never knows best...

dry as toast

Harvard had an undefeated football season. If I only bothered to write that application essay maybe I could be a proud fan, but instead I am a disappointed Cal fan. Oh well, as overrated as we may be, it still sucked to lose the only game I went to watch in person. Pictures forthcoming, and resolutions too.

Happy New Years! 2005, a year with endless possibilities and matching 401(k) contributions.

The year is coming to an end, so it is time to wrap things up and write lists. I am not really good with lists, but will give it a go anyways.

3 best albums of 2004 that I bought

1. Walking Cloud And Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered And The Sun Shined [Mono]: Mono first sucked me in earlier in the summer to post rock, and this just topped anything else I heard.
2. Absolution [Muse]: a combination of no bad songs and good good songs to make it hard to keep it off this list, especially considering how much I listened to this CD.
3. Happenstance [Rachael Yamagata]: I bought it just because Worn Me Down continues to a great song, and was pleasantly surprised by the rest of it.

3 best concerts that I went to

1. Puffy AmiYumi: still the only concert I have gone to where the crowd seemed really into it all concert long, well not all concert long because it is still hard to care about the opening act.
2. Metric: my first concert, and if anything it made me want to go to more concerts. Metric puts on a good show.
3. Lali Puna: the most complete concert I have gone to. No long waits and good acts.

3 thoughts on the year

1. Things turned out just as I expected, graudation and work-wise at least, which nowadays is rare.
2. It is really easy to spend $45 on food.
3. I will not say cell phones are necessary, but they are more useful than they first appeared.

Theme of the year

Blogging is not as evil as it looks. 7 months of it, have made me not-a-hater, I am still not a believer, but it is fun, and a good waste of time.

All thoughts were skewed towards the end of the year, but the second half of the year was lots more fun anyways. Resolutions may be forthcoming later, but off to San Diego in the meantime.

Unix fun: so my INST account finally got shut down, which makes me very sad, but it was invetiable. On the bright side, at least it was not too hard to move my stuff to my OCf account, a simple scp took care of that (specifically 'scp -r -c blowfish niche@[servername]: .').

So, then I am just futzing around in my OCF account, but then I notice: hmm... this directory structure looks a lot like the one I had in INST... aww crap! I overwrote all my OCF stuff with INST crap that I did not really care about in the first place... check my website... looks normal... check blogger... looks normal... oh I was just exploring the directory I copied all my INST stuff to, not my home directory as I thought I was exploring. And all is well. Well as well as I can be without an INST account.

Merry Christmas!

A Festivus for the rest of us.

Apropos: Kare Kano box set for $39.99!! Must buy... maybe... probably will not... anyways I already have crappy RM fansubs burned to CD... but... still maybe... er... will make decision later.

I am now a Teradata Certified Professional! Woot? Bow before my IT prowess? Well it is maybe cooler than being Oracle/DB2/Informix/Sybase certified, even if it does not have as much name recognition. Anyhow, I wonder if I got the question where I marked Teradata's RDBMS as "Easy to understand" correct? And because that one question is very indicative of the rest of test overall, my IT prowess is not something that really needs to be bowed before.

Just wait until I become a Teradata Certified Master! Then if I get a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, I can have the words master and black belt plastered all over my business cards and resume, and how can that not be cool?

I can see why my brother thinks Jean Reno is a cool actor, and the movie is pretty cool in a cheesy sorta way. You cannot go too wrong with Frech-Japanese movies with English subtitles. It is basically like another Jean Reno movie, The Professional, but instead of protecting Natalie Portman, he protects a Japanese girl. I just found the action in the film to be extremely hilarious (they have nunchakus). And as an added plus, the girl is cute too (even with her dyed hair, which I am against). So, it bears Nick's hearty recommendation for action fun.

Most underused useful MS Word feature (other than the Outline view)? Alt selecting stuff. With it you can select an arbitrary box of text to delete or otherwise maninpulate. Good stuff.

The 2nd lane from the right is where it is at. That is my observation after my long'ish 2 hour commute home from work today. Driving through 4 accidents will do that to you, of course my normal commute home is still about 1.5 hours long, so I guess it was not that much longer than usual. But yes, the 2nd lane, while not glamorous or speedy, it is definitely now my lane of choice when driving through traffic. It has neither the hard stops of the 3rd/4th lanes nor the onramp merges of the 1st lane, just slow chugging along with other likeminded drivers, who usually value drivability more than speed. Drivability, for me that is the key aspect of being in motion (i.e. not stuck at a stand still), so while I may only be going 3 MPH, it is still better than hard braking to a stop behind your choice of riced out cars. Plus, in general if you are leading a pack of cars, you can drive whatever speed you like in the 2nd lane. And if people think you are driving too slow? Well there is always the 3rd lane for them. Only bad things come from driving in any other lane (i.e. my car accident).

Threadless T-shirts relatively cheap (for printed T-shirts) and relatively interesting shirts. I like the one with the panda getting attacked by tanks; and the one with the girl holding a bloody kitchen knife and a pigeon.

New song to play to death. I like the violin loop.

I'm sick of seeing you cry
And wasting all your time
On someone who will never care enough
To make you feel loved
To make you feel safe
I would drop my life to take his place

To show you just how good
Being touched could be
Commit these words to memory
For when you find yourself
Pinned under his demands
I am still an option that you have

So carry me around
Like a picture in your purse
Pull me out when things are at their worst

You can show up at my house
Completely unannounced
We'll have that movie kiss we talked about

Where there are no words
Just a soft and gentle score
Our ears will ring from all the strings

We'll let the screen go black
And watch the credits run
And see the names of every one

Who we ever met
And who we ever missed
Each one had a role in this

It's just another film that won't get made
I'm sick of seeing you cry

Got my KSCU T-shirt today, though oddly the mailing address was for a certain Nizk. I am not really sure how they got that spelling, but if my credit card does not go through, it is not my fault. People really should have common sense and basic name spelling abilities.

There's a subtle secondary manner in which real estate prices have shaped consumer behavior in Japan: housing is so expensive that young people have virtually no means of renting or owning their own homes; even after they've joined the workforce, they continue to live with their parents for years or even decades after graduation. Given that the average American spends up to one-third of his or her take-home wages on shelter, by sponging off Mom and Dad, young Japanese men and women have significantly more disposable income to spend on themselves; a $600 Louis Vuitton purse -- or a $3,000 ultrathin 1.2-pound laptop -- becomes instantly affordable when you're living rent free.

From SFGate.com

So true, yet I have yet to splurge too much on anything. Credit card bill is looking somewhat painful this month though.

Disappointed. Will have to see how motivated I am to go to San Diego, but it will now be a function of cost instead of a function of blind need to go to a once a generation event.

Busy week. busy, but nice.

First Lali Puna concert on Tuesday, which was pretty nice overall. Definitely one of the most solid overall concerts I have ever gone to. All the artists were good (very impressed by Duo 505, Alias was reasonable), and they did not make the crowd stand around and wait, which in Nick's concert going book a major plus. So hence, the title track of this post, which if I got the reference correctly about the main character in Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (though I do not remember Murakami main characters as ever having names). And following that tangent, that is definitely the most messed up of Murakami's books. Long, messed up, and interesting?

Fast forward to yesterday, spurred by Amy's talk of the Jay Chou concert, I go and look around at many Jay Chou fansites and their forums and find a free poster offer at a bookstore near the Ranch 99.

Move to today, half day of work today, hurray! Considering the business of work this week, a chance to sleep in an extra hour was nice, even if it was for a doctor's appointment. Boo Tetanus shot (my arm is still sore)! But as a side result, with the free time, I go and use all my Chinese skills to ask for the aforementioned free Jay Chou poster. Plus, I go to Taco Bell to check out their value menu. A decent value I guess, comparable to all the other fast food restaurants at least, though I dunno about the quality because between the Tetanus shot and the burritos I was feeling pretty nauseated for a while.

End in the present, back from Berkeley. Week 1 of busy work week done, so evening fun in the cool bay breeze. Sadly, Jack London Square has lost 2 of the things that I associate with it, The Old Spaghetti Factory and the T.G.I. Fridays; all that remains is the Tony Roma's and Barnes and Noble. But, anyhow, got to eat at Yoshi's and it was nice, though we did not stay around/have tickets for jazz, but it should be a nice place to visit again. Must get Chirashizushi! Ended by watching The Incredibes, which was pretty incredible, but dunno the Jackelope short film is occupying my mind more than the feature. I am still trying to figure out why I think Jackelopes (mythical, majestic beasts that they are) are so cool, some game? Sam & Max maybe? Anyhow, more The Tick style super heroes would have been cool ("Not in the face! Not in the face!"), but I cannot knock Pixar for making a good film, as usual.