So I’ve got my lovely little IWC Small Da Vinci with a whopping diameter of 29mm. I love it. And yeah, I do actually rely on the moonphase for keeping track of a certain something that comes around every 28 days.
Here’s a crappy cell phone picture of the IWC on my wrist:
IWC Small Da Vinci on a 5.5" wrist, worn slightly higher than I'd prefer as the strap is the tiniest bit too loose
*I really hate diamonds. If it weren’t for the fact that all the Patek Philippe ladies moonphases have that nonsense all over the case, it would probably be on my list as an unattainable grail. Oh well, one less expensive thing to covet.
I said it well over a year ago, and I’m saying it again because I never did get that new computer. I’m so lazy though. I don’t need to buy a whole new PC when I already have a case and hard drives and such. All I really need is a new motherboard, CPU, and graphics card. But these days, I just don’t care enough to take my case apart and swap all that crap out and set everything up. Oh yeah, and RAM. Okay, this is getting more annoying by the minute, see?
There was no point to this except to point out how lazy I am about even entertaining myself.
Okay, fools, you asked for it (based on hits from search engines), so here is my mom’s quick and dirty pho recipe. Prepare to be wildly disappointed because my mom gave me pretty vague directions, which I am simply relaying here. I’m not a food blogger and I barely ever cook so if you don’t know what you’re doing, you probably won’t get much out of this; if you do know what you’re doing, find a different recipe because I don’t know what I’m doing.
(The only time I listen to the radio is when I’m driving, which is extremely rare since I don’t have a car.)
Or more like Tiësto’s new stuff sounds like everything on the radio. Everyone’s using those saw oscillators or whatever the hell you call ‘em. Dutch house invasion!
I’m really not complaining. So EDM went mainstream. So what? Who cares?
Discussions I found on these sounds, way over my head:
- pop sound sources
- Recommendations For SYNTHs Dance/Electro Current POP
(I was trying to find a non-vocal version of Chris Brown’s “Yeah 3X” when I found those links, ha. Go figure the guy on that forum who knows everything is from NL.)
That’s the first thing Rich and I noticed when going into Amsterdam for the first time. We were in a cab coming from Schiphol (only one or two hours until New Years, so trains were closed) and once we hit civilization, there it was, a large statue of a giraffe smack dab in the middle of one of those big open Amsterdam windows, looking out upon the world from inside a beautiful Amsterdam home.
Just one of the many little quirky things that made my first visit there so memorable.
Time: Is This the Death of Dutch Multiculturalism? – Wilder’s anti-Islam sentiments are legal: I can agree with that (free speech). The fact that his sentiments have gained ground amongst the people: disheartening. Wikipedia: Allochtoon – They want you to “integrate”, but you are still considered allochtoon (foreigner) if one of your parents wasn’t Dutch, even if you were born in the Netherlands. (Edit: Additionally, the whole concept of what it means to be Dutch is so muddled and abstract as to make it near impossible for anyone to know how exactly they’re to integrate. What does it mean?)
I bring this up because as many gripes as I may have about the States, reading that stuff makes me really glad my parents came to the US. I don’t know of any place that is as diverse, welcoming, and accepting as… well, I don’t know about all of the US, but at least the Northeast. While I suspect my parents would have made it wherever they went, they were given a lot of opportunities they wouldn’t have had anywhere else. There’s no question that they are Americans. That’s part of what makes this a great country. Thanks, and happy birthday, USA!
As Rich can tell you, I love to make new characters on RPGs all the time. For instance, I’ve made like ten thousand (exaggeration) on Oblivion alone, I’ve poured probably at least a thousand hours (not an exaggeration) into the game over the years. But I’ve never come close to finishing even half the content. I just start new characters and play through the first 10-20 hours over and over.
I used to think it was because I simply enjoyed character creation, but I’ve realized the issue is having to choose everything about your character before you’ve even really played. In MMORPGs, you typically start out as some general class/race, and after a certain level or quest, you choose a more specific route for your character to go. If you’ve never played before, you’re basically making a guess at how you’d like to play the rest of the game; if you don’t like it, your only choice is to start a new character and go through the whole starter quest stuff all over again.
The thing is, they always hold your hand through the starter area, but once you “graduate” and leave this zone, the whole world of skills/crafting/whatever is suddenly opened—but you can only choose x number of them! It’s simply too overwhelming. And it always happens that I choose my craft(s) based on a short little description, but after a bit more playing I realize my character would’ve been better off learning some other craft. Why can’t it be like real life, where mastering a skill takes a super long time, but does not preclude one from learning other stuff?
But anyway, it’s not just about the crafts. I wish there could be a game sorta like Oblivion where you get better at certain skills the more you use them, but do not have to choose your main attributes from the start. Oh hey, this sounds like Skyrim. I CAN’T WAIT FOR SKYRIM. However, I do not know of a MMORPG that fulfills this desire. And while Oblivion has enough for me to keep coming back, I usually give up on MMOs after four or five characters.
Despite these gripes, I’ve been enjoying playing the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta because the quests are pretty good. (Hey, I’m not the one who signed the NDA. :p)
