I don’t even remember why I chose XHTML over HTML. Possibly I thought it was the wave of the future. Or maybe I thought all the cool kids used it. (Not really. :))

I guess I started using XHTML about five and a half years ago (“validation”). I didn’t even know what it really was! I still don’t. People commented on Jeffrey’s blog about the extensibility of XHTML, and while I’ve heard the term before, I never knew exactly what that meant, and I still don’t.

I know a little about XML; I had to do a small XML project for school and I thought it was nifty. (Although in my major it was more about JDF files, or job description flows? Something like that. A file that would travel with printing jobs and would contain information about how to print said job.) But beyond that I never got into XML and this extensibility gig. I didn’t understand how XML changed or could even make a difference with HTML.

Because of that, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really shouldn’t keep up with something that I’m not using to its fullest potential (and I should definitely take the mention of it off my resume o_o). All the work that I’ll have to put into removing trailing slashes from every webpage I wrote (including inserting some code into Wordpress headers to strip the slashes out) is not a good enough reason for me to keep using XHTML.

I’ll get right on that. After I finish moving all my protected blog entries to a private blog, after I retag and recategorize all the remaining entries, after I tag all my Livejournal entries, after I tag all my dreams, yup. (Some projects that I’ve been working on for ever.) At least I’ll have a few years before HTML5 becomes a reality and I have to buckle down to transition to that.

2. Do you record your dreams in your blog or a journal?
Already answered. :3 Yes, I’ve been writing down dreams since the mid 90s; I thought I had a few really interesting dreams and considered turning them into stories. That never happened though. Mid to late 90s I physically wrote them down in a notebook, then I transferred over to an online log in 2002 or so.

3. Do you think dreams are messages our bodies are trying to tell us? If so, are you real big on trying to interpret all the details?
I believe some dreams can be messages, but I don’t interpret every single dream I have, much less every little thing that happens in a dream. I don’t think dreams are literal, or strictly symbolic. Mostly I pay attention to the feelings in dreams, and any patterns that come up over time.

4. Do you remember your first nightmare?
The earliest nightmare I can remember having is recorded in my dreamlog, but I don’t know if that was my first nightmare.

5. Have you ever had a recurring dream? If you did, what was it and what do you think it meant?
I don’t think I have recurring dreams in that the same exact thing happens. I’ll have dreams where I think, ‘This happened before’ or ‘I saw this before,’ but when I wake up I can’t remember the dream (or real life experience) that made me think that. I know I dream about malls a lot (hee), and airplanes crashing, but I’ve never dreamed the same exact dream.

1. What one food most reminds you of your childood?
Is Japanese food an acceptable answer? If not, then probably udon. Or maybe homemade chow mein with scrambled egg strips in it, that was how Bachan made it. :3

2. How old were you when you learned how to ride a bicycle?
I was nine years old (or maybe ten, it was during the summer anyway) and I taught myself! Without a scratch. I even remember my bike, it had a teal paint scheme and pink handlebars and seat and white wheels.

3. How old were you when you stopped believing in Santa Claus?
Eight years old, third grade, I remember some classmate was talking to other kids at his table saying he saw his mom doing Santa one night. Er I mean doing Santa’s job.

4. What was your favorite television show/cartoon when you were little?
First answer that comes to mind is Ren & Stimpy. :P I could also say Rugrats or The Simpsons (that one has lasting power, wow), but R&S was the first I thought of. That might have been the first show my brothers and I would watch regularly on TV in its scheduled slot (Snick!), rather than whatever we had on VHS.

5. What is the youngest age you remember being and do you have a specific memory of when you were that age?
Preschool age, three or four, and a memory from preschool: the teacher and his aide had just put us down on the carpet for our nap and drawn the curtains so the room was dark. The aide asked the teacher if he’d like a Coke, she was going to grab a Coke. I thought, ‘Lucky, they get to have soda whenever they want.’ :P I’m an adult now too but I can’t have soda whenever I want! I have to remember all the sugar and carbonation and, depending on the soda, the caffeine that’s in those things. Ugh.

I was partly sick from Thanksgiving to maybe a week ago. Mostly it was a middling coughy and phlegmy sickness, not the normal sickness of runny nose/sore throat/inflamed inner ears that I have every year. But still very annoying and I couldn’t do much all those days I wasn’t feeling well. (Barely managed to play with my cousin’s dogs while she was on vacation.)

My brother’s cat kept biting me. (I’ve been trimming her claws lately so she can’t scratch, but she’s decided to use her teeth instead. Argh.) That resulted in a swollen right finger (almost an infection?) for which I had to care for a day and almost made me miss a trip to Disneyland! On my left hand she gouged my palm and left an inch-long cut which is just barely vanishing now. It’s really annoying trying to dress oneself when one’s hands are injured and bandaged, I’ll have you know.

Someone did something unexpected, not exactly pleasant. That’s all I’ll say.

Again felt lost and unsure of what to do with my life. Still no drive to get a job. ._.

My computer was running a bit sluggishly while using Adobe design programs. I’m used to that, never was able to run InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator all at once. But the fact that I couldn’t paint in Photoshop with both Firefox and Seamonkey open on Flash-heavy sites was such a pain. (I tried to ask for money for Christmas to buy more RAM for my computer, not sure how successful I would have been if two people hadn’t surprised me with lotso cash. :3 I think, though, that part of my problem was that I had left old SQL files on my desktop totalling over 5 MB. I realized that today when my aunt was explaining virtual memory to my mom, haha! Hopefully moving them off my desktop will speed things up. Then maybe I won’t have to spend so much on RAM!)

I lost my hairclip. This shouldn’t be so bad, but I really don’t know where I lost it and it bugs me. How can I be sure I won’t commit the same mistake again if I don’t know what I did wrong? Also it was a really good hairclip, it lasted me a good few years whereas before I went through hairclips every year. And it was pretty. Then another hairclip that I owned broke. $16 for a really pretty hairclip and the metal busted on one side so it’s kaput. Who said having a lot of hair is envious? I think it’s a bother.

For a few months now my laptop would have times where the Backspace key wouldn’t work. After a while the H key would go out too. Recently the G key joined the random moratorium. Even more recently, shutting down and starting fresh would not get the keys working again. I spent a couple days depressed thinking of my little baby that got me through college just being a useless lump of ancient computer parts. After a trip to Fry’s I had the brilliant idea to just buy an external keyboard. I don’t use my laptop much anyway. Just to listen to music and to use Wordpress. But today! Today I started up my laptop and the keys worked!! I’m not holding my breath for this being permanent, but it gave me hope.

On said trip to Fry’s I was wondering why my month sucked so much, and I was beginning to blame it on aforementioned Someone, but I gave myself a hard shake and realized it was mostly my state of mind. Both bad and good things happened this month, I was just in a poor mood, likely because of cold temperatures and ill health, and I was focusing on the bad things. I managed to buck up and wrap Christmas presents and have a great Christmas with my wonderful family.

I wrapped my dad’s present, a JAG hat, in a huge box (“Did you remember to put anything in here?”) with tons of bows and ribbons on it. I noticed there was a serious Cinco de Mayo color scheme because I couldn’t choose among the red, green, and white on the wrapping paper, but no one else commented on it. :P

One brother’s present I wrapped in lots of newspaper ads, trying to make it look less like a DVD, the other’s I put in an empty Scotch tape refill box.

One cousin’s present I had to make a box for, so I used a Robitussin box (my sickness came in handy?) and the other I sandwiched money between two old Dragonball Z VHS cassettes.

Everyone had comments about how I wrapped their presents, so all in all I think it was a successful venture. XD

(I do this every year.)
$50 from Jichan
$50 from Auntie G and Uncle H (partly birthday present too, she said) (she also wrote their names exactly like that on the envelope, “from Uncle H and Auntie G,” I thought it was funny)
$20 from L
Little Nemo DVD
The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho from N
Harry and David Moose Munch cocoa from Tracey
King’s Shield by Sherwood Smith from C (keeping up my Inda series for Christmas tradition; next year I’ll ask for the last book :P)
Stardust (movie) from Auntie and Uncle
Coraline soundtrack from Auntie J and Uncle G (or reverse with Auntie and Uncle… doesn’t really matter) (plus money for RAM)
Finding Nemo antenna ball from Disneyworld from Cousin 1
Finding Nemo novelty pen from Disneyworld from Cousin 2 (plus a handful of chocolates and a couple chocolate liquors)
antique pocketwatchface necklace from Mum and Daddy

Some videos have montages of photos from past wars, some have video footage from past wars, some are mere reenactments. But they all make me stop and think. How can we send our sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, off to war?

I think, any war after the Vietnam War is stupid, after such horrible warfare. But World War II was the last “good” war, wasn’t it? And then there was “the war to end all wars,” what happened with that? (I don’t really know what that war was about or how it was supposed to stop future wars.)

But then I saw photos of battlefields from the Civil War (USA, just to be clear) and remembered the tragic losses we suffered in that war, so many families who lost brothers, fathers, sons. We learn about the end result of those battles in school and yet we still go to war.

I don’t know why we keep getting involved in wars. Aren’t we supposed to learn from our past mistakes? Isn’t this supposed to be an intelligent age? How does people killing other people “win” anything?

That led me to a sudden revelation. Had I been reading wrong all this time? My style of reading is exactly opposite his. I read at the dining table while I’m eating, I read during commercial breaks while watching tv, at school I would get to class and read for a few minutes until the teacher started lecturing, snatches of precious time in between other tasks. Have I not been getting as much out of books as I could have?

So I decided to try it. I would read a book for a long stretch. Ella Enchanted was a great book, I thought. I’d wanted to reread it for a while, and it was short enough that I could read it in a couple nights, because I couldn’t guarantee enough nights with time to read several chapters in one go for a longer book.

I read Ella Enchanted last month, most of it in one night. (I cheated myself and read a few pages before I’d finished the books I was reading at the time.) (I also stayed up way too late that night, but that’s another story.)

The result—I was pretty disappointed. I didn’t feel the story was any more real, or that I was further into the story. It was the same as always, a wonderful, beautiful story, but this time it was over so quickly. I didn’t get a chance to relish it and live in the world in my daydreams. It felt a lot more like I’d just watched a movie than read a book I loved.

My test may have been flawed though. Ella Enchanted is just one of those books I hate to rush through. My favorite books I always read piecemeal, to stretch out the goodness of the story. Except for The Count of Monte Cristo, that’s a whole different animal.

But in writing this I laughably realized that I have spent times reading many chapters of a book in one sitting. I just didn’t recognize those times as such because they usually start with me telling myself, “I’ll just read a few pages before bed.” Then the story gets me hooked so I spend a number of hours saying, “Only a few pages more, then I’ll go to bed.” Those are what I termed my “midnight rendezvous.” Heck, that was how I read a few Harry Potter books!

Comparing my two experiences, reading books in short little spurts versus reading nonstop for a long stretch of time, I’d have to say that I don’t notice much of a difference. Reading in bits and pieces is probably more work because I have to block out noise around me and focus on reading, but after a a sentence or two I’m fine and lost in another world.

I have to say I feel sorry for that guy though, if it takes him that long to get into his reading, he must miss out on a lot every time he has to start up again.

Yes, I actually used bright colors in my layout! I carried out my threat (last paragraph) with my inspiration of “candy colors.” :3 Although I think the colors will bug me after a while … right now I think the pink and purple are too close on the color wheel, leaving the green as a glaring complement and the most eye-catching part of the design. Bah!

It’s interesting, I went to Colour Lovers when I first started in order to find my “candy colors,” but I couldn’t find any! All the colors were of the dark, muted variety. Nothing bright and fun and, erm, eye-popping. So I ended up using my own colors I came up with.

Another complaint, the color appearance differs so much between my laptop and my desktop computer. grrrs. They’re so much more light and pastel-y on my desktop, and dark and saturated on my laptop. :( Now I question how awful they look on others’ computer screens. Hopefully no one gets eyestrain trying to read my blog!

My review of the Magical and Remember…Dreams Come True fireworks shows:

The parts of Magical I really enjoy are the colored castle (especially during the Pinocchio segment XD trippy!), the part where the two Sleeping Beauty fairies (Merryweather and Flora/Fauna, I can’t remember which :/) are arguing over the color of Aurora’s dress (Pink! Blue! Pink! Blue!), and the confetti/colorful fireworks. Especially, especially the colorful fireworks that are like fireflies and zoom around even after the firework explodes. :D I love those. (I also love waterfall fireworks and sizzly fireworks, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Despite those great parts, I tend to tune out after a while during the show. :/ It just doesn’t keep my attention. And, for a show that seems to rely so much on the music, the sound is really crappy. Bad sound system. :/ Disney, how can you disappoint the audiophiles?? Also the singer(s?) yells (please learn how to project from your diaphragm and not your voicebox) during some parts…

Another part that was supposed to be great was Dumbo. But the flying elephant didn’t wow me. I probably expected too much, I didn’t realize … well … that the Dumbo costume would be so huge and probably too unwieldy for the person inside. I fully expected Dumbo to move his body and limbs around more than he does!

Whereas Remember probably does not have a superb soundtrack, but hey there’s a whole story to the show (Disneyland!) and omigosh I LOVE the Haunted Mansion portion of the show. Every single fireworks show for the rest of my life will be compared to that. And none will top it. XD XD

Okay maybe I’m just biased. I can’t really remember the fireworks portion of Remember… other than the ones for the Haunted Mansion. The fireworks for Magical have more of a running theme (magic! color! sis boom bah!) and don’t appear to be just random colors.

But … if I compare based only on the end result, zoning out halfway through Magical and following Remember all the way through the show, I think I’d have to go for Remember…. ^^

Overall I thought it was tame, although you’d never see it on the Disney Channel. I also wished I could move my hips like Miley, I’m jealous!

Mum said it’s just what she’s being told to do and she’s going along with it, but she said the same thing about Britney Spears. O_o How do we really know that this isn’t her idea, this isn’t the real Miley?

I don’t know. Mum and I had a (totally unrelated) conversation recently about perception versus intention, what people intend to do versus how other people perceive the actions. An example was anyone who demanded an apology from Obama because of something he said which got misinterpreted. In other words, people are saying, “I expect an apology from you for what I thought was said.”

Regarding Miley’s show, I thought, hmmm, if 8-year-olds danced like that, it would only be the older people who would be scandalized by it. The little kids aren’t trying to find sex for themselves, they’re just moving their bodies. It’s all the fault of the adults who see sex in it and then molest children, just like it’s the fault of the guy who saw an attractive woman and raped her.

We as a society don’t like to see provocative attire (especially on children), and condone the sexy moves of celebrities as indecent and completely inappropriate for children.

If that’s true though, and we don’t want kids to mimic celebrities in order to protect them, it’s also logical how in Islamic countries women are required by the government to cover themselves so they don’t make men horny. It’s not that they’re nonentities in burqas, women are just protecting themselves and the men who have no sense of control.

Whose fault is it really? The teen-aged singer who wiggled her hips, or the adults who interpreted it as SHE’S SELLING SEX ON THE SEASHORE NOW.

Saturday I went with my brother and cousins to Anime Expo, woot! Tracey and her friend saw a panel on Trigun, then we wandered around upstairs where they had all these things scheduled. We were too late for the line dancing. :( Not that I really wanted to learn line dancing, though, I could probably find an odori class somewhere in West L.A., hahaha. I just wanted to watch! But they wouldn’t let us in. pooh.

After that we went to the vendor hall and wandered around there for the rest of the time. I got some clothes, a magazine, a Snoopy, and some Japanese paper at Kinokuniya later.

Then I wandered around the artist area while everyone else rested on the side. I saw a couple artists whom I follow on deviantArt, talked to one of them (didn’t introduce myself though; I’m a lurker watcher on her dA page >.>), skipped the other because her table was so busy and I was getting exhausted. Talked to some other artists … I don’t remember their names though.

When we were done at AX we drove up to J-town and ate dinner at the Curry House. Yay! Yum! And we checked out Kinokuniya, where I stock up on Japanese paper, both washi and origami. XD

Walked around the Japanese Village Plaza (or whatever it’s called), a lot of stores were closed for Fourth of July.

After all that we went our separate ways and C and I went home where we greeted our grandparents and had apple pie a la mode before watching the fireworks display. woo! (The fireworks are fairly boring compared to Disneyland, but heck this show is in our very own backyard! [Or, at the high school.] Can’t beat that!)

The next day my family and I drove down to Disneyland where I paid for a blockout pass ($40) in order to get my fun card for my birthday ($69) since I have an annual pass and can get in for free (technically) almost any day. So I came out $29 ahead! Which I spent on a hat last time I went to Disneyland. :P Now whatever I get on my fun card, I’ve already given Disney cash for it.

We wandered around Downtown Disney for a while, but it was so unbearably hot and humid that we didn’t stick around much, and we moved on to Knott’s Berry Farm! We didn’t go in the park, just ate at Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant (is that the name?) and looked through a few shops in the area.

We definitely checked out the Snoopy headquarters store! hee! I was sort of disappointed though. There was only one new Snoopy plushie, in swim trunks and holding a surfboard, and not many other plushies of other characters. :/ I saw Mr. Snoops in the store though! (The Snoopy in a business suit. :3) I thought it was hilarious to see a Snoopy in a suit with a really huge head. As evidenced in my Snoopy family portrait, my Snoops has a smushed head, or as R puts it, he’s been rendered brainless. *grin*

That was my wonderful birthday weekend! (And today we get to do the Downtown Disney part again for my brother’s birthday. :D)

addendum: What we ended up doing for N’s birthday was eating at the cafe/bar area of UVA Cafe and Bar instead of the Rainforest Cafe which had an hour waiting time x.x and then watching the fireworks from the parking lot. So cool. :D

And birthday presents list because I’ve been doing it for years now and can’t stop:

L $20
C/R Snoopy in a kimono
Tracey The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
Mum/Daddy Early Amusement Parks of Orange County (Images of America series)
Jichan $50
Auntie/Uncle $50