June 28, 2007 • 3:09 pm 1
I was sposed to get a car today. My dad and I’d arranged for me to leave work a few hours early; he’d pick me up in Hollywood and we’d drive to El Monte to choose and buy my car.
At 2 I get into my dad’s car in Hollywood, and only then does he tell me the salesman called at 11, saying he had “an emergency” and had to cancel our appointment. And apparently we cant’ see some other salesman.
I’m just super sad right now.
Filed under: car
June 26, 2007 • 8:36 pm 0
Yeah, I spoke up on the flickr forum about my photo transfers (it’s a pretty active forum; I’m definitely one of MANY people who had problems). Luckily, staff read the forum so I got put on a priority list, and the transfers went through.
So you can now browse my old Yahoo! photos at the end of my Flickrstream! There are a lot of Europe photos, but also some parties and pics taken at Beurkley. I’m not going to specify which ones, so as to make you go there and look yourself *evil*
Also, somehow I got an extra three months of Pro added on. Well-played, flickr!
Filed under: flickr
June 24, 2007 • 6:37 pm 0
It’s beyond wonderful to not have papers to write! Or any kind of homework, for that matter. I’ve been working part-time at the Archive, doing data-entry work, and I might extend my hours because the work, while repetitive, is certainly relaxing and stress-free (plus if I am going to be commuting from Cerritos, I might as well stay longer than four hours a day).
The best part of what I’m doing right now is that once I check out of the building, I do NOT have to think about “work” for the rest of the day. This is the first weekend I’ve had in awhile that I could really enjoy without worrying about anything being due.
But I have to start thinking about designing websites and tutoring a GRE kid pretty soon. I haven’t worked at my Test Prep Company in so long, I don’t know how I’m going to get back into the swing of things.
And while cleaning my apartment in anticipation of moving out, and organizing my files, I’ve been mulling over projects I should be doing over the summer. Now that I think about it, there are lots of things I need to take care of. I need to:
Actually, that last thing, I am getting at the end of this week!!!! My parents are helping me out, because they want me to get a new car, and there is just no way I could do that on my own. So I’m getting a Toyota Yaris!!
I really don’t care what kind of car I get, as long as it’s one that can safely and efficiently take me from Point A to Point B, where AB > 5 miles away. Seriously since (and I never would’ve thought it possible to do this) I’ve lived nearly ten years in Los Angeles without a car – that’s how long I’ve had a driver’s license, but no car. Okay, so maybe I spent about four of those ten years not in Los Angeles. Still, 6 years in LA without a car is pretty amazing, I think.
Filed under: car
June 18, 2007 • 10:06 am 0
I just remembered that Yahoo!Photos was closing so that Yahoo could “focus our efforts on Flickr.” No comment on whether that’s the best thing they could be doing with their resources, but I had a few things up on Yahoo photos, and while naturally, I have copies of these photos in various places, I didn’t want these to get lost in the dead-service ether.
Luckily, they provide a number of options for you to take your photos with you – you can export them to flickr, but also to Shutterfly, Photobucket, Snapfish, and another I’ve forgotten. You can also get a 3rd-party service (whose name I also forgot) to sell you a cd of the photos in your old account. I hadn’t realized how many photos I had on there. I thought I could use their one-by-one download tool, which they recommend if you have around 20 photos. I had 129!! I have no idea why.
So I chose the flickr option, but only because as a thank-you, they offer 3 free months of Flickr Pro account status! I received that once before, with the clogged-tubes contest, so I know flickr pro is great (I’m just too cheap to buy it myself).
And after I give my approval to have the photos moved, they’re like, “We’re so glad you picked us! thank you! yippee! (or should that be ‘Yahoo!’?)” Flickr’s always been kinda cutesy, but in a fun way, and (usually) not in that overly contrived, insincere way. More like, in an unabashedly enthusiastic glee that I find sort of endearing.
Anyway, they seem to promise an easy-to-export experience, so I hope to find that they make it clear which ones were imported from Yahoo (the better to tag them with), and that the photos transfer okay. I don’t doubt they will, though.
update: Grrrr, I am disgruntled! Flickr sent me another happy email yesterday morning saying the migration had been completed, but I’ve been checking my Flickr intermittently since then, and my photos have yet to arrive! And I can’t login to my Yahoo! Photos account anymore, as they say it’s been locked for migration. So where the heck are my photos, flickr??
A quick check of the forums reveals this isn’t an isolated problem, so I won’t be shooting off an angry email just yet. But seriously, if this is a known issue, can’t they just delay sending that happy “We’re Done Moving your Photos!” email until, like, you know, they’re actually done?
On the plus side, I do have Pro now. Yay.
June 16, 2007 • 9:56 pm 0
This quarter I didn’t try actively to find new programs or anything, but focused on intensifying my search for the best productivity maximizers.
I’m finding KeyNote to be indispensable for making outlines, copying notes I’ve taken, and even taking notes during class lectures. I’m finding the auto-save feature to be a life-saver, but one thing to make sure is that you don’t delete anything in case you lose it forever. Which is no big deal when all you have to do is create a new note.
I do wish the Keynote interface were prettier, but the open-source project has stalled since 2003, so unless I do something about it (or some graphically-talented developer discovers it) it’s gonna stay ugly. Still, function beats form in this case. The only thing that would make it better is if it was as intuitive to use as Notepad++
One cool thing I learned about presentation software is that you don’t have to use PowerPoint to make a good slide show. Actually, you might even say PowerPoint is detrimental to making an impressive slideshow. I’ve learned from the Design|Media Arts kids that you can use Photoshop to create a pretty fantastic-looking slideshow in PDF form.
On the other hand, using Google Groups to manage a group project isn’t the cat’s meow. I mean, I really appreciated the 10MB free file space, but the notification and other administrative features don’t hold a candle to Basecamp. Basecamp is almost (ALMOST) worth the fee for its features (and if you don’t need to manage multiple projects or file-storage space, then the free version is more than adequate, really.).
The bibliography web app I’ve been trying to build in Rails has stalled, mostly because I’ve been doing other things. Unexpectedly, what started out as a simple project to make an app that would simply spit out citations in the correct format has now become this note-keeping, citation-storing, mini project-organizer. Which is one of the reasons I’ve preferred not working on it.
Also, I discovered Zotero, which is a Firefox extension that uses SQLite to store notes and web citations. I used it to save electronic database articles and found it a lifesaver for those cases. Didn’t make use of the bibliography thing though. And yet I didn’t spend nearly as long constructing bibliographies for this quarter as I did the other two, maybe because I tried to build it one-by-one, with each citation. The biggest pain this quarter was formatting my footnote references, so that’s one thing I’ll be working on for next year.
I would also like to try a paper-writing strategy that will save me from the pain of trying to squeeze out 20 pages in two days – create a blog in which I just slap down a paragraph every time I take a good note from a book or have an idea. Then I’ll just try to fit everything in together. We’ll see if that ends up actually saving time, or if it makes the jigsaw-like process of stringing sentences together even more excruciating.
Filed under: school
June 14, 2007 • 3:59 pm 0
My final restoration paper is due at 5. I turned it in five minutes ago, so like, totally on time and all.
Whoo!
If I ever take two classes with a paper due the same day again, I’m going to quit school and never come back.
SUMMER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Filed under: school
• 11:41 am 0
TV paper is done!!!
I turned it in in the nick of time – the prof was sitting outside waiting for everyone to bring theirs. She’s gotten hooked on the Food Network now – score! Except FN is now my least. favorite. channel. EVAR.
Well, until Sunday night, anyway.
Seriously, I never thought this paper would be so difficult to write, but it was, and it was awful, and I have’t slept, and wow. Awful.
Okay, time to finish my restoration paper!
Filed under: Uncategorized
June 13, 2007 • 5:23 pm 0
Just read the latest post in BoingBoing’s popsicle series, about Korean red bean ice cream cakes that look exactly like the picture on the wrapper, and it reminded me of this sad picture my sister took of red bean fish-shaped cakes while we were in Tokyo:
My dad had made us walk all the way to Roppongi, I think it was, for these things, and they not only turned out looking nothing like the picture on the sign above the restaurant, but they didn’t even taste as good as the ones my dad always brings home from Koreatown in LA.
So, yes, learn how to make your food look like the picture on the package, people!
Filed under: food
June 12, 2007 • 9:45 am 0
I’m in class right now; we just presented our group project, which maybe I will post later.
One of the profs brought bagels! He is so my favorite, along with the TV prof. Do we sense a pattern here?
It’s hard to sit and listen to other groups present when I have so much other stuff to do, but the projects are pretty interesting, so I can’t work on
papers, really. Time to catch up on surfing bloglines and metafilter!
update: wow, one of the groups went all out. They did keyword analysis of news articles going back several decades, and classified the headlines using the Dewey Decimal system to create a 2-D map, going by year. They used this map to laser-etch the data points on half-inch thick squares of lucite, which they then stacked. And if you run a light across the stack, you can see the points light up.
This is why I really enjoyed my class. it was really refreshing to be working with honest-to-goodness art students, who spend their time and energy making things that are just really nice to look at. In other classes we talk about, like, theory and history, and we work on analyzing things, but the end result isn’t anything you could actually put on display for others to see.
I’m just writing this to prove that it wasn’t just the bagels.
update 2, like boingboing: Hunh. Just found out a few hours ago that one of my professors had what amounts to a stroke. He wasn’t really at an age where that’s a considerable risk, so we are pretty shocked by the news. The world just gets crazier and crazier.
Filed under: school
June 11, 2007 • 6:42 pm 0
One of the few perks of using Flexcar is that you get to try out different kinds of cars. Already I’ve driven a Scion tC, a Honda Element, a Corolla, and today I tried out a brand-new white Civic Hybrid, which didn’t even have license plates, it was so new (and, alas, no HOV sticker, not that I could’ve used it anyway).
This is my new fave car. The dashboard display is so futuristic and clean looking, plus you get to see the battery charging and stuff.
I was a little confused by the auto-stop feature, as sometimes it felt like I was going backwards instead of staying at a full stop. And when the light turns green again, the gas pedal takes half a second to react.
But without the AC on, I would’ve thought the car wasn’t on at all, and you do get great feedback from the part where the battery recharges using the car’s kinetic energy. or however the hell that works. I dont’ remember anymore.
All I know is, hybrids are great! I must’ve looked so smug as I zipped around on Sunset Blvd (I probably could’ve looked even smugger, if it hadn’t been for the blue flexcar logos pasted on the body).
(I’m adding a car category because I’m getting a car soon! It wont’ be a Civic Hybrid, but still, a car! It’s my end-of-June, half-birthday, it’s-not-an-iPhone-but-it’s-more-practical-anyway present. Hee!
Filed under: car
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