Zhanga: August 2007

Entries have their own pages now. Click the date to see the entry by itself with its comments.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007 (10 comments)

I got home Saturday night, then went to Gene's. Apparently Pat saw some Asians in a light-colored Lexus ES driving down the road that Gene's house is on, and thought that it was me. Based on his drunk recap of events, I gathered that this sequence of events occurred:

  1. Pat jumps into the middle of the road
  2. he pounds on the hood with his hands and makes stupid noises
  3. he gives them the double-birdie and says "FUCK YOU!!!" a lot
  4. angry Asians
  5. Pat realizes they weren't me (though this may have occurred a long time later, after I actually did arrive)

I had an hour to pack that night, then drove to Duke at sunrise. I turned on my desktop to find that after a summer of not using it, its main hard drive had died for no reason. Of course, that hard drive was the newest one of my four drives, and more importantly, the only one with data. Great. (And just for saying that, Murphy is now going to destroy my other drives.)

Later that night, I realized that I didn't have a blanket or anything to cover myself with at night. With the air conditioning on, I kept waking up because it was too cold. Eventually, I gave in and tried to use two towels, but they really don't work well because they're too small.

That sounded like a good that's what she said line, so it reminded me of a much better one. We were eating at Dale's lunch buffet, and Aalok had to get out to get more food. Hanif was sitting next to him, so he scooted into the table to make some room between the back of his chair and the wall behind him.

Aalok: I'm gonna need more than three inches.

Cue the "Hanif is gay" comments. By the way, James and Pat, I passed on your messages to him, but I think I may have failed to capture Pat's line in its full glory.

3:29PM

Saturday, August 25, 2007 (2 comments)

AT&T gave me a free pass to get online at the airport. Sweet.

I noticed an interesting addition to airport "security" today. There are signs all over the security scanning area saying that "all electronic items" must be removed from bags and individually scanned. Great. So I mentally went through all the stuff I was carrying:

I just took my laptops and nothing else out and they didn't complain. But when it becomes standard procedure to individually inspect every little electronic item, that's going to seriously suck.

Apparently, this extra security policy had a tradeoff: they didn't check my boarding pass at security.

Ok, one more complaint before boarding. There's all this talk about how Chinese products are poisoning American kids with lead in toys, how they're killing pets and putting fake stuff in food or whatever. Well then why don't you make it yourself? Oh wait, it's because you can pay the Chinese 10 times less and get 90% of the quality.

Why aren't the American companies being blamed for the products they produce in China? When an American company operating in China produces crappy goods, it's China's fault. The American company doesn't even get mentioned, and instead they blame the workers in the Chinese factory.

This logic is retarded. If Microsoft had an office in Atlanta and some employee there put a virus into the next version of Windows, is that Microsoft's fault or is that Atlanta's fault? But I bet if it was Beijing instead of Atlanta, there would be a difference in how we look at it.

Additionally, what would happen if a Chinese company operating in America produced crappy products? What if Lenovo (bought Thinkpads from IBM a while ago, but they're still made in the US) began making their laptops really suck? Who would get the blame: the American workers, or the Chinese company who employs those workers?

This access point drops me for about 5 seconds every 15 seconds, so I'm getting really tired of writing this entry when the screen sometimes lags my keystrokes by 15 seconds.

4:33PM

Tuesday, August 21, 2007 (0 comments)

I'm going to remove some old cruft from this site pretty soon. There is some stuff here that just has to go. For example, the page about blondes that I wrote over 4 years ago... seriously, why did I even put that up in the first place? And the page about why I'm atheist, well, that one reads like unedited diarrhea gushing out of my little brain. Seriously, who wrote those?

So now's your last chance to explore the old crap on my page that I deem unworthy of continued existence, before they actually get purged. Of course the good stuff will still be around, like anything having to do with Dutter or Science Bowl or Bill.

Maybe I should update the external links too while I'm at it, since nowadays I only ever visit 2 of the sites I listed (Merriam-Webster and the W3 validator) and only rarely visit Xanga.

Also, speaking of old cruft, remember those things back in the day called guestbooks? You know... back in the day when you had a Geocities account and fun blinking text all over the place (well, that part still sounds kind of like Eva today, but that's not the point)? Anyways, I found my old guestbook, which at the time I thought was the coolest thing ever.

One of the first comments came from Ronjon. He will be ashamed of himself once he sees this:

Thursday 03/30/2000 2:41:09am
Name: Dragons_Blood
Location: c'mon lets think.....hrmmm....earth maybe?
Comments: y0y0 curvy wassup man...jus thought id pop by n' say HI
kickass page so far....but ur games arent workin :( im soo sad
btw...get starcraft....heh...
since i got toooooooooo much time on my hands i think ill post some more :)
sooo hows it goin?! e-mail me sometime...no e-mail bomb plz...
well ill post some more tomorrow
------
| |
|coke| DRINK COKE MAN! -®ÖÑ- -later
------

You'd think Mary was nicer when she was a little girl 7 years ago, but no, you'd be wrong:

Wednesday 04/05/2000 8:02:30pm
Name: Mary Gong
Location: Where do you think?? Atlanta, Georgia
Comments: Hello.. RETARD!!!!!!!.

Your webpage is umm.. U-G-L-Y!!!!

Not sure what happened here:

Friday 06/15/2001 4:51:19pm
Name: Charles
Comments: SUp.. China. look i had to tell u something.. i think you're very hot and i really would like for us to start something togehter. please consider this. you know where i live and btw u left ur boxers at my house last night.

I guess I found that one six years too late. Oh well.

Just for Gene, I'm going to post a tutorial for controlling your computer's music over Bluetooth. I'm almost done, but it could still be a while because I'm trying to make it work for both Windows and Linux. I figure if it's interesting enough then maybe I can submit it to Digg and make some ad revenue. I heard getting Digg front page = ~$150ish in ad profit.

FYI, if you're wondering, so far my Google AdSense account has made $1.12... since April (and Google doesn't send a check until you have $100). I have gotten all of 8 clicks. Why can't the stupid spambots, who visit me 30,000 - 100,000 times a month, click my ads every once in a while to be nice!?

5:15PM

Monday, August 20, 2007 (5 comments)

I'm thinking about replacing the China map/flag as my site logo, and instead replacing it with this billboard:

I want to be an engineer... sex can wait!

(I don't know the original source or where this billboard is, but I found it here.)

One question, though: why is the guy black? I think I am far more deserving of placement on that billboard.

2:16AM

Sunday, August 19, 2007 (1 comment)

I went to 老四川 (in Redmond, not Atlanta) again today, and got the hot pot. For some reason, they have hot pot buffet for $10.95/person. It's not hard to imagine what happened... we just sat there and kept eating. It was great. We tipped like 27% or something because we were there from 8:30 until past the 10 PM closing time.

I figured out why common health advice suggests not eating a lot of red meat. I finally bothered to read the nutrition label on the last pack of pork ribs I bought, and apparently the %DVs for fat/sat fat/cholesterol are 43/55/23% per serving. The problem is that each serving is 4 oz, while a full meal will easily be 1 or 2 lbs, and if I'm really hungry I can probably sit down and eventually eat 3 lbs. Well, 1.5 lbs = 6 servings = 258/330/138% DV for those heart-attack-inducing nutrients. No wonder red meat is so bad for you.

Conclusion? Eat more of it while I still can, kind of like I did for an hour and a half today.

I got a call this morning from a number that wasn't in my phone. Random, but amusing to me:

Me: Hello?
Girl: Hey! Do you know who this is?
Me: ........uhhhh............. ummmm..... KT...?
Girl: Yeah! Wait... which David is this?

Ok that wasn't funny, was it. Sorry, it is really late, and I have again confirmed that I am really useless when it's late. Last night I was too lazy to begin cooking dinner, so I procrastinated until 12:30 AM. I dropped an egg on the hardwood floor because I am a clumsy idiot. Then when washing the pan after cooking, I was falling asleep so badly that I spilled large amounts of oily, soapy water out of the pan and onto the counter and floor not once, but twice. I am truly an idiot.

By the way, I'm typing this up on my Linux computer. The previous sentence had no purpose but to annoy Tiffany. Have a great day.

3:01AM

Wednesday, August 15, 2007 (2 comments)

I think my nerdiness just leveled up. My phone can now control my computer's music player via Bluetooth. This is as ownage as it is useless. On the same track, but more ownage and slightly less useless, the Wiimote also uses Bluetooth and apparently it can be used as an input device in Linux. But $40 is a lot of money...

Whoops, back to the cycle of computers and Linux - Britney Spears - Charles's penis. Ok, time for something else...

I have a $50 computer desk. It's going to cost me like $200 to ship it home. Luckily, MS is paying. Does that still count as talking about computers...?

My life is so dull. I'm trying to come up with something to write about, but nothing's been happening lately. My bike has this bug that causes it to randomly shift the back gears while I'm riding, which is really annoying. Worse, the chain likes to fall off the front gears, or not fall off but get completely stuck, both of which result in an immobile bike. My bike happens to like doing this at the worst times. It's happened multiple times in the middle of intersections, and at least once when the light was changing.

So I'm asking Charles how to fix this piece of crap. And... I guess if you stretch it a little, this still fits into those three categories... I fail.

11:34PM

Saturday, August 11, 2007 (4 comments)

A number of posts ago, I mentioned that people really like looking at Charles and his enormous penis. I finally did an analysis of just how much people love his cock.

I feel kind of gay spending three hours searching files for "charleshugepenis.jpg" and "charlesautofellatio.jpg" but I think the results are kind of interesting.

I went through 836,000 log entries between April 2006 and a few days ago. These entries represent every request made to my site during that time.

I collected three pieces of data for each day in the time interval:

Charles penis views
Number of requests for the two JPEGs linked above.
Google referrals (Charles)
Of the Charles penis views, this is the subset that came directly from some sort of Google search. For example, Googling for huge penises and ending up at one of those images.
Google referrals (All)
This is for comparison purposes. This is the number of visitors to any part of my site who came from Google.

(A referral occurs when someone clicks a link to get to my site. So a Google referral means somebody searched something on Google and clicked a resulting link to get here.)

Google referrals (Charles) is a subset of each of the other two. Also note that the referral counts are likely to be lower than the actual numbers because some browsers block the HTTP Referer field.

Now for the first graph. Charles tried to fellate himself back in April 2005, but Google really disliked me back then so nobody saw the images. Notice that in November 2006, Google decided to list my site for whatever reason, and it actually caused a couple of visitors every now and then. It was met with an immediate proportional increase in viewers of Charles's penis.

Hits vs time graph showing Charles penis views, Google referrals to Charles's penis, and total Google referrals.

A couple things I want to point out in the above graph:

  1. The gap near the end of the graph is the time period when my server was down recently.
  2. There are some spikes on certain days. For example, there is a spike on March 6-7, 2007. There are 147 hits on the 6th, and 314 hits on the 7th... because Charles got posted to some forum (look in the first post, inside the iframe with the scrollbar).
  3. There's a couple of peaks in July, and they came from this weird site pinoyexchange.com, but I can't find where Charles's penis is posted...
  4. Charles's penis has a small fanclub.

The next one shows Google referrals to Charles's penis as a percentage of total views to Charles's penis. (i.e., of all the views of Charles's penis, how many of those came from Google?) White means nobody looked at his penis that day.

Google referrals to Charles's penis as a percentage of total views of his penis

It seems that recently, about half of visits to Charles's penis came directly from Google. What can we learn from this? Well, about half of gay guys prefer Google for finding huge cocks. Now there's a good marketing statistic. (The actual percentage, after factoring in blocked HTTP Referer fields and visitors who went to the Zhanga page and not directly to the image, could possibly be higher than 90%.)

I have one more graph. This one shows Google referrals to Charles's penis as a percentage of total Google referrals to anything on my site. (i.e., of all the visitors clicking from Google to my site, how many of those clicks were on Charles's penis?)

Google referrals to Charles's penis as a percentage of total Google referrals to this site

This shows that recently, of all the hits to my site referred by Google, ~30% of them are to those two pictures of Charles. These are ~250 images on this site, and >1000 pages, so those two images make up 0.1% of the stuff on my site but get 30% of the Google referrals. Perhaps more alarmingly, that percentage appears to be steadily increasing...

Those graphs were made in Excel 2007. Office 2007 is a great product. Now if only the Windows team would pay attention...

(Btw, wtf? Is it just me, or can you actually see the Rice Man through those last two graphs?)

4:18PM

Friday, August 10, 2007 (2 comments)

I'm watching Harold & Kumar on TBS, and they completely destroyed the movie. I'm so disappointed. Here is a line from the beginning, when H&K are in Rosenberg and Goldstein's apartment:

Rosenberg: Katie Holmes is a nice, respectable, wholesome girl. And I'm gonna see her boobs.
Goldstein: The things I would eat out of her hands!

Is TBS serious?? They replaced "ass" with "hands"?!!

There's something censored pretty much every minute that they speak. Some of them don't even make sense. This one is when they are at Princeton with Cindy Kim:

Kumar to Harold: There are these two filthy ladies just aching to get boned by us!
[Cindy glares]
Kumar: I mean, uh, there are these two lovely young ladies who would like to have a chat with you and I.

(Both "ladies" should be "pussies.") This is one of my favorite lines and it totally loses its humor when it's censored like that.

Some of the changes are completely useless:

Extreme Punk: It's the brothers McGay!

What's the point of changing McFag to McGay?

I really want to find out what happened to the "Shotgun anus!" line, but it's pretty late and I need to get up tomorrow.

4:05AM

Wednesday, August 8, 2007 (1 comment)

Haha, I used to think I listened to too much Britney Spears. I bet you thought that too. And well, it's probably true... but let's put my shortcomings in perspective. Last.fm reports that I've listened to 50 Britney songs in the past week, which is like one every 2.5 hours if I'm awake 16 hours a day. But check out this guy! He completely puts me to shame. 915 plays this week? Assuming the same 16 hours/day, that's one every 8.4 minutes!

If his average Britney song is 4 minutes long, then he spends half his waking life listening to her. This guy is devoted.

Ok, enough about useless people.

One of the guys on my team is from Turkey. He applied for his green card in the past few days and should get a receipt or something in the next couple of weeks. The receipt allows him to cross the border into the US.

He's going to Turkey next week, and coming back three weeks later. He'll probably get his receipt-thing by then, but maybe not. Here's the fun (?) part:

Different coworker: What day are you coming back?
Guy on my team: September, uhh... 9/11...

He's uhh... not coming back. I think he picked the worst possible time to go on a vacation to Turkey. Good luck...

10:47PM

Tuesday, August 7, 2007 (1 comment)

I must have sounded very angry on the phone with DHL, because the manager drove over to my apartment at 9:30 and delivered it himself. At least there are nice people running the show, even if the drivers are morons and forget to deliver it two days in a row while making me wait at home an entire day.

My right speaker is sort of broken. Dell won't send a technician out to my place to fix it because of my warranty type. So they're shipping another machine to me. How does that make sense?

This is a really nice laptop though. Basically all the complaints I had about my last one are resolved here. There's a flash memory reader, more USB ports (and they're on both sides of the machine), a wireless on/off switch, bluetooth, multimedia buttons, a much better screen, and a cooling system that doesn't suck.

And it's fast... but apparently, not fast enough to "run all new features of Windows Vista with full functionality." I am only able to run it "at a basic level." What?? I have two 2 GHz cores and 2 GB of memory! That's not even enough to run the operating system?

(Isn't it great that Linux doesn't suck like Windows?)

I know you're getting bored... next post will be computer-unrelated.

8:08PM

Monday, August 6, 2007 (2 comments)

Three-paragraph lesson in spam:

Most spam these days is sent by zombie machines physically owned by good, honest people. Unfortunately, their machines got digitally pwned by spammers and the owners don't know it. When a Windows computer gets infected with random crap, there is a chance (apparently a pretty big one) that the dark side is using it to do evil things, like sending traditional email spam, and the relatively newer phenomenon of referrer spam. Referrer spam is basically sending bogus webpage requests to a site (like mine) to fill the server's access logs with links to some site. They sell the same stuff as email spam: Viagra, prescription drugs, poker.

Anyways, it's really starting to get on my nerves. During a 13-minute period yesterday, I got 499 hits by just one set of zombie bots. This is 100 times higher than the average legitimate load on my server and is too much for my DSL to handle.

So finally, I'm giving up passively blocking them. It's time for war. Starting an hour ago, every hit from a spammer bot gets redirected to the site it's trying to advertise -- effectively turning the scumbag's botnet against his own site while consuming no additional resources on my end.

1:39AM

Saturday, August 4, 2007 (2 comments)

Oh boy, I'm really pissed now.

Last night when I called DHL, the lady said she'll see what she can do. So here's what happened today:

  1. 9:47 AM - DHL wakes me up with a call. They tell me the package is out for delivery and it'll get to me today. The lady yesterday told me this location closes at 2 PM, so I asked if it would be shipped before that time. I was told most packages arrive before 3 PM.
  2. Noon - Hungry. No meat in fridge, and only 2 eggs left. In fact I haven't cooked meat for two days. I ate my last fruit two nights ago, too. But I can't leave because I have to sign for the package.
  3. 3 PM - Where the hell is my laptop?
  4. 3:30 PM - I call DHL. Lady tells me the package is on the truck and will arrive today. I repeated myself at least twice ("So it will arrive today for sure?") and was told yes, it would get here today. For some reason, instead of arrive before 3, it now is supposed to arrive before midnight.
  5. 7 PM - I'm more hungry now because it's near dinnertime. I ordered pizza for lunch, but pizza is no substitute for pork and pizza can't be the only thing I eat all day.
  6. 7:23 PM - I call DHL and ask why I've been waiting at home all day eating inferior food when there is no laptop in sight. I am told that the laptop showed up as out for delivery but it in fact had not made it onto the truck.

So here's the quick recap:

  1. Ordered laptop.
  2. Waited 26 days, then found out it was pushed back a week.
  3. Waited most of a week, then it finally shipped.
  4. Was told by tracking it'd arrive in 5 days. A phone call to DHL on the third day confirmed this.
  5. DHL made no attempt to deliver on the 5th day (although tracking did show it as out for delivery).
  6. Was called by DHL on the 6th day (today) and told it would arrive in a few hours. A few hours later, DHL confirmed it is arriving that day.
  7. A few hours after that, it turns out the package never left the DHL facility.

I'm not going to be seeing this laptop for a while. I actually bought this thing to use during my internship, of which I have 3 weeks left. If they keep this crap up, it won't arrive until after I move out of this apartment.

10:35PM

Friday, August 3, 2007 (2 comments)

I'm pissed:

  1. Jun 29 - Ordered laptop from dell.com. Estimated ship date July 24.
  2. Jul 24 - The order status wasn't updated, so I asked Dell what was going on. Victor Patel (they don't make up bogus last names, apparently) or something like that told me that due to high volume it was delayed and would ship July 31.
  3. Jul 30 - Order finally shipped according to Dell and DHL sites.
  4. Jul 31 - Got an email from Dell telling me the order was shipped via DHL Airborne on July 29. Except it didn't ship on July 29, and was coming in a truck. I later realized that DHL Airborne is the name of a division of DHL (I think), but it's misleading at best to call a truck "airborne."
  5. Aug 2 - I called DHL asking why their tracking status hasn't been updated for 48 hours. They said it was on schedule, would arrive in Washington Friday (today/Aug 3) morning and at my apartment Friday afternoon.
  6. Aug 3 - I come home to see no package and no note on my door (the attempted delivery note). I called DHL and was put on hold for half an hour before a really annoying lady told me they'll try to ship it Monday but she'll see what she can do.

In case it didn't register, today is the 35th day since I ordered that stupid laptop. Argh!

And that DHL lady was really annoying.

DHL: The courier may have tried to deliver to you today but nobody was home.
Me: There was no note on my door indicating that.
DHL: I understand that sir, but Dell requires a signature for deliveries.
Me: What I'm saying is nobody came today, because there is nothing --
DHL: Sir, you are not understanding me. This package cannot be delivered without somebody being present to sign for it.

Ugh!

11:32PM

Thursday, August 2, 2007 (5 comments)

As recently as five minutes ago, I thought that cooking my own meals didn't save me any money and wasted a lot of time compared to eating out. I just did the math though, and my total grocery costs spread out over 50 dinners is only $6.50 per dinner, which is pretty good especially considering the health benefits of not using a gallon of oil and a mountain of salt for every dish. The $6.50 even includes the generous amounts of watermelon that I allow myself to buy.

Sometimes I go to the grocery store and think, "Ok, carrying all that crap home on a bike was such a pain last time, so this time I'm just going to go in, get a carton of eggs which is all I really need today, and leave so I don't kill my back."

Unfortunately it never really works out this way. If I only plan on buying a small amount of stuff, then it logically follows that I have room for more stuff... like watermelon and meat. So far, I haven't actually managed to leave the grocery store without a completely full bookbag, despite how hard I try to convince myself to take it easy. Last time it came back to bite me, though. I ended up with a retarded yellow watermelon instead of a red one. Call me an old geezer, but yellow watermelons are unappetizing. Even if they taste the same, they don't look appetizing like a nice juicy red one.

Speaking of food, there is this girl who plays frisbee regularly. She has half my unforced dropping-the-disc rate, a better throw at short ranges, about as much endurance over a long game, and a waist three times mine. I have no idea how she does it considering how... big she is, but that deserves respect. Yesterday, I made what was about to be the best defensive catch ever. Usually when I try to dive I'm on offense and have to lay out because the disc is about to hit the ground, but this time I was on defense and the disc was a good three feet in the air and headed right at her. So I ran, jumped, and dove, and got not just a tip, but a tight, solid grip on the disc... and so did she, at the same time (and offense gets it in a tie).

I got a high-five from my team for effort, however misguided it was, plus a bunch of "Ohhhh, REJECTED!"s. And to add injury to insult, I also landed on the knee that I raped while biking a while back, so now it's even more messed up.

Lesson learned: never mess with a girl bigger than me. I will lose and look retarded in the process.

1:22AM

Older posts can be viewed through the links to the left, under the main menu.
1220 hits since September 4, 2007.