at the supermarket: trader joe’s soycutash

That’s the twee name for Joe’s frozen vegetable blend of corn, diced red bell pepper, and soybeans. I like to put this stuff wherever I can toss in random vegetables and cook for a long time, like Japanese curry or rice pilaf.

You have to cook Soycutash for a long time because the soybeans take forever to become digestible. Like, steaming them 20 minutes seems to be just barely enough to get them nicely soft.

I like the color presented by the red bell pepper, even though normally I don’t like the taste of bell pepper.

Filed under: Uncategorized

of course, that’d mean i’d have to buy a ticket

Ars Technica reviews are so long and boring but I can’t help but skim through them whenever an exciting new gizmo is released and they review it (i.e., I automatically click A.T. links whenever they show up in an RSS feed somewhere).

But this one about Leopard is making me lean toward getting a Mac when I buy my next computer.

Bah!

Til now a Lenovo Thinkpad has been my final choice for a future laptop replacement, but it’s been really close, between either that or a MacBook Pro. I’m hoping Apple will release a smaller MBP than the current 15-in model, but really, when the Dell dies, I’m not going to be able to wait to buy a new computer, even if that means I end up having to lug around a 15-in lappy, or paying $20 for a WinXP “downgrade” CD.

My poor Dell is 5 years old now, and it’s still going strong, mind you, but it’s such a big, clunky, noisy dinosaur (much the opposite of this one) that I almost can’t wait until I can buy a new machine.

Hopefully, *fingers crossed* I will win the lottery in the meantime, so that I can actually afford to.

Filed under: computer

treasure hunt!

The Hollywood Video in Cerritos is going out of business, apparently, and so they’re liquidating their entire DVD inventory. I went there today and it was still quietly chaotic, even though about half the shelves were already empty.

After looking at all the movies, I picked out a few classic ones but then realized I could get TV shows, one disc at a time. This has always been a big thing of mine, because there are a few shows where I love an individual episode but don’t feel like shelling out lots of money to get the whole season or series. Shows like Extras, The X-Files, or Frasier. I’ve always wished I could just buy single episodes and make, like, a mix DVD of personal favorites.

Short of that, being able to buy individual discs seemed like a good enough deal. I couldn’t find any discs from those shows that I wanted, but! I sniffed out a disc of Millennium, that other show by Chris Carter. And it had the one with the episode written by Darin Morgan, “Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defense.” Which is the only episode of Millennium I find worth watching.So I didnt’ have to buy the rest of that depressing show. And it was only $3! Score!

Filed under: tv

lookatthisdog

lookatthisdog

Originally uploaded by sugarfreak

I love it. (via Boing-Boing)

Filed under: Uncategorized

about the aged

I don’t want to sound like a provocateur (provocatrice?), or like an ingrate, but sometimes when I think about happenings in the field I work in, I can’t help but feel that we, the students, are never gonna achieve anything until all the old people retire.

It’s nothing against old people in general. Just these old people, in my profession.

And I’m not saying they’re completely useless. They still have plenty of good in them, for certain things (many things, even). It’s more about the attitude they have: “This is how we’ve done it before, so there’s no other way to do it.”

Well, no. Times change, and these days, times change drastically.

Don’t mind me. This is the characteristic impatience of youth speaking. Like, go away, old people, and let us do our thing, because it’s better than what you all have now.

And of course that’s not fair. Without those old people we wouldn’t have ANYTHING to work with, to speak of.

I guess what I mean is more like, okay, old people, good job and stuff. But it’s time to go, the fat lady has filed for social security, and we have some ideas brewing that we’d really like to try, because we think they’ll do some good.

Filed under: work

another reason ucla rules

Today I only had one class, but I had a group meeting before that class, and since I didn’t want to lug my laptop alll the way to campus and back (taking a car to school seems way lame, considering I walked/shuttled all last year), I borrowed a laptop from the library.

You see, UCLA has many libraries that lend laptops out for 4 hours at a time, free. I only learned about this program late last year, but took advantage of it whenever I could. Sure, they only lent out crappy Dells, but I needed a portable computer on campus, and voila!

I love that it’s so easy to use computers that are not one’s own these days, thanks to the miracle of cloudnet computing, and thanks to USB keys.

What I love even more, and was so pleasantly surprised by today, was learning that UCLA’ve changed their fleet of loaning laptops from crappy Dells to shiny black Macbooks!!

Equipped with Adobe CS3!!

Filed under: computer, school

nobody needs the RIAA

Radiohead are going to release their next album digitally in about 2 days, and you get to choose the price you want to pay for it. And it will most assuredly be DRM-free.

Over the last several years I’ve managed to amass over 3GB worth of music, all of it free and non-pirated, taking up valuable space on my poor little hard drive, which I still don’t want to delete because I still find it worth listening to.

This is a good time for music, just not a good time for big record companies owned by multinational corporations.

Filed under: music

UI failures

I accidentally missed the premiere of 30 Rock last night, so it’s a good thing NBC has been streaming all episodes in full on their websites.

Well, almost a good thing. It’s too bad that their streaming flash video interface sucks crap. I’ve spent about 30 minutes trying to watch the last 4 minutes of the show, only the video keeps crapping out.

If they were like Youtube and let the darn video stream download while it was playing, I could just set the player to pause, wait til the whole thing was buffered, and then view the episode interrupted.

Instead, when I hit pause, the video stream stops loading altogether, which means I’ve watched the entire episode on Stuttervision, as my computer and DSL connection struggle to keep up with the stream.

Oh, and just now, it froze my Firefox so I had to reload everything. Grrr!!

Filed under: Uncategorized

prose ode

I was gonna send this to the Cool Tools blog but my nerve quailed. Also, I don’t think this thing can be bought anywhere anymore (Made in USA and all that).

But I’m not going to let that 15 minutes I just spent writing go to waste!

So here it is:

I love my backpack! It’s an Eastpak. I bought it at Sam’s Club (or was it Costco?) right before I started college, just for carrying books and doing normal, student-y things. After 7 years of heavy, almost daily use, including on trips around Europe/Asia, this bag is still in nearly perfect condition.

Most other backpacks I’ve used have had the zipper break after a few years, or gotten holes in them, especially near the bottom. This backpack has none of those problems, and has almost no signs of wear, apart from slight discoloration on the bottom (which is covered with suede on the outside). The undersides of the straps are made of some grippy material that makes them slip-proof. Even the loop at the top of the bag (the one you may use to hang on a hook, or grab to pick the bag up off the floor) is as good as it was the day I bought the backpack. There’s not a single stitch undone or out of place.

What’s more, the front pouch holds a surprisingly large quantity of stuff, and while the design of the inside pockets could’ve been better (I don’t carry as many pencils as there are holders, and would rather have more wide pockets), even when I’ve forgotten to close the zipper, and flung my backpack around, I’ve never had anything fall out of the front pouch part (I have been pocket-picked from it, though =P).

There are a few shortcomings: the bag is not very waterproof — if it’s raining, my stuff inside does get a little damp sometimes. Also, the zipper tabs, while nice because they’re bigger than normal, make a lot of noise, and that makes me self-conscious when I’m walking through a library.

But for what’s a rather small, medium-sized backpack, it holds a ton, and holds it well! I’ve had stuff happen to things I carry inside the bag (ie water damage from not closing a bottle tightly enough or whatever), but the bag itself has taken a lot of punishment, and been none the worse off. I fully expect it to last another good 7 years, which is pretty good considering it originally cost less than $20!

The end.

Filed under: personal

bullet points

- I drove back to Westwood from Cerritos on Sunday evening because I had my first class on Monday. I was tired as heck because I’d just flown back from Rochester, and couldn’t’ take a nap until after my family went out to dinner with a cousin who had just moved down to LA from San Fran (where she’d spent 6 months trying to learn English). I drove to Westwood all drowsy, averaging less than 65mph.

- So yesterday was supposed to be my first class, so I went to class after dutifully printing out my syllabus and all that. About 30 of us were in it, and it was weird because we all kind of knew each other, on the first day back. 15 minutes after class was supposed to start, a professor who wasn’t teaching the class wandered in. He left the room, and returned five minutes later to inform us that class had been cancelled because the real professor hadn’t shown up, for unknown reasons.

- Sunday, I’d been too tired to go grocery shopping, so I went yesterday, Monday. I’d planned on going later in the evening but then made impromptu dinner plans with a classmate, so I left my apt. at 4, and what should have been a 30-minute round-trip to the Trader Joe on Sepulveda took twice as long because of rush hour traffic. Never again!

- Dinner was good though. Thai.

- I got about 8.5 hours of sleep but I’m still tired! Probably because I’ve been sleeping on a foam mat over here in my Westwood apt. My dad is going to bring up the futon bed frame tomorrow, and none too soon!

- So I woke up all tired and scrambled around to get ready for my first day at my internship. At 9:20 I was running around the kitchen trying to pack my lunch and eat breakfast at the same time. At 9:21 I realized that I wasn’t supposed to go to work until 11, so now I have a spare hour or so to do… what?

Here is my favorite picture that I took at the conference in Rochester. Ironically, it has nothing to do with Rochester, and it is blurry and awful as heck, but I love it:

Filed under: life