While walking today, this lady wanted to pet the dogs (actually just Nori, poor Mochi, he's being ignored in favor of a smaller cuter brother.)

Well, besides making the mistake of just liking the smaller cuter one, she bends over and then stops and asks me if this is a pit bull -- you know because she never touches pit bulls.  I find a lot wrong with this.

1. She is already too close, if she were facing a pit bull that she should be afraid of at that range, asking whether Nori was a pit bull would have been one of the last things on her mind.
2. Since she had to ask, I deduced that she had never met a pit bull.  If this is the case, then she made her decision on not petting pit bulls on ignorance.  This FUD based decisionmaking is always a bad thing and earns only my scorn.
3. Since she most likely never met a pit bull, she never knew them to be really cute dogs when raised properly.
4. BESIDES HOW CAN YOU EVER MISTAKE A PUG FOR A PITBULL?!, stupid lady.

I'm thinking about this also because the rainman sent me a couple links to articles about Pit bulls.  It's all FUD + Ignorance.

well... I'll take back the misogynist part since the person I'm describing can be a number of men I know.

So I'm sitting here at the coffee shop and a group of four decide to play Scrabble™.  Three girls and a guy.  One of the girls starts to pronounce that she will beat everyone at the table and then continues to talk about the rules while they play.  Some of her rules are wrong, which would be forgivable if she didn't put herself forward as some kind of great Scrabble™ player.  The other three decide to gang up against her and then I hear this stream chatter complaining how unfair it is that the three of them decided to gang up on her.  Well if you have the hubris to tell the other three at a Scrabble™ table that you're going to beat them, you deserve to be ganged up on.  I mean, my best friend while destroying you at the tabletop strategy games he so dealy loves would never tell you outright that he will beat you.  Instead he will give you advice subtly skewed to not only be of some use to you but really of more use to him.  It took much longer for people who play against him to gang up on him.

Ugh, I'm glad they're gone, I couldn't stand the constant stream of chatter from that one girl, sometimes I believe that some people shouldn't have the power of speech.

The third "dog"

Mochi and Nori have a new playmate.  Well, they follow him around and look at him while he works.  We just aquired a brand new (to us) refurbished Roomba.  This is the one with the updated firmware and scheduler.  It works really well, getting to most areas of the living room/kitchen without too much difficulty, even under the couch.  As a daily collector of Mochi (and now Nori) hair, it works well and I will not be vacuuming as much, maybe once a week.  It plays this nice cheerful tune, and disengages from the docking station and starts on its random walk around the room.  I like the algorithim that it uses, it "recognizes" objects to go around like islands and follows walls.  I like that it can go over rugs and finally it puts itself back into the docking station when it is running out of juice.

A really cool thing of this latest generation of Roombas is that programmability built into the device.  Basically it's like programming a simple microprocessor robot.  With a serial cable, I can get inside the SCI (serial control interface) and program to my hearts content.  There is also a bluetooth module that you can control the Roomba directly with.  The modding community seems to be really rich and the fact that the robot's programming interface specifications are open makes for interesting homebrewed apps, I saw a midi program that makes use of the Piezo speaker on the roomba to play tunes, cool.

...well at least the wall decoration at the Adler Planetarium is now accurate again.

Okay, degeneral emailed me today and asked me when Oktoberfest was.  So I looked it up and found out that it's held in September.  Actually the three weekends after Labor Day.  So the derfman's accusation that Oktoberfest is closer to my birthday is wrong.  But seriously -- I would like to go.  Here's the information i found so far:

CHICAGO:

Traditional Oktoberfest with live, traditional music.

Tonight I thought that I would go to the Wicker Park Chess Club and see how it was.  Well initially I went to the Lakeview-Cuyler chess club, only to find out that they are not meeting for the summer -- they could have mentioned that on their website, but I'm not bitter.  I just drove 5+ minutes to Myopic Bookstore where the Wicker Park Chess Club was being held.  If they weren't there, I could at least shop for some books.

Okay let's see, how to describe this...  Think of a room full of very smart people, some successful, some bitter because they aren't that successful, but all very smart, now think of these individuals trying to demonstrate how smart they are by beating you at chess (I have to admit that for only a few people is this really true -- but no one likes to lose.)  Now imagine these same people trying also to tell everyone how much they know by pulling Cliff Clavin's during interesting conversations.  Well tonight wasn't anywhere near what I just described.  Except for the guy I ended up playing.  I played this guy Dennis who talked to himself and swore when I made good moves and he made bad ones.  He was sitting alone and I ended up playing with him.  He asked me my name and pulled out this square of paper on which he proceeded to write his name, my name and the word "draw".  He then proceeded to heep track of wins and losses, I broke even with him.  Seems neurosis and social retardedness almost always goes hand in hand with chess talent (this writer is the rare exception.)  He also didn't really know how to shake hands, it was like holding onto a limp fish.

Okay, after all of this whining on my part, I kinda liked playing against real people face to face over the board for a change.  I think I'll be going as many Wednesdays as I can.

Yesterday, Rea and I went out for dinner with my parents, and hers.  My sister and my future brother in law Chris were there too.  Basically it was a dinner for Rea and a belated birthday celebration for my sister Jin.  Jin has a pretty quirky sense of humor.  Once when one of my college friends called me during spring break, she answered and made him think that I was killed in a car accident before telling him that she was joking and putting me on the phone.  Lance (yes, that was what he was callig himself then and probably why my sister played that joke on him) gave me an earful.  Well it was a good dinner and I think it was a pretty good wind up to all of Rea's birthday celebrations.

She didn't expect much from me (based on past performance) in terms of presents and I encouraged this making her think that I made her coupons for free back rubs or romantic dinner with Jae (hehe).  To her credit, she did figure out that I got her a unique piece of art jewelry from this store neaby, but she wasn't expecting the electric piano.  She was pleasantly suprised, but I suspect also that the fact that I didn't try to give her a coupon helped with her being pleased.

At the dinner we were talking about a number of different things with Jin and Chris and I mentioned the Superhero show.  This set Jin off as she mentioned this to Chris and he was kinda like "huh, what".  We were thinking about superhero names and powers and I figured that I'd pick the geek braintrust that reads this site for superhero ideas.  Wikipedia has an interesting article on Superheroes and while I probably won't immediately agree with the category system, it's still pretty good.  SO what do you think?  If I were to try out for the next season of Who wants to be a Superhero, what kind of superhero should I be?  I'm not much of a fighter, though I have done Kendo and a sword wielding superhero is pretty 80's and lame.  I'm thinking more of someone who likes to outsmart his foes, who has a backpack full of gadgets and a head full of ideas, who sets elaborate death traps for his unwitting supervillan foes.  That's kinda more my style.  Of course this kind of character works well in a team so who would my natural counterparts be?

I have a new guilty pleasure.  I've been watching this reality show on SciFi channel called Who wants to be a Superhero.  Cool concept, you'd think that they'd screw it up, but no.  Stan Lee presides over a Big-Brother like situation where people are in a superhero lair.  Each show has different challenges and activities and there have been multiple eliminations per show so far.  It's cool to see how some of the people are really buying into their superhero personas.  I've seen one of the more interesting things done to an eliminated contestant in a reality show in the last show.  I won't say what it is in case some of you decide to try and catch some of the show reruns on SciFi.

Another show I've been watching recently is Eureka also on SciFi.  It's about a secret town full of super secret government scientists.  Basically we follow the sheriff around and see things through his eyes.  It's an action drama with some suspense, but when I watch it, I get the same vibe I got from watching Northern Exposure, even if they're such different shows.  I am totally buying into the characters who are a good mixture of the stereotypical types you might expect in a show like this, but you get a real sense that they have more to them than you may think.

Okay, one puppy incident.  Nori met his first bad kid today.  I was watching Mochi and this kid with his mom, aunt and grandmother gave Nori a kick.  Today was the first day in all my experience working with kids at Sunday School, Children's ministry situations, and Day care that I REALLY wanted to hit a child.  What kind of kid (he looked around 4-5) would kick a cute little dog. 
I hope some bigger dog bites him.