Martin is cool

I get back from lunch today and see an instant message from Martin. It says ‘you seen reverse cowgirl today?’. I link on over and see this post and say ‘Holy shit’.
To those not up on the blogosphere scene, Reverse Cowgirl is a well known weblogger in LA. She could be considered a weblog celebrity by many in the weblog world. Somehow she ended up on Martin’s site. She like the site and Martin. A lot. Enough to devote an entire post to how cool Martin is.
I guess I don’t always seen Martin as that cool. He’s one of my best friends and I take it for granted that he’s an actor and has plenty of cool stories. Our families hang out pretty much every weekend and we try to drink beers at least once a week sans wives. I even know what kind of pr0n he likes to download. But obviously, I underestimate his coolness. I mean he can’t even fix his own doorbell…
I guess I better re-edu-macate myself on what ‘cool’ is all about. I think I have long way to go. I’m the guy that brought a laptop and a cantenna to Hooters so we could surf the web from the bar…
Martin hosts his site on my web server. I looked at the bandwidth usage and his site’s sucking down the bandwidth. Gigabyte after gigabyte. I can only hope that some big Hollywood producer sees Martin and and decides to offer him a six-figure development deal ASAP. Previously, Martin had promised me a shoutout when he wins the oscar. Now I’m one step closer to being part of a real posse.
In an attempt to absorb some of Martin’s coolness & fame I will post this picture of us together drinking scotch.

My wife rocks

My wife regularly shops at Asian markets. I’m usually not suprised when I get home from work and find some strange assortment of Japanese candies, Chinese beef jerky, and Korean pickles.
On Friday I was greeted with this sight:

Years ago, when I was working in Hong Kong & Singapore, I picked up drinking Japanese style iced coffee. Japanese iced coffee is nothing like the weak ass shit you get at Starbucks when they dump hot coffee over ice. WTF is that?
Brew coffee, mix in sugar and cream to taste, then chill. No watery coffee in a plastic cup. Typically the iced coffee is found in a small can (see above)
Starbucks has copied the style and they call it Starbucks Doubleshot. It’s available everywhere. It’s good, but the Japanese brands are better.
It is amazingly refreshing in the heat. Cool and sweet with good flavor, you really can’t ask for more get you going in the afternoon. For a while I was drinking 3-4 cans a day and riding the caffine wave until my eventual wipeout. I don’t drink it regularly anymore, mainly because I crave it so much.
Besides three cans of iced coffee, she also picked up a bottle of Pocari Sweat. In spite of it’s name, it’s a great tasting version of Gatorade that I started drinking about the time I started with iced coffee.
My wife knows my love for these drinks and hooked me up. Who can ask for more?
In other news, I dug up potatos in the backyard today.

Several months ago I found a bag of potatos that were sprouting in the house. rather than toss them I took the girls outside and we planted them. Fast forward to today and it was time to dig them up. Here I am with Zoe plucking the spuds from the ground with my bare hands. Zoe provided the management as I dug.

After washing the dirt away, here’s is nature’s bounty. I am a rocking farmer.
Wife wierdness:
My half-Chinese wife was born in New York and raised in Cincinnati. She’s as American as they come, but she was raised by her crazy Chinese mother. The effects are slight, but noticable. She eats something called ‘lo sung’ on her toast. It looks like bacon bits. She also eats something called ‘stinky tofu’ which should really be called ‘smells like vomit tofu’ with her mother & grandmother. Most of the time I let it slide uncommented.
The other day I came upon this scene:

Yes, Mira is laughing. Both girls love this. In China they don’t use q-tips to clean their ears. They use this special bamboo stick that is curved at one end and has a puff on the other. Michele uses the hook end to scratch the inside of the girls ears. Then the puff end to draw out the wax, dirt clods, and small stones that get in there.
The girls CRAVE this. They ask for ‘ear scratching’ all the time. It’s fargin weird I tell you. Not as weird as shoving a lit paper cone in your ear, but weird none the less. When I question such things, my wife has a pat answer, “A billion Chinese can’t be wrong.”
The fight:
Martin wrote up a brief description of our viewing of the Tyson fight. Less than a minute. I’m sure glad it wasn’t Pay Per View. I have say that Tyson was amazingly candid in the post-fight interview saying that he wasn’t ready for Lennox Lewis.
Geekage:
I’ve been getting more and more interested in the use of XML feeds. After reading Lukwam’s and Argv0’s posts about using feeds, I had to give it a try.
I got Newz Crawler working, but NewsMonster eludes me. Newz Crawler works pretty damn good. Tight integration with XP to boot.
What I really want to build is my own page to aggregate RSS feeds, but I have much learning to do.
I think this entry is long enough, don’t you?

Time for work, but first, pictures…

A couple days ago I looked out my office window and saw guys painting the building next door. Mind you, my office is on the 18th floor of a 21 story building. Next door, the building is like 30 stories tall.

These guys were painting the building with the same brushes and rollers you use to paint your house. Only they were 300 feet off the ground.
While I had the camera, I thought you all might like a picture of my office wall.

Is it what you expected?
Finally, here’s a picture of an apartment building on fire, across the freeway from our offices.

Ah, the benefits of working in a skyscraper. All the men gathered to watch the firetrucks. There was much disappointment when the fire went out and we couldn’t see anymore flames. Men are irresitably drawn to fires by some sort of primal instinct.
If single women ever got smart, all they’d have to do is light a fire somewhere and all the men in the area would show up to watch.
I’m off now to the office. At 9:30 begins a short 5 hour meeting on Media Asset Mangement. I’m fucking loving it.
Lastly, I was out drinking with Martin last night, and he wanted me to track back to him so he could see how it works… Consider yourself tracked…

30 Minutes

So I’m taking a 30 minute break before I do the dishes or whatever other shit I have to do tonight and I’ll catch up in my hugely important tidbits of information that I need to blog.
First, props to Lukwam who implemented a Trackback feature on his blog from scratch. Someone hire this guy he can actually code.
If you do a Yahoo search on “brush or floss?“, I’m the number one hit. Success at last!
My brother Matt sent me this link via overstated.net via My First Mine. It’s music mixed with the sounds of a man playing Counterstrike. Warning: It’s 4+ MB and involves much cursing. Shoo the kids out of the room before you play it.
Over at Thinkgeek, I’ve been obsessing over this. Of course, I have no use for it, but it looks cool.
Last night I made the plane & hotel reservations for SXSW. I think it’s gunna be a good time. After reading on a number of weblogs that people aren’t going due to cost. I guess the blogosphere is poor. I haven’t decided if I’ll keep it a secret that I work for Disney. Maybe I’ll bring Lessig a Mickey plush.
Mike Tyson got a tattoo. Martin & I are eager to see this fight. It jsut doesn’t get better than this.
Two minutes to go… I will share with you this email I got from my internet millionaire college roommate after he read my weblog for the first time:
“You have redefined Geekdom. I am planning an intervention.”
Time for my husbandly duties now. I’ll be listening to the Tavis Smiley show…

Pound Cake

First, here’s my latest audblog. I made it while driving in the car with the girls.
Powered by audblogaudblog Post
I now resume my text based weblogging.
Here’s a bit of info you didn’t know…
The name for Pound Cake comes from the fact that original recipe for pound cake was a pound of flour, a pound of sugar, a pound of butter, and a pound of eggs.
You learn some thing new every day.
A few have mentioned that I have not updated news of my daughter’s fever. I am happy to report that she is fine. Evidently, she responds much better to Motrin (ibuprofen) than to Tylenol (acetaminophen). Once Michele started giving her Motrin, the fever dropped dramatically.
Since I am an engineer, I tend to do things like record my children’s temperature regularly and mark when I gave them medicine. Partially in case the doctor wants to know later and partially because I’m a freak. In any case, recording the temperature allows me to makes graphs like this:

The graph starts on Friday night and ends on Saturday night.
Martin did a good job of writing up what I did on Friday & Saturday. To be clearm, on Saturday night we had pork babyback ribs, matzo boll soup made from scratch, and quiche. I don’t want to think about how many kosher rules we broke in one meal.
Casey had a very bad day.
Blogosphere stuff:
Friday’s event appears to be hot news to webloggers everywhere. I posted up my take and I see from referrer logs that quite a number of people are taking a look. The fact that my submission to Slashdot about the Pyra got posted is addding to the traffic. My ego has swollen dramatically.
The truth of the matter is that I didn’t read any of the panelist weblogs before the event. The Rabbit Blog looks familiar, but I don’t read it regularly. I’ve heard the names of the others before, but never really read them.
I’ve got to give props to Tony Pierce, who not only linked back to me, but gave me credit for one of the photos I took. As Rebecca Blood mentions in The Weblog Handbook, the real currency of weblog are readers. Links are the way people payback others in weblogs.
Jonah at lablogs.com has a good set of links about the event. I need to do more to get the lablogs.com group rolling.
I checked out the Reverse Cowgirl’s comments and I found her to be one saucy, harsh chick. Now, being that I’m married to a saucy, harsh chick, I found the site hi-larious. I bet a lot of navel-gazing academic ‘what does it all mean’ types get bent out of shape reading her site.
While I could go on sucking up to the other panelists, I won’t. To be honest, they aren’t blogs I’d probably read again. I hope I haven’t committed weblog hari-kiri by not fawning over Doc & Ev…
All you LA peeps should be aware that the next SoCal Wireless Users Group meeting is September 17th at 7PM. It’s a good place to talk about wireless stuff and I think more webloggers will show up. I can promise that there will NOT be a bevy of hot art babes floating around like at the blogosphere event.
I guess I should post it on LAblogs.com. I think that the assembled geeks would faint if Kitty Bukkake showed up at the meeting…
Ok, I’ts time for me to go play more Battlefield 1942. There’s plenty of Nazi’s that need killin’.