Today was pretty good. I headed out early to get lunch in Dublin with Morgan. This required that I get up unpleasantly early (for being on vacation), but it was the least I could do since she gave me a lovely slime controller. We rendezvoused at the huge Hacienda Crossings mall, which is actually the only group of structures besides houses in Dublin, as I discovered last year. Somehow we settled on going to FUDDRUCKERS. I had heard of them in the past but wasn't aware that they existed in California, so it was sort of a unique experience. It turned out to be a much better decision than we thought, since as we left out the back exit we were greeted by a thoroughly-hidden Q-Cup. I also executed Phase II of the Great SSX 3 Switch-off. So, all in all, it was a pleasant excursion, marred only by how long it took to fight through the post-Christmas traffic to get out of the parking lot, but I'll update about driving on that side of the bay later on.
Just so no one thinks I've disappeared: I'm off to visit Morgan and some lasagna for the weekend. Then, if I'm not mistaken, she will be making an appearance on this side of the bay early next week. Also, I need to let everyone know that she has implicitly explicitly challenged every one of you to Capcom vs. SNK 2 or something along those lines.
This is completely unrelated, but anyway: I think Macromedia is actually just an elaborate dummy company created by Adobe to make people buy their products.
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Paintings I did for this fall's art 100 (intermediate painting) course. They are quite large. I am running out of wall space.
Here's the trailer for Tim Burton's take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I don't know if it's the song, or Johnny Depp's hair, or the glasses, but I'm really scared to go to sleep now.
Also, a brief thought: Isn't the tag "only in theaters" pretty useless by now? I think it's sort of assumed information if you're already watching a trailer or looking at a preview poster. Is Hollywood really that desperate to remind us that we need to take leave from our television sets to go see their fancy new talkies?
I routinely make poor decisions, but starting a new game of Mario Picross in the same 48 hours in which I have a paper due is bound to go down in history as one of the worst.
So at a restaurant recently I had some tomato sauce that was advertised as "spicy." The sauce itself wasn't very hot, so when I found one of the peppers buried in it I decided to just eat it. This turned out to be a poor decision, as it immediately erupted into a very potent and lingering fireball in my mouth. I later found out from the chef that it was a Chinese tien tsin pepper, and after some poking around on das Internet I managed to track down some more information on its rank on the Scoville scale, the rating system for a chili pepper's hotitude. Just for comparison, the fiendish guero pepper I frequently encounter at the local burrito place has a rating of between 500 and 700 Scoville units. A jalapeño is between 2500 and 5000. The tien tsin, on the other hand, clocks in at 60,000. I'm not sure how each pepper's respective preparation (one submerged in a jar with its comrades, the other simmered in a sauce) may have affected its hotness, but that seems like a pretty extreme jump. I can't decide which pepper incident should be considered hotter, either. The guero felt like it had a greater absolute hotness but faded relatively quickly, while the tien tsin was not quite as hot but lingered for much longer. I guess I'll just have to hit up the Exotic Peppers wing of the bookstore over break.
復習為測中文大考的時候, I discovered that there are variations on the character 子, a pictograph of a child, which represent a child missing its left arm (孓) or its right arm (孑). WTF.
Really weird and kind of awesome ad I saw over at Penny Arcade. I'm kind of curious if it's playing on any more serious gaming sites.
Unlike CNN.com, which I frequently harrass for its choice of graphics, the New York Times usually manages to pull out some pretty amazing photos. Today's photo of a group of protesters in Kiev is no exception.
(Here's a link to the actual article, if you were wondering. Also, the current banner they're running with all the giant frogs jumping across the side of the screen is really freaky.)
There are some screenshots of the new Netscape release over at Gemal's Psyched Blog. While the vast array of tabbed browsing preferences makes me quiver with delight, the one shot of the actual browser skin makes me wonder: Just what were they thinking? That's got to be the most poorly-designed interface I've ever seen. (Not to mention unbelievably ugly.)
Back to the tabs for a moment, though: It looks like Netscape is going to solve the (minor) issues I have with the way Safari and Firefox handle their tabs with their exhaustive preferences menu. It's too bad I probably won't be able to actually use Netscape to look at Websites since I'll just be stuck staring at that ridiculous background texture and the millions of buttons. I can't help but think of other software like Adium, an alternative IM client, which features an overwhelming number of menu checkboxes and customizations but is still missing some key features that I won't go without.
I guess there's always hope, although it's more likely that the next Firefox release will sport all the new tab preferences than it is that Netscape will overhaul its UI. They can prove me wrong if they want, though.
