The Adventures of Curious George

When I'm super busy and not procrastinating stuff, I tend to forget to eat until I'm really hungry. The combination of constant activity and not munching all the time makes me lose weight. Moral of the story? That plan of "never stop doing stuff" sounds like a good one. Also, keep a Clif bar in your pocket in case you miss a meal and there's no food around :). What news, you ask? Well, since 10pm last night, I've slept for 12 hours, woke up thinking about a pretty girl I met at a festival last weekend, folded up my friends' guest-bed and put away the bedding, updated my facebook page (which I rarely do) and my CouchSurfing profile , which needs some more attention soon. I added a card to my PayPal account so I could buy Skype credit so I could call my mom so she could get Molly and Ransom's numbers from my phone, which I forgot at home (D'oh!) on this trip up to the Bay area, and contacted friends who'll be going to Maker Faire about wh...

Does anyone know why Google Maps blurs the area near the Egyptian border with Palestine and Israel? Image from google maps, red line added for emphasis. Is it a political requirement by some government? Is it blurred that way on whatever satellite/fly-over imagery Google gets? Whatever the case, it's the same on terraserver , down to the exact location of the blurring-line. Not only did I not find an explanation for this during a quick google search, the websites I found about "What's blurred out on Google Maps," like this one , don't to include it. On a somewhat unrelated note, I wouldn't have noticed this without looking at the nearby water. It's interesting; I find it easier to see larger ocean waves in the blurred area, sort of like low-pass filtering in lots of applications.

This guy reminds me of many of the thoughts I had before recently getting more and more jaded to the idea of military action. He writes about "cruise-missile liberalism," into which I suppose I've been slipping recently, and insists that people should be nice to each other, among other things. http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/ That said, he doesn't give me a satisfactory answer to "What do you do when peaceful Libyan protesters, walking down the street with signs, get mowed down, day after day, by automatic weapons, under the orders of the 'leader' of the country, and then some other Libyans ask for help in dealing with this horrific criminal." :/ Edit: this article mentions a few likely reasons America keeps involving itself in wars. Excerpted: "It is as if the president has big red button on his desk, and then his aides come in and say, "There's something really nasty happening to some unfortunate people, Mr. President, but if you pus...

An interesting article about Gay Parents in the New York Times Some excerpts: "JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — ... These days, there are eight churches that openly welcome gay worshipers." While 8 isn't great, it's more than I would have expected. "“We’re starting to see that the gay community is very diverse,” said Bob Witeck, chief executive of Witeck-Combs Communications..." They seem to know as little about the rest of the world as I know about Jacksonville. "Black or Latino gay couples are twice as likely as whites to be raising children... They are also more likely than their white counterparts to be struggling economically." How do those figures compare to straight couples? It's possible these things have little or nothing to do with being gay... "“What did we do? We wandered around lost. We married men, and then couldn’t understand why every night we had a headache.”" When I taught English in Egypt, people would come in with some funny...

Vanilla Sky hit me hard at about T minus fifteen minutes. Then ten of the last fifteen minutes pulled that punch disappointingly short of powerful; ten minutes of self-analysis, thinly disguised as a dialog in an elevator? Come on, Vanilla Sky. At least the last few minutes served up warm fuzzies. [Here ends my concentrated and careful writing. I will start using the verb "to be" again. Profusely.] In other news, I haven't really been as intensely happy or as happily intense as I was leading up to, at, and shortly after Burning Man. What a playground. What a chaotic fixers' paradise. And what a place to playfully flirt with an intelligent, adventurous lady. Such interiority I haven't known since, or any other time recently; maybe half that I've found in Molly and Ransom together. Then I had to go and formalize what shouldn't be formalized, and hide from reality over and over again. Indeed, instead of embracing reality these last few months, I...

I just drove a motorcycle from one house to another with a truck... [edit: because I don't know how to ride a motorcycle yet, but like I told Alex, I know how to drive a stickshift vehicle and how to ride a bike, so isn't a motorcycle just a stickshift bike?] And none of the truck, the motorcycle, or either house is mine. Welcome, I'm George and I do strange things. So do you, but they're probably not strange in the context within which you live... maybe they'd be strange to an Egyptian microbus driver? Or to an East Bay programmer? Or to a conservative Texan rancher? I like all of these people, so I've come to terms with the fact that I do strange things. Anyway, Alex and Connor just gave me a motorcycle (to borrow and learn on and look after), a book ( Long Way Down , which looks awesome), a bunch of tips about where Alex used to live in Oakland including Rico's Diner which is within walking distance and serves everything necessary to make your own t...

Which is not to imply that Cairo is not nice. I liked Cairo quite a lot. It was a lot comfier home for me than New York or Boston ever could be... but at least so far, Oakland is nicer than Cairo :) For one thing, it's bikable! Yay bikes! And public transit takes me into (and back out of) San Francisco for under $2, with my bike! I'm living with Molly and Ransom these days, which is marvelous. A couple days ago, I dug up the bathroom floor at their new house in West Oakland. Hypothetically tomorrow I will replace some pipes? Maybe the plumber will do it. We'll see how confident I feel in the morning. Right now I'm listening to Call of Ktulu by Metallica. How and why, you ask? Let's trace this tangent... - I started by looking for a Mad Max-esque aviator cap with a gas mask thingy (for Burning Man) - Found Steam Punk Tribune who mentions some weird Seattle band called Abney Park has one - Abney Park rocks steampunk-style and have silly lyrics about dirig...