banana peels and carrot peelings

• 11:15 What should the theme song for my life be? #
• 20:39 Quick: "Black Belt: Undercover Spy" or "Cubicle Gopher"? #

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Damn that xkcd. This blog post makes me want to acquire a HP 2133 and a USB GPS device. Too bad this isn't SimCity, I'd just type FUND and be on my way. ;)

• 15:10 Received: tickets for the soccer match next month. ROCK ON! #
• 15:33 I made QSE's songwriting contest. Here goes nothing... #

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There were many times this week where I said to myself, "I'm really going to need to post about this sometime. Oh, this would be great to post! ... oh, I would love to post this..." And of course, I never have the time or the inclination to really sit down and post something, because I'm always hurrying somewhere or doing something or, god forbid, sleeping.

Let me see... in somewhat chronological order:

• Got our elliptical the Thursday before Mother's Day.  I stayed home from work that day (ah, how I love telecommuting), and we got the box around 11am.  From there, Andy and I had to figure out how to get this huuuuge box up the stairs to our apartment.  However, Amazon reviews had warned me beforehand, and we just took the box apart on the sidewalk and trundled up the stairs with parts.  Andy assembled it that night.  It has been one of the best purchases we've made all year.
• Mother's Day was pretty interesting, in kind of a strange, event-filled day.  I knew that my parents were flying back in from Asia that morning, so I decided to sneak into the house the night before and put a big thing of flowers on the kitchen table and a note wishing my mom the best on Mother's Day.  Well, I arrived at home with Andy in tow, only to figure out that... that's right, my brother never cleans up when my parents are out of town, and the kitchen was a mess.  Even worse, the kitchen table was heaped (and I mean HEAPED) with mail.  So I had to spend some time cleaning stuff at my parents' house just to make sure there would be a clean table to put my flowers on.  I know better than to grumble at my brother, though.  He just does that, and it's okay because I don't have to live with it anymore.  (Totally  not my problem.)
• Belt test in the morning.  Sandy brought her 3 week old baby, Wolf.  I got to hold him for a while, and... wow, babies that young are really tiny.  He kept on looking at me funny, but I think it's because he didn't quite know how to focus his eyes.  The nice thing about the test was that I had to take 0 falls, and I got to spar a little during the brown belt test, though we were given strict instructions to play easy.
• Drove home, got in a workout, then went back up to Berkeley for free Korean food (e.g. annual awards banquet).  We snuck out early, but it was good to get in touch with people again.
  
• As alluded to earlier, I started a Chore Wars clan.  If anyone would like to track their chores and compete against three other people, please let me know in the comments and I'll send you an invite.  This stuff is awesome, and I'm getting flylady's special missions in there.  I know my chore list has seemed a lot more fun because Roush and Vulpine are participating!  Andy gets a kick out of it when I talk about how much XP I get for stuff.
  
• I finally bit the bullet and got a Facebook account.  This may have been a mistake, because I apparently know a lot of people who have Facebook accounts.  I ballooned from nothing to over 200 in about two days, and I keep on finding old college friends, old martial arts buddies, and former students on it.  So far, though, I haven't found Anna.  (ANNA, you'd better find me!  I'm even linked to your younger sister!)
• So auddess suggested that I apply for this Quick Stop Entertainment songwriter's contest, and I did it.  And then I realized that it was supposed to be for funny people, and so I waffled back and forth about whether or not I should actually do it.  And then I got an Email this morning saying, "Hey, you made it in!"  I had a while to decide whether or not I wanted to do it, and I finally did.  So, all seven of you who read my LJ, I'm going to be asking you to vote for my weak songwriting skills!
• I walked out the door this morning to be surprised by a big box sitting on our porch.  This is not the first time our delivery person has doorbell ditched us, except this time, there was no doorbell.  Or, if there were a doorbell, we didn't hear it.  It's a very pretty screen to put in front of the fireplace.  In fact, it completely obscures the fireplace.  This is a good thing, because we're planning to store the elliptical there when people come over.

Anyway, that's the condensed version of what's been happening in stav-land.  I keep on forgetting the funny things that happen, and only post the news.  More on funny stuff, I guess.

• 13:47 Getting settled to work for an afternoon. Go go gadget BRAIN focus #
• 14:12 Let's see if my Outlook Rule actually works... #
• 16:21 Completed 2nd round of icing the shoulder. Only 13 more days to do this. #

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• 12:38 Ha, suckered Vulpine into playing Chore Wars with me. Once Roushi gets on, we'll have a battle of three households... #
• 15:26 So hot... I can't think. #

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http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/etc/681700166.html

• 11:14 And I finally realize that the reason I was having problems yesterday was because my harness doesn't like having an empty function. #
• 11:58 The problem I've been banging against this past hour? Known bug. Sigh. #
• 12:00 I hate it when friends make appointments for lunch and then is incommunicado for hours beforehand. #
• 12:11 Gah, turns out the friend's stuck in a scheduling meeting with another one of my friends... snacking on nuts. #
• 14:02 I've been planning for a couple of weeks to work from home tomorrow. Unfortunately, the weather has decided that it will be hot hot hot #
• 15:14 Does anyone want to create a Chore Wars clan? It might be today's passing fad, but it just seems so cool. #

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It is so annoying that livejournal wants tags seperated by commas when twitter wants them seperated by spaces. Just destroys my groove.

I finally started using the Taglist plugin for Vim. Just for the record, it is the crazy awesome hotness.

Now I need to stop being lazy and configure it so that it can run ant for me and jump to the place where the error happened. (And lots of other things so that I can tell all the Eclipse zealots even more forcefully that Vim still is better. ;)

If anyone is interested in playing with Jaiku, just ask, I have 20 invites burning a hole in my pocket. I do happen to like it better than Twitter, but I use Twitter because it has critical mass.

It dawned on me that you might want to know about my Jaiku page.

'nuff said.

If there's one thing that Mac OS X does better than any other OS out there, it's not popping up random windows in your face that steal the focus from whatever app you're currently using. Whoever thought this was a good idea should be shot. If I had a dollar for every time I've accidentally dismissed some alert dialog before even seeing it because it popped up in my face at the same time I happened to be hitting space or enter, I'd be rich.

Speaking of things like this that drive me crazy: when I have multiple virtual desktops, and an application pops up a modal dialog, what sense does it make for it to pop up on a desktop other than the one the application is running on? Seriously folks. (Maybe I need to give up the Gnome, I dunno.)

• 14:11 Surprisingly enough, my right contact works much better when turned right side out. #
• 15:16 I'm hungry, but I don't feel like eating anything. How rational is that? #

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New, and rather good Gnarls Barkley video. I really should stop being lazy (and cheap), and hurry up and buy the album already.

And in writing this entry, I have realized there is a new Lyrics Born album that I didn't know about. I'm sleepin' on all the good stuff. Damn.

The company I work for, already a behemoth, keeps on getting bigger. We're buying EDS now. Crazy.

I've generally been annoyed by the fact that I can never seem to have my cellphone ring volume at the right level. Either it's too loud when I'm not in a noisy environment, or I miss calls when I'm walking down the street in the city. Here's the really annoying part: my cellphone has a mic. Why can't it monitor the ambient noise (at some reasonable interval, to not completely drain the battery), and change the ring volume based on that reading? That would be insanely useful, and doesn't seem like it would be that hard to do. And it would be even more useful if it was hooked up to an accelerometer: it could automatically silence the ringer when you're not moving (and turn on vibrate if it's off), and then you wouldn't have to remember to silence your phone. (My problem with having my phone on silent all the time is that I miss calls when I'm walking, since I don't feel the vibration.) Of course, these would be made options, like increasing ring is already an option. I need this badly.

If I have the time, I should look into implementing this for my phone, assuming I can actually get the access to the phone's settings and mic/accelerometer to do the proper determinations. I still don't know why it isn't already build in to any phone. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

I had to share this transcript of a rather interesting talk Steve Yegge did about dynamic languages. And he put lots of links to other interesting things... Now I have even more random reading material.

• 14:39 Quote from coworker: "Yes, yes, yes... YES... holy cows, all of our thumbnails are read-only. How mahy do we have of those?" #
• 17:01 Darn it, just found out that we're not going to be having a contractor until June. That leaves two weeks of fending for myself. #

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jwz posted his collected bicycle wisdom. As someone who owns bike shorts, clip shoes, and a messenger bag, he says that you shouldn't take my advice on bikes. However, I think that he has a lot of good, practical points, and the post amuses me greatly. (Especially since I'd already been thinking of buying just the bike he describes so that I have to drive less. ;)

Tho, really... paying someone to change a flat is a crazy waste of money. Adjusting your gears is hard, fixing a flat isn't. (And I thought this way before I owned any of the disqualifying gear, since I changed my own flats as a kid. ;)

• 15:09 3360 lbs 84 cases per pallet 2.75 pallets #
• 18:00 And at the end of the day, I finally realize that I have a grammatical mistake in an error message. #

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