Pepino's Notes

Simon Pride came to the United States to visit his new girlfriend Arielle whom he met when she was studying at Oxford in England. In their journeys they both came through San Francisco and I got to see them one evening. Another friend, Charlie Chen, was supposed to be with us too but his Windows servers had problems. Some mail script was written badly and he had a lot of manual work to do unfortunately. Anyway, we ate at a Thai restaurant and had a good time chatting. It was great to see Simon again after all these years.

From Studying Abroad in Japan.

Darth Vader and [Asian] schoolgirls. Is there anything else a nerd would want to see in the same picture, besides maybe a beowulf cluster of something?

I thought this was really funny when I read it tonight.

Yesterday
It wasn’t even 9am and I’d already got it wrong. My predecessor asked me to email her details of how to get the pension sum/ tax refund all of which is in the General Handbook and rather then type it out, I thought I’d scan it and email it to her. So I’m sat there with the handbook and have connected the school scanner up to the school computer. And I click on what I think is the button to start the software (it’s all in Japanese, so I’m guessing). Except it isn’t. It’s the wrong button and instead I uninstalled the scanner software.

D’oh!

I am going to have to pretend it wasn’t there and tell the teachers it’s not working and hope they’ve kept the disc somewhere…

Originally uploaded by Pepino1976.

Part of the fun of living in Oakland, California. A failed attempt on stealing my car. Lost a bunch of favorite cassettes and my favorite sunglass that Danielle had given me. Cost $500 to get the car running again as the wiring harness was ruined and needed to replace the broken glass too. Damnit.

Last night I rented the movie Be Cool which I have been wanting to see for a while and it did not let me down. The acting was good and actors in it got to play interesting characters. The Rock was funny as hell as a gay body guard and it was great seeing Aerosmith perform a concert song as part of the movie. There were little jokes throughout the movie and it was enjoyable throughout. I highly recommend it.

I am finally getting around to creating my own stylesheet for my blog because all of the cool stylesheets that I tried failed as valid XHTML. I figured I might as well spend some time and do it myself. Well, I had an validation error while even using the WordPress default stylesheet which I was just going to modify. Hmm. Checked it out and the error came from a post from Flickr: The auto-generated test post.

Line 199, column 201: value of attribute “align” cannot be “absmiddle”; must be one of “top”, “middle”, “bottom”, “left”, “right”

…ight=”18″ border=”0″ align=”absmiddle” />, a fancy photo sharing thing.

I changed the absmiddle to middle and now I get valid XHTML (and CSS). I’ve got to remember to email Flickr about this.

I just got through seeing the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and it was fantastic! Johnny Depp was great as I always expect of him and the whole movie was good with lots of surprises and excitement. People in the audience were laughing during many parts. I highly recommend seeing this movie.

Here is what my friend Eric had to say about this movie over on his blog:

saw willy wonka charlie and the chocolate factory tonight, giddy on smuggled sweets, with cousin jason and allison. initially, i was upset that it strayed so far from the original, but in the end i just appreciated it for what it was. depp was just warped enough to be convincing, and distanced himself from gene wilder to make me giggle. i can’t hear your mumbling!

how did they train all those squirrels? why didn’t gene wilder have a cameo, say as one of the grandpas? the multi-cam filming of the one little person was stupendous, and i found the variety of music to have me laughing out loud [louder than anyone in the cinema, but i'm just uninhibited like that], but i did miss the oompa loompa sing-a-long musical numbers.

I just read another great comic, Sshhhh! by Jason, which is available from Fantagraphics. Below is a description from the website:

“From the Harvey Award-winning author of Hey, Wait… comes this sharp suite of short tales, ranging from the funny to the terrifying to the surreal to the touching, all told entirely in pantomime. Jason’s clean, deadpan art style hides a wealth of emotion and human complexity, leavened with a wicked wit.”

I cannot decide on which service to use: Jots, Furl, or del.icio.us. They all are good and all have thier strong points. So, I’ll probably put bookmarks in all three for a while. I imported my local bookmark.html file into Furl so I have a big head start there but need to go through and tag them all. Too much work but at least I have my large collection online. I am leaning toward del.icio.us though for a number or reasons. Time will tell which one I settle on.

I am just now reading Monkey vs. Robot and the Crystal of Power. This is one of the best comics I’ve read in a long time. Here is the description from the Top Shelf Productions website:

A factory of self-replicating robots is stripping the jungle of its natural resources, threatening the territory of a colony of nearby monkeys. A series of encounters between the two groups quickly escalates into all out war. For all the book’s humorous and charming appearance, beneath this entertaining veneer runs a stirring examination of the dual nature of existence, the dichotomy within the human mind, and our profound effect on the ecological environment. A modern day fable for adults and kids alike based on the age-old struggle between nature and technology. Definitely Kochalka’s most significant and universally accessible work to date! — 160 pages

Great stuff. Go monkeys!