December 2004

KiSS DP-1000

I bought this DVD player as a birthday gift for Dorota. The DP-1000 is very nice. It can play video, audio and images recorded in many formats including DivX and Ogg Vorbis. And it looks pretty cool too.

Bars in Kazimierz

After having dinner at the Magma restaurant, I went with Ziemek and Dorota to three bars in Kazimierz (in Krakow). The bars were Baraka, La Habana and Alchemia. All three were pretty good but for tonight's mood I liked La Habana most.

I, Robot

On the flight from Chicago to Frankfurt I watched I, Robot. The film was OK to watch on a plane but I'm glad I didn't go to see it in the cinema. Isaac Asimov's stories of the same title would probably be a very interesting read though.

My research web page

I have created today a web page that will describe my research interests. The only content at the moment is a list of publications. I created this page because I often ended up referring people to my older papers and I wanted to be able to tell them to simply find the reference on my web page rather then looking for it myself and sending them email. I have also written about this in my MSDN blog.

Queen Sheba

I had dinner with Dario and Don at the Queen Sheba in Capitol Hill. In addition to regular Ehtiopian food, we had some Ethiopian beer. Both the food and the ambiance were very good. Definitely worth going back to.

Chantanee

I had lunch with Eric at the Chantanee Thai restaurant in Bellevue. The food was quite good. I had Chantanee noodle which was similar to Phad Thai but with tamarind sauce. Very good.

Capitol Club

I went today to Capitol Club for a dinner with Dario, Joel, Sandra, Lingli, Pracheeti. Arun joined us later for drinks. The food was pretty good. I loved the tomato soup and the fresh pita bread was delicious. I had a duck with couscous for the main dish.

About Schmidt

Today I finished watching About Schmidt. Recently I watch movies recorded on my DVR. The DVR lets me watch a lot of older movies that I have wanted to watch for a while. The downside is that because of my lack of time I often watch movies in many small parts. I think that it took me 5-6 sittings to finish this film.

Brunch at Julia's on Broadway

We had brunch at Julia's on Broadway on Capitol Hill. The food at Julia's is good and quite cheap. I also like the decor of the restaurant. I didn't take any pictures of the interior but here's what it looks like from the outside:
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When driving to Seattle, I shot this picture of the Olympic Mountains form the 520 bridge:
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Dedication Public License

I downloaded today Spybot-S&D. This is a software package to remove various kinds of malicious software installed on your computer. It came with a very cool Dedication Public License.

Wikipedia and movies

I have discovered today that Wikipedia has articles about movies. In my previous posts about films I used to provide links to IMDB. I have been using IMDB for a long time and I think that it is a great movie database but it started to annoy me recently by trying to open pop up windows (fortunately they are blocked by my browser). I will standardize now on links to the Wikipedia articles instead of IMDB. I have even gone back and edited past posts (since I started my blog recently this wasn't very difficult) and replaced links with new ones. For reviews of current movies, I usually use Rotten Tomaotes.

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, is one of the coolest Internet sites. It even has articles in multiple languages, for instance, Polish, Chinese, Sanskrit, Southern Min, or Sudanese.

Groundhog Day

I watched today the Groundhog Day. I have known the basic idea behind the movie for a long time since everyone knows the film and it comes up in cenversations from time to time. But this was the first time that I had a chance to watch it. A DVR is a great idea!

No poi

I went shopping to a local supermarket and I noticed a sign about the shortage od fresh poi. I took a picture of the sign:

There was no poi but they had very good Japanese mandarin oranges:
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Game night

Peter organized a game night tonight. This is the first and it was inspired to some degree by my telling Peter about Pam's game nights back in San Jose. This time we played Taboo, Transamerica, spades and hearts. We also played Transamerica at a party I organized at my place during the Thanksgiving weekend.

Towards the end of the party there were only six people left and I observed that we had five continents represented: Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and Northern America. Pretty cool.

man ray

I bought a set of three man ray CDs. The set is called l'integrale. My current favorite song is Mariposa (Nickodemus and Osiris feat. Carol C.) from vol. 3. You can listen to samples on Amazon.

Sideways at the Neptune

I watched Sideways at the Landmark Neptune Theater with Kai and Lingli. I really like the Neptune for its location close to cheap good food in the U-District and for the decor. Here are two pictures I took today at the Neptune.

The film was quite good too and all three of us liked it.

Google groups

I have decided to see what the Beta Google Groups site is like. I created a group of the same name as the group I maintain on Yahoo for my book club. Overall it looks very similar to Yahoo Groups but I like the threading view of the messages. Also it doesn't append any ads at the end of each message. The only problem is that it is not very reliable at this point. Maybe when it comes out of beta, I will migrate my book club there.

blogger.com

And now I created a blogger.com site. It looks very cool that I can have it hosted on my web site. There's even an RSS feed. However I will probably not use it since it doesn't support categories.

MSN Spaces

I have created a blog at MSN Spaces to see if I like it better than hosting my own blog. I like the way you edit your personal space. You can drag and drop various modules in your space. I'm not sure if I like it overall for my blog though.