Silver Case

I’ve been buying a lot of (mostly) small, vintage bicycle parts on eBay.

Recently the thumbnail image viewing and mouseover-zoom comprehensively stopped working.  Would just show me “javascript:;” on the bottom status bar, but nothing would happen. This was wedged for everything — firefox, safari, and chrome, all up-to-date on an up-to-date osx.

Was driving me nuts and didn’t heal itself, even after trying from different internet sources.

This seems to be a common problem.   Most of their answers didn’t help. Ad Blockers and so on.

What I found worked for me:  preferences: privacy: clear history.  And I wiped out all the history.  Now everything works on firefox again.

Same thing worked on chrome.  

wheee

Luke attended his Japanese friend Takumi’s birthday. All the kids want to play and get their treats.

Takumi’s mom gave each kid a handmade gift bag built from newspaper. All the moms were duly impressed. I don’t think it made the slightest impression on the kids though. Ingrates.

Was pulling a wagon-load of kids around the park with my BMX today.  Crashed them into some playground equipment (Luke was the victim — was screaming bloody murder about his leg).  I don’t know what I did at the same time, but all I know now is that my toe is getting bigger and bigger and more and more purple.  Damn.  As long as I don’t wear shoes or walk, it’s fine.

This is an historic moment I suppose — I almost made it to age forty without breaking a bone! 

The WordPress official app is a buggy piece of crap. So am trying out an (expensive) app called blogpress.

Gratuitous picture of my breakfast to test the picture function. Think it sticks the photo on my Flickr account.

Update:  there is no control over categorization from inside BlogPress it seems.

Location:Thomson Rd,,Singapore

Renold Yip just informed me that he’s in the middle of building the custom front-rack for the custom tandem I ordered for Luke and I from Da Vinci.  Hopefully it all arrives about the time Luke’s school holidays start. If not sooner.

The fork blades of the tandem are monstrous!

Haven’t messed with this site in ages.  Just logged back in to find spam-encrusted comments and an out-of-date wordpress install that took some ssh shell battering to get running again. This won’t help my Klout Score.

Anyway, what’s been going on ?

• An almost-seven year old son
• Work
• Building bikes

Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s keeping me busy.

2011 has been scandalously busy, with work and projects both secret and non-secret.

One project I’ve been grinding on is my Japanese.  I’ve earned my third badge now, recently, after completing my “Adjectival Expressions 95 Within 10 Minutes” on 22April.  Wheee

Singapore Airlines whacked fares to Japan recently.  We scored three tickets for $398each, so we’ll be going up on 15May and staying through Saturday.  Got a decent rate at the Peninsula.  We’re all set.   It’s going to be great for me, because I’ll get a lot of extra real-world Jap practice, I’ll get to work daily with Kitani Sensei face-to-face, rather than Skype, and then coincidentally I’ll be their for the Tokyo Lingual “school barbecue” at a koen near Shinjuku.   Will be nice to get out of Singapore for a few days.

Spent most of the hot afternoon doing back-dated paperwork.  This evening I decided to re-remember my katakana.  It always drives me nuts to not read it well when I am in Japan (lots of signage is in it).  It only took me about an hour with flashcards to memorize it (there are how many? 45?). It seems quite quick, so I guess some of the neurons I taught long ago didn’t fully-forget after-all.  Sort of like when I use morse code, it somehow comes back through the muck in my head.

I also bought #quakebook for Ling’s Kindle.  (So should everyone else!)

But now we’re starting to fear she’s becoming a Monkey Freak.

that monkeys are nasty little buggers

…who is ‘Larry from France‘?

we have reason to believe he may have a nom de guerre, “French Laurence”

Saw this demented crane along the CTE expressway last week.  They’re widening the expressway, and this location is right around a canal.  So I reckon they’re using this to set up a bridge portion of the extension.

I think I realized why this crane is so demented.  Not because the pieces it’s lifting are absurdly heavy (although they probably are), but because the crane has to massively cantilever out over the canal.

When I took Luke to school today, BBC was on the radio.  He asked if I could turn it off “and play music instead. Rock music.”

Sure, ok, so I switched to my iPod.

Just so happened that the first song up was Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused.”  Oh perfect, I though,  just what he asked for.

After a minute, “Dad, can you change this to rock music, not this?”  Led Zeppelin isn’t rock music anymore?

So I flipped ahead randomly, through Barry White (no),  McKoy Turner (definitely No), and others until I landed on Stevie Ray Vaughn song (“Tightrope”).

“Yes!” announced Luke.  That was proper rock music.

So what does this mean?  Led Zepplin is to Luke as Buddy Holly is to me???

I had more ties than losses or wins.  But the game is so boring that I don’t feel like playing more to make the results more statistically solid.  So maybe the computer has a 1-2-3-4% edge.  zzzzzz  We’re not playing for money, and the game isn’t entertaining, so not much for me to do here.

Piece of shit White Supremacist shot.

Eulogies included:

“He was the kind of guy who could and did get along with everyone,” said Bill Roper, head of Arkansas-based White Revolution.

I’m terrible with faces and, especially, names.  So I am very surprised that I scored slightly above average on the (slightly creepy) Cambridge Face Memory Test.

These are cool tools, but “operator” is  a bayesian wanker token.  It’s right up there with “tactical”  and “homeland.”

Watching the space shuttle from a commercial airliner gives an interesting sense of perspective of the height of the atmosphere.

Listen with audio off, unless you want to hear the typical tedious North American airline passenger commentary-drivel.

We added a new member to the growing menagerie of wild creatures that have visited our home.

Ten minutes from home, I got a call from Ling, “hey we have an owl in the bathroom.”

“huh?” I asked.

“Yeah, there’s an owl in the bathroom.”

“Well how the hell did it get in there?”   I asked, stupidly.  I’m sure it got in there the same way the bats and other creatures have before.

I told her to turn off the lights and close the door and I’d get home.

So I checked it out, sure enough, there’s a pretty decent sized owl sitting on my laundry basket in the bathroom!

So my idea was to catch it like a bird,  toss a sheet on it, or use sheets to corral it till its best option was to fly out the window (Our windows are those awkward push out windows that aren’t very big. I’ve no idea why it came in in the first place.

So as I was trying to carefully  stalk and corral it, while holding the sheet up, it landed on the bathroom sink.  Our maid, Emily (the country girl), simply walked over and picked he/she up!  It didn’t even put up any fight.  It just looked around a bit (it didn’t rotate its head 180d). We were all amazed.  We grabbed these photos, then Country Girl took it to the big bedroom window and it soared right out.  Everyone was impressed with the owl and Emily!

I must say, a damn cool bird.

My PhD biologist friend in Singapore thinks it was a barn owl.  Here are the owls found in Singapore.

PORTLAND — Safeway officials say they have proof that a local couple stole more than $5 million in merchandise from stores in the Portland Metro area over the past several years.

Ok, wow, that’s a lot of stuff to steal, isn’t it?

Evans told police that the couple stole mostly common items like shampoos, razors, Rogaine, teeth whiteners, conditioners to batteries, DVDs and CDs, according to the affidavit, which also said that Remington stole DVDs on 22 different dates since November.

Hmm. $5mn worth of shampoo?  Ummm, is this believable?  Normally the expensive stuff is behind a counter, or chained up, or something.

Safeway security officer Trent Drucker estimates that Remington stole $400,000 a year in merchandise over several years, totaling $5 million over the span of thefts.

“Trent Drucker” — sounds like a Simpson character.  But gee, there is a lot of extrapolation going on with these figures.  I am guessing Trent is pulling numbers out of his druck-hole.

Imagine they’re stealing expensive things only, so the average price is 50$.  That means they have to steal 100,000 items over several (3) years. That’s 33,000 items per year.  Imagine there are 10 stores on their looting circuit.  That’s 3,300 fifty-dollar items from ten stores for 3 years.  Imagine they’re very diligent, and steal 300 days per year, that’s: one hundred each of fifty-dollar items on 300 days a year at ten different stores for 3 years. And actually, it’s not, that would only net you $4,500,000.

Or go at it a different way, if anything like this volume of looting was going on for “several” years, why does “Security Officer Drucker” still have a job?!

Anyway, these remarks are clearly absurd.  And since they’re absurd, you figure they’re off by a order of magnitude anyway, so $500,000 over three years.  That still sounds astonishingly big.   Thus I bet the real figure is closer to half that:  $250,000.

Anyway, it probably doesn’t even matter, as a lawyer will get them acquitted.

On Nov. 19, Safeway security officials placed a tracking device on a van driven by the couple. Whenever the van was driven to a Safeway, surveillance videos were carefully scrutinized.

How the hell is that ever going to fly?  The signs in the parking lot onlys says that the store has no liability for damage.  If you get banged by a shopping cart, it’s your own problem.  I’ve not been to Safeway in a while, but I don’t think they also include, “parking here subjects you to warrantless, private,  wireless bug tracking.”

Anway, what a low story.  Morons chasing dirtballs. Neat.

I wonder if Security Officer Drucker held a boastful press conference where they showed all the booty they had recovered… $5mn dollars worth of purloined spam, rogaine, and energizer D-cells?

My orange pep pills didn’t work, so it’s another cowboy movie tonight:  3:10 to Yuma.    At least it’s started off a lot better — the 1870′s equivalent of the opening scene from Heat.  The fey cowboy has sure got some cool leather ensembles.

Chosun reports

Speculation is mounting over the identity of a woman who was spotted with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s second son Jong-chol at an Eric Clapton concert in Singapore on Monday.

She sat next to Jong-chol (30) during the concert, smiling and chatting with him, snapping photos and touching his arm in a way that suggests a close relationship.

Some believe the woman’s chubby features suggest she is his younger sister Yeo-jong (24).

Yeo-jong is the daughter of Ko Yong-hui, who died in 2004, Kim Jong-il’s third wife and also the mother of Jong-chol and Jong-un, the heir presumptive. But one South Korean intelligence official said the woman appeared to be Jong-chol’s wife.

A North Korean source said Yeo-jong was chubby as a child, but not any more.