New Stuff Bought, from Clint Reno (He of all the DoneWaiting Posters):

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I switched to a Feedburner for all my RSS needs today, but I’m almost positive I messed up the installation. Hopefully it will all work and it will all be transparent to you.

If you are subscribing and you see this, feel free to manually switch the feed from whatever you were on to http://feeds.feedburner.com/hanqduong.

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Well, whole new webpage anyway. I upgraded to Movable Type 3.2 last week and man, I think it’s the first time I’ve upgraded it without feeling like I’m adding more bloat to the page. Everything worked, I was able to get a bunch of nifty plugins (check the sidebars for the pudding-proof) and actually get those to work, which wasn’t always the case before. I’m back to an out of the box design though, because I am way past the point where I’m egotistical enough to think I can design a page that looks any good at all.

Anyway, random list of stuff that’s been occupying my time:

• Arthurfest - This was probably the least organized, most homegrown feeling rock festival I’ve gone to. There wasn’t enough food/water stands and the sound was pretty crappy, but the Black Keys and Sleater-Kinney were crazy awesome, as usual.
• Extras – hohoho. I finished off the rest of the series and it’s the funniest comedy I’ve seen this year. Not saying much, obviously. Kate Winslet’s phone sex escapades are worth subscribing to HBO for.
• Rockstar INXS – I keep watching this every week even though I don’t like INXS much and I think the whole thing is sort of a horrible joke setup by Gary Cherone so that he’s not the worst replacement frontman in the history of rock.
• Urban Dead – This is one of those text games that probably shouldn’t be as good as you would think. I like playing it because the idea of being a survivor in a zombie apocalypse is enticing. The end of the world being scheduled for later this month, the way things are going these days.
• My Horrible T-Shirt Addiction – this one and this one and this one and this one. Oddly I keep seeing people wearing all the other t-shirts from the internet, but never the ones I buy. I must have terrible taste in these things.
  

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For a complete and total lardass, I think this is actually the first time I’ve ever put up an entry about food. If, for whatever reason, you find yourself in Santa Ana, pick up some nem nuong cuon at Brodard. Pick some up for me while you’re at it. It’s a simple spring roll, but their dipping sauce is different from every other noodle house I’ve tried, and they put in a small strip of deep fried dough along with the mint, cucumber and vermicelli that really flipped my shit.

My entree was a pretty conventional bun dac biet, a rice vermicelli with everything thrown on it. I probably should have gone for the banh xeo, the vietnamese crepe of my youth, stuffed with shrimp, ground pork and sprouts. It should be noted my family would berate me for drowning my banh xeo in fish sauce, soggying up the crepe that my mom had worked so hard to crisp up. I was young, I liked condiments. Hell, I still like condiments.

What a weird food flashback.

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Love this one. It’s actually the smallest of the three.

This was a freebie that was tossed in because of a misprint.

I don’t even know this band, but I dug the bears… and I’ll just pretend it’s a poster for the Hitchcock movie, if there was an alternate ending where Cary Grant was attacked by bears.

All posters from Aesthetic Apparatus.

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It’s been a few days since I left San Diego Comicon and my brain is still on vacation. After a while you get used to the crush and the busy, and you half expect the people you work with to show up dressed as Jar-Jar Binks. Someone mentioned that after your first day you grow nerd gills, where your body learns to breathe and process nerd and use it for precious life energy. Even though I took an extra day before popping back into work, it’s been sort of a case of the bends. Has anyone ever died of nerd decompression?

Con went a lot smoother than last year, with my precious lessons learned from 2004. I only made one or two walkthroughs of the con floor, killed time in panels, slept in a lot and generally got tons of rest. The weather was wonderfully cooperative, and I was able to traverse the Gaslamp at will without bursting into flames. A non-immolating Han is a happy Han.

In terms of schwag, I bought a power glove shirt from Gameskins and a new Chocolate Thunder shirt from Jeremy Love, but that’s about it. I did score a couple of little freebies, including a tin of Invader Zim mints. Every thing else I wanted had stratospheric prices, like the red version of those previously coveted Gorillaz vinyl dolls or weren’t available at all, like the upcoming Mospeada Beta Fighter/Alpha Fighter combo. I also found that I was generally unimpressed by the wide variety of crap, mostly because all of it is available via internet anyway. Other than some convenience and saving on some shipping charges, I didn’t really see the big deal most of the time. I was vaguely interested in Black Lava‘s t-shirts, which run like some kind of bizarro Ambercrombie with their pro Asian sloganeering. Unfortunately, their designs are pretty plain and just not competitive with the gear from places like Giant Robot or Threadless.

The nerd contingent was quite a bit bigger this year, with lots of visitors from overseas, but somehow everyone managed to avoid a chaotic dinner party of 20+ and I snuck out of San Diego never getting stiffed on a bill, which is a minor miracle dining with cheapass nerds. Best meal of the weekend was probably a tapas extravaganza at Sevilla with old college buddy Charity, which was one of the few non-Mexican meals I had.

For the most part I got to see all the people that I like that I barely see once a year and was able to avoid most of my mouthbreathing internet stalkers, except for a few schlumpy exceptions. Kelly Sue was totally ditching me all weekend, but I’ve parlayed her guilt into future favors, so I’m still in the black overall. My pics are clicky here. If you want the same subjects actually in focus and with proper lighting, I’d check these out instead. There are even a few where I look stunningly non-hideous.

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I had this really long entry about how I shouldn’t speak to famous people, but it got eaten up by an errant keystroke. Suffice it to say, one the dumber things to say at a booksigning is “Are you OK? You look a little dazed,” as if you just dropped a brick on her head but were looking to get out of a lawsuit by appearing sympathetic.

And if anyone asks? This was totally Jo’s fault.

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Now that Jeff Kent has succumbed to a hamstring pull, the Dodgers officially have lost every single quality position player to injury. I’m generally not one to write off entire seasons this early, but I’ve never seen a team this decimated either. There’s an off-chance that recoveries from Izturis and Bradley could float the team until J.D. Drew recovers from a broken wrist, but that’s a bad bet.

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I’ve finally got a Now Listening section on my sidebar working, thanks to AudioScrobbler and some PHP scripting. Basically, the last ten songs I listen to in ITunes are now listed on the webpage. Not a big deal, but I figured I should point it out.

Also, I finally got a mobile phone that’s got a camera on it, so I setup a flickr account to get ‘em and post ‘em. I’m not sure what I would be taking pictures of, but it’s there. For anyone interested, my new phone is a Treo 650, which is supernifty and useful, but it’s also incredibly nerdy. When I’m using it I feel like I’m broadcasting “BEAT ME AND TAKE MY LUNCH MONEY AND MY STUPID PHONE.” Luckily, it’s a brick and I could probably beat my mugger to death with it.

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