I saw 18 police officers on my way home tonight. Five on motorcycles, three in cruisers, two on horseback, and eight on bikes.

Must be for the up coming Mardi Gras celebrations.

It's much too hard to plan things for many people, even when I'm not doing the planning.

I always end up worrying about who's going and who's not, that it seems like I'm begging for people to go.

But I guess it's only hard if you care about every individual's satisfaction, and not as hard if you only looked at the group's. It would be much easier to just dictate a schedule and have everyone follow it. Most people will conform, and for those who don't ... who cares.

Now I know why some dictators are so successful.

I saw this ad in an antique poster store the other day. It was an advertisement in a magazine from years ago.

Just imagine the kind of flak this would get in today's world. And more interestingly, can a company today post this ad and hope to get away with it?

I think I've figured out why I didn't like Spiderman or Daredevil, apart from the sometimes tacky plot.

The fighting/swinging through skyscrapers/jumping off of tall buildings sequences are all computer generated, and no matter how much I want my eyes to believe it true, it just looks too fake. I never got over how bad the swinging scenes looked in Spiderman, or how goofy the fighting sequence on the organ was in Daredevil. I'm used to the Jacky Chan, Jet Li, rock em', sock 'em, in your face, fast action, REAL kung fu. Until the computers can convince me otherwise.

Where else but at the Amazon party can you see the CEO in a conga line?

Also got away with a lot of Amazon.com freebies.

Last night we went to a party at a coworker's place. There weren't that many people there when we showed up. But things got interesting when Ike came. No one knew who Ike was, but he brought everyone. People were lined up outside to come in.

Apparently, Ike knew someone in the house, who in turn exclaimed, "who the hell is Ike?".

The house was also opposite a cemetery, where supposedly the legendary Bruce Lee and son are buried. I tried to hop the barbed wire fence, but decided (wisely) against it considering my incoherent condition.

This weekend is the Amazon.com winter party. The theme is winter carnival. Any costume ideas?

For those of you wishing to enjoy a weekend of exuberance, we are heading to Sin City the weekend of Mar. 14-17.

Come join us in Las Vegas, we're staying at the Luxor.

Things are not always so black and white.

They had a peace rally in Seattle this weekend. Speeches were given, Bush was bashed, effigies were made, and a lot of people were there.

What I can't get over is that there will probably be a war, regardless of how many people are opposed to it, and it's a war to prevent war (how ironic). But the precedence of preemptive strike is a scary one to set. As a generation that has rarely seen the horrors of war first hand, this could be a rude awakening.

By the way, Worst Movie Ever.

We never realize how important email is to a company until it doesn't work. Everyone is standing around, taking a break, because they can't do anything.

I wonder how much money we are losing because of this email downage.

Maybe it's time for fooseball.

My Valentines gift to everyone: more vicarious living.

For those who feel the need to live vicariously through someone else, here are the pictures from the past weekend of tubing and skiing.

The pictures were not taken by me, so I hold no copyright on them.

This came up in recent conversation:

Who do you think are the five hottest women (or men)? (dead or alive, entertainment, models, everyday people)

I love skiing. It's so much fun, and so much pain (I can't move right now, and I just came back).

It was the intern ski trip this weekend. We went up to Snoqualmie, and did some tubing last night (so much fun, I was standing up in the tubes by the end, and going down the hill that way). This morning we woke up extra early, and went to the ski hill to rent our equipment and to get our lesson.

The lesson was completely useless, even though I've never downhilled before, my cross-country skills made me a little ahead of the others in the class. In the afternoon, we got our tickets upgraded, and went on some real hills.

I started off with some green hills, just to get the hang of things. Going down the hill, and turning back and forth is so exhilarating, I just wanted to run back up the hill and do it again. The I went on some blues. It wasn't until Duane suggested that we try a different hill did we head over to the central lift. The lift completely bypassed what we thought was the top of the hill, and took us to another, higher peak. We were going to go down a blue run, but accidentally went on a black diamond. I survived, but it was a long way down, and I had some quality wipe outs.

Now my feet hurt and my knees are killing me. And yes, I did go down a black diamond (albeit by accident) on my first time skiing, as promised.

I've always wondered why some (mostly older) cars have three protruding nipple-like peaks on the headlight cover. Can anyone enlighten me on this?

I tried google, but none of my queries yielded the desired answer.

So at work I'm working on getting some numbers passed around through a perl cgi and some soap. But I kept on getting "malformed header from script" errors (error 500 for those familiar with apache). They basically tell me nothing about where it went wrong, and were very difficult to track.

Yesterday, I finally (with the help of others) tracked it down to a print statement in, get this, another module that I didn't write. But it all boiled down to a environment variable setting.

Sometimes I just don't get computers.

Recalled conversation from the weekend:

"Are you going to eat your balls?"
"No, you can have my balls."
"We'll split the balls."
"These balls are so good."

The trip to Vancouver was well executed. There were some hiccups such as the hour long wait for a reserved table at a restaurant, and annoyances such as the two hour line up at the border, but things otherwise went smoothly.

Pictures from the ensuing weekend.