November 2007 Archives

purchased: December 26th, 2006
MSRP: $149.99
target post-christmas price: $60!

see what we did there? booyah!


NOW ACCEPTING ORNAMENT DONATIONS!

we live on the third floor of an apartment in a very hilly part of san diego (well, okay, fine... all parts of san diego are hilly) called carmel valley. so we have a pretty scenic view looking out from our balcony. actually, it isn't really so much scenic as it is a parking lot and sky, but we have big palm trees covering everything up, so it's all good! it's actually nice to have this much privacy on our huge 15 foot long balcony, and it certainly helps us from getting in trouble for grilling yummy korean bbq on it!


"ahh... so warm!"

see? trees!

look! we're taller than the palm tree! bwahhah

welcome to our crib. this is where we kick it.


i dunno what's up with the super white walls, but our apartment pretty much has a black/white theme going on

this is wherez the fud is mayeed

our huuuge patio

it's so sunny sometimes i have to eat with my eyes closed!

had a great birthday dinner. nothing says i love you more than having samgyup sal and dwenjangjigae (read that as grilled pork meat and really smelly soup) served by your significant other :) well, there is one thing that does. and that's painstakingly rearranging the frosting letters that your local Baskin-Robbins employee wrote down because he wrote "Happy Birthday Bill!" instead of "Happy Birthday Phil".


Looking at the photo, I think Minae shifted the IL down one space, transplanted the L back to after the B, and shaved the bottom loop of the B off to make the H. I'm not sure what the last dot is, but maybe its there to read "HAPPY BIRTHDAY PHIL FULLSTOP"

END TRANSMISSION

i figure i'd start using my blog to jot down some notes regarding programming stuff since I really don't have a good place to put all these things... it'll also force me to start using my blog again which i haven't really kept up with in... oh, about 18 months?

anyway....

so i'm doing some programming in Visual Studio and have noticed one very annoying thing... everything is changing from standard ascii character sets to unicode, which i supposed is a push to standardized the way characters are represented. this has caused microsoft to add new functions which causes compiler errors if you're not using the appropriate ones. in any case, i thought i might point this out, and a simple fix if you don't want to deal with the unicode conversion is to go into the compiler settings and change the character set from unicode to multi-byte... here's some useful information from codeproject:

"In order to allow your programs to be used in international markets it is worth making your application Unicode or MBCS aware. The Unicode character set is a "wide character" (2 bytes per character) set that contains every character available in every language, including all technical symbols and special publishing characters. Multibyte character set (MBCS) uses either 1 or 2 bytes per character and is used for character sets that contain large numbers of different characters (eg Asian language character sets).

Which character set you use depends on the language and the operating system. Unicode requires more space than MBCS since each character is 2 bytes. It is also faster than MBCS and is used by Windows NT as standard, so non-Unicode strings passed to and from the operating system must be translated, incurring overhead. However, Unicode is not supported on Win95 and so MBCS may be a better choice in this situation. Note that if you wish to develop applications in the Windows CE environment then all applications must be compiled in Unicode."

read more here!

Distance: 460 miles
Fuel Economy: 35.2 mpg