I know, everyone wants an update. I went to LA this weekend, to visit Mike\rquote s family. It was mostly quiet, but there were 2 major events.

1) We went to Santa Monica Beach. Where we walked the boulevard, shopped at trendy mall stores, but while not in a mall, and ate a delicious snack of freshly chopped apple in a cup drizzled with caramel. Mmmmm.

2) I paid too much for some cherries.

It\rquote s my fault \endash I was out biking on my own and saw a street vendor selling them. I thought it was a good price \endash namely in that it was the price that she was selling it at. Mike thinks I paid too much.

I was never very good at haggling \endash which was a distinct disadvantage when we went to Vietnam as, much like buying a car here, you never pay the sticker price for anything in Vietnam. If you do, everyone points and laughs. My main haggling strategy while in Vietnam, was to stand slightly behind Mike (or one of his relatives) and look lost. Then, when the negotiations where getting really heated, I\rquote d leap in. \ldblquote Can I get a coke too?\rdblquote I\rquote d ask, furthering the process.

Mike and his family had the technique down \endash carefully engaging in the haggle dance. \ldblquote Your niece/son/daughter/wife would love this snack/scarf/brooch/marble horse.\rdblquote The venders would slyly point out.

\ldblquote My niece/son/daughter/wife has three of these snack/scarf/brooch/marble horse things at home, and don\rquote t really like them. I guess I could buy another one to annoy them, but it\rquote s not worth annoying someone at that price.\rdblquote The buyer would coolly counter.

The trump card was to walk away. Remember George when Jerry was buying the new car? It works. Walk away mid-deal and the vendor will run after you, the price falling sharply. The interesting thing about it all was that the haggling is only good for that item. Mike haggled a vendor down for a Sweater we wanted to buy as a gift. He got a good price (unlike me and the cherries). We checked a few more booths, then decided that we wanted to get a second identical sweater from the original vendor. She wanted full price \endash and the dance started again (The \lquote you just sold us one at this price\rquote argument was surprisingly ineffective).

Anyway, that was my weekend. A beach and expensive cherries.

Oh and Mike got a new jacket. And some shirts. And some plants. And some lumber.

I read this over at IMAO written by Frank J, who is way funnier then I'll ever be. I did color code things so that you can easily pick out the correct action depending on our current threat level, as well as making it impossible for you to read the 'yellow' level ones. That's not a real level anyway. yellow. Anyway for your humor and safety.....

Everyone has heard of the Homeland Security Advisory System by now and its rainbow of colors, but most are confused of exactly what it means to them about how they should act and live when it is at its different levels of alert. That's why I've decided to create this guide make things clearer to the people.

First, here is what the alert levels mean in general:

*Green (Low): All evil had been destroyed. The world is now a peaceful utopia.
*Blue (Guarded): There's still the occasional pickpocket, so show a little caution.
*Yellow (Elevated): Terror lurks in the shadows; be wary.
*Orange (High): The terrorists are out there and they are coming for YOU!
*Red (Severe): The world is exploding around you. The only law is your own gun.

To be more specific, here is how you should you act in different situations based on the alert levels.

How should I store my firearms?
*Green: Throw them in the fire. There is no more need for weapons.
*Blue: Wrap them in some rags and store them in the attic somewhere in case you need them one day.
*Yellow: Keep both your guns and ammo readily accessible.
*Orange: Load your gun and carry it on you at all times, even around the house.
*Red: The gun should be in your hand, pointed in front of you with your finger resting on the trigger.

I see a stranger outside.
*Green: Maybe he could give your kids a ride to school.
*Blue: He might be lost; ask him what he's doing here.
*Yellow: Stay in your house and avoid him. Strangers bad.
*Orange: Run outside and pistol-whip him while questioning his involvement with terrorism.
*Red: Kill him; no questions asked.

I hear a noise at night.
*Green: That's just the house settling; go back to sleep.
*Blue: Probably nothing, but you better check it out.
*Yellow: Grab your gun and call 911.
*Orange: No time for police; run through your house shooting anything that moves.
*Red: Initiate the house's auto-destruct sequence; leap out window.

You see a hippy.
*Green: Punch him.
*Blue: Kick him.
*Yellow: Punch him then kick him.
*Orange: Punch him then kick him and then stomp on him.
*Red: Strangle him.

You receive a strange envelope in the mail with no return address.
*Green: Rip it open; who knows what fun lies inside!
*Blue: Open it carefully just in case.
*Yellow: Don't touch it and call the police.
*Orange: Can wait for the authorities; toss it out the window and then unload a gun into it.
*Red: For the love of God, immediately flee from the envelope. Hunt down and kill the mailman.

You see some movement in a nearby tree.
*Green: It's probably a squirrel. Hello squirrel.
*Blue: Better check out what it is to be on the safe side.
*Yellow: Might be the escaped monkey from the zoo. Better contact the authorities.
*Orange: It's a ninja! Fire indiscriminately into the treetops.
*Red: Set fire to the tree and all trees around it. No safe haven for ninjas!

You see a strange van parked nearby.
*Green: It must be an ice cream truck. Let's get ice cream.
*Blue: Check to make sure it's legally parked.
*Yellow: Better call the FBI to check this one out.
*Orange: Politely knock on the van door. Kill everyone inside.
*Red: Shoot the van with a rocket propelled grenade. Kill anyone who protests; they're terrorists too.

You realize the person you are talking to is a Communist.
*Green: Kill him.
*Blue: Kill him.
*Yellow: Kill him.
*Orange: Kill him.
*Red: Kill him and burn his body.

You see a stray dog.
*Green: Go pet the cute little puppy.
*Blue: Better check if he has a dog tag so you can get him back to his owner.
*Yellow: Call animal control.
*Orange: It's some sort of terrorist trick. Shoot the dog with a sniper rifle.
*Red: Destroy the dog with a thermite charge and then kill all witnesses.

I hope that cleared things up on the alert levels.
Remember, terrorism can only be stopped by your vigilance and your actions

Laurel had a baby! If you don't know Laurel, well she's married to 'the Bob'. If you don't know 'The Bob', well he's Laurel's husband.

It's basically a Geek meets Geek love story - so I'm a bit surprised there wasn't a webcasting of the birth. :)

Anyway - my congratulations to them :)

Friday Night
Gym
Skipped gym as a birthday treat, though planned to bike to gym on Saturday as a make-up.

Saturday
Biked to gym.
Stopped at Copeland Sports on the way to inquire about fixing Bike.
Gym.
Went to Benihana which is the West Coast\rquote s Bisuteki with Mike and Fernando.
Fernando and \lquote Q\rquote and Thuy gave me Enter The matrix, much to Mike\rquote s chagrin. Thanks guys!
Saw X-Men2. Highly suggest making the effort. Ian McKellan rocks. His escape makes the whole movie. I won\rquote t ruin it \endash so see it.

Sunday
Tested the Matrix Game. Seems pretty cool. Great sound!
Biked to Stow Lake instead of going to the gym. Fed Ducks. Saw 18 catfish, 11 turtles, 9 ducks, 1 duckling and a gopher. Mike tried to catch a catfish with a stick.
Took Mike home to dry him off after fish pulls him into lake.

(Well, okay that last one didn\rquote t happen.)

*************************** Update 4:08 pm ****************
As Jordan correctly points out, I was had. I'm usually pretty good about these things, but this one got past me- even though the link clearly says Weekly World News in the upper right hand corner. (In my defense, I never look in those areas as it's usually advertisements).

See what happens when media sites contain both news AND entertainment? See? What happens? See?

(Sigh)

************Original Post************************************

Okay, the world gets odder and odder. Are we ready for Fruit Meat? Or is it Meat Fruit? Freat?

Anyway, one of those groups of oh-so-clever mad scientist types have genetically engineered a grapefruit tree to grow ....beef. I am not making this up. (From Yahoo, where I get all My Meat Tree News).

Fruit from the new Meat Trees, developed by British scientists using gene-splicing technology, closely resembles ordinary grapefruit. But when you peel the large fruit open, inside is fresh beef.

It allegedly tastes the same as beef \endash but does it have fat? Can you make a smoothie out of it? What will we do with all the cows we eat now? These questions still linger, but I\rquote m sure they\rquote ll manage to answer them.

After all, Beef is what\rquote s for dinner.

I'm posting this today because tomorrow I'll be too sad to do it. No! I refuse to be sad. true, I'm much closer to death now, but I'm also a year Smarter! Wiser! Experienced! Heavier! Slower! Less able to remember my name...

Sorry - that seemed to get away from me for a moment. The important thing for me to focus on is that I went to the doctor's yesterday for my yearly physical and she said I was too young for a prostate exam. (No, I didn't ASK for one - she just offered that information. Yes, my doctor is a she.) Of course, she also said things like 'For your age' and ' Middle aged men'. Hmmmm......

Anyway - here's something to chew on. I'm off to find a pink frosting cake and a bottle of Jack Daniels. See you when I Wake.

Things I am older than.

The Moon Landing
The Charles River Bridge
Neil Patrick Harris
Dell Computer
My Sister and My Brother.
Watergate

Thing which are older than me.

Golden Gate Bridge
My \lquote Older\rquote Sister
The Earth
France
Yukichi Chuganji of Ogori, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan
The Twinkie
Albert Einstein
TV Dinners

Feel free to suggest others. :)

....for politicians in favor of health care for the needy and against tax cuts for the wealthy.

This is politically related, but not really political. It's odd. It's something you might expect to hear happening over in Britain, where odd political games are commonplace.

The Republican majority in Texas is trying to ram through a re-districting plan which would cost democrats congressional seats. The Democrats, in a brave and decisive move, ran away. Seriously. (Via CNN ). The Texas House now lacks quorum, and no business can be conducted - which , of course, includes the redistricting. So, the House voted to sent the Texas Rangers looking for them - and the governor asked several states for permission to let the Texas Rangers ARREST them.

Unfortunately for them, apparently the people they need to help in the other states are Dems, who are politely refusing to get involved. So the 53 outlaw Dems are hanging out in Oklahoma, surrounded by Texas Rangers, who can't arrest them.

Only in America.

Hey Mary. It's you're birthday. (Well, in a few days. Happy B-Day.)

In the net-realms, you couldn't spend better time than the 5 minutes or so it takes to peruse the Arcata Eye Police Log.

This weeks Entry, named 'Captain Tantrum and the greenshirts' includes this gem:

3:42 a.m. A metaphor for human existence was spotted in the 1800 block of Q Street, but police couldn't find the enfeebled, near-moribund personage seen crawling in the roadway, attempting unsuccessfully to rise.

Have you ever had an expression that you used when you were a kid, but haven\rquote t used in, say, 20 years slam back into your skull with such ferocity, it almost makes you \lquote take a digger\rquote ? That was mine. \lquote Take a digger\rquote . We used to use it all the time \endash it meant, basically, fall off your \\. On Monday morning at school, when the one kid would come in with road rash all up his arms or face \endash we all knew. He had recently \lquote takin a digger\rquote .

I was biking downhill a little bit ago, on a windy dirt path, and had to navigate around a tree on one side, and a steep hilly incline on the other. Rather than, sensibly, walking my bike \endash I tried to ride through it, and my back tire slide a little down the incline. I wobbled for a second, then righted myself and continued on.

That\rquote s when it hit me. I had almost taken a digger. I was instantly transported back to grade school \endash handing out with the other \lquote geeks\rquote at lunch at BeeBee Jr. High school, eating lunch on those cheap, white picnic tables. We never worried, back then, about any consequences to crazy things we did. We used to jump our bikes off of crazy jumps, climb the backstop fences at baseball parks, leap from roof to roof of old storage buildings, whose roofs had partially collapsed. We were too busy with the thrill of doing to worry about what might happen.

So, I biked down the path a little faster.

And I didn\rquote t \lquote Take a digger\rquote .

Okay. I've been busy, hence no action on the boards. Partially due to a physics exam I'm not ready for. Partially because I've been Flash Geeking. So, here's what I've been doing.

I decided against the 'cartoon' site design I was working on. Yea, I know, I'm horribly indecisive. So I started to work on version 4 of my flash site. I'm up to about 400 lines of code. Here's an early (60% done) peek. For anyone who knows flash, all of the content is dynamically generated and there is only 1 frame. The movies are the only things which work, as I'm still working out my menu navigation (Though if you click the 'menu' button, a new menu will appear to give you an idea of what it'll be like). The delay at the beginning is Flash talking to perl - There'll be a pre-loader screen to amuse distract you during it.

When it's done, the plan is that the movies and text info will appear in random spots each time. If you reload it a few times, you'll see that the menu items already are randomly placed, but the movie always will show in the top corner for right now.

Also, I know the movie is too big for the grid right now. I'm going to fix them and move the pre-loaders from the clips themselves into the main document.

Let's see, other news.

The game I have been waiting for 2 years for (Call of Cthulhu), has good and bad news. The creators found a publisher who pushed it back till early 2004. Oh well, hopefully I'll have a new machine by then.

Finally, a big 'Hi' to Patty C., who I watched VIA her webcam for almost 20 minutes last night - hoping she would come into her chat room. Alas, she never did.

I puleld together 3 more videos from Vietnam this weekend. I realized, that in a couple of months, it'll be a year since the trip. I actually miss the country - I hope I can go back someday.

Anyway, you can either use the remote on my goof-site (For the remote, you want Temple, Tomb, and HoiAnn) or you can look at each one as a stand alone by clicking the titles below.

Tomb
This is video from the tomb of Khai Dinh (no relation). We actually went to several different tombs - this is just one of them. The stone soldiers in the courtyard was cool.

Temple
This is a clip of the monks performing a ceremony at the temple outside of Hue. The chanting is actually them (which is why the sounds is so bad - I was filming from a distance). The kids were cute.

Hoi Ann
This was a beautiful sea-side town we stopped at (the last place we visited). The town actually holds a celebration, where it reverts back to what it was like many years ago - with costumes and no electricity, ect. They weren't doing it when we were there, but you could see how charming it would be. This is also where Mike and I had our suits made (Hoi Ann is famous for sewing).