Pete Dudchenko

Pacific Beach is known in San Diego as a surfer beach town and this Saturday was the annual block party. They close down a major street and set up tents and bands and all the bars are open which makes for a pretty good time.

I think the funniest/most unlikely incident of the day was when, after hitting the block party, I returned back to the house (a number of blocks away) only to find it locked. As I scaled the back fence to try the back door, I hear Matt, who had gotten separated a few hours earlier riding by on a bike taxi with a girl just randomly riding around town. Here are some pics I took earlier that day…

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So far, I’ve used Blogger as my application for writting these entries and I must say it works really well. Actaully, I don’t think there’s much I would change about it, but I like to learn new web apps and in doing so I came across Wordpress, which is another blogging tool. The biggest difference is probably that Bogger is hosted somewhere else while Wordpress resides on my own website.

So far I’ve been able to learn not only about managing my own blogging program but in doing so and customizing the way the site looks, I’ve just begun touching on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which in general is a good thing to know about.

If you’re interested in looking at the differences in style and what I’m talking about, you can check out my test area here. I’m thinking of making this my home page and getting ride of a separate blog section all together. I could just incorporate my other sites (mostly pictures anyway) into this style sheet. Let me know what you think.

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Even seen the movie Predator where the alien can disappear and almost become invisible? Check out this site. I have no idea how legit it is but some of the videos are pretty cool.


http://projects.star.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/MEDIA/xv/oc.html

Ok, this site is pretty funny that I wanted to mention it. Its a bunch of students from MIT attempting to solve the question of whether or not time travel exists. Apparently on May 7th, all present beings as well as all time travelers (human or not) are invited to a time travel convention on MIT’s campus.

It raises some interesting questions such as why bother to promote the event before it occurs? If no one shows up, all the promotion in the world won’t do anything. Also, there really only needs to be one convention, not a yearly event. I know for a fact that I will never time travel because I already promised myself when I was 12 that if I could time travel I would come visit myself and bring money. It never happened.

By the way, its BYOB…

http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/

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Got an email recently about some more volunteer opportunities coming up. A couple months ago I blogged about working at a community center as a volunteer to help people with learning computers. So far I’ve only worked with one person a few times but its was a lot of fun and it seemed to help.

Recently, I was asked to help someone with college level math. I hadn’t actually expected to get opportunities outside of computer work but was glad to at least be asked. The only problem is that the last time I did college level math was back in college, and I’m talking about my sophomore year. Once I transferred out of an Engineering major, I had pretty much completed as much math as I would ever need for almost any other major (except for perhaps a Math major but I digress…). So unfortunately I couldn’t be of any help as I now struggle these days with just calculating tips at restaurants. Talk about “use it or lose it.”

Anyway it looks like a few more computer tutoring sessions are coming about including one tomorrow. It should be fun, as I’ll get to teach emailing basics and Instant Messaging. One piece of advice that I give out is that everyone should have at least two active email addresses. One for personal use, to email friends and family, and one for commercial use. The commercial use one is what I use when signing up for services, or newsletters and stuff that I really don’t care if I get or not. Usually when you sign up for something (online or not) you have to give a valid email address so they can send you a password or receipt or something else but the problem is that a lot of the times when you do that, they also send you a bunch of other emails that you don’t want (some let you opt out but then again they may give your info with other companies). Having this second email address allows you to keep the important emails (i.e. friends and family) separate from the spam and other junk mail. Perhaps not an “emailing basic” but still a useful tip.

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Couple of unrelated notes here…

I felt my second earthquake ever last night. It actually woke me up but I wasn’t sure if it was a quake or not. This morning when I turned on the TV I realized that it had in fact happened, and in my area, it registered as a 2.0.

Second, is anyone else a little freaked out by the ad campaign that Burger King is running? They’ve got a guy in a plastic head dressed up like a king that just suddenly appears in bed next to another guy sleeping. When he wakes up, the king offers him a breakfast sandwich and the guy thinks nothing of it. Random strangers dressed in royalty breaking into my place to offer me food just doesn’t work for me. In fact the costume itself would probably keep me up at night if I were still a kid. At least Chucky was no bigger than 3 feet tall. This guy looks to be about full size if not bigger.

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There’s a place just south of Torrey Pines in San Diego that people go for para-gliding and hang-gliding that I checked out this weekend. It was pretty cool to see it up close like that. I think its something I could get into it if I had the chance to try. Looks easy but I know that’s probably not the case.

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