Well, Peru was just absolutely incredible.  I’ll make a mega post later when all of my best photos are uploaded and spare you the play by play.

It’s summer!  What are my plans?

I turned in my TCH badge today but I still have a bit of work to do on the LEAH website.  Hopefully I can wrap that up by the middle of June.

Here’s a rough to-do list for the next few months:

Try to hook up with the Boys and Girls Club

—————————————————————————

Landscape the backyard to look like one of these yards

————————————————————————–

Successfully complete some inductive bible studies (starting with Kay Arthur’s book, Lord, Only You Can Change Me)

—————————————————————————

Improve my photography skillz (via Tom Ang’s Digital Photography Masterclass)

—————————————————————————-

Improve my tennis skillz (try to reach a 4.0 rating)

—————————————————————————-

Read the Harry Potter Series

—————————————————————————

I think I’m most excited about improving my photography skills.  Peru is such a beautiful country that really almost any photo you take is going to be a good one but I spent a lot of the trip frustrated with settings and not being able to get my photos to look the way I wanted them to.  I think photography is one of those fads that a lot of people can latch on to and most people plateau and are okay with it but only some people really disciplined in learning and pushing themselves to the next level.  It reminds me a lot of acoustic guitar in high school where everybody and their mama learned to play the C, G, D, E, A, B, F, Em, Am, and F#m chords, learned how to do a double strum, and then just quit learning.  I really want to push myself.  The book seems pretty interesting, it’s presented in the format of a class so there are assignments.  Maybe I’ll post my homework assignments here to log my progress.

It’s going to be a summer of transitions and changes, goodbyes and hellos, sunshine and mosquitoes, and learning and growing.  I’m really looking forward to it.

Oh yeah, and if you haven’t seen Pixar’s UP yet, go see it!  I think it’s the 4th best Pixar movie.  (1st Place is a tie: Toy Story & The Incredibles, 2nd Place: Monster’s Inc.)  Such a sweet movie to start the summer with — (oh and the 3D is not that great so it’s not a must).

I am one of your most loyal users.  I use the word “google” in its lower-case verb form on a daily basis, I use Gmail exclusively for all of my email needs, I use Google Calendar to coordinate my family’s schedule and even my friends’ schedules, I use Google Documents to collaborate on trip planning as well as other brainstorming needs, I use Google Groups to organize the student organizations that I am in, I use Google Images almost as frequently as I use the web, I use Google Maps to find my way around the city and on vacation, I use YouTube to entertain myself, and I even used Blogger once upon a time before I decided to buy my own hosting space.

This past year, I have adopted the use of Google Reader into my online regimen and it has served me fairly well.  I have been able to share things with friends that would have normally just fallen to the back of my mind never to be revisited again.  It has also pushed me to keep up to date on interesting news and hobbies that I have and I feel it makes me efficient with my time on the web.  It has been such a pleasant experience that I have convinced many of my friends to start using Google Reader (even the husband has joined, and I’m sure you know how difficult that is since I’m sure you are familiar with his online click patterns!) and I sing the praises of Google everywhere I go.  I think of it kind of as a volunteer gig.  In fact, I’m considering listing “Freelance/Volunteer Google PR Rep” right underneath speaking at Career Day at the Houston Hispanic Forum.

There are two things I don’t use of yours and for good reasons.  I don’t use Picasa to share pictures because Flickr is light years ahead of Picasa as far as interface and community go and you really messed up big time when you let Yahoo! buy Flickr.  Because of that mistake, I have to maintain a Yahoo! account that I only use for the purposes of Flickr.  The other thing I don’t use of yours is the G1 because the G1 is bulky, ugly and doesn’t have a slick UI like the iPhone.

All this to say, I am a fan.  I support what you do.  So please take what I have to say in context.

There are a lot of things you need to fix:

• You didn’t buy Flickr and now it belongs to Yahoo (yes, this is worth mentioning again)
• Your load times are starting to suck.  When I first joined Gmail, I could click on a link to Gmail and my inbox would appear within seconds.  Now when I click on a link to Gmail, I see this:

Then after a few seconds, I see my inbox.  I don’t know why I put up with this, but I do.  Many times a day.

• There are too many “Gmail is having problems, please check later” incidents.  Thankfully you released an offline option to Gmail and some other Google Services but downtime for email is really just unacceptable.
• Google Labs.  While I do appreciate many of the functions offered through Google Labs, why not offer it through the settings so that you don’t have to manually turn on labs and then enable the services?  And why do you have people wasting their time to develop functions such as “Canned Responses”, “Old Snakey” or “Mail Goggles”?  I mean, really?  Is this your best use of resources?
• When are you taking Gmail out of Beta version?
• Why didn’t you think it was a good idea to buy Flickr?
• Why have you made it so unintuitive to add friends on Google Reader?  Here’s the official answer on Google Help:

“Reader’s friend list comes from the list of people you can chat with on Google Talk or Gmail chat. To invite friends to see your Reader shared items, simply invite them to chat. To remove them, delete them from your Gmail contacts, or from your Talk list. Some friends might have been added to your chat list automatically if you’ve emailed back and forth with them; if you don’t want any more contacts added this way, you can change this setting.“

Why didn’t you just create a quick and easy way to add a friend to your reader by putting their email address in a field?  Surely you could have gotten Dave C. to work on that instead of having him work on Old Snakey!

• You finally enabled comments on Google Reader!  Thank you.  Why did you forget to add a new comment count?  You have counts for newly shared feeds, why not for new comments?  How will we know when there are new comments?
• When we see comments on someone’s shared feed, why not give us the option to add them as a friend?  Are you still using the pre-Facebook definition of the word “friend” and the pre-Twitter definition of the word “contact”?
• How come when I see someone’s public page of shared feeds, I don’t have the ability to add them as a Google Reader contact?
• When are you going to improve Google Finance so that I don’t have to switch over to Yahoo! Finance?
• When are you going to add Google Cars so that I don’t have to rely on Yahoo! Cars?

I better stop, my cheeks are starting to get hot.

Look, I still want this to work out and I’m not making any ultimatums here.  I just want you to stop taking me for granted and get to work on fixing some things.  And I know you aren’t really the jealous type but while I was researching Nambu, I found out about FriendFeed which looks pretty great.  That’s all I want to say about that.

Yours truly,

It’s Complicated in Houston

I’ve been using five ways to legally hunt and I’d like to share them with you:

One: The good thing about commercials is that they’re using better songs these days.  I downloaded (for $0.99 on Amazon.com!) Citizen Cope’s “Let the Drummer Kick” from the new 2009 Acura TSX commercial last week.  Same concept applies to prime time TV shows.  Usually a quick google search will help you find the song you’re looking for.  Just try to remember a line or two of lyrics.

————————————————————

Two: I’ve been paying attention to what people are listening to on Facebook.  It’s especially easy when my friends (or distant acquaintances) have great taste in music and post awesome lists of artists or albums.  My childhood friend, Charlene Jackson, recently posted a great list of the top 25 albums of 2008 with commentary and I slowly worked my way through the list, looking for YouTube videos of the songs and buying songs off of Amazon whenever I found winners.  Even a quick glance through people’s music lists can tip me off.  Thanks in advance for letting me borrow music from you all.

————————————————————-

Three: A few weeks ago, I discovered La Blogotheque and The Take Away Shows (on YouTube of all places).  I know I already shared this on Google Reader but I just have to reemphasize for those of you who don’t read my Google Reader shared feeds.  In their own words:

“The Take away shows are la Blogotheque’s first video podcasts.

Every week, we invite an artist or a band to play in the streets, in a bar, a park, or even in a flat or in an elevator, and we film the whole session. Of course, what makes the beauty of it is all the little incidents, hesitations, and crazy stuff happening unexpectingly. Besides, we do not edit the videos so they look perfectly flawless, instead we keep the raw sound of the surroundings. Our goal is to try and capture instants, film the music just like it happens, without preparation, without tricks. Spontaneity is the keyword.

The Take away shows exist since April 2006. There was Chryde, who wanted to shake things up and find another way to share music, and there was Vincent Moon, who wanted to film music differently. Chryde offered Moon to go and film musicians in the city, Moon seized the idea and glorified it. Since then, other directors across the world joined this project, and we plan to extend it worldwide.”

Here is one of my favorites.  It takes awhile to get going but listen to it through the end, it’s beautiful and powerful.  (I can’t really watch the video without getting motion sick, which is a shame since it’s such a beautiful place.  Not all of the videos on the website are this shaky, the different directors have different styles.)

Here’s another good one:

And here’s a fun one (thanks again to Charlene J.!):

They have so many amazing videos on there.  I love the way the videos are so organic and natural — in such ordinary and breathtaking environments (on a rooftop in Paris!).  I am going to try to listen/watch all of the Take Away shows.  There are a lot of popular artists on there like Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and even Jason Mraz — but there are also plenty I’ve never heard of like Satine or Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s.  And I figure, a band cool enough to let someone record a video of them like this deserves to be listened to.  This is easily my new favorite website.

Here are the more memorable ones:

Justin Racz wanted to use this photo in his book, 50 Bosses Worse Than Yours.  (Can you guess who the boss is?) I actually never bought the book to verify that my photo made it in there — but even if it isn’t, at least it was considered!  He was supposed to mail me a copy of his book but he never did. 

Elana Farley, one of the photo editors of Texas Bound (a supplement to Texas Monthly), contacted me to use this photo from a crabbing trip to Galveston.  She was by far the most thoughtful in thanking me for the use of my photo, she sent me the most current issue of their mini mag and a cool postcard with a handwritten message!

Ronnie Walker wanted to use my photo of Charlie, Judy and Lawrence’s dog, on his Grief Support for Survivors of Suicide website.  I guess he thought Charlie was pretty comforting.

John Tsotsoros, cast member in the Opera in the Heights production of Adriana Lecouvreur, contacted me to ask for permission to use my photos of him that I took during the dress rehearsal to update his website.

Last but not least, I was contacted by Steven Robinson a few weeks ago to use this photo in a press release for his company, Access IS, in relation to an Access keyboard for Nike America.

————————————————————–

With the exception of maybe the last photo, I don’t really like any of the other photos.  But I think it’s worth mentioning because it’s pretty cool that Flickr is connecting people who need photos and people who like taking photos.  And this is also hopefully encouragement to people to tag their photos more frequently and submit them to more Flickr groups.  Sigh, I’m behind on tagging.

As winter approaches, I really enjoy cooking hearty comfort foods.  I don’t normally photograph the food I make but I suddenly had an urge to take some of a crockpot Pot Roast I made a few weeks ago.

It’s not as if I need more reasons to eat but I’ve been meaning to post The Omnivore’s Hundred for awhile and am finally getting around to doing it.  Thanks to Sandra T. Tsui for sharing this on the reader!

Basically, the Omnivore’s Hundred is a list created and posted by Very Good Taste (VGT) and it has been passed around the blogosphere.

Here’s how VGT describes the list:

“Here’s a chance for a little interactivity for all the bloggers out there. Below is a list of 100 things that I think every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. The list includes fine food, strange food, everyday food and even some pretty bad food – but a good omnivore should really try it all.”

Here are the instructions:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

1.   Venison
2.   Nettle tea
3.   Huevos rancheros
4.   Steak tartare
5.   Crocodile
6.   Black pudding
7.   Cheese fondue
8.   Carp
9.   Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

I think being Asian gives you a distinct advantage on this list.  Between pho, pocky and flowers, we’ve got a lot of these items covered in our childhood.

I only crossed off one item: roadkill.  I’m pretty much open to trying any food once but since this isn’t really a separate kind of food, I’m not interested in trying it.  I think it’s there more for the shock value anyway.

It’s exciting to know there’s still a lot of food to try out there.  Now where can I find a three-star Michelin restaurant?

————————————————-

Speaking of foodstuffs, my buddy, Jin, recently started a baking blog, Angry Baker, to chronicle all of his baking experiments and endeavors.  On there he discusses methods, techniques, equipment and recipes.  Check it out and bookmark it!

I’ve recently been reading a new (new to me) blog “Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist: Advice at the intersection of work and life“  I don’t even remember how I came across it and I don’t know why I like it so much.  It’s just one of the most honest blogs I’ve read in a long time.  Sockparade’s not very honest.  So it’s nice to read from the other side of the spectrum.

I like the name Penelope.  I’ve considered naming my future daughter that — but only if I can stop the husband from trying to rhyme it with “Cantaloupe”.

Anyway, today is when Rosh Hashanah ends.  Wiki says that it is a day of rest and things that are prohibited on the Shabbat are also prohibited today.  Here’s a quote from her post about it:

“All this to say: you don’t need the Jewish holidays in order to learn something about yourself. Force yourself to isolate for a day. Don’t allow yourself to do all the usual things. You will learn something about yourself. It’s impossible not to.”

If it were a Saturday I think it’d be pretty easy.  I isolate on a lot of Saturdays.  But a Tuesday or Wednesday?  That’s pretty rough.  I’d really like to set a date for a day of rest on a weekday.  I’d also like to spend some time fasting and praying.  And then my next thought is: But maybe next semester though because this semester is really busy.

—————————————————–

After Hurricane Ike passed through Houston I didn’t really watch the news coverage of it.  So I’m really glad a family friend sent my husband this link of Ike photos.  Impressive photography and just solid photojournalism.  As a warning, the photos are hard to look at without wincing.

————————————————————–

Finally.  I just finished uploading the last of my Turkey photos.  Sometimes it’s hard to balance how many photos I take on a vacation.  I’m usually afraid I’ll regret bringing my D200 somewhere so I end up bringing it everywhere.  After 10 days in Turkey, I decided to leave the D200 at home for the last day of shopping in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.  It’s quite unfortunate because there were a lot of great photos to be had but it was also nice to just enjoy myself without carrying the extra weight.  Some people enjoy the solid, heavy feel of the D200 but I wouldn’t mind some lightweight technology.

I definitely think my D200 is one of the best investments I’ve made since graduating from undergraduate college.  I’m still trying to convince the husband to get an SLR camera.

I’ll be throwing up photos of Colorado and the Rocky Mountains as soon as I get a paper off of my back.

So after some observation, I realized that Twitter isn’t killing my blog.  Google Reader is killing my blog.  I usually blog about the interesting things I like but now I just share them through Google.  I think the solution is to pick out the really outstanding items I share there and blog about it.  We’re getting this (sockparade) down to a science.

Here’s a quick sampling:

I love Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keys.  I don’t know anyone that doesn’t.  Here it is in blog form.  Just make sure you read it from the oldest entry to the newest entry.  Did you know they are coming out with a Facebook Movie?  If you’re bored, check out the blog Cake Wrecks for a few good laughs.  I found it through Boing Boing but apparently Ashteroid is blogrolling it too.  Disaster movie got a 00% on RottenTomatoes.  Do you like your drinks on the rocks?  Here is an ice alternative that looks like real rocks.

The geek level and randomness varies from day to day.  You can either follow my reader by bookmarking this page, checking out the blue widget I have on my sidebar, or joining Google Reader yourself and adding me as a friend.

———————————————————–

I think it’s interesting how everyone (myself included) is hating on the new facebook layout.  I finally took a look around this morning and while it’s pretty cluttered– I have to admit that I always prefer personal customization.  Not Myspace-customization where the font, colors and backgrounds become hideous, but drag and drop widget customization.  So I think I’m okay with it.  It’ll just take some time to get used to.  What’s interesting is that Flickr recently updated their website too but I haven’t heard as much grumbling.  Without making a comment on whether the new Flickr is better or worse than the old Flickr, they flipped the page the same way Facebook has flipped, by placing the main content on the lefthand side of the page and the column on the right.  I think this is better design (which is why sockparade is the way it is) but it’s counter intuitive when you have already been trained to expect to see the page the old way.  I haven’t heard too much grumbling about Flickr.  Is it because Flickr management has made their way into our hearts and we trust them to do what’s best for Flickr?  Even if it means that comments left on your photos are mashed up with comments you’ve left on other people’s photos?  But maybe we’re willing to give that up in order to mute some activity?  That’s customer loyalty.

Speaking of layout changes, I am still scratching my head as to why Microsoft would change MS Office menus in Vista.  I know they were trying to innovate and keep up with the times but one of their greatest advantages over Apple was that they had a huge user base that was trained on the interface of MSOffice.  I’m not sure why they would sacrifice that.

Speaking of efficiency, I ordered a white, 16GB iPhone 3G this past Sunday.  They said it will take 4-5 days to come in so that means I should receive a phone call tomorrow or Friday.  I haven’t been this excited about a product since I got my Sony XBrite monitor in college.  I don’t mean to be over dramatic but I think this purchase will change my entire lifestyle.  For those who don’t know me, I’m not a very well connected person.  I am an email junkie during the weekdays but during the weekends and in the evenings it’s difficult to contact me unless you are with me in person.  I used to go days without knowing where my cellphone was and checking my voicemail once a month was not unusual.  With the help of the husband, I’ve curbed most of this behavior and have really made an effort in the past year to stay better connected.  But I still have my days.

Once I get the iPhone, I’ll always know where my phone is (it’s too expensive not to!), I’ll always have access to email, my spontenaeity will be much better informed, and I’ll finally have my calendar on me!  While this sounds great for efficiency, I hope I don’t get too sucked in.  I don’t want to be that guy (or girl) who is constantly checking his/her phone.  I don’t want to forget the pleasure of reading a paperback book on the beach.  You know, that sort of thing.  I think I’ll be fine, I’m just slightly apprehensive.

———————————————————

We went to the new H MART yesterday to pick up some ingredients for our Okonomiyaki dinner.  It’s a lot closer than Chinatown, has Korean, Japanese and Chinese foodstuffs and snacks and it’s cheap!  The produce section was really clean (sometimes hard to find in Asian Groceries) and looked really fresh.  They also have a mini foodcourt and some prepared food.  If you haven’t been, make a trip out there sometime soon.

——————————————————–

I’m sold on the Houstonist.  Last week it told me about the St. Arnold’s Scavenger Hunt Pub Crawl that was happening.  (We were outside of the first 200 entries, but they’re still letting us come to the party, we just won’t be eligible for the kegerator raffle.)  And this week I read about BarCampHouston3 which the husband and I will be attending this weekend.

——————————————————–

EDIT:

I just received the following email from AT&T!

“Your iPhone 3G order has been shipped and is on its way to the AT&T store in which you placed the order, please see address below. Your credit card has been charged.”

I love good freeware. I had to convert some .jpeg files to .pdf files this morning and stumbled across a really good freeware called Magic PDF.  After you install it, the software acts as a virtual printer.  Anytime you need to convert something to PDF, simply print it and choose Magic PDF as your printer.  It’ll prompt you to save the file and voila!  PDFed.  Simple, easy to use, and FREE!  No watermark or popup ads like some other freeware/shareware.

——————————————————-

Went to the Optometrist today.  Pretty ridiculous as usual.  Puffs of air shooting into my eyes, looking at the red barn at the end of the road and watching it slowly get blurry, following the tips of pens, staring into bright lights, trying to see how many fingers the assistant was holding up using only my peripheral vision, reading numbers in the “make sure you’re not colorblind” book, wearing the 3D glasses to choose which dot pops out, choosing number 1 or number 2, etc.  Why is Optometry school so hard to get into?

————————————————————

Also, I updated my links and recategorized them.  The new wordpress makes it really easy.  “What links?” you might ask.  The links on the right side of the page– so far down the page that you’ve probably never even seen them before.  Take a look if you’re bored.

Most people hate Martha Stewart.

I don’t.  I’m kind of fascinated by her.  I know she’s rumored to have a horrendous temper towards her staff and she did participate in the whole stock selling scandal.  But she’s got a pretty incredible biography and I respect anyone that’s been able to make a successful living off of what they love doing.  And I really like people who are at the top of their game.  You don’t have to like someone to give respect.  She’s a business-guru and I know Oprah gets a lot of attention for being one of the most powerful businesswomen out there but I’d venture to guess that Martha’s got Oprah beat when it comes to business.  (Oprah’s interview with Martha.)

I really liked her Blueprint magazine before it shutdown and I still subscribe to the Bluelines blog which has something to do with that.  I’ve recently started reading her personal blog (The Martha Blog).  It’s surprisingly personal and I like that she takes mediocre photos of her vacations and her 4th of July weekend with Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon on her boat.

Here’s a fun blooper reel of Martha Bloopers:

And here’s a fun segment that her production crew put together:

Through Bluelines I also discovered Dinner Tonight which has different recipes and food ideas for you to try.  I’m making Chicken Lettuce Wraps tonight.

Part of me feels like I need to train up to be a better wife and a better future mom.  And practicing these recipes and home ideas will help somehow?

————————————————–

I went to WaMu this morning to withdraw some cash and they have a new system where you complete your transaction at the pod counter with the teller and then the teller hands you a receipt and you get your cash from the cash pickup station.  This way the tellers do not have access to the cash and they can’t get robbed.  I think it’s a pretty smart system.