Back again

So, just as I was about to write a blog entry describing how Feedster came through with Janet Jackson pictures way before the big engines could catch up with it, coupled with a rant about how a network whose leading shows are rife with violence and allusions to sex and even purport to present "reality" had turned out to be just as hypocritically and capriciously Puritanical and superstitious as the next American, I found out our server had been hacked. Grr. I think I would rather have a car stolen than have my data messed with. It's just disruptive and scary. Anyway, things are back to normal (yay Richard!).

Since then, not too much has happened. I finally saw 28 Days Later (scary!) and watched Miracle (fun, simple!) with Wes (happy birthday wes!). I also made Valentine's Day reservations with the help of Open Table. What a cool service. It'd be nice if they linked straight to menus, though, since it took a while to figure out which restaurants (many of them!) didn't have vegetarian options, especially on their prix fixe menus.

I'm now on Orkut. Come find me. It's already proven quite valuable. I found out that Anna has been signed for many more episodes on O.C. and I found a really interesting list of collaboratively filtered web surfing experiments.

Back!

I'm back home from Lotusphere, and it's time to put my life back in order and catch up on sleep (I'm particularly sad about the hours lost before realizing Zone Labs was secretly keeping me from copying files to the server's Windows share). Donuts got mentioned in a blog and another blog and then in Ed Brill's blog, which is neat. People liked the demo, and the conference as a whole was impressive...I met lots of interesting Lotus people and enthusiastic customers. If I had watched the opening session from the main hall, I could have said I'd seen Patrick Stewart, but oh well.

The trip's trappings were less stellar...Universal Studios Florida was pretty cheesy; Song was nothing special; the hotel (Disney's Dolphin "Resort") was shockingly expensive considering the crying baby next door, the missing cue ball on the pool table, the $2 cans of soda, the missing remote control, the erroneous mini bar billing, the 2 mile road "running trail," the dim flourescent lighting...the only good thing was Ethernet in the rooms, and even that ran out of bandwidth. Adding insult to injury, it was the coldest Florida's gotten in some time while we were there (though it was quite funny to see people wearing scarves and gloves in 40 degree weather). I also had forgotten how vegetarian-unfriendly Florida was.

But it was warm enough to go running outside (the one day I managed to wake up early enough!) and there were a few fun places near the hotel to grab drinks. Overall, very fun, but it's good to be back.

Yeah, yeah

So I've been neglecting my blog. It happens to everybody, right? Not entirely sure why. Part of it is probably hanging out with Catherine (we saw Urinetown (cute, catchy music, weird ending) on Saturday and then went to Finale (half hour wait and a little pricey, but worth it...mmm) and last weekend we saw Big Fish (sweet, entertaining) and ate hot pot). I've also been busy getting a demo ready for Lotusphere (although I think last week would really have been the ideal time to be in Florida). Hmm, what else have I been up to? Friday, Abe and I played laser tag, which was fun, although the high schoolers demolished me. I'm also still working on my Warcraft skills. In any case, I'm off to the grocery store now.

Gar, why am I still awake?

I guess this time I can blame it on jet lag. I'm still adjusting after a fun-filled vacation in (an admittedly rainy) San Diego. Chargers game, disc golf, climbing, running, bowling, basketball, chilling, Lord of the Rings, the Ali G movie, Matrix Reloaded (finally), Mexican food, chain restaurants, pizza, video games, Legos, chess (haha, Paresh!), Scrabble (damn you, Eric!), poker, shopping, friends, babies, wives. Who knew San Diego could be such fun?

Fun with match.com data

After Martin noticed this article about dating preferences in Yahoo!'s most popular articles, I browsed my way over to match.com's PR site, which informs us that "Although only 43% of singles said they are confident they will start off 2004 with a romantic midnight kiss (with men being more confident of this than women), singles are united in their desire to be kissed gently..." The research area is also pretty interesting.

(On semi-related notes, check out this interesting use of the Amazon API to measure subject popularity and the Times articles linked from the recently updated Metabuzz.)

Why don't they teach you anything this useful in DARE?

Who knew that too much sugar with your liqour makes you sick?

"The sugar load is very problematic because it is very hard for the liver to metabolize a lot of sugar and alcohol at the same time," he said. "Of course, people are drinking more, with all these terror alerts going around. So I tell my patients to be pre-emptive. Drink a lot of water and take a Tylenol before you go out."

Whither Thinkquest?

So, I was looking through the Thinkquest site since my brother was thinking of participating, and I'm left wondering what happened to the poor thing. It's now run by Oracle, the big scholarship prizes are gone, and the whole thing seems to have a little more corporate feel to it than it used to.

On the other hand, it is nice to see that the library is well groomed, with nice descriptions of each entry. And it is good that the thing is still going on. I need to go back and clean out the vulgar comments put into the discussion boards we had in our entires. Teachers keep writing to complain that they can't link to the sites because of all of the crap people have written into them....I wish I had though to build more robust maintenance tools into it, but I always underestimate the number of stupid and immature people on the Internet.

I also took a look at the most recent grand prize winner, which actually has some fun little applets on it. The quiz says I'm 61% left brained and 57% visual.