Fugu Talk

When I first moved to Huntington Beach, it wasn’t hard to find lunch for $5. I can’t even get that at Carl’s Jr. anymore, but there are still some good deals, like this pastrami sandwich and heap of fried zucchini from Harry’s Cafe with a drink, for around $6. More notable – Harry’s is one of the local establishments that serves free meals on Thanksgiving.

I thought about reading Arianna Huffington’s book on blogging, but in the interest of short attentions spans (mainly, my own), I’ll just stick with three rules – don’t bury the lead (or it won’t show up in Facebook), include a picture (skipping it this time), and don’t spend too much time on it. Done.

I hate flying partly due to the uncomfortable seats and stale air, but largely because it’s just uncivilized. On a typical trip, chances are I’ll see travelers cutting in line, rude TSA personnel, surly airline employees waiting for their company to merge with another airline and its own surly employees, passengers who want to exchange seats, and I just noticed recently, there are a lot of guys who don’t wash their hands when leaving an airport bathroom (now that’s a biological threat)

Occasionally, I’ve observed behavior so bizarrely rude that it’s entertaining. On a recent flight, a passenger across the aisle leaned over and placed her drinks on my tray table. (my first reaction – how did she get two orange juices? And then, heeey!) Then there was that lady who killed time as our plane was stuck on the tarmac by clipping her toenails. And the couple who insisted on sitting on both sides of me and then spent the entire flight passing items in front of me.

But I don’t travel that much. Googling “airline horror stories” turns up quite a bit. My favorite (found on Yelp) – a first class passenger so incensed that coach passengers were deplaning first that he exited via the emergency slide. So I understand why those auto execs travelled by corporate jet. But really, since they were attending the same meeting, couldn’t they have shared a ride?

Although Wired asserts fax is not only alive, but thriving, based on the number of multifunction printers sold, I seriously doubt it. I bet most use only two out of the three functions (I have a multifunction printer, and I don’t even have  a land line).

And during the year I used eFax, I received just one legitimate fax (from someone who couldn’t find my email address), and only needed to send two – the first, not surprisingly, for my doctor’s terribly inefficient and error-prone billing service (apparently they couldn’t be bothered to call up my insurer themselves), and the second, more surprisingly, to the Apple iPhone Developer Program.

But the most telling evidence I’ve seen that fax is on the decline is from eFax itself. The first time I tried eFax, I thought the customer service was excellent. This time around, they never bothered to update their Mac application to an Intel Mac version, at one point I couldn’t even see a way to send faxes from their web site, and I received a regular stream of junk faxes, some from eFax (or it’s parent company, JRD Communications) itself. Although I hadn’t selected the automatic billing and renewal option listed on the web site, they went ahead and tried to charge my card again after a year  (once again, thank you, person-who-stole-my-credit-card-earlier-and-forced-me-to-change-it). When I emailed them to officially cancel, they replied I request cancellation via their on-line support chat system. Odd – shouldn’t I be able to fax it in?

The No Asshole Rule is a refreshing break from the CEO-worshipping books on the business shelf that seem to say you need to take the good with the bad (or more evident these days, the bad with the bad). The only item I might quibble with is the origin of the alternative nomenclature, “ass clown”. The author mentions the phrase possibly originating with a professional wrestler or the series The Office, but I’ve only heard it in the movie Office Space – I seem to recall in one of the DVD commentaries an actor saying they came up with that on the spot to maintain their film rating.

A surprise discovery during my stay in Waikiki last week - Origamido, a gallery on the second floor of the International Marketplace that showcases some marvelous origami works. Besides picking up some how-to DVD’s and a book from the store, I watched a fascinating documentary, Between the Folds, which spans origami artists ranging from Michael LaFosse of this gallery to French artists who crumple rather than fold to a 20-year old MIT professor who received a MacArthur “genius” grant.

I recently returned from my fourth trip to Waikiki. Some like the sun and surf – me, I like the food. I’ve got a few favorite eateries in the area by now, such as Ono Cheesesteak (breakfast sandwich with a cup of Kona coffee for $2.95), Jimbo’s  for Japanese noodles, and Fatty’s Chinese Fast Food (where you sit on a stool around an old-fashioned wok kitchen) in the International Marketplace.

Among new places, I tried a Puka Dog, also in the marketplace, with garlic mustard and pineapple relish.

And on the higher end of the scale, uni “sea urchin” pasta at Taormina.

A while back for some reason I was thinking about Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and I decided to feed “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” into WordsEye. The result wasn’t…dull.

The App Store seems to  provide the advantages of console programming (target fixed hardware) along with a convenient way to self-publish. But each submission is subject to Apple approval. I haven’t heard of too many rejections, but I have heard of a few, and I got my first one recently. After silence on the approval front over several weeks, this little demo of mocap from ElektraShock got rejected for “not providing enough user functionality”.

Getting started on iPhone software development compares favorably to the ordeal of console development (check out the Wii developer requirements ) But there is no App Store equivalent to the concept approval element of console projects, so you run the risk of investing a lot into an app that Apple ultimately rejects. (not that I put a lot of work into this one – it’s a vastly trimmed down version of a browser demo on Fugu Games)

After getting jolted by an earthquake last night, I tried to find news of it – nothing on TV, although the local stations were all over it an hour later, but I found near real-time earthquake tracking on the USGS site, complete with a map of recent activity: