Sunday, April 23, 2006

I feel like I should post even though I don't really have much to talk about. I've been busy lately working on a couple of papers which are due in a couple of weeks.

Last week I played tennis for the first time since fall. Woo! I keep thinking I should take lessons but I never get around to it. Maybe this fall.

Yesterday I watched Saving Face, which was pretty good.

Saturday, April 15, 2006

I've done a couple of interesting things lately.

First, I went to a stellastarr* concert on Thursday. They were pretty good. The band that opened for them, Mobius Band, was pretty good too. Wikipedia describes them as a fusion of The Postal Service and Radiohead. I sort of agree with that. I don't feel it's all that Radioheady though. (Side note: did you know that you can buy The Postal Service CDs from the USPS web site? Heh.)

And the other interesting thing I did was on Friday I went to the Milan Dragway and watched some drag racing. It was pretty cool... watching 1000+hp cars launching just a few yards in front of you is quite an experience. I saw a car run the 1/4 mile in under 7 seconds, trapping at well over 200 mph. That is acceleration you have to see to believe.

In one of the runs, one of the cars went out of control, hurtling/spinning down the track, bouncing off the concrete barriers and dumping oil all over the asphalt. It was pretty extreme; luckily the other driver was able to avoid him. After that incident the track was shut down for a long time as they cleaned up the mess.

So those are the interesting things. In other news, I've been listening to my new headphones for a couple of weeks now, and I like them more. Before I was saying how I can't tell the difference between these and my old pair, but now I think they sound better... music seems to sound fuller, cleaner, more natural, and generally better. But the difference is still subtle and I can't be 100% sure it's not just mental... it could just be my mind making up reasons to justify purchasing them.

On the down side these new headphones are definitely less comfortable after they've been sitting on my ears for 4 hours. I might get used to it though; I remember my old headphones being uncomfortable initially.

Friday, April 7, 2006

I have been in a room-cleaning frenzy the past couple of days. I'm going to be interning at IBM Research in New York this summer, so I've been trying to find a subletter for my room. So I was cleaning my room to take pictures of it, which you can see here. I wish I had taken "before" pictures so you could see what a contrast it is from before I started.

Anyway for the pictures, I gathered up all my junk and put it on one side of the room, and took a picture of the other side. Then I moved all the junk to the other side and took a picture of the first side. Pretty clever, eh? But then I started actually figuring out what to do with the junk, like throwing it away or putting it somewhere, so the room really is a lot cleaner now. Plus I got rid of 4 years worth of dust that had been piling up on my desk and stuff.

The room is so clean now it doesn't even feel like my room anymore. There is so much open space, so much exposed carpet, that it feels like something is missing.

On an unrelated note... you may know that I crosspost these entries to my Xanga account. Well, I decided to just enable Xanga comments rather than always have that text box that redirects people to my real page. I decided that the text box looked annoying.

Tuesday, April 4, 2006

I just bought some new headphones: Grado SR60s. If you google for them, you'll find people who say they are the best-sounding headphones available under $100. I'm not really an audiophile, so I can't tell what's so awesome about them. They do sound good, much better than my earbuds, but I can't really tell a significant difference between them and my old pair of Sony headphones, which I bought around 5-6 years ago for about the same price. One disadvantage these Grados have is that they don't completely surround the ear like my old ones did, so more ambient noise gets in. (And people in the room can probably hear my music more easily, but this isn't really a problem since I listen in my own room.)

Baseball season started, woo! The Dodgers are now .500, so at least they are doing better than last year. =) And they are currently playing Atlanta, which is good because it means some of the games will be televised on TBS.