C-Objectively

Photos still apply.

When I last left you Two months ago before an insane period at work, I had spent a weekend with my dad and brother in Seattle. The next Thursday I flew down to LA…

It had been my mom’s birthday a few days earlier and my aunt had told my mom she was planning a trip to Palm Springs that weekend for her birthday. What my mom didn’t know was that my aunt and I were planning the whole thing together for weeks, and that I was coming down to join them on the trip. Thursday night Ara picked me up from LAX and we headed home. He walked in and said hi and all that and they closed the door while I stayed around the corner where my mom could not see me. After a minute or two I went ahead and knocked on the door and my mom opened it. The look on her face was priceless. She was so shocked that I had made it that she was speechless; could not utter a complete sentence. I of course had a huge smile on my face and I gave her a big hug.

I had a giant cut of filet mignon at LG’s Prime Steakhouse which was excellent. I also got to see how Ceasar dressing was made. Who knew there was a raw egg in there? Most people freak when I tell them I eat raw egg in goglie. Man, I haven’t had that in a long time, I miss it.

Okay that’s enough wrap it up here.

If you are like me, you have been on the waiting list to try the Yahoo Mail Beta since the day it was announced, months ago.

Well if you are tired of waiting, I have a way for you to cut in line…

How to change your content preference:

• Log in to Yahoo Mail
• Click on the Options link
• Select Account information from the left panel
• Go to Member Information, General Preferences, Preferred Content
• Select, for example, Yahoo UK
• Click Finished
• Go to Yahoo Mail
• You will see a page that says “It’s the New Yahoo! Mail Beta… and you’re invited.”
• Click on “Try Beta Now”

I took these steps and I am using the Yahoo Mail Beta now. It has a couple of minor bugs I’ve noticed in the last few days but nothing major. And the AJAX interface sure beats the existing one.

Enjoy.

I’d been meaning to check out the Tulip Festival that goes on in Washington every April but we hadn’t had very good weather all month long. Until yesterday that is. We finally had a sunny weekend in April and I decided to head up to Mount Vernon, along with about ten million other people apparently, to find out what all the buzz was about.

The line to get off on the exit into Mount Vernon and to the tulip fields extended about 0.5 mile into the 5 North. People were pulled over onto the shoulder to try to get off. Well some crazy man in a white Oldsmobile about three cars up from me got tired of waiting in the line and wanted out. Except, I don’t think he really looked before he tried to merge back into the two lanes of freeway traffic. Unfortunately for him and his wife, at that moment an 18-wheeler truck was barreling down the lane next to us at about 60 miles per hour. My mind slowed down the action as I saw what was about to happen. White Oldsmobile sticks his nose out into the lane and the truck just BARRELS through him like he was made of paper maché. Except that he wasn’t, and it made a big crunching sound as the 18-wheeler took half of the car’s hood and bumper with him.

Luckily there was no harm done to the people in the car. The same could not be said of the White Oldsmobile however. I witnessed two other near accidents while I was in Mount Vernon. There really should have been some police directing the traffic in the area. There were probably 10-20 times more cars in that area yesterday than there are usually.

Accidents and near-accidents aside, and after some misdirection on the part of my brain’s navigation computer, I found the tulip fields and snapped these glorious pictures which I will share with you now.

Skagit Valley Tulip Festival Photos

   

I wanted to update people on the conclusion to a horrendous incident which happened a couple of years ago. I made a post about the murder and trial when I found out about it a year ago. I’ve also had a link to a site with news and background on the incident in the sidebar of my site since that time.

Well, the trial for the merciless Azeri murderer of an innocent Armenian officer, who was learning English in a university in Hungary through a NATO-sponsored program, is over.

An Azeri who confessed to murdering an Armenian officer 26-year-old Gurgen Margarian while at NATO Partnership for Peace English-language training in Hungary was last week sentenced to life in prison with eligibility for parole in 30 years, a maximum sentence under Hungarian law. The Azeri lieutenant Ramil Safarov killed Margarian with an axe as he slept in his dorm room on the grounds of the Hungarian Defense Academy during the night of February 19, 2004. Safarov then tried but failed to kill a second Armenian officer, Hayk Makuchian, sleeping in a room nearby.

Thank you Hungarian courts for at the very least bringing this animal to justice, and giving what little peace we can offer to the family of the young man who was slain.

Pictures to go along with the story.

Phew, now that was a busy but fun month. To start off with, I joined the BMWCCA PSR for their Car Control Clinic over at Bremerton Raceway. This was a day-long program where forty participant cars broke up into four groups, and rotated four stations with their instructors, learning the handling and braking limits of their cars. After we were done rotating the stations, we set up two autocross courses on the track and just went at it for three hours. I’m going to follow up with more details on this event because I think its not only a lot of fun but a great learning experience as well.

Then I followed that up with a bevy of outings for my birthday including a night out with the guys, lunch with my team at work, lunch with the guys at work, and probably two more lunches or dinners I’m missing here somewhere. In the process, I was able to coin a couple of terms: the Lighthouse, which is a move I may describe later; and the nickname Texas Ranger for someone who shall remain nameless. We had a lot of fun with those though.

The next weekend my dad and brother came up to visit. I hadn’t seen them since the holidays so I was definitely glad to have them up here. We hung out and they finally got to see my place in person. Ara drove up with me on the move but I didn’t have my own place while he was here. We lucked out on the weather while they were here; it was mostly sunny and hit 67 on Monday. It was so warm, I was about ready to declare it the beginning of summer. On Sunday we hit up Salty’s on Alki for their out-of-this-world seafood brunch. Salty’s is on the water across from downtown Seattle so it has a fantastic view of the city, which you can see in the photos linked at the bottom of this post. The food is not too shabby either; we had so much seafood and dessert that we didn’t really eat another meal all that day. That was a first.

Not satisfied with two weekends of fun in a row, I headed out the following Thursday night to good old Los Angeles…

I’ll finish the story in another post. Its already the middle of April and this thing has been sitting here unfinished in my dock for days.

I’ve been having a lot of birthday fun the last few days and I’ve got a lot to share with you but right now I am swamped with work and very tired. I’ll try to update you on all the cool new stuff tomorrow.

Until then, you can check out yet another cool new web site. If you’ve been enjoying some of the videos floating around on the Internet on Google Video, YouTube, and others and wondering how you could save the videos to watch while not connected to their web site, you’re in luck.

Enter KeepVid, a site that allows you to enter the URL for a video from almost every popular Internet video hosting site and it will let you download a local copy onto your computer. Enjoy!

Oh and here is a light saber duel made by some guys who are obviously very talented.

Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, has approved the creation of a version of The Simpsons’ opening credits with real people rather than animation. It is definitely interesting and probably funny to watch; probably funnier than most of The Simsons episodes these last few seasons.

Watch The Simpsons live action remake. [Google Video]

Read the article about the remake at The Sun Online.

Update - The link to the video broke after I posted this so I’ve found another copy and changed the link. It should work again. Enjoy.

I live by a lake up here, and sometimes the ducks from the lake like to take a break from the super wet wetness of the lake to walk around the parking lot of our condo complex in the wetness of the rain instead. Here’s one of my little duck friends playing Parking Monitor.

Last week I started to feel a cold coming on in the middle of the week. I’ve already had a cold three time since I moved to Seattle, even though one of the times was while I was in Rome. That’s more than I’ve ever been sick in such a short time. Needless to say, I was tired of it so I decided to mobilize the troops at the first hint of the coming war.

I dropped by the drug store and bought some Airborne and Cold-Eeze. I started sucking them down every three hours on the hour. I also had some Echinacea “Immune Support” tea which I was drinking a couple times a day. The next day I started to feel the effects of the cold. That night I continued my barrage of anti-cold measures. By the second day, it was already packing its things and ready to leave. Couldn’t withstand the onslaught. Haha, I win!

Now a friend told me there’s a ping pong, sorry I mean table tennis, place that opened up here in Bellevue. That sounds very tempting.

Volkswagen has a new ad agency and they’ve come up with some clever ads for the US release of the new 5th generation GTI.

Warning, these ads contain blatant parody of the TV show Pimp My Ride as well as the import car tuner scene in general. Anyone who knows what those two are will find these very funny. You have been warned.

VW GTI - The Trebuchet
VW GTI - The Crate
VW GTI - The Wrecking Ball

You get an F!

I’ve gotta say, Reebok’s series of Terry Tate ads, if they can be called that, has got to be one of the funniest, most original ad ideas I’ve ever seen. Let’s relive some of that office linebacker goodness:

Terry Tate - Office Linebacker
Terry Tate - Draft Day
Terry Tate - Going on Vacation
Terry Tate - Sensitivity Training
Terry Tate - OSPN Office Athlete of the Century

I just do not get tired of seeing a giant guy send skinny little office people flying into cubicles like that. I wish we had a Terry Tate at our office.

Favorite lines include: “You kill the joe, you make some mo’!”, “stick-to-itiveness”, and “Don’t bring that weak stuff up in this humpty-bumpty.”

Here’s a banned Xbox 360 ad that’s fun.

Still bored? Some other funny videos I found on Google Video:
The Chronicles of Narnia Rap from SNL
People falling into a trick mattress