Fluorescent Dreams Wax Cylinders

23:16 - The perfect cold cure...

The Chinese have developed the cure for the common cold.  (Or at least the con-crud that's been hanging on since the end of Further Confusion.)

It can be found at Little Sheep Hot Pot&.Their spicy broth mixes plenty of whole garlic (my preferred cold cure) with hot peppers (clear out the sinuses), ginger and ginseng (Chinese cold cures). Though it's billed as a hot pot restaurant, as far as I can tell, the broth is a collection of Eastern and Western cold cures. Their only non-alcoholic drink is a ginseng-honey-licorice root tea -- another cold cure.

The Bay Area has plenty of other hot pot restaurants. Most are equally tasty and less expensive. But I know where I'm going again next time I'm sick.

Little Sheep Hot Pot
34396 Alvarado Niles Road
Union City, CA

8:59 - Eli is smart AND beautiful!

I often tell Eli that she is beautiful. She now has more proof.

During Further Confusion, she wandered downstairs to hear a live band play. She was off to the side, reading a science fiction magazine.  While the band was playing, a fellow that she somewhat recognized came by.

He started chatting with her; he told her that she was "his kind of lady", and he offered to take her up to his room to "play a few games". She declined, but then she recognized him.

It was Norm MacDonald, the Saturday Night Live actor. (I can confirm that it was him.  I saw him in the lobby.) He's in San Jose giving a comedy concert.

Eli is BEAUTIFUL.

20:43 - Where is Chip?

I'm very, very easy to find this year.

I'm working the con store during dealer's room hours.

And otherwise, I am in room 1521.

See you at the convention!

23:29 - A few words about the words about Avatar...

I saw and I enjoyed Avatar. And I can make light fun of it (see my new icon!) But I've been more interested by the reaction against Avatar than the film itself.

Is the film anti-American?
Avatar's main antagonist gives an explicit, jarring speech about Shock and Awe. Further, the film is about low-technology natives protecting their homeland from high-technology people.

I'd say that Avatar is explicitly anti-imperialist. An anti-imperialist trope is anti-American only when imperialism is fundamental to America.

Is the film racist?
It takes a white man to bring together the tribes, in order to successfully fight his own kind. Before Josh, the Na'vi weapons didn't work against the RDA; after Josh, the Na'vi are nearly equal to the humans.

What are the good things about the film?
If Avatar gets more people to think that "the other" might also have a reasonable point of view, then it has done well. If Avatar causes people to learn about the real cultures that Na'vi took from -- the Amerind, African, and Australian aborigines -- or about the real, underwater creatures that they designed Pandora's creatures from -- then it has done extremely well.

What do you think? Take care, all.

23:36 - Avatar: The Last Rainforest (Spoiler-free!)

Beautiful film.

Worthwhile seeing for the incredible animation... two hours of nearly-naked feline-human crossbreeds.

If you're looking for plot, deep characters, or surprise...

It had two hours of nearly-naked feline-human crossbreeds! What else could you want?

10:17 - Bay Area: Did the Earth move for you, too?

Wheeeeee!

UPDATE: Magnitude 4.1, centered 10 km ENE of Milpitas. A local, small earthquake.

21:57 - The sex was grrrrrrrrrrEAT!

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

19:13 - Blasphemy made illegal in Ireland.

According to the Independent of Ireland:

ANYONE who insults another person about a matter held sacred by their religion can now be found guilty of a criminal offence and fined €25,000 under new laws that came into effect yesterday.

...

Under the new law, anyone who says, publishes or otherwise makes public comments that are found to be grossly abusive or insulting to matters that are held sacred by any religion are guilty of blasphemy if such material causes offence or outrage to a "substantial" number of people who follow the religion.

15:23 - New Years Eve 2009-2010

Eli and I had no plans for the New Year.

We wanted a quiet New Years, so we wandered to the Asian part of Newark. Unluckily, most of the quiter restarants were closed.

One place remained open: Bombay Gardens. We hadn't been there since Thanksgiving, but we like the place. They gave us a discount to join the party. I'm glad that we went.

Loud 4/4 electronic music with a heavy bass reverbed through the restaurant, going at about 120 beats per minute. When we got closer to the music, we heard the singing in Hindi and Punjabi. They were remixes of Bollywood songs with extra-heavy bass. (I recognized one or two of them.)

Our table came with a party hat, a party tiara, confetti, balloons, and plenty of noisemakers, and a great view of the Bollywood videos on the huge screen. They had left up Christmas lights everywhere.

I was among the lightest-skinned people there, but Eli was among the darkest-skinned. I'm a statistician. The average of the two of us fit in perfectly.

We sat next to a family: the father was a doctor, the mother a nurse. The doctor had a wicked sense of humor, and he teased me when I drooled too much at the videos on the wall.

Food

When we arrived, the only food that they had were the appetizers. I grabbed South Indian chaat of many kinds, fish pakora, a vinegary polenta, and other finger foods.

About 10:00pm, they brought out the main dishes: a half-dozen kinds of curries (including my favorite lamb curry), naan, kebabs, dal makhni, and other protein-rich foods. Yum!

Bollywood Videos

They had videos from recent films; Eli pointed out when 2008's Roadside Romeo had a video. I drooled at other videos, that showed beautiful ladies of all colors wearing bikinis. Another surprised me with two guys dancing together in an obviously comedic, gay text.

Dancing

It doesn't matter what you see in Bollywood movies: Neither whites nor Indians can dance. But Indians were dancing as whole families: three generations together. Lots and lots of children on the dance floor.

Dress

Almost all of the men were wearing "Silicon Valley Work Clothing": button-down shirts and slacks. But the women were very divided by generation. The older women (and some girls) were wearing bright, beautiful saris in different colors: red, green, or black with paisley patterns and plenty of sparkles. The younger women tended to wear U.S. clothing.

Some men were Sikh, and wore turbans or patka. (Hey, they're likely to have longer hair than me.)

Overall

When I went into the bathroom, I had this short conversation:

Man: Do you feel out of place at this Hindi party?
Me: Should I?

It was a loud, fun party with neighbors that I didn't know. I had a few conversations, wrote a few observations, danced, ate, and enjoyed myself.

Happy 2010. May it be a much better year than 2009!

22:23 - On Rush Limbaugh...

Rush Limbaugh is in hospital.
I disagree strongly and vehemently with Rush Limbaugh, but I remain grateful for the commercial that he did for Further Confusion, several years back.

What... you didn't know that he did a commercial for Further Confusion?

FurAffinity webpage containing the commercial

12:38 - Dealing with Eli's mom...

On (not?) waking Eli's mom

When we're in Los Angeles, we like to visit some favorite places -- ****** Central ******, for my memories of Mexico; Versailles Restaurant, for wonderful Cuban food; Rosco's Chicken and Waffles, for heart-stopping portions of Southern food.

After driving through West Hollywood, Hollywood, and other sections of Los Angeles, we came back on Christmas night at about 10:30 at night. I tried to close the bedroom door, and it was a little too loud. It woke Eli's mom, and she was extremely, loudly upset...

...that we hadn't woken her when we came in.

She berated Eli loudly, saying that she had been terrified for us, she had been praying to Jesus over us, she had been calling the last place she knew we had been, and she was CERTAIN that we were upset at her for not leaving a light on outside.

For. Fifteen. Minutes.

Ugh.

Television

This morning, Eli's mom admitted that she wanted the television on. She now needs two remote controls, which isn't what she expects. I repeat showing how to use one to turn on the television, and the other to change channels. And I made her change the channels herself.

She flipped to a channel, and left it there. I had to keep my mouth firmly, firmly shut about her choice. I rather doubt that she was much interested in the channel she chose, for three reasons:

1. It was an infomercial...
2. ...about prostate health...
3. ...in Spanish.

She figured it out after about fifteen minutes, and she changed the channel herself.

17:38

Dear all,

I had been lusting after the new e-readers for some time. Who wouldn't? Very easy-to-read screens, very portable, and a way to read books wherever you go. I told Eli that my desires were simple: I wanted something that could directly read .HTML, .PDF, that could purchase e-books, and that was not a Kindle. (I am very hesitant to buy a Kindle after Amazon twice proved that they would remove books remotely from people's machines.)

I was expecting a Sony e-Reader. Santa (in the form of my wife) brought me something both unexpected, but welcome: An HP mini subnotebook. After a few minutes' thought, I realized that she got me something much better than I had originally desired.

This subnotebook emphatically reads .HTML and .PDF out of the box. Many companies make software that lets this little machine read e-books. So, like the best e-book readers, I can download books wirelessly. Therefore, it does everything that an e-book reader does (with a less-easy-to-read screen and no two-week battery life)

...but it's a lot more flexible. In particular, every week, when I go to Arabic class, I needed to bring my notebook Macintosh with me, for a vocabulary program. No longer; the program will work perfectly on this little machine. It's a lot easier to put copies of websites onto this machine.

And I can write simple blog posts from it. Posts, like this one.

Thank you, Eli. Oops! I mean, Santa.

Take care, all.

17:06 - Nothing says "I love you" like mustard gas...

Eli and I are in Los Angeles, visiting Eli's mom. Eli's mom, Ms. Harvey, is in her nineties, living on her own.

We arrived at nine o'clock in the evening, to find Ms. Harvey asleep in bed.

"Oh, hello, honey.", she said. "I don't know what came over me...

"I was cleaning, and there was an awful stain in the bathroom. So I poured some ammonia --"

The first step... I thought

"-- into a bottle. And you know that other cleaning fluid I use? Well, I set that to heating --"

Heating?

"-- and added it to the bottle."

Oh, crap.

"And next thing I knew there was just this little bit," holding two fingers close together, "left in the bottle and this awful smell. I had to open all the windows and all the doors and something came over me. I went to bed fully dressed."

Congratulations, mom. You've discovered mustard gas.

I don't have Internet access, or a good medical book here, but --

1. She is NOT coughing or complaining of shortness of breath.
2. She is up, about, and walking at her usual (slow) pace.

Therefore, my best guess is that she's fine.

Take care, all.

13:56 - JOB OFFER: LOCKSS

Dear all,
The company that I'm working for has a job opening for a good software engineer.

LOCKSS does digital preservation by distributing copies of articles in libraries around the world. This is a good team, with very dedicated programmers. If you want an unbiased idea of how wonderful this place is, write to tilton, who left about two years ago.

Here's the job description:

LOCKSS Program Software Developer   Job ID   36723 Job Location   University Libraries Job Category   Information Technology Services Date Posted   Dec 12, 2009   This position is a two-year fixed-term. The LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) Program, founded in 1998 at Stanford University, is an international community initiative working to preserve today’s valuable web content for future readers and scholars. We work with approximately 200 libraries and 400 publishers, from all corners of the globe. The ACM award-winning LOCKSS technology is open source, peer-to-peer, decentralized digital preservation infrastructure [www.lockss.org] based on Java and Unix. We are looking for an exceptional software engineer. Responsibilities: The person we hire will share responsibilities to design, develop, and deploy the LOCKSS Program software. She/he will work with a small team to: • Develop, build, and implement major portions of the LOCKSS system • Participate in weekly design meetings, code specifications, and code reviews. • Implement design choices working alone or in a small group to deliver solid code in a timely manner, using a structured unit-testing framework. • Understand trends: World Wide Web, data communication (peer to peer protocols), digital libraries and electronic journals. • Analyze a diverse range of online publishing formats to enable content preservation • Contribute to providing support to an international group of publishers, systems administrators and librarians who are using the LOCKSS preservation system. Description of the Relationships and Roles: The incumbent will report to the Director and, LOCKSS Program, Stanford University Libraries/Academic Information Resources (SUL/AIR). She or he will work closely with the LOCKSS Program Senior Software Architect and the LOCKSS Chief Scientist. The Developer will be located in the LOCKSS Program offices at 1450 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto. Equipment, Systems, software, skills to be used in the performance of the job: Software and Systems: • Java: Java Servlets, JUnit, Java thread programming, Java networking • Unix and Linux shell scripting • Emacs, Eclipse, JBuilder or some other Linux compatible IDE • XML technologies Skills: • Ability to design, implement, test and deploy complex Web-based systems • Ability to work independently and as part of a small team with minimal supervision Qualifications: A four year college degree or equivalent is required, and an advanced degree in Computer Science is desired. At least three years of programming experience with Java is required. • Experience with: o Java: Java Servlets, JUnit, Java thread programming, Java networking, AWT/Swing, Castor, XStream, PDFBox o Development Tools: Eclipse/NetBeans, JUnit, Ant, CruiseControl o Collaboration Tools : Subversion/CVS/RCS, Bugzilla/RT/Trac/Roundup, MediaWiki/MoinMoin, SourceForge o Knowledge of C, C++, C# is a plus o Knowledge of Ruby/Rails, SQL, Python, Perl is a plus • Demonstrated ability to deliver projects on time and as specified • Record of inquisitiveness, curiosity; a quick learner of new technologies and tools • Ability to apply knowledge, ingenuity and logical thinking to solve systems and program design problems, within time and resource constraints • Ability to work independently and in a collaborative production team environment where tasks are often shared and success is based on the effective delivery of systems and services • Excellent oral and written communication skills; experience providing user support and writing documentation a plus If you're interested, visit jobs.stanford.edu and do a keyword search for "LOCKSS". The Job Title is "LOCKSS Program Software Developer", and the Job ID is 36723. Take care, all!

(8 comments | Leave a comment)

19:45 - Repost from vito_excalibur: Feminism Fail...

Why James Chartrand Wears Women' Underpants
He Must Be Joking

I'm clueless about feminism.

So I won't comment further on those articles.

20:15 - Congratulations to Kyell Gold!

Kyell Gold won awards for his book "Out Of Position"!

Yaaaay! Congratulations to the great writer!

23:34 - For my Jewish readers...

CHappy CHanukah!

10:13 - 2009 Music CDs: reminder

Just a reminder...

This weekend, I will be making and sending out compilation CDs of music that was new to me this year. The CD has about six hours of music; no artist or album has more than one song on this CD. It includes a broad range of musical styles and languages.

The only cost for the CD is this: If you like any of the songs, please seek out that artist and support him or her.

If you want one, give me your snail mail address in this entry (your response is screened.) I've turned off comments on this entry: leave your comment there.

Take care, all!

11:34 - Maceió: Brazilian Steakhouse

For Eli's birthday, I splurged, and I took her to Maceió. It's a new Brazilian steakhouse in downtown San Jose.

This restaurant is all-you-can-eat. When you sit down, they bring a small selection of appetizers (fried cheese, fried plantain, and fried potato strip), suggest a trip to the salad bar. The salad bar is good, with about twenty items to choose from. I recommend white rice (with or without beans) for your plate, to catch meat drippings.

They show you a piece of wood in the shape of an hourglass: red on one side, green on the other. As long as the hourglass has green on top, a stream of waiters will (slowly) bring different cuts of meat to your table...

Top sirloin, tri-tip, short ribs, rib eye steak, flank steak, lamb, pork ribs, turkey breast, sausage, and chicken came to our table. I wanted to try a little of everything.

All of the meats were 'juicy' and had lots of fat. The best meats were their turkey and those from cows: rich, cooked medium-well, and very simple. The only seasonings they used for most meats were salt and pepper, but that was enough.

If you go, dress well. Eli and I were "dressed down", and we tended to get the last bits of meat from the skewers. However, the waiters were friendly and accommodating. I can't complain: after the meal, when Eli and I rolled out of the restaurant, we both felt as if we had eaten a whole cow each.

Dinner is $45 per person.

Maceio
72 South First Street
San Jose, CA 95113
(408) 293-1215

9:08 - 2009 Music CDs

Dear all,

It's that time of year again... time to pass out the best music I found in 2009.

3catsjackson started this wonderful annual tradition.

I've collected about 70 of the best songs that were new to me this year. (The songs themselves were recorded between 1940 and 2009.) The musical genres include alternative, Arabic, classical, electronica, jazz, Latin, metal, prog rock, rock, world, and... *blink* ... Esperanto.

As always, this CD contains no more than one song from any band, and no more than one song from any album. I hope that, listening to this disk, you seek out and buy albums from the groups that you like. (Please support your favorite artists! Times are tough.)

If you want a copy, leave me a note (below) with your mailing address. All comments are screened.

Take care, all!