The word of the Hoff!

Manolo the shoeblogger has been posting excerpts from the autobiography of his idol, David Hasselhoff. At first I skipped right over these entries because while the Manolo has every right to indulge his devotion to the Hoff, I have every right to breeze through to get to the pretty shoe photos.

I accidentally read through last Friday’s, though, and realized I’d actually been missing out on some gems. Say what you will about Mr. Hasselhoff, he’s certainly had many more interesting life experiences than the average person.

And I agree with the commenter for that last story, every sentence *should* begin, “Someone handed me a koala bear, and…”

Filed under: best thing, book, fun

Practicing appraisal

While cleaning my room today I realized I had every bank statement I’ve ever received from my bank. I opened my account in 2000, as soon as I started college, and I never switched to online statements, forests be damned. So it’s quite a stack of paper.

Maybe it’s the archivist/pack-rat in me, but I still don’t want to shred these, or even throw them out. A quick skim through the years reveals a depressingly informative record of how my life has passed. It’s kind of like that short story, “Ordeal by Cheque,” only more boring.

Like, the first years’ worth of bank statements contains mostly entries from Amazon, half.com and deepdiscountdvd.com, along with the occasional Southwest Airlines ticket (not enough, I’m sure). That was a bad year.

In junior year I went to France and had to take out a ton of loans, so the deposits column looked healthy as the disbursements arrived from UC. Of course, the subsequent withdrawals negates that, in addition to providing another form of depressing: in September, when I withdrew 300 euros from a Paris ATM, that was equivalent to about 298 US dollars. By the following May, though, 300 euros cost about $360. Today, if I were to withdraw the same amount, I’d be out a clean $400 or more.

In any case, after that my statements are more or less completely mundane – jobs I’ve had and left, clothes that have long since worn out, etc etc, but of course those are the ones that are recent enough for me to have to keep.

Should I shred the historical ones?

Filed under: personal

short ones

I’ve already twittered twice today, and begin to fear the day I become a rapid-fire Twit, so these will stay here:

1. These days I find myself looking forward to going to work almost as much as I look forward to going to the mall on weekends, because both places are very nicely air-conditioned.

2. I loooooooove having a car. My Yaris is a bona fide cheap-ass Toyota, but it is brand-new, compact, cute, and gets about 33mpg on a BAD day. Also, it enables me to go places. Seriously, it’s so nice to be able to take something for granted that I never could before. It’s lovely!

3. I haaaaaaaaaaaaaate traffic. A commute that should take no more than 30 minutes gets stretched to three(!!!) times that long during the hours of, oh, 6am to 9pm. I average about 20mph coming home from work, which is pathetic to the max.

4. This video about resizing images by content from SIGGRAPH is incredible. Hang around til the end, when they make people disappear. Poof!

5. Having now gone to two close friends’ weddings, I’m beginning to warm to the concept. Especially the part where your friends send you fondue pots and brand-new cookware.

Filed under: life

at the supermarket: yogurt

Trader Joes offers a relatively wide selection of yogurts. There’s the normal kind, in the low-fat and nonfat varieties (French village, I think they’re called?). These will always do in a pinch, like when you need some pro-biotic goodness, as they have live and active cultures, but they can be pretty watery, mushy, and not that fun to eat, especially the fruit-on-the-bottom kind. Vanilla is good mixed with berries, and Black Cherry is reliable. Lemon low-fat tastes exactly like my nail polish remover smells.

For some quality yogurt, you have to go for either the Greek kinds or the Yogurt cups. The Greek style comes in several different flavors: my fave is the apricot, but the honey makes an excellent spread, à la cream cheese, and the unflavored is practically indistinguishable from sour cream – great for burritos!

But the small Yogurt Cups, the ones that come in packs of six 4-oz. cups, are really something. They are as rich and creamy as advertised on the package, and definitely not low-fat. The drawbacks are that they are small, and I don’t think they contain live cultures. Also, they are more expensive per ounce than TJ’s other varieties. The six-packs come in sets of two flavors – you can only choose either the package with 3 blueberry/3 vanilla or the package with 3 strawberries and cream/3 banana. Which sucks if, like me, you hate banana.

As for comparisons to other brands, well, I’m not a fan of the big-name ones like Yoplait or Dannon, even though I know Dannon is a big French brand (called Danone there). These yogurts aren’t that great (except the Yoplait Whipped varieties, which are acceptable if you treat them like desserts – I like the chocolate and key lime pie flavors.)

There’s that one at Ralph’s that’s called something like Stony Mountain, We Are Organic So Pay Up. Too bad it’s runny and gross, though, and not worth calling yogurt. Horizon tastes marginally better, but Horizon is also the sketchster organic brand and I won’t eat it out of principle.

No, TJs it will be. The small Yogurt Cups are best for those occasions when your wallet and your stomach want to splurge, but the Greek is all right any old time of the day.

Filed under: food

it was broke, but they didn’t fix it

My Canon Powershot S200 broke a few weeks ago (hence the sad, sad little flickr picture of my car). I discovered that my model was part of a recall, so I sent mine in to see if it qualified, and it did. The camera’s sensor had fallen prey to a manufacturing defect, so they even paid for shipping and everything.

Canon told me the repair would be done in about a week, but after two weeks it still wasn’t done. Then, a few days ago, they emailed saying my camera shipped, via FedEx 2-day! Since this was a free repair, I was impressed by the service, and happy about the timing, since that meant I could take it to Wisconsin after all.

Not that FedEx played its part. By now they should have the technology to provide a smaller window of time in which a person needs to stay at home to accept the signature-required delivery. But they don’t; when they showed up, no one was home, so I had to drive to Santa Fe Springs to pick it up.

I opened the box, and lo and behold….it was not my camera. They couldn’t fix my old one, apparently, so they gave me a better model!

It’s refurbished, and doesn’t look nearly as nice as my old one. The LCD screen is huge, which does nothing but suck battery life like crazy, and make it more susceptible to scratches. It’s already sporting some dents and things because it’s refurbished. Also, the front, side, and top are made of that cheap-looking silver-plastic stuff, rather than the solid metal my old camera had.

Third, it doesn’t use my old CompactFlash card, so now I have to go and buy a new memory card. Also, I have no way of getting my pictures off my old Flash card. I now have a de facto “Archive” of the last fifty pictures I took on my old camera, only inaccessible. *Sniff*

On the plus side, it’s a Powershot SD600, and 6 megapixels to my original 2, so it’s at least a few years newer (though it’s the same price as my old one was when I bought it, natch). I guess I can’t complain too hard about Canon’s customer service. And I won’t need to buy a new camera for a few more years.

That old camera was a real workhorse, though. And I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye!

Filed under: photo