Nyanko's Basket

It's been a year since I last posted... whoa. Lots of stuff has happened, which probably should go under a cut!

( A year in a few paragraphs )

Work has been really quite busy, with the release of Windows 7 SP1 and other projects still in progress. I've sometimes gotten home around 12 midnight and fed Belle and Lillian, then collapsed in bed. Belle had a minor scare in March when she started losing weight rapidly and developed fatty liver. Fortunately, the vet and I - and other friends who sent their love, light and healing purrs/reiki - were able to reverse it, and she's made a full recovery (and gained a bit too!) She is a lot more agile now and likes climbing up on cat trees.

I recently saw The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which was a 2-hour monologue about Apple, Steve Jobs and conditions in the Chinese factories that produce the vast majority of consumer electronics. Some of the conditions described are literally unspeakable - 14-hour days, 7 days a week, rooms which have beds stacked to the ceiling with about 10 square feet of space, extremely low pay, lack of basic medical care, among others. I will make another post listing some of the things you can do if you believe that this situation should be changed; it's quite Apple-speciifc, but would likely work with other companies as well. summercomfort, have you seen this? (He started performing in the Bay Area/SF last year and came up to Seattle for a few weeks)

I'm just giving this a try, since I haven't actually used it before and it looks pretty different from Semagic (on the surface, at least). ^^;;

But one of the things I like about it is that I can write up an entry using my LJ layout?

And insert maps easily?

( Maps )

I still need to play around with WLW more, though I've already found a plugin that will let me add pictures from Flickr. I wonder if it will let me upload local pictures to Flickr though (like Semagic does) and whether it supports queuing...

Edit: It appears that it doesn't support moods/music/tags (yet?) Or if it does, not exactly of the same kind as LJ does...

This is the first and last time, I promise~

Yay~ 2,000 comments posted on LJ!

I think the 2,000th one was in itsacz's most recent entry. :P

Also, I got tagged by sbsneech, and apparently I can't tag her back, so... here goes? ^^;;

( 10 weird habits/things/little known facts )

So, yeah, I'm back. I needed some time off, but not that much.

Many thanks to el_espada for the CD yesterday, and to redacted as well for the wonderful time I spent with them and for even escorting me to the interchange :)

I'll be sad to miss both of you when I go whenever that is... but... let's keep in touch! ^^

So, following in haplo3k's footsteps...

Journal entries: 913 914
Comments posted: 1,952
Comments received: 1,698

I wonder whether I'll hit 2,000 comments posted or received before I hit 1,000 journal entries. :P

But first, a random link:

Me, 'Person of the Year'? No thanks

This is an interesting counterpoint to the "Person of the Year: You" issue of Time magazine and the subsequent coverage focusing on the power of social networking sites and their users. (Sites like MySpace, YouTube, Google, FaceBook, LinkedIn and so on.) The author of this article argues that it is true that users do have a lot of power, but that they are also being profiled, data-mined, and marketed to; so they are not necessarily the ones who have the most power:

( Selected quotes from the article )

This fits in with my own observations and is the reason why I won't (at least for the foreseeable future) join any more social networking sites (LJ can be considered as one in some sense). The other reason is that I'm also lazy in terms of making the investment needed.

On another note, my eyesight has deteriorated by 50 degrees in the left eye and 75 degrees in the right to -1175/-1200 degrees respectively. Part of this might be because my lenses have become scratched and thus more blurred, so my eyes have to work much harder to maintain the same distance. I've noticed lately that I tend to get more headaches and eye strain after working at the computer a lot or reading a lot of scores. Right now I'm deciding whether to get a new pair of lenses before leaving or do that once I'm in the US; a new pair of lenses will cost more than $200 here.

I've been going through and rearranging my CDs, and inspired by kamenreader and his manga collection, I decided to sort them out. Here are the results behind several cuts. This is, as far as I know, my complete CD collection, though in the process of rearranging my room and packing I may discover more CDs, and it's possible I may buy even more before going. :P

( My CD collection, sorted by name )

( Sorted by genre )

( Sorted by year (of pressing/manufacture, not of purchase) )

Yet another entry from the future...

Date created: 2002-07-05 03:36:18

It seems like so many things happened during that time... Some of my friends left, I made new friends (including some who are very special and mean a lot to me), I got back into IRC in a big way, I started university and (just) graduated, and I feel that I know myself quite a bit better than I did four years ago. And I disrupted from the army and now I'm back in again for 103 days.

My very first entry is probably more funny for the comments than the actual post. :P

Some of my old entries still make me smile or burst out in laughter, such as this one, this one, this one, this one, especially this one, this one (which still cracks me up even now :P), this one, this one and this one. This is also pretty funny. ^_^

(By the way, if you want to go through my Johari / Nohari windows again, you can find them here.)

And some others make me reflect on how much I've changed since the time I wrote them.

Who knows what will happen next year?

Don't worry, the cats (and the umbrella) are still saved. :P

But I realized that if the image takes a while to load (as it did for some people yesterday), the journal is almost unreadable while that happens since the words are green too.

Hopefully this layout will solve that issue. :)

View it here.

I don't expect anyone to buy anything, but if you do, it would be a welcome bonus. :)

Also, a new version of Semagic! *goes to update*

So I uploaded two more pictures today, both from Azumanga Daioh. One is of Osaka, and the other one is of Neko Koneko.

You can view them here.

More icons/desktop backgrounds/etc. can be found here.