I discovered Ebichu anime last night.  Ebichu is a cute housekeeping (?) hamster who is fiercely loyal to her undeserving master.  Ebichu is simply hillarious.  Here are some screenshots to make up for all the boring technical posts:

Ebichu cleaning

Ebichu dusting

Ebichu telling her master's boyfriend to
be fair to both of her master's breasts.

Ebichu telling her master's coworkers
what a nice girl her master is.

Ebichu underappreciated
 

My wife wasted 5 hours today waiting for jury selection process.  She doesn't understand English very well but the jokers administrating the jury duty doesn't care.  Apparently they also don't care about wasting people's time because she told me she had to wait all that time just to be told to come back tommorrow.

Jury duty is a serious responsibility for every American citizen but bureaucrats are turning it into a joke.  What is the point of dragging in a busy housewife who understants little English to warm up a chair all day?  With such idiocy and glaring disregard for people's time, it is no wonder everyone tries to avoid the jury duty.  While everyone complains about the slowness of DMV and US Post Office, they are speedy when compared to the American court system.

On Sunday, my wife and I harvested some ripe persimmons off our two persimmon trees and took some photos while at it.

My wife doing her sexy persimmon hunter pose
in front of a persimmon tree.  Long stick she is holding is
what we use to cut the persimmons down.

A closer look at the persimmon tree.
Persimmons are riper at the top for some reason.

What we managed to harvest before I threw in the towel.

Eating too much persimmons can cause constipation.  Since I enjoy being an easy going fella, I don't eat persimmon.  Half of the harvest are for my wife and son.  The rest goes to our friends and neighbors.  The best way to eat persimmons is to ripe them until they turn red (called hong-shil in Korean) and then freeze them.  This way you can eat them like ice cream any time.

I just cancelled my registration for the IBDNetwork event tonight because I got up at 4AM today and expect to be sleepy by early evening.  So don't look for my face there.  I'll miss Joi's dinner also.  I hate getting up early in the morning.  My house office faces south east and, in the morning, the sun is too bright for the computer screens.  What I like to do is get up around noon and work til 4AM or so.  But I have little control over my internal clock meaning I am consistently inconsistent.

My son and I pooled our money together and bought a PlayStation2 over the weekend.  The bundle came with a game called Ratchet and Clank by Insomniacs which my son and I took turns playing.  I am not too impressed with the graphics, but the game itself is very well done and a pleasure to play.  Since I am a cranky old man when it comes to quality of software, the fact that I like the game means quite a lot.

Why didn't I get an Xbox?  Becaues it's the application (games) that matter, not the platform.  Selection of available games for rent at BlockBuster is much bigger for PS2.

Microsoft recently bought Hong Kong-based Creature House supposedly for the Expression technology, a vector renderer with some interesting features like soft-edge and reflection mapping.  One gripe I have had about Flash is it's lack of API.  If the rumor is right, Microsoft's Flash-killer (tentatively called Sparkle) will be primarily API-based.

XAML and Avalon might be interesting architecturally, but I predict that Sparkle will have the most impact on future Windows GUI.  I can't wait to get my hands on Sparkle.  I just hope Sparkle redistributables will be available for legacy platforms so I don't have to wait until the Longhorn marketshare grows big enough.

Once in a while, I receive a mail asking me to claim my share of a class action lawsuit settlement.  Amount involved is usually tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars.  The problem is that I have to fill-out long forms and provide evidences.  I am certainly not inclined to waste my time filling out those forms nor search for whatever proof they are asking for and I suspect many feels the same way or are as lazy/focused as I am.  So I am wondering where all the unclaimed millions are going to.

If they have enough information about me to ask me to file a claim, why can't they just send me my share of the claim?  For example, I have bought and registered many Windows and Office products so all the information and proof should be in Microsoft databases.  Why can't they make use of it instead of burdening me with chores to claim a lousy hundred bucks?  If that is impossible, why not use the money to reduce price on Microsoft products across the board?

I don't particularly care where the difficulties are other than that they are passing their difficulties to me.

In case you are wondering, I am still here and recovering from a recent debugging binge.  What was the toughest bug you had to fix?  For me, it usually involves odd multi-threading behaviors of the containers.  Of course, one time there was this fantastic piece of self-modifying code that was a real 'joy' to debug.  To put it simply, graphics data got converted into self-modifying code so it can be rendered fast without having to access slow page-flipping memory.  Fun to code but not fun to debug.

This is what a nice drive into hell must look like.  Thanks to Jon for the awesome photos.

Two weeks ago, I was watering the garden when my wife screamed that there was a dead rat by the water faucet next to our garage.  Feeling happy to have the opportunity to be manly, I calmly told my wife to get me a bag and a pair of used chopsticks.  With disposal equipment in hand, I walked over to the rat and discovered that it was not dead at all.

The rat was actually the size of a mouse and its has rolled itself into a ball with its head between its crotch.  When I poked it, it started crawling slowly and erratically toward our garage.  It was obviously sick, probably from eating something bad.  The rat's heroic (?) attempt to reach the safety looked just like those melodramatic movie scenes and I started feeling sorry for the rat.

Only when my wife screamed at me to save our garage from the obviously dying rat, I started guiding the crawling rat away from our garage and toward the road.  After nearly 30 minutes of gentle nudging and foot stomping, the rat finally made it safely (?) cross the road.  Later that night, I got worried about the rat so I went to check and found it gone, a happy ending of sort.

Burningbird's post about grey squirrels reminded me of the rat tonight.  I guess I am soft at heart.  It's a good thing I have a hard shell.