will someone please buy a wii?

i want to play so bad!

i'll be your new best friend...

chinese new year dinners

as is customary during chinese new year, i got to meet up with family. i had dinners on new year's eve and on the first. both dinners were fairly small affairs, 4 or 5 people in all. the nice thing about a smaller dinner is that everyone can talk to all of the other people. the only caveat is that everyone needs to speak the same language--which apparently my family does not. so both of my chinese new year dinner conversations ended up as a mishmash of cantonese, shanghainese, mandarin, and english. which probably means that i should work on my cantonese.

political prognostications

i've been playing the stocks on the WSX (washington stock exchange) and would have made a ton of (fake) money if their contracts were actually evaluated correctly. the securities and exchange commission should really take a good look at their operation. anyway, i've decided to come up with a few political predictions of my own. november 2008 is still a long ways away, and a lot of things can happen between now and then.

nevertheless, here are my predictions:

hillary clinton wins the democractic primaries, defeating john edwards, who will come in second. barack obama is a distant third or worse and never a serious contender; the only question being whether he will have his own version of the "i have a scream" speech ala howard dean.

rudy giuliani wins the republican bid, defeating john mccain, who comes in second. giuliani goes on to smile a lot, kiss babies, and then wins the presidency.

all those people wearing "i <3 ny" shirts can't be wrong, right? but then again, hillary is also "from" ny. interestingly, i know of at least one person who would vote for hillary if her administration were known to be a puppet regime with our old pal billy j pulling the strings from behind the scenes.

there is still plenty of time for my predictions to look stupid.

am i a snoot?

i have been told that if you want to live in cow hollow or the marina, you're a snoot.

just what is a guy to do then? apparently he should to move to the city and be around other snooty people so that no one notices the difference.

crazy bikers

if you hang around bikers at all, you will quickly catch on to what they like to talk about. very often you will hear about topics such as their bike's weight, or how dumb people drive to the gym to ride a stationary bike. one particularly prevalent topic is how crazy and inconsiderate automobile drivers are while they are on the road.

personally, i've seen these crazy automobile drivers from time to time, but i hardly feel that these operators are limited to the motorized vehicle domain. for example, i have often seen bikers on the wrong side of the road while biking at night without a front headlight (illegal where i live). now, i can see that someone might not want to spend the money on a headlight and thus risk getting a ticket for a short night ride, but why would you ride on the wrong side of the road?

what happens if someone biking on the wrong side of the road meets a car? if the biker is travelling at 15mph while the car is travelling at 35mph and they have a head on collision, that's effectively hitting the car at 50mph; compare that to a 20mph collision if the biker and car are travelling in the same direction. more importantly is the fact that car drivers have much more time to see and react to it bikers on the same side of the road. it is particularly difficult for drivers who are turning to see bikes on wrong side of the road.

so, a quick review:
dumb biker + car = 50mph crash = scrambled biker.
smart biker + car = 20mph crash = more like... biker over easy, but we all know the yolk doesn't always make it through unscathed. but the main point is that smart bikers are much more visible and less likely to get cracked and thrown into the frying pan in the first place.

naked in the locker room

i'm not a huge fan of seeing other guys naked-especially when it's a bunch of engineers in the locker room in the gym at work. what makes the matter particularly irksome is the fact that the company has generously provided a dressing stall with each shower so that there is very little reason for people to walk around the locker room sans clothing. and that is why i felt rather annoyed when i saw one guy in his birthday suit drying himself off as he blocked the locker hallway. after carefully stepping around him and squeezing through the little room left in the hallway i went about my locker room business. after several minutes of weighing myself, using the facilities and washing my hands, i returned to the locker area to see that the same guy was still naked! did this guy have nothing better to do than hang around the locker room and walk around naked? i understand that in the process of changing, there tends to be instances where one may be completely exposed. however, there is little reason for these occasions to exceed but mere moments and there is certainly no reason to use these occasions to block major thoroughfares in the locker room. the exception being of course, for young women. who are busy snapping each others' bottoms with towels.