oh yelp...

"You may or may not end up with someone's tongue down your throat when the clock strikes midnight,..."

sigh, yes, she speaketh the truth

Reader Decorating Dilemma: The I'm Moving Home Edition

Except I'm moving to Boston! Not home! Yay!

The mouse in my apartment

I chucked a fork at it from where I was sitting, but it didn't really seem all that phased.

essentially Philly

Baby Jesus abducted from manger by vandals

and yesterday, there was an article chronicling Philly's history of booing Santa Claus.

The only productive things I feel I've done today are a) eating, and thus nourishing my body to do it good, and b) practicing how to write the six Chinese characters I'm learning for Chinese class.

I just had a zen habits crack hit moment, as the thought "dude, where are my zen habits for today??!" put me in a nanosecond state of panicked impatience.

Oh, I got it now. I guess I'll keep these to serve as artifacts of my oblivion.

How do I delete a post???

"The world is going digital, but people are analog,"

Drinking black tea in the morning always makes me contemplative on my way to work.

Bubble bath time officially ended when a cockroach crawling just on the other side of the drain decided to jump into the tub with me.

I walked by Chez Colette this morning on my way to work so that I could glimpse the strangers eating breakfast through the tinted glass.

Whoopi Goldberg is definitely an infusion of sanity on the View. It actually makes me wish I was at home during the day so I could watch it. Or wish I wasn't so cheap and had cable and other various crap I'd need to record it and watch it later when I get home from work, although the anticipation that builds while I wait for YouTube videos to load because I'm mooching off of the only neighbor's internet available that isn't security-enabled definitely forces me to appreciate it. Thank you, [wireless network connection redacted]. But I do think they unfairly slam Elisabeth sometimes and definitely break to commercials when they don't feel like listening to her.

These bad economic times have forced me to...

start bringing my lunch again. I mean, I do already "bring my lunch," but I don't actually bring my lunch, I just end up not eating, or buying ramen noodles or something from the vending machine. I also have to pay off a $6K loan to my parents leftover from my college education. Maybe I will just eat that for lunch.

my co-worker likened my style to Rachel Zoe from the Rachel Zoe Project

Except I didn't actually know who Rachel Zoe is. Actually, I'm googling her now because I still don't.


No one really likes this co-worker. And I don't really like Rachel Zoe.

underneath the bullshit, MTV reality stars actually have emotions... and talent?

emotion: Abram on being married, after Dave shut the hell up
talent: Abram as the crocodile hunter, Abram doing coffee tawk

basically Abram rocks.

Quick & Easy Bicycle Skirt Guards

on Devon Seafood Grill where Matt Kurilla works and when Brooke Shields ate there she ordered but didn't eat anything the whole time she nursed

Evette Smith/Tow... ive had better crab cakes at fridays

creepy cultural cleavage

The American Promise.

I think my favorite line came when Obama was commenting on his grandmother: "She poured everything she had into me." We all need to do just that.

the glass ceiling with the 18 million cracks in it

The fact that she ran circles around the men tonight reminded me why the glass ceiling with the 18 million cracks in it really is poised to shatter. I can’t recall a woman rocking a convention like that, ever.

my recently retired desktop post-it

"One day during the war in Bosnia a report on the radio ended with an arresting image. A resident of a village that had come under attack the night before answered a journalists question. "This morning when I looked out the window at my garden, I knew the fighting was now close. There were bullet casings on the lettuce leaves."

my anti-doppelganger

apparently someone has been getting a head start on my dream life: Technology Enhanced Learning

and not only does she have a career that is so similar to my own passions and pursuits, but we share the same name!

so on top of that, I am ALSO an artist, an author of a ton of books, a Real Estate CFO, an election campaign donor to John Kerry & Barack Obama, an animal specialist, a graduate of a Milwaukee high school, working at a communications firm in London, a cinematographer, a countess from Swinton, a member of the Society of American Silversmiths, and a child caretaker.

"What gets you up in the morning?" and "What pisses you off?"

best passive-aggressive note title ever

the missing exhibit from the carousel of progress

I went shopping today. Much monetary damage ensued. And then I got ambushed on my way home by a Church of Mother God Christian Evangelizing on Walnut St.

Its amazing what a little struggling does for the human spirit... well, I have to resign myself to relative struggling, as far as the upper-middle-class-privileged-white-female's human spirit goes.

I started flossing.

Unix 0, 1, and 2 Redirection

What does “> /dev/null 2>&1″ mean?

"There are three standard sources of input and output for a program. Standard input usually comes from the keyboard if it’s an interactive program, or from another program if it’s processing the other program’s output. The program usually prints to standard output, and sometimes prints to standard error. These three file descriptors (you can think of them as “data pipes”) are often called STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR.

Sometimes they’re not named, they’re numbered! The built-in numberings for them are 0, 1, and 2, in that order. By default, if you don’t name or number one [of them] explicitly, you’re talking about STDOUT. (emphasis added)

Given that context, you can see the command above is redirecting standard output into /dev/null, which is a place you can dump anything you don’t want (often called the bit-bucket), then redirecting standard error into standard output (you have to put an & in front of the destination when you do this).

The short explanation, therefore, is “all output from this command should be shoved into a black hole.” That’s one good way to make a program be really quiet!"

Today is my one year anniversary working for Towers Perrin.

CAPTCHA

the worst acronym for the web's recently ineffectual security measure

Oracle Dates and Times

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/fcdb/oracle/or-time.html

every morning should start like this...

Earlier this morning, with coffee in hand and cats at my feet...

So I re-connected with my senior year AP English Lit teacher Laura Nicosia via none other than a recent obsession with twitter! Best use of those 140 characters as yet. She has a blog that chronicles her foray into web 2.0 technologies, which is great because its nice to be alongside aspiring female nerds fervently indulging their inner-technophiles.

Nerdapalooza!

I thought of doing this a few days ago knowing it will totally help, in the same way that PConrad's CISC474 Wiki was an amazing way to house ass-sucking computer science-y quirkage, but from time to time (i.e. hopefully on a daily basis) I will probably post cryptic completely nondescript jargon and pictures to help me remember things I learn while I'm doing work ranging anywhere from the workings of computer languages, database management, development and debugging environments, and whatever else I feel like.

These posts are strictly my own musings and a personal attempt to increase my knowledge base. I'll be using "pseudocode" (actual code that I'll give preposterous pseudonyms, which is different from real pseudocode) in any examples or in any screenshots, and which will in no way be used for personal or commercial gain beyond that. Therein. Henceforth.

My first post will be about executing SQL commands from inside java. I also want to subsequent-post about C# function delegates, callback functions, oh and a bunch of weird stuff about Visual Studio, just off the top of my head, and indeed, the list will ever be increasing.

zen habits

Lessons in Productivity from Ralph Waldo Emerson
...
3. Keep moving

“Ah!” said a brave painter to me, thinking on these things, “if a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to success in our art, but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.”

Emerson understood that it is human nature to “lapse . . . quickly into flesh and sleep.” Nature is constantly pulling us toward the path of least resistance. To battle this natural tendency for laziness, Emerson stressed that we must “use all the exalters that will bring us into . . . a productive state.” For Emerson, the most effective tonic for laziness was work.

Emerson knew that once motivation dies it is hard to resuscitate. He kept his motivation alive by constantly working. When times were difficult and ideas didn’t come to him, Emerson continued to work knowing that inspiration would come soon. In a letter to an acquaintance, Emerson compared the mind to a pear-tree that goes through a season of bareness only to suddenly burst forth in fruitful growth. However, the farmer must continue to prune and graft even during these moments of sterility in order to reap the harvest.

zen habits

How to Get a Lot Done – 7 Tips to Achieve More
...
7. Don’t be Bound by What Others Tell You Is or Isn’t Possible
If you don’t think something is possible, guess what? It isn’t. People do some pretty wild and unbelievable things. You’re a person, what makes you think you can’t do them?

In life you will encounter a lot of cynicism and disillusion, you’ll be told that certain things are or are not possible. Listen at your peril, as these are self-fulfilling prophecies.

While everyone has doubts, it’s important not to let them overpower you. If you’re feeling particularly low on confidence, there are still many things you can do to get over that. For instance:

* Start Small. There’s no need to take on the whole world in a day, and building up to things is the best way to get over low confidence. Tackle a set of smaller projects or milestones, and accomplish them. Give yourself some positive feedback to build on and then go upwards from there.
* Just Start. If you spend your time looking up at the top of a mountain, the climb seems a lot more daunting than if you just start with the bit in front of you. I often just jump into projects and ideas, deliberately not thinking them through, because I know that once I start, things inevitably work themselves out.
* Give yourself time. Everyone needs time to accomplish their goals, and as a general rule, things usually need more time than you would think. I can’t even count the number of projects that have taken me waaay longer than I had hoped or planned for. But looking back, none of that matters. There is only what you did and what you didn’t do.

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
~Annie Dillard

june's almost 1-year resolutions

I spent $22 last year on atm withdrawal fees. That's practically $2/month I could've spent on something else like a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee.

I also started bringing my lunch to work and its working out really well. Not only am I saving between $20-$40/week ($1040-$2080/year!) on food, but none of the food I've bought in the past two weeks has spoiled because its getting used for that extra meal.

And I've since been buying more fresh fruits and vegetables, using plastic containers, and reducing the waste I would have used (and partially paid to support the use of) if I were buying lunch.

Hopefully it means that I'm eating healthier food that's fresh and less processed, and I think its helped my morning routine to become a little bit more of just that, a routine, instead of just rolling out of bed and hitting the snooze button a bunch of times and still ending up at work a half hour to 45mins late.

compliments of the creepy daily quote subscription

"The virtues which keep this world sweet and the faithfulness which keeps it steadfast are chiefly those of the average man."
~ W. Russell Bowie

zen habits

7 Habits Essential for Tackling the Multitasking Virus
...
4. Release a fear of failure.

I just joined twitter. So I guess I'm officially an virtuaphile ^_^

I also just became obsessed with making lots of ^_^ faces. They're so cute!

don't get ripped off!

WisePrice

"... the result of... frugality, a bad experience, a good idea, and a few dedicated individuals."

This is such a cool site where you can submit the price of a service in your local community! They don't allow actual business or personal names, but since everyone has to register, its just one more hop/skip/jump to find out the information from the user who submitted the review. Its way more flushed out and organized than reviews posted on other sites, and definitely gives you a better sense of how the service/price/experience correlate by asking specifically for descriptions of each. I just registered and busted out a review of the amazing bikini and upper leg wax at the International Salon (Philadelphia, PA), and can't wait to post more reviews and spread the word!

Disclaimer: One part of my review reads like I'm Dustin Hoffman from the Rain Man, but you only have one half hour after you create the post to go back and edit, so despite the good review of the salon, I guess I'll have to suffice sounding like I'm autistic.

an inconvenient truth

"Judgement comes from experience, and great judgement comes from bad experience."
~Robert Packwood

pepsi-caffeine musings

My day was overwhelmingly filled with so much distraction and boredom and particularly overexposure to media (and too many episodes of MTV's Real World: Hollywood). I found out that a family friend just got into Yale, and I got that feeling of wanting to go back to school, something I hadn't been feeling at all for a few months. Patricia Sloane-White didn't go back to school for ten years, all of which she spent in the private sector. She's a person that seems truly happy. I guess I'm just so relieved to not feel that cracked out inadequacy and pressure and the general feeling of not wanting to be in school, which I felt at about the junior-year mark when I realized I still had 2 years left, 66% in quantity of what I'd already gone through, and not 33% like the rest of my friends and my class, and I felt just on the verge of totally lost after declaring my Computer Science major, my fourth at that point. So unless I take another crack at the Boren, which would require stringent self-assurance about my academic whereabouts, flying under the radar for a little while and not doing things according to other people's standards feels good.

comfort

"I find that it is not the circumstances in which we are placed, but the spirit in which we face them, that constitutes our comfort."
~Elizabeth T. King

countering counter-intuition

"Reflect upon your blessings, of which every man has plenty, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some."
Charles Dickens

for karis

"Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy."
~Abraham Heschel

hap-penis

"It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere."
~Agnes Repplier

Progress

"Problems are the price of progress. Don't bring me anything but trouble."
~Charles F. Ketering

From that creepy daily quote service I subscribe to...

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
~Howard Thurman

Yong(4) Gong(1)

Ni hao! I'm taking Chinese I from Jan-Mar, and then Chinese II from Mar-Jun. Yay!

So I suddenly decided that I like the pink and purple. I'm not really sure when liking pink and purple exactly happened. But I like the arrows. Especially the vertical ones on the right, which are a beautiful example of primitive computer graphics. The whole thing generally reminds me of being between the ages of 10-12. This is just one of the ways that I'm regressing into childhood. Others include: playing with stuffed animals, dating Ming-Jay, learning a new language from scratch, drinking soda (and rotting my twice-braced teeth), and in the hopefully near future getting a pet rabbit.

edit: the pink and purple at the time referred to the blog design template.