Lee.org

Someone told someone who told TJIC who told me about this. Now I'm telling you.

From The Lord of the Rings… well not really. 

Rock on! (as it were)

VC and I went to Cambaz tonight… It’s a new Turkish restaurant downtown. Who knew you could have fun in Hackettstown? Now I’m not talking about one of the fine sports-bars in the nearby metropoli of Independance or Great Meadows (home to Bobalou’s Famous Steaks & Sports Bar and Stumpy’s Sports Pub respectfully). I’m talking right in the heart of Hackettstown, practically within sight of the famous Hackettstown Trading Post lion statues!

The atmosphere was welcoming. The owner’s sister came out and chatted with us about the table decorations (last time, the owner himself forced us to try some specials for free… the 5-hr baked lamb was good). The food was great, with a definitely authentic provincal tang to it. And the belly dancer was really good!

And of course, sharing the experience made it so much better! Heck, I probably wouldn’t have gone out to dinner if it weren’t for VC. And of course, a final thank you to my mom for getting me a gift certificate for the place for christmas!

Hurray for good eats!

The Burning Man experience has convinced me that I should look into moving west. I’m looking for a place that’s sunnier, a bit slower, a bit more hip and quite a bit hippier. From Feb 22nd til March 2nd, I’m going to be traveling in the areas between San Jose, San Francisco and Grass Valley, looking for a nice place to live.

From Boing Boing:

Here’s the text-crawl from the upcoming and final (?) Star Wars movie, Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, as leaked on the Star Wars official site.

General Grievous? Isn’t he a contemporary of Professor Chaos?

Separated at Birth?

VC said that my new blog lacked color. She missed the image at the top. So I’m putting a random image thingie at the top. :-)

Shortly you’ll be able to click on the thumbnails to see the full images. I might eventually get around to putting up some real gallery software.

Thanks to Photomatt for the script. Though I instantly noticed that this script doesn’t let me link to images from thumbnails, it just displays them.

update 5-10-05 See New Random Image.

TJIC mentioned that he made $250 betting that George W would win the election so I checked out the site. I’ve become fond of betting on the weather. It’s this nice mix of science, probability, and reading human reactions to the weather. And I’ve won some money.

Thinking of human reactions, I’m reminded of a chart I saw a long time ago about perceived dangers vs. actual dangers. There were tens of items on the chart but I can give you an example of typical reactions:

On a scale from 1 to 10, rank how afraid you are on a daily basis, of being killed by

1. a traffic accident
2. an airplane crash
3. a nuclear power plant disaster

Most people put traffic accidents low on the list and put planes and nuclear disasters high on the list. But statistics show that you are FAR FAR FAR more likely to be killed in a traffic accident than the other two. It’s that incorrect response to stimuli that I’m playing on when I’m making my bets.

A while back I was looking at Tradesports for the first time and said to TJIC something like, “Why can’t people be dumb so I can steal their money?” Well, at the risk of huge humiliation and loss of all the money I’m betting, I’ll say that there are such people out there. And here I come.

———————–
1-26-05 update. Oh, who am I kidding. The weather market on tradesports is so small that I can’t ever make any real money at it. And the larger the market gets, the more that damn free market equalization thing will kick in.

I’ve booked a trip to San Fransisco.

I’ve been doing a lot of internal searching since Burning Man and I’m considering moving someplace sunnier, more culturally alive and… hippier. Next month I’ll be flying from NJ to San Fransisco for 8 days. I’m going to rent a car, drive around and try to find out if it’s the place for me.

The trip is Feb 22nd-March 2nd.
Current stops right now include San Francisco and surrounding areas, Grass Valley 2 1/2 hrs northeast of San Fran, Boulder Creek 1 1/2 hrs south of San Fran.

I’m liking WordPress a lot but the default stylesheet is far from ideal. Well, I guess it’s a matter of preference and customizations… Well, the new style sheet gives nice clean lines. I’m sure it’s a never ending project.

I just found this gosh-darn useful Javascript tool. It’s good for helping to lay out your web page, or understand someone else’s page structure.

From Slayeroffice.com

This favelet allows you to view the properties of any HTML element on a page simply by mousing over the element. The element will be given a gray background, and a DIV element that trails the mouse cursor will contain the element type along with all of the specified attributes of the element.
Hit the “esc” key to turn the favelet off.
Right click on the following link and select “Add to Favorites” or “Bookmark this Link”, depending on your browser.
Mouseover DOM Inspector