conquering the world one oxymoron at a time
Archive for January, 2007
January 30, 2007 at 2:36 am · Filed under random
If I could have one in my apartment, I would get a pet turtle, with a little aquarium that has water and rocks and maybe some plants so s/he can crawl all over the place and eat fish food and be happy and grow bigger.
But then I think about how irresponsible I am, and I feel bad that I may kill a turtle. I have a plant that sits on my windowsill that I forget about a lot. Most of the time, half the leaves are brown because the plant is dying because I forget it’s there so I forget to give it water. Thankfully, it’s a resilient plant, so it really ever only half dies. I give it a glass of water when I remember because a glass full of water is as much as the pot can hold. The problem is that I only remember about once a month or so.
People say that a married couple ought to get a dog or something before having kids, to get used to the responsibility and to see if they can take care of something besides themselves. I think I’m in the “can barely take care of myself” category, and seeing that I manage to half-kill a resilient plant a majority of the time, I don’t think I’m ready for turtles, dogs, or kids.
January 24, 2007 at 4:39 pm · Filed under grad life/MIT
Guess what I spotted today? You know those little white-background sticker decals that people put on their cars?They usually have an abbreviation of a place on them. I first saw them when I was in Europe; cars had decals like “GB” or “CH”. I think the trend started there, but got perpetuated in the US by OBX.
Anyway, today, I saw a decal like that on a car, except … it said “C++”.
Go figure, that we’re at MIT.
January 20, 2007 at 2:08 am · Filed under friends, music, going out
It’s been quite a while since the Gang got together. In fact, I haven’t seen some of these people since August/September last year, or at least not all together. Things have mainly been individual lunches here or dinner there or coffee when we found the time. Tonight, in honor of a birthday, we gathered (all of us, almost) for a late dinner at Anthem. It’s always nice to try out a new eatery, especially one that I hadn’t even heard of before.
By the time everyone trickled in, we moved the conversations from the bar to our reserved table for 16. Along the way, like one of those handshake games where you go around and shake everyone’s hand exactly once, we all naturally fell into a ritual of chatting, clinking glasses, and going out of our ways to say hi to every person, even the one headed toward that far other end of the table. As I glanced all around me, I saw hugs, kisses, winks, happy laughing faces, and smiling faces who radiated back genuine happiness at seeing me, and each other, again.
I felt like I was in the final scene of those romantic comedies that come out around the holidays, where everyone’s gathered around a big table, laughing and happy, but you can’t make out what any of them are saying because warm and fuzzy music is playing, leading to the credits rolling. So this time, my life felt like a happy movie. The best part is that this is just the beginning, and not the conclusion of my movie.
Unfortunately, the night had to end with the restaurant playing The Scientist by Coldplay. I never really paid attention to the lyrics, nothing beyond the eerily haunting melody. Ironically, I looked up the lyrics just earlier today. They are quite sad, but somehow right for my life at just about now. I cut the night short (the others were all going out, albeit only having about an hour before last calls), wanting to come home instead and just curl up against my pillow with my book of the moment.
January 19, 2007 at 1:25 pm · Filed under the internet, daily grind
I’ve been very distracted for the past couple of days, finding it very difficult to focus. I just sit in front my computer in my office and pray for random interesting things that I can find to occupy my time on the internet. This included reading multiple blogs, finding new and interesting blogs to read, and refreshing the ones I’ve already read in case there are new entries.
For whatever reason, I was leaving a comment that required me to write “millenium falcon” (don’t ask). It didn’t look correctly spelled, however I looked at it, so I went to dictionary.com to confirm. Turns out that dictionary.com will now not only give you the english definition of a word, but it will also give you the same word in multiple languages. Kinda cool.
Check it out: millenium at dictionary.com
January 18, 2007 at 1:38 pm · Filed under life thoughts, music
A while ago, I discovered this song called Fairytale (童话). I remember this past summer when I would walk around all day with this song playing repeatedly on my newly-acquired iPod Nano. After a bit of a hiatus, I’m still equally addicted. After discovering last night that YouTube has the music video version of this song, I have just kept playing it in the background …
I think the sad-inducing song makes me feel better about life in general because it lets me wallow in my own self pity, which for whatever reason is what I really need and want to do right now. It makes me reflect and miss people … friends, family, relationships, people I wanted to have been in better touch with …
全世界都不理我的时候， 只有你不可以不理我。
January 16, 2007 at 1:31 am · Filed under grad life/MIT
A few days ago, I was in a bathroom in building 8, and saw a sign next to the soap dispenser that said that suppliers like foamy soap better because on average, you need 30-40% less soap than liquid soap to do the same job. Plus, foamy soap needs less water to make the same amount of bubbles, thereby saving water, too.
The bathroom in building 56 (my lab floor) recently installed some new soap and paper towel dispensers, along with a sign welcoming suggestions and comments regarding the new equipment because the janitorial staff is trying things/vendors out. The new soap dispenser dispenses foamy soap, so I wrote an email to the address supplied by the sign:
“I like the foamy soap!!”
January 15, 2007 at 1:27 pm · Filed under daily grind
Due to a slight addiction to watching movies, I’ve been a loyal Blockbuster Online customer for almost two years now (since February 2005). I chose it over Netflix because Blockbuster Online offers the flexibility to also get free rentals in their stores, so when I don’t feel like waiting for the mail to show up, I’ll print out a little coupon and go into the store and get the new release that they “guarantee to be on shelves, or it’s free”.
Recently, Blockbuster Online’s seriously pissing me off. I’ve been watching Grey’s Anatomy on DVDs. The different discs for Seasons 1 and 2 are queued up in my account, and all that needs to happen is for me to send one back, and the next one on my queue will arrive. SHOULD be a great system. Except, for the second time in a row now, Blockbuster has skipped the next disc on my queue. I should be getting Disc 1 of Season Two, but instead, it sent me Disc 2. So I returned a non-Grey’s Anatomy DVD … and instead I got Disc 4.
What the hell??? Because I really want to watch everything in order, I don’t even know what to do now. I can’t watch Disc 2 before Disc 1. Do I return Disc 4, hoping that I’ll get Disc 1 in the mail? Ugh. I’m really annoyed.
January 14, 2007 at 1:16 am · Filed under grad life/MIT, hobbies
As luck would have it, the winter I decide to get a season pass is the winter that New England gets no snow. It’s the middle of January, and Killington reported lows in the upper-20s today. The summit was toasty and balmy, and my helmet made me roast, but the important thing is that I wore a helmet. I didn’t wear a helmet last weekend, and I hit my head twice. You would think that me of all people would know the importance of wearing a helmet… But then again, you would think I’d never go near a slope again, but there I was.
This weekend, I wore my helmet, and I didn’t hit my head once. Such is Murphy’s Law. I did drop my helmet in the parking lot before we ever took off in the car, resulting in some fresh scratches on the top. Speaking of the car, I drove the whole way to and from Killington, and the drive reminded me of how much I actually love to drive. The serenity of the roads, the smoothness of the banked turns on the highways, the shifting left and then right, the finding of kindred spirits who join in the rhythm with you … such are the joys of highway driving.
January 11, 2007 at 11:46 pm · Filed under daily grind
I came home to find this in the hallway outside my door …
Yes, thank you. I was looking for a toilet on my way home.
January 10, 2007 at 5:42 pm · Filed under site updates
It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a year since I ported this blog over to Wordpress completely, leaving the original blogger-hosted blog in the dust. It’s felt like forever, and before I stumbled on the old blog somewhere on this never-forget-anything cyberspace, I honestly couldn’t even recall what the old blog looked like anymore.
Honestly, the old theme was starting to get on my nerves. There were serious code glitches everywhere, causing incompatibilities with Firefox versus IE versus other browsers I didn’t even have the energy to bother to check. I thought I had fixed most of them, but there were a few elusive ones that never got addressed (see fellow CSS-nerd and site-overhauler, Liang’s comment on this post). Hopefully, with this new theme, things are more under control, and more consistent from browser to browser, and view format to view format (ie. main view versus archives view).
The deviations from the default theme include:
- new banner image
- minor tweaks on the look and order of post layouts
- relatively more major recoding of the sidebar layout
- expanding the container width to 720 pixels
Potential future modifications, if I ever get around to it:
- better linkage with the actual pages of shanwu.com (about, gallery, etc.)
- new banner image
- linkages to “previous” and “next” posts in archives view
- addition of an “Edit” link next to posts in the logged-in mode
- incorporation of domain pages into Wordpress-style pages — I have serious reservations for this because 1) it would take way long, and 2) I’m rather attached to the mouse-over image format of the pages currently, and I’m not sure if it’s possible to easily port the format into a Wordpress-hosted page
Okay, I think that’s enough coding for one day.
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