sunday

I swore I had something relevant to blog, but I can’t remember what for the life of me. Nothing interesting going on personally, and since I have a week off, I doubt anything worthwhile will come up. What the hell did I want to blog about?

This isn’t my lightbulb, it’s my boyfriend’s.

Last night he confronted me with the truth. Bottom line: he’s been treating me like shit for the past six months because it was his way of staying on top in the relationship (side note: he didn’t want to feel vunerable like he did in his last relationship).

This is not really news to me. I know how he’s been treating me, and I know he never fully recovered from what happened in his last relationship. My mind understands the words he speaks, my brain makes sense of the logic, but my heart refuses to follow. From an emotional standpoint, how am I supposed to feel when he compares this relationship to the last one? How am I supposed to feel about his vulnerability with Nicole? With me?

I think I need a break from this relationship. I think I need to be on my own to figure things out. He said last night, “don’t break up with me,” and I know I should have, but I haven’t. Why? I don’t know.

I’ve recently been feeling out-of-sorts, like I’m not completely happy with my situation. And for some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about Morgan, but that could have started when I listened to Usher’s CD two weeks ago. I remember Morgan telling me that he was always happy with what he had but he felt as though he was missing something to make him truly happy–a girlfriend. I never really understood what he meant until last night.

I’ve come to realize why I’m in this “destructive” relationship with my current boyfriend. While I’ve suffered the pain of losing a true love, I’ve replaced that pain with a new one. Being hurt by my current boyfriend just masks the pain I felt when I broke up with Morgan. And although I’ve had many opportunities to break-up with my current boyfriend, why haven’t I? Because I’m afraid of feeling that loneliness again, that feeling of constantly thinking about someone but not being able to be with them. At least being in a new relationship suppresses those feelings and thoughts. Hey, what are rebounds for, right?

In light of the arguments and tears between my boyfriend and me, I still can’t bring myself to part with him. He’s sort of a distractor, and this relationship a mask for how I really feel. I wonder if I’ll ever feel normal again.

My boyfriend gave me this book about…5 months ago, and I just finished it this past weekend. I’m not a slow reader, I just found the book slow to read. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explains his theory on how information and trends spread like viruses. He introduces three key players in society who he calls Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen, and uses examples from history to show how they and the Stickiness Factor, while under the Power of Context, pushes an idea over the treshold to become a popular trend. I found these middle chapters slow to read because he inserts a lot of anecdotes about Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues and Hush Puppies to exemplify his theory. The case studies in the end are a little more practical in that he presents the problem and how his theory is a workable solution (why are cigarettes so addictive? how do we curb crime in a bad neighborhood?) Now, if only society would take these case studies into consideration and begin making a change.

We’ve been getting quite a bit of thunderstorms lately, and it was too bad that it pretty much rained this entire weekend. My boyfriend and I did finally decide to venture out Sunday night to watch Click, and wouldn’t you know it, it was POURING after the movie. Well, we had planned on walking home, but decided to Metro it. But there was still a 5-minute walk from the metro to my condo, and let’s just say we made it a 1-minute run. Lesson learned: never run with sandals in the pouring rain. I was running the crosswalk and lost my right sandal. As I was going back to pick it up, I lost my left sandal. I’m sure the people in the car at the intersection thought I was crazy or ridiculous or retarded or all of the above. We finally made it back to the building soaked. It was a good time though.

I’ve been telling myself for the past week that I’m going to start working out, but I haven’t. I promise I’m going to start working out today.

Customer: I don’t have a ‘7′ key.
Support: It’s between the ‘6′ and ‘8′ key.
Customer: I don’t have a ‘7′ key.
Support: Do you see the ‘1′ key?
Customer: Yes.
Support: What’s to the right of that?
Customer: ‘2′
Support: And further right?
Customer: ‘3′, ‘4′, ‘5′, ‘6′
Support: What’s the next key?
Customer: ‘8′
Support: It should be to the left of the ‘8′
Customer: Oh, that ‘7′ key?

I had a little trouble embedding this video.

The instructions say to extrapolate the long URL from Google Video’s “Put on site”…which doesn’t exist anymore.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?videoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fvp.video.google.com%2Fvideodownload%3Fversion%3D0%26secureurl%3DjQAAAI2D-oeokHvEtP4vUMF6XpEPkLnk1CzCPWh_ceWkgqteIts5AhlVKPfw7OTKxfMTnFueC7owITuZG8Bgbq4EjeChTgoTU__CTEDXJH_pKnb-5HC2YGPArZRmloEk3bAoAvK5__9X1oW8dq0mZ-xFB1-6xdVitpR-FnidBC0Gpx0gTQjijrq7vrNfCh-mkLIP2g%26sigh%3Dr8uwuHM27caxFbz2AvH3PHkAUpg%26begin%3D0%26len%3D21366%26docid%3D3728266100951844857&thumbnailUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2FThumbnailServer%3Fcontentid%3D7d3c304a1b09e543%26second%3D5%26itag%3Dw320%26urlcreated%3D1138895377%26sigh%3D7g3V08dj4BKPsDXSwXhOmNiY2fQ&playerId=3728266100951844857&playerMode=embedded]

It’s now called the “Embed HTML” feature under the “Share this video” button, and the URL is not nearly as long anymore (which confused the hell out of me). So I had more than a little trouble, seeing as I spent 30 minutes trying to figure this out, but I finally got it to work, and it’s A LOT simpler than the instructions say posted four months ago. You still need to extract the URL in between the quotes after src.

So now it looks like this:

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?
docId=-5611795233114512826]

I woke up again last night at 11PM because it was unbearably warm in the bedroom. As I was trying to gain conciousness, I noticed a bright light flashing outside my window. At first I thought it was the light emanating from my phone, but then I remembered that my phone wasn’t on my side of the bed. Not thinking anything of it, I went to turn the AC so I could go back to bed. But I noticed the continued flashing outside the living room window and went to go investigate the situation. By now I was almost fully concious, and when I looked out the window I thought I saw people in the streets. Confounded at why anyone would be playing in the middle of the streets during a storm, I ran to get my glasses and clearly saw that it was just trees swaying in the wind (no wonder dark forests are so creepy at night). Well, I sort of managed to get back to bed afterwards. Usually a lightning storm is followed by torrential rains and then the smell of morning dew. Not so much. The thunderstorm pretty much lasted the ENTIRE night. Although the photo was taken in Shanghai yesterday, I’m pretty sure this is what it looked like last night:

I would have ran out to the rooftop deck and taken a proper picture, but I was still half asleep when this all happened (I did think about it though…).

I’m a little skepitcal about the Wii-mote. Nintendo die-hard fans swear by it, saying it’s better than the traditional controller because it provides better precision and is easier to use. I don’t quite agree, because precision (especially in FPS) depends not on the type of controller, but the user. I know gamers who are very adept with the controller and have no problem aiming and eliminating their foes.

And what about swinging your arms while playing tennis? Isn’t that hazardous? With cables flying around, I can see an accident waiting to happen. And don’t give me that crap about “parents will like this more because their kids will be more active.” BULLSHIT. If parents really wanted their kids to be more active, send them fucking outside! Just had to get that off my chest. (Why does this always somehow relate back to third parties babysitting our children?)

Anyways, the point of the post was to show you some demonstrations of the Wiimote in action.

From Neowin:

In light of recent security concerns and a lawsuit, the popular social networking site, MySpace, announced it would be increasing it’s efforts to protect younger users. While MySpace already prevents children under the age of 14 from signing up, there has been a lot of pressure for them to do more in keeping predators away from children. Under the new plan, any user age 18 and over will not be able to send a friend request to another user who is younger than 18 years old without previously knowing the young member’s full name or email address.

Many people continue to worry, however, because the system is far from being fool proof. Member’s 18 and under can still freely send friend requests to their older counterparts. The new system can also easily be bypassed if one were to lie about their age and claim they are under the age of 18. Because of this, many feel the entire scheme is going to be relatively ineffective.

MySpace expects to have it’s new protection measures fully in place and running sometime next week.