Recently in Interesting Category

I heard about it only last Friday. The President of China would be coming here to Microsoft on the first leg of his United States visit. Yesterday it all began. There were helicopters everywhere and police cars at every corner. Apparently, Dick Cheney was at the Mariott and there were people talking about snipers on the roof. Yesterday afternoon there were already Falun Gong protesters standing at the corner of the busy intersection right outside of One Microsoft Way.

Today at around Noon, I decided to take a walk down to Building 33 where President Hu and his entourage would be arriving to see what was going on over there. They already had the area cordoned off by the time I arrived there. Everything from the sidewalks to the curb was taped or barricaded off so I had to walk through the grass to get anywhere. Nobody knew when Hu would arrive, but a Seattle PI photographer I talked to said it would be sometime around 4, and that in a couple of hours the Secret Service would arrive to clear the area and place tour busses to block areas. There were several Falun Gong protesters sitting inside a barricade of orange plastic mesh doing exercises and holding signs.

Outside of Building 33 there were huge banners hung over the side of the building, and the Microsoft flag was replaced with the Chinese flag. More pictures at my Flickr photo stream.

Things were pretty quiet despite all of the protestor activity and I was getting sunburned, so I walked back to my office and ended up getting stuck in meetings for the rest of the afternoon. As Leslie and I were eating dinner at Blue Ginger, I saw lots of helicopters pretty much ensuring that the entourage was at Microsoft doing their entourage stuff.

As we were driving back home on 520, we saw the motorcade going down Westbound 520 heading to Bill's house for some rhubarb brown butter almond cake, no doubt.

I installed the MT Zeitgeist plugin last night and let it go crazy.

The results were.. erm.. interesting to say the least..

It looks like my site is a one stop shop for porn, Eminem, and let's not forget my Adblock filter file. For an up-to-date Zeitgeist snapshot of my site, click here..

The Political Compass

I read about this site on fellow Microsoftie Cyrus Najmabadi's blog.

Rather than simply defining yourself as being on the left or right side of the political spectrum, it can paint a more accurate picture of where you may stand on issues.

Since I'm sure everybody is clammoring to see where I am, so here's my chart:

Why does Andy Dick have a career? He's even more annoying than Ashlee Simpson, and at least she's easy on the eyes.

Leslie and I went to Best Buy to buy some screen protectors for her new PDA and possibly a couple of video games, and then to Taco Bell for a nutritious dinner.

So, we get to Best Buy. What the fuck happened to their PDA selection? They had like, maybe five different types of PDA intermingling with the music players. They had the new 4G iPod. The new interface has some nifty new features, but the new click wheel looks stupid as hell. It's like someone put a grey sticker over the click wheel area. It looks extremely cheap, and feels even cheaper. I was tempted to try to peel it off.

Ok, so back to the screen protectors. It looks like Fellowes is cheaping out and no longer making device specific WriteRight screen protectors. Now they sell "universal" ones that you have to cut in order to fit on your PDA. I mean, at least you get a nifty little grid to help you cut, but it's just cheesy to me that you can no longer get device specific ones.

We picked up some of those, then I figured I'd try to get Karaoke Revolution 2 and/or Ultramix. Best Buy didn't have *either* of them. I was all like WTF. Best Buy is quickly moving down several rungs on my cool shopping place list. Although it's not at Comp USSR levels (yet, even though to digress, the local Comp USA in Kirkland is actually quite decent).

So, it's off to Taco Bell. Ever since reading Fark's thread this morning about the ChiliCheese.org campaign to save the Taco Bell chili cheese burrito, I had been craving one. So, we went to Taco Bell for dinner.

After waiting 15 minutes to get my food because some douchebag ordered like 12 items (to go, no less -- that's what drive-thrus are for, you cock smoker), I happily ate my dinner. As we're sitting there digesting, Leslie looks outside and sees some punk bastard looking kid with what looked like a semi-auto with its barrel cocked back. We didn't wait around to see if it was real or a very well done replica. So, yeah, that was interesting.

That's it for now. I'm tired, as well as being tingly and slightly dizzy going through Paxil withdrawl (more on that later). Good times.

My japanese name is 山田 Yamada (mountain field) 一真 Kazuma (one reality).
Take your real japanese name generator! today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

That's almost as cool as my self-declared Korean name: 이김박 kekeke.

I read this on Boing Boing today: Boing Boing: NYC ban on subway photos.

Why? So people can be kept in the dark about the MTA employees who can't read? Or, maybe the illegalizing of photography around the bridges and tunnels was getting boring? Who the hell knows.

The reasoning, of course, is that by taking pictures in and about subway stations, you can find out all kinds of ways to do something nefarious. Since, after all, terrorists don't use the Internet and would never think that they could find all the information they could ever want to know about the NY subway system by simply using a search engine.

All this stuff is STUPID and doesn't make anybody any more secure. It just wastes more time and taxpayer dollars enforcing this crap.

Being a subway enthusiast, I find this possible new law absolutely ridiculous, and I sincerely hope that it doesn't get passed.

Yahoo! News - South Korea suffers alien vengeance

I found a link to this story from Fark, and found it extremely amusing.

I had to check the news source multiple times to make sure it was from a legit news source, and indeed, it was.

Some pictures from work, fresh off the digicam around 7:30 this morning.

Meet Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, Nemo, Akira, and Tetsuo, members of Mikimis' wacky aquatic family.

So, to everyone's shock, US Troops really maimed the crap out of the Bagdhad airport unnecessarily. Including destroying 10 poor defensless passenger planes (if it were me, I'd be flying the fuck out of there), looting the duty-free stores, stealing equipment, and other shenanigans.

Time Magazine's "Grounding Planes the Wrong Way" article.

I'm sure video games will be blamed as they always do.

At first I'd blame FPSs. I mean, half the fun in FPS-type games is being able to shoot up everything in the environments and then you have the GTA/MGS aspect where you can interact with objects and steal stuff.

But, the more I think about it, the more I blame text-based games!

Think about it:

blue^ posted this link to #ddrfreak, so my thanks to him.

American Apology Shirt.

So, I was reading the news about this teen who was busted for having kiddie-porn images on his computer. Now, anyone stupid enough to buy/sell/trade kiddie-porn deserves to get caught, however those images made up less than 0.002% of his collection. In total, the teen actually had tens-of-thousandsof pornographic images, and it seems like this the point the media is really pushing. Now, parents are getting in this huge uproar over how their kids can *gasp* get pornography over the internet, and how they can stop those activities.

So here is what I want to know: so your child has porn on his/her computer. What's the big freaking deal? I mean, c'mon. If you try and block those offensive websites, your kids are smarter than you, and they *will* find a way to circumvent those measures. Take away their computers, they will read nudie magazines borrowed from their friends or parents, or just shoplift them from the local Qwick-E-Mart. Take away the nudie magazines, and they will borrow porno movies from their friends or parents .. or just shoplift them from the local Qwick-E-Mart. The point is, kids will get a hold of porno whether the parents like it or not, so whats the point of getting all bent out of shape and sheltering them? Maybe it was just because I had a more progressive upbringing than most, but I think all this shock and outrage about a teenager having tens of thousands of pornographic images on his computer is pure insanity. Parents need to understand that when they were young, the Playboys and National Geographics they had stashed between their mattreses didn't turn them into some hairy-palmed lecherous monster. Likewise, allowing their children to be exposed to pornography won't do that either.

Just a clarification for anyone taking what I'm writing out of context: I'm referring to porn in general, not kiddy-porn. If he was stupid enough to have it, he was stupid enough to get caught. End of story.

Ok, that's it for my rant today.

No, TiVo isn't starting a health plan for the televisionally deprived. It's "Home Media Option: TiVo's newest upgrade to its Series 2 boxes. This upgrade adds many new features such as being a photo center, MP3 player, and even the ability to manage your recorded shows remotely. I'm searching for articles on the web regarding any information people have on expanding/hacking its functionality to increase its usefulness. I ran across this entry linked below.

Brad Choate's "TiVo Home Media" blog entry.