TheLeong.com

Don’t be alarmed – I didn’t really all of a sudden start celebrating Earth Day or anything.  But it does give me an excuse to finally get around to uploading the Spider-Man video we made back during IES.  Yes, this was about five and a half years ago, but I uhh   got distracted.

Some background: Bryan, Mikey, and I were in the same Jissen Nihongo 4 class during IES.  Hosoi-sensei’s theme for the final project was the environment.  We were broken up into 3 teams, with everyone having to write reports or something, then integrating that research and information into a video.  Somehow we were able to convince her to let us make a Spider-Man video (since Derek wore that costume every day) that was only loosely related to the environment, let alone the class project.  We filmed it on a Saturday outside the Techno Garden with Ari and Seth’s help.  Actually, I won’t go into what Seth did but it probably wouldn’t be considered help.  Oops!

We edited it at SALC, using some old computer maybe with Premiere 6.5?  I don’t really remember.  But I do remember that we were running low on time until the very last minute, editing and doing to voice over work while the other teams gave their presentations to a random assortment of Kanda kids.  But Hosoi-sensei knew that we were awesome anyway, so we got to show our video at the Sayonara Party.  Aoyagi-sensei came to the party just to watch the video, which was cool of him.  And of course we got an A.

The full title of the video is 地球環境保護戦士スパイダーマン, or something like “Earth Environment Protection Warrior Spider-Man” if you want to be weird.  I think Enviro-Warrior Spider-Man sounds more normal.  The result is a parody/homage to tokusatsu, pro-wrestling, etc. in the way that only a ghetto-yet-awesome college class project could turn out.

And here we go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7aYAhin4jY

And yes, I realize on YouTube I have the video listed as “Spider-Maso” in Japanese.  But it’s close and I don’t want to get hassled for copyright infringement or anything.  I dunno.

For a while I had been planning on totally re-designing my website, since effectively things haven’t changed (aside from slight visual changes) since I first created this page and the accompanying blog. This was about 5 or 6 years ago.

I kind of got distracted and fell behind. Oops!

But anyway, as you can see, I finally got around to totally re-doing things. A lot of this had to do with Blogger phasing out support for FTP.  Since I had been relying on Blogger publishing via FTP to my server since 2003 when I initially set up the site, I was pretty much boned and had to find a different solution.  Eventually I decided to switch to the WordPress platform, using it not only for the blog but as a CMS for the entire site.  It took me a little while to find a theme that could be edited to my liking, then I had to take care of importing posts from the old Blogger – I never updated my Blogger platform like 4 years ago when they overhauled their system so I was seriously using some old technology.  On top of that, since I had been using old Blogger with Haloscan for comments, it was near impossible to transfer all my old comments over properly.  I’m still working on that.

As of now, the blog is pretty much completely moved to this new location.  I’m still working on adding back pictures, using Gallery2 as the management system.  I also kind of like the Lifestream plugin (my Lifestream), although right now there’s not much in it except for Tweets and a lot of Diggs.  There are of course still a lot of little bugs and things I’m going to work on over the next few weeks, but at least the page is mostly up and the systems are in place to make using this site (for me) easier.  I pretty much had to give myself a refresher/crash-course in basic HTML and PHP, so it was kind of a fun little project.

I’ll write a bit more about specific things I need to work on still, after the jump.  Yes, I can do that now.  Click on “continue reading” to see the rest of this post.

• continue reading…

Fodor’s Travel Wire has some pretty good tips for packing and saving space. I got the link for this off of Lifehacker, one of the sites I visit at least twice a day for random links and news. Figured it was pretty interesting and useful enough to re-post on my blog, since me and a bunch of people I know are going to be packing up for Japan in the next few months.

6 Tips for Wrinkle-Free Packing

The IU Media Relations page posted the Michael Uslan speech from Graduation in text format, in case anyone wanted to read it. I read through most of it again.

I’m about to go to bed, and for the first time all week I get to wake up as late as I want, woo-hoo! Before I go, I thought I’d share with you two links that have been off the charts on the awesome meter recently for me. I’ve probably already shared these with a lot of you, since of course you have to spread the word about awesome stuff you find online (like a virus!).

The Ultimate Showdown
www.ultimateshowdown.org
This has to be one of the greatest Flash movies I have ever seen. There is an original song to it, and the animations are amazing. Not technically-speaking, just content and originality-speaking.

Retro Junk
www.retrojunk.com
Nick sent me a link from this site the other night, then the day right after that, the IDS talked about it in an article. Soon after, I decided to explore the site, and ended up wasting almost an entire hour on it just browsing the goods. Basically the site just has archives of old TV openings and commercials, with stuff from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. For shows that we watched while growing up, this site is awesome. Be sure to check out Ninja Turtles, the Ghostbusters Cartoon, Darkwing Duck, Heathcliffe, and all the Nickeloden shows.

And people wonder why I sit on the computer for hours on end getting no actual work done.

Too lazy to write about the Saturday night adventure of ghost hunting for the Unlocked shoot. Instead, read about it on Pat’s Blog. And you thought I wrote a lot on my blog.