mjm wired ;)  

Several years ago I was in the basement watching my two cousins playing during some family function. It was just the three of us, most likely during some sort of summer party. Well, both of my young cousins were pretty mischievous and they decided to play on this old spinning couch/lounge chair. They started spinning faster and faster, until one of them flew straight off and hit the basement floor, luckily it was carpeted. I just stood by and did nothing till it happened. [...]

I saw this in the newspaper and I thought it was pretty funny. Go to Google Maps and get directions for 2 major cities that are separated by an ocean. Say for example New York and London. Try it for yourself. Pay close attention to how Google recommends you cross that ocean. And of course don't forget the disclaimer: These directions are for planning purposes only. You may find that construction projects, traffic, or other events may cause road conditions to differ from the [...]

So in 1997 I was excited to get a 14.1" Sony Trinitron monitor. It worked at a pristine 800x600 SVGA resolution (and I could push it to 1024x768@85Hz, rare for the time). However that was only for my main computer at the time, a 166Mhz AMD K6 (sorry I couldn't afford a Pentium MMX). So the rest of the 286's and 486's at my house (all second hand) were running monochrome (remember Hercules?) or EGA. So I would scour the used computer shops for [...]

Okay, no, I'm not learning Japanese, nor will I. After 6 weeks of a multitude of unrelated illnesses and a few rather disappointing weeks at work, I finally went out ... at night ... without medication ... I think. I had Japanese food for the first time, you know, the real deal with sushi and many other "looks better than they smell dishes". It was an interesting night of discovery. I went downtown to the university campus looking for this place. I couldn't find [...]

I can't beleive I'm confessing on my blog that I am actually watching America Idol for the first time in my life and I actually enjoying it. Past few weeks were pretty entertaining with all the humiliation and belittling (sad fact of our human nature). But anyways, I've never watched the show before . I saw 15 minutes of Fantasia performing when I was in India in 2004 and otherwise I really have not found many "Idol's" very impressive. So last night the final [...]

From Microsoft's own website. In order to run Windows Vista in any other mode than Home Basic (i.e. no effects, and with removed functionality) Microsoft recommends the following: 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor 1 GB of system memory 40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space Support for DirectX 9 graphics with: WDDM Driver 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum) Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware 32 bits per pixel DVD-ROM drive Huh? Most personal computer manufacturers cut [...]

"Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." Everytime I visited a friend or relative with digital cable, I always thought "how cool". Yeah, so I have digital cable now, I didn't choose to get it, it's sort of just there, so I sort of use it. And it's somewhat of a disappointment. Yeah, not as nice as the brochure. Biggest pain: It effectively killed my urge to channel surf. You know when there isn't anything on, but you just want [...]

Yesterday night my youngest brother landed in California ready to start a new job and new life. Just last month he was sitting in an arena listening to speeches from a clueless kinesiology student, random honorary graduates and the university president which he really didn't like too much. However the final talk by David Bing, a former Pistons basketball player, was very sincere and in many ways enlightening. Mr. Bing said that one of his coaches once mentioned the "5 P's" to him: "Proper [...]