Vote for Pedro

Another wildly fascinating week here in Virginia (It's say weird to say that I live here). Hmm..let's see. I watched Napoleon Dynamite last night. I'd seen it before but it's such a quirky movie, it was worth another viewing. The movie is set in Preston, Idaho which in an LDS-dominated area near Utah (Napoleon is even wearing a Rick's College [the 2-year version of BYU] shirt at one point in the movie). Although it's never formally mentioned it helps make sense why there is absolutely no swearing or sex/kissing in the movie. For those of you that don't know, I used to live in that general area. Anyway for those who haven't seen it there are so many odd characters in the movie it's definitely worth a peak.

Anyway I've got to get back to improving my computer hacking skills (or bow hunting skills).

Oh yes, here's an article about farting fish. Some scientists have all the luck.

Attack of the shopping robots!

We hope everyone had a nice thanksgiving and that you didn't go to the stores the day after. We went into DC to see the relatively new National Museum of the American Indian. It was stuffed with people, which I think was a good sign. There was lots of info about several different native peoples from all over the Americas. It was definitely more enjoyable than sitting in traffic near a mall.

Although we didn't do any shopping after Thanksgiving, we did do a little bit earlier in the week. One of the things we picked up was a brand new monochrome laser printer for $50 (with super rebates). If you don't do color printing, a laser printer can be much more economical in the long run. There are often some super computer deals this time of year so if you need something now is a good time to look (on-line of course; none of that mucking about with other people).

We also watched a couple of basically depressing but good movies, Cidade de Dues (City of God) and Crash. I'm not sure if they gave us much to be thankful for but they were definitely thought provoking and I'd recommend both of them.

Happy Gluttony Day!

All kidding aside, all of us here including Merl and the Banditos (Merl has some new friends) are thankful for our wonderful friends and family and hope you have a nice Thanksgiving. We'll be getting starting our cooking here in a moment (mmm..chile con queso). FYI, we had a nice little snow storm here last night. Too bad it's all gone today.

I ran across this rather interesting article that looks at the economics of buying a hybrid car vs. an small non-hybrid economy car. Although I haven't looked through the methodology very much, it is an interesting read. Of course, the economic side is often only a small part of why people opt to buy a hybrid.

Getting ready for Thanksgiving

Another thanksgiving approaches. It's interesting not going to the story to buy traditional thanksgiving food. The store may be absolutely stuffed with people but the seafood section is rather empty. Anyway we're looking around for Thanksgiving recipes. If anyone has any great recipes, please feel free to drop us a line.

Ferry Halim has created some of the best flash games I've seen over at his site, orisinal.com (No, I did not spell that wrong). Here are three that I think are exceptionally good and wonderfully capture a mood.

Cats - Ever heard of the expression, "Hearding Cats?" Well, that's essentially the point of this game. Just touch the cats with your mouse to make them stop or go. The object is to get all of the cats either sitting or walking at the same time. Wonderful music.

Monkeyslide - I've had this game bookmarked forever. Just a clever little game with cute monkeys; what more can you ask for in life?

The Bottom of the Sea - A really simple game (just jump from platform to platform) with amazing ambiance. Notice the subtle shark shadows that occasionally move across the background.

The Corcoran

Yesterday was a special treat. My friend who works at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (i.e., Museum) in Washington, DC gave us a personal tour around. Being an artist himself and an employee there for such a long time he had such great insight into all of the paintings and painters themselves that made it a real treat. The funny thing about it was that there was a special Andy Warhol exhibit at the museum and that's where we spent the least amount of time. I wasn't terribly impressed with that section of the exhibit.

On another note I've been thinking a lot about how there are certain things about the design of computers (Operating Systems in particular) that make them highly inefficient. One of them is the amount of time digging through the start menu (or other similar item) looking for a program. It's a ridiculous waste of time. However, there are products (many of them are free) that make this much more efficient. For you MS Windows users out there, I would suggest trying launchy, an open-source knock off of Quicksilver for OS X. To use launchy, press alt+space. A little window will up in the upper left corner. Once it's open, start typing the name of the program you are looking for. You don't even have to spell it right. It will start to create a list of possible programs that you might mean. Just select the one you want with your cursor button and hit enter. It sounds complicated but let's say I want to open Mozilla Firefox. I just hit alt+space and type "fire" then hit enter. Much faster than digging around in that horrible start menu. I hope that helps.

Congrats to Becky

Yesterday Becky went through her prospectus defense and is now a PhD Candidate. Go Becky! As for me I had a paper published this week, finished revisions on another paper that was accepted with minor comments, and was invited to give a poster at an upcoming meeting. But enough impressing myself.

I thought that a site such as this one, which I listed as one of my 10 most pointless internet sites would ever go anywhere. My friend Allan pointed out my error that the car is Formula 1 rather than Nascar, as I'd previously stated. Who new how wrong I could be? Check out this video which has created a version of "Axel F" (from Beverly Hills Cop 2) using sounds from the afore mentioned site. Please note that it takes a long time to load.

Sorry for the crappy post but I've got important stuff to uuuuhhhhhhh do.

Fall is here

Despite our late Indian Summer days here previously it's finally starting cooling off here and the leaves are turning rapidly. And given today is a holiday, I decided to take a walk around my neighborhood this morning. One reason for my walk this morning was to check the progress of the Trader Joe's they've been building within walking distance of my apartment. Lo and behold, today was the first day that it was open. (See picture above). I raced home to put together some recipes. I've had some star anise which is wholly and distinctly different from anise that we bought it Mexico. I looked up some recipes on google that called for star anise and headed over to buy some goodies. Interestingly enough, google cooking has become its own term and in fact quite a trend for using up ingredients you may have sitting around your house. With that in mind I hope to make some apricot chutney.

Voting Day

Okay it was actually yesterday. I had registered on the last possible day where I could still vote in Virginia's state and local elections. In a state that is fairly strongly republican, Tim Kaine (D) beat Jerry Kilgore (R) by a sizable margin. One of the oddest things I heard was Kilgore (Red Guy) harshly criticizing Kaine (Blue Guy) for not being a proponent of the death penalty, which was a result of Kaine's religious beliefs (he's catholic). I thought it odd to hear of a republican attack a democrat for their religious beliefs.

FYI, some web sites such as the washingtonpost.com require to register to read articles and ask all sorts of personal info from you when you register. If you'd like to avoid this, just dump the URL in bugmenot.com and it will provide you with registration info for the site, thus keeping you from having to dish out your personal information to sites that really don't need to know that info in the first place. Stick it to the man.

Beautiful Weather

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I had a nice trip to Madison, Wisconsin on Tuesday and Wednesday. Just been busy here. I have a relatively big talk to give on Tuesday so I've been getting ready for that. Somehow between when I left on Monday and I got back on Thursday the anticipated audience for the talk increased tremendously, so I really need to get my stuff together.

Anyway, the weather here has been unbelievable for November (76 degress today). I spent about 3 hours this morning outside for our monthly Aikido in the park class and I wore a t-shirt and shorts and was very comfortable. Mainly cooking (for the rest of the week) and cleaning for the rest of the day. I may try to watch Throne of Blood today, Akira Kurosawa's adaptation of MacBeth.

If you're a fan of animated shorts you might like one of the following animated short series I tend to monitor from time to time.

Strong Bad - The most popular section of homestarrunner.com, a crazy character wearing a Mexican wrestling mask and boxing gloves answers e-mails. Click here for the classic Trogdor episode.

Weebl and Bob - Very odd group of generally very difficult to understand characters with an obsession for pie. Anyone who has shortened "Hello" to "lo" is good in my book. Click here to see one of my favorite episodes.

Neurotically Yours - My friend Jody got me into these toons. The voice acting is a little weak but I like the characters. Click here for a good one.