limedragon :)

minnie

Meet my new companion and assistant: minnie (shown on left). Treo is on the right, and he will be helping Mom now.

I love this little thing (BlackBerry Curve 8310). It’s similar in size to the Treo 650, but much thinner and lighter (65 g difference)!

I started a new sock on Wednesday night. Continue reading »

Postscript

Here’s a PS for the recent post. I’m trying out^* the ZenPhoto gallery, which some WordPress bloggers use. I love its clean interface and bulk uploading features. There’s a ZenPress plugin for WP that makes inserting images from the gallery fairly easy and painless.

Both appear to be relatively young in development; I think ZenPhoto has potential. If you’ve ever used Coppermine or Gallery2 for hosting your own gallery, they are massive compared to ZenPhoto, which uses fewer files, has simpler options/configuration, and is more dynamic. There are plans for WordPress integration, which I think would be awesome.

I used it for the hat pictures in yesterday’s post, so you may have noticed the difference. I displayed clickable thumbnails instead. I haven’t dressed up the ZenPhoto gallery on my site yet, but you can preview it here. I’m curious about a few things. Do you prefer thumbnails in blog posts (loads faster for reading) that you can click on-demand, or the larger images I’ve used in the past (loads a bit slower)? If you clicked to view a larger image, did it load quickly? Was it too much of a nuisance to have to back-button to the original post instead of closing a pop-up window? Many thanks! :)

^*Because my Picasa integration plugin for WordPress has suddenly started duplicating my pictures… sigh.

Spellchecking

I got a notification tonight from Firebox about a new update for 1.5, but I decided to try Firefox 2.0 instead. Guess what?

Continue reading »

Blogland

Such a vast area to nagivate! I’ve fallen behind on my blog reading again. Continue reading »

Bookography

Continue reading »

Q*bert

One good thing from the ’80s decade: Q*bert. If you played video console games or home video games (Atari, Colecovision, etc), you most likely played this game. I absolutely loved Q*bert, and it always pops into my mind whenever I see tumbling blocks, slanted squares, or cube-type patterns. It was also a colorful, maybe even psychedlic, game; you had to jump on each cube to change its color, completing the level when all cubes changed. As the levels got harder, sometimes you had to do it twice. If you made a wrong jump (eg: off the pyramid) Q*bert plonked to his death. There were also bad guys like a sproingy snake coil to avoid.

I took a break from my two sock projects on Friday and Saturday to knit a huge (to me anyway) washcloth with this cotton chenille. Because I chose a slanted square pattern, working on it constantly made me recall the funny-looking, adorable Q*bert creature. I used most of the cotton chenille hank and a US 6 needle to make a 10.5-inch square washcloth. I intended to machine wash and dry purposely to shrink the washcloth. (After all, the label says to handwash then dry flat.) None of the pictures I took turned out well, but the washcloth turned out great after a wash and tumble dry. It’s softer and fluffier. It hardly shrunk, though, but I’m happy with it.

While the Q*bert reminiscing was good, I had a not-so-good ’80s Fashion Nightmare Flashback at MOA while mall walking. In the Gap front window, there was an eerily familiar sight. There were thick-striped polo shirts accented with gray (eg: red gray red gray, or blue gray blue gray…). I managed to swallow my gasp of horror and not trip. I couldn’t believe it. You see, way back in the late ’80s, maybe 1 or 2 years before the Gap became what it is today (eg: it wasn’t yet cool), they had the exact same patterning on a bunch of mix-and-match shirts and shorts. The colors and styles appeared to be a strong match to the old versions. I couldn’t find an example at the Gap website, though. I remember back then, my friend bought one with red stripes, and mine was turquoise. (I hadn’t learned my colors yet, either, yuck! I don’t believe I wore any good outfits in the ’80s until I discovered Esprit and Generra. I freed myself from brand name dependency in the ’90s, thank goodness!)

A different kind of keyboard