I'm very loyal to my driving buddies -- the other cars on the road that drive at about the same speed as you do -- as they are very difficult to find, especially at night. So when I found one outside of Billings, in the middle of America, I stuck to him as closely as I could. Really, they do all the clearing of the road for you, let you know when the turns are coming, and light the way ahead. I think I may have scared him though, following for so long so closely. He made a hasty exit after a couple of hours.

I dropped off mystery guy -- not so much mystery as random guy I found on the internet -- in Fargo (North Dakota) at about 9 am, after 24 hours of straight driving, and proceeded to drive another 8 hours until I reached Madison. I'm currently reading The Dive from Clausen's Pier, whose heroine is from Madison. So I decided to drive downtown and see if I could see any landmarks mentioned in the book. Downtown Madison is very hard to navigate, especially at night. All I saw was City Hall, some signs pointing to the university, and the lakes.

I finally reached the little town of Callicoon, NY on Tuesday. There's pretty much nothing there. Even the resort I stayed at was not that exciting. We didn't do much except go bowling, play poker with the folks, and snowboarding on the one green hill that was open with manmade snow and a base of about 10 inches.

Finally, after Christmas we decided to go to New York City, where my uncle lives. NYC is a big mess. People were everywhere. Rockefeller Center was so packed that we could hardly move, and Time Square was just a sea of people cresting at the intersections buzzing with honking horns and screeching brakes.

NYC Pictures.

In New York City right now, will update later.

Why do people insist on using font sizes less than 10px? If I have to squint just to read the text, I just might skip on to the next site. It just doesn't make sense. And don't even get me started on bad colour choices. I've also noticed that colours appear differently on LCD screens than CRT screens (in particular some dark images in which you can see the outlines of things on LCD monitors, but you can't see anything at all on CRT monitors).

I think I'm going to change all my px values to pt values. And eventually, I might make something resembling a real (read compliant) webpage. But until then, watch out for a new project coming in the new year (if I get my act together).

Also note: Firebird will allow font size changes even if the css values are set in px, while IE will not. Moral of the story? Get Mozilla.

I only get 22 MB of diskquota for Distributed and Networks (12, actually, since 10 is default).

This school sucks.

Lord of the Rings, Return of the King.

Great imagery. Amazing computer animation.

It's a 2 1/2 hour climax, followed by 30 minutes of sappy ending.

And if you go, make sure you stop any fluid intake at least 2 hours prior.

Amazon now sells world's largest book, certified by Guiness. And today, it's available for Super Saver Shipping (i.e. free).

Just some statistics: it opens to 5x7 feet (roughly the size of a ping-pong table), weighs 130 pounds, and costs a mere $10 000.

From the UW web email access:

<title>Mail<br> :: Welcome to Horde<br></title>

Why put html tags inside the title tag?

Here's what the MSN Member Directory search error page says after an invalid result:

To perform a search, you must fill in at least one of the fields provided.
Any field filled in must have at least three characters.

(emphasis mine).

Which makes it impossible to search for "Ming Li", or anyone whose last or first name has less than 3 characters.

I think watching Charlie's Angels 2 actually made me dumber.

My latest shipment from Amazon came in on Friday. I ordered some books. But one of them was cut slanted (as in the pages are on an angle), and some pages were still uncut. I had to send it back. What I want to know is why this wasn't caught beforehand. I know for a fact that they're supposed to check for damages when they pick out the items for shipments. So would better training help? Or is it just the fact that some associates don't care about the job and that what they're doing have larger ramifications on the image of the company.

I also saw eXistenZ over the weekend. A good take on the confused state of mind when virtual reality is so realistic that you don't know what's real and what's not. A very philosophical question.

I'm debating on whether or not to post on craigslist for a rideshare.

Pro: maybe get someone to drive with.

Con: maybe get a psycho that takes all my stuff and dumps my body in the middle of nowhere.

I wonder if this guy works at Sybase.

I am now actively recruiting someone who will drive east with me.

My scheduled partner can't make it because of a citizenship ceremony.

What you get: a free trip out east, to any destination within 100 miles anywhere along I-90.

What I get: someone to drive with.

In other news, University of Toronto's grad school application process needs a revamp. First of all, they want you to submit 2 copies of form A, but in the package that you print out, there's only 1 copy. So you'll have to make another copy. Then, they want you to send the application to two different places (one to the department, one to SGS), so instead of spending $15.50 on 1 expresspost today, I had to spend $31 on two.

Tonight on the Billboard Music Awards, the announcer announced presenter Mandy Moore, who presented another presenter Stevie Wonder, who in turn presented an award to Sting.

So Mandy was really a meta-presenter.

I say they'll be up to 5 levels of meta-presenting in 4 years.

ETS (the people who administer the GRE) is just a money grabbing machine. I "could" find out my score today, but in order to do that, I'd have to call them, and pay them $10 for the call! All I get is a score, they don't even need to send anything, and it costs $10.

I think it's more of a preventative measure so that people don't call them, rather than them trying to make money off of it. But I don't see what the big deal is. Why shouldn't I, who paid them $100+ to take the test, be able to see what I got? They're so closed about the whole process. They're even worse than UW.

I think I'll wait until they send my score home.

I just paid $200 to fix a gasket that was leaking oil, and am about to pay another $200 to fix the muffler.

I'm fully feeling the wrath of car ownership.

And you're wondering why I'm going to be poor next term.

This is bad.

I had one of my profs mail my letters of reference to work. I guess somehow I forgot the suite # or something in the address. So FedEx delivered it to shipping & receiving in our building (but not the Amazon.com mailroom). This was last monday.

Today, I finally found out, and went to inquire. No one knows where my mail is. It's no longer in shipping and receiving, it's not in the amazon mailroom (otherwise I assume they would have delivered it), and it's not returned to FedEx (otherwise their tracking information would say so). So my letters are lost in the system.

I'll give them another day before I have to beg my prof to redo his letters, and send in my appilcations incomplete so they're in on time.

This is bad.

If you call FedEx customer service (1.800.Go.FedEx), there's actually no way to talk to a service representative from the main menu. You just have to know to press '0', and then they connect you.

They also have this voice recognition system, where you just say what you want (like "track a package"), which is pretty cool, except while it's "thinking", you hear these computer sounds (like beeps and clicks). I thought that was a little lame.

I saw Lost In Translation at a theatre near my house on Friday. It's a story about a successful actor (Bill Murray) going through a mid-life crisis while shooting a commercial in Japan. Mixed in the racial (but funny) commentary is a young, married college grad (Scarlett Johansson) who's also "lost" and needs to find herself. Instead, they find each other. It's a touching story about the fears that everyone has, and how we go about discovering who we are and what we want in life.

I also decided to rent Bend it Like Beckham last night after I saw the two main characters (Keira Knightly and Parminder Nagra) in other roles (Keira in Pirates of the Carribean and Parminder as Neela in ER). A light-hearted movie about what cross-culture kids have to deal with. While not all parents are that bad, many do have an entirely different (and mostly less liberal) world-view than we do, which leads to some conflict and self-discovery.

Ultimately, these two movies are both about finding yourself in light of cultural differences and societal preconceptions.

You want the next killer app?

Butt pads for snowboarding beginners.

Think about it. It just works.

On the way back from San Francisco, I saw a lot of cars and trucks with pine trees strapped to their roofs.

This week the OC had their Chrismakah episode.

The shopping malls are donning their decoration.

At work, they're preparing for peak orders in a week or so.

Yup, it's that time of year again. When we overspend of presents, reflect back on what we've accomplished over the past year, and drink ourselves silly until we make the resolution of not drinking only to break it the next day.

Ah, the holidays, I can smell it in the air.

Okay, so the Chevy Cavalier sucks, and we had to live with it for five days.

Here are just somethings I noticed.

The windshield washer fluid dispenser is actually underneath the wiper (as shown in the photo).

What happens when you depress the wash lever? The wiper moves back and forth, the fluid comes out, but at the end of the day, the wiper actually pushes the fluid to the bottom of the windshield. So when you're driving at high speeds, the fluid is pushed by the wind back up the window, obscuring the view (and at this point, the wipers have stopped wiping automatically).

Possible solution? Put the dispenser above the wiper.

The control panel is horribly designed. The temperature controls are at the bottom of the console, and actually inset (you can't really tell from the photo).

The controls are also directly in front of the drink holders, so when there are drinks in their holders, you can't access any temperature controls.

The only clock is on the sound system, so every time I check the time (which is very often), I have to look right and down. Cars should have all the essentials directly in front of the driver.

The last bit is a little picky, but there is no decimal counter on the odometre, only whole miles.

In our elevator, there is a sign for firefighters (and, presumably everyone else who wants to operate the elevator), part of which says

To open door, hold the "door open" button
To close door, hold the "door close" button

which is fine and dandy by itself, except that there are no "door open" nor "door close" buttons. But we do have "open door" and "close door" buttons.

Another thing to note, along with hotmail's new interface, they have changed what used to be "next" and "prev" links to be arrows. Except the arrows didn't point sideways, they point up and down. It took me a second take to figure out which one I wanted to click on.

Hopefully I'll remember to upload some pictures so I can comment on the shitty design of the Cavalier.

Go to google.

Type in "miserable failure".

Click on "I'm feeling lucky".

Laugh.