Plaidophile

You are missing out on one or more friends-only entries. Please log in, if you have an account.

I just did my taxes. $1800 refund.

(Without the deductions from my mortgage I'd have had to pay $360ish.)

(Of course without the mortgage, $360ish wouldn't have been a big deal either since I'd have a heck of a lot more money.)

(Of course that counter-argument ignores equity, though I'm not sure if my monthly equity accrual is enough to counter the difference in my total monthly payment vs. my previous rent in a bigger, fancier apartment which was downtown, but oh well.)

(Actually I just worked it out and the interest portion of my payment is only barely higher than the rent I was paying previously. Woo.)

I only drive my car once a week. Per year, this costs approximately:

• $4380: loan payment
• $1500: insurance
• $220: registration
• Total: $6100/year, or $117/week or $17/day

FlexCar costs $10/hour. It's very rare that I need a car 12 hours/week; I usually go out for drinks on Thursday (3 hours) and karaoke on Saturday (3 hours). On average I am clearly wasting quite a lot of money.

So, the new Olympic Sculpture Park is now open, and being an outdoor gallery, they are having problems with people touching the art. But is that really a problem?

This artwork is outside, and is supposed to be corroded and weathered by the (somewhat unpredictable) environment. Shouldn't the environment also include the people who are viewing it?

This is also what I hate about MoMA. Modern art was all about new frontiers and interactivity and a dialog between the artist and the viewer, but sometime in the past 10 years it's all been put behind a hermetic seal.

The stupidest "pixel ad" ever

My workplace is having a fancy post-holiday party (now that the holiday shopping season has died down) and it's at the Westin in downtown Seattle. The theme is Hollywood, and there will also be karaoke. I can bring a single guest. Anyone interested?

I'm trying Project Wonderful for (discreet, unintrusive) ads, mostly just to see what sorts of bids and ads I get. It certainly wouldn't be a source of real income or anything (I doubt it'd even make a dent in my hosting costs, even), due to the way the pricing structure works. I see it more as a fun link-placement service, where people can happen to pay money (a few cents a day) if they want to ensure their link appears.

It's interesting that so far, all of the sites (and most of the ads) I've seen on it are webcomics. I guess that comes with the territory of it being yet another Internet project run by Ryan North.

9:15 Wow, my first ad already, from someone I haven't even heard of before! Huh.

I've probably posted a recipe along these lines before but in case I haven't, I'd might as well do it again, since I made it tonight, and I've changed the recipe around a bit anyway. Of course when making soups it's more a matter of technique and knowing what to combine and in what order, but some variations are good for seeing what sorts of experiments to try.

Blake Lewis, my favorite American Idol contender this year, appears to be performing (billed as a "farewell concert" for his "band," probably as a final sendoff before Hollywood Week) at The Nectar Lounge on January 28 at 8 PM. $5 cover.

show calendar, Blake's myspace.

I went to karaoke again tonight, and got Spud to come (which is good, because none of the PoEers bothered to show up this week). I sang a lot of songs. I did Creep again, and didn't have any trouble with the bridge this time. I could have done more songs if I wanted to but I couldn't think of anything else I wanted to do.

I also forget all the songs I did, but I know I did at least "Ticket To Ride," "Take On Me" (again), "Undone (The Sweater Song)," "Oops! I Did It Again," and (again) "Creep." I thought I had a sixth but I guess not.

Spud did "Kokomo," "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show," "Hotel California," and "Wooly Bully." All of them were in a very Octothorpian manner.

There were a lot of incredible singers this week. Also a lot of terrible ones. It was great.

fluffy[at]beesbuzz[dot]biz. I gave up on jabberd and installed Wildfire, which seems to work pretty well.

I really like his revitalization of Doctor Who, but the spinoff series he's spearheaded are getting ridiculous, between Torchwood (antagonism with sex, violence, cussing, and gratuitous homosexuality for the sheer sake of "exploring new frontiers") and The Sarah Jane Adventures (Torchwood for kiddies).

Rediscovering the world of Doctor Who through Rose's eyes was a refreshing take on the canon. Repeating that formula in the other two shows is just obnoxious.

Okay, so after the first two nights of Idol, I've lost what respect I had for Simon Cowell as a producer. The first night (in Minneapolis), he called the girl who sang "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" completely original and unique when her performance was note-for-note identical to Kathryn McPhee's terrible semifinal performance last year, and on the Seattle night he called the girl who did an amazing (and very personal!) rendition of Summertime "nothing original."

I'm also very happy that Paula and Randy passed Blake (from Seattle), because he was very good, regardless of how Simon felt. I think Simon said that Blake wasn't particularly unique or original either, when Blake gave definitely the most interesting good performance I'd seen, what with integrating glitch-style beatboxing into his normal vocal performance (and Randy in particular was very enthusiastic about the performance, which gave me new respect for Randy). He is totally who I'm rooting for this season.

I needed to know this for a simple app at work and, not being a Win32 programmer, I couldn't find it documented, so to hopefully save someone else a wild goose chase: where url is an ordinary char* string.

I'd consider this article on transsexuality to be refreshingly progressive if it were published today, and yet it came out in January, 1936!

Obviously a lot of the notions and medical understandings of the day have gone obsolete since then, but the attitude of the author is something I actually agree with, and isn't presented in a "ha ha, look at the freaks" manner that even modern articles about transsexuality still exude.

After a conversation about metabolism and weight loss and such with some friends, I've decided to try the small-amounts-of-food-equally-spaced thing to see if it helps. So instead of eating full meals I'm making little snacks throughout the day, and sticking to generally healthy things. Carrots, celery, mini bell peppers, small servings of cereal or macaroni and cheese (I have these awesome little glass ramekins which are just the right size for this purpose), and so on.

I love you.

Hypocrisy is not updating your worldview based on changing conditions. Hypocrisy is lambasting someone else for doing something while in turn doing the same sort of thing.

HTH, HAND.

The iPhone is indeed very cool, but it's also not particularly compelling. All of the functionality it has that I care about I already have on my current phone, the device itself is way too bulky and scratch-prone (doesn't look very pocket-friendly), and as awesome as the media functionality is, all I care about when I'm on the go is listening to music, which my 4GB Nano already more than handles for me. Even if I weren't currently locked on a T-Mobile contract because of the crappy Sidekick 3 I wouldn't be interested in switching to Cingular for this device.

Also the Apple TV doesn't do anything I don't already get better from my Mini, and if anything it's pretty ludicrous in that it's even MORE lock-in to iTunes and iTMS. I have no desire to pay $12+ for a 320p sub-DVD-quality movie with no extras, when for $12-15 I get 480p with everything, and 480p upconverts quite nicely to 720p+. Plus the Mini can play DVDs (and does a great job of upconverting!), which the Apple TV can't. Plus, said Mini is serving this website to you right at this very moment.

The Apple TV might be pretty okay when combined wiht a desktop system with some sort of HD PVR thing, but again, I can get that with the MIni as-is. (I do want to upgrade to an Intel Mini someday though, to get optical output and a better video experience via Front Row et al.)

I have to wonder what the data service will cost on the iPhone, also, seeing as how Cingular is pretty notorious for having really expensive data service (they charge by the KB, unless you go flat-rate in which case it's like $30/mo for GPRS or $80/mo for EDGE). That's the main reason I stick with T-Mobile, too, since I get flat-rate GPRS/EDGE for $6/mo (used to be $5 but I lost that when I switched to the sidekick, meh).

Several months ago, I was going to the Pike Place Market after work instead of going straight home, and a #10 bus came by. I wasn't sure if it went close to the market because I'd never taken that one before, so I asked the driver what his last stop on 1st Avenue was.

Firefox on Linux pisses me off, for two reasons:

• It's always stealing my keyboard focus
• It interprets a paste as "do an I'm Feeling Lucky Google search on whatever's on my clipboard"

Both of these are particularly nasty with Google Reader.

So I went out to karaoke with a few other PoE denizens. It was fun. I sang three songs and totally killed my vocal cords trying to imitate Thom Yorke by singing Creep as authentically as possible. It was sweet.

I plan on doing this every week!

Oh, and also! NoCode's friend Bridget is awesome. She works as a sign language interpreter, and her schtick is to sign all the songs (instead of singing them). It is really amazing to watch. Especially Cyndi Lauper's "Bop She Bop" (which is of course filled with long nonsense-onomatopoeia choruses about masturbation, which Bridget made really good sense of, even though she'd never done that song before). It brought new meaning to the term "interpretive dance."

I'm now running my own Jabber server, so now you can add me as fluffy[at]beesbuzz[dot]biz. Hoorayness!

6:54 PM Maybe not.

7:57 PM GOD DAMNIT WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH IT

(Incidentally, not going through Denver this time. As per the title.)

So, here's why I won't be flying on United ever again if I can help it, and another reason not to trust small-time cops who are assigned low-ranking grunt patrols. United's lack of transparency caused more problems than the face they thought they'd save.

It'd sure be nice if Movable Type supported per-entry timezones, and furthermore if it would actually internally provide a time value in UTC (like for parsing in PHP).

Both of the entries from December 31 were actually posted on January 1, after midnight, in mountain standard time. However my weblog is set to pacific time.

What the hell, Movable Type.