heh

stereotypes don't exist in a vacuum

I was taking a break at work tonight, and wandering around the office a bit, and you wouldn't BELIEVE how many desks have a picture of a white engineer with his arm around a very fresh-off-the-boat looking asian girl. It's like an epidemic.

I mean, you see it all the time in the bay area, so it's not really surprising, just funny how universally true it is, and having evidence of it at work made me laugh.

washington mutual sucks

What kind of a backwards ass company still doesn't let you pay bills online?

My mortgage is through Washington Mutual. You can create an account on their website. You can log in, and see your loan balance. You cannot, however, PAY for your mortgage.

I just called them to verify this, in case I was being completely retarded. I started giving the person on the line a hard time about the complete lack of logic or customer service inherent in this setup, but given the nature of today's call centers, that's completely pointless. I asked if I could lodge a request that they add the functionality, and that was so far beyond her job abilities that I could literally hear her brain shut off on the other end, and she just kept saying "no" to me until I hung up.

God, what a stupid, stupid piece of shit. I don't write checks for ANYTHING. I pay the damn things online. But luckily I can log on and LOOK at how much I owe. I just can't do anything about it. Jesus.

good quote

I heard a really interesting quote today on NPR, which really puts a lot of my objections to the way people approach religion quite succinctly.

"The way to tell if you've just created a god in your own image is if he hates the same people you do."

IE, an all-loving god that we've been taught to believe in wouldn't have the same set of petty hatreds that most religious people have. He'd be bigger than that, and you should realize you're an awful shit for what you do in god's name.

just when you think you've seen every weird ass thing on the internet

Something comes along to surprise you.

i think i've died and gone to heaven

This is the coolest. art. ever.

I must print it very large and frame it.

Because I'm a huge nerd. And this rules.

leave my youth alone

I just had my ears sodomized.

Playing on the radio was a cover of Black by Pearl Jam, by Staind or Disturbed, or one of those other talentless hack alt-rock abortion bands that have swamped the airwaves in the last few years.

Can't you just leave that era alone? Ten still remains as one of the best, most honest rock albums of the 90's, before Eddie Vedder became some stoned loser, back when he was an angry, angry monkey, screaming and flailing about, and making fantastic music.

Do you really have to hold down the music of my adolescence, and just take a shit all over it, in your modern, whiny, overly-earnest singing voice? Go back to singing your overly literal songs about being an outsider, with your sixth grade vocabulary, and stop stealing from the small body of decent 90's rock.

it's summertime, and the living is easy

I hereby declare today officially the first day of summer.

Why?

Because I was able to drive around all day today, getting shit done, with the top down on my car. Man, was that nice.

They were playing a Bob Marley marathon on some classic rock radio station that I stumbled on. I took surface streets to all my destinations. The wind in my hair, a thumping tribal beat in my ears, and a world awaking from the chill of winter for my eyes. Girls wearing next to nothing, mailmen walking their route with a panama hat, saying hello to the half-deaf old women watering their lawns.

It's about goddamn time.

Granted, I still hate the sun, and all of you morning people, and all of you Californians who don't understand the beauty of a nice big warm thunderstorm that shakes your bones. But still, it's nice every once in a while.

MIT students pull prank on conference

BWAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAAA.

"In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference."

CNN.com - MIT students pull prank on conference - Apr 14, 2005

I really like this part at the end:

"The students were soliciting cash donations so they could attend the conference and give what Stribling billed as a "completely randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face.""

owned

The whole "OWNED" web phenomenon continues to crack me up. It's just so appropriate for so many occasions.

Intelligent Night Vision

Check out this demo movie of Honda's new intelligent night vision. It's pretty goddamn amazing, you get a HUD in your car that shows you an infrared view of the road ahead of you. Not only that, but it constantly scans for human-shaped objects ahead of you, and outlines them in red and beeps. Damn, I want one.

Honda Worldwide | Intelligent Night Vision

Proof that there is no god

This is the worst, cheesiest, dare I say gayest thing I've ever seen in my entire life.

It's a 9/11 tribute song, I think, and if you look at the website, it's dead serious. I assume it will be floating all over the net soon, if it's not already.

Don't turn it off right away. Keep watching. Every time you think it can't get any worse, it does. It will hurt your very soul and essence.

America We Stand As One (www.americawestandasone.com/video.html)

of all the pig-headed bullshit

This article has to take the cake.

Talk about a complete lack of analysis. They looked at Everquest characters being sold on Ebay, noted that male characters sell for more than female characters, and said that it exposes "sexism."

And this is the BBC for crying out loud, not some whiny American paper.

Do they take into account the fact that 90% of mmorpg characters are male, and that a lot of men don't feel like playing women characters? Since more men play, the competition on Ebay is going to be more fierce, and the prices are going to be higher. Not to mention the fact that of all the crazy, overobsessed gaming nerds I've met, they were about 99% men, and they're much more likely to blow their hard earned cash on a fake character in an online game.

God damn, this kind of fake analysis drives me crazy. It's like those fucking idiots who say that any tall building is representative of male genetalia. It's absurd, thoughtless, leftist nonsense.

BBC NEWS | Technology | EverQuest exposes cost of sexism

my new job

Some of you know, and some of you don't, that I quit my job at Sun last week, and went to work for a company called tellme.

Check out the website, we do voice recognition and VoIP. Some of the demos I've seen since I started have blown my mind. We can take info about you from your caller ID.

Like for Fedex:

"Hello, Tobin. I see that you've shipped three packages last week. Would you like to check on their status? Your first package for Mountain View is now in Iowa. It will arrive in two days."

The damn thing even hums to itself when it's looking something up. You'd have to hear it to believe it. You're on the phone with a goddamn computer, and it goes "doo de doo de doo", while it looks something up. It's crazy.

So I'm sleep depped as hell because I got my house painting done, and I've been working 12 hours a day at my new job, but I just wanted to mention something cool that happened to me today.

I was at work at 9pm tonight, and I ordered a pizza, and the Chief Creative Officer of the company wandered by, and thanked me for working late, and told me to charge the pizza to the company. When I left at 10pm, the CEO was still there, in a meeting.

After being at Sun, where people leave at 5pm if they come in at all, being in the insane "startup" atmosphere of a small dynamic company is like I'm Popeye and it's spinach. I love it.

People ride Razor scooters around at work. There's free soda and food everywhere. There are no offices, everyone's in this massive, borg warehouse. Everyone is excited to be there, everyone is brilliant and motivated, the company is growing and making money. It's everything Sun wasn't, in the last few years. And I'm finally at a successful, pre-IPO company.

You hear me, dot com bust? You can't stop me, I've taken a time machine back to 1999, and I'm getting to live the dot-com life, damn you!

Anyway, I'm on day three, and I'm loving it. I'll let you guys know what it's like after I actually start doing work, but the work environment is so wonderful and surreal that I felt the need to crow. I'm gonna go pass out now.

BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Game theft' led to fatal attack

Welcome to the future. The sad, disappointing, slightly pathetic future. As usual.

"A Chinese man has been stabbed to death in a row over a sword in online game Legends of Mir 3, say reports."

Sell a bad sword to someone in a MMORPG, get stabbed in real life.

Stabbed to death.

I have to say, I actually enjoy this sort of thing, not for the death aspect, but for the growing mesh between the real world and the online one, that people take online issues so seriously as to pursue them in reality.

I have to say my absolute favorite part was this:

"The row is thought to have blown up partly because China has no laws that cover the theft of virtual in-game items.

This is in contrast to places like South Korea which has a section of its police force that investigates in-game crime. "

Oh my god, Korea has in-game police. That's so hot. I want to see that episode of Cops!

""Yeah, I work the Everquest beat. This part of the forest has some really bad eggs.

Can I see the registration for that giant raptor, sir?

Oh, it's your cousin's raptor now?

I suppose that these illegal health power ups aren't yours either, you were just holding them for someone."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4397159.stm

this picture damn near made me snork my soda

It's just so perfect. I love Terry's head floating in the smoke.

someone is definitely going to hell for this one

April Fools

I'm sure most of you have seen some of these already, but here are some April fools sites that really amused me:

Google Gulp

"Think a DNA scanner embedded in the lip of your bottle reading all 3 gigabytes of your base pair genetic data in a fraction of a second, fine-tuning your individual hormonal cocktail in real time using our patented Auto-Drink™ technology, and slamming a truckload of electrolytic neurotransmitter smart-drug stimulants past the blood-brain barrier to achieve maximum optimization of your soon-to-be-grateful cerebral cortex."

Also, this one:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/pandaren-xpress.html

Simply type "/panda" in the game, and a GM will take your food order through the use of our innovative in-game Pandaren Xpress® menu. Within minutes, a Pandaren Xpress® delivery person will arrive at your door with a veritable feast!

Our friendly staff is standing by to prepare your order 24 hours a day. If your food isn't delivered in 30mins by a person dressed in a Pandaren costume, you eat FREE!

And some guy dressed up as a penguin in a Japanese zoo for April Fools too:



What other good ones have you guys seen?