process
4. Pollute your good, simple site with so much crap that everyone starts moving onto the next good, simple site.
5. Close your site down as you lose all of your users

So as you watch Facebook constantly redesign their site to make it harder to use and Twitter add more and more features that no one ever asked for, start thinking about the next good idea for a social media site as yours could be the next big thing.

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr. Seuss

The easier things get, the easier it is to screw them all up – me

The definition of an idiot is someone who doesn’t learn from their mistakes – me

The tallest tree catches the most wind – Japanese Proverb

If you head towards the light, the shadows will fall behind you – Unknown

Specks of dust piled up become a mountain – Japanese Proverb

When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better – Mae West

If you spend all of your time complaining of things about yourself that you don’t like, eventually you’ll convince everyone else that you’re right – me

People can be like magnets, those who are positive tend to attract far more than those who are negative – me

If you don’t find anything about yourself attracrtive, no one else will, either – me

You're doing it wrong! OMG FAIL!

While I was sitting on a group call the other night with some of my classmates from Intro to Japanese and listening to this girl be obnoxious to the teacher, it occured to me that the internet has indeed made some people shockingly stupid.

The problem is that people are so used to flaming everyone on message boards and social media sites that they get a little too used to doing it and think that it’s okay to do it all of the time.  For example my teacher (keep in mind this is the first group session) asked if everyone was at a computer and had the class site open, and obnoxious weaboo girl says “we’re obviously at a computer, how else would be we on skype?”  She also proceeded to correct everyone on their pronunciation and inform everyone that she had been teaching herself Japanese for several years now.  (That always translates to: I totally fucking love Naruto and I made my mom buy me Rosetta Stone.)  After several more witty comments, the teacher finally asked her to leave the call (you know you’re off to a good start then) to which she said she didn’t mind staying on because she was used to having to go slower than she’d like because everyone else was so much slower than her.  She finally left the call after several rather unsubtle hints and things progressed normally after that, but that made me wonder why someone would be so overtly obnoxious to not just a teacher, but to a teacher that you’re supposed to be extra polite to in deference to her being a sensei in a Japanese class.

Then when you start looking at the way people generally treat each other on the inernet, where they don’t think twice about flaming someone for an innocent remark or for not liking Arashi as much as they do, someone who spends vast amounts of time on the internet would lose the ability to have a normal conversation with normal people in the real world.  I have often wondered what the truly obnoxious people are like in real life.  I know that some of them are really quiet and shy in person, then when they hop on the message boards they’re a bitter little flame thrower.  Some, as I found out the other night, are just unberable to talk to for any amount of time because they’re horribly obnoxious.

So here’s a little piece of advice; you’re really better off just not flaming anyone on the internet because it’s pointless and stupid in the first place, but if you are going to be that person, don’t actually do it in real life, because there’s a decent chance someone will punch you in the face repeatedly (and everyone around will cheer.)

Crappy Translation

Being the kind, thoughtful, otaku that I am, I always think that it’s better to go ahead and buy manga rather than just reading the scanslations online.  The problem with this is that some of the manga companies, Tokyopop being the worst offender, don’t do a good job.  While there are a lot of examples of this, the most recent one to irk me was Your & My Secret (also known as My Barbaric Girlfriend if you want to read the better version online.)  Here’s the setup of the story: a wussy guy and a girl who is beautiful yet brash end up swapping bodies through an experiment gone wrong.  So the guy you see in the picture is actually a girl and the girl in the picture is her best friend who she has started to like since turning into a guy.  In the scanslation she says that they are going to be late for “Anpanma Empire’s Counter Attack” which is obviously some form of martial arts / military / action flick.  Which is interesting because you have the girl inside of a guy’s body picking a very guy movie to see.  In the Tokyopop version she says that they are going to be late to see The Hannah Montana movie, which doesn’t fit in with her personality at all.  So why did Tokyopop decide to put in Hannah Montana rather than the original movie title?  If you think it’s because American audiences wouldn’t get what Anpanma Empire ‘s Counter Attack was, you’d be wrong as that movie doesn’t exist in Japan, either.  If you think it’s because Tokyopop just doesn’t care and is bad at their job, you’d be right.  One thing that Tokyopop habitually does is try to change the translations in manga so that it rings a bell with American audiences, but I don’t think they have any clue who their audience is.  Invoking the sacred tween name of Hannah Montana won’t cause tons of 12 year old girls to buy your manga, but it will cause the people who like and enjoy manga to cringe at something so obviously out of place.

Good Translation

You might think I’m being unfairly harsh about this, but this is just an example of something that Tokyopop and the others do all the time.  They try to make manga cool and edgy and trendy with the kids by putting in their own interpretations rather than translations.  In one scene at the beginning of the manga, the main character says “let’s go” and Tokyopop translates it to “let’s bounce.”  In the Tokyopop version of Boys Be, they have two of the characters checking a girl out and one says that she has a “badunkadunk butt.”  Boys Be is not a new manga at all; what are the odds that two Japanese guys 10 years ago were talking about someone’s badunkadunk butt?

So here’s what I want from you manga publishers: I want you to translate the manga.  I don’t care what you think tweenage girls might think it cool.  I don’t care what you think the characters might say if they were American.  I don’t care what you think they would say if they were on an MTV reality show.  I want to know what they said; I’d like to stress that I want to know WHAT THEY SAID, not what you think they might have said if they were this or that…just what they said.

Sheryl Nome

Fair Warning: This is one of the rare Serious Posts

The one thing that I’ve been noticing a lot of lately is people who run around saying that they can’t do this, or that….they’ve tried hard to quit smoking, quit drinking, quit overeating, but they just aren’t able to do it.  The interesting thing is these people always act like it’s the cigarettes, the bottle, the hamburger that are at fault; they always seem to leave themselves out of the equation.  It would be easier and more honest to simply say “I tried to defeat myself and I failed.”  I think at the point where you go into battle with yourself and you lose is the point where you should just give up trying to achieve anything in life.  I guess these are the same people that want someone else to be responsible for everything in their lives as they are obviously incapable of handling them.  The reason why these things bother me is that I have first-hand experience with some of them and the reason why I stopped doing this and that was because I wanted to.  I didn’t want anything having any control over me, so I just stopped, and that’s all that anyone else has to do.  Sure your body may be a jerk to you and crave this or that, but that’s what the saying mind over matter is for.  You don’t actually need to eat that burger, you’re not actually starving, you won’t die without the next puff of that cigarette.  You know this perfectly well and all you have to do is not do it.

So why did I put Sheryl Nome at the top of the post?  Well, she actually embodies this mindset pretty well.  Anytime she faces an obstacle she assures herself that she can overcome it because “she’s Sheryl Nome.”  Sure, she got a bit disheartened when she found out that she was dying, but that’s perfectly reasonable and she overcame that as she sang in the shelter, saying “if Ranka can be the Princess of Hope then I can sing even in the depths of despair.”  I think this is one of the reasons that I like Sheryl a lot better than Ranka, because she is facing a lot of adversity while going from being the Galactic Nymph to a dying woman crying in the rain in the middle of the street.  Yet, she didn’t give up, because she’s Sheryl.

And how does this relate to someone quitting smoking, or trying to quit drinking?  Sure you can struggle and sure you can face hardships, but the only obstacle you really have to face is yourself.  Then you can look back and realize that you defeated the you that was a weakling and crybaby.

Modern and Warfare!

One of the top grossing games in history is Modern Warfare 2, a game which allows you to not only play single player missions (a fact almost nobody is aware of) and coop missions locally, but without a doubt the largest use for this game is online multiplayer.  The sad thing is that there is no instruction guide for new players looking to get into this online action.  Luckily, as usual, I am here to correct that problem and make your lives better in general by showing you how to best play this game online.

• The most important thing is to pick an online screenname that tells everyone how extremely awesome and tough you are.  Your name should contain either a reference to blood, money, shooting someone, or some form of explosive device.  The best name for beginners would be something like BLOODMONEYHEADSHOTNITRO.  A lot of people won’t know that you’re extremely cool unless you mix the case of your name so that it’s something like blOODmOnEyHEadshOTniTRO.
• It’s important to add a clan tag in front of your name whether you’re in a clan, or not.  Most clans online consist of one or two people anyway, so it doesn’t really matter if you’re the only person with that clan tag.  Clan tag naming is pretty strict in that it must reference either female genetalia or homosexuality.
• The media often tries to portray FPS like Modern Warfare 2 as the root of violent behavior, whch is untrue as you’ll find the online community to be quite caring of each other’s health.  More often than not you will be playing with someone who has the microphone gently inserted into one of their nostrils so that everyone playing with them can closely monitor their breathing.  Many other people like to let you know what their home life is like by talking to their mom or telling their little brother to shut the hell up.  These things can be viewed as annoying only by the most heartless of players, so if anyone ever says anything about your nostril mic, greet them in the warm MW2 way by calling them female genitalia or a homosexual.
• Most of the games that you will play are team warfare, where you and several other people you have never met work together to accomplish the objective of beating the enemy.  As you play a few games you will see that most people attempt to accomplish this objective by picking a sniper class and sitting in one spot for the entire match while never managing a kill.  This balances things out quite well as most of the members of the other team are doing the same thing.

Christmas!

It’s that time of year again, so here is a list of some of the anime episodes I’ve found featuring Christmas, feel free to add any others in the comments

• Chrno Crusade 12
• Those Who Hunt Elves II 9
• Mamotte Shugogetten 10
• Magikano 11
• Ah My Goddess II 3
• Always My Santa (Itsudatte My Santa)
• Futakoi 10
• Mamoru-kun 12
• Ai Yori Aoshi Enishi 0
• Fruits Basket 9(new years, but still)
• Read or Die 10
• Sister Princess 20
• Vandread 10
• Toradora 19
• Ichigo Mashimaro 12
• Hatuskoi Limited 06
• Love HIna Winter Wish
• Ranma OAV 2
• KissXSis OVA 2
• B Gata H Kei 04