alex chiang: web 6.0

Never been to the Pacific Northwest before; that situation shall be remedied.

Itinerary
Date Flight Routing Details
Thu Jul 03 99 Depart DENVER INTL (DEN) [...]

.!.
For the non-nerd readers of this blog out there, here is a glimpse of what it’s like to be a nerd — we are going nuts over seemingly inconsequential issues that normal people don’t even realize exist!
In our first episode, Val Henson complained about having to pay $15 for focus-follows-mouse (which I blogged about here).
Today, [...]

Let me plug one of my new favorite web comics: Basic Instructions. Scott Meyer strikes the perfect balance of insight, wry dry humor, and wackiness that really appeals to me.
Witchboard movie
Maybe I need to use this image of his as my logo:
Romeo Is Bleeding divx

A quick followup to my previous post on India’s brain gain, here is the New Zealand points indicator that indicates whether they want you or not.

Your total score is 130
The points threshold you must meet to submit an Expression of Interest is 100.

Hey, why not…

‘Brain gain’ for India as elite return seems exciting at first. One might think “Oh good! People returning to their homeland is a good thing, right?”
I find the phenomenon sad and disturbing.
Sad because it means the United States is losing out in the global competition for brains, and smart immigrants are precisely the ones we, [...]

Kinder, gentler Alex has been trying really hard not to be overtly mean-spirited lately, but this personals ad on craigslist really made my eyebrows go up:

I’m a 24 year old single mother of one two year old that I adore. I am not utterly unattractive, I have common sense, average body and weight, good job, [...]

Pet theory of the day: nerdism begets more nerdism. Which is to say, people who dive deep into one subject matter, deeper than their peer group norm, tend to dive deep into all subjects. The simple and obvious explanation for this phenomenon is that deep divers are simply intellectually curious about, well, everything. This observation [...]

Scenes from an open source lab… at 10:30pm:

22:37:10 sutula: taggart: apt-get source cron ? :)
22:38:27 dannf: taggart: $()
22:38:40 andrew: my guess is that you need to escape them at least once.
22:38:48 taggart: dannf: I thought about using that, but didn’t know how
22:38:51 achiang: doesn’t anyone in this lab sleep?
22:39:18 taggart: dannf: I just [...]

Ouch.

Charges Incurred While Roaming in New Zealand, ZZ

Date: 02/17/2008
Time: 8:52 AM
Type: INCOMING CL
Minutes: 19
Airtime Charge: 43.51

Leviathan dvd

.!.
Completely randomly, I saw a sweet band earlier this week called the Ian McFeron Band for $5 at a local venue. Actually, it was only $2.50, considering the $5 cover was for both bands that played that night. Well, really, it was $1.67 since there were 3 bands playing that night, but anyhow, we only [...]