2008 Sep 1, 9:35
sequelguy posted a photo:
Humorous modified sign: "Stop for me its the law" changed to "... its the claw" with a claw added to the stick figures arm.
seattle washington alki watersign 2008 Sep 1, 9:33
sequelguy posted a photo:
seattle water washington alki 2008 Aug 19, 11:02In which Grumpy Grammar Gus is taunted with poor grammar.
comic language humor geek english grammar via:languagelog 2008 Aug 18, 11:29"A special program about the housing crisis produced in a special collaboration with NPR News. We explain it all to you. What does the housing crisis have to do with the turmoil on Wall Street? Why
did banks make half-million dollar loans to people without jobs or income? And why is everyone talking so much about the 1930s? It all comes back to the Giant Pool of Money."
podcast audio economics npr radio mortgage 2008 Jun 25, 12:26
The weekend before last was Sarah's birthday and as part of
that, last weekend we took a trip to Victoria, BC. I've got a map of our trip locations and photos. Not all the photos are
on the map but they're all in the trip photo set on Flickr. It turns out there's a lot of tourist intended activities
right around our hotel which was in the inner harbor and downtown Victoria area. As such we didn't get a rental car and did a lot of walking.
On the first day we checked out the Royal British Columbia Museum which had
some interesting exhibits in it and the Undersea Garden which was interesting in that its like a floating aquarium but was a bit grimy. There was a group of Japanese tourists next to us during the
undersea show in which a diver behind the glass in the ocean would pick up and parade various animal life. The group all repeated the word starfish in unison after the show's narrator and one of
the tourists was very excited to see the diver bring over the octopus. The diver made the octopus wave to us while it desperately tried to get away.
We flew in and out of the Victoria International Airport
which is a smaller sized airport. Although we needed our passports we didn't need to take off our shoes -- what convenience! The US dollar was just a bit worse than the Canadian dollar which was
also convenient. The weather was lovely while we were there and I only got slightly sun burned.
victoria canada vacation nontechnical 2008 Jun 17, 12:27"... you can see that even the mighty Google is not immune to getting tickets." Google steet view photo car talking with police officer. Were they speeding? =)
google humor photo map legal ticket cop prius hybrid via:boingboing 2007 Nov 4, 11:20This weekend Sarah and I went to Tariq's house warming party in Issaquah and then to Seattle for Jon's going away party at Pike's Pub. On the drive over, just after getting through traffic on I-5
South, I saw emergency vehicles lights on the North bound side and suddenly found my lane stopped. I found out why when a man ran from the left most lane to my lane the right most, then darted left
one lane and back right again. Cars started leaving my lane and I could see the man now lounging on the pavement in front of a jeep. Apparently not hurt, he got up and started walking down the
highway. He didn't appear to be in his right mind and after walking by our car Sarah reported it to 911. The rest of the night went on as normal and I had fun with Jon and his friends. It'll be sad
to see him go next week.
nontechnical 2007 Jul 15, 5:08This previous weekend Sarah and I went to Canada for my friends Palak and Meghal's wedding. Our five day stay took us on
the route from Toronto, to Burlington (for the wedding), and then Niagra.
In Toronto we visited the
CN Tower, the
ROM, and the
Bata Shoe Museum. We generally acted like tourists walking around taking photos of things, putting on sun block, and not saying 'eh'. But we could have been worse
like the drunk American college students in front of us in line for the CN Tower asking the guide if the CN Tower is taller than the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. We stumbled upon the
Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibit which was really interesting. Sarah in particular recalls the cute stuffed animal
monsters.
After Toronto we drove to Burlington where Palak and Meghal's wedding would take place. We got up early and made it on time to the wedding which was
lovely. I hadn't attended an Indian wedding previously so it was a new experience for me. During the ceremony the child in front of me kept peeking over her parent's shoulder and staring at me. It
lasted all day with a break after lunch during which we drove around and experienced small town Ontario. After the break cousins performed dances for Palak and Meghal and then we all danced the night
away until the wee hours.
In Niagra we stayed in a hotel room with a falls view which was lovely. We went on the
Maid of the Mist tour that takes tourists
right up to the falls in a boat and drenches them. We also went on the
Behind the Falls tour which was not as fun. In both we are
given rain coats which are essentially glorified plstic trash bags. For dinner we ate in the hotel restaurant which had a lovely view of the falls. At night the falls are lit up in various colors
with gigantic lights.
niagra wedding personal toronto nontechnical 2007 Jul 4, 10:58Hackdiary
I really enjoy reading Matt Biddulph's blog
hackdiary. An entry some time ago talked about his
Second
Life flickr screen which is a screen in Second Life that displays images from flickr.com based on viewers suggested tags. I'm a novice to the Second Life scripting API and so it was from this
blog post I became aware of the
llHTTPRequest. This is like the XMLHttpRequest for Second Life code in that it lets you make HTTP requests.
I decided that I too could do something cool with this.
Translator
I decided to make a translator object that a Second Life user would wear that would translate anything said near them. The details aren't too surprising: The translator object keeps an owner
modifiable list of translation instructions each consisting of who to listen to, the language they speak, who to tell the translation to, and into what language to translate. When the translator
hears someone, it runs through its list of translation instructions and when it finds a match for the speaker uses the llHTTPRequest to send off what was said to
Google translate. When the result comes back the translator simply says the response.
Issues
Unfortunately, the llHTTPRequest limits the response size to 2K and no translation site I can find has the translated text in the first 2K. There's a flag HTTP_BODY_MAXLENGTH provided but it defaults
to 2K and you can't change its value. So I decided to setup a PHP script on my site to act as a translating proxy and parse the translated text out of the HTML response from Google translate. Through
experimentation I found that their site can take parameters text and langpair queries in the query like so:
http://translate.google.com/translate_t?text=car%20moi%20m%C3%AAme%20j%27en%20rit&langpair=fr|en. On the topic of non US-ASCII characters (which is important for a translator) I found
that llHTTPRequest encodes non US-ASCII characters as percent-encoded UTF-8 when constructing the request URI. However, when Google translate takes parameters off the URI it only seems to interpret
it as percent-encoded UTF-8 when the user-agent is IE's. So after changing my
PHP script to use IE7's user-agent non US-ASCII
character input worked.
In Use
Actually using it in practice is rather difficult. Between typos, slang, abbreviations, and the current state of the free online translators its very difficult to carry on a conversation.
Additionally, I don't really like talking to random people on Second Life anyway. So... not too useful.
personal translate second-life technical translator sl code google php llhttprequest 2007 May 5, 10:05
Carissa and Elijah are married! Sarah and I flew to Oakland the Friday of two weeks
previous (April 27th) into the Oakland Airport. We were on the same flight as Jon which was fun but we weren't seated with him. Instead I was seated between Sarah and a middle aged lady who enjoyed
talking to herself. It seemed a bonus if others such as myself listened but not a prerequisite for her speaking.
Sarah and I rented a car and we drove Jon first to Hayward where he was staying then we drove to our hotel in Dublin. The car we got turned out to be a PT Cruiser which was a
surprise of course but actually wasn't that bad. The power windows are controlled by the center console rather than by a switch near the windows themselves which led to several embarrassing seconds
when we later tried to pay the toll for the Bay Bridge.
The next day we went to Carissa's wedding which was lovely. In a small church with white roses Carissa's mom married Carissa and Elijah.
Afterward we went to the reception at the Senior Center. "Senior Center" may conjure up images of rolley charis that smell like old people but it wasn't like that at all. It appears to be a community
center funded by the Senior Condos next door so it was very nice.
Carissa is the first of the college roommates to get married! I guess I'm just having trouble imagining any of us getting married...
wedding friend personal california nontechnical 2007 Apr 15, 7:37Friday Jon, Daniil, and I saw
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters. It was really
great. The quality of individual Aqua Teen episodes varies wildly but this movie was very funny. It was like watching an excellent episode that happened to be 87 minutes long.
I had some difficulty generating interest for the movie as many didn't think this was 'their kind of movie'. I asked Sarah and she said no but I talked to her about it again later after she watched
a clip and she said she really didn't want to see it because it looked too weird. I asked her what she saw in the clip and she said a man with weird pants was talking with french fries while a
drink was getting a meatball to push him around in a cart.
Well, when you put it like that it does sound weird...
movie personal nontechnical 2007 Apr 5, 11:45British cameras watching the public now have loudspeakers hooked up to scold people behaving inappropriately. What year is it?
paranoia government tv camera article bbc 2007 Feb 13, 9:51A blog written by a librarian talking about ontology, blogging, tagging, and any other Web2.0 nonsense they like.
blog monthly folksonomy information library metadata ontology tag tagging web 2007 Jan 8, 5:25MSDN article talking about scope-ids in IPv6 literals in URIs.
msdn microsoft reference ipv6 ip internet scope-id 2004 May 10, 10:37Looking around the Microsoft campus it was easy to tell people who were there for an interview from the programmers who worked there. All of the people who were dressed formally, a suit or tie was an
obvious sign, were there for an interview. I spent my time between interviews talking to other over dressed people between interviews. The usual topics of conversation included name, city of origin,
computer science background, and the crazy problems our interviewers had asked us. Going through these topics with one such person, who incidentally was the only woman I saw interviewing, I asked
what school she was attending. She told me she was just finishing her Masters in Computer Science at
[some college] and I told her where I was from. She then asked me, "You have your
Doctorate in Computer Science?" "No," I said, "My Bachelors... I'm working on my Bachelors." "Oh," she said, "Well you look very mature." I'm fairly certain that's a first for me -- being told I look
"very mature" that is. Unfortunately, at that point my tram showed up and I had to travel to a different building. Now I'm left wondering what made me look mature. It could have been the gel or the
slacks or the tucked in shirt. The day previous while dressed casually, hanging out with my friend Jeannie, some of her friends thought I was her age, about eight years older. The common element
between my two appearances were my new black dressy-ish shoes. Maybe its just that easy.
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