Adventure Time
YouTube sometimes has videos taken down because they violate their terms of use. They either feature youngins shaking their booties to the latest hip hop beats, or commercial content the owners would rather not have available for free.
That's when you need access to the
Deleted YouTube Video Viewer. There are a lot of booty shaking videos on there, let me tell you, but that is not why I am making this post. No, I'm posting to share the glory that is
Adventure Time, of which I would not have any knowledge without this tool.
Watch the
deleted cartoon at this link, and let me know if you agree that this is full of both epic and win.
Happy Lunar New Year!
Tonight I celebrated the lunar new year at the
Empress of China restaurant with Dalban and his circle of friends. We were actually already stuffed from eating handmade noodle soup and dumplings at a Korean restaurant in Sunnyvale's Korean town, so the two of us barely touched the dishes but the rest of the group made short work of them. I love fortune cookies so I made sure to grab one before they were all gone. My fortune is pictured above, and I'm pretty satisfied with it. One question though, why does it say "will be" ?? I kid.
Then we tried to hit a local bar on Grant street, the heart of the famous San Francisco China Town, but it was full of creepy old men in trench coats. Occasionally one would wander out to the door, fish something out of his coat, and throw it into the street.
BOOM!
I thought it was a gun shot, but it was just a firecracker.
We wrote fortunes for each other on pieces of paper, stuffed them in red decorative envelopes, and randomly handed them out at midnight. My fortune said "Porky was a pig, and look how far it got him. Where's the yayo?" but I have no idea what that means. The funniest was "When the sunshine hits your face and wakes you in the morning you will find a black thong on the floor." I wrote a nice one for whoever got it, with a cute drawing of a happy pink pig.
Happy lunar new year!
Labels: business trip, California, San Francisco
Dining at Google
Last night I met up with Dalban and had a delicious meal at the Cheesecake Factory before heading back to his place in Palo Alto. That was just a prelude to the amazing buffet of "smart water", organic beverages, food, and geek-core tech goodies that surrounded me during my visit to the Google campus today.
Google has a ton of buildings down in Mountain View, CA. We signed in and met up with Dalban's UVic buddy who proceeded to show us just how cool the work environment here is. It's very social, very convenient, and very tempting. I admit that I was filled with a reasonable amount of geek-envy at the multiple 22" widescreen LCD monitors and machines adorning each workstation.
The social atmosphere reminded me of my time in highschool when I shared an art studio with Derelict. These days my own team is so often working on disparate projects that we need a weekly bulletin just to realize what each other is doing. Personally, I would love the kind of collaboration that seems so ingrained at the Googleplex.
Benefits that stood out:
- Google shuttle service equipped with wireless Internet to commute from San Francisco
- 20% flex time to work on your own projects
- No questions asked hardware requisitioning; want another 22", no problem
- Smart and motivated co-workers
- Working on some of the illest and newest tech and web solutions
- 360 degree peer reviews influencing bonus payout
- On site haircuts, oil changes, and $5 massages
- Free food, beverages, and electric scooter rides from building to building
- Being able to invite buddies over to "visit" and enjoy the free food too!
The weather is pretty nice down here too... no need for a jacket these days, it feels like late spring, early summer, at least for Edmonton.
Tonight and tomorrow I'll probably head over to the city (San Francisco) to check out the Lunar New Year (it's not really CHINESE new year - other cultures recognize it too) festivities.
One note of caution... if you searched on Google's website today, I might have seen it. You see, they have a wall where they project the current searches people are submitting, filtered for obvious nasty words I assume. It was pretty neat seeing searches coming in from all over the world, it really hit home to me just where I was.
Labels: business trip, California, San Francisco
Snowstorm Avoided - Pleasanton, California
From snowstorm to peaceful serenity, I managed to barely escape
the rumbling dump of snow hitting southern Ontario and catch a flight to the solace of San Francisco last night.
I was rather lucky because it seemed that half of all flights were cancelled. Likely because they were unable to make it in from their origins in the storm affected regions of the USA.
I arrived around 11:30pm, drove my Neverlost GPS enabled Ford Taurus for a good 30 minutes (doubling back a couple times for good measure), and arrived at the Hilton Pleasanton just in time to spend Valentine's day alone in an unfamiliar city.
Today will be an intense set of preparation for my 90 minute blitz with my customer tomorrow. Then I plan to stay a couple nights hanging out with Dalban, probably going out for Korean food at some point. Although I'm sure that in California the Mexican food is a must-try. Oh! I can't forget to revisit the
delicious In-and-out Burger!!
Labels: business trip, California, San Francisco
Best of Bootie
Last year I stumbled upon
Best of Bootie, an amazing set of mash-ups that blew me away. Unfortunately, like the selfish rogue I sometimes conspire to be, I kept the 2005 album to myself. It was something to be enjoyed in private, like a fine king-sized Twix bar.
Suddenly I feel the need to share, so please take a listen to the following sample tracks, and
go here to download the whole set if you are so inclined, make sure to check out the 2006 album too - I'm downloading it now!
2005 Album:
Track 3 - Lovemakers vs 50 Cent - Shake Your AssTrack 5 - The Bravery vs M.I.A - An Honest M.I.ATrack 18 - L'Trimm vs Armand Van Helden vs Beatles vs Gary Numan - My Other Car is a BeatleLabels: music
Cubicle to Corner Office
On my last business trip I had a lot of time en route to read, and I made short work of this book. "
How to get from Cubicle to Corner Office" is full of plain talk and common sense, backed up the anecdotes and real world experience of Joel Weiss, author and successful executive.
The book is very well organized and gets down to brass tacks immediately. Each chapter spans just 4 to 8 pages, including a single page summary of the chapter. The end of the book summarizes the salient points from each chapter neatly over 3 pages.
An example of the summary from the chapter entitled "Be a Doer, Not a Just Talker":
"Step forward, volunteer, commit, and then do it. Many people talk and promise, but few actually deliver. If you do, you will stand out from the crowd."I picked it up on sale at Indigo for less than $10, and although the advice may seem obvious, it called a few things out to me that I realize I could improve about myself.
For a "how to be successful" book, I was most impressed that it wasn't trying to sell any cheesy tricks or "new paradigms". It simply has good advice that is easy to understand, but takes effort and discipline to follow.
Labels: book
Smokin' Aces Review
I had the bewildering experience of watching Smokin' Aces tonight, and I have to say it was a try-hard failure. It was bad enough that I have to compare it to Ultraviolet in the way that it tries to get by with style without substance.
It has all the trappings of a cult Quentin Tarantino movie, what with all the super saturated colours, odd camera angles, bizarre ensemble of ultra violent characters, and tons of gratuitous gore. Still, it fails on many levels.
First, it lacks the black-humour that Quentin sticks in his flicks periodically to relieve the audience of stress before the next gore-fest. Secondly, it has a completely incoherent plot, that when understood, doesn't really make any sense at all anyway. It's all an excuse to see what happens when a dozen different crazy thugs all try to grab a drugged magician turned gangster boss for a chance at a million bucks.
If I had expected this kind of movie, perhaps I wouldn't have been so disappointed. Unfortunately the previews led me to believe this would be a fun and at times exciting B grade action-comedy, something along the lines of The Big Hit, Pulp Fiction, or Lock-Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Bottom line, rent if interested.
Labels: movie
Swimming in Gordons Bay
Yesterday I flew from Brisbane to Sydney to meet up with
Cibbuano and enjoy a day - a Jack Bauer kind of day that steadily ticked on for 24 hours and showed no signs of slowing down.
He dropped by the Radisson on Liverpool, and we exchanged secret gang signs under the whir of an overhead monorail.
After grabbing some Chinese dimsum that was delicious but barely tolerable by my then alchohol weakened stomach (my last night in Brisbane was intense), and following that up with a refreshing honey milk tea, I started to slowly regain my strength. With the colour returing to my face, we hopped into his Falcon and headed down Anzac Parade to Alison Road, final destination: Gordons Bay.
The view of the bay from the cliffs above was beautiful. This was truely a little gem that C & R had found. Unlike Bondi Beach or the other popular places to be seen in the sun, Gordons Bay is a sheltered alcove that focuses more on the beauty of nature than the beauty of Aussie metermaids.
Once I was out in the water, I felt amazing. I also realized how incredibly lucky people are in Australia's coastal cities to be able to access nature this way.
After that highlight of the day, Cibbuano showed me his diner, and while he worked I took a walk up and down Oxford street. There were a ton of cool restaurants and stores, unfortunately most of them were closed but I did manage to get a really nice bottle of wine at a little boutique shop called "The Five Cellars".
With work out of the way, we checked out the local pubs until 2am, picked up his girlfriend, and then set out for Kings Cross. A requisite of hitting "the Cross" is indulging in the vice supplied everywhere, and indulge we did until 3:30am.
When I got back to my suite, I had 2 hours of sleep to look forward to before checking out of the hotel and checking in at the Sydney International Terminal to start my multi-day journey. Actually with the time zone magic involved in crossing the date-line, my trip back consisted of only one day (Sunday) but easily consumed more than 32 hours. Take that Jack!
Cibbuano's take on the day can be found here.Labels: Australia, business trip, Sydney
YouTube sometimes has videos taken down because they violate their terms of use. They either feature youngins shaking their booties to the latest hip hop beats, or commercial content the owners would rather not have available for free.
