Yes, you saw that right. Somewhere along the line, someone thought that abalone and chicken would make a tasty combination–for ramen noodles.

Now, I love ramen.　(ラメンが大好き！) I can eat it everyday until my face is consumed with pimples, or until my body wastes away from lack of nutrition. Whichever comes first. So one day when I got hungry and started rootin’ around the kitchen for something to eat, I came across abalone and chicken flavored ramen.

I’m well familiar with chicken, but when I see abalone, I’m thinking back to 5th grade when we had to read Island of the Blue Dolphins. And I’m like, “Dude, didn’t that girl survive by catching these things and like, dried them on the rocks before she ate them?” So already my mind is grabbing at some sort of shellfish prototype. And within the span of 2 seconds my mind has formed an equation not unlike the one above.

At this point warning bells should’ve gone off. Should’ve. But hey, I like chicken, and I like shellfish. Plus, it’s fancy noodle that came in a caddy and everything! How bad can it be? True to my ramen love, I finished the noodles, but I refuse to sip the soup. The last time I failed to sip an instant noodle dish dry, was when I tried “Creamy Tum Yum” flavored noodles with Kim. Gah, her dog wouldn’t even eat it. (Granted Puppy wouldn’t eat the veggieburger either, so I’d say that’s one smart puppy.)

And just as I was thinking, “Man, no amount of MSG could possibly induce me to like this,” I saw the fine print: Non Fried – Your Healthy Choice

I felt cheated. The big print giveth, the fine print taketh away. Healthy ramen!! What is this world coming too?! If you can sip this abaloken monstrosity dry, then you can be the Instant Noodle King or Instant Noodle Sifu. Whatever you want.

I don’t know what the point to this post was. I was just lost, confused, and hurt. Misery loves company.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village
(レイトン教授と不思議な町)
http://professorlaytonds.com/

If you’ve ever bought a book of logic puzzles, think of this as the interactive version. Any puzzle fan would love it. It’s got a good 130 puzzles ranging from lame to rather-tricky. They’re all embedded into a plot surrounding the mystery of a strange will left by a wealthy, eccentric, old man. Best part is, they’re easy to play again, and you can load them up anytime and let a friend try a puzzle. Despite the few gay puzzles that got in, this was totally worth it. I thought I’ve seen my fair share of puzzles, but you’re sure to encounter a few you haven’t. They even have free new puzzles each week downloadable via wi-fi. Those ought to hold you over until the next one comes out!

Here’s one of the downloadable puzzles: Move 2 matches to turn these 5 sqares into 4 equal sized squares. Of course you have to use all the matches! And no, you can’t shove them together as if they were only 1 match.

So Opera9 has been out for while and I’ve been giving it a try. Why on earth they have a little flash animated “release party” on their site, I don’t know. It seems kind of silly to me, but that’s besides the point. I’ll just take this time to give my mini-review of the three biggest features Opera9 has been touting–without mentioning other browsers, because at the moment, I’m sick of reading comparisons. You can compare them yourself if you’d really like and I’m sure your thoughts on it would be better than anything I can rake up.

Widgets
This feature seemed kind of silly and kind of cool at the same time. Silly in the fact that there are dozens of other widget-providing programs out there, so why Opera too? Since the feature is still new, there isn’t a huge selection so I’ll give it some time. There is one widget however, that I found to be very handy. It’s the “Colors of the Rainbow” (cool name -_-) widget. It pretty much opens up a small little color palette like the one in photoshop.

Very cool for those times i need a hexadecimal number and I don’t want to open up photoshop. I know there are a few sites out there that will do the same thing for you, but this nice to have. The one thing that would make this cooler is an eyedropper. That would be awesome.

Content Blocker
This is a pretty cool new feature. For the most part, ads on sites don’t bother me too much unless they cover content I’m trying to read, or they have audio that freak the crap outta me when I least expect it. Usually I just have the refresh the page and hope I get an audioless ad this time around.

All you do is right click, select “Block Content,” shift+click anything you want off. It works fine for the mininova site, but when I tried it on animenewsnetwork.com, it did nothing. I haven’t testing it extensively aside from those, but it seems it has a bit more tweaking to do.

Bittorrent
Now this one surprised me the most. I was curious about how they would implement it. I tried it out by dling Naruto from bakaupdates.org. Pretty much, whenever you click on a .torrent link, Opera will open and download it like anyother download. It does give you a few options though:

That seems to be the extent of the options though. Here is how it keeps track of the dl:

As you can see, it’s pretty basic. For those of you like me, who are used to full-out programs like Azureus which lets you select which files you want to dl, who you want to upload to, prioritize, and all that goodness and much more, this will seem to be a bit… lacking. The worst part is Opera is slower when torrents are open. An aboslute no no. For now I will stick to a seperate program for torrents.Overall, the three biggest features did not impress me much, but the small little changes they have made through the browser are great, and I’m liking it very much. I’m still discovering small tricks and treats everyday. The only thing I wish they updated is the RSS manager/reader. It’s not very suave and could use some more options and additions.

Other than that, Opera, “You’re still my #1!” *does the BoA stance*

This past Saturday I got a nice little belated birthday treat from Tin and Mikey. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, so I was quite excited. They took me out to a drive in movie theater called Galaxy Drive-In Theater. It’s about an hour and a half south on 45 which most people will be able to see if they drive towards Houston at night.

I must say, the drive-in experience was quite a fun and unique experience. Being that it was our first time for all of us, we (or rather, Tin) carefully consulted the site to make sure we were properly prepared. The site advised that we come early because the weekends were quite busy, so we ended up showing up about an hour and a half early. The place is kinda in the boonies and there were only a few cars around, so we had our doubts as to how “busy” they could possibly get, but sure enough, by the time 7:00 came rolling around, the place was packed. Luckily we a got a good spot early. That picture above is my view from inside the car.

The way this theater worked was that there were 4 screens, each showing 2 movies each night (double feature for $6! woohoo!). The sound was sent through FM transmitter and you just had to tune into the corresponding station to hear your movie. Or you can do it the traditional style with the little speaker box you hang on your window. They had a little place where you could buy food for a fairly decent price. With two movies and an intermission, you’re bound to get hungry. We happily chowed down on nachos, burgers, hotdogs, popcorn and candy as we watched Hoodwinked and Fun With Dick and Jane. Both were fun and cute movies.

It’s worth going just for the experience, for us young ‘uns who weren’t around when they were cool. The previews and intermission screens they showed seem like genuine screens from the fifties. There were the usual screens tempting the audience into buying food from the snack bars, screens reminding people to throw away their trash properly, and much to our surprise and delight, there was also a screen encouraging people to practice their right to freedom of religion by taking their family to church Sundays. Very cool indeed. There was also a short little documentary type preview that talked of drive-ins as if they were an endangered species. Which was amusing. Although I suppose they are in some ways. Which is a shame because I think I rather like the drive-ins better than movie theaters. Allow me to compare:

Sound Quality: The sound quality is as good as you car speakers are so that can be a good/bad thing, but at least you you have total control over volume and all that. (Also, since you can see other screens from your spot, you can turn you station to those movies and listen in. hehe!)

Picture Quality: You’d think since it was outdoors, you would notice a big difference, but I hardly noticed any difference at all. If anything would bother me, it would be the dirt on the car windshield that would bother me.

Privacy: I think we all enjoyed being able to talk, eat, blow our nose, and answer the phone without worrying about bothering anyone but eachother. It’s also nice to know that everyone else may do the same without bothering you. Pretty much like you’re at home, but not.

Comfort: I don’t know about you, but I find car seats much more comfortable than movie theater seats. There was also the added plus that I could prop my legs up and recline if I wanted to. You also don’t have to put up with that nasty movie theater smell of dirty seats, old popcorn, and stinky people. I think that will always be a plus. If the car gets too stuffy, you can always crack a window or walk out and stretch your legs and never miss a minute of the movie. Heck, you can prolly even pee outside and not miss the movie either, but I don’t think people would appreciate that…

“Thanks for being with us this evening. We hope that in some small way we have been able to add to your pleasure, comfort, and relaxation.”

The only reason why I wouldn’t go to a drive-in instead of a theater, is because it’s closer, and there are more movies. And maybe bad weather. I apologize for the post being so long, but it was a cool and new experience for me and I just had to elaborate.

I am ridiculously addicted to House, MD. I’m not a big fan of medical dramas, but I’m definatly a fan of snarky, dry, sarcastic humor. Mikey and I just finished off all of season one and caught up with season two in a short enough amount of time to merit a “You guys are pathetic” from Tin. Although I blame him for getting us hooked on it in the first place. Most of the addiction stems from the fact that I just can’t wait to see what other outrageous things House will say or do.

As the risk of sounding like I’m in love with the guy, or just messing it all up, I’m not even going to try to summarize or start on character analysis. All I can say is just watch it! If your tired of boring old medical dramas or just love sarcastic humor, I promise you won’t be dissapointed.

By the way, my new camera is the Canon SD200. It’s quite nice. More than I need really. The cool factor isnt nearly as high as my sony but It definately has features to make up for it. Zoom is nice to have for once… hehe