We had some people over for Thanksgiving last week:

1. two of my high school friends, Ari and Geoff
2. the wife, Michelle, of another high school friend, Obie, who is now in the Peace Corp!
3. Robin’s mom, Diane, and her mom’s friend, Larry, who stayed until Saturday
4. Dennis, a friend from the college of ed, and his girlfriend, Joy

Fun was had by all.  The food turned out well, though I haven’t checked with everyone to make sure no one got food poisoning.  Robin felt nauseous in the middle of the night, and we used a new recipe from Alton Brown which calls for much less time in the oven than all the other recipes we could find, so we were worried for a bit.  But his is based on perfect temperatures…  the problem was that our thermometers suck.  But the meat was super, super juicy.  I guess there’s a fine line between juicy and disease.  😛

We made a ton of gravy, served in our new gravy pitcher from IKEA.  That was good.

On Friday, we took Diane and Larry around town, doing the touristy thing.  First we went on the Theo chocolate factory tour.  Theo uses all organic, fair trade ingredients.  No soy lecithin or other crap, which is good for Diane since she’s allergic to soy.  She ended up buying a ton of chocolate bars.  🙂

Larry and I went up to the Space Needle’s observation deck, and it was a perfectly clear, crisp day for it.  I wish we got there a little earlier, though, since we had some major glare off the water from the mid-afternoon sun.  The view of downtown and Mt. Ranier was pretty impressive.  I’ll post photos later. Robin didn’t go up with us due to her continued nausea, and her mom didn’t go up due to her extreme fear of heights (she even avoids some bridges which makes traveling up through Portland and Seattle a little difficult given the high number of rivers and canals and such here).

Then we went to Pike Place, though most things were closing, so we ended up just getting dinner at The Islander.  We spent a few minutes trying to figure out what Diane could eat (soy allergy, remember) and ended up getting her Honey Walnut Prawns, completely forgetting that mayonnaise often has soy in it, being so focused on avoiding soy sauce…  oh well…  Also, Robin somehow managed to order something that resembled our turkey dinner the day before.  Woops.   Larry doesn’t get out much and ended up getting fried chicken, but then wishing he had Diane’s prawn dish, but she loved the taste and ate it, regretting it later (she does that a lot–still eats Oreos, etc.). What I had was great (Pad Thai).

On Saturday, we went to Gasworks and then checked out the UW campus.  Crazy day at UW, as we were hosting the Apple Cup, the annual football game vs. Washington State.  I hear we lost.  🙁

After checking out the campus, Robin, et. al. dropped me off at Greenlake and went home.  I had to go to Amit and Kate’s wedding!  It was good.

All this weekend, I was slightly antsy since I had just installed the new hardware on Wednesday, but didn’t get time to check it out until Sunday.  The CPU is about twice as fast as my old one (according to 3Dmark06), and the video card is about 3 or 4 times faster than my old one!  This basically means that I can turn up the graphics effects and enjoy modern games in all their glory, though I wouldn’t be able to do this at super high resolutions.  In a year or two, I’ll do a real upgrade to a completely new system.

Aaron gave me a nice present last week in the form of the original Half-Life 2 and Episode 1.  After installing the new hard drive (and dealing with some issues about cloning the OS and boot system, etc.), I finally had enough free space to install it and other games I’ve been holding onto, including reinstalling WoW.  Now to just find some time to play…

I finally got around to installing Itty Bitty RPG over in the sidebar –>

Unfortunately, with my blog’s stylesheet, the pop-up box text is a little small, but you can up the font size of your browser while playing…  It’s sort of in beta stage right now and a lot of things aren’t there yet, but still fun to play.  Read more about it at the Itty Bitty RPG site.

Also, you’ll notice that there are now two sidebars.  Less scrolling!

The Google AdSense has been moved over to single posts so that people who come to the homepage won’t see ads (whereas people who get to specific posts from searching, will).  I played around with a plugin that Erik tipped me off on, but it turns out that it only lets you stick ads in WordPress widgets.. and there doesn’t seem to be a widget that can be inserted right after a post in my current theme.  Maybe switching themes would work but whatever.

Finally, I divided the search into both a general Google one and one specific to my site…  I still need to play around with having Google results be embedded in one of my pages; once I figure that out, those two search boxes will become one again.

Homemade video for Daft Punk (via Collegehumor).

So I’m going to get a bigger hard drive this weekend.  I think my mobo supports SATA.  Right now I have an internal 180 GB IDE and an external 180 GB USB which is kind of nice symmetry in terms of keeping a backup of my stuff…  Initially I was thinking I’d get a bigger disk and then put data on one disk and programs on the other.

But which should I use for what?  Do I need a faster disk for data access/media or for applications?  Or should I just get another IDE?

If I get a bigger disk, I’m also kind of wondering how I’m going to keep a backup…  Get TWO disks?  Or maybe make my two old ones backup drives?  Hmm.. I suppose if I make the new SATA drive the main one with apps and stick photos, music, and docs on my old one, my old external can still just backup my smaller older data drive…  But then I have to reformat and reinstall windows so that the SATA is my primary drive… what a pain…

Any readers have thoughts?

So, I went to a panel on Networked Public Spheres this afternoon that included one presenter talking about how young people are volunteering in unprecedented amounts but not voting much.  This can be thought of as a change from dutiful citizenry to actualized citizenry.  Interesting.  And then I immediately went to a ONE Campaign event pushing young voter participation.  Weird contrast.

The ONE thing was populated by a whole slew of really young undergrads.  Felt weird being there, so I left (and missed out on free pizza).  🙁   But of course the ONE campaign is much more than just voter turnout, so not sure why I left…

Now I am sitting in the HUB deciding whether to go to Lions for Lambs tonight or watch a basketball game.  😛

I watched Darfur Now earlier this week and it was really good, though I wish it ended with more information about what individuals could do.

Last evening I had a really good talk with another student who helped me solidify my research agendas.

It seems like I’ve been accomplishing more in the evenings these last couple of weeks than during the day, in sort of informal hanging out with people rather than structured scheduled meetings.  Is this what it’s like to not take classes or just a tiny anomaly slice of my life?

You know what, I bet this weird disjointed existence is related to being between major computer games…  Or maybe it’s just that I am idle and so am thinking about stuff more.

In the last year or so our mail is consistently misdelivered to our neighbors and vice-versa.  It’s very likely the reason why we missed the deadline to pay for her benefits this past summer and why we keep missing important stuff and/or have to request original senders to resend stuff. What a pain in the ass.

Robin did a search on the web and found others with similar problems.  Check out this great thread:

I want my snail mail! (via Ask MetaFilter)