Author: niv

life is fun, chicago edition

i just got to chicago to visit chad for a day. haven’t seen him since… i’m going to guess 2007. way, way too long for one of my best friends.

anyway, it is really fucking cold here.

SCENE: starbucks on w division st. niv with his macbook pro, checking emails, decides to take a break to tweet about the weather (HOW THRILLING):

me (tweet) : dear winter in the midwest, i will not miss you when i am back in california. you suck. yours, niv

@yodaism responds: @nivshah A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.

END SCENE

dusty rhodes’s road trip

our hero
this debonair motherfucker is dusty rhodes. last tuesday i worked from san francisco for the beginning of 21st amendment‘s and magnolia‘s strong beer month. i worked all day at a coffee shop, stayed out at 21A with some friends until pretty late, and didn’t leave the house again until friday, 3 days later. when i opened my bag friday morning to put my laptop in it, i saw his shit-eating grin staring back at me. everyone i was with and even some people i wasn’t with all denied having any knowledge of how i came into possession of (what we discovered to be) an $11 limited-edition action figure. it is truly one of my life’s mysteries, but i have chosen to embrace this particular mystery and turn dusty rhodes into a ridiculous, fat, polka-dotted mascot, of sorts.

so monday morning, the same people who talked me into drinking the tuesday prior talked me into taking the day off and going up to russian river brewery in downtown santa rosa to experience pliny the younger, one of the more celebrated california ipas (and beers) in existence. pliny the younger is a limited edition release that is only around for a couple of weeks, so we only had a small window to pounce.

an aside: yes, my last post was about how i quit my job and started my own start up. 3 months later, it might seem like i have given up on life and started drinking heavily, but i can assure that is not the case. ottoneu-related writing will commence shortly, and i will only give up on life and start drinking heavily if the next month and a half are a complete disaster.

so anyway, russian river, pliny the younger, and a wrestler mascot. like any good bay area burgeoning wanna-be hipster with a dslr, i decided to make a photo essay of our road trip from the perspective of our (my?) mascot. with that in mind, i present to you dusty rhodes’s road trip, a flickr set.

10 days in

i’m 10 days in to the great experiment i announced 19 days ago. i’m no longer an AT&Ti employee, but instead founder and ceo of ottoneu, inc. i have a shared office and a laptop – that’s it. as i was telling people i saw over the weekend, i’m up here on this tightrope way above everything without any net and apparently all i’ve ever wanted to do with my life is walk a tightrope.

it’s exciting and terrifying and somewhat convoluted.

so i’m probably going to write about my development/start-up stuff over at about90feet for the near term, which again leaves me a gap in what i should write about over here. right now, i’m spending about 90% of my time coding and 10% of my time screwing around, and that 90% fully belongs at a90f according to its mission statement. keep an eye out over there for now, and i’ll be back shortly.

dreams

i had a dream that i wrote that post about kurosawa that nitin asked for. instead, i woke up and wrote a couple of things over at about 90 feet:

1) my development strategy for ottoneu (or why i hate frameworks)
2) a tiny example of the kinds of weird things i have to think about when creating a complete game

so go read that, and don’t think that i’ve left this. there’s just a lot of moving pieces right now, and more will be written about it in the very near future.

the luckiest i’ve been in vegas

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.

this is hardly abandoned, geoff

things i could write about:
1 – the various twists and turns in my fantasy season, where right now i am in 5th place but could swing up to 3rd in the next month
2 – various projects i am working on
3 – my process in shooting this
4 – the reasons why the ‘ground zero mosque meme’ makes me want to move to canada
5 – a review of kurosawa’s “dreams”, which surely will turn into me raving about how i love kurosawa, which maybe fits into the title of this site better than anything else

vote in comments.

thank you, consumer reports

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.”

liars

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.