23 October 2006 Monday

Desktop wallpaper brightness

My eyes have been particularly strained this past week;

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in front of my computer screens at odd hours, and of course this is stressful on my eyes. What I hadn’t really thought about, though, was that about a week ago I had also changed my desktop wallpaper backgrounds to images of very bright rainbow colors across..

25 September 2006 Monday

Eyes

When your eyes look like you feel, or worse

If you’ve been up really late, watching too much television/computer screen, or crying buckets, you’re left with unhappy-looking evidence on your face, generally in form of puffy/squinty/bruised eyes.
And then everyone asks you why and it’s rarely a cheerful/useful exchange, so usually preferably avoided, neh?

To alleviate the physical/aesthetic symptoms, the first and main thing to do is the cover the area around your eyes (specifically right beneath — the “bag” area) with vaseline or some other intensive cream lotion..

28 August 2006 Monday

btw, the lyrics in Matt Nathanson’s song, Weight of It All, are pretty and nice to sing along to… but it’s a fallacied metaphor:

Show me where the sun comes through the sky,
I’ll show you where the rain gets in

Pretty. but wrong.

25 July 2006 Tuesday

Firefox bookmarks toolbar problem

Have been suffering an issue with Firefox for the past few months… involved the bookmarks folder being thoroughly nonuseable — nothing could be added to it whatsoever.. Couldn’t add or move links/bookmarks anywhere except under the regular bookmarks folder. Made me very unhappy since I needed the Blinklist bookmarklet, among other things.

18 July 2006 Tuesday

Quicktime fixed

Yay!!! Got Quicktime working on my comp again… been completely without it for over a month now.. amazing the stuff you miss out on when you can’t watch simple quicktime videos.. so many trailers...

04 February 2006 Saturday

stomach -- not tummy

so…. i’d really never thought about it before…. but when your tummy typically hurts, it’s not typically your tummy that’s hurting.

in the back of my head somewhere, i’ve always had a vague image of the human anatomy, and that the stomach is actually way up higher than we tend to refer to it.. and it’s actually our intestines that are all jumbled up around our waist. our stomach is actually closer to the bottom of our rib cage.

and for the first time that i can remember, it is my actual stomach that’s hurting—not my tummy. it’s weird… like a chest pain, but lower… like a back ache, but in front. it’s definitley not in my waist/bellybutton area, where most tummyaches are usually felt.

it’s not terribly painful.. i’m not sure what that deal is. i figure it will forgive me whatever trespassess i am guilty to it for, and be nice to me again sooner than later. that’s my assumption and hope. but the whole thing is strangely more intriguing than uncomfortable—though it is rather uncomfortable.

26 May 2005 Thursday

waking up from a bad dream

nightmares happen when i go to sleep really really really tired (like around 2-4am).. then i have to kick myself back awake and force myself to turn over—very hard to do when so tired, which is why that’s when the nightmares can come.

did you know that’s the cure to breaking away from a dream? if you don’t want to slip back into a bad dream, you must change body position signfiicantly—turn your body over.

14 May 2005 Saturday

Eating out of a box

Cheez-its and other snack foods of that sort should be poured onto a plate or something before consumption, so that you have a vauge idea of how much you’re eating at once. Straight out of the box, there’s no concept at all of how much you’re eating.

(Of course then i go and keep pouring out more when the plate is empty… but still a bit better than the alternative.)

02 April 2005 Saturday

Opera and Spring -- mostly unrelated

after running Opera 7.6 for the past many months (even though apparently the latest release is stil 7.54u2… *shrug*) i went ahead and downloaded the new Opera Beta … seems awesome. the one thing Opera can’t touch Firefox on, though, is the Web Developer Extension. aside from that, Opera runs faster and lighter in just about every way. (note: downloading the new beta version does not replace your current installation of Opera.)
also updated Thunderbird from 1.0 to 1.0.2. isn’t that exciting.

a very very rainy day.. started sometime early this morning… the sound you hear outside your window that surely the flowers are being beat down and everything crushed beneath the thundering raindrops…. but they aren’t crushed and they don’t drown; it’s April 2nd — April showers bring May flowers (but what do Mayflowers bring? Pilgrims!) and already the daffodils are out and the early little purple irises promised the larger ones on their way.. and the tall, yellow, feathery-type flower bushes who’s name i have currently forgotten are peeking through bit by bit. so there’s Spring.

another side thought of the moment… regarding a certain lavender box column: css and background graphics are highly uncool. they’re not cooperating for me at moment, and i’ve not yet wrapped my head around a creative solution. but i want it solved!
*update: 3:30pm… solved! annoying, but yay! …now there had better be a way to fix it in IE too.

furthermore on firefox, btw..
i found a note from a MatthewHSE in webmasterworld on tweaking firefox to be faster:

To get started, type “about:config” in your firefox address bar. The settings you’re looking for are:

1.) network.http.pipelining
2.) network.http.pipelining.firstrequest
3.) network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
4.) network.http.proxy.pipelining
5.) nglayout.ititialpaint.delay

Set #1, #2, and #4 to “true”. Set #3 to a high number, like 32. Set #5 to 0.

Enabling the pipelining features allows the browser to make multiple requests to the server at the same time. The “maxrequests” is the maximum number of requests it will send at once. I’ve heard that 8 is the most it will send at once, but setting it higher won’t hurt, just in case. The initialpaint.delay is the length of time (in milliseconds) after the server response before the browser begins to paint the page.

Firefox tuning thread

Furthermore on Opera…
Web Developer Toolbar & Menu for Opera... huh. :)
(i don’t think it had dynamic css editing.. but it’s still better than nothing before.)

and furthermore..
here’s the thing about Opera 8 (so far)… everthing seems pretty nice and reasonably polished.. i’m still not thoroughly used to the new sidepanels format they switched to at some point in the last 3 versions… but the big complaint i have about new Opera 8 (and this is a very big complaint, actually, though it seems such a small thing), is that they seem to have done away with that feature that allowed you to click a tab you are already on, which drops you right to the tab you had most recently used immediately before. i’m not sure how else to describe it.. but it’s a terribly useful feature for hopping back and forth between tabs, and it’s one thing i most missed when i using firefox. why oh why would they have subtracted this functionality?

*another upgrade: installed bblean 113b6 (have been on 112u1). not much change (which is fine) but i do already see that the ‘balloon tips’ for system tray seems to have been added as an integrated feature (matching the skin, too), so the plugin i’d recently found for that is no longer necessary (had been inconsistent anyway).

19 February 2005 Saturday

Hello Sunshine pt.2

yesterday was my grandfather’s 7th-seven… the 7th week/49th day after his passing. my mom sponsored a Sok at the Tibetan Buddhist temple (we’d been to one just two weeks ago, i think…) and she brought most of the food (people seem to bring anything: cake, cookies, crackers, cheese, ham, rice, lasagna, grapes, peanuts, etc.)…

A Sok, by my understanding and experience, consists of a whole lot of prayers and chanting (very rhythmic at times; also accompanied by a loud but pleasantly dull-sounding drum at parts) and various blessings.. food that has been brought by the Sok participators was laid out nicely on a table… one of the temple persons conducts prayers over them while we’re chanting in our seats with the prayer books.. then handfulls of food (crushed up) from each dish are gathered into a bowl and water is drizzled over it slowly until the dish contains a mountain of mushed food… maybe incense is placed on top now… at certain point in prayers, person takes dish outside and offers it there.

then you’re given some type of alcohol in your palm and you sip that and pat the rest over your head… and you take a pinch of this grainy/gamy thing they bring around, and you eat that.

also later, you take pinches of uncooked rice they have available, and you sprinkle a lil on your head. and then at specific points in one of the prayers, you toss it around you… which means there’s rice flying at everyone from different directions and that’s rather fun.

later, everyone is given a plate and a small piece from every dish is given to everyone… your plate ends up being quite a hodgepodge of different stuff… especially is there’s been a big turn out/lots of food. then you take a small bite of anything from your plate. and then a bowl comes around and you take something or a handful from your plate and put it into the bowl. that bowl gathers the “leftovers” from everyone and that gets offered out.

then after prayers are basically done, we all eat. don’t have to eat everything one your plate, but it is considered blessed food, so good to eat at least a little.

---

breakfast time!