you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

Stumbled onto a Fleetwood Mac video for Darfur. Then I noticed something uncanny…

My mom grows a strange cactus that produces some of the most beautiful and delicate-looking flowers that I have ever seen. When I was living in Japan, I visited a farmer who had the same kind of flower in his house, suspended in a big container of alcohol. Upon returning to the US, I remembered we had a few of these in the house and became very curious about what they were. Having developed an interest in botany as a little boy, I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting flowers and plants.

Every time this plant flowered, my mom made a big fuss over it, taking pictures and going on ceaselessly about how beautiful the petals looked and how wonderful they smelled.

I googled “cactus blossoms” for a bit, and eventually found some images of dragon fruit flowers. The “leaves” (if you can call them leaves..) of the plant resembled the ones we had, and the flowers were almost identical. Yet, I knew our plant wasn’t a dragon fruit. I didn’t know how to research this further, and not finding my plant, soon forgot about my quest.

Today, I accidentally happened upon dragon fruit images again and remembered my earlier attempt to identify the plant. This time, I looked up the scientific name, in hopes of finding relatives of this plant: Hylocereus. Bingo! My plant was a Epiphyllum oxypetalum.

After 2 years, the mystery was solved. These beautiful flowers are Queen of the Night, or Night-blooming Cereus.

doing wonders for my self-esteem here >_<

p.s. that diagram looks exactly like the USB symbol

In a survey by some British pollsters, ‘blogosphere’ and ‘blog’ came in 2nd and 3rd place, respectively, as the most annoying words on the internet. (’Folksonomy’ was the winner). While I don’t find ‘blog’ to be annoying (primarily because I have one of my own), ‘blogosphere’ and ‘netiquette’ do make me wince.

I never liked marketing-speak or awkward portmanteaus when plain English words suffice. Blogosphere and netiquette both have that contrived ring to them, which is why I suppose they are so hated. These are nothing compared to the dot-com heyday when every company was inventing words like there’s no tomorrow and tacking on “i” or “e” to everything in an effort to differentiate their product from the other me-too’s out in the market. Fortunately, most of that has died down now.

Here is the full article from Yahoo.

Does CS3 really need to be this big? Acrobat Professional alone takes up 800 MB! For a program that essentially makes forms and text documents, 800 is really excessive. The other programs in the suite are not much better, each of them averaging 500-800 MB.

On my Quad Core workstation, Design Premium took almost an hour to install (I did save a whopping 200 MB by de-selecting Adobe Bridge though). Adobe has never been known for slim applications, but they really let it all hang out on this one. To be fair, 2 other people have said it only too 15 minutes to install. My PC has Folding@Home on it, which may be causing it to drag.

As far as performance and usability improvements, I can’t say yet. I haven’t had the chance to try out the applications yet. Flash doesn’t seem to have changed much. I was hoping for a more Adobe-like interface, especially for the foreground and background color toolbar selectors and gradient fill controls like Illustrator.

I do like the minimalistic application icons and colored splash screens though.

I’ll stick w/ CS2 for the time being.

These are red shiso plants, growing happily in my backyard. Every spring, they sprout up on their own from seeds dropped by plants from the previous year. In English, they known as either perilla or beefsteak plants, although the only place I’ve heard these names used is in dictionaries and botany-related websites. I call them by their Japanese name, shiso. In Korean, it’s kkaennip, but I believe it’s a different cultivar than the plants you see here.

I love shiso and rediscovered kkaennip kimchi at the Korean eatery near my office. They marinate the leaves with too much salt though, so I decided to make my own lower-sodium version. Kkaennip kimchi is usually made with the green shiso, which has a much stronger flavor, but I had to subsitute.

Kkaennip kimchi is very simple to make. All you need is soy sauce, sugar, salt, a clove or two of pureed garlic, and some crushed pepper flakes. Don’t ask about measurements (I never measure). Use your judgement. If you want to cut down on your sodium, you can just submerge the leaves in soy sauce and they’ll turn out about the same. Refrigerate and the leaves’ll be ready in as little as 30 mins.

Here’s how they turned out.

Not bad. I went through this batch of in a few minutes. When I get some green shiso seeds, I’ll plant some and try again.

Folks, I said it before and I’ll say it again. The Zune is a fantastic failure. In the half year that it has been out, guess how many Zunes I have seen on the streets and subways of New York.

One. That’s right! One!

The subway cars of New York City are as good a barometer as any marketing survey, and reflect pretty accurately what people spend their money on and what products succeed in the marketplace, I think.

In 7 months, I’ve seen 1 Zune. iPods? Hundreds, if not thousands. Not a day goes by when I don’t see at least 5 or 6 people on the train with an iPod.

Microsoft expects the one millionth Zune to be sold sometime this month. Meanwhile, the iPod has sold over 100 million units in a little over 5 1/2 years.

Topping my list of really stupid and pointless– or even dangerous– inventions are these two items:

The George Forman iPod-ready Grill, because fire and expensive electronics mix so well. I wish this was some weird April Fool’s joke, but see for yourself.

Underwater MP3 player, cuz when you’re underwater, who needs situational awareness? The ability to hear approaching dangers or lifeguard instructions? Pffft!

Ever wanted to save a streaming video locally to your hard drive without jumping through hoops and monkeying with different screen recording software, sound card settings, and video capture devices? Now you can do it with VLC. Here are the instructions.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2004110413302786

I was able to get the video ok on every occasion, but capturing the audio in a format other media players could understand proved to be a trial and error process. VLC is very forgiving about the extension, almost to a fault. Unlike other media players that choke when the format doesn’t match the extension you’ve given the file, VLC will play it regardless of what you’ve named it. The resulting file I captured was not recognized by anything but VLC, which was a problem because I had to convert that to an FLV.

I finally figured it out using a combination of encapsulation and transcoding. I can’t remember now what they are though!

VLC is one of the best and most versatile media players out there, though the breadth of options and checkboxes can have casual users baffled. Even for a power user, all the options can have you running around in circles like i did today.