NachoWorld

I saw this list done on kottke.org, my brother’s site: kankanala.com, and a number of other sites recently. I’ve been posting this online since 2002, so no “via” link.

List of places I Stayed Overnight in 2005

Hobbs, NM
Boston, MA
Killington, VT
New York City, NY
Lima, Peru
Cuzco, Peru

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Sao Paolo, Brazil
Beijing, China
Xian, China
Chongquing, China
Shanghai, China
Pittsburgh, PA
Albuquerque, NM
Phoenix, AZ
Stony Brook, NY

My memory is getting fuzzy… I’m sure there are a few more places as well.

Many of these places (New York City, for example) I had extended stays over multple trips

2006 is getting out to a “great” start too
Hobbs, NM
Houston, TX
Boston, MA
Sunday River, ME
New York City, NY
Jamaica, NY
Los Angeles, CA
Decatur, GE
Miami Beach, FL

A link from my past. This artist takes drawing from young children and recreates their imaginations with a more intense graphical interpretation.

Finally no more interviewing…! I finished on Thursday but didn’t go out because that morning I woke up with a rich head congestion. It’s been a good couple months … a lot of sleeping on couches in order to save money but also a few perks like living on Miami’s South Beach for 2 days and going to the Hotel Delano on Pfizer’s tab. I’m writing a whole bunch of thank you letters so the blog still has a while to go before I can update regularly. Until then, cheerio.

Who would win in a race between a tortoise and a hippo? It’s one of the fundamental questions plaguing modern society. Until we can answer that, here are some pictures of a 100 year old tortoise adopting a baby hippo.

NAIROBI (AFP) - A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise, in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa, officials said.

“The hippo is a young baby, he was left at a very tender age and by nature, hippos are social animals that like to stay with their mothers for four years,” he explained.

Apparently there’s a book out now about Owen and Mzee.

A few years ago I wanted to write a post about how much SPAM I get. Sure, everybody gets a whole bunch of SPAM. Depending on the source you hear from, the average person gets 8 to 13.3 junk emails a day. Depending on the number of legitimate emails one receives, that’s a high percentage of total emails that’s junk.

Now the number of SPAMmy emails I receive is getting absurd. To be honest, I receive every email that’s sent to my domain regardless of whether it has a POP3 account associated with it, because I tend to use email pseudonyms when I register online (e.g. aa@nachoworld.com or crazymonk@nachoworld.com). Pseudonyms work quite well in cases where the evil corporation (American Airlines or crazymonk.org) decides to sell my address. I’ve caught a few unethical email sellers (I get some non-Morpheus related junkmail through musiccity@nachoworld.com) this way. However, even if I did simply get rid of my ‘catchall’ within the nachoworld.com domain, I would still be inundated. Sometimes spiders grab my Tufts email address from the public directory posted at directory.tufts.edu - I have never put my Tufts address into a web form. (Impressively there have been spiders that grab just Indian names from school directories in Boston and New York in order to send Indian party junkmail.)

When I used Eudora, I created a number of filters on my desktop client that deleted those SPAMful nachoworld.com email address messages as they came. The program also had a statistics generator which could tell me how many total emails I was receiving and the projected number for the year. I used to be impressed with that projected number. The problem was that the projected number for the year would rise every month. Now I use the full version of Outlook because it’s faster, but even now after I wake up and “check email” it takes a few minutes for the program to filter.

Now I pose this question to you guys. How many junk messages do I receive a day. I can guarantee no one will come close to guessing the correct number.

I’m on a two week tour of duty in New York City interviewing for radiology residencies. I’ll be back next week.

Surprisingly very little can be found about lightning and thunder during snow storms. Growing up, the great lightning storms of the flat plains were amazingly bright and beautiful (and frightening), but the photographers knew that they would only get the best shots during the peak April-August season. Not really the time of year for snow.

Right now, as a foot piles up in Boston, we are having a lightning blizzard. Poor cars that are stuck with spinning tires on Dartmouth Street. It’s a slight incline and it’s a major street. I hear the spinning tires outside my window about once every 15 minutes along with the crashes of thunder every half hour (which I first thought were snowmovers crashing the asphalt).

From sky-fire.tv:
Can there be lightning during a snowstorm?
Lightning is usually associated with thunderstorms, and therefore is thought to be a spring and summer event. Yet lightning does occur during winter, and even during heavy snowfalls and blizzards. Winter lightning appears to be unusually powerful, associated with loud and long thunderclaps. Sometimes associated snowfalls can reach 3 inches an hour. A man was struck by lightning during a blizzard in Minneapolis during March of 1996. He is still alive…and very puzzled.

From a meterologist from the National Weather Service:
I don’t believe there is any scientific name for lightning and thunder
during a snowstorm. That does happen occasionally in the wintertime, and
those events usually produce brief bursts of very heavy snow. These storms
are usually caused by a strong surge of warm moist air flowing over a dome
of cold air at the surface. Thunderstorms may develop, but temperatures are
such that the precipitation remains all snow as it falls to the ground.

Now that we’re up to Hurricane Epsilon in the 2005 season (which ended officially on November 30th), here are the previously retired hurricane names and future tropical cyclone names of the North Atlantic and elsewhere. Interestingly, the naming convention systems and types of names vary by region of of the world. It’s a safe bet that Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita will have their names retired. Now if only Hurricane Naveen or Hurricane Nacho were on the list (there has never been a hurricane named with the letter ‘n’ retired since the North Atlantic naming convention started in 1954). Too bad they don’t give Mexico naming rights.

My schedule for the next few months:

Last Sunday’s episode of “Family Guy” just reiterates my love for the show. “The Simpsons” were never so brazen (but it was funny in another way). “Family Guy” gets its humor from the strange, absurd, or uncomfortable things that it shows. Like a 2 minute chicken fight, or the PBJ time song. But it’s clear that “Family Guy” is in tune to internet culture. After Tara Reid’s nip slip on the runway a few months back, the internet was abuzz about her wretched boob job and really big areolas (not in those words). So when Peter is performing Tara Reid’s boob job, drops a pepperoni on her breast, and says that “it’ll work,” you can imagine what thousands of geeks were thinking. Sure, a few people that have seen the Tara Reid photos might have caught on her pepperoni nipples, but it’s really the forum-frequenters and BB, Fark, and SA readers that’d get it.

Brian’s Peanut Butter Jelly Time video.

An update to crazymonk’s link to Common Census is in order since the map has been updated many times since its post due to the number of links that it’s been getting from blogs.

The map has become a lot more accurate. All of New Mexico isn’t covered by Albuqueque. People of Hobbs generally idenitify with Lubbock, TX, which is now a cultural center. Southwest NM is covered by El Paso, TX and northeast NM is covered by Amarillo, TX. Not only do these Texas cities provide the airports for these regions, but these peripheral towns of NM go shopping and chill in these relatively large Texas cities.

More interesting, though, is that the cultural areas of some smaller cities do not cover the actual city itself. People living in or just near Santa Barbara, CA and Portland, ME identify with LA and Boston respectively. It’s only when you get much further out from LA and Boston in the direction of Santa Barbara and Portland into the rural areas, do the cultural areas of Santa Barbara and Portland come into play.