As of this update, we’re up to 104 different places.

This list covers 688 days – 8/23/2008 to 7/12/2010

We eat at a new place approximately once every 6.6 days.

We’ve eaten in 7 different states: GA, CA, PA, IL, TX, FL, NY

22 of 26 letters have been covered – missing letters: Q, V, X, Z

“If the U.S. imperialists start another war, the army and people of Korea will … wipe out the aggressors on the globe once and for all,” a dispatch from the official Korean Central News Agency said.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Better turn over the kimchi now, Kim Jong-Il.  Don’t forget, we’ve got Barack Obama.

With that, I leave you this little glimpse of what we’re up against:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0hk9vaqWUg

http://news.cnnbcvideo.com/index.shtml

Shameless plug for Northridge and their awesomeness.

It’s very simple.

You download the IE8 Blocker Toolkit, I come rickroll your children until they develop irreversible mental instability.

Consider yourself warned.

Technorati Profile

From a Norwegian article:

Microsoft recommends end users that are browsing the web with Internet Explorer 6 to upgrade today to benefit from numerous improvements including security features and usability enhancements.

Interoperability is key to enabling developers to continue to create great user experiences on the web. Our commitment to the technical community continues with our significant investment in Internet Explorer 8.

We continue to believe in the importance of supporting the end users and encourage the technical community to work with us in securing a good transition for the users that today are using IE6.

Hope that helps

Looks like Steve Ballmer is a brother for the cause.  Well, more like special consultant.

Here are other cause-related links:

Browse Sad – make your site sad for all those under-privileged IE6ers.
#IE6 – see what Twitterers are saying about IE6.

Coming soon – how to do your part, as both a developer and a user.

We hereby declare war on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, also known as “IE6″. Our people have been suppressed under your tyrannical rule for the previous 8 years, and still many of our more ignorant and incompetent brothers are deceived by your aging technology. It is our determination that we can no longer withstand your oppressive hold on our people, forcing our developers to tirelessly accommodate for your lack of adherence to even the most basic of CSS2 standards.

Your crimes will not go unforgiven, plaguing us with diseases such as the double margin bug and your inability to handle multiple CSS classes. While your successors have marginally improved on your shortfalls, you and your governing power, Microsoft, have been unwilling to relinquish your market share grasp by ignoring the repeated requests to replace you through a required upgrade via Windows Update.

Such crimes against humanity will not go unpunished, and it is far more than a guarantee that once we, as a collective whole, have achieved independence from * html { }, you will be cast judgment by a consortium of your peers (Mozilla, Safari, Google) to an undetermined fate worse than uninstall.

Any terms of your surrender are dependent on the validity of your successors. Though our intentions are strong and our determination stronger, we inevitably harbor mentally incompetent users who are still brainwashed by your default installation schemes and continue to pine after your family of products. However, there will be no negotiation – your surrender must be absolute. You must relinquish all market share.

Our faith is in proper object model rendering and the Acid3 test. Our victory is thereby inevitable.

Signed on this 16th day of March in the year 2009,
Every person who has ever opened a web page in a web browser

I’m taking a little break to write something that doesn’t end in semi-colons! Here’s my interesting fact for the day: Did you know that Sharepoint has a Javascript stack that you can chain on to run functions on the body tag’s onload called _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames? A simple JavaScript call to _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push(‘FunctionName’); attaches your function to load on page load. Amazing.

I’ve been at work far too long.

I’m thinking about getting a used one of these:

…only because I can’t afford one of these:

They will go great with my forthcoming new SmugMug account!

And it was all the result of me being suckered into marketing.

While wasting my life away in front of the TV over the weekend, one of the 46 million Rock Band commercials came on, and I beamed in pride that I didn’t have $179 worth of plastic instruments surrounding me.  But then, something happened.  Rock Band for the Wii just got price dropped to $99.  At least, that’s what it said on the commercial.  I didn’t believe it.  I wouldn’t believe it.  So I went to the wise sage of knowledge – the Internet.

The rumors were true.  $99 gets me a 6 month old game with an impending sequel (in a week) and a bunch of plastic instruments.  A Sylar-style hunger started to rage within.  I don’t hunger for powers.  I hunger for plastic Stratocasters.

Long story short, I have $99 worth of plastic instruments in my apartment now.  Rock Band, anyone?

Is there hope for me after all?  Can I overcome a ridiculous amount of laziness to write something more often than once a month?  Do I really need to come up with interesting stories to uplift myself to blogosphere fame?

There’s only one way to find out.

So today, during lunch, I had to go return a movie from the Redbox near my office.  Redbox may be the greatest thing to ever happen to occasional one-night new-release movie renters like me.  It doesn’t hurt that people online help maintain an entire database of codes for free rentals.  That’s not the point of the story.

The point of the story is that I almost died today.  Okay, well, maybe not that dramatic, but my little car would have suffered some pain, and that’s almost like dying.  I’m pulling in the parking lot to get a parking space, and there’s this big ol’ white Mercury headed directly towards me.  I have my eyes on a spot further up and to my left, and in a moment of weakness, I actually WAIT for the other car to pass me before I claim my parking lot stake.

So I stop.  I wait.  And this BIG WHITE DETROIT-BORN BOAT STOPS RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY SPACE.  Wow, annoying.  Before I could even think about what’s going on, the cruise liner starts moving again, headed back towards my direction.  My spidey-sense goes off, realizing that there is very little room on either side of this moving hunk of metal, and this guy is barreling straight towards the grill of my car.  I drop it into 1st and step on it, very narrowly squeezing between the white behemoth and a fatefully parked Honda Fit, giving me maybe centimeters of clearance in a fraction of a second.  All I could see inside was this amass of wrinkles, with those super-cool blocky sunglass things that fit over your existing glasses.

Man, that guy was ancient.  When he was my age, he probably high-fived dinosaurs.  Might have dated a stegosaurus.  Or maybe a raptor, if he swung that way.  Prop 8 probably was not even a thought back then anyways.  He probably planted the giant sequoias and dug the Grand Canyon with a spoon.

So I go return my movie, replaying my near-death experience in my head as I do.  I walk back out, fearing for my life, keeping an eye on any other killer senior citizens.  And there he was.  My potential murderer.  Hobbling slowly across the parking lot, fully depending on his cane for movement.  It takes him 5 steps for every one I take.  I could do nothing at that moment but cry for humanity, realizing that killers like him were on the loose even in nice upscale suburbia where I work.

I’m not an ageist.  I do, however, have a problem with people operating large white motor vehicles under the influence of decrepitness.  If you or someone you know suffers from constant decrepitness, please, get help somewhere.  And stay off the road.  Even if you’re in a car.  I don’t even care if you’re not the one driving.  Just stay off the road.

Join me in keeping murderers off the streets, one feeble old person at a time.  Preferably with baseball bats.

Sometimes I try to keep up as posts come in, but with so many feeds now and so little time during the day, they tend to back up.  We’re looking at about 600 unread articles right now – yikes.  That’s just from a day or two.

Now you know how I keep so knowledgable about…everything.  Shh, the secret is out.

Via xkcd.com:

The goal?  Design some awesome looking stuff.  The niche?  I’m not using Flash.

Here are some things I’ve been reading:

Keep an eye out, things may be a-changin around here.  I’m more than open for some feedback when it does.

Not a lot has gone on.  Work has kept me busy enough where I haven’t even thought about posting.  Actually, that’s a lie.  I thought about posting a lot.  In fact, I wish you could see the slew of half-written posts that have been abandoned for an undetermined amount of time.  Maybe I’ll finish some eventually.

Regardless, summer is in full swing.  We’re in the 90′s temperature-wise, and the compelling urge to cook outside is starting to flutter its wings.  This weekend will be as good as any to kick off the outdoor cooking season.

To celebrate, I’ve spent the past week frantically searching for parts for my makeshift smoker.  After searching every home improvement store in the area, I finally found adequate parts for my own terra cotta smoker.  Pictures forthcoming.  I also picked up a 6 lb brisket last night.  At an estimated 8-10 hour cook time, I will spend tomorrow nursing over my slab of cow while watching movies and firing up the Wii for the first time in weeks.  If this brisket test run is successful, next weekend will be ribs!  Hang on, the drool is starting to flood the keyboard.

Also, now with the imminent demise of Ringo, it looks like everyone is flocking to Flickr.  I actually like Flickr, though it doesn’t have that nice feed that Ringo has.  I wonder if I can write my own feed generator with the Flickr API.  Maybe that’s what I’ll spend Saturday doing.

By the way, you can find me on Flickr under georgechang.

Anyways, you can find me under georgechang and see what I’m doing – which is most likely nothing.

edit: I got like 100 hits in the past few days from people who searched for “Tuscani Pasta” on Google. I think I was the 3rd listing, right under Pizza Hut’s. Interesting.

I can feel my brain slowing down when it comes to studying and remembering stuff.  I was hoping that maybe – just maybe – since I didn’t use the ol’ noggin much while I was in school, I would have saved all that smartness for later on in life.  To all you kids out there who have think similarly – I assure you, that’s absolutely bunk.

Strangely enough, I read and study more now than I ever did in college – or maybe ever.  Yeah, I’m the nerd that you see sitting in a coffee shop hunched over a book.  I guess that’s better than the nerd hunched over his laptop with headphones on.  That’s only me on weekends.

So I’m off to a coffee shop to read.  Good luck finding me.

And now the Japanese have proven it:

“Japanese researchers recently performed the first experimental demonstration of a phenomenon that causes a busy freeway to inexplicably grind to a halt. A team from Nagoya University in Japan had volunteers drive cars around a small circular track and monitored the way ‘shockwaves’ — caused when one driver brakes — are sent back to other cars, caused jams to occur. Drivers were asked to travel at 30 kmph but small fluctuations soon appeared, eventually causing several vehicles to stop completely. Understanding the phenomenon could help devise ways to avoid the problem. As one researcher comments: ‘If they had set up an experiment with robots driving in a perfect circle, flow breakdown would not have occurred.”

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13402-shockwave-traffic-jam-recreated-for-first-time.html

So the next time you’re on the road and you want to touch your brake pedal when there’s nothing in front of you, remember this: you’re about to singlehandedly cause a traffic jam.

from the washington post

Debriefing tonight.

Coffee now.