i’m going to vegas!

for the weekend

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impromptu taste test

On its own, Dove dark chocolate tastes fine.   I bet it would make Hershey’s "Special Dark" taste like garbage in comparison.

But one small piece of Trader Joe’s imported French dark chocolate truffles gives the Dove its comeuppance. 

Next time: save the truffle for last.

update: I would put Ghirardhelli semi-sweet on a par with the Dove. Slightly less crappy, but doesn’t hold a candle to the truffle. (I never said this contest was fair.)

technorati tags: chocolate

Filed under: fun

to say nothing of their brains

Yesterday at church the pastor gave a sermon about The DaVinci Code.  I was a little irked at first.  For one thing, he’s preaching to the choir — I almost wrote ‘literally,’ but our church doesn’t have a choir, although we do sing. 

I guess the purpose of the sermon was probably not just to inoculate us from the Blasphemies!  Scorching Blasphemies! of Dan Brown, but to arm us with information to, like, viciously attack people who may believe the book is factual, I guess.  Something like that.  The international church-leader mailing list probably told everyone to say something about it this weekend.

What I’m most annoyed about is the fact that this dumb book has gotten so much traction in so many places.  People say maybe it hit a nerve or something, but honestly, couldn’t they have at least picked a story that doesn’t boast claims that can be easily debunked during an undergraduate art history course?  Or even a short hop to Wikipedia? 

Even better, they could’ve picked a book that commits fewer heinous crimes against literature.  Okay, so the plot is indeed intriguing, and you can’t deny it’s suspenseful, in the most artless way, but the prose!  My God, the prose!  I’m still bitter that a better writer didn’t come up with the ideas in this book.

In any case, a minimal endowment of critical thinking skills reveals The DaVinci Code to be ludicrous for many reasons — and even that doesn’t mean you couldn’t enjoy it as a story.  But there have got to be many more worthy candidates of the Stamp of Blasphemy than this one, and I for one would’ve been interested in learning more about those.  Hmm, that will be a fun library search!

To lend this one a patina of credibility by giving it its own place of honor in the discourse — even if only to debunk it, it’s still publicity — that’s not gonna help those people who lack the ability to think about things any more than their having read and believed this book in the first place.  Stupid people who’ve lost that crucial (and, really, not that difficult!!) ability to discern fact from fiction.

Filed under: book

Maybe even better than “Stench Like Flatulence”

I can’t ignore this L.A. Times article about kimchi and its health effects (both good and bad), because even though I personally dislike kimchi and could live forever without ever eating it again, our house reeks of it because my mom and my sister love it so.

But they might want to hold off on the excessive eating (and thus the excessive preparing: hallelujah!):

The researchers, all South Korean, report that kimchi and other spicy and fermented foods could be linked to the most common cancer among Koreans. Rates of gastric cancer among Koreans and Japanese are 10 times higher than in the United States.

“We found that if you were a very, very heavy eater of kimchi, you had a 50% higher risk of getting stomach cancer,” said Kim Heon of the department of preventive medicine at Chungbuk National University and one of the authors. “It is not that kimchi is not a healthy food — it is a healthy food, but in excessive quantities there are risk factors.”

The article also notes that this study will probably never be published in Korea proper. Their identity is probably too intertwined with the food, and I can easily imagine the rioting that would ensue. Kind of like their strange, unscientific fixation on “fan death,” which is easily one of the funniest Wikipedia articles I’ve ever read.

I thought this part was interesting, though:

[more people everywhere are eating Kimchi than ever before]

And that will soon include outer space.

The idea came about because taste and smell are greatly diminished in low-gravity conditions, giving astronauts a preference for strongly spiced foods. And astronauts often suffer from digestive problems [which, apparently, the kimchi would alleviate? really?].

Space kimchi is expected to make its debut in 2008, when the first South Korean astronauts are scheduled to travel on the Russian spacecraft Soyuz.

“Space Kimchi” would be an awesome name for a band.

Filed under: Uncategorized

lucky strikes means fine tobacco

I want to share a recent clip from “The Daily Show” featuring John Hodgman, whose writing in McSweeney’s is pretty good, whose stories on “This American Life” are pretty funny, and whose appearances on “The Daily Show” as ‘resident expert’ are little short of hysterical. His raises his commentary to a new level with his perfectly deadpan delivery.

[You can watch the video on YouTube if the above won't work.]

My favorite lines:

[The US Army recently sponsored a civilian-only essay contest called "Countering Insurgency." They're soliciting ideas from the public on how best to defeat the army insurgency. Because "Nothing less than the future of the civilized world may depend on it."]

Jon Stewart: John, isn’t it unusual, and perhaps a tad ominous, that the government is turning to the general public for help with its military strategy?

John Hodgman: Well, not really. The nation has been brainstorming this way for cash and valuable prizes since our beginning. Our national anthem: the result of a jingle contest. The decision to drop the atomic bomb, that wasn’t Truman, but sweepstakes winner Penny Holkum of Palm Beach, and for that she received a case of Lucky Strikes, and a lifetime supply of sadness.

Jon: And so what would be a good example of an essay?

John: Well, when it comes to writing an expository essay on counterinsurgent tactics, I’m of the old school: first you tell them how you’re gonna kill them, then you kill them, then you tell them how you just killed them.

Filed under: video

about flock

Flock is a new and different kind of browser.

Some people don’t know what a browser is.   These are the kind of people who, when they talk about "going online" or "using the internet," really mean "opening up Internet Explorer."

Take Annie.  During her user test, the developer asked her to open up Flock, and Annie had no idea Flock was a program; she’d thought it was a website.  So she didn’t know how to open up Flock, and the dev had to do it for her.  If he’d asked her to go on the Internet, she probably would’ve searched for the big blue e.

Later, Annie was asked if she knew what RSS feeds were.  She had no idea.  "What do they feed?"

This kind of person will probably not get much out of Flock.

One more thing: after the hour-long user test, the dev asked Annie which feature in Flock she found most impressive.

Annie thought for a minute.  "Well," she said slowly, "I thought that it was really cool that you could open up lots of websites in just one window.  And then flip through them using those tab things."

I’m pretty sure that a little piece of that developer died inside. 

That’s just one small hurdle the Flock people will have to overcome if they want to break into the browser market; they will have to make people realize what a browser is, and that there is more than one out there with which to "view" the Internet.

BUT, even if you *do* know what a browser is, and you know that Firefox kicks ass compared to IE, that still doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a lot out of Flock.  Especially if you know and use those little "extension" add-ons.

On the other hand, if you know what blogging is, and more importantly, you yourself are a "blogger," you might find certain things about Flock very useful.  And if you know what the phrase "Web 2.0" means (in the vaguest, most general sense), and you know what Flickr or Photobucket and Blogger and RSS mean: it’s very possible that you might be impressed by what Flock has to offer.

Like, I’m currently using Flock to update my blog with this post.  Instead of going to WordPress.com and opening up a new post from there, I just click the quill button at the top and a new tab opens up a "new post" page.  I can even choose between my Blogger blog and my WordPress blog for publishing (setting this up involves choosing the blogging service and entering your user info – not too painful).  

The coolest and most useful feature for bloggers would be the bar that runs across the top (which I can open/close as needed from the toolbar).  It can show all the photos in your Flickr account, and it can act as a sort of ’shelf’ where you drag various snippets of things you’ve found on the web for safekeeping until you blog about it later.  I dragged the Flock logo from their website to my shelf, so now I will drag it into this post, and voila!

 

This drag-and-drop function makes blogging tons easier to do, because you dont’ even have to cut and paste anything, really.  Even flipping between tabs is unnecessary because you have the shelf to hold your text and photos for you.

Since I use Bloglines for my RSS feed-reading, I didn’t find the built-in reader very compelling.  I like being able to access my 9 trillion feeds from anywhere in the world.  Maybe this feature is available in Flock, but as far as I can tell, it’s not easy to do.  Then again, I didn’t really try.  I really love my Bloglines.

The version I tested for Flock included a very impressive search box that did live search, with results showing up in a box as soon as you typed it in.  I don’t see that on the version I’ve downloaded, but hopefully they will keep that.  I had a lot of fun with that.

I haven’t tested any other features.  I thought their bookmarking system was pretty confusing; I also had trouble realizing that starred pages meant "bookmark."  Chalk that down to my own narrowmindedness, I guess.

 I know there’s supposed to be some voodoo magic with "social" features, like del.icio.us bookmarks and the like, but I haven’t dug too deeply into those yet.  Maybe that will make Flock more impressive to me.

So far, I think it’s pretty cool, as far as the blogging goes.   The rest of it isn’t quite compelling enough to make me switch from my first love, which is Firefox.  The deal-breaker for me is mouse gestures, although I’m sure they can fix that too (Flock is an offshoot of the Mozilla codebase).

So that’s it.  If you didn’t get much out of this review, well, I apologize.  The only reason I wanted to write this was so I could retell the story about Annie and the tabs, which I don’t think I will ever find not hilarious. 

 

technorati tags: web2.0

Filed under: browser, web2.0

and now I’m back

Oddly enough, I wasn’t terribly happy leaving Palo Alto. The busy-ness was somewhat mitigated by the amount of fun we had. Also, it was really really warm there.

At the convention – (I’ll deliver through bullet points):
- saw Raj, from The Apprentice (that bow tie’d real-estate jackass)
- talked to VCs for the first time. Took instant MBA 101 classes through co-workers
- we won for “Best Booth!” Bottle of Moet-Chandon was our prize =)
- the Governator of Cali-foh-nya gave a talk. I listened for a little bit, but don’t remember anything.
- Got shirts from Google. They say: “Google India is hiring!”

Things are looking promising for our new startup; at least, that’s the impression I got when I left, which was right after a talk with a possible angel investor.

On the plane ride home, I talked with a guy who was working on a screenplay. He wasn’ the writer, merely a producer; but he seemed to be doing quite a bit of editing on the screenplay. The writer has already been to Sundance and is going to Cannes this year, but I guess they’re still making the movie or something. I wasn’t entirely clear on their situation because through the last 20 or so minutes of the flight, I had to pee super badly. Damn Peet’s!

Actually, don’t damn Peet’s! It’s good. Now I wish we had more of those (I am so over my Coffee Bean fixation).

And now I need to decompress, before getting ready for another month of busy-ness.

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silicon valley

I am here, and it’s relatively late and I’m tired.

But I’ve been having fun and that’s enough for me.

TIE is tomorrow so we’ve been getting ready for it all day.

Fun to meet with the whole company in person, finally. People I’ve conversed with for months now have faces associated with their names. Nice!

(I hate Angie’s keyboard for making it so hard for me to type – the spacebar key only works when I punch it with my left thumb, which I’m not used to =P).

Anyway, sometime between trips to the convention center, Target and the Stanford Shopping Center and eating, the Annie-mal and I visited Flock to test their new browser. I will write more about it later, because I am beginning to realize that the 4 horus of sleep I got last night are helping make this post awfully incoherent.

[reminder to self: flock, tabs, stirr, web2.0, shirts,lemon trees, scheming,earbuds]

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Do you know the way to San Jose?

Because that’s where I’m going! Yippee!

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Look! Shiny!

The sad thing about reading about eBible is that there are tons of great Bible search engines, but that this one automatically becomes the most interesting to me because it’s all new and web2.0-y.

Well, I only just signed up for their private beta, so hopefully they have more to offer than those other, old, dull, web1.0 sites.

Filed under: Uncategorized