what's the point?

I'll not be seeing the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

I had already basically made up my mind on this. A thorough examination of my memories of reading the books as a child revealed that I didn't really enjoy them at the time, even before I knew of the Christian undertones. (If they can be called undertones, I haven't read them since I was, I'd guess, 9 or 10, from what I've read recently they're basically right out in front.) That being said, after reading this article my decision was sealed.

Gresham and his wife, Merrie, now live in a big house in Ireland, where they run a Christian ministry that specialises in healing the trauma caused by abortion, which they believe is infanticide inspired by Satan.

...

So, just one last question. Is it true that he stands to make an enormous amount of money from the film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

The microscopically trimmed moustache stretches into a smile. "Mind your own business," he says.

So, basically, going to see the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe puts money into the pockets of someone who believes abortions are inspired by Satan. Yeah, I'll pass.

Not quite as small victories... (but still, small)

So a little over a year ago I was overjoyed that I managed to ride 4.74 miles in 18 minutes for an average speed of 15.2 mph.

Today, I rode 50.3 miles in 3 hours and 10 minutes, for an average speed of 15.8 mph. And still, I'm afraid it's not enough. In two weeks I think I'm doing a very hilly 60 some odd miles at Summit to Surf X. The week after that I'm doing a metric century at the Blackberry Bramble, and then two weeks after that I'll be trying an honest to goodness century at the Vine Ride. I've been slacking in my training rides, and now I'm a little worried. Today's 50 was relatively reassuring though, I really didn't have any trouble except for maybe the last 5 miles, and 15.8 mph is faster than we'll probably ride the century, so....here's hoping!

God Bless You Internet

When Rod Brady was 10 years old he recorded an episode of the Doctor Demento Show off the radio (do you call an instance of a recurring radio show an episode?). One song in particular, "Existential Blues", from that show stood out and he included it mixes he'd make for friends throughout the years. Over the years it was remembered occasionally, but most of the old tape mixes had long since been lost or their quality eroded. Until I came across a link to this site that has archived 95.3% of the 20 year history of the show. A quick google search revealed when the song was played (December 29, 1985) and voila, from the ether, the song has been returned.

Let's not point out that the song is available on at least one Rhino Dr. Demento compilation. The fact of the matter is, how fucking cool is it that you can do what I just did, and that I do it on an almost a daily basis for equally obscure facts so much so that I take it for granted. So today, I say, God Bless You Internet.

Bitterness

[16:08:16] <Pelz> gd, people are so fucking stupid
[16:08:26] <joshua|work> you can say that again!
[16:09:02] <Uriah> noooooo shit
[16:09:07] <Uriah> im about ready to leave someone in a ditch
[16:09:20] <joshua|work> oooh, leave me in a ditch, then I won't have to deal with stupid people!
[16:09:44] <Uriah> no way. you get to suffer alongside the rest of us

Investing in our future?

OK, so Bush won. I have a hard time not putting won in quotes though. I'm not a conspiracy nut by any means, my brain just latches on to any possible explanation of how this could have happened. I still haven't come to grips with the thought of four more years of the Bush regime without fear of reelection. There is some hope though. If the moderate Republicans actually get off their asses and stand up to Bush's fundamentalist base we might be able to minimize the damage done over the next four years.

In any event, I left for San Diego Wednesday morning at 5am when the election still hadn't been decided. Right as we arrived at the hotel at around 10:30, I saw Kerry come out to give his concession speech. Finally back home now, and I checked out our mutual funds for the first time since the election. We're up almost $2000 in 3 days. Oh my ill-gotten gains. This is when the idea hit me, why not start a mutual fund that accepts donations. Or rather, start a PAC that accepts donations, and have them invested in a mutual fund, one that targets stocks in industries likely to benefit from four more years of Bush. Halliburton! Defense Contractors! You get the idea anyway. Then, in 2008, donate everything to the DNC, or if that goes over limits, some to the DNC, spread the rest out among specific candidates and PACs. Someone set that up, ok? I'm just the idea guy.

It really is better

Some time shortly after arriving in Eugene we decided that since there were no ATM's for our bank in Oregon, it would be wise for us get an account some place local. (Side note, months later when I finally got around to closing my account from NJ, the guy from the bank asked why. I told him there were no branches or ATM's in the state. He said, "There's an ATM in Portland, only 117 miles from Eugene" as if this would convince me to to keep my account.) So, in what seemed like an interminable wait for our worldly possessions to arrive from NJ, we headed off to a nearby bank to open an account. All goes well, until the rep we were dealing with suggests we take pictures for our check cards. We were not prepared for this at all -- unshowered, unshaven, I probably hadn't even brushed my hair.

"Do we really need to?" we asked.

"I'd highly recommend it. There is a high incidence of identity theft in the area." was his reply.

Well...we didn't want our identities stolen. Without our identities what do we have left! So, it was photo time, and oh what spectacularly bad photos they were. Mine especially. I had the stupid, "I'm trying to smile but I haven't the slightest idea how" smile on my face. My hair was a mess, I had like 3 weeks of unkempt beard. Not at all pretty. The only saving grace was that when our cards finally arrived in the mail a week to ten days later, our pictures weren't on them. We always meant to inquire about what had happened, but I wasn't in much of a hurry to have that picture shown to every grocery clerk and Target cashier.

All was well for many months, until we decided to upgrade our check cards to ones that gave us air miles with every purchase. Who can complain about free plane tickets just for spending your own money, interest free. Well, when the cards arrive with your horrible, mishapen features displayed prominently in the upper left hand corner, just about anyone can!

In any event, this is all preamble to today's story. I went out for lunch with some people from work yesterday to a cute little diner in Eugene called Braille's. It was a really good meal, I had pigs in blankets and some hash browns. The waitress was really fun, joking around with us, everyone's a friend! After we eat I go up to the counter to pay my part of the bill and hand the woman working the register my Check Card of Slovenliness (-1 CHA, +1 Air Miles, blackout date s apply). Now, most people are polite enough not to comment on how bad the picture, but not this time.

"Ooh, that picture's no good"

A little surprised, but not angry at all, I reply, "Yeah, we had just moved out here and weren't at all prepared to be photographed to open a bank account. The picture on my driver's license is much better." At which point I show her the photo on my license.

"Ugh." she says.

Ugh!! Gee thanks lady!

Two Stories by Joshua Cohen, Age 10

A little explanation first. These were written for a school project in 1985. We had to make our own magazine. These are two "articles" I wrote for the magazine. Spelling and grammatical mistakes have been kept intact along side my apparent homocidal leanings. Why I wasn't sent to a psychiatrist for this stuff I'll never know. Without further ado...

Invasion of the KILLER ANTS

Once in a small village in India a flock of geese were devoured by a swarm of ants. These ants are dangerous! They could eat an elephant in one gulp! All people in India were on alert to watch for the ants, but that didn't do much. In a matter of days India's population was wiped out. These ants devoured almost every country except for two; America and Rusia. American president Ronald Reagan JR. took action. He launched nuclear missles. Nothing happened. Finnaly the congres called on Commando. They gave him two weapons: a fighter craft and a high tuned electric guitar. Commando tried to stop the ants with the fighters weapons. That killed two ants. He killed the rest by playing them a tune.

Life as an M-16

I'm an M-16. My name is Blitzeen the M-16. I enjoy being an M-16 because I get front row seats at a lot of murders. I live in a cosy shed in back of Arnold Shwartzenegur's house. He is my owner. I'm all black. I shoot only the best quality gold bullets. I'm proud of my shot record. It is 2,000,000,000 and 0. I never miss a target. My favorite targets are cars, people and windows. I dont enjoy being in war because I get dropped. Once I got dropped and I chipped my black metallic paint. I was in the bod shop for a whole day. 24 hours!! My favorite murder was in 1981 I killed the president of Germany. I fight for gun's rights. I think if someone used me and killed a person and they get arrested for the kill I'd get very mad. I did the murder and the person gets arrested. We guns would like a day off the battlefield.

Douglas vs Limbaugh

I was in a supermarket with Adam. As we were remarking about their very impressive display of fresh herbs (the herbs were actually growing in the store and you could pick off a few leaves to take home), all of a sudden the rows of trees that made up the divisions between aisles started getting uprooted and flying around, disaster movie style. A hurricane had descended upon the store. People were running around frantically, grabbing cases of water and cans of beans. I had something in my hands that I was determined to purchase, so I started making my way to the registers. The storm really started picking up though and giant trees were flying all over the place, so we decided it was probably best to come back later. On the way out we saw a display of apple juice though, it was on sale for a really good price so I picked up a bottle and again tried to make my way to the registers. This time we went along a different path to the checkout, there were fewer trees and they were much smaller. The path also lead to the exit, and right as we started getting close to an available checkout lane the storm really picked up so we just ran out of the store, setting off the alarms because I hadn't paid for the apple juice.

In the parking lot things were much calmer. There were ambulances treating the injured, and Michael Douglas was walking around trying to adjust his tuxedo. I think he was playing John Kerry. Around that time Rush Limbaugh got on the store's PA system and started talking about how he was there for the victims of the disaster, while John Kerry went off to his fancy tuxedo party. Apparently John Kerry was running for election against Limbaugh, not Bush. We didn't stick around to hear where Kerry nee Douglas was heading in his tux, but it seemed perfectly logical to want to get the hell out of that store to me. The trees really were flying all the hell over the place.

We made our way back to my car where we saw more random destruction including someone riding a bicycle where the front wheel was bent in half. He didn't seem to notice. As we got into the car my cell phone rang.

More pointless stories

We went to Circuit City last night to get me a bag for my laptop since I'm going to NJ next week. Since the laptop bags are near the laptops, Robin couldn't resist playing with display models. For her this consists of testing out the keyboard, usually by walking up to it and typing, "does this keyboard suck?" One laptop was locked however, so I took it upon myself to unlock it. Sadly, Robin had no faith in my h4x0r skills, so she just walked away. Twenty seconds later I unlocked it, opened up notepad, typed, "does this keyboard suck?" and moved on.

I told Robin I had figured out the password, "cc3332, easy as pie."

She was clearly impressed, she's a sucker for the bad boys. "How did you figure out cc3332?!" she asked, almost desperate with desire (to know my secrets or just for me, we may never know).

I couldn't resist her charms so I caved and told her. "There was a little question mark next to the password box that said, 'Having trouble remembering your password? Click here to see your hint.'"

"So...what was the hint?" she asked, eager to see how I had crushed their feeble security with my massive intelect.

"cc3332."

A little bit of a geek noir thriller for your "enjoyment." In any event, I ended up getting the same laptop bag that Robin has, a very swank Targus backpack with more pockets than I know what to do with. One for the GBA, one for the iPod, one for my cell phone, after that I'm stumped! Now I just need to actually get my flight, hotel and car booked and figure out what GBA game to buy for the trip. I'm thinking either Astro Boy: Omega Factor or Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga.

blue, white, flying

I've had this picture sitting around since I went to NJ in June. I was using it today to test an app I was mucking around with as an excuse to play with the flickr API. The more I looked at the photo the more it grew on me. It just screams indie rock album cover.

The app I was toying with building was going to try and automatically generate photo mosaics given a source image by breaking it down into small squares, calculating the average color of that square and then searching flickr for photos tagged with a given color. Of course it would probably only work for images with a few basic colors. Most people don't tag their images at flickr with things like burntsienna and perrywinkle, for most of the colors in the spectrum (I'm talking roy g biv here) there are a few hundred images to choose from though. I got sidetracked while working on calculating the average color though and spent most of my time using delegates from the worker thread to update the UI, so now I have an app that can, um, calculate the average color of a photo!

I actually found someone who had worked on a similar app to generate mosaics of a video by using frames from other videos as the tiles. After reading over his work it became clear that I'd have to do more than just calculate the average color of a tile, which also made it clear that I'd likely never get the app really working. On the bright side I finally set up a flickr account. It seems like really nice technology, and pretty close to the cutting edge as far as features go (I love services that provide an API).

Patent Pending, Patent Pending, Patent Pending

Hey googlebot, when you read this, pass it on to google labs, but don't forget to give me some stock first. Way back in the day, I mentioned an app idea for a system that would let people ask a question, then send that question off to other users of the system who would then answer it. Well, rumour around the ol' internet these days has it that Google is working on an IM client based on the Jabber protocol.

Imagine if you will this: in your GIM buddy list (forgive me, I've never used Jabber, so I'm not sure what the correct terminology is) you have a built in buddy named "Ask Google" or something similar. Whenever you IM a question to Ask Google the question is then forwarded to other GIM users (only those who have elected to receive questions, and probably only to a random sampling of that subset). Some number of them respond back to Ask Google with an answer. The answers are correllated into similar replies, and the top n answers are then sent back to the original submitter. The submitter can then further rank the validness of the replies which can be used to rank the quality of the answers from the different users who replied. A user's "quality ranking" can then be used in the future to weight his/her replies when correlating answers. Someone whose answers are often ranked as high quality will be more likely to have their answers sent back to the submitter.

Additionally, Google can utilize the FOAF data it undoubtedly has waiting in the wings (from Orkut and the GMail invite trail) to send questions to a targetted audience. Answers from people within, say, two or three degrees can automatically be sent back to the submitter, or at least given a higher quality ranking. There can also be a method to select a broad category for a question when asking it, let users specify categories for which they're willing to answer questions (Ask me about: Programming:Web, Programming:C#, Music:Indie, Music:Experimental) and only send questions to people willing to answer questions on that topic.

As far as incentives to actually answer questions, I don't think you need many, especially if it's Google providing the system. There are plenty of people out there that would do it just to be able to say, "Hey, my answers are ranked in the top 1% of all questions asked for Comics:Marvel!" If for some reason that's not enough, the system could also assign points to users whose replies are highly ranked and those points could be used for...something. Google tshirts, freedom from ad-sense links for a month, who knows.

To take it even further, if a question goes unanswered, Ask Google can reply back to the original submitter suggesting he/she take his question to Google Answers. The idea would be that quick questions that you're having trouble finding an answer for yourself can go to GIM->Ask Google, more complicated questions that require actual research should go to Google Answers.

Damn that would be cool, and frankly the more I think about it, the more surprised I'd be if Google didn't have something like this in the works already.

Ch-ch-changes

As any fool can see, I've redesigned yet again. I can't really say why I did it, but I can say what I was aiming to accomplish. When I first started blogging I was doing it as a sort of online extension to my own memory. You see, I've got what we in the memory business refer to as a pretty bad memory, so writing these things down not only helps reinforce the memories, it also gives me some place to go back and look when I invariably forget having seen a movie or met a person or been to a state. However, as time has moved on I've stopped posting about my day to day activities for various and sundry reasons (primary among them is that they just aren't all that interesting) and Robin has started blogging (and while her blog certainly doesn't focus on our day to day life, she does mention events of interest so that should be enough). As I've moved more away from a journaler and more towards...well, I don't really know how to categorize my blogging these days, other than as sporadic...and poorly written too...this sentence doesn't actually end (mmm, meta blogging)!

Given the sporadic nature of the updates here, the first thing I decided had to go was the calendar. All it did was show everyone how infrequently I updated. And waste space. We hate things that waste space and so the calendar was right out. In keeping with the "it's updated whenever it's updated and that's that" theme, it occurred to me that most people who read this, will probably have read all but the most recent post, so there was really no reason to show more than the current entry on the main page. And so it was, and I saw it and it was good. However, I wanted to make sure that people coming in from searches (hello to everyone looking for an identification of the spider you just killed!) had easy access to other recent posts, so from there came the "Also Recently" list at the end of the current post. Other than that, there aren't many major changes, clearly a new color scheme, tightened up some of the items on the right, a few css tricks on the main content to improve readability and voila, here we are. Hope you like it.

That's a lie, I don't care if you like it. I'm looking at you here Will.

One side benefit of the new layout is it makes me write more to make the page look balanced. Admittedly that's a bad reason to write more, but I look at it this way, it makes the chances of more substantial posts much greater. And while I'll probably still weigh in from time to time with quick entries, I hope the norm moving forward will be longer, and hopefully more interesting posts.

There are still a few outstanding issues I need to address with the redesign, I just noticed the Category and Monthly archive pages still have date headers, I'll probably leave them there, but they need to match the new look and feel. Also, I'll hopefully get some icons from Craig to make things a bit more interesting. The whole colored boxes look is getting old to me.

Next Blog »

Earlier this week, Blogger replaced the ads atop their hosted blogs with a new navbar. Ever since then I've been addicted to the "Next Blog" feature which brings up a random, recently updated blogger-hosted blog. Oh the things you'll see. Here's a brief sampling:

We've got blogs that love god (don't get me wrong, I was glad to see that her dog was ok, but man...prayer boggles me)

Dear Lord, I don't understand why this is happening. I don't understand why Chance had to go through this ordeal. What does it teach me? But, I know Job endued awful things and he came to the conclusion that You are God Almighty and a wise God. I submit everything to you. My finances, my worries, my attempt to control things, and my ties with Chance (not that I'm asking anything elsewise) and let you take care of everything. Help me, Lord to trust in You. Please heal him and bring him home to me all new. Thank You, Amen.

Goth blogs

the name: bLackchErry
age: 16 zodiac: aquarius
location: the graveyard
ok.. it may seem dat i am dark.. but i ain't.. i just love goth culture.. i am friendly.. just be nice to me i will do the same.. dun be a bugger.. i detest hypocrites and poserz.. i love techno.. lets just say that the beat and rythem is groovy....i seem to love jrock and their culture too.. especially malice mizer and gackt..dun give me girlie and pinky stuffs.. i hate it.. just be urself and i am fine wif it.. dats abt it..

blogs in Icelandic

Í sjónvarpinu voru tveir menn í sóttvarnarbúningum, með gatasigti á hausnum og logsuðugrímu. Ótrúlega fráir á fæti og snarpir þrátt fyrir þunglamalega múnderingu. Þegar annar kom höggi á hinn blikkuðu síðan diskóljós, rauð eða gul, á höfði hins særða þannig að hann minnti meira á speismann en hugprúðan miðaldariddara.

blogs with Pictures of Babes!!!! (note, i found the Icelandic blog easier to understand than this one...)

Any of these babes have more sack than Dusty Baker, who isn't enough of a man to do what is best for his team, and push Sammy Sosa down the batting order.

blogs from Iraq

It looks like when we won the game, and when the Iraqis started shooting, the American soldiers thought that there was kind of an attack, so they started shooting too. Until they realized that the Iraqi team won, they started to participate in shooting with the Iraqis not against them... The odd thing is that although the shooting was to the sky, a bullet got into my uncle's house, but nobody got hurt.

and finally, the most sparkly blog of all time!

Stories I've Told

One night, in Madison, I was hanging out with Chia Chin, Brian and Tim. I think his name was Tim, I forget now, everyone called him Jesus, sort of like how people call Chris Ferguson Jesus. Except Tim had a shaved head. Oh and Daniel was there too. Daniel introduced me the Legendary Pink Dots.

In any event, we were all hanging out on State Street, basically right outside our private rent-a-dorm. Us out of state kids were too good for the public UW dorms. Remember when you went to college in Wisconsin to get away from all the kids in Marlboro who were going to Rutgers? Remember when you got to your swank dorm with a private bedroom and a shower you only had to share with one other person. Remember when you found out two girls from your high school lived right down the hall. Remember when you transferred to Rutgers. Those were the days.

So there we were, hanging out on State Street, across the street from whatever the fratboy bar across the street from our dorm was called. And the frat boys were all hanging out in the bar, and outside of the bar, and generally doing the things that frat boys do (later that year it included toppling a bus shelter when UW won the Rose Bowl). We decided that it'd be fun if we played some music to entertain the revellers. I'm not really sure how we decided this, or why, but it was decided. Our biggest problem was we didn't really have much in the way of instruments. Someone had a guitar, I think I had a harmonica, Daniel grabbed a garbage can and used it as a drum. I think Brian was singing. We sat on the street playing "music." We put a hat out and accepted donations from passers-by drunk and sober.

Eventually, we attracted the attention of some guy who looked like he'd been living on the street for a couple of days. He was a nice enough though. I can't for the life of me remember his name, but he had actually been living on the street for a couple of days. He had come to Madison by bus for a funeral, but didn't have enough bus fare to get back wherever he came from. He didn't come over begging or anything, he just thought we were funny college kids and sat around talking to us while we sang songs taunting drunken frat boys.

As is prone to happen in this sort of situation, especially if college party movies are to be believed, we incurred the wrath of some of the frat guys. I'm not entirely sure how it went down, but I think someone had just gotten kicked out of the bar, and Chia Chin started singing a song taunting him. He didn't so much approve and came over to let Chia Chin know ... by pushing him around. Chia Chin probably weighed 110 pounds, but he wasn't exactly one to back down. Luckily he didn't have to, as the funeral guy who had been sitting talking/listening to us stepped up the drunk frat guy, pulled out a knife and told him in no uncertain terms to get the fuck out of there.

We went on playing and hanging out for awhile still, I'm sure we were drinking ourselves as well. When we finally stopped we had about $20 or so that random people had thrown into the hat. We gave it to our protector and wished him well, then we went and got some IHOP.

Mystery Solved

When we moved from NJ to OR last summer there was a surprising amount of "culture shock" involved. Little things that I'm sure I've mentioned in the past like different brands at the supermarket all the way up to bigger things like the horrible facsimile of pizza they serve out here. One of the things that puzzled me the most, however, were the signs at Taco Time (a Mexican fast food chain that doesn't exist on the east coast). The signs read, "Crisp Meat $.99." I had no idea what they were selling, but crisp meat did not sound appealing, even to my thoroughly carnivorous soul. I've idly wondered all these months what crisp meat could be. I imagined some sort of deep fried beef, but even that would have to cook for a long time to get "crisp." A few weeks ago the mystery was finally solved, apparently it's some sort of thin burrito that's deep fried. It looks like a tacquito to my non-mexican-food-eating eye.

this blog is so aptly named sometimes.

Small Victories

Yesterday Lance Armstrong rode 100-some-odd miles at a rate of 32 miles per hour. Today I rode 4.74 miles in 18-some-odd minutes for a rate of 15.2 miles per hour. Tour de France here I come! As soon as we get the cash to sponsor our own team anyway...complete with jerseys that say, "Bonjour" on the front and "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys" on the back.

that cat..

...just threw up in my shoe.

that cat...

just threw up in my shoe.

i don't want clean that up. that's just gross.

Friday Toys

Now Robin can practice for Vegas.

and, more car-wifi-mp3-goodness.

The way of the samurai desert vehicle

From time to time I scan our referrer logs just to see who's linking to us. In the past it's turned up gems such as this. This time I found this, which in and of itself isn't particularly amusing. However, not being able to read german, I was curious as to what the page said, so I ran a block of the text through babelfish. This is what it spit out:

And as usual the tuning for the new topic, sea-monster participates last times second become, now thus again: Sea-monster The way OF the samurai desert vehicle The important thing is tons of express yourself melancholy Then co-ordinates times beautifully and postet industriously pictures!

Someone write me a story about sea-monsters and mastering the arcane and forgotten art of samurai desert vehicles. It could be post-apocalyptic steam punk set in a recreation of feudal japan.

The bane of Oregon Casinos

So, as Robin mentioned, we took a trip to the coast this weekend. Not down the shore as we'd say in Jersey though. It was very nice...very scenic. I still can't get over cliffs overlooking the ocean. We stopped at a casino, they didn't have poker though, only 5 sad little blackjack tables. Robin played some slots and lost, I played blackjack and was up a bit, then down to the felt with only $20 left and getting tired of playing. At that point I just started betting $10 a hand so we could leave, and started an amazing streak. I didn't lose another hand and left the table up $72 about 20 minutes later. The highlight of the streak was when I split Qs! I've really moved up a rank in my blackjack playing. Gone are the days of hitting on a soft 20. Now I've got just enough knowledge to do really stupid things.

Robin don't look at this picture

In honor of the continuing popularity of the spider post, I present to you the newest horror to reside outside of our apartment:

Robin, really, don't click here.

He's creepy, but really quite the hunter. Twice now I've seen him with a medium sized bee in his grasp. I can't say I much mind the fact that he preys on things that fly and sting. Of course, if he were to ever dare enter our apartment all bets would be off. He must learn his proper place in the world and that place is most definitely outside. I'm sure Robin would be happier if his place were a few blocks away.

Things Forgotten

I once knew a story about a guy who went to UMass. He had a baseball hat that said UMass. He somehow removed the M, so his hat said U ass. I don't remember the context of why I knew this story, if the guy in question was someone I knew personally, or a "friend of a friend." I'll refrain from making any asshat jokes until the day comes when I remember who he was. I need memory implants.

NJ Pics

The NJ trip went well. I'm finally used to flying again so I'm not a nervous wreck the entire flight. Uploaded some pictures I took while out there. This one in particular is pretty amusing:

The story goes something like this: We were having a meeting about some notes we had written on Silvestre's whiteboard. Rather than crowd into his office, I took a picture of the whiteboard and set it as the desktop of the machine in the conference room. The machine is hooked up to a projector that projects onto a whiteboard. Being the funny guy that I am, I then hid all of the desktop icons and the taskbar. We then called Carmen and told him someone had written on the whiteboard with regular markers and we couldn't erase it. Hilarity then ensued.

Ok, well, Robin thought that was funny anyway.

Trifecta

I finally finished off my To-Do list for my trip to NJ next week.

Although I do still need to buy a tie and make sure I have the regular buttons for my shirt (as opposed to the ones that match my cuff links).

Also, I should probably buy Mario vs. Donkey Kong for the plane ride.

Sloth

This is the kind of article I used to avoid like the plague. I knew (know?) I ate like crap, but I didn't really care to do anything about it. I'm what you would refer to as a...finnicky eater. I only like a (very) limited number of foods, most of which were much easier (and tastier) to get from a fast food restaurant. I've been eating somewhat better since we moved to Oregon, mostly because I'm working from home, so It's much easier to have an enjoyable lunch that doesn't involve running out to Wendy's or McDonald's. That's not to say that I've even been eating that well in the 8 months we've been here, but it's definitely leaps and bounds better than I was eating in NJ. However, for the past few weeks I've made a conscious decision to cut a lot of the crap out of my diet. I've done this before, but I always gave up and went back to junk within a week or so. Hopefully I'll keep it up this time. I suspect I'll have some inspiration when I get the results of my blood test back. I should be taking odds on how high my cholesterol is.

To get back to the article that inspired this, it's very long, but pretty interesting. It discusses the evolution of the human diet from the hunter-gatherer days forward, how our caloric intake has increased dramatically over the past 50 years while physical activity has decreased just as dramatically. I'm as guilty of this (if not more) as the next person. I don't believe in fad diets like Atkins though. It's amazing what the tried-and-true eat-less-exercise-more diet can do for you. I hope that I can look at this post a year from now and not be embarrassed by it because I gave up eating well and exercising a week into the future. Maybe by then I'll actually have been able to read Fast Food Nation like Robin has been trying to get me to do for years now.

note to self

you have a haircut appt at 1:15pm on june 5th.

also, you miss having a PDA sometimes.

Sappy

I love you Robin :p

Against my better judgement

I found this post on Engadget to be hilarious. People don't make nearly enough Jem and the Holograms references these days.

[Insert Uranus Joke here]

I took pictures of the scale model solar system today. I'll stop making Uranus jokes now, I swear.

Also, Robin got me poker chips for our anniversary. She rocks. Now everyone just needs to fly out here once a week so we can play.

Camera Resolution and pictures!

So today I went to the Good Guys and picked up a new camera, this one actually has a working microphone. It also started up in English instead of Japanese. The more I think about it, the more I think the camera Amazon sent me was refurbished. To celebrate the new camera and the sun coming out, I went for a bike ride, I tried out the new longer route and it was no problem, much more scenic and still only took like 40 minutes. I stopped about halfway through to take some pictures. They came out pretty well. If you look closely at some of the pictures you may see some fuzzy white things floating out of focus. This isn't a camera glitch or anything, it's the fuzzy white things that float all around town. Some sort of tree-reproduction-system or something! In some places it looks like it's been snowing, leading Robin to conclude that she was, in fact, right: it does snow in Oregon year-round.

On the downside, as you can see at my moblog, my monitor blew out today. I'm so not happy about having to shell out cash for a monitor after all the money I've been spending lately, but I stare at the screen for 14 hours a day some days, I can't do that on my laptop screen for much longer, it really strains my eyes at this distance. I'm thinking about getting this Dell flatscreen. 21", 1600x1200 resolution, supposedly works great with games, and I found a coupon so it's only $840. Somehow that doesn't make me any happier about spending the money. Coupon allegedly expires today though, so we'll see if I actually order it.

Frustration

As I mentioned earlier, I ordered a digital camera from Amazon last week. It finally arrived today, and I basked in its pocket-sized sleekness. For about 10 minutes. Then I realized that the microphone didn't seem to be working. How would I be able to document our drunken debauchery without the sound! I was distraught.

I tried willing the microphone to work. I tried getting a replacement from a local store. I tried dogs, and probes, and cardioplate crosoffs, teepers, bribery and stiktytes, but alas the microphone would not record. Finally, I resigned myself to getting a replacement from Amazon. You may or may not have noticed, but talking to a human being at Amazon is not an easy task. I spent a good 20 minutes going in circles in their help section looking for a phone number to call. I didn't want to use the automated replacement process online because it gave no timeframe. Finally I did a google search and found this page. I called the number (800.201.7575) and after looping through an automated menu several times, finally managed to get an honest-to-goodness-real-live person.

I explained my plight, and at first she was very helpful. She put me on hold to find out when I would receive the replacement. Then she came back. And things went bad.

"It looks like it would be ready to ship out by July 21st," she said.

"I'm sorry, did you say July?"

"Yes."

"21st?" I was starting to get annoyed.

"Yes."

"You know, It's May now, right?"

"Yes." She was starting to get annoyed.

"How is that possible? It only took a week to get to me the first time."

"Well sir," she began a patronizing explanation of how they don't actually stock items, but get them from other partners (Target, in this example).

"But when I look online it says it's shipping in 1-2 days!"

"That is not accurate."

I could tell that this was going nowhere, but I felt like arguing. She offered me discounts, then she offered me bigger discounts, anything to get me off the phone, her average call time was skyrocketing. She couldn't offer me what I wanted--a replacement that was guaranteed to arrive within a week.

In the end I just decided to return it. Tomorrow I'm going to go to the Good Guys and pick one up. I'm pretty sure I saw that they had them for sale when I was shopping around a few weeks ago. The moral of this story is, at least for me, feel free to buy books, cds, dvds from Amazon, but I will never buy anything more liable to break from them again.

Exerwhatnow?

Bought a bike on Friday. It's very swank. On the front fender, there is a rocket ship. The concept behind buying a bike is rooted in the sad fact that I rarely leave the house. I work from home, I play video games for entertainment. I'm not complaining mind you, I'm not the type that always needs to get out and do things, and it's not like I'm a shut-in or anything. I still socialize, I just do it online. We haven't met many people in Eugene that we'd go out of our way to spend time with. I'm not painting a very flattering picture of myself here! Basically, I wasn't getting out enough, even for my standards.

Anyway, I bought a bike, and it's swank, and so far I like riding it. The Willamette river is right behind our apartment, and there is a great series of bike paths that are easily accessible. So far I've been doing a 4 mile circuit that crosses the river, it's nice and scenic, and I discovered that there's some sort of scale model of the solar system along the path. So far I've only passed Uranus and Neptune. Maybe one day I'll find the Sun so I can say I've biked from the Sun to Pluto. The route I'm riding takes a bit less than 30 minutes to complete, so I end up doing the first quarter of it again, and then turning around, I probably wind up doing about 6 miles in 30-40 minutes. I've been looking at this map (warning, rather large PDF) and I think I see a circle I could do that would add another 3-4 miles to the original 4 mile course, that might end up being a better option than repeating the first quarter, and less boring than just repeating the whole route twice (I'm working my way up, I'm out of shape!)

Also, for the first time since we moved out here I've really been paying attention to the weather. It doesn't look good for this week. I'm actually going to be disappointed if I can't ride again until Friday. We shall see.

This is the route that I've been riding:

on Jiffy Lube

Me: i gotta go, um, change the oil in my car
Gail: yeah, good luck with that
Me: hah! i could do it!!
Me: maybe
Gail: i can't
Me: i could drive to jiffy lube for sure!
Gail: jiffy lube is my best friend
Gail: except every time i go they tell me my air filter is dirty
Me: my best friend wouldn't constantly try and sell me an air filter i don't need!

That sound you hear...

...is the collective groan of a large number of Movable Type users. As most people who pay attention to these things now know, Movable Type 3.0 was released today. With it, the days of free-blogging via MT are gone for many, including Robin and I were we to upgrade. Basically if you want a site with more than 3 blogs or more than 2 authors it's going to cost you. $70 initially for the personal edition (3 authors and 5 blogs), but eventually that price will rise to $100. If you want more blogs or authors than that the cost gets even steeper, up to $600 for 20 authors and 15 blogs (which will rise to $700 after the introductory period is over). What I find most amusing though, is that through the magic of TrackBack, you can see how disgruntled the user-base is.

Movable Type is a great product. But the thing that made it so prevalent isn't just the fact that it's flexible and easy to use (it is, there's no denying that). The fact that it was free played a huge part in it. The real problem I see, isn't that they're trying to make money from MT, it's their restrictive license. Granted, most personal users aren't creating 5 blogs with 5 authors, but here I am, most decidedly a personal user and I have 3 blogs and 2 authors. I'd think a personal license that allowed for 5/5 or even 10/10 and came in at around $30 would garner SixApart much more money. Enterprise users will still pay inflated prices just by nature of being Enterprise users. A $600 price tag is nothing for a decently sized company to absorb. A cheaper personal license lets right-meaning users pay for a product they appreciate without feeling ripped off, it also allows smaller corporate (say...non-profits) users to afford to continue using MT.

To add insult to injury, MT3.0 can hardly be seen as anything more than a point release. There aren't any major fixes in it that I can see. Nothing with enough wow factor that I would consider shelling out money for it in any event. For the time being I'll stick with 2.6.

To Do

Things to do before going to NJ for Craig's wedding

• Buy plane tickets
• Figure out where to stay over the weekend Ingratiating myself upon Adam & Wayne
• Book hotel Days Inn Hillsborough, here I come!!!!!
• Book rental car My Ford Focus is gonna be l33t
• Get a suit - Bought a suit on Saturday. It's nothing too exciting, just a simple black suit. It looks pretty good though.
• Get a camera - Just ordered the Minolta Dimage XG and a 512 mb SD card

無題

People are moving in next door.

First they moved in two doors down, but apparently they didn't like that apartment, because now they're wheeling their luggage next door. They do, however, like to stare into our front window when they think I'm not looking. Silly rabbits. I should've watched more DVDs where things blow up while that place was vacant. Now I bet Robin won't let me. Curse these thin walls.

I couldn't be bothered to title this, so I went to Babelfish and translated "untitled" into Japanese. Having an entry titled in Japanese makes me cooler. When I translated the output back into English it came back as "Non Subject" which pretty aptly describes this entry, I guess it works after all.

Hrm...

TextAmerica's RSS feeds aren't working right now. I'm not so arrogant to suggest that they did it because of my app or anything. It's been downloaded all of like 10 times I think, and three of those times are by friends of mine who don't even have a moblog. More likely it's just a bug, but still...exemplifies another reason why I wanted to get away from them, they're just very inconsistent in terms of level of service.

I'm a big, big dork

Moblog Import v0.1

I can't help it.

Everyone else is doing it

So, the paper I worked on in college is in the news again. For the whole skinny on the situation here's an article from the Times, I'd recommend reading Matt's post on too.

This whole thing is almost like a college reunion, except most of the people from the inside that are commenting are people I've never heard of. Where do I fall on the issue? I'm not sure. Is the cartoon offensive? Maybe, when viewed out of context, but coming out of a public university in the Northeast, I don't think there can be any doubt that this was satire. When I was a waiter, my boss who was German used to jokingly threaten to throw me into the pizza oven. I wasn't really offended by it, any more than he was offended by my constant jokes that he *would* throw me into a pizza oven. Really, that's just as offensive, to categorize all Germans as Nazis.

I don't want to defend or criticize the act of publishing the cartoon, because what it boils down to is it's their right to do so, regardless of what anyone else thinks. If people don't like it, they're free to raise holy hell in response. College is a place to experiment, to try things you'd never think of trying at home, or at work, or in any polite company for that matter. This paper is a place to learn for the current staff, just as it was when I was on the staff, and I can guarantee you that they did learn from this, even if the only lesson was that getting into the national news spotlight is way too easy these days.

In closing, it's good to remember the genesis of the name "the Medium:" because it's not rare, and never well done.

What the #$*! do you know indeed!

We went to see What the #$*! Do We Know?! tonight at the Bijou. Never in my life have I been angrier at a movie. I was so close to just getting up and walking out. To really get perspective on what that means take this into account: I never even considered walking out on Battlefield Earth. This movie takes a complicated scientific principal, quantam mechanics, and tries to turn it into a unified theory of mysticism. It was two fucking hours of self-help propaganda bullshit and it made me angry. I can accept people who believe this kind of stuff, that's all well and good, more power to you. But to try and explain it as scientific, that's beyond insulting. The fact that the movie was interspersed with documentary style interviews with scientists made it even more infuriating. I was sitting there, crushing an emtpy box of Mike & Ike's, wondering how people could spout off such nonsense. What absolutely floored me though, was at the end, they gave the names and qualifications of all of the scientists. Half of them weren't even physicists and one of them wasn't even a scientist, she's some nutjob who channels some Atlantean warrior. I'm getting angrier as I type this. I'll leave you with this (long) comment from IMDB from someone more rational talking about the film.

I had numerous problems with this film.

It contains some basic factual information concerning quantum mechanics, which is fine. Although quantum physics has been around for over 50 years, the film presents this information in a grandiose way that seems to be saying: "Aren't you just blown away by this!" Well, not really. These aren't earth shattering revelations anymore. At any rate, I was already familiar with quantum theory, and the fact that particles have to be described by wave equations, etc. is not new.

The main problem I have with this movie, however, is the way these people use quantum theory as a way of providing a scientific basis for mysticism and spiritualism. I don't have any serious problem with mysticism and spiritualism, but quantum mechanics doesn't really have anything to do with these things, and it should be kept separate. The people they interviewed for this movie start with the ideas of quantum theory and then make the leap to say that simply by thinking about something you can alter the matter around you, hence we should think positively so as to have a positive impact on the world and make our lives better. The reasoning is completely ridiculous, and the conclusions do not logically follow from quantum theory. For every so called "expert" that they interviewed for this film, there are scores of theoretically physicists who would completely disagree. They would point out, quite rightly, that the unpredictability of the subatomic world does not lend support to mystical notions about our spiritual connectedness.

It disturbs me that people are going to see this film and completely eat it up because it leaves them with a nice positive feeling. The main thrust of the film is based on a total misinterpretation of quantum theory, and it is as bad in its reasoning as any attempt to justify organized religion with similar pseudo-scientific arguments.

Avoid this film.

Oh yeah. At one point, one of the "experts" says that since throughout history most of the assumptions people have made about the world turned out to be false, therefore the assumptions we currently hold about the world are also likely to be false. Huh? That totally does not follow. And even if it did, I don't see how that helps his argument. I mean, if his ideas ever became common assumptions then I guess we would have to assume that they are false too, based on his own reasoning.

New TV and New Beer make Homer something something

Ok, there's not really any beer involved, but the new TV was finally delivered on Saturday. The whole thing turned out to be a bit of a production unfortunately. First they messed up and hadn't put the stand together ahead of time. They didn't have enough time to put it together and deliver the TV, so it was either put the stand together myself and get the TV onto it or wait another day and have them do it all. Since the living room was already torn apart to make room for the new set the latter was not really an option. I wasn't worried about putting the stand together, but I knew (all too well) my current set weighed almost 300 lbs and there was no way Robin and I were lifting something that heavy onto a stand. Luckily the new set weighs much less, only 130lbs, which was no problem for the two of us.

So they show up with the TV, drop it on the floor, turn it on to make sure it's working, give me the stand to assemble and they're on their way. About five minutes after they leave, as I'm flipping through the menus, I noticed a big black splotch behind the screen...not sure exactly what it is, but it's annoying as hell. Called them back up, they say they'll replace it, but they can't do it until Friday, *sigh*, oh well, it's nothing I can't live with for a week. And in general the TV is really nice. It takes a little bit to get accustomed to watching 4:3 programming in 16:9, but I'm already pretty used to it. Picture wise, for analog TV it doesn't look much better than the old set, but the real payoff will be down the road when I get HDTV and a progressive scan DVD player.

On to other home electronics woes, our Tivo is suffering in a bad way. The video seems to skip, stutter and get all pixelized. I've suspected for awhile that the hard-drive had some bad sectors, but lately it's becoming almost unwatchable. Every five minutes or so the picture will freeze, then get pixelized, then freeze again, then finally catch up. Ick. I don't really want to buy a new Tivo. I was considering holding out a few weeks and switching to DirecTv for the HD Tivo they're supposed to be releasing, but after reading up on it I just don't think it warrants the $1000 price tag. Now I'm leaning towards ordering a replacement harddrive for the Tivo from Weaknees and seeing if that clears things up.

I figured before I tried anything myself I'd call Tivo support to see if they had any input. They didn't, but in order to find out that they didn't I had to sit through the most annoying automated phone customer support system ever. It was a new fangled voice recognition system, and it wouldn't let me press buttons to choose options, so here I am, talking to a computer, a pleasant, female computer, but a computer nonetheless.

Computer: If at any point you'd like to speak with a Live Agent, simply say, "Live Agent"
Me: Live Agent
Computer: I don't have enough information to process that request, please answer the following questions so that I may better serve you: Please describe briefly the nature of your problem.
Me: Jesus Christ

This thing was really starting to frustrate me. I don't like talking to machines. I think at this point it just started fucking with me...

Computer: I'm sorry, I don't understand that. If at any point you'd like to speak with a Live Agent, simply say, "Live Agent"
Me: Live Agent
Computer: I don't have enough information to process that request, please answer the following questions so that I may better serve you: Please describe briefly the nature of your problem.
Me: The video stutters and is pixelated.
Computer: The closest match for your problem is Picture and Screen problems. Is this correct?
Me: Yes
Computer: Hold on while I transfer you.

Excellent...finally a real person. Although I must admit, I was begrudgingly impressed with the technology's ability to at least get the right category of the problem. I hadn't realized it was fucking with me yet, but I was about to find out...

Male Computer: Hi, I can assist you with your Picture and Screen problems. Do you have a satellite dish?
Me: No.

I was flabbergasted. The female computer transferred me to a male tech-support specialist computer. Apparently, even in the machine world, women have hit the glass ceiling...not to mention, I got transferred to another computer!

Male Computer: Ok then, do you have a cable box?
Me: LIVE AGENT!!!!
Male Computer: If you'd like to speak to a live agent, please call (505) xxx-xxxx. Please be aware that hold times may be very long.

*hangs up in shock*

All that time, and in order to speak to a real person I had to call a long distance number and wait. This really does lend credence to the conclusion in this article

Over the years I've observed that the more arrogant and less responsive a company gets, the more likely it's about to fail. Oddly, when the going gets tough, most companies don't do a gut check and rededicate themselves to service. Instead, they circle the wagons and go into a preventive defense—and search for someone to sue.

In the early years of TiVo, I'd get instant service. TiVo even gave me the name of a special ambassador—a strategy meant to ensure that the company got a fair hearing in the press, on the Web, and in other public forums. Today my inquiries go unanswered—or even worse, I never receive a promised response. Hold times on the help lines are interminable: It took me over half an hour last week to determine why the company had charged me $14.

Do you like...stuff?

Boring site maintenance stuff:

I updated the Link Archive and the Music History pages to have a much more consistent look (just by adding the header). I also added a scoreboard of sorts to the Link Archive, that shows the top 5 link counts by person. It's sad that Scott is still #1 and he hardly comes to IRC anymore since his job is lame. Working for Dad can be that way I guess!

Other stuff...I found this site the other day, it's fun to read other people's accounts of their poker exploits. I'm not sure why. This whole poker thing borders on being a sport. I hate sports. What's really crazy is the number of blogs devoted to poker. They seem to have an online poker series going too. Pretty cool. Anyone interested in setting up a scheduled single table tournament one of these days? We can start a private game at Poker Room, all buy in with 1000 play chips and play for awhile. If you're interested, post a reply here, first 10 entrants get a seat! If for some reason more than 10 people want to play we could create 2 single table tournaments and just combine tables halfway through. Nothing fancy, but it'd be fun i think.

Those girls didn't want me at all...

From this interview with Johnny Depp:

Q. Did you ever seen the porn flick Edward Penishands?

A. I certainly did. I absolutely did. And there was a sequel as well--Edward Penishands 2. I think it was either Tim [Burton] or John Waters who sent it to me. It might have been both. Tim and I were both quite proud they decided to do that. It was low budget and cheesy, but it was hilarious to watch. Those hands...they served him well.

All gussied up

For the color-blind among you who hadn't noticed, i prettied the old site up a bit. I think it looks good. I should be an artist.

Weekend Recap

Ichi the Killer: Good
50 Foot Wave: Rockin'

On an unrelated note, I finally made the switch a few weeks ago and am using Firebird Firefox as my default browser. Much of what it has to offer is Good. Things like better standards support, popup blocking, better control over what pages can do with javascript, and type ahead are all excellent features. The only times I miss IE are when I start up Firefox...it's definately noticeably slower, but I guess when you're not integrated into the operating system shell that's inevitable. My only other gripe is with the address bar pulldown. I've never been a big fan of bookmarks, instead I browse by zeitgeist. I type in a URL and if the site is interesting enough it will stay in the address pulldown long enough for me to find it again when I'm looking for something to browse. Sites like CNN, This Modern World and Shacknews stay near the top since I visit them often, whereas random links I may paste in, eventually get pushed out off the bottom of the list.

At least, that's how it worked in IE. In Firefox, the order of the URLs in the address bar pulldown doesn't seem to have any discernible logic to it. At the top are sites I visit everyday intermingled with sites i visited once, a week ago. It's a minor nuissance of course and overshadowed by the positives that Firefox has to offer, but it still bugs me.

Sigh, I really enjoyed the Ender's series too...

But Orson Scott Card's politics have finally caught up with him. I don't think I can in good conscience buy another one of his books after reading this:

http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-02-15-1.html

February is Free Beef Month!

When we moved across country we were certainly surprised by some of the differences between the East coast and the West. Things that you take for granted just don't exist out here (like....good chinese food). After a few months, we grew generally accustomed to the differences and learned to work around them, we've even found things out here that we like that didn't exist back east. However, at the start of February, we started seeing a series of commercials for Les Schwab tires (a chain that does not exist on the East coast). As their way of thanking America's farmers and ranchers, February is Free Beef Month. Needless to say, we found this disturbing, but chalked it up as just another quirky difference between the East and West coasts, something no one out here would even question. We were then very relieved last week when we started seeing commercials for a local bicycle store, advertising free tofu with every tire purchase. Thankfully it's not just us and our darned East coast seensibilities who found it odd for a tire chain to give away free meat.

It seems all i ever talk about is movies

We saw the Triplets of Belleville this weekend. It's a fantastic movie. It was actually referred to me by my niece, by way of my sister, who said it was her favorite movie until she saw Spirited Away. She has excellent taste for an almost-five-year-old.

The Bijou theater in Eugene is becoming my favorite place to go here. Not only do they show great independent movies (the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is not scheduled yet though :(), but they also show older, more popular movies late at night on weekends. Things like a Clockwork Orange, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and the Princess Bride. It is truly Very Good.

Happy (Belated) President's Day

http://www.southknoxbubba.net/skblog/archive_2004_02.php#2635

Weekend

We saw the Cooler on Friday night at the Bijou. It was a pretty good movie, it centers around "old" Vegas, the Fremont street area, and it has a much grittier tone than other recent Vegas movies that center around the strip.

Speaking of Vegas, how long before the Travel channel becomes the Vegas channel? I think that'd be a good idea. They can keep showing their Vegas specials during the day, keep showing World Poker Tour, but get rid of the other crap, and start showing other Vegas themed stuff. Pick up that new NBC show when it goes into syndication. Show every Vegas movie ever made. I'd watch it, it seems we get the urge to get back to vegas every 3 months, although it's probably fueled by watching Ocean's Eleven and the travel channel.

Some things just aren't right

http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/diet.fitness/02/03/lowcarb.pizza.ap/index.html

Some highlights:

Boyles has a word for those who want to avoid carbohydrates: "carbavoids."

I bet this guy think's he's really clever. I wonder how that's working out for him.

And this guy, well, he just has issues:

And in Escondido, California, John Pontrelli, owner of Pit Stop Pasta, offers what may be a traditionalist's worst nightmare: "pizza in a bucket." It has all the pizza toppings placed in a crock or, for takeout customers, a metal can.

It's like that commercial from the 80's, "Gimme a pizza....with nothin'" except the otherway around, and in a METAL CAN.

The sad state of chinese food

So a few weeks ago we went up to Portland for Kam's birthday. We went out to dinner at PF Chang's, which is apparently classified as a "China Bistro." In our neverending search for Chinese Food That Doesn't Suck (tm), we figured the more americanized the better, this place seemed to fit the bill. Anyway, the waitress comes over and asks us if we've ever eaten there before. We said no, and braced ourselves for the typical menu-overview. Instead, the waitress explained to us what soy sauce was, and how it would be our "salt" for the evening, and what chili paste was and how it would be our "pepper."

Ok, shut up, you're the ones who keep yelling at me for not updating.

Sorry, It sucks.

Like most people (I imagine), I wake up in the morning through the soothing sounds of a clock radio. Unlike most people, however, I usually set the radio station to static. It's enough to wake me up, and it's better than waking up to commercials, annoying morning drive chatter, or even worse, whatever drivel passes for music on the radio these days (when did i become such an old man??). In any event, for some reason, the station my alarm is set to migrates over time and inevitably ends up parked on either Morning Worship or the worst teen pop imaginable. I'm not sure what station it's on now, but this morning when my alarm went off all i heard was a woman saying, matter of factly, "I'm sorry, it sucks." I instinctively turned the alarm off, so I'm not sure what she was referring to, but how's that for a way to start off your Monday?

Tivo why have you forsaken me??

Our tivo has gone crazy. It's trying to record things like...Paid Programming. I'd really like to know what combination of thumbs up and down made it think that we'd like to watch some random informercials. I could see if it was a Juiceman informercial, or maybe the new Ronco invention, but there was no description, it was just a random infomercial.

*yawn*

been off work for the past 2 weeks, unpaid vacation, but i'll still take what i can get. we went to vegas for a few days after christmas, lost lots of money. good times. robin took some pictures, not sure if we'll bother uploading them or not. went to sam & kam's for new years, drank lots of alcohol. good times. i took a picture down someone's shirt with my camera phone, but it's too dark to be worth posting.

just played in a poker tournament at ultimate bet. went out way early, wasn't pretty. was all ready to stay up til 4am playing poker, and now it's only 1:30 and i'm done and i'm not tired. woe is me.

also, in the past few weeks robin uploaded pictures from our trip to the Museum of Natural History last February and from her trip to Prague back in August.

you know yr not blogging enough when...

yr template goes kaboom due to lack of posts in the past month.

such a slacker.

Textamerica...

...is really starting to piss me off. I can accept their little ad links that they force upon you, but the google ads are kind of grating. I'm sure that there's all of 10 people, tops, looking at my moblog, but it irritates me that someone else is making money off of my content. When i get some time i'm going to write something of my own to grab the images out of email so i can ditch them once and for all.

Where the hell have you been?

If anyone besides Robin and Matt read this (and sometimes Adam) i'd be more apologetic, but as such is not the case, oh well! And to answer the question, I was in NJ for a week, but mostly I've been playing too much Final Fantasy XI.

This page was starting to look sad however, so I figured it deserved an update. Thanksgiving in OR was pretty standard fare (for us anyway!). We sat around the house and did nothing. Then Robin had to ruin it by going to volunteer at a local shelter. She's a much better person than I am.

Have some interesting stuff to work on right now. Trying to figure out the best way to perform a complex task asynchronously. Right now it takes up to 15 minutes to run, and we just increased the timeouts on the page so it can finish. The plan is to find a threshold above which the process will be kicked over to an asynchronous one which will email the user upon completion. I'm thinking MSMQ and some sort of .NET app in the backend to check the queue and process the requests. It'll be good if we can do it that way since we still haven't really adopted .NET at work for anything production related and I'd really like something to use as a wedge in the door to full-fledged .NET development. I'm just so utterly tired of VB DLL Hell.

Love that Oregon weather

It doesn't matter

I was driving through the parking lot of strip mall when i see, in my rear view mirror, some woman waving frantically and running after my car. I take a second to try and figure out if i just hit something? No. Does it sound like something is dragging off the back of my car? No. Wtf does she want? I stop. In the middle of the parking lot. I roll down the window.

"Are you from NJ?!?!" she asks, clearly having noticed my NJ plates (i know, i know, i should really get OR plates one of these days).

"Yes, I am" I tell her.

"Where?"

"North Brunswick."

"Oh, your're from up north. We just moved out here from May's Landing. It's great to see another New Jerseyan."

At this she patted me on the shoulder (through the window) and walked away.

they don't write songs about NJ homecomings

The only songs I know about NJ are about getting the hell out of NJ. I remember when they wanted to make Born to Run the official NJ state song. That was funny. Anyway, i've been summoned back to NJ for work from the 16th to the 22nd of November. It'll be nice to be back, at the very least for the Chinese food and some real pizza, but mostly to see family and friends again. It's only been, what--3 months, but it'll be nice to see them. Now i'm just hoping they're not flying me in to fire me ;).

So, the spiders...

This is a picture of one of the spiders that has taken up residence right outside our front door. You can't really tell how big he is from the picture, but he's about the size of a quarter, with crazy white stripes on his legs. He has a brother too, who is sligthly smaller, but no less crazy.

What's funny, is i was doing a google search on "Oregon Spiders" to try and find out what kind of spider he is, and this page came out as the 11th hit. This post will probably just reinforce that. We'll be the web-center for spiders in Oregon, but will provide no real resource.

Web searches that bring people here...

"buy a canoe in Eugene oregon"

"Edward ka-spel 2003"

"Pictures of Oregon Spiders"

"eugene oregon picture"

"conversations overheard"

What to watch

This conversation is probably familiar to anyone who has HBO and Starz:

Robin: Man, Harry Potter isn't on until noon today.
Me: I'm sure Lord of the Rings or Ocean's Eleven is on before then
Robin: Ocean's Eleven isn't on until 11.

[insert witty Duran Duran lyric here]

Came across this on Edith Frost's blog:

http://www.duranduran.com/bookclub/

That's right, Simon LeBon has a book club. What's more impressive is he seems to have decent taste in books. I picked up A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami a while back, but I keep forgetting that I bought it and haven't read it yet. But knowing that Simon LeBon recommends another book by Murakami will make all the difference!!!

I realized today...

...that i haven't left the house since Saturday. Another one of the things about telecommuting to watch out for. I've been so damned busy lately. I worked all weekend, in addition to two 14 hour days last week. My timesheet for this month is starting to look pretty scary:

Getting out today for sure! We're going to see Edward Ka-Spel in Portland tonight. I'll most likely be exhausted tomorrow, what with the not getting home until, oh...3am. What the hell are we thinking. Robin gets up even earlier than I do, since she has Greek at 9am. Wednesday will not be a pretty day.

Suddenly...

....i live too close to California. What's even more frightening, is there are already plans in the works to ammend the constitution to allow for naturalized citizens to run for president.

Oh well, at least President Schwartzenegger would have more credibility landing on an aircraft carrier than President Awol, er Bush.

#link-archive

Lazy Sunday afternoon, what else is there to do besides finally write the connection between the mIRC script and the blog. So without further ado, i present to you, the irc link archive. Now you too, can marvel at the wonders discussed as we waste our time all day in IRC. Joy.

*Update* It was pointed out that I wasn't clear where this archive actually is...it's over there on the right, under the Music section.

Uninteresting technical details. The connection is a C# console app that basically takes two parameters and passes them to a URL on the site via the query string. If for some reason anyone wants a copy of either the mIRC script or the C# app, leave a comment and i'll get in touch.

Who says philosophers are no fun?

Went to a party at the head of the Philosophy Department's house last night. It was a pretty good time, the best part being, as all of the grad students were filing out to go to a bar, two of the faculty (i think, well, i guess one is the office manager) broke into the Philosopher's Drinking Song from Monty Python. Accordian and Vocals from the front porch.

After that we all went to a bar/cafe in Eugene and basically sat around for a few hours talking and drinking. Apparently that's what philosophers do, although most of the talk was decidedly non-philosophic (although Canada-bashing was clearly the exception), there were certainly bouts of interesting discussion between drinks.

Upcoming.org

It's sort of like Friendster, if your friend the Point Pleasant Boardwalk could tell you what it was doing, instead of who it knew. I never really believed all the hype about Friendster, it's cute and all, but ultimately pointless. I don't know if I believe the hype about Upcoming.org either. It's definately less pointless than Friendster. But what it all boils down to is that i'm pretty anti-social and i don't have much faith that random people on the internet that want to go to the same places i want to go are, by that fact alone, people i want to be friends with. I created an event though, for the Edward Ka-Spel show in Portland on the 14th of October. We'll see what happens with it. Judging from the other events that are already created for Portland, i figure most people won't even pay it any attention.

What i definately *do* like about Upcoming.org are the RSS feeds, every site should have them. I sometimes muse upon the idea of a future where everyone has a blog and it's sort of the center of their digital world, even without direct updates. That's what i'm trying to accomplish with the camera phone pictures, the music history, and one day the irc link history. Sort of a meta-summary-of-me, but without any input from me.

I am a networking *god*

In our new place, Robin and I have separate offices. So my computers are in one room with the cable modem and the router, and hers are across the hall in another room with an 802.11g bridge. Unfortunately, this plan did not work out very well, for some reason her connection would drop every hour or so, and sometimes not come back until either she rebooted or the WAP was reset.

Tried upgrading the firmware on the WAP, which was a little adventure in and of itself. Apparently, upgrading the firmware via wireless is a bad idea, since the first thing the firmware update does is delete the existing firmware, thus rendering the unit unable to further communicate wirelessly and preventing the new firmware from being written. Linksys was kind enough to send out a replacement though, and the firmware on that one was updated without a hitch. Of course, Robin's connection still dropped constantly.

So, being the loving man that I am, I decided I'd wire her office. Not knowing how much cable I would need exactly, I decided to buy some bulk Cat5 and make my own, this way the length was guaranteed to be correct. I had some cable runners left from when I thought i was going to have to run the coax for the tv across the livingroom, so the cat5 is neatly tacked along the floors and ceilings. I guess making my own cat 5 and running it from one room to the next doesn't really make me a networking god, but it felt good to do.

On an unrelated note, we ordered a laptop for Robin last week, and it came with a free Kensington Wifi Finder. And, just as the word of mouth would lead you to believe, it's fairly worthless. Sitting right next to my 802.11g WAP it detected nothing. At least it was free.

Bubba Ho-Tep

Bubba Ho-Tep is the most brilliant movie I've seen in years. If it's playing near you, i strongly recommend you get out and see it. Words can not describe its wonderfulness.

Heading up to Portland to see the movie was the main bit of our weekend. Other than that, we spent pretty much all day Sunday trying to finish unpacking. We didn't quite succeed but we are very close to done now.

Talk Like a Pirate Day is my new favorite holiday

From Tom Tomorrow's blog:

I suspect there be some new virus goin' around, posin' as email from Microsoft (but with a mighty odd-lookin' domain in the return address, if ye look closely). The scurvy dogs tell ye to download a "patch." Yer pirates, by god, ye've already got yer patches! And yer peg legs and yer parrots!

(oh, and as he would say, "Buy the book")

Hey look, a blog!

At the end of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey the heroes travel into the past for two years of some intensive guitar training, but to the viewer they return almost instantly (and ready to rock). Similarly, I now return to you, loyal reader, after being gone for what felt like two years, but to you seemed not more than a month. And like Bill & Ted, I too am ready to rock.

Ok, that was really bad. I apologize, I didn't mean any of it. I mean really, there are no loyal readers for one thing.

So, we are firmly entrenched in Oregon now. It has been a very crazy month, with many excellent adventures. Sorry, I can't stop. I don't know why. To sum up: trekking across the country with three cats, blowing out a tire at 85 mph on I80 in Nebraska, getting a pair of speeding tickets for going 84 in a 55, arriving in Oregon a week and a half before our worldly possessions, driving to Ikea in Seattle to get a swank shelf for the records, visiting Sam & Kam (but mostly Powell's) in Portland, working from the floor, working a lot, stuff finally arriving, and now, continued, everlasting, unpacking.

So there you have it. Things are slowly settling down. The movers scratched the screen on the TV, Robin starts school in a week or two. Working from Oregon is going pretty well (especially now that I have a desk to sit at). Yay.

Duh

Finally figured out what was wrong with the blog display. It was set to show only seven days worth of entries and i haven't been posting much lately due to the whole cross country drive and now our continued lack of possessions. Our stuff was supposed to arrive on wednesday, then saturday, now monday or tuesday. more to come once (if!) we ever regain our worldly possessions.

Hrm

Apparently when you drive across country yr MT templates blow up. I don't know what's wrong with them but i'll look into fixing them when i have a proper keyboard and desk and such.

Yay for in room broadband

not much to say right now since the laptop battery is draining rapidly. We're in Ontario, Oregon,about 6-7 hours from Eugene. The drive has been relatively smooth so far. 14 hours a day, crying cats, one blown out tire. Nothing we can't handle. More when we get cable set up in Eugene on saturday.

Busy, and then some

I can't remember the last time i was even remotely this busy. Working 9-10 hours a day, then coming home and packing for four hours, then going to sleep. Waking up early to get more boxes from the supermarket. Rinse and repeat. Always repeat.

Last night was a slight deviation from the routine, we went to Ikea to pick up some CD Holders (we got the cheaper, and much swanker dark-grey-metallic ones though) for Robin. We figure'd better to have them when we arrive in Eugene, then to have to drive 5 hours to the nearest Ikea just to unpack.

It's Robin's birthday, the sad thing is we're both so focused on packing and such that neither of us realized until a few hours after we'd been awake. I gave her her present on Monday, so it's not like i really forgot! I think we're going to Chuck E. Cheese tonight (somewhat unfortunately, i still have bad memories of my last trip there). We've been informed there is no ball pit anymore. I'm not sure what the point is.

*yawn*

Went to Atlantic City yesterday with Adam, Wayne, Wayne's girlfriend Amy (who was probably ill-prepared for our level of geekdom), Scott, Mike and Jose. Taught Jose what little i know about craps and he proceeded to double his money while i lost almost $100. Such is life. He then put his winnings on black and doubled them. I'd complain about the justice if he hadn't been such a boyscout earlier. He played the water gun game on the boardwalk (side note, that game was much better when you were actually filling a balloon instead of raising a stuffed animal up a pole) and won, then he gave the prize to a small child. He claims to be an angry Philipino, but i don't buy it.

While we were gambling, Adam, Wayne and Amy were playing skeeball. I'm fairly certain they have issues, although i suppose that's a better investment of $80 than my feeble attempt at playing craps was.

Today, we went on an errand-spree. Got a pair of prescription sunglasses for the Long Drive (tm). Tried to get the Harry Potter books on CD also for the Long Drive (tm), but they only had the fifth book, and it was $45. I don't think i'll be paying $45 a book to listen to them on the road. I was never really that interested in Harry Potter, the similarities to Books of Magic (case in point) always overshadowed anything the series may have had going for it. After that we went to Vintage Vinyl for one last hurrah. Picked up a whole slew of stuff, and now i'm converting it to mp3. Windows Media Player is giving me lip on some of the cds, crashes every other track so i have to do tracks one at a time. Why did i decide to use media player for converting again? I'm at a loss.

In case yr keeping track

Robin got home safely last night, despite a minor power outage. Her flight landed at around 6:15 but it took an hour for them to actually get off the plane. They made record time getting home from the airport though, so all and all could've been worse.

I'm glad she's home, but now it's time for her to work! We have a lot of packing to do ;).

On Cablevision

So cablevision makes me want to shoot things. We were having problems with our reception with the movie channels, and seeing as how we're moving in a few weeks, we didn't think it was worth our time to sit around for a day waiting for a cable repairman to show up to fiddle with the wires. So i told Cablevision to just downgrade us to the next package down, and apparently this is a task too complicated for them. I've called them no less than 5 times since then, for every problem imaginable...cable boxes mysteriously deactivating themselves, loss of service, and everytime they refused to listen to what i was saying because it conflicted with what they had in their computer.

"I'm sorry sir, the computer says you have package x, and on day y you will be downgraded to package z"

"Yes, but i'm already at package z, i'm not receiving channels a, b and c and haven't been for 5 days now."

"The computer..."

*sigh*

The end result is, they sent someone out who turned off 90% of the cable we had remaining, so we get channel 1-24, which basically gives us the major networks and CNN. Great. All i want is Comedy Central for the Daily Show and Cartoon Network for Futurama. Have to wait until Tuesday when they send someone out to flick a switch outside and turn them back on. Why am i not in Oregon yet? I'm sure things like this don't happen there. Clearly.

Dreaming

I woke up in the middle of the night after having the most bizarre dream. I thought i should go blog it because there's i wanted to be sure i remembered it in the morning. Instead i went back to sleep. I don't remember anything about the dream, except it involved a midget in some sort of bear suit. He may have trying to dress up like an Ewok, i'm not positive.

It's like the Daily Show writes the news...

This is one of the most mind-boggling stupid things i've seen come out of Faux News yet.

Three Little Words: Fox News Sues (washingtonpost.com)

Yay for laptops

My laptop got here today, about...3 or 4 days early. Yay. As you can see from the moblog images, it's a normal sized laptop that came in a huge box. Good thing too, we need more boxes for packing. The laptop itself is pretty sweet, it's got a huge screen, 15.4" wide screen. I tested out a copy of a certain not-yet-released Star Wars game, and it ran really nicely. Now i just need to get the thing rebuilt to Win2k so i can take it home and play with it for real.

Oh, the other really funny thing was, as soon as i turned it on i got a message that said, "Wireless Network Detected." I think to myself, "that's odd, we don't have a wireless network in the office." Apparently the people upstairs do though! And they don't know a thing about securing it either, so i did a little surfing with their bandwidth. The novelty wore off pretty quickly though, tomorrow we'll let them know that it's completely unsecure.

Robin seems to be having fun in Prague. She should come home soon though, the cats miss her.

Last night I went out to dinner with Wayne and Shannon. We went to Famous Dave's, which I had never heard of, but Wayne assured us it was excellent. I'm not sure that excellent is the word i would use to describe a restaurant that serves food on garbage can lids, but it was pretty good. They certainly did give us alot of food.

...

i certainly didn't sleep with my cell phone next to the bed so that when Robin got to an internet cafe and replied to my messages it would beep and wake me up. That's just not the sort of thing i would do.

Well, she's in Prague and she made it to the hotel ok, she's very jet lagged though and our digital camera seems to be on the fritz. I miss her.

Whew

Robin has arrived safely in Paris according to the Air France website. It's funny, i'm pretty scared of flying in general, and i worry whenever Robin flies someplace without me (or with me), so i end up checking the flight status pretty often to make sure it doesn't suddenly report:

Status: Burning Wreckage in Pennsyltuckey

or somesuch. Anyway, the funny part is, checking the status makes me realize how routine the flights really are, planes just don't crash that often. Logically i know that, but it doesn't stop me from holding on for dear life whenever we hit turbulence. Oh well, she's safe and sound in Paris (in theory, i haven't actually spoken to her, international phone calls are too complicated for us) and she should arrive in Prague in a couple of hours. Hell the flight to Prague is shorter than the drive to or from JFK airport.

Busy

Had a super busy day at work today, was incredibly frustrating. I'm trying to keep two developers busy, but it's hard to stay ahead of them, when in addition to writing the design documentation, i also have to write the stored procedures, insert valid test data (no small task in our ultra normalized data model), and create the missing data structures. Days like today, i really, really, really miss having a DBA around.

To top that off, my father called me at 5:30, asking for help picking out a laptop. With all the stuff we have to get done in the next two weeks (at work and at home) i told him i doubt i'd have time. He gave me attitude about not being able to spare 30 minutes to help him out, and i came so close to going off on him for not having time to deliver our wedding flowers to the children's hospital after the wedding. In the end, i decided work probably wasn't the best place to have that conversation, so i pretty much hung up on him. I'm still really mad at him, but i don't want to leave for Oregon not speaking to him. Or maybe i do, who knows.

Going to see the pirate movie tonight. Hope it's good. Robin leaves for Prague tomorrow. Gonna just be me and the cats and whole lot of packing.

Conversations overheard at McDonalds

So the one old guy says to the other old guy, "Back then, you could eat as many eggs as you want, and it didn't matter, you know why?"

And then the other old guy says, "'Cause of the chemicals"

"Right! There's so many fucking chemicals now. Back then the chickens just ran around and we fed 'em corn, and you could eat eggs all day long. And don't even get me started on wars. When we had wars we killed a whole mess o' people, these days it's just nickel and dime shit."

What an exciting day

So Rod resigned yesterday. He's going to go back to school and become a teacher. That's good for him.

Robin had emergency root canal yesterday. She's doing much better, although still in some pain. She's going back to the dentist today. They have to do everything on a rush schedule since she's going to Prague on Saturday, and the dentist will be on vacation the week she gets back and then the week after that we're moving to Oregon.

I can't believe the move is coming up so fast. We've (and by we, i mean Robin) packed 40 boxes and it doesn't look like we've packed at all yet. We got some good work done on the cat shelves for the crates yesterday. One shelf is carpeted and the cats seem to enjoy it. I got to get a Power Shot (tm) staple gun since the glue didn't hold the carpet down very well. Robin is afraid i may staple myself. Or her. Or a cat. Or just about anything. I might. I need to get a bigger drill bit next, the biggest one i had was 1/4" which is about the same width as the chain we're going to use to hang the shelves, so it barely fits through. Also, drilling through carpet is bad, apparently the carpet melts and sticks to the drill bit and just generally gets tangled up in things. At least it's not shag.

I had my first moving dream last night. We were driving all over the country with our stuff, but it wasn't for the move so we hadn't brought the cats. About when we got to Texas, it occurred to me that maybe we should've just brought the cats and made this trip our move. That was about it, from there i started worrying if we had fed the cats enough before we left and suddenly i was in a strange apartment feeding the cats. That's how dreams go i guess.

Ugh

So Robin has, what can only be classified as the Worst Toothache Ever. She's been in exorbitant amounts of pain since Sunday night. Pain that scoffs at Tylenol with Codeine and doesn't even pay much attention to Vicodin. Brought her to the dentist yesterday, he sent her to the endodontist since she undoubtedly needs a root canal, the endodontist isn't in until tomorrow though (Wednesday), so the oral surgeon she saw gave her the Vicodin. It helped at first but now it seems to be doing little to no good. Her appointment with the endodontist is first thing tomorrow morning, so she just has to make it until then with what i can only imagine is the most excrutiating pain known to man (or woman).

Weekend Recap

Not that anyone cares, but hell, half the reason i'm doing this is because i think my memory is fading way too fast. Writing this stuff down helps reinforce the memories and in inevitable event that i forget this stuff, i'll be able to come back here and see it. So without further ado.

Saturday we met with our wedding photographer one last time to go over the layout for our album. It should turn out really suave. We got a "nice" lesson on the Pleiadians from him to boot. I don't want to make light of his beliefs, because i think he's a really interesting person, but some of the things about the Pleiadians i found pretty amusing. Something about channeling aliens from our solar system's twelfth planet. I know there's debate about whether or not we even have a ninth planet (poor Pluto) or a tenth planet. I've never even heard mention of an eleventh planet, much less a twelfth. That all being the case, i'd like to state again, that this man takes the greatest pictures ever.

Sunday we went to my sister's for Gabriel's first birthday party. There are some pictures in the moblog from that.

When we got home we went to Home Depot to get some materials for the shelves we're adding to the crates we got to transport the cats across country. A couple of pieces of wood cut to size, a few feet of carpeting, a saw (so sad, robin made me ask someone there what kind of saw i should use, since the one i picked out 'cause it was cheap wasn't the right kind), and a few feet of chain to hang the shelves. Ignoring the fact the cats are going be stuck in these crates for 15 hours a day for 3 or 4 days, they should love the shelves!

Later sunday night, Wayne came by to frolic. We played Simpson's Uno and then Robin and Wayne played Pro Jax. It wasn't pretty.

This time for real!

Well, i gave up and basically started from scratch, i grabbed a new stylesheet and Main Index template from MovableType and just redid all of the colors and such. In theory everything should look right across the board, although i think IE5 might have some big fonts. Other than that, i think everything looks right. Wheeeeee.

Well, i guess that looks ok (take 2)

I finally got the stylesheet issue worked out, sort of. Mozilla and IE don't seem to want to render the same style the same way, so i finally gave up and gave them two different style sheets. The one i was using that rendered fine in IE but horribly in Mozilla validated just fine, so i don't know who's at fault, but i'm too old to play the "debug stylesheets for 4 hours game," or at least, i am now that i've already spent 4 hours trying to debug this damned stylesheet. So, it's a cop-out, but i don't care!

On a more exciting note, i once again emulated Matt and set up DoSomething in Winamp to submit what i'm listening to into a database table up here. Maybe one day this week i'll write that c# app i've been meaning to write that will take input from the mIRC script i already wrote to catch URLs posted to #them-again and link them from the side bar up here.

*Update*
Sonova %#$!%^ style sheet is broken in IE5 again, grr? Yes, grr. Oh well, i'm going to do laundry!

Explosions and Laptops

So apparently they blew up something in the parking lot of our apartment complex this afternoon. I don't have any first hand information, but Robin told me she saw rubble and fire marshalls yelling at construction workers. It sounds like they may have hit a gas line or something. I hope the place is still there when i get home from work, although i doubt we'll have any power. So cannot wait to move out of this place. 24 days to go!

On a somewhat related note (to moving), i ordered my laptop from Dell yesterday. I needed a new machine since i'll be telecommuting from Oregon and my home PC is running XP and as far as I've been able to tell, VB6 DLL's compiled under XP do not run under Win2K. So laptop is on the way, hopefully it won't suck.

Stylesheet Problems

I know they're there, i'm just too lazy to fix them, the site should render readable in most browsers now, just doesn't look exactly right yet. Oh well.

Wishful Thinking?

I think Robin thinks this is what our house is going to be like some day.

It's Christmas in summer!

Being the generous people we are, Robin and I made up a housewarming gift for Rod and Priscilla. It contained many precious items that we thought would ease the process of settling into a new apartment. We gave this wonderful gift to Adam to deliver.

But alas, Rod and Priscilla were not overcome with joy by our generosity and when Rod arrived at work today our lovingly thought out presents were RETURNED!

But never fear, my coworkers were more than happy to except that which Rod and Priscilla shunned:

Suzanne was the recipient of a genuine South of the Border Pedro Backscratcher. She thinks Pedro looks evil. Jaime also got a backscratcher, she named him Essé.

Vish got a giant South of the Border novelty pencil! Isn't she lucky??

Thanks to this traffic-light night light, the hallway leading to my desk is now safe!

Our library at the office got a new addition.

There were other gifts given out too! Silvestre was the lucky recipient of the Pedro South of the Border sun-catcher. He truly is blessed.

We decided Mike G had been too quiet lately, so he got the Pedro South of the Border Train Whistle!

In the end, everyone was happy, and Rod was crying over his loss.

Busted?

Well, i think Matt sold me out to Edith via Trackback. So, whereas before, i didn't think she'd ever see how lame i am, now she probably already has!

Thanks Matt!