Aside

Last night, after going through a debriefing of my first day, Becky pointed out an inconsistency with two of the fringe benefits that I get as an employee of Macworld (parent company IDG). On the one hand, they subsidize gym membership (sweet!), to encourage their employees to stay healthy and work out, etc. Now in addition to that, there’s a shuttle bus that takes employees from the Montgomery BART station (2nd and Market St.) to the office (2nd and Bryant…

Yesterday, I was driving Boyk and I home from Fruitvale. We had just eaten 10 tacos between four taquerias and polished it all off with a few churros. We got stuck in some brief traffic on the 80. Cyrus: “You know what sucks? Traffic.” Boyk: “Yeah, it’s definately not as good as churros.”

One of my best friends, Dallas Bluth is enjoying his summer in Lyon, France, where he lived from Fall 1996 until 1999. Through family friends, he recently met a woman named Fanny, who is to be married to a Crown Prince of Kuwait. The new couple will be moving to Dubai in a few months, where Fanny is to open a small chain of lingerie stores. Dallas fell into this, and is becoming Fanny’s new English tutor and will likely…

I spent most of last night camped out in Dulles airport. Managed to get a standby to Chicago and then to Oakland this morning. Not fun. However you should go buy your tickets to the Senegalese rap group Daara J (along with Lateef the Truthspeaker) show at 12 Galaxies at 9 pm on Saturday August 6. $13/advance. $15/door. Get them now. Daara J is awesome.

So three points on the Arabic Assassin story. 1) Clearly, this guy isn’t all that bright if he thinks that as a Palestinian-American his rapping about terrorism isn’t going to raise any red flags. Oh, and he’s a baggage screener, too? In the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston? Yeah, no red flags at all. (That being said, what exactly is an intercontinental airport?) 2) He does have a point that he’s not the first to write crazy lyrics for…

In case you’re not a journalist/journalism geek, you may have missed that Matt Cooper talked to Karl Rove on “double super secret background”. The Daily Show’s Stephen Colbert explained the other night what, exactly, that means: Double super secret background: “Just like regular background but with no tagbacks, frontsies or backsies, taken to infinity plus one on opposite day, circle circle dot dot now you’ve got a cootie shot. It was first pioneered by Edward R. Murrow.” – Stephen Colbert…

02:00 AM Jul. 16, 2005 PT Wired News by Cyrus Farivar Imagine eating food that was cooked using natural gas generated from your own human waste. Thousands of prisoners in Rwanda don’t have to imagine it — they live it. Prisoners’ feces is converted into combustible “biogas,” or methane gas that can be used for cooking. It has reduced by 60 percent the annual wood-fuel costs which would otherwise reach near $1 million, according to Silas Lwakabamba, rector of the…

Let’s say you’re like the Hyatt Regency in Reston, VA, where my parents and I are staying this weekend. And let’s say that even though your guests are paying a bunch to stay at your hotel that you’re charging them $10 for 24 hrs of WiFi access. When you’re deciding what third party businesses to put in the lobby of your hotel (Starbucks, etc) — you might not want to put a business (say, Panera Bread) that prides themself on…

SF Chron, via Slashdot : I did another LexisNexis search for Valerie E. Wilson in Washington, D.C. This confirmed she lives at the same address as Joseph C. Wilson. It also took me the next step. “Former name: Plame, Valerie E.” I now had the identity of a covert CIA agent (who was using her maiden name as part of her cover as an energy-industry analyst working for a firm called Brewster Jennings & Associates, now known to be a…

I write this from the Soho Tea and Coffee, famous for its late hours, being near Dupont Circle, and free WiFi, natch. I’m staring out at P St. where the water is running down the street and flowing into 22nd St., and the thunder is pounding, and when it does loud enough, the six people in here with laptops kick up their heads and start paying attention to what’s happening around them. I’m here this weekend for a family wedding…