Personal Dork Assistant

Joke of the Day

Courtesy of the inestimable Charlie Rosen:

[Phil] Jackson named his kidney stone "Kobe" because it wouldn't pass

More Lakers nuttiness: Mark Madsen actually hit a J last night. Right after Ben Wallace hit an 18-footer. Who knew?

And in other news, Barry Bonds homers on the first pitch he saw in Spring Training.

Meanwhile, Stu Scott is punking Rich Eisen in Hearsay. And we all thought the white boy was the smart one.

Stupid (but cool) Hack of the Day

"I made a RAID of Zip drives"

Sure it's only a RAID 0 striping configuration in software, but hey, you're boosting the performance of your Zip drives! Although with their reliability record, RAID 0 is probably not the optimal setup. In case you're keeping critical data on this, of course. Now if he can get a RAID 5 going, that would be somethin' else.

Omron of Japan announced

Omron of Japan announced a cool new package for LEDs that's very thin and has a large illumination area. Looks like they slapped a Fresnel lens in front of the LED chip to spread out the light. The reflector probably has some fancy tricks to maximize dispersion, too.

It should be an interesting manufacturing challenge.

Bare Bones Software is

Bare Bones Software is killing their freebie BBEdit Lite package and replacing it with the $50 Text Wrangler. Sure, Text Wrangler has a ton more features than plain old BBEdit Lite, but all I wanted was a quick and easy text file reader anyway. Apple TextEdit is okay, but it has all the extraneous rich-text formatting options which takes away from its editor-ness. Thanks to MacOS X, there's vi and emacs, but most of the time I want something point-and-click. For God's sake don't make me go install a Mac-ified XEmacs. That's just unnatural.

Blimey

Now that the Sopranos season is over, I have to find some sort of justification for keeping HBO. No, Shallow Hal isn't it. I do like (some of) their late-night movies, though. With the brainless action B-movies, obscure indie films, and the occasional soft-core skin flick, what's not to like? Actually, it's still 90% crap, but it's easy to sort through the schedule and Tivo whatever sound interesting.

So that's how I picked up Londinium, which I ended up fast-forwarding through in 30 minutes. I like quirky indie romantic comedies (more than the formulaic Hollywood romantic comedies, anyway), but this one just fell a little bit flat for me. Hit the Record button because I saw Irene Jacob's name in the credits. Loved her in The Three Colors: Red, and she's not bad to look at in general. But I didn't realize that she was playing Fiona the quintessential Londoner. I mean, I'm more British than she is (although I'm not particularly suited for roles in romantic comedies), and even Tim Legler (nope, him neither) did a better British accent. Maybe they figured that Americans can't tell the difference between British and French accented English. And there were scenes where the man was uninterested in her in bed. What the hell?

Slow Time of the Year

Another America's Cup race postponement, but this time for too much wind. For a sailboat race? Oh well, it's not like Sportscenter devotes more than 15 seconds on the America's Cup anyway. Maybe they should spend more time on it, considering their other filler material. Hearsay is painful to watch. It's like Taboo, with an athlete paired up with either Stuart Scott or Rich Eisen. The SC anchors pretty much carry the game, as the whole thing is a reminder that we don't watch athletes for their smarts. For the Golden State - Denver "highlight" (the teams shot a combined 61 for 171), they did an American Idol skit with the commentators playing judges. Tim Legler faking a British accent was possibly the most horrific thing I've ever seen on sports television.

ESPN can also stand to lay off the hype a little bit for their college basketball coverage. There was "Rivalry Week", "Bracket Buster", and now "Judgement Week", whatever that is. How about just show the damn games and save the hype machine for March (and "Championship Week", etc.).

Man, could the Sports Guy be a bigger pussy right now? The Grammy jokes sound like rejects from his Kimmel show scripts, which isn't a good sign considering how not well the show is doing.

John Mayer has the Sports Gal and Veronica in a trance. I wish I could come back in my next life as a sensitive guitarist who makes weird facial expressions -- the world would be my oyster. Don't you just hate these guys?

Yeah, vastly overrated. And I usually like sensitive guitar-strumming singer-songwriters. Meanwhile, two sentences about the Tyson fight. How about a Tyson fight diary and two sentences about the Grammies, eh?

Got a 10%-off coupon

Got a 10%-off coupon from 99 Ranch Market, and I was out of rice, so it was a good time for a big shopping trip. The place is an absolute madhouse on Saturdays, but I found a parking spot after a circle or two. There were staples like the rice and the fresh ramen noodles which is great in a broth. Whole chicken legs are cheap, freeze well, and easy to cook in a variety of ways. Restocked the pantry with a bottle of the good soy sauce and random canned things like bamboo shoots in chili oil and sardines in tomato-chili sauce. I don't know why grocery stores don't just give up selling other apple varieties and stick to selling Fujis, and I don't know why other stores sell smaller Fujis for twice the price of 99 Ranch. Okay, you need a tart apple like Granny Smith for cooking, but who the the hell bakes apple pie from scratch these days? Both Texas and California oranges were on sale, picked up a pomelo since it's a New Year thing, and grabbed a box of coconuts because I was on a roll. Put a few cans of Thai iced tea and grass jelly drinks in the cart on automatic. Rib-eyes for $3.59 a pount is good, and watching them whack the fish over the head with a mallet is better, but the best thing were the little sweet yogurt drinks that was on sale (with coupon) for 20 cents a six-pack. Yes, each bottle is barely more than a sip, and it's just milky sugar water, but you can't beat 30 bottles for a buck. Hey, I wasn't the only one who thought that, as the Mexican dude behind me had a whole case of the stuff.

No, I did not get a Swanson's All Day Breakfast, but thanks to the random 99 Ranch Market products and a sale at Ralphs, I now cover the constant variety of soft drinks. I'm down to my last ginger beer, though.

Aarrrrr

Kazaa (Lite) has a diverse range of material, but it's not very deep. Direct Connect has plenty of stuff, but the big trading hubs have high trading requirements, and the whole op/kick/chat thing is way too IRC. If I wanted to deal with that kind of crap, I'd be on IRC. Gnutella just flat out sucks. And I can't imagine how much of a loser you have to be to waste time downloading and piecing together chopped up files on Usenet.

So what makes a good P2P program?

• Content. Duh.
• Easy to use. At some point it's just easier to go out and buy the damn DVD or CD.
• Anonymity. I don't want to be your friend, I just want your files.
• Leechability. If I cared about fair, I'd pay for the content. Besides, uploading sucks on an ADSL line.
• Multi-platform. Windows and Mac, and Linux would be nice for the people that care.

BitTorrent actually comes pretty close to fulfilling all those requirements. The protocol is robust enough to support simultaneous downloading of random file parts from different sources, and you're uploading your part of the file to others even as you're downloading, with resumption of interrupted downloads. It's not quite as generalized as Kazaa or Gnutella, but it is a great system for top-down distribution of specific files, and the available bandwidth scales nicely with the popularity of the data. The system isn't quite as useful for typical MP3s, where the file sources are diffused all over the Net, but it's been successful for tapers who can rip a live show and put it in a central location where interested people can go grab it, but not overwhelming the host bandwidth in the process. It's a godsend for the IRC groups, where a central core can put the files up for download on a webpage instead of having to deal with the waves of lame leeches lining up for limited download slots on the main channel. A good example is anime, where the fansub groups can rip a show straight off of Japanese TV, subitle the episode, and put it up for the ravenous otaku within days of its original broadcast, and many months before it comes to American DVD. Plain old American TV is available, too, but it's unnecessary with the Tivo around. No, I don't need every single fucking episode of Buffy on my hard disk. Haven't seen a good tracker for real software, but those probably aren't overtly advertised on the Net, lest the Powers that Be strike them down.

If I had a boat...

I'd sail it on the ocean.
And if I had a pony,
I'd ride him on my boat

Lyle Lovett

Hey, there's a reason why more people read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas instead of this stupid web page. So you can read Hunter S. Thompson's column for your quickie America's Cup update.

For at least two weeks, I thought the lopsided whipping in San Diego was the most painful moment I have ever witnessed in the pain-riddled world of sports…. But not for long. Last Friday, a new champion emerged, and you didn't even have to be a sports fan to appreciate it.

Well, the Giants blowing the Series was at least as bad, but anyway.

More Insensitive Blather

More wordy self-pity for the Slashdot crowd.

We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards." We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. Our table was populated by complete nerds, cases of delayed pubescence, and recent immigrants from China.

I'm surprised they didn't relegate the Chinese immigrants to the retard table. Clearly, what they needed was an Asian school system, where being a 5-foot guy with glasses and good grades is an asset. Of course, kids in Asian schools never get bullied.

The whole argument is based on a false premise anyway. The assumption is that being a socially inept loser is correlated with intelligence. The correlation is anecdotal at best, much less the argument for causation one way or the other. Hell, being a Chinese immigrant probably shows a stronger correlation with good grades. These days, everyone has to do something nerdy to get into a good college, whether it be the choir, theater, or academic competitions. So if you're feeling so fucking persecuted, get yourself a manly gun and go do some real damage. If you're actually smarter than the average bear, then you should be able to do better than the Columbine kids, who only managed to take out 15 people, most of whom weren't even their bullies, despite all their fancy weapons and boobie traps straight out of the Anarchist's Cookbook. That's hardly even a blip on the statistics, far as dead kids go.

Notice how intelligence has nothing to do with anything in the description of the archetypical nerds. I'd give them some bonus points, redeemable for nothing, if they can actually read the kanji on their anime T-shirts, but I'm prejudiced.

Moment of Silence

No, not for the dead Orioles pitcher. The guy had a 13.50 ERA for God's sake. The sad event is that Rich Garces is retiring. El Guapo will be missed.

Marketing at Work

Randomly cool new product at Trader Joes: smoked salmon in "cocktail-sized pieces." In reality, it's just the trimmings from the smoked salmon fillets, packed up in plastic. Well, the bag of salmon chunks is a lot cheaper than the fancy fillet, and I was going to just chop it up for scrambled eggs anyway. Plenty left for the bagels, too.

Beaver Fever. Snatch It!

Usually, we save that cheer for the girls' teams, but since the Caltech basketball team pretty much play like girls, it seems appropriate here. On the other hand, what other school's best basketball player gets observing time on Mount Palomar? Bastard.

Caltech has a plan, though. The Beavers are going proactive. Instead of opening practice and see which future Mission Control engineers turn up, they have identified kids who have a shot at qualifying academically, and e-mailed every last one of them to see if they play basketball.

Dow said they have found a dozen-plus geniuses who also can play a little. He figures if he can get a couple of those guys into school, "a 6-7 guy and an athletic guard," and fill around them with the more coordinated of the Einsteins who just show up... well, Caltech isn't going to go another 193 SCIAC games without winning one.

In other news from Caltech, the L.A. Times discover the Humanities Requirement.

Carlton, who was thumbing through a robotics text, said he felt sorry for the humanities professors his freshman year. He recalled a poetry class in which the lecturer asked for examples of odes: "The answers we gave were 'electrode', 'cathode', 'anode' and 'diode.' "

The reporter seems to be taking the anecdote seriously, but I'm almost sure that the students were joking. Almost.

So what if you're not a Preferred Customer?

Best Buy printable coupons here, good for this weekend. Because everyone deserves to save 10% off of regularly priced Music, Movies, Computer Software, Video Games, and Video Game Accessories, any combination. Limit 5.

Reality Bites

Finally gave up on Joe Millionaire. There are no "winners" in this game. You don't want the mean golddigger to end up as the chosen one, but you don't want the nice girl to have to face the lie and end up as the butt of the joke. And Mr. Millionaire is no prize, either. All that gorgeous French countryside and fine food wasted on the guy. I could actually feel myself get dumber as I watched the show. Obviously, Fox couldn't get any real bright bulbs to fall for the premise of the show, and brains certainly wasn't the top criterion in choosing Joe. Thank God for the butler, who provided the only glimmer of intelligent commentary on the proceedings.

Going to delete American Idol from the Tivo Season Pass list, too. Watching the judges rip apart the bad singers in the preliminaries was fun, but everyone is at least somewhat competent at this stage. Now it's just a bunch of random folks singing annoying pop songs. And they knocked out my favorite gal.

Why do you want to be the American Idol?

"Um, because I pretty much suck at everything else."

Are You Hot? is just flat out bad. The website Are You Hot or Not? works because there are plenty of average-looking folks submitting pictures, and there's no explicit criticism, just a number defined by anonymous votes on the internet. Heck, the number might even mean something, if you get enough votes. The TV show attracts media whores, and the celebrity judges rip the artificially attractive people by their artificial criteria. Who gives a crap about what some C-list celebrity thinks of yet another pretty boy or skanky 'ho.

Good thing that the grandaddy of them all is back. Survivor Amazon started this week, and there's already a twist, as the two tribes were set up as Men vs. Women, instead of the gender-balanced tribes of the past. Of course, the editors took full advantage of the situation, as there were plenty of footage of the boys being boys. Meanwhile, the women had trouble chopping down trees, the swimsuit model was more concerned with keeping her clothes clean than building shelter, and the housewife was already crying about how it's all too much after a day and a half. However, the beauty of reality shows is that even if there's no script, the editors can still take the footage and tell the story in the classic way. So here's the big comeback by the ladies in the Immunity Challenge, when the big muscled guys couldn't scramble across the balance beam, and the rocket scientist and the computer dude couldn't put together a puzzle. Plenty of fodder for the whiny bitches on Television Without Pity to get their hate on.

All this TV-watching is made possible by the marvel that is Tivo, of course. I've souped up my Series 1 Tivo with the extra hard disk and Ethernet card, but right now Tivo is offering the option to transfer my Series 1 lifetime subscription to a new Series 2 machine. The faster processor and extra memory would be nice for a snappier interface. Now if I only had an economical way of passing off the Series 1 box. I could just eBay the old machine, but shipping is such a pain in the ass.

Konfabulous?

Or is Konfabulator suppose to be Cumfabulous?

Sorry. It's just that every new application platform must be evaluated with respect to its applicability to porn first and foremost. Komfabulator is a platform for simple applications (a.k.a. widgets) that adds functionality to the MacOS X desktop. A widget is composed of various objects (windows, images, text labels, etc.) defined via XML. Their properties are manipulated programmatically via Javascript snippets triggered by GUI events, such as a click or on initial load. The Javascript engine has been extended to allow external Applescript and shell script calls for extra control. So the weather widget can fetch a URL from weather.com, then parse the page and load a different background icon into an image object depending on the weather, and display the temperature in a text object. A click on the image opens the webpage containing the detailed forecast in the browser, while a click on the text jumps to the next city on the user-defined list.

Unfortunately, the widgets that come with Komfabulator were flat out weak. The weather widget only displays data from one city. The picture frame widget doesn't even let you choose the picture folder (it defaults to ~/Pictures). The Calendar and ToDo widgets don't integrate with iCal at all. They give people a bad first impression of the program. Add the $25 shareware fee, and people are already dismissing it as overpriced and useless. It's true that there are already vastly superior apps for desktop weather or network monitoring, and who the hell needs another desktop clock anyway? On the other hand, the idiots don't realize that they're not paying $25 for a bunch of pretty but underpowered widgets, but for a Javascript GUI runtime package that allows one to easily extend the power of the built-in widgets, or trivially build new ones from scratch. After a little hacking (with the Konfabulator reference at my side), I was able to add selectable folders to the Picture Frame widget, and add multiple cities (with automatic or clickable advance through the list) to the Weather Display widget.

I'm not rushing out to register the program, though. Although it's stupid to dis Konfabulator based the lame initial widgets, some of that lameness is due to weaknesses in the scripting engine. The Javascript engine doesn't have a very rich built-in DOM, so you can't get direct access to the system except for a few specialized areas (e.g. Airport wireless network and battery status) that seem to be tacked on for the demo widgets. This means that most useful things have to be done as external calls via Applescript or shell commands. So you munge together a long string for your external call (talk about your spaghetti code), and then parse the long string returned by the script. Frankly, that sucks. Konfabulator does have a URL fetching method. However, considering that it has an XML parser (probably just a version of expat) built-in, it's inexcusable that it can't easily parse HTML or RSS. If I wanted to scrape webpages via regular expressions, I would've stuck with sed and awk (yeah, I know I should learn Perl). This means that web page parsing is not robust, and people are building different widgets to read each site and its RSS feed, in order to code around each site's idiosyncrasies. The event model isn't very complete, either. How about a double-click trigger? And no keyboard events at all?

The interface has issues, too. Each widget is basically a collection of bitmap objects, with very little access to MacOS GUI elements except for simple dialog boxes. That's fine if you're a Photoshop jockey, but it can be a pain in the ass when you just want a plain old button, and it certainly doesn't do anyting for interface consistency. It's more like a Linux look, actually, i.e. I'll make it look my way and fuck everything else. People are already complaining about the large sizes of many widgets, and there's no easy way to change them short of opening the XML file and futzing with all the size and layout parameters one by one.

Oh well, it's good enough to satisfy my New Toy urges for now. Hopefully they'll get a better version out before my short attention span runs out. Of course, if they do add all the requested features, the whole thing will probably get so complicated that I'll just give up on it anyway. So don't listen to what I say.

So much for Smart Growth

Of course, we shouldn't be complaining about this since this is exactly what our house is like, except our garage is more like 1.5 cars, or one car plus space for lots of junk.

Although their new abodes are frequently squeezed on lots of less than a fifth of an acre, many new homeowners want three-car garages, an upstairs den where the kids can play video games and a master bath with a tub that will fit four.

At least our house is in El Cerrito with a view of the Bay. These folks are buying houses in Patterson, Manteca, Ripon, and Los Ba�os, which is great if you're going to work in Stockton or Tracy, but commuting to the Bay Area? You might as well as live in South Dakota and jet in every day. Oh, these houses are paving over prime farmland, too. Could there be a worse way to do suburban development?

Of course, the UC Berkeley design professor poo-poos the whole trend:

These new homes are a reflection of the idea that when you get to this place where the house is the only thing, you want everything at your fingertips. That's why you want to bring the movie theater into the home. It's pretty sad.

If the professor had a clue about home theater design, he'd realize that these big new homes with the wide-open design are awful for HT. The big speakers throw sound all over the house, resonating off all the hardwood flooring and stone tile, and that's before the subwoofer kicks in. So a Real Man has to add an extra wing (maybe convert a part of the garage or basement) with proper sound isolation and space for the big TV (or a projector). A pool table and bar would be cool for that game room ambience, but that would throw off the layout for the HT, especially the rear 6th and 7th speakers, and you might need a second subwoofer to fill the extra space with bass. And in the end, after all that work, you'll still be living in BFE.

What's Up, Doc?

No big surprise that the doctors are sick of dealing with HMOs (42% of doctors aren't taking new HMO patients at all), but now they're dissing the PPOs, too, and God help people on Medicare, since no doctor is going to bother after another cut in payments.

The newest frontier for an intrepid few physicians is to cut back dramatically on their practice and concentrate on serving only those patients willing and able to pay more for their care.

This can't be good, in the greater scheme of things. Well, if you want free-market health care, you have to let the doctors play, too. Although I think that a good number of docs would put up with the pay cut if they didn't have to deal with the nightmarish paperwork from the insurance companies.

Most of her patients now are required to pay their bill at the door. Those who have insurance are welcome to get reimbursement, but that is between them and their insurance company. Cortland does not have to hire an office staff to argue with insurers, or handle insurance claims.

None of this concerns the 41 million uninsured Americans. They'll get their medical care from the emergency room, where federal mandates requires treatment regardless of the ability to pay, but no federal compensation for said treatment. So the uninsured have no primary care to treat things before they get out of hand. The middle class bitch about the poor getting free healthcare, and the hospitals that train the doctors are being pulled under by the (free)load. I think this qualifies as a market failure. Ah, but health care isn't really a free market, so we just need to get rid of government regulations and subsidies and everyone will be happy. Or dead.

Monkey Madness

I know I'm not very good at Super Monkey Ball, but I was not aware of the depth of my suckitude until I saw some of these videos of one Mr. PackAttack at work. The host of the site says:

I recommend E9, E7, A11, E36, E6, E17, E27, and Master 3. I'd been playing the game for records for a while before I saw these vids, so I expected to see some crazy stunts, and even I was left speechless.

Holy schnikey. As impressive as they are on video, if you've never played the game, you can't possibly understand how difficult these stunts are. I'd throw my controller out the window, except I still need it to beat Metroid Prime.

I love a good

I love a good meal as much as anyone else. Reviews by folks on the web can really help sort out the good places from the bad. But how big of a prick do you have to be to rip a Hawaiian plate lunch place for "jeopardizing my diet"? It's suppose to be a cheap lunch for big Polynesian dudes, not haute cuisine. As for "I mean, Hawaii isn't really known for their beef, eh?", half the Big Island happens to be owned by one of the largest ranches in the United States. The tastiest bit of beef I've ever had was in Waimea, made from local grass-fed cows. Admittedly they probably don't use anything that nice in plate lunches. But I liked the Hawaiian macaroni salad, damn it, soft macaroni and all. The scoop of macaroni felt like carbo overkill in addition to the two scoops of rice on the standard plate, but then I'm not a large Polynesian dude.

The Anti-Atkin's Diet

• Breakfast: Pancakes
• Lunch: Sandwich
• Dinner: Spaghetti puttanesca
• Snack: Peppridge Farm Milano cookies

I finally figured out a use for the Canadian dried blueberries that uncle gave mom, who passed it to me because she has enough random things in her cupboard. At this rate, I should be finished with them in about 20 years, if I ate pancakes every day. Did give me an excuse to pick up some vanilla extract and maple syrup, which helps to add to the clutter in the cabinet of condiments. Could've used some cinnamon and nutmeg, too, but they don't keep as well as vanilla extract. I really should've bought a whisk, too. Boy was it a pain to whisk the lumps out of the pancake batter with chopsticks and a spoon.

The New Definition of "Loser"

For God's sake, how pathetic do you have to be to wear a "Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend" T-shirt, much less one in XXL. On the other hand, the hot Japanese chicks seem to dig sumo dudes, so maybe there's something there. The shirt is on clearance, though, so maybe the otaku fatties knew better.

Modest Proposals

And I thought it was nice to be able to put $3000 into the IRA for 2002. The latest Bush plan would allow one to put $7500 annually into an Retirement Savings Account, similar to a Roth IRA, plus another $7500 into a "lifetime savings account" that would have all the benefits of the RSA (i.e. tax-free growth) but with no limits on when you can withdraw the money. This would consolidate all the IRAs, education savings accounts, and other tax-sheltered vehicles into one system, which is a good idea. Of course, eliminating the double-taxation of dividends is a sound economic idea, too, but the loss in revenues will force the states to raise their taxes to make up the difference. Plus you'd need $15,000 to spare or a boatload of dividend-paying stocks to enjoy the benefits. Now we just need a plan to kill off the poor people and we'd be all good. Hey, cutting emergency room funding should do that nicely.

I wouldn't even care that much about overworked peons if the conservatives actually practiced what they preached. Instead, we're back to the voodoo economics of revenue cuts and massive spending, making for record-breaking deficits. Actually, higher interest rates would be okay, too, since the parents prefer to stuff money into CDs anyway. Yay diversification.

On Duplication

Used (a pirated copy of) Norton Ghost for the first time to clone my installation over to a new hard disk. I started with Windows NT, which meant that the main C: partition had to less than 4 Gigabytes, and that was getting a little tight with Windows XP, even with installing all the programs on the D: drive. And in the continuing quixotic quest to quiet an Athlon PC, I replaced the Western Digital hard disk with a Seagate Barracuda IV. Ghost cloned the partitions from the old hard disk onto the new disk at a brisk 1 GB/min clip, and after a couple of false starts (had to select the Active Partition on the new disk to make it boot, hello random stupid arbitrary switches), the machine booted off the new disk as if nothing had changed, which is a freakin' miracle, far as I'm concerned. Of course, it shouldn't require a 3rd-party program and heartfelt prayers to move a Windows installation around, but it worked and I'm not going to quibble too much about it, lest the Computer Gods (the geeky relatives of the Football Gods) smite my platters. Besides, with all the fiddly Unix bits hidden away, it takes a (almost free) program to move a MacOS X installation to a new home, too.

There's finally a decent drag-and-drop GUI frontend to rip DVDs on MacOS X. There were always the suite of ported Linux tools, but who the fuck wants to set a million cryptic parameters on the command line? Unfortunately, after one weekend at version 1.0, the developers are already whining about the lack of donations for their efforts. Considering the audience for this type of stuff, what were they expecting? Unfortunately, for something this processor-intensive, the Mac probably isn't the right tool for the job anyway. It took my poor 500 MHz G4 more than 12 hours to encode The Matrix into a 700 MB DivX file, running flat-out the whole time. Did I mention that most DivX players on MacOS X suck interface-wise? More stupid Linux ports.

Happy New Year of the Ram/Sheep/Goat/Bovine Ruminant

Anyway, who gives a fuck what you call it in English. It's the year of the 羊 and hope you have a good one. And in the true spirit of the season:

恭喜恭喜
紅包那裡

Yes, in this era of ATM's and international wire transfers, I still love those red envelopes with the twenty in it. Seafood pasta in a lemon-cream sauce isn't really the right thing for the occasion, but I'm out of rice, and one does what one can.