Return of the Dorks

Ah yes, so Star Wars episode 3 is finally out.  It was pretty entertaining.  So now is a great time to re-watch the Triumph skit when he goes out and makes fun of all the people who were standing in line to watch episode 2.
You can easily find it by searching for triumph the insult comic dog on google, but you can also see it here.

pho-pho-pho-RIDAY!

Yes, today is pho-riday, and appropriately, I had pho for lunch. It was great. It was phobulous. Phontastic. Wonderphol. You get the picture.
You know I probably wouldn't like pho that much tho, if it weren't for the plum sauce. That is some good sauce. Plum sauce.

I have little post-its on my wall right in front of my desk, to remind me things. Here's one I put up recently:



I need to read more books! My brain is turning to mush and I think I'm turning dumber by the day.

love is in the blood....

We all love to hear a good love story. Here's a good one taken from Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer. Start the sappy romantic music now.

Here the fluke lodges itself in a vessel and finally has its first meal since leaving the snail: a drop of blood. It now begins to mature. If it's a female, a uterus starts to take shape. If it's a male, eight testes form like a bunch of grapes. In either case, the fluke grows dozens of times bigger in a few weeks. Now it is time for the parasite to search for a partner for life. If it is lucky, other flukes sniffed out this human host and are lodged in the liver as well. The females are delicate and slender; the males are shaped something like a canoe. They begin to make blood-borne odors that lure members of the opposite sex, and once a female encounters a male, she slips into his spiny trough. There she locks in, and the male carries her out of the liver. Over the course of a couple of weeks, the pair make the long journey from the liver to the veins that fan out across the gut. As they travel the male passes molecules into the female's body that tell her genes to make her sexually mature. They keep traveling until they reach a resting place unique to their own species. Schistosoma mansoni stops near the large intestine. If we were following Schistosoma haemotobium , it would take another route to the bladder. If we were following Schistosoma nasale, a blood fluke of cows, it would take yet another route to the nose.
Once they find their destined place, the fluke couple stay there for the rest of their lives. The male drinks blood with his powerful throat and massages the female to help thousands of blood cells flow into her mouth and through her gut; he consumes his own weight in glucose every five hours and passes on most of it to her. They may be the most monogamous couples in the animal kingdom--a male will clasp onto its female even after she has died. (A few homosexual flukes will also get together. While their fit isn't as tight, they will keep reuniting if a disapproving scientist should separate them.)

The liver, what a romantic place to meet. Haha, speaking of liver, it reminds me of a joke about a Chinese man looking for love...but it's one of those jokes you gotta hear. It doesn't work reading it.
Think of this love story next time you eat grapes... hahahahaha...

Read more about Schistosoma at Wikipedia.

What's used for the title of the blog when using the online editor?
There's no subject header here like there is for post by email...

*edit. oh, there is none. hmm... there is still some room for improvement for Blogger. I should be working for Blogger!

ipodwar and religion at work

some people in ny are playing this ipod game where they go around and show each other what song they are currently playing on their ipod.  i mean, i love ipod, too, but this is seriously retarded.
rules
an account

an article from LA times about religious groups at work.  for the most part, it's only a mildly interesting article, but the part that cracked me up was

Even with those limits, however, the introduction of religion is changing the workplace atmosphere. Though it frees Christians such as Clark to bring their "whole selves" to work, it troubles many who are unaccustomed to seeing a Bible on a desk or hearing a supervisor respond to a casual "How's it going?" with an earnest "I'm blessed."

Re: Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich

This book is about the experience of a journalist who tries surviving for a few months by working several minimum wage jobs, like waitressing, housekeeping, and working at Wal-Mart, and her thoughts on some of the things that are messed up about the way businesses work. Her story confirms what I already suspected. That it sucks to be poor. It is pretty alarming, though, to read about the life conditions of some of her co-workers. I wonder if there were as many people this poor even long time ago, like before there were big corporations, and everyone was farmers. Yeah, I guess there were... because I remember in school learning about how there were landowners and then there were sharecroppers, and how the sharecroppers got screwed. It got me thinking about what my life would be like if I had to work those kind of jobs. Where you have to work really hard jobs, where you work up a real sweat because you're working so hard, like a horse, and you're paid so little you can barely afford to house and feed yourself. Like what would it be like to be a farmer. I do think though that there has to be a sort of gratifying feeling about doing physical labor for one's livelihood. Like, if you were successful, you'd really feel like you built something up. But then I'm sure that people who do manual labor because they have to probably think they'd feel more satisfied making more money while sitting on butt in an air-conditioned office. Maybe at some point in my life, I should do some really hard manual labor for a period of time. Just to know what it's like. You know, it can be like, character building or something. Form some tough callouses on my soft woman hands. I read an article today about farmers, and some of the innovative ways they find to keep their farm running. In the article, there is a young couple, pretty close to my age, starting out their lives as farmers. Both went to college. They made about $40,000 combined over a year for all their work. It's pretty mind-blowing why they would choose to do this... become farmers, I mean, but also admirable in a way. Anyway. Read the book... it's pretty interesting.

i think i'm not getting enough rest

i feel an overwhelming urge to fall asleep whenever i sit passively.  this makes it extremely difficult to watch NBA playoffs!  yet when it's time to goto sleep at night, i feel wide awake!  and then when i wake up in the morning, i hate myself for feeling crappy.

Hee Seop Choi, Octavio Dotel, Dontrelle Willis

Since I know you care...

Hee Seop Choi (Korean!!) has been playing pretty good lately.  He had 2 HRs in a game last week, a HR yesterday, and he's 3-3 right now against the Cardinals.

Octavio Dotel, Oakland closer, gave up walk off HRs to blow the save in back to back games... :'(

Dontrelle Willis, Bay Area native, has been pitching phenomenally.. He won again today, so now he's 8-0, w/ a 1.08 ERA.

Yahoo! News Story - Kenyans are eager to adopt baby girl found in litter of puppies - Yahoo! News

what the??? i can't edit the title of the post?? :'(

Here's the news story so that you don't have to navigate away from the site.
Can you imagine that dog dragging the baby across the road? Amazing...

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - Kenyans are eager to adopt a baby girl abandoned in a forest and later saved by a stray dog, officials said Tuesday.

"The publicity on the way the baby was rescued has sparked a lot of public interest in helping her," said Hannah Gakuo of Kenyatta National Hospital, where the newborn, dubbed Angel by health-care workers, is being treated for exposure and an infection in her umbilical cord.

"People have been calling the hospital, asking about the possibility of adopting her," Gakuo told The Associated Press.

Unwanted infants are often abandoned in Kenya, with poverty and failed relationships frequently to blame. Kenya's weak law enforcement and poor social security system mean most people who forsake their babies are never caught.

The stray dog that saved the child also was being cared for Tuesday, a day after its last surviving puppy died for unknown reasons, said Jean Gilchrist of the Kenya Society for the Protection and Care of Animals.

Animal welfare officials named the dog Mkombozi, or "Saviour," and gave the dog its first bath and de-worming.

"She looks a bit depressed, so we'd like to examine her to see if she has a temperature or any other problem," Gilchrist said. "She wasn't happy when we all poured into the compound. She decided to leave, but kids in the compound brought her back for the bath because she was full of ticks."

Mary Adhiambo, a resident in the compound where the dog lives, said Mkombozi apparently found the baby Friday in a plastic bag.

The dog reportedly dragged the baby across a busy road and through some barbed wire to the shed in the poor Nairobi neighbourhood where puppies from two stray dogs were sheltering.

The infant was discovered after two children alerted elders that they heard the sound of a baby crying near their wooden and corrugated-iron shack. Residents found the baby lying next to the mixed-breed dog and a own pup.

Residents took the child to a nearby police station to record a statement before taking her to the hospital.

interesting fact about two digit numbers

When you're watching the NBA playoffs or MLB games, here's a little fun game you can play using the two digit numbers on the players' jerseys.

Take any two digit number. For example, 13, the number worn by Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns, 2005 MVP. (He's Canadian, by the way. Just thought I'd mention that.) Add the digits that make up the number together. 1+3 = 4. Then subtract that number from the original number. 13-4 = 9. Then add the digits of the number you get. 0+9 = 9. You'll get 9 every time. Fascinating.

Why does this happen? It has to do with the structure of our base ten number system, I think. Basically, it happens for the same reason that the sum of the digits of two digit multiples of 9 always add up to 9. We learned this trick when trying to memorize our 9s multiplication tables as children. (18: 1+8=9, 27: 2+7=9, ...) If you could explain why that happens, I'd be impressed.

so much rain

a picture of mission peak on a sunnier day...

it rained a lot today... not that i'm doing all these outdoors activities that are hampered by the rain... well, actually, i drove my brother to PUC today, so it would have been a little better if it wasn't raining...
 
today, i installed konfabulator on my computer.  if you've heard of dashboard, a new feature that apple is touting as one of the top reasons you should get tiger, this is where apple ripped off the idea from.  konfabulator is pretty fabulous.  there is also a version for windows, if you're so inclined.

i saw a banana slug today

It was quite large. And quite bright yellow. Someone said, "Pretend we're on Fear Factor and eat it!" You know, for an animal that I would think has a lot of natural predators, it sure is bright. Is it poisonous or something? But then they wouldn't eat it on Fear Factor.... I'd venture to guess it probably doesn't taste like banana.

I know how it was just yesterday I gave my ode to PanEx. But I think come next Friday I will have to patronize Great Steak & Potato, instead. I had a cheesesteak from there today, and it was quite satisfying. My only complaint is that's it's a bit pricey for mall food. Great Steak & Potato doesn't sound as catchy as PanEx, tho... hm... G-SAP?
hahahahaha, what about G-S.Pot.

picture from Oakland A's game last week

This is the picture I took with my cell phone from my seat.  Best seats ever.  It was a crazy game, too.  I took another picture, but Paul accused me of trying to get a picture of Durazo's butt, so I'll keep that one for myself.

maybe links will work if i send rich text email...

instead of plain text email... maybe blogger assumes all email is rich text.
how about a link to a baseball blog

post by email with picture as attachment

where does it store the picture?

edit: niiiiiice it gets stored somewhere on blogger. i hope they don't erase the pictures after some time. anyway, that picture above was taken using my cell phone. i was driving home when this car pulled out from the sun microsystems campus. the license plate said "SUNOS". the picture was taken on the dumbarton bridge...

post by mail is buggy

it doesn't linkify my link, and also returned my mail to me, even tho it
posted the update.

Pan Ex

Panda Express should start calling themselves Pan Ex, and pay me a
junkload of money for giving them the idea. (pun intended)
On their <a href="http://www.pandaexpress.com/">website</a>, they say
Panda Express. Chinese for: Yummy
I think the PanEx lady is holding out on me, or my appetite is growing,
because although I think a 2-entree plate should get me stuffed. (I had
Kung-Pao Chicken and Eggplant Tofu w/ fried rice) I finished my plate
today and felt a little unsatisfied. Joel kept offering me some of his
food, which I declined. Jason suggested I should have gotten the 3-entree
plate instead. To which I responded, "3-entree plate at PanEx. Chinese
for: Rip-off"
The Kung-Pao chicken was a mistake, tho. I shoulda stuck with the tried
and true: Orange chicken.

considering switching from xanga to blogger

the only thing stopping me is that blogger seems less popular, and w/out
the xanga subscription service, i think even less people would read my
blog. pretty sure i'd get less comments, which is the most fun part of
blogging anyway.