sportless season

We have now entered a time of the year when the TV loses most of its value. The NFL season is of no interest to me (screw the Dolts), and the first F1 race is still over a month away.

But wait, a rain of hope! I caught a re-run of a British Touring Car race, and it was goooood... just what I needed. Sure, not as flashy as F1, but at least not as dirt-ass plebeian as NASCAR. Great racing, lots of overtaking, and even more fender-on-fender hateration. Stan likes.

counting the days

Oh how long it's been! Finally we can talk about global warming, domestic surveillance, and other government f#ckups. This must be how political prisoners in the old country must've felt in 1953.

Two more years. We just need to hold out a little longer... and hope that no more Supreme Court judges retire.

lexus self-park

I was wondering how that feature worked... well, see for yourself.

brrr

People in Alaska must be piiiised to see their state shown next to Hawaii on all the national weather maps. Take today, for example: Alaska, -8F. Hawaii, 79F. Yaouch.

not so good

The Patriot nation is not so happy today. How can we be up 21-3 at halftime, only to blow it so utterly in the second half? Uhhhh... no use watching the Super Bowl now, it's pretty clear who's gonna win.

watch out for that signal 6!

My dad tried to send me an email, but his message bounced back with the following:

5.1.0 - Unknown address error 554-'5.0.0 prog_map_lookup(addrfilter): child died on signal 6'

Nice.

ruski-susie

Sue is trying to learn Russian. She's expressed that desire a long time ago, but we quickly found that I was a lousy teacher. I tried to teach her the alphabet, but found that I was forgetting several of the 33 letters. Not so good.

Now, armed with a new textbook, we shall try again!

stan and alcohol do not mix

Uhh... I have a lot of explainin' to do when Susan gets home...

$400 big ones

So, I've read an estimate today that put the cost of the Iraq war at 400 billion dollars. That's a large sum, OK, but hard for me to understand. I know a B-2 bomber costs the taxpayers $2bln, so I guess we could've spent all that dough by building 20 B-2 bombers and crashing them into the ground... actually, that would be kinda neat! And, if Baghdad happened to be the location of those multiple crashes, and if those bombers were carrying nukes, we would've achieved the same exact result as what we have now. But I digress.

To come up with a better way of understanding that sum, let's take the population of US, and divide it into $400bln. If my math skills are holding up OK, that would be way over $1000 per person.

So, next time you're thinking about buying that something that looks nice but costs just a little too much, just remember the $1000 that you could've had...

we need help for realz

If anybody, anybody at all, is looking for a user experience / usability / design job, let me know! My team is hiring, so if good pay, great benefits, 23 days of vacation, and a chance to work with Master Stan appeal to you, let me know. In addition, Master Stan will be handsomely rewarded for referrals, so there's definitely something in it for him too ;)

a very deer island

The weather today was almost as amazing, so I decided to check out a place that looked interesting... on Google Maps, that is. Winthrop, a town on the western shore of Boston Harbor, has a strip of land that extends south. On the tip, there's something that looked like a park, so there I was, GPS'ing my way to a new adventure.

I found Deer Island - not really an island any more, but a hill overlooking the bay. As I've learned from the informational placards, it was one of the places in the harbor that was filled with land to make it somewhat useful. The airport, in plain sight from the hill, was created in a similar fashion (and, from the looks of it, will be absolutely foobar if the water level rises even 3 feet). Planes landing at Logan were making their final approach right over were I was: they would appear out of nowhere, roaring over the slim sliver of land, and dropping onto the tarmac that, to me, was indistinguishable from the blue water.

The view was fantastic:

But, it wasn't all roses. Deer Island is also home to a huuge wastewater processing facility, and the pedestrian walkway loops around the plant. I like what they did, though - instead of closing down the land, the planners let folks wander around and take in the sights. As a bonus, I learned all about how sewage from 32 communities is processed!

sixty-nine!

Yup, it is January, and yup, it is nearly 70 in Boston. I've seen many things in my day - negative 20C in Leningrad, snow in April - but never anything like this. Oh yeah, we demolished the 1913 record of 63F. Sweet.

Susan and I walked through Cambridge, across the Charles, into Beacon Hill, through the Common, and into Chinatown. We ended up at a hot plate place, and had a heck of a dinner. Susan tipped them really well, but I dunno - all they did was give us the raw ingredients!

vista, u never should've stolen our name

As soon as Microsoft stole the name for its new OS from our SI project (NetVista), it was doomed. First, it was delayed Gordon-style, and now chilling descriptions of its content management scheme are surfacing. If even 1% of what we're hearing is true, people will rebel, and march on Redmond with torches and pitchforks...

Then again, the same folks sat idly by when our god-given right to download free music was taken away by RIAA, or when online poker was suffocated in the US. Time to start a revolution, perhaps?

breaking news: snow!

Ford's message about the current President is a big deal... we're talking about one prominent Republican criticizing another, from beyond the grave. Yet what are we hearing about on the news? Snow in Colorado. Imagine that, in the middle of winter! In Colorado! Argh.

low resolution

I realized pretty early into 2007 that I did not make any new year resolutions this year. Am I growing complacent in my old age? Too easily satisfied? Or, burdened by the brilliance of my achievements, have I forgotten what it's like to burrow forward?