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December 15th, 2005 - Scion
The Scion radio commerical has to be the most annoying ad in the history of commercials. It's played on an internet radio station I listen to (Digitally Imported), almost every 30 minutes.
Imagine this conversation between two guys, both using a very holier-than-thou tone of voice: Guy: I'm here with Kano, Scion owner.
Tell me about your car.
Kano: It's a 2006 Scion xA.
Guy: And not your average Xa, if there is such a thing.
So what'd you do to make your xA, *your* xA.
Kano: Well when I got it from the dealer I had them add a lot of stuff they had available.
Alloys, spoiler, tail lights, OBX shift knob, LED interior light kit. The cupholders light up too. I like lights.
Guy: Cool, I love it.
You get a lotta looks.
Kano: Yeah, no definitely.
People ask me about it all the time.
But I don't do it for them.
It's more for me.
I'm selfish that way I guess.
And here's the one for the tC: Guy: All right, I'm in the company of Nate,
Scion enthusiast and all around good guy.
Guy: What are you driving?
Nate: It's a 2006 scion tC
Guy: And pretty loaded I see.
Nate: Oh Yeah.
Guy: Tell me about it.
Was it easy getting your tC the way you wanted it?
Nate: Yeah. It already came with the panorama moon roof, and the 17" alloys.
Then I went to the web, checked out the list of accessories, and said, I'll take it.
Guy: Oh yeah.
Nate: Yeah I wanted everything...
big stuff like the ground effects kit,
little touches like the OBX shift knob, carbon fiber dash applique.
It's all good.
Guy: A man who knows what he wants.
Nate: Oh yeah.
October 17th, 2005 - .
I went on a 50 miler with the Seattle Bike Club this weekend. We went to Carnation, a farm town where we saw lots of cows+horses, and a pumpkin farm. It was a great ride, with nice scenary and some fun hills. A rider was taking pictures, and got a few of me: here,
here (looking angry for some reason - I wasn't),
and here.
October 12th, 2005 -
I went hiking up Mount Si [photos] this weekend with Paul and Derek. I had forgotten how much fun it is to stand on top of a mountain and have a 360 degree view around. We could even see downtown Seattle 40 miles away.
October 7th, 2005 - Mountaineers
This week I went to an info session on the Mountaineers, Seattle's
largest outdoors group. Unfortunately, it was kind of
disappointing. The Mountaineers is a huge group that has potential to
be a major benefit to outdoors lovers, but it's tangled up in a
gazillion silly rules that were created for legal reasons.
For example, if you go on any of their hikes, they require you to
bring the "10 essentials," which is a list of things they consider
essential. One of these items is a candle. I asked the hikes
coordinator what would happen if someone showed up with only some of
the 10 essentials, and he said they have the right to turn you away in
that case. So if you show up to a hike without a candle, they might
send you home. (They say a candle is useful if you get lost alone and
need to start a fire or warm your hands). I've gone on tons of hikes
without candles. I guess I'm really living on the edge. :)
Other rules - they don't allow you to go on any climbing trips until
you take their basic climbing course ($300) which takes 6 to 9 months,
and if you miss any of the dozen or so lectures+trips you don't pass
the course.
Another thing is that they charge almost $100 to join the club, which
isn't necessarily a problem except for the fact that this $100 doesn't
seem to be spent on anything directly beneficial to you (there are
separate fees for all of the events). They're spending over $1 million
to build a new clubhouse, so I guess that's what it goes towards.
At the info session, the presenter, who said he was 69 years
old, talked about how the club is aging, and probably about half their
members are over 50. I wonder if they realize the reason for this is
that people in their 20's and 30's are deterred by all these pedantic
rules. Mountaineers has dozens of trips each week, but they don't
allow members to go on most of them until they've completed
prerequisite courses, so it's easier to just call up some friends and
organize your own trips.
September 27th, 2005 - .
I've been in Seattle for a month now, and love it. A few reasons why Seattle is great:
September 12th, 2005 -
I've posted photos from my move to Seattle. I start work tomorrow!
August 18th, 2005 -
I'm back from Europe! I've posted pictures from: the Netherlands, Brussels, Paris, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin.
July 22nd, 2005 -
I'll be away in Europe for the next month (returning August 16), so if you're trying to reach me, my cell phone won't work but email will, most of the time. I may be checking gmail (jdavin at gmail.com) more frequently than my cmu address.
July 14th, 2005 - Skydiving Vs Caving
Recently I've been trying to make up my mind as to which is more
scary: skydiving, or caving. You might say skydiving of course, and
that's what I would have said too, until I tried caving this past winter. Crawling
through really narrow tunnels deep inside a cave doesn't have the
sudden rush of fear that skydiving has, but it has a gradual building
of mental anxiety which is bounded only by your imagination. Your
imagination starts to come up with all the things that could go wrong
- your leg could get trapped, a rock could block the exit route, you
could get bitten by a poisoness spider, etc.
Further, while jumping out of a plane is really scary, in some
sense it is limited because you know that a lot of safety measures are
put into place by people much more experienced than you. With caving,
the only person responsible for your safety is yourself, and the
environment you're exploring (a cave) is much less controlled. This
might mean the chances of something going wrong are actually higher.
My conclusion has been that caving is scarier.
July 4th, 2005 -
I've posted the first photos taken with my new Canon 20d: the Three Rivers Festival frisbee dog show and jet skis, and the BMX show. I was impressed by the BMX'ers, maybe partly because I'm a biker myself. You know a show is good when you get there and think "pretty cool" after seeing a few stunts, and then the announcer comes on and says "Ok, they're almost done warming up; we'll start the show in a couple minutes..."
Tomorrow I'll post fireworks photos, which I'm planning to take from Mount Washington.
June 23rd, 2005 -
Wow. The US Supreme Court has ruled that
local governments have the right to seize citizens' private homes and property.
They ruled the city government can demolish private homes and businesses to make room for new commercial businesses, if it serves the public good.
The ability of a government to seize private property is one of the cornerstones of a Communist state.
June 17th, 2005 - Google Maps apps
Today I spent some time looking into all the Google Maps hacks that have been invented recently. I didn't find any central location where all these sites are linked to, so I'm posting this list here to provide a fairly complete list of the apps currently out there. Plus some of them are very cool - worth checking out!
June 11th, 2005 -
I've added a little feature along the right-hand side of the page which displays recent search engine queries (which are sometimes funny) that led people here. If you decide to 'hack' it, please keep it child safe. ;)
June 3rd, 2005 - Scientology
Tom Cruise keeps disappointing me. He's done a lot of movies that I like, and seems like a good actor, yet he's been completely brainwashed by the Scientologists! It makes it really hard to respect him as an actor when he goes around saying stupid things.
He claimed that Brooke Shields' use of antidepressents to treat her clinical depression was irresponsible and that Scientology would cure depression with "vitamins."
He also went a little crazy on Oprah Winfrey's show, jumping on the couch and wrestling with Oprah.
Why do so many actors and actresses believe in a religion that says an evil extraterrestrial god named Xenu has taken over our minds?
And then tells its members that they have to pay millions of dollars to the church to exorcise these brain demons?
May 27th, 2005 - Open source software
Open source software gets hyped a lot by its advocates. I'm certainly
not going to complain about getting software for free, but sometimes
certain programs get talked up to sound better than they are.
Firefox has met wild popularity lately, and certainly is a very good
browser. But it does have a fair number of annoying bugs, which no one
talks about when they evangelize firefox.
For example, this bug which causes password
auto-fill to not work on certain pages has been around for 5 years! The bug has 90 user votes, meaning 90 people have expressed a desire to get this fixed. There are
nearly 50 comments with people talking about how annoying
the bug is. There's a lot of discussion in the comments about how it
could be fixed. But in 5 years, and multiple versions of
firefox, nothing has been done.
Similarly, OpenOffice has its own following of fans, yet it still has
a number of major bugs and is much less powerful than MS Office in certain regards
(ex., no support for pivot tables in spreadsheets).
The Gimp, the open source competitor to Photoshop, has probably the worst user interface in the history of software.
What's worse is that the Gimp maintainers have been told this in the past but still think their interface is good.
Despite their flaws, I still use these programs because free is better than not free, for now anyway.
May 18th, 2005 -
Last summer I hiked on two of the top 3 most dangerous volcanoes in the world! Mount Rainer, and Mount St Helens. I'm embarrassed to say I actually didn't realize Mount Rainer was a volcano. It looks just like a standard mountain, since it's covered in snow and has plenty of vegetation.
May 5th, 2005 - our tax dollars at work
This is crazy. Snipets from an email: "The annual regional terrorism exercise will be at PNC Park on Saturday, May 7th. This will be the first exercise of it's kind in the country. The response for volunteers has been very low so far."
Gee, I wonder why!There are several ways to participate as a volunteer in this disaster drill: 1> General Volunteer. We need 14,000 of you.
It then explains that the general volunteers will sit in assigned seats in the stadium, where they can watch festivities and get reduced price food at the vendors. At a certain point everyone will be ordered to evacuate and go home. Estimated participation time is 3 hours.
The insanity! They're organizing a 14,000 person fire drill! What a waste of resources and administrative planning. And no wonder they're having trouble getting that many volunteers. Who would want to sit in the stadium for 3 hours to watch some unspecified "festivities"?
They are also looking for 300 volunteers (and apparently have already achieved that number) to be "moulage victims." This means that you get make-up applied to simulate injuries, and afterwards you go to a hospital where you're decontaminated through a shower process. Estimated time required is 8 hours.
All of this could actually be fun probably if they offered free beer. (imagine the fun that could occur with a group of friends: "Hey man, what injury do you have?" ... "I've got 3rd degree radiation burns!" ... "Haha, awesome, I've got a broken leg and a concussion!" I doubt the Red Cross will be doing that though.
May 2nd, 2005 -
Every once in a while I find a website that makes me wish I had thought of it first. PhotoSig is one of these - it's a well designed community based site for rating and critiquing photography. I recently posted one of my photos up there for comment. The site uses a points system to motivate people to write reviews, and appears to work pretty well.
March 28th, 2005 -
I've created a Daily Show video aggregator - basically it goes to the Daily Show site and extracts direct links to all the video clips they have. This is a nice convenience to me for two reasons: a) it's much quicker to view the videos, since I don't have to click through to many different pages, and b) it's easier to view the videos fullscreen since they're no longer embedded in the webpage. So now I can watch parts of the Daily Show despite not having a TV. :)
March 25th, 2005 -
I love Moore's law. It makes electronics depreciate at such a fast rate that I was able to get a new digital camera that is 3 times higher resolution than my old camera (bought 5 years ago), twice as small, cheaper, and with more features.
March 24th, 2005 -
There's been a lot of media coverage on the Terri Schiavo issue lately. It seems that this time, President Bush actually seriously messed up in catering to his evangelical minority - his approval rating has dropped 6%, and 82% of people surveyed - even the conservatives - disapprove of his intervention.
Most people seem to agree that it was legally irresponsible to pass a law flaunting the power of the judicial branch, and giving special rights to only two people. (His bill specifically allows "any parent of Theresa Marie Schiavo" the right to sue in federal court to keep her alive, and attempts to remove this issue from state court jurisdiction, where it rightfully belongs by law).
He's saying if someone has enough political pull (eg, from the religious conservatives) they can get their own personal law passed. I'd like to know Mr. Bush, can I get my own law? Because I'd really like one saying I don't have to pay taxes, or that I get automatic amnesty from parking tickets. Or maybe you could give me a get-out-of-jail-for-free card?
Media:
NYTimes editorial on how this flies in the face of the Constitution and a three-branch gov't
Maureen Dowd
Fantastic comedy from fafblog
March 15th, 2005 -
Here's an excellent NYTimes article on all the daily annoyances that bug us - my favorite being the Starbucks coffee sizes (tall, grande, vente). I too ask for small, medium, or large when I go to Starbucks.
February 28th, 2005 -
I started reading Maureen Dowd (NYTimes) relatively recently, and have been thoroughly impressed with all her columns so far. She often says things that need to be said, before anyone else has thought to say them.
Like her criticism of the Bush administration's lack of transparency (even though they claim to favor transparency). Last semester around election time Condoleeza Rice came to CMU campus to speak. But her talk was not open to the public; the attendees of the talk were pre-selected and mainly only politics majors were allowed. The students' questions were also pre-screened, and some students said their more hard-hitting questions were rejected.
Even Republicans would do well to read Maureen Dowd, because these types of suppression of government criticism are a slippery slope.
February 15th, 2005 -
I went to a psychology lecture today on the relationship between stress and immunity / inflammatory response, and I saw four people taking notes. I've been to dozens of CS lectures, and have never seen someone take notes there. Why is it that computer scientists don't take notes? Or perhaps I should ask why the psychologists were taking notes. Maybe it's that CS has a broader range of internal disciplines, with not a lot of overlap between those areas. For example, I attend lectures about graphics algorithms, but the topic would almost never be related to my area.
February 11th, 2005 -
The words cancelled and cancelling bother me. Apparently it is correct to spell both of those words with either one l or two. So I never can decide how to spell them. Should I use one l or two? I don't know. Life is full of tough choices.
February 7th, 2005 -
I went outdoor climbing at Breakneck Rocks for the first time today, along with a group of Explorer's club people. It was more challenging than indoor climbing since it's often harder to find good holds on natural walls, but that's part of the fun of it.
February 3rd, 2005 -
I would just like to warn everyone that we are currently at a Threat Advisory Level of ELEVATED, meaning that there is "Significant Risk of Terrorist Attacks"! Remember to bring your gas mask and radiation shield when you leave for school today.
January 31st, 2005 -
Wow: according to a study of over 100,000 US high school students, 36% of them believe newspapers should get "government approval" of stories before publishing them. Don't they read Orwell's 1984 in high schools anymore??
January 25th, 2005 -
Back from traffic court. I was the only one with photographic evidence proving that my ticket was invalid. Though I did sort of feel bad for the guy who tried to argue that he didn't know that he was parked on the crosswalk that he was parked on. Gotta watch out for those invisible crosswalks.
January 16th, 2005 -
Friday I was fined $240 for parking acrossthe street along a curb that is designated handicap parking from7pm-11pm (there's a church there - presumably it has services duringthat time). I moved my car before 7pm. The ticket ismarked 3:11pm. 3:11pm is not within 7-11pm. I don't know what is wrongwith Pittsburgh meter maids. But now I'll have to waste most of a daygoing downtown and testifying in traffic court. I can't wait to leavePittsburgh (only 7 more months to go!).
December 22nd, 2004 -
Ah, winter break. A time for good food,family, fun with the dog, and fixing the family computer, which ofcourse has acquired viruses, adware, and other unknown afflictions.
Yesterday I finally found the bug in the family computer. Literally. Iopened it up to clean out the dust, and found a dead bug below themotherboard.
December 9th, 2004 -
The low carb plague has become worse than I thought. I went to Entropytoday to get a protein bar, because I haven't had time to eat well fora couple weeks now, and I spent 5 minutes looking through a selectionof a dozen protein bars, all of which I couldn't get because they saidthings like "low carb," and "1g effective carbs." I can't buy those a)because I don't want to support Atkins, but more importantly because Idon't know if they'll taste okay. The "low carb" versions may not beany different than the previous recipes, but it's possible they mightbe. Maybe the protein bar had 2 grams of carbs before and now it only has1 gram. Obviously that 1 other gram was there for a reason, and Idon't want to get cheated out of extra carbs.
So I went to McDonald's and got a double cheeseburger.
November 4th, 2004 -
Four more years? That's a long time.
I just don't understand why the South and Midwest thought Bush would be a better option than Kerry. Sure, any president can make mistakes and do damage to the country. Maybe Kerry would have too. But why would you go with the one who has *already* made the mistakes and damaged our position in the world?
I like how the liberal British newspaper the Daily Mirror had a headline saying "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?".
I think I'll retreat into a hole and try to ignore politics for 4 years. Wake me when he's gone. Oh, he's expanding the Patriot act, classifying science and abortion as terrorist acts, and bombing North Korea? Don't want to hear about it, wake me when he's gone. :)
November 2nd, 2004 -
Everybody get out and vote!
My last-minute Halloween costume this year was a t-shirt with funny Bush quotes (which are also pretty scary): Front (not strictly a Bush quote, but an adaptation of his debate faux pas), Back.
Also, I've posted photos from my annual fall photography bike ride.
September 25th, 2004 -
Why do so many people in Pittsburgh ride bikes without helmets? Are they ignorant of the dangers, or just stupid? Biking is dangerous. Period. A thousand things can go wrong - a tire can blow out, a wheel can fall off if you forgot to check the quick release (this happened to someone I know), a car can swerve into you, you can hit a huge pothole unexpectedly, etc.
Yes, the probability of an accident may be very low, but if you're not wearing a helmet the probability of you dying is very high.
August 18th, 2004 -
So I decided to give in and try the free Ipods offer. If you haven't heard about it yet, a site is offering free IPods if you sign up for one of their trial offers (some of which are free, and you can cancel before getting charged anything) and get 5 other people to do the same. I was skeptical at first too, but there was an article on Wired today that says it's apparently legit. And yes, basically it's a pyramid scheme (though the company prefers to call it "viral marketing"), but it's one that doesn't cost you anything, so the only thing you risk is the short time it takes to sign up on a free trial offer. Of course, eventually they'll probably run out of ipods, but it's worth a try just for the chance of it.
Use this link to be one of my referals (you might as well use someone's link, if you're going to try it): http://www.freeiPods.com/default.aspx?referer=8112592
August 5th, 2004 -
I discovered the answer to why America has this crisis of fat people. I was at the gym yesterday biking on one of the machine's, and I noticed a warning label that said: "Stop exercising if you feel pain, faintness, dizziness, or shortness of breath." =) So we live in a society where they tell you to eat lots of chicken and burgers (carbs are evil!) and to stop exercising when you feel pain. That explains a lot.
The exercise equipment industry is becoming ridiculously lawsuit phobic. Besides that example above, modern bench presses are actually designed to make it more difficult (and more dangerous) to lift weight without a spotter. Reportedly, the logic behind this is that it'll "force" people to use a spotter. But really it just forces them to lift less weight when they don't have a spotter on hand.
July 18th, 2004 -
I had two really fun events in the past week. On Thursday, I went to the Lord of the Rings Symphony conducted by Howard Shore (composer of the LOTR soundtrack). It was the most amazing symphony I've ever been to.
Then on Saturday I went hiking up Mount Rainier with a group of interns. We weren't planning to go to the summit (you need ice climbing equipment for that), but went to Camp Muir, the base camp that people stop at before ascending to the summit. Camp Muir is at 10,000 feet elevation, and we started at roughly 5,000. The air was noticeably thinner at 10,000 feet. At least half the hike was over snow fields. We had perfect weather - warm and sunny. On the way down, we ran down the snow fields and sledded down some of the tracks that had been formed on the glacier. I discovered there are few outdoor activities more fun than sliding down a glacier in shorts and a t-shirt. Mount Rainier pictures here.