tempest in a teacup

[18:57] <SonicTempest> so anyway
[18:57] <SonicTempest> something funny happened to me today
[18:57] <SonicTempest> I went to a bakery to get a sandwich for lunch and they gave me a sandwich with sausage in it even though I asked for a vegetarian one
[18:57] <SonicTempest> I made a snarky comment about it on Twitter
[18:57] <SonicTempest> and within a few minutes they found me on Twitter and offered me a gift card
[18:57] <SonicTempest> I was like lol wtf
[19:00] <bonta> lolz
[19:00] <bonta> how the fuck did they know it was you
[19:05] <SonicTempest> I mentioned the name of the place in my Tweet
[19:05] <SonicTempest> http://twitter.com/sonictempest/status/22830612889
[19:06] <SonicTempest> http://twitter.com/GrandCentralSEA/status/22831925439
[19:07] <bonta> hahaha
[19:08] <SonicTempest> WEB 2.0 HAS CHANGED THE WORLD

Finished my move last week, and I’ve been at the new place for just over a week now. It’s a great apartment, and the location is pretty convenient. For instance, if I feel like eating out, I no longer need to take a bus anywhere. I still need to go back to the old place and finish cleaning up before doing the final walkthrough with my former landlord – I’ll probably be doing that this weekend.

What else have I been up to? WelI, I tried out the Crysis demo on my PC, and I was surprised to find out that it was perfectly playable at my monitor’s native resolution with everything turned up to High. Sure, I had to leave AA turned off, but the game still looked stunning, and it played pretty well too. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get it, but now that I’ve tried it out, it’s most definitely on my buy list.

Also, a lot of people bitch about Comcast, but the immediate payoff for me has been

1. Being able to watch Discovery Channel again
2. Not having three-digit ping to TF2 servers outside Seattle

So yeah, I’m pretty happy.

About time for one of these posts, I think.

I’ve found a new place in downtown Seattle that I’ll be moving to next month. My current complex is honestly not that bad except for two problems:

1. The ISP choices are terrible (I currently have 1.5Mbps DSL, which is the highest speed available)
2. There isn’t really much of anything within reasonable walking distance

The new place has a supermarket on the ground floor (yay) and a few restaurants within walking distance. The ISP is Comcast, which may be dubious to some but I’m willing to go through the annoying setup process if it means I get a download rate from this century. The only downside is that I’ll either need to take a bus or a company shuttle to work, but eh, I need to start getting up earlier anyway. Getting all my stuff moved over is going to be a pain though…the number of my possessions has increased considerably since I moved to Seattle.

Speaking of Internet, I braved uTorrent a while back to watch some fansubbed anime, namely the first two episodes of K-On! I like it, but I probably won’t be able to watch the rest of it since BitTorrent basically nukes my connection (for reasons I haven’t figured out yet).

Still waiting for Sony to patch in PS2 support for the Madcatz SF4 sticks…I figure if it doesn’t come within another few patches I may just sell this to buy a HRAP3 (which does work for PS2 games). As it stands I need to use my old Tekken 5 stick over an adapter, and going from the awesome Sanwa joystick + buttons to the decent-ish Hori stick and buttons is…well, it’s like owning a Ferrari and driving a Honda instead, if you get my drift.

Installed iPhone OS 3.0 last week. My phone seems to be a lot more responsive now, so it’s obvious they’ve put some work into performance. I don’t use copy/paste much, but the push notifications have been very handy – I finally installed an IM client (Beejive) on my phone thanks to this new feature. Of course, if the damn thing supported background tasks in the first place this wouldn’t be an issue…

That said, I kind of wish AT&T didn’t want $400 from me for the 3GS. That new camera and faster CPU are really enticing.

I took out my guitar for the first time in months today, and all I can say for now is ‘wtf I suck.’ Hopefully this will change.

Second leg of my flight was much worse than the first – we ran into a jetstream which caused the plane to get jerked about like crazy while I was trying to sleep. I did watch a couple of episodes of House and Fawlty Towers though. Hugh Laurie and John Cleese are made of win.

I got dragged into a detailed inspection of my checked baggage upon arrival because I was carrying food (the usual assortment of Indian provisions, microwaveables and most importantly INSTANT NOODLES) and I had an item (cumin seeds) confiscated for the first time ever! Good thing I have a spare at home.

My iPhone tells me that it’s still snowing in Seattle. Not happy…

Damn you for sneaking up on me again this year. Not that it really matters since I don’t really celebrate it anyway. Besides, I’ve bought myself plenty of stuff this year already…I guess my iPhone can count as an early Christmas present to myself.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all, and especially to my colleagues and friends in Seattle who seem to be enjoying (?) their second white Christmas in three years.

God damnit.

I hope the I-5 isn’t a giant ice-skating rink tomorrow.

No, seriously. I was wearing a jacket to work as recently as 3 weeks ago and now the temperature regularly hits 30 degrees Celsius, turning my apartment into a sauna just in time for me to get home (my patio faces west) and making me sweat while I’m sitting on my couch and reading.

I thought Seattle was supposed to be the land of lovely summers and dreary winters, not central Texas.

I bought an oscillating floor fan off Amazon to mitigate the problem, but it won’t get here until Wednesday. In the meantime I guess I’m in for some sweltering nights :/