First snow of the season in Seattle! You can check out some pictures and a video in my gallery album. After getting off work last night at 10:15pm, I slept in this morning till 12:40pm. After I showered and got dressed and ready to leave for work, I find this pretty scene outside my door. It was very pretty. My car was covered with a layer of snow. So I made sure I wasn’t trapped in since I live on the bottom of a hill. There were hardly any snow on the road, so that was a good sign.

Here’s an advice for those have snow covered on the side windows. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SCRAPE THEM OFF BY ROLLING DOWN YOUR WINDOWS! I made the mistake of doing that because it usually works with rain. What ended up happening was snow accumulated at the bottom of the window and when the window went all the way down, the snow came collapsing in since the windows are tilted that way.

It was lovely driving in the snow. It felt like a Winter Wonderland. I’ve seen snow before, I’ve played in snow before, but I’ve never driven in snow before. Hehe. Apparently it started snowing around 11am and people were leaving work afraid they’d get stuck because I heard there’s no snow trucks around here to clear the roads. I even got a email from my manager telling my team we should head back home early and work from home.

Anyway, they say this is once every few years thingy. I wonder if I’ll get to see it again this year.

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Random Crap:

In Living Color: Jim Carrey as Vanilla Ice (from rayalome) – hilarious video of Jim Carrey doing a parody of Ice Ice Baby.

foobar2000 (from skylancer) – a pretty neat and simple audio player, sorta like the VLC (VideoLan Media Player) of audio and music.

Xbox 360 Window Modded with some Blue Bling (from Microsoft newsgroup) – they’re actually selling this on eBay: Microsoft Xbox 360 Ultra Premium Modded Llamma Edition. With 8 days left for the auction, it’s already at $4,500. You can look at 11/29/05’s entry to see him describe what mods he added to the Xbox 360.

Very, very frequent flyer.. – After two months of zig-zagging across Canada by plane, frequent flyer Marc Tacchi has reached his goal of accumulating one million miles of credits — and become something of an Internet celebrity in the process. On his blog “The Great Canadian Mileage Run 2005,” Tacchi reported on Wednesday that he had racked up 1,003,625 mileage points and spent 56 of the last 61 days in an airplane. … By reaching the one million mile goal, Tacchi gets the equivalent of about 10 round-trip business class flights from Canada to Australia, which he has estimated would normally cost about C$70,000. Wo… That’s C$7,000 per RT business class flight! Is business class really that expensive?

RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs (from ungsunghero) – “We are merely exercising our right to defend our intellectual properties from unauthorized peer-to-peer notification of the existence of copyrighted material,” a press release signed by RIAA anti-piracy director Brad Buckles read.

Panda cub takes Washington by storm – He then shook his head and began clambering over the rocky display on wobbly legs, taking a couple of tumbles along the way and nosing at everything in his path. reading this story just makes me go goo goo and awwwww over and over again.

MSN Search: seattle free wifi (from Microsoft newsgroup) – check out the suggestion: seattle free wife. several comments included:

• Don’t believe the hype. The first one is free, and then you have to buy 8 more at regular price within the next year.
• As a somewhat renowned “free” expert, I would say that this is consistent with the concept of “free”, where the up front cost is zero, but the recurring and long term costs are in deed crippling.

Hacking Coke Machines (from Microsoft newsgroup) – pretty interesting… too bad I’m sick of soda since I get unlimited free soda at work.

This isn’t exactly the newest pya! FLOOD, but it’s been queued for awhile and I’m finally publishing it:

(flash) GIGA　Vr2 – a remix of the Dragostea din Tei by O-ZONE. Graphics are a bit scary though.
(img) 切り絵 – Paper Cuttings – some really interesting models this person created by cutting and folding paper.
(vid) すいません、ちょっと壁際通りますよ – Random Cars Flying – a video of a race car game with cars behind the driver randomly flying ahead of it.
(vid) かっこいいボーリングの投げ方 – Groovy Bowling – In official tournaments, does that count as a re-do or a gutter ball?
(img) 地下水の奇跡 – Geyser’s Miracle – That’s one strong geyser!
(img) けむり – Smoke Drawing – i wonder if that’s real. looks really pretty.
(img) 壁紙 – Wallpaper – a nice drawing outside a building
(vid) 驚愕のハード XBOX 360 – Xbox 360 excitement – a parody of how excited Xbox 360 owners are acting
(flash) 爆発ブロック崩し – Uber Breakout – a fun little flash game
(img) 欲張りすぎたか – Strong Ant
(img) nya、読めないんですけど – Cute Kitten
(img) 飛び蹴り – Flying Kick – are sumo wrestlers allowed to do that?
(img) サーモナー(´∀` )グラフィー？ – Lego Cat
(flash) RANDOM BATTLE – a really cool flash video with fight scenes resembling Xiao Xiao’s stick figures.
(flash) Animal Politics – a cute flash animation where our world leaders are animals discussing environmental issues
(img) 同じ種類ですか？ – Same Species? – can rabbits really grow that big?
(img) マリオ死にすぎ – Mario’s Death – how Mario should’ve died along the way
(img) 樹の鳥よ～ – Bird Tree – really cool how they have it above the water
(vid) なわとび – Jump Rope
(vid) アチャー – Acha! – some idiot sticks his hands in a boiling pan of oil
(img) あとは任せた！ – Timber! – some kids knock over a tall stack of milk cartons
(img) コピーするnya – Copy Cat – cute kitten

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Random Crap:

VLC Media Player 0.8.4 is out! It’s my backup player when Media Player Classic doesn’t work, since it seems the best at playing random crap, but has a somewhat bad user interface. The preference and option settings always take me forever to figure out what to do, but one great thing about it is you can play xvid or divx files before they finish downloading, which most players can’t.

Cute Calendar Puppies (from cari and decathanerd)

Canvascape – 3D walker (from /.) – Apparently Firefox, Opera, and Safari supports this canvas drawing layer and this person managed to write a simple FPS (first person shooter) out of it. It’s pretty neat. No need for flash or any other external plugin. Does not work in IE6.

Hands-on: Sony PSP Talkman – Translate, Speak & Learn English/Japanese/Chinese/Korean (from deadlock) – check out the commercial videos of this new PSP game. Wouldn’t really call it a game. It’s more like a translator/english learning software.

These video links might not work, so you might want to visit the article above and look for the video links there:

• Talkman TVCM “Buy You A Drink?
• Talkman TVCM “Toilet Paper!”
• Talkman TVCM “Korean Restaurant”
• Talkman TVCM “Learning with Max” #1
• Talkman TVCM “Learning with Max” #2
• Talkman TVCM “Learning with Max” #3

No-Flush Urinals Just Waiting for Plumbers (from /.) – I’ve actually never knew waterless urinals existed. I did know that urinals with 2 settings for flushes existed. A half flush for pee and a full flush for poop. But check out what a waterless urinal looks like: Waterless. You can see a simple diagram of how it works here. Seems like an intriguing idea and places have already started implementing these. The flush-free fixtures hanging on the restroom wall look good. The place smells good. The users’ reviews sound good. … Conservationists say the average no-flush urinal can save as much as 24,000 gallons of water a year. They say that the liquid sealant keeps dangerous bacteria as well as bad smells from the restroom without a need for water. Plumbers on the other hand are arguing because of sanitary reasons, waterless urinals aren’t that great of a choice, but that could also be because they might be losing a lot of customers if everyone takes the waterless urinal route, putting many of them out of work.

Strictly Reptiles, Inc. (from deadlock) – has some cute pictures of baby reptiles.

Life of Larry (Part 1 / Part 2) – a college film of Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy. You could clearly see where some of the ideas for Family Guy comes from.

Apparently they’re making a Dead or Alive movie based on the popular game. It’s called DOA: Dead or Alive (from fuzzywuzzy). You can watch the trailer here. The trailer makes it look pretty bad right now, but you know fans of DOA are going to go watch it anyway.

Great scare reaction (from deadlock) – a hilarious attempt to scare a trick or treater and he got so scared, he retaliated.

Baltimore Losing Light Poles to Thieves – City streets are getting darker because thieves, some disguised as utility crews, are stealing 30-foot light poles, authorities said. About 130 aluminum light poles have vanished this fall from locations across the city, despite the difficulty of carting off the 250-pound objects.

Man Cuts in Line, Is Wrestled to Ground – Security guards wrestled a man to the ground in a Wal-Mart after he cut in line to get laptop computers that were on sale Friday, a television station reported. The man started arguing with people inside the store, WFTV-TV in Orlando reported. He then started fighting with the guards, the station reported. One man told WFTV that the laptops were being thrown into the air and people rushed toward them, collapsing on each other. Another man described the scene as crazy.

Vt. Teacher Accused of Anti-Bush Quiz – One example: “I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes.” “Coherent” is the right answer.

Clerk Refuses to Call Police After Robbery – A woman who was robbed at knifepoint while pumping gas into her church’s van couldn’t believe it when the gas station attendant refused to call police for help. … The gas station’s manager said he was sorry about the robbery, but clerks at the station do not make emergency calls from the front counter, fearing retaliation for criminals. Sigh… What has this world come to?

Woman gives new meaning to “fast food” – A day before millions of Americans sit down to eat traditional Thanksgiving dinners, a Virginia woman grabbed the world turkey-eating title on Wednesday by gobbling down a whole roast bird in 12 minutes.

Car stolen? Who you gonna call? – Albanians are so sick of police doing nothing about the theft and hijacking of luxury cars that they’ve taken to setting up their own informal networks of hot-lines and roadblocks. … Using mobile phones, three cars homed in on the late-model limousine from different directions while an unofficial road block was set up near the northern town of Lezhe. The car-jackers saw the private roadblock, got out and took off, the Gazeta Shqiptare newspaper said. That’s great community effort. If the government isn’t going to do anything about it, then maybe it’s time to take it into our own hands.

NES Lock (from deadlock)
Apparently these were sold to parents who wanted their kids off the nintendo game console before finishing their homework. Wonder what was wrong with just taking the power cable.

Street Fighter Salsa (from deadlock) – Ryu and Chung Li go at it…salsa style. A really cool video of 2 dancers dressed up as street fighter characters doing the Salsa. They even insert their own characters trademarked stances once in awhile. Pretty neat!

Danes provide prostitutes for the disabled – The Danish government is under attack for paying for its disabled citizens to have sex with prostitutes. Time to become disabled and live in Denmark.

Xbox 360 day 2: component costs and crashes – First up, market research firm iSuppli, best known for taking apart consumer electronics to determine how much they cost to manufacture, has disassembled an Xbox 360. The verdict? Microsoft is taking a bath on the hardware, to the tune of US$126 for each high-end Xbox 360 sold. The ATI-made graphics processing unit alone is estimated to cost US$141 (including the RAM) while the IBM Xenon CPU accounts for another US$106. … We’ve been getting e-mails today from users experiencing problems with their new Xbox 360s., and a scan of gaming news sites and forums shows that we’re not alone. The most common problem appears to be overheating, with crashes and hard drive problems close behind. One video circulating shows one of the more common crashes, with the console going belly-up while running Project Gotham Racing 3. Owners report that the crashes and error messages do not seem to be confined to a single title or scenario.

Scientists engineer bacteria to create living photographs (from /.) – Scientists at UC San Francisco have engineered bacteria to create living photographs that weigh in at 100 megapixels per square inch. Pretty soon, we’ll have bacteria powered photographs.

Google Click-to-Call (from /.) – an interesting new service Google is providing where you can connect with any advertiser they have a contract with through phone and Google will foot the cost.