Lianhua.nu

Un compleanno ed un gioco di baseball.

Wow. The past few days have been seriously packed full of stuff.

Monday, in addition to being Memorial Day (no work!), was Emily’s birthday, so of course we had to do something fun! Emily had wanted to go to GoWasabi in Astoria, Queens, because they had seaweed-free sushi which is wrapped with soybean sheets instead, and she wanted Warlock to try it (he doesn’t eat sushi). So we went over there, and it turned out to be amazing sushi! Afterwards, we had ice cream too — Sean had red bean ice cream, Warlock and I both had mochi and Emily got tempura-fried green tea ice cream.
Photos!

So much sushi!

Emily’s Birthday Ice Cream!

Theeeen… we went and saw Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End. I don’t want to ruin anything by going into specifics, but I don’t think I liked it as much as the other two, and I hated the ending. Ugh! *ANGRY FACE!* That’s not what’s supposed to happen!
Anyway… it didn’t ruin our night, it was just fun to go and be there and see it in the theater. :)

Then we came back to our apartment, where we surprised Emily with her birthday cake! :)
Before we’d gone out for sushi, Sean and Warlock went out “to go to the ATM” while Em and I stayed here and played with Frankie. Then Sean came up to get us while Warlock waited (with the cake) in the stairwell, out of sight. Then when he wasn’t downstairs, we called him and he pretended that he had gone up to look for us, but in reality he was putting the cake in the freezer. :P
So, after dinner and the movie and everything, she got her surprise birthday cake! :)

Then, yesterday, we went to a Mets game after work, yay! :D
It actually turned out to be an amazing game, and we had so much fun. :)

Anyway… I don’t really have a lot to say… Sarah and I are almost finished with the project we’ve been working on, so… I’ll most likely be blogging again VERY soon!

Tutto la notte.

Yes… I have been awake all night. Why do you ask? :P

I finally got Light & Time up and running. Good times. Now all I need is for a client to get back to me, another to get home from Argentina and… some more clients. :P

I’ve also decided what I think I am going to do with Hello-Toby. Yes, I still own it, and I plan to own it for YEARS to come. MINE! But at least now it won’t be sitting there with outdated WP on it and nothing to show for it. I’ve had Lianhua for almost a year now. It’s about time I did something with H-T.

Let’s see… what else?

Oh, right. I upgraded Lianhua to the latest version of WP. I had to hold my breath and cross my fingers for a few minutes while waiting for it to upgrade, but I think it managed to go through successfully, and all of the plugins seem to be working fine (knock on wood) so all in all it seems like it’s all good.

And I added a nifty little page on how to exclude categories from WP feeds. I highly recommend it for those of you with PPP ads! HINT HINT?

So… right now, I’m sitting in bed. Sean’s curled up next to me, the kitties are… somewhere I can’t see… and Frankie is chewing happily away on some of his toys in his cage. Good times.

I feel productive, and a little… hyper, maybe? But not productive enough. Must work on Hello-Toby!

Ed adesso, una parola dal nostro sponsor…

I guess I should be a bit more opinionated in my blogs from now on… My last entry got some attention, everyone who commented had a little bit to add, haha.

I went back to work this week, basically on my normal summer schedule (Tues, Wed and Thurs from 9a-5p), and I’m already extremely glad I’ve only committed to three days a week. I’d be utterly exhausted if I did anymore — I’m already pretty tired.
Emily and I have to work on getting my contract ready and signed… She’s trying to get me a pay increase, which would be wonderful, for the summer, and trying to figure out what to call my position, how it will be affected by the changes taking place in the office, etc.
She has me working on a PHP script that creates an iCal file (.ics) which is then automatically ported into an installation of PHP iCalendar. It sounds really kind of boring, but I’m having so much fun doing it. I feel like it’s really helping me perfect some of the skills I wasn’t 100% confident in. This is why I love my job!

Sarah and I are working on a semi-new project… It’s a project we started back in December but have wanted to expand on, and we’ve finally sat down and decided to actually do it. We’ll keep you updated as we get it closer to being ready for the public. :)

Speaking of Sarah, she and I were talking about some of our old favorite blogs tonight… and about how it’s so sad that they’ve basically been taken over by PPP ads. There’s one in particular by a girl who we both adored in the past but have lost some touch with lately… We finally had to give up on her RSS feed because it’s just too hard to discern what is actually going on in her life, what is a PPP ad and what is one of those useless ‘filler’ posts thrown in between PPP ads to meet the PPP terms. It’s just so… sad. We both loved reading her blog, and she’s had some amazing and life-changing developments lately, but we (or I at least) just feel like we can’t break the surface because there’s this thick layer of advertising we have to dive through, and we can’t hold our breaths long enough to swim through and find the gems that we know are still there somewhere. (Wow, nice metaphor, Jess… haha.)
And what’s worse? Every so often there’s a post about how much money she’s made on PPP… a PPP sponsored post about how much she’s made, even. She’s getting paid to talk about how much she’s getting paid, essentially. It’s kind of sickening.
While I’m not a fan of PPP ads in general, I can understand their appeal — hell, I even signed up for PPP, but I never took the opportunities (they just didn’t fit my blog or my life at all). And I can understand wanting to make some spending money with them, to have a little pocket change or to save up for that nice new gadget you’ve been wanting. But when every other post is an ad, it just gets to be too much. I don’t even know what a ‘real world’ equivalent would be. Maybe if there were a commercial after every paragraph or every scene on TV. Well, I mean, there kind of is, but… I’m talking so much so that you can’t even catch the line of the story because of them.
I guess the few of us who have held out and just said NO to ads are kind of like the premium/paid channels… or the onDemand stuff. Commercial free, for your viewing pleasure! (Maybe I’m taking these metaphors a little too far…)
If I were ever going to take up PPP, which is extremely doubtful, I’d limit myself to one ad per week — at the very most, probably more like 2-3 per month. This 3+ ads a day thing is just… nuts. Don’t these people remember the days when they were normal bloggers, and they were perfectly happy to get one great entry a day, if not one per week? They claim that they’re still just as high of quality bloggers… but now suddenly they have six or seven entries per day? What happened to ‘quality, not quantity?’ I definitely see a proportional loss of quality with an increase in quantity of PPP ads…

Well… people will do what they want with their property, I guess. I wonder if they’d also sign up for one of those car advertising things, where some company gives you money to drive around with ridiculous decals all over your car? Or maybe they’d auction off tattoo space on their forehead for the highest bidder…