Archive for the ‘General’ Category.
Fighting Robots return to San Francisco!
Join us Saturday and Sunday, November 12-13th for The ComBots Cup and Robot Fighting League’s 2005 National Championships! See the metallic stars of TV gather to fight it out to decide who’s the champion – in robot weight classes up to 340 pounds. Thrill to the spectacle as robots fight only a few feet away from the bleachers!
The heavyweight combots cup competitors will be fighting for a $10,000 prize! The highest prize in the US history of fighting robots.
(Combots)
I think I’ll be going Sunday Sunday Sunday! Racewaaay Park!
The will of the California people seems to differ somewhat from my own. Most of the Propositions I voted for failed and most that I voted against succeeded.
I found casting my semi-libertarian vote pretty easy. I voted for (in order, starting at #73) “warning labels” but not bans, competition in the workplace, informed consent, smaller government, unbiased government, open marketplace, open marketplace, open marketplace.
Continue reading ‘How I voted’ »
I need a new bed.
In most every bed I’ve ever slept in for more than a few months, this divot forms where I sleep on my side. Yes, yes, I know that you’re supposed to rotate your bed every couple months. I do that but it only staves off the divoting for a while. I think it’s that I fall asleep stay in once place; I’ve read how people toss and turn in their sleep all night but I think I toss very little if at all.
I spent like $800 on this snazzy bed a few years ago. 4 years later, the divot became permanent. I’m sleeping on an Ikea mattress right now; for the first 3 months I thought I had found a mattress that didn’t sag beneth me. Nope. I put a good-ol’ divot in my family’s guest bed too. The destruction continues.
I didn’t have this problem with a water bed and Stevie points out that his Select Comfort air mattresses don’t get divots.
I’m thinking about getting a Select Comfort bed. What do you think?
I went out to some Day of the Dead festivities in my neighborhood a couple nights ago. I was struck very strongly at how there were no Hispanics at the event.
I’m in the heart of the Mission District during one of the largest Hispanic events of the year and… no Hispanics. It was all with the drumming and artist types and costume photo ops. It felt very disingenuous.
Here ya go Trav…
1. How much music do I have?
Something like 100 gigabytes worth… it’s a mix of CDs I’ve owned and encoded into FLAC, music I’ve stolen (in the figurative sense only) from various places, and music that’s been given to me.
2. What was the last CD I bought?
Cookie Mongoloid – Blood and Cookies!
3. What am I listening to right now?
Right now, I have “Me Lost Me Cookie in the Mosh Pit” on Winamp and NPR on Radiator, SomaFM’s Groove Salad is ready to stream. And just to confuse you, last night I was jamming to Beyonce’s Dangerously in Love.
4. Name five songs that mean a lot to me.
Breathe – Telepopmusik. The song has this association with my Burning Man experience. I can’t pin down a single experience, I think maybe I just heard it a lot at the 2004 event. I dig the techno sound, I dig the floating sensation it calls forth.
Blue Eyes – Cary Brothers. It’s a good song. Simple, straightforward. It’s connected to Scrubs, a TV show I really like. Nothing too deep here…
Mad World – Tears For Fears. The version from Donny Darko. I dig how the changed tempo conveys a totally different message from the original. And I’ll stick the solo version of Overkill by Men at Work / Colin Hay into this entry as well.
Sinead O’Conner – Nothing Compares 2 U
Tonight Tonight Tonight – Phil Collins. It’s got a spiritual connection to a trip that Stevie and I took together in college. There’s this moment of clarity we shared driving across the everglades in the middle of the night when this song came on. It had some unspoken significance even before that moment as well; I don’t know why, but it feels important.
update 11-11-05 Upped from 40 gig of music to 100.
Ah! I missed it! Sunday was a good/bad day for me. I came down from staying the night after a Halloween party Santa Rosa for a house interview. Party was good, time spent, good. I had a good feeling about the house but they called to cancel before I got there. I looked around the marina wondering if I should buy a boat to live on. (A: No, duh!) I spent a while pouting, I even skipped out on the Chet Helms free psychadelia concert, I was thinking “I’ll never find a good place to live”. I tried to get in to “Bat Man: The TV Show: The Play” but it was sold out… and it was their last show EVER. Until I saw the Poseiden Adventure. Ernest Borgnine is a man’s man.
I didn’t even hear about the illegal soapbox racing til Trav mentioned it via Boingboing. It’s cool to live in a place that gets BBoinged. But then aren’t most of the BBoingers here?
Wow, this post is really looking like that quintescential “stare at my belly button lint!” entries. Let me cheer you (and ME!) up by saying that last week I met and shared a tobacco hookah with the Shanan, the Tivo Diva. It was krazy, I felt like I was having a brush with stardom. It is soo weird how seeing people on TV puts them automatically in a higher place in your internal hierarchy. And on that same night I had a very nice evening filled with tapas, “The Angry 420’s” and Couchsurfing.com’s Shameless Heather!
Last night, I spent my evening watching The Poseidon Adventure with a cadre of bad movie connesseurs at The Dark Room, 2263 Mission St. Done up in MST3K style, we paid $5 to hear the Bad Movie Night theme song played on banjo and then we hung around and ate popcorn and the movie. Twas fun.
I caught Cookie Mongoloid at 12 Galaxies last night. It was awsome. They are a Cookie Monster – Sesame Street Speed Metal Cover Band, heavy on the art of the performance.
notes
– Metal renditions of Sesame Street classics work well for me
– Double barreled, air powered cookie shotgun!
– Cookie Uzi – it jammed on stage so no cookie uzi for us :-(
– I got their leather studded cd “Blood + Cookies”
– Mongoloid fans have good, if gentle mosh pits
– “What body parts start with ‘C’ ? Me can only think of 2 things. One thing is ‘colon’. Me not say what other thing is.” !!!
Holly was telling me that Humvees get 3 MPG. That sounded like propoganda so I checked it out…
Oh my. She’s not so far off! Gasoline powered Hummers get 4-7 MPG! Turbo diesels get 10-15.
That means my 45 mile commute to Cupertino a few days a week would cost $50 round-trip in gas instead of my current $10 round-trip! Something like an extra $6,000 a year in gas. (12,000 miles @ $3/gallon, Hummer 5MPG, Sebring 27MPG)
That’s why it’s a status symbol.
I want a 9000 SUX
TJIC writes how the city of Arlington, MA paved his street without informing anyone and … oh, you’ll have to read it for yourself. And the photo is priceless.
http://tjic.com/blog/2005/10/23/look-for-the-government-label/
