Hairy Potter

I took my mom and sisters to the movies last night. We all saw Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and really liked it. I've seen the other two movies and read all five books, and yeah, I'm a little embarrassed about that, but they really are good books. Amazingly crafted, really- they're long books that are suspenseful throughout despite being about witches and wizards, a theme that's already been done to death. ha ha ha. But seriously, I am a little embarrassed to be blogging about Harry Potter. There will be no links to that crap here. I am writing this post because it reminded me of a blog post i wanted to write before I knew what blogging was. What I think is a great story to share. I was travelling with my girlfriend at the time who was so into the books she convinced me to read them, and got me into the whole HP phenomenon. We were down in Southern Thailand, in Krabbe, enjoying a few weeks R&R before leaving Taiwan to return to California. The vacation was great, possibly my best ever. Awesome food, scenery, and everything was cheap. I even ended up buying my shy girlfriend her first bikini... for like 15 bucks. She had mentioned earlier that she wanted to get a bikini wax before trying it on. She even knew where she wanted to get it done. See, when you don't speak English, but need an English name for your store, there is virtually no limit for how odd your choice can be. The Thai woman working the beauty parlor where we went had asked her son for a good English name, then went and made a sign with the proper font but apparently no thought of word play. Great for tourists, we get to tell people we went to Harry Potter Bikini Wax and Massage. Insert your own crude joke here.

Famine to Feast

So after weeks of unsuccessfully selling real estate websites and job hunting, I now find myself in a place where I may have more jobs than I can handle. One would be working for SDSU as a website developer for faculty and staff in the Social Science Research Lab. Sounds ideal for me. It would be a perfect job, part-time, so I can continue in my other lab. The other position is an internship working for Mission Federal Credit Union, helping them revamp their new hire training packets. The final job would be working as an ESL teacher. All good options, none sparklingly bright, but here's hoping the interview I am going on in a few minutes goes well.

Molly's Birthday

Congrats on Molly's 198th birthday. Molly is my 1989 Ford Escort. I didn't name her, my sister did when someone gave it to her. the odometer is coming up on 99,000 miles. The sticker my oil change guy put up on the window says 100,000, but he doesn't know that we've already flipped the dial one time already. She really is a super girl. Climbs hills below 50 sometimes, has no power off the line, but starts every time and didn't cost a dime. She has her quirks, the space poop sticker my friend at NASA gave me and a passenger's side window that suffered from a bad tint job. It was only one window, the rest of it was fine or I would've done something about it sooner. The big window on the passenger door had this really odd problem with the tint as it was aging. Everyone who sat there asked me why they couldn't see through it. If you were never in my car, let me describe it the best I can. A lot of people used the word "Dali" when trying to describe it, but that's hard to imagine, really. See, you can see through it clearly, but the surface bent all the images. It wasn't like looking through bubbles, but more like everything was through wavy lines that just distorted your vision enough to make you sick if you looked long enough. Like a dumb lobster, I squinted my way through left turns that got slightly worse every day until just the other day. When Kris picked me up from work I ended up in the passenger's seat, so I peeled that crazy tint off the window. After 30 minutes of scrubbing adhesive off the window, I can see clearly through her. Happy 198,088 miles Molly. Thanks, we love you!

Write On Lang!

I know I've linked to Slamonline.com before, but am linking back again today because I'm happy for the guy who writes it. Lang is an important part of my everyday life, and though we'll never meet, I'm happy for him. See, he writes the blog that I look forward to reading during my lunch break. I've been going to the slamonline website regularly since it was nothing more than an online archive of all the articles from a magazine I've already bought. I've enjoyed watching Lang make his mark on the site. Its become a place for hoopaholics like me to get journalist quality links to other great articles about basketball, commentary from people at some of the games, and some just-plain-cool links like the recent picture of david bowie getting a spoon tossed in his eye. Wow, it sounds like I'm really trying to suck up to Lang. I'm not. Why would a Lakerfan like myself want tickets to a Hawks game? The Clippers are just as bad and a whole lot closer. Its that I respect what he does as a writer, and am glad that Sports Illustrated has allowed him to start his own blog on their site each week. Lang, to his credit, keeps his cool. In Monday's post he writes: In an effort to keep my ego in check, they spelled my name wrong on the header. So from now until they fix it, we will keep referring to them as Sports Illllllllustrated.
Am I selling out? I wish. I'll gladly sell out, if the price is right. But since Sports Illlllllllustrated is paying me only in surplus football phones, it's kind of a wash.

Wedding

I'm probably one of the only 30 year olds I know who just went to their friend's first wedding. And no, its not because I don't have any friends. I went to a couple weddings in Korea and Taiwan, but they aren't the same... The minister got the bride's name wrong right off the bat, but recovered with poise and humor that sort of set the tone for the ceremony. It was a beautiful room, in San Francisco's Metropolitan Club. He read the bride and groom's written account of how their relationship came together then they exchanged vows and we had a terrific dinner. I particularly liked how the bride's account of how they met was painstakingly articulated.. spanning so many pages that it took about ten minutes to read. Then the groom followed up with three sentences. both were sweet and touching. I'm so happy for my friends. Congratulations Brian and Kieren!

What the Fruck am I doing?

Its been one of those weeks, without deadlines for assignments or projects, I find that I'm just spinning my wheels a lot. Not getting much done. Its nice having the pressure gone, but I scarcely reckanize myself. This morning, for example, I'm packing for a trip up to San Francisco to see my friends Brian and Kirin get married, and I'm still in sweats reading web pages agonizing over the breakup of the Lakers that is already happening. (Actually that sounds a lot like me. Its life without a to-do list that is changed.) Phil Jackson is not coming back as a coach. Shaq is demanding to be traded and from his complaints it sounds like more than just trying to get the extension he's been seeking. It looks like the fate of the team will rest with Kobe being resigned... Shaq gone (sniff..) Phil gone.. makes Kobe's trial even more important. What the Fruck are the Lakers doing? Hard enough to see the team not win last week, but seeing the team lose the league's best coach and arguably its two best players... pretty frucking tough for an über-fan like myself. Oh well. least it ain't dull.

My grandma would love this!

I first visited this website a few months ago, then revisited it every day for about a week since I thought it was so funny. Now that I read an article about how their designs are selling at Urban Outfitters, I remembered how special SubversiveCrossstitch. com really is. It was tough to pick a favorite picture to post online today, but this one with the little ducks and bunnies made me laugh harder than the others.

Anything to avoid thinking about the Lakers

This little guy in the boxing gloves who is dancing like Ricky Martin is Strongbad, a character at the Homestarrunner.com website I have been checking out lately. These guys have made a ton of flash cartoons, but the strongbad emails in the link above are the most hilarious. Homestarrunner has a wiki that isn't working as i write this post. A broken link along with an animated gif seems like a pretty lame post now that I think of it. Guess I won't post about cartoons anymore. Today's post didn't go well. Watch Trogdor instead. I'm not this funny.

Earthquake

This afternoon we had the first earthquake I've felt since I've lived in San Diego. It turns out it was a five point two on the richter scale, which isn't all that big, but big enough to give everyone a tense moment. It has me remembering the 7.6 quake I lived through while in Taiwan and how fricking scary that was. The bridge I took to school each day had collapsed. My school had significant damage, one whole wing was not re-opened. Three of my 25 kindergarten students had lost their homes. Aftershocks for weeks... such a tense time for the Taiwanese, the whole city basically camping in a park until the aftershocks stopped. I remember the six.five aftershock that I survived riding in an elevator. All of that was scarier than today's event. I went into the lab where I worked and loudly blamed today's rumbling on the Mexican food I had for lunch.

A rose by this name wouldn't smell sweet

My friend has a knack for discovering people with exceptionally unfortunate names. He passed along European basketball star, Gregor Fucka, and Nascar race driver, Dick Trickle, but the one that takes the cake is the research scientist living in Singapore. Click to see the winner of my first Most Unfortunate Name Contest.

Four headed monster

Game three of the finals is just underway. I heard this story while listening to the radio broadcast, and found it hilarious. Tickets to watch these games are going for $35,000 in LA, just to put this in perspective. A fan watching the teams warm up for game three actually rushed the floor during pre-game shootaround and took a swing at Karl Malone, one of the strongest guys in the league. Amazing that someone would have the plums to do that, in the first place, but what was he thinking, didn't he know he would get ejected if he attacked one of the players? Amazing how dumb some people are.

What. A. Game.

The NBA finals have turned into a real series. The Lakers were strong favorites to win it all... most people thinking LA would sweep Detroit, then we lost the first game, and needed this miracle three point shot from KB8 at the end to win it.
Amazing game, really. The overtime was never close, we ended up winning by 8. I love how sports brings people together. Calls from both sisters and friends all asking "Can you believe this?"

spelling action heats up

This poor kid fainted under the pressure of the spelling bee. He got up, then nailed the word. I love the reaction of the kids behind him Thanks to SLAM for the picture.

< geek>

Been having dreams of CSS code. Seriously. I have little images of quotes, divs and all sorts of geek crap visiting me at night. BBEdit has been my new best friend. The Nursing Research Site is looking cool. Very proud to be designing at this level... pretty much ignoring dreamweaver and doing it all in a text editor. My upstairs neighbors think I'm cool, too. I could hear them last night making all kinds of noises just before bed. I could hear them upstairs cheering me on as I was coding. Ohh Ohh Yeah! Somehow they even knew when it was getting tough for me. She shouted out "harder harder!" They were exceptionally proud of me last night. Not only was she screaming "yes, yes" they were even so excited they made more noise by jumping up and down on the bed, moaning and shouting. < /geek>

worse than a brain fart

So we had a third person join us for our mountain bike ride today. We rode out in Santee Lakes, the place where both of our bikes broke down last time. Not today.. this was a great ride. We found new trails and had a good two and a half hour ride. I came back with black ash and dirt all over my legs... from the knee down, I looked like some sort of odd Chappelle show character. Robin dropped me off at my car, I put my bike in the trunk, then drove off to meet a friend of mine who was waiting for me at my house. When I got home, I saw that I had made a terrible mistake. A stupid little brainfart like I do all the time, only it was worse. I left my front bicycle tire leaning against my car and drove away. I called Rob to see if it was still there and it wasn't. It was a nice rim, and will be expensive to replace, but its also sentimental since my friend Steve gave it to me for doing a logo for his bike company, Perv... It'll cost me 200 bucks, easy, since I have to get a rotor for my brakes, a good strong rim, and wheel build, tire... shit. Its worse than a brainfart. Its like a brainshit all over myself and its running down inside my shirt and gathering in a clumpy mess at my beltline. Doh!

Wiki, Bliki, Blognition

Wiki is my current obsession. I have been working on describing what I call a "bliki" which is a hybrid of blogs and wikis on my bliki. I think there are lot of powerful things you can do with these new forms of media. As a former teacher, I keep coming up with ways to use these in a classroom setting, and ways that it is good for kids. Blognition is my most recent idea for ways to use blogs to further student's thinking. Today, though, I want to plug my friend's wiki as a really good example of how good style sheets can make a wiki look. If you happen to read this blog and don't know what a wiki is, don't worry. I'll continue blogging about less techie themes and more about debauchery and simple pleasures. I'm just really impressed with the wiki my friend modified today.

Rush to the Finals

Last nights Laker game had a lot of fans feeling nervous. The team was behind for a lot of the third, and some of the 4th until Kareem Rush drained 3 3-pointers to lead the Lakers to victory. That's why I love sports. On a team with 4 Hall of Fame Players, who would have thought that it would be a second year player who doesn't get much playing time that was driving to the hole and going 6 for 6 from behind the arc?