i’ll write about #5 above soon, but first, i might as well share a story from my most recent trip to vegas (got back this past sunday).

i got to the airport pretty early for my 9:30pm departure – around 7:30 or so. normally i wouldn’t get to the airport that early, but that’s just how this trip went. i checked in and went to the relatively-short security line. i was in line behind a couple who, to me, seemed german or something – really unfamiliar with security, required multiple attempts to get through the metal detector, etc. the guy didn’t even pull his laptop out of his backpack when putting it through the x-ray, which required a second trip through the x-ray machine just before my bag and laptop and shoes went in. all in all, pretty freaking annoying.

i got through security and i was sitting at my gate reading work emails and thinking about how i should do a little work, but just resisting with all my might. i noticed the couple that was ahead of me in security walking by – for whatever reason i noticed them going towards one of the dead-ends in mccarran’s b terminal. i didn’t give it a second thought.

10-20 minutes passed and i decided, yes, it was time to do some work. i unzip my bag and reach in to get my work laptop. i thought briefly that the computer seemed a bit light to me, but only once i opened it up did i realize the problem. “don’t forget to call the food bank” was written on a post-it note in the bottom left corner
what fucking food bank?
oh shit
what have i done

that’s right, i swapped laptops with the guy who was in front of me in security. i took his 13″ mbp, he took my 15″. adrenaline and butterflies took over my body in a wave, starting directly from my lower intestine. i somehow processed that yes, he and his wife and a second couple had walked down the hallway to my right. i ran down there.

now you’re in an open space. there are 6 gates in a circle in front of you. each gate has people boarding and each gate has lots of people sitting around. there are slot machines in the middle. what the hell do you do?

i ran from gate to gate looking for a sign of the people i had seen earlier. thank fucking god the wife (i presume) had a very distinctive light blue jacket on, because i found her and her friend sitting at gate 24, waiting for their flight to edmonton. it took the longest 45 seconds of my life. i explained the situation and had no issues swapping laptops with the (apparently) canadians.

“that would have sucked for everyone” her friend said. “a lot” i agreed.

and that is how you have good luck in vegas. while this story might seem anti-climactic, anything less than this ending would have sucked for everyone a lot.

via rhodg (link):

“In this room, which is impervious to outside radio signals, our test engineers connected the phones to our base-station emulator, a device that simulates carrier cell towers,” the nonprofit organization wrote. “We also tested several other AT&T phones the same way, including the iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre. None of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.”

It continued: “Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4′s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that ‘mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.’ The tests also indicate that AT&T’s network might not be the primary suspect in the iPhone 4′s much-reported signal woes.”

apple has started their concentrated campaign of lies around the design flaws of their latest phone. i have an iphone 4, and its a beautiful device, but it is a piece of shit terrible phone. it drops calls if you hold it the wrong way. it is awkward to use as a telephone in almost all but the most formal of circumstances. and these motherfucking liars at apple are motherfucking lying about the problem.

here is apple’s piece of shit lying statement. it is not a software problem, you liars, but you know that. it is a goddamn terrible design decision. and you can’t sit here and argue essentially that all phones have this problem to an extent AND you have a software problem.

ok, i’m getting carried away. but let me pose this question: if i am making a phone call, and then i shift my hands around and all of a sudden i’m covering the antenna, why does my perfectly motherfucking clear phone call drop, if this is just a simple software fix? was my perfectly clear phone call confused by the incorrect number of bars displayed on the phone and thus thought it had service, when in fact the service was very low the whole time?

WHAT KIND OF JEDI BULLSHIT ARE YOU ASSHOLES TRYING TO PULL?

the sad part is that due to my employment at AT&T it makes no sense for me to change phone companies. but apple is really, really starting to piss me off. and i’m not even going to bother linking to the piece of shit apple apologists out there, all you assholes make me sick. why don’t you push the company you love to do better instead of mocking everyone who recognizes that apple is, right now, completely batshit insane and pretty evil. you’re like republicans, you fucks.

this is day 3 of my really bad mood.

when i first started at my current job, a lot of the code i was working on was written by a company in india that we outsourced work to. it was awful, awful code. like, incredible, in a way, because they did things that were so stupid i didn’t even know they were possible. it’s slow, it’s buggy, it’s prone to failure, and that’s why the first few months were so freaking awful for me – every weekend was fixing this shitty code, this vavni (that was the company name) code that blew up at the slightest input that these indian asshats didn’t consider.

so their american contacts were actually in the office with us, which is why we started using them in the first place. and beyond the fact that their indian cohorts wrote terrible, terrible code, we knew them for their food – awful combinations of indian food that made the common hallway smell like a third-world country. we knew they all bought shitty tiffin lunches from cheap places near their homes because they were all single men who didn’t know how to cook like mom and now were at the mercy of some indian lady in a strip mall somewhere, but that didn’t change the fact that they stunk up the office and we hated it.

(a tiffin lunch is basically a complete indian meal – 4 dishes, roti, etc, in a metal tiffin container that is really f’n cheap. basically old indian women make them after they don’t have kids to feed in the house anymore but still want to make food as if they do, and guys who just moved from india and don’t have women to cook for them consume this stuff in droves. my parents have asked me to get tiffin meals a few times, but given all this, i have passed. it’s not that food isn’t good, though i’m sure it wouldn’t meet my standard of “did my mom make it?”, but instead it just seems too sad.)

they moved out a few months back. their sticker is off the door. we stopped working with them. their name is the equivalent of shit.

which is why, in the last 2 weeks, when the toilets became unusable, their name came up time and again. “someone vavni code’d the toilets”

which means they (in one example) apparently crouched above the toilet seat, put no cover on the seat (there are plenty of covers in these stalls) and sprayed diarrhea all over the seat, and then didn’t flush, or at least clogged the toilet so bad that it wouldn’t flush.

there are two sit down toilets and 2 urinals in the men’s room. they have killed the plumbing, whoever ‘they’ are, to the sit down toilets, and now the entire hallway, instead of smelling like a tiffin lunch, smells like shit, to the point where we miss the tiffin lunches.

i share this story not to make you all think of this disgusting situation in my office, but to state once, clearly, in the open, that no, it is not ok to do this to communal toilets, and if you have ever done anything like this to a communal toilet, the reason better not have been less than a medical emergency.

yesterday i bought new brown shoes. my new go-to, in between black shoes with a suit and sneakers with everything else. completely bland and un-newsworthy, except for the fact that these are the first new brown shoes i’ve bought in over 11 years.

these shoes replace the brown shoes i bought when i started 10th grade in cleveland.

i remember going to the mall with my dad to get the shoes these are replacing. i remember talking to the salesman who i had seen around before and i had seen help my dad before. i remember the way my dad looked at me when i shoved the shoes on without pulling out the back properly. i remember the way he sheepishly told the salesman “, kids” (that comma is no typo, friend). i remember the excitement of wearing brown shoes and starting private school and living in a new city where i knew no one. wait, not excitement, dread. terrifying dread.

and here we are, just over 11 years later, and i’m over a year into california and i work for the goddamn death star and i know only a few more people than i knew 11 years ago but i am going to marry one of them. and the year starts with a 2.

happy new year.