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Checkmate
Wow, it’s been a busy day. We took our friend to breakfast at Merritt Bakery, then I drove her to the Oakland Airport, while Seppo returned home to walk the dog. When I got back, we worked on weeding the front yard, then went off to our bank to do crazy joint banking stuff. We now have a joint checking and savings account, and individual checking accounts with cosigning rights, in addition to our personal credit cards and one joint credit card. It sounds complicated, but it will actually streamline our billpaying every month.
In short, we’ll direct deposit into our joint account, and get personal spending money moved into our checking every month. All bills get paid from the joint accounts, all “family” purchases are put on the joint credit card. It’ll be easy to see our monthly input and output. All personal purchases will be made on the personal checking accounts and credit cards, with each of us managing our respective discretionary income as we choose to see fit. I foresee this being very convenient for gift purchasing and random splurges. 🙂
After this complex bit of hanky-banky [sorry], we went off to the Apple store so that I could return my weak-assed iPod nano-specific Belkin FM transmitter — whew, that’s a lot of descriptors — and get a speaker-output-to-tapedeck adaptor. We’re rolling old skool style, baby.
To further advance our ridiculously productive morning, we dropped by the Cingular store to upgrade our sims, as instructed to us by the anonymous voice on our voicemail. I think we should all start following instructions left to us by anonymous voices on our voicemail. Yes. *plods along all zombie-like on your ass*
Now, I’m compiling a list of ingredients to purchase for The Revenge of the French Laundry Potluck that we are having tomorrow. If you haven’t been invited, don’t be mad but read our disclaimer at the foodblog instead. 🙂
Stress test
Your Stress Level is: 32% |
You are slightly prone to stress, but generally you keep it under control. You know how to relax and take things as they come, even when your worlds seems to be falling apart. Occasionally, you do let yourself get stressed out, but you snap out of it pretty quickly. |
Blogger in Beta
This makes my little heart go pitter-patter.
5 minutes later.
Actually, I take that back. I created a test blog [sidenote: that “incite a ____” theme has been so useful for me!] to check out their new features, and it looks like the entire blog has to be private or public, not on a per-entry basis.
Boo. Boo-urns.
I am hoping they move toward protected entries. Almost everyone I know has a gmail account, so it would be painless to allow them to see my protected entries, if and when that feature drops.
Visitored!
My friend has been in town for a business trip and it’s been fantastic! It’s so much fun and really nice to have her in town. I feel bad because I always tell her to move back. I’m mostly joking because I think when people make major life decisions, it should be on their own impetus and not because other people have told them they should, but it’s hard not to get too hopeful! 🙂
It’s been busy, busy, busy, but definitely in a good way. We had a surprise early birthday party for her, which was really fun. We also had some delicious food, which doesn’t hurt. 🙂 I had my first soju shot yesterday. It was really tasty, so I wonder why people drink it as a shot.
Tonight, we eat dinner, go to the Y, then I bake some cookies.
Jeanorama
Sick and tired of jeans that
- sag in the rear
- are too long
- are faded beyond belief
- are too low in the front
- have broken zippers
- are just plain ugly
I went on a quick shopping spree during lunch to buy some much needed pantage. Thank goodness. I found a bunch of things the exact right size (difficult with proportionally short legs with thighs on the big side relative to my butt), so I got three pairs of jeans and a couple of shirts on sale, as well as a replacement hoodie for my broke-down-five-shades-of-not-black-anymore one.
My problem finding jeans leads me to think about the problems that most women I know have finding their size. My numeric size is quite common, so I don’t have a problem with that, but usually, the pants are too long. Even the shortest sizes are a teeny bit long. Other women tell me that their thighs are too big, their butts are too big/small, the waist is too high/low, etc.
I feel like in the last 10 years, women have been offered more choices than ever before for jeans in particular, so I’ve been really grateful, but there’s still a long way to go. In high school and college, I was always stealing my brother’s jeans because I was so sick of wearing girls’ jeans, which all had high waists and didn’t sit at my hips. And men’s jeans have a waist AND inseam length. I wish women’s clothes all had the same deal.
Last week, in my dentist’s office, the dental assistant brought me a random magazine while I was waiting in the chair. It was Ladies’ Home Journal or something. There was a section on how high waisted jeans slimmed down your errant tummy. I was horrified because I had thought that high waisted jeans were something we had evolved beyond and would never see again. High waisted jeans always just made the belly area look bizarre, no matter who you were.
Fashion is weird.
RIP iPod
On June 27, 2004 I received a beautiful little iPod from Seppo. It had a sweet, personal engraving. It was light and elegant. It was the most expensive piece of personal electronics I had ever owned to that date. It made it easier for me to enjoy my music. It had plenty of splace to carry around all the music I had and more. Its UI was simple and classic.
Yesterday, it died. I don’t know why. The last time it had some trauma was several days ago, at least. The harddrive died. It clicked, it rattled, it reset over and over again, and it overheated. I tried all the different solutions presented by iPod, iPodLounge, various websites and message boards. I ran multiple diagnostics tests. I even smacked it around. I opened it up and reconnected the parts, hoping that the problem was a loose connection; it wasn’t. The harddrive gave a little rattle that indicated that some crucial part was just not right.
Thanks for bringing me two solid years of good music listening. I’ll miss you.
Google Analytics
Every several months or so, I find myself raving about the newest Google product. But for most of them, I stop using them because they are not that useful for me.
I’ve tried and uninstalled Google Desktop Search (it was blocking out a lot of space on my harddrive that refused to be defragmented and slowing everything down; uninstalling freed up something like 4-6GBs of space for me), Google Earth (it’s nice to look at once in a while, but I found myself hardly every firing it up), and Google Desktop (I kept overloading the number of widgets and them getting annoyed by the clutter, then stripping back, then adding some more, rinse, and repeat). I’ve tried Google Spreadsheets, but I’m not that excited about it because I only use spreadsheets once a year (for NaNoWriMo).
Google Analytics is something else though. It took maybe a minute to sign up (once they send you an invitation) and set up my various domains. Then it took maybe another minute to add the tracking info to my blogger templates so that each page of each website could be tracked.
It’s great! I love the little charts and graphs it produces. I, like many others, initally thought that you needed to run AdWords in order to take advantage of Google Analytics, but no.
Frankly, it’s not too different from Site Meter, which I know several of you use already, but it has a bunch of different types of reports and just looks a lot nicer. It can be used on any website or webpage (even if you just want to track a single page, for some reason). I recommend it.
Consumer snowball effect
So we bought the HDtv from Andre.
So we thought, hmm, we could get the HD cable box from Comcast.
While Seppo was trading in the HD cable box, he was talked into getting the HD dvr* on top of that.
We now have two TiVos AND an HD dvr that has two tuners to record two shows simultaneously. Overkill!
Then we thought, well, we should get a media/tv organizer that works better with our setup.
So we went to Ikea and bought two TV stands (that have been placed side-by-side) to hold all the random boxes and some of our dvds.
Then we rearranged our couch and table and rug.
Because, you know, we got a tv. That we totally hadn’t planned on getting.
*By the way, the Comcast DVR is poo-on-a-stick. The horrible, horrible interface makes me want to pull out my hair. I love great UI and TiVo certainly wins hands down in that aspect. The Comcast DVR is only worth having because of the ability to record HD.
Splurge!
So… I have no idea how to justify this, but Seppo and I bought an incredibly-close-to-brand-spanking-new HDTV which arrived in the mail yesterday. Thanks, Andre! Why are you so awesome? 🙂
It is really quite gorgeous.
In a much smaller splurge, I am purchasing the Outlander Audiobook CD (Unabridged). It is 32.5 hours long. That’s nothing compared to the last book in the series, which is 58 hours long. 😀 Anyway, I am getting the audiobook to help with my commute. I’ve been listening to podcasts of NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” and “Sunday Puzzle” the last few days, a change from listening to the local newsradio station and random music from my ipod, and this change has been for the better.
The first time, part 1
I still remember the first time I heard music in stereo sound. I was twelve years old. I had just received a Sony Walkman (my first!) from a visiting friend of the family, as it had been my birthday not too long ago. It was a hot summer night, and I was supposed to sleep in the livingroom along with my sister (because the guests were sleeping in our room), but instead of actually sleeping, I lay down on the floor with the thin sheet over me and my first headphones covertly placed over my ears.
In the dark, I closed my eyes, pressed play on the Walkman, and for the first time in my life, really listened to the sounds coming into my ears.
It was… indescribeable. It was amazing. The music came from both sides of me, all around me, from within my head. The music flowed through my consciousness, and it was like I was right there with the musicians, like they were playing a performance for me, in a small room with me. The music washed over me, became a part of me. Or I became a part of it. I don’t know.
—
In the fifth grade, the yearly school eye exam revealed that I was terribly near-sighted. My sight being the only sight I knew, I had no idea there was something wrong. I had figured that you can of course see things near you and not see things far from you. Except that I couldn’t see things most others could. In any case, a visit to the optometrist was scheduled, and a pair of glasses were soon procured.
That evening, I walked back from my piano lesson (I only lasted a month :|) which was just a few blocks away from my house, accompanied by my sister and my cousin, who were also taking lessons there. It was a fall evening, and it was starting to get dark already even though it was just turning to dinner time. There were crunchy dried leaves on the ground, and I looked down, dazzled at how much detail I could see of them. Looking up to the trees that were dropping leaves, I couldn’t believe I could pick out individual leaves. Looking past the trees, I was floored by what I saw.
I saw pinpoints of light. Little, individual, bright shining points in the night sky, different sizes, some twinkling, some steady.
I had no idea. I had, until that point, thought stars were more like the five-pointed stars we draw as kids, big fuzzy bursts of blurry, unfocussed light, some so close to each other that they looked like one.
—
I was in the eighth grade, at my new school. It was the first week or two of classes, and the new music teacher was trying to teach us how to really hear and appreciate music. He played a recording of what a violin sounds like alone, then he told us to listen for that sound and see if we could hear the “buzz of bees”. Puzzled, we waited as he put in another tape and hit play.
Of course, the tape he put in was a recording of the Flight of the Bumblebee. At first, it was just one big wave of music washing over me. I could hear the overall melody and what felt like just a big blob of other stuff with it.
But I stopped and really strained to listen. I tried to pick up the sound he had played for us earlier. And BAM, there it was. Holy moly. I could hear the violins, just the violins, almost as if they were playing completely alone. In a split second, it was gone. It was just a jumble of music again.
Until that moment, I thought when music was played with many instruments at the same time, you just heard the resulting cacophany. No, tht’s not even true. I hadn’t even given it enough thought to have formed an idea like that. Music was just sound and it was either pleasant or not. In that short moment when I could hear the violins, I felt like I had been jolted awake.