Author: blueZhift

The new Celebrate! Chicago Christian Woman Magazine has just launched and my lovely wife (aka WillowBrow) is one of the cover ladies for the web site! She’s the Chinese woman in the black chongsam holding flowers in her hands. w00t! My babe’s a star!

Okay, maybe I’m overblowing that star stuff a bit, but seriously, this looks like a pretty good magazine for the modern Christian woman, or any woman who believes there is a spiritual dimension to life that must also be nurtured. The magazine market is pretty brutal though, so I hope this one will be around for a while.

When I started working in downtown Chicago my office just happened to be in the same building that serves as the corporate headquarters for Playboy Enterprises. The weird thing about all of this is that for the first few months I didn’t even realize this because I always used the building’s west entrance. It was only when I came in on the south side that I was greeted by a couple of� plaques and inside an enormous Playboy banner that left no doubt. It was a “Doh!” moment to say the least.

I was in that building for about a year, and during that time I may have seen models in the lobby maybe once, and Mr. Hefner never. So when I heard about the Triple Platinum autograph session at the Virgin Megastore featuring Hugh Hefner and 3 blonde bombshells (also promoting a reality show they star in on E!), I bought a copy of the November issue the day before and got in line for the signing yesterday.

There was quite a mix of people there, mostly young men with maybe a third women. The odd thing for me was the fact that I really hadn’t read the magazine regularly for at least 10 years. I was there mainly to meet Mr. Hefner and get his autograph. It was pretty cool, the guy’s in pretty good shape for 79. The models were nice too, but I have to admit that I don’t really go for blondes all that much, even though I play one in FFXI most of the time. All in all it was one of those pop culture events that was well worth the time. Here’s a photo of my bounty which may be worth something on eBay some day.

You’re soaking in it! This post is being written from Ubuntu Linux which I installed on a new hard drive last night. I’d been getting more and more fed up with my Windows XP setup. With my Windows setup I just could never be sure whether it was clean or not and wouldn’t crap out on me without a moment’s notice. So after the realization that most of what I do on my home PC doesn’t require Windows, I decided to give Ubuntu a try. This decision was aided in part by a really good sale on 80GB hard drives at Best Buy. And a few months earlier I had tried the Ubuntu Live CD on this box, so I knew it would work on this hardware. And I liked the aesthetic and overall Ubuntu philosophy of a Linux for human beings. The install was pretty straight forward. The only thing I had to wrestle with a little was the video setup for X, but I’ve done that before and the Ubuntu Wiki was incredibly helpful too.

I’m running the Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger preview right now, and  for the first time in a long time, I feel like I can use my computer with some confidence!

Sunday WillowBrow returned from visiting her family in Hong Kong and the people rejoiced. No really, we did indeed rejoice as I’m sure the kids are much happier now that mommy is back. I can fill in a bit, but am no substitute. My cooking is adequate at best and my empathy is probably best described as algorithmic. They are good algorithms, but algorithms nonetheless! And even with a house full of kids, I was a bit lonely without her.

From what she’s told me, she had a good time reuniting with family and friends, but being back in Hong Kong also brought back some bad memories too along with the usual issues that only one’s parents and family can dredge up. For one thing, my wife is bigger than the average Chinese woman. She’s not fat, but at a little under 5’7" (170.18 cm) she towers over most of the women in Hong Kong. And she has a beautiful golden complexion which is darker than most Chinese people. She really is quite a babe, but her features fall outside of what she tells me is the Chinese standard for beauty (pale skin, tiny body), never mind that she’s been turning heads in Hong Kong since she was a 12 year old schoolgirl. In Hong Kong there is a lot of pressure to comform, perhaps more than in other parts of China. So she feels very very self conscious about her appearance and says that one of the reasons she left Hong Kong was so that she could be her own person without being judged. She’s such a smart and beautiful person, but even with that, it seems that you can never escape the judgement of one’s parents. I wish they could see her the way that I do. Perhaps they do, deep inside, but just don’t express it very well.

Can’t we all just get along? I was reading about the new GTA Trilogy and the article had an ad for the new Quattro Power razor from Schick. Obviously this is just a response to the M3 powered razor from Gillette. This is vacuous marketing at its finest because there is no undisputed evidence that battery powered vibrating razors work any better than their nonvibrating versions. Indeed, it also isn’t clear that the Quattro’s 4 blades are any better than the M3’s 3 blades, which  by the way Gillette spent millions of dollars developing. Ironically, Schick’s parent company, Energizer Holdings Inc., requested and got an injunction against Gillette’s claims that the M3 power razor’s vibrating lifted whiskers up away from the face.

So while the Cold War is over, the battle for razor supremacy continues.