Author: Pearl L

no more blogging! aaah!

it’s the last day of tenth week. good luck on finals, everyone~!! well… at least to those of you who still have to endure them. wrawr.

does it ever strike anyone that grown-up conservatives were those kids in preschool who didn’t play well with the other kids? because honestly: what do you hear from conservatives?

– “Why do I have to share?”
– “How come I can’t have more?”
– “But I don’t want other kids to play with my toys!”

okay, I know, I’m not being fair. i’m just whining about extremists. granted, there are liberal extremists too, and they’re no better than conservatives. It’s just that extremist liberals basically the same selfish logic and give it a pseudo-social bent. I think that contradicts the very ideas of liberalism: that everyone deserves a fair shot at a decent life. I didn’t say special treatment, I didn’t say a perfect happy life. I said a fair shot at a decent life. And you know, it’s up to a society to do its best toward that.

Anyway, I could write a whole thesis on that, but i’ll stop here. at any rate, it takes a certain kind of willfulness to be extreme in either direction, and for anyone to say that only one way is the way to go on all issues is… well… i’d say they’re not very educated. :(

education’s a good thing! knowledge helps a person better understand their world and can help them improve it. yay education!

haha, ok, i’ll stop! i’ll stop!!

…belated.

oh my gosh, I do *not* fare well without a computer/internet connection. >_<

thanksgiving was good! got to see my parents, got to hang out with my sister, see some of my friends, and do some christmas shopping and prep for the trip later this month. I can’t wait!! it’s going to be sooo hard concentrating on school knowing that england is right around the corner. I can’t believe it’s tenth week already, and finals week is right around the corner! <sob!>

anyway, home was nice. it was good to get out of LA for a little while, even if it meant leaving jer. I was so happy to see some of my old friends. everyone seems to be doing well, living at home and working or doing grad school. my old friends are such overachievers! hehe.

I got a backpack for the trip this weekend too! my parents and I went to the R.E.I. in Fremont (across the street from that awesome Fry’s on Durham) on Saturday and took a look at the inventory. I had no idea backpacks were sooo expensive. but then again, you could see the care that was put into designing each of them: most of them had loops for hooks and such, little side pockets, places to hang your gear, straps to bind things in place. there were 4500 ci monsters with detachable fanny packs, adjustable backs and so forth.. I decided those were waaay too huge for me and picked up a Moraine 3200. here’s a pic.

so yup. that’s the most exciting stuff of the weekend. I missed out on a lab proctor position at social sciences computing though, since I was at home and couldn’t get online. :( that was the bummer of the vacation. oh well.. maybe something else will turn up. :)

so I finally got blogger to post by using one of the alternate servers… well, actually they’re the main servers but I hate using them because they never display the date in the proper fashion. Most of the blogger servers render my date stamp in sentence case — November blah blah blah. The server that I normally use can actually render dates the way i like — all lowercase. so please forgive me if my pages look really really icky right now. it’s not my fault! *sob!!*

anyway, just a post about awful blogging business.

HEY so everyone who reads this blog and is good friends with me, please email me your mailing address so I can send you a christmas card/post card! email me, darnit!!

so onto more joyful business!!

I discovered several very happy-inducing things today!!

1. being the stationery freak I am, I have been completely enamored of a japanese stationery mart nearby. they don’t have cutesy sanrio stuff (which I don’t mind), but they focus on good ol’ stationery for students, etc. I’ve wandered into it quite often, but have often walked away empty-handed, nevertheless still content from the experience of being so close to so much cool pens and pencils and papers!!

but this time was different. :) last night, I rediscovered my old “campus” brand binder, the one I had picked up in taiwan when I last visited. it’s a small binder/notebook type thing – takes paper that’s about half the size of a standard copy size paper, has little pockets inside, etc. the trouble with the binder is that it takes special paper that has lots of holes punched in it, and it’s hard to find in the US.

this store carries that paper. :)

so today, I picked up a pack of unlined paper, a set of new dividers, took everything that was in the binder before and snapped all the new stuff in. first of all, everything fit (YAY!). second of all, the unlined paper was soo much nicer than the lined paper I had been using. I was going to be happy enough just writing on the fresh sheets of paper when….

I started playing with word and my printer. I found a paper size called “A5,” mused that the dimensions were about the same, and fed a sheet through my printer.

it printed perfectly. :)

I went nuts! I looked around in all my other applications and realized that A5 was a standard paper setting!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!

so now… i’ve finally got my excel address lists going again, with copies in my little binder. I’ve got my calendar in my binder. I’ve got my “wedding planning” list in my binder. My binder has use again!!!!!

Needless to say, I am thrilled to find a new way to keep organized. =) =) =)

2. And there’s a second thing that makes me happy today!! I discovered Irfanview, which is a supremely handy app for viewing/batch renaming your images. super handy if you’ve got a digicam and you want to rename all their names to numbers and such. I also got to play with Exifer, which is great for handling the exif information on your digicam images. It also makes it easy to add jpeg comments, which is really handy when you use JAlbum to create web albums of your pics. JAlbum automatically thumbnails and generates slides for your pictures for posting online. It can also import your jpg comments as captions and display any exif information you choose on the slides. freaking awesome. I was only playing with all of this today because I got my pictures from summer 2000 back from wolf camera. They made a photo CD from my negatives! yay! so now, half of my pics from the summer olympics are (finally) now online. the rest will be up after I get back from thanksgiving. :)

3. Dinner with jer at Houston’s. I managed to tear jer away from work and get dinner with him at Houston’s. They had the pork chop today! YAY!! It’s not always on the menu, but it’s almost ALWAYS sooooo good. ooh, and coffee afterward was tasty too. :)

*yawn* time for bed. :)