Olivia Munn IS the Lesbionic Woman

Unopened rebate requests found in San Jose dumpster

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_6814729

...I am staring at more than 1,300 rebate requests sent to Vastech on Bonaventura Drive in San Jose. The envelopes were tossed - unopened - into a garbage dumpster near Vastech. I have two boxes of envelopes that were thrown out without being processed. In all of my years of reporting, I have never encountered such outrageous behavior against consumers.

Come on, isn't that where we imagine EVERY rebate mail in request ends up? I hate mail in rebates and it's gotten to the point where I won't even figure them into the price of something I'm buying because half the time they never show up or get wrongly denied.

via Brian Cantoni

No More Dialing POP-CORN for the Time

Time of day calling it quits at AT&T

Cheney on Iraq: "Quagmire"

Even though it was 1994, he got it pretty much spot on:

Bill Walsh 1931 - 2007

Uh oh, first Ingmar Bergman, now Bill Walsh. Don't these things always come in threes?

RIP Ingmar Bergman

Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman passed away at the age of 89.

I read that he was really scared of death when he made The Seventh Seal. That's probably a large part of why it remains such a powerful film, even 20 years later. Playing chess with Death. How often has that premise been ripped off?

Revisiting Washington (Guidebook)

This is really cool. The Washington Trust for Historic Preservation has taken a guidebook of Washington State from 1941 and revisited all the tours and tips in it and updated it for the 21st century.



They've added video clips from the era, radio broadcasts and plenty of photos from the times along with modern updates such as GPS coordinates and PDF printouts of routes.

It's pretty interesting to see what's become of some of the highlights after 50 years.

Best of all, Revisiting Washington: A Guide to the Evergreen State is being released for free on CD (available at most state museums) and free download (PC only).

This should be great for discovering the back country roads for motorcycle trips around the state.

New Tacoma Narrows Bridge Open

Finally! They've been working on this thing since I moved up here. Of course, being a SF Bay Area refugee, I made sure and had my Good-To-Go transponder already installed. They had quite a run on them as the opening day neared.



I drove across on Monday, all the while thinking of those videos of the original bridge collapsing in that windstorm in the 40s.

Seattle PI has a nice write up of the opening day festivities [link]

It's the Blue Shells

The hilarious xkcd:

and not just the blue shells, what about those damn snakers?

Our Government or His Government

I love this video. Sara Taylor being reminded what the oath of office she took was supposed to stand for:

I swear the fish was THIS big!

Another big bad World of Warcraft boss killed by Reforged. The Lurker Below won't be bothering anyone any longer (until reset).



Drops: Glowing Breastplate of Truth and Choker of Animalistic Fury

Meanwhile, Mstree's gear get's purpler and purpler.

I Don't Recall

Killing Internet Dragons

Yesterday, after a couple weeks of wiping repeatedly, 24 of my invisible internet friends and I (Reforged - Runetotem(H)) were able to take down that mean pit lord Magtheridon.

(If you don't play World of Warcraft, this probably makes no sense at all, but you can still look at the picture and admire my (Mstree) Stylin' Purple Hat.)

Tacoma Narrows Bridge stranded at the stateline

Doh! A section of the Tacoma Narrows bridge being shipped from Minnesota got stopped at the Idaho/Washington border when the WA state weigh station declared it to be overweight. It made it through five states, but not Washington.

[News Tribune]

R2-D2 Mailboxes

This is too cool. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of Star War, the USPS is coming out with some R2-D2 mailboxes. Hope to see one soon. [link]

RIP Brad Delp of Boston

Brad Delp, lead singer of Boston found dead in his home. [link]
Pretty sad. I know I wore out at least one or two Boston tapes in my youth.

Nortel to restate earnings (again)

For the fourth time in four years, Nortel has to restate earnings to fix accounting errors.

The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

Buell getting ready to play in the dirt

At the Buell dealer get-together a couple of weeks ago, the manufacturer announced that they'll be introducing a water-cooled 450cc dirt bike for 2009.
It could be introduced even earlier and they may be planning to compete in the 2008 motocross season, taking advantage of the 1 year production waiver.

Link from SpeedTV [linkage]

WoW Item Creator

Think you know the perfect item that's missing from World of Warcraft?

With the WoW Item Creator, you can show those Blizzard developers what they're missing.




Wow Item Creator!

Prefab houses from shipping containers

Check out this post on Stacey's site:
frenettik


It's all about houses made from shipping containers. Pretty slick and not too 'spensive.

I've been looking for a shipping container to use for storing my motorcycles and other toys. This might be a good lead if they also sell the boxes before conversion.

(I had a job in high school painting used shipping containers for a company that rented them to construction sites for temporary storage. I should have snagged one then.)

Bob's Java Jive shut down

Oh noes! The city of Tacoma served Bob's Java Jive with an emergency repair notice on Wednesday for some electrical problems and they are effectively shut down until further notice.

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

Not really, it's kinda pretty, especially if you don't have anywhere you have to be. A little storm blew though last night.

My driveway:



I had to lock the hubs just to get up my driveway.

I am expecting an urgent delivery today. I hope the big brown trucks have snow tires.

"The Dude abides"

Looks like there's a PNW Lebowski-fest, imminent (The PNW PWNs, just in case you're wondering.)

And we can blame/thank this guy.



I'm already craving a white russian.

MotoGP 2006 Highlights

Man, I love Youtube.com!

I always seem to stumble across something interesting and totally unrelated to what I was originally looking for.

MorpheusGT has cut together some of the most exciting footage from the 2006 MotoGP season and put together a 4 min video. Needless to say, it features lots of dicin' between the Doctor and the Kentucky Kid.

Poor Randy Mamola

Reduced to shillin' for a MotoGP board game (and doing his best Crazy Frog impression in the commercial for it).



I kid. I'm actually a big Mamola fan, being from the SF Bay Area, and no one can deny that he's one of the best GP riders ever. I think the last time I saw him ride, he was giving those sick 2-up rides on the MotoGP bike at Laguna Seca (wheelies and stoppies included, if I remember right)

Vatican: Dakar Rally - Bloody, Irresponisble

Reuters is reporting that an editorial in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano is calling the Dakar Rally 'The Bloody Race of Irresponsibility' in response to the death of a motorcyclist during the fourth stage of the race.

The trail of blood which grows longer from year to year on the route of the race instead underscores the undeniable component of violence that lies behind every attempt to export Western models to human environments and ecosystems that have little to do with the West.

The Vatican?

Dell to auction off custom World of Warcraft XPS M1710 laptops

File under 'Yum!'
Saw this on Engadget:




Of course I'm so helpless without my multi-button mouse and Nostromo gamepad that there's not much I could do in Warcraft with just a laptop (except maybe the auction house).

R.I.P. Lily Munster

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/01/10/obit.decarlo.ap/index.html

Dakar claims another rider

Sad news out of Africa. Elmer Symons (South African rider that had been living in the US) was killed in the fourth stage of the Dakar Rally.

From the press release:

The organisation of the Dakar received the news this morning of the death of South Africa's Elmer Symons, bike rider n°107.

Today at 9:16, the race headquarters received an Iritrack alert coming from km 142 of the 4th stage from Er Rachidia to Ouarzazate.

On the site of the crash by helicopter 8 minutes later, the race direction could only record the death, confirmed 10 minutes later by the medical helicopter.

Head of a company specialised in the exportation of metal parts from the United States to South Africa, 29-year-old Elmer Symons was taking part in his first Dakar as a competitor. He had lived two others in an assistance crew. He was 18th overall.

The rally organisation is waiting for the return of Kingsley Symons who takes care of the assistance of his brother to witness their support and sadness.

Not a lot of details as of yet, but always sad when things go so bad.

World of Warcraft as a lesson on project management

I know it's geeky as hell, but I saw this on Boing Boing and thought it was pretty interesting:

Joi Ito's talk at the 23rd Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin last week aimed to explain his obsession with World of Warcraft and MMOs in general. I saw Joi give a version of this talk once before -- he's basically working on the idea that these tools are an amazing way to learn leadership, teamwork, project management, planning and so forth (and he notes that blue-collar construction workers are generally better leaders than MBAs). It's a mind-blowing little riff, especially as he breaks down the way that the UI tweaks and the constitution of each guild are predictors of its long-term success (and how that can apply to the management of open source projects).

Stolen Kidney (not an urban myth)

Bodies the Exhibition is currently in Seattle (extended to April, I just heard).

Sometime around New Years Eve, someone swiped a kidney from the touch table.

According to the Seattle PI, there's now a $10,000 reward for the return of the preserved organ. Almost makes it worth donating one ;)

At least no one woke up in a tub full of ice with a note to call 911 taped to their forehead.

Dakar Rally 2007

Best thing about January? Hard to say. MacWorld? CES? NFL Playoffs?

For me, I think it's the Dakar Rally (Still hard not to call it the Paris-Dakar Rally, even though it hasn't started from Paris in a while.)

Scrutineering (tech inspection for us in the US) finished up today and according to the official press release, it's a record field this year: 231 bikes, 14 quads, 181 car crews and 85 trucks.

This year's rally will run from January 6 - 21, 2007, starting from Lisbon and ending in Dakar, a total of 7915 km.

This is really a beautiful race to watch played out over a series of days. Some of the footage is hypnotic, especially the desert segments. I'm not sure who's covering it for the US media, but last year I was able to find a consistent bittorent feed nightly from an Aussie station. I think it's pooled coverage, but they sure seemed to show a lot more than OLN, Speed, or whoever was covering it for the US.

While I'll watch pretty much any motorcycle racing with little or no prodding, the Dakar is even cooler because it's the only place I get to see big DAF trucks and Unimogs hauling ass through the desert.

I hope this year's race goes off without any casualties. The last two years have had three participants (all motorcyclists), and at least three spectators (children, as if it wasn't tragic enough) killed in various accidents.

Wikipedia says that over 40 participants have been killed since the race began in 1979 and an unknown number of spectators (records aren't/weren't always kept of the spectators across the different African nations.) Hopefully 2007's race doesn't add to that count.

KTM is always a manufacturer favorite, and this year is no different. The have three factory teams running in 2007 (Gauloises, Repsol and Red Bull).

One of the KTM privateer teams (San Francisco's Team Rally Pan America) are teaming up with Wheels 2 Africa after the race to backtrack along the course once the rally is finished and distribute medical supplies, food and other humanitarian aid to people in need.

The Beaver Trilogy

I first heard about the Beaver Trilogy on NPR's This American Life (the reruns episode). It's a strange documentary/drama by filmmaker Trent Harris. When I first heard about it, it sounded interesting, but it was shown at Sundance in 2001 and then never distributed, as far as I can tell, so I gave up trying to see it. Then, thanks to the internets tubes and boingboing, I found out that it (or big pieces of it) is available on youtube. It's pretty hard to explain, and the story behind the films is what makes it interesting, so listen to the American Life story first if this sounds at all interesting.

The first third is footage that Harris shot with a then-new video camera, starting outside of the Salt Lake City, Utah news station that he was working at in 1979. He happened to catch this kid snapping pictures of the news helicoptor and used him for a subject to try out the camera. I quickly becomes apparent that this kid (Groovin' Gary) is a genuine character.
Groovin' Gary is obsessed with a few things, the top two are Olivia Newton John, and being on TV, so he hams it up for Harris. The next scene has Harris travel to Gary's tiny hometown of Beaver where Gary had staged a talent show for Harris' benefit (I think), mostly as an elaborate way to get to perform onstage, in drag, as Olivia Newton John. It's something out of a David Lynch film when Gary undergoes his transformation, makeup provided by/applied at the local mortuary.

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Harris was so taken with the kid and his story, or he felt there was something that still needed telling, that when he moved to Los Angeles he reshot the entire documentary in 1981 as a dramatic film using a then-unknown Sean Penn as Groovin' Larry.

Part 2
Part 3

And finally, because twice is not enough, he redid the movie again in 1985, this time with an unknown (but still creepy) Crispin Glover.


Part 2
Part 3
It's kind of weird to watch the original authentic documentary footage evolve into the story of being who you are and fighting repression in a small town. All this starting from a kid that just wanted to take a picture of a helicoptor and maybe get on TV.

More free issues posted at Newsarama

Looks like Phonogram #1 wasn't the only freebie that Image has posted up at Newsarama.
Death Jr. (vol. 2) #1, The Nightly News #1 , The Pirates of Coney Island (story by Rick 'freakin' Spears of Teenagers from Mars fame) and Cyberforce #1 are also up in their entirety.

The Cross Bronx issue #1 online

Michael Avon Oeming's The Cross Bronx issue #1 is online for your free perusal at hiddenrobots.com.
The four issue mini-series just finished and the trade is in January's Previews, scheduled to ship in March.
The Cross Bronx is a noir-crime/voodoo story about revenge, gangs, guns and a pissed-off mother/Santera priestess. If it only had pirates, it would have been perfect!
Newsarama asked the creators why they're putting the issue up online:

"Our hope is to bring more attention to the trade, which will be out in March. Hopefully people will dig the issue enough to want to cap it off with the whole thing. We've done the same with Powers and we've really opened up our readership" - Mike Oeming

"Please read the comic and buy the trade. I don't have kids, but one day I will and they'll probably need shoes." - Ivan Brandon

Ever since getting hooked on Powers, I've been a big Mike Oeming fan. I'm going to have to remember to include the trade in this month's order. ( JAN071926 in January's Previews)

33 tips for touring by motorcycle

The AMA's website has a nice list of tips for smart touring. Some are pretty obvious, but I'm seeing some for the first time:

4) Portable weather radios are now in the $20 range, and the first time one saves you from running right into a massive storm, you’ll wonder why you ever traveled without one. Check accessory companies like Aerostich, or Radio Shack.

5) On high-mileage days, you’ll feel a lot better if you carry eyedrops and use them every time you stop for gas.

20) Especially if you’re riding alone, wear a dog-tag with your name and contact info. You can get them lots of places, including your local army surplus store.

21) Take a look back at where you were parked every time you leave someplace. You’d be amazed at what you find.

31) If you call a hotel—even if you’re two blocks away—you can often get a better rate than if you just walk in. And if you have access to a computer, there are some spectacular Internet-only deals available these days. Either way, do yourself a favor and have a reservation by 4 p.m. You never know when a convention will take over your destination city. Remember that AMA members get a discount at Red Roof Inns (call (800) RED-ROOF and use AMA code CP503343).

Tip 17 is a plug for MoTow and that's one that is pretty vital for any long distance motorcycle touring. Think of it as something like AAA's breakdown service but for bikers, and at $25 a year, it's a bargain.

Phonogram Issue #1 up on Newsarama

Phonogram Issue #1 up on Newsarama
Originally uploaded by ronbo.

Newsarama has Issue #1 of Image comic's Phonogram online for free:
http://www.newsarama.com/ImageComics/Phonogram/01/Phngram01_full.html