Popularity Over the Internet

What? You can have a website call your phone and make others believe you're popular? Holy shit! If you ever need your phone to ring, for whatever reason, go here. this is awesome.

The Popularity Dialer

Be Yourself, Just Not All of Yourself

The saddest part of this article is not the idea behind the article (because anything Will Smith does is automatically mainstream and cool) but rather the idea that the reporter actually went on-site and followed these guys around, documenting their triumphs or, in this case, failures. Poor bastards.

All this fuss over the foiled terrorist plot in the UK has made me realize that the system we have in place for our "threat levels" is fundamentally flawed: we only ever raise them after an attack has occurred. Whether I agree with the whole ordeal is another matter altogether, but nevertheless, the indicators are only ever indicating that "a terrorist threat is imminent" (red! Get out the crayola box!) when a terrorist threat has just been attempted.

I'm getting a Wii. That and maybe a new bike. And a laundry rack. I've never bought a console system before, but I'd gladly make an exception for this one.

Spam, Wonderful Spam

I just don't think spammers care anymore. There used to be an art to spam, a sort of tempting title to an email that you recognized instantly as junk and yet you were still strangely intrigued. You wanted to click, but you were worried that some bastard might have hooked up an auto-download feature up to the email and you would end up destroying not only your computer, but every computer on your network. There used to be a time where the spammer was hated and despised, where your inbox was an Indiana Jones adventure in disguise. But now...

I just deleted an email with the title "Tuainae Muirssa a were mason." Who, in their right mind, would ever open an email with such a title? I get a few of these a day. I stare at them, becoming more and more frustrated as I scan the subject again and again, just trying to make sense of what may be lurking underneath that asinine and feeble attempt at capturing my attention. It seems as though quantity has become the new quality, and that grammar has been replaced by a computerized dictionary spewing randomly generated letters.

I miss the days when my long lost third cousin twice-removed in Africa had died suddenly and that I, the closest known living relative, had inherited his multi-million dollar fortune as long as I paid a measly couple of thousand for some processing fees. I yearn for time where my finances had been pre-approved, where free viagra and cialis rained from the skies, and my next vacation could be all expenses paid.

There was once an age, but no! There was once a golden era where "hot lesbian sluts" used to crave my "steaming cock," where I would have to spend time to individually weed out the temptations and tend to my email account. But now my mouse simply moves directly for the Delete All, without a second glance, without ever looking back.

Oddities Abound

I had an appointment at Kaiser Permanente this morning and as I took a seat in the waiting room I noticed something odd.

A few steps in front of the front desk there was a sign that appeared to be a small notice board so that people could read it before they approached the front desk. However the entire notice board was covered with one sheet of paper that read, simply:

Please, do not lean on the sign.

Nothing more.

EDIT: I was commenting on the irony of having a moveable sign that said only "do not lean on the sign."

Go Ninja, Go Ninja, GO!

In case you've been living under a rock (because everything on here is just SUPER trendy) for the last few days, you might not know this very, very important event that will happen on about March 30, 2007:

Welcome, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV... aka TMNT.

It'll be darker than the other movies, and done completely in CGI, which is a huge relief for me, because, for some reason, I didn't initially take to the idea of people running around in turtle suits for the other movies. It just didn't seem right, growing up with the cartoon and all. Like I said, it'll be darker, like the comics (I claim one less nerd point: I never read them) and the humour will come from verbal play between the characters and not gags like in the other movies.

I have a severe distaste for gag comedy that goes over the top.

Although there won't be any traveling through time like all 4th TMNT things should be, I'm still geekin' out over it.

Almost Creepy

This is nuts.

It's a nightime shot of the sydney harbor... a 720 megapixel shot. You can zoom in so far that you can see individual people in the windows. He combined 169 photos to be able to do it.

Enter, Stage Left

Here starts the beginning of a new blog.

I'm at work right now--I've just moved cubicles so I'm hiding and telling no one of my switch yet, hoping to escape from actually doing any work for a while. It's not like I hate the people I work for, I just hate what the bulk of my job entails.

I work at Advanced Analogic Technologies Inc. in Sunnyvale (smack in the middle of silicon valley for you SoCal people) and my job description is "intern of test engineering." That means I have two main responsibilities: I test parts and I deliver things. Only problem is I hate testing parts and no one has asked me to deliver anything for the entire time I've been here. And I just got a new car, too.