never knows best...

dry as toast

Lacrosse. Gotta support San Jose's whacky sports. It was actually pretty decent to watch in my opinion. It is interesting because the players are basically allowed to mug each other, and defense seems to consist of whacking the person with the ball with your stick. The seating was okay too, sandwhiched in front of a guy who knew about lacrosse (all the better to understand what is actually going on) and behind some guys who were heckling the opposing goalie. Fun stuff.



Only other the interesting thing of note is that I have had something to drink both today and yesterday. Yesterday at happy hour with the rivals and coworkers, I had a beer and half a Southern Comfort on the rocks (only half because the girl drank half of it when I offered her some). Today I had a beer that I paced through the Stealth game, and by the final quarter it was pretty nasty, but it probably made the game just a little more enjoyable.

I think I finally understand why I think I used to eat so fast, yet currently am outpaced by just about everyone I eat with. It all has to do with portions.

So, as a young boy to young man, I guess I did not eat much, which lead to my belief that I am a faster than average eater. This continued to freshman year at the DC, where of course you can eat only so many burgers before deciding that one burger a meal is enough.

Then a lot of solo eating, so it never was much of an issue.

But now, with eating lots with Amy, with coworkers, and even with family (for some reason I am getting larger and larger portions of rice), it is becoming very apparent that I am a slow eater. So sad... Oh well, I can still finish a quick meal in like 10 minutes, but for a real meal it will take me a while.

The cracks in the illusions of youth are starting to show.

I now understand why when I was checking my RSS feed on Amy's computer I could not see images, and why I never noticed it before. It is all in the browser. For the past couple days I have been using Firefox at work because the internet proxy has been flakey, and I did not want to mess with my IE settings, plus the pop up blocker is appreciated. So, it looks like the Gecko rendering engine handles the XML it gets from the feed differently than how IE handles it. Interesting stuff. Well it is to me and my non-cool, but cool geekiness.

Since RSS is still a topical next big thing that will change and revolutionize the internet, it is nice that Blogger automatically creates feeds. Especially nice cause I get to read people's blogs without increasing their hit counters, which of course they must prefer as well because of course they do not want to note my pointless browsing.

A couple of interesting things about my RSS feed. First off, it looks like images now show up in the feeds. A nice change, it gives me even less reason to increase other people's hit counters (actually just checked and it does not look like I get to see your images). And the other change, well not really change because I think it has always been like that, is that my RSS feed only shows posts up to August 16 (when I make Blogger show the most recent 999 posts), the day I started using titles. That kinda sucks because it means that I will not be able to just save the XML as an archive of my blog text. Oh well, other work arounds will arise.

I have not been online much for a while, and I guess that might continue until I move (if I continue with my decision to move to Pittsburg). But, even then I will be moving to a house with no utilities (for now at least), so maybe a month more of sporadic blogging and online chatting. Am I neglecting too many non-Amy related things? Nah. Probably not, not too much that needs much maintenance.

For your viewing pleasure, me punching some hapless IKEA stuffed animal.

Oh and Murakami's new book got released today. I should have gone to a local bookstore to check it out. Oh well, I did my part by putting myself on the reserve list to borrow it from the library. That is enough of being a fan for me. At least until I read it.

Though if he does come around here for a book signing, I will certainly buy whatever is necessary to get a signed book. But thinking more about the books that I have gotten signed, basically after I have gone to an author's book signing, my interest in that author has dipped significantly. It happened to Pratchett and Stephenson, it can happen to Murakami too.

A fried potato a day makes the day that much better. Saturday: latke, Sunday: croquette. Mmm.

Wow Streamload is offering 10 GB of free space. Of course only in 100 MB increments, but still, that is quite a comeback for one of the more abused free online disk services.

I remember that it all started with Streamload (I am pretty sure it was Streamload) and stupid Chris asking me to download Escaflowne episodes for him. But as I downloaded, I watched them, and then I got hooked. And so that is how I got sucked into downloading and watching a whole lot of pointless stuff. Now it is pretty minimal, I am only watching School Rumble right now (and it is pretty pointless, but it has it's moments) and maybe Samurai Champloo when it starts up again. 4 year arc.

I finally listened to the whole Postal Service CD (my brother has it), and I enjoyed the nice stereo effects on the uber-hit single that I never noticed before. Go headphones!

Oh and from my fantasy basketball scouting I see that there is a South Korean basketball player playing for the Blazers? Who woulda thunk it? I should just add him to my team to show how good my team is. Actually my team sucks and I would lose my 2nd place spot in a second if I added more dead weight to my line-up. But still... I would get a lot of cool points for having him on my team.

Things of note in Vegas: it is cold, people smoke, and Nick sucks at gambling. Now to elaborate on each.

It is cold. It was really cold, especially when you spend a good 2, 3 hours wandering around the Strip late at night. Even more so when you are hungry, though apparently I still was not hungry enough to finish off all of a Denny's Denver Scramble. That Hostess Choco-diles (think a Ho Ho, but more Twinkie like) was damn good though, and from some vague internet searching just done, it looks like it is pretty rare too. Well, back to the weather, so it was apparently cold enough to snow, at least onto the tops of hotels (it was raining ground level).

People smoke. Ya, so of course people smoke, but it has been a long while since I have been exposed to that much secondhand smoke. My eyes felt and looked like crap all weekend long.

Nick sucks at gambling. Dude, even UC Irvine rises up and beats the spread in their game against Pacific to screw over my parlay. $26 profit if they lost by more than 4 (they lost by 2). So ya, not a lucky weekend for Nick, I guess I should have learned how to play craps or baccarat. Of course the main reason I think playing baccarat is cool is because it was the only game dignified enough to grace Brain's Palace (Brain's ill conceived hotel/casino).









Yes, I look stupid in a hat, and oddly in this one instance it does not stop me from wearing one.

The more I think about it, the more certain I am that I am spoiled. Sheltered might be a nicer word for it, but spoiled is pretty apt.

And nowhere better than Las Vegas for a spoiled child to go.

New year resolutions:

1. Procrastinate less. I got off to a real good start, right? Only 2 days late on resolutions. Quote of note, my high school senior quote: "Procrastination is good time management!"
2. Expand my knowledge base by another category. Classical music or actual cooking (not just watching TV cooking shows, I already have that covered) would be cool, but frankly anything that is not work related would be good.
3. Have 5 things in my lists next time. Maybe it is because I have not put enough thought into these things, but 5 seemed like a hard number to reach, and 3 was pretty straight foward. Plus 5 is a normal'er number.

There you have it.