According to king5 news here in Seattle, some port of Seattle police officers received or sent or forwarded on some porn or “racist” emails (the “racist” email they used as an example was a video (probably a link to a video) of some guy picking up some Hispanic day laborers, and instead of taking them to a job, drove them to an INS office). According to the King 5 investigators,

Over a two-year period, 32 officers either received, saved, or passed on more than 175 inappropriate e-mails.

Your results: You are The Joker. I was soooo close to being Dr Doom!

The Clown Prince of Crime. You are a brilliant mastermind but are criminally insane. You love to joke around while accomplishing the task at hand.

Hooked up and installed the Now Reading plug-in for Wordpress. So now on the right side you can see the books i’m reading/read lately. I might go back and backfill some other books i’ve read lately as i find time. If you’re reading this via an RSS feed, you wont see any of that stuff, though, so here’s a link to the library. I’ll have to see if there’s a RSS feed plug-in for the “now reading” plug-in!

A partial video of laura driving home last night in the hail. The original video goes on for another minute, just as much hail. Note: that isn’t snow on the ground. thats all hail! Its fun to watch the hail bounce off the hood, then off the windshield. ping ping!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PwYFX6dmgk

The full movie embedded after the jump.

If you don’t even know what i’m talking about already, then you aren’t using the internet right. I saw the “new numa” video today on the gootube, and i just think it is interesting how 2 people made famous by stupid internet videos took totally different paths. Even more interesting is how both of the original videos pre-date youtube, and pretty pretty much started the viral video thing. I remember watching the star wars kid videos off of a 32M thumb drive someone brought to a party. People were almost as excited to see this new thumb drive thing as they were to see the video.

• Star Wars Kid (Ghyslain Raza), recorded himself playing “lightsabers”, but didn’t keep the tape. someone else used video editing to rotoscope in a light saber. Kid is shamed almost to death, goes into depression, sues people.
• Numa Numa dance (Gary Brolsma), made a video of himself lipsyncing a song. it was so popular that there are hundreds of copies of it out there, spawned its own site NewNuma.com

Follow the jump for youtube videos of what i’m talking about. if you don’t know, you’ve missed out!

So I got some Barnes&Noble gift cards for xmas/birthday this year. I went to their website, and not only are the things i was looking for more expensive than Amazon, i get to the payment page, and i see this:

Only one Gift Card or Certificate can be redeemed per online order. To redeem multiple Cards or Certificates, select the Pay by Phone method below.

Brilliant. Well, B&N isn’t getting my money today, i don’t have the time or energy to call anyone. I just bought a bunch of stuff from amazon using 4 gift certificates that i had. I wonder how much $$$ B&N loses because people give up like this when they get all the way to the ordering page?

What we learned this Christmas vacation about airline travel:

1. Never travel multiple airlines in a single trip (at least in the continental US where you can avoid it)
2. keep everything they give you. boarding passes, luggage info, etc. even if someone tells you that you don't need it anymore.
3. If someone from one Airline X tells you to "take this to a Airline Y counter", don't go anywhere. That person can call the other airline's counter/desk directly and do it over the phone.
4. The airline that caused you to be late / miss a flight is responsible for helping you. If your Airline X flight was late, causing you to miss a Airline Y flight, Airline Y can't do anything for you, they didn't do anything wrong (yet!).
5. Travel protection insurance during the winter for midwest travel is probably worth the $100 extra (or whatever it costs for your trip)

For more details about our xmas travel fiasco, follow the jump. Its a looooooong story.

During lunch today i watched the most amazing thing ever. I watched live coverage of 2 spacewalking astronauts messing with a solar panel on the international space station. What a marvel of technology we have nowadays: I can sit in my office, and via the internet watch 2 guys at work in outer space, banging on stuff with a scraper, or shaking a solar panel to make it open, seeing it all through the camera on the astronauts’ helmets. All the while listening to them talk. My job would be so boring on a camera.

It started out so well. A beautiful sunset on the ship canal bridge coming into Seattle. We were on our way to the Monday Night Football game between the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks. Oh how decieving a pretty sunset can be! The game was awesome (even as a Packer fan!), but the ride home was….not so good. We were at the game for 4 hours, 5:30-9:30 pm. We were in the car for 3 hours and 36 minutes to get home. And its only 23 miles… For more pics and more story, follow the jump!

Every once and a while, it actually snows in the seattle area. From the Seattle traffic cameras, it doesn’t look like much of Seattle proper got any snow, but we live in what is called the “puget sound convergience zone”. So when seattle doesn’t get “it”, we get it instead. We got between 2-4" of snow yesterday and today.

There was enough snow, and it was wet enough to make snowmen and everything. Leave it to the neighbors to take it up a notch…

I only got 77.8% on this one, and that was right in the middle of the curve. Some of them i tried too hard on!
Are you tone deaf?

After listening to them again at the end, i could probalby do better if i took it again.

I just took this quiz thing online, it was pretty funny! I’m surprised i did so well!

You paid attention during 91% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don’t get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?

But then again, i was pretty nerdy! Was???

So last year i went as a bobblehead of myself for halloween. See this post from last year for details on that :)

This year, our carpool planned a group costume that was a huge secret. We came as the disney princesses!

From left to right:

• Jeff - Belle
• Jay - Cinderella
• Me - Jasmine
• Andrew - Snow White
• Mark - Ariel

Aren’t we pretty? :D You should have seen the doubletakes we got while driving to work in in costume. Last year i won a $50 gift card to Best Buy for best costume, this year the 5 of us won $100 to the brand new Whole Foods opening up nearby work next week. Jackpot!

update: added a couple more pics after the jump

SCOTT COHEN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Our “work” kickball team, the “Ball Squad”, made the Seattle Times “lifestyle” section today! In the print edition of the paper, this picture is on the front page of the section, huge and in color! A second picture of Jay pitching (b&w, though) is on page 2. On the web version of the article, both pics are in color. For all the info, see the article at the Seattle Times website

Since the FIOS guy was going to have to, in all likelihood, drill a hole in the wall to install our super high speed innerweb, we were going to have to move everything in my office. Since we were going to have to move everything in my office, we decided to paint my office, too. Once the office was mostly empty, we saw how horrible the carpet was, so we looked into redoing the floor with new carpet, or maybe some laminate floors. We settled on some blue colors to match the world map on the back wall, and some “hemse” laminate “click” flooring from IKEA.

To see how it all went, follow the link!

Today was my install date for Verizon’s FIOS - the new super high speed fiber optic broadband. Well, it was supposed to be 9/12/2006. Then it was supposed to be 9/14/2006. Then it was supposed to be today, then it was supposed to be 9/21/2006. Imagine my suprise when i got to work today and had voicemail from the verizon installer at my house…

Once i got home, a challenge in and of itself, the installer came and had everything set up in a few hours. According to speakeasy’s speed test, this is what i get:

YOWZA! For more details, follow the link!

Laura and I were married on August 19th, 2006, in a beautiful ceremony at the Paine Art Center and Gardens in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The bride was gorgeous, the weather perfect for an outdoor wedding, and the day could not have gone smoother.

The pics are all up in this Flickr photo set. Have a look see!

Awesome. The best game i’ve played since Lego Star Wars last year. Best story since HL2. We’ll see if Lego Star Wars 2 can top Dead Rising! Follow the jump to read more specifics, including some things i’ve found that weren’t mentioned in any of the walkthroughs. (nothing that exciting… :))

This week I had the opportunity to go to Neilson Norman Group’s (NN/g) Usability Week 2006 conference in San Francisco, and attend a 3 day usability training seminar by Bruce “Tog"Tognazzini, of “Ask Tog “ fame. The Tog seminar was titled “Interaction Design: Three-day Immersion”, and it was fantastic. I’ve been reading Tog’s “AskTog” website for a long time, so I was pretty sure it was going to be good, and I was not let down. More after the jump!

I’m trying out the “Blogging” feature from Word 2007 Beta 2. Setting it up with wordpress seems to have been trivial so far, but what happens when I actually try to post is another thing entirely. So far, I have to say that 2k7 looks gorgeous. The default Word background has a very Apple look to it with the blue curvy line thing going on.

I can’t seem to find the “more” tag though. And I have the smart quotes turned off, but it seems to insert them anyway. That’s what beta software is for, though!