I really did not like the Cardigans. I'm sorry to the Cardigans fans reading this post. So I went back to return the CD. Yay CD Warehouse - they took the CD back and let me exchange it for ... Tool!! I have a long Tool saga - first introduced to the band thanks to Andy when they had just release Lateralus - I still remember sitting outside DCL in Andy's car listening to Andy's brand new CD. It was good. Then, in Berkeley, I bought a new Tool CD (Aenima) thinking it was Lateralus. Only it wasn't and I really did not like it. Finally, Andy fixed that error by redirecting me to Lateralus and actually let me copy the songs from his CD/iTunes rip and listen to them. All was good and I actually like the music enough to buy it. Now I can officially have all the mp3s and its all legal and everyone's happy. And the stupid RIAA complains that mp3s don't help CD sales. Phooey!
But all this ranting had nothing to do with my music binge. Well, somewhat. So I bought 4 CDs yesterday (including today's Tool exchange) and then went to the library and checked out like 15. I usually end up getting the "usual" stuff from the library - Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Mahler. Not this time. I got some Jazz stuff and lots of world music stuff. Things that I don't listen to usually. I think I'm getting into a musical rut, so I'm going to try and break out of it. If you have some good music that you'd like to suggest, comment away! Note that I'm not looking for music that's out there, per se. Just good stuff from different genres.
I'm a musical wierdo. Who else would go into a CD store and come out with (CDs by) the Cranberries, Cardigans, Yo-Yo Ma and Pavarotti? The Cranberries and Cardigans CDs were because I wanted one of them (Cranberries, as it turns out) and got confused between the bands. So I bought both. I'm going to try and return the Cardigans CD - its just not my thing. I'm happy to report that the Yo-Yo Ma CD (Obrigado Brazil) is simply fantastic. So is Pavarotti (The Essential Pavarotti). Those were definite good buys.
The number of hours I've spent at WOW indicate that it merits a blog posting.
What is this WOW that I speak of? Its a bubble tea place (a chain, I believe) in the U-Wash area. Its a really cool place - large, comfortable sofas, very clean and neat and lots of space. Brightly lit and no smoking. All very good so far.
I didn't notice it for the first few times that I went there, but eventually a friend nicely asked me if I'd tuned in to the music they were playing and if it bothered me at all. I hadn't tuned in, so I did. Christian Rock. Nonstop, hardcore, christian rock. Only christian rock, all the time. Hrm, this was getting interesting.
Then we notice, in very small letters, WOW stands for Wonders Of Worship. Oh dear. What is this place we frequent?
Did this discovery mean no more WOW? Not at all! We now take every visitor to Seattle to WOW to experience it. Yes that's right, its a Seattle experience, just like the Space Needle or EMP or whatchamacallit. I actually really like the place - the staff is super polite and nice, everything is great. I don't mind the christian rock, just that it'd be nicer if they played it a little more softly.
I realised I have not blogged for like - ever. So I need to restart. Lots of updates about what's been happening and stuff I've been doing.
First of all, I'm out of the cast! Woohoo. Unfortunately, I will not be able to snowboard again this season. Primarily because my foot is still broken. So I'm wearing a special boot that provides all sorts of extra padding and looks very much like a snowboarding boot. Oh, the irony!
Then I finished a bunch of books. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (translated by someone else) which I did not like that much and don't think deserves a post of its own (there are some people that I know who might violently disagree) and The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen which is a totally awesome book that I'm rereading and will write seperately about. Awesome, awesome book. Especially if you put it into perspective and consider where I'm working. Currently reading Shusaki Endo's The Samurai. Pretty good so far, will post about it at some point.
In other news, I finally got a new car. Its a black Acura TSX and I absolutely love it. Its a great pleasure to drive and it looks cool. I had to buy it from Portland and go there to pick it up, mainly because the Seattle dealers were being jerks and would not agree upon a price, besides being just shady in general. Both the Portland dealers, on the other hand, were very cool, straight and honest. Usually not terms associated with car dealers. I'm very happy with my (Portland) car buying experience. Eek, I've been working here for only six months and I'm starting to use the "experience" word all over the place.
In other news, my mother's been visiting me (extended visit) because both my parents got really concerned about my foot. I have a cool mum. She's doing her own thing and we have a nice agreement about how much time I spend with her (which allows me to maintain a semblance of a social life). Good deal. Plus she cleaned up my apartment, keeps it clean and I get a whole bunch of really, really good food to eat. Every day.
In other words, I'm happy.
I got positive feedback from at least two people who switched to firefox after reading my blog entry. So here are some more tips on power-using firefox.
Commonly used keyboard shortcuts
Ctrl-K for jumping to the google bar
Ctrl-L for jumping to the location bar
/ for in place text searching
Start typing or ' for in place link searching
Ctrl-T for opening a new tab
Ctrl-PgUp or Ctrl-PgDown or Ctrl-Tab to navigate the tabs
Ctrl-= and Ctrl-- to increase/decrease font size
Programmable shortcuts
This is an awesome feature - the basic premise is that you can assign a shortcut to your bookmark. Say you assign the shortcut "dic" for dictionary.com and "the" for thesaurus.com. That way, when you type in "dic" into the location bar, you go straight to dictionary.com. The reason this simple idea becomes so powerful is because you can specify and arbitrary string anywhere in the URL and firefox will do string substitution for you. If that was greek, just try this out and you'll understand:
1. Go to dictionary.com.
2. Search the dictionary for a word; any word.
3. Bookmark it (Ctrl-D)
4. Open Bookmarks, scroll to where you put the bookmark, right-click -> Properties
5. In the keyword field, enter: dic In the location field, scroll forward till you see something like ?q=word you searched for. Replace that with ?q=%s. If you're anal, replace the name to say just Dictionary.com. Close the properties dialog.
6. Try it out - go to the location bar and type in dic some_word. If everything went right, this should take you to the dictionary.com definition of some_word.
My other commonly used shortcuts (for mozilla) were/will be: thesaurus.com, google lucky, perldoc. I haven't figured out msdn yet but its only a matter of time.
Adblocking
This is actually not a native firefox feature. So you have to download the AdBlock extension. Downloading the extension is pretty straight forward and there should be nothing to it. Remember to restart firefox in order to use the extension (this means closing all windows, not just the current one). Now go to a heavily advertised site (such as yahoo or cnn.com). See those stupid ads? Right click -> AdBlock image. It will give you the url of the image to adblock. Modify this URL so that you adblock all images from the advertisement site. This part is a little tricky - you don't want to adblock all images from yahoo, since a lot of them are legit. But you do want to adblock all images from say, ads.yahoo.com or ads.osdn.com (for slashdot). So replace everything after http://ads.yahoo.com/junk with a *. You should see most ads on the page disappear. Remember you can always go back and tweak these settings.
Hope these tips and tricks help! Enjoy!
I've been getting a lot of flak lately for using words like reckon a lot. Apparently, reckon is a highly used Texan word (or Southern word, same difference). Ack! Considering that I'm not exactly a Texas native, or more precisely, have been to Texas exactly once, for two days, I wondered where I got it from. I suspected my days at UIUC with all this southern country bumpkin but then I suspect Mike for almost everything that I do that is not socially appropriate. (If you know Mike, you'll realise that this is perfectly reasonable). Turns out that's wrong and for once, Mike is not to blame. I was chatting with the Australians yesterday (Jon and Katie) and turns out they use reckon a lot. No wonder I picked it up!! I lived with them for over 6 months and hung out with them for much longer than that. So things aren't that bad anymore and I can use reckon and no worries in my vocabulary without problems.
While talking to Katie yesterday, she told me of another commonly used ozPhrase - fair dinkum. This means for real. As in "fair dinkum, I'm not lying". I like this phrase and shall integrate it in my vocabulary.