Category: Uncategorized

The look and feel of the blog — as well as some features — are going to be erratic for the next little while. Those are the risks when one is a test pilot, but what better way to give Blogware a thorough shake-down than with a reasonably popular blog?

Some notes:

1. Yeah, I know the timestamps attached to my posts are off. Not much I can do about that. I’m not on the development team, so all I can do is go to the “Settings” page and see that I’ve already selected my time zone. I’ll file a bug report.

2. Requiring an account just so you can tag your comments with your name and URL sucks. I agree with the many people who’ve sent me email and instant messages about this one, and I’m going to fight like a pit bull for that feature.

3. Where are the accordion graphics? I just haven’t had time to make new ones that fit with the site’s cleaner look.

4. Archives. For the time being, archives that predate July 2003 can still be found in my old Blogger-based blog at http://kode-fu.com/shame/. I will be working on an open source tool to move my old Blogger entries to Blogware and make it available to anyone who wants it (that is, once it’s working and once Blogware’s out of beta). I’ll even blog the process and my design notes, seeing as I’ll probably do it in Python and not touchy-feely “let’s hear our inner voice” you-can-tell-what-I-had-for-lunch Perl.

5. Those slice-of-life stories, including the actual worst date of the Worst Date Ever series. Between the new job, wrapping up my freelance clients, housemate hunting, an upcoming wedding and so on, I’ve been trying to squeeze out enough time to finish the story. the wait will be worth it.

In the online comic Achewood, Teodor and Ray are giving their friend Roast Beef — the unhappiest geek on earth — a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy-style makeover.

Beef isn’t very pleased with the results, as you can see. Stereotypical geek response.

Personally, I think he looks like a badass:

Lookin’ good, Beef!

Us Asian guys, we turn up where you’d least expect and always school you propah, dogg!

I’ll let this excerpt from the New York Times article tell the story:

In his lyrics Jin talks unabashedly about his Asian ethnicity, sometimes in self-defense but more often because he wants to bolster the idea of an Asian-American rapper. In last year’s battles on BET’s “106 & Park,” rival rappers most frequently hurled ethnic insults at Jin:

I’m a star

He just a rookie

Leave rap alone and keep making fortune cookies.

But Jin turned those taunts into his own disses:

You wanna say I’m Chinese

Sonny here’s a reminder

Check your Timbs

They probably say made in China

he raps, referring to Timberland shoes. And

Yeah, I’m Chinese

Now you understand it

I’m the reason that his little sister’s eyes are slanted

If you make one joke about rice or karate

N.Y.P.D. be in Chinatown searching for your body.

Yeah, boyeeeee!

I can tell young parents just by looking at their eyes. They’re a strange combination of tired and alert. Kids take up a lot of energy, and you’ve got to watch them like hawks because they have a knack for putting themselves in all kinds of dangerous situations.

(There’s a Dennis Miller joke in which he says that parenting is so tough that the only reason God got to rest on the seventh day is because He sent His kid to live with another family.)

Apparently, being an uncle also gives you “toddler sense”, a knack for knowing when a kid is about to put himself or herself in peril.

Two Saturdays ago, I biked to Henry’s — Accordion City’s premier camera store — to purchase my super-nifty Nikon Coolpix SQ. After buying the Coolpix, I lingered in the store for a while, thinking that the rain would stop coming down in buckets shortly. Half an hour later, the torrent was finally beginning to show some signs of letting up enough for me and my camera — in my knapsack, protected by three layers of plastic shopping bags — to head home. I stood in the little covered doorway of the store’s entrance, waiting a little longer and watching the rain subside.

I was standing there daydreaming, half-noticing a toddler — perhaps three or four years old — playing with the automatic door. He’d step towards it and watch it open, then run away from it to let it close.

He then decided to walk towards the door and stay there. It opened all the way. He then stuck his arm in the gap between the door and frame, where the hinges were. He was so close to the doorway that he was out of the door’s sensor range, and like a good automatic door, it started to close.

Toddler sense…tingling!

A fraction of a second later, it dawned on me that this big glass and steel door was going to crush this kid’s arm like a nutcracker crushes walnuts. I don’t remember actually diving for the door — I just remember suddenly being right at the door, holding it open, and pulling the kid’s arm away.

“Don’t put your arm there! You could’ve been hurt!” I scolded the kid.

(I can imagine my friends having trouble picturing me as “adult supervision”. It happens sometimes.)

The kid’s mother, who was busy attending to his younger brother in the store, saw all this. She snatched the kid from the doorway and brought him to his father, who’d been eyeing the display racks. With no one in the range of the door’s sensors, the door closed, with me outside and the kid and his family inside. The father was checking his kid’s arm and the mother was scolding him.

I waved and said “Uh, you’re welcome” to them, but they were oblivious. Ah, well. They can’t take away the “warm fuzzy” that small-scale superheroism gives you.

If being an uncle has sped up my reflexes this much, I can’t imagine how fast my sister — with Aidan reaching his “terrible twos” and Nicholas a few months old — must be.

I’ll bet she can catch bullets with her teeth.

How about putting the car in cruise control at 65 mph and then breast-feeding your baby?

Novelty stickers for your car windshield: Terrorist Hunting Permits!

Thanks to Matthew for the link!

I need an aspirin the size of Australia.

Had a lovely time ringleading last night’s stag for Derek Walker. Started off severely upmarket (The Roof, rooftop bar at the Hyatt with a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and $12 martinis) and progressed steadily downmarket until we hit The Matador (notorious speakeasy with low-grade vodka — Russian Prince — in mickey bottles sold by a woman wandering the tables with a duffel bag full of the rotgut). We had great conversation, drank heartily, ate well, danced up a storm, had accordion hijinks, met girls and best of all, Derek, Dhimant and I managed to piece together a lot of information about what really happened at Crazy Go Nuts University after boozily cross-referencing our sordid histories there.

Full details including a photo gallery will follow tomorrow, but in the meantime, enjoy this QuickTime video (444 KB) of some of the dance action midway through the night at Velvet Underground.