No Pants Poll

January 10th was the 8th annual No Pants Subway Ride. This year, over 1000 New Yorkers got on the subway, took off their pant and went for a ride.

The event was created by Improv Everywhere and has spread to other states and even other countries.

Unfortunately, the event wasn't held at a Jewish friendly time like, for example, Sunday and I was not able to participate. What I want to know is if the event would be at a Jewish friendly time, would you join? Comment and vote on the left.

The results are in:

WOULD YOU PARTICIPATE IN THE ANNUAL NO PANTS SUBWAY RIDE IF IT WOULD BE ON SUNDAY?

YES!	7 (25%)
NO!	14 (51%)
Only if my friends come too.	5 (18%)
Only if none of my friends see me do it.	1 (3%)

Votes so far: 27 

12, pretty good. Now who's brave enough to say they said yes? ;-)

Star Pirates

For the last couple of months I've been playing an awesome game. It's an MMO but is not even flash, plain html, yet very fun and highly addictive. The game is Star Pirates. It somewhat reminds me of the good old BBS game TradeWars 2002. Yes, I'm that old.

You can play solo or join a fleet. You can play for free or pay or get someone in the game to pay for you. Paying members get certain perks that help you in the game but are not necessary and the price is only $4.50/month. You start out with a small weak ship and a basic weapon. As you earn more money in the game and find items you can use or sell for profit, you upgrade your ship and your equipment. With luck and strategy you can easily end up more powerful than the paying players.

Part of what makes this game fun is the one more turn al a civilization. One more kill to get you to next level, one more research to get your stats high enough to switch to a better paying job. A great evil is that you can only search for loot once an hour and until your level is high enough, this is your only way for finding items and money. This makes you go back to the game every hour in search for that elusive rare find that will spell the difference between winning and defeat. This game is also constantly in development. Gameplay tweaks, new items, holiday specific items and more.

Join the game and unlike me, you wont even have to start at the bottom. If you see that you like the game, message me and I'll provide you with decent, not great, those I need for myself, set of equipment and maybe even some money for a new ship.

Macys Gift Cards

Saturday night we were going to a surprise birthday party.  I was planning on getting a Macys gift card.  I decided to send an email card instead of relying on them to send a mail card on time.  Last time, the card came late.

To make sure the email doesn't get lost, I sent it an hour before the party and immediately got a confirmation that's gonna be sent on, get this, Sunday!  On Sunday, 12PM, I got a phone call which went to voicemail.  10 minutes later I got an email that the order was canceled.  WTF?!!!

I called Macys and was given some bs that since there's a lot of fraud with gift cards, their policy is to confirm all orders and if not confirmed, to immediately cancel.  They were very sorry for all the bs but it's their policy so deal with it.  There was no automated system or separate phone number or even a separate division to deal with this.

The convenience of getting an email gift card from Macys turned out to be very inconvenient.  Next time, I'm using Amazon.  I've had 0 problems ordering Amazon gift cards and they were sent immediately and arrived on time.

Dafina: Revision n+1

Revision n

Layer 1 - Chopped onion and 3 cloves of garlic.

Layer 2 - Lamb breast or lamb stew and a bag of roasted and shelled chestnuts.

Layer 3 - Salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, hot red paprika, cinnamon, cumin, curry powder, at least 1 tbsp of honey.

Layer 4 - Bulgur and rice and/or barley.

Layer 5 - Yams, eggs and either hotdogs, salami or veal tongue.

With water add either a can of beer or a cup of coke.

Monkey see, monkey do - MeMe

Since everyone's doing it and now that all of you jumped off a cliff and there's a nice pile of bodies to break my fall, banzai!

Book Meme:
The Rules: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 56. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal/blog along with these instructions. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. Tag five other people to do the same.

"However, it can also offer some performance improvement in cases when you know a SELECT statement will return only a single record (for example, if you include a WHERE clause specifying a value from a unique column). In this case, you can use CommandBehavior.SingleRow to inform the provider."

This is from O'Reilly ADO.NET in a Nutshell, a book I haven't looked at in at least 5 years. The thing is, my programming books, haven't really used any of them since I can just "google it", are in the printer stand which is closer to me than my bookshelf.

Seven Facts About Me:
The Rules:
1. Link to your blogger and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people (if possible) at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs.

1. I can read a 500 page book in Russian but my brain shuts down when I try read half a page of news.
2. I have several terabytes of anime spread across DVDs, 3 computers and 2 external drives. After we finish watching a series, I can't bring myself to erase it.
3. I almost always have 5 2lb sticks of salami hanging from the ceiling in my kitchen.
4. Even though I liked the subject, due to my bad memory, I managed to fail every Biology test, quiz, midterm, final and regent.
5. I wear a kimono for suedat shlishi and also if I don't go to shul because I'm sick or my wife is sick. I wear it even if guests are coming.
6. Like a good muslim, I had my bris at 13. This may or may not have contributed to my name on my cell message being Mussa ibn Ibrahim. ;-)
7. I hate gefirte fish. I'll eat it when there's nothing else. My neighbor mixes it with vegies and sauce. I bake A & B salmon gefirte fish in tomato sauce for Yom Tov. Other than those situations, never, no way, no how.

I'm not gonna tag anyone because I'm lazy and because everyone's doing this anyway.

Sholom Zohor

Tomorrow, in my shul, 1749 Ocean Avenue, between L and M.

It's a boy!

Born December 23rd at 3:59PM.  Weight, 7lb 15oz.  Ironically, Shlomik was also 5 days late and was 6lb 15oz.