tempest in a teacup

Somehow in the space of two hours I have managed to not only leave my cell phone at work, but fill my apartment with smoke. How did I manage the latter, do you ask?

Why, I cooked some instant noodles!

In the microwave.

Without adding water first.

Do you know what you get when you cook flavour powder, dried mushroom, dried rice noodles and oil in a microwave without water? You get a giant block of simmering carbon. And a crapload of smoke.

And my apartment STILL smells like smoke, 3 hours later.

Fun fact: this apartment I’m living is was refurbished after a fire accident prior to my renting it.

I really wish I could say that there was something important on my mind while I was engaging in this minor act of arson, but there really wasn’t…

4 comments

On Friday I did something that could be considered rather unusual for me - I went to a baseball game.

To be precise, it was a Seattle Mariners game. I didn’t buy the tickets myself - a colleague at work had bought tickets for whoever in our department wanted to go, and I figured that it was about time I went to one of these games, if only with out of scientific interest. Hence, I did.

Pretty much everything I learned about baseball, I learned in those three hours sitting up in the stands behind home base, and my colleagues Chris and Ted were very accommodating in that regard. The game is certainly paced faster than one-day cricket (what isn’t?) although I suspect it’s just about as fast-paced as the Twenty20 variety.

I suppose it was rather enlightening. I’m not usually one to get caught up in the moment (unless aforementioned moment was something I was involved in), so I felt a little awkward with all the cheering around me. The Mariners aren’t exactly known for their excellent game, but it looked like most Seattleites love them anyway.

It was also rather amusing to see the nonsense the stadium would put up on the big screen between innings - for some reason this got a big rise out of the crowd, even though it was nothing but a pre-rendered 3-D animation of a bunch of boats racing (the objective ostensibly to get the crowd to cheer one of them on). I had my DS with me, so I was putting some quality time into Metal Slug 7 between innings instead. More on that in another post, I suppose :P

I’ve never been particularly inclined towards being a sports fan - part of it is probably that being the fatass that I am, I’ve never actually taken part in any sports. That doesn’t stop a lot of people from supporting their favourite teams, though, so I’m not quite sure why I don’t gravitate in that direction. I can appreciate the depth and strategy inherent in these sports, as well as the skill required to play them, but for some reason the notion of being a spectator doesn’t interest me that much. I guess I don’t really have the mindset for it.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what the title of this post is about, one of the inter-innings things they put up on the screen was a series of short interviews with Mariners players about which of their teammates they thought worthy of an Olympic medal. Then Ichiro Suzuki came on the screen and said, pointing at himself, “This guy? ANYTHING!” This was followed by a montage of Ichiro’s head photoshopped onto pictures of various Olympic atheletes. For some reason I found this hilarious.

1 comment

No, seriously. I was wearing a jacket to work as recently as 3 weeks ago and now the temperature regularly hits 30 degrees Celsius, turning my apartment into a sauna just in time for me to get home (my patio faces west) and making me sweat while I’m sitting on my couch and reading.

I thought Seattle was supposed to be the land of lovely summers and dreary winters, not central Texas.

I bought an oscillating floor fan off Amazon to mitigate the problem, but it won’t get here until Wednesday. In the meantime I guess I’m in for some sweltering nights :/

3 comments

Monday was a repeat performance of Friday’s “awesomeness” at work (only worse), and I got home just in time for a wind storm to knock out all power for 5 hours.

So yeah, I was a little tied up.

That new 3G iPhone looks awesome, though.

3 comments

Mine was pretty terrible.

I think I’ll go blow up some random douchebags in Team Fortress 2 to vent.

2 comments

It's almost April, and it SNOWED while I was at lunch today, for a good 2-3 hours or so.

WTF.

Pictures as soon as I can get them off my cell phone (Bluetooth refuses to work for some reason).

No comments

So Epic Games is on Steam now.

This is probably because I’m weird, but the first thing I thought when I saw the lineup was “Where the hell is Jazz Jackrabbit?!”
I mean, sure, I liked Unreal as much as, if not more than Quake II back in the day (never really played any of the UT games), but if id software can get Commander Keen, of all things, on Steam, surely Epic can post up one of the best PC platformers of all time! And its sequel, for that matter.

Heck, they could probably get One Must Fall 2097 on there too, since it’s technically freeware now.

---

My mom has started making suggestive noises about my supposed need to go and, uh, get more “involved” with meeting people of the opposite sex (to which my dad more or less just rolls his eyes). You may recall that I’ve talked about this subject before. Not much has changed regarding my ineptitude since then. My concerns are also, as you might expect, unchanged.

It seems like any efforts I have to make on this front will require a significant investment of time and effort, which I’m not sure I’m willing to do. On the other hand, I’m not a big fan of matchmaking systems. So I’m pretty much stuck between a rock and a hard place at the moment, at least as far as this problem goes.

Oh well, at least I have more important things to deal with that can put this out of my mind. Like my visa situation -_-

No comments

Just got back about an hour ago.

There was a reorganisation of my group at work about a couple of months ago, and our new boss held an “offsite” for us to get together and discuss possible long-term directions for where we wanted to take our group's products. It was a pretty interesting discussion, although I found that I wasn't quite able to contribute in the capacity that I might have wanted to. Afterwards we went out to dinner at some way-too-expensive restaurant while swapping anecdotes…a good time was had by all.

---

One of my recent obsessions has been BBC comedy panel shows, particulary Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Qi. The former is a music-themed panel quiz show with new guests every week, and the latter is a show devoted to dispelling “general ignorance,” and is hosted by one of my favourite British actors/comedians, Stephen Fry. Both are hilarious when at their best, and have introduced me to a few more interesting personalities like Bill Bailey and Noel Fielding. Unfortunately, since these shows aren't available through any legal avenues in the US (the BBC does do Region 1 DVD releases, but the most recent show they seem to have is the new series of Doctor Who and Torchwood) I have to watch them though…other means.

It's kind of odd that I find shows like that much more entertaining than most of what shows up on American TV…then again, I haven't owned a television subscription for about a year now, so I probably have no right to make the comparision. I never did watch anything more than Scrubs, Mythbusters and Stewart and Colbert when I did, though. I'm probably missing out, but I really can't give a crap. :P

On a somewhat related note, I looked at the Spring anime season lineup, and there is nothing that looks interesting to me. I might watch Code Geass 2 out of boredom (seeing how I wasn't that impressed with the first season), but that's all. Might be a good idea to go out and get some older series on DVD - I already bought a Vision of Escaflowne boxset, so I might look into other old shows like Cowboy Bebop that are available at a reasonable price.

Watching DVDs on my computer is rather a pain, though.

No comments

Police incompetence in Singapore!
Terrorist suspect escapes while in police custody in Singapore

It's always great for your peace of mind when your family lives in the same 700 square kilometre area as an escaped terrorist.

No comments

This article on the BBC website kind of jumped out at me today:
Starbucks to lay off staff in Seattle

When the coffee companies in Seattle start laying off people, you know we're in for some trouble.

Jokes aside, the US economy doesn't look too great right now. What started as the bursting of a housing bubble seemed to have locked the rest of the economy in a vise grip, causing other markets to freeze up and generally cause problems. Most worryingly it looks like the credit markets in general have tightened up, meaning money isn't as readily available - this will probably end up having a contractionary effect on the economy. A recession looks like an inevitability, not a possibility.

For those who have heard the word “subprime” tossed around by the talking heads on TV without a clue of what it meant, here's a quick summary. Subprime mortgages were housing loans (supposedly) offered to people who couldn't qualify for loans with better interest rates due to poor credit histories. Thanks to a perfect storm of low interest rates, weak financial regulation and “financial innovation,” many of these loans were offered to prospective homeowners, even those who could have qualified for loans with better terms. After this - and this is where the weirdness begins - the banks and financial institutions performed some financial wizardry on these loans and sold them to other parties, who then sold them to other people…and so on. In the meantime, people used the rising value of their properties (caused by the housing bubble) as collateral to fund a spending boom.

The bursting of the housing bubble ended up throwing a spanner into this mechanism. With the values of their properties falling, homeowners were faced with the prospect of losing their homes (Some statistics put the number at as high as a third of homeowners in the US). However, because of the financial engineering that had gone into this process, people and organizations who had bought mortgage backed financial instruments - like, say, the Michigan state board in charge of student loans, or the Florida state teachers' pension fund - found that their source of income had vanished in a puff of smoke. A major British lending institution, Northern Rock, was found to have invested heavily in such securities and needed to be bailed out by the British government. Here in the States, Countrywide Financial, one of the biggest subprime lenders, was devastated and eventually acquired by Bank of America. And the process still continues.

The government has been making all the wrong noises in the face of a recession; an economic stimulus package that does nothing for those who need it most (low-income households), and - this really made me laugh - persuading the private sector to provide relief. The last president who thought that was a good idea was Herbert Hoover.

This will probably be a major issue in the election campaign - for one, I'm hoping John McCain doesn't win, because he has openly admitted to not knowing anything about economics, which leads me to believe that he will continue to foist an economic policy that I can only describe as mistargeted, ineffective and self-serving on a beleaguered economy.

No comments