Big thanks to Razak for posting this in the Ars Technica Lounge. D-War (Dragon Wars) is a new film directed by Hyung Rae Shim of Korea. The plot seems simple, as all dragon movies should be: every 500 years a dragon is reborn and given a second chance at life. This time, a big bad dragon gets reborn, and it’s chaos in the streets of Los Angeles. Most importantly, there’s a lot of people shooting at dragons, and lots of dragons belching fireballs at humans.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been a big fan of online tea purveyor Adagio.com for a long time. My first order with them was a green tea starter set in August 2005. I received a sixteen ounce IngenuiTEA teapot as part of the package. The IngenuiTEA is a very handy way to make loose-leaf tea in small quantities. You add two teaspoons at the bottom, fill the plastic container with water, and wait. When your tea is done steeping, you place the IngenuiTEA atop a mug and the tea drains out the bottom. Very awesome. My friend roclar did a review of his IngenuiTEA in October of 2006, which includes a video. I didn’t notice it at the time, but we own different versions of the personal teapot.
Read the rest of this entry »

Almost a year ago I wrote about giant mutant beetles (okay okay, they’re Hardwood Stump borers) that had surfaced in our yard. I killed another one of them this year already, so I know they’re around. At the time, we figured as long as they stayed outside they were harmless. It turns out that their incursions may have resulted in one of our oaks contracting slime flux.
Read the rest of this entry »

A really neat photo set from GeekAustin has surfaced comparing the next-generation SmartCar Fourtwo to the original version. I put a $99 refundable deposit down on a Fourtwo about two months ago. The 2007 model is apparently a little bit wider. The front headlamp assembly has been redesigned. Much to the chagrin of those who have followed the Smartcar since its inception, the dashboard is no longer angled, as you can see in this photo. For those of you wondering how a tiny go-kart of a car could go 160, keep in mind that’s in kilometers per hour; that’s about 100mph. I am not sure if you could get a SmartCar to do 100mph if you drove it off a cliff.

Anyway, I’m still very interested to see the SmartCar in person when it goes on sale in February of 2008. I believe the closest dealer to me will be in Northern Virginia. Based on my experience with the Gen1 MINI Cooper S, having a “novelty” car far from a dealer exacerbates potentially bullshit problems, like the power windows not working on MINI. If I thought driving 90 minutes each way to get my Cooper repaired in the DC metro area, I can’t imagine driving up from Richmond. February is still a long ways away.

Warning: this is a long and nerdy post.

I have been playing EVE again lately, a Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game wherein an average of 25,000+ players mine asteroids, blow up computer-controlled pirates, and most importantly, battle other human players over large swaths of virtual territory. Players come together in the forms of corporations, and corporations form alliances. Player membership in alliances can number in the thousands. I currently belong to a corporation made up (mostly) of Ars Technica players, and in turn we belong to an alliance named GoonSwarm. While the actual active membership of GoonSwarm is unknown, estimates vary between two to four thousand players. GoonSwarm is fighting a huge war with another alliance named Band of Brothers (BoB).

Three events surfaced today that allegedly link employees of CCP, the company who produces EVE, to helping directly BoB or other alliances in the game. When the allegations were made public on the official EVE forums, one of BoB’s most high ranking officers admitted to having CCP developers as friends and/or personal contacts via MSN Messenger.
Read the rest of this entry »

Always on the lookout for a new boxcutter, I was intrigued by the X-blades folding utility knife found at Costco. What interested me the most was the price (five for $17), and that the blades were replaceable razor blades. Each knife comes with ten replacement blades, or sixty blades to a box, or one hundred and twenty cutting surfaces. Sounds like a bargain, especially for someone like me who is too lazy to keep a knife properly sharpened.
Read the rest of this entry »

I mentioned the other day how we gave Rosie and Porter their flea and tick treatment. Their chemical assault was prompted by a short hike earlier that day by Lady Jaye and myself. There we were, the two of us, enjoying a nice trek through a nearby state park. The sun was out, the birds were chirping, and it wasn’t so hot that I was getting cranky. We stopped to check for ticks and found almost a dozen of them between us. They were still crawling on us for the most part, but some of the smaller (younger?) ones had already attached themselves to Lady Jaye.

We went to the pet store to grab the topical pesticide for Porter and Rosie and found the O’tom Tick Twister, a nifty pair of tools for removing ticks. Growing up on a farm in Oklahoma we were used to ticks and all the hoodoo necessary to remove them. We had the “heat up a needle and press the hot needle on the tick” technique, the “pull gently with tweezers” technique, and the “cover them in clear nail polish to suffocate them” technique. I seem to remember one involving rubbing alcohol. If you put a tick on a tick, would the first tick uproot? Hrm.

The O’Tom Tick Twister is a much more effective tick removal tool than sacrificing your pet rabbit to an island god. The kit comes with two green plastic fork-like tools, one for small ticks and one for larger beasties. You insert the fork around the tick and then twist, not pull. The Tick Twister is extremely effective. It removed a large tick from my abdomen in two painless rotations.

The Tick Twister was about $4 at Petco, although their Web site doesn’t seem to offer the product. You can purchase it online from Amazon.com for $3.49 before shipping or other similar e-tailers.

I highly recommend this to anyone who lives in an area where they might encounter a tick. Make sure to mark your calendars after removing a tick in the event you contract a tick-borne illness such as Lyme disease or Rocky mountain spotted tick fever.

Tick Twister, I spin out five blood-sucking STFU mugs!

It’s approaching summertime here in Virginia, and after Lady Jaye and I went on a hike Saturday (more on that later) we knew it was time to break out the flea and tick medication for our dogs Porter and Rosie. I normally get FrontLine, but it was over three times the price of any other topical flea and tick product. I don’t remember it being so expensive. We purchased SentryPro XFC instead.

SentryPro XFC promises to kill fleas, ticks, mosquitoes, flea eggs, and flea larvae for up to three weeks. Sounded good to me. We bought two appropriate dosage sizes and applied them as directed to Porter and Rosie. Unlike other medications that go all the way to the base of the tail, SentryPro XFC is only to be applied from the base of the neck to halfway down the back. I thought this was odd, but didn’t think much more about it at the time.

Everything seemed to be going fine, and Lady Jaye and I went out for a bite to eat. We came home about three hours later. Rosie was flicking her tongue around, as if she was trying to get a funny taste out of her mouth. She drank some water, ran around, and then licked the side of the couch, tail wagging. Both dogs were scratching, but I chalked that up to the fleas biting for one last time before the SentryPro XFC put them to sleep … permanently.

An hour went by, and Rosie was still air-licking. She was also hacking and dry-heaving. I figured that Rosie had licked some of Porter’s treatment off his back. This would explain why we were directed to treat only halfway down the spine, so that the dog couldn’t lick off its own dose. I called the hotline on the back of the SentryPro box and talked to a very nice and helpful lady. She said that it was okay that Rosie ingested just a small dose, and gave me a tip to help soothe her mouth. I put two tablespoons of canned tuna fish juice in a bowl and made Rosie drink it. I think put one tablespoon of tuna fish juice in a small bowl with water, and gave it to Rosie. I made another one for Porter, just in case. After some coaxing, Rosie and Porter quite happily drank all of their nasty tuna water. The hotline lady asked us to watch Rosie to see if she if her dry heaving continued and be wary for a bloated stomach. If Rosie kept trying to vomit and wasn’t producing anything, her stomach could become distended. Another hour or so passed, and Rosie stopped licking. Things were looking up. We all went to bed, cradling Rosie like a baby in my left arm as usual.
Read the rest of this entry »

Mimicking the success of last winter, I hoped to log another 3000 miles on my motorcycle Cylon before April of 2007. Due to bad weather grounding opportunities to motor to DC and the fear of reoccuring exposure on my foot suffered during 2005 I barely managed 1800 miles during my “winter miles” challenge of 2006/2007.

The bright, shining spot amidst my failure was my motorcycle trip to Tybee Island, Georgia in March. A thousand of my winter miles were accumulated on this trip. Thanks to some thick SmartWool snowboarding socks my feet stayed nice and warm, even when the temperature was down to 10°F.

Now that it’s warming up, I’ve been taking Cylon out for more “fun” rides of an hour or less like I did or last year. It’s amazing to see all the construction along the semi-rural routes I found. I will continue to strike out and find new roads to play on, and hopefully I will join my stepfather on a mid-distance trip later this year before it gets too hot. Winter miles may have been a failure, but I’m not hanging up my leathers just yet.

Final 2007 winter miles: 1876.

You will love the new Linkin Park album, Minutes to Midnight. The first track sounds exactly like a Stabbing Westward song. The rest of Minutes to Midnight isn’t bad, but if you’re expecting the scratch- and guitar riff-heavy sounds of the first two albums you’re going to be in for a surprise. As I noted in my review of DJ Shadow’s album The Outsider, it can be a jarring experience when an artist or group changes musical direction.

“Bleed It Out” is the first decent song on the album. It does not surprise me that this is also Mike Shinoda’s first turn at the microphone. Primary singer Chester Bennington (Shinoda is LP’s rapping vocalist) attempts to stretch his vocal range a bit in Minutes to Midnight, but I’ve always liked him better as a counterpoint to Shinoda and less the main focus of a track. “What I’ve Done” is a good example of what happens when Chester’s bleeding heart wailing is untempered by Shinoda or more hip hop elements. It almost made me reach for my cuttin’ tools.

If you’re looking for an evolution of Linkin Park, pick up (or return to) Shinoda’s 2005 side project Fort Minor. If you want to hear a mashup between Linkin Park and an industrial rock band from the 90s, check out Minutes to Midnight.