Falling stocks? Declining economy? WHAT DOES IT MEAN??!!

According to my friend’s father, this crashing economy of ours signals the start of the apocalypse, as narrated in the Bible (They’re a very religious family). Everyone, but mostly Russia, will all-out invade Israel in the most massive world war ever, and Israel will come out unscathed while the rest of us suffer heavy losses, as if there was some metaphorical holy shield over the country.

It’s a bit hard to believe, I must admit. One of the reasons why I’m agnostic (My religious status: Not sure if there is a God, don’t care to find out if there is one).

Although, it did sound plausible when my mom went super-nice on Thursday night. (I nearly had cardiac arrest, people.)

Here’s a shoutout to all my e-pals: Sorry–you know I’m horrible with keeping in touch. And now that my parents are mad because two of our computers are infected w/ viruses (Which I’m not sure is entirely my fault, because the only sites I visit frequently are fanfiction.net and… well, I think that’s about it), I’ll have restricted Internet access until further notice. Which means I probably won’t get to contact you guys for awhile.

Unless I pull out my sneaky sneaky computer surfing skills…

 

Teeth Dream + My Own Laptop (?)

I thought I was the only one who had teeth dreams. Then I went to www.philsproof.com, and found out that the majority of people have those. You know, the dreams where your teeth fall out for no reason? Even if you’ve already lost all your baby teeth? Yeah, apparently they’re a sign of insecurity or something, and since I haven’t had one in about a year, that’s a good thing, right?

In my dreams, I think I lost more teeth than I actually had. It was like my oral anatomy suddenly turned from homo sapien to Great White Shark. Then I wake up, surprised to find that my pearly yellow teeth are still intact.

I will make a personal header for this blog, soon. Well, when I get access to the Adobe Photoshop computer.

Speaking of which, I think I finally have my own laptop! Okay, it’s not my own, it’s my dad’s company’s, but my mom nor my dad have been barking at me to give it up to them to watch their movies/DVDs on, and now I can do my homework (And update my blog) from the privacy of my room, FINALLY.

Although, I do need to save everything on a flash drive, because I don’t have my own printer… yet. But one day, I’m going to be printing out twenty-page papers every other day, and it’s going to annoy the heck out of my dad because the ink runs out whenever he or my mom tries to print something. And then I can safely argue for them to either move one of our printers into my room or buy a new one just for me.

This laptop does have a downside, though–it’s harder for me to get my work done. I mean, there’s that lovely little blue ‘e’ button right on the desktop, and of course that looks more appealing than the Church Reformation of the sixteenth century that I’m typing about on Word.

But I will NEVER EVER set up a firewall to restrict my Internet access while I’m doing homework. What idiot tortures him/herself like that?

 

Internet highway, make room for Chrome!

Oh-ho, I think we have a breakthrough here:

Google Enters the Browser Wars

Tuesday, Sep. 02, 2008 By JOSH QUITTNER

A new superpower just entered the long-simmering browser war: today, after years of secret work, Google, the world’s most popular search engine, will unveil its own browser, called Chrome.

“On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple,” Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director, wrote on the official Google blog on Monday afternoon… “Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.”

Chrome looks like a “best of” browser, incorporating — and in some cases, improving upon — a few of the most popular features of its competitors…

… With a 72% share of the browser market, Microsoft is the real target here. Far from sinking into irrelevance, desktop computer browsers have continued to evolve and become even more integral to how we use the Web. Whoever controls that experience can leverage it to the detriment of website owners — and in ways that must keep the Google guys up at night. For instance, IE 8 makes it far easier to find something without going through a Google search. When you search within IE 8, you’re presented with a number of buttons, such as Search Yahoo! or Search Wikipedia…

I checked out the cartoon the article linked to. It said the cartoon was leaked in an email, I think, and it has all the boring junk about what Chrome improves on, does, blah blah blah. Stuff I don’t really understand, but somehow, it comes up useful anyway.

All I was hoping is that it wouldn’t end up a disaster like Vista.

Then I stumbled across the page were Google claimed that with Chrome, when you close a tab, it ends the application immediately.

!!!

And that’s when the built-in ’Hallelujah’ chorus (that everyone has in their heads) went off. After years and years of having Microsoft IE freeze up on me because it couldn’t end an unresponding process when I wanted it to, I was about ready to hack into Google headquarters and steal a beta version myself. Do you know how much time I would’ve saved over the years if the Internet applications closed LIKE I WANTED THEM TO?! It’s like trying to train Rover the bad dog to stop chewing up the good futon, and one day, when I switched his dog food from IE Munch to Chrome Crunch, he suddenly decides to sharpen his nails on the scratching post and chew up the rubber bones like you want him to.

Okay, bad metaphor, but I’m trying to explain how anxious I am to see if Chrome is really all that great.

And maybe we’ll have to switch from JavaScript to this new thing called ‘V8,’ but it’ll be worth it, right? I mean, I could probably write an AP Euro analysis in the time stalled everyday when my dad’s stupid old computers freeze up from a few too many applications.

Wait. Wasn’t V8 the name of that vegetable soda…?

 

I’ve cured my no-blog-itis!

I told myself I wouldn’t blog today, because I have much more important things to do. Like get back on track with my AP Macroeconomics course, because I’m supposed to have it finished by now, and I’ve still got a few sections to go. Oh, and translate my French oral. Stupid French. Why couldn’t we have an eighty-page workbook instead? At least we wouldn’t have to make stuff up. Or memorize it. And the teacher wouldn’t even bother to scrutinize the entire book for correct answers. Lucky Spanish people.

But blogging is so much more interesting!!! And it kills my eyes, so I have to think and type fast. When am I ever going to get contacts? Oh, right. When my eyes turn into solid steel and become infection-immune, because my mom thinks contacts will be my sight’s demise. She’s way too traditional. The only thing twenty-first century that I think she endorses is computers on cable. Which she gets mad at frequently because they freeze and slow down too much.

I think computers are the reason why modern people’s patiences are wearing too thin. They’re so fast now that if we have to wait more than two seconds for a page to load, we start concocting drastic schemes on how to destroy the CPU.

I’m an impatient girl. I admit it. Once, when my mom was suppose to carpool Apurva and I back home, she didn’t come at the time she said she would. Or five minutes after that. Or ten minutes after that. So I called my dad to pick me up, and he told me to either wait for fifteen minutes or take a taxi.

Okay, this is Florida, for goodness sakes. The taxi-per-population here is like one per five hundred thousand. And if you do manage to find a taxi service, then you’d have to wait about fifty minutes for them to get to you, because they’re just so far away. Diana says she has a taxi service on her cell phone, and it takes less than thirty minutes for them to arrive, but she’s rich, which is another problem for me: I can’t afford a taxi. My parents don’t believe in allowances, and they never give me extra emergency money besides lunch and math competition money, so my cute I’m Happy Bunny wallet is always empty.

So there I was, barking at my dad that I couldn’t wait fifteen minutes, because my mom was NEVER GOING TO COME, and I couldn’t get a taxi because 1) taxis are an endangered motor species here, 2) if I did call one, it would take forever for them to get to the school, and 3) I was flat broke.

He finally relented after I spent about fifteen minutes yelling into the phone (And drawing attention. But that’s my mom’s fault, because she’s got the voice of a stick of TNT, and never learned how to whisper or talk in low tones on the phone because she thinks the other person can’ t hear her when they’re probably holding the phone about a foot away from their ear.), and he started getting ready for the drive.

Then, after about two minutes, my mom’s tiny Toyota Corolla suddenly came teetering down the street, and I called my dad again, which I was pretty reluctant about, because his lecture on being patient and waiting was right.

So now the situation was: Mom, thirty minutes or so late; Dad, irritated; me, learning an important lesson on patience.

And now I try not to get mad at computers, because all that adrenaline wasted isn’t worth it. Besides, now that I’m getting about six and a half hours of sleep a night (And I’m supposedly on vacation!!!), I’m too tired to imagine the best way to break the darn screen with a sledgehammer.

Yeah. While all my other friends are getting a good ten-to-twelve hour night’s rest and sleeping in until eleven (like I used to be able to do), I’m waking up at six thirty in the morning and going to bed at twelve, because the Olympics are in China, which is halfway around the world, and half a day’s worth of time difference.

Now I have to study for an online exam. Waaaah!

Later, 9:09 PM

I am DA BOMB. I finished three online lessons today. Can somebody give me a whoot-whoot?

*Crickets chirping*

Fine. Be that way.

I found a rather interesting article on Time.com (Wow, what a surprise there) that said that people who kept food diaries lost twice as much weight as those who didn’t, because:

Dear (Food) Diary By SANJAY GUPTA, M.D.

… “it’s not just writing it down that counts,” Stevens says. It is also about using that record to identify eating habits that need to be modified. While most people think they know what they eat, they really have only a general idea and tend to have selective memory, especially when it comes to the foods that aren’t so good for us. With a detailed food diary, you can see where those extra calories are coming from…

…There is another part of the food-diary experiment that really seems to be working for me. In addition to being honest and diligent about the diary, I am showing everything in my diet diary—down to the last morsel—to my wife. Stevens says it’s all about accountability. You may have been thinking about eating that extra cookie, he says, “but you didn’t want it to show up on the diary at the end of the day.” Tonight, we are eating 6 oz. (170 g) of grilled tilapia with steamed broccoli and a handful of steamed brown rice. I originally thought we were going to have steak tonight, but my wife got hold of my food diary. And, yes, she saw those M&M’s.

— With reporting by Danielle N. Dellorto

Dear (food) Diary,

Today, I started off the day with a small bowl of Chinese food. It had lettuce, tofu, and cooked bacon (WHO COOKS BACON IN AN ASIAN COOKING POT?), and maybe just a tad bit of rice. I don’t know. I really have no use for this diary, considering that my mom monitors everything I eat, and I’m only allowed about as much rice as an African orphan may consume in a day. Maybe a little more. Maybe.

But anyway, my breakfast was lightly cooked in oil on my aluminum-foil-covered stove (I’m not kidding. My family’s so Asian, my mom put aluminum foil all over the stove to make sure it doesn’t get dirty. Yeah, sacrifice appeal for cleanliness. I’ll have to post a picture sometime), and it was vegetable oil, so my breakfast was about two or three hundred calories. At the most.

Then for lunch, I had leftover vegetable-oiled lettuce, tofu, cooked bacon, and noodles with sauce. There were a few pieces of chicken, but I don’t like the fatty skin, so I didn’t eat it. My lunch was, once again, two to three hundred calories.

For a before-dinner snack, I ate almost a whole bagel. Almost. And there were no sugars, so that was maybe a hundred calories, at most. But I haven’t had any bagels in a long time, so I was happy. All I’ve had since summer began was… well, Chinese food. And not the nice, fatty, soy sauce/teriyaki-dipped Chinese buffet-style food, either. Just a smidgen of vegetable oil, some sauce, and lots of green onion. Stupid green onion.

For dinner, I had–oh, forget it. I’ve been writing the same freakin’ thing in my food diary for TWO AND A HALF MONTHS!!! I AM GOING INSANE! WHERE ARE THE CARBS?! WHERE ARE THE CALORIES?! I’M AN ASIAN! I NEED CALORIES!!! OTHERWISE I’M GOING TO END UP RAIL-THIN AND BOAST THE FLATTEST CHEST IN THE WORLD!

Ahem. I have no idea where that chest comment came from. I shall conclude with the fact that I ate more traditional Chinese food for dinner, and my entire intake for this day was definitely less than a thousand calories.

Needing the Bad, Sugary Carbs,

Zoey Li

I wonder what the average American’s food diary looks like?

Dear Devil Diary,

This morning, I started off with two Eggo waffles and three pop-tarts. If you think that’s bad, later I found my spouse’s perfectly prepared breakfast of bacon and pancakes (because his/her waist is non-existant), and I ate it all. So my calorie intake was about a thousand right there.

For lunch, I had one of those ramen noodle things I picked up a the Chinese grocery store near my home. I thought it would be okay to eat, because, psh, the thing is as dry as the Sahara and the packets of flavoring and seasoning are tiny, but after I finished the bowl, I turned to the nutritional facts and practically had a heart attack right there. Did you know that one of those little packages has about 1600 calories in it?! And 168% of the suggested daily amount of sodium intake???!!

Dinner wasn’t any better. I had an extra large fries, extra large drink, two triple whoppers, and one of those badonk-a-donk butts. Oh, and I stole one of the kids’ Happy Meals.

Santa Claus is going to hate me.

Not lovingly yours,

A Hopeless American

And whose got the priority in China?

China Quake Rebuilding Costs $147B

Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008 By ASSOCIATED PRESS

(BEIJING) — China’s government estimates it will cost $147 billion to rebuild from the massive earthquake that struck the central part of the country in May, according to state media…

…Soon after the quake, China set up a $10 billion reconstruction fund — compared with the $40 billion spent on the Olympic Games that are under way in the capital, Beijing...

Yes, that’s right. The world comes before China’s own people. Look good before all the strangers out there and neglect the tragedy-ridden people at home. That’s the Chinese government for ya.