Violin

Today I bought a cheap small violin. I have really enjoyed my first few hours as a violinist, walking through Golden Gate park with a violin in my hand, people [cute girls] looking at me and thinking to themselves "hey, there's a [sensitive but passionate] violinist." I tried actually playing it but I don't think the noise I produce will win anyone over at this point, just the look.

I will be having a recital in the next few months.

2009 Recap in Expenses

Once a year, I like to actually put my meticulous records to use and look at what I spent money on in the past year. Here's my post from last year, for comparison. Without further ado, some percentages:

Rent is obviously the largest contributor to expenses, followed by Travel and Food. For Travel last year, I went to New York, Japan, Virginia, New York/Rhode Island, and then Virginia again. For Food, this category is actually only restaurants (excludes Groceries) and I think this is high because I had a lot of visitors this year and made sure to take them to my favorite restaurants. The Miscellaneous Expenses category includes random purchases and anything I couldn't remember. So my TV, my bike, and all my Christmas gifts to family were the major contributors. The home improvement category was reasonably high since I moved into an

apartment of my own this year (as opposed to subletting). Here are the changes from last year's numbers:

It's actually surprising how consistent they are, given that I spent much of 2008 in New York. Overall, my total expenses dropped by 11% year over year, because I didn't make a cross country move in 2009 (with associated flights, shipping, furniture, etc.).

In my post last year, I hypothesized about keeping track of everywhere I'd physically been (all walking routes, subways I'd taken, etc.). I dismissed the idea as impossible logistically, but a friend of mine recently pointed out the Google Latitude feature Location History: https://www.google.com/latitude/apps/history

It seems to have a limit on the amount of data it can display (the last 500 entries, which corresponds to about three days I'm finding). But it is mildly interesting to take a look at one's own traffic patterns.

My day at work, in unfinished beverages

The worst update in the world.

Posting is more and more infrequent, and for that I am more and more sorry. Things happening:

1. Lots of work. Like the hardest I've worked.

2. Moving to a new apartment (hopefully complete this weekend)

3. Listening to this Beach Boys rehearsal that Michelle sent me: http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2009/09/02/the-beach-boys-rehearsals-1967-2/

Chrome Quick Searches

My one complaint with Chrome for a while has been that I didn't think you could do 'Quick Searches' like you can in Firefox, where you set up a keyword that you can enter in your location bar to search a specific site (e.g. type "a cameras" to search amazon for cameras). However, someone at work pointed out yesterday that you can do this in Chrome and I've been a speed-browsing maniac ever since.

Chrome calls it setting up other search engines. Basically you perform a search at the site you want. Let's use the amazon example above. The cameras search results in the following URL:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=cameras&x=0&y=0

You copy that URL and then right click it and select 'Edit search engines'. You then click 'Add' and three fields appear. The first is what you name the search (in this case, I'll call it 'Amazon'). The second is the keyword you want to put in the browser to trigger it (in this case, I'll put 'a'). And the final field is where you paste the URL. However, you have to find the search query you originally put in and replace it with '%s'. So the URL would look like this:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=%s&x=0&y=0

Click OK and you're done. Now when you type in the Chrome search bar 'a' followed by anything, you'll immediately be brought to the amazon search results for that query.

Melanesian Choirs

It's been almost two months since my most recent words here. What could possibly drive me out from my proverbial burrow? I am so happy listening to my most recent musical acquisition.

I don't know where this came from but I got home today with the absolute need to hear the Melanesian chants from the movie The Thin Red Line (maybe it was my recent heightened interest in Panda Bear's 'Person Pitch', which sometimes reminds me of these chants at points). I found one of the chants on YouTube. But it wasn't enough. I discovered that Amazon was selling the CD for $120. That is too much money and too little instant gratification. So I was driven to "the black market." But, now after emerging from my shady dealings with my dealer who calls herself "BT," I am so enthusiastically in possession of all 26 tracks of Melanesian chants from the movie soundtrack. If anyone else would like these, we can probably arrange something.

One thing I've been up to recently is becoming a full member of this group of awesome people: http://www.brutelabs.org/

You can see my latest small contribution in the blog section of this site (I used Blogger's API to feed the content into the site): http://crosscountry.welldone.org/

Stay tuned for an unveiling of my main project with the BRUTE LABS people, which more than announcing any contribution I made, really will be an unveiling of an incredible artist whose art belongs in all of our homes.

The Bing marketing campaign