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spendy
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Jan. 31st, 2007 @ 03:05 pm
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I am bad with money. There's no escaping it, I love to buy things. Shiny things, new things, fancy things, even old things.
This morning I bought a PowerMac G4 Dual 500MHz tower to use as a second computer, so my PowerBook can spend more time off the desk (justified as a reason I'm not Journaling more). Of course, an old G4 tower can't be used as-is for iMovie and DVD burning, so I bought a gig of RAM plus a new video card and hard drive (SATA!) for it. Grand total spent? Somewhere on the order of US$650. All the parts should be arriving in the next week or so. I'm excited, but I can't help but feel like I need to go to the max-- 2GB RAM, another SATA drive, a 19" widescreen LCD... but then again I'm already depressed about my credit card debt :D
My cell phone ($360 Sony Ericsson K800i) was supposed to come (to Federal Way) on Monday. Daniel was supposed to be home to receive it (no school on the day between semesters) but Mom took him to go pick something up so the post office kept it. I went home on Monday but didn't find this out until the PO was closed of course. But I did manage to finish putting the brakes on my car, and we brought it down off the jack-stands finally (it's been up for over a month).
Parts list:
$320 Ground Control coilover sleeves with Eibach springs all around
$450 Koni shocks (Yellow front, Red rear)
$130 Ingalls camber kit all around
$140 Whiteline rear swaybar
$530 SuperPro bushings all around
$320 New upper and lower ball-joints all around
Subtotal for parts (not including tools, tool rental, or misc like brake fluid) is $1890.
Worth it? I think so. Haven't gotten her aligned yet, but the prelim test drive on monday night was pure driving ecstasy. She's at the lowest allowed by the sleeves, 3.5" below stock. Meaning there's barely 2" clearance from the ground to the oil pan and downpipe, and I can't fit a jack under it. Hell, I scraped the bumper rolling her down the wheel ramps! Now she needs new shoes; the stock wheels look a little weird :) Pics will come this weekend when I have my 3.2MP Cybershot phone :Demo:  accomplished iTunes: Benassi Bros - Turn Me Up |
I'm going to try to do an entry every day, and if not, at least every other day or whenever I get time. Looking back at my past entries, my entire life outlook has changed immensely over the past couple of years. I wouldn't say that I'm a sadder person in general, but I definitely have less bouts of just plain cheeriness at the world. Perhaps I'm just considering more things at once nowadays. Hell, my last entry was the summer after I graduated high school, and not even any real summer stuff was written down (except on paper, which I'm going to have to transcribe for posterity later). So my last online blurb is really unrepresentative of how far I've come in life really.
I'm a sophomore at the University of Washington. This quarter I'm taking Chemistry 142 (General Chem), Korean 316 (2nd year Heritage), and Philosophy 120 (Intro to Logic). I entered the UW thinking I'd be a CompSci major, so I'm still registered as such, but I haven't taken a CSE course since I failed 143 last winter. I may just coast into Acadæmia and graduate with a Philosophy or some sort of Language or education degree, with a minor in a math or science field. Who knows. I don't really know what direction to point in, but I do know that I don't like homework (which Chem142 has plenty of) or poorly-done lectures (which Phil120 is pretty much entirely composed of). Maybe I should take up music again. Lord knows I haven't touched my clarinet in a year and a half.
My current living situation is the dorms, McMahon 5N. My cluster is 508-518 (the elevator cluster) and my room is 508 (the north L-shaped double). There are ten of us in the cluster. Aaron Bean is my roommate. Stephen and Steven each have a single room. Ben and Brian are in the opposite L-shaped double. Kyle Butler and Taylor Mann share the double to the right of the balcony, and Kelly McCormack and Taylor Heiss occupy the opposite.
Right now I am still struggling to fit in with my chosen nuclear set of friends here. Last year I made no effort at all to make friends at the UW (stupidly letting all outside efforts fall and fade) so I came in this year with no real connections, only vague acquaintances. So I decided this year to use the cluster system to my advantage and form a "posse". Unfortunately for me, three of my clustermates already knew each other from high school (Taylor, Taylor, and Kyle) and two more (Kelly and Aaron) fit in more easily than I did with the sports aficionados and whatnot. I still feel like a tag-along, but I don't think they mind me much. I'm the lovable Asian after all.
Sara is attending the UW this quarter too, living in Nordheim 4202 with three other girls (Christine, Allison, and Sarah). I'm glad for her, she's finally getting back on track after a year of insane screwed-up-ness (which will all be laid out in detail when I reveal the last couple of crazy years of my life).
I can't think of any other vague things to say right now, so I'm just going to post this. Probably going to elaborate my thoughts later today, but with class and then driving back to Federal Way on the docket, I'm not sure when that might be possible. I really need to re-portable-ize my PowerBook. If I only had the money for an iMac... damn credit cards, I do have the money!emo:  busy iTunes: Bowling for Soup - Punk Rock 101 |
Yeah, that's right. I'm bringing this shit back from the dead. Expect semi-regular entries, probably all around midnight-ish, from me in the future.emo:  optimistic |
No, it's not our incompetent government. Nor is it the fact that half the nation seems to think that "division of church and state" doesn't apply.
The thing that pushes me over the edge is our complete and utter techno-idiocy as a culture. Yesterday I dropped my Motorola portable phone on the ground and it snapped in two. I never liked flip phones to begin with (why have a beautiful high resolution screen if you're going to HIDE it?), but this one just takes the cake. Incredibly thin. Weak hinges. Pitiful amount of memory. Ancient camera. Impossible, sluggish user interface. Yeah, I'm talking about the Moto RAZR. America's #1 selling phone is the WORST PHONE EVER MADE. Motorola doesn't even have much to offer in general.
I only got this phone because I accidentally put my last phone, a Sony Ericsson T610i, through the wash. It actually started working a couple days after it dried out, after I had ordered the only bluetooth-capable phone T-Mobile had to offer in the US at the time. Big mistake, I should have ponied up and went for another SE phone. Europeans really know how to do phones. By current-day standards, my T610i is four years old. The RAZR is only two years old. Yet the RAZR was HELL to use, compared to the slick engineering of the SE phone. Whoever at SE was designing the layout of things on screen... he 'got it' when it came to human interface. Motorola has a brain-dead monkey in that department. Even when I had plenty of free memory (of a puny 5MB), the phone limited me to a maximum of 100 text messages, inbox and outbox combined. WHO DOES THAT?!?
My brother had a T610 as well, until his went through the wash last month. For Christmas ($200) he replaced it with a Sony Ericsson K750i, a two-year-old model in the same upgrade family. It's an excellent phone, you should check it out. I'm going to opt for the $170 more expensive model, the one-year-old k800i. It's insanely great. Unfortunately, none of this shit is available through T-Mobile in the US, so our contract renewal rebates don't apply. We have to pay full wholesale through gray-market distributors on eBay. Notice the star ratings Mobique gave to the following four phones... this is a guy in Europe by the way, and yeah they really do have that much choice in mobile phones. And they have broadband EVERYWHERE. And for cheap.
Released 2005: http://www.mobique.com/motorola/v3/
2003: http://www.mobique.com/sonyericsson/t610/
2005: http://www.mobique.com/sonyericsson/k750i/
2006: http://www.mobique.com/sonyericsson/k800i/
I'm moving to the UK.emo:  pissed off |
| » Graduation |
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I don't feel graduated.
Jun. 22nd, 2005 @ 11:29 pm
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| » Prom |
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OK, so I haven't updated in like forever. Sorry. I'm going to kick myself later when I have no record of my life.
*kick*
I'll talk about prom later.
Jun. 7th, 2005 @ 10:57 pm
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| » Senior Skip Road Trip |
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Over Memorial Day weekend, our school had a four-day weekend. This traditionally causes many Seniors to just take Thursday off to benefit from a very theraputic five-day weekend. Often, students will use this weekend as a chance to take a trip, called a Senior Trip.
We did so.
Sara, Spenser, and I decided to take a trip to Spokane. Why? Because we could. But why? Because it sounded like fun! Road trips are always fun!
We left Friday morning (because Spenser couldn't afford to skip any of his classes due to declining grades) at around 11AM, picking up Sara along the way because she had to be a guinea pig for her sister's dental school at Renton Tech. We hit the road (I-90 eastbound) and made excellent time. On the road there, we saw a bicycle. On the road. There was just a bicycle sitting on the road, like it fell off some guy's bike rack.A car behind/next to us almost head-on ran it over.
We got to Spokane around 4PM-ish, and decided to take a picnic at the waterfall park to have lunch (yes. we had peanut butter and jelly). By the way, Spokane tried to kill my car. There was a parking lot tha I was gouing to use instead of feeding the meters on the side of the street, until the lot's entrance made me scrape some bit of my car's underbody. Not cool. Quickly we decided that Spokane was nothing special, and we hit I-90 east again, with Cour D'Alene, Idaho in mind. Let me tell you, all over Washington, gas was about $2.39/gal for the cheap stuff. Twenty miles east in Idaho, we found gas for $2.06! Goodness. (this is part of why we took my car: Spenser's shaggin'wagon no doubt could house more stuff and be more comfy, but hey, gas mileage!) And the Cour D'Alene Fred Meyer is huge and awesome and breathtaking. But while at Freddy's for more supplies, we saw a map of Montana. Road Trip you say? Yee-haw! Now of course, no road trip is complete with a map, so we passed it up and hit the road blind. Mmmm, road.
We drove as quickly as we could to Montana, trying to hit it before sunset. Upon doing so, we discovered something beautiful: 75MPH on the interstate baybee! Of course, it being night and the middle of Nowhere, MT, I decided to see what the mountain curves are made of. I must say this. With the gear ratios of my car, it really shines at 85MPH :) And utilizing both available lanes of traffic moving east enabled me to take downhill curves rated at 45MPH at a blazing 90MPH with the clutch in. Whee.
So then it's night, and we're getting hungry again, so we make a destination of Butte. We will be in Butte by 1AM, and we will have dinner. Then we will hit the road again. Of course, I make true to my promise, and we park at a Safeway in Butte. But then, the Safeway is closed. Eh? Stupid non-24-hour Safeway. I crank the heater full blast and we chill at the trunk waiting for spaghetti to boil (having Sara along means she won't let us eat crappy food). Of course, the pasta pot we're using is waaay big and it refuses to boil on the little butane burner I brought. So we settled for somewhat strange spaghetti, but oh well, it worked. Then we hit the road again until Ellis, MT, where I was simply too tired to continue, so I parked on the side of the road and we slept.
When we woke, the car was so cold that there was about three cups worth of water condensed on each window. Hrm. We cranked the heater (cold!) and continued, catching the breathtaking Montana sunrise o'er purple mountains and grassy plains. Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies, and only one radio station for miles! (and it played country too)
Wyoming showed itself at around 7AM, and we hit the west entrance of the park, cruising the loop, taking turns driving (we had only gotten a couple hours of sleep, and even though Spenser never had to drive, he fell asleep constantly and drooled on himself even) and then we visited Old Faithful. Ah, Mother Nature at her finest, uncut and raw. We even ate lunch at a picnic spot, stuffing ourselves on fresh crepes made by Sara herself.
When we finished with Yellowstone, we decided that it would be a good idea to head back to civilization for a little cell reception so our parents wouldn't kill us all. We made record time through Montana, stopping only to sleep that night (with similar results as before). Sunday morning and we were in Cour D'Alene again, cooking crepes in the parking lot of Denny's. Yes, we were cheap enough to whip out the butane and just grill it up outside a restaurant. Whee.
We met an interesting character while cooking. We're leaning on my Ford Focus, the trunk is open, the Washington license plate is visible, the cooler is out, and Sara's got a spatula in her hand. "You guys traveling?" No, we live right over there, that green house. We're just out to meet some society. Here's your sign. "I used to hitchhike all over America. That's how I figured out that Cour D'Alene, Idaho was such a great place. But then I got a girl pregnant, so I'm stuck here. Hey man, never hook up with a girl here." Um, I'll take that into consideration.
We then high-tailed it back into good old Washington State and made a picnic lunch at the arboretum in Spokane, cooking linguine noodles with white sauce and eating waterlogged (from the cooler) cheddar cheese cut with Spenser's pocketknife. Then we went a bit northish and hung out at Grand Coulee for a while in apprehension of the evening laser light show. Sara of course noticed that we didn't have anything to make for dinner, so we hit a Safeway up and she got the fixins for soft tacos and coos coos. Spenser wanted a simpler meal, opting for a can of beef stew and a can of baked beans. Heresy to Sara.
Evening rolled around, and we had a veritable feast a-cooking on a picnic table overlooking the dam. Quickly it became apparent that we had far too much food for three people, and that Sara's tacos were awesome (with fresh lettuce, tomato, and avocado!). We ran out of butane fuel in the middle of heating up Spenser's canned goods, but at least we had cooked the beef before that. We gorged ourselves and then saw the laser light show. FRICKIN' SWEET. Oh yeah!
Mmm, but then it was night. Late at night. So we drove and drove and drove, and took a wrong turn, ending up north in Omak. 1:30 AM. I'm driving. Nobody is on the road. Speed limit: 60. Hrm. Nobody on the road. My car's speed at 1:30 AM? 80MPH. Then we stopped at a Sherri's in Wenatchee for coffee, and sara took over the wheel while I retreated to the backseat to sleep. We were determined to be in our own beds at home by morning, so Sara continued my tradition of going 80. She had been driving for no more than 10 minutes when suddenly, headlights in the rearview.
Odd, thought Sara. They must really be bookin' it to be catching up wi-- oh s**t. We got pulled over for doing "80+" in a 60 zone. I wake up to Spenser and Sara yelling at me to get up. There's a nice policeman outside my window. I'm lying down in the backseat with no seatbelt on. %*#@. Sara gets a ticket for $153, I get one for $101. Argh. And in order to take them to court, we have to come back to the Chelan County District Court in Wenatchee! Grr.
Anyhoo, that was the trip. Sara takes herself home, I take Spenser home, and finally I crawl into bed in the wee hours of Monday morning. Fun! :D
Photos
Jun. 7th, 2005 @ 10:59 pm
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