Category: thisnthat

Okay, so i’m about five days late on this. but Happy Lunar New Year~!! ^_^ hope everyone gets lots of red envelopes!

[ this update is for aaron ]

a lot has happened, but i haven’t blogged about much of it because it hasn’t been very interesting to write about. and if it’s not very interesting to write about, it’s always not interesting to read about. and my friend, i’m all about readability. [snicker]

my recent preoccupation has been what i’ll call “the india factor.” i’m leaving for the asian subcontinent in just a little over a week (wow! is it that fast?!) for something like a month. on one hand i’m kind of disgruntled that because i’m going on this trip, there’s no point in looking for work (which i know will take a while) since i’m not going to be around for very long before i’m gone. This bothers me because i’m quite eager to get my career back on track (or at least finding some sort of track =P). so i’ve been kind of sitting on my hands for the past few weeks, wanting to look for work and call up people and so on and so forth but then being overwhelmed by a sense of futility that anything that i find now will be amply filled by the time i get back from india anyway. it’s not a good/productive mindset at all.

but petty disgruntledness aside, i’m really excited to be going to India. it’ll be a wonderful opportunity to visit this country whose society i’ve been analyzing and intellectualizing for the past year or so through a variety of different angles, because all the book knowledge in the world is nothing compared to actually immersing oneself and experiencing it in person. i’m looking forward to having my preconceptions blown away…

so i’m still in the midst of preparing for the trip, although time is slowly dwindling. rebecca gave me a list of the items she packed for robby on their last trip to india, and i’ll be following that a bit when i hit longs and walgreens for the requisite medicines and so forth. i’ve gotten three of my shots (which hurt terribly), but i still have a couple more to go. oh, and i need to pick up our malaria medication too (darned mosquitos!!).

also, i decided to purchase a laptop for the trip after all, since it would do no good to be swiping jer’s notebook computer for when i want to blog/post pictures. I had a really terrible time deciding what computer i should get, and with what specs after i became disillusioned with the one i originally wanted, the fujitsu lifebook s2020. the video card in it is absolutely terrible. nevermind questions about its 3D graphics capability when my eyes were hurting just looking at it trying to do 2D — a standard WinXP desktop. [cringe] anyway, i could get into the details of my notebook quest, but trust me, it’s really not pretty.

i ended up ordering an ASUS M3N from OCSystem.com last week because they had a really sweet deal. I didn’t find out till after I placed the order that they had a really bad reputation (according to resellerratings.com), but after jer called them, it seemed like our order had hope of working out okay. it’s still being built right now — they had to special order the motherboard with two SODIMM slots cuz they were out, but everything else is good to go. hopefully it’ll be ready for us pickup this week. cuz we’re leaving the week after!! aaah!

oh, so the basic specs on this pretty piece of machinery: 14.1 in lcd screen, 1 inch thick, 5lbs, 1.6 Ghz Centrino processor, a gig of ram, internal dvd/cdrw drive. the video card is halfway decent — a notebook can’t call itself a Centrino unless it has the pentium M chip, integrated graphics, and wifi capability built in — and the integrated graphics chip performs better than most of the ATi Radeon Mobility cards, although not the higher end 9500. but i’m not looking to play neverwinter nights with the graphics and framerates turned up all the way, so really, i can deal. the most important thing is that it’ll be light, portable, small, and i’ll be able to take it with me and journal on the go. i’m so excited!

so yeah… with this handy dandy laptop, i’ll be keeping a ethnography of my time overseas, and i’ll post the more interesting bits on this blog here. i’ll bring my camera too and post some pictures. :) frankly, i won’t have much else to do while i’m there. suggestions for what i should do/see/eat/explore are welcome. =) oh, and if anyone wants a postcard, please email me.

… and i’ve never been so happy to be back. It was 0 degrees Fahrenheit when i left from Boston Logan Airport this morning, 7 degrees in Milwaukee when i made my transfer, and 68 degrees when I arrived at LAX.

I love California.

anyone need anything from the boston area? cuz i’ll be there for a few days. email or call if thar be anything ye be needin’.

is really really ridiculously yummy.

time well spent:
– family
– parents
– sister
– jer
– and some friend time, but not that much. wasn’t in the bay area quite long enough. :(

places where time was spent:
– bay area
– las vegas
– good ol’ south la bay

food eaten: las vegas
– rio world carnival buffet
– rio seafood buffet (soooooooo AMAZINGLY GOOD!)
– mirage room service blue chip nachos (best deal in vegas)

food eaten: home in the bay
– hot pot!! hot pot!!
– dim sum!! dim sum!!
– chinese mi-fun!!
– yummy soups

food eaten: home in la
– homemade korean bbq
– lots of edamame
– lots of dumplings and gyoza
– more edamame
– pizza hut buffalo wings

things acquired:
– new hutch for my desk
– new hutch for jer’s desk
– new chair for my desk
– new shirts for jer, sweaters, socks for me at banana republic sale
– new rug for the house
– new skirts, tank top from limited
– new puma jacket
– new sweater for me from my family
– new sweater for jer from my family

what a dizzy holiday season. so many new clothes! now i have no excuse to dress like my usual fashion-victim self. oi… we spent quite a bit of cash. but… but…. i still really really want to get a laptop, especially if i’m traveling later this year. and .. and.. i’m going to boston next week and there is an outlet mall really close to where i’ll be staying……….

-shakes head- temptations! bad! bad!

song in my head: Death Cab for Cutie – We Looked Like Giants (Track 10)

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!