Ads are making me totally hate Yahoo! I understand why ads exist, and I can tolerate them up to a certain point. It’s only fair, after all, and I still read Salon, for heaven’s sakes. But on Yahoo! Mail, the ad-forcing has gotten to be intolerable. I can barely even access my email anymore, because some stupid javascript/flash bug makes any Yahoo!Mail page redirect to a page with nothing but a flash banner ad, which never takes me back to my inbox.

Maybe I’m a little biased, because I love with Gmail and use it for about 95% of anything I do, but I held onto my Yahoo account, just because I’d used it for so long for various things, and because I’m wary of letting Google hold a monopoly on my information. But it seems more and more to be the case that Google well deserves its monopoly.

Plus they offer free POP, which means my Gmail can be downloaded and archived as it should. Yahoo! never offered free POP*, and the suckitude of their mail experience has only grown over the years, in stark contrast to Gmail’s steadily improving interface. So this new ad snafu is just the last straw. Basta!

*So the most annoying part of all this is how I can’t get my Yahoo! Mail off their servers and into my own data archives. Rah!

I forgot to change WordPress sites after posting that last post. Seriously, let’s all remember I’ve moved

er..hope everyone’s updated their rss feeds

the end

http://blog.esthernam.com

Also, BARACK OBAMA OMG YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

during grad school, i made frequent use of the student commons for the library program. there was a microwave, a fridge full of sodas, and a table of snacks with a jar for students to put in change for whatever they took. and people always put money in the jar (maybe not the always $.50 that’s requested, but you’ll always see money in the jar).

and the microwave wasn’t even chained down or anything!

i say that because a classmate from another department remarked, upon using our lounge, that this was rather remarkable. most other departments have to lock down any and all equipment of any value, because otherwise it’d be stolen in a heartbeat.

people have left computers alone in the lounge, with nobody else to watch it for them, without consequence. i guess it is sort of crazy, especially given how abjectly poor most of us are.

part of it, though, is probably that there are no undergrads in the library school. everyone knows undergrads are the worst (so suck it, Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy!)

i just got an email (note to self, unsubscribe to those student listservs already!) about an upcoming bake sale for the program’s student organization. they have these periodically throughout the year, and the interesting thing (to me) is that they leave everything out on the table in the commons, and expect people to pay for the goods, without having anybody standing there to watch the stuff or take the money! this is how they do fundraising!

it’s pretty crazy, but kinda awesome, i think. i will say this: studies have shown that the honor system is more effective when you place a mirror near the tip jar or whatever. because apparently, seeing your physical image triggers something in your mental self-image that somehow pushes you to be more honest. or something.

on a somewhat related, if totally pointless note, the metro in LA and subway in berlin also go by the honor system, whereas on BART and in Paris, you have those clangy ticket taking machines. Yet the MUNI and buses in Paris and Berlin go mostly by the honor system, but in LA, the bus driver is ticket-taker, enforcer, and generally merciless ruler of the Bus Universe.

I went to BarCamp LA this year, and had a blast. Since it’s an un-conference, I went with very few expectations, and that may have helped, but it also meant I was open for whatever might happen.

After breakfast AND lunch, the day officially began when the organizers had every last person introduce himself/herself (in a pleasant surprise, the male-female ratio was somewhat healthy - not the typical sausage fest, unlike most tech-centric events =P).

Each person was allowed only 3 tags, and I had some difficulty choosing mine. In the end, I went with “archivist,” “Django,” and “women2.org,” figuring one of these might stick in somebody’s mind. And as it happened, it was the second one! Immediately after introductions were finished, I met with several Django-ologists, and we convened for almost an hour, missing the first set of sessions almost entirely. Later, we had a Django BoF, and that was enlightening.

Anyway, one of hte big sponsors of the event was Dreamhost, who offered free registration and a year of hosting! So I took that offer this morning, and have registered my real, full name. I was even able to take advantage of their birthday promo, and now have unlimited disk space/bandwidth for the life of the account! Not too shabby.

So stay tuned for a change of address and a new design. Now that I’m on my own server, I’m no longer stuck with using the woefully inadequate WordPress.com templates, or even stick to the…well, not woefully, but still somewhat inadequate WordPress platform!

Really, now that I’m on my own server, the possiblities are endless. Realistically, for this maximizer, that means the change won’t be soon, but it is imminent!

strangest Google search term to reach my blog:

“boba jello shots”

Dogsitting has disrupted my sleep schedule considerably. Working for a media organization (ie., artists) means I can slide into work as late as 11am, so I’ve managed to maintain waking hours more typical of a college student til recently.

But having to wake up to answer the morning wake-up call of nature early every morning (and I found it really amusing how the dogs make this call: they crawl out from underneath the blanket and hop around or otherwise shake the bed to rouse me awake, and then when I’m looking at them, they lift their hind leg to mimic peeing), meant I began to go to bed early so as not to miss out on those precious few hours of the dreamless.

Which is annoying, because I recently learned that the most creative time of the day is around 10pm (the least creative time is 4pm - those siesta-practicing cultures knew what they were on about!). So that means I have to cram in as much productivity as I can into the hours between, say, 9pm - midnight, as opposed to before, when I had all the hours before around 2am sprawled before me.

Hmm. This is probably not making much sense, because it’s almost midnight and I am beat.

The owners of the dogs I sat for a few month ago went on a trip recently, so they asked me to dog-sit for them again. It’s nice, especially as the weather’s gotten cold; the three of us can snuggle under the blanket and stay pretty toasty.

Still, the dogs have been sort of a handful. I’ve always wanted a dog, and still do, but it really is a lot of work to take care of them. At least these two have each other for company when I’m away, but when I come back it’s as though they haven’t seen a human for years. They are pretty attention-hungry, and make me feel guilty when I’m at the computer or playing Rock Band on their owners’ PS3 (hee!).

This is the single most oft-repeated question I’ve had to ask since Friday: “What did you just eat?”

Of course, they never answer.

I downloaded the Mac version of Freemind to try since I can’t afford something as nice as Mindjet. I opened the app, and it seemed deceptively simple. Freemind is a Java app. But nothing happened!

So I dutifully went to the software’s wiki, and forthwith is a direct excerpt from their FAQ (which they call “Asked Questions,” probably because nobody uses this software, heh):

I start FreeMind but nothing happens on MacOS X Leopard

This issue might be related to the problem met by OpenOffice users on Leopard. Apple seems to have replaced “Apple Computer, Inc.” by “Apple, Inc.” in the Java string. The JRE is thus not recognized anymore on Leopard, and Java fail.

That’s like, the sorriest bug I have ever seen. Not the worst, nor the funniest. Just sorry.

When I was 8, my family went to New York over spring break. We flew Delta, on a red-eye, so I think I slept most of the way.

We landed at JFK and my dad hailed a cab to take us to our hotel. I think the driver reminded me of George Burns because he looked to be about 90 years old and smoked pungent, juicy cigars, one right after the other. He was nice enough, though, and garrulous, engaging my dad in conversation up in the front seat right away.

Weirdly, as it turned out, the same driver had driven my dad around NY before! Multiple times! My dad took business trips to NY somewhat frequently at the time, and the cabbie claimed to recognize my dad by his tendency to always be the first off the plane (airline connections often allowed us to pick our seats). And I guess the cabbie always tended to be first in the waiting line at the taxi stand, so the coincidence, seemingly so random, was somewhat plausible.

(I mean, since I was all of 8 years old at the time, I may be getting this all wrong, but that is exactly how I remember it. Seriously, maybe he just saw different Asian guys at random times and didn’t notice any differences between them; but my dad rolled with it, even saying he recognized the cab driver as well, so it’s never occurred to me to question it.)

The old man talked a lot, but not in a boring or irritating way. I wish I could remember any of what he said, but mainly I just remember finding his cigar-smoking both gross and intriguing. At that age, I’d never before met anyone who smoked cigars, and he was pretty hard-core, and spit brownish…spit…out the window every once in awhile.

By the time we got to our hotel, he’d appointed himself our ‘official’ cab driver for the rest of our short stay in NY. At the beginning of each day, at a pre-arranged time, he’d wait in front of our hotel (which the doormen complained about, I remember the cabbie telling us) and drop us off wherever we needed to go before carrying on with the rest of his day, taking other fares, doing whatever cabbies do. I think he tried to engage my sister and me in conversation once, but of course we were both too shy to respond. It’s too bad, because I remember recognizing how cool he was, and it would’ve been the polite thing to do to acknowledge this.

And his cab was nice, one of those old-timey round yellow cabs with the wide seats, which I liked better than the plain, angular ones with seat belts. Even though the thick stench of cigars made even the back seat somewhat unbreathable, by the final day of our trip, when he drove us back to the airport, I’d grown used to it, and found it less and less unpleasant. And all these memories are tied to the stink of those cigars.

Cheers to you, old cab driver man!

My dad wants to sign up for an AT&T Uverse plan. Basically, that’s a Satellite TV/Internet/Wiretapping bundle. Our cellular plan is currently also AT&T (and that will never change as long as I have Helmut!!).

But I am wondering if this is a good idea. On the plus side, we’d only get one bill! And they might give us a discount for installing ourselves firmly in the AT&T empire.

On the other hand, whenever you think you’re saving money on Internet or cable, you always end up getting nickel-and-dimed to death. So I wanna think this through very carefully before we commit.

On the other other hand, the last two sentences would apply even if we didn’t go with a bundle. Because all TV and Internet companies in the US, well, how you say? Suuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Maybe the best thing would be to learn to live without cable TV (going without internet, of course, is out of the question).

Okay, this week’s featured product isn’t exactly available at your supermarket, but it IS a common beverage item and I’ve had it for a few years now, so when it does become more widely available, I will be ahead of the curve!

Now, I’m not the biggest fan of single-serve coffee pods, due to the overall waste and expense of the whole thing, but you really can’t beat the convenience of it! The only thing more convenient is drip coffee, and quality-wise, it’s hardly a fair tradeoff. So the price, environmentally and financially, is (just barely) worth it, I think.

My parents got a Simplehuman single cup pod brewer a few years ago.* Simplehuman also distributes single-serve pods made by Molto Coffee, and I’ve found this company’s coffee pods to be slightly superior to most other such pod brands, like Senseo’s brand (Douwe Egbert) or Melitta; it’s much better than Folgers. Some of Molto’s beans taste kinda burnt, but I’ve yet to find a better brand for single-serve coffee pods of this shape.

My parents prefer the Decaf Colombian, and I have to admit, it’s not bad, especially for decaf. But I like the Kona Blend, as it’s decently mild and smooth. For a stronger cup, try the Sumatra Mandheling - it’s a bit on the toasty side, but I like it better than the Costa Rica, which is a little too earthy for my tastes.

On the tea side, the Tropical Green Tea is quite pleasant. Earl Grey is really strong and a bit too bitter, as if it’s not brewed properly by the machine.

On the whole, I wish more coffee brands produced pods. I can understand why they wouldn’t, and it may still be too early to figure out how to sell coffee in this form without seriously compromising its quality, but really, this category needs more worthy competitors. It’d be nice to be able to drink great coffee even when you’re in a hurry and don’t have time to prepare a cup the hard way.

*Simplehuman stopped selling the original coffee maker; a revamped version is due out in 2009. I doubt I’ll be buying the new one, seeing as how I’m neither rich nor a die-hard early-adopter, but I think the company produces some of the best-designed machines around (even the unboxing is well-considered, just like with Apple products!). They also have great customer service. Also, I’m totally not being paid to write this (although if anyone would LIKE to recompense me for the trouble, I wouldn’t say no!)!

This Sat Oct. 18th, bring your home movies to a worldwide Home Movie Day location near you. We’ll inspect the film in any format (like Super8, 16mm) and if it’s in good enough shape, we’ll project it! And teach you how best to take care of it so it’ll last longer. Or tell you where you can have it transferred. Etc etc. Even if you don’t have any home movies, you can still come and watch other peoples’!

The last two French movies I’ve seen, it turns out, are both adaptations of American stories (or rather, one story and one real-life occurrence. “Tell No One” was a novel by Harlan Coben adeptly adapted by Guillaume Canet, and “La fille coupée en deux” was loosely based on a sensational trial in America at the turn of the century. With Chabrollian twists, of course.

I think that I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed any American version of either. I’m not saying that that’s at all rational, I’m just saying it’s probably true.

Until recently, Hansen’s creamy root beer used high fructose corn syrup. Now, as anyone who’s ever heard of Michael Pollan knows, HFCS is the devil’s saliva and must be avoided at all costs.

So when I decided to go off HFCS, I knew I had to quit drinking Hansen’s soda, and that made me really sad. I’m a huge soda fan, mainly for the fizziness. I’m very into the idea of giving up Coca Cola, Diet Coke, Sprite, and all those other mainstream soft drinks, but soda with real sugar is a bit pricier than those, especially the bottled kind (which I hear is better because it lacks the plastic lining inside).

Now, I love Izze soda and Jones soda and Thomas Kemper as much any true aficionado, and maybe it really is worth it for both taste and health (or, to be more accurate, lesser un-health), but for a die-hard fizzy-drink addict, the toll on the wallet is hard to take. I’ve even experimented with making my own soda, just using club soda or sparkling water and making variations on simple syrup by adding flavors from berries and things, but that’s time-consuming, and kind of difficult to do when, say, you just want something to drink at work during your lunch break.

So it’s been hard to give up on Coke entirely, or even HFCS in general, which is in every freaking product ever made, it seems. But I try.

The point is, I’m super pleased to find that Hansens no longer uses HFCS in their creamy root beer! It’s now made with cane sugar like every other socially acceptable soft drink. So I can enjoy the delicious creaminess of this concoction once more, and with less guilt! Also, it’s still in cans, so it’s still reasonably priced, $2-3 at Trader Joe’s.

Anyway, so yeah. If youer’ a root beer fan, give Hansen’s Creamy Root Beer a try. Real sugar is where it’s at!

At least, until I take the next big step and remove THAT from my diet. But that is a very, very long ways from now.

Now that I’m used to using Google Reader, I’m liking it a lot. I esp. like the Sharing feature, because I can see what friends are reading, plus they provide an additional filter - I can rely on my friends to show me the 20% of the internet that’s actually worth reading, so I don’t have to read the crappy 80% of the rest of what’s out there (unless I want to!). Also it’s way easier to share interesting articles/links. (note to self: should find a way to hook this up to delicious or Tumblr, where I used to do most of my sharing.)

Reader’s still got a few UI shortcomings, esp. compared to Bloglines, which I still use for more in-depth blogs, but as far as oxymoronically efficient time-wasting tools go, it’s not bad! The skimmable RSS feeds all go to my Reader, because the layout makes scanning really easy. I esp like the keyboard shortcuts that make sharing and marking all read really easy to do.

Give it a try if you haven’t already. And add me as a friend so I can see what interests you!

My mom just told me that I have one last chance to fly the airline she worked for - I have to buy my ticket by the end of September, but I can use the ticket to travel anywhere the airline flies until the end of April.

As always the ticket is standby, but it’s a pretty hefty discount - when outrageous fuel surcharges cost more than the price of the actual round-trip international flight, it’s nothing to sneeze at!

So…where should I go?

Yesterday I made a day trip out to Westwood (because it’s *that* far away that I had to make it a “day trip”). I had to go to the student health center. Before that though, I dropped by my old work-study to shoot the breeze with my old supervisor. Later on I walked with her to the food place at the north end of campus, and as we were walking through the school I remarked that it was nice to be back on campus again.

My supervisor was like, “Are things really that bad that you’re happy to be here!?”

Okay, so apparently things are not going so well at my former place of employment/school, but hey, I enjoyed being a Bruin! I enjoyed being in school and being able to put off living for awhile.

Now that I’m out of school and faced with having to find work, things are pretty horrible. So yeah.

Whatever. Anyway, I finished my day trip with a visit to Westside Pavilion (to watch “Tell No One,” a brilliant French adaptation of a Harlen Coben thriller that was nevertheless quite Hollywood-y, with callbacks to films like “Vertigo” and “Mystic River,” at the recently-redone Landmark theater that serves alcohol and has reserved seating, with full-on leather chairs and loveseats!).

Then I went to the Westfield behemoth at Century City to pick up more Molto coffee pods for our Simplehuman machine.

I have to say that both those malls, despite being malls, are quite pleasant! Either is miles better than the Grove.

Cheryl got me hooked on these. They’re like those peas that sometimes come in those Japanese savory snack bags, you know, with the differently-shaped rice crackers that are sometimes wrapped in nori, and that taste sort of umami-ish with just a hint of, like, mirin, or something.

Well, the peas *look* the same as those. But wasabi peas are covered in wasabi powder (who’da thunk?). When you first pop them in your mouth you don’t really notice anything, so you pop a few more in your mouth, enjoying the mild burn on your tongue.

And then, a few seconds later, comes that rush of heat that overpowers your nose and climbs roaring all the way up your septum, nearly burning off your adenoids and conveniently clearing any sinus problems you might have had.

The lingering aftertaste, though, brings back that umami-ish flavor; there’s also that fun texture, with the translucent skin of the peas that crackles when you bite through, and the sturdy pea underneath, all of which induce you to shove your hand back into the bag for more, until they’re all gone.

Yeah, and you can even get them at Trader Joes! =)

First headline in my google reader this morning: “China wins early gold after big opening.”

First headine when i refresh for newer stories: “China’s winning start dulled by murder.”

Okay I’m going to adopt this triple feed reader strategy. Bloglines has served me well over the years, so well that I haven’t even moved to their new Beta version. I just love how simple, fast and easy the old version is, even better than the fancy AJAX-y expanding/collapsing in the Beta. So I’m going to keep feeds that I find to be of value, but which require some in-depth reading (ie. time), in Bloglines.

Unfortunately, Bloglines for mobile phones has a lot to be desired. Since Google Reader came out with a new implementation of its Mobile Reader, I’m going to migrate some of my feeds to that to try it out. Since I’d mainly be reading RSS feeds on my iPhone when I’m on the go, I figure it’d be nice to have access to news feeds and blogs that update frequently, as well as feeds that can be read and scanned quickly, so not too many pictures (Cute Overload and Cukisàg are staying in Bloglines!). I also really like the Sharing feature as implemented in GReader, which is miles easier and better than how Bloglines does it. So I look forward to being able to use that.

As for the third - I’ve been using iGoogle for some of the funner things, like Quotes, Overheard, and AppleInsider, since those stories aren’t urgent. I think I may keep those there. And I used to use My Yahoo! all the time, for Reuters and for “Oddly Enough” wire articles. But I haven’t visited My Yahoo! in months, and hardly missed it! So bye-bye, My Yahoo!

The only snag so far is that I haven’t quite figured out which feed would work best where. And del.icio.us popular is running on all three feed readers. I can’t decide where it fits! It might just stay on all three. (Check out del.icio.us 2.0 by the way, it’s nice).

i’m trying to figure out how to maximize my productivity using my new…iPhone! Well, it’s not brand-new. I spied a pretty good deal for it on Craigslist and found the seller to be pretty trustworthy, so I bought the original, 1st-gen phone. I think it’s worth it because I don’t need to pay an extra $20 a month for faster data speed.

In fact, I was originally gonna unlock it so that I could just keep my regular voice plan, disable EDGE, and go with just the WiFi, but I ended up activating it (which took exactly 3 minutes via iTunes), and now, after getting a taste of EDGE-speed access, I think it’s all right, worth the $15/month I have to pay.

Anyway, as soon as I activated and the Home screen appeared, it was Love. I’ve decided to name it Helmut.

Right now I’m loving Tap Tap Revenge, and Scribble, and the Maps application. Pandora would be cooler if you could run it in the background, and Twitterific would be better if it notified you of new tweets, like the desktop Twhirl app does. Maybe they should make Growl for the iPhone! Also, why do they constantly need to know where I’m located? That’s annoying and they should allow you to disable it.

Anyway, what I would like is for an effective way to tap in notes and tasks, and to get reminders, preferably without using SMS since I”m limited to 200 messages a month. Unfortunately, Remember the Milk isn’t free. So I’ll be working with gCal I think. And Twitter, I imagine.

Is it just me, or did the Mouse Gestures add-on change in Firefox 3? I use the “down-right” gesture to close tabs and windows, but now if there’s only one tab open (ie, a single web page in the window), I can’t close the window with the gesture anymore! I have to use the keyboard or *shudder* move the mouse all the way over to the red “close” button!

It’s annoying.

These popsicles are excellent, with chunks of fruit and all sweetness and light with no artificial ingredients. I’m a big fan of the strawberry, and I just bought a box of Caribbean-flavored fruit floes, which contain chunks of pineapple and even coconut, and those are really good too.

The lime flavored ones are good as well, with just a touch of bitterness that reminds me of tonic. Great for a hot summer day!

The bars are a good size (flat), not too melty, and at $2 for a box of 4, a pretty good deal.

Note: I know about 70% of the products in this recurring feature are from Trader Joe’s, but I promise I’m not a shill for them, really! I just shop there more than I do anywhere else, so my sample’s biased. There’s a fair amount of stuff at TJ’s that’s a little on the crappy side, but for the most part they seem pretty transparent, trustworthy, and reasonably-priced, so they’ve got my loyalty. I had a friend who worked for them and liked it too, so they also get points on that front.

You know what makes me feel old? remembering a time when planning long trips entailed estimating how many rolls of film you had to buy. =P

That said, a lot of people don’t realize that film is still superior to digital in every way except convenience (and price). Not sure what to do about that, except to feel sad that film production is on its way out, and hope that real archivists do their job well enough to ensure that photochemical and optical methods of enjoying moving images persist well into the next century.

My family has to move out of our house in six weeks! The owners have decided to come back from wherever they’ve been for the past 20-odd years. I’m not sure exactly how long my parents have known they’d have to move out by mid-August, but they didn’t break the news to me until…let’s see…today!

They’ve been looking at houses and it looks like they’ve made an offer on one in Buena Park. It doesn’t really matter to me where they ultimately decide to live, but I’m not sure how I feel about moving out of my childhood home! That’s always a sad thing to see pass.

More urgently, though, I’m not so sure how to deal with the fact that I’m going to have to do some serious deep-cleaning and discardia within the next five weeks!

i think i know enough python now to be dangerous. as in, i’m glad i bought a new hard drive yesterday because i’m going to have to back up my machine regularly in case i accidentally write a program that deletes something important.

don’t laugh, it’s happened before =T

A couple of friends of mine are driving up to SF this weekend, and two of them asked me to housesit/dogsit for them while they’re gone. I of course leapt at the chance, as I love their dogs AND their apartment is awesome. Plus they said there’d be a lot of leftover booze in the fridge from the party they’d had last weekend. If any of you guys happen to be hanging around near Beverly Hills/Century City that weekend, you know who to call!

Apparently my family had planned on going cherry-picking this weekend, so my mom was a bit miffed to find that I’d gone and made plans already. I don’t know. I guess I could’ve backed out, but to be honest I’m already chafing here, and feel like I should take every chance I get to stay in LA awhile longer.

In other news, this one job interview I’m up for has been going insanely, and slowly, to the point where I’m no longer sure I’d be willing to take this full-time one, even if I were to get it. I stand a 50-50 chance of that right now, since it’s down to me and some other candidate. But if the interview process is this demanding, I don’t know what I’ll do if the job turns out to be even more so. I think the fact that I’m even considering going on even now is a sign that it IS awesome enough to keep trying for; I’m trying not to overthink/second-guess myself, so keeping on trucking is what i’ll be doing.

And I hope it isn’t just the fact that two fluffy and adorable dogs play around the workspace there that’s making me want to continue.

occurred some time last weekend, when i was at a friend’s party and overheard three people carrying on a conversation about boolean searches.

Jane and I were talking on the phone about her new career as a writer; she’s writing poetry now.

Anyway, she met some dude, and he’s a poet, and that’s always fun, so we chatted about that, and at one point she said “Yeah, I’ll become like, that lady who was Jackson Pollock’s wife, whose work was totally overshadowed by his fame… wait, what’s her name again?”

And we couldn’t remember. I could remember the actress who played Jackson Pollock’s wife in that movie that came out a few years back, but the actual artist’s name? “Wasn’t it Leigh something?” I said.

And Jane was like, “No, I think it’s something weirder, like Ezra,” but I didn’t think so.

We racked our brains for a few more minutes, but nothing came to us. “So yeah,” Jane said, “I’d be like that lady who was Jackson Pollock’s wife, whose work was so overshadowed by his that we can’t even remember her name!!”

Finally I looked up Jackson Pollock in wikipedia. “Oh yeah, it’s Lee Krasner,” I read.

“Oh, yeah, that’s it.. see, I knew it had some weird syllables in it. Krasner..”

i just realized that even if i end up moving elsewhere in LA, i probably won’t be living in westwood again, not any time soon or even in the distant future.

the prospect of no longer having such easy access to diddy riese is making me unspeakably sad.

i am:

1. kinda freaked out about losing my keys. i left them out on the grass last night. luckily i had a spare car key, so  once i stopped freaking out this morning, i ended up being only 20 minutes late to my interview.

2. excited about this place where i interviewed. it’s hard to explain without showing people the materials i have at hand, but trust me, it’s kickass. and when i did further research online after the interview, i discovered that it’s even more kickass than i thought. the prospect of working here is exciting, if daunting. that is, if i get it, i don’t know if i could do the job right. so it’s kinda scary in that way. but still awesome.

3. pretty confident that i did well on the interview. i don’t suppose it hurt that, this evening, i attended a screening put on by a classmate - and found that one of the people who interviewed me this morning works at this same film center, as a side job/hobby! it was weird.

4. exhilarated from the drive down sunset from echo park/silver lake to westwood. truly one of the most awesomest drives in LA.

5. sad about moving out of my apt. esp since i lost my mailbox key, and will porbably have to pay a fine.

6. a craving for fro-yo. i will have to settle for some ice cream.

My dad’s birthday falls less than two weeks before Father’s Day, which poses the usual double-present dilemma for my sister and me every year. We actually get it twice a year (4 times?) because my mom’s birthday is only a few weeks before Christmas.

Anyway, this year we got him a digital picture frame for his birthday, a Kodak number that plays mp3s and does slideshows. We thought it’d be nice because he could look at all the photos he took from my parents’ recent trip to China and his daughters’ respective graduations.

But scarcely a week after we gave it to him, I came home to find it neatly tucked away on the back corner bookshelf, not plugged in and not being used.

For Father’s Day, we got him a shirt that was on sale at Banana Republic. Yesterday my sister told me that he wears it like, every day.

I’m going to pin this down on UI issues.

I’ve been feeling a little depressed lately, and am not sure why, especially since I’ve just finished school, which should make me ecstatic! On that level, I surely am, but now that I’ve finally, frickin’ FINALLY graduated, shoes are dropping all around me.

Like, the combination of having to find a sustainable job, the impending misery of entering student-loan-repayment, and the prospect of having to move back in with the parentals –  I’m probably not nearly as stressed out about all this as I should be (otherwise, I’d probably have a job by now), but still — it’s bad enough having to make all these transitions; the possibility that none of them will go in a positive direction is pretty discouraging.

On the plus side, I’m starting to get back into the groove of doing computer-y stuff, like for reelz. I spent most of the weekend learning a bit of Python, and while the indentation-consciousness is driving me batty, it’s nice to feel a sense of accomplishment for once. Hopefully I will stay on this track for awhile. Demons in the archivery business, get behind me!

(Also, when I do programming stuff, I forget to eat. Which is always a good thing. Although, since sitting on my ass all day doesn’t burn any calories, I guess it’s a wash, really.)

Maybe I should take up running again. Because then I could eat more ice cream (obviously). Really, there’s no ill ice cream doesn’t cure, or at least alleviate, if only for a few soothing moments.

i found an M&M in a drawer i was cleaning out. then i remembered i’d stowed a bag of dark chocolate M&Ms in there, about 5 months ago. this one must’ve escaped, and stayed neatly hidden under sheafs of bills and recipes.

i debated eating it for about 3 minutes. but finally i threw it out, because i am not liz lemon!

having finished my program in a movie-related field, i think i’m ready to start enjoying movies again!

1. I hate Windows Vista.

2. What am I doing with all this leftover loan money, besides take whirlwind trips to SF? I am…going to start  paying off my loans early! I know that’s like the nerdiest thing to do, but it feels good! Somehow, 35k seems a lot smaller and more manageable than 40k. Maybe because I can see myself making 35k a year, while 40k seems a bit of a reach.

3. I know, I know, incredibly lame.

4. But I still have a car to pay off as well, so that’s why I’m trying to be sensible.

5. I’ve made more money over this past year than I thought I would, thanks to internships that have actually paid me real money. I hadn’t expected that. That’s why I had so much loan money left over.

6. The funniest thing about Twitter is that, even when its service has been horrible, people haven’t been jumping ship as they have done when other websites suffer from heavy downtime and outages (cf. Friendster, circa 2001). Instead, people offer to try to help the engineering team out to save this now-indispensable service! I just find that hilarious.

7. And completely understandable. I love Twitter, and I’m no longer ashamed to admit it.

8. I met Mags’ baby today! He is ADORABLE. After holding him I was seriously all like, I want babies! Until Mags told me about the episiotomy she had to go through, and the 2 weeks of… let’s just call it fluid loss, plus the 4 more weeks of, shall we say, fluid leakage…and suddenly I felt like I could probably stand to wait  another couple decades or so.

9. Also, Baby is a poop machine! An adorable poop machine, sure, but yeah.

10. Also, he was wearing this hilarious sleeper that said “Surrender the b00bie!”

My sister just informed me that my mom is miffed because i don’t want to continue living with my parents after i move out of westwood. “She just wants to live her own life,” my mom was quoted as saying.

umm…YEAH?

Really, if anything, I’m doing them a huge favor. It’s not like I’d be helping out around the house or paying rent if I moved back in.  I feel like a guest there now as it is.

Also, I’m about 98% certain that moving back in with them would drive the entire household batty in a fortnight.

So I definitely need a job. And a new apartment. But the job has to come first.

Job!!

Digital archiving seminar: I met a lot of new people. One of them gave me stellar advice, when I told him I felt weird about wanting to not go into moving image archiving even after getting this degree: he said it wasn’t the content of the degree that mattered as much as what I went through to get it.

Such good advice! Of course, he went through that experience, which is how he knows. Anyway, I feel a lot freer for knowing that.

As in, I don’t really care if I find a job in archiving anymore. I’m gonna just do what I really feel like doing, which is web work.

I met someone else who offered to give me an informational interview at his firm, which does web developing for the entertainment industry (we *are* in LA). I was sort of tentative, since I’m not really a programmer. But he said I”d learn plenty on the job.

I think he’s right. If I find a problem, I will find a way to solve it. And if I learn to program while I do that, so much the better, right?

I’ve spent almost $1000 this month on…stuff. Maybe it’s because I”m about to finish school, and have all this loan money leftover. Or because I have so much crap I want to do while I still can.

Whatever the reason, I am enjoying spending money way too much! I need a job. Bad.

just remembered - this is what my program director said, during my portfolio panel, about my website:

I liked clicking the buttons.

The nonprofit where I have my second internship runs a film festival every year. It’s in the first week of May, so things are understandably a little crazy these days. I’ve asked them if there was anyhting I could do to help out but so far few takers. Most of them have been there for years so it’s a well-oiled machine, just one that happens to go insane this one month every year.

Still, I feel guilty going into work these days, since most of the tiem I’m just transcoding video files, which involves little more than sitting there, and shuttling a hard drive back and forth between computers every few hours. Plus I’m only there twice a week, 6 hours each day, so I can go home while it’s still light out.

I write emails to my supervisor and get responses as late as 1AM. I just wanna be like, omg go home!

On the other hand, maybe it’s good I’m not so involved. Especially since tomorrow’s COMPS!

The “good” thing about comps is that we don’t get our questions until Friday afternoon. The finished thing is due Monday morning. Which means that there is a very valid excuse for turning in less than stellar work.

And this excuse is bolstered by my history of extreme procrastination, where I’d write entire term papers in about the same amount of time.

Of course, I’ve never had a term paper that was more than 25 pages long. This one looks like it needs to be about 35. So that’s the BAD thing about comps.

That, and the fact that, well, it’s comps!

augghh

i’m tampering with the original arrangement of my school files in preparation for comps. i had lovely SVN version control on all my directories, which are organized by quarter and where possible by assignment.

now i have to look through everything and figure out what important articles and papers i might need to answer my comprehensive exam questions (which i don’t get til Friday). which means messing up the versioning (not that I can update it anyway because the repository is on my Dell, 35 miles away)

the question in organizing them is this: will it be easier for me to search for articles by their provenance? in which case, disturbing the fonds will have done more harm than good.

except, going through them, they’re so messed up i can hardly figure out what is even there. so i really have to go through everything just to figure out what the file contains. so if i organized them nicely, maybe it would help. and then i could rename them for easier mind-indexing. except for the files that i already know by filename.

i think i’m gonna have to find a middle ground - something neater than what’s there now (a hodgepodge of indecipherable file names and document types), but leaving things where they were in general - ordered by quarter, then class, then assignment.

swann in love
ice pirates
buckaroo banzai
baby

(at my internship last quarter I processed a bunch of files for a certain technical award that’s given out annually in the entertainment field. going through those I kept running across these titles so now my curiosity burns)

1. this sounds like an awesome weekend project. it’s almost enough to make me go to SF! (because super happydevhouse and bay to breakers just aren’t enough)

2. i got a de facto extension on my midterm. i couldn’t handle both that and my portfolio presentation being due the same day. i say de facto because i simply forgot to finish it in time. the instructors couldn’t be cooler about it, just telling me to email it when i was done.

3. i kicked ass on the portfolio. don’t know why i worried about it so much. i think they were blinded by the great photos I used on my Keynote slides (most of them are in my flickr faves). the program director, normally a crabby old coot, was actually cordial, which is like, majorly unusual by his standards.

4. okay, actually, this midterm thing is bugging me. it’s haunting me like helen thomas haunted stephen colbert in that white house correspondents dinner video. i need to finish it, but i…just…can’t!

5. according to the iPod death clock estimator, my iPod mini is due to die on Memorial Day weekend. That is the worst possible time, because I have to work all freaking weekend (network switching party, gah!). on the bright side, if it were to die, i could try a project i’ve always wanted to try, and score major bonus points on the scale of g33kitude - turn the 3rd gen mini into a flash mini!!

i think another reason i don’t like to watch tv on tv is because i’m really susceptible to ads.

like, i really wanna try this sierra mist undercover orange drink. and, it’s only gonna be around for a limited time, so i’m gonna have to get moving.

or maybe it’s because i really like clear things.

so if any of you techno trailblazers is planning on getting a shiny new 3G iPhone this june, let me just say that i’d be *happy* to take that nasty old EDGE speed iPhone off your hands =)))))

as i learned from a phone call today, that first reason is totally true. moms are so weird!

test

from vodpod.com posted with vodpod

To love Macs: Diacritical marks and special characters are super easy to add from the keyboard! On windows you had to memorize multi-numeric codes, like alt+0233 for é, or alt-0231 for ç. And press the function key too, if you were on a laptop.

On the Mac, you just press the option key and the letter you need the accent for. Like é! Comme ça!

¡Olé!

das meisterwerk is complete!

you’ll notice it’s another wordpress blog. you’ll also notice that i freaking paid $15 to be able to redo the CSS. and the sad thing is, it was WORTH IT, and i was immediately sorry i’d spent so much agonizing over it instead of just going straight to PayPal.  i guess i am a control freak after all.

now i wish i could sleep, but i keep getting excited thinking about all the things i can do now that this damn thing is done.

i want to cry!

i’m serious! it’s been awhile since i have, so i’m about due.

i’ve come close a few times, but at inopportune moments, like in the car driving, or at a restaurant. but when i’m alone and can cry, nothing happens.

i wish i could, just to get it out of my system! it’s a really good stress reliever.

seriously! try it! you’ll feel a lot better afterwards.

alrighty.

i’ve spent most of last week panicking about my portfolio. i’ve gathered up the materials I think i’ll need, and now it’s time to actually look at my old papers and see how i can best dress them up so they’re ready for show.

at best, i’ll just need to edit them together so the disparate works flow nicely.

at worst, i will have to rewrite and re-research them to fix all the bad crap i wrote.

i’ve been putting it off long enough. the thing is due this friday, and i ahve to prepare it well beforehand so i can print it out and stuff.

so yeah. now it’s *really* time to panic.

first: your body is in pain.

second: you swallow an orange pill. sip water, sip again.

third: ten minutes later, the sky clears and there’s cotton candy!

fourth: you’d better not develop a tolerance for this.

the end

I’ve been trying to figure out how best to organize the hundreds of articles I’ve gathered over the course of my program - two years’ worth of courses with dozens of papers, most of which I’ve printed out to paper. I want to have them handy and easily searchable in case I need to use them in my comprehensive exams that are coming up in like, a month (HOLY CRAP A MONTH?? I AM SCREWED!)

Anyway - do I file them by topic? But then what about papers with overlapping themes? Do I file by author? But how am I supposed to remember what article I need, if I don’t remember what article was written by whom?

It’s a funny quandary for a pseudo-library student to be in.

I think that instead of filing them, I’m gonna label the articles, gmail style. That means an article can have more than one color label (for each topic that the paper covers). I think I will then graffiti the article with the color(s), and use post-its to summarize the point of the article. I would use post-it flags to label the articles, but they tend to fall off/be annoying. Thank goodness I have crayons! I just hope I have enough for all the labels I will need.

Heavily Mac-Centric this time ’round, of course. To be honest, having a Mac has been in itself a huge productivity boost. But also a huge time-wasting tool. Conclusion: Leopard is an unbelievably beautiful OS. I love it!

1. Perennial favorite: Basecamp - I loved it enough to shell out $12 for a month of service this time, which gave us 50GB of filespace to use. My other group members didn’t find it that useful, I don’t think, but I was really grateful that all my files were in a single location - it meant I didn’t have to constantly search through my gmail (where ambiguous and obsolete subject headers don’t help anything) for files and worry about which version they were.

2. Mori - after moving to my Macbook i needed a notetaking program that was the equivalent of Keynote. I consulted Ask Metafilter, and there were many great responses. But a lot of the programs were serious overkill for what I wanted - like Yojimbo and DevonThink, which let you attach PDFs and everything. Mori was the closest to Keynote (the Windows program), so I’ve been using that to take notes in class, and it’s been o-kay. Next quarter I’m gonna try out the new Evernote beta.

2a. Noted is also a great program - small, simple, and auto-save-y. I’m using that for regular, post-it type notes. Just wish there were a non-rich-text option.

3. I tried Smultron for text-editing, but it proved to be pretty unstable, so I’m using TextWrangler for now. I miss Notepad++ though. Also, I’d like a replacement for regular Windows Notepad - something that loads in one second, and is plain text. I don’t always need drawers and syntax highlighting! And I hate Rich Text Format. I just do.

4. RTM has sort of left my sphere of awareness, which is disappointing considering how promising it seemed last quarter. But nowadays I use gcal to send me reminders (via email and SMS), and really, nothing beats my trusty hipster PDA for immediate, daily to-do lists. Using Post-Its instead of whole index cards has been a good idea, I think. Sadly, this means Twitter’s been relegated strictly to entertainment uses. Well, that’s not sad.

Except for the part where I just admitted that I find Twitter entertaining.

5. I shelled out $150 dollars for MS Word ‘04 for the Mac (I got 3 licenses, and figured my sister and I owed Microsoft at least that much anyway, for all the software we’ve obtained through … more unsavory means). Then I tried the 1-month trial of iWork. And yeah. Keynote kicks Powerpoint’s sad little behind. I’m almost willing to shell out $40 for iWork, just for Keynote. Because Powerpoint sucks that much. What is with the no-thumbnails-in-editing-mode, eh???

5a. For collaborative work (which was definitely a theme this quarter, as all 3 of my classes involved group projects) - Google Docs really shines. The simultaneous-editing capability is great, and of course the revisioning history is nice. I really like the idea of Google Spreadsheet Form building. My only quibble is, why don’t they integrate chat in the word-processor? They do it for Spreadsheets!

6. I’m almost done with my 2-year M.A. program, and my classmates are only now slowly absorbing the wonderfulness that is Gmail and its companion, gChat. That’s saved us a little bit of time (mostly through, er, not having to meet for our group projects). Now I wish they’d climb the AIM bandwagon, because then the ones with Macs can use iChatAV, whose AV, remote desktop, and screen-sharing features are seriously awesome. I know I can put it to more productive uses than talking to Boba Boy’s cat!

6a. Skype might have been a runner-up, but during my Info Arch class we tried to have a guest lecture present via Skype (he was in Denmark), and we had about 30 mintues of technical problems, and in the end we could only establish video connection both ways - we got his audio as well, but he didn’t get to hear anything from our end. It was a minor CF, really, and did not warm us to Skype.

7. I’ve been using Mozy to backup all my school files, which I figure are the most important. Not being accustomed to having such a capacious hard drive, I’ve sort of gotten out of the habit of scrutinizing the files I download - no more being picky about what mp3s to get, and no more worrying that downloading a video file will force me to delete other files from my hard drive! The downside, of course, is that I’ve stopped worrying about backing up mp3s altogether, which means that 160GB external drive I also have has been very sadly neglected. To which, I say: tough!

8. Not a productivity app per se, but Paparazzi, the website screen-capture program, has been an invaluable tool as I study sites, build PowerPoints, and do freelance webwork. So, props!

To try: Jing. JDarkroom. Evernote! Visio.

Want: Mac equivalent of MS Paint. Sometimes, even Seashore is too much, to say nothing of Photoshop.

Ok I only tricked one person with my post yesterday. (I probably only got one visitor yesterday).

Anyway, so duh I’m still in school. Today was my first Human-Computer Interaction class, and it was nice to see so many grad students from all different departments. THe vast majority of my classes have been all-IS, or TFT or MIAS people. This class has people from Psych, CS, Public Health, IS, Education, and even Medical Imaging or whatever the hell it’s called. It sounds even more made up than “Moving Image Archive Studies.”

Anyway, the course seems interesting. The readings have a fair amount of pop-psych stuff to it, but I guess HCI is still in that fuzzy, psychology kind of area so it makes sense. So I guess I’m finishing my grad school career in an old Psych major state of mind, which is funny.

In other news, I checked out portfolios made by past students, and they are insane. I was kind of blowing it off until today but now I realize I have a ton to do.

Why am I even writing this down? I have work to do!!

Today I went to my internship in Little Tokyo and realized I wasn’t being useful at all there. They’re busy doing their thing, and there really isn’t much time to work with me to do what we need to do for the archive. So I think I’m going to quit.

I’m supposed to have my first class this quarter tomorrow. Actually, it was my only class. And I thought it’d be fun, but I’ve realized that it’s not really going to be all that useful for what I’d really like to do.

Fact is, I don’t think this whole “school” thing has been worth it. And since it’s still only two days into the quarter, I think I can get most of my tuition back for the quarter by un-registering, so I’m looking into my options for that now. Which is good because I *really* didn’t want to build my portfolio in two weeks, or take comps in four.

Of course, now I’m going to have to move out of my apartment, since housing is for enrolled students only. Too bad; I had two roommates this year but they were pretty awesome, surprisingly. Still, living alone is the best of all worlds; maybe I can move into my own studio or single now. Preferably somewhere in WeHo or further into the Westside.

Which I can now afford to do, because I got a job!! It’s not exactly related to anything I’ve been studying or learning, but still seems promising. Actually, I have studied for it, since I majored in French in college.

Basically, I’m going to be a French tutor for these kids, whose dad is bigwig who works for a major company around these parts. I found the ad on Craigslist and the pay was so re-donkulously high I applied on a whim (had my resume all ready! granted, it was crafted for an IA gig, but I just added a “languages” section and voilà!).

And I got it!

So I’m pretty excited. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Tomorrow being April 2nd and all. HA!

Today I started my second internship at this place where I intern. This one involves working with (ta-da!) actual film!

Yes it’s hard to believe, but I’m in the last quarter of my 2-year program in moving image archive studies, and have not touched so much as a reel of film since our orientation back in ‘06.

So there’s plenty of novelty, and since I’m pretty familiar with the place where I work, it wasn’t too awful. I was still plenty nervous, though. Imagine, handling film! And it was old Russian 16mm film, in color. I would love to watch some of these one day.

I also got my first workplace-related injury, less than an hour into the job. I was winding film and a bad sprocket caught on my finger and RIPPED across it. It was like a paper cut, only with film, and almost an inch long. It was pretty painful, and gross. So now I wear a glove when I wind film, even though they say it’s harder to detect damage, and if somethign gets caught on the glove, it could rip the film.

Well, better the old film than my finger, I say. As I plummet to the bottom ranks in my program.

Tomorrow I officially start my other internship, at another place where I’ve interned before. I’m excited, because that internship is located in Little Tokyo, and there’s going to be a Yogurt Land there soon!

The Riches

Have I Got News for You

New Amsterdam

Bewitched

My work-study supervisor got me hooked on “In Treatment.” It is crazy!

Crazy-fun!

I’m on episode 36 now. There are 9 left in this season.

Crazy!

Just had a meeting to present my class project from last quarter to a group of “real-world clients.” I don’t think I went very well.

By which I mean, I think the presentation went well - we left the majority of the talking to one of my group members, and everyone went away duly impressed at the end.

But I was a mess. I wasn’t able to print the things I should’ve printed, so that threw me off. Plus it was early in the morning, and I wasn’t fully awake - that’s my excuse, anyway.

But also, the group member kept saying things that didn’t make sense, or that I didn’t agree with, or, at one point, that kind of undermined our entire project. So I interrupted a few times. I don’t think that impressed anybody =P

I mean, I didn’t point out any of the things we didn’t agree on, since that would’ve given away the fact that we didn’t really prepare for today (it IS during our spring break, after all! Technically we shouldn’t even have been required to present this late in the game, but circs beyond our control mandated it).

But while the group as a whole did well, I did a bad job of selling myself at this meeting, which irks me because I did so much work for this project.

Oh well. I think I learned a lot about how these kinds of meetings are supposed to go, and what kinds of things you’re expected to say and do. On the one hand, this is very useful career experience. On the other hand, now I know why meetings are evil and should be avoided whenever possible.

[Editing the original post for Google: the solution is at the bottom!]

Why is it that it only took about an hour to get Movable Type Open Source installed and running on my WinXP machine, but took hours to figure out how to get it to work on my Mac?

Here goes:

I’m using XAMPP installed on Leopard. Wordpress works fine when I use XAMPP, so I ran it to install Movable Type Open Source 4.1 .

But when I ran the MT wizard, the Perl module for MySQL didn’t register (although all the required modules are there), so I couldn’t choose MySQL during the database configuration.

I used CPAN to try and install DBI and DBD::MySQL, but I got this error when it tried to run the Makefile:


Checking if your kit is complete…
Looks good
Using DBI 1.52 (for perl 5.008008 on darwin-thread-multi-2level) installed in /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/auto/DBI/
Writing Makefile for DBD::mysql
— NOT OK
Running make test
Can’t test without successful make
Running make install
make had returned bad status, install seems impossible


After hours of Googling I tried using Fink, but while the packages downloaded and installed properly, the MT installation still stalled. So I got rid of Fink.

Another solution suggested creating symlinks (from XAMPP’s MySQL install to /usr/bin/), after which I ran Makefile.PL from the .cpan build directory and it went okay, until I tried “make” and got this:


cp lib/DBD/mysql.pm blib/lib/DBD/mysql.pm
cp lib/DBD/mysql/GetInfo.pm blib/lib/DBD/mysql/GetInfo.pm
cp lib/DBD/mysql/INSTALL.pod blib/lib/DBD/mysql/INSTALL.pod
cp lib/Bundle/DBD/mysql.pm blib/lib/Bundle/DBD/mysql.pm
cc -c -I/sw/lib/perl5/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/auto/DBI -I/sw/include/mysql -fomit-frame-pointer -DDBD_MYSQL_WITH_SSL -DDBD_MYSQL_INSERT_ID_IS_GOOD -g -arch i386 -arch ppc -g -pipe -fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -no-cpp-precomp -fno-strict-aliasing -Wdeclaration-after-statement -I/usr/local/include -O3 -DVERSION=\”4.006\” -DXS_VERSION=\”4.006\” “-I/System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE” dbdimp.c
dbdimp.c: In function ‘mysql_dr_connect’:dbdimp.c: In function ‘mysql_dr_connect’:
dbdimp.c:1538: error: ‘ulong’ undeclared (first use in this function)
dbdimp.c:1538: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
dbdimp.c:1538: error: for each function it appears in.)
dbdimp.c:1538: error: syntax error before numeric constant
dbdimp.c:1540: error: syntax error before numeric constant
dbdimp.c:1654: error: syntax error before numeric constant
 
dbdimp.c:1538: error: ‘ulong’ undeclared (first use in this function)
dbdimp.c:1538: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
dbdimp.c:1538: error: for each function it appears in.)
dbdimp.c:1538: error: syntax error before numeric constant
dbdimp.c:1540: error: syntax error before numeric constant
dbdimp.c:1654: error: syntax error before numeric constant
dbdimp.c: In function ‘mysql_describe’:
dbdimp.c:3252: warning: assignment from incompatible pointer type
dbdimp.c: In function ‘mysql_describe’:
dbdimp.c:3252: warning: assignment from incompatible pointer type
lipo: can’t open input file: /var/folders/C8/C8LGuPXHEh4ps4Lyk6fJgE+++TI/-Tmp-//ccVwhBoA.out (No such file or directory)
make: *** [dbdimp.o] Error 1


After a few hours of Googling more, I got to this page that provides the solution! I ignored it at the beginning because it specified “MacBook Pro” and “Tiger,” but I blindly followed the commands, and it compiled and installed! But as he mentions, “make test” fails, and that was a problem, and the MT install still couldn’t find DBD::mysql.

So I also had to do what one of the commenters suggested:

Running make test revealed ‘libmysqlclient_r.15.dylib’ was not being found - an extra ‘mysql’ directory was still in the path.

My quick and dirty fix (and to save my sanity) involved manually creating a ‘mysql’ directory in /usr/local/mysql/lib and copying the .dylib file to it.

So I just did the same thing, except in my case I had to copy the file libmysqlclient.15.dylib (no _r suffix). So you run make test and figure out what file isn’t being loaded, and copy that into a new mysql directory in /usr/local/mysql-xxx/lib. Use sudo as needed.

After that I restarted XAMPP and went back to mt.cgi, which was able to find DBD::MySQL!!!

And then MT couldn’t find the mysql socket, so I had to click “Advanced configuration” and copy in “/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/var/mysql/mysql.sock” for the socket. And then I had to create a new database for MT to find - I guess it doesn’t create the database itself.

And now I can run MT on my Mac. Woohoo!

Now if only I could remember why I wanted to run MT in the first place =P

Did some spring cleaning in my room and the common areas, after having woefully neglected household chores for the past few months. That’s right, *months.*

The entire apartment needed vacuuming, badly. As in, I’m amazed I didn’t break the old Eureka.

Now I just have the kitchen to do, which will be pretty manageable, as it’s the only area we’ve been cleaning regularly.

But man! That living room was downright foul, and I don’t know how we were able to tolerate it for so long.

Hopefully I will keep up household chores more regularly from now on. I’ve never enjoyed wallowing in filth, but last quarter my roomates and I kind of let everything descend into madness. After this, I’m realizing it’s better to spend some minutes every week tidying, than to do it all at once. Because it gets to be pretty foul.

Also: never move into a large apartment. Unless you can afford professional service.

I don’t know why, but these were such an unexpected find at TJs, and so surprisingly pleasant, that I became an instant fan.

They’re not even unusual or anything: just your run-of-the-mill after-dinner soft mints, the kind you might pick out of a dish just before leaving a restaurant, only without the possible urine-tainting from people who partake only after they’ve visited the restroom =D

Anyway, these mints are pretty soft, and maybe just a little bit sharp with the peppermint taste, which keeps you from popping them into your mouth, one at a time, for hours on end. Which is good.

However, I’m not entirely sure what makes them particularly English, especially since the package proclaims it’s a “Product of Netherlands.” The only ingredients are sugar, cream of tartar, and natural peppermint oil.

I do like the nice round tin though, that’s pretty classy, I guess. Right now I’m using it to store a bunch of mini Cadbury eggs, and it’s given the chocolate a nice, faintly minty twang that I like.

the more i think about what i should do when i graduate (in 3 months!!!!) the less i know what i’d really like to do. i think i’d really like to work at a startup, because of the energy and the possibilities, not to mention the flexibility.

the problem is, startups don’t really need archivists, see? =D

i see *some* overlap between the things i’m most interested in right now and this thing that i’ve taken out $30k in loans for, but i wish i’d had more time to work out how i can make them work better together. i really need to pay back that loan, and i really want to make good use of this degree i’m getting.

so resolved, on this sad friday night: i will get my ass in gear to maximize these three months i have remaining.

well, after this week i will. after finals.

I woke up early this morning because I had a nightmare, and the whole day I was slightly feverish and dizzy.

Finally, I went to the Bruin student health center but they said I had to pay $12 to talk to a triage nurse, who would only be able to give me “advice,” or else wait til 8AM tomorrow to call in and make a same-day appointment.

So I’ve decided to just take a big dose of Vitamin C, and now I’m just drinkign tons of fluids to hopefully pee out whatever it is that’s making me sick. Hopefully I’ll wake up early enough tomorrow to make an appointment if need be.

I hope I get better, though, because it’s been tough to concentrate on anything all day. It doesn’t help that I’m slightly alarmed about what the causes might be. Illness is no joke these days.

could you please let me go?

Originally uploaded by mizuha

This one’s the first, I think, of many many rodent photos I’ve faved on flickr. This one is great because you can only imagine what the hamster is thinking as he tries to shove the entire cracker into his mouth-pouch.

My totally original, non-obvious conclusion: hamsters are cute!

my classmates and i have been trading a bunch of emails about our latest class assignment (the final for our cataloging course). we’re just mad because it seems like more stuff than we should really need to do, and not in a good way - which would be like, making us better catalogers - it’s just more about extraneous work and stuff that makes us (me, at least) more confused rather than more…enlightened.

but part of our complaint is that we’ve just been assigned to watch a whole lot of things in the school media lab. i foresee many logistical problems, seeing as how she’s only given us two weeks to watch everything, there are 20 people in the class, and the lab is not open 24/7.*

so. we’re mad that we have to watch a bunch of TV and that our assignments are longer than they need to be. why is life so hard??

so maybe it’s not so surprising that, after “stuff white people like,” my new favorite RSS feed comes from “whitewhine.”**

* also, the lab is cold.
** they’re (i’m) not racist! the idea behind both blogs is that people in my SES (high education level, solid middle-class background) are…well, spoiled. i guess that makes me classist, but hey, they’re my people so it’s okay, right?

Last night was kind of a big night at the place where I’m currently an intern, so when I walked into work this morning, there was practically nobody there.

As people slowly drifted in, they were either hung over, sleepy, and/or pretty much useless. Everyone just kinda debriefed each other on the previous night’s happenings, and nobody got any work done (excluding people like me, who didn’t get to participate - which I didn’t mind in the least, to be honest!). The atmosphere in the whole building was pretty subdued, overall.

It was nice! Even more low-key and quiet than usual, making for a pretty relaxed workday.

Also, I found deluxe, raspberry- and mint-flavored hot chocolate packets in the kitchen today. Yummy!

About “Inbox Heaven: The Ultimate Email Setup“: Im’ not planning on implementing this, but what the fellow says about Gmail is the truth:

Who cares if Google is smuggling gremlins to a secret bunker in order to launch a subterranean attack and take over the Earth in 2143? Not me! I’ll still be smiling when they arrive at my doorstep, happy in the knowledge that — yes — the gremlins might have come for my Hobnobs, the true source of all power, but at least I’ve got Gmail.

If it’s a Faustian bargain we’re making with Google, well, hey, it’s email! You’re supposed to assume the whole world can read your emails anyway (because they can)!

I also like this funny image they use:

David Bordwell on “His Girl Friday“:

The lesson that sticks with me is this. If Columbia had renewed its copyright on schedule, would this film be so widely admired today? Scholars and the public discovered a masterpiece because they had virtually untrammeled access to it, and perhaps its gray-market status supplied an extra thrill. Thanks mainly to piracy, His Girl Friday was propelled into the canon.

This part comes at the very end of his article but the rest of it is a good read too. As always!

“Police say a bullet hit one of the struggling men, shattered a window and then hit McRoy.

“The bullet hit a DVD McRoy was carrying in his pocket. He suffered a bruise but didn’t realize he had been shot. As he told a police officer what happened he noticed a bullet hole in his jacket, the shattered DVD case and a piece of the bullet.

“The DVD was nicked. It was a gift from an employee who had recorded a TV show about fire extinguishers.”

Okay, so maybe recording a show off the TV isn’t a crime (yet), but it could very well have been something like piracy!

[Yahoo! News]

Today I joined one of the l-school’s geek clubs on a tour of Yahoo!’s usability lab facilities. I don’t know what I expected, exactly, but the labs are very well put together, I think. The rooms and equipment were cool and fun to look at. It was a far cry from that one time I did user-testing at Flock in a spare room stocked with only one video camera and a Macbook Pro =D

Usability design seems like an interesting path to take. I never really thought about it as a career option before, but it looks pretty solid. Must investigate!

Every time I try to read this one article for my cataloging class, i find myself completely unable to read more than a paragraph at a time.

The article is about how to catalog episodes of “I Love Lucy,” and it just makes me want to watch “I Love Lucy,” so I stop reading and go on the internet to find clips to watch.

Come to think of it, that’s what I do every time a movie or tv show or website is mentioned in an article.

The new digital archivist at the place where I’m interning started her job yesterday. Today we had a nice chat, and she’s really cool.

She went to library school in Florida, working in school libraries and doing media things and IT, before moving to CA with her husband and landing a cool-sounding job at a well-known basic cable network, setting up content management systems/workflows there.

Then she moved to Seattle and became a consultant, and did information architecture work at MS!!!! I told her Id’ just read about that thing in the IA polar bear book and she was like, heck yeah MS rawks!

Okay, so that comment took a few minutes for me to digest, but I can see her point, really.

Anyway she moved back down here because her husband hated Seattle (heh), and did more consulting work.

She assures me that there will be plenty of work out there for IAs. So it’s too bad I’m not majoring in IS and specializing in IA, eh?

She also ventured that content mgmt and DAM would be okay too, job-wise. Hmm, okay.

She said UX was also big.

I dunno.

Are chimeras hirable?

I think I watched more movies in the theater over the past weekend than I have in like, the past 2 years. For someone who’s half in film school, I really suck at actually going to the movies.

Anyway, thanks to a rather nice job perk, I saw “Juno,” “Atonement,” and “Michael Clayton” on film, free! I thought they were all pretty good, which should be no surprise given that they’re all Best Picture nominees this year. Most def. worth the price of admission (not to mention 6 hours of my life).

On DVD I watched “The Awful Truth,” “His Girl Friday,” and “Killer of Sheep.” I’ll leave it to you to guess which one was a class assignment =D

Actually, the two Cary Grant movies are part of a 5-DVD set I bought last week because one of the films, “Holiday,” is for a class assignment. I mean, I guess I totally could’ve just rented it or gone ot the library, but I had a Border’s coupon and none of the films in the collection. The two films in it that I haven’t seen are “Only Angels have Wings” and “The Talk of the Town.”

I guess I’ll leave those for next weekend.

I am still awake right now because I just watched two episodes of House on hulu.com. I don’t know how I got sucked in, I was supposed to dedicate this sad Friday night to homework…Well, I guess technically it *is* Saturday now. =P

I like House and watch it if I ever happen across it during those rare times I’m using the actual telly. On those occasions I usually miss the teaser, and now I realize that was a good thing, because that’s when a lot of gross, scary sickness-related stuff happens.

And then near the end of the second act there’s usually something gross going on too. That’s when I get sort of weak-kneed and nauseous and have to avert my eyes.

But, I love Hugh Laurie and Dr. Wilson. Maybe I should just suck it up and buy a season of Jeeves & Wooster like I’ve always wanted to. And…what, Dead Poet’s Society? Blegh. What else has Mr. R.S. Leonard done…

Wow, I never thought I’d miss my Dell, but:

- When you are in the midst of multiple development projects, don’t just get a new computer and then chuck the old one!

- I haven’t bought Photoshop for the Mac yet, and it bugs!!

- Same for Office. I’m still waiting for my free copy of Office ‘08 Mac to arrive. Til then I’m using Office ‘04 Test Drive. Bugs!!

- Being poor, I’m just using TextWrangler for coding. I miss Notepad++ =(

- Not loving the new Macbook keyboard layout. The expose buttons on top are wrong, and you have to press fn to use any function keys. Which sounds logical when I write it out, but in practice it’s annoooooying. Also miss the lack of dedicated “home” and “end” keys.

- Can’t really test anything on IE.x! While this may be good for one’s sanity, it’s probably not so good for one’s client.

- I need Volumouse. Someone write up a script that lets you adjust volume using the scroll wheel while hovering over a title-bar or at the edges of the screen! Please!!

- The Finder is not as useful as I need it to be. What’s the Leopard version of Windows Key +”r”? Can I do that in Quicksilver?

Don’t get me wrong, the Macbook and I = true love. But even true love ain’t perfect.

One more thing:

- Does anyone know a good way to grab static HTML files out of PHP-generated content? I just found out one of my hosts can’t use Wordpress, so I figure I’ll just use it for content management, then generate static HTML, like how Blogger does it. But how?

The very first website I ever visited was Yahoo.com, in 1995 or was it 1996? I was in the 8th grade. Yahoo was the only web site whose name I could remember when I first dialed up (14.4kbps, w00t!) and connected to the Internet. I think I was using Mosaic, or whatever the default Netcom browser was back then.

And I thought it was awesome. Because everything that existed on the Web was there, and it was even organized and alphabetized!

Hahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahaah!

Anyway, I just hope Microsoft doesn’t screw up flickr and delicious. Please, please leave those services alone!

Yesterday I had a paper due, so the day before yesterday I got about 3 hours of sleep. After class yesterday, I drove straight home, had a bite to eat, showered, and went to bed.

That was around 7:30pm.

I woke up this morning, at around 6:30am.

It was delicious.

Which is good, because I have another assignment due tomorrow =X

Lessee..

Qtrax has said its users will be able to download songs – making it potentially much more user-friendly, but also more of a headache for the labels, who want to be able to closely monitor what users are listening to.

Qtrax users have to download software to use the service, and are also encouraged to ‘dock’ their music player with their computer every 30 days so that the service can ascertain which songs have been played.

DRM-based music distribution that invades your privacy and demands actions from its users beyond “download and play”…

Yeah, this will do really well.

Well, to be fair, iTunes basically works off a similar model. The difference is that the iTunes music store sells actual mp3s now. So QTrax is only about a year behind the times. Also, I hate their all-flash interface.

I think the point I’m trying to make is that a music-selling model that remains mulishly focused on what the music industry wants and needs is doomed to fail, because what the music industry wants and needs is a model that’s long been obsolete. “More of a headache for the labels”? Do you really think consumers care?

I think it’s much smarter to focus instead on what those consumers want, and to reduce *their* headaches, like iTunes has been doing, and now Amazon, et al et al.

okay so i know i said i was all about the adium duckie, but then i browsed through their Xtras page and found this: can you spot my new adium icon?

re-DONK-ulous!

IMG_0709.JPG

Originally uploaded by estherbester

so named because the biggest reason i got a mac was the adium duckie.

also, the 2.2GHz core 2 duo, isight, 160GB hard drive, intel GMA x3100, superdrive, bluetooth and leopard - i mean, those things are alright, i guess.

Okay, so the date I’d been waiting for so long to arrive……has arrived! Macworld SF!

Okay, and it was slightly disappointing.

The MacBook Air is undeniably bee-yoo-tee-full (actually, I think I’m more in love with the separat Superdrive, but that’s another story). Unfortunately, the Air is not quite what I wanted out of my next laptop. I’d been hoping for something more like the 12″ Powerbook redux.

So I’m going with the black macbook! Or maybe the white. I’m going to do some empirical testing at the student store tomorrow to know for sure. See, that’s another thing. The Air isn’t out for another two weeks. I can get a blackbook TOMORROW!

Yay, a new lappie!

And I’ve saved so much money by not getting the Air, and also from stupendous Bruin discounts, that I might throw in an iPod Touch as well!

Finally, I can surf the web wherever I am (and also Wi-Fi is). Yelp and Google maps are going to be SO much more useful =)

Most of our classes at school use Moodle to keep track of articles and syllabus info. That’s fine and all.

But it is a huge pain having to download all the .pdfs for each week’s reading stack, a single article at a time.

They should create a script to allow a prof to bundle all the pdfs into a .zip archive or something.

The end.

i’ve been using tumblr for awhile now, and while at first I thought it was superfluous, seeing as how i have this blog and del.icio.us, I really liked the bookmarklet so I kept it around, and the service has really grown on me. This is one example of how a good UI can mean the difference between dedicated use and total neglect.

The bookmarklet has really come in handy and it’s so easy to use. It works almost as well as a desktop app, and it grabs data automagically from whatever page you’re trying to link to - like links, photos, quotes. (One improvement I’d make is to make the photo-link instructions more explicit - it took me awhile to figure that one out).

I also set it up to export my posts automatically, via RSS, to my Facebook mini-feed (also an RSS app, AHEM). That way, I can automatically share all these cool links I’ve found with all my friends. (So, I guess I got you all hating Tumblr now. Hi!).

The actual tumblr page is customizable, jsut like one’s Twitter page, and they’ve got some nice-looking templates there too. And look how pretty is this visual archive - it makes all the crap I’ve posted look good!

So yeah, I’ve started to use that instead of my del.icio.us/share RSS feed, which is one of my sets of links over there on the right column (which is why that one hasn’t changed in awhile). Del.icio.us I now use primarily for research purposes.

I don’t remember where I wanted to go with this. Oh, right. The end.

I’ve started receiving spam from someone who is using my email address. A quick glance at the return name and headers indicates that I am not doing this in my sleep or something, so obviously it’s some evil random spammer. Damn you, evil spammers!

My cell phone died so I got a new one, a Sony Ericsson z310a, aka Cingular’s “el cheapo” model. It’s got many good and many bad qualities, which I outlined in detail but then my post got borked and Wordpress auto-save did NOT pull through - grrr!

Anyway, it looks less cheap and ugly than my old Samsung p207, but feels more cheap and is still not as neat as the slider phones I’d been eyeing for awhile. The front LCD display is monochrome and tiny, even though it looks large because the whole front is shiny.

The inside display is not too hi-res, but it does have these cool light effects along the sides of the phone which you can customize for each caller. Also, I can sync my calendar and backup my contacts list (nerd w00t!), as well as transfer photos via infrared or Bluetooth.

Most of all, though, this new phone was free, and I still like it better than my old phone.

The phone looks like this:

And the inside display contains this picture that I stole from someone on flickr:

Which leaves me pretty darn happy with it, for now, anyway! We’ll see if it outlasts my two-year contract, which my last phone nearly failed to do.

update Okay I’m really annoyed by the fact that I’m going to have to buy a Bluetooth earpiece for this thing. The speakerphone sucks. Grrr!

Finding Nemo 2

Originally uploaded by IFDImages

So awful (and hilarious)

Part the First

good: had a reunion with old college church friends!

bad: got rear-ended on the 405 on my way to meet old college church friends! 5 cars were affected in total, and mine was at the very front. I wouldn’t even have gotten involved if the car behind the car behind me hadn’t been a huge SUV, the owner of which told us this was his second accident in like, 3 weeks. Grrrrr!!! And of course, his car hasn’t a scratch on it.

ugly: the back of MY car!! =*(((((((((

Part the Second
good: finally got to try Scoops in Hollywood!

bad: I chose vegan coconut coffee ice cream, which was good, but I am beginning to make the painful realization that “vegan” most likely means the ‘ice cream’ was made from soy. Some people are lactose-intolerant. I am soy-juice intolerant. =T

ugly: Or maybe it was the Wako’s fish donkatsu I had for dinner

During my working and schooling over the past year I’ve come to:

- respect TV

- learn and appreciate (if not love) video

I’m starting to get really sick of going to my internship every day. I’m not even supposed to go in every day, but because we have to finish this stupid digitization stuff before the week is out (because we’re renting a Digibeta machine at $600/week), I can’t skip any days. It’s even more annoying because we keep running into stupid technical glitches.

I haven’t had a day off since the train wreck that was finals week, and that includes the weekend, because spending time with my family is not the same as “having a day off.” I need to hole up in a cave somewhere for about a day or so, and I need to do it pretty soon or I”ll go stir crazy.

Four more days, four more days…

Weird. I was looking for my past posts in this series and only now realized I hadn’t published the one for last spring. Oh well. RSS readers will see it pretty soon, and better late than never. Unless you actually like, read this blog, in which case you are probably thinking, “No, better never!”. Too bad for you.

1) Keyboard shortcuts: I am super in love with Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts. They probably shave off at least ten seconds off my email time, which will indubitably pay off the day I enter a “fastest email reading” competition. Seriously though, keyboard shortcuts are great because you don’t have to use the mouse (or even look at the screen - such an inconvenience, that!).

2) Remember the Milk! The biggest change I’ve made this quarter is that I’ve been trying out Remember the Milk, the to-do list service. RTM is really great about sharing its functions with other web tools (making the semantic web do its job!).

Like, so far, I’ve gotten RTM to send me reminders via text message, and I’ve hooked up RTM with Google Calendar so that I can view an agenda for my day when I check my GCal [aside: I really wish they’d get Google Gears hooked up to GCal already]. I also added an RTM widget in iGoogle, since I check that pretty often. Now I just need to figure out whether it’s better to add something to GCal (marking important dates?) or to RTM (tasks and assignments?). Right now I have to SMS both of those if I want to figure out what I’ve got lined up for the day.

I can keep raving about RTM, but to be honest, it’s been quite an investment in terms of the time it takes to learn to use effectively, and I’m still in the process of figuring out what configuration works best for me, since I had to coordinate RTM with Twitter and GCal. I’m hoping that this investment will pay off later in efficiency, which is the whole point. It’s not like it’s as intense as GTD, so I’m willing to do try this.

3) Twitter. Yeah, I use Twitter to add things to RTM, via direct messaging: “d rtm print out journal article for IS240 paper by tomorrow at 5pm.”

4) Google Talk/Gmail Chat. I’ve hooked up Twitter to gChat so that I can not only send Twitter my RTM tasks via SMS (which I also use to get reminders from RTM), but can also get to Twitter thru Gmail or Pidgin. In short, I don’t have to visit the Twitter page to do my thing, or even the RTM website.

5) Return of the PDA. While I was learning the ropes to RTM, I reverted to the Hipster PDA. What can I say, paper rules! One innovation: I use post-it stickies attached to thick card stock, because I have lots of post-its but no index cards, plus it feels more portable.

6) Wordpress. Writing blog posts about my practicum after each day I worked came in really handy when I had to write my end-of-term paper, so I’m gonna keep doing that. It was less helpful for my class papers, but I think if I’d know what I was going to write before I actually had to start writing my papers, I would’ve used this technique. We’ll see next quarter.

7) Blocksite. Facebook, obviously, is horrible for productivity, but luckily the Beacon fiasco led me to the Firefox extension Blocksite, which is even better than the KiwiCloak Greasemonkey script I used last year, to keep me from visiting timesucker sites. This is because Kiwicloak can be deactivated by a simple click of the monkey at the bottom left corner, whereas Blocksite requires a few more button clicks and things to do same, making it much more effective as a reinforcer (tip: block “http://*.facebook.com/*”).

8) Lappies! Speaking of classes, since the UCLA computer lab started lending out nice black Macbooks, 4 hours at a time, I’ve been able to use a computer in class nearly every week. That has been super nice, as typing notes is much easier than writing, and it’s way easier to work on group projects using collaborative online tools. I think I’ve finally crossed that threshold where I’d rather use a computer in class than a paper notebook. Sad, but true. I fully expect to become bionic within the next decade. For now, I’ll settle for buying the intriguing new, super duper MacBook Pro when it comes out.

9) Same old, same old. I still love KeyNote for notetaking, and still love Basecamp for managing group projects. I must also give a huge shoutout to Google Docs, which is far and away the best collaborative writing tool there is. As much as I <3 Basecamp and all 37Signals products, compared to Google Docs, Writeboard sucks.

10) To try next time: see if Slideshare is useful in any way.

So in sum, I guess RTM and SMS win the day. My cell phone has taken the place of my iPod in terms of calendaring and task-remembering, because it’s much more convenient to use text-messages than to remember to sync my iPod to my computer.

Never forget that the mother of ingenuity is laziness!

the second-to-last-day before finals:

1. one cinnamon-raisin bagel.
2. half a cupcake from Sprinkles, unfrosted.
3. handful of Cat Cookies (for people).
4. one 8-oz. can of tonic. Quinine-laced and everything.

My head hurts.

Seriously. Two projects due in three days means four times as much surfing and facebooking and blogging. Six times less sleep. Seven times more work to do in 8th the amount of time. Or something.

A few notes:

1. I was going to meet up with my family in downtown LA today so I asked my mom to bring a little bit of laundry detergent because I’d run out and I really needed to launder. She brought me some, all right…..in an old GARLIC CONTAINER.

2. Something near or under (or above?) my apartment complex makes this really loud, deep, repetitive, rumbling noise. It sounds like a ginormous fan is turning, and the vibration is really strong. The sound frequency is so low that I mostly just feel it in the back of my neck, and it’s super duper annoying, especially when it’s only most noticeable at night when I’m trying to sleep.

3. I am SO glad I kept a running journal of the internship I did this quarter. It is amazing how quickly I forget things these days.

4. On a related note, I lost access to the Web somehow for about an hour this evening. I could still IM people and check mail, but anything http:// -ish was out. It was so annoying! Because without Google, I don’t know anything anymore.

5. Beard Papa’s is fiendishly expensive. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten my mom hooked on their cream puffs. Fortunately, another one’s going to open in Cerritos so maybe I won’t have to buy it for her anymore.

Today I turned in a paper. And I was late turning it in, for the first time, like, ever (actually, the last paper I turned in for this very class was late too, but I had an extension for that one, and a really good excuse). 17 hours past the official due time.

I don’t know why these things are so hard to write, but they are. Honestly, I’d rather write four 5-page papers than one 20-page paper, any day. In one day, even. I hate writing!!! Papers!!!

Anyway, now that that paper’s done I feel like a gigantic weight has been lifted, and it doesn’t even bother me that I have another short paper due on Monday, and a group project to work on after that, and two freelance projects.

Compared to the trouble this twenty-page mo-fo gave me, those are like, frosted cupcakes with sprinkles and fairy dust.

Upcoming Facebook feature (according to their news page):

Sort out your friends.

We’ll let you organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what.

Angie and I were talking about that article by Cory Doctorow, “How your creepy ex-coworkers will kill Facebook,” and about how when a service like that gets too big, it’s going to be less desirable to use because you’ll be connected to people who you might not necessarily have wanted to “friend,” but whom you also can’t really afford to not friend. That kind of thing is what keeps people jumping from one site to another. When you can’t differentiate between a real friend and someone who you added just because you didn’t want to snub them, well, the specialness of the network you’re building goes down just a bit.

So being able to sort your connections into groups, like, say, “People whose photos I want to see and whom I can grope via Superpoke” versus “Polite Adds” is one way to solve that problem. Flickr already has this tiered system, with its “Family,” “Friends,” and “Contacts.” And it works pretty well!

For a SNS like Facebook, what this would do in terms of reinforcing close ties and maintaining weak ties…it’ll make that divide stronger. If the idea of social networking is to bring people closer together, well, those weak ties won’t become stronger. Those people will be walled off, so it’ll be like having two social networks in one!

Actually, it’d be more like real life!

I have a 20-page paper due in less than 5 days which I have yet to start, which means my surfing activity has been cranked up all the way to eleven.

The best site for serious procrastination is Metafilter. Usually.

Today, I log in and what do I find? A freaking post about the problem of film preservation, that’s what!

Gah!

[Maybe it just means it’s time to move on to YouTube]

i’m done i’m done i’m done!!

While this quarter wasn’t quite as awful as the winter of Winter ‘07, it still offered plenty up of suckitude, especially toward the very end, and it wasn’t even necessarily all due to my horrible time-management skills.

Things just ended up happening all at once, and I was left juggling 18 sets of plates, and caught none of them.

So I’m SOOOOOOOOOooo glad it’s over.

Also, I realllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllly need to do laundry.

Only morbid curiosity made me sign up for an invite to hulu.com, whose name just reeks of eau de corporate office desperation, but after having checked it out for a bit (I consider this “research” for school), I’m surprised to find myself more impressed than contemptuous. The site loads quickly, and it’s clean and well-formed. I’ve grown used to how cluttered YouTube’s gotten, but I much appreciate minimalist design.

The content offerings are good if you need to catch up on the latest episodes of shows like “House” and “The Office” (i.e., NBC/Universal and Fox shows). Like, I’m super happy to find “30 Rock” on there, and ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT!!!! They also have old shows, like Bob Newhart and Woody Woodpecker. I wish they’d provide more episodes, though, rather than a partial selection. Maybe that will happen later. Unless they make us pay for those, which they very well might.

Hulu uses Flash-based video, of course, but the quality is noticeably better than what you’d find on YouTube or on those Daily Show clips on Comedy Central’s site. The video quality on Hulu is similar to what you’d find on the godawful NBC TV website proper (though I haven’t tried their proprietary player, just on principle), but Hulu’s UI is way, way better. They seem to have put a lot of effort into making the video player work smoothly and look nice, too.

For instance, the “seek” function is actually functional! The cursor is precise and it works without a hitch, which is so rare. Streaming is smooth, unlike that stoopid NBC site (yes I’m bitter). Videos even resume where you left off, if you clicked to watch something else or went to another website. I know they’re tracking our every move on the site for datamining purposes, but that is a given, and at least they’re giving us something useful out of it.

Also, you can pop out videos to resize them however you want: no longer the tyranny of “bad,” “tiny,” or “awful, blocky, full-screen.” The best size, though, is the default as displayed on the web page.

There are also buttons for feedback, writing a review, rating the episode, and sharing, and even one for learning details about the clip you’re viewing, which, if the info is incorrect, you can fix via the “feedback” button. The menus work similarly to most of the other video-sharing sites.

The coolest part about sharing a video (or embedding one) is that you can select a short clip from the video, and the way to do it is awesomely easy and intuitive. I only wish you could see thumbnails of the start and end points or something, rather than having to guess and click “preview” to check, which gets annoying pretty fast. I’d embed a video but it doesn’t seem to work anywhere right now. Here’s a video I’ve linked to on my tumbleblog, since Wordpress doesn’t allow embedding.

Below the video are comments and “related” videos. The site is very easy to explore, with very few annoying things about the menu and navigation (just because Amazon uses ginormous hover-based nav menus doesn’t mean it’s cool).

Also, it’s free. The episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (featuring an impossibly beautiful Robert Redford) is as free as the latest episode of “My Name is Earl.”

The biggest downside is (surprise!) the ads. They’re about what you’d expect, appearing during act breaks like regular commercials, but that doesn’t make them any less obnoxious. But since they’re there, I wish they’d have different ads during each break, rather than, like, the same screechy Saturn commercial all three times.

Still. I was ready to heap scorn on this venture, but I can’t. Lame name aside, I like!

update: omg what is with those INTRUSIVE ads that appear above the player menu and COVER UP THE VIDEO??? BAD, hulu, BAD!!!

Here’s something new: a foreign-foods edition of this column. And it’s FSM-approved!

Katsuo Udon really deserves props, though. I’m pretty sure the name is supposed to sound Japanese (and the font used on the packaging suggests likewise), but the product seems to be of Korean origin. It’s available at several Korean supermarkets, that I know for certain; haven’t checked any Japanese markets.

Anyway, this udon is really well-made. The noodles offer a perfect balance between chewiness and suppleness, and the liquid soup base is flavorful without being overpowering. The dry seasoning packet is a joke, but they always are. If you chop up your own scallions/onions and drop in an egg when the noodles are done (but while the water’s still boiling) - mwah! Perfection itself.

Of course, such quality comes at a price, about $4.99 for a pack of two, last I checked. At the Korean market you can get a different pack of udon that comes with powered soup base (like ramen) for like, $.50 (0.36 euros) or something. So I consider Katsuo to be an occasional treat (i.e., I wait until my mommy buys it for me). But on days when you want something really hot, or just something soupy and noodly (but not instant ramen-y), this is really the way to go.

What a great way to spend the day

1. A car.

Just kidding! I already have one! Woohoo!

2. A carton of Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream from Ben & Jerry’s, which I still have not found in any grocery store I’ve visited. Why not, Westwood Whole Foods, why ever not?
3. End to the writer’s strike so we can have TV again.
4. As long as we are thinking big: Stephen Colbert.
5. The long-rumored, possibly imminent, small-form MacBook Pro.
6. A guinea pig (because I have no room to keep a pony).

Ahh, the holidays.

I don’t know if it’s coincidence that all the holidays where you gorge yourself (with social impunity) occur during the winter, but I’ve been preparing for it this season like none before. You know, like, because when it’s winter it’s cold, and you want to fatten up before the hibernation period begins. Plus it’s all dark outside.

Anyway, I’ve already had two Thanksgiving-type meals, and am finding it difficult to concentrate on anything because my mind and soul now have to devote a lot of their resources to the process of digestion. Blergh.

It still makes me smile whenever I see another Yaris on the road. Not the half-size hatchback ones, but the ones like mine. They’re so cute!

Finally disabled the Snap! Preview thing on this blog. How annoying was that?

To make up for it, I added a Twitter RSS feed. This means I can blog less, so everyone wins!

Today in archiving school we talked about archives that are run by crazy collector types (there are no other kinds of collector types. Just kidding. Sorta).

The thing is, collectors collect because they are passionate (dit “crazy about”) the things they are collecting. This means that they amass not only a vast amount of physical material, but also exabytes worth of information about the material: they are usually going to be experts, through and through, in the field in which they are collecting, or at least experts about their collection. So like, they know lots about, say, films of a certain genre. And also things like, oh, what’s in the collection, why each item they have is important, what each item contains, where the item is, where the item came from, what the item is worth.

Also, many collectors tend to be protective of their collections, because they are valuable, if only in the eyes of their collector. This makes collectors kind of paranoid, that someone might want to take away their collection, or to steal valuable items from the collection. Or harm the collection in some way. They might feel similarly about the knowledge they have of their collection: if someone else knows about it, they might be in a position to take it away, right?

So. Collectors know a lot of stuff. But not all collectors are trained in *managing* these materials in any rational way. Why bother cataloging, when *they know* everything already? So their knowledge will end up being strictly proprietary; and even if the collector is okay about sharing info (many looooove talking about their stuff to others — bore-them-to-tears kind of love), it’s likely that he/she is still going to be the only person who has all the information there is to know, just because they’re the closest to the collection, and they might not have time to be cataloging or otherwise purging all the important metadata from their brains. Also, nobody else cares as much as them to find all this out, or so they may think.

So what happens when this person dies? Is all the knowledge going to go with them? Mightn’t this be somewhat detrimental with regard to what’s left?

I’m swamped with things to do (it’s midterm season) but I couldn’t resist the chance to finally see UCLA’s 35mm nitrate print (rumored to have been the producer’s very own) of “Casablanca” at school. One of the profs screens it for his undergrad intro to film class every year. Which means the film print gets worse and worse every year, since every time it goes through the projector it’ll likely get more scratches and dirt.

On the other hand, people like the prof (and Henri Langlois) believe prints should be shown as much as possible because that’s what they’re meant to do. Some may even believe that the prints need to be ‘aired’ out like that in a regular fashion.

Whatever the case, I figured I should watch it before it got to the point where they couldn’t show the nitrate print at all. So no regrets! Such a fine movie.

That’s the twee name for Joe’s frozen vegetable blend of corn, diced red bell pepper, and soybeans. I like to put this stuff wherever I can toss in random vegetables and cook for a long time, like Japanese curry or rice pilaf.

You have to cook Soycutash for a long time because the soybeans take forever to become digestible. Like, steaming them 20 minutes seems to be just barely enough to get them nicely soft.

I like the color presented by the red bell pepper, even though normally I don’t like the taste of bell pepper.

Ars Technica reviews are so long and boring but I can’t help but skim through them whenever an exciting new gizmo is released and they review it (i.e., I automatically click A.T. links whenever they show up in an RSS feed somewhere).

But this one about Leopard is making me lean toward getting a Mac when I buy my next computer.

Bah!

Til now a Lenovo Thinkpad has been my final choice for a future laptop replacement, but it’s been really close, between either that or a MacBook Pro. I’m hoping Apple will release a smaller MBP than the current 15-in model, but really, when the Dell dies, I’m not going to be able to wait to buy a new computer, even if that means I end up having to lug around a 15-in lappy, or paying $20 for a WinXP “downgrade” CD.

My poor Dell is 5 years old now, and it’s still going strong, mind you, but it’s such a big, clunky, noisy dinosaur (much the opposite of this one) that I almost can’t wait until I can buy a new machine.

Hopefully, *fingers crossed* I will win the lottery in the meantime, so that I can actually afford to.

The Hollywood Video in Cerritos is going out of business, apparently, and so they’re liquidating their entire DVD inventory. I went there today and it was still quietly chaotic, even though about half the shelves were already empty.

After looking at all the movies, I picked out a few classic ones but then realized I could get TV shows, one disc at a time. This has always been a big thing of mine, because there are a few shows where I love an individual episode but don’t feel like shelling out lots of money to get the whole season or series. Shows like Extras, The X-Files, or Frasier. I’ve always wished I could just buy single episodes and make, like, a mix DVD of personal favorites.

Short of that, being able to buy individual discs seemed like a good enough deal. I couldn’t find any discs from those shows that I wanted, but! I sniffed out a disc of Millennium, that other show by Chris Carter. And it had the one with the episode written by Darin Morgan, “Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defense.” Which is the only episode of Millennium I find worth watching.So I didnt’ have to buy the rest of that depressing show. And it was only $3! Score!

lookatthisdog

Originally uploaded by sugarfreak

I love it. (via Boing-Boing)

I don’t want to sound like a provocateur (provocatrice?), or like an ingrate, but sometimes when I think about happenings in the field I work in, I can’t help but feel that we, the students, are never gonna achieve anything until all the old people retire.

It’s nothing against old people in general. Just these old people, in my profession.

And I’m not saying they’re completely useless. They still have plenty of good in them, for certain things (many things, even). It’s more about the attitude they have: “This is how we’ve done it before, so there’s no other way to do it.”

Well, no. Times change, and these days, times change drastically.

Don’t mind me. This is the characteristic impatience of youth speaking. Like, go away, old people, and let us do our thing, because it’s better than what you all have now.

And of course that’s not fair. Without those old people we wouldn’t have ANYTHING to work with, to speak of.

I guess what I mean is more like, okay, old people, good job and stuff. But it’s time to go, the fat lady has filed for social security, and we have some ideas brewing that we’d really like to try, because we think they’ll do some good.

Radiohead are going to release their next album digitally in about 2 days, and you get to choose the price you want to pay for it. And it will most assuredly be DRM-free.

Over the last several years I’ve managed to amass over 3GB worth of music, all of it free and non-pirated, taking up valuable space on my poor little hard drive, which I still don’t want to delete because I still find it worth listening to.

This is a good time for music, just not a good time for big record companies owned by multinational corporations.

Today I only had one class, but I had a group meeting before that class, and since I didn’t want to lug my laptop alll the way to campus and back (taking a car to school seems way lame, considering I walked/shuttled all last year), I borrowed a laptop from the library.

You see, UCLA has many libraries that lend laptops out for 4 hours at a time, free. I only learned about this program late last year, but took advantage of it whenever I could. Sure, they only lent out crappy Dells, but I needed a portable computer on campus, and voila!

I love that it’s so easy to use computers that are not one’s own these days, thanks to the miracle of cloudnet computing, and thanks to USB keys.

What I love even more, and was so pleasantly surprised by today, was learning that UCLA’ve changed their fleet of loaning laptops from crappy Dells to shiny black Macbooks!!

Equipped with Adobe Suite CS3!!

I accidentally missed the premiere of 30 Rock last night, so it’s a good thing NBC has been streaming all episodes in full on their websites.

Well, almost a good thing. It’s too bad that their streaming flash video interface sucks crap. I’ve spent about 30 minutes trying to watch the last 4 minutes of the show, only the video keeps crapping out.

If they were like Youtube and let the darn video stream download while it was playing, I could just set the player to pause, wait til the whole thing was buffered, and then view the episode interrupted.

Instead, when I hit pause, the video stream stops loading altogether, which means I’ve watched the entire episode on Stuttervision, as my computer and DSL connection struggle to keep up with the stream.

Oh, and just now, it froze my Firefox so I had to reload everything. Grrr!!

I was gonna send this to the Cool Tools blog but my nerve quailed. Also, I don’t think this thing can be bought anywhere anymore (Made in USA and all that).

But I’m not going to let that 15 minutes I just spent writing go to waste!

So here it is:

I love my backpack! It’s an Eastpak. I bought it at Sam’s Club (or was it Costco?) right before I started college, just for carrying books and doing normal, student-y things. After 7 years of heavy, almost daily use, including on trips around Europe/Asia, this bag is still in nearly perfect condition.

Most other backpacks I’ve used have had the zipper break after a few years, or gotten holes in them, especially near the bottom. This backpack has none of those problems, and has almost no signs of wear, apart from slight discoloration on the bottom (which is covered with suede on the outside). The undersides of the straps are made of some grippy material that makes them slip-proof. Even the loop at the top of the bag (the one you may use to hang on a hook, or grab to pick the bag up off the floor) is as good as it was the day I bought the backpack. There’s not a single stitch undone or out of place.

What’s more, the front pouch holds a surprisingly large quantity of stuff, and while the design of the inside pockets could’ve been better (I don’t carry as many pencils as there are holders, and would rather have more wide pockets), even when I’ve forgotten to close the zipper, and flung my backpack around, I’ve never had anything fall out of the front pouch part (I have been pocket-picked from it, though =P).

There are a few shortcomings: the bag is not very waterproof — if it’s raining, my stuff inside does get a little damp sometimes. Also, the zipper tabs, while nice because they’re bigger than normal, make a lot of noise, and that makes me self-conscious when I’m walking through a library.

But for what’s a rather small, medium-sized backpack, it holds a ton, and holds it well! I’ve had stuff happen to things I carry inside the bag (ie water damage from not closing a bottle tightly enough or whatever), but the bag itself has taken a lot of punishment, and been none the worse off. I fully expect it to last another good 7 years, which is pretty good considering it originally cost less than $20!

The end.

- I drove back to Westwood from Cerritos on Sunday evening because I had my first class on Monday. I was tired as heck because I’d just flown back from Rochester, and couldn’t’ take a nap until after my family went out to dinner with a cousin who had just moved down to LA from San Fran (where she’d spent 6 months trying to learn English). I drove to Westwood all drowsy, averaging less than 65mph.

- So yesterday was supposed to be my first class, so I went to class after dutifully printing out my syllabus and all that. About 30 of us were in it, and it was weird because we all kind of knew each other, on the first day back. 15 minutes after class was supposed to start, a professor who wasn’t teaching the class wandered in. He left the room, and returned five minutes later to inform us that class had been cancelled because the real professor hadn’t shown up, for unknown reasons.

- Sunday, I’d been too tired to go grocery shopping, so I went yesterday, Monday. I’d planned on going later in the evening but then made impromptu dinner plans with a classmate, so I left my apt. at 4, and what should have been a 30-minute round-trip to the Trader Joe on Sepulveda took twice as long because of rush hour traffic. Never again!

- Dinner was good though. Thai.

- I got about 8.5 hours of sleep but I’m still tired! Probably because I’ve been sleeping on a foam mat over here in my Westwood apt. My dad is going to bring up the futon bed frame tomorrow, and none too soon!

- So I woke up all tired and scrambled around to get ready for my first day at my internship. At 9:20 I was running around the kitchen trying to pack my lunch and eat breakfast at the same time. At 9:21 I realized that I wasn’t supposed to go to work until 11, so now I have a spare hour or so to do… what?

Here is my favorite picture that I took at the conference in Rochester. Ironically, it has nothing to do with Rochester, and it is blurry and awful as heck, but I love it: