Since my wordy post about Wikipedia and archival of ongoing events went over so well, here's the peanut butter jelly time song....
Continue reading No comments, eh?.
January 2008 Archives
I've long said that one of the greatest benefits of Wikipedia is its ability to harness the widespread attention being given to a particular event. So while Wikipedia is good at slowly accumulating obscure details about something that happened long ago (e.g., Confederate railroads in the American Civil War), it's...
Continue reading The power of the present.
Taking a cue from Danny's recent post, I snagged two Wolfsheim albums from Zune: Spectators and Casting Shadows. The first thing I noticed was how much these guys sounded like Depeche Mode in Lederhosen, but once I got past that I realized I could actually understand the songs these guys...
Continue reading Ich kann das verstehen.
I saw this picture in a post over at English Russia (agh, the ads!) and although the post was titled Bad Parking 5, I have to admit that "bad parking" wasn't the first thing through my mind. It was closer to, "I think I know what kind of truck I...
Continue reading Totally awesome parking job.
It's taken me years to get around to watching Seven Samurai and now that it's here at the house, it's taken me three weeks to get through the whopping 207 minutes of film. For comparison, that's longer than:nine episodes of Who's the Boss Air Bud and Air Bud: Golden Receiver...
Continue reading Seven Samurai over three weeks.
Too cold. And 9 degrees was on the warm side. This wasn't any sort of freaky-deaky centigrade, either. Snowflake symbol indeed, gauge cluster....
Continue reading Just how cold was Detroit?.
Nearly as cool-looking as the Geely CD (ahem) is the Honda CR-Z. The only catch? It's a hybrid. Why can't we just get back to small+light+simple?...
Continue reading Another Detroit favorite: Honda CR-Z.
Is there a name for all of the miscellaneous clothes dropped on the floor in front of your washing machine as you move soaked garments from the washer to the dryer? If there isn't, there should be....
Continue reading Washer/floor/dryer.
Well, you get a blurry picture of the Hànzi/Kanji on the rear-end of the Mazda Furai. It's still my favorite car from the show....
Continue reading What do you get if you cross the last three posts?.
Unlike yesterday's post on Chinese cars being imported to the US, I'm going to talk today about US cars being imported to China. This is non-news to anyone involved in the auto industry, but I'm not entirely sure how well-understood it is otherwise: Buick is totally hot stuff in China....
Continue reading The other side of the Chinese fence.
I'm fascinated by Chinese cars. It reminds a lot of the Japanese invasion of the mid-1970s (and the Korean invasion of the late 1990s) and I can't help but think that it's going to be really interesting to watch the evolution of these currently-crapmobiles. The thing is that the NAIAS...
Continue reading Presenting the Geely Coupe (now in Blur-o-Vision!).
We did the auto show today. I'm tired, so I don't have a ton to say. Except that the Mazda Furai is seriously cool. More pictures later this week....
Continue reading Auto show.
I'm spending the weekend in Detroit, in part because of the NAIAS. But I'm not going until tomorrow, and I need to write about something tonight. So here's the deal: I drove nearly an hour between the airport and Raven's place up in Pontiac. In that hour, I encountered hundreds...
Continue reading Welcome to Detroit. Renaults go home..
I [heart] QVC antics. Excellenté....
Continue reading This is a big horse.
I was watching The Amazing Race the other night (don't ask) when the contestants landed in Taipei, Taiwan. Besides referring to the city as "Tuhpai," two of the contestants mentioned that they "didn't know anything about Taiwan...but we really like Thai food."...
Continue reading Taiwhat?.
Again, I'm too pooped to write anything real here. But I did put together two posts this time over my my work blog—and both long articles, at that....
Continue reading All blogged out (pt. 2).
The big swath of plastic below the keyboard (you know, the palmrest area) on my Thinkpad R61e now squeaks when I put my right hand on it, making the whole thing feel filmsy and cheap. This is bothersome. Legendary Thinkpad (IBM/Lenovo/whatever) engineering appears to have gone the way of the...
Continue reading The Thinkpad goes Dell-style.
I'd like to update last night's post with an addition: My reasoning is that the biggest idiots of them all are the ones who slide off the road and go crashing into the fire hydrants. As you can see, sometime last night (or early this morning) someone drove completely off...
Continue reading Correction to yesterday's post.
Approximately once or twice each year, the sky falls on Seattle. Tonight is one of those nights1. On days like this (and on the day afterward) I invariably have a bunch of conversations about the weather and the traffic, and many of them result in the other person commenting that...
Continue reading The snow and the stupids.
I was listening to All Things Considered on my way home from snowboarding earlier when I heard something that nearly made me pee my pants. Reading this story on Bush's visit to the United Arab Emirates, the commentator noted that: On arrival, Bush was given a large necklace encrusted with...
Continue reading A gift befitting a knight. Like Sir Mix-A-Lot..
When it's dark outside, it's difficult to tell the difference between the blue bin (recycling) and the green bin (compost). And every once in a while, I get close to accidentally dumping a bunch of recycling in the compost bin (or vice-versa). Up until last night, when I dumped a...
Continue reading Allow me to explain.
I read Raymond Chen's blog from time to time, somewhat because he's a really conversational writer, and somewhat because he's got lots of interesting things to say about the history of Windows. I was amused by this post about MS-DOS and Windows 95, in particular by the shenanigans Microsoft engineers...
Continue reading Sucking the brains out of DOS.
It's been a while since I've posted any tragic, tragic television appearances. I thought it couldn't get any worse, and then Jeff Foxworthy sticks his foot in his mouth around 1:05. Really though, the blonde is the star in this clip. P.S. I don't think France is a country, either....
Continue reading This might be a stupid question....
Car parts coming unstuck—always good times. P.S. The video is loud. Turn your speakers down....
Continue reading Who did your welds?.
Something interesting came up in this article about AT&T and its consumer sales: Speaking at Citigroup Inc.'s Entertainment, Media and Telecom Conference in Phoenix, [AT&T CEO Randall] Stephenson said the bulk of the weakness [in AT&T's consumer phone and internet business] is coming from service disconnections due to nonpayment on...
Continue reading The price of entertainment.
Manuel got Layla and me a fantastic Christmas gift: a Moravian star. The Moravian star (Herrnhuter Stern in German) gets its English name from the Moravian Church, seated in Herrnhut, Germany. The star (pictured at right) was apparently some sort of geometry project in a school in Herrnhut just under...
Continue reading Moravian star.
The big story tonight in Seattle is that the local buses will have to have their front-mount bike racks temporarily removed due to a design flaw in the racks. In the meantime, the county is installing smaller racks, and has apologized profusely to bike-riders, who may be inconvenienced by the...
Continue reading Big news in Seattle.
I've been trying to get wedding photos printed for the last three or four weeks now. I've been to essentially every photo kiosk in the area (specifically, the local Fred Meyer and Walgreens) and have gone through two USB flash drives, an already-suspected-broken CF microdrive, and kiosks that can't recognize...
Continue reading Kodak does math.
At least, I'm not embarrassingly bad at it anymore. I'm able to make my way down two of the blue runs at Stevens Pass, and really only fall over when I've decided I need to let it hang out a little. ...so I wrote this big long post about how...
Continue reading What the deuce? I don't suck at snowboarding anymore.
Note to tape measure manufacturers: +1 for including metric dimensions on the front face (green box in the photo). -1000 for including metric dimensions on the front face, but not including metric measurements on the tape itself (red box)....
Continue reading Dumbest idea ever: halfway metric tape measure.
At this point in the fight against spam, my blog is getting regularly hammered by about a dozen or so spam bots. And I've got mechanisms for properly handling all of those. But over the holidays, the amount of transient spam (and new additions to the spam bot pool) has...
Continue reading Spamcation.
My truck needs a new transmission. I'm planning to swap it out once the weather gets warmer, but before that happens, I need to find a replacement. Specifically, I'm looking for a C6 to fit in my 1976 F-250 (2WD), which has a 390 FE engine. The problem, of course,...
Continue reading All you Ford fans out there.
