Author Archives: TheUser

Orochon Ramen

Orochon Ramen is a delicious ramen restaurant in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. They have three types of soup (miso, soy sauce, and salt). After picking a soup, you pick how hot you want it, what other things you want in it, and any sides you may want. It was really great. I had a miso soup with egg and a side of spicy pork. It’s about $8 per plate, which is quite affordable, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone in the area. Their website is http://www.orochonramen.com/.

Anime Expo 2008

I just got back from Anime Expo in Los Angeles, and it was great! This year I went to the opening ceremony, the AMV contest, AX Idol, a signing by NIS character designers, a NIS America panel, Last Comic Standing, a David Hayter panel, a David Hayter signing, Whose Line Is It Anime?, and the closing ceremony. And I spent less than $50 on merchandise!
We stayed at the Omni hotel, which was only a few minutes away from the convention center via shuttle. Shuttles were free for us. The hotel was very nice, especially at 60 degrees the whole time, but I lost my extra battery for my camera. I’m pretty sure it was dead (broken dead) so it wasn’t a big loss. Antonio said he may have lost boxers and jeans. Duncan, who was in a different room, lost a pair of glasses. Justin, also in the other room, lost a pair of boxers as well. That doesn’t just seem like coincidence. Are the cleaning people stealing things? Together with the fact that there was a used tampon in between the mattress and box-spring of Justin’s bed (they got a free upgrade for that), I’m not sure I’d want to stay there again despite it seeming very nice.
This was the first year that I went to the opening ceremony. It was fun, but not too terribly exciting. I did mingle quite a bit with The World Ends With You, although it took me days to realize that the reason why I couldn’t see other players was because I was using the PAL version.
The AMV contest was quite long, but a lot of fun. There are definitely some AMVs I’d like to look up and watch some more, and they made me more interested in a few anime series. None of my choices won, but oh well.
AX Idol was really awesome. Last year I thought it was really boring, but this year, almost every contestant had a lot of talent. Half of the people were competing in voice acting, and the other half were singing. It was really amazing. One guy, who had his head shaved except for a short triangle-shaped mohawk, sang Rain, from Cowboy Bebop. I have a nice picture of him courtesy of “JUB” via Pictochat!
photo.jpg
Last Comic Standing is a stand-up competition. It was funny and very enjoyable, but some of the “comedians” were quite bad. A lot of them told jokes like “I’m a minority…it’s hard to like anime when you’re Black and/or Hispanic, food stamps, Home Depot etc.” I’m glad these people can joke around with their own culture’s negative stereotypes, but seriously, enough. The two finalists were also pretty bad >_>. I guess the audience was stupid because they’re the ones were judging. There were judges there to comment, but they didn’t choose the winners. Do you know who the coolest judge was? Man-Faye! It was awesome seeing him! Whose Line Is It Anime? is an improv show in which everything is anime themed. Terribly bad. It did make me miss Live Nude People that much more though.
We hung out at the NIS booth a bit, and I got my picture taken with a giant Prinny! Phoenix was funny as always too. I bought a Disgaea picture and got autographs from two different character designers that work at NIS. I also went to a NIS panel where they talked about Disgaea 3 and A Witch’s Tale, their new upcoming games.
I also went to a David Hayter panel. He was the voice of Lupin in Lupin the Third, the voice of Snake in the MGS series, and the screenplay writer of X-Men. It was really entertaining. I tried getting his autograph at multiple sessions but kept not making them. Finally on the last day, I managed to get his autograph.
I also went to the closing ceremony, and it was pretty boring. We did go to Little Tokyo to eat though, where the food was delicious!
I can’t wait for next year!

HTML Form Combo Box

I found an interesting article on how to create a Combo Box in DHTML. Form controls are definitely in need of the combo box, but I’m not so sure this does the job all that well.
http://www.tgreer.com/comboArticle.html.
A combo box is a drop down select list that can also allow the user to input his or her own strings. The author of the article builds one in DHTML by first placing a select list on the page and then placing a textbox on top of it using CSS. He then causes the dropdown list to make a Javascript function call, causing the textbox to update with the value of the list’s selection. It’s interesting in concept, but you can tell something strange is happening. Looking at the page, you can tell there’s a rendering error (in this case not an error) and that there are controls stacked on top of each other.

3DO


I stubbed my toe
on a 3DO
I think it may be broken;
The machine’s confused
from being misused
it wants me to insert a token!

– Mikey, Select Button

Windows XP

Good bye little friend! When you were a newborn, I preferred your older brother, 2000. Now young Vista is your parent’s favorite.
For those who don’t know, today is the last day retail stores can purchase Windows XP from Microsoft. If you want to buy a copy of XP, do it soon. Copies are still purchasable from retail stores, but once they run out, they’re out.

Diablo III

frothfrothfroth
I was worried it was going to be a Wrath of the Lich King announcement or something, but I had been thinking it would most likely be Diablo.
Blizzard, you didn’t fail me. Thank you so much.

Pyro Fortress

Pyro Fortress came out last week! In other words, the Pyro update for Team Fortress 2. With its release, players were obligated to play only as pyros with epic, flaming battles!
The Pyro’s achievements were much more easily attainable than the Medic’s, and they were actually things you might want to do as Pyro as opposed to the Medic’s achievements that required you to do things a Medic shouldn’t do. The three new weapons are the backburner, the flare gun, and the axtinguisher. The backburner replaces the flamethrower, adding health and always scoring crits from behind. However, it doesn’t have the airblast that the flamethrower now has, which can repel enemy rockets and grenades. The flare gun can light enemies on fire from a distance. Lastly, the axtinguisher is a melee weapon that scores crits always on enemies that are on fire. You also no longer need to get all the achievements to unlock all weapons. It was a lot of fun, but I unlocked all the weapons in about two days.

Mega Man 9

Mega Man 9 to come out on WiiWare!
After 11 years, Capcom is releasing a sequel to the Mega Man series!
More information can be found at RockmanPM and Select Button!
The game will apparently be in the style of the old 8-bit games, which is even more retro than the later entries in the original Mega Man series. It looks like an NES game, which could be pretty cool if they make the game correctly. The fact that it’s in that style but not actually an NES game means they’re able to break any boundaries the NES had while still making a game in that style.
Too bad I’ll have to play through 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 to get ready for this!

Getting Vertical Scroll Position in a Div to Persist Across Postbacks

I’ve been working on this for a little bit now, and it was surprisingly easy. I just didn’t know all of the syntax.
First, any element in a webpage that scrolls has a scrollTop attribute that’s equal to the number of pixels it has been scrolled. When it’s scrolled all the way to the top, scrollTop is zero.
To cause this to persist, you can store it in a hidden input.
<input type=”hidden” name=”whatever” id=”whatever” value=”default” runat=”server”>
Name and id should be equal, and making sure runat=”server” is present is important. Now this should persist automatically. The only other thing that’s needed is to store and restore the value. You can use an onscroll=”nameOfJavascriptFunctionThatStoresThePosition()” attribute in the div in question to call a function whenever the div is scrolled. Then in your Javascript section, set window.onload equal to whatever function is going to restore it. Parentheses aren’t needed at the end because you’re mapping onload to a function.
The last thing to remember is that in your storing and restoring functions, you can’t simply refer to the id of the hidden input because your codebehind might, and most likely will, change it. You’d have to use <%=idOfInput.ClientID%>. You can use document.getElementById(‘ blah ‘).value, where blah is that previous tag. To restore the value that value should be set into the div’s scrollTop (again, you can use document.getElementById(), but you won’t need to do ClientID stuff because the div’s not runat=”server”. To store the value, you just set the scrollTop into that hidden input using that same method. Pretty simple!
Of course, if you’re not concerned with a div but rather the whole document, you can do a similar thing using body’s scrollTop or just enable SmartNavigation if the page is being designed for InternetExplorer.