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Friday, November 28, 2008

Black Friday 2008 - Overview of Online Deals

For all of you who didn't wake up early, there's online shopping to the rescue!

Amazon.com
  • $200 Sony Blu-Ray player. (You could have gotten one for $100 if you were there for the Walmart door-busters, I heard.)
  • Reasonable movie deals, including $15 for Iron Man on Blu-Ray or $9 on DVD.
  • Great deals on TV shows, including seasons 1-3.2 of Entourage for $10 per season or seasons 1-2 of Robot Chicken for $13/season.
  • $200 for an old 16GB iPod Touch (compare to $208 for the new 8GB iPod Touch).
  • There are deals here (and all over the internet) for TVs, cameras, hard drives... I don't know how anyone can tell what's a good value for stuff like that. Don't go above $120/TB for external hard drives (or $100/320 GB if they're portable, perhaps).
Overstock.com
  • Free shipping site-wide. Compare to Amazon, which has free shipping on orders of $25, except for a lot of items.
  • Check out the list of Black Friday deals for other sales (nothing spectacular, unless you need a set of golf clubs or something).
  • Many things are cheaper on Amazon: e.g., complete Planet Earth series on Blu-Ray is $74.94 on Overstock and $69.94 on Amazon -- and qualifies for free shipping. It's worth checking both, though.
Buy.com
  • Free shipping, seemingly on most things
  • $13.55 8GB thumb drive (with swively-ness)

Target
  • free shipping on most things
  • 2-day sale
  • many things are sold out
Kanye West Apparel
  • Kanye glasses shirt, $8 from Wet Seal
  • Kanye glasses, $5 from Urban Outfitters (which, by the way, has free shipping the whole weekend with the code FREEBIRD08)

Monday, July 21, 2008

Umm.



This is how I feel about NBC's "Last Comic Standing."

Saturday, May 17, 2008

I will need to go buy sunscreen soon.

I think I will start blogging again now that I'm in Colorado.

This is an amazing place to be. I will give a brief summary now and add photos later.

Our host family. They are very chill -- including the cute baby -- and they have good taste in music. They have been super nice and welcoming. David says "dude" a lot.

The house. We knew it would be very pretty, and it is. Our rooms have big beds, nice chairs, and a great view. Mo's room also features a large mirror.

The mountains. They are awesome.

I still don't know what I'm going to be doing yet, but it seems that Mo will be doing stuff in C. We haven't explored the area or eaten or unpacked, but perhaps I will post an update if we do any of these things. I think I must be either really tired or in shock, because I don't really have any emotions. I'm just kind of like, "well, this is basically perfect."

Oh yeah. They have a nanny and a maid and a ton of movies... and no Dan Dan. He's apparently so brilliant that he has a 4.0 at CMU and he has to stay there over the summer so he can do this like, 4.5 year undergrad+masters program. Oh well. I hope no one will expect us to be quite that good...

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Rough sketch

10am.

I had a dream that I typed up a blog entry about my field trip experience and posted it when I had internet access again. That sounds like a pretty good idea, so here I go.


For those of you who don't know, this is my first out of 3 or 4 field trips for my Art 199 (aka sculpture) class. Today we are going to Millennium Park. We left the Art and Design Building a little after 8, even though I got there at like 7:38 because I was so worried about being late. Unfortunately, "a little after 8"didn't give us enough time to grab parking at our little train station outside the city, meaning we are driving in to the city right now. "We have an hour and 15 minutes" they say, until our tour. The only problem with driving into the city is that one of our drivers (my professor's friend) doesn't want to drive through rush hour, while the other one (a senior in the class) needs to get back early and doesn't care about rush hour. So I guess we'll split up. Personally, I don't need to go back early, but we'll see how it goes.

Hopefully my camera is working so I can take some photos of sculptures to post later.


8:30pm.

I had quite a fun, full day! Here's what I did (later I will post pictures and perhaps go into more detail about certain things, not that you will care).

We were able to park in the parking garage under Millennium Park. Kind of weird that parking in Chicago is, in some ways, easier to come by than parking in CU (not that I would want to do it every day). They make very good use of underground space.

Before our 11:30 Millennium Park tour, my classmate Liz (who I was in the car with on the way up) and I walked over to Walgreens so I could get batteries for my camera -.-; and a soda. No adventure is complete, of course, without going to Walgreens.

Then we met up with everyone and went on our tour. It was great! I have actually never walked around Millennium Park before. I really liked the space they had for concerts. Our tour guide gave us a lot of background about the history of the park and the structural challenges the engineers faced, so I learned a lot (the point of the whole trip, of course :P). Although obviously there weren't flowers and whatnot, it was a very nice day to be outside.

After the tour, our group went to Bennigan's and ordered way too much food. It was awesome. I had a delicious Monte Cristo and traded Ben my side dish for his dessert. Amanda ordered 3 (!) drinks. Then everyone except Maxine and I had to leave (they were the group that needed to go home early), so Maxine and I gathered up all the leftovers and looked at a few shops. I was reminded, of course, of the Music Club trips to see the Chicago Symphony orchestra... good times!!

Then the two adults, Maxine and I went to the Art Institute to see the Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper exhibits. Being especially interested in watercolors lately, I thoroughly enjoyed the Homer exhibit -- plus, there were tons of paintings and information about the techniques he used posted next to them. Hopper, you might remember, is the painter of the famous Nighthawks, with the people sitting in the diner at night. His pieces usually feature bold, flat colors and a focus on how light falls on objects. I really liked his urban scenes.

Although I was tempted to buy a book on watercolor techniques, I ended up just buying a little Homer postcard set so I can send postcards to people when I'm in Colorado (don't worry, I'll send Colorado-themed ones, too).

Then we went to au bon pain and it was buy one get one for specialty drinks so I got myself a free latte.

And now we are driving home and should get there around 10.

I am studying linear algebra for my test tomorrow. Actually, I just realized that I've been studying chapter 2 very diligently instead of 3 and 4 like I'm supposed to. (Yes, there are 9 chapters in this book and we are more than halfway done (I think?) with the semester. It amuses me.)

This book often says things like "the interested reader might want to prove this before moving on" or "the careful reader might have noticed such-and-such"; they never address me. I think I would fall under the category of "the lazy reader."

Anyhow. Onward to studying. Maybe I'll import my photos tomorrow.... after I do the MP!


10pm.
We got back into town, and now I am posting this and going back to math. xP

Monday, March 17, 2008

Projects I'm thinking about doing

  • Make a webcomic. Unfortunately, my watercolors + ink outlines idea is pretty much exactly the same as Minus. I might give it a try anyway.
  • Learn the basics of Cocoa well enough so that I can make a few basic list-making apps for myself. (I'm a compulsive list-maker. It helps me feel productive.)
  • Think up an idea for an animated Radiohead music video to enter this contest. Has anyone made an animated movie before? :P
  • Make a website for our favorite up-and-coming Internet celebrity, Matt Schouest.
  • Work through pages 39-56 in the physics workbook (the ones that have material that will be on the next exam). Does that even count as a project?