Check this. You can put http://gabbly.com/ in front of any URL and it will pull up a chat box so you can chat with others who are on the same site. For instance, click here to chat with anyone here visiting takoyaki.org. Like anyone every visits… 🙁 (is that too emo) Oh, apparently it only works in Windows.

link via Rice Bowl Journals Forums

Here’s a neat little site called Visited Countries that will make a simple map of the places that you have traveled to. I added some gradients to the map so that it doesn’t look too boring. 🙂

via Kokochi

I was putting some music videos on my iPod last night when I found some old video captures or some Japanese CMs (commercials) I made when we lived there. The one in the picture above was my favorite ad. It’s for “Vitamin Water” and stars Quicktime movie, so you will have to have it installed in order to view it.

Today Mikey, Koa, and I went to the Satsuki Matsuri, which was held at the Zilker Botanical Gardens. There were a few live “shows’, such as a kendo demonstration, traditional dancing, and taiko drumming, but the crowd was too big for us to see much. Actually, the space was too small, and so it seemed too crowded. There were some food vendors there as well, but most were Chinese it seemed, including HongKong market and Momoko. Maiko sushi had some food there also, and it looked the best. Along with their sushi rolls, they had gyu-don, which looked great! I had already eaten, so I didn’t get to try… We did get some ice cream and snacks, but were disappointed that there wasn’t any beer! Although the matsuri wasn’t the best, it was still fun, and hanging out with Mikey and Koa was cool.

My favorite commercial right now….

I was listening to Derek Lowe getting shelled by the Braves batters yesterday and thinking that this is going to be a long season. But then when I saw this photo today at Yahoo! Sports, I realized that his poor pitching performance can be blamed on him wearing pants that are four or five sizes to large.

[AP Photo/Francis Specker]

My friend Ryan sent me a link to the SupersizedMeals.com website to check out the 100×100 burger from In-N-Out. It’s amazing, yet disgusting at the same time. If you think a 100-patty/100 slices-of-cheese burger is terrible, you need to check out all the other huge meals featured on the site, including the gigantic beef shank. It’s pretty gross.

[link via Ryan]

I have been using my dvd burner to make backups of all of our data, but it’s kind of a pain to keep the discs organized, and with the number of digital photos we take every month, the ~4GB is getting limiting. I thought that we could fit a year’s worth of photos on a DVD, but it’s not even close!

Anyways, I bought this wonderful Fantom 250GB USB 2.0 hard drive a couple weeks ago, and it is awesome. Not only can I backup all of our digital photos, but I can backup all of Mariko’s data from her laptop, plus the data from my desktop computer. It took about half an hour to copy all of our stuff, but I didn’t have to deal with swapping DVD’s or anything. Just drag the entire Data directory to the new hard drive, and let it do it’s thing. After that, just unplug the drive, and lock it up in our firesafe box. Simple as that! Plus, I bought it for $99 after rebate. 🙂

Haven’t posted in a while, although a lot has happened! Nothing really special, just normal busy stuff. One of the cool things that has happened is that I won my Fantasy Football Pick’em league! I think I got a pretty good technique for picking the teams. Anyways, you can check my Yahoo! Fantasy Sports page to see my virtual trophy case and past results.

Recently, I got a few electronic gadgets that are really great. The first thing I got (which was a birthday gift) was a Belkin 802.11g router with print server.