Melissa and I are heading off to Tahoe to get at least one full day of snowboarding. The awesome part is that we will be staying at the Kivelstadt cabin, located just one mile from the Alpine Meadows parking lot. With all the snow that’s been falling, it should make for a great snowboarding trip.

I just recently upgraded to the Motorola RAZR V3 phone and wanted to see some cool color apps on it when I stumbled on Google Local for Mobile. Google Local is the official name for Google Maps. I just tried it and it is simply awesome. I know this is old news for many, but if you have a color phone and have not tried this application, you are missing out. Just type in “google.com/glm” into your phone’s browser to download the application. Check it out.

The San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) held the opening press conference for the 49th Annual San Francisco Film Festival yesterday morning at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in Union Square. About 300 press corps members, part of the local and international press corps attended the event. Due to the film festival’s Hong Kong entries, there was even a news crew from World Channel International, the local Chinese language station.

Graham Leggat, the SFFS’s new executive director, spoke articulately with a slight Irish accent. Although he has been on the job for only the last five months, he exhibited very intimate knowledge about the festival and its entries. Unlike Roxanne Messina Captor, who was not very articulate, often would fumble film titles, and didn’t seem to be as as intimate with the festival’s programming. The primary message to his speech was simple: putting together a film festival is a social endeavor.

Leggat stated that the film festival has gone out of their way to create a citizen press corps by recruiting Bay Area bloggers, like myself, to attend the film festival as press. This is my second year covering the festival, even though I have been writing about the festival in the form of film reviews for the last four years. So far my experience with the festival this year yields a sense that the festival is a lot more organized, surely due in part to Leggat’s new leadership.

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In this episode, teams made their way from Munich, Germany to Palermo, Italy on the island of Sicily. They needed to go to the famous Palermo Opera House, of Godfather III fame, to find their next clue. At the start of the leg one thing was clear to me: I really don’t like the Hippies, BJ & Tyler. Their antics and attempts to be funny are killing me. Again, I repeat, they must die.

Teams arrived in Palermo and went to the Detour and then the Roadblock, where a Yield was available. The Old Farts were the story of this race. Why is it that old people on the race always miss the clue boxes? The clue boxes are bright yellow and red you blind geezers!

The Laundry task was easy for team members that pulled clothing off the line as they went along. Then there were the Nerds, who were initially pinning the clothes back onto the line after they inspected them. Are they retarded? It was only after other teams arrived that they realized they could just simply pull the articles of clothing off the line.

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An Illinois man was fined $250 and placed under court supervision for one year for sitting in his car on the street with a laptop and piggybacking off his neighbor’s WiFi connection. I don’t agree with this guy being fined and humiliated like this.

This case is akin to having a neighbor with a really strong sprinkler system (wireless router). If I realize that the sprinkler system sprays beyond his yard (private domain) onto the street (the public domain), I should be able to park my car there and get a free wash. I am technically not stealing the water, just using it. Sure, water isn’t free (neither are high-speed Internet connections), but the neighbor sprayed his water into the public domain and that makes it public.

Of course, if this guy was in his car attempting to gain access to his neighbor’s computer instead of simply getting access to the Internet, then he should get a much more severe penalty. But my understanding is that this was a case of frivolous web-surfing on someone else’s connection. All San Francisco residents have done that once or twice. In any case, I am curious to see how this plays out going forward. Stay tuned.

After months of rumors, Arrested Development will not be resurrected on Showtime.

Ninjas seem to be everywhere these days. A group of kids from the LBC and Costa Mesa called the EMC Monkeys are training to be ninjas together and putting together videos of their exploits. Check out this video of one of their lead members, Xin Sarith Azuma Phan Wuku, it’s awesome! If these guys decide to go full ninja style and kill people we’re all doomed. Their website says that they are “for hire” so it’s only a matter of time. May God help us all.

From Dog the Bounty Hunter to Tom Hanks in the Da Vinci Code, the infamous mullet hairstyle is making a comeback into our pop culture. Sad.

Apparently, when Bill Gates gets nervous, he rocks back and forth like an autistic savant. This video clip claims to be actual footage of Bill Gates being questioned by U.S. anti-trust lawyers in 1998. Needless to say, he doesn’t seem to be enjoying the entire process. Even funnier is that at the end of the clip there is an ad to obtain a set of DVDs of the entire deposition. Who the hell would want eight hours of the richest man in the world rocking back and forth like a child? Now that I think about it, I bet Larry Ellison has multiple copies of this DVD collection.

Over 500,000 people marched in downtown Los Angeles today to protest a proposed federal crackdown on illegal immigration. The demonstrators oppose legislation passed by the U.S. House that would make it a felony to be in the U.S. illegally. By many accounts, this is the largest protest peaceful protest in the city’s history. This doesn’t count the Watts Riots or the Rodney King Riots. Those may have been larger overall, but those “protests” were anything but peaceful.

In Denver, Colorado, more than 50,000 people protested downtown Saturday, according to police who had expected only a few thousand. Phoenix was similarly surprised Friday when an estimated 20,000 people gathered for one of the biggest demonstrations in city history, and more than 10,000 marched in Milwaukee on Thursday. Thankfully none of the protests held all over the United States on this issue errupted in violence, although few sporadic arrests were made, but that’s to be expected.

Some scientists say that global warming acceleration may raise sea levels by 20 feet by the year 2100. This map shows how Downtown San Francisco may be affected should the water rise 20 feet. As you can see, our condo (the red square) would be clearly underwater should this come to pass. We will be sure to divest this condo to ensure that it doesn’t become part of the Gonzalez estate, unless we also bequeath a boat to go with it. I would like to think that our heirs would have homes on Russian Hill or Nob Hill by then and they wouldn’t be swimming. But, it is clear that we really need to take what is happening to our environment seriously. Otherwise, future generations will have a lot less of the world to enjoy if all coastal cities are encroached upon by rising water.

Dick Cheney’s travel requirements were made public today on the Smoking Gun. Among the things he must have are all the lights turned on, the room at 68 degrees, decaffeinated coffee, four to six bottles of water, and four cans of caffeine-free Diet Sprite. Additionally, the room’s televisions have to be preset to — wait for it, wait for it — Fox News. No mention was made of beef jerky, a shotgun, buckshot, a defibrillator, and a couple of floor mirrors to practice scowling and looking like a Dick. Apparently, he brings all that other shit himself.

The official response from Microsoft regarding the recent Xbox 360 hack:

The core security system has not been broken. However, it is reported that the authentication protocol between the optical disc drive and the console may be attacked, which if accurate could allow people to play illegally copied games. Our security team is aware of this and we are investigating potential solutions to this issue. The Xbox 360 platform was designed to be updated, and we are prepared to respond appropriately should any unauthorized activity be identified.

Everyone should keep in mind that Microsoft invests a great deal of time and effort to ensure that Xbox gamers enjoy the most powerful and exhilarating game experience available today. Genuine and unmodified Microsoft Xbox products provide gamers with the reliability, security, support and dynamic gaming experience that they expect. Microsoft works with a large group of legitimate business partners to sell and service genuine Microsoft Xbox products. Microsoft does not authorize or support any products or companies that modify or change the Xbox console in any way.

Reading between the lines you can tell that they’re pissed. XBL auto-updates will surely go out to thwart this. It reminds me of the DirecTV programmers vs. hackers battle that raged for years until alas the DirecTV folks beat the pirates, or the lazy ones anyway. Stay tuned.

No, not that Bush. I don’t know how I missed this, but this is a video of Pierce Bush, George W. Bush’s 19-year-old nephew, defending his uncle’s position on the Dubai ports deal. He’s admittedly high on caffeine when he’s doing this interview and can barely speak. Why is he speaking up on this issue? I don’t even think he knows. At this rate, he’s probably going to be the Republican frontrunner for the 2024 presidential election.

I remember going to this site years ago and there were about half the number of games than there are on it now. Some of the games on the site are really good, and addicting. A good diversion when you have the time. Enjoy.

Spam subject line writers sometimes translate Chinese menus. Via Memepool.

The blogrolling.com website’s slow response time, down time, and overall malaise was completely killing my home page load times. Last night, I finally had it with the poor perfomance and decided to start using blo.gs to update and track my blogroll. Adios blogrolling.com, you won’t be missed.

A taste test performed yesterday showed that San Franciscans can’t taste the difference between tap water, which comes to San Francisco from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, and commercial bottled water: Aquafina and Dasani. On a funny side note, the guy running the taste tests, the Deputy Director of the SF Water Department, is named David Assmann. How this guy survived elementary school with this name is beyond me.

In this episode, teams continued the leg from the mat and headed from Moscow, Russia to Stuttgart, Germany. Surprisingly, the Old Farts are still well in the race. The teams that chose to wash the trolleys were definitely trailing near the end of the pack. And as I predicted, the Nerds were pulling up the rear.

The best news for this episode, the teams didn’t all bunch up at the airport. Three teams: the Jocks, the Nutty Dentist, and the Hippies, made it out of Moscow the same night as they touched the mat. All of the other teams had to wait until the following morning to catch flights out of Moscow, putting them 10-12 hours behind the lead teams.

The test drive at the Mercedes-Benz factory looked sweet! Teams were driven by a professional driver on a closed course that included the “wall of death,” an amazing 80-degree banked turn. The speed at which the car took the turn looked incredible. Surely to experience the gravity of that turn in a production car was a once in a lifetime experience.

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