Yahoo! News - Michigan's 'Hold' Music Gets Much Hipper
Hip? Last time I knew, music from the 50's and 60's was not 'hip.' In fact, I think I'd rather hear some crappy elevator music that I don't recognize than an uber-shitty version of a good beatles song or an uber-shitty version of a bad freaking Beach Boys song.
Then again, now that I've memorized the Capital One hold music-and it is truly awful, this I guarantee you-maybe it's time for a change.
When you come down to it, I guess any music that is super-popular is going to suck. It's just the law of humanity. Mainstream musical taste is only as good as the lowest common denominator.
Case in point? Britney Spears. Need I say more?
I am a geek, through and through. I bought a badass laptop from my friend Dan, but as you may have seen in my Geeks section, it didn't go so well when I managed to blow up the partition the second day I had it. Huzzah for exploration!
So I've been a little busy over the past week trying to fix it, I apologize. As for today, I am lazy and there doesn't seem to be much worth ranting about or mentioning. At work, I spent an hour fixing my Palm Pilot, and I can confirm (as if you care) that it is working after minor screen surgery and a lot of annoying manipulation. See, I really am a geek. But hey, it pays to be a geek when you can fix your own stuff instead of shelling out "mad bank" for a new palm pilot/computer/whatever. Ask a mac owner what he did when his mac broke. First he'll say some garbage about "it never breaks" which is inherently untrue. Then he'll tell you he had to go to some charges-your-firstborn mac store to get it fixed. Then ask a PC geek what he did when his PC broke. He fixed it on his own!
Ugh. This entry is lame.
Maybe I'll get around to ranting about the most recent carb craze. But maybe not today, because I'm in "extreme laziness" mode.
Remember the choice article I was talking about a few days ago? Well Jon sent me a link to the real thing. Read up. Which are you?
AlterNet: GONSALVES: 'The Tyranny of Choice'?
Thanks to Boing Boing once again.
I'm pretty sure I'm a maximizer. Do you agonize over choices or do you go with "good enough?" An interesting read, even if the original article is a stupid pay article.
R505GCP and booting from firewire - www.ezboard.com
I bought the PCG-R505GCP VAIO subnotebook from my friend Dan for a very good price. Dan's would make a pretty bad used car salesman, because he actually gives good deals.
I was so excited to have this new notebook. It's very light, battery life is fantastic, and it's speedy. Everything I wanted, and I didn't want to pay for the overpriced dock that Sony sells with the thing to get CD/Floppy access.
Every time you get a used computer, it's not a bad idea to reinstall the Operating System. This one was in fine condition, but there were a few missing admin tools that I wanted back. So I decided to play with Partitions and Recovery methods and in short, blew up the computer. All partitions ended up deleted and the machine was a $600 paperweight.
Hopefully this mini-article (I call it a "How To Not" as opposed to a "How To") will show up in some search engines so others out there won't go through the agony I did with this thing. My first piece of advice is DO NOT think you can boot from Firewire. The ONLY firewire device you can actually boot from is the dock CDrom (which actually is a firewire device) or some other very proprietary Sony devices. I attempted using a Sony external DVD burner, to no avail, along with three other external Firewire devices.
Don't bother trying to boot from Firewire, it is impossible, even though the BIOS says 'boot from i.LINK.' A sham, I tell you! The best you can do without the dock is to get your hands on a USB floppy device and load DOS and then the Firewire drivers. Sounds fun, no?
Even better: you can only boot from certain Sony USB drives. They cost $80. You have to get the VAIO specific bootable floppy drive. Good luck finding that even on ebay for less than $60.
A nice little workaround is some older TEAC USB floppy drives are bootable. I have one sitting in front of me, model number FD-05PU. Unfortunately, it's hard to find these, since the one I have at least is an iMac version (go figure a Mac product will work with a Sony, the most stubborn product on the planet).
Unfortunately nothing promises to work with this thing. My suggestion is to go to your local computer geek retailer, make sure they won't charge or deny you if you try to return something, and buy a USB floppy drive. If it works, huzzah, that's how you're going to have to reinstall. If not, return that shit and grumble.
Oh, and another thing. Attempting to network boot using Microsoft Windows RIS is also an exercise in futility. The Network Card in the VAIO is proprietary and you need special drivers, and RIS can't make a valid image out of the Sony Windows XP cd. Go figure.
Chalk it up to a run-in with the company that makes some of the world's coolest products but has the world's worst support.
I really don't know how humans have evolved into such whiners. So now a website called "I hate work" is accused of promoting absenteeism.
Personally, I think it's no one's damn business what I do with my Personal days or Sick days. If I take them I take them, it's not my employer's place to judge why I've taken them. We get these days for a reason.
Because work sucks.
Big surprise, we need to get out of work for a reason. Employers won't have to whine about losing workers if they work on making working conditions not suck. It's as simple as that.
I won't hold my breath on that one.
WirelessCabin, Advanced Communications for Aircraft Passengers
The last places on Earth that you can go to get quiet from cell phone gabbers are, as far as I can tell, underwater, Ashfield, and in planes.
It was inevitable, of course, that they would get people gabbing on planes. I swear to God, if I have to hear some stupid college girl yacking through the whole flight about inane shit, I will go apeshit.
This is the funniest thing I've seen all day. It takes a little while to read, but man is it funny.
My dad should get a particularly loud chuckle from this one.
PS, there's a new rant today.
Back in high school, I took a trip with Raven Adventures and some high school classmates to Costa Rica. Toward the end of our trip, we trekked 28 miles from the Monte Verde Cloud Forest Preserve down to the volcano town of La Fortuna. It was my first (and thus far only) experience with what was affectionately dubbed "Jungle Miles."
You see, "as the crow flies," the trip from Monte Verde to La Fortuna was 28 miles. As the poor high schooler with a breakfast of one slice of watermelon in his belly and a plastic garbage back for a rainjacket trudges, it's more like 48,347.6 miles. What happens is that the rugged terrain causes a great deal of lateral and vertical travel that you can't account for before getting to it. In other words, you do a hell of a lot more walking than you might if you were on a straight road in Kansas.
I hadn't given much thought to Jungle Miles since collapsing into bed that night in La Fortuna. Until yesterday.
Yesterday I discovered Boston Street Miles, a distant but powerful cousin of Jungle Miles. Feel free to make all of the connections between "concrete jungle" and the like. Lately I have been speeding up my daily commute by rollerblading to and from the T in the morning and the evening. Well yesterday was so ungodly beautiful that I figured I would blade the 6 miles home. That is 6 Mapquest miles aka 6 "as the crow flies" miles. In Boston Street miles, it's like a million and one.
Boston streets are notoriously shitty. I remember when I was growing up in Western MA, everyone complained about how Boston sucked up all of the state's resources and surely due to the poor road conditions in Western MA there must be streets of gold in Boston. Fast forward to now, when I live in the Boston area. It is true, that road funds everywhere across the state have been sucked into Boston, like a giant money-sucking vaccum not unlike a gold-digging significant other. Unfortunately, the nexus of aforementioned money-sucking vaccum is the Big Dig, not Boston itself. The roads here suck. Every time I drive out to Western MA I'm astounded at how good the roads are. Nothing compares to driving down Beacon Street in Somerville and having your car bottom out in the Pothole of Doom (tm). This is a phenomenon I expect in a washed-out dirt road in backwoods Hawley in the middle of winter, not "metro" Boston.
What you don't realize while in the comfort of your car and artfully dodging multiple Potholes of Doom (tm) is that there is a whole other level of Boston street suckiness. This is where me and my rollerblades and Boston Street Miles come in. What seems like a perfectly "smooth" road in a car is experienced in a completely different way on a pair of rollerblades. When your feet are essentially connected to the road, you realize just how rough the road is. Your teeth chatter (not from cold) and your entire body is numb from vibration. You dodge potholes and patches and cracks even more vigorously than in a car, all the while hoping you don't get plowed over by some maniac asshole Boston driver. So you go over to the sidewalk, only to discover that every slab is of a different height and texture, and there are more cracks than the world record for a group moon. So you go back to the street ... and so on. You can see how quickly 6 miles might add up to more, with all of this lateral motion.
Now I think I know why people always stare at me when I'm blading in Boston. So few people do it. This isn't California, where the streets are smooth and everyone uses some form of personal transportation involving wheels and muscle-building. No one blades in Boston because it's near-suicidal. If you don't die from the Frogger-esque dodging between cars and pedestrians then you will almost certainly take a huge digger (inevitably in front of a crowd of onlookers) and end up with a nasty scrape on your ass. Yes, this is a personal experience, though thankfully not yesterday.
So next time you're driving on a road other than a backwoods Hawley dirt road in the middle of winter and you give thought to complaining of its quality, make sure to give a thought to my ass schlepping across Boston and racking up more miles than a Frequent Flyer en route to China.
All thanks to Boston Street Miles.
'Lost in Translation' doesn't translate well in Japan | csmonitor.com
I was kind of wondering when this would happen. I was surprised it didn't happen sooner, but I didn't know that "LiT" wasn't out in Japan until this past weekend. For good reason.
While pretty accurate in some arenas, I did notice while watching the form that there were some dramatic overstatements of Japanese culture. I can't imagine that there will be a lot of Japanese laughing along at some of the blatant cracks made at Japanese people and culture.
I remember the one thing that really stuck in my mind when I watched the movie was the shower. It was too short for Bill Murray. Showers there may be short (I didn't have much experience with many showers there), but adjustable, an amenity that I would assume would be present at an upscale hotel like the Park Hyatt (where Murray's character stayed).
I, of course, didn't know this when I was in Japan. Like Murray's character (if only I knew his name ...), I came across a short shower ... a very short shower. Like knee-height. You have to understand, I was in a very different country and a very different culture. My understanding of how the bathroom-with a separate toilet (heated seat) area and laundry area-operated was quite crippled. The showering area consisted of a huge tiled room with a bathtub and the shower head (remember, at knee height). Naturally, I had no idea how to deal with the bath, so I stuck to the knee-high shower.
The thought that went through my head as I huddled in the cold-ass room (they leave the windows open during the night even in the winter) beneath the knee-high shower was "gee, the Japanese sure are weird." I had heard (erroneously) that most bathing was done in the bathtub. Of course I thought the low-ass shower was only for washing one's feet or something. Let me tell you, when you're crunched up in a ball trying to get warm water on you and you lose your balance and fall against the cold tile wall with your naked bum ... well, it's not the most pleasant bathing experience.
Two days later, I learned to adjust the shower. It was a good thing.
Gout Risk Increased with Drinking
In case you didn't know (which I didn't), Gout (explained here) is some sort of arthritis. There was a debate here at work as to whether it was a Goiter (Evan's initial thought) or Gangrene (my initial thought) but obviously we were both wrong.
In any case, unless you want your joints hurting like hell in your old-ass future, quit drinkin!
I don't know if anyone saw this unfortunate article anywhere, but it just floored me. Didn't Jesse Ventura get enough of driving Minnesotan politics to a new low? Doesn't George Bush make a mockery of the presidency enough as it is?
Most importantly, why didn't anyone tell me my ass was so big?
Er ... I mean why didn't anyone tell me the man was a visiting professor at Harvard?
Yeah, respect level for Harvard just dropped about 50% right there. Way to make sure everyone knows you have "top grade students." This only proves that all you need to get into "Big Red" is either insane smarts (like my friends) or piles of money (like most Harvard students).
I had forgotten to include the three Ireland panorama shots we took when I posted the pictures before. So here they are. They're rather large (after all, they're panoramas) but truly inspiring. If you don't like the weird border (that's what happens when a panorama gets stitched correctly), then uh ... tough. But look at how spectacular the stitching is! You can barely see any seams between pictures except on the Dingle thumbnail. This was all done automatically.
Click on the thumbnails below for a fullsize view of each picture.
I've been waiting for a day like this! Now I can wantonly administer high-fives without fear of reprisal or persecution!
Sweet Jesus!
American Airlines In Privacy Flap
Good morning, this is flight AA658 with nonstop service to YourPrivacyRaped City. Will passengers Abjheet, Akbar, Malinowski, Ali and anyone else who has a last name that doesn't sound White Bread American please approach the ticketing counter to be entered into the "database" and have your information spread over God knows how many other "databases?"
Thank you for your cooperation, and thank you for flying American Airlines. And JetBlue. And Northwest.
It has come to my attention (yet again) that Microsoft Internet Explorer is still a shitty standards-noncompliant browser. You see, I took the time to come up with a nice little border-color-change for any image that links to something else, but of course Internet Explorer doesn't see that. Every standards-compliant browser out there does fine with it (Safari, Mozilla, FireFox, Opera), go figure that Internet Explorer can't. This is something that I probably should try to fix for IE, since so many people use it and need to know that an image is clickable (my Guinness ads were testament to the fact that people didn't figure out you were supposed to click on the pictures).
But God, can't you try for once to comply to industry-wide standards, Microsoft?
It has become accepted fact that I have a knack for pointing out social trends that will sooner than later become the mainstream. Witness metrosexuality (yes I so had my finger on the pulse of that one before it got out of hand and South Park made fun of it) and the pre-wrinkled shirt thing. In fact just monday I pointed out to Kristin and Nicole the prevalence of pre-wrinkled shirts.
Hearken to me, unbelievers, for the time of reckoning is nigh. I have predicted the next fashion trend, suffice to say it won't be long now before it comes to pass. And what, you may ask, is aforementioned next trend? I'll tell you.
Dorxuality. Yes, that word is definitely plagiarized from Ryan's vocabulary, but rightfully so. Geeks will be the next gay. And I don't mean Gay in a bad way. I mean the trendy fashionable gay that permeates today's society.
The trend has already started to seep into society bit-by-bit. Note the thick-rimmed black plastic glasses you see some guys wearing. It's no longer a style relegated to guys who think they are being "mod" or "indie" or whatever. Note also my undeniably geeky hairdo I've been rockin lately. I have gotten more hair compliments with this geeky hairdo than ever before, seriously. In light of this new trend to geekiness, I have worked out the next phase of the geek movement, something that will be snapped up by the masses who don't even know what it means.
I'm absolutely sure someone else must have come up with this idea, but I'm the one with the cool illustration:
Some of you may not even know what this is a spoof of. Well, have you ever heard of that uber-trendy brand "French Connection UK?" Well their new (insanely popular) marketing shtick is the acronym "FCUK." You can't walk down trend-central Newbury Street without seeing a shirt that says "FCUK Him" or "FCUK it" or "Hot as FCUK." Cute huh? Vomit.
If you're a hardcore geek you probably instantly recognized that "fsck" is the unix-based hard disk checker-upper. If you're not, well, I just told you what it means. Being that my site is light-years away from even remotely sizeable readership, I can get away with spoofs like this. Thank God for that.
Ask yourself what you can do with all of those really stupid pictures of yourself that you don't want anybody seeing.
Answer it the way Josh Wrisley put it: "Justin, this would make a great Guinness advertisement!"
Without further ado, I present to you my take on what you can do with all of those stupid pictures. Hell maybe Harp Brewing Company will pick me up as their next big thing! Just go over, take a look at the first picture in each ad (there are two ads), and make sure to click on the picture itself for the conclusion to the ad.
HA. Enjoy!
Today I managed to drop my Palm Pilot from about a foot off the ground onto carpeted floor ... the force of which shattered the screen. Quality worksmanship, right there.
It's not so much the loss of the material possession that I lament, as I could easily buy something of the same quality for about 30 bucks or less. More likely, it's the loss of the ability to remember shit. It was my little datebook, and now I have to actually remember everything! Gasp!
I see it as a dilemma that will only become more and more prevalent in our evolving society. By the time two years has passed from now, the internet will only be as far as one is from a cell phone, and you'll see almost everyone with one. Just look at Japan, where everyone from 70 year old ladies to 10 year old kids has a "handy phone." With the prevalence of such handy little devices, we are slowly relinquishing control of our own lives and even our brains to little computers. After all, when was the last time you did a math calculation (short of very simple algebra) by hand rather than a calculator? When was the last time you actually knew a friend's phone number? These days I know only a handful of numbers or addresses simply because all of that "trivial" information is stored in my phone and my (now very dead) palm pilot.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen to us if one of those electromagnetic bombs were to go off on our vacinity, frying anything computerized. Seeing as everything, from cars to refrigerators, has become computer-controlled, into what age would we be thrust? It's an interesting thing to think about.
Now it's time to copy down my calendar onto ... paper. The poor man's computer!
Kanji Tattoos are all the rage now, with people thinking they have stuff like "courage" or "strength" or "good in bed" written on their arm/ass/penis/boob/whatever. I have always been sure that the Japanese and Chinese were looking at these and secretly sniggering, just like we snigger when we take a look at Engrish.com. Now they get their revenge.
I can't tell you how annoyed I get when someone says "oh you know Japanese?" (which in itself is a joke) and then they continue with "Can you tell me how to write '(fill in the blank with some fruity word)?'"
I inevitably reply "I can't read or write Japanese." And the conversation is done, but I leave it feeling violated at having been asked to come up with something that stupid that might sit on someone's arm for life.
But this article is where it's at. Finally, we see that there are thousands of fools out there with gibberish, maybe even some Chinese guy's sweet, sweet revenge engraved in their skin.
You'll have to sign in, but just use the username and password of anonymous. This is gold.
So you may have (but probably not) been wondering where the hell I was over the past few days that I neglected to update you on your French lesson. The short (and only) answer is that I was in Irvine, California to visit UC Irvine's Urban Planning Department. It was a good trip. I have no idea why someone would ever even think about moving back to cold, depressing, cranky Boston after being out there. Regardless, I have a funny, if not short, story.
My flight first routed me to Houston, where I hung out in the George Bush airport. Yes, they actually named an airport after Bungling Daddy Bush. Thank God it wasn't GW, at any rate. I particularly enjoyed the statue of George senior with a windswept suit and tie, with his coat thrown over his shoulder. What a pose! How heroic! Moronic. Texans truly are weird.
After Houston, I took a flight to LAX, upon which I was informed by native Los Angeleans that the only way to get from LAX to Irvine at 11:30 at night was a cab and for sure I would pay out the bum. Not a pleasant thought.
Upon my arrival, I realized that my hastily-formed plan of going to an information desk would be an exercise in futility, simply because it was indeed 11:30PM and nothing is open, even at the airport, at that time. So I milled around the baggage area trying to figure out what to do, and most importantly trying to figure out how the hell I'd get my hotel's phone number.
But then the big man approached.
He was huge, shaved bald, scary, and in a pimpin suit. He looked at me and nodded. The three things he said to me were:
"My name's Roy. I got a towncar. Where you goin?"
I, of course, was speechless. I didn't want to pay some random guy with a towncar to drive me to Irvine, an hour away. But what the hell, it was 11:30 and I wanted to get to the stupid hotel. I told him Irvine, he told me 85 bucks.
Ah what the hell.
So big Roy grabs my bags, we walk like 14 miles to the parking lot, to his towncar, and got our asses moving.
Now, I know you're thinking "85 bucks?! Ripoff!" Now you try making a rational decision after a day of flight, 3 time zones, no food, and it's 70 degrees and you're wearing a Boston-geared jacket and hat. Right.
It got me to thinking. This is a legitimate business here. Not really legit as in legally sanctioned or following any sort of structure, but legit in that it makes money. Wait around at the pickup area of an airport, and there are surely hundreds of people a day looking for a way to get somewhere. Get them before they get to a cab, woo them with your towncar, and you are set. Most of them are in a state of semi-consciousness like I was (I swear it's the air they use in those planes), so you won't get much of a fight. It's like shooting fish in a barrel!
Though this is an idea that has occurred to many others, I file it away with my other business ideas like the clear front refrigerator (with LCD darkening), the tapeworm, and other less-than-legally-responsible ideas. Someday, when the world has drifted into anarchy, I will implement them. Mwa ha ha.
...
As a hopeful entrant into the ever-expanding field of transportation planning, I've been watching the developments of Maglev trains for a while with a great deal of interest. It's a technology that has been around for years but it has been too expensive for economically-feasible projects. But I guess technology improvements and transportation needs have finally intersected so projects are starting to gain momentum. There are projects even in the U.S., if you can imagine that, where the automobile is king.
But this article gives me pause. This country is full to the brim with NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) citizens. No one wants to be disturbed by anything that may be absolutely crucial. To get away from our disgusting oil dependence, mass transit is a very viable option, especially for growing cities like Pittsburgh. The fact that the mere sound of something could stop a project dead in its tracks (haha nice pun) is something I find mildly disturbing. Of course it is a viable concern of peope who may be near maglev tracks, but people would rather live with 10 lane highways? There are some times when I want to say "screw the people whining, because they'll whine no matter what you do."
And it's true. Americans, apparently, were born to whine. Hopefully in the future the sound of a maglev will drown out their pathetic mewling.
Okay okay, settle down. I'm sure all 5 of you, my loyal readers (up from the 2 I used to have!), are just waiting with baited (bated?) breath to find out what the French on that clothing tag reads.
So here goes (remember, this is supposedly a real tag):
"We are sorry that our president is an idiot. We didn't vote for him."
HAHA hoooooo anyway, I think it's funny.
Sad that your foreign relations are so bad that people are making apologies for your terrible administration on clothing tags ...
I found this wonderful little piece over at BoingBoing. Can you read French? Check out the end of this Seattle-printed clothing tag.
If you can't read it, I'll tell you tomorrow ;) Nothing like anticipation.
I wonder if this thing is real? It seems like something some smartass would create in Photoshop ...
Wired News: The Bigger They Are ...
Hahahahaha thank God I don't shop at Sprawl-Mart! Serves you right for shopping at the demon-spawn!
While perusing a particularly interesting piece about wooden speaker cones (fascinating, really), a post from a Slashdotter pointed me to the beer can chicken roaster. Holy hell this world is a weird place.
I mean, who in God's name would have thought to stick a beer can up a chicken's ass (or is it the vacated neck?) to roast it? As much as the visual disturbs me to no end, it does seem like a mildly good idea. Flavor that bird from the inside out!
Oh, I just looked at the picture again, and there is no doubt about it. That can is definitely up the chicken's ass.
Well there seemed to be some technical difficulties when I posted the Ireland pics so it posted twice, but hey, it's all good. Thank God for MovableType and the ability to delete posts...
In other news, I'm getting comment-spam on my site! I've made it to the bigtime now, folks. Now you can read about viagra and penis enlargement and all that bullshit not only in your chock-full email account but also in the comments on this site, if you're unlucky enough to read something and find the comment before I find it and delete it.
Joy!
My apologies for the delay on the Ireland pictures. I have been struggling for days with various web gallery programs, none of which do what I want them to: make a decent gallery. But here they are, finally, the Ireland pics. Please ignore the awful filenames you see in there, Adobe Photoshop has some interesting tools but for instance while you may be able to rename a whole assload of files, you can't undo it once you've renamed them. Oh and don't even get me started on how disgusted I am by the sorting algorithms available when you make a gallery. I blame those fugly filenames on the awful sort. *sigh*
Anyway, some of the pictures are out of order but I spent a lot of time and did a lot of extra coding to put most of them in the right place and make things look decent. And check it out, with just a little css border fun, I made it look like a real photo gallery with frames and everything! Whoop-de-frickin'-do! Hover your mouse over the thumbnail to get alt text which explains what the picture is. Please enjoy.
By the time you've read this you'll probably have missed it, but the date today is 04.04.04 (or 04/04/04 or 04-04-04 or 4-4-04 or ... eh, you get the point).
Spooky huh?
It won't happen again for another ... uh ... year, when we will have 05.05.05 (or 05/05/05 or 05-05-05 ... gah who cares anyway)
In celebration of this momentous occasion, I'm sitting on my ass ... with a cold.
w00t.
Well we made it back from Ireland in once piece, though I managed to lose a few of my Irish-gained pounds on the plane due to some sort of heinous illness. Let me tell you, being sick on the plane is one of the worst things in the world.
Still working on getting the pictures in order to post, but soon enough they'll be up. If only I could find a quick n' easy method (that doesn't suck) for creating large photo galleries.
For now, I leave you with this: