unwiredben

We moved into the new apartment on Monday, and the last week has been a flurry of activity in getting everything setup.  The first few days were spent getting some essentials, but the big fun started on Friday morning when the movers arrived with all of our stuff.  It arrived in fairly good condition, and we've not noticed anything missing yet that we did not later find.  We made lots of walking trips to Costco, Target, and Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  I got renter's insurance and a ZipCar membership for doing errands.  We even had our first houseguest on Saturday night.

I'm afraid our life is looking suspiciously like the entries in http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/.  Park Slope will do that to you.  However, we've been mixing it up.  Saturday, when we were walking to lunch, we made up a game where I'd get points for every stroller, and Annelies would get points for every dog we passed.  I got off to an early 4 to 1 lead, but she came from behind on the walk back to the apartment to win the match.  I'm not sure how to count babies that are strapped to the parent in a Baby Bjorn contraption; if I'd gotten those points, it would have been a tie.

We saw Kristen Schaal (the fan Mel on Flight of the Conchords) and Kurt Braunohler perform on Saturday night amid the downpour from Hurricane Hannah.  Here's a clip of one of the bits they did, although I think our version actually went a ltitle longer.

While cleaning out stuff at home in preparation for the move to NYC, I found this t-shirt that I'd made in college. The iron-on part has discolored over the years. This is probably the geekiest shirt I ever made and ever wore.

The blue text refers to a VT100 terminal control code. Back before mice and graphics, people talked to big computers using terminals, usually a CRT and a keyboard that connected to the computer and acted as a remote interface. They sent characters back and forth, and usually, the characters sent to the terminal would be directly displayed to the user. However, the VT100 (and its compatible successors) could interpret some sequences of characters as special commands. A common one is Ctrl-H which would ring a bell on the terminal. The one in blue is the code to move the cursor back to the top left of the screen, or the "home" position.

Add that to the riff on the "if you lived here, you'd be home by now" signs that show up on apartment complexes, and you've got one of the geekiest things that you could possibly wear. Also in the running is the C programmer's reference shirt I once had which had all the text printed upside down so you could look down and read it while you were coding, and the KMFMS shirt that parodies the art style of the industrial music group KMFDM while also taking on Bill Gates.

Due to the uniform nature of audio track pricing, you can get quite a bargain on a couple of classic Firesign Theater recordings from Amazon. 1969's "Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me Those Pliers" and 1970's "I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus" are both showing up for under $2 each. Why? The albums originally were LPs, and since Firesign's audio-collage style really doesn't divide up nicely into tracks, they end up having only one track per side.

Also worth getting from their catalog is the 28-minute long The Further Adventures Of Nick Danger from their Shoes for Industry compilation, cheap at 99 cents.

I was looking at the Schiphol (Amsterdam) Airport website trying to see what I can do during my four hour layover on the way to Tanzania later this week, and I found this passage very illuminating:

"Allow yourself to be surprised by one of the many surprising toilets at Schiphol. You will feel as though you are in the heart of Amsterdam or are being surrounded by Dutch tulips. Location: G-pier and Lounge 2."

Somehow, I never think of toilets as something I want surprising me, but that might just be my cultural insensitivity talking.

Also, in describing the Back to Life Aquamassage at the airport, they say you "can leave your clothes on", which seems to imply that you could also take them off. If that's the case, I'm not sure I want to get into the aquamassage chamber.

Finally, in the "fun for kids" section, they talk about the Grand Café Plaza, which serves "genuine clown pancakes". I never thought clowns would make good pancakes; they might taste funny.

People keep comparing Barak Obama with John F. Kennedy. Does that mean he a telepathic sex-expert robot? See the (not quite safe-for-work) video History Lesson #1 on SuperDeluxe.com and decide for yourself.

I hear that there's talks going on at high levels in the company, and the word in the corridors is that Facebook may acquire my employer to make a play in the mobile space. Of course, the new venture would be called Facepalm.

Disclaimer: I made everything up.

Last night, I headed down to the Alamo downtown for a double feature. At 7pm, Austin mayor Will Wynn was doing his own version of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" presentation, then at 9pm, the Master Pancake guys were doing a take on the horrible 2004 disaster movie, "The Day After Tomorrow".

Wynn was a good speaker. About half of the presentation was pretty familiar to people who've see Gore's film version. There was an intro video clip by the Blue Man Group, plenty of pictures of ice and forests, and the dramatic "what's flooded if the seawater rises" shots. However, Wynn had customized the presentation for the Austin audience, and there was a lot of detail about Austin's own energy use (primarily transportation and home/office use), our energy production (roughly 40% coal, 30% natural gas, 20% nuclear, 10% alternative), and what plans the city has in place. Austin will make a big different because it's the country's fastest growing big city, having jumped from around 22th to 14th in size in the last decade, and it's also the most advanced in several areas, such as solar rebates and alternative energy production. The city has joined about 500 others in the US to endorse the Kyoto accords, and we've got some radical plans to give residents better information about energy consumption, such as allowing you to look at a property's power bill history so you can compare efficiency when looking for a house or apartment. For more information, you can view the highlights of the Austin Climate Protection Plan.

Wynn did a Q&A after, and there were some great questions. One audience member asked why we weren't mandating better nozzles at gas pumps to reduce vapor emissions. Apparently, we can't as cities are forbidden from imposing those rules until they actually violate the Clean Air Act, and while Austin has gotten close, we've taken active measures to avoid actually violating it, which means we can't use some remedies to make things better. Another question was about how its unsafe for bike to many locations in town; Wynn talked about his committee with Lance Armstrong to identify better bike paths and also said they were working on a route planning website that would use accident and traffic information to help riders plan safer routes.

The entertainment part of the night was another Master Pancake show. The guys came on stage at the start in Al Gore and GW masks, and they had a pretty good and loose skit about Bush's new "realization" about global warming featuring a smoke machine as "Foggy", the new administration spokesfog. Their jokes during the film were good; it's great to make fun of a movie that is so bad yet takes itself so seriously. With Jake Gyllenhaal playing a starring role, there was plenty of "Donnie Darko" and "Brokeback Mountain" references, but I chuckled the loudest at the jabs at KUT's Larry Monroe made when a certain character that has a resemblance to the DJ came on screen. It's too bad this was a one time show; it was a much better match for them than last month's "Pretty Woman".

Did you hear about the cryptographer that tried to turn a mixture of peanut butter and mayonnaise into clarified butter? He wanted to do a Jiffy-Hellmann Ghee Exchange.

(To those of you who don't get this, be glad. To those of you that do, I'm very, very sorry.)

If you're going to be getting some Ben & Jerry's this evening for your sweetie, Chunky Monkey is a fine choice, while Junkie Monkey probably is best avoided.

I just got a mail from a recruiter.  That happens every couple of days.  The odd thing about this one is that it's an internal recruiter at Palm.  You know, Palm, the company for which I work. :)  To quote the message: "Your name also sounds very familiar, I believe we have talked before"  Indeed, I think we have.  I sent her back a pointer to my record in the internal company database along with a smiley.

However, if any of my developer friends want to be considered for a "Smartphone Server Application Engineer" position, let me know. I'll pass on the details.

Some of my friends are big Demetri Martin fans.  I know I am.  Some of you even became fans due to my insistence that you watching some clip of him off my DVD player that I'd recorded, maybe the one where he has his mom and grandmother do all the punchlines to his jokes on a flip chart.  That was was classic.

So, if you are a fan of his absurd comedic style, why haven't you gotten yourself a ticket to his show at the Paramount Theater on November 18th.  Details and a horribly stretched picture are online at gettix.net, and it's been on sale for almost 40 minutes.  I just got two tickets for the 7PM show, one for me, and one for my lady friend.

Back in May, after an evening with friends at Dave and Busters, I got a little electronic device from their prize booth that's fascinated me for its impracticality.  It's a plastic electronic toy with a single button.  Pressing the button starts it making a horrible shrill sound while it spins a disc inside a plastic cover.  On the disc are a row of LEDs such that spinning them produces a display.

Every time you start it, it shows the exact same set of phrases, but it's got a 50 of them.  However, the choice of phrases is VERY random.  I had to document this; the whole sequence took over three minutes to watch, so I used my Treo's voice recorder to take notes, then transcribed them for you:

I (HEART) YOU  /  BEST FRIENDS  /  BOZO  /  CHECK IT OUT
CHILL  /  COWBOY UP  /  DUDE!  /  HOT! HOT! HOT!
DWEEB  /  FORSHIZZLE  /  FOXY  /  LET'S ROCK
TIGHT  /  FRONTIN'  /  PARTY ANIMAL  /  PEACE!
LET'S DANCE  /  UP OUT  /  SLAMMIN'  /  SMILE!
STRAIGHT UP  /  'SUP  /  FUN TIME  /  FUNKY
GOOD LUCK  /  GROOVY  /  HAPPY BIRTHDAY  /  FLY
LET'S PARTY  /  HOWDY  /  PHAT  /  JAMMIN'
FREAKY  /  I'M OUT  /  SAY WHAY?  /  MISS YOU
SWEET  /  WHAZZUP DOG?  /  TRIPPIN'  /  AWESOME
WORD  /  PEACE OUT  /  COOL  /  BITE ME
HIZZY  /  PIMPIN'  /  RIGHTEOUS  /  WICKED
HAPPY NEW YEAR  /  MERRY X'MAS

and then it repeats.  To be honest, I'd never heard the phrase "cowboy up" before seeing it here.  I'm also not sure why every gerund has to be spelled with the "G" missing.  Maybe that's what they mean when they say "it's nothing but a G thang".  I don't quite get the context of "I'M OUT", but I like that it's followed by "SAY WHAT?" then "MISS YOU".  Then, having items for your birthday, New Years, and Christmas all together seems like a shotgun approach.  I was half expecting "GREAT ARBOR DAY" or "COOL HANUKKAH" to show up next.  Apparently the designers picked words by watching MTV and then looking through their 1980's video collection.  The good news is that now that I've seen them all, I won't have to look at the device and its horrible noise ever again.

Thursday morning while in California, I heard a small bit of unintentional hilarity.  NPR had a report on Morning Edition about flight attendants who were taking self-defense classes to improve in-plane security.  The story started out talking about how the position was once viewed as very glamorous, but today's attendants need a different skill set.  Then they start playing audio from the class where the students are practicing assaulting dummies and you hear the line "get away big brute", and then you start to chuckle.  You can skip to about 0:40 in the audio if you don't care about the intro.

No real content from slightly stressed out Ben right now, but this YouTube video of early-1970's Morgan Freeman looking all-Jimi-Hendrixy and making jokes about matchboxes makes me smile.

(while preparing to head to Schlitterbahn, after kazanya started talking in Russian)

Did you hear that scientists in Georgia came up with an operating system that runs on onions?
They call it DOS Vidalia.
(while in line at Schlitterbahn, I spotted a girl wearing a black, pirate-themed bikini)

Do you know why that girl has the skull and crossbones on her bikini bottom?
That's where she keeps her booty!

Some of you will remember my own personal Andy Dick story from this year's SXSW, how he went wild during the Q&A, throwing one of his cast members on the floor and dry humping her, stealing microphones from anyone trying to answer questions but him, and generally being a (slightly funny) a-hole.

According to this except yanked from Salon, he's at it again:

Andy Dick = totally insane: At the Comedy Central-sponsored roast of William Shatner in Los Angeles on Sunday night, sorta funnyman Andy Dick had his very own Courtney Love moment, publicly melting down in a way that cries out for an intervention. Apparently visibly drunk for the duration of the show, Dick started licking comic Patton Oswalt's face after Oswalt joked about Dick's cameo in Jessica Simpson's "Public Affair" video (in which Dick licks Simpson's roller skates). Dick went on to turn his tongue on Farrah Fawcett, Carrie Fisher and Nichelle Nichols (who played Uhura on "Star Trek") during the taping. But he really let loose at the after-party, taking a piss in front of New York Post reporter Mandy Stadtmiller, then offering her cocaine, then trying to grope her and finally biting her hand. Asked by Stadtmiller why he started with the licking, Dick responded: "I was doing it because I was desperately trying to tie the show together like a fisherman with tuna, and you're a little piece of fresh tuna. But thanks for asking. Do you want me to lick your face now?" (Page Six)

"I was desperately trying to tie the show together".  Yow!

Last week, I played hooky for a few hours and journeyed downtown with kazanya to see the National Poetry Slam's "Nerd Slam" showcase at Antone's.  It was a mid-afternoon show and mostly populated by slammers from around the country.  The main seating was all full, but we got seats over to the side with a good view of the stage.  I took videos using my Panasonic camera of a lot of the performances, and I've included the intro poem below.



The event was a little disappointing to me, mainly because of the moderators and the audience.  There were way too many guy poets to have time for all of them to read, so they alternated between guy, girl, and group performances.  However, for each guy they spent lots of time getting two poets on stage to compete against each other in a trivia contest where the quizmasters were giving very, very hard questions.  A very loud group sitting behind us started shouting "Not a nerd!" over and over during this part when the poets on stage would blank on the questions, and it was just unpleasant.  It would have been much better to have just drawn names out of a hat, skipping the trivia portion of the event entirely.

Most of the poems were pretty blah.  I liked one of the girl's doing a poem about a name-dropping English professor, but I thought the poem about love expressions in programming languages was a bit trite.  An ode to the Muppets was quite nice, but we don't need another bad poem about the pleasures of nerd girls when there's Ernie Cline's work out on the net.</lj>

Several of my friends saw the brilliant film "The Comedians of Comedy" at SXSW a couple of years ago.  A few of them even got to see the actual comedians from that tour perform at Emo's.  While I don't think the TV show documentary series of their second tour held up as well as the original film, it was still worth a watch.  I now present the Michael Blieden-directed video for Fiona Apple's "Not About Love", staring the lovable Zach Galifianakis.  It makes me giggle.

I never got around to doing my own secret project with the bumper sticker that I scanned, but a reader of my blog took my graphics and has turned them into a local Austin 'net phenom with the Virtual Waterlook Records Stickers website.  It even got some sweet coverage from The Austinist.  I'm glad to see this project finally come to fruition.

There's lots of common expressions that you've got to translate when visiting to the UK.  Yes, we both speak English, but word choices are often quite different.

US: "For Rent"
UK: "For Hire" or "To Let", depending on the usage.

Rental cars are "cars for hire", while if you want an apartment, find one that's out "to let".  I found all the "to let" signs a little interesting, as it's imminently graffitable into "toilet", and the inner-eight-year-old giggles at the thought.

US: "Thrift Store"
UK: "Charity Shop"

I like this turn of phrase, as it pushes the emphasis to the good works they are doing with the money raised by selling donated goods instead on the money the shoppers are saving by buying used items.  Sometimes it was hard to tell what was a charity shop.  I saw several PDSA stores which fund animal hospitals and thought they were actual clinics until I looked in the shop windows.

US: "To Go"
UK: "Takeaway"

Another emphasis change.  Us American's emphasize the portable nature of our food, while the British prefer to dwell on the mechanics of the purchase.  We want to "go", while they just want it out of their sight.

UK: "Rising Bollards"

There's no US version of this term that refers to posts that rise out of the roads to prevent non-authorized traffic.  They're fun to watch; there is a set on the main bus line in Cambridge controlling access to a mostly pedestrian area of the city center.

US: "Open Late" - store is open past 10PM
UK: "Open Late" - store is open past 5PM

We went into a mall in Cambridge that made a big deal about its late operating hours.  It closed at 8PM.  It also featured a multimedia display from the local city council that had cringe-worthy parodies parodies of the MasterCard "Priceless" ads talking about penalties for moving violations and vandalism.

By the way. it's apparently a rather low-class thing in the UK to eat frozen food.  The main grocery stores have a rather limited selection, making room for the chain "Iceland" which specializes in all things frozen. If you visit the Iceland site, be sure to read the slightly witty history of the store which refers to the early 2000's as "The Dark Ages", and their PowerPoint-clipart warning about management consultants.