Last night some co-workers and I went to Dave & Busters in Milpitas. One of use thought it was a good idea to take a cab there. And it was a good idea because, really, some of us were in no shape to drive. Dave & Busters was fun despite the fact that they didn't have any 151. However, the real fun began on the way home. Here's an idea: we took a cab there...why don't we take a cab home? Another great idea! The cab company (dose hata's at da Yeller Cab Company) apparently didn't think it was a good idea because the cab didn't come for at least 30 minutes. It might have come after that but we didn't stay to find out. Why not? Well we decided to walk back to work where are cars are. That took 2:30 hours starting at 1:30am. Popular mapping applications claim it's a 6.3 mile treck, but we took a different route which might have been a bit longer. But to look on the bright side, by the time we got to our cars, we were completely sober. Also completely worn out, but sober.

To anyone who thinks it isn't possible to walk from Milpitas to Santa Clara, think again. To anyone who thinks it's stupid to walk from Milpitas to Santa Clara, you're right.

Not a long time ago in a galaxy not far away, a Jedi was another word for a corporate slave. Yesterday, I did something that I haven't done in a long time: go to work on the weekend. Yup, I spent a good half a day at work yesterday. People sometimes ask me why I willingly go to work on the weekend. This question is best answered with today's Dilbert.

Fortunately, I had Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress with me. I had been putting off watching it because I couldn't find a free 3-hour block of time to watch it, but then I realized that it's only 2 hours and 20 minutes so it was all good. This movie provided inspiration for George Lucas the Great for making Star Wars. The similarities to Star Wars include the two main characters, a couple of peasants named Tahei and Matakishi, who were the basis for C3P0 and R2D2. There was also a princess running from people out to capture her. Toshiro Mifune has a fight scene where he and an old friend (who is a general for the opposing side) duel with spears while his opponent's soldiers, clad in daisy dukes (oRo?) anxiously watch. That scene was similar to Obi-wan Kenobi's fight with Darth Vader, while Darth Vader's stormtroopers, clad in PVC (oRo?) duel with light sabers. (Who wears short shorts? Those Japanese foot soldiers wear short short. What was up with that? Why don't they just wear speedos while they're at it?) Finally, I can see where Geroge Lucas got his inspirations for the stormtrooper weapons. The Yamana riflemen use rifle technology where the bullets will either miss their mark or hit the area several moments after the mark has left the bullet's trajectory (or both) if it has determined that the intended target is not high up enough on the credits list. This was reflected in the stormtroopers' inability to hit Harrison Ford while uncredited rebel troopers fell by the dozen. However, the lack of space ships and leather-clad, overgrown, asthematics made it completely flop as a Star Wars spoof. Aside from that, it was a pretty good movie. It was more comical and less thought-provoking than Kurosawa's other movies but enjoyable nonetheless.

Oh yeah, here's what my gmail inbox looked like this morning:

w00t!

Right-o. Back to work.

A suspiciously Halloween-esque (or should that be Halloween-ie?) batch of candy showed up in the kitchen at work yesterday. This amuses me about as much as it scares me. Halloween was a good two and a half months ago. How does Halloween candy sit around for two and a half months without luring itself into someone's belly? And how did it mysteriously find its way into our kitchen? Among the candy were two plastic-esque (plastic-ie?) objects. One was a whistle in the form of a pumpkin and the other was a whistle in the form of a skull. These two artifacts may offer insight into the latest perplexing mystery of my life. But in the interest of pretending to be sane, I'm not going to pursue it.

Last night I tried to hook up an old floppy drive to my computer. A floppy drive. Yes, a floppy drive. It's one of those things where you can fit 80 of them into a Zip drive. Or something. Or it was something because I may have plugged the power cable in wrong because moments after powering up, the case filled with smoke and some wires melted together. This is an important milestone in my computing life because I have never, on my own, been able to achieve smoke from my computer before.

Why was I trying to install a floppy drive? Well it started when I remembered out that one of my old video cards (Riva TNT2...old skule) has a DVI interface so I wanted to try it out with my Dell 2000FP. Well I plugged it in and nothing came on the screen. The monitor went into power save mode. Apparently, this is a problem with a lot of Dell monitors on NVidia cards. From what I gather, there is some marginality in the DVI signal from the card that causes a flash ROM in the monitor to get corrupted or overwritten. This causes the graphics card to not recognize the monitor. I downloaded a fix that was supposed to restore the ROM and make it write-only but it seems like the ISO is corrupted so the files on the CD I burn won't work. There's a floppy version of the fix too, but I needed to get a floppy drive working before that. So now I have a case filled with smoke, a fried green floppy drive, and a DVI port on my monitor that still doesn't work. Yay.

I've been looking at the BMP file format for a little project that I'm working on. It's a very simple format so it's very easy to parse and decode. It also has some quirks. The image is stored upside-down, meaning the pixel data in the file is the bottom left pixel. Then it goes left-to- right and bottom-to-top. I'm guessing this is why when you load a bitmap in a web browser, it loads from bottom to top. Another thing is that each row in the the bitmap data is padded to a 32-bit (4-byte) boundary. So your (uncompressed) image size isn't simply x-dimension x y-dimension x color encoding, you need to add the padding to it for each of the x rows.

Anyway...

The latest season of 24 has been OK. I'm not as excited about it as I was about last season though. I guess I'll keep watching it to see if it gets better. I'm waiting to see what the villain in this season is made of. If he's anything like Habib Marwan, this season could be pretty interesting. So far, though, he doesn't seem as cunning as the late Mr. Marawn. I do like the fact that the president's wife is a nutcase though. Maybe that, alone, is worth watching.

Phew, too much typing.

I think the holiday season is officially over. The reason is that I am back to being angry when I drive to and from work, so that means that people are going back to work and therefore are no longer on holiday. May the grumpiness be with you.

Speaking of traffic, I tried to get onto 101 South from Fair Oaks this morning and found it closed. The funeral procession for the police officer who was killed in EPA earlier this week was going from Palo Alto to San Jose so southbound 101 was closed. I missed the procession but I saw an empty 101 South next to a packed 101 North. One of my co-workers said she saw the procession go past Mathilda. They had a firetruck on the overpass with a ladder raised and a flag on it and several police officers and firefighters saluting.

I just realized something: I didn't need to take my car in for some recall work last year. Either Nissan forgot to send me my Recall Of The Year prize last year or my car is finally free from factory-installed defects. The first recall involved the possibility of my engine catching on fire and the second one was about a crank shaft sensor failing and causing the car to suddenly stop moving. Oh well, at least I didn't need to to visit those punks at the service center again.

I woke up this morning and heard on the radio that there will be a PBS special on how American boys are the most violent kids of any industrialized nation. Someone involved with the show (I forget what his role was) was being interviewed. He had some interesting things to say. For example, he claims that girls are getting better at learning than boys are. He says the school system is rigged against boys because going to school involves sitting in one spot and listening to a woman talk -- something boys are not naturally inclined to do. He also dropped several numbers, the most shocking of which was that 40% of boys in America are not raised by their fathers. Much of that is supposedly because the mothers usually take the kids in a divorce, or the father leaves the family. When some boys were asked who the man is in their lives, one said his coach, one said his mother, and another said he was the man in his life. I'd provide a link or something to the show but I can't seem to find any mention of it. I might be making things up again. Anyway, I think it's on PBS tomorrow at 9pm. I could be wrong though. Horribly wrong.

Then I saw the most awesome Foxtrot comic in the paper. Check it out! I know someone out there will get it. I know it!

I'm so giddy right now I can hardly type.

One new year.

Nine days.

Zero updates.

Until now.

Doesn't that sound like a great teaser for a movie? I think it's high time someone make a movie about blogs. Maybe a whole trilogy of movies. Start with a young and naive The Phantom Blogger, then continue with an awkwardly romantic Attack of the Blogs and finish up with the adventure-filled Revenge of the Blogs. People would line up months before opening day to watch it.

I had a wonderful start to my new year. It started out with a game of Scrabble, a game of mah jong, a game of poker, and a game of Scrabble. Yes, that's two games of Scrabble, but the second one was actually a different game because it started at 5am or so on Janary 1st, and ended right around quarter 'til frigging-tired. If that's not how you start off a new year, I don't know what is. OK, maybe a lot of drinking, dancing, and dropping balls from tall buildings. And kissing a hot babe at the stroke of midnight, but I can do that anytime I want...when I'm dreaming. Dreaming of a hot babe, that is. One who isn't made of polygons. It happens sometimes.

The fantastic new year continued when I got through the first week of work without the possibility of being laid off. The company is definately on the right track now. Seriously though, I've been getting pretty busy at work, so that's a good feeling. I'm anxious to get back into the hustle and bustle of hardcore chip making again.

Thanks to the USPS's holiday schedule and Netflix's new feature of waiting a day or two before sending out my next DVD, I got my first DVD of the year on Wednesday. It was yet another wonderful cinematic feature from the mind of Akira Kurosawa: Red Beard. It's about a pompous, young doctor with aspirations of being the shogun's doctor who goes to a poor clinic and ends up being a minion to a doctor known as Red Beard. This was Toshiro Mifune's last film Kurosawa. Apparently Mifune was so fed up with Kurosawa's antics that the two of them had a falling out. If they did, Mifune never showed it in the movie. He, once again, delivers an intense performace as a tough, grizzly doctor utmost concern for his impovrished patients. The movie shows the young doctor as he slowly learns to respect his profession and his patients. But I can't help but wonder why there was another woman who used her womanly charms to seduce a man for her own evil plans. The Lady Macbeth character in Throne of Blood, the oldest son's wife in Ran and even the main character's daughter- in-law in Ikiru all manipulated men to fuel their greedy or vengeful desires. If it wasn't for the wife in High and Low, I would have thought that Kurosawa hated women. I'm thinking he's just emphasizing the weakness of men.

I played Halo last night. My character didn't have a name so the game assigned me one. As the worst player on the planet, the game decided that I should be named Killer. Everyone ended up killing Killer. Especially Howard and Donut.

So that's my year so far. Kind of boring huh? Not so! Not only will I keep my usual new year's resolution, "Make a list of new year's resolutions", I resolve to remember my new year's resolutions until, well, about tomorrow. That's all.