Irrelevance Glorified

This post is about one of my favorite & ridiculous shows on television. Its premise is in many ways a perfect one : to predict the outcome of a battle that can never happen, ensuring that its results can never be proven true or false. Continue Reading »

Back in May, I took a long weekend and traveled back to Chicago for my nephews very first birthday. It was the first time I had seen him since last August, so he had grown up quite a bit, and was on the very verge of walking. My other sister was traveling up from Florida, and a bunch of rugrats were invited over to ensure that chaos would ensue.

Interacting with Sachin is interestingly different from a lot of other kids. In the limited interaction that I’ve had with my other friends’ young kids, I feel like I’m met with a bit of skepticism. Like, they are not sure if I’m for real or not, and they take a while before they feel like they can address my existence. For Sachin, he took to me pretty quickly. I think that the most simple explanation is that unlike my other friends with little kids, I look a lot like his Mommy and Daddy. Sachin showed little hesitation in crawling up to me, pulling on my pant legs to bring himself to his feet, and then asking to be picked up.

In the pictures below, you’ll notice that there aren’t a whole lot of actual birthday party pictures. That’s because I was pressed into camcorder duty, and was thus unable to use my own camera. However, there are a lot of other pictures of doing cute little Sachin things that I’m sure people can enjoy. You can blame the graininess of the pictures on the fact that I used a high ISO setting to combat his fidgety-ness.

Flickr Set Here
Slideshow Below
Pictures and Descriptions after the jump.

Continue Reading »

I took two hikes at the beginning of May, and since I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures during the hikes, I’ll just combine them into one post.

On May 1st, I joined a group of people hiking Skyline Ridge, one of the state parks on top of the ridge of hills just south of Palo Alto and Los Altos. I had visited Russian Ridge previously, and Skyline Ridge is right next door. Skyline Ridge is much like Russian Ridge, except that the views of South Bay aren’t as nice, and the archeological artifacts are more prevalent. Overall, the trail was a C. Afterwards, we joined up with another group of hikers who were on Russian Ridge for a nice little picnic.

The week after, I joined in on an urban hike, a trail dubbed “Reverse Bay to Beakers”. Bay to Breakers is an annual 12k race in San Francisco that goes from downtown San Francisco to the Pacific Ocean, at the west edge of Golden Gate Park. We were taking a route that was more conducive to lunchtime eating, though, so we did it in reverse. There were a lot of people involved in this hike, which means that we had to go out in teams.

We were told to proceed to the destination, Gaylords at the Embarcadero Center, by whatever methods we saw fit. Once there, we would compare notes and relate any adventures we had. Previous incarnations of this hike had people participating in outdoor weddings and other amazing events. So, there was a bit of pressure to both get to the destination quickly and have adventures. In the end…we didn’t have any adventures. But I took some pictures anyway.

Flickr sets here and here.

Slideshows below
Pictures after the jump.

Continue Reading »

I’ve been trying something new recently. Namely, I went to Meetup and started joining hiking groups. I figured there are a lot of people in the Bay Area who like to hike, and I could tap into their latent desire to organize things. For this particular weekend, the organized hike was up at the Morgan Territory Regional Preserve, an open space just north of Livermore, in the East Bay. Now is pretty much the best time to visit, because Winter is over and Summer has not really begun. In July, this hike would have been intolerable due to the heat, since East Bay gets really hot and this hike has very little shade. In Spring, however, the wildflowers are out, which is a nice treat.

For the first half of the hike, we just admired the wildflowers and the rolling hills. The views were not fantastic, although there was a pretty good view of the peaks of Mt. Diablo. The second half of the hike was more shaded, and passed through groves of trees and poison ivy (luckily, I didn’t run into any) while climbing rather steeply back towards the parking lot.

Overall, this hike wasn’t all that interesting. The wildflowers were nice, and the more challenging portions of this hike were interesting, but it was fairly short (~ 5 miles) and the views were not great (it was a little bit hazy). It was nice to visit an area that I hadn’t hiked at before, and we had a great lunch at Sai’s, a vietnamese restaurant in Livermore. I’ll give it a B-, but the whole experience an A-.

Flickr Set Here
Slideshow Below
Pictures & descriptions after the jump.

Continue Reading »

Well, it’s been a long time in-between hikes. We can blame my laziness as well as the threat of rain, which combined with my laziness can make it hard to motivate myself out of the house. One of the last weekends of March proved to be quite beautiful, so I decided to try out Mission Peak, in East Bay. It has a reputation of being quite a steep hike, but it’s relatively short (~ 5.5. miles out and back) so I had always elected to try other hikes.

This hike is very accessible, which is both good and bad. Good because it’s only a 30 minute drive from my apartment, and there is no segment of the way that is composed of windy, narrow road. Bad because this means that everyone comes with their kids and their strollers and such. I got a somewhat late start, and arrived to find the parking lot full and the residential streets packed all around. I lucked out and found someone leaving, so my walk to the trailhead was only about 5 minutes.

This hike is not fooling anyone. You get to the trailhead, and you see the peak ahead of you, with the path snaking up to the crest. You know exactly what you’re getting into. The path up from the Stanford Avenue trailhead is wide and graveled. I’m not a huge fan of multi-use trails; I like to pretend that I’m trekking through the wilderness, and that illusion is disrupted if I have to watch out for mountain bikes and if I hear the sounds of babies in strollers.

I also was hoping that the view would be clearer, since it had rained a few days before. Alas, the haze returned sooner than I would have expected. Overall, though, it was a good way to break in my otherwise lethargic body (I was sore for a week) and to get myself prepared for the hiking season. While steep, the view was pretty rewarding. I give this hike a B+/A-.

Picture set on Flickr Here
Slideshow Below
Pictures & Descriptions after the jump.

Continue Reading »

You’re probably shocked and confused that there are two angry bad rants so close to one another. Well, the publishing of the rant for G.I. Joe was precipitated by my viewing of Equilibrium. As I was watching this movie, I realized it was perfect for a rant, but I had a draft of that G.I. Joe one sitting in the queue. So, I pushed it out so I can get going on this one.

Equilibrium is a 2002 action flick starring Christian Bale & Taye Diggs, among others. While not getting the greatest reviews when it came out (37% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), it’s had a bit of resurgence in the intervening time, and at this point it’s rated 7.8/10 on IMDB. Because of the intriguing re-evaluation of this film’s merits, I thought it was worth a Netflix rental. As it turns out….this is a bad movie. Read on for more, spoilers included.
Continue Reading »

I don’t know of any recent food product launch that has gotten as much publicity as KFC’s recent Double-Down. In case you are unaware, the Double Down is a “sandwich” composed of two pieces of breaded & fried chicken surrounding cheese, bacon, and sauce. If you are watching your weight, you can substitute grilled chicken for the fried chicken. That was not a mistake by the way — it’s a sandwich with no bread (but breading optional). I normally read a bunch of tech and political blogs, and many of them have come out with opinions. Consumerist had their review, and also included a review by Consumer Reports. Gizmodo ate theirs while using their iPads, because they are hipster nerds. Even one of my favored political blogs, FiveThirtyEight, got in on the fun (with a focus on numbers and statistics, because that’s how they roll). If you follow me on Google Reader, I’ve shared a few items on it, because it’s hilarious in concept; you just get the feeling that it should be an SNL commercial (Taco Town!!!). Anyways, I saw a clip from the Colbert Report that includes it. It starts with mentally-ill food mascots, segues in to a Double-Down taste test, and caps it all off with a visit from the “German Ambassador to the U.N.” to try out some cupcakes. Pitch perfect

As I’m writing this, it’s November 6th and I’m on a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo. I’m flying ANA, and overall, I would have to say the movie selection is pretty impressive. The last time I flew to Japan, I was stuck with Jaws (the original movie), two different movies about North Pole explorers separated from their dog teams (focusing on the dog teams, of course), Big Momma’s House 2, The New World, Match Point, and When a Stranger Comes Calling. Not the finest selection.

But this time, I have a number of interesting choices, both old and new. The Hangover, about 4 Harry Potter Movies, The Taking of Pelham whatever, Training Day, a couple of James Bond movies, Transporter 3, Heat, Shawshank, The Da Vinci Code, Night at the Museum, Little Miss Sunshine, Babylon A.D., and some others. A number of these movies fall in that nether region of “I would never pay to watch that, but if you strapped me into a seat for 11 hours, I might consider them.” One movie in that category especially caught my eye : G.I. Joe.

From all that I’ve read, G.I. Joe is a horrible movie. I didn’t think that it would exceed my expectations. However, I did feel that it might be angry bad fodder. And boy, is it ever! It is so bad, that I find myself reaching for my laptop while the movie is still running so I can record the ridiculous before I forget about it.

G.I. Joe is just the latest entry in the obsession with taking my childhood toys, applying CG, and pumping out crappy movies. It should come as no surprise that movies such as Monopoly and Bazooka Joe (seriously) are in the works. As this movie was coming out, all the signs pointed to a disappointment. All the trailers were very careful never to show more than 0.5 seconds of any scene, with absolutely no dialog. No screening events. A Wayans Brother. Etc. But enough build-up, on to the suck. And naturally, there will be a lot of spoilers as I discuss the plot.
Continue Reading »

I recently realized that I had a severe backlog of Daily Show videos to get through, over a month. Well, I buckled down one weekend when I had to do other computer work, and watched a bunch at a time. There were a number of good ones, but only a few that really had the level of sarcasm that I was looking for. I have found that John Oliver is really the best for this sort of thing; I think it helps that he’s British.

First up, a visit to an RNC meeting in Hawaii to discuss fiscal responsibility.

That video is good, but I don’t necessarily think that its all that hypocritical to have a summit on fiscal responsibility in Hawaii. Maybe they got really good group rates.

However, this next clip is delicious.