AC Milan Resmi Dapatkan Honda !!

AC Milan telah resmi mendapatkan jasa pemain asal Jepang Keisuke Honda. Rossonerri berhasil menggaet Honda setelah kontraknya habis bersama CSKA Moskow pada Januari nanti.
CEO Milan Adriano Galliani secara langsung memberikan pernyataannya terkait proses transfernya.

"Ia akan mengenakan nomor punggung 10. Hari kami membocorkan rahasia ini. Sekarang tinggal mengurus proses administrasinya. Sulit bila mengharapkannya bisa diturunkan pada 6 Januari, namun Ia akan bisa turun pada tanggal 12 Januari. Sekarang bisa kami pastikan resmi," ungkap Galliani seperti dikutip Italianfootballdaily.com.

Honda pun mengucapkan perpisahannya setelah membela CSKA Moskow di ajang Liga Champions melawan Viktoria Plzen dini hari tadi.



"Ini adalah laga terakhir saya berkostum CSKA. Saya ingin berterima kasih kepada rekan tim saya, para fans dan pihak klub yang telah mendukung dan mempercayai saya selama ini," tuturnya.

Keisuke Honda mulai membela CSKA Moskow pada 2010 lalu. Sejak itu Ia telah memainkan 116 laga dan mencetak 27 gol.

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 2 ½

The Trials

Obligations

The first week of NaNoWriMo brought plenty of excitement but it also brought its fair share of trials.  I had sworn off all forms of communication with others unless it was an emergency or near emergency but not everyone knew this and I’m a sucker for not wanting to make people feel unwanted for lack of a better word.  I also had a few obligations going into the month that I didn’t or forgot to cancel.  The first of which was a date.  I hadn’t had a date in quite some time so I wasn’t ready to cancel this one.  I also really wanted to reconnect with this person so canceling was out of the question.  It was a fine distraction though and I did actually get a lot of writing done before the date so in hindsight, I had no cause to worry.

Other obligations I had were to my family (my niece in particular), and the videogame studio I’m a part of, FlubberKnuckle studios, not to mention work obligations like a friend REALLY needing me to work a day for them so they could interview for a much needed extra job.

I don’t get to see my young niece a lot so when I do I like to do things for her.  She usually invites me on field trips and other school events with her so if I have time I like to go.  I couldn’t say no this month even with NaNoWriMo looming over my head.  The NaNo gods must have looked over me for the month though because her event (along with a lot of school days) was cancelled multiple times until the next month.

My game group, FlubberKnuckle Studios, is restructuring and focusing on further building our designing skills and so everyone is hard at work learning new software and creating new deadlines for various projects.  Every week we check in with Wednesday conferences updating everyone on our progress with whatever we’re doing.  My goal before the month was to learn the Blender and Unity software.  I started a few tutorials and played with the software but didn’t accomplish much.  With everyone in the group working so hard and taking our deadlines so seriously I felt that I couldn’t entirely shut out my FlubberKnuckle productivity so I continued to build my knowledge of the software and participate in conferences, though I missed two.  What I learned is that I don’t like juggling important tasks like that without a dedicated workspace.  Unless I have a desk and a quiet space to work—in my home next year—I will only participate in NaNoWriMo if I have no other obligations and vice versa.

Life Doesn’t Pause

Distractions, distractions everywhere!  Time I find is such an easy resource to waste especially for myself.  I take life slowly most of the time and like to just stop and think about things, everything really.  I don’t have a space of my own and I don’t own a car so finding that precious quiet time that writers crave is like mining for gold and precious gems.  It’s a task it really is.  I stay in a one bedroom apartment with my mother in an impromptu (what I thought temporary) move to save money.  I stay in the living/dining/now bedroom and my mom likes to watch T.V…a lot.  When I write, I typically write for a stretch and then pause to think about what I wrote and what I’ll write next.  Problem is whenever I pause and the sounds of the T.V. travel over to my ears and my eyes begin to wander in a search for something newer or fresher than the bright whites of my notebook or laptop screen.  It’s astounding how much time I actually wasted absentmindedly watching the crap she was watching at the time.  When I realized how little work I had gotten done it started to piss me off.  My mom is wondrously considerate like myself and I knew if I had asked her that she’d go quietly to her room but that shit wouldn’t have been fair of me so I kept my crabby attitude and tried to work through it.  I knew then that I needed some other work space but it was cold and the buses really ran like shit and I couldn’t think of any decent places to go where there weren’t many distractions around.  There aren’t any nearby coffee shops where I stay, at least any that didn’t require an hour and a half bus wait.

The buses were where I wasted the bulk of my time for the month.  Mostly during my travels to work.  Don’t get me wrong, I still crammed as much work into my bus ride as I could and actually did some of my best work on the coach.  But even writing on the bus proved to be inconsistent.  Getting a seat on the bus (especially the one I catch) is never guaranteed and about 70% of the time I stood up on a crowded coach.  Waiting for the buses alone wasted about 2 to 6 hours out of my day depending on how late they were.  But on the good bus rides I could easily write between 400 and 1000 words because of the lack of distractions (when other people weren’t acting crazy).

The writing itself was a whole other trial.  My plot, I now saw, was not fully fleshed out.  I wrote from the outline but added new details, locations, and characters as I did.  The outline kept changing and the chapters filled out more.  The writing came slowly and I found that I was truly a slow and methodical writer.  I had to pause to figure out every little detail about what I was writing even words and word arrangement in a sentence.  I was entirely too slow. 

So now I saw that if I wanted to win this contest I needed to change where I wrote and how I wrote.  So I brooded on that for a while whilst continuing to try to blot out the distractions at home with earbuds and music which proved only marginally effective.  I knew my next step but it would take a large setback to make me implement it.

Up next, the pitfalls that nearly destroyed my resolve.

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 2

The Month Begins

It was November 1^st and NaNoWriMo was well underway.  I stayed up late the previous night to get a midnight start on the writing and wrote a few paragraphs whilst following my outline fairly closely.  The writing was a bit slow and clunky and I hated the way I phrased a few of my sentences.  I sat and deeply thought about what would sound better like I usually did.  I kept doing that until I remembered what the contest was about and so I stopped editing myself so much and just ran with it leaving sentences I didn’t like behind…unless I really hated them.  My notebook is a battleground of scratched out sentences.

I forsook all distractions the night before.  I unplugged my Xbox 360 and logged out of all my social networking sites aside from email clients.  My iPod was unplugged, drained of battery, and left in the corner of my table because I knew with it that I’d waste valuable writing time on the bus listening to music and staring out the window.  I told my friends via Facebook and a few texts that I wouldn’t be around for the month of November because the contest.  I had a plan and I wanted to stick to it for a few reasons.  My first reason was because I’d never stuck to a plan, schedule, or routine and I really really wanted to break that cycle.  I want to be a much more productive person and I saw this as a major step for that.  My second reason is because I really really wanted to get some traction on this second book while the events of the first one were still in my head and the ideas were flowing.  There was no better time to do it.  So no distractions meant getting things done.

I left out of my house before the sun was even up, around 6:00am.  I wrote a lot on the bus which helped me finish that first chapter which I felt a little better about because of how I ended it.  I made it to work around 7-ish and continued writing.  I wrote in the dark and empty café.  I had my notebook out and was ready to start typing the first chapter up on NaNoWriMo.org.  I browsed the site and learned that you didn’t type out anything on the site itself but instead posted your word count.  You could take your own count or “validate” your novel early which counted the words for you and promised not to be a portal for novel theft.  Eh, I trusted it.  So anyway, armed with this new knowledge I opted to continue my early morning work visits so I would continue to treat this noveling business as legitimate business.  I updated my word count and checked my phone to see if I could do it from there and to my surprise I could.  What a thoughtful team of visionaries, these NaNo people.

I moved my show from the café and the distraction of WiFi to the signal deathtrap of the basement breakroom where it was hot and stuffy from all the machinery and steam pipes.  I began working on my second chapter, writing it down in my notebook.  More inspiration found me in the form of a visit from a cute older lady named Myra.  She asked if I was doing homework and I told her about NaNoWriMo.  She seemed pleasantly shocked and said what I was doing was cool.  She herself likes to write and had been working on something off and on.  I told her that she should just go for it and soon.  If not for the month then just whenever.  She said that she should, smiled, said that she didn’t want to be a bother, and walked off down the hall.  I went back to writing and maybe 10 minutes later Kurt the pastor comes in and asks me what I’m working on and I tell him what I told Myra.  He asks if he could read it when I’m done and I asked him if he had a Kindle or Kindle software so I could send him a free sample.  He didn’t but he gave me his card and well wishes.  That was pretty much how my conversation went with anyone who caught me writing for the next month.

So all in all I was off to a good start.  I had an outline that stretched far ahead of me.  I had a decent place to get my writing done, updating my word count was much easier than expected, and my book was rolling along at a decent though somewhat slow pace.  With a start like that I had no clue that my challenges to come would have me questioning if I should even waste my time trying to finish the contest.

My NaNoWriMo Story Part 1

Pre-NaNoWriMo

This year was my first experience with the super cool and awesomely exciting National Novel Writing Month or as the cool kids call it, NaNoWriMo.  I heard about it towards the beginning of the year and planned on participating at that very moment.  Even better was the fact that I was finishing my first Average Joe novel (I thought, more on that later) and planned to use the month to jump start the planned sequel.  It all sounded so crazy.  How the heck could anyone write a whole book in only a month, a mere month.  It took me at least a year with both Hell Warriors: A Hero in The Flames and Average Joe and the Extraordinaires (AJE), that’s not even including the countless revisions and tiny tweaks I’ve done with both throughout the years.  So, more than anything else, I wanted to see how I’d stack up in the contest with the odds so high and my normal production speed so low.

I created a profile on the NaNo site (nanowrimo.org) months in advance and browsed through the site.  It’s a pretty neat and easy site.  There weren’t a million and one things cluttering up the front page which was great because I didn’t feel instantly intimidated or confused.  Browsing through the site gave me a sense of what to expect from the contest.  I’d check back on the site sporadically for updates like once a month or sometimes more frequently than that.  The main tip than I gleaned from veterans and from my own common sense was that the key to success was to write without abandon, to write as if you were held at gunpoint and the minute you stopped was when the seedy gangster pulled the trigger.

You’re only supposed to care about one thing and that’s your word count.

I finished Average Joe and the Extraordinaires, aka book 1 of the Average Joe series, about two months before the contest officially started on November 1st complete with what (at the time) were my final edits.  So I hooked up with an editor for that and started my idea factory for book 2 which I knew would be called Average Joe and the Beauty (AJB) from a simple idea that popped into my head.  I noted random ideas down in my Quicknotes and References file for the plot and went back to old notes to see what I could use to get a rough idea of what the sequel would contain.  On October 5^th I started an official outline of AJB containing all the rough notes I had previously wrote and some new ones.  I got all the elements together and started working on a basic chapter by chapter outline of the book and where my plot was going.  I gave myself a headstart of about 8 plotted chapters for the next month.  This came from a bit of advice I read from the pre-NaNo emails you get from signing up.  Before NaNo even began I knew that my story would have 2 main POV’s from Joe and Liandra as well as a few villain POV’s because I liked those in AJE.  And I knew how I would begin and what ground I wanted to cover.  What I didn’t know (at the time) was how much my chapter outlines would change because of the choices I made while actually writing but more on that later.

I didn’t have internet and at the time thought you’d have to do all of your writing constantly online so I planned to use the library and my job’s free WiFi (free for me not them) to do all of my writing.  I do my best writing in notebooks so I figured I’d write into the late hours of the night in a notebook and wake up early and copy it all over into NaNo’s online writing software while at my job.  Luckily I did this for one day and saw that you only had to post your word count daily so I was greatly relieved that I didn’t have to kill myself for this but I was very proud of myself for being so prepared.

In my head I was ready for NaNo 2013.  Could I have been better prepared?  You bet!  Even at the time I knew that but I figured I had a strong start and I really did.  I was gung ho about it and felt my chances for “winning” were really good.  I knew the writing itself would be tough, it always fucking is, but I thought “this is good, even if I don’t win I’ll have a helluva start.”  That thinking prevailed throughout the month and was really what kept me from giving up throughout.  More NaNo adventures to come.  Part 2 will chronicle my actual start and the challenges that came from that.

More content to come for December.

I've been neglecting my blog for too long.  Time to add some content for the month.

Muttor And Sweet Bell Pepper Spread

Muttor And Sweet Bell Pepper Spread

Last week when i decided to make paratha, I didn't have green chili in the fridge so I decided to use the sweet bell pepper instead. When I minced it in the mixer, the idea suddenly came to me to use mutter as well and make this tasty mixture. When the parathas were done and we tasted it right away it was tasty and crispy. But when we actually sat down for lunch, that's when the parathas had cooled down a bit and they had started to get soggy and somewhere too difficult to eat without creating mess. So in the evening I used the remaining mixture on the bread along with some tomatoes and cucumber and it made perfect sandwich. The taste of spread comes out better too. So I think this one definitely works better as spread on bread, burgers or as side chutneys than paratha stuffing.

Ingredients

2 Cup Muttor

1 Sweet Bell Pepper

1 Lemon

4 Garlic Cloves

Handful of the Corriander Leaves

1 Spoon Red Chili Powder

1/4 Spoon Corriander Powder

Salt to taste

Method

• Squize lemon juice in the mixie.
• Add in chopped sweet bell pepper, garlic, salt and coriander leaves and make a smooth paste.
• Add in muttor, red chilli powder, coriander powder and make fine paste in the mixer.

Notes

I used frozen peas without thawing them but fresh peas could be used too.

We had this one as one of the chutneys for burger breads when we barbequed and everyone loved it.

Personal: My random day

I was out and about doing errands in Dearborn.  I met up with an old friend for a ride then once done with my task I decided to walk back to Detroit where I could catch the bus back home.

After taking what I considered a scenic route, I ended up running out of road to walk on because the service drive turned into the freeway.  I however had already walked a mile and didn't want to walk a mile back so I pressed on.
I ended up walking through tall grass towards a place under the freeway bridge hoping it wasn't another highway as it was fenced off.  I found a path to walk down which led to an opening in the fence.  I walked through and saw tall hills far from me but directly in front was a small muddy stream.  I thought about walking back the way I came because being here seemed like a bad idea but I pressed forward anyway.

Under a bridge to the west I noticed a man and his collection of items.  The man obviously lived there and was making water in the stream.  I quickly walked east, to avoid contact and being sighted by the man.   I was headed towards what I believed to be my destination somewhere near Greenfield.

I observed the birds and insects around noting hawks, geese, ducks, butterflies, and whatever was rustling in the tall grass and in the stream.  I walked on in the hot sun and contemplated crossing the stream because I concluded that I could reach my destination quicker that way.  Behind me I noticed a group of men all on motorcycles quickly approaching on the other side of the stream.  As they got closer I noticed they're all older white men.  That made me suddenly more nervous, a natural instinct.  I watched them pass by and snapped a few photos of them.  Across the stream I noticed more men standing and talking and then noticed some sort of water release gate like in a dam.  Further ahead on that side was a golf course.

I watched the bikers as they bobbed and weaved up and down on the causeway.  I had hoped they would lead me to an exit but those dreams were dashed when I discovered I didn't want wet toes.

I walked on and grabbed a walking stick because a journey aint a journey without one.  I walked nearly a mile down noticing that my way out was barred by tall weeds and a tall fence.  In the weeds some creature stirred, rustling the bushes loudly.  I looked but couldn't find the creature and was glad to keep it that way.

I walked under a quiet little shadowy bridge where I couldn't even spot a bird or any other sign of life besides graffiti.  On the other side of the bridge I had hoped to find an exit and wasn't disappointed.

There were thick weeds all about but in the middle a path was made which made the walking path look more like a tunnel.  I smiled at my fortune and walked up the path which quickly turned into a hill.

I dropped my stick and marveled at the civilization around me.  I now saw where I was, it was some sort of flood control area.  I looked around at the street signs and saw that I ended back at the street I first started on.

"How the hell did I end up back here?  Stupid shortcut!"