So I'm interested in finding new and fantastic eateries in and around SF, the must-eat kinda places. Have any suggestions?
So yes... I am back on Vox. After lots of deliberation and lots of new ideas about things, here I am again.
I love Wordpress, but there's something about the privacy functions here and community that keep drawing me back again and again.
It's a new year, but definitely not a new me. I'm the same old me that I've always been, and I finally realise that I'm not really going to become a whole new person every time the calendar flips over and starts anew. The best thing to do is just change incrementally, I suppose, and let life just stay its course. I'll get where I'm going eventually.
Hmm... I have to get back to this whole Voxing thing. I think for now I'm going to clean up my hood a bit and figure out what to write about on here. I've been waxing poetic about photography and art and stuff on my WP blog, but it's public, so I don't ever reveal too much at once on there. Maybe one of these days I'll figure out how to have my own domain and have my own blog on there, but that's a bit out of reach right now, especially for a barely-employed girl who spends her money supporting her cat's nasty canned food addiction.
Resolutions for the new year? Not really... I think I'll just "Do more fun stuff" and "Live life" and all that. Oh, and "Listen to more music" and "Have more fun" in general. I'm boring and non-committal like that.
So here I am... I'll go around and say hi on everyone's blog in a minute. Or, at least I'll try to hit up the people who have posted recently. Yeah. Going to try to make this more of a daily habit, but we'll see how far I get.
Hi.
Vox created an easy way to blog about interesting things on the web. This is the test post.
Beedogs! Beedogs! Beedogs everywhere!
For the past few months, my car stereo has been acting up. When the inside LCD lost a line of pixels, I shrugged. When it lost all lines of pixels, I frowned. When all buttons stopped working, I soldered, sweated, and then finally shopped.
Jess' story http://moof.vox.com/library/post/collect-call-from-becky.html about a very persistent late-night collect phonecaller reminds me what happened here about 3 months ago. Twice a week we'd get a collect call from the Cook County Jail. The Caller ID said "Prison" and the recorded "do you accept this call?" message was very ominious. This call is from a prisoner. It might be monitored. The charges were stated up-front, which is nice, but totally overpriced. (Shamefully so, in my opinion. But that's another story.)
Diana and I develop these mild fascinations with things, usually exotic and exotically-named things. One such thing is the Pawpaw, a fruit native to the eastern US. It's no relative of the papaya; rather, it's a kissing cousin of the cherimoya and soursop. Besides having an awesome name, it's kind of mind-boggling to us that an exotic tropical-esque fruit comes from non-exotic places like Pennsylvania. People on the east coast might not find it weird, but imagine if you discovered that there was a type of durian native to Nevada.
We'd never seen or eaten pawpaws, though, so Diana couldn't resist the opportunity to mail-order some fruit, even though the minimum order was ten pounds and the shipping was far from cheap. Now our fridge and our bellies are stuffed with pawpaws of four different varieties. (A little too stuffed, in the latter case, although I'm feeling better now.)
Turns out they really are a lot like cherimoyas. Soft skin, soft custardy flesh with a subtle tropical-fruit flavor, big oblong black seeds. Quite yummy. Diana made some into a pie by mixing them up with condensed milk and an egg, and our friend *** came over yesterday and helped us eat it.
One of my favorite pastimes involves reading books in beds. Unfortunately, since I prefer to lay on my stomach, reading on a laptop is extremely bad for my neck. I usually have to curve my head up in order to see the screen. While this is possible, my body usually aches the next day.
In college, tired of buying heavy books only to finish them a week later, I resorted to online tutorials and a laser printer. Although it worked well for bed-reading, the solution was messy due to hundreds of printed pages per week. Thus began my quest for a digital alternative.
A year later, I decided to convert an Apple iBook into tablet form. At the time, the screens in iBooks were 1024x768 resolution - plenty of real estate to display a PDF book. After several weeks of rewiring and construction, I ended up with a prototype. Unfortuately, without a touch screen, input suffered and I decided to return to normal books. I did learned one important lesson from this experiment, however - pixel density matters! Even though I could fit a book nicely in the 1024x768 resolution, the pixels were physically too big and the made the text hard to read.
A few days ago, I stumbled across the website for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It uses a build-in LCD at 800x480 resolution and over 200 dpi and can connect wireless (hence, I can read Safari Books Online on it).
I received the device yesterday and read my first book last night. Wow! I am impressed! Although the operating system and web browser are a bit slow, the screen is beautiful and renders my online books crisply. Overall, a nice device.
As you may have noticed, ricciadams.com has been replaced by "Ricci Adams' Core Page."
"What exactly is a core page?", you might ask. It's basically a list of all blogs, social networking sites, projects, and other web pages which identify my presence on the Internet. It's similar to the "homepages" of yester-century; except, instead of displaying outward links to interests of the author, it focuses on inward links to the author's creations and other identities.
My core page's current features:
1) XFN values - Part of the XML Friends Network microformat is the "me" value, which basically says "This link points to a page which is part of my online identity." Hence, all of my links specify this value in their rel attribute. An XFN compatible web browser or search engine visiting ricciadams.com could determine that my MySpace page, Vox journal, and other links were also "me" (and display results as such to the viewer).
2) Weighted lists - Also known as tag clouds. I use the visual weight of each link to represent my activity for each link. Since I check MySpace and this journal almost every day, they are the boldest. Sites which I don't frequent often (such as 43 Places and orkut) are in smaller print.
3) Beta badge - It's a known fact that you can't be cool and Web 2.0 without the word "Beta" somewhere on your page. Thanks to Jens for the idea ;)
Potential features:
1) Feed aggregation - Some of the sites on my core page host Atom or RSS in addition to standard web pages. It would be neat to have the feed for ricciadams.com be a collection of all of these sub-feeds. Since Safari RSS supports the feeds: protocol, this should be simple to implement. Unfortuately, some of my favorite social networking sites still do not provide feeds.
2) More dynamic content - I would love to have my Tetris DS scores or current geographical location appear on the core page.
