This is an interesting read about why using the Apple Music Store could be a bad choice. I have an iPod, but I’m only using MP3s on them, and have not yet felt compelled to use track-by-track online music stores. I don’t really listen to any popular music, anyway, and the exceptions to that rule give me their CDs. ;) I actually prefer WMA over MP3, but the iPod can’t play WMA, so I had to stick to MP3.

I hate lossy compression in audio. But I’d rather listen to music than not.

1. please stop spamming from my e-mail account.
2. how did it get to be January 30th already?
3. happy birthday, livia. :)
4. my visitors counter was set to not increment from successive hits from the same ip. but i changed that now. from now on, it’s a “hit counter”
5. adam posted some photos from tonight
6. i’m ready to show some pictures now.

mark jaremko, livia, elliot and mandy, wendy, rehearsal for sarah pont‘s wedding, korean bbq with charlotte, elliot, livia, kenny, wendy, and lori, luna park with lilli and wendy. luna park was excellent. also, there’s a really great brunch place called joanne’s in south san francisco. check it out.

rehearsal

korean bbq

water

Go check out my friend Luke’s site. It’s like, creative and stuff.

Speaking of E.piphany (I met him there), they finally became profitable this quarter. Hooray! It only took seven years. Too bad I sold so much at $4.

This is pretty cool: Mozilla Firebird: Tips & Tricks

I especially liked making this change:

Speed up page rendering

By default, Mozilla Firebird doesn’t try to render a web page for 250 milliseconds, because it’s waiting for data. If you add the code below to your user.js file, Mozilla Firebird immediately tries to render the page, even without complete data. The drawback is on slower machines where doing a “reflow” may actually cause the total page load time to be longer.

Do a search on the page and you’ll find it. The “Force frames to be resizable” feature is cool, too. Haven’t had to use it yet, esp. since frames seem to be falling out of favor lately (as they should).

You can also block ads, but it makes some pages look weird.

I’ve sunk to new lows by using my friends to sell stuff. :)

So I think I’ve got this data thing worked out for my 2.5 months in NY. I’ll bring an external 3.5″ 250GB drive, an external 2.5″ 40GB drive, and a bunch of blank DVD+R discs. I think that will give me enough storage to bring most of my files with me and keep things suitably backed up while out there.

I also use this cool USB 2.0 3-drive RAID box, but it sounds like a jet. I mostly use it as a backup device, and because it is running RAID 5, I can sleep well after copying something onto it. :)

My local storage right now involves a 400GB NAS box in the closet (cheap, 2x200GB, striped) and the aforementioned 3-drive USB 2.0 box. When I travel, I use my notebook’s little 60GB 7200rpm drive, an external 2.5″ 40GB drive, and soon, an external 250GB 3.5″ drive. I think I can put together the external 250GB drive for around $189 or so, with some deals I found today on the INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY (har har har). It is possible to go cheaper, but I don’t want to skimp too much on an enclosure. There’s a quality/price/good-deal balance somewhere. :)

Since everyone seems to be doing this:

Maps of where I’ve been — as of Jan 2004

Jeremy just sent me a link to join Orkut, Google’s friendster-killer. It’s fast, it looks good, and their HTML is probably to spec. ;) Join! They don’t spam. Or so they say. :)

Hello, friends. A quick note to tell y’all that I am 95% certain that I will be in New York for two weeks in February and for the entire months of March and April! Tickets are booked, and contracts are in the mail (so to speak). So, let’s hang out. :)

Here’s one of my favorite photos from my last stint in New York:

brooklyn bridge at dusk, on the way to grimaldi’s pizza

It’s time for my periodic solicitation of comments. Who are you? If I don’t know you already, how did you find this site?

I’m always interested in finding out who is out there. :) Oh, and point us to personal sites and photos, too. I want to see what y’all look like. :)

Just got this from the reporter who interviewed me:

“The interview has been published in this issue’s Pacific Times. It’s in Chinese. But if your parents or anyone else is interested to read the article, they can find the newspaper in major Chinese/Taiwanese bookstores and supermarkets throughout So Cal. There is also a website www.pacific-times.com but reports on the site usually are text-only. It should be on-line by tomorrow afternoon. The article would appear in “Taiwanese American” (Tai-mei-ren) section on the website or p.7 of the newspaper.”

Exciting! Now, can someone read it and tell me what they said about me? :)

Happy Chinese/Lunar New Year! Google has two cute monkeys hanging off of their logo today. I don’t know what Chinese New Year means anymore. As a kid, we celebrated with the family, received money from our relatives, and had lots of food. Am I supposed to give money to my cousins and stuff now? :) I guess I would, if we had some sort of family gathering.

I have just rediscovered WindowBlinds. It’s amazing what a pretty skin will do for something. I hate that default blue look that XP ships with. The first thing I do when I get a new computer is change the theme to silver.

UPDATE I’m now using Style XP, which is much, MUCH better than WindowBlinds because it uses Windows XP’s native theme machinery. Thanks, Eric! Also, SideBar is a great little freeware utility, except that it is currently consuming 83MB of my precious RAM. Download it and preview what Longhorn will offer. :)

Anyway, here’s my desktop, now:

Alex just learned from Adam that Vienna Teng‘s CD Waking Hour is now available from Apple’s iTunes Music Store (direct link for iTunes users). Very cool.

I copied this entry almost directly from Alex’s journal. :)

palace of fine arts

Esteemed neurosurgeon Kenny Liu is in town with his fiance Lori for a few days before heading off to Maui to relax on a much-deserved vacation (Kenny and I went to Maui together not long ago).

As always, it was good to see him, and I’m going to try to meet up with them again on Saturday when he returns. Maybe we’ll have some time to take some stupid pictures. :)

Not much else to say these days. I’ve been staying up until the wee hours of the morning, working (8:30am, last night). But somehow, I still feel well rested. [see some photos]

erin and beagles

Happy Birthday, Adam and Carolyn! I had a great time at their joint birthday party, once again hanging out with Adam’s family and with my “old” posse of Silicon Valley tech people. :) We ate a lot of food and watched mutant beagles Darwin and Newton run around trying to grab a bite here and there. Was great to see again some folks that I rarely get to spend time with. [see some photos]

I woke up late, and the phone has been ringing non-stop. E-mails are piling up in my inbox, and I am browsing stupid things on the web. Why don’t I get to sleep until 3am every night? Probably because my day apparently doesn’t start until 3pm.

So the phone is now off. IM is disconnected. Time to do work.

The thing is, all of the voicemails and e-mails piling up in my inboxes have to be addressed at some point in the future. I’m not sure when I’ll get to them.

Mandy and her new company invited me to shoot some photos of a new ring they have designed. We (Elliot, Mandy, Wendy, Kim, Sara, and I) hopped aboard the J Church and rode downtown and back, shooting photos in various urban settings. Here’s my favorite one:

Wendy, with MUNI

Don’t click on this link if you are easily offended, or if you are a minor. Please? (That’s pretty much an invitation, huh?):

http://www.kontraband.com/index.asp?p=movies.asp?ID=856