i have to admit to liking this look. a lot.

according to this quiz, i am a chaotic good human bard. i guess it's cos i love the ladies and the liquor. according to the details, i am also very close to being a chaotic neutral dwarven barbarian, which is perhaps less surprising.

Alignment:
Chaotic Good characters are independent types with a strong belief in the value of goodness. They have little use for governments and other forces of order, and will generally do their own things, without heed to such groups.

Race:
Humans are the 'average' race. They have the shortest life spans, and because of this, they tend to avoid the racial prejudices that other races are known for. They are also very curious and tend to live 'for the moment'.

Primary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.

Secondary Class:

Detailed Results:

Alignment:
Law and Chaos:
Law ----- XXXXXX (6)
Neutral - XXXXX (5)
Chaos --- XXXXXXX (7)

Good and Evil:
Good ---- XXXXXXX (7)
Neutral - XXXXX (5)
Evil ---- (-1)

Race:
Human ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXX (13)
Half-Elf - XXXXXX (6)
Elf ------ XXXXXX (6)
Gnome ---- XXXXXXXX (8)
Halfling - XXXXXXXXX (9)
Dwarf ---- XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Half-Orc - XXXXXXX (7)

Class:
Fighter -- XXXXXXXXXXX (11)
Barbarian -XXXXXXXXXXX (11)
Ranger --- XXXX (4)
Monk ----- (-2)
Paladin -- XX (2)
Cleric --- X (1)
Mage ----- (-7)
Druid ---- XXX (3)
Thief ---- (0)
Bard ----- XXXXXXXXXXX (11)

from urcella: clothing dissing my old neighborhood. there is much dong to be eaten by this fellow.

pvp freakout!

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 70% Iron Man 65% Hulk 65% The Flash 50% Green Lantern 45% Superman 45% Catwoman 40% Robin 37% Batman 35% Supergirl 30% Wonder Woman 15%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

do yourself a favor, rip a few bongs, then settle back and watch these:

• don't miss the reggae one: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/gijoe.html
• oldie but goodie, ran into some folks last night who still haven't seen it: http://www.ps260.com/molly/SHINING%20FINAL.mov
• holy fuck \m/: http://seriousbusisness.ytmnd.com/
• i can almost imagine some of the dudes i play wow with freaking out like this: http://wowseriousbusiness.ytmnsfw.com/

website of the month: pubwalk.com. mashes up Google Maps and Citysearch to show all boozing establishments near a specified address and allows you to build a customized pub crawl route with directions from each joint to the next and estimated walking and drinking times. there's even a streamlined interface for getting the directions on your phone. brilliant.

here's an example crawl of the Lower Haight bars nearest my house.

a few bars are missing - most notably Zeitgeist and Mad Dog in the Fog, dunno what's up with that - but the developer says he's working on it. i also want a permalink feature so that i can bookmark a map with my home address as the starting location. but that stuff is minor. i gotta call a bender to try this out!

i was a bouncer briefly back in the summer of 2004. my friend Lisa bought Eli's Mile High Club, an old blues club in Oakland, and reopened it as an indie rock joint with live burlesque shows on Tuesday nights. i moved back from Brooklyn where i'd been living for six months, building a system for serving ads in real time into computer games, to be mister security guy for her.

the part of Oakland where the Mile High is located (just down MLK from MacArthur) is not the safest for waifish indie rock girls to park and walk solo. i like to think that my bald/bearded/sideburned mug and offensive lineman frame were enough to deter most of the drunken bums from hassling people most of the time. i never had to deal with any real violence, luckily, although i did get a death threat from one ass clown who was so drunk/fried it took him 5 minutes to parallel park in front of the club and then tried to get me to bring our door girl outside for a chat.

i can conclusively say, however, that my bouncing experience was nothing like this guy's. at this point, i'm happy to live vicariously through a random person's blog and employ myself in a field where i can possibly actually distinguish myself.

my recent roommate had a couple of cats (creatively named Boy and Girl). a few months ago she brought home one of those laser pointer keychains. within minutes we were driving the cats crazy with it. you know how cats like to chase the red dot around.

well, it turns out some jackass patented that. no, not the laser pointer - the nutmaking of the cats.

A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.

full text here

according to my pal Chuck, the word on the street is that a 12 year old kid whose pop is a patent attorney is the "inventor" of this "method".

seems like an april fool's joke, doesn't it?

thanks to lawyer-wannabe Dan for interrupting studying for finals to call in this important tidbit.

total eclipse - requires windows media player. install if you don't already have it. you won't be sorry.

i usually don't post anything here that i saw on Boing Boing, cos i'm sure we have, um, overlapping audiences, but this is an exception: a fusion of Craigslist rentals and Google maps that gives an unbelievably useful view of just where those listed homes are. wish this had been available to me a month ago when i was looking for apts in SF. would have saved me from wasting my time.

golly, if i needed any more reason to stop thinking about buying in SF, here it is.

update: i asked a friend who's a loan broker for comments on this essay. here's what he had to say:

Interesting read, but I see many major flaws.

The drop in sales was compared between December and January. This Patrick guy compared sales from this past summer to January to paint an even bleaker picture. Home sales are slowest in the winter months. That has been true in the real estate market forever. What he failed to note was that this January was still the 7th best January in terms of sales for all of recorded US history.

Also, regarding the drop in the Median price of homes, that is accounted more by the increase of less expensive homes rather than the drop in larger value homes.

However... San Francisco is still overpriced and will see a correction. There won't be a big pop like the dot com stock bubble, but SF and parts of the peninsula/south bay will take a hit in housing prices. However, certain places (like parts of Oakland) are still bargains. I don't recommend buying in SF unless you really want to.

The lack of sales will just mean that home prices will begin to taper off and not increase in value as much as it has in the past few years. Those that sell in such a market will lose money. Those that hold on to the property will recoup any possible loss and make money when values start to rise again in a few years (which it always will).

The guy who wrote this article seems somewhat embittered... some of the assertions he makes are flat out wrong. He states that the median house price in the Bay Area is $910,000. A quick google search will reveal that the current median value of homes as of 2005 is $556,000 (San Francisco's Median is $713,000) [SFGate]. Getting a simple fact like that wrong calls into question the rest of the numbers used in the article.

Like a great number of demagogues, this guy mixes some truth with a lot of lies to prove his point.

Bottom line, certain housing markets nationwide are overpriced and will probably see a correction. To say that this holds true for every location (or even the entire Bay Area) is just plain false.

check out this gorgeous tarot deck. also, the catchiest tune i have heard in months.

i spent all week reading about JCR and Jackrabbit for work. we were originally planning to build our calendar server on top of Slide, but as i've given more thought to the server architecture, JCR has become much more appealing. the biggest hurdle to using Jackrabbit is that i really want something Spring-based. the guys who formed the Acegi WebDAV project have a similar goal, and we're talking about whether it makes more sense to somehow add Spring and Acegi Security support to Jackrabbit or to build new WebDAV/CalDAV and JCR implementations.

i have also spent the week looking for apartments in San Francisco. my apt hunting experience has been quite different this time than ever before (i have moved a total of 7 times since leaving college in 1996). usually i have great apt karma and find an amazing place within the first week (sometimes even the first day). not so this go round. i've been hearing from others that the majority of places on the market are shit, and now i'm experiencing that for myself. i'm trying to be patient, but if i haven't found something in the next few months, i will probably just suck it up and stick it out in Rockridge til next spring. rent is cheap, the neighborhood is quiet and pretty, and i can save lots of dough by not paying SF rent. but it means i will have to continue driving back and forth across the bay bridge every day. so mind numbing!

(note - i have no cousin named Gabe, but everything else about this dream seems uncomfortably familiar...)

Subject: dream about you...
From: wb
Date: 6:18 PM
To: bcm

The scene opened in a tavern of some sort. It had a wooden, old pub feel,
but it was also quite large. I noticed you across the room and walked over
and said hi. You were with a group of about three guys. There were also some
girls nearby, but it wasn't clear if they were with your group or not. One
of the girls was quite attractive. She had medium to shortish brown/black
hair and was dressed in a dressier outfit than the other girls, but she had
a black scarf that looked sort of old and worn which made the outfit seem
casual. She had a distant sad face and wasn't talking with her friends.

You and I started talking. That girl over there is attractive, I said. She's
my girlfriend, you said. Beth. My eyes grew wide, oh really. I asked for how
long and you said a few weeks. We were drinking and put our drinks down at
the same time. Inside the dream I don't recall ever being at the bar before,
but I somehow knew the girl. I've seen her before, or know her from
somewhere, I said. What I remembered about her is that she had two sisters.
Isn't she the one with two sisters - they are like an inseparable group? You
nodded and said, the sisters died a week ago. That's awful, I said. How did
they die, a car accident? No, you said, they were killed.

Our drinks were finished and you walked outside. I followed. It was night,
not too cold. The road in front of the bar was cobblestone and it was thick
with vegetation, a spring night perhaps. There was the sound of water
nearby. A small bridge was across the road and down a bit from the bar, you
walked in that direction. I followed. I asked questions about your
girlfriend, you answered a few.

Once we got to the middle of the bridge you stopped and looked down. The
sisters died here, you said.

Shit, I said. We stood there for a minute, looking down at the river which
was hard to see in the dark. How, I asked.

You said, I killed them.

You what? You killed them?

You nodded, I killed them. Cut both their heads off.

Why the hell did you do that?

They were against me dating Beth, they hated me for some reason and were
doing everything they could to stop me. So I had to kill them.

But doesn't Beth know it was you - how did you kill them?

They were standing here, right where you are standing. It was while everyone
was in the tavern. They were plotting against me and my cousin provided me
with a sickle and I got a running start and dashed up and sliced their
fucking heads off in one swoop.

Brian, what the fuck, you might go to jail.

You shook your head. The heads fell into the river - I pushed the bodies, my
cousin was below and took care of them so nobody would find them.

Aren't you a suspect?

No - I was back inside the tavern within 5 minutes, like I was taking a
leak.

I stammered - You were only dating her for like two weeks - how do you know
she is worth killing her sisters over?

She's worth it, you said.

I started to wonder why you were telling me this - I started to get a bit
nervous for my safety. You started to walk to the other end of the bridge. I
followed again. There was a rough path that went all the way down to the
riverbank. When we got down there you pointed up at the bridge and made a
line down with your finger, the path the heads took.

A man's voice said hello and I turned, scared shitless. There was a guy,
even taller and bigger than yourself. Wearing overalls, looking similar to
you, but with darker hair, a thicker beard, a rougher crazy version of you.

You said, meet my cousin Gabe.

I put my hand out but your cousin had his hands full - in each hand was a
large, sharp circular blade saw. When he saw that I was surprised and
nervous he smiled a wicked little grin. Clearly he had some idea that you
must have told me the story.

You said Gabe, lead us home. Gabe took off at a fast pace and we followed
behind. I was getting scared - why did you tell me this secret, why did you
bring me down here. Then again, you had no reason to kill me or tell me the
secret just to kill me and I trusted you somewhat.

I said, You trusted this guy to take care of the bodies for you?

He has lived by the river all his life - he knows how to do shit.

We stopped at Gabe's little hidden workshop in the woods. There were all
sorts of blades, saws, knifes, hunting gear. You picked up a browned blade
sharpening stone. Gabe, don't you think the police would be interested in
this, soaked with head blood? You guys snickered. Then you threw the stone
into the river.

We kept walking and then up a hill that the river snaked around. There was
an cottage, in the English ye olde style. Covered with moss, like something
from a fantasy novel or role playing game. It was lit by candles and had
smoke coming from the chimney. It was cold so I was eager to go inside.

There were women and other relatives inside, including your mom. They were
all dressed in old style clothes, like in a period film. The interior of the
place was all wooden cups and old stuff. We sat in the kitchen eating rich,
stale bread with warm butter. There was a stew on the wood-fire stove.

I made eyes towards your mother asking if they knew about the sisters.

You said, Sort of.

We sat and had a family meal. I still was in shock but started to
contemplate whether I thought I should turn you in or not. As I was thinking
this I started to get paranoid that everyone could tell what I was thinking
and started to notice little things in the conversation, trying to decipher
them as key words to get the outsider and cut him up. Gabe was near me at
the table - he was big enough to just grab me across the table. He could
have me pinned down and stabbed in seconds. So I made an effort to remove
what I was thinking, what I was going to do or the crime or anything else
from my mind and just eat and drink.

Then the alarm went off - 5.30 - time for a.m. work out.

it's a trap!

AIM IM with Mark Luntzel <neckjonez>
2:02 AM
Mark Luntzel: religiois debates at bar closing are a losising thing
Mark Luntzel: now I am reme,bering the late night overfooding at my place in the mission and you should know that I do really love you