30 June 2007

iPhone Day? iPhone Day!

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iPhone was released nationwide yesterday to the masses of people lined up from New York to San Francisco. Even Woz stood in line at Valley Faire just to pick up a couple more iPhones for his kids.

Did I get one though? Nope. Not a chance. I really wanted to, but I don't have the money to pay for one. Although, if you've had a chance to read any reviews, the iPhone is almost revolutionary, and I really want a widescreen video player, so I may just wait until the iPhone hits 3.5G (instead of the slow EDGE network) and swap then. I won't be cutting edge that way, but atleast I won't be annoyed out of my mind with slow load times and poor call quality.

Did anyone get one yesterday? I'd be really interested in playing around with one and seeing how the interface looks. And flicking. Flicking extremely fast.

29 June 2007

It's Fantasy Football Time!

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I'm starting a new fantasy football league. Year-to-year keeper, 10-12 teams (hopefully), and a lot of fun and exciting smacktalk with people I know. I'm excited.

I'm gonna kick some ass. Or something. It'll be awesome.

Signing up for Yahoo public leagues like always. I'm excited.

If you're interested, send me a line!

28 June 2007

The Migration

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I've been fooling around with Ubuntu, the GNOME based debian linux distro, for the past few weeks on my laptop, but it never really stuck with me. It's probably because I never had the willpower to tough it out and figure out how most of the stuff worked. But today, I started doing some work in R and AFNI and I figured it was best to collaborate with the lab in the OS that the lab uses (they actually use Fedora 6, but its similar). So I spent most of the day fixing up the linux environment, install codecs, an NTFS read/write/mounter to access my windows partitions, created network bookmarks to my shares for easy access and install a bunch of google applications.

The only thing that's keeping from making the full jump and moving ubuntu up to #1 on my grub loader is my lack of a notetaking program on the linux boot. I really want to use OneNote like I've been using for awhile, so I'm trying a virtual machine to boot into windows and run OneNote in a separate task. The problem that worries me is whether the interface will work well, whether it'll be fast enough, and whether I can live with it at whatever speed it is...if not, I'm really hoping that Google Notebook updates to be usable offline with Google Gears.

Until that happens though, I'm gonna try to make it work.

Oh, and I installed a media server on my desktop, so I can access my TV shows from anywhere. I think. I'm gonna try it out tomorrow in class.

26 June 2007

Long Day In The Bay

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First day of summer classes for me resulted in an unbearably long day.

I had 2 hours of lecture in the morning, followed by an hour of discussion, followed by 4 hours of work, followed by a lot of reading.

Professor seems nice enough, but I have a feeling I won't be challenged. That means I'm probably not going to keep up and I'm going to be annoyed at the dumbing down of the material (like today's description of van der Waals interactions which was depressingly bad...). At any rate, I'm current caught up on reading for the next day...which is actually a significant hundred pages or so, but I skimmed a lot of it since it was review. I really hope I can keep it up, but if I can't, you'll know why...

Uh, a couple more things to note. I did buy a TV, but for some reason overstock is cancelling a lot of orders (most of them didn't get the 2-year protection plan, but some did). Some people are calling in and reporting that their TVs are confirmed and will ship in the next 1-4 days, and my order is currently "Accepted" and my warranty plan has "Shipped", but I don't know what's going on with. Just crossing my fingers I suppose.

Finally, since I didn't tell this story yesterday, I'll tell it now. It's about a Corona:

I had dinner with Maggie, Coral, Kristina, Yuan, and Tyler last night and we sat around Asian ghetto for a bit while we ate. After awhile, Kristina had to go home, and I figured we'd be walking back, but Yuan was looking for a ride back (cause he's lazy and he lives far away) and we kind of followed Kristina home to see her new apartment.

We get up and I see a empty case of Corona on the floor and ask. At the same time, Yuan opens the fridge and grabs a bottle of Smirnoff Ice just to fool around. I follow suit and grab a Corona (which apparently was an "apartment" thing and not Kristina's...my bad...). I ask if I can have it. Kristina asks her roommate who says yes. I take it. Now, these weren't the screwtop bottles, but I'm fidgeting with it trying to get the cap off. I try for a good ten minutes or so before I get frustrated and start rummaging around her kitchen for a bottle opener. I look and look, but there's nothing but knives in the drawers. I start thinking about whether I should use a knife...but I hold off.

At this point everyone had migrated from the living room into Kristina's room, so I follow suit, still playing with the bottle top. After getting frustrated for the second time, I ask Kristina if she has a bottle opener. She has to ask her roommate, who replies that they don't have a bottle opener, and that I should use my hands. I try, but again, no go.

A few seconds later Kristina's roommate walks into the room, grabs the bottle, and starts bashing it against the bathroom sink to try to pop it off. I'm starting to laugh cause Kristina says something about this talking way too much effort. The cap still doesn't come off though and they start moving to the kitchen to use a knife (I was gonna do that myself...). Anyways, they finally get the cap off after much more effort than was probably necessary (GET A BOTTLE OPENER!) and I enjoyed a free after dinner beer (which was more bloating than I thought it'd be...).

Of course, Kristina kicked us out before I had a chance to finish cause she had to go to Safeway and I had to walk around the streets at night with an open bottle...underaged no less. Yuan called my a retarded drunk while we were leaving since I couldn't find the elevator (which wasn't really my fault since I wasn't paying attention on the way up). Luckily my drunken stupor hadn't settled in and I made it home without getting lost in People's Park and falling in a trap, getting raped, then waking up in the morning with a hangover. Atleast, I got home...safe and sound...and sadly unimpressed with my free beer.

Thanks though.

24 June 2007

Video of the Week - Knocked Up

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Wow, what a great movie.

I saw Knocked Up today with Maggie and Yuan at the local UA7. We ended up sitting in the wrong theater to start with and noticed that we were watching a Marvel film (Fantastic Four 2) instead of the movie we had intended. Oops. That was a mistake. We rush over in time to miss the opening credits, but we managed to make it to see the hilarity that ensues. I was absolutely captivated by the whole premise of the movie and while it could've been less vulgar, it was hilarious. The dialogue was witty. Everything flowed well together (except the random interludes to make it clear that time was advancing) and the chemistry was solid throughout the movie.

I give it a mighty thumbs skyward. Watch it. Seriously.

Here's a clip :P