Things I Am Loving, Early February Edition

The Hunger Games trilogy. I don’t know why I bother trying to avoid popular fiction sometimes; I usually end up enjoying it once I give in. I ended up devouring the three books in less than 24 hours. They’re riveting: very action-packed. I kept telling myself, “One more chapter,” and then I just finished the book. Very similar (almost felt a little knock-off-ish?) to the Japanese novel/movie Battle Royale, but I guess the whole contest-for-your-life-in-a-postapocalyptic-setting thing can’t really be copyrighted or trademarked or whatever. They’re both good, you should read both!

Everyday carry. I guess there’s a name for what I’m obsessed with, all those nicely-arranged photos of what is in people’s bags, or what guys carry around in their pockets, or people’s “necessities” or whatever. It’s on Wikipedia, so it must be official. There’s also a Tumblr. I’m more into the mundane stuff (wallets, notebooks, pens, makeup bags, trinkets) than the survival stuff, which some people take really seriously. But I have a real interest in the physical objects that people carry about. Part voyeurism, part curiosity, part I-don’t-even-know. I think you can tell a lot about a person by what objects they place importance on. The image below is my favorite from FY! What’s In Your Bag?, another fantastic Tumblr on a popular theme. How elegant!

Audiobooks. The drive from the Bay Area to Los Angeles is somewhere between 5-6 hours, depending on traffic and how fast you’re going over the speed limit. It’s not that awful, considering the Bay Area to Oregon was closer to 8.5 or 9 hours, but it still drags on, particularly since the majority of the drive is on I-5, which is quite possibly the most boring freeway (highway?) ever. I’m a big fan of audiobooks for the duration, which kind of let me read a book while driving. My favorites are Young Adult fiction from childhood (pretty much anything by Tamora Pierce), which I’ve read enough to know almost by heart. I also have these on in the back a lot while writing papers or cleaning my room. Comforting noise that I don’t have to pay that much attention to.

Strawberry mochi. It’s been a long time since I’ve had this stuff, but I threw it in my cart on a whim when I was at Trader Joe’s, picking up groceries. SO GOOD. I know the whole idea of gelatinous rice cake mixture wrapped around ice cream and then frozen doesn’t really sound so delicious, but it’s really excellent. As long as it’s strawberry. I think the sweetness of the ice cream flavor makes this, cause I don’t actually like the vanilla or chocolate flavors. Anyways: a good little dessert snack, not too rich or anything. I feel so Asian when I eat them.

Fresh Sugar Passion Tinted Lip Treatment. Okay, I know it’s ridiculous to spend $22.50 on a lip gloss. It’s not even lipstick. But this stuff is awesome. One layer is just a great hint of color, but you can pile the stuff on if you want it darker. It’s got a smooth texture, which I love, cause I hate waxy stuff like Chapstick. It even smells great! It comes in more restrained colors, like clear/nude/rose, but I love the Passion color, described as “sheer crimson red.” It’s stupid expensive for a single tube of lip stuff, but since I don’t wear foundation, eyeliner, eyeshadow, or… well, any makeup other than nail and lip stuff, I figure I still come out ahead of all my other girlfriends on $ spent on makeup products throughout the year.

Index cards. I think I could write an ode to index cards. They’re just so damn versatile. To-do lists, Latin flashcards, perpetual diary entries, recipe cards, you name it and you can use an index card for it. The rules 3×5 ones are my favorites for everything but flash cards, for which I prefer blank on both sides. Don’t even get me started about color-coding nouns and verbs and other bits of language.

Matchbook. It’s an online magazine, it’s free, and you can download their entire archive (13 issues, including this month’s) for free, if you sign up for a (free) Issuu account. It’s full of lovely design stuff, recipes, fashion, book reviews… pretty much everything I adore in life. Minus, you know, video games and football and all that stuff I inherited from my brothers.

As one of their features, they do a mini-interview with those they feature, and I figured I’d end on that. It’s called the Matchbook Questionnaire:

• Tea or coffee? Chai tea lattes.
• I collect… Notebooks. Office supplies in general. Books.
• Favorite city? San Francisco.
• Spring or fall? Fall.
• Bloom of choice? Sunflowers.
• Style icon? I’m a jeans/skirts/sweaters/flats girl. Not so much with the fashion.
• Fragrance? DKNY Be Delicious.
• Linens? Anything cotton in more than 400 thread count.
• China pattern? Plain white bone china. Elegant enough for fancy occasions, and simple enough for everyday.
• Most prized possession? My baby blanket. Or silver charm bracelet. Or stuffed dog, Macaroni. Or collection of past planners/journals/scrapbooks.
• Girl crush? Kate Beckinsale.
• Boy crush? Norman Reedus.
• On weekends… I start off slow, with buttered toast, orange juice, and fresh fruit.

Why Analogue Books are Best: Two Views

(image via Bookshelf Porn)

Jonathan Franzen:

Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring….Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough….Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change….Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.

Maurice Sendak:

Fuck them, I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be, I will be dead, I won‘t give a shit.

(via Austin Kleon)

My Bed Is A Masterpiece

Seriously.

One of the things my parents/mom bought me for Christmas was a duvet cover! I had a comfy, cozy duvet all last term, and no cover for it. I wanted something white, she wanted me to get something less boring, and finally she compromised and bought me a beautiful white cover with subtle lines so it has some form of texture. The combination of finally having a metal bed frame, my memory foam mattress, the gorgeously soft Calvin Klein grey sheets (500 thread count), and this lovely duvet cover have turned my queen-sized bed into a veritable paradise. I plan on spending at least 30% of my total time this term lounging here. For real.

(Please ignore the off-center poster up there. I rearranged my furniture and haven’t gotten around to shifting the art yet.)

P.S. That brown dog is Macaroni, my dearest and oldest stuffed friend. He was a Valentine’s Day surprise from my parents when I was a little kid. He was named after the heart-shaped pasta we had for dinner that night.

P.P.S. I am so totally writing this blog post in bed.

In any case, moving on! My new planner has space for goals for the year on the first page. This is my clumsy way of segueing into the topics I said I was going to cover: looking back on 2011 (books read) and looking forward to 2012 (resolutions).

Let’s cover 2011 and my year in reading first:

• Total books read: 96
• New books vs. re-reads: 63 new and 33 re-read
• Physical vs. digital: 65 physical and 31 digital
• Non-fiction: 9/96
• Most anticipated: Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston
• Read twice in one year: Bossypants by Tina Fey and The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler
• Worst read*: Probably something by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (I re-read a lot of YA things I read years ago this winter). Not awful as in poorly written (although her first are a little awkward), but very vampire-cliche.
• Best read: The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler

*I can’t put down a book once I start it, even if it’s awful. I HAVE TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS. And even awful books have their moments.

My resolutions for this upcoming year include things about my bed and books, too. See how all these disparate subjects are (awkwardly) coming together? Here’s a probably incomplete list:

• No more eating in bed, even during finals week (!). We have a kitchen table, a couch in the main room, and I have a large and spacious desk in my room. There’s no reason why I need to eat my cereal in bed. Well, I mean, the sheets are warm and comfy. But seriously. No eating in bed anymore. Drinks are still totally okay.
• Read more books than 2011 (at least 97). Also, I’d like to increase the number of non-fiction things I get through.
• Cut back on the Diet Coke (2 servings or less per day) and increase water consumption (at least 2 servings per day).
• More sleep, less naps.
• Get rid of (throw away, donate, recycle, use up, whatever) 366 items, one per day of the year.
• Finish a goddamn crossword puzzle completely. I always come so close, and then have something like 3-10 clues I just can’t get.

So! Yeah. There’s that. Classes start in something like 36 hours, so I’m going to do my best to savor the last free hours… sleep in, be lazy, spend a horrifying amount of time on the internet, and get a nice dinner out (or ordered in) tomorrow. Maybe finish at least the frames for my new end tables. Hope y’all had/are having a lovely weekend!

On our next installment: a long overdue list of Things I Am Loving.

Thanksgiving! (+4 days)

Oh, sure. Go ahead. Be all indie-sullen and go on and on about subjugation of native people, and smallpox, and all of that. But let’s face it: Thanksgiving is an awesome holiday. You get to spend the whole day cooking and eating and watching football. Could you really ask for anything better?

Considering this is coming after Thanksgiving, obviously it wasn’t applicable for Thanksgiving 2011. Whatever. I was too busy eating Chinese food (which Westwood is sadly lacking), shopping, and spending time with my family to update this before Thanksgiving. Those are slightly better excuses than “eating Ranch sunflower seeds” and “watching old episodes of One Tree Hill,” which is what I usually do in Los Angeles.

Two of my key recipes I make every year, that people love: sage stuffing (with home-baked cornbread) and a marbled pumpkin cheesecake. For the stuffing, I use the cornbread recipe included in the link in the ingredients list. It’s pretty dry, but since it’s for stuffing, that’s totally fine. I also add sage to the cornbread batter before baking – about two large leaves, chiffonade-d. For the pumpkin cheesecake (and pumpkin pie in general), I also 1.5 the spices. More cinnamon, ginger and cloves is always a good idea.

Please ignore the fact that my crust is clearly sticking to the springform pan in the above picture. I loathe crumb crusts. Almost as much as making normal pie crust.

What other tips can I offer? Oh, gosh. Let’s think back to all the silly mistakes and tricks I’ve made/learned over the years:

• Crack eggs on a flat surface, like the kitchen counter, and not on the rim of your mixing bowl. Nobody likes egg shell fragments in their food.
• Have (at least) two designated mixing cups, one for wet ingredients and one for dry ingredients. Nothing like measuring out the buttermilk and then realizing you have a wet cup when it comes time to measure the flour.
• If you’re making a recipe on the back of a box or can (I always use the pumpkin pie recipe on the back of the Libby’s can) – DON’T THROW AWAY THE BOX OR CAN UNTIL YOU’RE SURE YOU DON’T NEED IT ANYMORE. Pumpkin pie is one of those things that you need to change the oven temperature halfway through. The last time I made it, I had to fish the empty can out of the trash. Twice.
• If you’re a girl – save the manicure until the next day, at least if you plan on cooking. Have a spa day partway through your Black Friday shopping spree. You will wreck your nails in the kitchen.
• Plan a really easy dinner for the night before, or order in take-out. You don’t want to do any more cooking (or cleaning) than absolutely necessary. Breakfast for dinner is one of my personal favorites.

My brother made this. Isn’t it gorgeous? I assure you, it was as delicious as it looked.

I don’t really have any turkey advice for you, since sides and desserts are really my speciality. I like brined birds, because they tend to be more moist… and I have a serious love affair with salt. My mom thinks the brine makes the bird saltier, and she doesn’t like making gravy with the drippings, because of the salt. But her idea of well-seasoned is my idea of bland, so… try a brine if you haven’t before. You can always use a salt-light brine. Seriously, though, it makes the juiciest bird.

Also: I’m a big reader, and Ruth Reichl, ex-editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, has written some great food memoirs. I have Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples, and both of them are fabulous. They also both include bits on Thanksgiving. She’s really a great food writer, you should give them a try.

That’s all I have. It’s time to buckle down and write something like 22-30 pages of essays and prep for a final presentation now. Hopefully I’ll get my shit together and write something on Christmas baking (I’m kind of an expert), you know, before Christmas.

Things I Am Loving, ??? – Now

So… yeah. It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these. As it turns out, grad school is kind of a big deal and it takes up a lot of my free time, especially when (for what is essentially the first time in my academic life) I decide it’s probably important to actually do the assigned reading.

Seriously, guys. My classes only meet once a week each, but I have like a trillion pages of reading between each class because of it. And they happen to be Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, so it isn’t even as if I have nicely spaced blank days to get shit done.

The four-day weekends are pretty awesome, though.

In any case – not ALL of my time is taken up by school. Especially when I have papers assigned. I’m still the queen of procrastination, and while I wasn’t writing my paper on associative indexing this weekend, I went out and did stuff and spent a metric fuck-ton of time on the Internet, and here are some things that I enjoyed, in no particular order:

The fact that the La Brea Tar Pits are like RIGHT in the middle of downtown LA. I mean, in my head, I always figured they were on the outskirts or something. Nope. They are right next to/behind the LACMA (LA County Museum of Art), and as I was standing by the fence, watching the pits bubble in this really freaky way, I could also see a bunch of high-rise banking offices and a billboard for the iPad 2. I meant to take a picture but forgot, and this was the best I could find online. You can see the buildings and billboards I mentioned:

I’m an avid fan of wasting time on Tumblr, and have a super-intense love of those “What’s In Your Bag?” features that are pretty much everywhere. I’ve even done one or two or three of them myself. FY! What’s in your bag? is one such blog on Tumblr, and this chick* is awesome for carrying around both peanut butter and a hammer. The rope kind of freaks me out a little, though:

*Okay, could be a dude, but I’m gonna go the asshole-making-assumptions-based-on-stereotypes route and guess that based on the makeup and bright red purse… it’s probably a lady.

So, one of my roommates listens to a lot of country music, and this song comes up on her rotation a lot. It’s a good thing I like country music.* It’s pretty catchy, though, I admit I downloaded it for myself. The song is “Chicken Fried” by the Zac Brown Band, and the song itself doesn’t start until around the 1:00 / 1:10 mark:

*DON’T JUDGE, HATERS.

October is a great month for reading scary/spooky books. I’m fairly certain I linked to this blog post by Neil Gaiman last year, but just in case I didn’t: he came up with an idea called All Hallow’s Read, where people gift others scary books for Halloween. I’m in love with the idea, and I gifted myself with a copy of Ransom Rigg’s* Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. It’s a great read, and the photographs scattered throughout it really make the book.

*Most awesome  name ever, right?!

In any case – time to get back to reading 30 page articles about the mind-numbingly complex-and-yet-boring XML documents used to encode ridiculously detailed scraps of information about archived collections. Yippee.

A Love Letter to the iPad(2)

I guess a disclaimer should be offered up-front: I’m a total Apple fangirl. I’m typing up this blog on a MacBook Pro, I own an iPhone. And while I’m not the only one by any means, I am really and seriously in love with my latest Apple toy.

I bought an iPad 2. I named it Mnemosyne, after the Greek personification of memory and the mother of the Muses. While my laptop is called the “Turing Machine” after one of the fathers of modern computing, all my Apple peripherals are named after Greek mythological figures: my iPod was Apollo, who was the god of music as well as the sun; and my iPhone is Hermes, as it delivers text messages to me regularly.

The purchase was ostensibly for class, to load up readings to carry to class that would be lighter, more convenient, and possibly more eco-friendly* than printing everything out (one of my classes had decided to forego textbooks in favor of a tangled web of PDF files). I did download some helpful academic programs (GoodReader deserves all the praise that it gets), but I also decided to go to the local FedEx Office to print out double-sided copies of my readings for class anyways, so my excuse pretty quickly flew out the window.

What can I say? I just focus better when I read stuff on paper for class. Also, as much as I love my toys, sometimes my eyes need a break from digital screens.

*I’m still not sure if e-books and such readers for them like the Kindle/Nook/iPad are actually more eco-friendly than good ol’ paper, and neither, it seems, are other people.

I also, however, was quick to download games and other entertainment: both Marvel and DC offer applications to download digital comics (and have helpful links to purchase paper editions as well), and there are a lot of gaming options, including new-for-the-iPad advancements/adaptations (such as a new version of Dead Space by EA) and some great board game adaptations (from classics like Monopoly and Scrabble to still-favorites-but-lesser-known gems like Catan and Carcassonne).

Bypassing all the pre-loaded iPad apps for now (things that Mac users will be used to, like Calendar, Notes, YouTube, and Photo Booth), here is a screenshot of my second screen page, with third-party apps gloriously displayed:

The Video folder includes Hulu and Netflix, as I have accounts for both. Here’s an expanded view of my Games folder:

Fun Mac Tip: Holding down the home button at the bottom center of the iPad (or iPhone) and clicking the top power button will take a screenshot of the device.

I’m not going to do a run-through of each and every app, but I did want to cover my favorites pretty quickly:

• Battleheart is a really fun little hack-and-slash game with an amazingly adorable cast of characters. It has a really simple control system, where you drag a character to an enemy to attack, or to another character to use a special ability. You can switch up your team, recruit new members, buy equipment, and play in arenas until your adorable characters are swarmed by equally adorable goblins and bats. Very simplistic but very addicting.
• Dropbox is a must-have. An account up to 2GB is free, and I use it to sync documents between my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad, as well as back up important papers and such until I’ve turned them in.
• GoodReader is amazing. You can read lovely PDF files, mark them up with highlighting and notes (and save these changes to a second copy, so your original stays pristine), and everything comes through in bright, crisp color – I scoff at your Kindle or black & white Nook.
• Instapaper makes reading long articles and such a pleasure. You sign up for a free account, add a little bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar, and save all the reading you don’t want to finish at the moment to your account. Sync it up while you’re on wifi and a simplistic text-and-pictures version is available offline for you to read at your leisure. They also offer editor-picked choices of popular articles, if you’re not sure what you want to read on your commute.
• The New Yorker has a really beautiful iPad app. As a print subscriber, you have access to the digital editions as well. The iPad makes reading magazines a really pleasurable experience, with easy scrolling and links to additional material that a print magazine could never offer: slideshows of additional images, audio clips of poets reading their work, etc. (A one-year print and digital subscription is $69.99, only $10 more than the one-year digital-only subscription at $59.99 – monthly digital subscripts are available for $5.99, and individual issues for $4.99.)

Moving beyond apps and into a general review, the iPad is a genius device. It’s beautifully designed, which is only to be expected for an Apple product. It also just feels nice in your hands: I have a slip case for protection (see below) when I put it in my bag, but I don’t use any permanent case for the front or back. It just feels too glossy between my fingers for me to want to put a case on it.

It’s great for curling up in bed and watching video – it’s very light and comfortable to use, more so than a laptop. The iPad 2 clocks in around 1.35 lbs. The MacBook Pro at 5.6 lbs. Also, the slide button on the top of the right side of the iPad, where the silent/vibrate button is on an iPhone, can be set to either mute/unmute or can be used to lock or unlock the screen rotation – so you can set a video on landscape mode, lock the orientation, and then curl up on the bed in whatever position you want without having the screen get all twisty on you. Which is nice, cause I’m the kind of person that likes to watch video while curled up on my side. Which is awkward, to say the least, with a laptop (damn hinged screen), and just so much cozier with the iPad.

The iPad is also a great little e-reader device. Kindle offers an iPad app, so you have full access to anything from the Kindle store. Apple also has its own app, iBooks, with an integrated bookstore, and a slick digital-bookshelf display:

I’ll be honest: I still love my physical, paper-pages books. They’re heavy, they collect dust, they take up copious amounts of space on shelves. But there’s just something about physical books and turning pages that I’m in love with. Still, I have the iBooks program, and I did download the first book in the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, which my friend Mark has been pestering me to read for over a year now. It was only $1.99, which was pretty awesome, and it did allow me to read in the car when my mom and I left at 5:30 AM to get to LA in time for another of my grad school orientations. It was way too dark out still to have been reading a paperback. Sure, you can buy book lights and stuff, but it was nice and convenient. And just like any other e-reader, you can carry hundreds of books at once for only 1.35 lbs.

For my fellow geeks, I would definitely recommend an iPad (or Nook color) over something black and white, like the Kindle. Why? Because a full-color screen means full-color comics: as previously stated, Marvel and DC both offer apps for the iPad, where you can download both free and paid comics. With DC having just rebooted their universe, it’s a great and far more approachable time to start getting into comics, instead of getting scared by the really high issue numbers and being concerned about massive amounts of backstory.

Also, if you were inclined to scan high-resolution copies of your legally purchased comic books (because you would never illegally download them from the internet), they would not show up well on a Kindle. On a beautifully colored iPad screen, however, comics are a joy to read. Occasionally, there are some issues with double-page spreads, but it’s still a very enjoyable experience.

So, would I recommend that you run out and buy an iPad? I guess that depends on what you want to do.

I tend to agree with the viewpoint that the iPad is a great tool for absorbing media – The New Yorker app is one excellent example of such. Watching video, reading articles, and playing games are all fantastic. However, I can’t really picture using it to heavily produce media.* The on-screen keyboard is definitely easier to use than the tiny one on the iPhone, but it still isn’t the best experience, especially for those used to touch-typing on a full keyboard. (For instance, ‘apostrophes’ and “quotation marks” aren’t available on the primary screen, which makes typing out more than a few contractions or lines of dialogue irritating. The purchase of a wireless keyboard (yay for Bluetooth!) might make a difference in this, and Apple actually offers a version of their wireless keyboard with an iPad dock integrated. This, however, raises the point that you’d might as well get a laptop instead if you intend to be carrying around a keyboard frequently. Part of the appeal of the iPad is the portability and sleek design.

(Then again, the most expensive version of the iPad (WiFi + 3G and 64 GB) will currently run you $829. Even with the addition of the $69.99 Apple keyboard, it remains cheaper than even the lowest-priced MacBook Air ($999) or MacBook Pro ($1199), as far as other portable Apple options go.)

*I haven’t yet tried out the iPad versions of the popular Mac apps iMovie and GarageBand yet. (If my friends and I get around to the collaborative vlog we talked about during the summer, I might pick up iMovie and toy around with it.) I’ve heard good things about both, but neither are currently programs that I would have use for. Also, for heavy creative purposes, I still imagine that their Mac computer counterparts would be more useful.

Sure, there are a lot of competitors out there – Lenovo, Samsung, Toshiba and more offer versions of tablets. Still, the iPad continues to dominate the market, and I can’t imagine that changing in the next few years, unless something truly revolutionary comes out. (Remember all those so-called “iPhone killers”?) And with their huge share of the market, App availability is something to take into consideration. Developers build for the iPad. Sure, there are a lot of lame things cluttering up the iTunes App Store, but there are a lot of really great programs, too. And while there are some Android-only apps, there continue to be many more that are iPhone/iPad exclusive – and developers often develop Apple versions of apps first, as there’s a bigger market there.

Finally, I have no idea what syncing to a Windows computer* is like, as I use a Mac laptop. I do know that with a MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad, all my toys play together nicely on the same WiFi network, and as far as syncing documents back and forth with programs like Dropbox, that work on all platforms. I have a fair number of apps that are accessible on both my phone and the iPad, which is great. And there are often Mac version of apps for your laptop or desktop Apple computer that will sync or share with portable versions (such as the iWork suite of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers; iHomework; Bento; and many others).

*Apparently, when iOS 5 is released this fall, needing a computer at all to sync will be unnecessary – something you might want to take into consideration if you’ve been hesitant about mixing Windows and Mac products.

So: should you shell out the money for an iPad? If you can afford it, if you love Apple products, if you already own other Apple products – I would say absolutely. While I definitely purchased some new apps the day I got my iPad, I had many I’d already downloaded for the phone that were cross-compatible, which was nice.

If you’re hesitant but you think you want one, head down to your local Apple store (or Best Buy, or whatever other authorized dealer is around) and play with one in-store. I have a feeling that you’ll fall in love just like I did. The Walnut Creek, CA Apple store had a bunch of apps pre-loaded that let you feel out the capabilities of the device. If you’re looking for a more data-entry heavy machine (like for taking notes every day in class) that is still less than a full computer/laptop, it’s possible a netbook would be more your style. Or you might want to try out the iPad/wireless keyboard route.

If you’re an anti-Mac person – well, sorry for the last 2000 or so words, and I doubt I’ll be able to change your mind. Mac haters are just as enthusiast as Mac lovers. (I should know – I used to be a Windows girl, and groaned whenever I had to use a Mac for class.) But you should still head down and play with one. I went through an enlightenment, and maybe you will, too!

Edit (25 September 2011 @ 7:04 PM): Take a look at this clip from McSweeney’s FAQ about their iPhone/iPad app for what I mean about Apple’s majority market share:

Q. Why is there no version for Android?

A. Unfortunately, we have no plans to make an Android version of the app at the moment. Apps written for the iOS and Android operating systems cannot quickly be ported to one another — they have to be re-written from scratch. Developing an app takes a long time and because we are a small company, with an even smaller technical department, we just do not have the resources to support multiple platforms. There is no subterfuge, corporate bias or underhand dealings — Apple’s platform was simply the most mature when we first decided to make an app. We would love to have an Android version, but we’re just too busy right now. Sorry.

BLAWG!

Guys. It was kind of touch and go there for awhile as to whether I was going to remember my password to even log into this site.

Clearly I did. You can restrain your shouts of glee.

So! I have a blog. And this might be my longest stretch of silence to date. Basically all summer. Which makes no sense… I can find the time to blab to the internet about all the pointless things I’m thinking about while I’m supposed to be writing term papers or translating 1200-year old epic poetry, but not between the months of June and August. Or July and August. June 29th and August 17th, whatever. Don’t be so detail-oriented, guys. You gotta let some things go.

This summer, instead of writing on my poor, neglected blog, I have been:

• Cutting out and scanning to save my favorite stories and articles from something like 10 years of Highlights issues.
• Sifting through another 10 years of National Geographic issues, doing the same thing so that I can toss the (ridiculously heavy) paper editions.
• Going through a freaking huge box of old photographs from my mom’s closet, scanning them and marveling over how adorable I used to be.
• Reading 30 40 books for fun, since I never have the time to do so when school is in session, thanks to heavy loads of academic reading assignments and essays.
• Visiting my family’s cabin, Oregon, Santa Cruz, and various other locations.
• Playing a lot of board games and drinking a lot of alcohol with friends (with Anomia, Smart Ass, and Chrononauts being the winners of the summer so far).
• Discussing starting a collaborate vlog (video blog), which I would cross-post (at least my entries) here, with my wonderful high school friends when we scatter again (more?) to various locations in the fall.

The 30/40 books shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. I’ve talked about my obsession with books and reading in the past. And as you can see, I have always been book-obsessed, even at the tender age of 5 1/2 years old in kindergarten:

Seriously, though, I feel bad about completely abandoning this thing. I’m sure there will be more to post once I finally get my camera developed and I can talk about some of the pictures on it – I’ve become a complete cave(wo)man this summer and have been toting around this old-fashioned disposable camera. I could talk about seeing Jack London’s house and bromances and getting drunk in San Francisco, but what fun are the stories without lovely, visual proof?

Until then, faithful readers – I bid you adieu again. Hopefully it won’t be another month and a half before we converse again.

BRB, Drowning In Boxes

Hey, internet friends! I just got back to California some 12 hours ago. Actually, maybe somewhere between 13 and 14 hours ago, but I digress.

This is what my apartment looked like briefly before leaving Eugene…

…and this is what my room in California looks like, currently:

Keep in mind, in California, this is after three boxes of books have been unpacked and approximately forty clothes hangers have been removed from the right-side clothes closet, and a ridiculous amount of junk has been thrown away, both in Eugene and in California.

(Also – I might have an issue when it comes to buying books. My mini-library is overflowing. And see that corner of my laptop screen in the photo? That is where I am currently writing up this post. META!)

So… I shall return with some musings on college and Eugene, and things I learned there and favorites from town respectively. But such pearls of wisdom, such Pulitzer-Prize-quality writing, such brilliance that you’ve come to expect from Yours Truly, will only come after I’ve put all my stuff away, because living like this only for 13 hours has already driven my inner OCD freak insane.

 

Things I Am Loving (??? – 10 June 2011)

Oh my. I got all involved in the end of school, and editing poetry and fiction portfolios, and studying for a statistics final, and neglected my little corner of the internet for awhile. And it’s been a few weeks since I did one of these round-up posts, so I suppose it is time for a new one.

Anthology magazine is brilliant. I first read about it on either Black*Eiffel or Oh Happy Day!, I’m not entirely sure which, but it was the latter that inspired me to pick up the latest copy (issue 3) while at home over Memorial Day weekend at Issues* in Piedmont/Oakland, since Jordan Ferney had an article in it (and I love her blog!). Anthology is a little pricey (it’s $12.00 an issue), but they are a quarterly publication, putting out only four issues a year (one per season). Issues not only had Vol. 3, they also still had a small amount of Vol. 2, so I’m only missing one right now! It’s a lovely magazine full of fantastic interior design articles, party suggestions, DIY crafts, and shopping suggestions. Take a look at their blog for ideas about their content, and find yourself a copy if they have a seller in your area!

*Actually, let’s add Issues to the list of Things I Am Loving. It’s a really cute, really small store just off Piedmont Avenue with a HUGE collection of magazines, both professional and of the zine-esque indie variety. Not only do they stock the normal stuff you can find at any Safeway magazine rack, they also have a great selection of way less common things – and a Moleskine notebook rack. So, pretty much everything I love ever, especially with Dr. Comics and Mr. Games just down the street. Plus, you’re in Piedmont, so head down the street when you’re done and get an ice cream sundae at Fenton’s!

I love it when my internet interests spiral into each other. It’s like when you find out that your real life friends from different social circles are also friends with each other, but in a nerdy, websites-on-the-internet way. GQ’s 10 Essentials led me to Cool Hunting, which is basically a collection of awesome things I will never be able to afford, and Cool Hunting actually did an article on Anthology Magazine! It made me smile. And is yet further proof that you should pick up a copy.

Sort of similarly, I just bought two new notebooks from Paperthinks, who make brilliantly colored leather notebooks from recycled leather scraps and 50% recycled paper. So, not only are they pretty, they’re also pretty eco-friendly! I chose Turquoise and Lavender, but eventually I hope to have one of each of their rainbow of color options: some 24 colors at the moment.

 

I went with their blank, large size: 12×17 cm (or about 5″ x 6.75″), with a matching satin ribbon, and one of those convenient pockets to slip loose, flat things into the back of the book. 256 pages means one of these should last you for quite awhile. And they’re just so brilliantly colored, how could you not lust after them?

Two of the blogs I read (of many) wrote about them: Notebook Loves Pen and  Black*Eiffel. I just couldn’t resist buying a couple, particularly because Kate’s Paperie (an online vendor) was offering a 20% off coupon for anyone signing up for their newsletter before June 30, 2011.

Max von Laue, a German Nobel prize winner for Physics, was in danger of having his gold medal whisked away during World War II. Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy decided to prevent this. As Wikipedia says,

…George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. After the war, he returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The Nobel Society then re-cast the Nobel Prizes using the original gold.

How awesome is that?! Talk about hiding something right under the Nazis’ noses.

Post-It flags. I have been going through stacks of these things lately. I always buy a pack or two at the beginning of the term, vowing to be responsible about assigned reading, but I inevitably fail by the end of the first week, or maybe mid-way through the second, if it’s a really good term.

In any case, since I started keeping my reading journal (in a shiny, 1.5″, purple 3-ring binder), I’ve been loving these things. I use them to bookmark passages that catch my eye, because slips of scrap paper or index cards might mark the page, but not the exact spot on the page, leaving me in a few cases to re-read both facing pages and not remember what I intended to flag in the first place. With these brightly colored sticky flags, I can mark the exact spot on each page that caught my eye. And when I’m reading a really good book, the side ends up looking something like this:

My previous method involved using my iPhone to take photo snaps of the lines on the page, but this was a pain in the ass because of holding the book open and steadying the camera to make sure the words weren’t blurry, and unless the lines were on the top-third or bottom-third of the page, depending on the book, I couldn’t get the page number in the same photo. So, yeah, Post-It Flags. They’re brilliant.

And that’s it for now, folks! Hopefully by Monday night or Tuesday sometime, there’ll be photos from my graduation. Maybe earlier, there’ll be a dramatic account of packing up my apartment, a process I’m not entirely looking forward to. Or perhaps I’ll take notes during the looooooong drive back to California I’ll be making on the 14th. And then, like happened last year, I have a feeling we’ll lapse back into the once-a-week-at-best pace on posts during the summer, because really – who wants to be cooped up at a desk, tapping away at the keyboard when there is sunshine and Otter Pops and watermelon and margaritas by the poolside to think about?

A Reading Journal

I’ve been thinking of starting another notebook/journal. For anyone that knows me or has done even a cursory examination of past blog posts, this should come as no great surprise. I’m addicted to notebooks and journals and paper and pens and office supplies in a way that is not entirely healthy. Last weekend, while home, I purchased no fewer than

• two sheets of (really cute) Japanese stickers
• one purple pen that writes with a freakishly fine line (I’m using it to compose my one sheet of statistics notes)
• one shiny metallic gold pen that writes ever-so-much-better than my metallic gold Gelly Roll pen
• and a composition book with college-ruled pages instead of the traditional wide-rule.

That last point is important, because wide-ruled pages can go suck a dick. Seriously. I hate them with a passion that only other people that love office supplies with my fervor that have equally small handwriting will understand. Seriously, I can fit 2-3 lines of writing per wide-ruled line on a page. I HATE WIDE-RULED NOTEBOOKS.

Glad we got that out of the way, phew.

In any case, I’ve been thinking of starting a reading journal. I love books, and I own a lot of them. I think I’m up to around 500, which doesn’t come even close to some prodigious collectors like Umberto Eco, whose multi-thousand volume collection I’ve drooled over in the past, but as far as I know, definitely takes the cake out of any of my family and friends.

Fun fact: my dad helpfully built shelves into one of the two closets in my room (yes, I know, I’m spoiled) because my free-standing bookshelves were slowly but surely starting to take over my room. I had at least five of them in there at one point. Upon seeing the collection of books housed there (which didn’t even include the three-tier shelf in my college apartment and a few boxes stored around my bedroom), one friend remarked that he didn’t think he’d ever read that many books in his life, let alone come close to owning that many.

*The horse-on-a-stick was a birthday gift from my friend Mark, who had asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I told him “a pony.” That was what I got.

So, yeah. I read a lot.

I have the Delicious Library 2 software for cataloguing what I own, and keeping a handy ‘bookshelf’ (their version of a playlist) of which of my vast collection I haven’t read. This is handy. There is also a little ‘Notes’ section on each entry, for adding tidbits of information – I currently use it to note where I bought the books, or who gifted them to me for what occasion.

Delicious Library is excellent for keeping track of such small bits of information. What it is not great for, though, is keeping a reading log: dates books were read, whether it was a first-time occurrence or a second or third or eighth read-through, quotes or snippets that were particularly interesting, or words that you want to look up so you can impress your friends or your creative writing instructor.

I tend to be the kind of person that over-thinks things. Your average person would just grab an empty notebook (perhaps that lovely college-ruled comp book previously mentioned) and a pen, and get to it. Unfortunately, I am not that person.

For one thing, bound notebooks have a finite number of pages, which leads to a multi-volume likelihood, especially in the volume that I read. A three-ring binder seems like a better decision, probably in conjunction with classic binder tabs. That’s about where I hit a dead-end. Six tabs or eight? Classic clear, or a rainbow multicolored batch? Should I write on graph paper, white printer paper, lined paper (not wide-ruled, of course), or go for an eclectic combination of all three? What size binder? Should I get a clear plastic cover to slip things into? Should I go with O-rings, D-rings, spine-mounted or otherwise? Should I splurge and buy something glorious in leather?

The great thing about a 3-ring binder is that things can be added and removed and rearranged on the fly – no messy ripping out of pages, especially from stitched-in pages like in composition books.

Yes, I know I’m being silly. At least when it comes to details that fine and nit-picky. But I really am curious as to what to put in this reading journal of mine.

I know I’ll want a section to record reading notes with all the standard stuff: title, author, when and where I read it, genre, rating, a half-page or so for noting down a quick review, or a paragraph or two that caught my eye. Book pages could be updated over time, since I’m the kind of person that re-reads things over and over again.

I think I’d like another section dedicated to reading lists I might want to use: Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel Prize winners, Oprah’s Book List, whatever. I might not work my way faithfully down each and every one, but it will at least be a jumping-off point if I’m stumped for something to read.

I’ll certainly include a list of the books I want to read. I have a few fractured versions of this right now, scattered across a note on my iPhone, my Amazon wish list, and a few scraps of paper here and there – altogether a completely unsatisfactory solution. I desperately wished for this list on paper (perhaps updated and printed off every three or four months for inclusion in my purse for bookstore perusing) while my dad and I were combing through 3 or 4 used bookstores in Alameda last weekend.

Speaking of bookstores, a somewhat geographically organized list of my favorites could be nice – notes might include how well-organized they are, store hours, whether they have a cozy cafe or not, and how far off retail price they list their books for. Business cards or bookmarks might be added in on those pages.

In any case, I think this is going to be my next project. I just finished Bossypants by Tina Fey, which I absolutely cannot recommend enough, and I think it might be my first entry. I think I’ll also go back to the last two or three books I read previously (Coastliners by Joanne Harris, a great summer read, and How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors, edited by Dan Crowe and Philip Oltermann, are the ones I can probably recall the best) and throw those in there as well.

I can see this being the kind of thing I’ll treasure five or ten years down the line.

If anyone suffered through reading some 1100 words about my office supply obsession and such, any suggestions on the subject would be lovely – do you keep a reading journal? What might you include?