coffeefog

snow day!

free plane tickets

I feel guilty for not giving Lydia credit for the painting in the last post - that's her work. But she's usually so modest about stuff, I thought she'd feel weird if I put her name to it. But she's a fucking genius, so there. I originally commisioned her to sketch a "robot drinking coffee" tattoo, but she was more comfortable working with this subject in a landscape. I may or may not get the entire painting tattooed onto my back - we'll have to see if it will fit underneath the tattoo of Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman arm-wrestling that I got across my shoulders at USENIX 2001.

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Thanks to Monzy for pointing out this free ticket anywhere in the world on American Airlines. See, JetBlue just opened up a ton of cheap fares to and from NYC. American is suffering. American would like to see JetBlue suffer, so they have come up with the following deal: fly to/from NYC twice before April 15 and get a free ticket anywhere in the world.

So it looks like, round the end of March/early April, I'm going to fly to NYC for a week, spend 3-4 days with my sister, then fly to Miami for a few days, then fly home. And then I'll have a ticket to Tokyo burning a hole in my pocket...

Katy, this is official warning to keep March 29-April 2 free...

roboticus

so... cool...

smoking lot

eric says "are you sure these pictures of me smoking in the parking lot are going to help you win that photography contest?"

i say "it's over. i think it ended in november."

"then why are you still taking pictures of me smoking in the parking lot? you must have thirty by now."

"i don't even know anymore."

best video game ever

best video game ever is Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga. Even if you thought WarioWare was the end all of GBA games, the crown prince in Nintendo's modern line, you'll be blown away by Superstar Saga. To quote a source I no longer remember, it's "the perfect blend of Final Fantasy, Zelda, and Super Mario Brothers." And that couldn't be more true.

The real pain in the ass about these Role Playing Games is that they tell you exactly how long you've been playing your saved game. In this case, over 20 hours so far. I could have learned Spanish in that time.

Every night when I'm like "hello, friends. what should we do for entertainment this evening?" and a friend says back "mayhap we should go watch some live music and drink beer!" I die a little inside, because all I really want to do is go home and play mario & luigi.

Oddly enough, I have my girlfriend's mom to thank for finding this for me. I would have completely blown this title off if it hadn't been a gift. But now I recognize it as the best videogame ever. Thank you. But let us hope that my girlfriend's parents will never read my blog.

more voting

If you don't read Dan Gillmor's eJournal you really should. Dan Gillmor is the San Jose Mercury News's technology reporter. He blogs several times a day, and it's the perfect mix of technology news, emergent net journalism, and politics.

So anyway today he pointed me at another electronic voting scandal The deal this time is that the Department of Defense is constructing a real, live internet voting system to use in the 2004 presidential elections, in which 100,000 votes will be cast from overseas military personnel. But because it's the DOD and not some private company, they actually invited a bunch of academics in to violently identify every blatant security hole in the concept.

The panel of 10 reviewers concluded:
Because the danger of successful, large-scale attacks is so great, we reluctantly recommend shutting down the development of SERVE immediately and not attempting anything like it in the future until both the Internet and the world's home computer infrastructure have been fundamentally redesigned

Other Interesting tidbits from the article:

• And we must consider the obvious fact that a U.S. general election offers one of the most tempting targets for cyber-attack in the history of the Internet, whether the attacker’s motive is overtly political or simply self-aggrandizement.


• The fact that 50 votes were cast in Florida using [internet voting], and that a change of 269 votes in the official tally of that state would have resulted in Al Gore becoming President, shows how dangerous such an assumption can be. We note that Florida is participating in 2004 in the SERVE program.

So, like, whoa. Did anybody else know that Florida was participating in a prototype internet voting scheme (in which 50 LIVE votes were cast) during the 2000 presidential election?

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Also, I've been thinking it would be really fun if I could read some sorority girls' blogs. Like MTV's Sorority Life style sorority girls. I know there are probably at least 8,000 sorority girls with blogs out there - we just need to find some. Adam, get to work.

UPDATE 2PM: Daisie scored the greek co-ed digits.So now we got the LJ hookup, but I bet Xanga and blogger are hosting no small share of the pie.

workin'

I've been working my ass off for the man. Just 4 days left until retirement.

The weekend's coming up soon, and that's pretty cool. Cause I'm tired. So my girlfriend's going to be out of town all weekend, and I don't have any plans for Sunday yet, so here are the options I've got figured out so far:

• how much ice cream can you eat in a day
  
• castlevania

and that's about it. But really Sunday will be about sitting, and maybe walking. And maybe not missing any more people's birthdays, because apparently I missed a birthday party on Monday. oops. Nobody even told me about it. That day. Nobody even told me about it that day. I don't hate you Corey, I don't. It's more just measured ambivalence.

here's to america...

Al Franken SOTU commentary

17 minute mp3 of Al Franken's State of the Union commentary is a pretty good listen. It sounds like it was put together by 5 year olds, as far as call quality and "number of times someone on the conference call hit random numbers on their touch tone phone" and too-much-giggling, but if you can look past that it's cool.

do not park here

the most beautiful spam

since i've owned my own domain name I get all sorts of great spam from people trying to sell me google juice. Spammers email me at fanciful addresses like sales at coffeefog.com and webmaster at coffeefog.com, unaware of the fact that my sales department is only staffed by 22 full-timers who are already sorely overworked, that my webmaster is a hyperactive 19 year old who ran away to run the Dean RSS feed at the Iowa caucuses and has not yet returned, and thus everyone's unable to reply to even the most well-intentioned of "improve your search engine results immediately" emails. Besides, you can't even BUY the thousands of hits that I get from being the #4 result for google:"pictures of depressing things".

That said, the body of this spam entitled "GUARANTEED TOP TEN POSITIONS ON GOOGLE & YAHOO" is fucking beautiful. This is poetry. This is intense. I love it.

bam

my rss feeds are now 2.0 compliant, and really pretty too. Instead of the 50 word plaintext summary, now I got 'em all pretty formatted and stuff. If you're running MovableType and have ugly RSS feeds, get a new RSS 2.0 template. Link via panic.com/~stevenf.

In the meantime, I wish the rest of the world would get RSS feeds so I could stop using my web browser all together. It's already cut down on my unnecessary web surfing by 80%...

money!

Yishan is an economist for the masses. I finally understand what it means when the dollar is down against the euro. If only he had explained it in terms of monkeys having sex, it might have made a little bit more sense. But I think I got the basics anyway.

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Drove down to LA this weekend. 12 hours in the car, 24 hours in beverly hills.

It was the first time I've ever had to navigate myself down there, so now I finally know the "lay of the land", or at least a tiny patch of 4% of Los Angeles. What's disturbing is that I was using a Los Angeles map that was physically the same size as the San Francisco map I always look at. So built deep into my head is this expectation that 1 inch is 1 mile. But in LA 1 inch is like 15 miles, so driving places took a lot longer than I expected. It all comes down to a problem of "scale." I just wish Yishan would explain "scale."

I'm so sorry Adam, for I've let you down. I was on Pico Blvd at 10am on sunday morning, and I didn't even take a picture of a street sign. Nor did I get to Llama school.

These are not my friends:

law and order coloring book

do you have a Law and Order Coloring Book yet? No? It's ok, neither do I. But I have it on good authority that on next Tuesday's Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Jerry Orbach, who we all know and love as the wise-cracking Detective Brisco, will be a guest. And on the show he will be receiving a complimentary coloring book, as created by Brandon Bird. "Complimentary" means that despite the normal retail price of $10, he will not have to pay for it at all.

computerising?

Do you have an anteater in your dock? Lately we've been playing this fucked up form of paper-rock-scissors using everybody's three favorite icons: anteater, hammer, and old-timey computer screen. hammer beats computer, computer beats anteater, and anteater beats hammer. I no longer understand the rationale for those levels of superiority - we used to, and quite logically, play such that hammer beat both anteater and computer, because in real life if you fought an anteater with a hammer you would probably win. Same goes for computer, unless the computer had laser eyes. But anyway, to make a long story short, hammer became the icon to throw because it was, frankly, unbeatable. Games quickly got uninteresting and now we've developed the new "anteater beats hammer" rankings. Also, I think if in reality you got an anteater and a computer together in the same room, the best you could hope for would be mutual disinterest. in other news if you are a computer nerd like me then you might enjoy reading this diebold voting machine code audit (from summer 2003). it's fun to watch a bunch of academics completely rip industry's C++ source code to shreds. they point out and critique dozens of security holes in the (accidentally leaked) code running on voting machines, so it's been a really informative read for me.

hypertext

great links from all around:

• acid trip drawings - 8 sketches drawn by a man every couple of hours during an LSD experience. this is from a government study in the sixties. source: kottke
  
• peugeot commercial is a must-see. source: dumbengineer
  

free coffee now and forever

free coffee in the park made the weekend go by pretty quick. this guy's coffee tasted really good, too.

macworld

hey hey

just got back from macworld '04 in sunny moscone center, downtown. And all I really have to say about it is that if you walk from Moscone center up to the Civic Center along Market street in broad daylight, you will see a lot of really depressing things. Sketchy people, sad people, poor people, face-tattooed people. It's really depressing. But you know what's not depressing? Pictures of babies drinking coffee and listening to ipods. That shit is basically as uplifting as it gets. Enjoy.

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Raj took a lot of pictures of me at macworld today on his hiptop. Unfortunately they're all of my belly button, because we found these "Macworld 2004" temporary tattoos that looked like they were trying to be all "woo hoo crazy spring break." So I thought that was absurd, and the joke went to far, and now we have 5 pictures of my belly button with this stupid little temporary tattoo on it. We don't have any pictures of me not showing off this tattoo. That is so fucking weird. It seemed like a really funny joke at the time, but I'm not sure I "get it" anymore.

too much coffee, ethan

John was totally right about Global Blends coffee on Castro street in Mountain View.

Should your dealings in international jewel thievery take you to Mountain View, California, you should get over there for a cup of coffee. I had a caramel cappucino and a cup of this excellent Kona blend drip coffee. And they were both free, but that's more a result of John's friendliness with them, and quite possibly his super cool matt gonzalez shirt, than any corporate policy of giving away coffee. Actually, I take that back. Right now they're doing this promotion where for every espresso drink you buy, you get a few "free drink" coffee cards to give to your friends, with the idea to bring in more customers.

Anyway. I could go on about this place for a while, mostly because I was there for an hour and the staff gave me too much coffee. I asked about a couple of things on the menu because I'd never heard of them, and the staff was like "oh, do you want one?" and I was like "jesus, no, I need to sleep soon. I just wanted to know what it was." and then they usually told me what it was.

too. wired. ... ... i try not to do this to myself at night. i need to dig up a really great quote about coffee from the burn collector collection.

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15 minutes later
Well, I just got a bummer of a phone call. A friend's dad is sick, which is upsetting, but it sounds like it's "gonna get better sick." That really brought me down from my hyper bouncing around world. Bye bye, caffeine buzz. We shall only be apart for 12 hours at the most.

Now I can stand in one place long enough to do the dishes, at least.

macworld

yo - i need a free macworld pass for tomorrow. I *know* somebody reading this can hook me up. I didn't do the legwork this year, so now I might be passless, forced to stand in line with the unwashed masses and pay $22. $22 that could be better spent on a third macally USB MicroMouse.

UPDATE 3:30PM: I have acquired a MacWorld pass. Tomorrow I shall answer only to the name of "Mrs. Goswamy". If you see me at the show, please do not call me by my given name for I shall be forced to ignore you.

lay low for the letdown

check it out - a moblog from the man with the blinkin'est devil horns that have ever existed. also he is known as "raj" by some.

rumor!

MacWorld Expo starts today, but only the lame shit is going on today. Today is when all sorts of "creative professionals" sit through 3 hour sessions on how to use Final Cut Express 3.1. boooooring. It doesn't get fun until tomorrow around noon, after Steve Jobs's keynote, when they open the show floor. Then you get to stand in a line 3 people deep to wait to briefly caress whatever new hardware just got released during the keynote. All the while with the Simpson's comic book guy standing right next to you, pushing into you, remarking about the beautiful finish. And then you walk around the show floor with your sarcastic friend, making fun of all the products you don't understand. Then you come across a booth of really cool laptop bags, and they cost $100, and even though you already have a laptop bag you buy a new one anyway because you're a yuppie bastard. I hate it i hate it i hate it.

Anyway - I got a little carried away there. I've accidentally blown a lot of money at Macworld's past. It's worse than vegas for me.

So there are many rumors abound about new mini-iPods to be announced at the Keynote tomorrow. The rumors are both coming from the usual mac rumor sites, but also from the mainstream media. I have some insider info about these - totally top secret - from my good friend at Apple. He couldn't tell me anything about the new iPods, except that Apple was revisiting the celebrity iPod concept from a year ago, when they had Beck and Madonna iPods. The new iPods will optionally have a "celebrity personality," with a signature and a celebrity picture on the back. Except this time instead of musicians, they're going to be using characters from the currently popular Lord of the Rings series. You'll definitely be able to get an iPod with Gandalf, Aragorn, or one of the hobbits. Possibly other characters like Elrond the chief elf - I don't have final details on that. Why else would the hobbits be schilling for the Apple Store?

Just wait. Tomorrow morning around 10:30AM PST you'll see how accurate my "inside info" is.

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This is the best macworld review I have ever read, on last year's Macworld SF 2003.

street table

hey i found this bitchin' table on the street today it is fundamentally part triangle, part square, but it still holds more trigonometric secrets, like a wobble. i brought it inside and wiped it down and stuck a napkin under one leg and now it sits in the corner holding my twin peaks tapes

for the new year

resoultions: always use a fresh towel to dry myself when I get out of the shower never eat an entire burrito in one sitting play with more dogs that's all i've got. so far.