GeekRoar

Does the name ‘Pavlov’ ring a bell?

Leopoldo — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 20:16:22 +0000

Walking down the central square of my college one day I saw a guy I did know but recognized. I did not know who he was, did not know his name nor where I knew him from. This was not unusual, the part of my brain that is supposed to remember names and faces has never quite worked quite right, but the odd thing is that whoever he was I knew I really liked him. Liked him… a lot.

I did not think about it until a few days later I ran across the guy in the school Library. Once again there was no name or association but once again I felt that warm appreciation, the sensation that this was a good person. Someone I liked. Someone I admired. Someone I was happy to see and wanted to see again. A bit disturbed by the lack of supporting information I started to systematically rack my mind for some identity… some relation or association. Workmate? No, I had trained most of the people at the school’s computer lab and made an effort to remember their names and faces, with limited success granted but that was unlikely. Past roommate? No, as bad as my memory was with some effort I could recall the names of people I had lived with. Classmate? Possible, but why would I be so fond of the fellow?

A couple of days later I saw him again and the mystery was resolved. At the cafeteria he asked me, as he had for the better part of the year, what I would like on my burrito. Chicken, cheese and extra salsa. Thank you… From the bottom of my empty stomach, thank you.

Things in slow motion

Leopoldo — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 02:56:28 +0000

Fire, water, kicks, bullets… all kinds of things in slow motion

http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=20698

Pastiche Cider Dinner

Leopoldo — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 06:15:10 +0000

Last Wednesday, some friends and I visited Bar Pastiche (http://portland.citysearch.com/profile/41544861/portland_or/bar_pastiche.html) for their ‘Cider House Dinner’. We had originally planned on doing the dinner the previous Wednesday but Pastiche cancelled out on us because they had not received a replenishment of Cider. The group was put off by a morning-of cancellation of a dinner that had been planned and reserved a good many weeks beforehand and of the original 9 only 4 made it to the re-scheduled dinner.

The menu consisted of salt cod in scrambled eggs, chorizo, a cod in pepper skins dish, a hunk-o-steak, quince and cheese for dessert and as much cider as we cared to put down with the dinner. I disliked both cod dishes and thought it a bad idea to repeat such a strong ingredient in a five-dish meal. My companions liked the cod with eggs but hardly anyone touched the cod with pepper skins. Both the chorizo and the steak were delicious. We all eagerly slurped chorizo juice from the plate with hunks of bread and ravished the steaks. The quince and cheese provided a nice end to the meal. The cider was good, but not great. It was appropriately dry but not very flavorful, which in some ways was good as it did not detract from continued consumption throughout the meal.
Overall I would recommend this meal to any interested in a meal meant to be eaten slowly and during a good conversation.

Video: Balancing Point

Leopoldo — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 00:53:46 +0000

One camera plus two rock balancers and some editing software = Balancing Point. Check it out.

The Death of PWASOH

Leopoldo — Sun, 14 May 2006 15:56:12 +0000

The People With A Sense Of Humor (PWASOH) mailing list was started in 1991 when I sent a joke to a set of co-workers and got cheers from some and jeers from others who did not want their message boxes (this was before email) filled up with crap. I let people know that they could be added to the ‘People with a sense of humor’ list if they wanted to get more jokes and that anyone could be added or dropped at any time. Over time the list grew to friends, their friends, their friends’ relatives, people who they happened to chat with at a coffee shop.
Sometime around 1997 a picture I posted of an airport hangar filled with fire-retardant foam got passed around aviation web sites and my web server (running out of a closet in my home) was brought down to it’s knees as traffic increased 200 fold overnight. The following hundreds of requests to be added to the list forced a move from personal email management to a Yahoo Group where people could sign up and drop off as they wished.
I knew the list had ‘made it’ when, during a vacation in Hawaii, a perfect stranger stopped me on a street corner to ask if I was ‘that joke guy’. Honest engine, it really happened. The encounter left me a bit dumfounded but was neither the first nor the last. Then in 2001 disaster struck.
Someone reported the mailing list to Yahoo as being in violation of their policies and without so much as a ‘hey, you did something wrong’ Yahoo killed the PWASOH list, and banned me from Yahoo. Various attempts to find out what the offense was met with nothing more than ‘Thank you for contacting Yahoo, someone will get back to you’ and nothing more. To this day I have no idea what the offense was, some cartoon I posted that was copyrighted? The use of a swear word in a joke? Some Republican offended at a political joke?
The experience of loosing the archive going back years and the list of recipients (I had some backups, but they were never very good) and of being treated so poorly so demoralized me that I gave the list up for dead. Occasional queries from friends or list members caused me to give the list one more go. I set up a new server, installed a list manager, tested various combinations of blog software and did a lot of testing, but I was never quite satisfied with the setup so I settled for parking the visual jokes (mostly photoshoped images or scans of funny ads) on an online gallery with an FAQ promising the list would one day be back. Last year I got some steam to start PWASOH up again and set up a new blog that could be posted to via email (for easy posting of jokes) as well as a new discussion group manager. Things were looking well for a PWASOH returns party when I got a notice my domain was about to expire. No problem, I said, I will just move this to my new host and re-launch the site! I made three attempts to move the domain registration, not wanting to pay the 4x price being asked for renewal by the old registrar but no matter how many forms I filled or automated domain moving tools I used the domain just would not go. I figured, all-right I will let the registration expire then re-purchase it using my new registrar. Wrong.
The day the domain expired I tried to re-purchase it to find Network Solutions was ‘holding on to it for 30 days in case I changed my mind’. Gee thanks, that is NOT what I needed, but ok, I guess I will try again a bit later, only to find cyber squatters had bought the domain straight out from under me. All I can say is GAAAHHHH!!! Network Solutions sucks just about as badly as Yahoo does!
I guess I can’t blame the squatters. There were a lot of links out to PWASOH, mainly from sites promoting funny pictures and all that traffic for the low price of a registration must have been good for the bastards that stole PWASOH dot com from under me… hmm looks like I can blame them. Oh well, defeated once again I think it is time to put the old list finally to rest. It had a good run, no make that a great run and brought many smiles to many people, but there are times when I guess you can’t ignore the universe saying ‘move on now, nothing else to see here’.
Farewell PWASOH, I miss you. I miss the daily jokes. I miss the odd encounters. But most of all I miss those emails I got every so often saying ‘thank you, this joke had me smiling all day’.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Leopoldo — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 01:09:27 +0000

Tomorrow morning, shortly after 1:00 in the morning the time and date will be:

01:02:03 04/05/06

at least by the US way of counting dates.

Thailand: Sex tourism

Leopoldo — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:46:24 +0000

You read about it in the guidebooks and the travel web sites, but until you see it in person you can’t really know just how pervasive and disturbing the sex tourism in Thailand is. Every city I visited had girlie bars and working girls but the Sois at the East end of Sukhumvit and pretty much all of Pattaya were the worst. You constantly see old (and young but mostly old) European and American guys walking down the street with some beautiful and very young Thai girl on his arm. You never know if she is with him for the night, for the week or if he is living in Thailand and has hooked up with a Thai girl, what they call a Sexpat (pun on ex-pat or ex-patriot meaning a foreigner who chooses to stay). What makes it particularly disturbing is when the guy looks particularly creepy and disheveled and when the girl looks particularly young, like sixteen years old or younger.

Walking by girlie bars ropers call out to you, usually with ‘where you going’ or ‘come on in’ but at times with ‘hey handsome’ or cat calls. In the more aggressive areas they will grab at you, sometimes taking a strong hold of your arm and trying to drag you in. I got my ass patted more than a few times by girls trying to score a customer. The girls standing in front of the go-go bars all wear numbers, one assumes that the idea is you can select which one you want and either go into the back or pay for a room for a few hours with her. I never inquired but was told that $10 US would buy a blow job, $30 US would give you a few hours with a girl and $50 US would give you all night with a couple of girls. Streets specialize to different clientele with an all Japanese Soi in Bangkok, gay streets in each city and a number of European prostitutes from Easter Europe in Pattaya.

From what I saw there was no lack of customers in any area. Many tourists seemed to be in Thailand specifically for the sex tourism., most of all in Pattaya where I saw couples that seemed to be there for no other reason than for a bit of sexual excitement I overheard a conversation in Pattaya between two guys from the US bragging about their exploits of the week and got the impression they would head home as soon as they had enough of the nightly sex. It left me feeling like American and Europeans were repeatedly taking sexual advantage of the less wealthy nation and made me wonder if locals looked at me more as an exploiter than a curious traveler.

Thailand: Engrish

Leopoldo — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:43:36 +0000

Spend a day in Asia and you will inevitably run into Engrish, those not quite properly translated phrases. Engrish can be weird, can be odd and is often hilarious. One of the funnier examples was a sign in the bathroom at the Top North hotel that stated ‘Please do not put garbage in stool’. I am not sure what the original sentence was, but it sounds like a campaign against junk food. Of the daily examples I saw probably the most enigmatic was these three lines written on the back of an entry ticket for a Wat in Bangkok:

Please dress up politely.
Do not clime the rail.
Do not dangle any doll.

The first line makes sense, they really don’t want you waltzing around the Wats with tank tops and sandals, it is just a request for respectful modesty. The second line when put into context translates to ‘Please do not climb to the top of the towers even though there are railings in place’ or something to that effect. But the third line? I have spent days trying to figure this one out and I’ve come up empty. Anyone out there have a clue what ‘Do not dangle any doll’ could possibly mean?

I assume most Engrish is the product of a translation produced by a non-native speaker with limited understanding of English grammar. I do however have to wonder if Engrish might on occasion be produced as a sort of practical joke. I mean, come-on, think about it, imagine someone is paying you to translate a sentence and they will never be able to tell how accurate your translation is. Now imagine they stiff you on payment or just irritate you, or you are just feeling a bit devilish that day. Wouldn’t you be tempted to mess with the translation a bit? I would.

For more examples of Engrish visit: Engrish.com

Thailand: Temples and churches

Leopoldo — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:40:59 +0000

I spent my first day in Thailand looking at one Wat after another. While the temples are impressive I found myself tired of them after just a few. Some consideration on the subject and I realized that what I was missing was anderstanding of what I was seeing. Rows and rows of Buddhas (literarily, some Wats have dozens of them lined up) loose any meaning when you cannot tell the difference between one station and the next. Sure that one has his right hand up while the next one has his left hand up, but so what? I figure if I visit Thailand again I will have to spend some time learning about the religion it’s icons and their meaning. One thing I can comment on: For the first time in my life I have seen temples so elaborately decorated as to rival the great cathedrals of Europe.

Thailand: WTF moments

Leopoldo — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:38:34 +0000

The closest thing I have to a personal credo is this: ‘every day try to taste, see, hear, smell or do something you have never experienced before’. Working an 8 to 5 job that requires a bit of effort to accomplish. Traveling in a foreign continent all you have to do is step out the door. Thailand is full of new flavors, sights and experiences for the Western traveler, some are expected like tasty Curries everywhere while others make you stop and stare. These are the What The Fuck moments of the trip and they are a daily occurrence. WTF moments come out of the blue and catch you completely unawares. They are unique, circumstantial and nearly impossible to describe (you really have to be there). One of those moments was being in the middle of Bangkok with thousands of people bustling around to get to their destinations when the national anthem starts playing on loudspeakers and the crowd all suddenly comes to a communal halt. Another came walking down Convent street when Nick pointed out a baby elephant across the street and I realized with all the sights, noise and commotion I had completely failed to notice it! An Elephant, on the street and I DID NOT SEE IT! Some WTF moments lend themselves to photography:

Take for example this plastic Ronald McDonald greeting tourirsts with a traditional Thai bow on Sukhumvit road:

Or this Thai girl decked out in a German outfit at a ‘German’ restaurant in Pattaya:

Or this row of computers dressed up to look like cute little Penguins in Koh Samui:

My favorite of the bunch is a DVD cover for a (one assumes pirated) DVD of ‘Good Night and Good Luck’ being sold by a street vendor in Bangkok

For anyone who has seen the movie (or has the slightest inkling what it is about), say it with me: WTF!