Baby

My friend Len's wife Sonja just had their baby this weekend, and promptly named her "Rebecca". Happy birthday, Becky!

Ah, life's little miracles. It goes to show, extensive laptop use does not cause sterility.

Biting heads off chickens

I am 41% Geek.

You probably work in computers, or a history department at a college. You never really fit in with the "normal" crowd. But you have friends, and this is a good thing.

Take the
Geek Test
@ FualiDotCom

So I took the geek test... and it's a pretty accurate description. Sad, but at least I'm under 50% - however the fact that I am posting this on my blog at 1:30 in the morning may have pushed me over the precipice. Did it help that I'm on my work laptop which just finished processing 6 hours worth of client files?

I didn't think so.

Hide, little clock, hide

I need one of these...

Clocky is a clock for people who have trouble getting out of bed. When the snooze bar is pressed, Clocky rolls off the table and finds a hiding spot, a new one every day.

Death by Fish

No, I didn't order the Fugu (No need to panic Mr Simpson. There is a map to the hospital on the back of the menu.) However, this weekend I did go overboard with the fish - Friday at noon, some folks from the London & NYC office were in town, so we went to a little Asian Fusion place called Monsoon in Santa Monica near 3rd and Wilshire. I ordered the chirashi, which is sashimi on a bed of flavoured rice. Later that night, roommate says to me: "You feel like sushi?" "Sure," says I (foolishly). So we head out to another little place called Kabuki down near LAX to join some of Roommate's friends from the SF Bay Area for dinner. Getting there at 9, we were faced with a massive crowd and a one-hour wait. Famished, we finally sit down at 10 and are presented with a 1/2 price off menu. With delerium setting in due to low blood sugar, Roommate & I go totally nuts ordering sushi for everyone. After the damage was done, we were left with four large takeout boxes of sushi. It turned out that all the Friends from Frisco were staying at the Westin, which inexplicably, does not offer its guests refrigerators for their rooms; thus logically, yours truly takes the bounty home. The next day, Roommate was called to action attending the wedding of a friend, and I was tasked with the duty of consuming the remaining fish. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were served with delicious day-old sushi, each meal less fulfilling than the last. Once again on Sunday morning, to break our fast, more of Friday's meal was served, however with fatigue setting in, we decided that the welcome had worn thin for our maritime meal, and promptly disposed of the remains of our protein-rich platter. In epilogue, several of my co-workers were felled by a foul gas while attempting to enter the men's restroom at the office the next day; truly, the sea is a cruel temptress whose vengeful creatures wreak only destruction from across the veil of their watery grave.

Thus came to pass the Six Meals of Raw Fish, forever inscribed in my memory as a feat never to be repeated again.

Soylent green is people

Happy St. Patrick's day everyone!

A toast to all in the Emerald Isle, and their thick, pasty beer.

It's official, I've gone mad

Today I went shopping at Linens 'n Things for a comforter cover and some shams, and I left with a set of faux-suede covers and a memory foam mattress pad / pillow set. Somewhat suffering from sticker shock at the charge to my AmEx card, I did a quick tally in my head and came to the conclusion that I've spent over FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS on things that go on top of my bed. This includes two sets of sheets, a down comforter, and of course the abovementioned covers and mattress pad.

This better be an investment that pays dividends. I swear, the ladies have got to dig the 500-thread count sheets - I sure do.

Once bitten, twice shy

On Wednesdays, I can get the freshest fruits and vegetables. There's a farmer's market that gets set up every week outside my office; they close the street for a block in each direction, and the vendors sell everything from honey to oranges to avocados. We tend to go out for lunch quite often around here, and I had noticed a curious behaviour of my co-workers. While I tended to walk along the middle of the farmer's market, looking at what fresh fruit I could buy and consequently leave to rot in my fridge, they usually moved over to the sidewalk after half a block. Yesterday I asked why they did that, and they explained:
A little over two years ago, following a minor traffic accident at 4th Street and Arizona, an 86-year old man slammed on the accelerator instead of the brakein his Buick. The car careened south down Arizona Street directly through the middle of the farmer's market, where it struck 50, and eventually killing 10 people. The car came to a stop not 10 steps in front of the main entrance to my building. Many people, my colleague said, actually saw the entire event take place through the windows; virtually everyone who had a southwest facing office saw the entire scene unfold. In fact some people in the building rushed out and helped lift the car off one of the victims, still breathing and trapped underneath the car.
After that stunning revelation, I understood why barricades are now set up on each end of the market; there is at least one police cruiser at each street corner, and the farmers themselves park their trucks as to block traffic at each location. Still, it's nice that they had continued to set up the market every Wednesday morning, where casual shoppers can stop off to buy delicious organic zucchini.
I guess it's an old issue now that this event has passed from recent memory, but should the elderly be required to re-certify? Personally, I am all for requiring recertification. Combined with strict graduated driving, (once my utter, unspeakable nemesis) it helps ensure that only the best be granted the priviledge of driving during the most dangerous years of their lives .

Manitoba is cold in the winter

I don't think this article needs much commentary. Note the text in bold:

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - A Los Angeles man who sneaked into Canada in February to see his Internet girlfriend will be deported -- minus all his fingers and some of his toes, the Winnipeg Sun newspaper reported Tuesday.

Charles Gonsoulin, 41, will have the fingers and toes amputated because of severe frostbite suffered during a 100-hour trek from Pembina, North Dakota, across the border to Emerson, Manitoba, where he was found wandering on a golf course on Feb. 23, suffering from hypothermia.

Gonsoulin and the Canadian woman met in an Internet chat room in 2002. The woman lives in Quebec, Gonsoulin's lawyer, Mike Cook, told a court hearing. Quebec is about 2,500 kilometers (1,600 miles) east of Manitoba.

Gonsoulin could not enter Canada legally because he was convicted of robbing a Pizza Hut in Arkansas in 1984, the newspaper said.

His girlfriend could not afford to travel to Los Angeles, he told the Sun. So he took a bus to North Dakota where he crossed the border.

"Mr. Gonsoulin didn't really know that there was any place on Earth that could be so cold and so inhospitable," Cook told a court hearing Monday, adding his client had never felt temperatures colder than 10 degrees Celsius (50 F).

Temperatures dipped below -26 C (-15 F) during his long hike.

Today I learned...

I've got this new idea - I'm going to have a blog for myself at work. I've created this document that sits staring at me from my desktop called "Learn.doc". Every working day I'm going to update this document with something new that I learned at work, be it a skill or a new feature of the product I'm working with, or some fun facts about the industry in general (did you know that Merrill Lynch has issued floating rate notes with coupons based on a function of the CPI? eeee!)

This, I hope, will motivate me to diddle away less time on the web.

Westside culture

I was looking on one of my favourite sites - the wikipedia, and I came across an article on where I live. It's quite an interesting read.

"Many of the major educational, retail, cultural, and recreational attractions of Greater Los Angeles are located in the area, as is a large portion of the entertainment industry. Century City is the major business hub of the Westside, comprising many of the major companies and agencies making up what is known as the film industry today. In fact, more of Hollywood's deals get done on the Westside today than in the actual city of Hollywood itself. The Westside rivals downtown Los Angeles for the number of people commuting to it from other areas, particularly the San Fernando Valley to the north and the South Bay to the south."
[...]
The Westside's traffic congestion is legendary. Although once served by the Pacific Electric Railroad's streetcars, it was the first region of Los Angeles to be developed largely around the automobile, and is notorious for its lack of significant public transportation"

Pretty cool, eh? Kinda explains how it takes over an hour for me to drive 5 miles home. Also interesting is a post on the Santa Monica Big Blue Bus, which I take on a regular basis:

"The City of Santa Monica runs its own bus line, the Big Blue Bus, which also serves much of the Westside and UCLA. It is generally considered to be one of the best run bus lines in California, as evidenced by the fact that it did not raise its regular fare above 25 cents until 2002. In contrast, most public bus lines in California were charging fares of a dollar or higher well before the year 2000.

A Big Blue Bus was featured prominently in the motion picture Speed."

Funny, I haven't seen anyone who looks like Sandra Bullock on the bus yet. More likely, they tend to be either homeless or retired.

Guess I spoke too soon

As CNN/USA Today/Gallup discovered, the blogging phenomenon hasn't hit the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans just yet. Only 7 percent of adults surveyed said they read blogs a few times a week, and 48 percent said they never did so.
However, it's very telling that there's a 52 percent market penetration of a new medium in less than 10 years. Remember, television took a good three decades before it took off.

Passive communication

Just about everyone I know has a blog now, at the same time as it becomes more popular in culture in general.

I posit that this is the logical extension of electronic communication, along the vector of immersiveness. E-mail, as the grandfather of electronic text communication, has extended logically into instant messaging, and text communication became more of an interactive experience. The problem is that inherent in this experience is the conversational nature of that communication. Namely, you type what you can think of in the short time between messages, and there's a limited time - and space - to collect and organize your thoughts. On the other hand, e-mail lacks the formality that used to be present in the fine art of letter-writing. Can you imagine publishing some politician's personal e-mails in decades hence, they same way that Lord Byron's correspondence had been published? Hardly New York Times bestseller material.

Blogging is the next step in the opposite direction. As a publishing medium, blogging fills in the gap (canyon?) between the grassroots and mainstream media - this is the phenomenon that gets all the airtime. However, what I find interesting is how it can serve as passive communication between geographically distant or infrequently contacted friends and acquaintances. Rather than interacting with a specific person, you are broadcasting to an anonymous, passive audience. This saves one from the pressure to respond to e-mails and IM's - simply post what you wish to be read, and interactivity will come back in the form of comments. The inclusion of hyperlinks enables yet another connotation of this new medium: blog communities. With passive communication, it's possible to keep in touch with an extended network of "friends," which really enables the whole "six degrees" thing. Check out www.xanga.com for a good example of this.

I think ultimately, this is a good thing. With reasons ranging from long-distance networking to saving airtime on your cellphone, isn't it about time that you got one?

PS: no, I didn't get paid for my public service announcement. :)