( holy week + travel to singapore )

( weird weird dreams )

( nostalgia and RO )


( hard drive failure! but a happy ending )


Also I am grateful for friends who will take care of me when I get myself good and caffeinated. You know who you are <3

I love tea, and I have a couple containers of loose-leaf lying around somewhere, but I generally forget to drink it because we don't have a teapot, so it's very fussy to boil water in a pot and then pour it into a glass to steep, and then do that again once the single mug is gone.

But uh. Apparently we have a tea ball, which I found in box of post-its, and it is so much easier to use, frankly it makes me happy to a ridiculous level :)

(It just occurred to me that I could have used the hot water dispenser with the loose-leaf, but!)


SO ANYWAY. I have a stomach full of warm tea, a list of things to do, and a calm, relaxed sense of well being. Tea is awesome.



My grandpa wanted to spend some time out of the city, so we (grandpa, me, cousin, aunt) went to Subic over the weekend. Sadly it rained, which meant we had to forego a lot of the things we wanted to do, so the weekend was boring, but it was boring in a stress-free chill kind of way. That's okay. (In fact, that's very okay)

Also okay: we found a restaurant that serves an excellent fried shrimp dish with salt and pepper. Excellent I say :)

Ummmm. I did get to drape my arm over a tiger, though, so uh yay? It was two years old and kinda big but mostly it ignored us. So I wasn't terrified, but there was no way I was going to move my hand off of where the trainer put it.


Oh! And I borrowed my brother's camera, which beats my crappy phone camera, so theoretically should have been able to get decent shots. Unfortunately, I didn't really know how to compensate for blurring under low light conditions. I had to immediately throw away two-thirds of my shots because they were blurry; that leaves me some 250-odd to go through for quality. Still better than my old record which is taking two shots early in the day, then forgetting to get any later on.


Cameras are fun! Having been able to take photos on this trip makes me want to splurge on a phone with a better camera. I mean it won't be any kind of DSLR, but it should get me to near enough point-and-shoot that I'll be able to take photos on a whim (currently, whims are broken by the fact that the camera on my phone takes forever to load and doesn't really take good pics besides). Bonus: with the right app, I can just upload and share the pics as I take them, rather than having to remember to sync from the camera and organize and etc (...currently Flickr crashes on my phone when I try to upload. Another point for getting a new phone)

Currently my options are the iPhone 4S, and, well, the iPhone 4S. I've thought about trying out Android, but honestly I can't be bothered to wade into the ios-vs-android religious wars long enough to find a review that'll influence my decision either way.


Also, speaking of DSLRs, it turns out that if you turn the zoom level way up, that can aggravate blurriness in low-light, especially if you accidentally turn off image stabilization. Even the very best technology can't help a person who's determined to shoot themselves in the foot /o\



Also, also, I am tempted to tweak the default Tags module location so it's the first thing that comes after the entry, rather than the icon, but maybe that's too big a change now. Hm.

I am sitting in bed, listening to my portable mobile tablet read an ebook to me, while I knit. I don't need to look at the screen (which is good, because my eyes are tired. I'm at the point where I'm squinting at the screen, but not at the point where my head aches from the light), and I don't need to turn the pages (which is fantastic, because my hands are full of knitting).


I'd played with VoiceOver settings before, because I knew I'd want to try it out in case of headache / tiredness, but this is the first time that I've used VoiceOver in real world use, rather than just testing snippets here and there.

So far so good :)


One thing that held me back at first is that in general, I get more tired when listening than I do when reading. However, after fiddling with the settings, I found out that lowering the volume and speeding up the speaking rate (both of which were unintuitive steps to me) has helped reduce the weariness.

Reducing the volume reduces the feeling that I'm being shouted at, and lets me listen with less stress. And increasing the speaking rate increased my comprehension (do you know the studies that say that speed readers absorb more information than slow readers, because they take in things a block at a time rather than a word at a time? I suspect it's something like that. Or it may be because I'm less bored and my mind has less time to wander).

Anyway, yes, really glad that I have the tools that I have \o/ I love tech!

Some pictures of loot I've hauled home from June through to August. Some are long overdue. Most involve yarn *g*

All of them were taken using a phone camera, so please excuse the quality!

( yarn - Australia )

( yarn - USA )

( yarn - local yarn store (Dreams Yarnshoppe) )

( books, tech, etc )

So all in all, I have enough to keep me busy for the next six months or more. *purrs*