I always knew South Korea was forward thinking.  Now they’ve build an ocean side observatory from recycled shipping containers.

Really?

I’ve always thought that it was pointless to get a penthouse apartment in any major Chinese city because you’d be staring at smog the whole time.  This series of photos exemplify the pollution that’s happening in China due to the rapid industrialization and lack of standards/control.

What’s striking about this photo is that the kids aren’t wearing gloves, their hands are just that dirty, all the time.

There are many actions you can take on your friends’ status updates on Facebook.

The first action is inaction.  If you feel indifferent, or lazy, or if the “friend” is just an “acquaintance”, you can do nothing.  You might feel like a voyeur (or stalker-lite) for peeking into someone’s life without being an active part of it, but that’s what social networks are all about (e-stalking).  This is also about as passive as you can get on facebook.

If you feel strongly for or against the status, or if you follow this flowchart, you may choose to post a comment.  This is about as aggressive as you can get in a virtual environment short of throwing punches in super poke.

If you feel less strong FOR the status, but would still want to alert the poster so that they know that you know that they’re up to something, then you can “like” their status.  This is a passive-aggressive “like”.

If you feel weakly AGAINST the status, however, all you can do is “hide” their status (but hide actually has a different semantic meaning both in the term itself, and the actions that facebook takes once you hide something).  The original poster will never know that you hid their status, and any passive-aggresiveness that only one person is aware of is no aggressiveness at all.

Hence the asymmetry.

Cement factory gets abandoned in Barcelona.

Architect buys cement factory.

Beauty ensues.

I’ve blogged about canned bacon before, now here’s another very similar, same shelf-live (10 years!!), machine gun on the can instead of camo version (via gizmodo).

Congrats to Natalie and August launching lenguajero.com.

Do you want to learn Spanish (or English if you’re a Spanish speaker - although I doubt you’d be here if you were a non-English speaking Spanish speaker), then see how you can start learning English or Spanish today.

on the interwebs:

fmylife - because other people’s misfortunes bring me happiness

mylifeisaverage - the opposite of fmylife

latfh - because hipsters are funny … looking

awkwardfamilyphotos - we all have them hiding in the drawers

tweetingtoohard -because life just isn’t hard enough

failblog - always a favourite

thisiswhyyourefat - because it is

passiveaggressivenotes - because I’m a carnivore, and I don’t need some wimpy support group

Over the past month, I’ve been doing a lot of biking (mainly on the weekends, since apparently long bike rides take a lot of time).  Here’s what I can remember.

May-02

(Road) S. Lake Washington -> Cedar River Trail -> Tiger Mountain -> Leschi - 64 miles.

May-09

(Road) Same as above - 64 miles

May-10

(Mtn) Tapeworm - 4 miles

May-16

(Road) Whidbey Island - 72 miles

May-23

(Mtn) Tiger Mountain - 12 miles

May-25

(Mtn) Rat Pac - 12 miles

May-30

(Road) Bainbridge Island - 44 miles

May-31

(Mtn) Tokul East - 8-10 mile range

Jun-06

(Mtn) Paradise Valley - 11-13 mile range

Jun-07

(Road) TWBC Peninsula Metric Century - 69 miles

I’m taking a break this weekend as I head home to Canada, but am looking for other trail suggestions for the coming weekends.