While writing out my rent and utility checks, my girlfriend, whom I was on the phone with at the time, instant messaged me this article. It details the email correspondence between a bill collector and someone she is tasked with to pursue on a late bill. I rarely laugh out loud while staring at this monitor by myself, but in this case, I had more trouble stopping myself from laughing.

Thanks to Brenna for the link!

[Edit - Crazy: I posted a bad link. Fixed it.]

[Edit 2 - Crazy: Looks like News.com.au got an interview with this guy. Link.]

I was surfing around and came upon this article at Wired.com. Basically it is the video posted above, which is an interview with Neil Gaiman. A book he wrote, Coraline, is being made into a stop-motion animated movie. Not only that, but its being filmed in 3-D by the director from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. It looks interesting and I’m pretty much game for anything by Neil Gaiman. I recently finished an excellent novel written by him called American Gods. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in fantasy, sci-fi, or mythology.

I’m also a huge fan of stop-motion animation, so this movie looks to be right up my alley. It looks like Coraline will be released in February of 2009. I’ll be checking it out for sure.

This linked dump started many months ago and I never finished compiling it. Rather than start over with a new one I just updated the old draft with the current date and some newer links after the originals.

Famous Marvel Buildings and their real-life equivalents - I saw this and thought it was neat. This guy went to the addresses of some buildings such as the Baxter Building (Fantastic Four), The Daily Bugle (Spider-man) and Strange’s Sanctorum (Dr. Strange) and took a picture of the actual buildings residing there.
Link.

One of the books I’ve been reading fanatically has been the Immortal Iron Fist from Marvel. ‘The Last Iron Fist’ story is now one of my all time favorites. Brendan linked me to some line art that had been done for the book. Neat stuff.
Link.

Swimsuits appearing at the past Olympics and tested by NASA - I thought this was pretty neat.
Link.

Fanboy has made it into the dictionary.
Link.

The back of Yulia Tymoshenko’s head. This is a really prominent politician in the Ukraine. She apparently is known for her style. Her current hair-do involves a thick braid wrapped around the back of her head making it look like a crown. Its actually pretty neat, but I don’t see how that can all be real hair judging by the constant thickness of the braid throughout its length.
Link.

And now to reaffirm my masculinity:
The expanded beard chart.
Link.

My Little Pony Customs. This is some really impressive kitbashing. I think my favorites are MyLittleStormtrooper (pictured above) and My Little Alien.
Link.

Barack Obama has released a flickr set of photos from election night. It really gives a personal view of events as they happened from his end of the spectrum. Its a fascinating set of photos.
Link.

No. I didn’t actually stuff anything, but I did make some stuffing.

Allow me to elaborate.

I had some leftover fish and chips from Sunday. There was not a lot there, but it would be enough if I made a little something else. This sounded like a perfect opportunity to make some Stove Top Stuffing I had bought at the market a few weeks ago and just never had the chance to make. I realized my measuring glass never made it out of the Brighton House with me, but fortunately I had a full set of measuring cups. I measured out the water and put it on to boil, put in the half stick of margarine and let it sit for a bit. As I added the contents of the packet, I couldn’t believe how much was coming out of the single pack. I tried it mix it as best I could as it just got thicker and thicker. I let it sit for a bit longer while I checked the box. As it turns out, a single packet is actually six servings.

Talk about getting served.

I ate an entire bowl of stuffing, since I had eaten the fish and chips while I was making the stuffing. The bowl seemed like a lot to me, but there was still at least twice that left in the pot. I put it in a container and threw it in the fridge for later. Not sure how I’ll reheat it without a microwave, but it sure was easy to make on the stove.

Another year, another celebration of All Hallows’ Eve. Our annual Halloween party took place at The Point, a bar just behind the Bell in Hand in Fanuel Hall. It was a much more intimate venue and worked much better for us this year than the huge hall we had last year. If it had been just slightly larger and just been our friends, I think it would have been perfect. That being said, it was a blast. There were unsurprisingly several Sarah Palin costumes and only one Joker costume. There were certainly some creative costumes like the hot air balloonist, the pedophile, Roger and Jessica Rabbit and the Powerpuff Girls. Two larger groups had themes. Dave, Max, Nate, Jamie, Amy, and several others went with a monopoly theme. Dave was the monopoly guy. Amy was Chance. Jamie was Community Chest. Nate was Go. And Max, well, Max was a thimble. I think he would have had an easier time selling himself as humpty dumpty.

The other group costume was using the Celtics theme. Davidson and I were Brian Scalabrine and Scott Pollard, respectively, the only two white guys on the Celtics this past year, both of whom sat on the bench throughout the playoffs. Some of the girls dressed up as Celtics dancers and Duke dressed up as Gino because everybody was a winner.

It was a challenge to have a costume with no pockets, but it made things interesting. And yes, I brought my own coozie for my beer bottles. I’m just that awesome.

I have amazingly already posted my pictures here.

Happy Halloween!

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Mozilla recently revealed an add-on for Firefox called Ubiquity. Basically it serves as a command line for your browser. The catch is that most of the commands are created by users and creating commands is very simple. This allows people to flex their creative muscle and take advantage of current API’s that are available for different sites and create really useful (and more often useless) mashups. If you watch the above video, you can see a few examples of the mashups I’m talking about. Having recently moved into a new apartment, I can fully appreciate the example where he mapped several craigslist apartment listings on a single map with just a few keystrokes. If I ever find some free time, I’d really like to explore some of the things you can do with this and whats already out there.

In my seemingly constant quest to unpack and sift through my things to try and make more room, I came across several items I did not think were still in my possession.

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My wonderful girlfriend linked me to a couple of pieces of art on DeviantArt. The artist took Transformers and tried to draw them as they would look if they were actually human. Some of them are spot on, others are just too generic to get who they are, but overall its a fun idea and neat to see the interpretations that translate really well.

Animated Characters in Color

G1 Decepticons in Color

G1 Character sketches in black and white

This actually reminds me of one of the episodes from the original series where Ultra Magnus, Arcee, Springer and I think one other had their minds switched with humans or something along those lines and the bodies they were put into were great human interpretations of the robots’ personalities.

As several people who have seen my new apartment can attest, there is some water damage in my ceiling. It was there when I first saw the apartment, but I was told that it would be repaired and fixed by the time I moved in. That never happened. A month later, nothing has happened to see it repaired. I saw the Super the other day and asked him to stop by and he said he would as soon as he was done with what he was working on. Needless to say, he did not show up. He’s a busy guy. I understand this and he has a lot of apartments to look after, but this is severe damage that is going to lead to mold if it already hasn’t. So I just left him the following friendly note:

XXX,

I have had severe water damage to my ceiling since I moved in. I pointed it out to you, but I haven’t heard back at all. It is still actively dripping water and I saw a mouse poke its head through the hole in the center of the damage. I was hoping you could take a look at it before it gets any worse. I’d like to get this repaired and patched as soon as possible before the winter snow comes to make things worse.
I’m available nearly every weeknight between 6pm and 9pm to show you the damage. I think its caused by the cable utility box outside my window. I’ll show you when you stop by.

If you need to get in touch with me, you can reach me at ###-###-####.

Thanks in advance,

Bradley
## XXXXXX Ave.
Apt ###

I folded the note and taped it to his door. He had said that if I had a problem to just leave him a note if it wasn’t urgent. I really want to resolve this in an amicable way. I’m going to give him plenty of time to respond, but I need this ball rolling. If I do not hear back from him by the time I have to send in my next rent check (sent one in today), I am including a copy of this letter, pictures of the damage and a brief summary of events leading up to this point. If nothing still, perhaps the mayor’s office would like some good publicity. It will only take one inspector to look at it before the fines start rolling in.

Someone linked to this on facebook and I felt obligated to link to it here with Rosh Hashannah coming up.

For all the goyim:
Rosh = Head
Ha (prefix) = The
Shana/Shannah = Year
Rosh Hashannah = Head of the Year / New Year
Tova = Good / Happy
L’ (prefix) = To
L’ Shana Tova = To a good year!

This is another figure I picked up on Brendan’s birthday hunt. His name is Decepticon DropShot.

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I’m better at SQL than Microsoft Access.

This past weekend, Thanh, Brendan and I went on a toy hunt for Brendan’s birthday. Among the items I purchased was this guy. Transformers Movie Mudflap.

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One week in the new apartment and I already had an opportunity to go to a show!

My mother had been telling me that she had gotten me something ‘really cool!’ and that she would be mother of the year.

She was right.

As I sit here, waiting for my toilet bowl to disinfect, I’m finding myself becoming more domesticated. Now that I have moved in by myself, I’m the sole keeper of this domain and as I look around I’m now seeing little things that may not be broken, but I think could be made better. So I’ve set into motion a few minor projects to make things a little better. Today’s project involves cleaning the toilet. The toilet bowl was a bit gross. I picked up some cleaner yesterday with one of those angled tops so you can squirt it under the rim of the bowl. Naturally as soon as I tipped it upside down, the cleaning agent poured out of the sides of the spout and right into the toilet water instead of coming out of the spout aimed below the rim. Clearly the seal was very poor around the nozzle. Wonderful. The next ten minutes were spent swirling the toilet water around the bowl with my newly purchased toilet brush and scrubbing the crap out of the sides of the toilet. Literally! I’ll spare the pictures, but I’m supposed to let it sit for about 10 minutes before I can flush it again.

My life has become so exciting.

Among some of the other items I picked up for the house was a new garbage receptacle since I think I have a little mouse. This way it won’t eat through my garbage bags. I actually watched the little bastard jump into the higher bag I setup. At least this way, the opening is high and covered. As for the mouse, I bought a humane mouse trap that won’t kill it, but will make it significantly easier than me chasing him around the apartment like Wile E. Coyote chasing after the Road Runner like I did in Braintree (odd, I was going to link to the post I had made about that, but now can’t find it). Lastly, I bought a hair stopper, which is just a plastic strainer that you put over the shower drain to prevent much hair going down. My shower was missing a drain plug and was just one big whole, so I needed to put something there. I was getting tired of being paranoid about my hair washing down the drain and having to call the super to have a plumber come and unclog my drain.

Got another video up for Powet.TV. I’ll talk about the move in another post, but one of the priorities after move-in was to get this video edited. I don’t think it came out too bad. Its pretty obvious what parts I refilmed and what I kept from the drab monotone original take.

Day 2 started with me groggily getting out of bed, grabbing my work laptop and heading into the basement. An hour later, I had the network back up with access to the internet. Unfortunately, I ended up having to reset my router causing me to lose all of my security settings and MAC addresses for each laptop allowed on our network. Fortunately, I wrote most of them down in my little black book. This was followed by futzing around a bit online, checking e-mail, message boards and news sites, then starting to do a little packing.
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Year to year, I have to admit, I’ve had some pretty good birthdays.

Part of this might be due to summer weather or no school or one of a dozen other reasons.

Last year kind of sucked. Things were pretty busy and I didn’t think about it until it was too late to plan anything. Rather than do nothing at home by myself on my birthday, I just figured I’d come into work. It didn’t occur to me how many people on the team would be on vacation or that most of the rest would forget, but work I did that day with little to no mention of a birthday. I ended up needing to stay late to work on something to top it all off.

Not this year. This year I promised myself something better. In talks with Davidson, he had mentioned a friend of his doing a variation of a pub crawl, but something slightly more geeky. Geek happens to be my specialty. About a month ahead of time, I sent an email out to all of my very geeky friends. I outlined a two day event of epic proportions to herald this grand celebration of my birth.

On Saturday, August 16th, we would go to Randolph and catch a movie and from there move along the Red Line hitting up the New England Comics in Quincy and Harvard Sq., Newbury Comics in its multiple locations and top it off with Comikazi in Davis Square. Afterwards, we would grab some dinner and retire for the night.

On Sunday the 17th (my actual birthday), we would get an early morning toy run to Toy Vault in before heading back to the house, where we would then play Mario Kart Wii, Smash Bros. Brawl and Rock Band until all hours of the night while grilling up some food.

Things didn’t go quite according to plan.
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I have posted the pictures from my camera in the galleries here. More to come…