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| i figure things ought to be circular, so here we go.
here's to five and a half years of uninterrupted xanga posts, not the kind of the posts with bare links to sites unaccompanied by a personal backstory or anecdote, but posts that i sat down to compose to capture the feeling of the moment over this half of a decade, from office chairs in dhahran to internet cafes in hong kong to dorms in both pebble beach to berkeley.
here's to the posts about college acceptances, limericks, commentary about design, posts about projects in websites and t-shirts, my threadless phase, my flickr phase, the presidential elections, travels to dubai and spain and italy and the netherlands and places i'm forgetting to name, haikus, a love confession, dream logs, death in the family, a semester withdrawal, social commentary, and everything in between through most of stevenson high school and college at cal. over six hundred entries, and absolutely every single one of them public. and it all started in 2001, when a spammer discovered my personal site hosted at geocities and convinced me to sign up for xanga.
i stuck around here for years beyond the sprouting of attractive alternatives because of the community and my friends, but readership here has long peaked and dwindled. i've explored wordpress, blogspot, and livejournal during the past few years, and while i could put my css skills to better use at the first two, for community reasons, my successor will now be livejournal for good. (ask me for access to friends-only posts.) for the last handful of you who've stuck with me this long, thank you so much for your support and (especially) comments, and i hope to see you on the livejournal side. | | |
| supposedly, BART is going to change its maps from its iconic geographically accurate maps that we locals have come to love to something more linear (or diagrammatic). i wish i had more solid sources, but the sf weekly blurb from late last year was claiming that a BART spokesperson said this change would happen. sure, the maps of the past were linear, but that was before my time. (note: the diagrammatic map i linked is the work of a third party, not the planned official map).
maybe straight lines would be easier to read to an outsider. perhaps the style of the london underground maps would add some extra sophistication to what some people perceive as an aging transit system. but those geographically accurate maps did emphasize the unique geography of the bay, with four of the five lines meandering from opposite ends of the bay area and merging harmoniously through the heart of san francisco. and it's probably the map-loving boy inside me professing that i will miss them.
(if anyone knows what happens to old maps from the insides of the trains, please let me know.) | | |
| as you may know, i've posted about ads here over and over again, as they've been an area of interest to me. the super bowl has quite a bit of hits and misses, usually leaning on the side of the misses with ads on shaky foundations of bodily functions humor, but this is probably my favorite among the super bowl ads this year - an ad by coca-cola. incidentally, this other ad also by coca-cola is particularly sweet (particularly during primaries season), and i'm not just talking about the artificial sweeteners.
(alternatives in case the links break: coca-cola parade and jinxed)
speaking of primary elections, if you're a nonpartisan (no party) registrant in california, you can in fact request an independent or democratic party ballot to participate in the primaries without altering your no party status. (i believe the republican party does not offer this option in california - it varies from state to state.) given that the day after tomorrow is super tuesday, the date of california's primaries, it's too late if you haven't requested one by mail already. but i figured i should clear this up for the future, as people seem to generally hold this misunderstanding that the primaries still restrict participation by party affiliation.
edit: i should clarify. i meant that it's too late for the mail-in absentee method, but the other ballots can always be requested on the spot at the polling locations. and yes, you can drop your absentee ballot in any polling station in your county (and it would not be provisional). and no, if you're registered with, say, the green party, you can't request a democratic ballot, as crossovers are only allowed for the unregistered party folks. | | |
| this has to be one of the more interesting polls to come out of slashdot. it asks what percentage of people would select the same poll option as you, with several ranges from which to choose. it's turning out to be dynamic and contradictory, much like one of those questions where option C claims options A, B, and C are false. if you check it out, please try to at least mentally pick one before peeking at the results.
oh yeah, and the world of solitaire is an online solitaire game that looks and runs as smoothly as the one bundled with windows machines (arguably better looking). great if you're feeling sporadic solitaire urges on the go. | | |
| hahaha. so i was linked to this flip chart comedy bit by demetri martin on comedy central. it's not brand new, but it's still amusing to me. it also reminds me of one of my favorite blogspots that i linked here a couple years ago, indexed, whose author creates some fun graphs. the difference since my last post about that site is that it appears that it's expanding to the print book form next month. seems like the trend among my favorites at the moment.
also, this was probably the most glum starting semester week i've ever seen. at least the courses are interesting, some of the people are back, and the california primaries are approaching.
edit: oh yeah, speaking of flipbooks, about a little over a week ago, i created some frame-by-frame drawn animations with quicktime for the first time ever. these were were the first real motion clips i've created since my animated GIFs from the turn of the century (just my pompous way of saying 1999/2000). i actually previously didn't realize quicktime could generate motions so easily until i saw sue create one last, last fall in a cs art of animation course at cal. i couldn't get in last fall, but some documentation online showed me how to import image sequences and mix audio clips.
also, i showed karen how to do it, and she created her own animation segment better than mine. | | |
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