Friday, January 30, 2004

Went to the Ann Arbor Folk Festival today. It was good! Ani DiFranco performed and was pretty good (she was the only one whose name I had heard of.. though I hadn't heard any of her songs). But I thought the best performance was by Martin Sexton. His guitar playing and singing were awesome.. not necessarily in terms of playing fast but in terms of mastering the nuances of dynamics and expression. At one point he used an effects pedal that converted his singing into the sound of an electric guitar. Kinda cool.

There were 5 other groups who performed, most of which were quite good as well. The emcee was pretty funny and he also performed songs in between the sets. I decided to go to this thing at the last minute on a whim, and I'm glad I went.

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Hi. I feel like I should update because it's been a while, but not much has happened. Oh, last weekend I went to the Michigan - Western Michigan hockey game which was pretty good. Our goalie had some pretty good saves while theirs.. not so much. We won 7-0. There was also a big fight near the end and 4 players (2 from each team) were disqualified (I guess that's basically being ejected but I think they're also disqualified from the following game).

Did you know UCLA has a hockey team? I didn't. It's not listed on their main sports page. Maybe because it's not NCAA.

Also Teresa was here visiting her friend last weekend so we had brunch on Sunday.

During dinner today Mike told me that the "two spaces after a period" typing rule was actually false. I was taught by many different people (teachers, my Mom, etc.) that one should always put two spaces between sentences. I guess the theory is that the gap between sentences should be larger than the gap between words. But after doing some web research, it turns out that for optimal readability you're actually not supposed to do that, according to professional typographers and various style manuals. (Google for "two spaces after period" for some references.) Learn something new every day.

(Of course, on the web it's moot because browsers render all consecutive whitespace in HTML as a single space anyway.)

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Happy Chinese New Year. It's the year of the monkey, which gives me pause because I was born in the year of the monkey. This of course only happens once every 12 years, so when it does happen it serves to remind me that I'm getting older.. in the last year of the monkey I was half my age and a 6th grader. Now I'm an 18th grader.

This reminds me of when I was going through some of my old grade-school papers at home over break, and one of them was a journal that I kept for a few days some time in elementary school. The entries contained things like: "I had cup-o-noodles for dinner," and "I watched the Dodger game." I realized that my daily habits have changed little in 12 years.

Anyway I discovered today that my messageboard does not work in Mozilla (or its derivatives such as Firebird). I tried to find an elegant solution to this but was unable to. The problem is, I need to have that popup window submit a form and then close itself. For some reason I cannot get Mozilla to do this properly (handling both the case where the user hits enter and when the user clicks the Post button).

I will wager that not enough of you guys use Mozilla to care. Besides, if you do care, you can't complain about it anyway because the message board is broken. Ha.

And I have no idea if the thing works in Mac browsers..

Sunday, January 18, 2004

One of the more unusual fortunes I've seen:

At first I thought it said "through" instead of "though" so it made no sense. Then I figured out what they were trying to say and it's still kinda weird. But at least now I know why tea kettles whistle: they are optimistic.

Hm, I bought some CD-RWs since I don't like wasting space on CD-Rs when I burn mp3s for the car and I don't have enough to fill a CD. These CD-RWs were marked "high speed" 4x to 12x compatible. My CD burner is kinda old but it can handle burning CD-Rs at 8x and CD-RWs at 4x. You would think that since both the burner and the discs support 4x, it would work, right? Apparently not. I guess the "high speed" designation is some special thing that my drive doesn't support.

Oh well, my computer at work can probably burn them so I may still be able to get some use out of them..

Saturday, January 17, 2004

I spent some time learning some MySQL and redoing the message board.. it's now written in PHP using a MySQL database. I threw out all the old perl code and started from scratch, essentially. So at the moment some features don't work because I haven't reimplemented them yet in PHP, namely file uploads, autolinking, and allowing html tags (such as colors). I might get around to doing those at some point in the future.

On the plus side, the message board is now threaded, an idea I jacked from Kyung. Plus you can view by date order like it was in the past, if you don't like the threading. Also it remembers your name so you don't have to reenter it every time you post.

Anyway, let me know if you find any bugs.

Oh, I rented the movie Blow. It was pretty good. Jenny pointed out that the style was kinda like in Scarface where they have this "dated" look for the scenes that are set in the 70's/80's.

I made some fried rice and it was actually edible and not bad. I'm proud of myself.

Leah has moved her blog and Allan has resurrected his from the dead. Woo!

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

1. I finished reading Fluke by Christopher Moore, which is a book I borrowed from my Mom. It's pretty weird and out-there (for example during a lot of the book, the main character is inside a whale) but it's also a fun read and the story kept me interested.

2. I watched the movie Big Fish. Pretty good.

3. Found this group called Tammany Hall NYC which plays some acoustic guitar songs that I like. A couple of songs from the Back in the Bottle album have been in Scrubs episodes, which is how I heard of them.

Speaking of which, they keep preempting Scrubs because of that damn Apprentice show. Grr.

Friday, January 9, 2004

I noticed while driving today that my car turned 76,000. It's not a significant number other than containing a few consecutive zeros, but it just reminded me that I haven't talked about cars for a while so I will do that now.

I was wondering what modifications to do to my car next. There aren't any I really want to do, but there are a few I was thinking about. Some minor electrical things like having the alarm flash the turn signals instead of the parking lights -- this is because my fogs are currently wired to my parking lights, so I have to turn off my fogs every time I park or else they flash with my parking lights when I arm/disarm the alarm. This may not be that easy since my alarm was installed for me, and I don't have the wiring diagrams so I'd have to figure it out. Plus I'm not sure how easy it is to tap into the turn signals after the flasher unit.

Another nice electrical thing in this cold weather would be a remote starter. This is tricky on a stick-shift, though.. I'd have to disable the clutch interlock and somehow use the neutral switch to substitute for it.. but then this would no longer let me start the engine in gear with clutch in.. ideally it would be like my motorcycle which allows a start if the tranny is in neutral, or the clutch is in, or both. I guess I need the equivalent of an OR-gate. Or I suppose if I hadn't lost my motorcycle service manual, I could look at their wiring diagram to see how they did it. Anyway, I'm not sure how feasible this is, plus I don't particularly want to carry around two remote fobs on my keychain for one car. Maybe the solution is to remove my current alarm completely and put in one that has remote start.. figure out the neutral switch business.. and fix the turn-signal-flashing thing while I'm at it, killing all birds with one stone.

What else.. nothing, really. Your average performance/handling mods are probably not worth it to me. Rims, wheels, springs, and struts all around would easily set me back a few grand and wouldn't be worth it at all since I don't really have a problem with the current handling after I put in the rear anti-roll bar. The best bang-for-the-buck performance mod would probably be a replacement Y-Pipe (the section of exhaust from headers to cat) which adds 20 HP on the Maxima, according to one guy's dyno. Pretty good with no intake or cat-back. But this is not really attractive to me because I don't have a problem with the current performance, and I'd have to pay a muffler shop to do it, thus taking the fun out of it. Speaking of intake and cat-back, I don't really want the extra noise, and I don't believe that the difference in performance would be significant, so I'd probably pass on those.

Anyway since I don't necessarily want any of the above mods that bad, my laziness will probably take over and none of them will get done.

The Detroit Auto Show is going on this weekend and next. I should probably try and find someone to go with.. if that fails, I might go on my own.

More car comments: I noticed that people actually drive the Scion xB in LA. I noticed a lot of them out there. I guess some people actually don't think they are ugly. I don't think I have seen one in Michigan yet.

In other news, I got a new keyboard today. It's almost as cheap as my previous one but it's better, or at least, not as crappy. My previous keyboard had the following problems: (1) When typing quickly in Dvorak, keystrokes would be lost. Probably this is because they skimped on the number of unique keys that can be pressed at one time, and set it up so that the certain key combinations that could not be pressed together did not come up when typing in Qwerty. (2) Nonstandard placement of the Insert-Home-PgUp-Delete-End-PgDn keys.

The two keyboards do have the following "feature" (actually it's just because they are cheap): keys on different rows are not beveled differently, so when I physically move keys around from Qwerty to Dvorak, the keyboard still looks even. This is a problem with more expensive, fancy keyboards where keys on higher rows are beveled more towards you and keys on lower rows are beveled away.

I had no idea this was going to be such a long entry.

**

I was thinking I will start keeping track of what I eat, just out of curiosity. I don't plan on posting everything I eat on here, but I will comment on any interesting observations after a month or so has passed. =) By the way, today I had Indian food for lunch and frozen pizza for dinner. Fairly typical.

Tuesday, January 6, 2004

I've taken a 50-degree temperature cut.. it's 9 degrees now in Ann Arbor. Brr. It's so cold that some ice got somewhere inside the rear windows of my car and now they won't roll down.

The flight back was interesting. I sat in some rear-facing seats which were rather uncomfortable because they didn't recline. Plus when the plane was taking off it felt like I was sliding forward off the seat rather than being pressed back into it, and the sliding forward feeling is quite weird. And there are numerous other problems such as lack of underseat storage, lack of tray, competing for legroom, having to look at the faces of all the other passengers during the flight, etc. The only redeeming thing about the seats were that since there was a little group of 6 people all facing each other, and we were all relatively young, we had some interesting stranger conversation about random stuff.

Anyway that was my flight. Now it's back to school.

Oh, I read the book Angels and Demons by Dan Brown while I was in LA. Pretty good. Kind of similar in some ways to his other book, The Da Vinci Code, which I liked a little better. I borrowed the book Fluke by Christopher Moore from my Mom.. it's supposed to be weird. I suppose I'll read that one next.

Sunday, January 4, 2004

Hello and Happy 2004, y'all.

Let's see.. much has happened since last time I updated. Primarily I went snowboarding at Lake Tahoe. We stayed in Reno where I gambled away a good amount of money in a too-short amount of time. I learned Baccarat.. that is, learned that it is pretty lame. It's not much different than War. No thinking involved and it goes fast so your money doesn't even last long.

The snowboarding itself was pretty cool though. We went the perfect weekend because it snowed just before, so there was fresh powder, and it snowed just after, so we missed the storms (sort of, we hit them on the road on the way back). Plus it wasn't as crowded as one would expect for a holiday weekend. Here's a picture Jon took, possibly from the top of the mountain at Kirkwood:

Anyway after snowboarding I got sick. So to celebrate New Year's I slept in bed and watched the Rose Bowl. Basically I didn't leave the house between Wednesday and Friday and used up a lot of tissues. Luckily by Saturday I was more or less recovered so I had lunch with my cousins at this Brazilian BBQ place. It was pretty good -- they just keep bringing various forms of meat to your table and you eat till you can eat no more. Then that night I ate more meat at Outback Steakhouse which was quite good. So Saturday was meat day.

Then today I had dinner with a big ol' (17-person) group at the Old Spaghetti Factory. It was pretty good but I should have stuck with spaghetti because I had this shrimp linguine thing that could have been more flavorful. Oh well. Still not a bad place.

Anyway tomorrow it's back to Michigan and time to resume the identity of my alter-ego, The Fank.