きょうは きんーようびです。。。

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

こんにちは！

きのうは　ろくーがつ、　にじゅうくーにち、　もくーようびでした。

きょうは　ろくーがつ、　さんじゅうーにち、　きんーようびです。

あしたは　しちーがつ、　ついたち、　どーようびです。

いま　なんじですか？

ごご　ごじーさんじゅうよんふんです。

きのうは　げつーようび　でしたか？
いいえ、　きのうは　げつーようび　では　ありませんでした。

Blissful

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Jen-tizzle snapped this shot of me somewhere up in the Marin headlands.  I dig it.  There are more pictures from her visit here.

Feel Better, Rui!

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Rui Carmo is recovering from a hospitalization.  He runs the blog/wiki The Tao of Mac, which is hands-down my favorite place to go for industry news, insights, and humor.  He's closed all commenting on his site and is already inundated with email, so I'm posted this in hopes that it shows up in his referer logs.  You're in my thoughts today, Rui.  Get better.

Egads!

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

I can't think of a worse way to die:

A Disney Web site description of the ride says: "Zoom from 0-60 mph with the force of a supersonic F-14, take in high-speed loops and turns synchronized to a specially recorded Aerosmith soundtrack."

Poor kid.

きょうは もくーようびです。。。

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

きょうは　ろくーがつ　にじゅくーにち　もくーようび　です。

きのうは　すいーようび　でした。

あしたは　きんーようび　です。

わたし　の　たんじょびは　ごーがつ　じゅくーにち　です。

あなた　の　たんじょび　いつ　ですか。

More quarters please...

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Does pinball count?  Arcade games were fine and dandy - I have fond memories of spending hours in front of the original Gauntlet multi-player and also Samurai Shodown (yeah, I think they really spelled it Shodown)... but I loved pinball the best.

Jen and I visited Santa Cruz boardwalk last weekend and I found my all-time favorite pinball game - Funhouse.  I took a picture for old times sake.  They had one of these at the local Chuck E. Cheese's where I grew up.  There was a big, creepy animatronic head that would taunt you.  I loved it.

Hooray for Robots!

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

I really dig the new robot themes.  Mena ftw!  Also; I got a nifty error telling me that the Compose doesn't work in Safari, but I don't seem to be having a problem.  Maybe I'm just not using all the whiz-bang features.

I love this recipe...

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Spicy tofu stir fry!  Tofu cubes, red and yellow bell peppers, garlic and green onions, string beans and zucchini, roasted pine nuts and drizzled with a bit of honey and lime juice to make it sweet.  You roll the tofu cubes in a super-secret spice mixture prior to frying them.

Morning Jazz

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)



Dropped my car off at the shop this morning for its 7500-mile inspection - just a thousand miles late.  Took the buss through the Tenderloin (always an adventure) and stopped off at the Apple store to ogle the new Macbooks before walking into work at the SoMA office.  All the while I was in the mood for jazz...

I would've liked to share a video with you, but YouTube's API seems to be funky.  It's not finding the video I'm after, so I can't add it to my Vox collection.  But if you're in the mood for some morning jazz, check out Sculpture by Skalpel.

Update: Searching again, later, I was able to find the video for Sculpture - don't know if anything was changed or if YouTube has some caching that needed updating or what.  Anyway, it's here so I'm adding it to the top of this post.  Cheers.

The soundtrack to my life

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Definitely, absolutely, "Come and Play in the Milky Night" by Stereolab.  The rest you can find on my last.fm profile.

Tortoise Live at Werchter

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)



Rock Werchter is apparently a music festival in Belgium, and apparently YouTube is a great place to find videos of live performances.  This Tortoise performance includes the following tracks:

1. Stretch
2. Ten Day Interval
3. Swung from the Gutters
4. The Lithium Shifts
5. Crest
6. Seneca

And features some nice xylophone action and their rock-tastic dual-drumming.  Enjoy.

Life is for enjoying

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Tish and I had scheduled a day of it this past Sunday.  We were going to randomly pick one of the cards from the SF Walks deck and, well, walk it.  She shows up with some burned cd's and we opted to do a drive from the Bay Area Backroads deck instead.  We decided on driving to Napa and visiting the Niebaum-Coppola Winery.

We couldn't find it.  I must've turned around on 29 about a dozen times.  The best part of the day was finding, out there in the middle of nowhere, a Dean & Deluca.  I thought there was only the one in Soho, but no, out there in the middle-of-nowhere-Napa, was this little slice of grocery heaven.  Luckily I escaped with spending less than $100, but just barely.  We got some deli meat, some cheese, some olives, a baguette, some drinks, and some ridiculously scrumptious desserts.

We looked for a place to have a picnic, but no.  Eventually we gave up and called the number on the Niebaum-Coppola card from the deck.  Turns out they'd renamed it The Rubicon Estate, and we'd driven past it a dozen times.  Bastards.  So we pulled into the drive and were greeted by an attendant who explained how things work.  We pulled forward to another attendant and asked him where we could have a picnic and he basically told us "in your car, foolio, go park over there."  So we had an in-car picnic and by the time we were done, the freaking place was closed.  So Rubicon sucks.  We're cool, they suck.  That's how it goes.

At least it was a lovely drive and we both got to see Napa for the first time.

Late on the Wikipedia Birthday Meme

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

After reading a few posts on this meme I just had to be a sheep and follow along.  Mostly I was just curious.  Watashi no tanjoobi wa go-gatsu juugo-nichi.

Events:

1. 1802 - The Légion d'Honneur is founded by Napoleon Bonaparte.
2. 1897 - Oscar Wilde is released from Reading Gaol.
3. 1962 - A birthday salute to U.S. President John F. Kennedy takes place at Madison Square Garden, New York. The highlight is Marilyn Monroe's infamous rendition of Happy Birthday

Births:

1. 1870 - Albert Fish, American serial killer and cannibal (d. 1936)
2. 1946 - André the Giant, French professional wrestler (d. 1993)

Deaths:

1. 1526 - Emperor Go-Kashiwabara of Japan (b. 1464)

Challenging Your Heroes

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

I used to watch The Pink Panther and listen to Goon Show episodes with my father, so I've just about always considered myself a Peter Sellers fan.  As such, I've avoided The Life and Death of Peter Sellers as I was afraid that the reality of his life would take something away from my view of him as an actor.  Kind of like how Chevy Chase wasn't quite so funny after I found out he was a complete jackass.

Last night I was at the video store and I couldn't bring myself to rent the new Pink Panther flick with Steve Martin and Jean Reno.  It might have had something to do with my absolute loathing of Beyonce.  Instead I finally broke down and picked up The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.

At first I was really disappointed by the writing and direction.  Geoffrey Rush's performance was also particularly irksome at first.  I just didn't see the Peter Sellers in him.  The stand-out actors were Emily Watson (yeah, that blind chick from Red Dragon) and the children.  As the movie went on, Rush fell more into character - or I got tired and stopped noticing how bad it was.  The plot device of interjecting Rush in the guise of those people most important to him to deliver monologues to the audience also seemed particularly insipid but got better over time.

The movie was not without bits of charm sprinkled here and there.  ("Do you still love us, Daddy?" "Of course I do, just not as much as I love Sophia Loren.", etc.).  I wish more time was spent exploring the relationship between Sellers and Blake Edwards.  I hadn't quite realized how rocky their relationship was.  Also left undeveloped in the movie was Sellers' relationship with his children.  Instead the writer/director seemed to want to focus on Sellers' relationship with women, yet only two of his four wives appeared in the film.  One of those was dreadfully played by Charlize Theron.

Sadly, the Sellers I thought I knew through his characters is now forever lost.  The innocence of his gags is now tainted by knowledge that he was, in his own special way, a jackass.  The only good I can say about the film is that it made me want to read Being There.

Helpful URL

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

cory: http://www.tamponcrafts.com/toupee.html

crw: think i'll pass.

Welcome!

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

I, for one, welcome our new 0.7.3 overlords.  Where does one find a change log?  Mm?

Blast from the Past

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

(or, Missing NY on a hot, muggy kin-yoobi)

It's been a while since I've perused my old journal, but I had cause to today and came across this.  I haven't been to NYC since I left it in 2003 and today I'm pining for one of those breezy autumn days in the city.

I've been feeling very conflicted about a lot of things lately, almost to the point of nihilism.  Contributing to that in no small way has been my purchase of the Criterion Collection version of Mike Leigh's Naked.  It had been a few years since I'd last seen it, but it really stuck with me.  The liner notes had a couple of really good critical essays on the work.  One by Amy Taudin shed some light on the inclusion of the Jeremy character - who until then I thought was extraneous.  She sees him as a way to contrast Johnny's playful abuse with Jeremy's actual deviance.  It makes sense, but doesn't make it any easier to watch.

If you dislike hostility, hatred, emotional and physical abuse, and characters with a penchant for mindfucking each other in long dialogues - skip this one.

Vox update

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Very cool.  I'm still playing but the Flickr-integration made me smile.  I just downloaded Flock and Vox didn't seem supported, would like to see that in 0.8.  Would also be nice to have digg/del.icio.us support.  The new Compose page was a bit of a shock, but I'm getting used to it.  It feels a bit more... solid.

Flickr/Photobucket candy to build on qotd success - show users a random image from their flickr/photobucket accounts and ask them to tell the story behind it.

Just found the auto-complete on tags.  Nice.

Quick Updates

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Trip to Vancouver was pushed back, Reno was cancelled altogether.  Tish and I saw The Omen on 6/6/6.  Mona came to visit from Arkansas and we did fun touristy things.  There are pictures.  Tish and Christine took me to The Hemlock on punk rock slideshow night and I felt ridiculously out of place... but it was good to get out like normal people should.

I've decided to try at least one post a day in Japanese - mostly just saying what day it is, so I can remember all the different numbering systems and keep up on my other vocabulary.

I've been behind the curve on digg and youtube, but I've got accounts at both places now.  I've also been exploring google spreadsheets and the google/gmail firefox sync extension.

I haven't had much time to work on ninjai, but I noticed that there's a public repository for Data::ObjectDriver, so I plan to port from CDBI asap.  Hooray!

Recent temptations successfully resisted: DS Lite, black Macbook, dual-boot Vista on work ThinkPad, staying out late at The Fiery Furnaces tonight and potentially missing an early day of work tomorrow in Walnut Creek.

Practice makes perfect

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Irrashaimase, Boynton-san!

きょうは　ろくーがつ　じゅうごーにち　もくーようび　です！

My Geanealogy

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

William Whipple, Jr.

My, how far the apple falls from the tree.

Images in Comments

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

I just discovered that I can't post images in comments on Vox.  That's sad, I had a real snarky comment-image in mind and I can't post it.  Blast!

Actually, it would be cool to be able to access stuff from my library while posting a comment.  Someone must've already thought about that, right?

The most embarrassing CD I own...

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

It's got to be that one Andreas Dorau album where he's in drag on the album cover.  German techno at its best/worst.  I was turned on to his stuff by a friend of mine in college and it's graced my collection ever since.

CoLinux Lazyweb

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Dear Lazyweb,

Microsoft is out to thwart me.  For weeks now I've been using CoLinux (0.6.3/FC1 upgraded to 3) on the ThinkPad that's been issued to me by the company I'm consulting for.  Unbeknownst to me, Windows silently installed an update that ate my TAP32 driver.  The CoLinux wiki says that the TAP32 driver should act as a bridge between your connection to the Internet and your CoLinux installation via Windows Connection Sharing.

It's worked for a while, and it still works.  Sort of.  What's changed is that my TAP32 adapter has disappeared from the list of LAN connections and I'm not longer able to switch Connection Sharing sources between my ethernet and wireless adapters.  Presently, it's stuck being shared via my wireless adapter.  What's weirder is that the TAP32 driver shows up in ipconfig.

Now you see it...

Now you don't...

Has this happened to anyone else?  How can I get my TAP32 driver back so I can choose which network connection gets shared to my CoLinux installation?  Help!

What song makes you happy?

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

"Fabulous Day" by The Essex Green.

There's something about this song that perks me up.  It's really the only song that comes to mind where no matter what context I hear it in, it makes me happy.  It's by no means one of my favorite songs - a lot of those have memories attached that leave me feeling bittersweet or forlorn.  This is just a throwaway song of goodness.

Vox Invites

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

So I have unlimited Vox starter accounts to give away.  The invite page doesn't specifically state that once someone has a starter account they'll be able to upgrade to a full account later.  Common sense says they will, of course.  But I thought it might be nice to include some text that makes it explicit.

Hello, World

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Wow.  I must say, I'm very impressed with Vox.  It works just like hosted blogging software should.  It's pretty snappy.  It's got a cool name (curious who gets credit for it).  The only downside to it is that I think it will end up poaching me and most of my friends from LJ and MySpace.  We'll have to re-establish all our friendships, etc.  That's a bit of a pain, but in the end it'll be worth it.

I told ydnar that I think the vox main page should have a flash animation with Mean saying "vox... vox... vox..." through a vocoder.  That would be keen.

Congrats to Team Vox!