I don’t know why, but I smell guinea pigs. Or maybe just the shavings. Or maybe the smell of a guinea pig in a clean cage. Something. I know it’s related to guinea pigs. I don’t know why I smell it though. I don’t think there’s any guinea pigs within 150 feet of me.
yucky ocha
I am still surprised, after almost a year, how gross ocha can be if made with tap water here.
I’ve probably been spoiled, living in L.A. where water comes from high up in Colorado. Here, it comes from groundwater, where there’s lots of minerals.
Although I can tell when I’ve been served tap water in restaurants in L.A., it just doesn’t compare to the tap water here. In L.A. it’s fine using tap water for instant ramen; I don’t drink the broth, and the taste of the water isn’t intrusive enough to ruin the noodles. Here, tap water makes the already salty noodles noticeably more salty. Which, yes, tastes just as bad as it sounds.
But honestly, I probably would not have noticed the difference in the ramen if it hadn’t been for my beloved ocha. I can use the tap water fine to make rice, tortellini, wonton soup. It’s the ocha where I really, really noticed a not-so-subtle disgusting taste that ruined the green tea.
Now I buy distilled water, specifically, at the market to get nice ocha. I use it only for ocha and ramen. I also buy water with “minerals added for taste” just for drinking. (That’s the one at the market I go to. I have to go to another market entirely for distilled water. And non-molassassed bread.) I can taste when C has used the water kettle for instant ramen, it makes my ocha bad. boo. But I can’t tell him, Use the expensive, nice-tasting water! If he doesn’t notice a difference in the ramen, there’s no reason I should waste more money keeping my ocha nice. I just have to remember to empty the kettle of water before I add my own.
Just two more weeks, and I get to go home to nice water.
the Arm Saga
Don’t feel like doing other stuff I should be doing for school. XD;
This is about my current bout with tendonitis/tennis elbow/stupid arms.
Let’s go back to the first weekend in the quarter. I’d gone back home (driven three hours) for Easter on Saturday. After dinner I played the Wii with cousins and bros, WarioWare and then Wii Sports. I could tell when swinging the bat in baseball and throwing the ball in bowling that my elbows were complaining; they felt sort of like my arms could be torn off, or that there was no strength in my elbows. But I kept playing because, hey, I’ve never had problems before, right?
(From maybe 2001 on I’ve had instances where my elbows would hurt while using the computer. I would just adjust my position or try not to rely on my arms so much. If my arms ever hurt when not on the computer, I just slept with them in a relaxed position, maybe 160° angle, and they would be fine the next day.)
Sunday night I drove back to school, three hours.
Monday morning I woke up, went to class fine. This class, though, was in the PC lab, where the drawers (??) that the mouse and keyboard sit on tend to roll back under the table on their own. So number one I might not have been sitting in the best position, and number two mostly I was using my right arm to hold down/out the drawer. That was the last straw and my elbow began aching in class. The rest of the day it hurt, and I tried not to overuse it. Tried not to use it at all but that wasn’t possible.
Monday night I kept waking up in pain, because I’d washed my face and applied all the facial products, yes using my right arm. Tuesday morning I was a bit better, but not by much.
From then I’ve just been keeping my right arm out of commission as much as possible. I try not to lean my head on my right hand while in class/in front of the computer. My dishwashing ability has gone down; I scrub less so I have to spend longer time going over the same thing. In labs I have to use the mouse with my left hand, and try to keep my right hand in my lap, relaxed. Also don’t use my right arm when I drive. I managed twice so far to drive home and back at 70 mph using mostly only my left arm. XD; My right arm I use more as dead weight to make right turns easier on my left arm, which can start to hurt while driving.
Even though I’m getting used to driving one-handed, I still don’t like to do it. I feel most secure with my hands at 10 and 2. Or probably more like 9 and 3. (I will ignore that article in Westways or whatever it was that suggested 8 and four to avoid getting wrists broken when the airbag deploys. If I were to encounter an accident I would rather have better control of my car and have more of a chance of avoiding collision than having less room to make quick movements resulting in a more likely impact and save just my arms from getting hurt.)
This whole thing has made me think a lot. I can’t play the Wii. ;-; I can barely play video games with a regular controller: I need a pillow to rest my arm on and have to remember to keep the elbow relaxed. Do I have to think of another career if my arm doesn’t get better? Should I get into a different line of work regardless? How the heck do you rest something that you end up using a durn lot more than you thought?
I have to be more careful from now on. Even though I’m not right now. My elbow is complaining but I’m ignoring it because I’m too lazy to pull the laptop closer, pull the chair under the desk more, raise the chair higher, sit with better posture.
I know I’m going to be using the computer a lot in my career, so all my arm use quota will be used up then. So what else can I do? I mean, can I go swimming? Just barely one hour of playing the Wii, six hours of driving, half an hour keeping my arm firm to hold out the drawer, has rendered my arm useless for the past seven weeks. Is a job worth that?
Will I even be able to work this summer? (I will probably just have to use my left hand with the mouse.)
taken for granted
Must … update … blog.
After about five or six hours coding this layout, from 12 pm (an hour after I woke up) on, I have to say I don’t like this layout as much as I’d hoped. I couldn’t do it the way I’d wanted (background images on top and bottom), so there’s lots of extra space around the boxes. murrr.
Now the colors are looking funny to me, not as nice and soft and pretty as they first were. I also just realized that I forgot to check the colors on my desktop (colors on my laptop look waaaay different from any desktop), so I don’t know how funky they really are.
But meh. No more ugly pink color and tiny box area to scroll through.
Group presentation yesterday in art was all right. Eddie Izzard was nicely received. (Her Engelbert Humperdinck bit was used to illustrate idea selection.)
The earlier part of the day was spent uninstalling and reinstalling my printer, in an attempt to get back my ability to print InDesign documents with the Composite CMYK setting. I don’t know why it takes so long to install a printer. Rather, I don’t know why it takes so long for the installer to realize that there’s just no way the website is going to be found to self-register the product, so just move on in the process already! But whatever. It didn’t work. Still can only print in Composite Grey or Composite RGB. I have no freakin’ clue why.
The HP website (I have a Deskjet 4160) has a support page about printer settings not available in InDesign, but for Macs. (Funny, I never thought of hooking Macs up to regular printers. All the ones I’ve dealt with as of late were hooked up to fancy printers with RIPs, if any.) I don’t even want to fashion that “help” to my own situation, because they suggest overriding InDesign print settings and going through the HP print settings dialogue. Ouch! No way!
The Adobe website has a topic in the InDesign support forum for Macs, but that was about an Epson printer, and a somewhat fancy one, not my dinky $60 one. The response there is that a lot of inkjet printers print with RGB or something, which I find truly odd, so might as well go with the Composite RGB. Or buy a really fancy RIP that’ll convert to CMYK for you. Right.
A couple weeks ago when trying to find a solution through Google I saw this page, an entry in a blog with a similar situation but also involving Illustrator. I can’t seem to find it now though. Someone commented saying he’s had that problem, and that he always just … does something involving the printer. I can’t remember. Removes the printer from the settings, I don’t know. Which is why I went through that whole mess this morning. But it didn’t work.
I think, I’m not sure, that this problem occurred after I changed color settings or color profiles or something in InDesign. I don’t know how or what to change the settings back to. I did synchronize color settings in Adobe Bridge though. I don’t know what that did really, but hey I got a little note about it so I did it hoping it would fix my problem. It didn’t. So I am stuck saving files as PDFs and printing through there.
(I don’t know why I don’t want to print RGB. It’s stuck in my mind that if it’s for print, I should stay away from RGB. Apparently the CMYK color gamut is smaller than the RGB gamut. I experienced that when I didn’t realize the picture for my movie poster was in RGB. Augh. But tha’s neither here nor there. What I want to say is that if I’ve designed something in CMYK [technically; I set up colors in the program using CMYK, but I am looking at the colors in RGB on the monitor], I feel that it would be just plain weird to print with Composite RGB to a printer that uses cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.)
Hmm … just read more topics at the Adobe InDesign support forum, and it was explicitly spelled out that only postscript printers accept CMYK. So what was I doing before? O_o
Another note: the funky colors are probably a result of me tilting my screen more than I had earlier this morning or last night. XD;; Wow, I really need sleep.
10:04pm The dawning light! (After looking up “inkjet printer cmyk rgb.”) Inkjet printers expect RGB since that’s what the general public would work in, and has a driver in the printer to convert to CMYK. But that brings up the question … how was I able to print CMYK?
Ugly life
Oh my goodness, Ugly Betty was all over the place tonight! o_o Trying to keep their audience … very cruel.
But I’m not really one to talk about primetime television on my blog … except Monk, of course.
My cell phone keeps “failing” calls today, I don’t know why. I had to call my voicemail four times to hear a message, write down the number, and save the message. Or did I save the message? I may have just given up the last time. It’s interesting that the message was available every time though, and not deleted. That’s nice. *pats voicemail company on the head* Then a group member called me and all I got was “Hello.” *phone ring* *some people talking* *dead air*
Oh yeah! I remember, yesterday I tried calling my voicemail and somehow I ended up getting the last person I called. In between me (what’s the cell phone equivalent of “dialing”?) going to voicemail and having someone say “Hello?” I heard some girl talking, she was saying something like “I know how to do it!” and some guy was saying “Get [something], address, [other stuff].” … Right. At first I thought it was the person whose car I whacked in the parking lot at school. (Trying not to hit a car on the other side whose driver was still in the car, both cars I guess were parked too close on each side.) But no, I ended up saying to someone else entirely, “I think I hit the wrong button… bye.”
After that I got a call from a phone in the 925 area code. I picked up ’cause I couldn’t remember if I had a group member in some class with that area code. *blink* Some guy asked for me, I thought, then the sound cut out for a bit, and I said “Hello?” and ended up hearing some lady speak Spanish to me. Riiight … She was asking for Eddie, which in a male sort of Mexican accent can sound like my name … right? My hearing isn’t that bad … right?
But I think I’m sort of rambling. I meant to say that I just hope I don’t forget something tomorrow or next week.
I can’t think, my left elbow hurts. Er, right above the elbow, on the outside. My posture probably isn’t helping. *sitting crooked* And the keyboard is pushed all the way to the right to make for the mousepad on the left so my left arm is sorta reaching to hit the keys … I hate keyboard/mouse positioning. It seems like they’re both in the way of each other. Ideally the mouse should be right in front of your hand/arm, not off to the side, but then ideally the keyboard should be smack dab centered in front of you, not off to the side. I think I need to buy a keyboard with no arrow keys or number pad. XD; Do they even make those in regular sizes? ie, not travel size?
I’m such a bad blogger. I can’t write coherent, topical entries like some bloggers. Can’t keep a personal blog that’s all nicely written and such. None of which (whom? I switched nouns somewhere) I’m going to mention here because I don’t want them to notice me talking about them. XD; I’m all rambly and blalala just like I used to be four years ago. Huh. Wait. Six years, in just a month and some days. o.o!! Wow. I might need to get a life.
Anyway! I need to finish reading chapter 15 for typography, which I find personally a waste of time because I don’t plan to set tables but then of course eventually I will but I don’t want to read the chapter because it isn’t a manual for my program of choice, InDesign, it just says what to do, and possibly ways to go about doing just that, if “your layout program allows it/has that feature.” *twitchtwitch*
Don’t get me wrong, I like the book and plan to keep it and use it for reference (in life … for life … they both sound like I’m going to make life choices based on the book O_o). It’s just that the author tries to be general and applicable to what you do, and it’s very helpful in that sense, but it gets sort of annoying when he says, “a good typographer does such and such, and I don’t know how to do it in your program specifically but you really should do it because I’ve modeled you into a typography snob and you’re going to feel guilty if you don’t.” Augh!
Right. Tables. I don’t think InDesign does tables. I know it does tabs! I like tabs. Not sucky, ugly tabs in Word, or fat tabs that take up a lot of my typing space in Notepad. Nice tabs, that you can set the way you like.
Anyway. Typing for 30 minutes. Wow. Maybe this is why I stopped writing in here. XD; Takes up so much of my time! Other things I’ve dropped this quarter: going on aim; reading (except for my typography book); any extra work on my appearance (but who am I kidding? I don’t do much more than bare minimum that often when I do have the time); tidying up apparently, there are piles of stuff everywhere that I keep thinking harbor spiders or fleas. But things I’ve picked up: behind-the-scenes site maintenance; keeping to a somewhat reasonable sleep schedule during the week (except tonight :x); nursing my right elbow >_< to keep it from hurting; making school-related supply runs alone.
Now I should get to bed.