I bought this from Amazon. I know it’s silly, but since the Transformers movie’s coming out soon, it got me thinking about Transformers. A while back, I’d seen a really cool-looking “new” Transformer – an Impreza that looked like it was actually really neat – a nice looking car, and a cool looking robot, to boot.

Ei-Nyung had offered to get it for me, but for some completely idiotic reason, I passed. I ended up looking up the toy, and yeah, it looked pretty awesome. In fact, the whole *line* of toys – Transformers Alternators – looked awesome. All the cars looked like great models, the robots looked really well articulated, and well-designed.

So, I picked up “Ricochet” on Amazon – it was the only one I could find that was both available, and not too expensive to gamble on. It arrived today, and damn. It’s incredible.

The car’s incredibly cool – the front wheels link so that they steer in sync by a bar that connects when it transforms via MAGNETS. How cool is that? The tires are rubber, the hood, doors, and trunk open, and when the car’s in robot mode, a whole mess of stuff is articulated – elbows, shoulders, fingers (a single “claw-hand,” but still), hips, knees and feet. The head even tilts on a ball, so it can look in any direction. Great stuff.

I’ll be looking for more of these things. If I can find ’em, I know they’re high-quality.

For $22, you should definitely get this. MI-5’s first season is some of the best TV I’ve ever seen. Haven’t watched all of the second season, but the first season pretty much stands on its own.

List 10 things you like, but don’t have enough time for – or certainly not as much as you’d like. Simple.

1.) Cooking elaborate things
2.) Painting
3.) Mountain biking
4.) Day long gaming sessions (not videogames)
5.) Lying in the hammock
6.) Recreational driving
7.) Playing with Mobius
8.) Traveling
9.) Having people over for no reason
10.) Working on making the house/garden better

Bonus!
11.) Painting the Mini
12.) Photography
13.) Designing and building furniture (not something I’ve ever done, but something I want to do)
14.) Playing music (clarinet, piano, saxophone)
15.) Re-learning Japanese
16.) Learning Finnish
17.) Training, in earnest, for Ninja Warrior

Now, the question is, how much do I enjoy those things, and how much time do I have *really*?

Quite a day for “stuff” yesterday. Got some foam interlocking tile mats for what used to be our bedroom, and will soon be a home gym. Put about 2/3rds of it together last night, then finished the rest this morning, after waking up at 5-freakin’-am.

Also got a Dyson DC14 off of woot.com, which arrived yesterday. Man, it’s awesome. It totally sucks (har har), but more than that, it’s just really well designed. Ei-Nyung pointed out that all the parts you’re supposed to switch or grab to use the vac are yellow – the carpet/hard floor switch, the on/off switch, the carrying handle, while all the disassembly switches are white. Small detail, but really quite clever.

The thing’s really clever in other ways as well – the “wand” stores inside the flexi-hose, and the whole thing snaps together in a way that feels very unified – it doesn’t feel like an arbitrary weird bit, like our old Panasonic vacuum, whose flexi-hose just sort of sat there, slung over the top of the vacuum. The various bits and bobs click nicely into place, to empty the vacuum you just disconnect the cannister, walk over to your trash, and hit a button. I hated the fact that on vacs with bags, after you’ve taken out the bag you’ve got to wash the vacuum, ’cause all the fine dust “poofed” out of the bag and got everywhere, then once you put the new bag in, you’ve gotta vacuum *again* because again, there’s dust everywhere.

I think the reason people become Dyson evangelists in the same way that people become Apple evangelists is that this thing works the way I *want* a vacuum to work. Consumer Reports didn’t think it was worth the price, and that you could get your house equally clean for ~1/2 the price, but I’ve never seen a vacuum that was as well designed as the Dyson, and where the user experience was as refined.

That, and it got so much more fine dirt out of the places we regularly vacuum than our old vacuum that it was *shocking*. The dog hair, I expected. The fine dust not so much.

Also picked up Prince of Persia Classic on Live Arcade. As many gaming sites have already said, this is what a classic remake should be. It looks great, the new animations make it feel really contemporary, and the gameplay is still relevant and fun. If I had to choose between this an Pac Man CE, though, personally, I’d go with Pac Man.

So, had a pretty laid-back but productive weekend. Friday night after work, Ei-Nyung & I moved into the room that Joe moved out of. We ended up hanging up a curtain, and moving the large furnitures around to try to find some sort of optimal layout.

We ended up going with a sort of oddball arrangement, but I think it works pretty well – the room’s sort of divided into two parts – an “office-lite” arrangement and the bed. I’ll post a picture at some point or another. Saturday, we got some stuff to “round out” the room – Ei-Nyung got an end-table for her side of the bed – something she’s been wanting in forever, and we got another curtain for the small window on the side. Ended up merging all the curtains in a bit J-shaped arrangement, which is sort of weird because one window’s only bordered on one side by a curtain, but it actually works out for the best. If that window was symmetric, the curtain would hang behind the bed and be a giant pain in the butt.

Okay, I’ll just take a picture now. Sheesh.

Anyway, also got some shadow-boxes to put the various games I’ve worked on in, as a little weird thematic thing for the walls, but I’ve been thinking about getting some really tall, narrow canvases and doing a sort of Mark Rothko rip-off thing for the area above the ottoman.

That was the better part of Friday night and Saturday, and Sunday was spent just hanging out with friends, playing games, and going food shopping. It’s been a while since I’ve done any cooking, ’cause I get home from work a little on the late-ish side. So, I ended up getting some salmon, and making salmon with a lemon-cranberry relish for dinner.

Gotta go back to IKEA to get some longer curtain rods, Ei-Nyung’s cut and is hemming some curtains for the narrow downstairs window, and that should take care of things.

Oh – I’m cleaning out the garage slowly – probably cleared out about eight square feet (Lame, I know. Shut up.) in an effort to be able to get the Mini into the garage. Why? ’cause of this. I figure I have to repair one small rust spot on the roof, then roller-ing the paint on the roof seems like a relatively straightforward thing to do. I mean, you couldn’t really ask for a more featureless, flat expanse of sheetmetal than the roof of a Mini. Why not give it a go?

We also bought some interlocking foam tiles online to temporarily re-floor the room that was our bedroom, and use it as an exercise area. Basically we can bring up the rowing machine, the treadmill and the weights, and use it as a workout room – it’s already got a great mirror, and the room gets a lot of sun.

It’s actually sort of weird, now that our one housemate’s moved out – we’ve got more space than we reasonably know what to do with. I’ve spent most of the evening in one room, but we have essentially five that I could have just casually hung out in. It’s weird. I suppose I can’t complain – we got a good place at a good time for a good price. Though the remodeling process has been incredibly stressful at times, there’s no way we’d have been able to get a place this nice in a neighborhood this nice (and friendly) any other way. Thanks in large part to my parents. Don’t think I’ve forgotten. 😉

Anyway. It was a really good weekend.

One more thing: (and no, that’s not a nod to the impending WWDC, though I suppose now it is) Anyone out there in the tubes play Arkham Horror? I’ve heard good things from various ex-coworkers, and was talking with a friend a couple nights ago about how we miss the days of long-assed games where you’d get a bunch of people together in the *real world* and spend a day gaming. I keep teetering on the edge of getting it, but not pulling the trigger. For those who have played it – worth it? If not, can you recommend something else? For the locals – any interest?

Put this up last night, while unable to sleep.

Finally managed sleep at about 2am, but then woke up at 5:30, and didn’t really get back to sleep again ’till about 7:30.

“Fun.”

This happened to me earlier this week, when I went to get a new router from Best Buy. After looking around for a while, we decided on getting an Apple AirPort Extreme. Best Buy had them for $161, when they were $179 everywhere else. I went to the Emeryville Best Buy (yes, I know, I’ve sworn them off before. Shoot me.), and got in line. At the register, it rang up at $179. I said, “No, your website has it at $161.” The woman at the cash register said, “Okay, you have to go to customer service to get a price match.” So, I went and stood in line. 20 minutes later, I get to the front of the line, and say, “This was $161. Please check, and match the price. Thx.” She looks it up, and sure enough, $179. I realize at this moment that telling her that the intranet posts incorrect prices, and that she’d have to look it up on a different computer sounds absolutely *ludicrous*, unless you actually know what’s happening.

After a few minutes of trying to explain to her that the price on her system is wrong, I throw my hands up and give up. As I’m leaving, I realize I have my laptop in the car, and Best Buy probably has some sort of WiFi. Sure enough, they do. I go back to the customer service line, wait *another* 20 minutes, and then get to the front. I show the woman the price on my laptop, and how it’s different than the price in her computer. She looks sort of befuddled, but eventually gives in, and gives me the price. So, 40 minutes later, I’ve saved $20. Whoop-de-do. But at least those fuckers didn’t get away with their bullshit.

I certainly couldn’t have said it better.

At what point can you fire the entire government?

Call your congressperson and demand they vote NO on the current bill, and its betrayal of the American people. This should not stand. I, for one, will not vote for anyone who supports this travesty.

Reid, Pelosi – you should be ashamed.

I know I certainly am.

This is one of the more interesting articles I’ve read recently. It’s pretty much a takedown of a specialty chocolatier that trades, essentially, in fraud.

It’s an interesting read if you’re interested in chocolate, or basically how someone can pull the wool over someone’s eyes to the tune of almost a 7,000% markup over the retail price of their source materials, with essentially no added “craft.” Hell, you could probably make a good argument that what NoKA provides is actually that they actively make the product *worse*.

This fascinates me, in large part because one of the companies I’ve worked with in the recent past was essentially also in the business of pulling the wool over people’s eyes. It interested me how this guy – a real salesman’s salesman – could dupe relatively intelligent people by exploiting their insecurities, and their perception of value or quality.

It all basically comes down to exploiting perception. In the case of my personal experience with fraud, it had to do with the notion of experience, and knowledge. In NoKA’s case, it has to do with source ingredients and process.

This probably has some tie-in to a discussion last night about renovating the house, and the concept of paying $300/sqft for renovations, when that’s more than normal estimated *initial construction* costs, though while those numbers make my jaw hang open, I didn’t get the impression that the person we talked to was a fraud – this is more just a statement on what people are willing to pay in the Bay Area for something of perceived value.

I dunno.