Personal Dork Assistant

You think France missed Zidane

You think France missed Zidane in the midfield a little bit? Had to avoid the sports sites for half the day before I saw the game thanks to the miracle that is Tivo.

Adventures in Breakfast Pastry

Decided to go with the carrot-zuccini-raisin muffin today. Should be filling enough to make lunch unnecessary. The same muffin that goes for $1.50 at the student co-op coffee shop sells for $2.75 at Peets. Bastards. The students can use some work on their milk-steaming technique, though. Setting the kettle down and letting the steam run just ain't the right way to do it. At least the coffee is decent. Not as complex as a Peet's brew, but it's strong enough and not bitter.

Why the NBA is going downhill...

"The Nets worked their Princeton offense to perfection in the first half, routinely finding the open man with accurate skip passes over Boston's pack-it-in defense." — ESPN Recap of Game 5.

I mean, I love the Princeton system, but in the NBA? Although Pete Carill is on the Kings coaching staff, so maybe there's more to it than I thought.

Picked up a Game Cube

Picked up a Game Cube over the weekend. The E3 price drop plus a $30-off-3-games deal at Best Buy made it too hard to resist. So it's one more reason not to leave the house as I turn my brain into mush, and I'm helping to support future PowerPC development, too. Bonus. Picked up Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Super Monkey Ball, and Resident Evil to start. Would've liked to have a racer and a sports game, but wasn't impressed with the current selection or racing games, and I might as well as wait for the 2K3 version of Madden and friends.

So I've played with the GC for a weekend, and boy do I suck at video games. Haven't played a console game since the PSX days, and it showed. Couldn't get a handle on the analog control at first. The small analog stick doesn't have as much play as the PC joysticks, and I couldn't be subtle enough with it, which meant my monkey-in-a-ball was plunging to a screaming death every 30 seconds or so. Couldn't get through the training mission in Star Wars, and I kept getting killed by the first zombie I saw in RE. After the weekend, I did manage to finish the Beginner stage of Super Monkey Ball, find the gun in RE, and at least get to the start of the Death Star trench run. Considering how much games cost these days, maybe it's a good thing I can't blow through them in a few hours.

I've actually enjoyed SMB the most so far. I wanted games that were fun, simple to play, and not require a huge amount of running around, which is why I picked up a Nintendo system in the first place. Of course, Resident Evil is none of those, but the graphics were pretty and there was the chance to pick it up on sale. Anyway, they should keep me busy until the next wave of flagship titles (Mario, Metroid, Zelda) hits.

Hey, I've been Googled! Self-referential

Hey, I've been Googled! Self-referential cache link. It's kinda out-of-date, and the robot probably won't be back, but it's a little bit of self-validation.

Good thing mom always flies

Good thing mom always flies EVA Air instead of China Airlines. The fact that EVA's airplanes don't fall out of the sky is a nice bonus, but it's also socioeconomic protest of the native Taiwanese against the flag carrier, a representative of the mainlanders and the KMT. So mom is flying back a few days later so she can fly in with a friend, and she's giving up her biz class seats so her more robust friend can have some more room. Economy airplane seats is the one place where I'm glad to be a shrimp of a man.

Sunday Morning

• Cup of Peet's Anniversary Blend from the french press with a big shot of half-and-half
• Warm apricot danish out of the toaster oven
• Allegri's Miserere in the CD changer
• The new version of Mozilla on the TiBook. Catching up on the L.A. Times, especially the Column One features, and the N.Y. Times magazine.

May the wind take your troubles away

May the wind take your troubles away,
Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel,
May the wind take your troubles away.

� Windfall, Jay Ferrar

As long as we're on the alt.country kick, I picked up the Uncle Tupelo Anthology on a Fry's run the other day. Landmark stuff. And the CD came with a sticker! Anything that comes with stickers gets a bonus point in my book. Tivo also sent out a sticker to its customers. Unfortunately, it came with a letter announcing a monthly price increase, but it came with a sticker so it was okay. I decided to bite the bullet and go with the Lifetime subscription anyway.

True Love

"David M. Frey, 22, of Gainesville, Fla., and E. Jennie McNelis, 23, of Bensalem, play the characters - he's the poultry and she's the blue fuzz."

Courtesy of The Obscure Store, which is a bastion of cynicism, so it's nice to see a feel-good story once in a while. Let's save the dangers of marriage for another day.

Why I Hate Weblogs

I agree 100%. Weblogs are trite, meandering, junk-writing dashed off by lazy writers.

Good thing I don't give a shit.

Picked up a pint of

Picked up a pint of Ben & Jerry's Pistachio Pistachio ice cream on a lark and it's actually growing on me. The pistachio ice cream doesn't really taste like the pistachio nuts, though, mostly because one is sweet and the other is slightly salty, but the contrast is better than the typical B&J mix which has sweet ice cream on even sweeter chunks. I still prefer good old fruit bits in my ice cream, though. Haagen Daaz's Cherry Vanilla is amazing stuff.

Magic Diary

Found out that there was a pre-release tournament showcasing the latest Magic card set in San Diego on Saturday. I haven't played in a long time, and I don't have any tournament-legal decks anyway, but pre-release tournaments are sealed deck, where you build decks from fresh starter and booster packs, and the competition isn't as hard-core as typical tournaments, so I wouldn't be totally outclassed. So what the hell, it wasn't as if I do anything more interesting on Saturdays. Since I don't know anyone and don't have a constructed deck to play, I had nothing to do during the long downtimes at the typical tournament. So I brought my iPod and the Palm Pilot, and kept notes through the day to keep myself busy.

9:00
Finish cleaning out the deadwood in my card binder and rush out the door, sans breakfast.

9:25
Get to the San Diego Convention Center. Get bent over by the parking garage. Six bucks? Prepaid, of course.

As I opened my wallet, I recognized my one forgetten task that always comes when I go out. Forgot to go by the ATM, and after paying the extortionary parking fee, I have exactly $22 left in my wallet.

Of course, the Pre-Release Tournament costs $25.

Moment of panic and self-recrimination doing irreparable harm to my psyche. Then remembers the change drawer in the car. Scrape up enough quarters to make up the difference. Even have enough change left for a soda later.

9:30

Follow the stream of geeks up to Ballroom B6C. Surprisingly large number of chaperoning mothers and entire families in the crowd, but all in all still mostly gamers. The line extended well down the hall. I knew I should've gone to Costa Mesa.

9:47
Get to the front of the line and pay my money. I now have 50 cents left on my person, not counting the P9 + friends sitting in the binder. 64 people per flight, six rounds of swiss. I'm in flight 2. Hopefully they'll run the flights simultaneously.

10:00
I'll have to stick it out in the main tournament unless I find an ATM so I can play the side drafts. At least there are no dealers to suck up more of my money. Although I wanted to find out what the latest DCI announcement had done to the value of dual lands, not to mention the set of artist-signed Force of Wills. Most likely it just slashed the value of the binder by half.

10:07
I thought that they'd renovated the convention center, but the restrooms don'teven have IR autoflushers. I actually had to tap a handle to flush the urinal. What is this, the Dark Ages?

11:15
They waited until Flight One was seated and registered before seating Flight Two. So there was a lot of downtime. But we finally have our "product" now. Ah, the smell of freshly opened Magic cards.

1:20
Wasn't terribly impressed with my assortment of cards, and my fears were confirmed when I was summarily crushed in my first match. Couldn't stop the enchantment-boosted forestwalker in the first game and couldn't stop much of anything in the second. Spend some time fiddling with the deck and do some test draws.

2:30
Played a girl from SDSU, who frankly wasn't very good. She didn't put much pressure on me and didn't have any tricks, so I could play my cards at leisure. 6/6 trampling wurms do the job nicely

3:40
Got paired down to someone who was 0-1-1. Another woman, too, which is a bit of a statistical anomaly. Unfortunately, this lady was no cute co-ed, and let's leave it at that. She was playing W/G, and my green grunts hold the ground while the blue evasive creatures carry the day. So I'm 2-1, but they're pretty weak wins. I consider dropping out while I'm ahead. Then I find out that the top-24 get prizes, which makes it worthwhile to stay in for at least one more round.

5:00
Three girls in a row, at a Magic tournament. What are the odds? She was seated next to her friend, since they were both 2-1. If life were like a Hollywood romantic comedy, she'd be the Rosie to the Meg Ryan. The guy next to me, playing her friend, was flirting like mad. Althoughlines like "Do you play a lot of Type 2?" didn't sound like they were working.

I drew good in game one. She drew good in game two. She got mana-screwed in game three. Magic in a nutshell.

6:00
Okay, there's conspiracy afoot, as I sit downacross another girl. She talks to her deck. Apparently Magic decks are feminine. Her unblockable crab chews me up, then my fliers + her mana screws win me the next two. There are only 25 people left in the tournament anyway, so at least I'm guaranteed a few pack's worth of prizes.

6:50
Phew, glad that's over. Finally play against a guy. A regular Joe, in fact. Was slightly worried since I was 0-1 against men and 4-0 against women for the day. We actually have pretty similar decks. He has better card quality in core green, but my splashed red tricks come through and I maintained steady pressure with the unblockable blue creatures to win a tough 2-0 match. Actually was pretty lucky to get matched against the guy I did, because there were some other seriously sick decks amongst the 4-1 group. Hey, 5-1 is about as well as I've ever done at a tournament, even if it was against medicore opponents. I didn't have to make very many tough tactical decisions, since most of the games was a mindless beatdown with an unblockable creature while the green grunts stood off in a stalemate. The toiurnament was understaffed and there was a huge amount of unnecessary standing around. Turns out there is a dealer table, but his prices are so outrageous that he might as well not be there. So it's a good thing I won a few matches, otherwise it wouldn't have been very much fun.

7:30
Did I say there was too much standing around? They finally get around to handing out the prizes. 6th place out of 64 ain't bad. My opponent match win percentage tiebreaker was pretty poor, since I lost the in the first round and crawled up the backside of the swiss draw, otherwise I would've been higher. But it doesn't affect the prizes one way or another. So after 10 hours of work, I got eight packs of the new set for my efforts. Zippity doo. At least I got my money's worth out of that $6 parking space. There's a prom going on in the main ballroom down the hall. Teenagers in formal clothes coming in, geeks in T-shirts heading out. I think I'll stop by In-n-Out on the way home.

Went to see Star Wars.

Went to see Star Wars. Walked up to the ticket window for the 3:00PM matinee ten minutes before showtime and waltzed on in. True, the local theater doesn't have the super-duper THX sound system and stadium seating, but it was Good Enough, although I do have to say that my own speakers do sound a lot better. Can't beat the big screen, though. I can always catch it again at the digital-projection-equipped theater downtown. No reason to be first in line there.

I don't go into the big summer movies with big expectations, so I'm not let down by entertaining mediocrities like Attack of the Clones. I do have to say that Natalie Portman > Carrie Fisher. Now if only Senator Amidala would deliver her lines in ways other than a stern monotone (blame Lucas for that one). The Anakin guy seems to be constipated rather than being consumed by the Dark Side, but I guess that's what Episode 3 is for. The CG visuals are noticeably more impressive than even Episode 1, thanks to Moore's Law, and the plot is interesting enough. I admit that I got a big kick near the end when the clones were on their way off to war and the Imperial March starts playing in the background. Kitschy popular entertainment at its opiated best.

I kept my movie karma in balance by going to see a film presented by the Critical Gender Studies Department, about a Sri Lankan woman returning to see her children after working in Greece as a housemaid for ten years. In all that time, the only communication has been by letter, and more importantly, by the money she sends back. Ironically, the manual labor of the men is not in demand in the global marketplace, so it's the nurturing skills of the women that's become the primary export. Of course, I knew about Mexicans in the U.S., the Filipinos in Japan and Taiwan, and Eastern Europeans going west, but it boggled my mind the threads of human commerce linking places as disparate as Greece and Sri Lanka.

Watching Star Wars actually made me appreciate the little documentary a lot more. They're opposites in many ways. One has gorgeous Hollywood actors speaking painfully stilted lines in front of computer-generated scenery on high-definition digital cameras. The other is filmed on a fuzzy 16mm camera featuring a heavy-set Sri Lankan woman, telling a painfully honest story. Each effective in their own way, but being effective at sucking $6.50 out of my pocket seems a little empty, far as Higher Callings go.

Sports Wrapup

The Spurs have no backbone, spine, cojones, balls, whatever. They got outscored 125-88 in the 4th quarter against the Lakers. Lame. Of course, it takes more than just a backbone to bang against Shaq, hint to Yao Ming. And has there ever been any pro playoff series been more irrelevant than the NBA Eastern Conference Playoffs?

Talk about your choke jobs, the Sharks blew a great chance to close out the Avalanche in Game 6. The Sharks outhit and outplayed the Avalanche 99% of the time thanks to the superior depth, but they couldn't match up when the Avalanche send out their top five-man unit. So right after the Sharks score a goal and at the beginning of overtime, Forsberg-Sakic-Hejduk-Blake-Kasperitis come on the ice as one unit and score big goals. Now they have to go to Colorado and face Patrick Roy on home ice. Gack.

At least the Giants are playing well. It's not been pretty on offense, asides from the Barry Bonds Show, but the pitching's solid and the defense is great. That was a couple of real good, hard-fought wins against the Braves. The A's are really imploding, though. They've not been pretty on offense, the pitching hasn't been solid, and the defense is awful. Can't be just because Mulder's been hurt, although that was a big part of it. They can't beat up on the divisional bottom-feeders either, with the way Texas and Anaheim are playing. Heck, the A's is the divisional bottom-feeder right now. The unbalanced schedule doesn't help, either, especially if it comes down to chasing the Wild Card.

The In-n-Out drive-thru line has

The In-n-Out drive-thru line has its own peculiar rhythm. It's not particularly "fast" food, per se, especially during your typical mealtime rush, when it can take 15 minutes to get to the front of the line. It's never a good sign when there's still half a dozen cars ahead of you to the squawk box. There's a moment of annoyance at the waste of time that lies ahead and I almost whip the wheel around to head right back out the lot. Then reasoning takes over and I figure that I won't save any time by driving somewhere else and I really don't feel like cooking. Well, nobody said they had to be good reasons.

I pull into line and start sucking exhaust like a good little consumer. My turn to order comes up soon enough, and I face up to the squawk box and the monkishly minimalist menu, brightly lit and outlined in oversized letters. Double-double with grilled onions, order of fries... Already had a regular soda for lunch, so I'll go with Diet Coke for now. I can see how people get addicted to Diet Coke. It doesn't taste worse than regular soda, just different, and you get all the chemical "benefits" of Coke without the body's usual sugar satiety signals kicking in, so you can just keep pouring the stuff down the gullet. Of course, there are people who can drink regular Coke like water, and they deserve the hideous death that the fast food industry is selling to them.

The line lurches forward in fits and starts. A slow but smooth progression sometimes stalls for a while. Maybe there was a bunch of counter orders, or maybe they're cooking up a new batch of burgers. Sometimes the stall occurs just as I reach the pick-up window, and I wish I could explain to the people behind me that it's not my fault the line isn't moving, that I'm only getting a single order of burger and fries. Meanwhile, on the other side of the window, a timer is ticking away, counting the wait time of each customer that pulls up.

I get my food and take off, trying to get home before everything gets cold. It's still the best chain-store burger you can get, although I feel a little gipped ever since my office-mate (a former In-n-Out team member) told me that the burger patties are only 1/8 lb. each, so a double-double is just a quarter-pounder. It's plenty, really, but it's the principle of the thing.

Civil Obedience

Most people don't seem to consider this to be an artistic act. After all, he just made a highway sign to published specs, but this struck a chord with me in a number of ways, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. An authoritative voice derived from the trappings of authority, backed up by the truth. People followed the sign because it looked like an official sign, and because it was a helpful sign. Subversion through conformity. Very cool.

I bet the Techers banged their heads against the wall when they saw the story, too, wondering why they didn't think of it first. The Harbor/Pasadena Freeway was converted from a carriage path to California's first freeway, and it's the artery that connects Pasadena to downtown LA. The road is still designed more for Model-T's than Mercedes, and it can be a harrowing ride during rush hour, especially if you're trying to merge into 55mph traffic from a dead stop on one of the short, antiquated on-ramps. It's fun to fly down the curves at 4am, though, and I made the run quite often at that hour, since that's when The Original Pantry started serving breakfast, and there's nothing like a big plate full of eggs, bacon, and potatoes (the #6 combo) after an all-nighter. The best thing was the big plate of all-you-can-eat thick-cut griddled sourdough toast, though, which was a perk the Techers got because we tipped more than their typical 4am clientele. It turns out that the revised freeway sign is sitting right about where the Pantry exit is. Good times.

Why I Need a Whisk

Do you have any idea how hard it is to whip up milk foam with a chopstick?

The Peet's Anniversary Blend is great for the morning macchiato. Glad that I managed to get in on the last batch.

Moral Crisis

Stopped by the grocery store on the way home to pick u some garlic and ginger. Didn't feel like cooking that night, though, so I figured that I'd pick up a sandwich at the deli counter. Then I realized I forgot to restock the fridge, so even though I had half a dozen different soft drinks, none of it was cold, except for the half-and-half, and I usually don't chug that straight. So do I want to pay an extra buck for a cold soda from the store cooler? How much is convenience really worth?

Turns out that the good (not-from-concentrate) orange juice was on sale, so I went with that instead of the cold soda. Being able to buy the good OJ is one of those little luxuries that make me appreciate my lot in life. Although one brand amongst Tropicana, Florida Natural, or the generic label will usually be on sale at any given time, so the price difference isn't too outrageous. Prepared food is expensive, though, especially when I pick up some regular ingredients alongside the deli items and can't help but work out the per-meal costs. I should learn to bake, considering how much I spend on breakfast pastry. One of these days I'll plug it all into Quicken and figure it all out. Not that it would actually make any difference, but I'm obsessive like that.

Self Validation

Could've hopped on the bus on the way home, but I decided to walk. I needed the exercise. As I turned the corner on the home stretch, only then did the bus chug on by, thanks to the afternoon rush-hour traffic. So I was only a block behind the bus, a couple of minutes, in the greater scheme of things. Keeps me from dropping dead, hopefully.

Love is like chili-cheese fries

I think I wanted the idea of chili-cheese fries than the chili-cheese fries themselves. Combined with a side order of a hot dog with the works, it left a serious case of heartburn. At least chili-cheese fries get flushed out of the system in a day or two. Love doesn't triple your cholesterol level, though.

So chili-cheese fries aren't really so bad. I don't understand what's so great about gravy over chips, though. Makes me more American, I guess.

Weekend Catch-up

I have five episodes of ER stacked up on the Tivo, and May sweeps is coming up with all new episodes you don't want to miss. Time to hitch up the pants and settle into the couch. For god's sake the eps still have commercials trumpeting the Olympics complete with footages of a happy Michelle Kwan.

Maybe, but probably not.

Maybe, but probably not.

Worst Pick-up Advice Ever?

Not that I'm the expert on this sort of thing, but...

"If you're attracted to someone, pant."
�Rick Steves' Europe Through the Backdoor 2002

So Jason X (a.k.a. Friday

So Jason X (a.k.a. Friday the 13th in Space) is in theaters now. Who the hell decided to greenlight this one? It must've taken some serious chutzpah to pitch this angle to the Hollywood bigshots. Or maybe they just sucked a lot of dick.