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I was pretty excited when i found out that it was possible to stream Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” movies to Xbox 360 and have them played on the TV. The catch is a unfortunate requirement for Windows Vista. After picking up a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium edition purchased courtesy of my sis’s employee discount, i installed it as a VMWare Fusion’s virtual machine, running under Mac OS X Leopard. I had little difficulty streaming Netflix’s WatchNow movies to the virtualized Vista environment though at full screen, the playback was anything but smooth. The biggest problem was Windows Media Center refused to play any video media. It does not seem to support VMWare’s virtual video adapter. So after spending close to two days trying to set it up and also troubleshooting it, i gave up.
This morning, i read an announcement made at E3 that some time this fall, it will be possible to watch some Netflix movies on demand on Xbox 360, without the need for Windows Vista! Yes!!! Adios Vista!
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It was a pretty busy Saturday for me. After picking up a DHL package from the West Seattle Post Office - yes, a DHL package delivered by the USPS - i went crabbing at Shilshore Bay Marina with a bunch of Smelly’s co-workers. I knew that it was possible to catch Red Rock crabs off docks/piers but i never thought it was possible to trap Dungeness crabs from the same areas until this morning.
This is the first time that i have gone crabbing. The concept of shrimping and crabbing is very similar when using pots. The idea is to attract crabs with some bait into a trap that they cannot get out of. Crabbing offers some additional advantages over shrimping. The most important one for me is i do not need a boat. Because it is possible to harvest crab off a dock or pier, less bulky trap like the ring net can be employed. On Saturday, we had two crab pots and a ring net.
Preparing the bait cage for the crab pot with some razor clams. (Picture courtesy of Smelly)
We filled the bait cages with some leftover cans of salmon-flavored cat food from my shrimping trip last year. We also tried using the leftover razor clams as well. Both types of baits worked quite well but i think a solid bait like the razor clam is probably better because it does not disintegrate into little pieces from being thrown around numerous times.
Tossing the ring net. (Picture courtesy of Smelly)
With crab pots, once they are dropped in the water, they can probably remain there for a very long time since any crab that get into the pot will not be able to get out. With the ring net, it has to be checked every 15 - 20 minutes. Our first keeper was a male Red Rock crab caught using the ring net.
Holding down the big Red Rock crab. (Picture courtesy of Smelly)
Ian showing us how to identify the sex of the Red Rock crab. (Picture courtesy of Smelly)
Ian - the crab meister - in action. (Picture courtesy of Smelly).
Ian hauled up two Red Rock crabs. (Picture courtesy of Smelly)
We caught several other Red Rock crabs but they were legally too small to keep. Washington state law requires a minimum size of 5″ for Red Rock crabs (male or female). For Dungeness crabs, they must be at least 6.25″ wide and only male crabs can be kept. The male crab can be identified by the narrower abdomen at its underside.
Mike measuring the size of the catch with a crab ruler. (Picture courtesy of Smelly).
Crab to me: You want a piece of me?
Smelly and i had to leave earlier because we had an appointment with Leslie Engen of San Jo Shibas. This was to be our final visit for our Shiba puppy prior to picking him up the following weekend. Yes, the puppy has been selected out of the four. More on that in another post.
After dealing with the blood vessel-bursting traffic from the East side back to Seattle, due mainly to the shutdown of SR520, Smelly and i walked about two blocks for the annual West Seattle street fair to have some food. The food selections appeared to be lesser than the previous year. I had a pork bratwurst from Ziegler’s Bratwurst.
Janet standing in front of Ziegler’s Bratwurst at the annual West Seattle street fair.
Munching down a pork bratwurst with Sauerkraut and onions. (Picture courtesy of Smelly)
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I normally do not like to do #2 at work. But when you gotta go, you gotta go. Today at work was no different. I had a strong urge to go after finishing my chicken McNuggets meal from McDonald’s. With at least two more hours to go before i could leave for home, there was simply no way i could hold. In other words, the dam was just about to burst, the floodgate was just about to break wide open.
After going through the usual ritual of wiping the seat and putting down a piece of toilet seat paper cover, i sat down. It was then i realized something that was utterly out of the ordinary. I thought i had seen everything that one could possibly or would ever want to see in a restroom. But on the floor in front of me about a foot away from the toilet was a pop corn!!!
Blurry picture of the pop corn in the restroom stall. Consider the circumstance that i was in, it is actually quite decent.
While i was doing my business, i was also multi-tasking in trying figure out how the hell the pop corn got there in the first place. Why would someone bring pop corns into a restroom? Worse, why would that person be bringing pop corns into the stall? I was going through various scenarios in my head, none of which made any sense to me, as one who simply cannot fathom the thought of bringing food into a semi-public restroom.
I came up with the following two “probable” scenarios:
Scenario #1
He was eating his oven-fresh pop corns when an unforeseen bowel disaster struck. He could not leave his bag of mouth-watering pop corns on his desk since some uninvited co-workers might take advantage of his temporary absence and help themselves with the unattended pop corns. So he took his bag of pop corns into one of the restroom stalls. One of the pop corns accidentally fell off from the bag in his haste to unload some serious gravy.
Scenario #2
He made the pop corns with full intention of eating them when he was pinching a loaf. While he was releasing the chocolate hostages and munching on the pop corns at the same time, one of the pop corns fell out of the bag. When that happened, i am very curious to know if he actually contemplated with applying the five-second rule.
As much as i ponder upon scenarios after scenarios, i still can’t find answer to the question: Why?
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I didn’t do grocery shopping this past weekend so i had nothing to cook last night. Smelly and i decided to try one of the restaurants near the Alaska Junction. I suggested Garlic Jim’s Famous Gourmet Pizza since Smelly loves garlic and i was out of idea what to eat for dinner.
The Garlic Jim’s near the Alaska Junction was quite empty when we arrived there. In fact, only one table was occupied when we stepped foot into the restaurant. That was one clear ominous sign that i wish i had not ignored.
We ordered some garlic wings and a garlic chicken pizza. The chicken wings showed up like it had just been swimming in a pool of grease. When the garlic chicken pizza was brought to our table, i realized that i forgot to tell the waitress that we wanted the thin-crust version of it. In fact, i think the waitress should have told us the options available, just like what she did for the wings. I am not a big fan of thick-crust pizza. It was not the worst pizza i ever had but it was close. The honor for the worst pizza goes to Pizza Hut. Both the garlic wings and garlic chicken pizza had absolutely no trace of garlic! Normally i will be burping like there is no tomorrow when i eat something with garlic. Trust me, you don’t want to be anywhere near me after i have consumed the garlic-potent Shish Tawook at the Mediterranean Kitchen in Bellevue. After the supposedly garlicky meal last night, i had one burp. Yes, only one stinky - not literally - burp.
If the name of your franchise includes the word “garlic”, your menu better have something that taste garlicky. Unfortunately, the only thing garlicky about Garlic Jim’s entrees are their names. Gourmet pizza? Not even close.
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About two months ago, i bought a mantis egg case from the Home Depot on 1st Ave. There really isn’t any need for a biological pest control in my backyard since the few plants that attracted tons of aphids last year were no longer there. Last year, the three pepper plants in the backyard were infested with aphids so i introduced two batches of lady bugs to eliminate the aphids problem. The only reason for getting the mantis case is to satisfy my curiosity.
The instructions on packaging material mentions that the eggs hatch in about 10 days after the temperate reaches at least 70 degrees. This had been a relatively cooler spring and summer so daytime high did not hit the 70s until a week or two ago. After inspecting the egg case at least once a week for the past month, i gave up the idea that i would see mantises in my backyard.
Yesterday afternoon, i was inspecting the recently planted Irish Moss and to my surprise, i found several mantis nymphs!
Tiny mantis nymph on my thumb.
A mantis nymph hidden in Irish Moss.
I am a little concerned that i may not have any food in my backyard for the mantises. I may have to introduce some pest just to feed my mantises!
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Two days ago, i received an instant message from a close friend:
[13:07] XXXXXX@hotmail.com: http://XXXXX.imagepicss.info
It looked extremely fishy to me. But i was curious, so i clicked on the link. The link brought me to this page with a login box:
Login box at XXXXX.imagepicss.info.
The next thing i did was to google for it but the search came up empty.
Search on google.com came up empty.
To find out who owns the imagepicss.info domain, i looked it up on Whois.Net. According to Whois.Net, imagepicss.info was registered on 7/1/2008, barely two days ago, by a company based in Hong Kong called Blue China Group.
Domain registration information on whois.net for imagepicss.info.
I then did a search on google for “Blue China Group” and this came back with some very interesting results. Apparently, according to secmagazineus.com, social networking site MySpace filed a lawsuit in December of 2007 against the Blue China Group, “alleging the defendants engaged in a massive spam operation designed to harass users and generate profits.” The defendants “induced MySpace members to disclose their login credentials – usually through a phishing website – and then used that information to access members’ MySpace profiles to distribute unsolicited messages to the members’ friends.”
So how does the Blue China Group entice MySpace users ? According to spywarehunter.org, the Blue China Group tricked MySpace users into installing a ’stalker tracker’ program that was supposedly able to figure out who’s been checking out the users’ profiles. When a MySpace user signs up for the program using his/her MSN login, all of his/her friends on the MSN contact list start getting spammed, which appear to have been sent by the actual user.
The lawsuit was filed last December and the imagepicss.info domain was registered only two days ago so i am guessing being sued does not prevent those spammers from continuing to spam users.
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For the past 11 years or so, my jobs required me to constantly travel. I had never taken a bus to work. Early this year, i switched to a non-traveling job but i was still driving to work. I wanted to take the public transportation to work but it was just too much hassle. To get to work, i would have to take two transfers on three different buses. If i don’t miss any of the connecting buses, it would take me at least 90 minutes. Even when i drive my car to work, i have to leave my car at the parking lot in Magnuson Park - leased from the city by my employer - and then hop on a shuttle bus that drops me off about ten blocks away. My work location has a parking lot but since the parking spaces is limited, the spots are assigned by “seniority”. From what i found out recently, the next available spot will go to someone who has been here since the middle of 2005.
On 6/30, my employer started a GreenLine shuttle service that runs every 15 minutes from Pacific Place to where i work in Sand Point. I greeted this news with great excitement because for the longest time, it really bothered me that i could not take the public transportation to work even though i am working in the same city where i live. This morning, i took Metro bus 54 from West Seattle to downtown. Then i walked about three blocks, waited several minutes and got on the GreenLine shuttle bus. The journey from home to work took a little more than one hour, which is just about the same amount of time that it takes me to drive to work on a day with bad traffic. I was listening to music, checking my email, surfing the web on my iPhone throughout the commute. In fact, i managed to catch some Zs on the shuttle bus! Now, with gasoline prices at all time high, this shuttle service could not have come at a better moment. It not only keeps some of the gasoline money in my pocket, it saves me from having to deal with the horrendous Seattle traffic!
Life is great!
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The temperature displayed in my car after being baked in the late afternoon sun for about an hour.
Yesterday’s high of 92 degrees fell a little short of the record of 93 degrees set in 1987. But it was hot enough for both Smelly and i as we rode on the Cedar River Trail.
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