Jascha Pohl Sucks

My new hobby: kitty toilet training

I don't know if I have mentioned it before, but I think they have been evident in some pictures that I've posted, that Becca has two cats. Since I live with Becca now, this means that I have two cats.
I used to be certain that I was allergic to cats. This fear seemed well founded since both of my parents are definitely allergic and I've had bad allergic reactions at the homes of cat owners. I also found that I didn't have reactions at the homes of dog owners. But, with the old Becca, who also had two cats in her house, I didn't have allergies. And at another friends' house, who has dogs, I had bad allergies. What I realized was that I had bad allergic reactions at the homes of people with pets that shed hair everywhere and owners who didn't clean nearly often enough; I have bad dust allergies, and this I've known since I was five.

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In order to live with Becca's cats, and because it is the kind of thing that I think is cool, I have made a number of small improvements to our lives to keep the place somewhat clean. My first home improvement, which I actually made about 6 months before moving in, was to buy a Roomba vacuum. The thing works! Oh, my god, it is awesome. We pick our shit up off the floor, throw it on a couch or whatever, hit the "Clean" button, and leave for work. When we come home the place has been vacuumed and the Roomba is happily sitting on its dock charging for the next run. The vacuum's bin is always filled to bursting with cat hair. It is very rewarding, and it keeps me from having runny eyes and nose all the time.
So it has been the better part of year since I bought the Roomba and I felt it was time for the next phase in home improvement: to get rid of the smelly litter box. The box is Becca's job because they are Becca's cats. This saves me the chore of having to clean it, however this also means I am at the mercy of her remembering. Sometimes it gets pretty loaded in there.
On a recent trip to the pet shop to get food etc. I saw a funny toilet seat-shapped thing calling itself the "Kitty Whiz Transfer System". This thin piece of plastic claimed that it would allow me to teach a cat to use a toilet. How great would that be? No litter to clean, no lingering ammonia smell, and the incredible bragging rights that you taught your cat to take a dump in the toilet. I had to get it.
I waited a while to actually use it, though, because Becca had a week-long business trip and this wasn't a task that I felt I could do alone. In that time I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was planning to do this. He recommended strongly against it. When I asked why he told me a long story of how he read online how to do it and tried to build his own "Kitty Whiz". Long story short, he didn't make it strong enough and it collapsed under the weight of his poor cat, who fell directly into the bowl. I figured, "hey, that's hilarious. I'll consider this a success if that happens too."
But, I'm pleased to say, Becca's cats did not fall into the bowl. They are in their 3rd day of training and look like they're getting the hang of it. The first day was a tough, traumatic day for them because we were instructed to lock them in the bathroom until they figured it out. After 24 hours of whining, they did get it. Now they just need to keep using this special toilet-mounted litter box without incident for another 4-5 days or so and we can progress to the next stage. I'll give more updates as I have them.

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Huh?

Hey guys, what's up? I got an e-mail notice the site got hacked or something? Hopefully you all aren't getting unruly. It looks okay to me, but uh - e-mail if things go crazy nuts.

Get Some Nuts!

In the words of the great Jeremy Trotter:
"Mr. T just never gets old! :-D"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NySN_plfiNI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bUxi_Eo6fU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm6ZGQV4HjM

Q.E.D.

I�m a black guy, that�s so Cuil!

So, yeah, not a whole lot of posts lately, but I'm not going to let that stop me. In fact, I'm going to be going to Spain and France for the month of September and I plan to use this site to post updates about my trip. I said that last time too, and then I found out that Europe seems to think it is perfectly reasonable for internet access to cost 3 euros an hour and for computer keyboards to be made of solid lead. I'm planning to bring a palm pilot I won in a raffle so that I can at least type up my posts ahead of time.
But there was something I wanted to talk about in the hilarious world of the moment, and that is the latest upstart search engine, Cuil.

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Since my girlfriend and most of my bay area friends work at Google, and others at Yahoo, I follow news articles about search engines very closely. A dance friend of mine started Powerset, which immediately got bought by Microsoft for a fuckton of money, and I really wish I had become a closer friend when I had the chance. Cuil, according to it's press release, was started by a former Alta Vista guy and, more importantly, a woman who Google already thinks is hot shit, as evidenced by the fact that they bought her and her previous search engine the last time she popped up on the scene. Cuil's PR campaign brags that it is "the world's largest search engine" because it indexes more pages than even Google (though google in response explained that they crawl over 1 trillion webpages and only index the ones that appear to be of any use to anyone) and the creator swears it delivers superior results.
So, unless you're rooting for the underdog with unbelievable hubris, you've probably already guessed that the website totally blows goats. I'm here to tell you that this search engine would blow goats ... if it could only find them. But that's to be expected. Wikia search sucked on its first day, but the creator was quick to stress that they were just getting off the ground. Powerset was great but limited on its first day, but they emphasize that they're only searching over Wikipedia data. Cuil bragged about its superiority on its first day when if fact it couldn't find a turd in an outhouse.
The unique part about Cuil's search results is that, in addition to the classic text snippet that most search results have, it provides an extended snippet and a photo, very similar to the format of the top of the main page on Google News. In fact, just like Google News, the image next to the text may not be from the linked site, but instead from some other source from which a picture was selected by lord knows what search engine magic. The absolute funniest article reviewing Cuil pointed out the particularly hilarious results this feature occasionally yields. I can't begin to imagine what wacked out algorithm would decide that a picture of two men masturbating on each other would be the best image to assign to the biography of a professor of quantum computing when safe search is on!
With some sick hope on my part that a picture next to a webpage about me would have some weird sexual image as well, I decided to "Cuil" myself. Sadly, I have a very common name, so I have to add extra search terms. I decided to try my name and then robot . I got this:

I also got 8 other results. At the time of this writing, 8 of the 9 total results were links to copies of that article. Whereas that article is simply the 1st hit from Google and a couple other papers I helped author are a short ways down the list.
Ok, I'm rambling on. This post isn't anything like as funny as I'd like it to be. Basically I wanted to post the picture from that article because it is hilarious, but I don't think Dan would appreciate me putting gay porn pictures up on his site.
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That ray gun is mine!

I am super super super excited to say that I just found out that I will be an acknowledgement in the credits of EA's upcoming game Dead Space! So sweet! I have no idea how much I can talk about the game, probably not much, but I can give you several links to official YouTube videos ( Strategic Dismemberment ). My friend Adam did the dismemberment tech for the game and he's very proud of it, though he's pretty sure ZeroPunctuation is going to rip the game a new one.

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My heros are dying

I can't even begin to express how sad it is that George Carlin died yesterday. He was a genius, and hysterically funny. I listened to his albums constantly as early as I learned to work the record player, so somewhere around the 5th grade or earlier. Enjoying Carlin was often an intelligence test of possible friends and, yes, some people didn't make the cut.
It is weird to see these headlines this morning like "Carlin now headlining in heaven" when he was one of the loudest, shout-it-from-the-rooftops athiests I'd ever heard. What is very funny, though, is that even the Associated Press is quoting Carlin's website for biographical information. Much of that biography is fiction and he proudly said as much in interviews, especially relishing his ever-changing stories of how his mother died, "In an ill-fated hot-air ballooning excercise" etc. He's getting one more jab in at the end.

Umm...

So Facebook says it's Peter's birthday today so I'm going to go out on a limb and say:

Happy Birthday Peter!

The Food

So I am going to lump all of my food experiences into one big thing. Many many great meals will be left out because I had so many, and to be honest, have forgotten quite a bit.
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Beijing

4:30 AM jet-lagged style:
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Beijing is not small. They say the size of the city is the size of Belgium. There are quite a few people there. Rush hour makes LA looks like a lazy drive in the countryside. It is also very polluted and you can feel it (they say a day in Beijing is the equivalent of 70 cigarettes). But that place has a buzz. With the Olympics coming up, you can almost feel the excitement. I dont know how they will be ready for it, as it is less than two months away an half the stuff they wanted for it wasnt ready. I flew to the new airport. Very nice actually. I rode the new metro (the first time on the trip I didnt take a taxi for local transport). Also nice and easy to figure out.

I did more sightseeing (and probably spent more money) in the three days I had there than the rest of my entire trip. The first day I woke up early and went to the Wall. The second I went to Tianamen Square and The Forbidden City. Tianamen is just... huge. Thats about it. And seeing Mao's face on the entrance to the Forbidden City from there is quite strange. The Forbidden City was neat, but very crowded. I was upset to not get the Roger Moore narrated audioguide I was promised by Matt (I would have loved to see this place to a voice that could also say "Vodka martini shaken not stirred"). But they have a new system that is a fantastic idea, but the lady who narrates it goes on and on and on. It's all done by GPS. You put the thing in your ear and as soon as you get somewhere a British lady starts talking to you. She tells you lots of stories about past Emperors or whatnot. Almost all of them involve concubines. It seemed like the Emperors had a pretty cushy lifestyle. I liked the names of the buildings. The Hall of Supreme Harmony was closed for renovation, but I could still check out the Hall of Middle Harmony and the Hall of Preserving Harmony.

I also went to the Summer Palace. I was determined to do nothing, but I got convinced to go there on my last day. Also very nice. Just huge. Its kinda like an enormous tea garden like in SF. There is a huge lake and you can walk around it as well as climb the Hill of Longevity. Buildings here had even better names, including the Hall of Understanding the Universe and the Bridge of Knowing the Fish. I took a 2 hour very peaceful nap.

My hostel was awesome. It was in a hutong. These are the old neighborhoods that are quickly being demolished in the name of progress. This was the only place in my entire time I spent in a dorm, because real money is actually spent in Beijing. But it had an awesome crowd, a rooftop area overlooking the hutong, and 4 yuan large Tsingtao beers. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

And I had Beijing Duck in Beijing. At a fancy place where the guy comes out and carves the duck in front of you. And they have ushers leading you to the bathroom. It was good. The only meal I had where I spent money, and well worth it.
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Death of a Visionary

Stan Winston died today. While Jim Henson was a hero to me largely posthumously, Stan Winston has always been there making amazing creations, each one more elaborate and technically sophisticated than the last. I went into Mechanical Engineering and on to robotics because of Henson and Winston. My design of my robot head was based on books by the Henson Creature Shop, and on books by Cynthia Breazeal, who's robot Leonardo was designed and built by Stan Winston and his company. Film and Animatronics have lost a legend. Horror and Sci Fi will never be the same. Now Rick Baker is the last champion of practical effects.