Category Archives: Personal Blog

Entries from my personal journal

Personal Blog

Osaka Adventure – Day 1

2 Comments

We got right off to an adventurous start today. After waking up and enjoying a tasty Scott-cooked breakfast, we made our way to The Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum.

Lo, the educational wonders of the rich history of instant ramen! A large timeline wall displayed every product since instant ramen’s inception in 1958! A colorful cartoon clearly geared for 10-year-olds explained the birth of the idea for cup noodles! And best of all…

That’s right, I got to make my very own instant ramen! And I mean the noodles themselves – we got to roll them out and cut them and decorate our own package! Let’s ignore the fact that Sena and I were the only two adults participating. Don’t worry, photos will be forthcoming.

Other than that, I got reacquainted with all the little things I loved about Japan from my last visit: the textured sidewalk paths for the blind, CC Lemon, those little shortbread and chocolate things in the shapes of mushrooms, etc.

This evening, Scott cooked a delicious dinner of rice and pork and veggies. They have lemon-infused soy sauce here! I want to bring some home, if I can, but the logistics are tricky since I don’t have any checked luggage. Anyway, Scott’s mom would be proud of the cooking prowess he has inherited from her 🙂

Personal Blog

Osaka Adventure – Travel Phase

I am safe in Osaka, all! Chillaxing at the airport, currently, as Scott went to the wrong airport to get me, doh! Worry not, through the magic of Skype and free wireless internet, we were able to touch base and he is on the train bound for the correct airport 🙂

Meanwhile, the traveling phase went well enough. One of my super powers is my ability to sleep like a rock in even the most uncomfortable of situations, so I snoozed soundly through the long flight to Seoul. On the brief moments I was awake, the lady next to me was very enthusiastic about chatting and sharing her life story. She was bound home for the Philippines, she has seven children (all grown up), she and her husband have been married for 50 years and just got done driving up the coast of California and back. She was very nice, and envied my ability to sleep for the majority of the 14 hour flight.

Meanwhile, I had the longest layover EVER in Seoul. I got in at about 5am and my flight out wasn’t until 1pm, so there was ample time for killing. I’d never been to Korea before, and even though I don’t technically count being in just an airport as having visited a place, I did find the place enjoyable. For one, I think all airports could do with more large touch screen displays that give you step by step visual directions from where you are to whatever gate you need to go.

Also, they had these classy relaxation/lounge areas on the upper floors of the airports, with really comfy lounge couch chair thingies. I promptly took a nap for several hours 🙂

I killed the rest of the day with naps, a nice breakfast/lunch/jetlag meal (gyoza and orange soda, does it count as ethnic? I think it’s still airport food, but it was tasty), interneting (I wish all airports in the world had free wifi!) and playing Phoenix Wright.

The hop from Seoul to Osaka was short enough, and now I wait for the arrival of Scott. What remains to be seen is if I can hold out for real food or if I’m going to buy 3 boxes of pocky and devour them before he gets here. Only time will tell!

Personal Blog

General Update

2 Comments

Things are going well in the Lisa-verse! Life is busy but good and generally on the up-and-up, though Derby season always makes me a little homesick for Louisville.

Last night, Nick and Nathan and Ross and I spent the evening playing Arkham Horror, which was my first time playing the game. I liked it quite a bit! I’m a sucker for cooperative board games anyway, but this one had a nice adventure element going on with it. It is very much like playing a one-shot session of D&D without the planning overhead that the DM has to do. Thinking about it in this way made it much easier to stomach the fact that it’s a 5 hour game.

Granted, we all were devoured in the end, but I’d happily devote another evening to it. Next time I play I’ll have a much better understanding of how things work, and make a more educated choice in my character.

Other updates!

1. Mr. Davis is doing really well – he loves the clicker training, goes out on walks with me, and is generally all about affection and snuggles. However, he has recently taken up the habit of climbing up the screen door when he’s riled up and playing, which is problematic. What I need is a long, narrow strip of carpet that I can mount on the wall for him to climb up. Any idea on where to procure such an item?

2. I’m going to Japan in like 2 weeks! SO EXCITED! I’ll be visiting Scott Coffrin, who I haven’t seen in years, so that will be fun. It’s a short, week-long trip, and I’ll be in Osaka for most of it, with a day trip to Kyoto somewhere in there. Can’t wait!

3. I have a boyfriend! That’s old news to most of you, but I know not everyone keeps up with facebook relationship status changes 🙂 We are going out on a fancy-pants date this very evening, in fact.

4. Work remains busy and fun and exciting and awesome.

That’s about it from me for now, I suppose.

Personal Blog

Training Mr. Davis

1 Comment

I decided before I ever got my cat that I wanted to do clicker training with him. Mr. Davis is taking to it extremely well! One of the more recent things we were working on was having him jump up onto my wooden cube and wait there as I got his food for him – we’ve probably been at this for a little less than a week – me clicking and treating to get him up there, then clicking for him staying there for longer periods of time, then making the food and stopping to cue him back onto the cube and click and treat whenever he jumped down.

This morning, he meowed, jumped on the cube on his own, and watched me intently (and quietly) completely unprompted. He stayed there the whole time while I got his food, and waited until I said “Okay” to jump down, all without any clicks. I was so proud! It’s super helpful, too, because he was one of those cats who twined around your legs while you were in the kitchen, making food preparation a treacherous occasion.

The biggest trick is figuring out the course of action to take to train him to do something, since it involves shaping tiny steps in the right direction. My current challenge is his morning “is it time to get up yet?” habit, which includes climbing up onto my chest, meowing in my ear, and putting his paw on my face. Since the idea being clicker training is that you reinforce behavior you want, and I can’t very well bring the clicker and handful of treats to bed and spontaneously click when he’s sleeping quietly, I will need a different strategy.

Other clicker skills I’ve taught him are “up” and “down” on cue, and to sit and let me put his harness on. Still working on a reliable “come,” and a way for him to ask for me to play with him (his current strategy is to meow sadly and threaten the couch). Also, I’m teaching him to go into his crate, and to let me handle his paws so that I can clip his nails.

Personal Blog

New Kitty

1 Comment

I brought home my new cat from the shelter today! This is my first cat as an independent adult-type-person, and he is wonderful. His shelter name is Mr. Davis, and though he’s been at the shelter for about a year, he doesn’t seem too attached to it, so new names are up for grabs.

We were apparently meant to be, as when I visited him the first time at the shelter he crawled right into my lap, bypassing the finger-sniff-test altogether. Today when I went to pick him up, all the cats were stressed and cranky (they are moving locations, so everything was being packed and shuffled up. Mr. Davis was laying on the ground with a very “don’t touch me” swishy tail, and the shelter people were looking for where they had packed the treats so they could lure him into the carrier. Then, all of a sudden, he stood up and waltzed right into the carrier, and then laid down and made himself comfortable. The shelter volunteers were in awe. Didn’t make a peep the whole ride home.

He was very low key when I brought him home, and after some sniffy exploring, made right in with the purring and the snuggles. He’s quite big, but very sweet. Here are photos!

And no, he doesn’t have a drinking problem, Josh was just using that bottle as a scale clue.

Photos!

Personal Blog

Church trap

Every morning on my way to work, I pass a little church on Buena Vista which, like many little churches, has a sign out front with a new message every week. This place, however, has the most bizarre, quippy, and humorous messages I’ve ever seen on a church sign. It’s to the point where I eagerly look forward to passing it, to see what weird or witty message is up.

Some favorites:

“I love the smell of chaos in the morning”

“It’s not about the shoes”

“Avoid churches” (which was followed by a bible verse, Matthew, I think, I cant recall it)

I’m intrigued to the point that I might stop in one Sunday and see if the sermons are as snarky as the board sign.

Personal Blog

Website wonders

Internet, what am I going to do with my website?

I’ve come a long way as a builder of website, from scrappy do-it-yourself php, to work-done-for-you plugins like Gallery, to now when part of me just wants to dump everything and use Google Sites because of how simple it is. I realize that everyone’s website is “under construction” to some degree, but I have a bad habit of stopping early in grand designs.

Right now my biggest problem is that I feel dispersed across the internet. I want my website to be a centralizing force, but I’m not sure what I want that to mean, exactly. Here’s an inventory of my internet doings:

My portfolio site, which rose up to a state of half-finishedness before my getting a job and losing all motivation to make it pretty. The process was this: I’ll just lay out all the text and the basic format, and go in and make a stylish design and fancy menu later. As is evidence by my straight up text link navigation, “later” never happened. It is certainly minimal and straightforward, and I did toy with integrating some personal site stuff (as evidence by the sidebar on the first page), but nothing is set in stone.

My personal site, which is in absolute shambles. My intention for this place was to store my various non-professional projects and art, and at the time I was super proud of myself for getting Gallery up and running and integrated. I love to have that stuff sharable, but I hate that my personal site is tucked back and hidden. Is it appropriate, now that I have a job, to once more integrate all this stuff together?

My blogs, one of which is this one, and crossposted to Livejournal, my personal site, and Facebook notes. The other two could fall under the category of “projects,” I suppose.

My Picasa site, where I post my photos, both social fun photographs and my fledgeling attempts at Photography.

Add my Formspring and Twitter pages and I am spread and crossposted pretty thin.

Everyone has the sweeping desire to overhaul their website from time to time, and I’m up for the undertaking, I just need a *plan* before I go in this time. Should I Google Site it afterall? What are my goals with my web presence, beyond just consolidation? Who is my audience? What are my intentions??

Any advice is welcome.

Games and Game Development, Personal Blog

Strawberry Kiwi Pie

My pie-for-games program at work has been a huge success. The long and short of it is, I want to play a new game that’s just come out, so I say that the first person to finish the game and lends it to me gets a pie of their choosing. Cheng won this round with Heavy Rain by lending it to me before he’d even played it, as he wants to play Assassin’s Creed 2 first.

ANYway, he requested my strawberry kiwi pie, which is somewhat of a Lisa Brown concoction, and I thought I’d record it here to share (and so I can look it up easily later. I swear I wrote this down on the internet sometime before, but maybe not.)

Crust:
I always use the crust from this recipe for my pies. It’s simple and tasty. If you have another crust recipe you prefer, then go ahead and use it.

Filling:
2 1/2 cups(ish) of strawberries, hulled and halved lengthwise
2 1/2 cups(ish) of chopped kiwi
(I’m really guestimating these amounts, I tend to grab “what looks right.” So maybe 4 or 5 kiwi fruit and a container of fresh strawberries)
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup corn starch
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat Oven to 425 degrees F

Prepare the crust as per this recipe.

Mix the filling ingredients together.

Line a pie pan with half the crust. Pour filling into the crust. Dot the filling with 1 Tablespoon of unsalted butter, cut into small pieces. Cover with top crust and slice vents.

Put some foil around the edges of the crust. Bake for 30 minutes, then lower the heat to 350, remove foil, and bake for 25-30 minutes more, until it’s all bubbly and such.

Personal Blog

Books

I’ve been keeping my brain filled up on books, but I’ve been slacking in my intentions to give my thoughts on them. My two most recent excursions have been A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins.

A Confederacy of Dunces was a bit of a rough read, not because it was bad or anything. On the contrary, the dialog brought its characters to life in impressively distinct and colorful ways. It’s just that most of the characters are so dreadful and hate-able that it’s hard to endure their presence for very long. I kept thinking “if these people don’t each get theirs in the end, I’m going to be really upset.”

Fortunately, I was not upset! The ending wrapped things up in the most pleasing way it could, and I was satisfied. However, I don’t think I’d go on that adventure a second time.

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, on the other hand, I enjoyed very much from start to finish. Tom Robbins has a way of pouring out words in buckets, and my brain had a way of lapping it all up into order. It’s strange, too, because some wordy authors I don’t like at all, I just read too quickly and get tangled up in the words. With Robbins, though, everything synched up, and I ended up being delighted by his wordiness. Not to mention the fact that the story was engaging and the characters all felt real.

It was also fun because Josh, who lent it to me, had written notes in the margins and underlined phrases throughout. I love it when that happens in books, because it makes me feel like I’m spying on the inside of someone’s brain.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a new book to read, I’d highly recommend the Robbins book, but approach A Confederacy of Dunces at your own risk.

Personal Blog

Fun with Words

So I was thinking about how something in my last facebook status post sounded off, and upon identifying it, I became curious. I should have said “since Drew Barrymore was IN E.T” and not “on.” Saying on was making me think of Entertainment Tonight, not the movie.

Have you noticed that we tend to say an actor is “in” a movie, but “on” a TV show? Why is that? From whence did it develop?

Linguistics friends, I expect answers!