Author: Pearl L

i picked up the george foreman grill from home over christmas break, and boy is that one of man’s greatest inventions! it’s soooooooo easy to fix a meal with it! it’s the ultimate lazy person cooking device. no fuss, just food.

i’m writing this because i just had a chicken-flavored-with-rooster-sauce burp. teehee! so yummy! ^_^

There’s a lot of good software out there, and I while I haven’t really had a chance to play with much of it, here’s a bit on what I’ve been playing with lately, and a few recommendations of programs worth checking out.

I just started playing with Mozilla 1.5 yesterday (I know, took me long enough!), and i like it a lot! It has much better functionality than Internet Explorer, runs faster, has a clean design with a sexy feel, and has some of the things that make Opera, my favorite browser, so darned good, like tabbed browsing and a hotlist panel. Not too shabby for a free browser.

Opera, however, still remains king in my mind. (screenshot to the right. and yes, i know i have mac envy.) Although its rendering of some pages is sometimes imperfect, by and large it’s much more pleasant to surf the net and manage a lot of open windows with Opera than IE. Opera’s functionality is better than IEs in leaps and bounds. Search bars are integrated into the browser — there’s no need to go to the Ebay site first to search it; you can do it right from the toolbar. The same goes with Amazon, C|Net, and Google. The Find in Page search is also super handy: typing in a query automatically highlights matches in the page as you type. Additionally, the browser itself is very customizable — the GUI is xml based so it’s easy to move things around to where you like them. Put your buttons and search bars wherever it makes the most sense to you, not just where the browser programmer thought it should be. For instance, I really like having my hotlinks bar on the right hand side rather than the left, and Opera is the only browser i know so far that would let me do that. It’s also very to change the overall look and feel of Opera, as you can skin the browser virtually on the fly (no browser restart required) and further customize each skin with various color themes and special effects. It’s a browser made for the Internet power user, the person who spends ridiculous amounts of time reading stuff online who prefer to get to the content instead of wasting keystrokes typing in unnecessary URLs or using extra clicks to get to where I want to go. That is, it’s perfect for people with short attention spans… like me!

Also trying out Thunderbird, the Mozilla stand-alone mail client, but I think I still like Eudora 6 a little bit better. Maybe some more time with Thunderbird will change my mind.

And as always, i must plug the joy that is Trillian Pro. So I already knew that you can open up multiple screen names in one instance of Trillian and message them with the sn of your choosing, but i didn’t realize there was a way to keep the buddy lists of those screen names separate. I only found this out last month (stupid slow pearl!), and i’ve been playing with it a little bit since then. It’s so cool! the buddy lists of each of my sns don’t have to merge! No more signing on to separate screen names to organize/sort through deleted/lost names! It’s almost enough reason to give up DeadAIM.. but not quite. ;-)

Trillian Pro’s extensibility is also worth mentioning. A host of plugins enable a user to open trillian, check their mail, check RSS feeds, check the weather, check time in other parts of the world, pop up reminders, among a ton of other things in just one simple program. I donated $15 to Cerulean Studios waaaay back when, which turned out to be a good thing, cuz they ended up giving me Trillian Pro, which now costs $25 to buy. If you don’t want to shell out that sort of cash for software you haven’t tried, you can probably find yourself a hacked version somewhere online to try out. And yes, it would be worth the time to look for and play with a program like this. :)

If you find any other useful/handy pieces of software bliss, let me know. :) I’m always on the lookout for good things.

Remaindered links:
:: Starfish – generate abstract patterned backgrounds for your desktop!
:: PuTTY – a good little free telnet client. Too bad UCLA BOL doesn’t offer shell access anymore. :(
:: JetLinks – handy program for managing and synchronizing your bookmarks between browsers.

seeing i’m on Amazon all the freaking time, i figured i might as well sign up to be an affiliate and put a little search box up. It’s up by the site search box, in case you’re interested. *nudge nudge*

College secret: instead of selling your books back to the campus bookstore and getting thoroughly shafted, sell them online on Amazon. You’ll get a better price for your books, as well as the knowledge that you’re helping another fellow student not get shafted at *their* campus bookstore. I ended up buying many of my textbooks online in my later quarters. The internet is good. :)

I’ve got a ton of books I have yet to load onto Amazon. Here’s a sample of what i’ll be putting up in the next few days, in case you want first dibs on any of them before they become available for public sale.

Books on India:
Wages of Violence by Thomas Blom Hansen
Theft of an Idol by Thomas Brass
People Unlike Us: The India that is Invisible
The Other Side of Silence by Urvashi Butalia
Ashes of Immortality: Widow-Burning in India by Catherine Weinberger-Thomas

Feminist Texts:
Frontline Feminisms by Waller and Rycenga
Challenges of Local Feminisms by Amrita Basu

I also have a bunch of terrific european history books (modern and medieval) that will also be up for sale soon. I’ve got books on Medieval Russian history, Medieval French history, French absolutist monarchs, and so on and so forth. So if these topics tickle your fancy, drop me a line. They’re good books! Make excellent reads.

Learning and reading is good. :)

Sorry for the lack of updates! i’ve been out and about quite a bit lately, as well as more or less shut in for the past few weeks or so. As much as i love the holidays, i’m quite glad that they are over. well, almost over. (Chinese New Year IS just around the corner.)

notable happenings in the world.
so much as gone on in the past month or so, and frankly, i’m too lazy to give them their proper due. so in short order…

– Britney Spears gets married (here’s a pic of the license.) Here’s the happy wedding party.
– Britney files to get her marriage annulled. Her soon-to-be-ex explains it was just a joke.
– Cow found infected with BSE. Mad Cow scare ensues.
– And…..We’ve returned to Mars~!! :D

UPDATES:
– panorama of the New Year’s Celebration in Times Square. It’s pretty sweet. =)
– if you don’t have 3-D vision, try jiggly vision! Mars lander photograph done in jiggy-D!

Well, it’s 2004! Anyone do anything fun for NYE? Jer and I stayed in and played Diablo 2 all night. haha.