Author Archives: ayn

Happy Holidays, Wii, shopping, and random updates

Haven’t blogged for a few days, I did manage to catch up with most of my feeds and shared a few items in GReader… We didn’t do much for Christmas, just ate at a different restaurant every meal (as usual), played Wii, and shopped, well, we did a lot of shopping…

The Wii is a ton of fun, we only have Wii Sports, which came with the console, and The Legend of Zelda. Wii Sports is fun, I like tennis, bowling, and boxing. ๐Ÿ˜€ It is actually pretty good exercise playing Wii, I’m dead serious. I workout quite a bit, run about 5 miles per day and do weights 3-4 times a week, my shoulder and back were sore after playing some tennis. I bought Zelda because I was looking for games to buy for the Wii and it was rated very highly at all the gaming sites. I am not really into gaming, I guess the Zelda series is cool and people out there actually cop the Wii just to play this game. Sherry and I played it, the first task was to herd some goats into the barn, we could not f’king get any of them to go inside the barn. We even googled some strategy guides and it just told us to go to a place so that the goat will be between the barn and me, and it will go in there when you go closer toward the barn. We tried that and the goats always went to the side and went away last minute. (would appreciate any tips, please comment!)

We were pretty excited about boxing day shopping, I made a list of places I had to go shop and I think we hit them all. First stop was Bloomingdale’s and we were there almost sharply at 8 a.m. I finally copped the Number (N)ine jacket I’ve been lusting after for months. That thing is ridiculously expensive and I caught it at 40% off one weekend, but it was still too high. Today It was marked down by 50% and there was a 15% coupon, I applied for a Bloomie card and got another 15%. After all this it was under $1k, pretty damn good deal. ๐Ÿ™‚ Sherry didn’t cop anything special, just some random stuff from Zara and Club Monaco. Neiman had a ton of bags on sale, including A LOT of Balenciagas. They didn’t have the motorcycle bag marked down, but there were a ton of other styles for cheap. Nothing really caught her eyes though, plus she just copped a Bottega bag like 2 weeks ago so her bag fund is probably not real high at the moment. The shoppers at Neiman rocked some nice shit, we saw at least 2 Balenciagas and a lady there even had a Hermes Kelly bag (at least I think it was a Kelly, the Birkin is bigger, I think)… Most of the Dior Homme stuff at Neiman were marked down by at least 50%, but all that were left were in bigger sizes like size 52, didn’t have anything that fit me.

For about a month I had been trying to decide between a Bottega and Goyard messenger bag. They are both not cheap so I had to be absolutely sure before I pull the trigger. I would also want to customize the Goyard bag with initials and/or stripes so those would’ve been even harder to figure out. I still couldn’t quite justify spending $2.5-3k on a messenger bag, although I would really use it every single day probably for decades to come, still not easy to justify. We went to the Bottega pre-sale and the messenger bag was not marked down at all, and Goyard never puts anything on sale either. Today at Neiman I spotted a really nice messenger bag by Mulberry, it was on sale and marked down additional 25%, I tried it out and it was pretty f’king dope, so I said f it, cop the Mulberry and forget about the BV and Goyard. I am pretty happy with my decision right now. ๐Ÿ˜€

Oh yeah, coincidentally both the jacket and the bag sport RiRi zippers! M6 on the bag and M8’s on the jacket! I like shit with RiRi zippers… ๐Ÿ™‚

Tomorrow I will be in Vancouver for a day. My uncle left us last week and I am going to pay my respect at his funeral. He was a very good man and he will be dearly missed. RIP, Dr. Wong.

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PhotoBooth works fine with older Macs

This is not really news or anything, but in case you don’t use Digg and haven’t seen this blogged anywhere before, the PhotoBooth application shipped with newer Macs with built-in iSights works just fine on older Macs. You can’t get this app from Apple even if you are willing to pay for it, but since Sherry has a MacBook, I just copied it from it to my PowerBook G4, it works perfectly fine with my (external) iSight. ๐Ÿ˜€

I need this coz it might be useful at new year eve parties… ๐Ÿ˜‰

PhotoBooth works with PowerBook G4

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Yelp got “street-smart”…

This is very useful and I’ve always wanted a feature like this, makes so much sense especially when Yelp has a mobile version of their page…

Yelp Blog: Yelp Just Got Even Street-Smarter

Yelp Just Got Even Street-Smarter

And by street-smart, we mean you can now search on Yelp around a specific address, intersection or street, in addition to searching city-wide or around a zip code.

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ChangingThePresent

This is a great alternative to giving some b.s. gifts to your friends and family, not to mention last minute gifts to those who are impossible to shop for…

ChangingThePresent:

About ChangingThePresent – How it works

Overview

Many of us don’t need any more fruitcakes, toasters, or pen & pencil sets. Buying unwanted presents just isn’t a fulfilling way of spending our money or expressing our love.

It’s no surprise, then, that the media has reported the beginning of a trend. People are discovering that the best way to show you care for someone isn’t giving them something they don’t need, but rather in doing something to make the world a better place, in their name.

If you make such a donation gift through this site, you can also have us send a personalized greeting card to let them know how thoughtful you were.

Be sure to create your wishlist so your friends know what you want, and ask them to do the same.

Just imagine how much good we could do by capturing for effective nonprofits even a little bit of the $250 billion that Americans spend each year buying presents for one another. As this site catches on, it will become the standard way many of us will show how much we care. If you’re here now, you’re at the front of the pack.

Finding Donation Opportunities

You can browse by cause to find over a thousand donation opportunities. You can search by name to find hundreds of nonprofits, and see their offerings. Soon, you’ll be able to search by name to find and support virtually any nonprofit. (If you would like to see your nonprofit on this site, please go to the page, For Nonprofits.

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Thanks to Amazon now we’re getting a Nintendo Wii!!

So I told Sherry to put her name down to get a Wii, the probability was like 1 in 28, not bad, but not good… I didn’t get picked, but she did! But I’m still not sure if it will show up before Christmas. Obviously we have Amazon Prime and upgraded to 1-Day shipping for 4 bucks, but still, they might not ship on or before Thursday… I picked up The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on PriceGrabber and she copped Excite Truck from Amazon… I think we need another pair of controllers…

Sherry’s list of things… » I got a Nintendo Wii…

Andrew told me that Amazon was having a promotion where you can sign up for a chance of purchasing Wii. And I got it!!

I never win anything, this is really really exciting…. Now I’m just waiting for it to get here. I love Amazon!!

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Photoshop CS3 is nice, and FAST!!

So finally downloaded Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta, took a long time to install, but once it’s installed everything is nice and speedy. It runs A LOT FASTER than CS, my pervious version. (I never saw the need to upgrade to CS2).

The new Camera Raw is much nicer, Bridge works much better than the photo browser in CS. I haven’t done much in it, but here are a few things I’ve noticed so far:

  • SPEED! CS3 is fast! Even on my PowerBook G4! It runs much faster than CS. When I used Sherry’s Core 2 Duo MacBook I notice a nice speedup from my PowerBook G4, so I bet CS3 now would SCREAMMMM on the Intel Macs. I’m kindda glad it doesn’t crawl on my G4, otherwise I would definitely have to get a MBP… Now I’m not sure if I would really need to upgrade… But it’s of course too early to tell
  • Liquify filter now works in 16-bit mode! And it’s also quite a bit faster! (yes, I can’t get over the speedup, it’s f’king awesome!!)
  • My custom shortcuts are gone, which is annoying, I’ll have to set them all up again…
  • My actions were gone, but I used Spotlight to search for “actions palette.psp” and it found it right away, very nice!
  • to hide CS3 you still have to do ctrl-command-h, which is still kindda strange to me

Here’s a photograph of model Melody I processed quickly to try out CS3… didn’t do anything special, just some minor skin clean-up, channel mixer conversion to black and white with mostly the red channel, liquify filter to enlarge the eyes and to make the face smaller and longer, USM (unsharp masking) sharpening with 2 different settings, downsize and sharpening again, frame & sign.

Melody

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