blueZhift Blog

About 6 years ago, I posted here about a blue haired Asian woman I had the good fortune to see when I was out and about. Since that time a couple of very likely spam comments have appeared about the virtues of Asian women. I’m probably goig to delete those comments, since they are, of course, just spam.  But before I do that, I just wanted to note that a few days ago, here 6 years later, I had the pleasure of seeing a gorgeous black woman who had wonderful blue highlights in her bangs!

It’s not so unusual now to see interesting hair colors, though blue and pink are still a little rare. In any case ladies, keep up the good work! ~_^

Moving can be tough, but I wasn’t really expecting all of the emotions. Sometimes you just gotta let it all out. That’s where this video came from.

Ooooh, I’m so angry right now! I needed to buy moving boxes so I figured, okay, I’ll go to my neighborhood Ace Hardware store. Ya know, support community businesses and save some gasoline, so green, right? I get there, and 20 small boxes cost $75! I buy the boxes anyway because I’m there with kids and calling my wife on the phone to confirm the $0.67 per box she paid proved fruitless as she did not remember what she paid. She sent a text later about it, but by then it was too late.

I simply couldn’t believe that Ace in competition with Home Depot would be charging so much more for boxes. Just shows what I know. Being irritated and knowing I’d need more boxes, I bit the bullet and drove to Home Depot and confirmed that Ace Hardware was indeed charging astronomically high prices for moving boxes. Yes, I got totally raped by Ace Hardware on those boxes.

I don’t have time to go back to Ace and complain or try to get a refund, but they certainly won’t be getting any business from me again if I have a choice. Next time I hear a sob story about how Home Depot is driving small hardware stores out of business, you’ll only hear laughs from me. Raping your customers is generally a bad business strategy.

Update: Ok, so maybe Ace is not so bad after all. Over the course of the weekend, I discovered that pretty much everyone except Home Depot sells moving boxes for the same relatively high rate! The Home Depot boxes got the job done for me, but I did note that they were a little softer than the more costly ones, meaning that you’re only getting one move outta these guys. The Home Depot boxes were made of 100% recycled paper though, which might explain the softness. Still, I’d go with those cheaper ones every time. I don’t know how anyone plans to compete with Home Depot with such a wide price disparity.

Whoa! It’s been forever since I updated this blog! I went to Ohayocon 2010 and had a great time and have had a bunch of stuff going on since then. Now I’m gearing up for Anime Central and need to finish the AMV I put off for Ohayocon. And, of course, I’ve got costumes to make and/or tweak. Got one request for Domo-kun that I’ve gotta plan.

So it’s been a rough ride, but that just reminds me that I’m still very much alive!

In the wake of the failed Christmas day bombing attempt by a Nigerian man, there has been a renewed called for the expanded use of full body scanners at international airports. The Dutch have already announced they will use these scanners for all U.S. bound flights. And Nigerian officials have made a similar announcement. These millimeter-wave and backscatter X-ray scanners essentially strip away clothing to reveal things that may be hidden underneath. Privacy advocates have likened their use to virtual strip searching and have strongly resisted their deployment in the United States.

I think it’s high time for Americans to get over their problems with the nude human body. Not a single one of us came into this world with a stitch of clothing on. Do I really need to care that some TSA staffer I don’t know will see me naked in some scanner? No I don’t! Department store changing rooms have been monitored for years to prevent the far less than fatal crime of shoplifting.

There’s nothing shameful or offensive about the naked body. But I do take offense at the twisted, charred, and often naked, corpses in the aftermath of a successful airliner bombing.

I know I probably should address this to Yahoo! directly, and I probably will once I figure out how. But for now I just wanted to register my disapproval of the new Yahoo! home page. It’s really not all bad, but those left side panel mouse over pop up/slide out boxes are the most annoying web page feature I’ve seen in a long time!

Every time I hit the Yahoo page, I invariably get the annoying pop up/slide out box on my way to something else. Mouse over actions beyond simple tool tips are IMHO, a bad idea. People will always trigger these without wanting to and sooner or later they start to stay away from your pages. As it is now, I dread visiting Yahoo because of this annoyance.

It suddenly occurred to me this morning that it is totally absurd for me to be parenting someone else while having so many unresolved issues of my own. Nevertheless, I suspect that is the situation with most parents… No wonder the birthrate is dropping more technologically advanced parts of the world.

Oh well, call me Captain Obvious.

I still can’t get over the feeling that time is running out. Of course, that’s probably because it’s true. There’s only a finite amount of time left in my sojourn on Earth and I have no idea just how much of it is left. I suspect that most people just ignore this and carry on, but I just keep having these feelings that I need to try new stuff before I run out of time.

Even though I believe that there is more than this life and that God has a purpose for all of this, I still want new experiences in the here and now. Is that bad? I’d like to think that this is all preparation for whatever role I may have in the next life. But I have no proof of that, and it seems likely that’s it’s all my own depraved thrill seeking.

Oh well, none of that changes the fact that the sands in my hour glass are running out. I don’t think my faith has been shaken, I just want to understand all of these feelings better.

Now with Youmacon 2009 in the past, life is returning to what passes for normal for me. This last week I’ve been wrestling with SAS at work. It’s definitely different from the programming languages I’ve used in the past, but I should have it down pretty soon. It’s just maddening to not be on top of things like this.

At home I’m having a lot of geeky fun transitioning from Windows XP to Mac OS X Snow Leopard on my new Mac, Mikuru. I use a Mac at work, so I’m very familiar with the platform, but at home I’ve been using Windows on home built PCs for the last 10 years or so. As a result I have a lot of development stuff that I need to transition. I’ve decided to do this by running Windows 7 in VMWare Fusion 3 on my Mac. If performance in the VM is acceptable, I’ll be able to avoid having to use Boot Camp.

Yesterday I finally got wireless working on my daughter’s old Windows XP laptop which I’ve converted to Ubuntu Linux. It’s an ancient Dell Inspiron B120 with 512MB RAM that even after a clean install runs XP horribly slow to say nothing of after the kids have managed to load it up with malware. I finally gave up that battle and put Ubuntu 9.04 on it. But wireless is usually tricky on Linux. In this case installing the b43-fwcutter package did the trick. Then I upgraded to 9.10 without any trouble. The new Ubuntu machine, dubbed Yoshi, is mostly dedicated to homework assignments and cannot run Roblox, which is a good thing in this case!

And I’m finally catching up on a lot of manga and anime that’s been piling up. There were a lot of new releases over the last two weeks that I’m having a great time with. I just finished Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project volume 2 yesterday. The Shinji and Kaworu shonen ai plotline is very funny and I found myself loling on numerous occasions. At the behest of my youngest son, we’re finally going to finish watching Kaleido Star, so we capped off the evening’s family viewing with volume 4 of the DVD set.

Well, I’ve got manga to read, so I’ll be finishing this up now. It’s going to be an interesting month I think.(^_^)

This isn’t a continuing series, just some random thoughts from an observer. An observer I say because I’ve never been a social butterfly. I’ve always thought of myself as more of an observer, but over the years I learned to play my part and function reasonable well in social situations. I like to joke that I’m just a collection of heuristic algorithms!

Anyway, even in the best of times, breakups and other drama reek havoc over one’s social network of friends and acquaintances. But now, social networking sites like Facebook have the effect of magnifying this in  a way not seen since people started accidentally clicking reply to all on sensitive email messages. At least with Reply to All, things are going out over email to a relatively static and known list of recipients. But with sites like Facebook, not only is the list dynamic, there’s really no way to know who is now privy to your status. And triple damage bonus points come if/when it leaks to the general web and is indexed by search engines like Google. From that point the whole world, including past, present, and future employers may have access to info about your social life.

None of this is really new. But it really hurts when you see someone you care about driven off of the network in part because of this. Well that’s all I have for now, just had to let that out. I don’t know of any real solution. I think that social interactions will just have to renormalize, which like resetting the world economy, is going to take a long time.