disjoint thoughts

I love xkcd. This geeky comic almost never fails to bring a smile to my face. But every now and then the comic is so abstract and cryptic that I have no clue what they’re talking about. This strip in particular had me scratching my head until i found this post by Jenner on the xkcd forums:

Examples of Bel-air vs Reverse Bel-air is as so:

Bel-air:
I ate some pretty bad food at this really dingy diner last night and I think I may have gotten food poisoning. I’ve been up all night with a stomach ache and lets say nothing about what’s been going on below that. I just don’t understand /b/, what should I do? I mean, it wasn’t like I ate that much of it. I just got in one little fight and my mom got scared and said you’re moving in with your auntie and uncle in Bel-air.

Reverse Bel-air:
Now this is a story all about how my life got flip-turned upside down and I’d like to take a minute just sit right there I’ll tell you how I got arrested for soliciting a minor while just waiting for my nephew to get out of elementary school with my stereo blaring. It’s tragic really, serve and protect my butt.

As you can see, the Bel-air melds the song into the end of the conversation, and you suddenly realize they’re singing Fresh Prince. Whereas the reverse starts with Fresh Prince and then merges in the relevant conversation.

Let’s say you have an awesome parking spot. Maybe not as cool as the parking spots we have at OpenRain, but a good one nonetheless.

What do you do if someone else jacks your spot? Leave them a nice, passive aggressive, note for them:

Worked for me!

Are you wanting to develop rock hard abs? Is the lack of a six pack impeding on your ability to attract members of the opposite sex? Is most exercise you get on a daily bases coming from your Wii? If you’ve answered “YES!” to any of these questions, the Wii Sports Ab Workout might be your road to success.

Follow these easy steps to get started with the Wii Sports Ab Workout:

Step #1: Load up Wii Sports and start a round of boxing.
Step #2: Hold the Wiimote with the toes on your right foot (If you cannot hold the Wiimote between your toes, you may consider attaching them to your feet, or a pair of sandals, using medical tape).
Step #3: Hold the Nunchuck with the toes on your left foot.
Step #4: Lay on the floor.
Step #5: BOX!

Note: you cannot use your arms/elbows to prop yourself up! It will require the use of your abs if you want to watch the screen.

For an extra bonus, play with a friend! The shear hilarity of the experience will make surely make you laugh until tears roll down your cheeks and thus increase the burn to your abdomen even further!

Savoeun and I went climbing out at Sven Slab on Sunday and had a little unexpected adventure. The first route we hopped on was a lovely crack called One for the Road. I was half way up the first pitch, and thoroughly enjoying myself, when I started to get attacked by bees. I soon realized that the ledge at the top of the first was the home for a hive of killer bees. Bummer. Sav and I managed to retrieve all our gear, but I ended up getting stung in the face three times! So what’s it like getting stung in the face by killer bees?

It sucks. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s pretty uncomfortable. It’s a little comical too. I can’t smile or laugh and keep my eyes open at the same time!

The past two weekend I’ve spent climbing in Red Rocks, Nevada. In these four short days I’ve climbed some of the most amazing, long, and fun routes of my climbing career. Of particular note is a route called Community Pillar. Now this climb might not be your typical “classic” route, but it was HILARIOUS. The amount of squeezing through improbable holes and up tight chimneys you do is mind blowing. And watching people attempt to go through holes they are fairly certain will get them stuck is entertainment like nothing else. Here’s a video I made for my climbing partner Erin who couldn’t join me because she’s in Nova Scotia:

You can check out the photos I took from both weekends here, and here.

Want a CHEAP ipod touch case? Too lazy to order a real case online? Are you just plain crazy? Well follow these easy steps to create a great ghetto ipod touch case…

1. Buy a pack of Dentyne ice gum.
2. Chew the gum, all of it.

3. Remove plastic.
4. Slide ipod into your brand new Dentyne ice iPod Touch case.

5. (OPTIONAL) Cut hole into case so you can control music without removing touch from its case.

6. …
7. Profit?

Pretty sweet case, huh? Huh? I rate it a solid 2 out of 10.

Sunday before last I spent an afternoon bouldering and sport climbing over at the Mine Area of Queen Creek. Over the past few months RCC has begun to restrict access to some of the areas of Queen Creek they own. Here’s a little update on the situation:

The road before the old parking area now has keep out signs…

… and the old parking area itself now has a fence with razor wire, yikes!

It’s not all bad news though. They’ve created a new parking area next to the road. There’s a new trail that someone has cleared from there, up the wash, and to the old trail.

It seems like Resolution Copper Company wants people to stop climbing in the Mine area sooner rather than later. On Saturday Gina and I headed out to Apache Leap, only to find the parking pullout for the Mine Area blocked off by two huge cement barriers. On the other side of the barriers stood a sign stating “CAUTION BLASTING IN PROCESS”…

Before that, on either side of the paved road were private property signs as well:

It appears that this is the beginning of the end for the Mine area.

Yes, I did finally get my ipod, after a week of watching other people who didn’t pre-order play with theirs. I’m not bitter though. One thing I’ve noticed is that the iPhone version of Safari and the iTouch version are slightly different, and report themselves as being a different client. Take a look at these logs:

192.168.1.119 - - [24/Sep/2007:15:56:49 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1296 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3A100a Safari/419.3"

192.168.1.115 - - [24/Sep/2007:15:56:53 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1296 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C28 Safari/419.3"

This sucks. Especially when people like google announce that they’ve optimized google calendar for the iphone, but it doesn’t work on the ipod.

Within hours of Steve Job’s keynote announcing the iPod Touch I put in my pre-order for one. I’ve been waiting months for a widescreen iPod. Ever since my video iPod (or iPod classic as they’re called now) was stolen, I’ve been waiting for a new version of the iPod before going out and purchasing one. There’s some part of me that hates purchasing the exact same piece of technology that I already owned. Even though I loved my old iPod, I couldn’t bring myself to put up the money for the exact same thing. I wanted something better, cooler, sexier.

So when the Touch was announced, I knew immediately that I was going to buy it. I pre-ordered it because I assumed that would be the fastest way to get one. If I had known that people walking into Best Buys and Apple stores last week were going to be able to buy them off the shelf before mine even ships, then I would have held off and got one from the store. To add insult to injury, the status of my order is “Prepared for Shipment”. This status is some state where I cannot change or cancel my order and am left to do nothing but wait.

Thanks Apple! This is the first and last time I use the apple online store to buy anything.