Friday, February 24, 2006

Today I bowled a 156! I think this is my second-highest bowling score ever. I bowled three games and broke 100 in every game. Awesome.

Monday, February 20, 2006

Not much going on lately other than work. So this is gonna be a short entry. I just felt like I should post something since I haven't in a while.

Next week is spring break. Gonna visit Jenny in sunny California!

By the way, the picture from my last entry, of me Scotch-taped to my chair, shows the 23" flat panel wide screen monitor I have at work. I got it last month; it came with one of our research group's new computers. It is awesome.

Thursday, February 9, 2006

Today, Jay Scotch-taped me to my chair.

Tuesday, February 7, 2006

The other day, Kevin L. (I just realized that I know at least 3 Kevins whose last names start with L) told me about Pandora, which is one of those "personal streaming radio" websites, meaning it streams music to you, and customizes what it sends based on your likes and dislikes. This isn't really a new idea since a lot of other sites like this exist (echo.com from 6 years ago, Yahoo LaunchCast, last.fm, etc.). But as far as I can tell, the interesting thing about Pandora and the difference between this and the other sites is that it actually looks at the characteristics of the song and selects other songs to play for you based on that. It's not based on, for example, what other people are listening to or what other music is categorized the same way. Instead it chooses songs based on things like "mild rhythmic syncopation, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, major key tonality" and so on. So the result is, you get to hear a lot of music that sounds good, often by groups you've never heard of. It's a slightly different philosophy than the other websites which operate more like "other people who liked this song also liked song X" and so they play song X for you -- the downside of that method is that you only get to hear popular songs. Of course Pandora has its own downside which is that the music you hear is more homogeneous -- after all you told it what music you like, and it's specifically finding more music that sounds like that.

Another good thing about Pandora is that it's all Flash, so it just works. I was trying one of the other sites (last.fm) and had a lot of trouble getting it to work on my Linux machine, I had to download and install their custom application, and it couldn't seem to play music directly so I had to set it up to play through an external player, and the links on the last.fm website that are supposed to make the application do something don't work.

Oh yeah, I added an RSS feed for the message board. So now there are two RSS feeds you can subscribe to: the one for my journal entries on the left, and the one for the message board on the top.

Cool: Jenny just told me about this Ann Arbor campus bus tracker. It'd be more useful if I actually took the bus. =)

Sunday, February 5, 2006

I was told that a girl who I went to elementary and middle school with (I didn't really know her, but I knew who she was) is now a famous K-pop star [link1, link2] (and has been for a few years, apparently). She must be somewhat famous, my Korean labmate/roommate knew who she was. Interesting.

Thursday, February 2, 2006

Feels like I cheated sickness. Earlier this week, like on Monday and Tuesday, my throat was a little sore and I was feeling tired, like when you're about to get a cold. But since Wednesday I've felt fine. So I totally dodged that cold. Ha! It probably helped that I got an unusually large amount of sleep earlier this week, around 10-12 hours a night.

Also earlier this week, I went to Subway and had a Cold Cut Combo. Now the Cold Cut Combo is a sandwich that combines various meats. It's not a combo in the sense of "includes chips and a drink". Anyway the cashier lady asked me what I got, and I said "Cold Cut Combo". She charged me for the meal ($5-something) rather than the sandwich ($3.49), and when I pointed this out to her she said "ok, but that's not what you said! You said combo!" And I pointed out to her on the menu, where it says "Cold Cut Combo $3.49", and said that's what I want. She said no, if you want the sandwich only, you should have said Cold Cut Trio. Now (a) there is no Trio anywhere on Subway's menu, and (b) it says Cold Cut Combo $3.49 right there! I said "combo" because that's the name of the sandwich! So I suggested maybe they should clarify their menu so people don't get confused about that. And, get this, she said "no, you should remember next time so you don't order the wrong thing!" Great.

I seem to remember that Subway used to have a Cold Cut Trio, so maybe the lady just didn't realize that the menus had been changed. But you'd think pointing it out on the menu would cause her to realize it...