Category: Uncategorized

Google is so cool. It helped me in my job so many times by getting me the best search results. It’s just like an external brain… there is a heck of a lot of stuff I don’t know but then I google it, get the answer, answer the question and then I *seem* smart, when in actual fact I’m probably not – I just know what keywords to use. I guess it’s like how people in South Beach *seem* perfect (or walk around like it) when in actual fact of course, they’re not (1). They just find ways around it (read plastic surgery). Oh, and I’m not talking about personality here either. I’m actually just dribbling.

Anyhow, Google has just released google maps: maps.google.com. I’m a big supporter of clean, usable interfaces (props to Frosty who actually got me thinking about that stuff in the first place) and this interface rocks. It’s so quick, clean and intuitive I just love it. You search for a business nearby and va-voom! There it is. I’m saying goodbye to Mapquest from now on. For now maps is only US-centric but I expect that will change as Google modifies it to cater for other countries in the future, especially considering it’s still only a beta.

Also, I’m now an even more major fan of Google because of their Picasa photo organising program. I thought I’d give it a shot and see how it’d do with organising my 7+ gigs of photos on my computer. No problem. It found ones I’d actually forgotten about and because the interface is so damn good I had no problem in actually realising this.

Oh, I also use blogger, also (now, anyway) by Google. And I use gmail (e-mail addy is daecks@gmail.com by the way) Why? Because they’re piss easy to use and I’ve never had any problems with any of them.

(1) – ok, I don’t think she was from South Beach but it’s a funny story anyway. At the Superbowl party I went to on Sunday night these stripper-like girls turned up. I thought “wow, these parties really go off!” but as it turned out they were only friends of friends (2). Anyway, the blonde one was looking at a globe of the world later on in the night and showing us where her family comes from. She didn’t know where Belgium was. I don’t think she was even looking in Europe.

(2) – that’s not to say of course that a friend of a friend could not be a stripper. Had to make that clarification. A friend who was a stripper would be even better though. Had to make that clarification too.

*Finally* I went for a night out in South Beach. Only one word describes that night out: awesome. When you’re kicking on to breakfast at 6:30am in the morning and making sure that a friend is ok as they’ve been getting sick in the toilet, you know you’ve had a good night. I *think* we ended up in a place called “Pearl“. The name of the place was “Rumi“. Check out the pictures of this place! They played some bloody good music but only towards the latter part of the night. It seems that the music has to be dumbed down a lot earlier on in the night to please the fickle part of the crowd (err, rethink that. It’s South Beach. The fickle part of the crowd is the crowd) and they only play the non-commercial, actually good-to-listen-to stuff later.

The club’s closing song was “no woman no cry” by Bob Marley so I grabbed someone’s cigarette lighter and ended up walking down the stairs at the head of my group swaying the lighter from side to side. It kept on extinguishing and I ended up flicking the little steel drum out of the lighter somehow, and at some point I burnt my thumb although I only found that out the next day.

I crashed at Nina’s place in South Beach which was about one or two streets away from the club. Her and my friend from work (she was my friend’s cousin, and my friend is from my workplace) had another breakfast (at 3pm) at the Big Pink. I tell you what, the potato omelette they make there is bloody fantastic. That is completely neutralised by the fact however that they don’t know how to make an iced coffee. And what is it with this cinnamon thing again? Why do they have to have it on everything???

Anyway, gotta get back to doing the thing I was sent over here for: work.

*sigh*

What can I say about San Francisco? I absolutely, without a doubt, positively loved it. A-friggen-mazing place. We stayed in a hotel which was about a one minute walk from Union square, more or less the centre square for San Francisco and we had the cable cars going past our window down in the street. Did I do a lot of walking? Hell yes! I was absolutely buggered from walking around but loved every bit of it. A nice change from all the flatness here in Florida.

We went out one night for some sushi and then went to grab a drink. Who would’ve thought that the first place we went to grab a drink happened to be a gay bar? No matter, the people there were bloody friendly and I stored my camera there for a while when we went to check out some straight places, with a gay guy as our tour guide of course.

I got a bit freaked out on the way home. My friends had gone home much earlier in the night (as to why, refer to my post: “The woman“) and it got to about the time where I had to leave the group I was hanging around with (read: nearly sunrise). Did I know my way around San Francisco well enough to find my way home? No. Was I a bit scared? Yes. Luckily I found Powell street after a bit of looping around and was just crossing at the lights across the road from our hotel when the lens cap from my camera fell off. A bum who happened to be walking alongside me picked up the lens cap and began looking at it quizzically. I said to him a couple of times “Mate, can I please have my lens cap back?” No response. I knew I had a $1 bill in my pocket and offered to swap it for my lens cap. We did the swap and by this stage I was out the front of my hotel and I absolutely bolted it upstairs. There were always a few people around the whole time I walked home, but I was still a bit freaked out in some points. Scary stuff.

We did the whole touristy thing, checking out Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf and took a bus tour of the city. After staying in San Francisco for a little over 3 days I did not want to leave there. It was such a cool city. Ah well.

It also happened to be the city where I lost my iPod charger. I believe we all heard a clunk sound as we were packing the car to leave San Francisco. Upon reflection, that did very much sound like an iPod charger hitting the ground, even though we couldn’t find anything. I think that bum who tried taking my lens cap snapped up my iPod charger before we knew what the heck was going on.

To feel my pain, sing this to the tune of “San Francisco” as sung by Scott Mckenzie:

If you’re leaving from San Francisco

Please do take care

To not leave belongings there

If you’re leaving from San Francisco

A bum’s got your charger

And he couldn’t give a care

Bah! Screw writing anymore lyrics.

Pictures start here.

Err, thought it would be time to update my blog. Well, I’ve started up tennis again. Yah! I haven’t played a game since I got over here and now I plan to make it a weekly thing. I was missing it so, so much. The only sport I’ve been doing is the odd swim and I don’t do it often enough to get anything out of it. Anyway, it’s been good to get away from the computer for a while. I sit all day in front of one (which I hate doing… well, all day at least). I hate, hate, hate that part of my job.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool that someone had started researching Venus fly traps. I went on a rant about such stuff in this post a while back. The research discusses the mathematics of how the trap operates, but it still leaves open how the hell the plant *actually does it*. The research is here. I only hope I don’t look like that guy when I’m talking about Venus fly traps. Actually, I probably look worse since I’m normally intoxicated at the time.

Could you imagine how happy I was when I found this site? Oops, did I just link directly to Salma Hayek? Oh. Heh, they do talk about the famous scene in “From Dusk till Dawn”. Hats off. It takes quite a while to read through all the top 100 women (as voted by readers of askmen.com). I found it quite a good idea to have several pictures of each person. Noice. Enjoy guys.