Category: ravings

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.

a quick story and a promise for more

friday night, trills and erin and i went and saw matt good play in front of 150-200 people at the great american music hall in san francisco.

first of all, the venue is amazing. its an amazing ornate theater, plenty of space (especially when there aren’t that many people), tables (!), waitstaff (!!), and a nod towards local beers (lagunitas on tap!). pretty impressive, and highly recommended.

the concert was pretty fun, though i am not really up on the latest matt good stuff so i didn’t know a lot of the songs. also, the opener was brutal (automatic loveletter), completely clichéd. that’s right, ‘é’. but this isn’t about automatic loveletter or about the theater or about the concert, as fun as it might be.

it’s interesting how much this concert made me think. i was in high school when i first heard the matthew good band on muchmusic (the canadian MTV for those who don’t know). my parents went to toronto with my grandparents one weekend and they brought me back a couple of cds and i was hooked. i was one of the only people to buy their one american release from the tower records i worked at in college. trilling and i still talk about how awesome rico is. then they broke up, then i listened to matt good solo a little bit. song for the girl is one of the highest songs on my last.fm, especially when you remove the entire return from cookie mountain album (which you shouldn’t, ever). then matt good got a little too acoustic-y and i fell away from him a bit. but matt good was with me (and with trilling) through some pretty definitive years.

and 10 years later i’m sitting with trilling in san francisco listening to matt good. so of course, you think about those definitive years. and shit, there is a lot to think about.

at the end of the concert, trilling was drunk. and he decided, in his drunken state, to yell “sidney crosby is a pussy” incredibly loudly at the canadian matt good in front of only 150-200 people in a small, ornate theater in san francisco. needless to say, matt good heard him. and his response was why he is awesome.

instead of telling trilling to shut up or fuck off or ignoring trilling, he said “it’s funny that you should mention that” and then went into a 2-3 minute spiel about how wayne gretzky never got hit and sidney crosby does get hit and still gets back up and scrapped for that gold medal winning goal (huge cheer) and ryan miller was pretty awesome so at least america has that going on.

now, i’m sure the guy has a ton of experience with idiot hecklers, but he also has experience being a big rock star in canada, so the thoughtful, calm response was unexpected and awesome. of course, trilling wasn’t even thinking about the gold medal, he was thinking about alex ovechkin. which is a whole separate post entirely.

that was all rambly and nonsensical, but i just need to get something going, get anything going.

now, about that promise for more – ottoneu’s fantasy draft was yesterday, and i’m going to go through what my strategy was for the draft (this is the first year i had a strategy going in) and how well i did to my strategy. so look for that tonight or tomorrow.

also, boomgard pointed me to frightened rabbit, and their new album is meh, but their first album from 2008 (midnight organ fight) is really, really good. so go listen to that. and if you like jazz, i don’t need to tell you this, but if you’re interested in liking jazz, listen to coltrane+monk at carnegie hall. i might have not needed to tell anyone that. i just had to tell myself that. or admit to myself that i am an idiot for not listening to it until very recently. update: i should have thanked parker for helping me see the light on the coltrane+monk collaborations. and now i have, thanks parker.

also as i click the categories for this post, i’m realizing that metaniv and ravings go hand in fucking hand. which tells you a lot, i think.

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.

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.

honor is not dead

i haven’t had any red meat in a while.  but sunday, i had the perfect opportunity.

currently my red meat situation is thus: zach entered the pact with me at sundance, but he fell out a while ago and paid me $100 for the delight of not having to deal with it anymore.  however, right as zach failed, chad entered, mostly because i challenged that he couldn’t do it (rather than for the reasons i am doing it, which he found compelling but not quite compelling enough).  and since then, in april, chad has been going strong and i have as well.

sunday i decided to get a  sandwich.  i showered and got ready and drove over to the town and country shopping center at el camino and embarcadero.  that’s the thing about california, even the yuppie strip malls sound exotic.  i wanted to go to the village cheese house, but it was closed on sundays (dumb!).  so i went over to the mayfield bakery & cafe and i went to their bakery section and i asked for sandwiches.  jen and i had been before, and they had ‘run out’ of sandwiches in the bakery section and asked us to go sit for a full meal, so i asked them if they still had any sandwiches.  the word choice was weird, because the lady there informed me that they served to-go premade sandwiches at the bar in the cafe so i should go over there.  i left the bakery section, wondering what she thought about my choice of using the word ‘still’, and went over to the cafe’s bar.

on a sunday, around 1pm, the mayfield cafe’s bar was disappointingly busy

i asked the bartender what sandwiches they had.  he told me chicken salad, paused, turned and opened the mini-fridge behind him, peeked into a sandwich, and said “and also turkey”.  i thought for a second about how i always eat turkey sandwiches and chicken salad sounded exotic, like where i was, and that i don’t know if i’ve ever really had a chicken salad sandwich, and predictably proclaimed that “i’ll have the chicken salad”.

as i got into my car, i noticed a strange smell, familiar yet unexpected.  as i pulled out of the town and country parking lot and on to embarcadero road, i peered in to my sandwich.  as i waited for the red light to change so i could turn on to el camino, i realized that yes, those were giant chunks of bacon, thickly cut, on my chicken salad sandwich.

the thoughts that went through my mind are as follows (roughly): “fuck!  maybe it’s turkey.  i’m in california, why would they give bacon without telling you?  wait, this is clearly regular bacon.  it smells too good.  no way its turkey.  ok, no one is home.  no one knows what i’m eating.  i could just get away with this.  no, that is not right.  ok well i’m not going back to change it and i’m not going to waste this $8.  well, wasting $8 is way better than wasting $100.  maybe i can pick out the bacon?  cmon, picking out bacon, what have you turned into?  ok, what’s the right thing to do here.  pick out the bacon.  just eat it.  go get a burrito no that gave you really bad heartburn when you did that yesterday you idiot.  ok pick out the bacon.  ok just eat it no one will ever know”

so i get home, cursing to myself that i bothered to ask what kind of cheese was peeking out (brie) when i got the sandwich but didn’t bother to explore further for bacon.  and wondering if i could really deal with not telling chad that i had broken the diet, or even with telling chad and breaking the diet and paying him $100.  and i got in my kitchen and i opened up the sandwich and looked at the slice of bacon, almost whole, staring back at me.  and i thought

“i don’t really even want to eat this bacon enough for the trouble”

and i picked out the bacon.  and i put it in a trash bag.  and then i ate a middling chicken salad sandwich, or at least a sandwich that i hope was middling because otherwise chicken salad might really, really suck.