With all the death and destruction in the tuna backbone post, I thought I’d do a bit of the opposite.

This video is from a recent trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium: quite possibly the most awesome aquarium on the planet.  These bluefin are in the aquarium’s ‘outer bay’ exhibit, a jaw dropping multi-story, 1 million gallon goldfish bowl.

Here’s a photo from a visit in 2004.  (photo is with the original digital rebel)

A coworker once counseled me, that if confronted or frustrated by a situation where someone is of questionable competence, the best thing to do is to let the person’s own incompetence shine through. Set up some pins and let the person knock em down.

Here’s Couric setting up some pins for Palin and Paling not even able to tie her bowling shoes.

I saw Sigur Ros last night with an Icelandic coworker.  I had opted to buy front row tickets from ticketsnow.com, which turned out to be 2nd row tickets for a 3x face value markup.  Nonetheless, it was a ridiculously awesome show.  They came across as a totally different band, way more energy and nuance than they could ever convey on an album.  I wish I’d bought tickets and a time machine for the night before last.

Here’s a little video:  ”glósóli”

Here are some photos from the show:

Toward the end they said “come up!” as the concert was in a theater of sorts, not a concert venue, so everyone was confined to their seats.  So every one got up and gathered around the stage.

One of the cool things at the auto show was a dynamometer demo sponsored by Lexus. They had a tuned IS330 on the dyno and were lettting people sit in as passengers while one of the techs did a dyno run. Pretty awesome, as I’ve never seen a dyno in person, and the Lexus sounded pretty nice, but you couldn’t see any of the dyno readings. It would have been a bit more engaging to see a huge display with torque and horsepower. My joke at the time was: “Talk about going nowhere…fast.” Har har har.

We rolled out our new HD video player at work. It’s beta, a bit buggy, but still pretty exciting. The newest version of flash allows for streaming of h.264 content inside of flash objects which means no more FLVs and crappy encoding. Here’s a demo with some BBC HD content. You might have to wait a sec to allow the video to buffer. Also, the newest version of Flash is required. If this seems like a viable way to host videos…Vimeo’s going out, Motionbox is in.

Long long long time friend Jason Chiu was recently written up in the UCLA Alumni newsletter about his work as an airline pilot. Anyone who knows Jason knows that he’s always wanted to be a commercial pilot. Congrats dude!

Below: 5am, landing at JFK on a Virgin America Airbus A320. Nice styled winglets.

I’ve undertaken the task of overhauling the blog. You’ll notice a slightly different look, but with completely different guts. Tomorrow night’s task is ajaxy window blinds in-page commenting.

A little while back it was Chinese New Year(s?). Chinatown fills up to the brim with confetti. At first I thought there was a some sort of parade, but soon found out that the confetti was from these awesome party poppers, see below.

They ranged from $5 to $10, and were between 1 foot and 3 feet in length. Some had parachutes with good fortune messages where a toy soldier should be. I apparently twisted mine the wrong way and almost took my pink off with the explosive charge.

Oh boy, street meat is good. Legend has it that the halal cart at 53rd and 6th is the best in the city. People will line up down the block at all hours just to get a plate of rice, lettuce and lamb or chicken.

The truth is that it’s not that good. I’ve repeatedly gotten food poisoning from it…nothing serious, but the kind of feverish-I-shouldn’t-have-eaten-that-dirty-food sort of discontentedness…and I like to think of myself as having a pretty strong stomach, having eaten dirty street food all over Asia.

So if 53rd and 6th is no good, who is? Well, there’s a guy/cart, one block from my work at Beaver St. and Broadway. He’s one of the happiest street vendors I’ve ever met and his food is fresher and better tasting the rest. He makes each order individually–the whole time smiling and joking around. He recently got a new type of sauce, dubbed “blue sauce.” Check out the video, you’ll see what I mean.

You can tell who actually reads your blog or wonders if you’re dead when you don’t post for a month and a half. Those people start telling you to update your blog. My apologies. Amidst some computer rebuilding, I, from time to time, neglect my blog. No wonder only 2 people read it on a regular basis…and one of them is me.

News? It’s officially winter in NYC. This is my first East coast winter, which is substantially different from a Bay Area or Santa Barbara winter. People more often talk about the weather. You must bundle up, or bundle down. My wardrobe was not prepared for winter, so I’m slowly procuring more garnmets that will keep me warm.

I’ve been working at Motionbox for about six months now. We announced today a series B round of funding, which will hopefully put food in my mouth and a roof over my head for a bit longer.

Sushi Club, our annual Campolindian get together, will be held on December 26th at David’s house. Come one, come all.

Below, David visited New York this past weekend. First snow of the year. First snow in NYC for me.

Adblock is the shit. It’s a Firefox add-on. It lets you block images, iframes or flash in web pages based on the source. I’d totally recommend running it. At first I didn’t get it (for 2 seconds), as I thought It’d automatically block ads. But then I found that you have to build your own database of ads.

So I took 5 minutes, went to my daily reads, right clicked on the ads and blocked them down to the root, i.e.,

This: http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/800/14845/1187986648/oasc04.247realmedia.com/RealMedia/ads/Creatives/BusWeek/AMD_63019_ros_300_geo/AMD_PeoplePower_300×250.swf?clickTAG=http://oascentral.businessweek.com/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/businessweek.com/home/143853630/Right2/BusWeek/AMD_63019_ros_300_geo/AMD_63019_ros_300×250_geo.html/34353536653630383436643036646630?http://breakfree.amd.com/people/?sa%20_campaign=media/breakfree/busweek/crmain

Becomes this:
http://a248.e.akamai.net/* (Edit: be careful about blocking Akamai content, they deliver good and bad. Probably more good than bad.)

I stamped out annoying flash ads (press ctrl-F, and then click on the beige overlay), silly google adsense text ads and even that Washlets ad (NSFW maybe, seeing butt doesn’t make me want to wash butt…oh btw, watch the video with the Asian woman: Washlet is “an opportunity to pamper yourself” [your butthole]).

You can also block non-advertising content, say for instance someone’s ugly profile pic on Facebook or all those annoying badges on TechCrunch. Whenever I come across a new ad, I love stamping it out. Yep. I’d definitely recommend it.

Below, from the NY Transit Museum. A detailed model of how a hydrogen fuel cell works. For homie Daivd who 1) shared a video with me and 2) works on hydrogen fuel cell buses.

After work on Friday, I met up with roomie Chris, as he works on top of (in the GM building) the flagship 5th ave Apple Store. I wanted to get my 3rd gen iPod fixed but apparently there was some hooplah about a “phone, widescreen video ipod, and internet communicator” combo device that was being released. I wasn’t sure what was going on but it was fun to watch the controlled madness–lots of media, lots of cheering Apple employees, a line wrapping around a whole city block.

I got there right after 6pm, the drop time, and consequently missed the initial burst of excitement. As I said, there was a line wrapping around the block, that was separated from normal traffic by police-type barricades. There were plenty of Apple employee handlers and security watching over and guiding the line to prevent any misfortunate cuttages.

Around 7pm, the line had slackened. Perhaps the line ushers weren’t doing a good job of moving the line foward. There were breaks in the line to allow for entrance into the center courtyard, and the ushers would have to shuffle people between such breaks. Perhaps it was in one of those shuffling periods, but with nobody in sight behind, that Chris and I made a dashing move to get in line. We effectively waited less than 10 minutes in line. It was our original intention to perhaps see a live specimen of the phone in its birth environment and maybe even touch it; however, the plan completely backfired when, while waiting in the relatively short line, either Chris or I decided it would be a good idea to just buy one.

Our eager, child-like banter shifted from “I wanna touch it” to “various was to get out of our current contracts and sell our current phones.” Well, we succumbed. My credit card company is happy. Apple is happy. The phone is so slick that it makes me happy.

30 minutes later, after soaking in the frenzy of the subterranean store, we emerged back to street level to the cheers of Apple employees, iPhones in hand…