hwan.com

I've been wondering what to do with hwan.com, it being somewhat boring and tiresome to update. Do people even visit anymore? Well, whether they do or no, I'm going to give the site another facelift. Time to rise anew, my Frankenblog! I spent some of today tinkering with a JavaScript function that returns a calendar month in an HTML table , taking the year, month, and an array of values representing days that require links. A fun exercise. Next, I'm going to FINALLY build some utility classes/functions for handling the hwan.com entries. The current page code, while neat, is quite broken and a pain to use. Things that have been going on? A lot of StarCraft, bicycle classes. Some reading done, some exercise. Very little socializing or shopping. Thinking about buying a place has made me rueful about my improvident spending habits. I wish there was an easy way to get a home.

I was walking home and fiddling with my iPhone when it slipped out of my hands and bounced into a storm grate. Scrambling on the floor I tried in vain to squeeze an arm through. I continued home distraught when I ran into Sarah Silverman. I don't actually recall sleeping with her but it may have happened, I'm not sure. There was another girl in the dream, in another setting, unnamed and faceless now, a sidenote in my imagination. I do remember coming back the next day to the grate and prying it open. I lowered myself gingerly into the water and lifted my iPhone out, shaking off the excess water. I don't look at it, for fear of what I might see. I've grown rather accustomed to it. Outside of the iPod functionality I primarily use it for its WiFi though I have been more active with taking pictures and posting them to twitter. Speaking of which, I'm finding it very difficult to come up with material for hwan.com these days. It's just that there's no...

Monday I woke up at 5:30 in the morning and my sleep hasn't been quite the same since. Well, nearly the same in that I haven't gotten to work early for quite a while. I do enjoy getting there early (a rare happenstance), before anyone else, my tasks rolling and everything in the zone. Ah, to sleep on time. An alarm to go to bed! Someday I may actually do it. Played a few ICCup games of StarCraft, did alright. My game has improved considerably, but I still need to practice my technical skills and micro. I've chosen Zerg as my race but the constant expanding and building is such a hassle, albeit a necessary one. It's seems obvious why so many players choose Protoss, with their simple, powerful units. Unfortunately I've only one friend at my level, but that's enough for us to both continue growing, building off the skills of the other. I've also been reading the Battle Angel Alita manga. Addictive and thankfully not that long. I like that it deal...

Bicycle class yesterday. Need to get a new chain and new brake cables, will want to tune-up the latter, install the former next class. Lots of characters. Story-filled old men, quiet young dudes, shady fellows. It's quite entertaining though I do find all the stories tiresome. Not the teacher though; I find him quite the sage. Funny, I keep thinking I'll have something to say but I'm afraid I don't. No real tales to tell. OH I've been getting into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs . Love the lead singer's voice, reminds me of Siouxsie Sioux. Zero, Maps, all the tracks are really right up my alley. I saw them play on last weeks Saturday Night Live and was impressed. Also I might start getting into Glass Candy as I am fairly in love with their version of Computer Love . Yeah sorry, can't think of anything else worth mentioning right now. Mayhaps after the weekend?

I woke up and realized that I hardly drank anything today, Good Friday. At work it's easy to keep drinking -- water, coffee, juice, that's all we got and plenty of it. But at home it simply doesn't occur to me to make myself a drink. Perhaps subconsciously I just don't want to wash the cup. Whatever the reason, I hardly drank anything. Two cups of instant coffee( awful I know), that's it. So, a few glasses of watered down Tropicana and I'll return to bed. I kept thinking it was Saturday, the day had all the trappings of one for me: no plans, no work, got up just before noon. Cleaned the apartment, did a little laundry, watched some TV, played some games. Good day. I sure could go for some ramen right now.

So it turns out that having a hole in a bicycle tire tread causes the inner tube to explode when inflated. Two inner tubes later, I've replaced both the front and back treads and my bike feels very different. The new treads are tacky and stick amazingly to the road; almost too well as they kick up a lot of gravel, making a disheartening sound as the stones grind against the rain fenders. My attempt to clean the chain has resulted in a clunky ride -- the internals of the rear axle no longer spins freely. Not that I remember it doing so but it does dwell on my mind now. I bought some MOO minicards and while I don't have much excuse to give them out I do find them fun to have. I'll need to remember next time however that they really do have very limited real estate for pictures as they managed to crop out the edges of the ones I'd uploaded. I also got that little keychain dispenser which is larger than I'd imagined but still quite neat. Quiet weekend thus far. ...

I blame my tumblr.com page for the lack of updates. And Twitter. And FaceBook, though to a much lesser extent. Those are good places to check up on my "What's my mood?"-type updates. I've been meaning to add a link to my tumblr here. But obviously I'm too lazy to do it, though writing about it is no problem for me. Making (and eating) dumplings. So that jury duty thing didn't turn out to be much of anything as we were dismissed early, there apparently being no need for us that week. I did a lot of sitting around trying to do work on a WiFi connection and, as such, not getting a whole lot done. The experience is very much like waiting for your flight at the airport, after you've passed customs -- you can't go anywhere, you're stuck in a big room with a bunch of strangers, and you're all waiting for your number to be called. I didn't really meet anyone there, but it was refreshing to be reminded of who exactly makes up the popu...

I was catching up on my 30 Rock viewing the other day and Liz Lemon said something to the effect of "...It used be that you only had to wait for a phone call. Now guys can ignore you with so many different devices..." e.g. Facebook, myspace, twitter, MSN. That insight struck a chord with me -- there really ARE so many ways to not meet people, to not talk to friends, to not communicate. Or perhaps micro-communicate, batch communicate. Microbatch communication? Publishing thoughts, 140 characters at a time. I feel a bit stretched thin. Jury duty, indeed. Just the selection part mind you. They sit you in this big room with around 200 other people, waiting for your section to be called. I spent the first day fiddling with the laptop work lent me so that I could still be productive, though Remote Desktopping on One Zone high speed internet is an exercise in time travel, the bad kind where things sometimes take a while to catch up to where you are. I will be going to the courthou...

Wow, I'm taken aback by the vitriol that many critics are throwing at Watchmen , notably those on Rottentomatoes . Seriously, 43% on the tomatometer? Ouch. I enjoyed the film enough that I picked up a copy of the comic, something I'd always wanted to own but just never really had enough interest or reason to do so. I found it for half price, this latest reprint (the 22nd?) likely causing Alan Moore to spin in his grave, poor fellow. Still, from where does all this hate for the movie come from? I admit that it's not everyone's cup of tea but it's easily more entertaining than 90% of the junk out there. I don't watch that junk but I'm certain of the validity of my statement. Bicycle season! And with it comes.. flat tires. My ride home from Koreatown somehow earned me a flat tire. I went to buy some wrenches today, but I got the wrong size. Perhaps the time to replace the tread is nigh.

I got sick on the weekend, some kind of flu-like thing that kept my energy levels way down. So low did I feel, depressing, morbid thoughts swimming about my head as I tossed and turned, unable to rest peacefully. All better now, thankfully yes. Now if only March would get back on track towards warmer days and nights. Unwilling to venture outside I finally got around to installing and playing Mass Effect, BioWare's action RPG from 2007 and it is good. It reminds me strongly of Knights of the Old Republic which isn't that surprising -- why change a winning formula? Planets to explore, lots of crazy races and creatures, fun combat and easy inventory system, plenty of character dialog and development and NPC banter. A fair bit of walking in this one too, but I don't mind it all that much. I've only played about 10 hours or so worth and so far everything I've seen has been pretty delicious. The planet surveying brings to mind Star Control 2, what with the resource searc...

I am trying that Indigo shortcovers.com iPhone app and, while I do enjoy the actual reading of books on my phone, the software could really use some work. My biggest beef is that it connects to the server if you haven't opened the application for a while, even though all you want to do is continue with the page that was already downloaded. Which is itself another issue -- the app seems to only download a chapter at a time. Is it so hard to load pages in the background so that I never have to face a loading screen? The interface while reading manages to annoy me by taking up valuable real estate with an unnecessary menu bar at the top and bottom (guys, it's a touch-screen device; I don't need back and forward buttons). A Kindle-killer I think not. It especially doesn't help that the search engine for titles is dastardly poor. Oh hey, yeah, The Watchmen this weekend. Not sure how I feel about it. I mean, I entirely expect the plot to be mangled and perhaps stripped of...