Category: Uncategorized

The keynote speaker gave us advice on how to attain increased
longevity based on his research into areas in which people have active
lives past 100 years of age. While mainly about a meatless diet, the
unspoken messages in his speech were about stress levels. Low stress
makes you live forever apparently, and not one of the examples this
guy used looked like they had a computer in their homes. So, I
started the day learning how to add years to my life by eating better,
increasing interpersonal contact, and reducing stress then ran
upstairs to my first seminar (since the keynote went long) at which I
received an overview of various complicated methods of accessing data
rapidly. I then went to lunch, at which were provided three different
kinds of meat sandwich.

For those of you who maintain interest in the Underworld location debate, be sure you check out the relevant posts of webshite and outgrabes, and also go back to mine for another comment lending credence to Budapest argument.

Living in a land where the weather is constantly temperate must increase the desire for nice cars. I can’t go a block without seeing a BMW roadster, a new Mustang convertible, and a beautiful classic car. On a bearings-getting expedition yesterday I saw something I had never seen before — a Lamborghini. It was parked in a spot right next to the regular cars. I gawked for a bit then lit out before the owner came back and had his goons shiv me for damaging his vehicle by focusing on it for too long.

I have a sneaking suspicion that jet lag is going to turn out to be a real bitch.

Picture two men wandering around a sunny city, their spirits oscillating between sun-induced glee and travel-induced exhaustion and you’ve got a good summary of yesterday afternoon and evening.

Conferences usually mean several consecutive nights of going out for drinks, and I fear this greatly for the following reason: I can’t find a beer for less than five bucks. I’m fairly certain that the hotel staff now knows me as “the cheap guy”, since after a few forays in an attempt to find reasonably priced alcohol, I ended up in the gift/stuff-you-forgot store staring at the refrigerator unable to convince myself to buy a six-pack of Budweiser for $10.50.

I’m in San Diego at a conference for the next few days, and I got off the plane about an hour ago. I must admit, I feel bad for all of the Europeans who came to our magnificent country in search of gold, silver, and whatnot. What they found was what I spent six hours flying over today: a whole lot of nothing.

Had never seen the Pacific until today. Awesome.

Just came from the grocery store. Someone asked me if I worked there. I’m guessing it’s the eveningwear-Ken slacks and white shirt combined with the frustrated, bored demeanor.

Tired of “news” about runaway brides? B A Start brings you the important stuff. Looks like Gates let the news out that he’s planning to ship the next version of the Xbox this year.

Now, I got the Xbox in the fall of last year. Despite the chorus of wails from the leet community, I had no issues buying the Xbox with the full knowledge of the rumors. As I made small talk with one of my brother’s geek friends, he expressed deep concern about the purchase, since the next-next-gen machine was due out “next year”. I patted him on the head and told him it would all be okay somehow. He’d see. There are plenty of Xbox titles out there to keep me occupied well into the career of the Xbox 360 (or whatever it ends up being named), but this line of reasoning cannot be followed by a geek. You have two choices — retrogaming or the latest/greatest. I felt it best to let the topic slide. The black-shirt-with-white-text-wearing squirrel of a man skittered into the other room, presumably to level up his paladin.

I was going pen a small post asking if it was possible for there to be anything geekier than Star Wars Risk, but then I remembered Lego Star Wars: The Video Game. Good gravy. A walk through Target is like visiting the inside of a deranged Lucasarts marketing director’s secretest fantasy. I thought the blitz for Episode I was bad — I refused to believe, couldn’t believe that anything could surpass Amidala shampoo. It would appear that I was incorrect. My guess is that they fear the release of Episode III to be their last chance to make a gazillion or two off or Lucas’s thirty-year-old vision, despite promises of a couple TV shows in the works.

We have something required of us which was not required of generations prior, something they took quite for granted. The proliferation of the internet repeatedly puts us in the situation of having to define ourselves. Every email address, every screenname, every new logon, every forum membership, every blog comment requires an identity, and for the first time in history we have to make it up on our own.

This is a boon and curse, of course. Now your last name or skin color doesn’t define you unless you want it to. So the question is, what is one to do? A great exercise in this is making an avatar for yourself on this website, pointed out to me by Tom ages ago.

So what do you pick? Do you make your online identity the same as your real world one?

A cooler version of yourself?

Someone vastly different?

Something outlandish?

The choice is yours, and that isn’t necessarily a good thing. More on this later.

A surprisingly heated debate took place between some friends the other day on where the movie Underworld is set. Opinions were as follows:

London, because they have British accents. Clearly wrong, since the subway has none of those Mind The Gap warnings.

America, because the non-vampires (Michael and his co-worker) have US accents, the two great covens are divided by “a great ocean”, and there are Bacardi posters. Also wrong, because of the following.

Somewhere in Eastern Europe, because Michael’s street address looks like it would be in Eastern Europe.

Here’s the straight dope. Michael Corvin’s address listed as “Laktos Joszef 39 ut.” In Hungarian, utca means “street” and uttest means “road”. Also, the movie was filmed in Budapest.

On related notes, Jonathan Harker’s journal entries in Dracula start with him arriving in Budapest and there is a Corvinus University in Budapest.