Monthly Archives: December 2003

general ramblings

the bane of my existance

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i’m talking about impulse shopping. it truly is the bane of my existence. today, having never had plans to purchase anything, i got something on an impulse. maybe it’s because i haven’t gotten anything in a while…maybe it’s because it only feels like i haven’t gotten anything in a while. whatever the case may be, today’s purchase was a little excessive. i think that i will have to moderate myself a little bit.

so because of my uncontrollable shopping habits, the people who really suffer here are my friends. cheap-o christmas gifts to you all! =P

the thing about impulse shopping is that you never know what you are going to get. i think this is my favorite form of shopping because i really do enjoy the cool finds that i do end up getting. it’s not as much fun to go shopping with a purpose because you know what you are going to get and after you get, it’s kind of anticlimatic because well…you’ve been expecting it this whole time.

general ramblings

uh oh…

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’tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la la la la la.

i just bought myself my own christmas present. i’m not going to say what it is yet, but i guess this year, xmas will be super heavily happy for me.

ahhhh, finding comfort in shopping. this can become an expensive form of therapy.

photographic

click!

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what is the very first thing i do to my new bundle of joy, the canon s400? i record a new sound for the shutter. i absolutely HATE how the default shutter sound is this really cheesy sounding fake shutter. i mean, if your camera doesn’t have a real shutter sound, why put in a fake one? really? it’s a big pet peeve of mine.

and because it’s so obviously fake, i swore that if i ever got a camera that had a feature to let you record your own sound i would change it immediately. so, every time i take a picture now, the camera’s recorded sound for the shutter sound is a recording of me saying “click!”

i love it.

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techie

more pMachine stuff

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the more i fool around with pMachine, the more i like it. i think as i understand it better, it makes more and more sense to me. there are still a few peculiarities about it, but it isn’t so bad. with each passing day i feel more and more confident that i made the right decision to build off of pMachine instead of some other blogging tool. what amazes me is that pMachine is relatively unheard of. i wonder why…it really is good software.

so the little pet project that i’ve been working on is making a pMachine-enabled blogroll. just a nice way to manage links. the big problem i had with this before was that i hand coded the list of links that currently is to the left. this is a problem. it’s hard to manage and a pain to deal with. that’s what makes blogrolling so attractive. but what i really hate about blogrolling (and most free services) is that they force you to advertise their service on your site….unless you pay them for the service. while this does make good business sense, i guess i really dislike using other people’s software and advertising it when i feel i can do it myself. i guess that’s just the inner geek in me.

i’m not so thrilled with the way it handles caching, but it isn’t so bad. i think that i may add on the built-in caching mechanism and make it a little bit more intelligent. the one big downfall i saw to pMachine was the fact that it has to do a database request for every page. i really prefer publishing to HTML instead of hitting the database all the time. i guess i’ll go install the caching system soon and see how it works.

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general ramblings

yeah, so i am a blogger now

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i feel almost dirty. i feel like i’ve betrayed people. a few people have commented about liking the new layout, but there were also a few…no [url=http://www.geocities.com/sushisis/]just one[/url] voice of bloody murder for switching over to “the dark side”.

i sort of feel compelled to blog and blog and blog. but then nothing comes up. i think that’s why i liked waiting until the end of the day to put all of these thoughts together.

anyway, work was a little bit of a rough day for some and an easy day for others. my day sort of fell somewhere inbetween. we had pizza ordered in for the engineers because we had to be around in case anything bad happened for a server upgrade. the upgrade didn’t go quite as smoothly as planned, but i guess these sorts of things happen.

i’ve come to realize that i really hate the sysadmin type of work. it just doesn’t agree with me anymore. i don’t want to find out why hardware things are broken. why a router doesn’t see the internet or share its connection or whatever. i just don’t care. i introduce enough broken things in my code, having to deal with the hardware layer is just pure irritating for me.

but oh well. setting up the wireless router last night was already a bit of a chore for me. i guess i just don’t have the patience i used to have…which is weird because this was probably a whole lot easier to set up than anything else before. i guess i’m growing impatient with my old age.

i’m sort of disappointed with how the journal page looks, i sort of wanted to spruce it up a little…but i fear that i’m far too lazy so it may very well be that this is as good as it gets. content over design, right? actually, i’m more interested in getting some other functional stuff working here that i may very well not touch the look and feel for a while. the first thing that i’m going to have to add is a decent blogroll type feature. it is such a pain in the butt to update that list of links!

general ramblings

overheard today

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girl 1: if i were a guy, i’d totally be checking out your boobs.
girl 2: no way! if it were me, i’d totally be checking out your booty.
girl 3: really? you know, that would make you an ass-man.
girl 1: i’m a boobs man all the way.

…

the things i hear…

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general ramblings

volleyball recap

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we went 3-1 last night. it probably should have been 4-0, but that’s the story of our season. still, we played quite well and i was happy with how it all went. i was hitting particularly well last night. in fact, i was swinging the hardest i think i’ve ever swung before….and they were landing in. it was quite a sight to see.

i’m pretty excited about playoffs. i think both my teams have a good shot at making it through the ranks.

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today's new thing

new toys

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the new toys i ordered came in the mail today! after much debate, i finally got two things that i’ve been struggling about for a while now. the linksys wireless 802.11g router is a thing of beauty. i’ve had a little difficulty getting it set up, but most of it was due to my own braindead-ness. but once i got it up and running it was smooth sailing. i’ve heard about how you can hack this router because it’s running linux, so i’m anxious to start getting under the hood and seeing what i can do with it.

i’m currently typing this entry via the wonders of my new wireless router. though not as cute as [url=http://www.track15.com]dardy’s[/url] airport, i still like it just the same.

the other thing that came in the mail today was the canon s400. i’ve been debating whether or not to get this for so long, i never thought that i would actually get it. but after i opened the box, i fell in love with it. it’s so tiny, so portable, so sexy. i’m still trying to learn how to use it and i’ll look at the pictures in a little bit.

quite an exciting gadget day.

rants

house of prime rib

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oh yeah, i forgot, after cirque, we went to the house of prime rib for dinner. we had reservations for the place, and though parking was a pain to find, we finally found a spot a few blocks from the restaurant and we were seated pretty promptly.

man, the service at the restaurant absolutely blows. it took forever to get our order in. my glass of water was empty most of the night, and we unfortunately got a waiter whose shift ended before our meal did, so we got a new waitress in the middle of our meal which added to the lack of service. very poorly done, if you ask me.

the salad was pretty good, though, i have to admit, i haven’t had a salad that good in a long, long time. the prime rib itself was pretty decent too, but what separates the house of prime rib from other places (aside from the fact that they only serve prime rib…oh and a fish plate) is that you used to get unlimited seconds on the prime rib. i say USED TO because that is no longer the case.

no, no more free unlimited seconds. in fact, the seconds that you get is this piddly little sliver of a slice of prime rib. our friend, brad, finished the second helping in seconds and was wanting more only to find out that their policy has changed!

no more unlimited seconds…

really tiny portions for your seconds…

i felt seriously gypped. grrrrr. the only reason why the place was good was because of this gimmick…now, they are just fall into the medicore steakhouses that sell prime rib. there’s nothing that spectacular about them to set them aside from other places.

oh, the pleasant surprise was their horseradish. it was extra super hot. i wasn’t expecting it to be so strong and i took a big bite of it and got a bigger-than-i-wanted surprise. this will probably be my last visit to the place for a long, long time.