according to the new york times, most of the buttons at pedestrian crosswalks that you press to activate the “walk” signals, just don’t work, and in fact haven’t worked for decades.
in the mean time, just think about all the other buttons you press that probably do nothing. does that make you feel better? it’s supposed to.
kurtis and i went up to tahoe for a day of boarding, to take advantage of the huge storm that pounded the bay area this week, dumping four+ feet of fresh powder up in the sierras. we ended up at squaw valley, since alpine sold out by 10:30 since they’re doing that $39 deal this year. it was pretty great: lots of powder everywhere, which was actually quite a challenge, not having boarded in stuff so deep before. so it turns out, that if the powder’s too deep, if you slow down or turn too quickly or lean too far forward, you just sink into it and come to a stop (at best) or flip over (at worst). i sort of imagine it’s almost like beginning surfing. although, anything you do in that much powder just doesn’t hurt at all. it’s like falling into a huge pillow. so i was able to be much more reckless, because the falls were painless. even the groomed runs were soft enough so you weren’t really in danger.
so at the end of the day, we board all the way down the mountain, and as we’re walking past the lodge to the car, we see this huge vehicle there. with speakers attached to it. and a dome on top. with a dj in it. blasting out fat beats. we’re like, “you know, that looks a lot like the space cowboys’ unimog. it is the unimog!” it turns out that they were just up there for the weekend, and playing a party on saturday, so they were out at the resort rockin’ it out. an incredibly pleasant surprise, which warmed the heart even better than a mug of hot cocoa.
is it me? or do the little symbols that you’re supposed to wear to show support for getting women to quit smoking as part of that circle of friends organization look like janet jackson’s nipple piercing ring?
i saw whale rider the other night. admittedly, i did cry, but i was already in a weepy mood. while this is a good movie, and keisha castle-hughes is pretty great in it, it’s a pretty straightforward movie, and not one with any surprises in it.
it’s sort of like driving a really nice rental car across idaho. you’re a little surprised at how comfortable it is, and how well it handles, but to be honest, it’s a straight road with no obstacles in your way, and as soon as you get on the freeway you can see exactly where you’re going, and no matter how fast you drive it looks like you’re going the same speed. but it’s still a pleasant ride.
i lost my umbrella condom last weekend in l.a. this makes me sad. very sad. and my pocket wet. very wet.
i’m finding that more and more often, as i come back home from spending the weekend in l.a. with hmc, i’m just really down and depressed on the following monday. i don’t want to go to work, i don’t want to drive down to corporate, i have trouble paying attention, i just sort of don’t care. i just feel discouraged and stupid for leading a ridiculous life.
not unlike the tuesday blues, after the big outlay of seratonin, i’m going thru serious withdrawals from blowing my psycopharmacuetical load.
where’s the 5htp for relationships?
According to a study done at Washington University, rats exposed to magnetic fields similar to those humans encounter developed damage to the DNA in their brain cells.
They also say that the exposure resulted in an increase in brain cell “apoptosis” or “cell suicide” - a process in which the cell self-destructs because it cannot repair itself.
Additionally, UK’s National Radiological Protection Board has already noted a weak association between the incidence of childhood leukaemia and exposure to elevated magnetic fields.
The association is not observed in the UK, but has been seen in the USA and Sweden. One possible reason for this difference is because the USA uses a 110-volt electricity system, which confers a higher exposure to residual magnetic fields than the 240-volt system used in the UK and mainland Europe.
while i was up in tahoe boarding for the day, the pistons pulled off a pheonomenal trade right before the deadline, shipping out a bunch of second rate players and getting rasheed wallace, the much-troubled but incredibly talented power forward, who had just been traded to atlanta from portland just last week. and on top of that, we get the celtics’ starting point guard, mike james, to be our backup, and by shipping out our old backup point, chucky atkins, we free up enough salary cap room to sign mehmet okur, the best turkish player in the league, this summer!
now we have ben wallace and rasheed wallace down low, rip and chauncey, and tayshaun prince at the 3. plus james, okur, the big nasty, and elden off the bench.
that joe dumars is a genius.
(now if only we could get darko out there!)
so much anecdotal information, but finally, from the chp website, the definitive answer on whether you need chains if you have snow or even just all-terrain tires and four wheel drive:
“R” ratings on snowy roads indicate chain requirements for various conditions. Some vehicles may not be required to use chains under all conditions, but all vehicles must carry chains. Most vehicles come equipped with snow tires. Look for M+S (mud and snow), All Season, or All Terrain, on the side of the tire.
R-1 chains required except for vehicles with snow tires (chains required for any vehicle pulling a trailer)
R-2 chains required except for 4-wheel drive with snow tires
R-3 chains required for all vehicles
i love this.
apparently, suddenly alarmed that outkast’s hey ya is sweeping the nation and appearing everywhere, polaroid suddenly feels it necessary to issue a press release and warn everyone to not to shake it like a polaroid picture.
i can see it now, at polaroid hq: “we’re getting all the free publicity from this incredibly infectious tune, and with live performances at the grammys and the nba all-star game, suddenly people may exuberantly overshake their pictures! we’ve got to stop them! for their own good!”
although listening to just the melody nonstop during the all-star lineup introductions almost killed that song for me. almost.
Yao Ming, C, Rockets
Q: What kind of American music do you listen to?
A: I like the National Anthem. I listen to it at least 82 times a year.
so the san francisco international asian film festival is coming up next month, and there’s some good stuff, like the new takeshi kitano film dolls , a bunch of asian music videos, as well as your chance to see a stephen chow double feature of the still miramax-delayed but hilarious shaolin soccer as well as the popular god of cookery (ok, but not as good as the leslie chung/anita yuen film the chinese feast, imo).
but what’s the deal with their headline film, the showing of the much-heralded zhang yimou film hero, with the all-star cast of jet li, maggie cheung, tony leung, zhang yiyi and donnie yen? sure, it’s the opening night film with a reception gala, but even if you want to skip all the frills and just see the film, it’s a whopping $30. for $30 i usually can get a film and a lap dance.
and it’s not even like i’m asking to meet jet li. i’ve met him before. he’s shorter than me.
there’s this thought that runs through my head every now and then:
is there a point to cleaning up old email?
i mean sure, there are finite limits, especially imposed on work account on work email servers. but that stuff either you have a business justification that it needs or doesn’t need to be kept around. or you can just archive it to some work storage area.
but how about personal emails? you keep them around, thinking, these are valuable correspondences to/from me, i need to have them around, in case i want to go back and read over them, to remember something or for nostalgia’s sake. but how often do you actually do this? in the past year? how about mail from two or even three years ago? worse yet are mails in a different file or email format than you’re using now, due to having changed computers or mail programs (e.g. outlook express to eudora to thunderbird). are you really going to try and go through those, given that it’s even more of a pain in the ass to try to find something to open up and read those files?
and how about mail from chat lists? just people in some e-community you’re in talking about whatever topic of the day/week/month, current goings on, where to buy the best toothbrush, what color are your socks today.
so why keep this shit at all?
then again, this adds up to what, 200, 300, maybe 500MB? that’s less than a cd-r. hell, since it’s text, if you compress it in a archive, maybe it’s less than 150MB.
for that much, who cares? so why do i keep thinking about it?
zero’s comment:
Master & Commander is good in that it didn’t suck they way you’d expect a Russel Crowe film to suck.
reminded me of something that roo and i have been bandying about for some time now. when did being just ok become the standard for acceptability? you see this all the time, people recommending things saying, “well, it’s not bad” or “it’s not terrible” or “it doesn’t suck”. what? are you kidding me? i can continue doing whatever i’m doing and have the same level of not being exposed to things that don’t suck by not watching/reading/listening to whatever you’re talking about, much less subject myself to something that’s just artistically tepid.
when did just not being bad start being the threshold for viewing? if you ask me, you shouldn’t watch a movie unless it’s actually good in some way, however you want to define it (acting, plot, direction, effects, action, whatever). why waste time watching things that don’t suck when you can watch things that are not only not just not sucky, but actually good, or even great? i just watched buster keaton in the general the other day, and it was fantastic. a little silent movie in black and white which could mop the floor with most crap out today.
i’m not trying to make this a rant on how things were better in the old days when we walked to school uphill and wrote on boulders, etc. but just don’t sell yourself or your time short.
mediocrity is a virus. don’t let it spread.
it’s so easy:
1. send flowers. there’s just no argument about this. the girls like it, so just shut up and do it. call up a local florist nearby wherever you the flowers sent (her work, her house, etc.). just order a nice bouquet, maybe some local spring mix instead of the typical roses.
2. take her out to dinner on v-day. hopefully you’ve already made reservations at a nice restaurant, if not, do it now!
it’s really not that hard.
i was reading this article on slate on how hdtv would affect viewing of not only standard television and hollywood fare, but also porn. while hdtv is a boon to sports, giving unparalleled detail and quality, it’s a little too detailed and revealing for the current production of television and movies, revealing things like makeup tricks and all the before undetectable little flaws of all your favorite (and previously glamourously beautiful) movie stars.
the article claims that this might hit porn even harder, as its actors are even less naturally beautiful, given that their main attraction also involves a more physical type of acting prowess. however, i’m not sure this is really the case. do we really want our porn stars to be that beautiful? some of them are, but most of them are really made up and surgically altered to an extreme aesthetic, thus the whole term of porn star boobs describing incredibly fake and pneumatic breast implants. i mean when someone stick thin as briana banks (careful, porn link) has huge grapefruit sized breasts that hang/float strangely (and yet in a porn star way, still erotically) from her chest, what standard of beauty are we trying to depict, anyway? maybe hdtv will reveal a greater level of exaggerated and amplified fake beauty, and it’ll be even more exciting because it’s even more fake.
however, HDTV has revealed that some glamorous stars look a lot more pedestrian than we’ve been led to believe. And the makeup tricks that protect the aging and less-than-perfect are easy to spot in HDTV. perhaps this will only thus threaten the traditional stars that we know and love. seeking perfect idols, will we accept the imperfections, or will we demand perfect specimens? maybe this will force cg-enhanced stars to cover all of the real flaws of nature. or maybe it will come to a point where you’re idolizing a cg construct, or maybe cg constructs of stars. much like movies where stars are playing cg versions of themselves (tom hanks in the upcoming polar express), we’ll only accept the perfectly rendered versions. everything coming back full circle from the talkie days, where the silent stars couldn’t make the transition, now it’s back to stars who can act and have excellent physical emoting skills, but who don’t necessarily have to be beautiful.
ok, probably not. but what if?
i’m back from the abyss. ok, just being melodramatic, seeing as i’m just back from a hellish week of work, which is little to complain about since hmc has weeks like this all the time. basically i was up at 5 or 6 every day, driving down to corporate for all day meetings or sales seminars, and then prepping for a big presentation later in the week, and then spending the evenings in business and customer dinners, not getting home until 10 or 11. just a little tiring, that’s all. definitely a beautiful luxury to be able to sleep in on the weekends.
i was sitting in sales training this week, and while the content was good, i’m thinking, “how many times can they present the same stuff in a different way?” there are several prevalent theories on successful selling, but really, at some point they’re just variations on the same thing, and how many times do they need to drill them into you? i guess since they keep increasing your quota, they feel obligated to say that they helped you try to attain it.
oh, and i watched seabiscuit, since it was up for best picture, and it was actually really good. yes, it was pretty mainstream and kind of a tearjerker in a orchestrated root for the underdog sort of way, but it was very well done, and i certainly had my tears jerked several times. there was one part at the end where it was a little too melodramatic, but otherwise, it was pretty good. so much that if it actually won best picture, i wouldn’t be outraged. i wouldn’t say it’s better than lotr: return of the king or lost in translation, both of which i loved, and i haven’t seen mystic river or master and commander, so i can’t compare it to them.