sha v 4.0

Archive for May, 2004

Movable Type

Monday, May 31st, 2004

Since I have today off of work, what better time than to restructure the archive pages of my website?

…Nevermind, don’t answer that. Anyway, for no particular reason, I decided to restructure my website files. Instead of having all the archive pages in one folder, I broke them up into directories separated by year and month. And each individual entry file has the format [day]_[title].php. This just makes it easier for me to find files, should I ever need to. Which I probably won’t. So not the point.

The only neat thing to come out of this was that I found this .htaccess trick that will redirect URLs pointing to old files to the new files. Try it here. This is helpful because people linking to any of my old files will not get broken links. Go me.

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Dreams and OCD

Friday, May 28th, 2004

I had another dream last night which highlighted my unconscious fear of missing taking pictures of important events. I was at some movie premiere, and part of my duty there was to meet and greet the two actors who played Merry and Pippin in the Lord of the Rings movies. Why? I don’t know. It’s my dream! So they eventually arrived and were meeting and taking pictures with all the other Imaginary Dream People who were in attendence. Finally it was my turn to take pictures with them. My dad suddenly appeared to do the honors. Now any of you who have ever had their picture taken by my dad probably know that he is famously slow at taking pictures. Well, let me tell you that with Merry and Pippin present in my Dream World, it’s absolutely unbearable. The picture kept getting messed up and I kept asking them to try one more time, but in the end I didn’t get any pictures with them and they had to leave. Boo.

In other news, there is more information to add to the ongoing saga of the woman down the street with OCD. I see her probably 2 or 3 times a week, and it’s gotten to the point where we tacitly acknowledge each other as I pass, but we’ve never spoken. I refer to her as “OCD Woman” and I think she probably refers to me as “Dog Girl”. (Because I’m always walking Enzo when I pass, not because…nevermind.) So anyway, I discovered that her morning ritual is even more elaborate than previously thought. As I was passing by this morning, she had just closed and locked her front door. I noticed 2 bricks in her walkway that stuck out above the others. She walked to these bricks and carefully placed one foot on each of the bricks before turning around and unlocking and re-locking her door. Wacky!

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Nostrashamus, Revisited

Thursday, May 27th, 2004

So another television season has come and gone, and it is time to check the accuracy (or lack thereof) of my previous predictions.

All in all, boy do my predictions suck. Let’s get a breakdown:

Alias: I had predicted that Lauren would go good at the end, but that she would die, thus somehow preventing Vaughn and Syd from getting back together. Not only was I wrong on the first point (although they did play with the idea a bit,) but on the second point, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Though Lauren did die, and Vaughn did kill her, Syd and Vaughn didn’t just get back together, they actually made out while Vaughn was shooting Lauren. Seriously.

I was right about my secondary prediction of Sloane having a hidden motive, though. It was revealed that he and he daughter (who can solve complex equations in her head while in a drug-induced stupor) are running off to find the Rambaldi artifact together. For what purpose, who knows? Nobody cares about Rambaldi but the crack-smoking writers.

American Idol: Boy, I didn’t see that one coming. I predicted the top three to be George Huff, LaToya London, and Fantasia Barrino, in that order. Little did I know that George and LaToya would be voted off fairly early on. Crazy teenyboppers.

Again, though, I was right about John Stevens being painfully boring. :D

Friends: Finally one that I was spot-on about. Ross and Rachel did indeed ride off into the proverbial sunset.

Survivor: All-Stars: I’m pretty sure Rob didn’t win, but I think he came in second. Not bad for someone who’s never seen the show.

Star Wars: Episode III: This still remains to be seen, but I stand by my predictions.

The O.C.: A fairly odd season finale that ended with Ryan going back to Chino (i.e. “Da Ghetto”), Marissa going back to her alcoholic ways, and Seth sailing off to Tahiti in a very small, dangerous-looking boat. But we were still treated to Peter Gallagher’s fantasmic eyebrows, so it was all good. In the meantime, maybe I’ll check out North Shore, i.e. “The O.C., but in Hawaii.”

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Afternoon Tea

Monday, May 24th, 2004

This past weekend in honor of Mariel and Cheryl’s birthdays, a few of us got together for tea at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay. The first exciting happening was that Cheryl had a loaner car from a Mercedes dealership, and after confirming several times that I was indeed insured for it, I drove it out to Half Moon Bay. It probably looked much nicer pulling up to the valet people than my beat up Honda Accord.

Tea time itself was a very nice affair, complete with little sandwiches (without crust), scones, and bite-sized desserts. About halfway through tea time, I got up to go to the restroom. In a fit of Asian Inspiration (which, is probably the name of an Asian hip-hop artist), I took my credit card with me and before I got back to our table, I gave it to one of the servers to pay for everyone. Once the check came and I was discovered, some of my friends were understandably miffed, but I glowed in triumph.

However, not to be out-Asianed, later that night I found a stack of bills hidden under a magazine in my room.

It’s war.

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Hotlinking

Friday, May 21st, 2004

Some of you may or may not notice that I turned the anti-hotlinking measures back on. What this is supposed to do is show this picture whenever people on other websites embed pictures from my site on their site. I had tried this before, but there were some problems with people behind firewalls (and if there still are, let me know) so I turned it off. Most of the time it’s more annoying than a real problem, but what prompted me to turn it back on was this site (I took a screenshot.) I might be overreacting, but it didn’t quite sit right with me. I briefly toyed with the idea of replacing the linked picture with another (read: possibly offensive) picture, but finally settled on the regular .htaccess method of preventing hotlinking.

If you’re having problems viewing my site, let me know. It never seems to really work correctly.

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Happy Birthday!

Thursday, May 20th, 2004

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish Mariel a Happy Birthday! Also, a belated Happy Birthday to Buddy, Cheryl, Christine, and Cliff! Whew…

Now for a complete change of subject. Yesterday Kahn (“The Wrench”) informed me that, despite what the trailers said, Shrek 2 was actually opening Wednesday night, not Friday. In a panic, I got some people together to go see it. I decided to buy tickets online in case the theater was crowded. The first site I thougth of was movies.com, so I went there to find showtimes. I found a local theather and clicked on the “Buy Tickets” link, which redirected me to movietickets.com. Each ticket was $10, with a service charge of $1.75. A little pricey, yes, but whatever. Later in the day, Buddy asked if I wanted to go see a movie, so I informed him of our Shrek plans. I told him that I would forward him the link to buy the tickets. So again, I went to movies.com, but this time, the theather I had bought tickets for was not listed. So I searched for “AMC Theaters” on Google, clicked on their “Showtimes and Tickets” link, which again took me to movietickets.com. This time, the right theater was listed. All good, right? Wrong. I went to Buddy’s desk to see if the link was working, and I noticed that on his page, which was on the *same* movietickets.com site, listed the service charge as only $1.00. Wha? After a bit of head-banging and confusion, I discovered that getting to movietickets.com through movies.com causes the service charge to be $1.75, while going through any other source makes it $1.00.

So the moral of the story is: Sha Sha uses a lot of words to say not very much.

~-= The End =-~

P.S. The movie was funny.
P.P.S. There is something after the credits, but I missed it. If you catch it, let me know what happened.

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The Big Apple

Wednesday, May 19th, 2004

Some of you already know that I spent the weekend in New York for Moo’s graduation from medical school. I was going to wait to write about it until I had uploaded my pictures, but some people are impatient, so the pictures will just have to wait.

I arrived Thursday afternoon and had the World’s Longest Cab Ride to Moo’s place because of the afternoon traffic. Much of Thursday evening was spent helping PRP with her thesis project for her Interior Design degree from FIT. She was more than capable of doing it herself, were it not for the fact that she is very very pregnant.

Friday was the actual graduation ceremony, which took place at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. Hillary Clinton was their graduation speaker, which sounds exciting, but believe me, was really, really, not. Though she was an articulate speaker, her speech was boring and disorganized. My brother is convinced she wrote it on the cab ride over. It is exciting, though, that Moo is now officially an MD, although she can’t write me my asthma medicine prescriptions for another year. Useless!

After the ceremony, it was back to my brother’s place to frantically help PRP finish up her project. It went pretty smoothly, except for what I shall only refer to as “The Glue Incident.” She wasn’t even the last one to turn in her project!

Friday night we had a nice dinner at Danube, an Austrian restaurant. I decided to go Austrian all the way, and had schnitzel and strudel (not at the same time.)

Saturday was The Day of Manual Labor, where my parents (and by “parents” I mean “Dad”) and I helped Moo pack up her stuff and move it into storage. That night we had a yummy sushi dinner at Zutto.

I flew back Sunday, and made the enormous mistake of watching about 10 minutes of the in-flight movie, Chasing Liberty. Or as I like to call it, “Roman Holiday, if it were Crap.” Mandy Moore — Audrey Hepburn you are not.

Edit: Pictures here!

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Speed Team

Monday, May 10th, 2004

For those of you local folks, watch your speedometer on 280 today. According to this article:

The California Highway Patrol has dispatched a “speed team” to a stretch of 280 between Mountain View and San Bruno with instructions to pull over and ticket vehicles going even 5 mph over the posted speed limit this afternoon.

Good thing the local police is spending their resources pulling over people going 5 miles over the speed limit and not, you know, catching murderers and stuff.

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Google

Tuesday, May 4th, 2004

There’s been a lot of talk recently about Google because of they are going public. As Bill Mann of The Motley Fool says, “You’d think that they spotted Jesus walking across the water near the San Mateo Bridge.” I, like Eric, decided a long time ago that I didn’t want to invest in Google’s IPO (not that I even really know what it means to do so.)

However, I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about Google in general. When they started out, they seemed to be a plucky young startup, just out to make a better web search engine. And to most people’s surprise, it worked. In a very short time, Google has become the undisputed king o’ web searches; so much so, that “google” has become synonymous with “web search.” However, I think that they’re at the point that, no matter what they like to think, they’re no longer a plucky young startup — they’re a hugely powerful company that seems to be getting bigger every day.

While I’m not quite at the level of Google conspiracy theorist, I do believe that Google does have some other purpose. (I hesitate to say “secret agenda” because that sounds a little too evil.) I can’t believe that this company merely exists to make search engines and webmail. It may be that its founders started out just wanting to make a better search engine, but I think that Google has now evolved beyond those borders. I recently happened upon this article, which theorizes that Google is creating a massive distributed computing platform. It’s an interesting read.

We will now pause while every Google employee laughs at me.

Thank you.

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