This morning I saw a grown man wearing a suit riding a little girl's bike up 9th avenue.  The bike was tiny, pink, and complete with shiny handlebar streamers.  After I watched him ride slowly by, I found myself trying to figure out why such an occurrence would... occur.

Here are a few possibilities, along with their likelihood on a scale of 10:

• His usual form of transportation was unavailable, so he rode his daughter's bike to work.
• Likelihood: 2
• There are plenty of modes of transportation available in Manhattan...
  bus, subway, taxi, etc.  Plus, is riding a little bike like that really
  that much faster than just walking quickly?
• He bought the bike for his daughter and didn't have a car to transport it, and was too lazy to carry it home.
• Likelihood: 4
• It was mid-morning on a weekday, and why would he wear a suit to go buy
  a bike?  Maybe he had a meeting cancelled or something, but couldn't he have ridden a taxi home with the bike?  It would certainly fit in the back seat, if not the trunk.
• The guy is just flat-out crazy.
• Likelihood: 9
• There are enough crazy people around to make this the most probable explanation.  However, the suit did look pretty nice, which prevented me from giving this explanation a rating of 10

Can anyone think of a different explanation they'd like to contribute?

I decided to take advantage of having premium and make a skin for my site today... enjoy :p

Apparently this weekend was the biggest snowstorm in the city since they started taking records in 1869... 26.9 inches in 24 hours.  Didn't seem all that bad to me

I installed linux on my (4th gen) ipod a couple days ago.  Its not that hard to do… you can use this guide to install linux with the podzilla interface.  4th gen and later ipods aren't officially supported by the
ipodlinux project, but the software is stable.  You don't have to worry about messing up your ipod or
anything, the apple firmware isn't modified during the linux installation
process.   When you start up your ipod, you choose whether you want to start up linux or the normal apple firmware. 

The Podzilla interface looks pretty much the same as the standard apple one.  Podzilla adds a bunch of new games, like chess and othello (the chess
is a little buggy). Also, you can actually record sound through your earbuds and play
it back. There's even a gameboy emulator that works with 4th
generation and newer ipods. I haven't had the chance to try it out yet, but I saw a
screenshot of someone playing mario.  The emulator supports standard gameboy roms with the .gb extension.  You can get a version of doom  for ipods as well, appropriately called idoom.

The only real downside I've found to running linux as opposed to the apple firmware is that you can't listen to music at the same time you are playing the games.  The music player is implemented as a separate program, and I guess they haven't sorted out the multi-threading issues.  There's not really any reason not to try it out though.

Here's something I wrote a few weeks ago but didn't get
around to actually posting...  I had written it on my home computer, which
I then packed and put on a moving truck.  The truck took a couple of weeks
to get to my new apartment, while I slept on an air mattress that deflated as I
slept and caused me to either wake up on the floor or get up in the middle of the
night to blow it back up :/

On
the fateful night of December the 19th, I flew in to New York City to look for an apartment. 
Awesomely enough, this just so happened to be the night that the transit strike
started (the strike also happened to end on the 22nd, the last night I was in
the city).  The strike shut down all of the mass transit in the city,
which basically screwed me over.  The strike shouldn't have really been a
problem for me.  I was looking for a place close to the office so I could
just walk to work.  My hotel was in that area, so I should have just been
able to walk around and check out apartments.  Unfortunately, things never
turn out to be so easy.

Most
of the listings I found, even on web sites like craigslist, were through
brokers.  I really didn’t want to have to go through a broker, but I
didn’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter.  In case you don't know who
brokers are, they are evil real estate agents who hoard lists of vacant
apartments.  They then advertise these apartments and show them to
people.  Just for that, they charge you a huge chunk (~10-15%) of your
yearly rent if you end up signing a lease.  Of course, with Manhattan rents this ends
up being thousands of dollars.  The landlords don't care… they just tell
the brokers which apartments are available so they don't have to spend any
effort advertising.  So, there’s pretty much a B.S. system in place to
benefit the brokers and landlords and screw over tenants. 

Anyway,
because of the strike, most of the brokers decided to forget about trying to
get into work.  I'd call a broker office and there wouldn't even be
someone there to pick up the phone...  The few brokers I did get a hold of
were a-holes.  I called one guy about a listing and he said he’d show me
the place later that afternoon.   He told me he'd call back in half
an hour to arrange it.  After an hour passed, I called his office and he
was gone...  I tried calling him back a
couple more times but never got a response.

Over
the span of three full days I was able to get *one*, yes *one* broker to show
me some apartments.  I was forced to choose from the four apartments she
showed me.  I just picked the least expensive one since the others didn't
seem any better.  Of course, I got charged thousands of dollars for her
few hours of time.  At least I negotiated her down to a 12% fee from her
brokerage’s standard 15% even though I had no other options (and I had already
signed the lease heh).  

Looking
back, I guess things turned out alright in the end.  My apartment isn’t bad and I live near a
couple people from work, and it’s a 15 minute walk to the office so I don’t
have to ride the subway.  I’m just glad I
won’t have to deal with any of that B.S. again… at least until next year :/

A couple of days ago at work, I left my desk for a minute to go use the
bathroom.  When I came back, I found a shiny new Vortex Tornado
gun sitting on my desk.  Now I am truly an official xanga employee   Unfortunately, my desk sits in the cross-fire of a bitter
rivalry.  The layout of the office affords me little natural
protection against incoming ordinance from either direction. 
Perhaps I can broker peace between the warring factions... more
likely, I will go down in a glorious blaze of rubber ring
bullets.

So it's my last semester in grad school and I'm living in adorm.  That wouldn't have been my first choice, but I couldn't find an apartment for just one semester.  Anyway, with the way the rooms are set up I share a bathroom with the guy living next to me.  The bathroom is in between our two rooms, and each of us has a door to it.  What's the big deal, you ask?  Well I'll tell you.  It all has to do with my crazy bathroom neighbor.  At first, everything seemed normal.  I never really even saw him unless I passed by him in the hallway.  Then, one day during the semester, that all changed...

I was in the bathroom one day, minding my own business, when I heard the familiar sounds of the Simpsons intro resonating through the doorleading to my neighbor's room.  Nothing wrong with that... it's a funny show.  I gave it no more thought, returning to the room from whence I came.  A while later, when I next entered the bathroom, I could hear the excited voice of Homer Simpson.  He had gotten himself into some sort of trouble, as usual.  Homer, you silly oaf you…  "Ah," I thought to myself, "he must really like the show."  I left the bathroom and continued along with my daily business.

The next time I went into the bathroom, I was surprised to hear the Simpsons playing in the room next door.  "Hmm," I thought. "How many episodes is he going to watch?"  I soon had my answer.  I still heard it the next time I entered the bathroom, and the time after that, and the time after that.  Hours stretched into days.  The days turned into weeks, the weeks into months.  My neighbor literally watched the show ALL DAY LONG.  If he was in his room, sounds of the Simpsons could be heard wafting through the air.  Sometimes I'd get up during the night to get a drink of water and be joined by Barney's drunken ramblings.  Other times I'd wake up early for a job interview or to go to class (yeah right...;) ) and Krusty the Klown's laughter would welcome me to the new day.

I couldn't understand what was happening.  Isn't this guy a pre-med?  Does he really not have any work to do?  What the hell is going on here??  My world was in disarray.  Then, one day... there was silence.

Could it be??  Could he have finally run out of episodes?  Did he really watch all 15 seasons in under a single semester?  The silence continued for a few days.  I thought that perhaps it was finally over.  Memories of the Simpsons faded into the past like forgotten dreams.  All was well in the world.  And then, something happened.

I was in the bathroom when I heard a noise in my neighbor’s room.  "Whatever could that be?" I wondered.  And then it hit me.  The familiar sounds of the Seinfeld intro started to emanate from my neighbor's door.  It had begun... 

Unfortunately, I won't have much time to mess around with this page until after the semester is over... sorry! :p