Spoiler Alert:
Yep, so last week Luke left, and this week Jesse is gone. So much for the last remaining people I had a vested interest in. It was a good call on the other player’s part as they were a really strong team and had an alliance with the other team up for elimination, John & Natalie.
Once again it came down to the guys, with my guy in a 1 point deficit, which is really hard to recover from. The guys’ questions are always slow lobs right over the plate, because they are trivia from areas like fashion that really have no trivia; this does not make recovering a point any easier. At least no one spoiled this one for me.
Oh and the Sox won tonight, unlike last week when I had Luke going spoiled, and a Sox loss in the same night. Rough night of watching TV I know. But hey, my bike riding friends say that when the Sox were down 3-1 in ALCS games, they experienced significantly more road rage.
Another Week, Another Reason Not to Watch Beauty & the Geek
October 24th, 2007Red Sox Win the Pennant
October 22nd, 2007That is all.
Pass No Laws Before Passing Bad Ones
October 19th, 2007I usually don’t waste time at work with the blog but this has really hit all of my political buttons. In case you’ve been living under a blindfold for the last year or so, the US. government broke the law by asking the big telecoms to break the law and hand over customer data without warrants, which the telecoms gladly did. Unfortunetly the White House is throwing every state secret, classified, you can’t talk about this rule in the book at the people, congress, EFF, others, who are trying to expose this presidentially sanctioned criminal activity. They are also trying to pass an ex-post-facto law, which specifically indemnifies any telco that may have illegally helped the government in this case. Yesterday I read that the senate had agreed to attach language to the new surveillance bull that does just that.
This pisses me off to no end. I elected the democrats to stop just such tomfoolery from going on. It is better than we make no new laws than that we make bad laws such as this! If the democrats can’t convince the white house and the republicans of the need for new and good laws, then I am perfectly happy with their primary purpose being only to prevent the republicans from creating bad laws. But that is not what they are doing, out of what I must assume is fear that if no legislation passes they will be looks upon as not doing their jobs they are failing me. As far as I am concerned it is their job to ensure that no legislation passes. Yes, that takes the view that the republicans will not pass any good legislation. Not too far off in my estimation, as these republicans are ignoring the only tenet of their platform that I agree with, that being fiscal conservatism.
Luckily today I read that Senator Chris Dodd, who is a 2008 presidential candidate, has put the new bill “on hold” which, essentially is the best one man can do at preventing the bill from moving to the floor for discussion. And for that I must say thank you! Senator Dodd has proven to me that he is at least trying to do what he was elected to do. He is not afraid to do nothing when the only practical alternative is to do a bad thing. How hard is that people; come on. I can only hope that other senators and presidential candidates see his actions and copy them verbatim.
A Week for Losers
October 17th, 2007
Well, in the start the eventual Red Sox loss (#3 in a row) I got an IM from Josh that included a spoiler for this week’s beauty and the geek. Quit now if you don’t want to be spoiled. It was one line, all spoiler, no lead up:
Man, Luke talks then he’s gone.
I finished the game, yelling enough at Josh that he felt compelled to take up the Red Sox cause for one night only, which is a big step for him, and I post it here only so his family has evidence of his weakness and treachery. I finished the game, then settled down for a spoiled Beauty and the Geek at 1.1 time normal speed.
Oh so, I skipped last week’s Beauty and the Geek update, well it didn’t have much to do with Luke or Jesse, but it was interesting. Nicole tricked Sam into putting 2 strong competitors up against Rebbecca and Will, whom Sam wanted to keep in the game, but Nicole did not. Nicole’s trickery paid off her in the end. In other news, Nicole apparently attends Tufts, which is all of a 15 min walk away from here.
Ok so this week. There was a make over. Luke went from this:
To this:
In the end, Luke and Katie got put up for elimination by Shae and Josh because, as I said at the start, Luke isn’t really in the same category as some of the other geeks like Josh; and therefore, is seen as a threat to win. Although, Katie, after a 2nd best showing in the episode 2 debate, didn’t seem as smart as she was given credit for in the teaching segment this week. Luke went home in the end because Nicole knows what Britney Spears and Ashlee Simpson are famous for; that is having 2 kids and shaving her air, and lip syncing respectively. Come on, even I knew that. The real question is that with Tony, Amanda, Luke, Katie, and Hollie gone, are Jesse and Erin really enough of a reason to keep watching this pretty awful show. Maybe I’ll give it a try at 1.4 times normal speed like I used to watch family feud with the room mates. At that speed the 44 minute long show would only take 31.4 minuets. Don’t expect an update.
Titles are Hard, I Give Up
October 14th, 2007So the Red Sox lost, It was such a close game, until the end, and I drove home during that (when it went to 9-6) so it seems even closer. But both of the ALCS games so far I’ve actually watched instead of just happening to be able to see the glow from fenway. Tonight I was even out, at Emily’s apartment condo warming party. It was a fun party other than the game. Actually it was more interesting, in that 4 of the girls who at first sight appeared to be single were actually lesbians, lowering the number of single girls there by a large fraction :-/. There was some public girl on girl make out action, I suppose that can make up for the lack of singles.
There was good news in the sports world for me today though (just in the games I didn’t watch). That being:
- #3 Ohio State won as expected without me even so much as checking to see if the game was going to be on TV here, although I doubt it was. With the rest of the results, it looks like OSU is once again going to be #1 in the AP poll, but I doubt the BCS will be that kind to us.
- #17 Kentucky helped OSU out by knocking off #1 LSU. Seems like this game was awesome and well deserving of being watched. I’ve got a cousin at Kentucky now, so theres an official reason to pull for them. Last week I pulled for LSU against those evil Florida Gators, even though a Florida win would have increased OSU’s ranking; its nice to see a team I actually kind of like knock of OSU, it feels better than if we’d needed the Gators to do it.
- #2 California lost to Oregon State also helping OSU out in the rankings. I must say these Oregon teams are making me happy this season, with this, and Oregon’s win over Michigan in week 2.
- And the last one is just spiteful: Louisville topped #15 Cincinnati. I am by no means a UC fan, so keeping them in the rightful place and out of the top 25 is appreciated.
So where was I instead of watching college football? Well, at another activity 2002 me would not have guessed, playing board games. I arrived at the Game Until You Die party later than I wanted, but just in time for the 5th spot in a game of Puerto Rico, which I came in 3rd. It was good to play with new people, as I saw 2 new strategies that I can try on my usual play group, who was in the other room playing power grid. I’ve played Puerto Rico more times than I can count at this point, and I’ve never won, but I’ve placed 2nd many times, so I feel that I could be good, but it really is a great game, its so much fun and interesting even when 4 of you have accidentally let the 5th person run away with the game. So now that I’m remembering board games and football and not baseball I can goto bed smiling, which is exactly what I set out to do with this 2:20am post.
Island Hopper
October 10th, 2007
This week Paul picked Island Hopper, which is, what I would call, some kind of Asian Fusion Restaurant. Its on Mass. Ave. and Newbury St. I had the Mango Chicken, which was served in mango halves, and was yummy. If anything there just wasn’t enough of it. But, apparently, the item to get was Beef Randang, 3 people ordered it and they all liked it, as far as I could tell. Topics of conversation included numerical methods and creative methods for asking girls out on dates as practiced in small town Idaho, near where Napoleon Dynamite was filmed; we had an expert on hand.
After dinner we went to JP Licks, which is a yummy local ice cream place. I always go with the Cake Batter flavor, once I tired to get Oreo Cake Batter, but I screwed up my order and just got Oreo, so now I keep it simple. While eating we noticed this sign for their ice cream cakes, which left us with the intriguing question, “When, exactly, are Oreos in season?” Any ideas?
Mario Kart Double Dash
October 9th, 2007
Remember, my room mate Sririam got a Wii not too long ago. Now, my primary interest in the Wii is as a 250% more expensive than it should be Game Cube, so that I can once again play the aforementioned game. Mario Kart is my game, so much as I have one. Last time I seriously played Double Dash was when I was living in Morrill Tower with Chris, which was sophomore year of college…. 2004. Its been 3 years; I’m not as rusty and I expected to be. I was pretty bored over the long weekend (I got Columbus Day off) so in addition to starting Arrested Development (now in season 2), I unlocked everything you can with the 4 non-all-cup-tour cups on 50, 100, and 150cc cups. I’ve never actually unlocked anything on the game before, as Chris came to me with everything already unlocked, so that was fun.
Wavebirds, thats what you call those wireless game cube controllers. They are ridiculously difficult to acquire. It seems Nintendo stopped producing them, and demand is way up because no one wants to use the plain old wired controllers with the wii (that just seems wrong). The only place I could find any is ebay, and the go for ~$45 a pop on there regularly. I got lucky though, so I thought. I found someone selling the game and 2 wavebrids (all separate auctions but the same seller), and I won all of the auctions. That saved me ~$12 in shipping, which made things more reasonable, and the game went for way less than retail. Anyways one of them was missing a part that was clearly pictured in the image. The seller has agreed to let me return that one, and 2 pristine controllers arrived today from another auction. I’m only 1 short now, and then, once my room mates get up to speed, the tournaments will commence.
Erik’s Deck Party
October 8th, 2007Because of the unseasonably warm, wonderful weather on Friday one of my coworkers, Erik, had an impromptu dinner party on the roof deck of his apartment, which is at the base of beacon hill. I had never been to his place before, because he only hosts board gaming when I am unable to do so, which usually means that I am out of town. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a dinner party where the dinner was delivered Thai food before, but it worked. I got there just in time to provide input into what to get for dinner, but I didn’t, as I’m a Thai food novice still. I was late because there was a fire in the park street T station, which well, that just screws with everything. Being late also means I missed the last bit of daylight with which to get some nice skyline photos from a new vantage point. The view from his roof deck is pretty unique. The images are situated clockwise from left to right:
The party was a lot of fun. There were only a few people from work there, most of the people where from Community Boating. Erik is always telling us stories about these people so it was interesting to meet them. It was pretty dark up on the deck, so dark I’ve no idea what Thai dishes I actually ate, or what was in them, but they were yummy. We were also, very surprisingly, able to see 3 shooting stars. Yes, in the city, so they must have been amazingly bright. I only saw 2 of them. One went from north to south right over the middle, and darkest, part of the sky. The other a few hours later, went from north to the south west, directly into the lights at Fenway, but we were still able to see its last bright explosion through all the light pollution.
Beauty & the Geek Rankings
October 4th, 2007Beauty and the Geek actually airs on Tuesday, not Thursday as my blog would make it seem. Not much to report here, Jesse was almost eliminated, but survived. Luke was hardly in the show at all. Thats sort of a good thing, in that they will include you in the show more if you are more likely to be eliminated. I found a site, an ad laden annoying scummy site, but they are doing weekly rankings. In the first ranking Luke had the top spot, but hes slipped a little, down to number 3 and Jesse jumped to number 2, although the reasoning there is more wishful than scientific.
Of Mashups, Podcasts, and Cat Macros
October 4th, 2007Check out this great Google maps mashup I found: Zip code mashup. I found it because a packaged arrived yesterday and the delivery confirmation claimed it was sent to my address in zip code 02143, which I thought wrong. So I wanted to check and make sure that I’m actually in 02144 and not 02143, because I could easily have memorized the wrong zip code. Turns out 02144 is correct, like I thought, but I was surprised to learn that Somerville has 3 whole zip codes to itself. That seems like a lot to me, but then, it is the northeast. Oh, apparently, we’re calling these things special google maps overlays “mashups” now. A “mashup” really is just the result of open access to information; people put together information from different sources. Thats just an awful name for something so common. Its also kind of misleading like the term Podcast.
A podcast, is just an audio file (often in MP3 format). It is nothing else. Podcasts are often delivered via RSS, which is nothing more than an attempt to turn the “user pulls the content” nature of the world wide web on its head. That would be, into a “users have content pushed to them” medium, such as television. RSS does this by wasting a ton of resources polling for updates. Any well seasoned programmer will tell you the polling is an awful idea unless you have no other way, and if you have to do it, maybe you should rethink why you need to do it in the first place. I tend to think that making the internet more like TV is also an awful idea, so that even this friggen blog automatically offers an RSS feed irks me. Right, so a podcast is an audio file that is pushed to the user, its simple, the only software you need is an audio playing program and a web browser. The web browser will display the XML that implements the RSS feed, and you can easily find the link to the audio file, download it and play it. But the name podcast makes people think that there is something special about this audio file, and that they need to have special software like iTunes which combines and audio player and an RSS reader, when in fact, neither are needed. I know it sounds cool, but nomenclature should make things as simple as they are, not more complex.
On the subject of names for things I don’t like: “lolcats” for pictures of cats with words on them. Well I don’t like pictures of cats with words on them much in general because most of them aren’t very creative and the shorthand English doesn’t make them funnier. Now, really creative ones I’ve got nothing against, but I would prefer to call them Cat Macros, which is an accepted alternative term. The worst part about lolcats is that I’ve heard (not heard of) people use the term when talking about images in the same style but without actual cats in them. If you add a humorous caption to an image of a turtle it should be a Turtle Macro, not an lolcat.