Finding Nemo 2

Finding Nemo 2

Originally uploaded by IFDImages

So awful (and hilarious)

Filed under: Uncategorized

good/bad/ugly

Part the First

good: had a reunion with old college church friends!

bad: got rear-ended on the 405 on my way to meet old college church friends! 5 cars were affected in total, and mine was at the very front. I wouldn’t even have gotten involved if the car behind the car behind me hadn’t been a huge SUV, the owner of which told us this was his second accident in like, 3 weeks. Grrrrr!!! And of course, his car hasn’t a scratch on it.

ugly: the back of MY car!! =*(((((((((

Part the Second
good: finally got to try Scoops in Hollywood!

bad: I chose vegan coconut coffee ice cream, which was good, but I am beginning to make the painful realization that “vegan” most likely means the ‘ice cream’ was made from soy. Some people are lactose-intolerant. I am soy-juice intolerant. =T

ugly: Or maybe it was the Wako’s fish donkatsu I had for dinner

Filed under: life

i’ve totally changed

During my working and schooling over the past year I’ve come to:

- respect TV

- learn and appreciate (if not love) video

Filed under: school

rah

I’m starting to get really sick of going to my internship every day. I’m not even supposed to go in every day, but because we have to finish this stupid digitization stuff before the week is out (because we’re renting a Digibeta machine at $600/week), I can’t skip any days. It’s even more annoying because we keep running into stupid technical glitches.

I haven’t had a day off since the train wreck that was finals week, and that includes the weekend, because spending time with my family is not the same as “having a day off.” I need to hole up in a cave somewhere for about a day or so, and I need to do it pretty soon or I”ll go stir crazy.

Four more days, four more days…

Filed under: life, school

productivity tools: notes from fall ‘07

Weird. I was looking for my past posts in this series and only now realized I hadn’t published the one for last spring. Oh well. RSS readers will see it pretty soon, and better late than never. Unless you actually like, read this blog, in which case you are probably thinking, “No, better never!”. Too bad for you.

1) Keyboard shortcuts: I am super in love with Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts. They probably shave off at least ten seconds off my email time, which will indubitably pay off the day I enter a “fastest email reading” competition. Seriously though, keyboard shortcuts are great because you don’t have to use the mouse (or even look at the screen – such an inconvenience, that!).

2) Remember the Milk! The biggest change I’ve made this quarter is that I’ve been trying out Remember the Milk, the to-do list service. RTM is really great about sharing its functions with other web tools (making the semantic web do its job!).

Like, so far, I’ve gotten RTM to send me reminders via text message, and I’ve hooked up RTM with Google Calendar so that I can view an agenda for my day when I check my GCal [aside: I really wish they'd get Google Gears hooked up to GCal already]. I also added an RTM widget in iGoogle, since I check that pretty often. Now I just need to figure out whether it’s better to add something to GCal (marking important dates?) or to RTM (tasks and assignments?). Right now I have to SMS both of those if I want to figure out what I’ve got lined up for the day.

I can keep raving about RTM, but to be honest, it’s been quite an investment in terms of the time it takes to learn to use effectively, and I’m still in the process of figuring out what configuration works best for me, since I had to coordinate RTM with Twitter and GCal. I’m hoping that this investment will pay off later in efficiency, which is the whole point. It’s not like it’s as intense as GTD, so I’m willing to do try this.

3) Twitter. Yeah, I use Twitter to add things to RTM, via direct messaging: “d rtm print out journal article for IS240 paper by tomorrow at 5pm.”

4) Google Talk/Gmail Chat. I’ve hooked up Twitter to gChat so that I can not only send Twitter my RTM tasks via SMS (which I also use to get reminders from RTM), but can also get to Twitter thru Gmail or Pidgin. In short, I don’t have to visit the Twitter page to do my thing, or even the RTM website.

5) Return of the PDA. While I was learning the ropes to RTM, I reverted to the Hipster PDA. What can I say, paper rules! One innovation: I use post-it stickies attached to thick card stock, because I have lots of post-its but no index cards, plus it feels more portable.

6) WordPress. Writing blog posts about my practicum after each day I worked came in really handy when I had to write my end-of-term paper, so I’m gonna keep doing that. It was less helpful for my class papers, but I think if I’d know what I was going to write before I actually had to start writing my papers, I would’ve used this technique. We’ll see next quarter.

7) Blocksite. Facebook, obviously, is horrible for productivity, but luckily the Beacon fiasco led me to the Firefox extension Blocksite, which is even better than the KiwiCloak Greasemonkey script I used last year, to keep me from visiting timesucker sites. This is because Kiwicloak can be deactivated by a simple click of the monkey at the bottom left corner, whereas Blocksite requires a few more button clicks and things to do same, making it much more effective as a reinforcer (tip: block “http://*.facebook.com/*”).

8) Lappies! Speaking of classes, since the UCLA computer lab started lending out nice black Macbooks, 4 hours at a time, I’ve been able to use a computer in class nearly every week. That has been super nice, as typing notes is much easier than writing, and it’s way easier to work on group projects using collaborative online tools. I think I’ve finally crossed that threshold where I’d rather use a computer in class than a paper notebook. Sad, but true. I fully expect to become bionic within the next decade. For now, I’ll settle for buying the intriguing new, super duper MacBook Pro when it comes out.

9) Same old, same old. I still love KeyNote for notetaking, and still love Basecamp for managing group projects. I must also give a huge shoutout to Google Docs, which is far and away the best collaborative writing tool there is. As much as I <3 Basecamp and all 37Signals products, compared to Google Docs, Writeboard sucks.

10) To try next time: see if Slideshare is useful in any way.

So in sum, I guess RTM and SMS win the day. My cell phone has taken the place of my iPod in terms of calendaring and task-remembering, because it’s much more convenient to use text-messages than to remember to sync my iPod to my computer.

Never forget that the mother of ingenuity is laziness!

Filed under: school

*crash*

i’m done i’m done i’m done!!

While this quarter wasn’t quite as awful as the winter of Winter ‘07, it still offered plenty up of suckitude, especially toward the very end, and it wasn’t even necessarily all due to my horrible time-management skills.

Things just ended up happening all at once, and I was left juggling 18 sets of plates, and caught none of them.

So I’m SOOOOOOOOOooo glad it’s over.

Also, I realllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllly need to do laundry.

Filed under: school

what i had for dinner today,

the second-to-last-day before finals:

1. one cinnamon-raisin bagel.
2. half a cupcake from Sprinkles, unfrosted.
3. handful of Cat Cookies (for people).
4. one 8-oz. can of tonic. Quinine-laced and everything.

My head hurts.

Filed under: food

more finals madness!

Seriously. Two projects due in three days means four times as much surfing and facebooking and blogging. Six times less sleep. Seven times more work to do in 8th the amount of time. Or something.

A few notes:

1. I was going to meet up with my family in downtown LA today so I asked my mom to bring a little bit of laundry detergent because I’d run out and I really needed to launder. She brought me some, all right…..in an old GARLIC CONTAINER.

2. Something near or under (or above?) my apartment complex makes this really loud, deep, repetitive, rumbling noise. It sounds like a ginormous fan is turning, and the vibration is really strong. The sound frequency is so low that I mostly just feel it in the back of my neck, and it’s super duper annoying, especially when it’s only most noticeable at night when I’m trying to sleep.

3. I am SO glad I kept a running journal of the internship I did this quarter. It is amazing how quickly I forget things these days.

4. On a related note, I lost access to the Web somehow for about an hour this evening. I could still IM people and check mail, but anything http:// -ish was out. It was so annoying! Because without Google, I don’t know anything anymore.

5. Beard Papa’s is fiendishly expensive. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten my mom hooked on their cream puffs. Fortunately, another one’s going to open in Cerritos so maybe I won’t have to buy it for her anymore.

Filed under: personal, school

done! (almost)

Today I turned in a paper. And I was late turning it in, for the first time, like, ever (actually, the last paper I turned in for this very class was late too, but I had an extension for that one, and a really good excuse). 17 hours past the official due time.

I don’t know why these things are so hard to write, but they are. Honestly, I’d rather write four 5-page papers than one 20-page paper, any day. In one day, even. I hate writing!!! Papers!!!

Anyway, now that that paper’s done I feel like a gigantic weight has been lifted, and it doesn’t even bother me that I have another short paper due on Monday, and a group project to work on after that, and two freelance projects.

Compared to the trouble this twenty-page mo-fo gave me, those are like, frosted cupcakes with sprinkles and fairy dust.

Filed under: school

If I had a life, anyway.

Upcoming Facebook feature (according to their news page):

Sort out your friends.

We’ll let you organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what.

Angie and I were talking about that article by Cory Doctorow, “How your creepy ex-coworkers will kill Facebook,” and about how when a service like that gets too big, it’s going to be less desirable to use because you’ll be connected to people who you might not necessarily have wanted to “friend,” but whom you also can’t really afford to not friend. That kind of thing is what keeps people jumping from one site to another. When you can’t differentiate between a real friend and someone who you added just because you didn’t want to snub them, well, the specialness of the network you’re building goes down just a bit.

So being able to sort your connections into groups, like, say, “People whose photos I want to see and whom I can grope via Superpoke” versus “Polite Adds” is one way to solve that problem. Flickr already has this tiered system, with its “Family,” “Friends,” and “Contacts.” And it works pretty well!

For a SNS like Facebook, what this would do in terms of reinforcing close ties and maintaining weak ties…it’ll make that divide stronger. If the idea of social networking is to bring people closer together, well, those weak ties won’t become stronger. Those people will be walled off, so it’ll be like having two social networks in one!

Actually, it’d be more like real life!

Filed under: web2.0