kismetism

Just subscribed. Now that I have income, I feel obligated to support things I like. And Pandora is definitely long overdue for some financial love from me, I think. >_>

The tipping point was this morning, when the traffic to work was totally and absolutely atrocious for who knows why. (no accidents that I could see.) And while I was stuck in stop and go on the bridge, fate adds insult to injury by making sure all of my radio stations were playing commercials instead of music.

Don’t laugh. It’s the little things in life.

Then it occurred to me. I have an iPhone now, and there’s a Pandora app on it. Took me less than thirty seconds to whip it out, plug it into my tape deck adapter thinger, and immediately started piping music from my Glee station through the car speakers.

Don’t laugh. It’s the little things in life.

So once I got to work, I opened Pandora and subscribed pretty much immediately. I’m nearing the max allotment of free listening hours this month as it is, and we’ve still got nine days left.

A nice bonus is that I can add a Michael Jackson station so a certain someone else who frequently rides in my car will stop complaining about my radio station choices. >_>

So as I mentioned quite a while ago now, I purchased a new desktop computer shortly after I found out I was employed. Instead of going with Dell, I chose a vendor located in Florida on the basis that it had been recommended by Kotaku readers to the main Kotaku editor and he had been pretty pleased with the purchase.

Too bad I don’t get to say the same. >_> At least, not entirely.

It’s kind of an epic story and it ends well-ish, but it was an aggravating experience overall. If it weren’t for the fact that I had been provided with a work laptop of pretty serious gaming power, I probably would have exploded over the entire experience much sooner. As it was, I didn’t have any reason to be impatient.

It started with the fact that the machine just took a really long time to build and ship out to me, at least a month. Once it actually arrived, we noted that there was a serious dent in the wooden crate that it arrived in. Clearly, despite the fact that the box had “FRAGILE” stamped all over it, UPS had not treated it with much respect.

This turned out to be a really serious issue, as I finally got around to trying to hook the system up. Not only were the legs of the tower cover completely shattered, the graphics card was dead and the CPU fan was jostled loose, enough so that the CPU wasn’t getting enough air and ran at 90 degrees Celsius.

All these problems were found over the course of two weeks, as I couldn’t call their tech support most of the time for help and they were lousy about answering email. In the end, they sent me a new tower cover and next-day-aired a graphics card to me straight from Amazon.com.

I also had to suggest that they give me a direct email to someone at tech support, after which the person was very helpful and quick with responses. He directed me on what to look for to address the temperature issue and after poking around a while, I figured out that the fan was loose and fixed it as best I could.

I know I can’t really blame Origin for what amounted to a ton of issues spawned from rough UPS handling. And they did help me as best they could. They definitely should have put me on a personal line to support earlier, though. In summation, I’m not really pleased, but neither do I really hate them and want them to die.

Hilariously, today after I got back from work, I saw yet another package from Amazon waiting for me and boggled at what it could be. Turns out it’s ANOTHER graphics card, but this one is Amazon’s mistake. I’m sending it back to them, even though I’m not sure they would really notice it missing.

Anyway, yeah. Now I have a kickass desktop onto which I am installing craploads of things. It runs a lot louder than I was expecting, but what can you do. It’s mainly a gaming machine, anyway. >_>

So I’ve been using Gmail practically since its day one, right? And you know how they boast that they’ve got so much storage that you never need to delete anything. Which has been true thus far. But recently I’ve been closing in on the cap, much to my alarm and dismay. When you actually hit the cap, you have to pay if you want additional storage.

So last night I noticed that I was at the 90% mark and decided that maybe I should try to cut down, and perhaps attempt to use the archival feature, which I have never bothered to do.

But first, I thought… well, I get all these emails/forwards from my dad, often with attachments. Maybe I should just get rid of all those first and see what happens. So I selected out all the emails from him that contained attachments (very easy). And sent those 1220 messages to the trash.

Then I emptied it and almost fell out of my chair at the space I had, cause I went from 90% space filled to 33%.

Yeah, I guess I don’t need to archive anything after all. >_> Pretty amazing, though… six years of email and I’ve only eaten one third of the given space… if you ignore my dad’s plethora of spam, that is. ;x

[edit] Alex notes that archive doesn’t actually DO anything but take the “inbox” label off an email. Brilliant! >_>

So I did something today that I’ve never done before… namely, blow up. At my mother’s friend. Who gave me (albeit mostly meaningless-to-me) gifts a couple days ago when I first arrived in Shanghai.

And I’m not talking like… that I was just stewing about it. I mean, I got angry, verbally. At him. When he was paying attention. With my parents sitting right next to me. And his wife sitting next to him. In a public space with thousands of other people around.

I know I can be a little snappy at times, when I’m in a bad mood… but this was really something else altogether. And I don’t think it’s really an experience I care to repeat.

I’ve no desire to go into all the little details, but I have to note that extraordinary clarity with which I remember the moment where I just totally lost my cool and burst at the seams. I actually slammed my palms on the table top with such force that Phoenix Wright would be proud and screamed “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU” at the guy’s face.

Yes, I am absolutely and totally serious. No, I wouldn’t believe that I could do something like that either. Yeah, he was definitely startled. To be clear, up until this point, my interactions with my mother’s friend had been fairly genial. I am usually very self-contained and generally avoid speaking with friends-of-the-family when I can… language barrier and total lack of common ground, you know.

The moments right after that are a little fuzzier, but I think I glared at him for a couple nanoseconds more, then went back to eating my food and refused to look at him or anyone else at the table. I have no idea if anyone else in the vicinity noticed; even though I screamed it, we were in a very loud location as it was and my yell was probably swallowed up by the din of the noise very quickly beyond our table.

My palms are stinging at the memory. And though I don’t quite regret what I said or how I acted, I did promptly feel a tiny shred of remorse… mostly because I thought my parents would disapprove of my lack of self-control and I had started to wonder if I wasn’t just making things worse.

To my surprise, both of my parents individually sidled up to me when the other guy wasn’t in earshot and remarked about their wholehearted approval of my outburst. Apparently they agreed with my sentiment entirely, if maybe not entirely with the method of my delivery. But … they actually seemed impressed that I had it in me.

Yeah? So am I.

Lovely purple bruise just below my left knee, thanks to bumbling around in the Tactile Dome. Slightly smaller, but matching, one on my right too. qq.

It was a fairly disastrous day overall, actually, and I was super stressed and felt terribly guilty/bad… but at least we got three runs in. The overseer guy was really nice about us being late and tried to give us more time.

And yes, we found the headless doll. :P Dev also managed to find a small electronic keyboard (that’s what the little red light is, just before the red room!) … and I wish I had snuck my cellphone so I could record the sound of him picking out the Mario theme in the dark!

AND someone had the nerve to leave a note on my car, telling me to “learn to park!” … when I had only parked that way because the SUV on the left that was there first was jutting so much into the space that no one else had dared to try and squirm into it. This is really bothering me way more than it should… I have a lot of trouble letting go of things like this, even when there’s no way I could be blamed for it. Grumble.

Oh well. Tactile Dome is still amazing, anyway.

… Was really kind of insane, seeing all those people, whose lives Lloyd has so strongly affected. Kind of surreal.

I’m proud that I managed to avoid crying, though, even when forced to speak!

Funnily enough, I wasn’t really at a loss for words so much as I knew that whatever I had to say, Lloyd already knows of my everlasting gratitude… maybe even more than I do. I guess I had to represent, though. Silly TIC children. (And poor Alina. :x )

BRANDON. YOU DIDN’T SHOW.

;x

So more badminton anecdotes for you, since I’m doing such a good job failing to write about anything these days. You know that lady I ranted about some time ago who plays badminton at the same place as us. Well I’m not totally over that dislike, but she was doing a pretty good job of not inspiring it since I got back… until today. When she and her partner played two matches against my dad and I (1-1) and we were lined up for a third when a court opened and her son and his friend went to it.

There were no other people lined up to play on the court (people often avoid the younger players.. because… well, they suck >_> ) and my dad spent a short while calling for other players to take up those two positions rather than having the two kids rally by themselves.

So with no other people, my dad was like, fine, let’s go. Because he’s more interested in just playing (and in me getting exercise >_> ) than anything else. So we went and played with them… and they wanted to play together, so it was me+dad vs them. ::lol::

We went easy on them and my dad was, as usual, kind enough to give them good shots that would stretch their abilities while not being too difficult. (I gave a pointer about returning serves to the left-handed kid, too. :X )

After a full game, my dad went to put his cards down for a new match and the lady (whose son we were just playing with) had the nerve to get mad and scold him for disrupting our planned match-up. I nearly choked on my own fury. We were playing with HER son! How can she get angry at us for doing something for her OWN KID.

ARGRRGLKHGKHLFEKJRLQ. Horrible mother is horrible.

Heeey. Let’s write.

I neglected to mention how much a pain in the ass moving is; packing up our 3-year apartment on Ellendale and trying to stuff the lot of it (sans furniture, which was donated to Salvation Army — we think -_-; ) into my tiny Prius… not the least bit fun.

Less horrible was finally pulling into Castro Valley and moving boxes out of the car and into the house… and then piling a tiny cityscape in my room. And while I immediately unpacked some things (read: desktop computer, clothes) … the rest just sat there and I’ve been mazing around these cardboard obstacles to get from closet to bathroom to wardrobe to bed, etc.

Finally sorted through them a little more tonight and now I can see the floor of my room, which is pretty nice. :P I’m thinking of getting a yoga mat so I won’t have an excuse not to do Wii Fit… because currently my excuse is that the hardwood would be a cruel fate for my back when it comes to jack knifes. (we’ll just ignore the fact that there are any number of other exercises I can do.)

Besides procrastinating the sorting of my room, been prepping materials for this summer’s TIC, which has been …….. revolutionized to some degree. And I’ve been programming, of course — why is it that I am always programming something new for ATDP every year? >_> At least it’s coming along.

HmMmmmMmMmmmeh. There are some other things I could chat about, but maybe some other time. ::post!::