Posts from — September 2007

TV shows that have had an African American character whose last name is Black in order to make jokes:
- The Office [US]
- 30 Rock
- Curb Your Enthusiasm

They all made different jokes about it, I think 30 Rock had the funniest ones.

I was looking forward to seeing David Cross on Monday, but the show sold out.

:-/

If you enjoy Arrested Development, you should definitely give It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia a try. The third season starts this week on FX. Fox released an episode to the web (included below). It’s not as good as AD, but I guess it’ll have to do…

If you spend a lot of time reading things on the internet and aren’t using an RSS reader of some sort, you’re almost definitely wasting more time and effort than you should be. This video explains how RSS and feed readers work and what they can do for you:

(the video won’t show up if you’re reading this on a feed, then again you probably don’t need to watch it..)

OK, so on to the facebook part. I was really getting annoyed with emails from facebook like “Charlie Brown added you as a friend!” and “Linus wrote on your wall!” etc. Now, one solution would be to make a label in gmail for facebook and filter all the notifications to there, but I think an RSS reader (like Google Reader) is a better match, since it’s built for handling notifications like this (plus I have a pretty good system for turning these notifications into low-priority action items).

Anyway, all you have to do is log in to facebook, click Inbox, click the Notifications tab, then click the Your Notifications tab on the right. Add that feed to whatever feed reader you use. Then, click “account” (upper right), then the Notifications tab, uncheck all the boxes, and save changes.

Now you won’t get spammed every time something happens. Still not a great system (why does it just say “Lucy posted on your wall” instead of actually telling me what was posted? Seems anti-user, to me).

Andrew Long (my roommate from freshman year) was visiting from NY last weekend, so John and I took him for a hike in Big Sur on Monday. Here are some of the pictures I took.

The Bixby Bridge

It was really windy, so we complied…

OK, I’m out of photos now.

I’m not showing the scaled down ones, since they’d be too small, so here they are:

This one was taken when we first were entering Yosemite valley.

The water here is a naturally occurring soda spring.

This picture was taken in the middle of a dried out lake. To get a sense of how big these mountains are, take a look in the lower right corner of the picture. That’s my Mom standing there. The trees are so tall that they make the mountains look less impressive without a good frame of reference.

These are much better at higher resolutions, but I can’t seem to find the full size version of flickr, and picasa won’t let me download the full-scale original (18MB, so that’s probably ok).

The weekend before last, my parents, brother and I went to Yosemite for some hiking and such. It’s amazingly difficult to capture the magnitude of the views that can be found there on a camera, but these are the best pictures to come out of the trip. I have more pictures on flickr. Click for larger versions.

These pictures aren’t really in order.

Brian and I befriended this squirrel named Fat Squirrel. He wasn’t very photogenic, but he was fat.

The coloring in this picture is an accident, but I think I like it. This is the back yard of a hotel where we had a snack and lemonade after some hiking. (We weren’t staying at the hotel, though)

None of us were attacked by bears.

Having cars and people in the picture helps to give a sense of scale here:

Mom really liked this one diner we went to. I don’t blame her, it was quite good…

The panoramas weren’t uploaded correctly, I’ll post them separately soon…

This morning, I woke up to a sky with a hazy orange hue. It wasn’t sunrise (I don’t get up that early), it was haze from a couple of nearby forest fires. It’s not like they’re really close or anything, but the sky looked very odd. It reminded me of a scene from Vanilla Sky.

Still no earthquakes..

I’m really tempted to get an iPod Touch. This may happen before my Fall travels begin.

I also need to get some new headphones for work.

More updates coming later, seriously.

Google Reader adds a search feature. What a novel idea
It’s actually a surprisingly hard thing to implement (devil’s in the details…), and a nice addition to a great product.