Oh my...

I don't believe this... but it's not surprising... rumor has it there's a Naruto movie coming out in August in Japan. The title, Daikatugeki!! Yukihime Ninpoujyou Dattebayo ("It's the Yukihime's ninja arts book!!") might need a little shortening before a US release, if it's ever released in the US...

So many social networks, so little time...

In a spurt of procrastination, I joined Orkut, Google's spin on Friendster. Google's Orkut Buyukkokten started it as a personal project. (How cool is that? Google actually expects everyone to spend one day a week working on their own little interesting projects... and now the man has a whole website named after him.) A little sleuthing reveals this is in fact the same Orkut who was behind ClubNexus and inCircle. Suddenly this becomes a lot more interesting, like the epic struggle for this man having seen Friendster take his idea and screw it up...

Too soon to tell if this will catch on; if you're interested let me know and I'll invite you. Yes, it's that exclusive. It seems like an interesting improvements on Friendster, but they still haven't nailed navigating the social network yet. Hopefully our senior project will address this better...

Idle browsing (I call it "research for senior project") turned up Ortuk's original paper on the subject, which reported some interesting results from analyzing Stanford students' profiles:

- 62% of product design majors consider themselves "creative"
- 59% of philosophy majors think they're "intelligent"
- 55% of English majors like to read in their free time
- People who consider themselves "sexy" like books on sex and hot tubbing
- Men are more likely to enjoy sci fi movies
- Women are much more likely to prefer romances
- People who like gay/lesbian books or movies cluster together
- People who like gospel music cluster together
- Raving, ballroom dancing, and Latin dancing are also their own tight commmunities
- "Sexy" people hang out together
- So do people who spend their free time "fulfilling commitments"

I can't say this is entirely surprising... but interesting...

blue

I don't know what's more disturbing: that I found this music or that I made a Flash movie about it...

people with WAY too much time on their hands

Dictionaraoke.org - The Singing Dictionary: Truly disturbing. What else are you going to do with all the pronunciation samples in your standard dictionary? But still...

artsy good fun

From Erika's blog: another Flash animation much better than the one I'm going to make. But this is priceless in its own artsy/geeky way. Join us, will you, when we go Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black. Move over, VH1...

Such a week

For the pre-midterm stretch of the quarter, it still seems like a whirlwind of stuff is going on. Thursday was A-Day. I finally turned in my coterm application, to the tune of the dramatic fanfare in my mind. Were it a movie, there'd be a long slow-motion shot of me boldly walking down the Gates hall with my envelope and handing it off with a much louder-than-necessary thud. (Particularly since I handed it to the lady who'd be ultimately responsible for making sure my application gets read fairly gently.) Now to wait... until March. Such an excruciatingly long time to find out what I'm going to be doing for the next year. And it doesn't help to tell people in job interviews I may or may not still want their job after three months...

Friday Yune and I went to go see the winter one acts, which I halfway recommend at least. A lot of interesting experimental work, and no straight-up traditional storytelling. Lots of fun though; it's amazing what students can pull off without any teachers or professors to get in the way. Granted, at times it didn't come out just right, but it was still pretty cool and I still recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen them.

Side note: her couch is quite seductive. Be warned... if you sit, you won't want to get up.

Saturday Cheng moved out of FroSoCo, just two quarters shy of being an honorary four-year fixture. We're all sad to see him go, mostly because we're lazy about venturing all the way onto the Row to visit him. He had the audacity to complain to me about his new room, a staff single that's even larger than his current single. Granted, he has to drop down to one desk, but the fact that he can also fit a couch and his bed gives him no grounds for complaints.

And today will be C-Day, for Cupcakes. Yes, today is the day of The Cupcake Bet, when we find out whether there really could be such a thing as too much chocolate...

zozo: 1, flash: 0

The somewhat unimpressive fruits of my labor: How do you write a paper?

Flash remains ever vexing.

Now it's time to actually write a paper, and this is turning out somewhat prophetic...

week in review

Week the first has already passed. A lot has happened in the sleepy first week. Classes began. An IMAX movie seen. Palo Alto frequented. So now, in a quick summary, the joys and gripes of the past week:

Joys

1. I have a date to Viennese! She's lamenting the arduous process of dress shopping right now. At the risk of parodying Flower Drum Song, I enjoy being a guy...
   
2. More dance than you can shake a stick at. A most excellent Jammix, half emptied by ski trips that weekend, made for some great dancing, including a wonderful waltz to Erin Shore at the end (the MIDI truly doesn't do it justice...) Plus possibly a stint with Los Decanos, if my schedule works out.
   
3. The Palo Alto Borders, which is far cooler than its Novi counterpart and even The Original one in Ann Arbor. And having time to browse...
   
4. That new crepe place on University: it's been a while since I've had Asian style crepes and these are, well, almost as good...
   

Annoyances and Gripes

1. Flash. For all the nifty things this program does (including such wonderful opi as Stick Figure Fight), whoever designed the interface should be shot. I swear there's a conspiracy afoot to keep Flash a hard-to-acquire skill and thus artificially inflate Web designers' salaries...
   
2. The grad admissions department, which last week "wasn't sure" if they had one of my recommendations or not, and only Monday admitted that they couldn't find it. I trust my advisor more than I trust these people, but since he's at Oxford right now, I'm up the proverbial creek. Fortunately another prof took pity on me to write another letter on three days' notice.
   
3. Forms designed by masochists who think it's sooo cool that everything fits on one page. Asking people to write anything legibly in half the space of college ruled paper is like asking Bob Sapp to squeeze into a Japanese elevator with you--it can be done, but it'll be painful.
   
4. The friendly folks at Chase Visa, who've assumed that since I wasn't here over break to receive the papers contesting mysterious charges placed on my account by Japanese firms that I no longer cared to contest them. This fight may stretch on, but I'm shopping for another Visa card.
   

aim: love it or leave it

What do you hate most about AIM or your AIM client? What do you like about it? Now accepting: rants about AIM.

A real post is coming soon, trust me. I had one last time but my web browser managed to lose it somehow...

if PowerPoint inspires mediocrity...

Following up on my previously reported Gettysburg Project comes this screen shot from my Comm 169 class.

why haven't i tried this before?

Think your computer's possessed by demons? Afraid it might become so? Have it purified at a shrine...

A match made in heaven

I was sitting idly by in the airport waiting for my flight yesterday, when who should appear on the jumbo screen on the wall but a Ms. Britney Spears. She had displaced all other news by getting married. CNN was already planning to milk this for all it was worth, stacking columnists all day long, to help viewers figure out "just what this means", as if it had profound meaning and changed our world. But it turns out that by the time I had landed, the marriage had already been annuled...

it's a great time in Detroit

Apparently being dubbed the most dangerous and most pedestrian-deadly city, Detroit now can claim another #1: it is now the nation's "fattest" city. Councilwoman Carol Alvarado of former three-time Fat City champion Houston, was pleased. "Congratulations, Detroit," she said.

On a probably unrelated note, I set off the anti-theft alarm at Kroger three times today. (Yes, this town is yuppie enough that grocery stores have anti-theft systems.) But no one really seemed to notice or care. It's just like Wal-Mart. Working at Best Buy for so long has conditioned me to ignore the obnoxious beeping; it seems to be quickly going the way of the car alarm as a well-intentioned but useless security device. Indeed, no one came charging out of the store to make sure I'd paid for the $10 of groceries I was carrying. Next time that happens I resolve to get a panicked look on my face and start running.

patience

Having been asked several times already, I suppose I could clarify. I myself didn't know what roadmapping was last year. It's the practice of drawing on a passed-out victim with a magic marker. While it may sound cruel, we justified it as punishment for passing out on the couch with his shoes on. My only regret is that I didn't see him wake up and find his new I LOVE RED MEAT and BUSH IN 2004 tattoos...

To echo someone's private sentiments, the presence of a new baby in my (extended) family did net a chorus of relatives inquiring about when they could expect a baby from me, with almost an eerie hunger in their eyes. How exactly I come into this when a pair of newlyweds just had their first baby a month ago I'll never know. Similarly, my New Year's Eve started with my parents lamenting my lack of progress in securing a mate. This is what I get for staying at home and having dinner with them while my brother, now surgically tethered to his girlfriend, was at her house.

That's all for now... I'm going to go take Grandpa out to lunch. Visions of bi bim bab now being replaced by a chicken sandwich, but he'll be excited. And that's all that really matters.

2004 it is

New Year's Eve was another blast from the past, running into old characters from high school, and even this guy I tutored when he was in middle school. Freaky. But yes, it is now 2004. Naturally, we started the new year by roadmapping a guy who passed out drunk on the couch.

Around this time the media is filled with trite recaps of the past year's biggest news, most scandalous stars, most riduculous reality shows, what have you. But only Dave Barry can truly put it into perspective:

It was the Year of the Troubling Question. The most troubling one was: What the heck happened to all those weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to be in Iraq? Apparently there was an intelligence mix-up. As CIA director George Tenet noted recently, ''Our thinking now is that the weapons of mass destruction might actually be in that other one, whaddycallit, Iran. Or Michigan. We're pretty sure the letter ''i'' is involved.''