Wow, ok

Tonight I got a text from my sister saying that our autistic cousin was missing and she wanted to know what the best way to get the word out about him (tv news, radio, flyers, etc.). I thought it was a joke at first since, come on, how often do you get a text saying a family member is missing?

She was driving around San Jose looking for him without any luck (as you could imagine) while I was calling all the local news stations to see if they could put out an announcement and checking with all the hospitals just in case. Frantic was way of putting it. Shitting bricks is another.

Since he's autistic, he rarely goes anywhere by himself except to and from his adult education class. I was ready to drive down to San Jose to join her in aimlessly driving around when I got another text saying that the police had found him outside of a Target store miles away from where he was last seen. Man, I would have been pissed if I had actually left. What the hell was he doing across town at Target while everyone was freaking out? Ironically, I was also at a Target store when I got the initial text.

Lesson learned: implant a GPS chip under any of your loved ones' skin...immediately.

Microsoft FAIL

I just saw two new Microsoft ads (ones which follow a trail of distasteful/failed ads featuring little kids taking pictures of stuff, people being fooled into thinking they were using a better OS, Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates acting entitled, etc.) via one of the many blogs in my RSS reader. In theory, these ads make sense: with the economy not doing so hot, you want to sell buyers the idea that cheaper is better. But that is exactly it: you're selling them a cheaper product. Of course the PCs are cheaper if the specs don't match up with the competing Macs. Sure, Lauren (who happens to be an actress...aren't these people supposed to be real folk who answered an ad?) got a cheap PC, but one that completely under-performs in all aspects compared to a comparable Mac, including half the battery life.

Also, isn't Microsoft a software company? Why do the requisites of Giampaolo's desired laptop all relate to hardware? The size of the keyboard, the amount of RAM, and battery life have nothing to do with software. Hmmmm. Also, if Giampaolo wanted something portable, wouldn't he want a 13" or smaller laptop and not a behemoth 16" one? Double hmmmm. Another also: why is HP the only PC brand mentioned and bought in these ads? Did HP subsidize these spots? TRIPLE hmmmm (but that's beside the point, so I digress).

I have trouble believing that Cripin, Porter + Bugosky are 100% behind the ads they created. I think that Microsoft's marketing team bullied them into creating ads that would push the "cheaper" messaging at the expense of any real substance. But to the agency's credit, I think these were shot at Fry's. I can spot those shrub-lined parking lots any day. I love you, Fry's Electronics.

The moral of the story? There are a few: 1) Don't trust ads with "real people" who have a long acting history, 2) You get what you pay for and 3) Shop at Fry's.


Link


Link

Fucked up shit

SFist posted an article about Prop 8 Maps, which uses Google Maps to pinpoint people who donated to the Prop 8 campaign. It's kind of fascinating and kind of disheartening to see that so many people donated (I've only scanned San Francisco and San Jose). I hope I don't recognize anyone I know.

Regarding Prop 8

This morning I checked the results for Prop 8, hoping that there was a chance it had failed. The margin was a lot smaller, but it still passed.

I'm at a loss to understand the amount of hate it takes to want to change a constitution specifically to discriminate. While walking home from BART last night, Patrick and I saw some kid jumping up and down shouting "YES ON 8, MOTHERFUCKERS!!" He didn't look old enough to vote. Why would it affect him aside from validating his hate? But that's beside the point of this post.

An overwhelming feeling of camaraderie overtook me during the course of this election. Everyone I knew pumped their fists for Obama because it was time for a change. But presidential election aside, people were also rooting for the failure of Prop 8. I was so touched by the amount of support from close friends, family, co-workers and total strangers. Even celebrities and big corporations gave their support for a cause they thought was worthy of their attention. Though I don't have as much at stake in the failure of Prop 8 as the people who have fought for their marriages, it was still a very personal matter at the core.

Getting texts and calls from my friends asking about the status Prop 8 last night meant the world to me. The disappointment in the faces of my happily married straight friends as they found out Prop 8 was winning meant the world to me. Reading all the posts from people voicing their outrage of Prop 8 meant the world to me. I'm honored to have these people in my life and feel that with this much support.

We lost this battle, but won one as well last night. One step at a time.


One day I'll get a chance to make many horrible marriage decisions like Britney.

David Foster Wallace

In the last day, three of my friends¹ alerted me to the suicide/death of David Foster Wallace. First it was shocking, then it made me extremely sad. I own two of his books and have only read one². Today I will start the other one.

RIP, DFW. You've been a good to me³.


This is the first image of DFW I ever saw, the one on the back cover of ASFTINDA.

__________________________________________________
1. I've shared DFW stories with Audrey, Tristan and Ross. Maybe we should all go see the John Krasinski's film together. 

2. I started my relationship with DFW some time back in college when I got an offer in the mail from QPB (Quality PaperBack) for 5 or 6 books at a dollar a piece. Even though I had never heard of DFW before, I thought A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments was a charmingly long title so I bought it. Why not? It was only a dollar. I also order some art reference books that I've never attempted to read. Once I received ASFTINDA, it sat on my shelf for a loooooong time. I didn't quite have the ambition to tackle the lengthy book, most of which was set in tiny, tiny type via footnotes. 

After reading it, there hasn't been a televised tennis match where I don't think of DFW. Last year I bought Infite Jest when it was released at a reduced price of only $10 (!!). It hasn't been read yet, but I will make time for it.

3. DFW's stories have kept me company while waiting to be called for jury duty and rekindled my interest in David Lynch which led me to buy his films at inflated prices on eBay.

A Sunday afternoon WTF

So I was reading SFGate.com and there's an article about Gavin Newsom's wedding to a rich, blonde bimbo. Ok, so it's SF Gate and I guess Gavin Newsom is the mayor of San Francisco so it's kinda almost relevant to write about his wedding, right? But, uh, did they have to get former SF mayor Willie Brown to write it? The article reminds me of Gizmodo's liveblogging of an Apple event, except it's not entertaining and there's no iPhone hype afterwards. Oh, but Huey Lewis played at the wedding! That was pretty exciting.

Here's a sample of the article:

The theme of the wedding is "Out of Africa," Montana style.

So I had to get a new outfit for the wedding: white silk and linen sun blazer, white Riviera collar shirt, Brioni khakis and brown-and-white spectator pumps.

Robert Redford would be proud.

Bravo, Willie!

SRSLY, SFGate, WTF?

It's a sad day for photography

I learned late last week that Polaroid will stop production of their instant film to focus on newer technology like portable printers and television sets. The news was kind of heartbreaking, though admittedly I haven't been using the film that much of late (because of 1: the price and 2: the even more instant digital photography). Still, knowing that it would be there when I needed it was comforting. My collection of 20+ cameras will inevitably become useless. Now, many hipsters will suffer the consequences when they want to shoot their next MySpace photo. What a shame. Maybe now my earlier post about a Photoshop filter will come in handy?

Goodbye, old friend.
P.S. Who wants to buy some Polaroid cameras? Or sell me some cheap film...
P.P.S. Update: Or you can do this to your cameras.


Photos I forgot about until this post.

They took my water away

Airport security took away my water but left my lighter, which was hanging out right next to the water.

I loathe scammers; or how I learned my lesson

Having sold some useless and some not-so-unless stuff on Craigslist myself, I assume that most people who sell on there are like me and describe their products honestly and don't try to scam. I was wrong.

The last few months I've been trying to get my hands on the Sony Ericsson W880i phone (there's nothing wrong with my old one, except that it's not new anymore), which is pretty price here since it was only released overseas. The price finally came down low enough where it was fathomable to buy one. Current price is about $300. I found a guy on Craigslist that listed it for $300 but after some sweet talking, I got him to give it to me for $280...if no one else offered him more.

Long story short, I bought the phone. I tried to import my address book via Bluetooth and that's when my troubles began. I called Sony Ericsson and they said that it would be free for the original owner, but if I couldn't show them proof that I was, it would cost $100 just for them to inspect it, and then another $200 for them to fix the problem. I laughed, said "That's absurd!" and hung up.

So I called the guy and said that the phone is not working properly and I'd like to give it back in exchange for my money. Obviously, this idea was as ridiculous to him as Sony Ericsson's price quote was to me. "What am I going to do with a broken phone?!" he asked rhetorically. "No one's going to want it when it's broken. How do I know that it was broken before I sold it to you? You probably put a virus on it!" I wanted nothing more than to reach through the phone and smash his face in with something large. After many more lies and accusations that I was responsible for the phone, I told him I just wanted my money back, that as a seller it is his responsibility to give me my money back for a faulty product.

In the end, he gave me back all but $40 of the money I paid for it, saying that he didn't feel right giving me back al my money since the phone doesn't work correctly. If I had ever had to hurt anyone physcially, it was this guy.

Not so smooth move

If you ever decide to take an herbal tea laxative, make sure you drink lots of water afterwards and only drink one bag's worth of the tea at a time. It started when I was feeling a little bit blocked, if you know what I mean. After a couple days of being...um, blocked, I thought it was time to make good use of the Smooth Move laxative tea left over from my Master Cleanse days. Instead of steeping just one bag, I thought it would work twice as fast if I used two bags. There's an 8 to 12 hours wait, the box said.

Trouble started the next day when I couldn't stop visiting the throne. It's a good idea to keep your whole day free if you're going to take this tea. Nature will call often. As I sit here writing this blog (two days after the fact), Nature is still tugging at my sleeve...ever so slightly.

My bike doesn't look good in nude

My little Peugeot was in desperate need of some new handlebar tape, so I went down to Freewheel Bike Shop and tried to buy some medium-dark brown tape (I want to replace my seat with a nice brown leather seat eventually). Apparently the color I want is really hard to come by, even though purple tape, pink tape, and purple tape with pink speckles were readily available. So I decided to go with a tan cork tape, figuring that it'll eventually get darker from wear. It took a while to put on the new tape, but I actually did a pretty decent job. However (and this is a huge however), my handlebars now look like they've been in an accident and are all bandaged up. It makes me a little sad to look at the bike. Sometime this week I'm going to have to go with another color, probably black, because I can't handle the tan.

Mother Nature wants me to be fat

Ross and I had made plans to go bike riding and play tennis this Saturday, but the weather report calls for rain. What the hell? How am I supposed to stay active and fit?

Rain, Ross, and racquet below.

The man is out to get me

I got an email from my internet provider yesterday asking me to stop using peer-to-peer programs to download/upload NBC material. The letter pretty much asks my ISP to send me a reprimanding email and tell me to stop pirating. So all of you downloading episodes or seasons of The Office better stop it now.

In other news, is it shallow that I listen to Sufjan Stevens because I think he's kinda hot? No? Ok, good. Also, I think he looks like a young Clive Owen.

Sole is the fish of the devil

I'm never cooking sole again. It's been over a day and a half and my apartment still reeks of fish. I should have known better than to eat fish named for its resemblance to sandals.

So ugly!


UPDATE: 4/07 - It's been a week and I can still smell it. Febreeze has nothing on the smell.

Jury duty and the flu

I started feeling achy as soon as I got home from work today, and by 7:30 I was feeling pretty toasty. Pooh called and lured me over with stuffed peppers and apple cake. He also supplied me with chewable vitamin C tablets and zinc lozenges.

When I got home, I checked in with the automated jury duty system and guess what? I have to report for jury duty tomorrow...at 8:30, in the morning. Awesome. I guess a decade of weaseling my way out of jury duty ends tomorrow. They'd better let me go home because a lot of people are gonna get sick.

I was banned

I haven't been able to blog because I'm banned. With fancy logarithms, Blogger has pegged me as a spam blogger and froze all new entries. I had to request for someone from the Blogger team to review my site to make sure I was a real, flesh-and-bones web logger.

This is what I got:

My spelling is atros...atrocis...bad

I went through my entries and found a shitload of spelling and grammar errors. I really need to take advantage of Blogger's spell check (although the feature is disabled when using Safari and its limited capabilities). In my defense, I'm an immigrant who claims English as his third language.
So solly.

Fuck you, Muni

Twenty-five minutes for the 14/49 in the rain.

Netflix update...fuck 'em

I won't have to worry about Netflix anymore, I cancelled it. I checked the status of my pending first DVD shipment and not surprisingly, the date was pushed back yet again. I pride myself on having a significant amount of tolerance when it comes to customer service, but Netflix definitely broke through my threshold level. I think that if they didn't post what day my DVD would go out and then change it each day, it wouldn't have pissed me off so much. I enjoy a bit of stick-and-carroting to keep things interesting, but it gets old pretty quick.

Did I get throttled by Netflix?

It all started last Wednesday when I got a piece of what should have been junk mail. It was a fun direct mail piece. There was a miniature Netflix envolope glued onto the front, you pull it off and on the back was a code for a 30-day free trial. I used Netflix years ago and didn't think the service was all that bad, so I thought, "Why not? It's a month of free movies...I'll just rent as many as I can and burn them."

I loaded up my queue with about 20 movies (Netflix advises to keep your queue full so your movies keep coming in the mail). Immediately, it said that my first DVDs would be sent out on Thursday, which was the next day. "Awesome," I thought, "I'll have movies for Friday." I logged onto Netflix to find the promise of a Thursday shipment had been pushed to Friday. Then on Friday, instead of actually sending out my DVDs, the shipment was again delayed until the following Monday because Netflix doesn't ship on weekends. Well, Monday turned into Tuesday, Tuesday turned into Wednesday, and now it says my first DVDs are expected to ship on Thursday...again. We've come full-circle and I'm still without DVDs. My month-long trial is now a 3-week trial at best.

I mentioned this to Audrey a few days into the waiting and she sent me a link about Netflix throttling. Supposedly, Netflix slows down the shipping process for those who return their movies too fast. I kind of doubt that I'm a victim of throttling since I'm a trial user and they should be on their hands and knees trying to impress me with their service. A concerned email was sent a couple days ago and I have not heard back from them.

Damn you, fancy junk mail!

Note: I believe Netflix uses Gotham as its corporate font...or is it Verlag? I can't tell, they all look the same.