wangarific

So I grew up thinking I wasn’t allergic to anything and was pretty happy about that until I started college. Then I quickly found out I, like a lot of Asian people, was lactose intolerant (I just fart alot and it’s funny), allergic to walnuts or chestnuts or chinnuts or something, and just last week I discovered I was allergic to cats.

Martha and I had gone over her co-worker’s house to see a pair of cats we were considering adopting. The moment I walked in my nose started getting stuffed, my throat was tickled, but I felt otherwise alright. We stayed a little while, had some pizza and hung out, and I was generally alright with that. Then I touched my eye for some reason and it just got crazy itchy. When we left, all those symptoms subsided… turns out I’m allergic to cats.

This makes sense though, when I used to visit Martha and she had her cat April, who has since passed away, I had the same symptoms. Back then it was springtime in Virginia so I chalked it up to allergies. The allergies aren’t bad, I didn’t notice them when I used to play Xbox 360 over at pmoa’s and he has a stupid cat, but I think living with one (or two) is not possible anymore.

That does mean I can get a bulldog or a shar pei.

Until a few days ago, when Swedish authorities raided the hosting services of The Pirate Bay and shut that operation down, I had no idea what The Pirate Bay even was. I’d been using isohunt for all my torrent searching needs and had no idea TPB was so much better and so much bigger. I wonder how many people learned of TPB because of this raid who otherwise would never have found it? Unintended consequences…

TPB was down a few days but now they’re back… mirror in Holland, Russia, Ukraine, and another EU nation.

Hahahahaha… when will people learn? You can’t stop this stuff.

As if the stereotype of the fat cop with a mouthful of donuts chasing a perp isn’t already deeply ingrained in American culture… now cops in Chicago are getting segways. For half a million you can get a hundred segways, with parts, and it seems like the trend is growing since the article claims that cops are a key market for the scooter.

Honestly, I think it’s a pretty good idea because it does let the police stand taller and cover more ground but I think it’d be funny to see a police officer on something I usually associate with nerds, i.e. myself.

Good article on how to create a USB key that will help you obfuscate/scramble/bojangle your online activity.

GovTrack.us basically takes all the information from THOMAS, the official site from the Library of Congress that tracks legislation, and puts it in a nice box with a pretty bow on it. Joshua Tauberer, the site’s creator, also pulls in a ton of other information from other sites and basically provides what I think is the best look into the activities of Congress. You can search bills by keyword, you can track voting records, etc. in a very to use interface.

Curious about the status of the Fair Tax Act of 2005? (H.R. 25) It’s in committee and looks like it’ll die in committee. It was introduced 1/4/05 and the last time anything ticked with this bomb was November 1st of last year… the Senate version is worse off, it was mentioned 1/24/05 and then referred to the Committee on Finance.

Peruse the site, it’s great.

The fact that someone can bat for nine-and-a-half hours probably means the game is a lot longer than it really needs to be.

Reuters India

California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer lambasted President Bush and VP Dick Cheney today for the rise in gasoline prices, then jumped in a 18mpg Chrysler LHS to go to her Senate off a block away. New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer took the one block ride in a Hyundai Elantra.

What a joke.

Peter Carlino is brilliant. He wants to open a barbershop where the barbers would be lingerie-clad girls. It gets a little better. When you schedule an appointment with one of the lovely ladies, you can also pick what they’ll wear when they cut your hair. Some folks, like Mary-Francis Labrecque in the article, aren’t happy but there isn’t any nudity and women are allowed to do whatever they want… it’s the new millennium for crying out loud.

Peter Carlino is brilliant.

Listen media moghuls, turn off registration requirements for your sites. This is what happens… I see a headline on Google Desktop that interests me, I click on it to read it. If I see a “registration required” for a FREE news article, I will close the window and not register. If I am at all interested, I will not register, I will go to Bug Me Not and pull a bogus login credential so I can read the story. Maybe I will use my Google Toolbar, fill in some bogus information, and then hit AutoFill just so I can get to the story. I will never give you my information and create an account.

Newspapers are losing readers to online content. The last thing you want to do is be inhibiting pageviews just so you can “track” my interests and do nothing with it. You need those impressions so you can sell advertising, I don’t need to read the news from your site because I can get it somewhere else if I really wanted to. CNN and ESPN don’t require me to register.

Get a clue.

I have a blog about grilling, a blog about money, but not one about all the cool things I find and all the things I want to comment about. So… this will be for that. For the etcetera.