Archive for January 2006

I just saw a commercial for Final Destination 3. …Really? Can that possibly be a good movie? Here’s the plot in a nutshell. Someone freaks out because he/she daydreams that a bunch of people die. Random people avoid catastrophe as a result of his/her freaking out. They screw up “Death’s design.” Then they all die, except for a guy and a girl so there can be a sense of a “happy ending” including implied procreation. Someone from Final Destination 2 might come back… but not from the original since they’re all dead now.

There. I saved you eight bucks.

It’ll be a Before & After puzzle in Wheel of Fortune. Just you wait.

I’m sorry for not posting in a week. I’ve been busy playing hopscotch. In reading that, you probably reacted the same way my friend Sarah did when I asked her to play hopscotch with me. I wasn’t kidding then, and I’m not kidding now. I’ve been playing, musing about, or writing about hopscotch.

Read more…

Lately I’ve been getting strange subjects in my email (I use GMail; yes, I know my privacy goes down the tubes, I’m switching over in the near future). Anyway, a lot of subjects have had {Definitely Spam?} and {Disarmed} at the start of the title. Normally this was in Spam and/or Group emails, but lately any email I get from Lisa has {Definitely Spam?} in front of it; and I get the feeling she didn’t do that.

Are these GMail tags that are accidentally visible? Anyone else having this issue?

Edit on 1/26: Apparently this is something that my zaissofspades.com mail accounts are adding to my email before the get passed along to my GMail account. Why my zaissofspades accounts think that Lisa = spam… I don’t know. But sometimes I think that too.

Samantha left a nice comment today:

Surely something interesting has happened since the 3rd.

And… it’s true. I have had a bit of trouble with writer’s block lately; the ideas I’ve stumbled uon have seemed overall pretty boring, so I’ve steered away from them. But in the interest of keeping the entries flowing, here are the interesting somethings that have happened since the 3rd:

• I got to spend some quality time with my friends Eric, Rachel, and Chaia. It reminded me of all the good times in undergrad, and our bond is still goin strong. I miss you guys!
• I hung out with my parents, and saw my dad get noticeably better. For those of you lacking a recent update, my dad is officially cancer-free, and he’s getting is strength back slowly but surely. By the time I graduate, he’s gonna be running around like the 23-year old that he is (inside joke). Oh, and for those of you lacking any clue what I’m talking about… oops.
• I got a part-time contract job working at LotterShelly, a small design firm in Pittsburgh. I started today. I’m really excited, because this is my opportunity to discover (1) if I love working at small companies as much as I think I do, and (2) if I’m really cut out to be a designer as a career.
• A paper that I’m co-author on was nominated for Best Paper at the CHI Conference. This is very exciting news - and while I didn’t do much of the writing (I ran the experiment), I’m still pretty psyched.
• Classes have started again, but I don’t start until tomorrow (thanks to a MWF schedule and no classes Monday afternoon due to Martin Luther King Day). I’m taking Marketing, Game Design, and a design course called Conceptual Models.
• I bought the Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Ghost in the Shell series (does anyone know the plural of series?). They all come highly recommended by me. I was surprised by Ghost in the Shell… I thought I wouldn’t be a fan, but I found it to be really provocative.

OK, I think that’s enough for now. More interesting entries to come, I promise.

The calendar year has changed, and apparently I’m a little slow on the uptake… so many other blogs were right on the ball (including Jenn’s, Alex’s, Jason’s, and my favorite from some guy I don’t know. But, under the philosophy of “better late than never,” Happy Freakin New Year.

As I start pondering New Years Resolutions’ it occurs to me that part of the reason that I might not have stuck to prior resolutions was the informality in structuring them. Think of your standard New Years’ Resolutions: “Meet new people,” “Lose weight,” “Learn a new language.” How boring! I figure I’m much more likely to keep my resolutions if I model them after the old high school debate resolutions from a few years back. Here’s a sample:

Whereas the magazine Dynamic Graphics is the first magazine I’ve seen that targets UI Designers like myself, and
Whereas they have articles on new, hip font faces, which makes me feel like not-as-nerdy for getting crazy over cool fonts, and
Whereas each issue discusses a brochure / website / marketing theme and suggests a color palette with the pantone colors clearly identified – which is very cool, and
Whereas I feel more cultured having magazines on my coffee table when people come to my apartment;
Be It Resolved that I will subscribe to Dynamic Graphics this year.

See, I think that’s much better. Aren’t you psyched about that resolution now? And it’s not even yours!