Cereal Bugs

Don't you hate it when you find out that your cereal is full of dead bugs only when you're halfway through the last bowl of the box?

Eames lounge chair

This is the "Eames classic" lounge chair. Introduced in the 50's, it's become a bit of a bit of an icon of American modern(ist) furniture design. It's featured in NY's Museum of Modern Art, and more notably (for some generations) it was a centerpiece in Frasier Crane's apartment. If you've seen one of my shirts, you know I want one:

The only problem is that it's a designer chair sold by Herman Miller, so it's naturally quite expensive. I've always been unable to convince myself to buy one, afraid of it becoming my own personal Rubicon on the way to a life of lavish decadence. Do I really want to become a person who spends $2000 on a designer chair? Perhaps that's the wrong way to think about it though: I don't necessarily want to become that kind of person, but I do want to have a nice, comfortable chair. Where does one draw the line between appreciation for the finer things and conspicuous consumption? I'm not exactly sure..

Right now I have an IKEA Poäng, which has become increasingly uncomfortable with its velcro-on polyester pad and rigid wooden armrests, especially for long periods of reading. So I've been giving the Eames some thought again recently, considering I might have some bonus money left after paying off my car loan (something I was planning to do a long time ago, but I kept buying too many toys). It's very tempting. Must.. resist..

I envy you Eddy. The only questions on your mind are, Who's going to walk me? Who's going to feed me?

Splat Monster

It looks like the eyes were probably painted on by somebody, but if not, how cool would that have been if this splat monster had just formed randomly?

Hot air balloon flyover

So I'm sitting here and a huge hot air balloon flies right over my apartment, really low to the ground. By the time I got my camera out it was a ways away, so it looks small in the picture. It was a lot bigger when it was right over me:

Now I have this strange urge to take a hot air balloon ride (something I've never done). It probably costs a lot, so I need some other people. Anybody else want to go on a hot air balloon ride?? Let me know.

Fun with pivot tables and match.com

I recently considered signing up at an internet dating site, just to see what was available. Naturally I was quite skeptical (since I am not divorced with kids and over 40). Match.com claims to have the largest number of members of any dating site, so I checked it out first. Fortunately, match.com allows anonymous non-members to do very extensive searching of their catalogue without signing up.

I started off with a basic search: women aged 20-27 within 25 miles of my zip code (this includes most of the Seattle metropolitan area). I drilled down from there based on various factors such as education, income, religion, etc... After I had collected a good amount of data, I dumped it into Excel and analyzed it. Using pivot tables I could see how various factors affected the number of potential matches. For example, here is a plot of the 'Income' and 'Education' factors:

There aren't too many surprises here: more education correlates to a higher average income, but not that much higher. Other plots such as Age vs Income or Religion vs Education didn't reveal too many surprises either.

The real surprises came in the magnitude of the numbers of matches. For my search of single women aged 20-27 in Seattle, there were only 530 results. 530! Clearly there are many more than 530 single girls in Seattle, so match.com's selection seems to really suck.

Out of those 530 results, if I restricted the search to include only matches whose Education and Income buckets matched or exceeded my own, there were only 7 results (though there were 64 if I also included one income bucket below mine).

I know for a fact that there are way more than 7 girls in all of Seattle with comparable income and education levels, so one thing is clear: they aren't using match.com.

I don't think I will either.

Alactraz Island

Interesting fact of the day: Alcatraz timeline

• 1850-1933: Military fortress and prison
• 1933-1963: U.S. Bureau of Prisons maximum security penitentiary
• 1969-1970: Occupied by Native Americans as part of the Red Power movement
• 1971-Present: National Park (Golden Gate National Recreation Area)