Yesterday was a bunch of dim sum in Chinatown with Sharon, Charles, and people they know. It was a lot of fun and I got to try a lot of different, tasty dim sum from four different places.

However, one of the places must’ve disagreed with me, because I spent a lot of last night in the bathroom. After one such trip, I decided to check my email and saw that Amazon had sent me a promotional email touting Adam Lambert’s new album for $3.99 (as well as a long list of other albums for $5).
Given that I had been mildly interested in the album anyway, the price was right, so I decided to go ahead and get the album. However, given that it was 3 AM, I assumed that the “Buy MP3 Album with 1-Click” button would give me an opportunity to input payment information (which, you know, kind of goes against the entire point of 1-Click). I also had not paid for music from them for a while, since I tend to download their free tracks or usually have credit to cover what I want.
It so happened that the credit card I had tied to 1-Click was no longer valid.
I clicked to buy, confirmed, and the album immediately began downloading. At this point I was worried because I hadn’t been able to pay. Indeed, when I woke up in the morning, there was an email telling me my order had been cancelled due to invalid payment method. However, the downloaded album still sat in my music directory.

Ended up calling their customer service (or, rather, having them call me with their awesome “Call Me” feature), which was actually a pleasant experience. There was essentially no wait to speak to reps and they were fairly knowledgable. In the end, the rep ended up telling me to keep the album as a gift from Amazon, and that he hoped I would shop with them again. It was rather unexpected, and awesome.

So yeah. All of you should buy your music from them. Their customer service is great (even though the issue was my fault here) and it’s pretty darn cheap anyway. Plus they’re running a promotion right now so you can get . And they have a bunch of good albums on sale for $5 each (including Kelly Clarkson’s “All I Ever Wanted”, which I highly recommend). Win.

And the Adam Lambert album? Not really that great. Some nice tracks on it (Fever, Whataya Want From Me, Music Again), but the album as a whole is generally rather uninteresting. Possibly worth the $3.99 (there are at least 4 tracks that I like), but certainly not worth full price.

Unrelatedly, oh god work is going to be insane this week and next week. At least Thursday is Thanksgiving… otherwise I might go crazy by the time feature freeze rolls around December 4.

Today, I was bored, so I decided to go down to the computer room and watch some TV. It was the first time I had watched TV in well over a year. Caught the tail end of Access Hollywood, then switched and watched a bit of the new Survivor.

The thing that I kept noticing, and that eventually drove me crazy enough to stop watching (after only about half an hour), was the number of cuts shows and commercials nowadays have. You’d think there’s a new FCC regulation that you can’t have a single shot longer than a second or something, for fear of offending someone.

Seriously, I think the only shots I saw that lasted longer than literally a second were commercials where the background was changing constantly (annoying), shots where a single person was talking to the camera (Survivor interviews, at least… the Access Hollywood interviews constantly cut between shots even while they were interviewing someone…), and the long scenic shots in Survivor like where they focus on a bug and then shift the focus out to the tribe banner or something. (The new Survivor intro is particularly guilty of this… even when showing the people, they show at least two shots of each competitor in the 1 second of screen time they give them.)

I noticed this a while back in music videos as well… the new (and old) music videos for Daughtry, for example, feature almost-constant cuts between scenes.

Has our society really gotten so ADD that we require constant changes in imagery to remain engrossed?
Or have shows always been like this, but I’m just now getting old and weird enough to notice?

So this weekend was full of worry, worry, worry oh god worry.
Had a doctor’s appointment today and everything was better. Yay doctors. I have a followup appointment in a month, but he doesn’t expect any issues.

Relatedly, I have to say that I’m a big fan of Kaiser. This makes two randomly-assigned doctors now, and both have been extremely knowledgable and friendly and approachable. Neither rushes you, and they both joked and chatted and generally made you feel at ease. I also like the convenience of having everything there… last time, I headed down one floor to get blood drawn, and it took very little time due to the HUGE number of blood-drawing stations they had.

Besides that, today has apparently been SPEND MONEY OMGZ day. This morning I bought this 1TB HD. I maybe should have waited until Black Friday, but I kind of need it now (my external drive is down to 4GB of free space), and it’s a good price anyway (assuming I get the rebate sent in and such). I can always buy another one during Black Friday if they’re really cheap. And if not, I can sleep in instead. Yay.

There was also the $15 copay for my doctor’s visit. Not a lot, but meh.

There was also also going to Best Buy (which was right there) and picking up the complete Firefly series. That’s another chunk of change.

My credit card is sad now. :P I’ve more than doubled the balance on it today.

So that’s been my day. Yay my day.

Edit: Yes, I voted. I voted by mail a month ago.
Also, now that I’ve actually updated my spending spreadsheet, looks like I nearly tripled my credit card balance today. Awesome. :X

Also, Maine, WTF is wrong with you? This is upsetting.

There was more karaoke.

I posted a “combined” gallery of randomness from the previous few days to photos 2. It includes random portraits of Charles and Sharon, sandwich and games night, the QE Halloween birthday party thing, and karaoke tonight.
You can go view photos there.

Mostly, I just wanted to make this entry for this.