wow, almost 3 months without blogging! all my other services have served my need to blab my thoughts and feelings out to the world quite nicely. but some things are too long for twitter, so it’s time to come back to this thing.

First thought: Stanley still lives! we almost killed him at our volunteer appreciation party last week, but the Exec. Dir. gave it a last-minute reprieve.

Second: I’ve been using FF for months without Greasemonkey, and haven’t missed it! I guess all those things aren’t strictly necessary for me now that I don’t browse the web 12 hours at a time (clearly, surfing only 8 hours at a time means my usage is much more casual). The only indispensable extensions? Web Developer Toolbar and Mouse Gestures.

Third: Metadata symposium at the Academy was interesting. I like when there are lots of industry people in attendance, esp. from the big studios or vendors, because then you get a peek at current practices that you know must be scalable to some extent, even if they’re not perfect. I guess that’s what “best practices” means =P

Just witnessed my mom attempting to illegally pirate software. She uses a program at work that she likes and wants to use at home. So she decided to copy the program file onto a flash drive and bring it home to paste on her laptop.

Of course, on Windows, you typically need more than the .exe to be able to run a program. So she came to me for tech support, which is how I got wind her of illegal, pirating ways.

I said “It doesn’t work that way, mom, you’re going to need the installer disk for the program.”

And she said, “But it isn’t free!”

Luckily, there is a free, non-business use version of this particular program, so we’re in the clear.

I have mixed feelings about piracy in all its forms, but don’t usually think of it as being “cute.” On this one occasion though (and hopefully it stops at just one), I may make an exception.

i want to cry!

i’m serious! it’s been awhile since i have, so i’m about due.

i’ve come close a few times, but at inopportune moments, like in the car driving, or at a restaurant. but when i’m alone and can cry, nothing happens.

i wish i could, just to get it out of my system! it’s a really good stress reliever.

seriously! try it! you’ll feel a lot better afterwards.

Today I went to my internship in Little Tokyo and realized I wasn’t being useful at all there. They’re busy doing their thing, and there really isn’t much time to work with me to do what we need to do for the archive. So I think I’m going to quit.

I’m supposed to have my first class this quarter tomorrow. Actually, it was my only class. And I thought it’d be fun, but I’ve realized that it’s not really going to be all that useful for what I’d really like to do.

Fact is, I don’t think this whole “school” thing has been worth it. And since it’s still only two days into the quarter, I think I can get most of my tuition back for the quarter by un-registering, so I’m looking into my options for that now. Which is good because I *really* didn’t want to build my portfolio in two weeks, or take comps in four.

Of course, now I’m going to have to move out of my apartment, since housing is for enrolled students only. Too bad; I had two roommates this year but they were pretty awesome, surprisingly. Still, living alone is the best of all worlds; maybe I can move into my own studio or single now. Preferably somewhere in WeHo or further into the Westside.

Which I can now afford to do, because I got a job!! It’s not exactly related to anything I’ve been studying or learning, but still seems promising. Actually, I have studied for it, since I majored in French in college.

Basically, I’m going to be a French tutor for these kids, whose dad is bigwig who works for a major company around these parts. I found the ad on Craigslist and the pay was so re-donkulously high I applied on a whim (had my resume all ready! granted, it was crafted for an IA gig, but I just added a “languages” section and voilà!).

And I got it!

So I’m pretty excited. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Tomorrow being April 2nd and all. HA!

Yesterday I had a paper due, so the day before yesterday I got about 3 hours of sleep. After class yesterday, I drove straight home, had a bite to eat, showered, and went to bed.

That was around 7:30pm.

I woke up this morning, at around 6:30am.

It was delicious.

Which is good, because I have another assignment due tomorrow =X

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

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…

- 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:

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.

If Web 2.0 Applied to Real Life
Originally uploaded by darthservo.

I faved this when I was just getting into folksonomies and the wisdom of crowds, Web 2.0 craziness, and people were going completely nutso with the tags. *Every* web app had them, including us, whether or not they made any sense.

Yeah, that got old kinda quick.

I don’t love this photo that much anymore, but I’ll keep it in my faves just as a reminder of how crazy I was about folksonomies. I still believe in the idea behind this whole semantic web thing, but know it’s gonna be awhile longer before stuff like this will actually be of any use to anyone. And in the meantime, we’ll just poke fun at it. I mean, it is kinda funny, in a smiley-face way, if not wholly in a ha-ha way.