a seemingly juvenile story

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.

an innocuous purchase

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.

reality imitates insane dreams

i have been dreaming a lot recently. 2 weeks ago in vegas was an all-time high in dreams (something they pump in to the rooms?) but my mind has been pretty active in general after i close my eyes. maybe this is a result of getting better at remembering dreams. there is a lot of room for consideration here, but that isn’t the point.

the point is last night i had a dream. and my dream had to do with me doing a spacewalk which intertwined with and eventually became a moonwalk. and my main concern, naturally, was how would i get my camera out into space with me – would it blow up in outer space? how could i prevent that?

and then i read this:

The D3S digital SLR cameras and AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED lenses ordered by NASA will be carried on the Space Shuttle and used to photograph activities at the International Space Station (ISS) in the future.
No special modifications will be made to these products. They will be the same products available to end-users, confirming the incredible versatility of the D3S.

seriously? today? after i dreamt about it last night?
creepy. and awesome.
UPDATE
now i am reading a long article about james cameron, director of multiple movies that i’m sure you’re familiar with, and i stumble upon this:

But, before bringing a camera into space, Cameron had to prove it safe.

WEIRD.

weird coincidences

part of my job requires that i, from time to time, scour through databases of athletes of all sorts.  today the focus was on college basketball, where i ran into a quirk that made me do a double take.  we’ve recently gotten updates to our college basketball rosters for the 2009-10 season, and while the original set of players came in by last name, the new players we get come in by team name.  which is all a long way of setting up this unlikely pairing of names that i found towards the end of the 19618 row table:

| 3024400 | Williams | Travis | 80 | F | 33 | 0 |
| 3032344 | Rehnquist | Peter | 107 | G | 25 | 0 |

williams and rehnquist. back to back, for some reason, in a gigantic table of basketball players.

basically i’m getting coded messages from my database. now i just need to see what exactly the database wants me to do.

why i might never play xbox 360 again

i’ll admit it – i’m cramming in a few posts to try to get my monthly total respectable.  on the other hand, microsoft’s pricing for hard drives is absolutely absurd, and now that i’m up against my 20gb hard drive’s limit, i’m going to have to make some tough decisions.

i don’t download movies.  i don’t buy a ton of arcade games.  i definitely don’t install games on my xbox.  however, my drive is full.  i get a lot of demos.  i do have a few full arcade games.  but the killer for me is the DLC – i religiously buy DLC for games i like, because why wouldn’t i want more levels of rainbow six or call of duty 5, but these things take up a ton of space.  so, my decision to 1) buy multi-platform games on the xbox and 2) spend money on xbox live’s marketplace has caused me to run out of hard drive space.  of course, it seems pretty obvious to me that this behavior is something microsoft would want to encourage, so maybe they wouldn’t take a huge markup on their hard drive upgrades.

to be more plain, the only reason one would buy a xbox 360 hard drive upgrade is so one can spend more money on xbox 360 games and xbox live’s marketplace.

and yet a 120gb hard drive, something i can get on newegg for $65 and on ebay for even less, sets me back $135.  a full 100% mark-up on a device that will almost always be purchased by someone enthusiastic about using the system and spending money on the system.

so i think for multi-platform games from now on i’m going to just stick with the playstation 3 – it has more capacity out of the box, and hard drive upgrades are encouraged rather than blocked off by proprietary technology.  this plan will go into effect once i get my ps3 repaired.  which is a whole other story, which i probably won’t post, because it’s even more boring then this post and the previous one.

vroom vroom

in my own personal attempt at having a mid-life crisis at 28, i have replaced my 1998 toyota camry with a 2010 audi a4.  i got the car last monday.  so far, it has been a great decision.  after one week, i drove the car 336 miles, or 48 miles a day.  if i maintain that rate, i will drive 17520 miles this year, and 52560 miles in 3 years.  my lease is for 3 years and 45,000 miles, so, sustaining this driving rate, i will be 7560 miles (or $1890) over my miles limit at the end of the lease.  of course, i will not sustain this driving rate – i drove every day the first week, including a very unusual 80 miles round trip to the buffalo wild wings in dublin, california and a pretty abnormal 55 miles round trip to benihana in burlingame, ca on a weeknight.  a weeknight!

so as you can see, my life is not at all interesting.

a collection of ideas for short stories

also known as “things that have happened”, a recurring segment here

1) i had red meat saturday night.  i had lamb chops at kokkari estiatorio, one of the best greek restaurants in san francisco.  the lamb chops are their signature dish.  they were very good.  honestly, i would have rather had the fish, but at least i’m past this hurdle (which i cleared to very little fanfare) and i can go about my business as a person again.

2) i got civ4 working in ubuntu.  downloaded the game through steam.  ran steam and then the game through wine.  i wanted to do a little write-up, but then #3 happened.  and yes, i know half of that was gibberish to you.

3) my car broke down on the 280, northbound, in burlingame.  the 280 is one of the faster highways around, people generally go around 80 on it, so this was… a scary situation to say the least.  but i managed it ok, and i didn’t cut anyone off or cause any issues, and i got AAA to tow the car off the right shoulder into a garage in burlingame and i’m currently waiting to hear from the mechanic at said newly-minted AAA approved ASE certified garage as to whether or not i just murdered my ’98 camry.

each of these bullet points deserves its own post, but life isn’t fair, so for now, i give you this.