MOBLOGing

Just trying out the new mobile phone blogging feature. This pic and message are sent right from my phone. Look for more random pictures from my cell phone camera in the near future.

I'm not watered-down so I'm dying of thirst

So last night it rained for the first time since April 23rd. It was nice to get a chance to see rain before I have to leave Arizona. It's pretty weird how the weather is nearly the same every day. In the month I've been here its been cloudy once and rained once. Its like living in Groundhog Day because every day looks the same. But it's actually pretty neat since I really don't have to look at the weather forecast.

All of the buildings at work are connected by corridors so once you are in one building you can access any of the others without going outside. We might as well be in a giant human-habitrail on the surface of the moon since going out in the middle of the day is so hot, I try to avoid it if possible.

Kiss My ASCII

If you were ever wondering what I'd look like in ASCII text, here is your answer:



If you don't think it looks like me, try taking a few steps back from your monitor. I made this with some cool matlab code that converts images to ASCII text art. It's an image because blogger is dumb and doesn't like me inputting raw text, so it messed up the font size and spacing.

Work is going well, I've got a lot going on this week both at work and home. My roommate will be arriving in a few days so we will get to buy the rest of the furniture for the apt. The And1 Mixtape tour is stopping in Phoenix on Saturday and a few friends and I are planning on going. Also I found out Dave Attell is coming in two weeks, so I'm looking forward to seeing that show.

I found out that Walmart sells 36"x48" photo posters online for $38 shipped. I'm getting alteast two for my room, maybe more if they turn out good. It seems like a pretty good price to cover one wall of my room with a picture I really like.

Oh yeah, what post on ASCII images would be complete without a racecar pic?

Pissed off from being pissed on

Like the title says, today I was thinking about how it sucks when I'm using the urinal and I get splash back on my pants, shirt and shoes. I tried aiming for different parts of the urinal but there doesn't seem to be a sweet spot on the ones at work. I was thinking about this problem and I came up with an idea for a differently shaped urinal that might reduce some of the splashback. My design has a sloped back that causes the spray reflections to be aimed down towards the bowl portion on the urinal instead of back at the user. This backward sloped angle is the critical component in the splash reduction design. One problem I though of was how will the flusher work? The water will come out of jets aimed at the top of the back wall, shown in the diagram, and flow along the surface. Looks like someone else has been thinking about this. Here is someone who actually got a patent on an anti-splashback design. My internet search also brought me to this site, check out the top 10. Also, if you have time to kill, play the urinal game and test your bathroom skillz.

Checked my bandwidth here at home on cnet's tester and got 5.9mbs, a new record. That seems pretty good to me but check it for yourself and let me know if that is high, low, whatever.

We go back like fat crayons

Got my first assignment at work yesterday. I've been working on a piece of code to compare two files and plot the differences between them. I'm learning linux and perl along the way. I Ate lunch at Chipotle today. Everyone who has been there knows how damn big the burritos are, but I always thought they were pretty healthy for you if you didn't get sour cream, cheese, or avacado. Well think again. Turns out a burrito with just rice and chicken has 27g of fat. Add beans or fajita vegetables and you can add atleast another 12g of fat. A fully optioned burrito with all the fixins packs an elephantine 72g of fat and over 1500 calories. While they are freakin huge, usually almost 1.5 pounds, it's still shocking to me because I always thought chipotle was a healthy option.

Later, I got my first adult haircut in about 3 years. By adult I mean not simply clipping on a #4 to a buzzer and cutting it all the same length. This is also the first haircut I've paid for in the last 3 years. Since I was paying I decided to get a fade from 2 to 4, something I definately can't do myself. I'm happy with it, and I'll go back when I need another haircut, but it still kinda pisses me off to spend $15 to get my hair cut. Probably always will.

Witty Relevant Title

Finally got my computer at work today, only took 4 days. I spent most of the day catching up on administrative stuff that I should have done the first day but couldn't because I had no PC. Watched the Pistons beat the Heat tonight, made me happy to see shaq and dwayne wade lose. I saw this cool video of a dj scratching the imperial march from star wars on collegehumor. Check it out, 8mbs but def worth watching.

We need to Kollaborate

Do you remember the ridiculous dancer from that Kollaboration video that circled the internet a few years ago? Turns out he was hired to make a VW Golf ad for the UK a few months ago. Pretty cool shit, even if it is only 60 secs.

I also realized a lot of people don't know about a lot of the cool shit you can do right now on google, stuff they don't promote much. Here are some listed in order of most known to least known:

• news.google.com - News from around the web updated every 15-25 mins.
• froogle.google.com - A Mysimon.com inspired shopping search.
• gmail.google.com - Google mail, I hope you know about this by now. If you need an invite, email me.
• maps.google.com - Maps that kick the piss out of maps.yahoo.com and take a dump on mapquest.
• answers.google.com - A cool way to do research, also it shows you how people who are much better than you at searching google can make money.
• catalogs.google.com - An infrequently updated library of all sorts of mail-order catalogs. Looks like this was what they were using to develop the text-recognition technology for google print.
• print.google.com - An online library of scanned novels started last year. Ironically this is the idea that the google guys originally had, which spawned google in the first place. They were two Stanford grad students who wanted library books to be available and searchable online.
• scholar.google.com - Search academic papers and view most of them for free. It used to be that you had to pay journals like IEEE $5-10 to get out-of-print articles. Now you can find the free copies that the authors of the papers host on their personal websites.
• video.google.com - Cataloged clips and closed captioned text of all major network shows.

Plus there's a bunch of cool shit you can type right in google and it will interpret like calculations, "12 inches in centimeters" and UPS tracking numbers. Also you can just type the symbol of a stock and you get the stocks performance. The best part is this information comes directly from yahoo finance. Man, that must really piss off yahoo.

And while we're at it, check out the wayback machine on some of your favorite websites to see what they looked like when they were cached over the past few years.

Time to Man Up

Boys and Girls it is time for all of us to heed the advice of Coach Lazer Collazo and show some balls. Second day at work was equally as slow as the first. My computer hasn't come in yet so I haven't been introduced to the software and the system I'll be using. Seems as if the computer will be ready either Thurs or Fri at the latest. I still have stuff to read and people to meet so it's not a waste of time.

If you haven't seen Housingmaps.com by now you need to check it out. Coolest google maps use yet.