Hate's a strong word- that's why I used it

2012-02-02T00:38:00.000-08:00

I'm flying tomorrow. So if you hear about a plane crash, worry for me. I always worry about flights for some reason. I start thinking about leaving a will and putting all my affairs in order. The problem is you're so dependent on the system when you're flying. If there's a problem and they can't solve it, there's nothing you can do. It's like being an astronaut, something I would never be. I would like a personal parachute and an eject button on my seat. Then at least I'd have a hope, an illusion of self-reliance. I've read too many plane crash reports on wikipedia I think.

I was reading an interesting article about why black and white film is more flattering for some movies than color, and somehow I clicked a link to this. Apparently an internet sensation. Rebecca Black - Friday. You're welcome.

I've removed my link on the left to ars technica. I've gotten tired with how a lot of their articles are news with interspersed author opinion telling you what to think about what's being reported. It's the Fox News of technology websites. It's like the opinion you'd hear if you were getting your news from Sheldon Cooper too. Lots of backhanded condescension. Bleh.

2012-01-31T15:27:00.000-08:00

The cashier girl at Chop't today wished me a happy Valentines day. Is that coming up already? We just had Christmas! And Kristen's birthday is like directly after Christmas. They should move Valentines day to the summer. Saint Valentine was born in April, they could move it to April.

2012-01-25T17:31:00.000-08:00

Watching more Hoarders on tv. They say it's a sentimentality about these random things, and I can kinda understand that. Sometimes I feel irrational about getting rid of things like birthday cards or ill-fitting clothes. These people on the show always seem like they're mostly stable people, and their one vice is hoarding junk. So it's like me, but a little more extreme about feeling bad about tossing things.

The one thing I don't get is how you go from hording stacks of junk to storing jars of urine in the corner of the room. Okay, so the water was shut off. But don't you start making phone calls when the water gets shut off? You get the water back on. Urinating into a bottle would not be something I'd even consider. And then storing the urine? This sounds questionable now that I'm saying it, but why not pour the urine down the drain? I know, I know, different pipes go different places. But it's gotta be preferable to storing the stuff in a bottle on the floor.

These's some hidden element to this disorder that I haven't figured out yet. I need to watch a few more episodes and then I'll be an expert.

2012-01-24T13:27:00.000-08:00

I don't know about The Big Bang Theory anymore. Last night I watched the newest episode and it had what seemed like a 10 minute scene of Sheldon saying "I have wood," when talking about his boardgame, and the other two guys snickered and egged him on. It went on for an unbearable length of time. This is material that, back in the earlier seasons, would have amused one of Penny's idiot boyfriends. Then the smart guys would make a joke about him being a neanderthal because of his idiot jokes. But now they're all idiots, and judging by the enthusiasm of the laugh track, the audience is Penny's old idiot boyfriend.

Raj has been de-empahsized because he doesn't have a girlfriend. All Howard really had going for him was his creepy pickup lines and constant rejection, and Bernadette has killed that. She was good for a few episodes, but now she has been hanging around for way too long.

Same with Amy Farrah Fowler. Actually, I never really liked Amy. Maybe it's because I don't know any girls like that. But I also think her flat line delivery and constant smirking isn't very convincing. None of her lines flow out like they're being naturally said by a person. Apparently she's played by an award-winning actress, but someone told her "walk and talk like a robot" and that's exactly what she does. She needs a different role.

2012-01-17T15:44:00.000-08:00

At Starbucks this morning both the guy infront of me in line and the guy behind me in line ordered "the usual." My sister Irene used to work for a Starbucks and said that some customers get angry if they come in regularly and you don't remember their drink. But I feel the opposite. I want impersonal service. What starts with them remembering your coffee drink eventually turns into buddy-chats when you stop in. It always happens.

I actually avoid the closer Starbucks because the girl there always asks about my work and weekend plans and I have to be nice to her. It's a hassle. I don't care about her weekend plans; she probably doesn't care about mine. Let's stop pretending already. I should just be real for a change one day. "We're not friends. Just make me a mocha, coffee wench! Please. Thank you." (One should always remember his pleases and thank yous.) But if I said that someone would probably spit in my drink. There's no winning.

2012-01-15T10:17:00.000-08:00

I'm watching Extras. That British series with Ricky Gervis from a couple years ago. I know I'd seen the first episode once, and the first few episodes aren't great. But it builds. Season 2 is almost like Curb Your Enthusiasm gold, though I'm not sure you'd appreciate it if you skipped to Season 2. Also last episode of Season 1 is especially good because Patrick Stewart plays an idiotic version of himself.

Today I wanted a chocolate milk. All I could find at the local mini-mart was YooHoo, which I was going to get, until I noticed there was no expiration date on the bottle. And then I noticed they don't even call it milk, it's a "chocolate drink".

2012-01-11T23:13:00.000-08:00

I'm watching Hoarders. Mostly because nothing else is on. According to Wikipedia, most hoarders are men, but I think all the ones I've ever seen on this show are women hoarders. (And I'll tell you right now, it's definitely not because TLC is pushing the T&A for the young adult male audience.) Though I've only seen maybe 4 episodes.

I wish I could say that everything I have in my apartment serves a purpose. I have this efficient, minimalist ideal in my head that I think I inherited from my mother, but I also have a hard time throwing out old books I've read, which sounds like my dad's influence. I also tend to save gifts even if they have no use to me. That might be out of guilt. And I find that I can easily throw out any books if I can keep the digital Kindle version, so now my book collection is actually shrinking. It's like I have this fear that I might want to randomly look up something in an old book I've read. Though I don't think that's honestly ever happened. Every quotable thing is already on the internet, and I don't have gobs of time to sit and re-experience old books.

Ha! Now Toddlers & Tiaras is on. Some show about little kid beauty pageants. TLC FTW! It's a little weird to tell your 7 year old kid to be flirty and sexy. But if you don't push too hard, that's probably better for the kid than sitting them in front of the Jersey Shore or other reality tv influences. Most of the kids in this episode at least seem to be fairly happy. Besides, I think Britney Spears grew up doing these pageants, and she used to be well balanced.

I should find something useful to do.

Update. Now watched the whole episode and I take it back. This should be illegal. It's kinda funny and cute or whatever when the parents are practicing with kids at home, but everything changes when they put these kids in makeup on a stage and make them strut back and forth. Something very unsettling about it. And kids grow up in that environment, don't they? There's a 3 year old league, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9... it just keeps going. The 3 year olds are disturbing because they're showing a bare midriff while being dragged around stage by a parent, and the 9 year olds are disturbing because they're like miniature people!

I also tend to think kids should try not get emotionally invested in competition before high school. Kid life should be carefree.

2012-01-11T11:55:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking of selling my couch and loveseat and getting one of those light gaming chairs that sit on the floor instead. Something like this one. It may look kinda silly when you walk into my living room and instead of a couch I only have a little chair sitting on the floor. But I rarely get visitors, I almost never sit sideways on the couch, and these couches will slow me down when I look for a new apartment.

Speaking of which, I'm not entirely sure what to do about moving. The new rules at work indicate that they'll let you move wherever you want, but they may adjust your locality pay accordingly. (The DC locality pay is 23%.) I want to wait and see how exactly they're implementing that. But I also want to get out of my apartment. Management has increased my rent by the legal maximum, which I do not appreciate, and is simultaneously offering a $200 discount if you recommend a new tenant. So I would like to get out of here ASAP and hopefully stick it to the man with a pricey apartment they will have trouble filling. Punitive relocation. That's how I roll.

2012-01-07T22:24:00.000-08:00

Watching Runaway Train. I started out having no idea what the movie was about. Instantly my expectations were lowered to the ground by over-acting and cliche prison boxing scenes. Then Jon Voight stepped in and saved this movie. And then it was fantastic.

2011-12-06T05:13:00.001-08:00

If you look on amazon.com for Driver San Francisco for the ps3, apparently my review is the only negative one there. And game fans are hating it. Every few days I get an email from amazon saying there's been another angry comment on my review. It's keeping me mildly entertained.

I've sorta loss steam with this blog after watching a King of the Hill episode where Hank is forced to read an employee's exhaustive blog about every petty issue in her self-centered life. "It's no wonder she didn't get any work done!"

2011-11-17T00:55:00.000-08:00

I spent a long weekend driving around Texas. Texas, where the weather is beautifully warm and the highways have unavoidable surprise tolls. I dig that southern hospitality too. People say it's a fake niceness, but at least they pretend to be nice! Try to talk to a clerk in DC and you'll get nothing but passive hostility.

I got pulled over by a cop because the ticket I had wasn't the right ticket to get through an automatic toll. So I had to back up and find a new lane and the cop thought I was backing up too far. He didn't give me a ticket though, just stopped me and checked my license through his computer. Luckily he didn't notice that "must wear glasses" provision on the back of my license because I definitely wasn't wearing them at the time. (I really only need them at night, and when I'm trying to read signs.)

I have a new grey hair. This one is on the side of my head and is not very flattering. I'm not happy about it.

More later.

2011-10-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

I'm watching The Family Stone. It's sorta like Meet the Parents except the family is super liberal and the guest girl is very up tight. I saw it in the theater with my family 5 years ago and enjoyed it then. Upon a second watching I'm not so sure.

The family in this movie is ridiculous. The mother tells one son that this year's Christmas will not be clothing-optional because they have guests. Umm, gross. Thank goodness. There's an 8 year old granddaughter walking around and you're going to have a clothing optional Christmas?? And then the mother makes condescending remarks about their guest being silly when she says she'd be uncomfortable sharing a bed with her boyfriend in the boyfriend's parents' house. Have a little empathy. I've never met a family that gossips and makes fun of someone behind their back to this extent. Even the grandparents in this family are like little kids.

Sarah Jessica Parker does make some bad moves. She stiffly holds out a hand to everyone she meets like it's a diplomatic event. She speaks really loudly at the deaf brother (though to be fair, I'd probably just not talk to him because that'd be so easy to mess that up). And she makes an insensitive comment about gay parents hoping for straight kids. She immediately starts backpedaling afterwards but that doesn't work. This would cause a awkward silence at most tables, and the gay son was a bit offended, but instead the grandparents start yelling. Sarah Jessica Parker keeps trying to backpedal until finally grandpa bangs his hand on the table for silence. This whole family is out of control.

I don't think my dad has ever banged his hand on the table, actually I can't even remember a time that he's yelled because he was angry. Maybe that's why I have so little patience for impotent outbursts of anger. I'll tell you right now, if anyone ever bangs their hand on the table, I am out of there. I will not be bullied into silence by anyone's childish hand banging. Well, I guess I would be, but I would also immediately leave in silence. Always have an exit strategy.

(talking about the groom's brother at a wedding. I'd been the only one to meet him.)
Lauren: Is Dave short?
me: Umm, he has the proportions of normal man.
Kristen: What, you mean he's not a hobbit?

2011-10-01T05:17:00.000-07:00

My hair stylist yesterday said that she could tell from the texture of my hair that I'll have a full head of hair until I'm 50. Score! At this rate though that'll be my greatest achievement as a 50 year old. I just have to hope that men continue to be self-conscious about their hairlines and that there are no new breakthroughs in hair rejuvination medicine in the next 20 years, then I'll be sitting pretty.

The work calls to me. Another 58 hours!

2011-09-12T09:44:00.000-07:00

I'm watching a little Teen Wolf. I was looking at something else on wikipedia and found a link to the show, and noticed it had received mild approval from critics. So today I watched the first two episodes. Some observations:

-What kind of person hears that there has been half of a dead person found in the nearby woods, and decides they want to go look for the other half??? Why would you want to do that? And why would you let that person be your best friend? In high school my best friend wanted to go see a bad movie and I refused to go. Hunting a corpse is absolutely out of the question.

-The main character has an awful lot of hair. He's reminds me of John Travolta in the '70s. People who have a lot of hair are usually really into brushing and styling it, but this guy is more of a "run to school wearing whatever" kind of guy. Maybe it's a Justin Bieber influence on kids today.

-Lots of "I can't control my emotions" and "I can't control my werewolf transformation" moments that don't interest me. I realize it's occasionally hard to control yourself, but grunting and rolling around on the ground is not how real people handle these moments. Man up teen-boy!

-None of the girls are hot. I'm not sure if this is my fault because I'm just too old for high school girls now. But there are only two female character and I don't find either of them to be particularly attractive. They remind me of the girls on the OC. Angular chins and long wavey hair. At least the popular one is competent at Algebra II. Friday Night Lights had some hot high school-ish girls. Let's get it together, Teen Wolf!

-Do most people know how to play lacrosse? I certainly don't. I was going to call BS on there even being lacrosse in California, because we didn't have it at my high school, but apparently there is a small league out there. I know I hadn't even heard of the game until seeing it in American Pie. What exactly are you supposed to do when someone has the ball in their- ...basket-stick-thing and comes running towards you? Apparently "tackle" is not the answer. But not knowing what the defenders are even trying to do makes the guy's spins and leaps less impressive. Lacrosse is heavily featured in this show. I wish they'd included a scene explaining how it's played.

-I like how the "super speed" isn't conveyed using fast motion film, the way it is in Vampire Diaries and True Blood. That never looked very convincing.

(Trent Reznor, to fans after finding out his new album was retailing for $30)
"You know what that means. Steal it. Steal away. Steal, steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealing."

2011-09-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

Hello, All. (Rachel, Sarah, family.) This month I need to do work, so I won't be updating again here until October, but I should update now while I'm thinking about it.

I made it to NYC two weeks ago just in time to get hit by Hurricane Irene. I didn't think it would be a big deal, but all the buses shut down 24 hours before the storm. So I couldn't get back to DC and ended up unexpectedly spending a few days at my cousins Brian and Linda's place. They were very nice about it and power didn't go out or anything. It would have been fun if I wasn't stressed about late work and if I had more than a single change of clothes.

Then last weekend I was in New Orleans in time for tropical storm Lee. That was really just a lot of rain but I think it was the first storm since Katrina and a lot of people were worried about flooding. We had sandbags ready, but I was unconvinced as to their standing-water effectiveness, which my host did not appreciate. Apparently blind optimism is preferred in some situations.

I'm buying some Vietnamese coffee equipment from Amazon because Linda showed me how to make it in NYC. It's surprisingly easy, but my order is $2 short of Amazon's free shipping. Now I'm looking at videogames to add. How did I not hear about a Donkey Kong Country sequel being released for wii? I thought about buying that, or Super Mario All-Stars, or Punch-Out, but in the end bought none of the above. Next month though I'm hoping to redbox rent the new Deus Ex. It's gotten good reviews but I've been fooled by glowing videogame reviews before. Instead I'm going for a $3 mouse pad. I spilled a drink on this one and it's all gross.

Oh, according to facebook Julie is getting married this weekend! I hope to spot photos on facebook later.

2011-08-24T18:22:00.000-07:00

There was an earthquake yesterday afternoon. Lots of west coast jerks on facebook thought it was funny that we got worried over a 5.8 earthquake. "Out here we eat 5.8 earthquakes for breakfast!" Har, har, har, asshole. You must be really popular. The difference is that California buildings are designed to handle earthquakes so you can sit pretty, comforted by your rigid building codes. If I was in the middle of the desert I wouldn't care about any sized earthquake. It's collapsing structures that are the cause for concern, not the possibility of falling and bruising your ass. Dumb ass. If there was a little tornado in California I wonder if the Midwest would say "I eat F1 tornadoes for breakfast! Just go to your basement!"

My apartment building was built in 1926, and is made out of concrete that is older than the freeway that collapsed in Oakland in the 1989 earthquake. (An earthquake which I remember, and it didn't scare me nearly as much as this one because I was at my parents' solidly built house in the CA woods when it happened.) I didn't crawl under my desk, but for 20 seconds I stood in my 4th floor apartment's doorway, listened to the building creak and groan while swaying, and thought "If this keeps up much longer, it is going to collapse and I am going to die." And any of you would have thought the same thing. It was a little traumatizing.

Now I have some deep cracks in the concrete in the hallways of my building. You can see spots where the wall is no longer flat because I guess part of it has moved. The water and gas and everything still works so I suppose its fine as long as there's never another quake, but still I'm not comfortable with it. Large buildings this old should come with a warning in the lease.

"I have studied geology and therefore earthquakes and know that a 5.8 is not the end of the world." My esteem for geologists just plummeted, because you are an idiot. The earthquake started as a subtle tremor and got progressively stronger. During the quake nobody knew how strong it was going to get. And I'm sure you're not qualified to look around and tell how strong an earthquake these different east coast buildings will withstand.

I don't think I've ever been more angry at idiots.

Phil: Joe, it's tall, dark and handsome. Two out of three isn't bad.

2011-08-17T13:42:00.001-07:00

I've been reading A Game of Thrones and am now on it's sequel (can't remember the name). The HBO series does actually cover the entire first book, and does it pretty well. I didn't notice anything really missing except some some minor battles towards the end. So you can probably skip that book if you've watched the whole tv season.

The books have much less sex than HBO, though there's still a little of it and it is occasionally more graphic than most fantasy books. Also there's less of a rivalry between Littlefinger and Varleys the eunuch. The book makes it clear that Varys the eunuch is the sneaky spy master while Littlefinger is just a nobleman who for some reason sits on the king's counsel, while in the tv series the two both seem to have extensive and comparative networks of spies. Finally I think the king's brother is gay in the HBO series but none of the characters are mentioned as being gay in the books. Maybe that'll be made more plain later in the books though.

I like most of the characters and it's an engaging, though slow-paced story. I have two complaints. First, the female villains are all two dimensional pseudo-characters and the female protagonists are only slightly better. I also don't care at all about the woman across the sea or that silly mish-mash barbarian culture. I should have just skipped her chapters. The other thing I don't like is the chapter structure. It seems like the author purposefully ends one chapter just when it's starting to get interesting and then jumps storylines to the least interesting storyline possible. Or maybe he only does this sometimes, but it just seems like every time because it's so incredibly annoying.

Penny: Has Leonard ever dated any regular girls?
Sheldon: Well, I assume that you're not talking about digestive regularity, because I've come to learn that such inquiries are inappropriate.
Penny: No, I mean has he ever dated someone who wasn't a brainiac?
Sheldon: Oh, well there was this one girl who had a PhD in French Literature.
Penny: How is that not a brainiac?
Sheldon: Well, for one thing, she was French. For another, it was literature.

2011-08-16T12:29:00.000-07:00

What is the name of the phenomenon of light bending as it travels from one medium to another? Answer: Refraction! There was a physics question at last night's trivia and I was all over it! Though I think Rachel knew the answer too. This makes up for me confusing Ohm's law and Ampere's law a few months ago.

It was a busy July and now it is a busy August. I went to Courtney's wedding in Texas and then Rachel's wedding in Cape Cod, then spent a week in Mississippi doing construction, and then a week in New Orleans relaxing. So, very briefly:

Courtney's wedding was a great time. I was at a ranch near Houston and then out in downtown Austin. I really like the Dickens side of my family and am happy to hang out with all of them. They're just so friendly! Maybe it's a fake southern hospitality thing, but I'll take it! I was originally just going to do a Thursday-Sunday trip but then extended it because Courtney has been living in London for the past few years and I haven't seen her at all. So after the wedding I stayed in Austin with Courtney and Phil, and a bunch of their friends. Staying in a downtown hotel and wandering the downtown Austin bars is almost like being in DC, except everyone there is very laidback and beers are 1/3 the price. Also we have no dueling pianos in DC.

Rachel's wedding was also fun, but more rushed than I would have preferred. I drove up with Puja and Sunjeev, and what was supposed to be a 8 hour drive turned into 12 hours, which is longer than any drive should be. So we arrived Friday night, got lunch and went swimming on Saturday, Rachel's wedding Saturday evening, and then we drove back on Sunday. It was busy. Driving with Puja and Sunjeev was fine (when Puja wasn't checking my alertness by asking me to explain the entire Rent storyline), but I really should have flown. And then I should have taken an extra day or two to relax on the cape. But I got a photo with me and Rachel when she was all decked out, which was all I really wanted, and I bought a drink for Diana, and I discovered that while I can dance just fine to club music while intoxicated, more alcohol will not enable me to hand jive or whatever to oldies songs. And there were a lot of oldies songs at this wedding.

I wish I'd taken more photos at both events. You see dozens of people everywhere taking photos and think it's unnecessary for you to take your own, but then it turns out that nobody wants to share their photos! Everyone is privacy-paranoid with their facebook photos.

The construction at Mississippi wasn't too exciting. I met some nice people, some people I didn't appreciate as much, and had a very stress-free week. Construction each day, and the Hearts card game and ice cream trips each night. It turns out that I really don't enjoy being both sweaty and covered with dirt/sawdust. The combination of the two is 10x worse than either being dirty or sweaty on its own. I guess that much like Jesus, my contribution to the world will not be by following a parent into carpentry. I am good at hearts though, especially when playing conservatively I can pretty consistently get the fewest points.

New Orleans was a lot more fun that I thought it would be. Alcohol is dirt cheap, everyone is eager to give you a to-go cup, and you can just walk around or even drive around while drinking. Also pretty much every meal had something surprisingly delicious. I'm not normally a food person but this was all great stuff! I had some fried oysters and actually enjoyed oysters for the first time. (Raw oysters are inedible.) On the downside, the weather is routinely hot and humid like the very worst days of DC summer, and it only gets hotter at night for some reason.

I'm going to be working hard this biweek. I'm hoping to meet up with Dave in NYC at the end of the month.

And I'm posting from my office so no quotes this time.

2011-07-05T01:59:00.001-07:00

Megamind >> Despicable Me

2011-07-02T06:05:00.000-07:00

I've been watching The Walking Dead. It's okay. Some moments of good writing and a few of pretty terrible writing. A lot of characters I don't care about. Especially the female characters who tend to alternate between breaking-down crying or getting really bossy. Maybe I'm sexist, or the show is.

The secret to surviving a zombie attack is the same as in real estate: location, location, location. It is not sticking together, which is what the characters on this show like to tell each other. "We've got to stick together!" The number of people is a moot point if you get swarmed with zombies, which is more likely to happen if you're sticking with noisy, dumb people. I guess if you know you're incapable of surviving alone then you should find someone who is competent to latch onto. But that's how life is for some people, zombies or no.

So location. Just be where the zombies are not. Take your supplies to the middle of the desert. Zombies don't drive, and if they do you'll see them coming 20 miles away. Or if you're near a coast take a boat out. Zombies won't swim.

I wonder if part of the zombie appeal is the average sci-fi geek knowing that he could easily take out a string of zombies with just a shovel or a hammer. It's so manly! Just a man and his trusty shovel, breaking bones of aggressors who can only clumsily try to grab at him.

And how could zombies possibly overrun a military base? Every man with a gun can take out dozens of zombies without a problem. I guess they didn't know at first where to shoot, but how long would that really take to figure out? After the first zombie didn't die until his head was blown off, I think I'd start aiming for the head. Heck, a lot of those macho military guys could probably take on endless zombies just using an improvised club.

The last episode of The Walking Dead is weak. Some extremely contrived events and poorly thought characters. It's funny that one guy introduces himself as "Doctor Edwin". Even after the apocalypse, doctors will cling to their titles.

There's a moment near the end where the doctor says "Before you go..." and he leans in and whispers something in the main guy's ear while everyone else is just watching them. I find myself not caring at all what he said. But from reading a couple online reviews, I guess I'm the only one who isn't actively pondering what one adult man might decide to whisper into the ear of another. They tried to pull a Lost trick and I'm disappointed in the writer's cheap tactics.

(comments about a news article about LightSquared's wireless network causing GPS interference)
kdavis: GPS's are so useful to me that I'm very biased here. I travel a lot for business, maybe 15-20 business trips per year, and get lost easily. The GPS has improved my quality of life more than any single device invented in my lifetime. Frankly, if somebody found a way to eliminate HIV but it would wipe out GPS's, I would choose saving the GPS's.
NotContinuum: kdavis: I will now kill you, bury you, and piss on your grave.

2011-06-29T12:12:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking of changing a flight next month and American Airlines is screwing me. There's a $150 change fee!!!! Crazy! I can get an entirely new one-way flight for less than that! Now I'm trying to figure out a way to not use my return ticket while also screwing AA out of giving away my seat.

(from a forum discussing whether King of the Hill makes fun of the South)
Drocket: Seriously, just look at the characters in Kind of the Hill:
Hank: A staunch Bush supporter, Hank is constantly misunderstanding just about everything that goes on around him because he's stuck in a fantasy-land of 'traditional American values.' Every other episode has Hank spend the first half failing to notice a problem until it smacks him in the face.
Peggy: A smarmy know-it-all who's a complete idiot.
Bobby: Also an idiot, Bobby wants to be an actor/comedian, which horrifies his father. Bobby regularly gets into 'liberal'-type situation, which cause Hank to freak out.
Luanne - a blond idiot
Dale - a paranoid idiot
Bill - a bald idiot
Boomhauer - unable to say anything even remotely comprehensible. May or may not be an idiot

2011-06-27T09:28:00.000-07:00

I saw X-Men first class yesterday. I would have skipped on it and tried to see Thor instead but Kate Reid wanted to see X-Men. It was okay. Actually, I'll go ahead and say it was decent. Marvel comics movie tend to rely heavily on CGI and comic book fan pandering. Xavier makes a stupid joke about his hair, or Xavier and Magneto walk into a bar and Hugh Jackman (as an unnamed Wolverine) tells them to get lost, and the theater audience ate it up like a new episode of Seinfeld. That and there was a tedious 10 minute scene where all these characters are sitting together and they go around in a circle showing off "what they can do." Ugh, shoot me now. 10 minutes of bland "stand back!" dialogue and CGI, but luckily it was all inter-spliced with scenes of Xavier and Magneto actually moving the plot along somewhere else.

My biggest problem with the movie is this character called Banshee. He's sort of a weird looking guy, and I remember him a little from the comics but I never paid much attention to him. His talent is to make noise, and I guess he has some internal sonar too, okay whatever. But he can also fly by making noise at the ground. One of the characters says that so long as he makes supersonic sounds, it'll let him fly. How could you even think that is plausible? Supersonic means faster than the speed of sound. How do you make sounds of different speeds? Well, you don't. There is only one speed of sound. Unless you're controlling the air temperature/pressure. And how would a sound keep you afloat? Answer: it couldn't. The comic book writers have confused sound with wind, and the two are not at all the same. Sound is just a vibration, it won't push things over or kickback at you like shooting a gun. If your mouth was blasting the air that carried the sound in it, then it would take a noticeably long time to even hear the person talking from across the room.

So I didn't like Banshee. Beast's feet were super gross and they were heavily featured. Mistique's constant self-pity was boring, but I guess that was necessary to have her shift from Xavier's sister to working for Magneto. The whole "everyone's mutation is different" premise has seemed stupid since high school, as has having a mutation that lets you do physically impossible things like control magnetic forces or read minds. But the movie only threw these things in your face some of the time. And there were a few inspired moments, like with the Navy captains who are reluctant to start world war 3. So I'll give it a B for what it was, a comic book movie. I don't have high hopes for Green Lantern, but I still want to see Thor at some point.

(from a star trek forum)
Bryan: I still chuckle over a scene in the "Gambit" episode when the Enterprise detains and inspects a small Klingon transport on fairly flimsy legal grounds. At one point, Worf tells Crusher "we could claim [his] computer was generating unusual signals" as a pretext for a more thorough search than the law allows. It's nice to see situational ethics aren't limited to humans.

2011-06-15T08:11:00.000-07:00

I watched Something the Lord Made, which I thought was going to be a Christian movie, but it's not. It's about doctors at Johns Hopkins. Some good acting by Alan Rickman and Mos Def and some decent dialogue. Nothing super memorable. For me, the most striking thing is how important it is to these doctors that they be referred to as "doctor".

When Mos Def is first talking to Alan Rickman he calls him "sir" a few times, and each time Alan Rickman says "call me Doctor." Mos Def couldn't be called Doctor because he hadn't gone to med school, and his honorary doctorate at the end of the movie was like the tear-jerker Rudy moment, because until then he could not be addressed as Doctor. Mos Def stuck out because that's how doctors talk to each other: "Hello Dr. _" "Dr. _, would you hand me that tool?" Never a first name. It's like a mutual ego-masturbation orgy when a bunch of doctors get together at the water cooler. "Hello Doctor!" "How are you, Doctor?" They kinda do the same thing in The Big Bang theory, where the PhDs all look down on Howard as not being a doctor. I get that it takes a lot of time and study to get a MD/PhD, but it seems very dumb to ascribe that much importance to your name.

I guess you can ascribe your sense of self-importance to anything you want. I know mine is entirely based on a combination of this full head of hair on my head and how good I am at Tekken. If all my hair falls out in the shower one day that will be exceptionally traumatizing. (I'd have to practice extra hard at Tekken to compensate.)

Puja said I could call her Doctor Puja if she ends up getting a phd. Funny, but I never will. I don't call anyone "Doctor" unless I'm talking about my doctor to other people, and it's because the function is more important than the name (in the context of the conversation at least), just liked I'd say "my boss" or "my mom" instead of giving out specific names. Nor do I call my coworkers "Examiner" though some of them are weirdos and insist on that when talking to attorneys. I've never been in the army, but they take their titles very seriously. I'm not sure how I'd handle that. There's a lot about the military culture I'd have problems with.

They should start making up titles for more things. People who have run a marathon should be granted a "Marathonus" title. And people who are better than me at Tekken should get a "King of the Iron Fist" title. (In the game story, the "king of the iron fist" is the belt you win when you beat the tournament.) King of the Iron Fist that will be the best title, obviously, because it takes good reflexes and a lot of years of practice to get this good at Tekken, and we could use the prefix "King" for short. -King Schell

(from Zombieland, caught this on tv today on Encore, which I didn't know was part of my cable tv package)
Tallahassee: I'm not great at farewells, so, uh, that'll do, pig.
Colombus: That's the worst goodbye I've ever heard, and you stole it from a movie.

2011-06-13T06:21:00.000-07:00

I sure hope the beeping noise that the tractor across the street makes when it's put into reverse has saved lives somewhere. The beeping is louder than my alarm clock and the driver is just sitting with it in reverse, not even moving. If I had a knife I would stab something.

2011-06-12T12:40:00.000-07:00

I watched the first two episodes of The Killing. I had read some good reviews but wasn't totally sure what to expect. The first episode was good and the second episode was decent, when it's actually about the murder investigation. For some reason they devote a major subplot to a mayoral candidate rooting out disloyalty among his staff. It starts out totally unrelated, becomes potentially slightly related, and then becomes totally unrelated again. But we keep following his campaign drama for like a third of each episode. And it doesn't amount to anything and it's boring. I also feel like the show's just getting asymptotically slower to drag the murder investigation out over an entire season. It's like the movie Mystic River, but in Seattle and 10 times slower.. and 1/3 of it is about this random unrelated guy running for mayor.

Also the main character lady detective is a smiley near-albino that you have to kinda squint to determine that she actually has eyebrows. But I won't let that affect my score.

Episode 1 (two parter, so technically the first two episodes): 7/10, Episode 2: 6/10. I'm not gonna watch any more of them.

2011-06-10T08:44:00.000-07:00

I wish I could smack whoever decided that every single desk in my office has to have a little pull out keyboard tray. That thing sticks out uncomfortable far, provides no wrist support, and kinda shakes because it has a flimsy hinge attaching it to the desk.

I would also lecture whoever decided that it needs to be 68 degrees in here. I know it's 90+ and humid outside, but we're inside! And we sit all day. I would be comfortable if I was 50 pounds heavier and on a high-sodium diet.

My final complaint: the permenant workers here have leeched all the good chairs from our temperary offices. I come into the office and end up sitting in something that has broken armrests, or today my chair has a back that's about half as tall as a normal chair. I don't mind it too much because it keeps me from falling asleep, but it's still not right to be only given the chairs that nobody else wants. I should take the worst chair down here up to a random office upstairs and switch it with a good one each evening.

I haven't written anything here in a while. Some quick movie/tv reviews:

127 hours - Pretty good movie. 8/10. I was worried it would be like Buried, but it turned out much better. Mostly because somehow the main character never broke down in dispair. He was like Hatchet, methodically going about surviving and trying to free himself.

I am Number 4 - This movie was terrible. Though the title is terrible and the preview is stupid, so what were you expecting. It's based on a series of kids books, and you can tell. Even Timothy Olfant cannot save it from its premise. The only good thing I can say is that things kept exploding and I didn't fall asleep. 3/10.

Tangled - Unmemorable but not bad. The male lead is the charming rogue, sorta like Aladdin, and the girl is like the little Mermaid or even Princess Jasmine. She doesn't really have much character. Neither does the guy actually, he's no Gaston. It had a few funny bits though, and I liked the horse. 6.5/10.

Star Trek 1 - I fell asleep watching this. Too many sweeping shots of, what in 1978 were probably good graphical effects, but are pretty terrible by today's standards. And the original Enterprise has to be the least asthetically pleasing thing floating in space. The plot felt like 2 or 3 episodes squished together, none of which were very interesting. 2/10. 4/10 if you're a star trek fan or 6/10 of you're a ToS fan. I've heard that only the even numbered star trek films are good, and that might be true.

Justified - I really enjoyed this show. It's like Nash Bridges, or even Walker, Texas Ranger, but Timothy Olfant plays the main character as being so smooth and friendly. Even the people trying to kill him like him. The first few episodes where he talks about having killed a guy as "It was justified" in that southern drawl will win you over. Season 1 is too episodic but season 2 is much better, and I liked the support characters in season 2. Season 1: 8/10, Season 2: 9.5/10.

I was looking through Amazon reviews of the movie Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and found one guy who game a detailed, positive review. And he sounded very reasonable and convincing. Then I click on his "other reviews" link, and find 12 pages of super long reviews of ANIME! Okay, I take it all back, clearly he and I have nothing in common. I'm not going to take movie advice from an anime fan. It's like getting tv show advice from someone who loves soap operas. I don't mind people watching anime, I just wish they would stay off the mainstream internet.

2011-06-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

I've been watching Workaholics. I caught an episode a couple weeks ago because I was watching something else on Comedy Central and there was a commercial for an upcoming episode where the guys visit a gathering of Juggalos. I have a tender spot in my heart for ICP so I set my dvr to record the show and watched it later.

The show is surprisingly good, in a very crude, juvenile sort of way. It's like Aways Sunny in Philadelphia but the characters are slightly less malicious and much more focused on drugs.

I'm not really seeing many clips online but here is a really short one. If you can get past the super annoying, super loud comedy central ads. (Rogain ads for me, clearly not being seeded by my google search history.)

(forum about Achron, a strategy game where you can issue commands into the past)
Vexing: “After a classic pincer movement from 50 seconds into the future and 10 seconds in the past, Red counterstrikes with Aerial… no! The factory was destroyed 20 seconds ago, annihilating the future assault!”
Murray: As long as I get to say “Marty, you’re not thinking fourth-dimensionally!!” multiple times while playing
Malibu: The only winning move is not to play?
Daiv: Actually the only winning move is to already have won.

2011-05-31T16:34:00.000-07:00

I watched Due Date. The movie went from bad, to very bad, to almost turn-this-off bad, and then back to just bad. There weren't a lot of funny parts and the beginning was just a series of authority figures physically attacking Robert Downy Jr for no reason, something I tend to not find very funny. Getting shot with rubber bullets by an air marshal: not funny. Getting assaulted by a crazy handicapped war veteran: also not funny. And Zach Galifianakis playing his usual weirdo, digusting character has gotten old.

But I did enjoy Zach Galifianakis doing an impression of the Godfather, and there were a few times that Robert Downy Jr was making fun of Zach Galifianakis that were kinda funny. There was also an interesting scene where Robert Downy Jr is trying to prove that Zach Galifianakis is a bad actor, and tells him to pretend that Zach is a football coach whose wife is divorcing him. Zach does such a good job it's almost like it was bringing up issues from Zach's character's past. But they never touched on it again.

I guess it's just the physical humor in the beginning that was lost on me. I wasn't raised on the three stooges.

(from a guide about building your own computer)
Watch out for money-saving opportunities. For instance, many items come with a rebate offer attached. A rebate works like this: the manufacturer promises to give you money if you buy a product, and then once you buy the product, they do not actually give you money.

2011-05-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

I had two nightmares last night. Right in a row! I haven't had a nightmare in like a decade. I think it was because I bought a Chop't sandwich/salad, ate it too fast, fell into a food coma while watching tv, and then went from sleeping on my couch straight to sleeping in bed. Usually I'm alright with the food coma sleep, but I've heard it can be unsettling sleeping while digesting... or something. Dang, Chop't! Let's get it together. Expensive and subconsciously disturbing.

(from xkcdsucks)
There's really nothing to be said for this one, except that some people are praising it for some reason--I think people are so used to Randy's godawful walls of text that when he produces a comic without words they feel such a wave of relief they mistake that for a well-made comic

2011-05-29T16:23:00.000-07:00

I've been experimenting with blending some fresh spinach into my smoothie. Sarah suggested it a while ago. Yesterday I did a strawberry smoothie with a small handful of spinach and today I made a banana smoothie with a medium sized handful of spinach. In neither smoothie can you taste the spinach, but both smoothies had little bits of spinach that you can kinda feel on your teeth. There's a small chance you can taste a tint of greenery flavor. I'd need to do some direct taste tests to be sure.

(forum about a mythbusters error)
EJanitor: Anyone who watches Mythbusters for scientific reasons should maybe start watching Star trek instead. This is all entertainment, it has nothing to do with scientific accuracy.

Overly Critical: Hey, they're teaching kids to go out and prove things for themselves rather than believe them off the bat, and that's never a bad thing.

syousef: The Mythbusters basically piss on the scientific method in every show, drawing wild conclusions from a single ill thought out experiment, often with no controls (or weak ones), and often testing a single instance or brand and then generalising for all of that type of product.

evwah: not to mention that they always try to prove stupid crap like "a rolling stone gathers no moss". I'm waiting for them to try "the grass is always greener on the other side", or "it takes one to know one".

2011-05-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

I watched The Prestige yesterday, and I figured out everything about half way through. Usually I'm like the last person to figure out a mystery, probably because I tend to read while watching tv, so it makes me think that the Prestige was more predictable than the director thought it was. It was entertaining though.

(about Apple suing a guy over selling "White iPhone" kits)
PlushLish: So wait...He sold a kit which made the phone look white. Not changed the software, not sold knock-offs from his trunk, not sold real iPhones at recess...what's the problem? I can put a bedazzled cover on my phone but Swarovski can't sue me.
Dude: Anyone can sue anyone. Winning is something different. Apparently Apple's case is so bad that this teen doesn't even need a lawyer.

2011-05-18T02:14:00.000-07:00

I got this ASUS EEE PC just before Christmas and I hate it. Its keyboard is too small for my fingers to type on and it has some kind of problem that will slowly corrupt whatever operating system you install. I've installed Windows twice and linux once, and each time the OS works for a week or two and then slowly ruptures, eventually falling apart like a very old car driving down the highway. I'm pretty sure that the problem is either corrupted BIOS or faulty RAM, but I'm not motivated enough to actually fix the problem, because the keyboard is such a pain even when it does work!

So today I went to BestBuy and type-tested a bunch of laptops and netbooks. There are some uncomfortable ones, but by far the worst is that 10 inch ASUS I bought. I don't know how I got so unlucky. I'm leaning toward buying a ThinkPad X120e. Cheap, capable, and with a promising keyboard.

If you want a netbook, and we're on good terms, you can have this almost-working ASUS. I can even tell you how to reflash the BIOS and replace the RAM. Kate Reid has a similar netbook and really likes hers. You'll just need fingers or hands that are smaller than average.

In other news I spotted Kate W's sister and mom on the metro and resisted going over and saying hello. I just blended in with the crowd, which is something I'm pretty good at doing. If it was just Amber (the sister) I'd buddy up and say hello without a thought, and I have in the past when I've run into her. But Kate's mom was always so welcoming and friendly, it'd be weird if she gave me a welcoming hug now, and it'd also be weird if she was suddenly more distant. Plus Kate has probably told them some bad breakup stories about me, just like I'm telling everyone about her. Such is life. Puja once called me Mr. Awkward and liked to say that I'm insensitive to awkwardness, but evidently she's totally wrong. (I was congratulating myself about that as I lurked on the other side of the metro car from Amber and her mother.) I should rename this blog Mr. Sensitivity.

(Mr Garrison teaches algebra on South Park)
x = salagadoola mechicka boola
y = bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
x + y = y
x = 0
Mr Garrison: X equals zero. The song is badly written.

2011-05-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

Rachel and Peter recommended A Game of Thrones, so I've been watching it recently. I think I've seen 5 episodes now.

I think there should be a limit about the number of characters you can introduce in an hour, because the first episode goes way overboard. Like 20 characters are introduced and I can't remember any of their names.

There's a whole lot of talking and very little action. So far like 6 people have died, so we're averaging a little over one per episode. Despite its medieval setting, it's not an action show.

I feel like they go out of their way to make it an "adult" show. I appreciate the more brutal combat scenes, but then there's a lot of the show that's just weird. Every episode has scenes that take place in a whorehouse with random naked girls. Fine, whatever. Then the most recent episode had a scene of dialogue during which a lady breastfeeds her adolescent child, and another scene of dialogue while a guy has his chest and armpits shaved. With a random closeup on his nipples. I wonder if the Game of Thrones book is like this. I realize that a lot of people don't have the patience for a whole lot of dialogue, but putting the dialogue during a chest-shaving episode is not a solution.

I always thought the books were about Machiavellian scheming, but there's surprisingly little of that. I enjoy the scenes with the dwarf. He's the most witty and insightful of the characters. I don't like the blond prince and princess because they're just way too blond. The prince is the unlikely combination of cruel, unintelligent, and basically living on the lam, and the princess is the same except less cruel (or at least we don't see it). They're so blond, they remind me of the Girls Next Door, or the elves in Lord of the Rings. Speaking of Lord of the Rings, somehow those movies managed to imply that a character was crazy, without submitting the audience to scenes of a grown child breastfeeding. Ugh.

Note to self: never order kung pao chicken. Pictures on the internet make it look tasty, but it's 90% inedible squash and peppers. I feel like I've fallen for this trick before. These chinese food dishes need more descriptive names. Kung Pao = peanuts, peppers and squash. Doesn't sound as good now, does it? Stick with what you know, Joseph.

(from facebook. Sarah is a girl from my jr high. She's married now with a son and daughter)
Sarah: Well Zane finally pulled the Christmas tree over on top of himself last night. Thank god it's just a small fake one, and the ornaments are not glass. Can't wait for a real tree to topple over in my living room.
Ian: Such a lil' monster!!!
Sarah: You know it. I think he gets it form his dad. Too much muscle packed into such a little man.
Sarah: I mean Zaks not little, I was talking about Zane there.

2011-05-13T16:07:00.000-07:00

Irene's visit was a success. We did a lot of things I wouldn't normally do and it was kinda exhausting. We went to an artist open house, toured the National Cathedral, and I saw Eastern Market for the first time. Kate R has made fun of me for years for having lived in DC without seeing Eastern Market, but I gotta say, it's not very spectacular. It's just a large market of homemade whatnots. Maybe Kate sees a different side of it.

I ran into Lindsey at Safeway. She's moving out of DC in a couple weeks, headed for Indiana. Bummer. We never really hung out, but I'd run into her occasionally at Courthouse or around Adams Morgan and would always be happy to stop and chat with her. But everybody leaves DC eventually. From facebook I gather that Kate W is moving to New Orleans this summer for school. I wonder if it's possible to reach a point where you don't actually know anybody in a city.

(The rest of this entry is about St Elmo's Fire, you can skip it if you want.)

I watched St Elmo's Fire today. Mehrnaz is a big fan and once tried to get me to watch the movie, but I only caught a tiny bit of it with her and was never interested enough to go out and see the rest of it. I spotted it on the cable schedule and on a whim I recorded it on my dvr. Verdit: it is better than I thought.

I don't remember any of the characters' names, but I really enjoyed Emilio Estavez's character who finds a woman he likes and proceeds to stalk her with the single-minded fury of a middle schooler. He was a high point of the movie. Judd Nelson plays a hill worker who bullies his friends and cheats on his fiance. (I'm not sure I believe that a lingerie saleswoman would ever offer to model something for a customer, but I've never been lingerie shopping so I guess it's possible.) Rob Lowe was a very unconvincing sax player, but sorta convincing as a fratboy loser who hits on every woman he sees and is incapable of holding a job. That seems like how Rob Lowe would be if he wasn't an actor. Demi Moore sorta played the same character, but the female version, and with a little more subtlety. Their stories were not as interesting.

Andrew McCarthy plays an annoying passive listless writer who is so casual with the local prostitute that he lets her flirtatiously stick her fingers into his mouth. Gross! I guess nobody worried about anything in the 80s. That's another one of the movie's themes. Nobody worries about anything, be it jobs or relationships or their friends. A lot of the movie is pretty predictable because we've all seen how these things end. Various bad moves include: stalking a girl through the rain on your bicycle, being secretly in love with your best friend's girlfriend and then confessing it all the night they've broken up, cheating on your fiance until she accepts your proposal... it's a long list.

Anyway it was an interesting movie. Not my favorite, but better than the 47% rotten tomatoes has given it. And I enjoyed some of the shots of DC. The Tombs looks similar in some scenes, though it's totally different from the outside. And the Georgetown shots look pretty accurate. The only weird sets are the various apartments. Two of the characters live in some kind of expansive loft. Something you might find in NYC but not in DC. Though DC was definitely different in the 80s. So maybe if you went to a sketchy neighborhood you could get a gigantic loft back then.

Just reading a rotten tomatoes review. Apparently there's a Demi Moore sex scene that my cable tv version didn't have! Screwed by basic cable!

Sheldon: I've written a new and improved roommate agreement that benefits me greatly. I'd like you to sign it.

2011-05-05T23:51:00.000-07:00

Tonight I read through some xkcd. The xkcd hatred will never die.

895 isn't funny, but it is interesting because I've often heard space-time described as being like a sheet being distorted by the gravity of massive objects. But this wouldn't be part of an "understanding gravity" lecture because it has little to do with explaining gravity. Instead it explains space-time. I'm glad I'm not a teacher because I would have little tolerance for smart-mouth students who raise non-issues just to be disruptive or show off. And if any kid announced "boooooring" during my lecture I'd give him detention in an instant. Damn kids. Randall sometimes likes to draw comics where one snarky kid derails a lecture with his pointed questions. It's the student he wishes he could have been: too cool for school, and everyone would have known he's super smart without thinking he's a kiss up who participates constructively.

894 is not funny. It's just.. puzzling. Guy thinks we need to feel some collective sense of pride as a species for being good at things. He asks a stupid rhetorical question that implies that he thinks computers are a competing species. And the girl says we're good at teaching, which I guess means programming, which technically computers are significantly better at anyway. (That's why programming has gotten more and more abstracted.) Obviously there are no other species that are capable of programming computers. And then the guy says something stupid. Anti-education, anti-understanding that she's using "teaching" to mean "programming"? I dunno. Put two dumb people in a room, feed them the tech news, and record resulting dialogue as they struggle to understand humanity's relationship with computers and to communicate with each other.

893. This was the real reason I started typing about xkcd tonight. At first I read this and thought, are we really sending that many people to the moon? It seems to imply that we've been sending 10 people a year for the past 40 years. Or is it a cumulative count, but then shouldn't it just keep going up? The number of people who have walked on the moon can't decrease. I ignored the caption's use of the phrase "living humans" because obvious dead humans don't walk. That was before I knew that "actuarial tables" meant "lifespan statistics". Okay, so it's a misleading graph. We sent 12 people through the 60s-70s and haven't gone back since. That's what I'd expect. (No real reason to go back, I mean there's nothing there..) And Randall has predicted and graphed the astronauts' lifespans. Not a very polite thing to do. And where's the joke? Maybe the alt tag qualifies as an "interesting point" but it's an old point, and still not funny, and has nothing to do with the graph of moon-walker lifespans.

I should do a detailed graph of xkcd comics' quality over time. Then you could actually see the decline.

(comments from a youtube video of a guy's enormous full-scale model of the Starship Enterprise built in minecraft)
F0ll3nHero: Ok usualy I would troll hardcore on someone for doing something involving the starship enterprise, but this is simply to damn amazing,I can barely make a damn smiley face and you made a 1:1 scale of this megacreation..
demen6159: ill help u if u still need help
Funazzachick: That is absolutely incredible, I'm not sure where you got all of the squares for that but it must have taken AGES. Ingenius really, I couldn't have done it. Time well wasted :)
ih8makinusernames: I hope you feel accomplished. Normally I'd call you a no lifer but I just got done watching a video about a guy who spent 4 years building the "perfect" city in Sim City 3000 so nothing will ever really constitute a No Lifer comment compared to that.

2011-05-04T18:21:00.000-07:00

It's been the most stressful week of my life since college. Yesterday I got a notice that tomorrow I have a mini-hearing/interrogation where the office HR department is going to grill me about my work habits. Then the HR rep is going to try to argue that I'm defrauding the government by claiming to have worked hours that I didn't really work.

First, to be clear, I am an honest person. I do not skimp on my taxes, I do not twist the truth. If a cop ever asked me how fast I was driving I would tell him if I knew. I'm pretty sure that I have never defrauded anyone and it seems like I should know. They haven't told me exactly what data they have that makes them think so, but I have a few guesses and I'm trying to prepare a non-hostile counter-argument based on them.

The bigger concern is that I talked to a union representative (just because my notification email said I had the right to do so), and he was concerned that maybe management is out to get me and is just looking for an excuse. I guess they do that for marginal employees. I'll have to talk to my supervisor a bit, but I don't think that's the case. At least I'm really hoping not.

I had a stomachache all day yesterday and it's been coming and going today. It's quite stressful knowing that someone is out to get you. And then not knowing what she's dug up to base her accusations on. I guess I'll find out tomorrow.

I'm picturing something like Bill Gates' deposition in 1998, except my interrogator will also be the one writing up the penalty recommendation so you don't want to upset her. And I don't really have anything to hide (unlike Microsoft's financial assault of Netscape).

The union guy said if they decide that I've been falsifying my timesheets it would result in a suspension. I suspect I can convince them that I haven't done that, but I will have to admit that I'm not always logged into my phone service when I work (which apparently is a serious work-at-home rule that I've always ignored because I get like 1 phone call a month, you get a little email-like notification in outlook when someone leaves a voicemail, the VPN is already slow without needing my telephone software making it worse, and nobody has ever complained that I'm unreachable). I've also broken a rule about requesting vacation time 3+ days in advance, and it's possible that I've been subconsciously counting hours worked between 10pm and midnight, which you're not supposed to do. They seem like small things but rules are rules. I might still get suspended. Honestly, I have no idea what's going on, and my supervisor says he doesn't know either. I guess I could get fired. Yikes.

They could make this process much less stressful with very little work if they wanted. It's been really tough getting work done this week and I have lots of work due before my sister shows up on Friday. And I still have to clean some. Oh, Irene is visiting me this weekend! The first family visit since 2005. I see family in CA, they just don't often come this way. I'm not sure what we'll do here.

(this exchange occurred over a series of emails)
me: Hey what's your cell number? I lost my phone two weeks ago and all my numbers with it.
Spittle: [sends his number]
Spittle: gotta love that. reply within 1 minute.
me: you're quick with that number. if you were a girl i'd call you a phone slut. or a tease if you're one of those girls who gives out the number with no intention of responding to a voicemail. slut.
Spittle: I'd be the girl that says "okay ready? 2-0-2 - 2-2-2 - 2 GOOD FOR YOU! AHAHAHAHAHA"

2011-04-22T08:38:00.000-07:00

I was watching an episode of Smallville the other day. Not a great show, barely watchable actually. I think that if I didn't like superman I wouldn't like the show at all. It's not very well written, there's no main villian, Clark's parents give dumb, feel-good advice, and I couldn't care less whether Clark and Lana ever get together. It's a bad show but I keep watching because I have a silly hope that each episode will be better than the previous. But I didn't bring up the show just to bash it. Yesterday I watched an episode where Clark got some red kryptonite that turned him into "evil Clark" who wasn't actually evil, he was just slightly more selfish and impatient than the normal boyscout Clark. He asked out Lana and took her to a bad boy bar full of rebels and no-good frat boys. And you know it was a bad scene because they were playing Andrew WK as dance music (though the dancers were pretending it was something slower). What bar plays Andrew WK? I would go there every day!

Wednesday was Kate Reid's birthday. It was a combined birthday party with one of her housemates. I got the evite and was confused because it was for Jeff's 30th birthday and Kate's Sweet 16. I don't know anyone named Jeff, nor do I know anyone who is 16 years old. Later I figured out that Kate was re-doing her sweet 16 birthday. Apparently guys do not get sweet 16's, something I didn't know. Also I thought it was going to be a quiet birthday since it was midweek, but it turns out that Georgetown spring break starts this week, so Wednesday was like a Friday for the dozens of Georgetown students who were there. So I stayed up too late and drank too much, and spent Thursday nursing a hangover. Today I'm ready to work though!

(Peter comments about the random people who wish him happy birthday on facebook)
Sarah: I wished you happy birthday on facebook!
Peter: I don't mean you, you stay here with us. It's people I never talk to. People who, if they told me they were coming to DC, I'd be like "Eh. Have fun."
(I know he's not talking about me because I definitely didn't wish him a happy birthday on facebook)

2011-04-18T01:46:00.001-07:00

Saturday was Peter's birthday party. I took a cab and rushed over early, just because Puja had told me she was going to be leaving early, and then it turned out she had cancelled without warning me. So I spent a bit of the night sending Puja pointless text messages, because I know she hates them and they cost her 10 cents each.

Rachel suggested I invite Micros, but I don't have his phone number, nor Eric's phone number to get Micros' phone number. Maybe this whole "get numbers as you talk to people" idea wasn't a great one. So far I have Puja, Rachel, Kate & Kate, and then all my sisters and their husbands, and my cousin James, and the local chinese food place. I guess I don't see a lot of people.

Sarah figured out how to add punctuation to my text messages. It's a very slow process. If you get a text from me with punctuation then it means I really care. (If it's a question, you darn well better answer it.) Except a period or a smiley face, my phone likes to do those. I still can't figure out how to change the auto-completion when it suggests a word. I'm going to be sending a lot of form text messages from now on.

Oh and I spoke to Diana briefly and it wasn't a disaster. It was more successful than I was even hoping.

I got a terrible haircut at the hair cuttery last week but everyone had the good taste to not mention anything. I even had a pretty good story, if it had come up, about how the stylist and I ended up yelling at each other in the middle of the salon because she was cutting it wrong.

(walking with Kate when it's a little cool out)
Kate: I would have to take my hands out of my pockets and I don't want to do that.
me: I've heard that putting your hands in your armpits is warmer than your pockets.
Kate: That's true, for body heat... Or you can cut open the belly of a tauntaun and crawl inside.

2011-04-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

I finally finished the Next Generation. Bought the set on dvd 2 years ago and have been slowly watching the episodes. I didn't watch quite every episode, but I gave each one a chance. If I could tell it was going to be bad 20 minutes in, I'd skip. Like that one where all the characters turn into kids. No Patrick Stewart! I could tell right away it was skippable.

The series finale wasn't as good as I was expecting, based on all the critics' raving I'd read. The time-backwards phenomenon was interesting, but it didn't really make a lot of sense. And considering that they were trying to tie this episode to the Encounter at Farpoint premiere, I was expecting something more dramatic.

I think my favorite episodes are the Wounded and Sins of the Father. Pretty much, as soon as Klingons show up, you'd know the episode was going to be a good one. Q is also a pretty good indicator of a good episode, and the borg, though neither is quite as good as the Klingons. I'm not sure now whether to start on DS9 or go back to the Original Series. Haven't watched much of either of them yet.

(from the episode A Matter of Honor, when Riker visits a Klingon ship as part of an officer exchange)
Klag: If Klingon food is too strong for you, perhaps we can get one of the females to breast-feed you.

2011-04-10T23:03:00.000-07:00

I'm eating a late dinner and rewatching that episode of Vampire Diaries where both the witch guys get killed. Puja told me that she was surprised that they killed off both characters so quickly, but for me it was like Christmas came early. Both of those characters were annoying. Now I'm mostly just really, really hoping that the brother will die. Ugh, that whiny brother. I've never been much of a bully, but he really provokes the bully-side of me. Every time he's on screen I wish I could punch him in the stomach and stuff him into a locker.

I'm not a huge fan of the girl witch either, but she's really more of a deus ex machina plot device than a person. It bugs me every time she says "my powers" as though she has a specific quantity of spells to work with. When really, she can make feathers float, do a vampire dog-whistle, make water catch fire, and whatever random thing they have the special-effects budget for. Instead she could call it "my magic" or "my reason". As in, reason for being a part of this show. Now she's dating the brother. Maybe they'll go driving together and get in an accident. Then we'd finally have a show free of annoying characters.

I'm surprised Elena, being a doppleganger and all, doesn't have a list of "powers". The girl in true blood can read thoughts and shoot white light. Maybe they'll reveal something later.

My final thought about VD: the wiki is almost unreadable (I was trying to look up the doppleganger powers). It's like a sixth grader wrote this thing. I'm really hoping this isn't because it's directly quoting dialogue from the tv show, but that's very possible.

(Paul Barnett talks about a Nokia presentation at a technology festival)
Nothing more frightening than realizing there’s groups of anthropologists in a room having bananas thrown to them and hooting and throwing leaves in the air who are coming up with how we should use telephones.

2011-04-07T00:24:00.000-07:00

I watched Dead Ringers tonight. It's a movie about creepy twin doctors and their crazy issues due to being twins. I was going to make a tasteful, hilarious joke here about how, if you happen to have twins, probably the best thing for everybody would be to drown one of the babies in the bathtub. But then it occurred to me that Ravi is having triplets, and they will probably be creepy. He should put each one in a different daycare, encourage them to develop their own personalities. None of this completing each others sentences creepiness. I also have two uncles who are twins, but they've both been very different for as long as I can remember.

Dave Reynolds sent me a great mug from Micronesia. It's a mug with photos of the governor of Micronesia's face on it. And apparently the mug shots are sort of a forced tradition because he does not look at all happy to have his photograph taken. One photo has him glaring at the camera and the other has him giving a very forced half-smile. If this was a tumbr I'd post photos of it on here. It's really quite funny.

(comments from a provocative news article about how 25% of married women wish their marriage proposal had been more romantic for various reasons. Guys not having rings is one of the cited complaints. Male readers came out of the woodwork to criticize.)
Dubs: "If you like it you should of put a ring on it" so she can lord it over him and constantly remind him how she deserved to have the picture perfect proposal, the perfect wedding, the perfect marriage, the perfect family....and ultimately the perfect divorce...all due to delusions of grandeur and an over inflated sense of entitlement and unrealistic expectations.
Doug: I had the ring when I proposed. I had it made up beforehand. I caught hell because I "should have" proposed then taken her out to buy a ring that she liked. Can't win for losin'. The first gift of many which were unsatisfactory for one reason or another. Oh well.

2011-04-04T20:36:00.001-07:00

Last Friday I lost my phone in a taxi. Called it a couple times but nobody ever answered, and then the battery died so I gave up. I went to AT&T on Saturday and told the saleslady that I wanted her cheapest phone that had decent battery life and text messaging.

So it's my first flip phone, cost me $10, and the battery life is outstanding! My old phone would last like a day, this one has gone for 3 days now and is still at 5/6 full! Also it's super, super light. I'm pretty pleased. The only downside is that texting is slow and I can't figure out how to put punctuation into my texts. There's going to be a lot of run-on sentence texts from now on.

I don't call the parents for weeks, call up this evening, and get quickly hustled off the phone because I'm interrupting them watching the Boondock Saints! What!?! I'm the first born son!

(from Deuce Bigalow: Male Giggalo. Deuce picks up a woman at a bar.)
Deuce: Maybe we should take care of a little business first.
Claire: If you prefer.
Deuce: I don't have a set price or anything, but I have been getting ten dollars.
Claire: I'm sorry?
Deuce: Well that's my going rate. But I'm willing to negotiate.
Claire: [chuckles] That's funny. But the price is five hundred.
Deuce: You're gonna pay me five hundred dollars?
Claire: No, honey, you pay me.
Deuce: Oh, I get it. This is some kind of role reversal. I'll play along with this.
[deep voice]
Deuce: Okay, 300, 400, 500, you're my hooker. No, seriously, where's my ten dollars?

2011-03-30T21:25:00.000-07:00

I watched Buried last night. Could also be called "Ryan Reynolds lies in a box and gets emotional on the phone". There were some moments of excellent acting and some interesting camera work. The reviews I read talked about how you just couldn't stop watching it after you start. And it was like that, but not in a good way. It's like my attention was being held hostage. It wasn't fun. Not great dialogue (though not bad either), and only one character on the screen the whole time. The only reason to watch is to see what happens to the guy, and that didn't really pay off in the end. One review compared to to a movie called Open Water, so I'm going to skip that one too.

A lady posted in the laundry room that she's looking for someone who will walk her kid to school in the mornings. It would be nice to have something to wake up for besides shuffling over to the computer and reading the news. But I don't have any babysitting experience, and I probably don't fit the expected profile. Plus if it's raining and cold out (like it was today) I'd probably try to call in sick, and if the kid had any symptoms of illness I'd instate a 6 foot rule. I'm not your mother.

me: I probably wouldn't join your food group.
Eric: We'll have an O'Schell night! We could make hot pockets... and poptarts!

2011-03-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

This morning I set up my regular alarm clock, and then also set my phone's alarm to go off on the other side of the apartment at the same time. It's like training a monkey here. It's sorta working.

Some useful trivia for you: triangulation versus trilateration. This caused me some problems last week because pretty much everyone incorrectly describes GPS and other locating systems as using triangulation, and I end up with the one guy who thinks his system is novel because it uses trilateration.

This week is quite busy for me, I'll be back on here next week.

(From the last time Whitney was off visiting Europe 18 months ago. She's there again right now.)
(4:29:07 PM) me: you're gonna be missing out on doug's last concert in nyc. i'm bussing up tomorrow for it.
(4:29:16 PM) whitney dickens: i know :(
(4:29:22 PM) whitney dickens: im a loser sister.
(4:29:28 PM) me: yep. bad sibling.
(4:29:30 PM) whitney dickens: but, once you get married you have better things to do.

2011-03-18T21:09:00.000-07:00

I had another post written up about hairstylists at the hair cuttery, but it was very cynical so I deleted it.

I'm watching some of Good Will Hunting. One of the biggest mysteries in the history of film: how did Matt Damon and Ben Affleck manage to write a good script? I guess if you set a million monkeys typing in a half million rooms, two of them somewhere will type out a good script. Though Ben Affleck also wrote Gone Baby Gone and The Town, so he must carry a brain somewhere above those gorilla shoulders.

It seems more than a little mean to tell someone that the best part of your day is in the morning before you see him, when you're hoping to not see him. I don't think I'd tell my best friend that. Even in the context of that scene it seems mean. Sure, I hope my friends lead successful lives. But even if I was stuck in prison with a friend I don't think I'd hope to wake up each day to find him gone. Well, in prison maybe I would, if I really wanted what was best for him. Hmm. No, I think a last goodbye is always nice. A meaningful handshake to conclude an experience. That always makes for a much better parting.

(from Deadwood, when Richardson is caring for a sickly Farnum, who despises him)
Farnum: Could you have been born, Richardson? And not egg-hatched, as I've always assumed?

2011-03-16T04:47:00.000-07:00

For the past year I've used an electric toothbrush and I've always thought that the little light on it is light-sensitive. When you turn off the bathroom light it knows there's nobody in the bathroom and it automatically turns off its charging light. Handy, right? It's like a little reverse night light. Then today I set up a fan in my hallway, where the nearest power outlet is in the bathroom, and I discovered that the fan powered off when I turned off the bathroom light switch. Duh! I can't believe I never knew this. In two seconds, so many mysteries were solved! This is the reason that my razor is sometimes curiously uncharged when I leave it charging over night. And that other electric razor that I got frustrated with and threw out because its battery refused to charge, it was never given a fair chance.

(from a washington post article's comments)
not worth the finger strength I used to click on this article

2011-03-14T04:43:00.000-07:00

I'm listening to Fiona Apple. Remember her from the 90s? Dan once tried to tell me that she was good and I think I instinctively called him a girl (this was high school). This is the first time I've given her a chance and it turns out that it's pretty decent stuff. She kinda drawls on but it's very smooth, sorta like jazz, which I usually don't have the patience for but I'm exceptionally tired today so maybe that's helping.

(comments about the X-Men: First Class trailer)
The best part of the trailer was seeing Magneto in his full gear and watching Azazel Teleport. I also like the way Magneto was crying when he was trying to lift that ship at the end. I totally understand how he feels, I tried doing that before and got a real big headache.

2011-03-09T17:26:00.000-08:00

I just found out that Ravi, my old freshman year roommate is having triplets. I got invited to the baby shower, which is irregular because I'm a man, but Puja invited me to her baby shower too. So maybe it's co-ed in Indian culture. The baby shower invite said nothing about triplets. I had to find out through facebook hints. I was thinking of dropping off a present and skipping out on the baby shower, but I'm not going to buy 3 presents and not get some Indian food out of it.

(from a user review of Prison Tycoon 4, talking about trying to signal the guards that a prisoner's escape hole is behind a pillar)
I clicked the pillar, and I get the building edit screen... grrrrr..... Get the Guard selected again, and try to click the hole.... WORKED. He runs over to the hole... then STOPS. IT's time for his coffee break, so he turns around and walks toward the bunk-house! You would think stopping prisoners from escaping would over-ride his break time.... They must be UNION Guards.

2011-03-04T23:52:00.000-08:00

I tried watching Amelie tonight. I really tried. Watched about an hour of that nonsense. This is probably what the rest of the world thinks when they try to watching something like Ace Venture with subtitles. Just a bunch of weird characters being weird and none of the humor gets across the cultural barrier. Do we really need voice-over telling us what random things each character likes and dislikes? I guess someone thought it would add more depth to the characters. "This old man loves de-boning chicken with his fingers! Look at the satisfaction on his face!" Oh, French people. Also it seems unhygienic to allow passing people to stick their hands into your sack of wheat. Even though Amelie likes doing it, she should show a little self-discipline when walking through the market. Maybe that's just me.

Apparently it's difficult to do work and watch a movie with subtitles. I'm reorganizing my netflix queue now to postpone any further foreign movies until April.

Also, I've decided that I'm switching to diet soda. The pepsi I just drank has 300 calories of sugar. That's more than I'd burn if I went down to the gym tonight and used the elliptical until my shirt was dripping sweat. Something I'm definitely not going to do tonight.

(comments about a copyright infringement lawsuit defendent who wrote an impassioned not-guilty plea in response to claims that she downloaded the movie Far Cry)
mogbert: She doesn't sound like she has kids. Also doesn't sound like the type of person who would enjoy an Uwe Boll film, as she used complete sentences and didn't appear to be lobotomized.

2011-03-03T23:07:00.000-08:00

This entry would be titled "Joe goes suit shopping" if I were still titling blog entries. My godfather has given me a few suits over the years but many of them don't fit me anymore. I've gained 25 pounds since he first started giving me suits; it's a trend I'm going to have to stop if I want my clothes to continue fitting. Anyway, I've been doing some online suit shopping, which seems like it'd be less time-consuming but I'm not entirely sure that it is. But it's easy to do because my measurements appear to be fairly standard, for a tall skinny guy.

I kinda like the speckled wool suit look, but those are hard to find right now. There's this one from J. Crew, this from Brooks Brothers, and this from Jaeger, but none of them are available in anything close to my size. I especially like how J. Crew pants sizes top out at a 30 inch inseam. (I'm sure they had longer pants before, but why not just include the full length and let people get them hemmed to fit?) I know they're more fall-style suits, so I'll check again in the fall if I'm still interested.

Instead I got this rust-colored suit. (My credit card rewards are exceptionally efficient for brooks brothers, so I got this suit on a heavy discount.) I like the material but I'm not totally sure about the color. It looks good on that white guy but I'm not sure about how it meshes with my complexion. Maybe I'll post a photo of it.

I also got a couple darker suits from Macys.com. Macys is supposed to have decent suits with a very hassle-free return policy, and the mall is on my way to work so returns are convenient. There's a pretty big sale going on now too (my order was 40% off), so I ordered a few things.

I got this Sharkskin suit, and it fits well but I don't really like the material so I'm going to return it. This other Tommy Hilfiger suit also fits well, and I like the subtle striping. The jacket had a white thread sticking out near a button that I tugged on and a 1/2 inch dangling white thread turned into a 2 inch dangling white thread. I could almost hear the jacket unraveling from the inside out. So I'm exchanging the jacket. Finally, I got this DKNY 3-piece suit. It's, eh, okay. Nothing really great about it, and compared to the Tommy Hilfiger suits, the underside of this suit's armpits are very low. You can kinda tell from that photo if you look closely. The jacket restricts your arm movement, which I don't enjoy. So I'm returning this one too.

I'm really going to be pushing the boundaries of Macy's return policy. If it turns out to be really hassle free I might order this three-piece suit after I investigate the complaints one reviewer had about the pants' pattern emphasizing the zipper seam. The Tommy Hilfiger trim fit really suits me. I've been thinking about ordering this cotton suit from J. Crew in case it's brutally hot at Courtney's wedding, but J Crew is definitely not inexpensive and no suit material is going to make 100+ degrees comfortable, so I'll wait on that.

(I'm running late on a case so Micros suggests that I just ignore it and "accidentally" send out the same response I sent before)
me: yeah they'd call me, i'd be like "ooh, mistake, sorry". then like a 50% chance they'd call my supervisor and tell him I'm incompetent.
micros: Nah, we wouldn't do that, as long as you agreed to withdraw it and reset the response date.
me: but i think if i was the attorney i'd complain. you're being too forgiving on someone who isn't doing his job. if someone just sends you the same action for totally wrong claims he's wasting everyone's time
micros: In my experience complaining about examiner incompetence doesn't get you anywhere.

2011-02-23T22:50:00.000-08:00

I went to visit Puja today and Sonya vomited everywhere. Apparently she was borderline sick and Puja thought about calling to warn me away but then decided against it. I probably wouldn't have believed her anyway. Puja got all flustered but Sonya was pretty happy, and it didn't really bother me because I was sitting on the one piece of furniture that she didn't puke on.

I watched most of the Lightning Thief, and I feel stupider for it. It is NOT like the first Harry Potter movie. It's more like a teenage boy's version of that movie where the teenage girl discovers that she's a princess. Can't remember it's title. They never explain why everyone is so certain that Percy stole the lightning. And the Athena's daughter girl was kinda cute, but Athena is Zeus's daughter, which makes Athena's daughter Percy's first cousin once removed. Sketchy.

2011-02-20T12:25:00.000-08:00

Some excerpt comics from Buttersafe:

Hopes
What it means to be alive
Serving the queen
Morning inspiration

(commenting on a news article about prohibiting D&D in prisons because it encourages gang activity)
DarkUnderlord: I'd have thought the Dungeon Master of a D&D game in prison would be more likely of getting stabbed, rather than organising a stabbing. But hey, I guess that's why they've got experts on gang activity.

2011-02-16T12:49:00.000-08:00

Today I did lots of errands downtown. Got my booster shot, finally, for Hep-A. I didn't ask the doctor about whether the fact that it'd been 13 months since the original shot made a difference, since you're supposed to get the booster after 6 months to a year. Hopefully I'm immune now. I'll make sure to ask him if I end up traveling again to somewhere with Hep-A.

I brought a whole bunch of change into Capitol One and used their change machine to exchange it. Ever since my days of having to use the local laundry mat I've kinda saved quarters in a little bag. Sometimes I use them to buy sodas from the vending machine in the basement but otherwise they just kinda sit there untouched. And I finally got around to exchanging them at the machine in the bank. It sifted through and counted them in about a minute. $106 worth. Woohoo! Maybe I'll buy some nicer beer tonight!

I tried to write a check from my capitol one account to my citibank account, and it got marked as "fraudulent" because my signature isn't the same as the signature on file from 6 years ago when I opened the account. So both banks freaked out because they thought I was laundering money or something. I had to make 2 trips to both Capitol One and Citibank (thankfully they're right next to each other downtown) to get everything cleared up. Yes, my signature is not now the same as it was 6 years ago. They could have called me to check on it, or they could have compared my signature to the previous check I wrote, or even looked at a few checks and seen how my signature has kinda evolved over time. The teller at Capitol One admitted that they could have done those things, but sometimes they just don't do their due diligence for some reason. He apologized, said it happened to him once with his rent check and he even works at the bank. If Capitol One wasn't so super convenient I'd switch banks. I have no loyalty.

(at the Three Moves Ahead DC meetup)
me: Is that a Kindle?
Josh: Yeah.
me: How do you like it?
Josh: It's great for reading print. If you read magazines you might want something else.
Troy: This might be a personal question-
Josh: Are you going to ask me whether I take it into the bathroom with me? Because I do.

(Oh, at the 3MA meetup I sat across from and talked to Jon Shaffer, lead designer of Civ 5. Kind of a big deal. Didn't really talk about anything too exciting though, Civ 5 wasn't my favorite game. He said they couldn't avoid the whole "it takes 50 years to explore the other side of the hill" aspect of the game. Eh, I don't believe that but I didn't want to argue with him. Said some other things "off the record" but nothing super juicy, I can't even remember any of it. He's working on revising Elemental's UI right now, he probably said some negative things about it's current UI.)

2011-02-14T21:22:00.000-08:00

I'm watching Love Actually, in honor of Valentines day. (Happy VD, everybody.) I have a love-hate relationship with this movie. There are a bunch of stories and they cover the whole spectrum for me. The storylines, as ordered by wikipedia:

Billy Mac & Manager: I really love this story. Billy Mac is a great character, he's like Jack Sparrow but more likable and more real. I love how he's sorta flapping his arms like a hippy when he's singing in the intro scene. As far as I know, Bill Nighy is always fantastic. And this storyline about maturing beyond the rockstar mentality and appreciating your friends warms my heart every time.

Juliet, Peter and Mark: Otherwise known as the weird third-wheel story. I'm not a big fan. The creepster friend likes his best friends' wife so much that he's awkward around her and does... weird stuff. Kiera Knightly is cute but too skinny, and she can't save this storyline. None of the characters are really fleshed out. I did enjoy, the first time I watched the movie, how it kinda tricks you into think the weird one is acting strange because he's gay for his friend. Because that might actually be kinda tragically touching. Instead you find out that he has an unhealthy fixation on his friend's wife. Let down. Maybe if we knew that he somehow knew Kiera Knightly from someone else. But you can't have your friend introduce you to his girlfriend and then decide they you're going to love her too. Or I guess you can, but you're an idiot.

Jamie and Aurélia: I didn't much like this storyline. Some male writer's wish-fulfillment fantasy of having a hot Portuguese maid fall into his arms despite his buffoonery. The end of the story is like something out of a broadway play or a fairytale. They don't even try to make it believable. The story also glosses over how discovering your brother fooling around with your wife will completely destroy a family. That would be a less-than-happy Christmas reunion.

Harry, Karen, and Mia: Kind of an interesting story, and well acted all around, but perhaps too abbreviated. It just isn't given enough time to drive home the drama. And what is up with that scene where Mr Bean takes 10 minutes gift wrapping the necklace while Alan Rickman is trying to rush him the whole time? Is that supposed to be funny? It was just oddly absurd.

David and Natalie: This story was okay, but also clearly a male writer's wish fulfillment of some kind. The young, single prime minister is awkward around women, and happens to have a hot, personable maid working in the white house (or the brit equivalent) who randomly confesses her love for the guy in a Christmas letter. The part about how the president's flirting with Natalie caused David to make a political stand against the USA was clever. But I'm not sure Hugh Grant makes a believable prime minister.

Daniel; Sam and Joanna: Liam Neeson is excellent, as he usually is. And I liked watching him try to connect with his step-son. The Sam and Joanna storyline was ridiculous. First, there's the random acrobatics in the airport at the end. They might as well have made the kid fly like superman. Also the kid looks like he's 12, and is in love with a girl who is 16. Plus she's American. Even if he plays the drums like a rockstar he doesn't have a chance, and that is how it's supposed to be. I'm sure half the guys in high school had crushes on hot senior girls when they were freshmen, and it never amounted to anything because freshmen boy don't really have anything to offer, um, anyone. The writers have stretched reality way too far. At least make the kid likable for some reason. Maybe he's super poetic or witty. Give me an excuse to believe he has a chance with a 16 year old rock star singer girl.

Sarah, Karl and Michael: Gah, this story was depressing. Girl has issues because her brother has serious issues, and you try to help her but you can't. Michael is essentially a non-character and his haircut was like something out of the 80s, and why doesn't he have a british accent?

Colin, Tony, Stacey, Jeannie, Carol-Anne, Harriet and Carla: What a random story to throw in there. It's like they threw in a surreal dream sequence where hot girls are falling out of the sky, but then at the end instead of waking up, the character says "I was awake the whole time!" Again, give me an excuse to believe this story. Milwalkee, Wisconsin? And that has to be the quietest bar I've ever seen. Who knew that's where the hotties go to slum it. It's like the writers went out of their way to make this storyline unbelievable. They could have just inserted this storyline as a cartoon, where all the girls are identical copies of Jessica Rabbit, and it would be equally believable.

John and Judy: Who is this? Oh, the stand ins. I guess a writer thought "wouldn't it be funny if people who are naked together every day for their job still feel awkward about making romantic overtures?" And it turns out that it really isn't that funny. I don't mind them adding boobs to the movie, but I could have easily done without this whole storyline. And then the movie might have been more successful with conservative people. I was at a college church group when they were discussing this movie. The review I got was "That movie is basically porn. I had to walk out." Later I discovered it was because these two characters mime sex as their job and we watch them trying to talk to each other while they do so. Anyway, a mostly boring subplot.

Rufus: Mr Bean. I'm not even going to comment on this non-storyline. Two appearances of a character does not a storyline make.

(comments about a torrent of The Room. No, I didn't download it, I own the dvd.)
animalstack: YOU ARE TEARING ME APART LISA!!!!
djTeka: Thanks! Gonna check this out, thanks to Tim and Eric making me interested in this movie!
seanhart213: I definitely have breast cancer.

2011-02-12T22:44:00.000-08:00

I started watching Boston Legal. It has some funny parts, but not as many as I'd like. Is James Spader really that good looking? He's not super witty, definitely not very nice to people, and every girl at that office is all over him. William Shatner is pretty funny and there are some absurdly funny moments.

I've also started season 2 of Breaking Bad. That show just gets better and better, I think because it's giving more screen time to the inept drug dealer kid. I'm not a big fan of all the marital drama.

2011-02-05T01:47:00.000-08:00

Kinda bored so looking through meetup.com to see if there's anything interesting. There's a bunch of things, but I'm not really sure what interests me. I'm not an enthusiast about anything. There's lots of sports, scrabble, concerts, writers support groups, things like that. I guess any of it might be fun with friends, but with random people it could so, so easily be a mistake. Also:
-Tapes n' Tapes at Rock n Roll hotel. I have a bunch of Tapes n' Tapes here some reason, I'm not sure why I ended up getting it. I really enjoy a few of their songs and some of the others are kind boring. But I haven't been to any concerts in a while now. And I don't think I've ever been down to the Rock n Roll hotel. That's way out on H street.
-Microcontroller Mondays, where a bunch of dudes get together and talk about their microcontroller projects. Sounds sorta interesting, but odds are it would be a bunch of guys I don't want to listen to talking excitedly about their homemade dvr or robot. And I'm not working on any microcontroller based projects of my ask anyone about. I was not impressed by their homepage's video about a cupcake they mailed to another hacker club in Canada. Being geeky for its own sake is not something to celebrate. Button that down and rejoin normal society.
I will be attending the Three Moves Ahead meet up tomorrow afternoon. A bunch of people (i.e. pretty sure all guys) are going to talk about strategy video games over some beers down in chinatown. Since I like strategy games I'm going to see if they have any insights or anything interesting to say. If it all gets too nerdy I'll just my beer drink faster.

Oh, I watched the Town. It was really good. Surprisingly good. I was expecting to fall asleep because it was right after eating a big dinner. But instead it was pretty much interesting all the way through. It was Ben Affleck's first believable role since Good Will Hunting. I guess he's suited for playing the seedy hoodlum types.

(from 30 Rock, after Jack misses the secret emergency meeting)
Devon Banks: I tried to call you, but not on a phone, so you may not have heard me.

2011-01-30T15:22:00.000-08:00

I fell asleep watching Winter's Bone. How did an IMDB reviewer make that movie sound promising? Basically a girl walking around the woods asking people if they'd seen her drug dealer dad. And the backwoods people reacting guardedly or being openly hostile. Boring, and not many hot redneck girls. Surprise. (Looking through some other imdb reviews, I think they're written for movie makers or something. Lots of emphasis on atmosphere or artsy aspects. They need to put more emphasis on the "this movie sucks" aspect of the reviews. Lesson learned: don't believe imdb reviewers.)

And today I booted up my xbox to find that my saved game of Batman: Arkham Asylum was gone. I was going to write a glowing review of the game because it's really quite good. But apparently it has saving issues and lots of people online have had their saves corrupted. (And then other forum deadheads tell them "you can't shut down while it's saving," or "you can't switch to game of the year edition" or other unrelated banalities. Forum bottom feeders almost never have any answers, especially in video game related forums.) I wrote a scathing 2-star review of the game on Amazon, so I'm not feeling as frustrated about it any more. I'm just not sure if I want to replay the first 10 hours of the game.

soulpainter: Me too. I was standing in the main square. Batman had been standing still for a couple of minutes. I then decided to quit, which I did, correctly, through the menus. The game was not saving, and I did everything correctly. Next morning when I went into the game. Guess what, its stuffed. If anyone wants a copy of Arkham I think mine is still half way up the street...

2011-01-28T21:08:00.000-08:00

The stylists at the hair butchery have found a new way to mess up my hair. I told the lady "Number 3 on the sides, a finger's width on top" just like I always do, but this lady had other ideas. First, she had a number 3 razor, but her preferred razor uses like the metric system or something, and so she just had "the equivalent" of a number 3.

Then, instead of a finger's width she used a comb and gave me "the equivilant of a finger's width". So instead of having hair that's 3/4s inch long, I have a 3/4 inch shapeless sphere of hair around my skull. I wasn't very happy. But then I went to visit Puja tonight.

Puja: Oh, you got your hair cut.
me: Yep, thanks for noticing. I'm not totally happy with it.
Puja: Why? It looks good... It looks better than your usual haircut.
(Thanks Puja!)

2011-01-24T12:24:00.000-08:00

I hate shopping for shoes. You'd think it wouldn't be too bad because shopping online lets you see hundreds of different shoes and filter by style, size and color. But it still sucks because the current state of the shoe industry sucks.

I would wear normal business shoes like a regular adult but they are so, unbelievably uncomfortable. It's like walking in wooden Holland shoes. I'd have to become one of those people who take their shoes off in the office or at someone else's house as soon as they arrive. Yuck.

There was an episode of Grosse Point where the main actress, who was always mean and condescending toward everyone, had to gain a bunch of weight for a movie role. Suddenly she became super friendly and was asking production assistants' names and doing favors and stuff. The staff decided that she had always just been hungry. I'd be like that. Gone would be the friendly, witty, Joe, instead I'd be thinking all the time about how much my feet are killing me. And you can forget walking around DC. I'd be cabbing everywhere.

Running shoes on the other hand are super comfortable, but any one can tell with a glance that they're running shoes because they all conform to that distinct sneaker look with bright colors and fancy tread. Even if you try to compensate by wearing a suit or something it'll look silly. People will think you're wearing a swimming suit underneath to head out to the beach after work. Why can't they try to disguise running shoes as something more formal? I'm not to impress fellow athletes with the style of my shoe. They should make running shoes for non-athletes. I'm not running anywhere, I'm just trying to get through my day.

And why the heck do shoes all cost so much? $100 for a pair of shoes that aren't Nike pumps and it isn't 1991??? Crazy! Where is the money going? I should start a shoe company.

2011-01-17T00:30:00.000-08:00

Some quick movie reviews.

You Again: This one was terrible. I was hoping for something like Just Friends, where Ryan Reynolds as a "cool adult" visits home and finds himself being pigeonholed back into his geeky role from high school. But this one was all about women acting like junior highers. Like Mean Girls, but with adults and not as clever. And no normal, straight-man characters to express disbelief and every character's immature. I can't believe I sat through this whole thing.

Centurion: Also terrible. There's a reason you never heard about this movie. It's not as bad as that King Arthur movie with Kiera Knightly, but it's close, and in a similar style but with more sweeping landscape shots a la lord of the rings. (More specifically, imagine that part of the beginning of The Two Towers when Aragon, Gimli and Legolas are running across the plains tracking the orcs. Probably half of this movie was like that scene, but with 6 dudes running away from a bunch of people tracking them on horseback, while the camera cuts from one group to the other and back again.) The other thing this movie had was lots of quick shots where a random guy gets his head smashed or something and blood splatters everywhere. I think there was a big battle scene that was just a series of quick shots of random guys getting hacked in the head or limbs. I guess that's kinda what war is. Things this movie didn't have: comic scenes, dramatic scenes, believable characters or interesting dialogue.

Never Let Me Go: This movie was surprisingly quite decent. I'd seen the movie The Island and the preview for this movie so I had a good idea of what to expect. The movie also starts out pretty slow and never really picks up speed (about a quarter of the way into the movie the story jumps 10 years and all the actors change. It was a little disorienting ). Some of the details about the science or the society seem a little far fetched but these far fetched aspects were sorta crucial to the story. I really enjoyed the way we saw the characters handle tragedy towards the middle and end of the film, which is what the movie really wanted to be about. Pretty good stuff.

Paper Man: This movie was pretty good too. I've never much liked Lisa Kudrow but I didn't totally hate her in this and all the other actors did well portraying believable characters. The story was interesting, the dialogue decent. There was a bit of comedy, a bit of drama. There was a slight plot twist that surprised me. Some of it was a little slow but all in all I liked this one.

(from a review of Action)
But the real stars were the writers. The show seems like it’s all about Peter Dragon, but it’s just as much the story of nebbish writer Adam Rafkin (or was it Alan Rifkin?…). Fighting to retain every sensitive allegorical scene in his magnum opus, Beverly Hills Gun Club (like the ritual slaughter of the pandas), Rafkin is the perfect counterpart to Dragon’s consummate amoral Hollywood insider.

2011-01-16T20:04:00.000-08:00

I went to One Lounge yesterday because Kate was having a party there. First of all, I'm not a huge fan of that place. The music is too loud, the bartenders too rare, and the whole house-like architecture is a little weird. Plus it loses points for not having partitions between urinals in the bathroom.

My main story from the night is that there was some poor guy at the place trying to dance with any girl he could find. He'd just walked up to girls and asked them to dance, not taking no for an answer. I was just standing somewhat nearby and talking to another guy, and three times random girls either: started making frantic gestures like she wanted help, or she jumped over and just started talking to us, or in one case a girl grabbed my arm to start dancing with me instead.

So now I think that the ultimate wingman is probably a super persistent yet repellent guy. You just have to set him loose, give him about 10-20 seconds with a girl to creep her out, and then swoop in for the save. It almost sounds unethical.

(comments from a jpost article about Stuxnet)
Barak Bard: 2010 may be the first year for which the Israel Prize will be given to "Anonymous".
Stephen: 0010 0101 1001 0010 11001 Did you get it? Now if not, take PC and throw into a big fire. The virus comes and goes, it enters and exits without leaving a trace on your hard disk. As long as there is one infected computer in Iran it will quietly sit there awaiting instructions. When you change all the computers, that is into the great bonfire, the virus will return as the angel of death on those new computers. The G-d of Israel is on cyber attack to those that blaspheme his name and his chosen people. Read the Bible and how Pharaoh was taught a lesson. This a today's plague, no frogs, just viruses.

2011-01-10T13:15:00.000-08:00

I bought a EEE PC netbook just before winter break and I'm not very happy with it. First, the keyboard is difficult to type on. It's a compact keyboard, but even more compact than the usual laptop keyboard, and it's not very sensitive. I had no trouble typing quickly on my old laptop, but on this thing I have to deliberately push every single button or it won't recognize the presses. Also the touch pad is way too sensitive and obtrusive. So I touch it all the time and it loves to click out of the field I'm typing in. Or it will click back to the beginning of the field and I'll find myself suddenly typing at the beginning again. Between making sure to press each key firmly and being careful not to touch the touchpad, my typing speed is down to like 10 words per minute.

It also has some major software problems, but those are my fault. And I could fix them, if only using the thing wasn't such a nightmare. Its wireless network seems slow too for some reason. That might be a software issue, though I've updated the drivers and windows thinks it's working fine. Other than that, it has some great hardware packed into it, and it rocks at performing tasks, so long as you don't actually have to type or interact with it. It's good at decoding videos and right now I'm mostly just using it as a server. It's not quite what I was hoping for it.

I got all dressed up and came into the office but the attorney I'm meeting with isn't until Wednesday. I had written the wrong date on my calendar somehow. Grr.

(Playing poker with some cousins. Someone called for a game of Screw Your Neighbor, which other players negatively characterized as not being a game of skill. It was a long game, and people sorta started to go their separate ways, getting food and watching tv, as they lost. At the end of the game there were only 3 people left at the table.)
Mike: So is that it? Did you ruin our game with your long-winded game of chance?

2011-01-10T01:40:00.001-08:00

Tonight I sat through Mean Girls on TNT or USA or something, even though it was rife with commercials, was censored (probably not much because it's only PG-13 I think, but I'm sure they edited it for content/time), and I have the DVD of it somewhere in the apartment. Is it a new low in laziness? No surprise: I'm having a hard time getting back on work like I should be.

On the other hand I set up my laptop to serve videos to my ps3 which has proven to work well for watching small files. My network makes 720p stutter and I didn't even try anything bigger. I'll talk about the holiday break when I post photos from there.

I watched Mama Mia over at Rachel's new place. We were waiting for Verizon to show, but they apparently cancelled her appointment because someone had written that her building doesn't get FiOS. Mama Mia was better than I thought it'd be, but still not great. Too much Abba. And it's very broadway-ish but without great characters. Lots of daddy talk/drama that doesn't pay off into big drama. (Rachel hadn't seen this but somehow I did- Chris Klein Audition tape)

I have an annoying attorney interview at 1pm tomorrow. This guy loves to fly over from the west coast for some reason. Maybe he likes to get away from his family. It's like my fourth meeting with him and the case (surprise surprise) is going no where. I need to wear a tie, put on my polite face, and find us an office to meet in. Ugh. Office rooms are hard to come by these days.

I'm having a hard time sleeping. It's my guilty conscience.

(Whitney and Joe are visiting San Francisco)
me: The wax museum is great! I remember when I went it was a super hot day, which is rare in San Francisco, and most places don't AC, but then we went to the wax museum and it was nice and cool, and full of weird wax people.
Whitney: Yeah... Black people are weird.
(then I had to tell Whitney that she had in fact misheard my comment, and we weren't going to be getting into another one of those conversations)

2010-12-13T17:00:00.000-08:00

I am quite busy. I'll be back on here in January.

(comments from an article about World of Warcraft)
For me WoW is not the girlfriend I never wished I met, but the one who I wish I could have just been good friends with. But I couldn't and I still can't. Now when I see her, I know I shouldn't get too friendly, because we'll get together again and we both know that won't end well.

2010-12-10T18:35:00.000-08:00

4 layers of bubble wrap + a whole lot of masking tape. I am a MacGyver when it comes to insulating drafty AC window units.

2010-12-06T23:11:00.000-08:00

Tonight at trivia there was a question "which law of physics is expressed I=V/R?" It was the engineers' moment to shine and we totally dropped the ball.

It looks easy when you see it written, but actually it was very hard to hear the announcer tonight because the bar was crowded and he gave the physics version first (current density = conductivity * electric field) before saying I=V/R. Peter, in his disdain for all things technical, was supplying sarcastic answers and Rachel was suggesting different laws of thermodynamics. They also give you no time to think, as I've complained before. The closest we got was Ampere's law, which is actually quite close because I is measured in amps. But no, it's Ohms law which really isn't at all the same as Ampere's law. So many weird names in physics that nobody cares whether you know.

Last week I was thinking about building a SATA switch for my media player (it has one SATA input but I have several drives I want to use) and was looking at datasheets for BJTs. I remember how everything works in theory, but the specific formulas and the math are nearly gone to me now. Maybe it's finally too late to go into mainstream engineering. My career path gets narrower every year.

(my nutella sandwich tasted weird, and the nutella itself was from a jar that I bought years ago, so I hunted around for expiration info and found a relevant forum)
Junior A: When does nutella expire? I bought some nutella like on april and wondering when do they expire. they been left in my room for like a month and opened already.
Simon T: read the label tells you everything you need to know
desdemon: It lasts forever. We had our jar for years after I remembered it and ate some. Look at the expiration date. You can easily add a year after it:)
Sylvester: Expiration dates only apply to food.

2010-12-04T22:33:00.000-08:00

My paraphrasing and commentary of "5 tips for meeting women" by some dude bro.

1: Even if you're not confident, try to pretend to have some semblance of self esteem when introducing yourself.
- I guess this is a good point. Nobody feels comfortable talking to someone who is jittery and awkward and always trying to back out of a conversation. But if you're this way normally, putting up a good show is only going to get you through a single painful conversation. There's a long string of them ahead and the girl will figure you out eventually. Here's a better tip: wait until you're 4 drinks in and then the initial conversation won't be as bothersome. (Or if it is you won't care.) Then just make sure you show up early to each date thereafter and down a drink or three before she arrives. This carries the added bonus of knowing exactly why you later won't remember the details of what she said, as opposed to the mystery my memory sometimes is.

2: It's not about you.
- This lesson's title makes it sound like it's going to be about asking girls questions to move the conversation along, but instead the lesson is: things are easier if you have a buddy. This is obviously true. Lots of life is easier if you can find a friend to suffer through it with you. I don't know how you could even tolerate being in a bar or at a party with no friends.

3: Approach a group of girls.
- Because I guess a girl likes it when she isn't sure if you're hitting on her or her friend. Somehow the author thinks you can just swoop in and be friendly without hitting on or getting rejected by any specific girl. Yeah, right. What a weird, creepy idea. If I was hanging out with friends and a girl swooped in to be funny and friendly with all of us, we would probably think she was crazy. Or that she wanted all of us. I bet that's what the girls assume when a guy does it. And it's probably true because it sounds like the work of a man out looking for anything he can find. Mystery does this but he mixes in negs to keep the girls unsure of whether he wants them. That's probably a good tip if you're going to try to creep into a group this way. Also, I don't approve of sucking up to friends or the herd mentality to which it caters.

4: Beckon with your index finger for a girl across the room to come over.
- Dang, don't give away insider secrets! My trick is to do the index finger beckoning while slowly licking my lips, and then at the end I punctuate it with a pelvic thrust! It works every time. Either that or it's about as creepy as I imagine. A girl would have to be super cute in order for me to not feel weird about a predatory finger beckoning. (And she couldn't be at all sketchy in a dangerous way or I'm out of there. Girls with Russian accents: this move is not for you.) Responding to that beckon is a commitment and a half!

5: Don't worry about the rejections.
- This is decent advice, though its definitely easier said than done. And its common knowledge when you're selling anything door-to-door.

(Forum comments about the HP and the Deathly Hallows)
goodterling: More like Harry Potter and the Long Ass Camping Trip. This movie sucked!

2010-11-29T20:57:00.000-08:00

For Thanksgiving I went down to NC and visited Whitney and Joe. It was fun and relaxing. I got lots of sleep, shared Thanksgiving with a bunch of international business students, drove around Durham. And was generally pampered by Whitney and Joe. It was nice to get away. Though we did have to all go around the circle and say what we're thankful for this year. I hate doing that.

I've been watching Boardwalk Empire and I'm getting more and more convinced that it's not going to pan out. Each episode raises a bunch of questions, answers very little, and doesn't really progress the story much. Plus there are no really great moments. There are only one or two episodes left in the series, we'll see what they can do. My hopes diminish with each episode.

Finally, internet dating update. I've finally completed my profile, though the endless questionnaires were a huge pain. I resent their oversimplification of me. The questionnaires love to ask about a complex issue and then provide only 2 possible simple answers, neither of which describes my views. Then it complains if you list too many questions as "irrelevant". Anyway, now that I've done all that I've discovered that looking at girls profiles really isn't that fun. It's more like homework. Lots of reading, lots of looking at pictures without nudity.

OkCupid wants you to give each person a numerical score but I feel like you walk away from each profile barely knowing what each girl is like. Certainly not enough to score the girl. I wish there were video clips. Video clips of them talking to a friend. That would give you a good sense of the person.

(Liz Lemon on 30 Rock)
I will cut you open like a tauntaun!

2010-11-25T03:50:00.000-08:00

I should have known better than to pre-pay for a rental car. Saved me like 50%, but sure enough, I'm trying to slightly change something and I'm totally getting the run around.

I just want to move my pickup time from 10am to 7:30am. The website gives me an error saying "Sorry, our online reservation system shows the location is sold out for that date. Either change your entries and try again or call the location directly to confirm availability."

The lady at the national number said that she can't alter pre-paid reservations because that's an online feature. She forwarded me to online services. The lady at the online services number said that it was some kind of issue with the location's office, and she would get the same error if she tried to alter the reservation. She said I should call the location's rental center. The DCA rental location has a sweet automated message: "the location is busy helping other customers, you will now be transferred to our world-wide reservations assistance." And we come full circle.

Tomorrow morning I'm just going to head out early and hope to get an early car. I'm driving down to Raleigh. I'm kinda looking forward to the long, relaxing drive. I don't drive around very much these days.

(from a Eurogamer article about the Microsoft Kinect)
The elephant in the room is that, well, most people can't fit an elephant into their room - and a great many people don't have space for Kinect in their rooms either.

2010-11-23T00:50:00.000-08:00

Rough night at trivia tonight. It was just me and Rachel and we scored second to last. The announcer quipped "The Better Half: 34 ... More like the worse half." Jackass. Rachel did pretty well in the food round. I was looking forward to that round because I thought I heard him say it was going to be "Boobs, Glorious Boobs" instead of "Food, Glorious Food". I guess my mind is in the gutter. (I'm not sure what boob trivia would be, but I did see that movie Breast Men in college. I'm sure I'd know most of it.) Neither of us could match explorers to countries of origin, besides Magellon. My movies trivia knowledge only helped a little. I didnt know there was a 2008 re-release of South Pacific, or that Rocky Balboa's dog was named Butkus. I didn't even remember he had a dog.

OkCupid has matched me with a few girls. It's a little surprising because I haven't yet taken the time to fill out any of their questionnaires. So I'm not sure on what basis it's matching me with people. Based on my photo? Who knows. Maybe it has software that parses and analyzes your self-description. Anyway, I got 3 mostly normal girls and 1 girl whose entire description is "I'm looking for subs to worship me."

Rachel: I was going to comment, after Kate said "You'll never get a date if you keep wearing your ex's hat." That you'll never get a date if you keep quoting your ex on your webpage!
(For the record, most of these Kate quotes are not my ex. And I will not be telling any of my future dates about this page.)

2010-11-21T16:19:00.000-08:00

I'm watching Mind of the Married Man. Before buying the dvd I saw a funny clip on youtube of it. This one (there's no sound). Something funny about all the guys sitting around ogling a mtv singer and not even looking up from the screen when asking their coworker to buy duplicate "just thinking of you" cards for their wives.

But it turns out that a better title for the series would be Mind of the Married Weasel. It's not fun to watch someone make up lies and then lies to cover lies, the whole while sniveling to his wife about how she should trust him more. I like for my characters to have a tiny bit of nobility to them. There was a much better Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry and Jeff are hanging out when Larry gets a phone call, and he warns Jeff that he's going to be very fake on the call and he hopes Jeff can handle overhearing it. Curb did a good job of showing how friends might conspire in a lie, in more of a harmless way. Mind of the Married Weasel is just a bunch of scummy guys who get together and bring out the worst in each other.

I'm still unsure about seeing the new Harry Potter movie before the second part comes out. But, the new Winnie the Pooh movie looks to be pretty promising. And it comes out on my birthday!

(about the "go kate" hat that I still wear sometimes)
me: It's the only hat I have so I wear it when my hair looks bad and I'm going outside.
kate: You're never going to get a date if you wear your ex-friend's cap around! Joe, buy a new hat already!

2010-11-18T09:05:00.000-08:00

Last Christmas my sister got be a bunch of Stanislaw Lem books and recently I've been reading The Cyberiad. It's a bunch of loosely tied together short stories but they're hilarious. It's really more of a space fantasy than science fiction, because the science parts of it are mostly just technobabble. Lots of math jargon is thrown in without being at all relevant and I could see it being distracting or confusing if you don't recognize that it's not supposed to make sense. I'm only about a quarter of the way through the book, but my favorite story so far is about the invention of a computer that writes poetry:

"What, those aren't decent poems?" protested Klapaucius.
"Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..."
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Turl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscript go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a squared cos 2 fie!

The computer poet goes on to outdo poets worldwide, cause mass suicides, induce weeping in a force eventually sent to shut it down, and then cause supernovas in nearby stars after it is shipped to a distant galaxy.

It's interesting that the poem manages to rhyme in English even though the story is translated from Polish. I wonder how much the translator messed with it.

(from a Eurogamer article quoting a game developer talking about retailers and downloadable content)
"Actually, you need them to get to the stage where they stock the box. It's not inconceivable that you're going to ask them to give the box away at some point in time. But then, they participate to an extent in the subsequent DLC exploitation." Ah, exploitation. How we've missed you.

2010-11-15T22:50:00.000-08:00

I'm writing up an online dating profile. It's actually not that easy to do. I've got it mostly written out but now my problem is that I don't really have any great photos of myself. There are a lot of rules about your online photo (see here) and I don't seem to have many photos of myself that don't have other people with me. I guess I could crop a photo. I wish I had been quicker to pose in front of landmarks and scenery in the past.

(from xkcd sucks redux)
So, to summarize, the brilliant joke here is this: spinning your computer chair is fun, which is an observation that has been noted by anybody to ever sit in one

2010-11-12T07:10:00.000-08:00

I got both Katy Perry's albums. I wasn't sure what to expect, I guess something like Britney Spears. And it sort of is. It's similar to Britney or Christina (the songs flip flop between resembling each). It's not high art but I'm enjoying most of it. Sometimes I'm surprised by myself. (The Peacock song is the only one I instantly skip so far. Hummingbird is coming close. How the heck did Peacock get green-lighted for the cd? No rhymes, no melody, no steady beat. It's like a worse version of Over the Moon from Rent.)

I also picked up a bunch of The Cotton Jones Basket Ride, and it's very decent. I think I'd almost like it more if I didn't feel let down that it isn't nearly as compelling as the excellent Page France or The Broadway Hush (all of which share a bunch of the same members).

For Veterans Day yesterday I watched a bunch of Band of Brothers episodes. I'm not sure if I've written about it here before. It's generally a good show, and at some points is very excellent. It suffers from having to stick closely to a true story. There are too many characters and a bunch of the characters are only significant for their contribution in a single episode. Most of them are like the red shirts in star trek, except in trek the red shirts only ever got killed off, they never had extended scenes or were essential in saving the day.

My grandfather flew bomber planes in WWII. He never talked about it and it wasn't apparent if you'd met him because he was neither injured nor traumatized (as far as I know). But he decided to risk his life in a way that I never have, and I'm not sure that I could. I could see myself going through a patriotic phase and instinctively volunteering for something, but as soon as "getting shot at" became a factor, I'd probably talk myself out of it.

(from xkcd sucks redux)
I feel bad for the poor tech support fellows, innocent men trying to get through their day like everybody else, who will now be hounded by endless calls from fat cheesy-fingered xkcd fans, giggling incessantly as they emit a heavy-breathed “Shibboleet” and facetiously demand to speak to an engineer.

2010-11-09T14:06:00.000-08:00

At trivia yesterday our team Mud Grass Horse did poorly for some reason. We only did mildly better than Frenemy Engineers (just Rachel and me) did the week before. I think it was because there weren't a lot of sports or history questions for Peter and more people just means more second-guessing, with nothing much gained. I managed to convince Rachel that a photo of an Eckart (sp?) was actually a stork. I'm surprised she knew it was an eckart, I still don't know what that is.

There was a question about what was the musical in which "everything's coming up roses." I could remember that Bettte Midler singing the song and that the movie was named after her daughter's stripper character, but it wasn't until 5 minutes after handing in that round that I remembered it called Gypsy. They don't give you nearly enough time. The questions are super long, so it takes like 15 seconds for him to read, then he waits 2 seconds and repeats the question. Then he waits 5 seconds and moves on to the next question. Even the person writing down the questions has to scramble to write them fast enough. You really only get time to think for the photo and matching rounds that are handed out before the trivia starts. It's like shotgun trivia.

Alan tried to tell me that voting is a civic duty. But it's not. Jury duty and paying taxes are civic duties, and they're both a pain in the ass. The benefits of voting are derrived entirely from the results, which are often impossible to accurately predict when casting a vote. Really, it's a crap shoot. Some people think you'll have a better america if you vote one way, and other people think it'll be better the other way, and everyone's definition of "better" and "america" is different. Everyone voting with their whims just adds to the chaos.

Besides which, I often think the public in general is not qualified to be making decisions about a lot of things. Since the invention of tv we've got the public voting largely according to which candidate looks more appealing. People are also too easily swayed by name recognition, 15 second commercials, and catchy slogans. Rachel likes to call me conservative, but I'm not. I think that the conservative arguments are generally quicker to try to appeal to the emotional and mildly-intelligent. "You can't spend your way out of a recession!" It sounds reasonable at first, but really, that's the only thing you can try to do. You certainly can't save your way out of a recession.

So lets be clear: I always vote the correct way. Voting such that you agree with me is your real civic duty. If I happen to not vote, then you're free to do whatever you want in the voting booth. Going into the booth and casting a vote against mine should be a crime!

One of my former friends posted on facebook "If you didn't vote then we aren't friends, seriously." I honestly don't miss his raving facebook posts. And I don't have any civic requirements like his. In fact, you could shirk your taxes and I wouldn't mind at all. (I still have to file my dc taxes from last year. They're way late now.)

(from a Citigroup messageboard)
Tercel: Take a look at KBLB...they are going to mass manufacture synthetic spider silk. It'll be ultra-lightweight and 5 times the strength of steel.
cptnwillard: spam
Tercel: Not at all.
Tercel: Bumped for topic
cptnwillard: How is your post related to Citigroup?
cptnwillard: This is spam.
cptnwillard: Go away.
Tercel: Because KBLB is a penny stock also, except it has some value right now. Lol.

2010-11-04T00:58:00.000-07:00

It's the middle of the night and somehow got stuck watching this tv show called Property Virgins, it's about people buying their first home. (No, I am not shopping for a house.) I honestly think that realtors are the scum of the earth, and the lady who hosts this show is no exception. Everything about her is fake, from her smile to her tan, and I wouldn't trust anything she says.

Why even use a realtor? I guess they might have access to more listings, but there should be some other service to get around that. A good database and we'll make that entire industry obsolete. Really the realtor just tries to sell you on aspects of a house that you don't care about, convince you to ignore aspects you are concerned about and then does some questionable double-dealing when you're bidding on the house. Bidding through a realtor is like playing poker from the couch in another room, with an intermediary walking back and forth telling you what's going on. They tell you to trust them, but there's no attorney-client privilege or doctor-patient confidentiality. They're salesmen. It's like confiding in a used car salesman with your budget and concerns, and expecting him to keep your best interests in mind.

I should add that to my online dating profile when I sent one up. I don't have a lot of strict requirements, but no smokers, no druggies, no realtors.

(part of an email from a girl I knew in jr high)
Sarah R: I looked at all the old yearbooks the other day with my husband. He remembers your older sister from high school. Looking back I'm sort of mad. In eighth grade Matt Luther and I got voted most likely to eat free, and they took our picture with us standing around a garbage can. Like we eat trash?

2010-11-02T16:57:00.000-07:00

I've ordered a bunch of button-up shirts. I wear t-shirts pretty much every day, but lately I've noticed that I'm the only adult who does. Every other guy wears polo shirts or button up shirts daily. Rachel said it was okay because my t-shirts have personality, and Kate said I'm just a casual person. I like being casual. I remember that TV show though, "what not to wear" and they were always criticizing people for dressing like teenagers. And I have an awkward enough time trying to get a date as it is. So I'm growing up. For now anyway. I'm also getting a nicer jacket because my ski jackets don't really work with a button shirt. I'm hesitant about upgrading my shoes though. Formal shoes are so uncomfortable. I'm going to have to find some kind of nice-sneaker compromise there.

(from King of the Hill, the school board director talking to the principal after Bobby protests the vending machines)
Karl, I wish I didn't just see what I saw here. But I did see it. And more importantly, I was seen seeing it.

2010-10-31T21:11:00.000-07:00

I just watched Get Him to the Greek. I have mixed feelings about it. I wrote several paragraphs about different aspects of the movie but then deleted them because they weren't going anywhere. I'll just say that the movie wasn't super funny over all. Some parts were funny. Some parts were painfully unfunny. And I don't find it credible that you can really love a girl (as we're lead to believe that Jonah Hill loves his girlfriend), have a friend force his way into an awkward, uncomfortable threesome situation, and then manage to save both the friendship and the romantic relationship. Didn't they cover that pretty thoroughly at the end of Chasing Amy?

I did like the scene where Russel Brand talks to his 7 year old son shortly after learning that the boy really isn't his son. That scene was almost touching.

(from xkcd sucks redux)
The joke here is basically that there is a paradox called the Banach-Tarski paradox that says that you can take one sphere (not a real sphere, a theoretical sphere, as this paradox doesn’t apply to real objects) and, upon cutting it into pieces, reassemble them into two identical spheres, each the same size as the original sphere you carved up. This obviously doesn’t make much intuitive sense, but it works out in the magical math land of theoretical geometry, and, as in many xkcd comics, in this panel the joke is that one of the laws of magical math land suddenly applies in the “real” world, with humorous consequences. Of course, the consequences are only as humorous as “the guy had one pumpkin and now he has two” which isn’t really that funny. In fact, I can think of a 1000 different ways that this idea could be applied with morbidly humorous consequences for the various characters of the comic. Maybe Hipster Hitler can make use of this idea by having ol’ Hitler try to use this paradox to turn his one testicle into two. Regardless, in xkcd, a funny application of this idea is probably not meant to be. The joke also fails in that Randall was apparently incapable of drawing two equal looking pumpkins.

2010-10-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

I saw Me First and the Gimme Gimmes with Rachel last night. It was a decent show. Me First likes to talk between each song, which I found kind of annoying. The songs are short, so it's like a 2 minute song, followed by 1 or 2 minutes of talking. Totally kills the tempo of the concert, but Me First doesn't care. They intentionally kill the tempo sometimes by stopping the song between the build up and the hard rock so they can crack random jokes.

Somehow Rachel and I got stuck behind a bunch of old people at the concert. A lady and two douchey guys who chugged beers and fist pumped to the music without rhythm. At one point they all hugged shoulder to shoulder and swayed to the music, pretty much blocking out Rachel's entire view of anything. (I offered to switch spots with her but mine wasn't a whole lot better. I could only see because I'm taller.)

Two nights ago (or maybe three now, I wrote this some time ago) I was walking out behind the verizon center looking for an ATM. There's some kind of show there that requires lots of horses or cows or something. They've got G street blocked off and filled with a bunch of fenced-off animal stalls. And there were a whole bunch of cute girls milling around wearing tight horse riding pants and doing horse-maintenance things. One even smiled at me through the fence but I didn't know what to say. If only I had really been raised on a farm, instead of just being socially awkward and uncouth.

(my visit with Puja was cancelled last week because Sonya's sick)
Puja: She seems to be doing a lot better, so by next week she'll be back to "I adore Joe" status.
(damn right)

2010-10-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

Just got a letter from my apartment building's management. My rent is going up $34 in December, which is the most they can legally raise my rent apparently. It's 2.05%, the 2% being management's maximum optional increase and .05% because of inflation. It's significantly, significantly less than I was worried about. And apparently they can't increase the rent more than once a year. Now staying here another year might be a viable option. It's a spacious, sunny, quiet apartment. Though in some ways a change would be nice because I've lived in DC for a long time, have no super close friends who live in the neighborhood, and memories of Kate W color all the local spots we used to go.

Kate R: Good luck with your promotion review! Maybe you'll make enough to stay in your rock-star apartment!

2010-10-17T13:06:00.000-07:00

Friday I saw the Thermals with Rachel. I don't think she and I have seen a concert together in like 2 or 3 years. We got dinner at Tabaq first. The mojitos there are pretty good and my calamari was excellent but I had this meatball plate that was only okay. They also played Toy Story 3 on their projector, even though that movie isn't out on dvd yet. I think they pirated a copy because after the movie there was a powerdvd error and the program quit to windows. AND, I was kinda pissed because there was this team at trivia, not long after toy story 3 came out in theaters, whose name was "Woody Dies at the end of toy story 3" which was upsetting both because Woody was such a likable character and because this team had spoiled the movie! But, (spoiler alert) he doesn't really die. What a bunch of jerks at trivia. That's probably the same bunch of jerks who stole "the better half" 2 weeks ago.

The thermals were pretty decent. One of their opening bands had their treble-base balance soooo off, all you could hear were the vocals and the drummer's cymbals. You could see that people were playing the guitars/base, but you couldn't hear it at all. Black cat drops the ball. But in this case I think it actually improved the band because you could hear the vocals so clearly and it gave it a folk-music sort of feeling. Also I was sitting on a bench with Rachel and I could hear her when she spoke without having to yell "what??" So it was really much more pleasant. The new thermals stuff is forgettable. They played most of the classic songs, which was essential, but I kinda feel like the momentum was killed by the interjection of new songs, or crappy, repetitive songs off that older new album. Really, the only worthwhile album of theirs is the body, the blood, the machine. Had they just played that album it would have been a great concert. Instead there wasn't really any moshing because of the weaker opening bands and the constant insertion of new songs.

Why do bands even play new songs in concerts? Nobody wants to hear them. I mean after a band has a legitimate album out, they'd expect that the audience came because they liked the album. And you can't really appreciate a song until you've heard it like 2 or 3 times. You certainly can't mosh to it.

Rachel drank a beer or two with me at this concert, which I appreciate. Usually I'm drinking by myself because Rachel is driving everywhere.

(talking about moving out of DC)
Rachel: You can't leave. Think of Sonya!
(Puja's daughter likes me.)

2010-10-04T23:36:00.000-07:00

Today at trivia, someone else was using the team name The Better Half!!! Outrageous! It's the name Rachel and I would use when we were the only two on the team. We used it so much that one time I told the announcer a different team name and he said "Aren't you the better half?" Now I feel violated. This is how those copyright holders much feel.

(from xkcd sucks)
And after all that, the character I liked is shown to be an idiot, and the nerd who was just trying to be smug is shown to be the wisest of them all. Well hot damn. So much for having hope anymore.

2010-10-04T13:56:00.000-07:00

Computer nerding it up this weekend. I got a new computer and installed windows 7. Putting the computer together wasn't terribly difficult, just time consuming. Fitting the cables without blocking airflow or fans was tricky, and half the components I ordered didn't come with screws for some reason.

Windows 7 was a bigger problem. At first everything about it was frustrating. Installing the right versions of programs, and then figuring out where they installed was tricky. And a couple things I downloaded came with trojans and I had to start all over again. Navigating the file system was a pain until I set up the shortcuts I'm used to using. It tries to be very start-menu centered, but I prefer to never use the start menu for anything. Anyway, for a while I could empathize with the frustration my mom feels when she tries to use her computer. I felt like I was battling the OS every time I wanted to do something. But it's all fixed now.

I've been playing a little (tiny bit) of civilization 5. I like the new hex tiles, and I like the new way units don't stack. It almost seems like a tactical game, until you realize that each unit just has a "combat rating" that tells you everything about it's effectiveness in combat. I haven't played any civilization games since civ 2, but it still takes 40 years for your scouts to see whats on the other side of the mountain? And 100 years to raid a nearby city? The time frames for some actions are just way, way off. Also, you'd think they'd have a more accurate model by now than deciding to "research" the wheel. Did the cavemen really do research before inventing the wheel? Okay, so it's not an accurate model of historical development. What is it then? I'm not really sure. It's a kinda fun, totally inaccurate model of how you would plan for a civilization given these circumstances. I'm just incapable of suspending my disbelief enough to think "maybe this is how the Aztecs could have developed had the white man not rained on their parade." Because its all so skewed. It doesn't help that the entirety of combat, when one unit attacks another, is that the units overlap for a moment, followed by some scuffling effects, and then you're shown how much damage each unit took. It's interesting in general, it just doesn't capture the imagination and it's not engaging.

(from an interview with a Gamefaqs faq author)
A lot of recent games have this pathetic desperation for you to "share" them. Skate 3 wants me to upload videos of my pretend self skateboarding in its pretend city. Blur invites me to Tweet my latest race victory - say, what's that sound? Oh, it's hundreds of "unfollow" buttons being clicked at once.

2010-09-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

I've had the new brand new album for a while now but never really listened to it. I didn't much like their last album (the devil and god are playing inside me), so I had low expectations going in. The huge problem with this album is that track 1 is terrible! What a producing mistake that was. It's like putting the dreary "No Seatbelt Song" at the beginning of the album. Nobody would make it past that. So after like a year, somehow I listened past the first song, and there's actually some good stuff later.

I think I like this song "At the Bottom" the most out of all of Brand New's songs. Excellent imagery.

(from a user review The Sure Thing)
The first ten minutes of Reiner's commentary are a must-listen if you rent this for two hilarious moments:
1) when he confesses to having been unable to direct the opening sequence because Nicollette Sheridan (the cover girl) was in a bikini and, in auditions had told him "You can't handle it" when he'd asked to see her body--and he agreed; and
2) when he says that John Cusack reminds him of himself then WITHOUT A BEAT proceeds to praise the young actor's tremendous intelligence, sense of humor, good looks, and sex appeal. Well worth it.

2010-09-26T17:45:00.000-07:00

Watching Hancock while I eat dinner. I'm only gonna watch the first half because I have to do work, and the second half is terrible. How can a movie start so interesting and end so terribly? Will Smith does okay with his scowling and occasionally interesting interactions with Jason Bateman. Charlize Theron acts weird and annoying the whole time, not unlike Edward Cullen's wide-eyed constipated look when he first meets Bella. I guess that's the look for supernatural attraction. Jason Bateman carries the movie. Him and special effects.

Back to work.

(from a user review of Road to Perdition)
Those who are turned off by Road to Perdition because of the bloody deeds performed by Hollywood Good Fella Hanks, akin to watching Jimmy Stewart in the role of someone who kicks puppies, are perhaps missing the point.

2010-09-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

Not a lot of time today, but I just installed windows 7 on my new desktop. Not super impressed with how windows is getting more gelled and less.. useful. The control panel at least is sparse. Maybe there are more controls hidden a little deeper. Anyway, the computer is still in pieces on my carpet, I just plugged most of the together and made sure it was all working. It seems to be. The windows experience index loves my computer. After this month I'm going to put Civ 5 on it.

I know I've been missing for a while, but I'm going to continue to be MIA until the end of the month. Busy with work. Go read Rachel's Africa posts instead.

(part of a very long user review of Breaking Dawn, the last book of the Twilight series)
Remember the template in the other books? 'Happy, happy...Just kidding! SAD!!' Well in this one it was... 'ok plot ok writing... Just kidding! I SUCK!'

2010-09-06T00:14:00.000-07:00

As usual there is nothing worth watching on tv. Only king of the hill, but I have it on dvd anyway. So instead I'm trying to watch some semi-crappy movies on comcast on-demand (Pathfinder and then My Super Ex-Girlfriend). Now it looks like the movies on there are both censored and have commercials! What! Why would I want commercials on demand? F cable tv. I only ever got it because kate liked to watch tv. This week I'll call comcast and see about canceling it.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend is funnier than I thought it was going to be. By that I mean it's mildly entertaining. I got lunch with Amelia last Thursday and she told me how she thought her ex might have copied her apartment key, so she was going to get all her locks changed. I've never had a crazy ex though. I wonder how common it really is.

My desktop computer might have completely died via overheating. I'll find out tomorrow. I should have installed a case fan long ago.

(From an article about the best sitcoms on tv, an entry about Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia)
Your jaw will drop and you’ll squirm in your seat when you hear Frank dismiss his daughter Dee’s pregnancy with a deadpan “Do yourself a favor and flush it out.”

2010-08-30T23:30:00.000-07:00

No trivia today because Rachel ate some ground up glass in her lunch, much like Charlie Wilson's dog in that movie. So instead I'm watching a bunch of bad movies, just to confirm that they're bad and I want to get rid of them.

So far the list is:
The Sure Thing - John Cusack's first lead role as an annoying college freshman. The girl from Spaceballs is in it as the prudish girl he likes. Besides one scene where he pretends to be a crazy hitchhiker, there's really nothing funny about the movie. All John Cusack's pickup attempts are unfunny and uninteresting. And the cross-country shenanigans are unmemorible.

Stargate - The first half of this movie is decent science fiction. Then it turns into a standard sort of rebellion movie and you seee that with all his advanced technology, really Ra just has jet airplanes and guns shaped like sticks. The alien horse-animals look terrible, even by 1990's standards, and the annoying kid actors are given way too much screen time. I think it must take all of a director's and writer's work to make child characters not be annoying. You just can't do it when you've got a dozen of them. A dozen kids in the same movie will ruin the picture, unless they're only in it for a few minutes. One of these kids was supposed to be the mentally handicapped of the group, and there's a slow motion death scene where he's running toward the other kids and the other kids are yelling at him to hurry. Then he got shot. The scene was ineffective and I was just glad the character had finally been killed off. It would have been a better movie if James Spader had shot the kid's character when he was first introduced to the kid.

Eastern Promises - Decent movie, just something I would definitely not watch more than once and didn't even really enjoy watch it the first time. Lots of abused women. Lots of distant, cold characters who pretend to be friendly while they're cold, terrible people on the inside. Apparently the Russian mafia is not as warm and likable as the Italian mafia. But it's only like half a Russian mafia movie, the other half is a "it sucks to be a girl in a russian village" movie. I do like the gay mobster's son character. He was well played.

Tomorrow is my sister Irene's birthday and I have no idea what to get her. She likes art... You all get upset when you don't know what kind of gift to get for me, well imagine being in my shoes. I never know what to get anybody!

(girl on Dating in the Dark)
Appearance is very important to me. I need to be attracted to a guy. I can't have somebody grow on me... like a fungus!

2010-08-24T18:31:00.000-07:00

Watching Dating in the Dark. Without whitney because she's cancelled on me. The problem with this show is that the girls range from somewhat attractive to quite attractive. It's like you aren't even risking anything by going into the dark. There's one episode where a guy thinks one girl is fat and so he rules her out, but he's wrong and she's pretty cute. (When the guy traced her outline and found out she was fairly thin he tried to be charmingly honest and quickly destroyed the date. Apparently it doesn't always go over well when you confess to a girl that you've been calling her fat nicknames with the other guys, even if you're sorry now.)

I've yet to see an episode where a guy thinks he likes a girl, but then see's her in the light and decides against her.

The whole "expert's compatibility score" thing is clearly bs. I wonder if, before they had that feature on the show, none of the guys or girls could make a decision about any particular person and the whole thing just floundered around.

This was a good episode. I thought the dufus-looking guy was going to repel the ladies with his silly suspenders and jeans look (it's like he modeled his style after Duckie from Pretty in Pink), but the girls both thought he was "perfect looking". Girls are strange.

Kathryn (to Kaylee): You're a liar!
mom: Kathryn! Don't teach her that word!

2010-08-22T22:26:00.000-07:00

I watched The Kids Are All Right (a movie I always mix up with the Local H song All the Kids are Right), with Dave and Huyen. Pretty good movie, except the resolution was a little unjust. It was their last night in the states so afterwards we got some pizza, shook hands, and see you in a couple years. It was a sad night but the weather was super nice so I walked around dc a bit.

This new hard drive has proved to be like poison for my computer. It was working well for a week or two and then, starting yesterday, problems galore.

First it suddenly started causing a super long delay in the post, so long that my computer would get to the windows loading, and then timeout and shutoff before I can log in. Then it burned out my psu, but luckily I had a spare in the closet. Then it caused my ram to overheat so that my computer would reboot but then refuse to even find the ram. (I wasn't sure about this until I touched the ram and almost burned my finger. I'm not sure if that problem is with the new hd, new psu, or old ram.) But everything seems to work fine when the hd isn't attached. Windows also doesn't find the drive when I hook it up with a usb adapter. My laptop seems to find the disk when I hook it up using this external media player, and it looks like all the data is still on there and everything. Now I'm running chkdsk again (I ran it when I first got the drive), but it doesn't look like it's finding anything. One file with bad sectors so far is all. It's going on 7 hours now of chkdsk, hopefully it's almost done. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when it comes back as "okay" but my desktop still refuses to read it.

(Undeclared's Ron about You've Got Mail)
"It's just pleasant. It's like waves lapping at a shore or something. It's like they're emailing each other and they don't know, they're all connecting. It's like us bonding, Lloyd, it's beautiful."

2010-08-21T16:55:00.000-07:00

I was going to rush down to the doctors office next week to get my Hepatitis-A booster shot. I got the original shot in January, and you're supposed to get the booster 6 months later. It's been more than 7 months now and Dave got me all worried. But according to this page, you just need to get the booster between 6 and 12 months later. I can totally wait on this.

I should file my dc tax return though. I'm not sure how long the extension I filed will put that off.

(about Dave and his wife, who came out to a movie with us)
Kate: I was totally impressed that they jumped onto the idea with so little convincing and that I got my way without having to compromise: definition of good friends.

2010-08-20T03:22:00.000-07:00

Just watched a Reno 911 episode that had a cameo by Wolowitz from The Big Bang Theory and Charlie and the Waitress from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Wolowitz played a teenager soliciting a prostitute under his mother's supervision. The cops were going to arrest him but then decided to drive him to a Jewish brothel instead. Charlie and the Waitress played two white trash siblings who cause a domestic disturbance over a doll. (The cops thought it was a real baby at first.) The police tell the siblings to "make up" and they turn around and start making out. The police then arrest them for being disgusting. Charlie and the Waitress did a good job.

Yesterday I went to dinner at Founding Farmers with Dave and like 4 or 5 other foreign service people. Listened to a lot of talk about the foreign service, surprisingly. But it was fun. Tomorrow morning Noelle is driving up and we're getting brunch at Founding Farmers. I'm big on supporting those organic weirdos lately.

Sarah asked me whether there was anyone at the reunion who was ugly and unpopular in high school but was a knockout at the reunion. Not as far as I noticed. I think that only happens in the movies. A fair number of people have gained weight, something that's hard to avoid as you get older. But as far as I remember no girls came back to the reunion being significantly hotter than they once were. Though the girls were generally more friendly and down to earth, which in a way made them more attractive.

Now I'm watching Dead Man on Campus and feeling dumber for it. Not keeping this movie.

"Shut the hell up, you once-fat bitch!"

2010-08-18T05:59:00.000-07:00

I went to my high school reunion last weekend. It was actually a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be. I couldn't convince Dan to go because he apparently still sees everyone from high school that he has any interest in seeing, which I guess would be just me and David. But I think that might have been for the best because Dan might have dragged me into his labels and us-verses-them mentality, which would have just made the reunion like high school all over again.

I wasn't super social in high school. Anti-social would have been a better description. But I decided, going into this thing, that I would put past biases and bad memories aside and give everyone a second chance. And it totally paid off. People were more friendly than I'd ever seen them. I got hugs from a bunch of girls that I was never friendly with and I talked to (and got along well with) all kinds of people that I never really spoke to in high school. It was almost a redeeming experience. Instead of thinking I went to a small town high school full of hicks and preps, I now know it was a small town high school full of normal kids who were maturing and coping with adolescence.

By far the most unusual story I heard was from my old friend Goose who spent about 20 minutes telling me a story of how he developed Schizophrenia and started hearing voices a few months before the reunion. He bought a GPS which randomly brought up a location in the desert that the voices told him to drive to, but he ran out of gas and sorta went crazy on the way. He started giving away money and acting crazy, and he was arrested and spent 2 weeks in an insane asylum in Las Vegas before his mother could get him out. Now he wants to go off his pills because he has a higher calling and he needs the voices to tell him what it is.

It was like talking to the crazy kid in SLC Punk who thought his mom was the devil. I hope Goose pulls through. He was always a good kid. I bought him a beer, I hope it doesn't conflict with his meds.

(talking about my driver's license. The bouncer had hesitated before letting me into the bar.)
Dan: No wonder he didn't believe it. Is that your photo from when you first got your license?
me: Yeah, that's me at 16. What are you talking about, I still look like that.
Dan: You sure loved those bangs.

2010-08-11T04:54:00.000-07:00

I got a 2TB hard drive from newegg yesterday and spent a good 3 hours trying to figure out how to format the thing. Neither Windows nor PartitionMagic want to do it, and people in forums were no help (as usual). People blamed it on everything from file system cluster sizes to northbridge drivers to windows xp being 32-bit. I finally got linux to start formatting the drive, which took a whole lot of finicking as linux always does (gparted refused to format it, but fdisk seemed to be working), when my computer overheated and shutdown 10% into the zeroing process. It does that occasionally because instead of having a case fan I just leave the case open. I probably should have ordered a fan from newegg at the same time. I'll have to get back to this next week.

Flying to CA this evening. Back on Tuesday. My mom called me last night to warn me that it's been cold in Occidental and she had finally gotten tired of it and turned on the heat. Which means the house is going to be kept at a constant like 63 or 64 degrees. Prepare to be uncomfortable. Awesome.

me: It's the same with one of my sisters.
Rachel: Is it Lauren?
me: No, my oldest sister.
Rachel: Is it weird that I know your sisters' names?
(Yes. Creepster.)
(Actually I once knew Rachel's sister's name, but I can't remember it now. I am the less creepy of us. Or maybe my memory just isn't very good.)

2010-08-08T01:41:00.000-07:00

I tried to stop into Sticky Fingers Cafe to see Sarah but when I got there it was a little busy and she was nowhere in sight. There were 2 people ordering infront of me and their order was going sooo slowly. Slow like you can only find in a liberal, vegan cafe these days. Starbucks would never stand for it.

After 5 minutes of no progress I cut out and went to giant where I picked up She's Out of Your League at the redbox. I'm expecting good things.

Today I'm doing work, then I'm going to try to find Dave tonight for a last night of probably-not drinking. Only single guys are good at drinking. Once they're in a relationship they're always taking it easy or cutting out early. I think it happened to me too. It happens to everyone. Except my brother-in-law Doug for some reason. Maybe I should move to Texas.

(Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, after seeing Steve Jobs park in the handicapped parking spot at Apple)
"Oh, I never realized that those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped."

2010-08-07T01:30:00.000-07:00

I talked to the lady at the front desk of my building and she said that I should be able to go month-to-month after my lease is up. This is really good news. They might still increase my rent (which is already pretty expensive). But at least I won't have to move on the same weekend as the end of the fiscal year at work. Plus there is much less competition for apartments during the winter than the fall. And if I decide to leave DC mid-year I can do it without breaking an expensive lease. We'll see how much the rent actually increases.

Tonight I saw The Other Guys with Dave, Tom, Nick and Nick's wife. Nick only lives a couple blocks north of me. Anyway, the movie was a lot better than the trailer made it look. I'd give it a solid 7.5/10, while the trailer makes it look like a 4/10 at best. Actually the trailer isn't that bad. I guess what I saw was this teaser trailer, which is just stupid and not funny. But the actual trailer gives away some of the jokes, so maybe it's better that I never saw it.

(user comment to a Washington Post article about the $825 Billion stimulus bill)
Tom333: You want to stimulate the economy, Obama? Stop the embargo on UFO technology. We already have the technology for zero point energy and space warp drive. We back-engineered it from crashed UFOs. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both promised to end the UFO secrecy but they wussed out. Don't be a Demowussy, Obama.

2010-08-04T01:07:00.000-07:00

I just did 2 miles on the elliptical in 15.5 minutes. It wasn't super difficult either. Maybe I'm getting stronger? That's unlikely. Maybe the machine is busted and level 7 isn't what it used to be. Or maybe it was because I fell asleep on the couch during Seinfeld shortly before going down to the gym. A nap will do wonders.

I didn't really eat anything energizing. I had some coffee, then a corndog for lunch and a bunch of frozen burritos for dinner. Oh! But then I also had some after-dinner cereal, and it was that Basic 4 cereal, which sounds like it should be healthy. That's probably the secret.

After the elliptical I did 5 minutes on the stair master for my ass. That's not really true, but I thought about using the stair master! That's a good first step. I also thought about doing some pushups or light bench-presses to preempt any man-boobs, and I thought about trying to build up some manly biceps by doing some curls or something. I did lots of thinking tonight.

(Micros wants to practice fielding grounders for his baseball league, so I come up with this great idea where I bat tennis balls at him with a tennis racquet. Micros is nervous about getting injured.)
me: i don't see any problems. you've got the tennis equipment, i've got the skills. we can do this.
me: and you've got the health insurance too.
micros1781: Yeah, we'll try it. I'm just saying I'm nervous about the plan.
me: you can't go into something like this being nervous. it's gonna be great. this plan is foolproof.
micros1781: From your perspective, sure.

2010-07-30T00:14:00.000-07:00

Movie review Friday. (Warning: spoilers about Robin Hood, Benjamin Button, and Inception)

I'm watching the old Disney version of Robin Hood. I remember watching it as a child with my family, in the room of our house that we called "the cold room," because it was always cold for some reason. The movie starts out so happy and playful. Then it gets very sad and miserable in the middle (not only is everyone in prison, but the rooster sings a sad song, and it's raining!). And then it ends on a happy note. It's an emotional rollercoaster for a child. I'll get this for my niece in four or five years.

I watched Benjamin Button last week. It was a snoozefest. I actually fell asleep about 2/3's of the way through. Imagine the most boring romantic non-comedy ever, and then have one of the characters grow younger like Merlin, but without the magic or the mystery. Also too much emotionless Brad Pitt narration like in the beginning of Interview with a Vampire. Not recommended.

I saw Inception last weekend with Rachel, Peter and Leslie. It was good. Good effects, pretty interesting environment and story. The problem was that a lot of it didn't really make sense. Peter said that once you're accepting that one person can enter another's dream, then you have to accept whatever. But somehow I don't. There was that 80's movie Dreamscape, where Dennis Quaid was going into people's dreams, and this was sorta similar. But Dreamscape was more like the Matrix and less like, umm, star trek.

-Is there really such a thing as a dream within a dream? I've never had one. One morning in college I turned off my alarm and then went back to sleep and dreamt that I was going through my morning routine. That was kinda disappointing when I woke up and discovered I had to brush my teeth and shower all over again.
-Isn't no gravity the same as a falling sensation that supposedly wakes you up? It seems like having no gravity would be a pretty major thing that would echo back through the layers of a dream. Also falling into water.
-They said that time passes 20 times slower in a dream because you're using all of your brain, but why should the time dilation compound for a dream within a dream? You can't use more than 100% of your brain.
-I could tell what was going to happen at the end. Kate said she could too. It all got pseudo-dreamy and surreal. Maybe they were too clear, before the end, about the kicking out of the different layers of the dream, so when they suddenly started skipping through the end in a montage it was clear what the director was going to do. And did they pull the A Beautiful Mind trick and have the kids not age? I guess it depends how old his memory of them is.

It was a good movie, but doesn't hold water quite as well as most science fiction movies that I prefer. Maybe it's because they explained all the rules too explicitly about the dreams within dreams. They need to gloss over the less-realistic aspects and not expound on them.

(11:54:32 PM) me: i saw that bomb squad movie that won the academy awards. that one was really good
(11:54:58 PM) Dan: f that movie. i won't see if on principle
(11:55:07 PM) me: cause you loved avatar?
(11:55:13 PM) Dan: since when did we let woman direct movies?

2010-07-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

Let me start by saying that I'm not super picky about my friends. I'm usually not all that judgmental and I don't think you need to have the same tastes or a super similar personality to be my friend.

That being said, I'm unfriending someone today for the first time ever. It's this dude-bro I met on craigslist. I don't have a lot of local guy friends and he wrote an ad saying that his guy friends were all busy with relationships so he was looking for some normal guy friends to just hang out. I wrote back saying how normal I am (and I am very normal) and he responded "you sound cool. what's your facebook?" Next thing I know, I'm facebook friends with a d-bag frat guy. He writes in slang and every single one of his photos is of him with a slightly unbuttoned shirt posing with either alcohol or bar girls. His favorite tv show is Entourage and his favorite book is, and I quote, "Does Men's Health Magazine Count?" This isn't a real person, this is a compilation of two dimensional characters from teenage comedy movies. Unfriended.

JP Blackford (the old GTA from my probability class at GWU, who is strangely facebook friends with Mark, Kate's sister's boyfriend) fell for it too. He was this guy's other new friend for like a day before one of them unfriended the other.

(Eric and I are driving behind Dave in his newly bought used car)
me: do we still need to pick up beer?
Eric: I don't know. Maybe we're stopping.
me: Or maybe Dave forgot.
Eric: Call and ask.
(I call Dave's cellphone)
Huyen: hello.
me: hi Huyen? It's Joe. Are we stopping along the way for beer?
Huyen: umm. yes.
me: Also, did you guys know that your car is leaking oil out the bottom?
Huyen: what?
me: (I repeat it but Eric starts laughing and drowns me out)
Huyen: Umm...
(a few seconds later)
Dave: hello, Joe?
me: oh Dave, I was just asking whether we were going to stop for beer.
Dave: yeah we'll stop at a place. Like 10 minutes.
me: okay. Also, did you know that your car is leaking oil all over the road?
Dave: what?
me: Did you know that your car's leaking a stream of oil?
Dave: what?
me: (loudly) Did you know that your car is leaking oil!
(moment's pause)
Dave: this is a terrible practical joke that isn't working at all.
(correct.)

2010-07-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

The wine tasting on Saturday started early, and I had a mild stomach ache and head ache but those went away after we got started. I'd been tasting once with Eric and Dave in California, and that was pretty similar except this time we had a bus and everything was much more organized. People liked some wines and there were a few wines that people complained were too sweet, and one that Lem and Sarah said smelled like manure. I can taste the differences in the wines, but none of them really appeal to me and it's probably irrelevant whether one is slightly less bad tasting than another.

We went to 3 wineries, and I think Rachel's blog post describes each one better than I could. I'll just add some random things.

At the second winery Lem wanted to get the one cute worker girl to do our tasting, so while everyone else in the group was still finishing lunch he randomly was like "let's go!" because a free spot had opened in front of her. So he and I ditched the rest of the group and started our tasting early. I think I saw Julie give us a "what are you doing" look.

Lem flirted with the girl but it didn't really go anywhere. I think this was about an hour before, at the next winery, Lem was making fun of another guy named Chris for him being asexual, and Julie responded by calling Lem a "man-whore," and Lem protested that he's a changed man and his whoring days are over.

There were some heavy criticisms of our bus driver's soul patch. Our driver had both heavily styled, spikey hair and the soul patch, which is a tough combination to pull off if you're not a part of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

There was a lot of making fun of me because I don't eat fresh fruit. I don't really see the big deal, plenty of people don't eat fruit. Do they even have fruit in Africa? And that's huge continent! And I eat fruit it my strawberry icecream or milkshakes, or if it comes in my pancakes or something. I'm really very normal. I just don't pick stuff off trees or wander around in the produce section.

There was a pregnant wine taster at one of the wineries. It got some whispers from within our group, but I'm not a doctor so I have no opinion. Maybe she just wanted to hang out (like I did), maybe she was tasting and spitting, maybe she was European.

And I think I accidentally mooched sangria at the third winery without chipping in for the cost. Sorry.

After the wine tasting we went swimming at Rachel's building. Well, everyone else went swimming but I just dangled my legs in. I didn't have a swimming suit and, call me old fashioned, but I didn't want to borrow Peter's. It was still fun just dangling my legs and hanging out. Leslie had a great story about a girl fight she once saw at this same pool over the use of a pool chair (does a towel reserve a pool chair when the towel owner leaves the pool vicinity? The lifeguard had to hear both sides and issue a ruling). And Sarah talked to me while she did ballet and leg stretches in the water. Her ballet makes the memory seem kinda surreal, almost like a scene out of a movie.

(a user comment on the news article about Joe Biden saying that he wouldn't characterize the tea party as racist)
It's not a racist organization... Just 97% its members are white. They don't have any friends or partners of color. They don't socialize with people of color. They don't like seeing a black family in the white house. They think the AZ law is cool and just. They think all people of color get a free ride. They don't think the term "lynching" has any racial overtones, nor do they think the confederate flag means anything racial.