So AnimeNext ‘09 was a blast!  you can check out all the pictures  in the normal place, so enjoy!  It really was a good time.  the Zodi-ACK! girls ran a 24-hour booth, so that was crazy!   The Cosplay Burlesque show’ I must say, was better than last year, but it seems they still need to manage the whole thing better.  It started about 15 minutes late and went about an hour over its scheduled time-slot (not that any of us in the audience were complaining…)!  Overall tho, great show.  The Dealer’s room was pretty big and nicely laid out this year as well. Picked up an advance copy of the 1st (of 2) box of “Romeo X Juliet“, an anime Dan & I got a sneak peak of @ AB09.  Artist’s Alley was awesome if not crowded, but there were so many talented people there.  Saw a bunch of friends from college there (one of the many reasons I go every year): Scott & his GF, Brad, Katy, Logan, Mike Opperman & Mike Sidel. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, things have been alright, if not a little dull, as of late. Just not much going on really other than Con prep. As I said last time I’ve started Baguazhang with Dan & my Mom.  We’re learning @ Master Aiping Cheng’s Tai Chi & Qigong Center in Milford, CT.  I have to say, it’s a great experience – and we’ve only done 2 classes.

Planted most of the garden last weekend – not sure how it’ll fair, some of the tomato seedlings didn’t look like they would make it.

Got Rob & Dan started into Soul Eater – they’ve just hit the halfway point @ episode 25.  They seem to be enjoying it a whole lot.

Speaking of Rob & Dan, we’ve become more interested in the Steampunk genre recently.  We’re working on characters to base Original Cosplay costumes on, as well as a story for the characters for Cons. Dan’s created a steampunk Gypsy, Rob has a kinda crazy Bombardier and I have a kind of Mad Scientist/Alchemist – named Stalbach.  We started designing symbols to brand or somehow fashion onto the backs of our characters’ jacket, coat, shirt, whatever.  I ended up basing mine on my tattoo and came up with something more fleshed out than I had planned.  The Gear of Stalboch.  So yeah, that’s exciting.

My Birthday was nice – pretty quiet and relaxing.  A bunch of us went out to TGIFriday’s for Dinner – that was delicious.

But yeah, like I said, not much that’s been going on around here that’s exciting or anything.  We’ll see how things pick up after AN09.

-=Justin=-

OK, no updates in a while, yikes!
Gonna try to make this quick since I’m short on time :-\
2 new Galleries up. Check ‘em out!

Songstress Karaoke – Our friend, Cat’s dream was to have a birthday party @ a Karaoke lounge with all her friends and in cosplay of Songstress form a la Final Fantasy X-2.  I assume this dream was before I was included in that group of friends.  Nevertheless I threw together a last-second costume where I attempted to take Yuna’s Songstress outfit and modify it for male usage and then attempt to add a “Goth” theme to it … results may vary.  either way it was a fun and hilarious time!  see for yourself.

Anime Boston 2009 – nuff said really…  This year was not at all like last year’s “LineCon ‘08″  but it has been dubbed “PlagueCon ‘09″ since everyone and their mother got sick.  almost anyways – I had whatever it was a few days prior so I remained immune (or I started the plague, take your pick)

Other than that – Job’s going well, Joanie is awesome (if not a little sick from the con), and I’ve just started Ba Gua classes.  All in all, lotsa fun right here!!

I may expand upon this all more later, but for now, good night!

-=Justin=-

That’s what happened on 03/14/09. much has happened since then, but then, I don’t have pictures of anything else. Pictures DO, however, exist for this fantastic event - so check it out.
So since then I’ve been working for Achievement First as an IT Associate which is awesome.  It’s the job I was hoping to get and it turns out to be the job I’ve been looking to do.  I am in charge of the Networks, PC’s & Laptops @ 2 New Haven charter schools – Amistad Academy Elementary School & Amistad Academy Middle School.  I also help out with the High School and Elm City College Prep Elem. & Mid. schools (all located in New Haven).  It’s way fun.  That’s really all there is to it – I enjoy what I’m doing right now.

Went to ICon the 1st weekend on April, with Dan.  it was a lot of fun. I took a whole buncha pictures which promptly fizzled when I tried to pull them off the [fried] SD when I got back… soooo not happy about that.  It was a lot of fun tho – Dealer’s room kicked ass, got to meet and hang out with  the Gaming Guest of Honor – Jess Hartley, saw a cosplay Burlesque Show – similar to the one from AnimeNext 2008 – same troupe, some different dancers,   also attended a few panels that turned out ot be both informative and hilarious!  All in all it was an awesome time and my only regret is that the pictures never made it out alive.

Also hatching a new costume idea – this one original, not a cosplay of an estalished character tho it does pull ideas from many places.  I ended up buying a pair of goggles with interchangeable colored lenses and inserts with a leather jaw mask – both seeming to fit in a steampunk style.  so I’m now brainstorming for a steampunk mad scientist costume of my own design.  gonna be fairly expensive and difficult to build in parts because I need to use leather – light leather, but leather nonetheless.  Hopefully it’ll look as good IRL as it does in my head.  we’ll see.

-=Justin=-

First Person to successfully tell me why my keyboard looks like this:

OMGWTFBBQ (Better image to come ... eventually).

wins a free … hmmmmm…  we’ll go with – loaf of homemade wheat bread since that seems to be what I’ve been making recently!

(anyone who has used this setup or actually WORKS in the computer field is already disqualified, so nyah!)

proper post about how I feel about the new job I started to follow soon … ish.

-=Justin=-

Been stuck on this song for a while now – “BaleOut-Final” by RevoLucian. For those who don’t know, it’s a techno remix of the famous Christian Bale Rant. It’s a free download here (there are 3 versions now – the original, an extended mix and a “clean mix” meaning all t he swears are just beeped out like when the news sites had the original rant out). Again – for those living under a rock or who just don’t pay attention to media and news like this, the rant itself is heavily obscenity-laden so it stands to reason that this song is pretty much focused around Bale’s constant dropping of the F-Bomb. Overall it’s got a good beat and is pretty funny when you realize how stupid the rant was in the first place.

Other than that last week of freedom has been an interesting ride. I start work on Monday, the 16th @ 9:00 am. I’m pretty excited considering this is the job I’ve been looking for. I got all the paperwork via email and I’ve already filled it out and sent it in so I should be good to go on my first day. Just found out I’m getting a company laptop – I find that pretty exciting as well!

Despite the excitement though I seem to be up and down emotionally – not fully sure why right now. Sometimes I’m fine and having fun, then I just get hypersensitive to the people around me and I just need to cool off for a while. Sadly I also seem to be having some communication problems with some others. I can’t get in touch with some people when I really need to… Worst thing is to get a Voicemail greeting when you really just need to talk to someone, yanno? I fully realize some of my friends are fairly busy people, but I’ve tried many different times of day/night and it seems to be the same thing more often than not. I’m sure I’ll get it all sorted out eventually. Last night I just went out for a drive – haven’t done that in forever. Took 2 hours – drove randomly to try to get myself lost (I was gonna get back with my GPS – but I as much as I kept going to places I didn’t know and taking random streets, I kept coming up to places I know. Thought about driving to Mass, but I couldn’t get through to clear it with t hem, so I decided not to. We’ll see how this weekend goes – the Boondocks & Booze should lift my spirits a bit (pun intended) and barring that I start on Monday, so that should keep my mind off things for a while (Mon – Fri anyway).

Last weekend, with the acceptance of the job and salary, I went halvsies on a new HDTV with my roommate, Nick. I ended up deciding on a 47″ Phillips model. It is very pretty. Spent a lot of the rest of the week getting everything working just the way I wanted with the TV. Everything works beautifully now

Oh yeah, almost forgot – Pics from Otaku Fest in Cambridge, MA (03/01/09) are up as well now.

Well, back to getting ready for the weekend.

-=Justin=-

Well, it’s been well over a month – Oops!
Actually, I had told myself that I would forgo this and a few other activities in until I was able to find a job. So can you guess why I’m posting again? That’s right – I’ll be employed soon enough!! (Not you what you were expecting? I’ll get to it and you’ll understand.)
So February went pretty much as planned. Work for Health Net until the 13th, got let go with the other contractors and dig into the job search more furiously than before. Found and applied to a ton of jobs via:

• Monster.com
• Careerbuilder.com
• Dice.com
• Craigslist.com as well as a new site some co-workers gave me – LinkedIn.

Did a bit more updating to the site itself – Got the Music Section all up and working.  Obviously new stuff will be added when available but right now there are only the 4 things that we all know about – because that’s all there is.  I’m (still) working on a fifth so that’ll be up … whenever.
Read the rest of this entry »

OK so another gallery added to the Normal Life album.  My Aunt Laura wanted some company going up to Mohegan Sun Casino this Saturday to see a free concert by  band called the “Ballas Hough Band.”  I agreed to go and it was a good time – I though the Band was actually really good!  her camera isn’t the best so I brought mine and I got some decent pictures and some pretty good video as well.  so the pictures are up on the Gallery as I mentioned  and the videos from the concert can be found @ my YouTube site at the moment:

http://www.youtube.com/user/shock83j16

So enjoy those for now, I’m still working on getting some of that other stuff together that I mentioned I wanted to try to put up, but as of right now I have too many projects going on:

• Working on putting together my Franken Stein cosplay for Anime Boston
• Transposing and arranging a piece of music from an original score (Final Fantasy Prologue/Castle Music)
• Working on another Original Piece using Garage Band as my Mixer.  (I’ll prolly put a sample up when  I get the other [finished] stuff up too…
• Trying to find a job to go into when my current contract is up on 02/13/08
• Trying to get a good linux UPnP media server working with proper Transcoding of video files for the XBoX 360

but, Yar… that be about it.  Stress is starting to get to me and I can’t wait for the 13th – not because I’ll be out of a job, but because once I’m out Joanie’s coming down for the weekend.  Chances are it’ll be my last happy weekend  for a while – the way things are going anyway.  well, still trying to keep my head above water here, so time to dive back in.

-=Justin=-

So, the 1st post of the new year…  Buncha new things around here.  Obvious Christmas newness aside I’ve upgraded Gwin (My server).  Site was down for a few days after the upgrade because I had to reconfigure the apache server and ports and no-ip.com reg stuff.  All looks good now.  Just need one more thing…

Server – Has:

• New Motherboard – GOAL3+ 754 SiS 761 GX Micro ATX Motherboard
• New Chip – AMD Sempron 1.6GHZ 64 Bit
• New Media HDD – 1TB
• New system – Ubuntu 8.10 AMD_64

Server – Needs:

• New Gwin (v2.0) sticker for the case – cuz I likes it like that (Zodi-ACK! is working on it)
• New Case… maybe – current one doesn’t really have any issues and has served me well…

So that’s all nice and new!    Obligatory Christmas Schwag listing:

• FMA Season 2 (Parts 1 & 2)
• Aquarion – Complete Series
• Air Gear – Complete Series Boxed Set
• Phantom of the Opera Nutcracker
• Earmuffs
• Garmin nuvi 200W
• Candy
• a Bunch of Gift cards that I’ve already spent.

So there you have it.  On top of all t hat I have 2 new galleries I’ve added onto the site

A set from my Trip Up to Canobie Lake Park w/ Joanie & friends (07/22/08), and a new set from this New Years Where I stayed & celebrated w/ Joanie, Rue, Ashleigh & Raye @ the Zodi-ACK! residence (That’s the one that’s showing on the sidebar right now).  so check ‘em out and enjoy.  Also, may be changing around a few things on the site as I just registered a MySpace Music acct for the Techno stuff I’ve done and am in the process of getting back into again – http://www.myspace.com/drshock39n39frie – so it looks like I may be splitting shocklog into a hybrid Photo/Music site.  we’ll see how that goes

-=Justin=- Out!

Just a quick link more or less for my own purpose of remembering it.

Nifty little article even if it is in engrish translated from German

Edit:  also add de Blob to the Software section of the wishlist.  that is all.