Over a month ago I made mention of this bus tour I went on with my family. I didn't really feel like posting about it, and am still kinda of blah about writing about it but I figured I should at least post some pictures. I think I'm still traumatized by spending too much time in close proximity to Chinese people. I dislike just about every kind of person out there, but it's not too bad until I'm forced to spend a bunch of time with the same kind of people. God I love diversity.

Yeah, so that was about it. Sorry for the lack of posts, I've been in an anti-posting funk lately.

My brother sent me some info about this Air Force proposal to develop a weapon that would cause people to become so sexually aroused that when used on enemy soldiers, they'd rather do each other than shoot anyone.

I'm pretty sure they tested what's been dubbed the Gay Bomb on LazyJ. Oh snap!

It's really hard getting work done when your boss is on vacation for two weeks.

So, I was checking out some of the "best of" craigslist tonight and found this post:

To the guy who had sex last night in front of my house

The "residential area 14" is a very specific part of austin. Then the picture (which I've edited and added below) looked VERY familiar. This happened in front the duplex my friend lives in. He denies writing it, and admits to wishing he was the author.

For now, the mystery remains. I have also eliminated toyotas from my potential new car list.

So, who's with me?

I've managed to not do anything work related this morning, and I'm so close to making it until lunch I figured I'd post something. I rarely think of Microsoft as being cool, and I'm a big fan of most things Google. But apparently Microsoft has been busy. Check these out:

This is Photosynth, something Microsoft labs has been working on. It stitches a bunch of photographs taken at a given location together. Sounds kinda lame, until you realize it does it in 3D! The interface is sweet, letting you zoom in and out, and selecting all sorts of different view points of the same object from all the photos that it's processed. It's hard to explain, but definitely worth checking it out. There's only a few set scenes you can check out right now, but the idea is that in the future you'd be able to do an image search for something, and then all the resulting images would be pieced together to create a 3D environment for you to explore. This could do wonders for the porn industry, but I shudder to think what would become of all those Paris Hilton up-skirt photos.

This one's pretty badass too, and outside of the cost I'd definitely get one. It's called Microsoft Surface and is actually supposed to go on sale late this year. Who knows if that's true, but there are some really cool videos of it in action. It's a computer, sort of, but looks like a coffee table. It's all touch screen based and becomes a hub for all things digital. Want to check out all the pictures you just took from your vacation? Place your digital camera on the table and it displays them all. Want to move those pictures to your PDA? Place your PDA on the table, and drag the picture with your finger into your PDA. You can look up map directions and then drag them to your phone. It's interaction reminds me of Tom Cruise in Minority Report, except for it being a table and not a hologram. It seems very cool except I wonder how well people will adapt to giving their coffee tables so much more attention.

Sigh. Is the day over yet? I'm running out of ways to procrastinate.

LazyJ sent me this a few weeks back:

I'm quite flattered, since we all know that LazyJ would rather be crapping, which also means he'd rather be thinking about me.

In other news, no one stole anything from me this weekend except maybe my ability to breathe without coughing.

Ok, this is getting ridiculous now. This past Sunday someone stole my mountain bike, right out of my garage. Granted it was open most of the day, but I was also outside most of the day. There were two periods of about an hour where I wasn't outside, and at one of those times some assmunch took my bike.

The bike was 6 years old and not in the best shape, but it was $750 new and I had spent $150 or so last year on new wheels after mine locked up from riding so hard, or from a lack of maintenance. I'm not sure which. Ok it was the lack of maintenance but still. It was MY bike!

Last year someone stole my stash of DVDs by coming in through an unlocked window in the back of the house. The curious thing is they took my DVDs which were...um...backups...but left all of lazyJ's DVDs sitting on the shelf in their nice pretty cases. And now they take my bike, and leave all four of lazyJ's, most or all of which are better than mine.

I've thought about a security system, but if I just keep my windows locked and garage door closed I wouldn't have a problem. The other thing I'm going to do however is put stickers on all of my stuff that says "Don't steal this one, the better one is over there."

So we had layoffs the other day, but I was spared on account of how proficient I am at being awesome. They did fire one of my favorite coworkers however, one which I've written about before here and here. Recently I was reviewing a document she had written which read exactly like one of those instruction manuals with the awful Chinese to English translation. There were words I recognized, however she had found new and interesting ways to combine them with reckless disregarding thing grammer plurals and orders worded.

As far as the "bling bling" part of the title, I got $150 bucks from work for my failed patent submission. Failure has never rewarded me financially quite like this - I'm going to have to go hire a collection agency 'cause apparently that asshole Failure hasn't been paying up.