Believe your noodly master, hon

Being in power means there's always someone to take the fall.

The article mentions, though, that Cheney is still "under investigation and in legal jeopardy." We'll see where that goes in, what, another two years?

And what a game it was! Cal 42, WSU 38. It was a cliffhanger to the very end. Our defense really stepped up in the fourth quarter, and the offense did it's job. It's true: the fourth quarter's ours.

They did show off some of our weaknesses. WSU found a mismatch in our pass coverage, and they made scoring on us look easy in the third quarter. Their running game was more successful than I would have liked.

From where I was sitting, it looked like the officials made some downright terrible calls. What did it look like from TV land? Despite this, our team pulled out some clutch performances, and we're looking more like a team that's turning around.

And of course, Go Bears!

I just scored two free tickets to the Cal vs WSU game tomorrow. They're in the donor's section right next to the student section. Goooo Bears!

R.I.P Yvonne De Ridder Files 1908(?) to 2005. *

I wanted to believe we really were a great team this season, but I couldn't help but feel that we were a pretty good team getting lucky. I still have hope, but really I'm just hoping for more good luck. I don't see Ayoob making much progress, and we're just being worn down by injury after injury.

Well, at least we can still enjoy demolishing Stanford when the time comes, and anything can hapen in Cal Football.

In case you were wondering, and I know you were, here is the answer to what exactly constitutes civilization.
Now that I'm sure you're wondering, I'm posting this so anyone hearing me say "x is civilization" can understand the depth of my dedication to "x"

Riddle me this.
I am trying to come up with a riddle based on the following notion: The better an arbitrator is, the less arbitrary his decisions are. Any help?

Here's my quote for the ages: Functionally organized visual cortex is a concept of post-Ford construction, and it is unlikely to arise in a biological system.

I don't have any evidence for my claim. The only thing I can indicate (and this sort of thing never proves anything) is a lack of evidence for a functionally organized visual cortex.

So this morning I stop by a campus cafe and grab an Odwalla drink. The sign says Odwalla Juice: $2.69. I grab one and head to the checkout. The lady says, "$3.49" and I say, "oh! I thought it was $2.69." She indicates the sign below the one I saw indicating Odwalla Smoothies are, in fact, $3.49. She looks at me and says,

"That's not juice. That's nutrition, baby!"

I've spent a lot of time in the magnet. Fortunately, none of these things have happened to me. [NY Times, reg required]

Photos upcoming. I am not dead. That is all.

Here's the deal: I'm supposed to be in Costa Rica, but I'm in Berkeley instead. Our flight out of oakland to phoenix was delayed to the point that, if we took the flight, we would miss our flight out of phoenix to costa rica. The nice lady at America West's ticketing counter booked us on a Taca airline flight out of San Francisco to Costa Rica. It was a red-eye.

So they put us on a shuttle to SFO, and we got there at around 3:00. The Taca desk doesn't open untill about 9:00 pm. We spent the afternoon in the airport reading Harry Potter.

Once the Taca desk opened, the agent told us there was a problem. The America West agent had booked us on the 1:00 AM for *Saturday* morning. I don't know how she managed to get a confirmation number on a flight that had left 11 hours previous.

Upon hearing this, we troop over to the America West desk (in a whole different terminal) just to find it completely desserted.

At this point it's about 9:30 and Nikki starts trying to get a hold of someone at America West on the phone. After telling the above story no fewer than three times--and it's a confusing story, so it takes a while to tell--the AW people tell us to go home and try again tomorrow.

So 16 hours later, here we are, back in Berkeley, booked on the exact same flights for Sunday.

PS The moral of the story is: don't fly america west.

I'm leaving for Costa Rica tomorrow morning. I'm very excited. The forecast looks a little dreary, but that's what I get for going to the tropics in the rainy season. I'll be sure to post some pictures when I get back. Don't go crazy while I'm gone!

So my boss had me helping him with a presentation he was working on. He wanted to use a frame from a Pogo cartoon (by Walt Kelly, for those who care) in one of his slides. He has some trouble interfacing with the intertron, so he asked me to help him find it. Apparently he had found what he was looking for by using google image search with the term pogo. I did exactly that, and to my horror, the first hit was [nsfw]this picture . That's right. My boss had essentially forced me to look at boobies while at work. I guess my job isn't too bad after all.

An article (by a findlaw writer) on CNN about the legal precedent that may apply to the Karl Rove identity leak case.

If manhattan can do it, so can you!

Ok, ok. I know. You're sick of me posting stuff from Penny Arcade. Well, I simply had to share with you a quote from today's newspost. For the most part, said post is similar to (albeit self-consciously) the impotent whining of a kid who can't play with his toy. The last bit, however, manages to turn into an acute sort of distopian consumerist manifesto:

"We purport to be angry, but it is largely an ethereal anger, suitable for forums on the Intertron. There is no connection between my willingness to purchase shoddy products and the continued production of said products. At any rate, there is no connection that I am able to perceive."

If you haven't heard of Project Gutenberg, I sugest you check it out. It's a huge resource of both free and public domain books, digitized for your electronic consumption. It's also a great resource for when you want to know how many times Shakespeare uses the word 'tup' in Othello, for instance. Just search over the whole text.

Anyway, it seems that in order to speed the digitizing of these books, someone scans all the pages and uploads them. The pages are then OCRed, but they still need to be checked. This is where the Distributed Proofreading system comes in. You go and get a page and check it for errors. Once all the pages are checked, it becomes an official e-book. Hooray!

I'm working on an online GRE prep course. It gives a question, then provides feedback. I got a tough one right, and here's what it said to me: "Wow! The light of a thousand suns is no brighter than you." Kind of effusive, if you ask me. Anyway, the prep is free to UC Berkeley people (and maybe others). Check it out.