Random Thoughts from a Random Taru

Two new TV shows I’m addicted to right now (on top of Heroes) and a few more that I’ve gained interested in.

Moonlight – Cheesy vampire P.I. story. Reminds me of Forever Knight back in the 1990’s. Good guy vampires = teh win. At least for me. There isn’t enough stories like that. My fear is that the show will get cancelled after a few episodes. It’s in the Friday night death slot and the basic premise sits squarely in a rather niche genre.

Pushing Daisies – Very cute story about a guy who can bring people back from death with the first touch, and then back to death with the second. He brings back his childhood friend who he loved. One thing I really like about the show is the saturated colors. The greens are a very vivid yellow-green, the sky is a pure sky blue.

Those 2 shows I’ve watched each episode several times now. The other shows I’m following are Life, Journeyman, and Bionic Woman (not so much). The main actor in Journeyman (strange title, in my opinion) is a Scottish actor with a Scottish accent. On the show his voice is totally different with an American accent and pitched higher. I saw him on Jay Leno and the first thing in my mind was, he looks like the actor in Journeyman, but with a different voice and accent. Hahaha.

I just had the best bottled jasmine tea. Asahi shan tea pu-erh cha (香茶プーアル茶). It’s a mix of pu-erh and jasmine tea, according to the label. What pu-erh is, I don’t know, but it makes good tea. I think I can go glug glug a bunch of it. Too bad I only bought 1 bottle.

Interesting how Virgin Mobile of Australia thought it was okay to randomly take pictures from Flickr to use in their ad campaign.

Flickr: The Virgin Mobile – Are you with us or what? Pool

One girl in the US is suing the company because they didn’t get a model release from her. Whoever did the ad campaign should have known better.

How would I feel if one of my photos were used? Well, if it contained a person, then I wouldn’t be too happy. I don’t upload pictures of my friends and family to be exploited like that. If it was just an inanimate object, then I wouldn’t give a care in the world. I would probably be flattered that they used my photo. It’s a very delicate line, really. I’m uploading photos of my daily life for everyone to see. I figure, I don’t know the people who look at my pictures, and they probably don’t really care. I don’t really post incriminating photographs, unless you’re an unneutered male rabbit… But, I think the rabbit was an exhibitionist anyways, so I doubt he would have cared. :P Anyway, I don’t care if people look at my pictures. If I did, I would have set the privacy to private instead of public. I don’t care if people post comments on my pictures unless they were rude. I love taking pictures. I usually post only the ones that I think are good anyways. Just don’t take advantage of my photography.

I’ve been following the story about Youssif on CNN.com. What happened to the boy never should have happened, and what’s happening to the boy now was once considered an impossible dream. People can be so depraved, like dumping gasoline on a 5-year-old boy and setting him on fire. And then people can be so generous, like how thousands of strangers donated money from around the world to help the burned 5-year-old boy. I really hope everything turns out well for him.

My mom said that I can keep rabbits, providing that I clean up the house. And that the rabbits can hang out in my sister’s room. Yeay! Now I have to clean! >_<; I’m having a hard time chucking things. So many memories… Chucking things seems so sad, but I must! I must chuck! For rabbits! <3

I quite like it. I think I’ll work on rabbits next.

This weekend was pretty busy. Aside from my virtual adventures in Vana’diel, I had some real life adventures as well. Yeay!

Saturday: After dawdling around I finally took a shower at 5 PM in order to get ready to go to Kandarp’s BBQ/birthday party. I figured being a bit late won’t matter since the last time I went there was plenty of food. I was so wrong. At least I stopped by Mitsuwa to buy Kandarp a gift (and Suggie since I thought it was her birthday as well, but it turns out I mistook a person named Sandy for Suggie. Kandarp got both presents.) and I also bought myself two rolls. Those two rolls probably saved me from being miserable and stuffing myself silly with chips. So when I finally got there, around 7 PM, all the chicken was gone, and there were no more hamburger patties. Some shrimp were pulled out and was stuck on the grill, but the propane ran out of gas. >_<; Someone was suckered into getting more food and propane (not me!). I ended up talking with a coworker about how charcoal barbecue tastes so much better than propane or gas and a crazy idea fermented in my head… What is the crazy idea? Well, to get a charcoal BBQ grill and grill the Costco chicken that Kandarp serves at home. Yes, amazing.

Okay, it’s not that crazy. Until you factor in 9 pieces of chicken and 1 Erika to eat it all. >_<;;

Sunday (earlier today): I dragged my good friend Franklin out on my crazy idea adventure (every hero/villian needs a side kick!). After lunch, we stopped by Home Depot to pick up a small BBQ grill and some plastic planters. I needed to buy more filters for my fish tank so we went to Petco and I saw the adorable rabbits from the Petsave foundation. The little guys I cleaned after. So cute! (Rabbits = sidetracked) Anyway, after that I still needed a charcoal starter since Home Depot was lacking them and Lowe’s we went. There were plenty there. Finally, we were able to go to Costco to buy the chicken. Ahh, chicken. So many pieces of chicken. More than I can possibly eat in a week by myself. >_<;

So once I got everything home, I went to the mall to buy make up. >.>; So I chucked my old ones because they were almost a year old! YUCK!

Back to my weekend adventure story! So now I’m back home, setting everything up, I needed scissors and a screw driver and my small charcoal grill was set. The charcoal starter worked wonderfully, although it took me a bit to get it started. I might have stuffed too much newspapers in the bottom. ^^; When the coals looked “ashy” I opened up the chicken breast package and cooked 3 at a time, 9 minutes on each side. I called up Franklin, but he didn’t want to come over because his mom was making him dinner. I managed to get a hold of Laura finally so I invited Laura and Steven over to eat my food. I think we all agreed that the lemon herb chicken was the best. We also opened up the yuzu sake drink from my cousin and drank half the bottle. I also mixed a special drink, maybe even a new combination! It’s some sort of Italian liqueur with Calpis and water. It’s delicious actually. I should name it and claim it as mine before anyone else does. Haha… >.>; Anyway, I ended up with 4 chickens left, so I gave 2 to Laura and Steven to take home and 2 for me to eat over the week.

Now I am really tired and it’s already past 1 am. Eek! >_<;

On my way home from work, I had an urge to eat rice. Specifically, brown rice. Unfortunately, there was no brown rice at home. At least, none that I knew was ready and waiting for me. My only hope laid in me making it to Nijiya in Torrance in time to buy it. And score! I did. I bought a bunch of food to last me a while. Yeay! Num num num. :9

I bought Utada Hikaru’s new single Beautiful World from the Japanese iTunes store. My preferences are set so that if there’s a Plus version (higher quality for a bit more $$, or in this case ¥¥) I would automatically get that version. Unfortunately, that’s not what I got when I clicked on the the “Buy Album” button. I ended up with the DRM encoded standard version. >_< I e-mailed Apple’s customer support, not sure if everyone on Apple’s JP store speaks Japanese I wrote a short bilingual message. Yes, “why wouldn’t they speak Japanese?” you might ask. Mac OS is in English, so that sets iTunes in English with all the automated messages in English. So it was kinda late at night and I was tired. :P Basically, I said, “I wanted the Plus version of Utada’s album, but got the standard version instead. Help!” That was last night. The response I got this morning was (in Japanese), “We’re sorry, but we can’t do anything. Here is 1 free song credit for your loss.” I’m like, wth… So I spend a good few minutes writing a response that included 2 screen shots, 1 of my downloaded files and 1 of the iTunes store on Utada’s page. I told them that it was their responsibility, otherwise this is fraud. You buy a certain version of something, you pay the proper amount, and instead they give you a suckier version. I even checked during the day if I got a response of some sort, but I didn’t. Now that I’m home and it’s 2 PM in Japan, I received a second response. This one was much better. It was basically another apology and an option on how I want my money back, either via credit card or by store credit. Well, seeing how I don’t have a Japanese credit card, I told them I want it back by store credit. Yeay!

Now I have to go buy the album version because I want a high quality version of Beautiful World. Hikki rules!

Another video game from the government. This time it’s called “Ground Truth”. Yeah, truth about what? Just the sound of it feels like propaganda.

Gamespot article