spell "Jordan" with a backwards R!

Ah yessss! F1 team, formerly know as Jordan, has been sold to a Russian dude and will now be called "Midland". A bit disappointing - "Mother Russia" or something more ethnic, like "Zhiguli", would be more appropriate.

Anyhoo, a Russian driver is testing for them, and very well could get to drive a Formula 1 car before an American gets to do it.

Without a major manufacturer's backing, I would be surprised if the team scores any points next year. I just hope that one of the drivers can take out Schubastard when he tries to overtake 'em. Ah yes. Nothing would warm my heart more than a fireball with that neo-Nazi in the middle of it.

IKEA is a-OK!

Sunday was the day. Sue and I hit up IKEA for the first time in our collective lives.

To give you some background, IKEA just opened the first store in Massachusetts. To say that it was a success would be an understatement. Driving there, you see so many cops directing traffic, you think that you're heading into a maximum security prison. Which begs the question, who's guarding the maximum security prisons?

But, I digress. We were lucky to find parking - the insanely huge parking lot was f.u.l.l. Did I mention that I was driving my Prelude? The irony of driving a sports car to a furniture store has not hit me yet.

Anyhoo, the store itself is a lot like a museum: full of people and interesting things. IKEA, though, is a museum, where you can touch the latter. They have EVERYTHING and the kitchen sink. Several kitchen sinks, actually!

The shopping experience is a bit bizzarre. You walk around for hours looking for stuff; once you find something, you write down the item name, and then pick it up at the end of the tour. Sounds easy? Well... it would be, if the items were not labeled in Swedish!

Let me give you an example - we wrote down "TREVLIG, Cooking & Dining". OK, so far, so good. Then, once we got down to the pickup area, we realized that we have no idea what a "Trevlig" was. Here's my conversation with the store person:
- "Hi, I'm looking for a Trevlig."
- "Okay. What is it?"
- "I don't know. I was hoping you could tell me."

So yeah, after we got all the Trevligs, Firnufts, and Svalkas, we sped through the checkout and went to the loading bay...

Yeah, we took the Prelude... lets just say that it may not be the ideal vehicle for transporting heavy-ass, huge IKEA boxes!

Still, somehow we got all the Bjirkuddens home. Therein came the second challenge of the day: assembly. I must give IKEA credit - the directions and the materials are great. But, be forewarned - a power screwdriver comes in really handy! As does a handyman. Such as me. I don't mean to brag, but now we have the most stable dining table on the planet.

Now, we just need to sell the old crap on Craigslist!

um yeah, TAX the hybrids...

Another interesting tidbit. There is a proposal out there to start taxing the hybrid vehicles more because they use less gas. What the hell.

The administration said that it would veto an alternative solution, which would be to set the tax on gas to match inflation (it has remained constant since 1993). Of course! That would raise the price of gas slightly, and god forbid maybe even cause some people to conserve! And we can't have that, for it will hurt oil profits...

I'm gonna have to check whether my Russian passport is still valid.

last rites

Here's the last picture of my baby, before I hand her off to a stranger. Now I know how fathers feel.


Now, think about the amount of coordination involved in one person from Illinois getting a vehicle from another person in Massachusetts... how in the heck did people do this before computers?

uh!!

How can one president be SO wrong?

OK, check this out. The administration is denying funding to a group that is fighting HIV in Africa because they provide referral services for safe abortions. So... save the fetuses so that they can grow up and die from disease?

Sometimes I wish that Barbara considered an abortion.

go blue!

Michigan vs Ohio State, 1PM today

let the shopping frenzy begin

No idea if these are legit: Black Friday Specials. In any case, it's gonna be great... hitting the stores, then hitting the job. Yes, I'll be working on the Friday after Thanksgiving, yay!

I'm lovin' it!

YES!

When Susan showed me this site, I could not believe my eyes:

i-am-asian.com

Just take a look for yourself...

McRice, anyone?

watchin' oprah

OK, so when you live with a girl, you make tradeoffs. You trade some TV time for home-cooked dinners. It's part of the deal.

Sometimes, though, I like what I get in this bargain. Today, Oprah had girls parade around in bras. Yes. I've never seen an H-cup before - or even thought they existed. Apparently, these things go up to double-J. Crazy.

creator of the freakin' internet

Tim Berners-Lee, father of the web, recently spoke at my company. As most geniuses, he is sometimes hard to understand. Especially if this particular genius jumps from topic to topic, and then goes into an incomprehensible rant on RDF.

Anyhoo, one message that I thought was really interesting is this: when trying to implement a standard, make every step a step downhill for somebody. Tim was talking about HTTP, HTML, and a whole bunch of other doohickeys that now make up the web. Hard to believe that not too long ago that stuff wasn’t even there, and no one could agree on interoperable standards. Thinking about that definitely puts the issues that I’m facing at work into perspective (by making them seem like child’s play).

At the end of the talk, somebody asked Tim about what he thought the web will be in the future. Tim answered, “I hope that I don’t know, because the web, like paper, was designed to be constraint-free.” That response sure sounds different from anything an IT executive would say – pretty much every company out there dreams of locking its customers into their standard to reap the profits.

Good thing Bill Gates didn’t invent the web.

normal...

Great quote from Ellen Goodman, found by Sue:

"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."

russian roulette

My company is having a raffle for the limited number of the remaining flu shots. Luckily, I don't give a crap about getting one, but I wonder how I would feel if I was closer to the average age of an employee at my company (54, last time I checked).

By the way, George W., did we not have the same shortage last year? Maybe those secret chemical factories in the now-subdued Iraq can help us out a little? Oh, wait...

selling my sol

So, the yellow 'Sol saga seems to be over. Sold it on eBay for $2025, and this time the guy sounds serious about picking it up (and has already put down the deposit). When I talked to him, he said that he's getting it for his daughter who just turned 16, and is really looking forward to surprising her... that's nice!

Another thing that's nice is that I drove this car hard for over a year, and still made $25 on the whole deal (since I bought it for $2000).

crash

'Crash' is a good movie. I bet twenty people probably told you this already. Maybe you should be a better listener, and get it on DVD.

I like my salsa in a jar

Take note: salsa lessons may sound like fun, and I'm sure that for some people they are. However, you may not enjoy them as much if you're male of a heterosexual persuasion. You may also find salsa annoying if you're inherinetly bad at dancing (i.e., if you're white).

I had all three strikes against me. I mean, I am perfectly capable of figuring some stuff out - with paintball, I was shooting straight and tucking into bunkers on my first day. Not so with salsa. This was the most unnatural thing ever, and I hated every second of it.

At least Susan had a blast.

photoshop this

Is it just me, or does the open/save workflow in Photoshop suck? For some reason, that damn app never knows where I keep my files, and where I would like to save them. Chances are, if I work on a file, I want to save it to the same location. Photoshop stubbornly disagrees.

fusion of what?

OK, take a look at Ford Fusion... let's compare:




Notice any resemblance? I'm not even gonna mention that the taillights are a complete copy of 4th gen Prelude's. What can I say? I guess imitation is the highest form of flattery.

notorious MSG

Gotta give Jude the credit on this one: even when he is 600 miles away, he still knows more about what's going on in my back yard than I do. Apparently, this band, Notorious MSG, was about to play at UMass Lowell, and I had no idea! Good thing Judeslav came through, and Sue and I went to enjoy the show (but not before we had to sit through three hours of *really* amateur performances.

In any case, this band rocks in an utterly surprising manner. Imagine three guys that look like they're from a kithen of an 80's Chinese restaurant, rapping. Oh yeah, they lit up egg rolls onstage, too.

I leave you with a sample of their lyrics:

"We party every night
so proud to be Fresh Off the Boat for life
yeah muthasucka stand up for your rights

A green card would be nice
so proud to be Fresh Off the Boat for life
yeah muthasucka now's the time to fight"

what's that on my chin?

That's right, the skin is out, and the beard is in!

usability day

For those who didn't know that Nov. 3rd was World Usability Day (i.e., 99.99% of the population)... well, yeah, it was. Check out this site, http://www.worldusabilityday.org: people actually did stuff!

One of those people was yours truly. The usability dudes and dudettes collected in the Museum of Science and proceeded to set up exhibits that tried to explain what the heck usability is. Trust me, it's not easy. Particularly if your audience is kids with a 0.15s attention span.

So, what did we do? We set up posters of poorly designed doors, and tried to tie the whole "it's not you, it's the designer" theme to software usability.

Did I mention that kids have a 0.15s attention span?

But anyhoo, if even one of those kids learned something even remotely educational, we did our job. Even if it did take 12 hours. When they said "World Usability DAY", they weren't screwing around!


The MITRE crew in full force.

Stan Jr.

Our miniscule apartment will now be home to three creatures, two thirds of which are named "Stan". That's right, I'm talking about our new beta fish!


Stan Jr. is one chill dude; even the flash from the camera doesn't disturb him in the least. He's cool like that.