Archive for May, 2007
This is version two of the blog, which currently contains 133 published posts. To some extent, this blog represents the creative excesses of a design enthusiast who is somewhere in the process of applying to grad school, working at a law firm and resides in the Financial District of New York City.
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Want to try the Joost Beta? Leave a message with your e-mail address and name.
Basically, it’s a streaming television service. It’s still in beta, but from what I’ve seen it seems pretty stable though the selection of shows is kind of mediocre right now. For what I’ve heard it’s been getting better though. Supposedly it will be completely supported by advertising (e.g. no subscription fees!) but we’ll see if that happens when it’s really released.
Overall, I think the quality is decent, but not great.
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I just got back from California where my cousin Steve sort of got married (he was married a couple months back but this was the official celebration). Anyway, it was a lot of fun seeing family again. We actually have another wedding planned for next year as well because Vivian, another cousin, is getting married to this other guy, Dave, this time next year.
We’ll see if that actually happens though because she’ll have to fight off my dad for his attentions — Dave’s an electrical engineers like my dad so I guess my dad seems to think its kismet. ANYWAY.
I’d like to be able to say I went surfing, but more correctly, my sister and her friends went surfing whereas I was hugging a surfboard for an extended amount of time and drinking copious amounts of water. Very salty, that oceanwater. But it was fun and I enjoyed looking all goofy and hardcore in my wetsuit, haha. We also went to her friend’s uncle’s house to eat and had these banana fritter things – I think it’s a Filipino dish – that were so (so, so) good. Oh man.
After my sister left, I went to visit some temples with my parents which was somewhat less exciting, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. (I’ll upload pictures later.) It was about as fun as hanging out with aunts and uncles over the age of 55 or so ever gets. We also saw a lot of pictures of my parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents when they were younger so that was cool.
Anyway, that pretty much sums up the bulk of my trip. I spent a lot of time playing on my sister’s new Dell MX1210, which made me want a new laptop. Mmm. Oh, and speaking of nerdy things, I played a PS2 game with my cousin Dennis and I can’t seem to figure out what game it was. He said it was called Time-somethingorother and it was an arcade-styled first-person shooter and you used a plastic gun to shoot at the screen. The plotline was something about some villain planting missiles on an island so you have to go stop him. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
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I want a new computer. Let me explain.
For starters, I got this computer (HP Pavillion zd7000 line) a little before my freshman year at college and I really love it. However, a lot of the letter keys are rubbing off at this point, the left screen hinge has begun to crack, and now my optical drive is acting up. But fine. I can deal with all those things. Afterall, I’ve basically left this thing on for about 3 years straight with the exception of carting it around on about 15-20 plane flights, going through about 3 complete reformats, installing all number of programs and downloading at a rate of probably I’d guess 1.5-2 gigs of data per day for various reasons.
Unfortunately, the graphics card it’s equipped with is this NVIDIA GeForce4 Go bullshit that is compatible with absolutely nothing. The only thing it can handle are games designed prior to, like, 2000 (I’m guesstimating, but you get what I mean). I actually like a lot of old games though. So, fine. However, the OS does not like trying to play those games that were designed for Windows 95 or anytime before that. It makes it kind of unstable and there’s a lot of crashing, restarting, debugging, running emulators, setting profiles, setting CPU cycles, etc. etc. So basically, there’s rarely a game that actually plays all that nicely on my computer. Grr.
Anyway, so I mentioned previously that I bought Psychonauts, and I found out after spending 3 hours getting it to install (my CD-ROM drive kept screwing up – I think the lens may be a little wonky) that I couldn’t play it because it’s incompatible with my stupid graphics card. Grr. Furthermore, my third favorite game of all time (Curse of Money Island comes in second) is Civilizations III. I was very, very excited about and following the development of Civs IV up until the point that I discovered my graphics card could, once again, not handle it.
So fine, I wouldn’t mind shelling out some cash for a new computer except — I don’t want to get another computer with XP because in a couple of years I’ll wish I had Vista. Secondly, I don’t want Vista until Service Pack 1 comes out because I don’t want to mess with the general buggy-ness that is Windows. SP1 is slated for the end of 2007, which means no matter what I have to wait until then.
That’s where I am. Honestly, I’m not that upset except I really wanted to play my game. :( Woe is me. What do I do?
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Packing up my apartment took, like, four days — I’m not even kidding. What a pain in the ass.
But anyway, I’ve been dealing with a lot of organizational things recently so I haven’t had much time to blog. (Furthermore, let’s be honest, no one really wants to hear about how I decided to organize my office supplies anyway.) I also went ahead and reformatted my lovely computer so now it’s running a lot faster, but that meant reorganizing all my files and programs and getting updated applications, etc.
Now that my computer is up to par, I can do things like play games! I bought Psychonauts, a Tim Schafer game (he designed Grim Fandango which is my favorite game of all time), except I can already tell I’ll get sucked in if I start and I think I might need to rejoin the land of the living for a while. Hmm. What a predicament.
Okay, well, that’s honestly all that’s new with me. Most of my grades came in today and I was pretty shocked that I got an A in Business Law. I’m pretty sure I did the math and unless I totally aced the final, I thought I was going to get around a B+. So either I did really well or she curves like a madwoman. Good stuff.
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A couple days ago I went to Professor Wilkerson’s house for a senior send-off/end of the year get-together for one of my journalism classes. It was actually really enjoyable. I like how in college teachers seem to equate serving you alcohol as some sort of peace offering of sorts to their students, haha. Anyhow, I’ve decided that while I am still not completely sure what I’m going to end up doing career-wise, I know exactly what I’d like my life to look like.
For starters, Professor Wilkerson answers the door and is wearing this really classy black dress/sundress that looks like a mix of J. Crew and Anthropologie. We go in and her house is just amazing in how it’s decorated – the whole thing has been redone in a mix of French, Native American and African styles. There were about twelve of us there and we were all marveling at how beautifully the whole thing is decorated with neatly placed flowers and large, long windows (I think she put them in herself), really classy touches of photos and baskets, and dark wooden cabinets, ugh. Everything just matched and came together and was so chic. Plus, peering out of one of the windows was were these two small matching white dogs that were just adorable.
Anyway, as materialistic and vain as it sounds, I would just love for my life to look like that someday. Put-together and classy. (I realize for those who know me it seems like a bit of a stretch, but work with me here) Finally, and here’s the kicker, Chris spilled his drink and she’s like, “Oh, it’s okay — wait, you didn’t get it on the Pulitzer, right?” — yes, as in the Pulitzer Prize. Which she has. It’s placed underneath the picture she took when she interviewed Denzel Washington.
The moral of this story is that a) my life pales in comparison and b) you shouldn’t invite college kids over to your house because they will mess stuff up.
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I just updated from WordPress 2.0.5 to 2.1.3. While most things seem to be working correctly, a few of the plugins seem to be spitting out funny results. I’ll fix these things as soon as my exam tomorrow morning is over. Ciao!
UPDATE: Okay, everything should be fixed. Props to Brian for giving me a heads-up on the coding error.
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The last post was depressing, so in order to prevent ending on that note, here’s a shoutout to Davemo, who has started his blog. North American Scum. Yay, go Dave.
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You know you’re getting older when you get excited about household appliances. The highlight of my week was getting a new washer/dryer set installed and going shopping for a new vacuum at Target — we got the dirt devil.
I’m not sure how much I like growing up. This summer is started to freak me out — I’m supposed to go to New York, but this is the first time I’ve gone somewhere by myself where there wouldn’t be a familiar face to pick me up at the airport. I’m also turning 21 this summer, which completely blows my mind. I can’t believe I’m in my twenties. I feel like I could still be 14 in terms of maturity.
I think I’m also freaking out because there’s a lot of things developmentally as a human being that you stop being able to do after you get older. It makes we wonder what I should have done earlier. For example, you no longer can increase the amount of calcium you can store in your bones. Once you hit a certain age, you’re only able to replenish the calcium reserves. I realize worrying about my calcium levels seems silly, but as someone who has never really had health problems, the idea of having to deal with those in the future makes me uncomfortable.
I think wanting to learn Korean right now is also a result of getting older. The part of your brain used for language learning, they say, can increase in capabilities in your youth. If you never use it, it never reaches its full potential. Once you hit a certain age, it plateaus and your language learning abilities can’t increase — however difficult it is for you to learn new languages at that point will stay that way for the rest of your life.
I’m sure there are multitudes of examples like that. Is it too late for me to do anything about it? I don’t want to grow up. It seems dreary.
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