Adjusting to being an adult...or not

Attempted Robbery

2008-05-27T20:47:00.002-04:00

I got off the metro and noticed how there were an inordinate amount of teenage boys hanging out at the top of the escalators. I emerged from the escalator and walked away from the station with my earphones on. Usually I'm listening to a marketplace podcast but today I figured I'd listen to some modest mouse. I had just walked past the barber shop when I felt a hand going into my pocket, so I automatically without thinking put my hand in my pocket to keep my iphone from being snatched out. I looked over and saw some kid in his late teens yelling "gimme your ipod!" I looked at him for a moment, taking in what he looked like, that he had short braids, a semi-dark complexion, beady eyes, unshaven peach fuzz, and a bright blue aqua hoodie. I then took in a deep breath and bellowed out "POLICE!" that could easily be heard a block away. The kid freaked, yelled, "oh shit!" and took off. I yelled out at him, "FUCKER!" and that was the end of it.

I called the cops when I got home to ask them to step up their patrol around the GA/Petworth Metro Station. This turned into multiple transfers, different phone numbers to call, and multiple call backs. Turns out that while Metro Transit police had an interest since it started out on metro property but since the actual incident took place on a public sidewalk, I had to call DC police. I ended up talking to both a beat cop and a detective that parked themselves in my living room for half an hour taking my report. They left telling me that they wished we lived in a world where a person could walk home from the metro and enjoy their music but we don't. The detective was very pessimistic about the city and it being "crime infested."

Shortly after, I got a call back from the metro transit police. Originally, they had told me they'd send out a car to take a "police info report" but then they were swamped or something and just took my account over the phone.

I don't know how I feel about the whole situation, either I can have these skirmishes or I can pay 4 bucks a gallon along with the 300 dollar car payment along with the 100 dollars for insurance a month. I dunno...I'm not sure if my days are numbered or not in terms of living in the city, but it sure does make me wish we lived in a more civil world.

Why do we care about OJ so much?

2007-09-18T10:23:00.000-04:00

I've been listening to Al Gore's "The Assault on Reason" audio book and its eery how much he hits it on the head about the media. Why are we so preoccupied about a washed up football player more than we are say,

the erosion of our civil liberties at the cost of the "war on terror"
no one really caring that our country is really in a war
that britney's ex-husband has a hit out on him

Ok, I was just making sure you were still reading. Seriously though, I enjoy my daily dose of inane pop culture as the next person...but its when I'm standing in line at the supermarket browsing the magazines, or when I purposely surf to sites like popsugar or TMZ. It shouldn't be a leading news headline when I turn on CNN or watch NBC/ABC/CBS's nightly news where journalism is supposed to be holding itself up to a higher standard.

There is something wrong when there is more news coverage about Obama making some remark about what Hilary Clinton is wearing rather than the actual public discourse on what these people represent and do they possess true leadership and vision to lead our country.

And of course, the reality that voter turn out in this country is pretty miserable. So much apathy. And yet, we care so much about whether some guy we'll never meet or truly care about, on whether he'll go to jail or not.

Radio Silence

2007-06-15T11:37:00.000-04:00

Wow, 2 months of radio silence. What happens when you start assuming more responsibility? I guess you have less time to play. Or maybe the time you have to "play" is looked as required downtime. I've lost the writing bug, at least temporarily. Which means updates to this blog will be even more sporadic.

I am however enjoying this cool weather in DC though, even though I hear its gonna be hot again soon.

I did make it down to the newly dedicated Victims of Communism memorial downtown which was nice. So I guess I'll post a slide show of those up.

Another year

2007-04-09T22:52:00.000-04:00

So tomorrow is my birthday. And while it doesn't really spawn any great profound thoughts. It made me think of an interview I heard on NPR a couple of weeks ago with Will Ferrell. He talks about about how he and his writing partner usually shape his characters around this guy. The average guy with unearned confidence. And it got me thinking about how its easy to become that guy. To think become so self-absorbed into thinking you're doing something in life that's so important, but the truth is, its pretty lame. To have that arrogance and not have the humility to realize, maybe its not that important. I've become that guy a few times during my life, and I hope that I'm able to keep myself from becoming that guy again.

To all the lonely guys / Google Hits Referrals

2007-03-07T09:45:00.000-05:00

Every week, I'll get a handful of visits from what I can only assume as lonely dudes that think they have a snowball's chance in dating WJLA's hottie Allison Starling. How would I know this? They're coming from google with the search term "is alison starling married?" or "alison starling married." All because I mentioned her a few times in my blog. First thing's first. She's not married. Or at least I don't think she is, from seeing her ring-less left hand ring finger during a broadcast. Second, why would any of these guys think they have a chance in picking her up? Are you going to casually wait outside the WJLA parking lot and accidently run into her (because that's not creepy.)

I think Alison is slowly but surely beating out Krystal Koons as the most googled visit to my blog.

Local Celebrity sightings!

2007-02-16T20:37:00.001-05:00

So after blogging about the fact that I never bump into channel 7 news personnel, I bumped into 2 this week! But, neither of them were around the Rosslyn Channel 7 "nerve center."

Yesterday when out to lunch around Clarendon, I walk right into who I assume is Pamela Brown after perusing the channel 7 website. I guess they were out doing a story about the ice or something, because my friend shouts out to her, "interview him!" and points at me, while we're making a bee line to the Baja Fresh.

Then tonight, my wife and I were out to a nice quiet dinner at one of our regular spots, Arucola, when suddenly after finishing my apple strudel, I see Gordon Peterson right in front of our table! I lean discretely over to my wife to tell her and she's like, "oh." Come on! Its a local celebrity! She tells me if it was Brad Pitt, then maybe she'd be a little excited. I get all giddy and she tells me to take a photo, then I tell her I'd rather not. I recall cajoling an acquaintance once to go say hi to WTOP's man about town, Bob Maddigan, and she walked away freaking out Mr. Maddigan. Then again, my wife's like, "so you can go up and tell Topher Grace that you're a big fan but you can't whip out your camera phone?"

Of course, my wife had no idea that we were sitting next to the real life Ron Burgandy. I mean, he's been in the business back when anchormen meant something. I didn't want to bother the man though, seeing how he probably just got off of work and wanted to have a quiet dinner with his wife(?) and friends. So I ended up taking a paparazzi photo. As you can see, my wife's skeptical shoulder is in view. In fact, while we walked out, she was like, "does he do the weather?" After calling me the biggest dork in the world, she then followed it up with, "if you get this excited about someone like Gordon Peterson, what's gonna happen if you run into Alison Starling?"

WJLA

2007-02-07T08:59:00.000-05:00

So I work a block away from the WJLA/Channel 7 News/Channel 8 cable news building now. You'd think being in such close proximity to so many local celebrities, I'd bump into one by now. But no, you'd be wrong. The only time I'd probably see Doug McKelway or news heart-throb Alison Starling is if I got to work at 6:50am just in time to see them do the "wrap-up" segment for Good Morning America when they're standing outside in front of the building. But I'm not that nuts about local news personalities to wake myself up at 5am to get myself to work just to get a glimpse of people standing in front of a camera outside.

In fact, everytime I go into the building to either get lunch from the China Garden or Baja Fresh, or to buy something at CVS, you'd think I might happen to bump into Gordon Peterson or Elliot Frances running an errand, but nope. Nothing. In fact, when you walk into the lobby and see the Channel 7/8 News entrance, its like the Wizard of Oz. Lots of video/server decks and blinking lights and monitors and not a soul in sight. You think with such a public area and them wanting to be in touch with the public, there'd be more of a Today show like setting, but nope. Its just a locked down fortress. Kinda disappointing. Maybe its best, to keep crazy bumbling fools like me from fawning over the "Talent."

The cost of the commute

2007-02-06T22:31:00.000-05:00

I never really thought about how much money/time I put into commuting. After all, its just one of life's little things that you let inertia just carry you and not give any thought to how much its costing. In the past month, I started a new job that requires me to metro now instead of driving. This was a personal choice since we only have one car, and I've been dominating its use for most of its life while my wife had to deal with the metro, and then eventually me just giving her rides.

My commutes though, are a little atypical to the DC area. After all, with my old and new job, I commute OUT of the city into northern Virginia, while everyone else is coming in during the morning rush. If I took the car, it would take me 20 minutes tops to get to work. However, I take the metro, and on average, the commute to work averages anywhere between 40 to 60 minutes. Doubling, sometimes tripling the time to get from the house to my work area.

So I decided to break it down, if I could commute with a car or metroing, what would each way cost me?

With the car, there are a lot of visible costs. There's the car payment, insurance, parking fees, and gas of course. Then there's the slightly less visable costs, since I don't have to pay these things except occasionally. Maintanence is one. Which on average will break down to oil changes and 15k/30k type of services, which for an average car usually breaks down to about 1200 bucks a year. Then there's the environmental cost, although seeing how we own a hybrid, its a bit less of an impact. I worked it out to be about 600 dollars a month on average. This is with no money down on a car for around 20k (nothing fancy, regular small to midsize sedan) That breaks down to about 20 bucks a day. This also takes into account that my company is generous enough to pay for our garage parking in Rosslyn.

Meanwhile, with Metro, the only cost is the metro pass. And again, my company is generous to provide me enough Metrochecks to cover my commute 100%. But...the trade-off is time. Lots of it. Seeing how I spend on average an extra hour everyday on the metro, all that time can add up. There's also the inconvenience of freezing my ass off recently with the arctic blast that we've been dealing with. Also is the loss of mobility. Before, if I needed to run an errand, pick up dinner, or whatever, I could do it. Now? Not so much.

So while I might be saving 600 bucks a month not owning an extra car, I am having to pay with it in other ways. Time IS money. It never made sense when I was a kid. Time was abundant then! How did it become so scarce?

Knowing is half the battle, not the war

2007-01-20T15:43:00.000-05:00

So I realized I'm getting less tolerant of people that are of the G.I. Joe mindset. You know how the jingle goes. "Knowing is half the battle! G.I. JOE!" I used to be the same way. I felt very mature because I could identify a problem/character flaw within myself but then what? If you've identified a problem and say, "yes, I know that's a problem" the first time, then yes, good for you. But then when it just becomes a habit to use it as a rationalization or an excuse, it ceases to be a positive thing. Identifying a personal problem and then say you're working on in when in reality you're not does nothing for me and I'm not going to give you a cookie for it. The rest of the battle and the war is working on it, or accepting it, own it, be it, and don't excuse yourself for it. Again, probably easier said than done.

Status Anxiety & Clerks 2

2007-01-16T20:57:00.000-05:00

Why are we working our asses off? For the money? Or is it for the status? A question that was posed last week on PBS on a special called "Status Anxiety" by Alain de Botton. Are we all just starved for societal love? Are we just all really that new little kid in kindergarten craving for social acceptance and that elusive feeling of feeling loved and safe.

The show really got me thinking. I mean why are we all running the rat race? Especially in this area. I mean, the GDP in this DC Metro area alone is probably more than several developing nations put together. Of course I don't have any scientific proof to that, but it sure feels truthy, doesn't it? I mean, seriously, the weddings industry in this region alone is somewhere around 4 billion dollars or so I heard on Marketplace in passing one evening.

The funny thing is, I found that living in this area has been more of a hindrance than a helping in really finding deep connections/bonds with people. In my experience, most of the people I come in contact with are willing to be around me if it suits them. Fairweather friends I suppose.

We happened to get Clerks 2 in Netflix over the weekend, and man, Kevin Smith gets it. Or so he does a very good job of eloquently grossing me out and preaching about what real deep friendships are all about. If you haven't seen it, you should, not just for the donkey scene. Between all the dick and fart jokes sprinkled with Star Wars and Transformers, there are real moments that friends share with each other that you can't get from 99% of the superficial people out there that you want to respect your supposed status. And you can take that to the bank.

Having it your way vs Harmony

2007-01-06T13:31:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about how most relationships I've had to deal with. Be it with family, friends, or professional. Ultimately it boils down to two dichotomies that become trials/obstacles. The first is being there for a person, which brings up the idea, do you just listen and not say anything or do you advise? Do you think you have a solution, but does this solution ultimately push the person to maybe change their habits? And usually people don't change for others, they have to come to that decision themselves. And then I have to ask myself, usually in hindsight, why do I care so much if this person changes their habits or not. Why do I care that they need to realign their habits and moral code to something I might consider "right." Seeing how most of these "rights" are based of principles of ideals and not experience. Or maybe some of them are my experiences, but they're not that person's.

Which seques into the next question. What do I prefer more? Being right (having it my way, a la House M.D.) or having harmony and being able to bite my tongue and live and let live.

I understand there are times where a person must stand up for what they believe but then there is a lot to be said that everyone sees life through their own prism and who's to say which prism is better?

Lately, I've been just being hands off. "Letting go" as in, why put so much energy into something you know you have no ability to change. Maybe its another step towards complacency, but I don't view it that way. When you free up that energy to enforce things you can't change, you're also free to re-channel it into something else, hopefully something more positive shaping.

Greatest Hits

2006-12-04T16:23:00.000-05:00

Judging from my non-scientific stat keeping. The biggest hits to my blog are:

Krystal Koons - everyone seems to have a morbid curiosity about this sweater vest android and her promises to wow us. I'm still waiting to be wowwed Krystal.
Barbara Harrison - This I get. You're watching the morning news and think, "Hmmm...wonder what will turn up if I google Babs."
Alison Starling - Ok, there are a lot of lonely dudes out there lusting for Alison, because there have been quite a few hits on my site with the googling of such keywords as "Is Alison Starling married?" or "Alison Starling Photos." I mean, really, if you can't get enough of looking at her, just set the Tivo to record channel 7 from 5am to 7am...and every news break during Good Morning America (22 and 56 minutes on the hour!)

So there you have it. Three top hits from since my blog's inception, all about DC-centric women, all written during my prolific spring phase. And probably zero returning readers after they have satiated their curiosity.

Silence

2006-12-04T13:22:00.000-05:00

Nearly a month of blog silence. It could be an eternity. Postings will either become disjointed, or severely dropped off seeing how I am in a period of transition. The holidays are coming up, I've got myself a new job, and I will be out of town for part of the month. There's always my del.icio.us links on the right to keep you entertained.

Last night at the Verizon Center

2006-11-07T09:28:00.000-05:00

Last night's game was as exciting as the redskin's football game on sunday. We were down by one (Caps:2 Senators:3) with only a minute left in the last period when just 30 seconds left in the period, the Caps scored a goal and tied it up! Which was pretty damn exciting seeing how the Ottawa Senators were pretty damn skilled at moving around on the ice and scoring most of their points within the first period. With the game in sudden death overtime, it only took another minute and a half when the Caps scored again! It was a pretty fun game, especially for a guy that's not that into hockey to being with.

Etiquette

2006-11-02T12:56:00.000-05:00

The problem of staying in the area that you grew up in is sometimes you're gonna bump into old & familiar faces. I just had an encounter of such. I wasn't entirely sure but I think I bumped into a guy that has been in my class since 6th grade. But here's the thing, he was a complete asshole to me throughout our time from elementary to high school. So I walked on by. I looked straight at him, did a double take, thought long and hard about yelling out his name, but then thought why would I even care to talk to this guy? If it was him. He was completely condescending to me and treated me like a second-class citizen. Was it proper etiquette to say hello? So we could recount and reminisce on the good old days? What good old days? Exactly. I think I made the right decision.

Halloween Spirit

2006-11-02T10:22:00.000-05:00

We did the most old-people thing you could think of on Halloween. We eschewed the kids that came around last year asking for candy by going over to a friend's house that lives in the non-kid apartment areas of Glover Park. Its strange that most of the apartment neighborhoods in NW where working professionals and students live have almost zero trick or treating traffic. We used to live in McLean Gardens a few years ago and I had expected some Halloween foot traffic and was sorely disappointed when there wasn't any.

We went over there to watch a very annoying old school movie called "The Haunting." There was a remake recently with Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones which I didn't see, but from my understanding, it was even more horrible than the original.

It was selected for one reason, it was rated G. Some of the attendees, including me, don't have a stomach for Horror movies. I guess I'd take an annoying movie over a movie that was gonna have me freaking out in the middle of the night when I get up to take a trip to the bathroom.

The benefit to all of this is that we got to keep all the candy that we would've given out that night, and now I feel like a kid again with a bagful of sweets that I can pig out on for the rest of the week. Problem is, I know better to do it because I'd be in a world of hurt after downing a pound of chocolate and sugar in a sitting.

tech blog

2006-11-01T11:17:00.000-05:00

I started up a tech blog yesterday and started posting furiously. I wonder how long this will last

http://observingtech.blogspot.com

Bootlegging Hodgman

2006-10-26T11:08:00.000-04:00

So I don't know if it was kosher or not, but seeing how no one was instructed to put away their cameras and NPR was apparently there taping the event, I shot some video of the event for my brother-in-law. He wasn't willing to make the 5 hour drive from Dallas to see Hodgman in Austin. Maybe this will entice him to haul ass down to Austin now.

Intro & Theme Song

the areas of his expertise

2006-10-25T10:27:00.000-04:00

We went and saw John Hodgman (of NPR, Daily Show, This American Life, and Apple's commercial fame) last night at the warehouse theater.

There was an excellent reading by F.W Thomas about a boy's allowance and the correspondence between him and his father that was very funny. David Rees rants on the ABCs, Thomas Friedman, and his comic presentations were classic. Everything was pretty informal except for Hodgman's introduction. Accompanied by Jonathan Coulton on guitar, it was quite a hilarious send up for all that is Hodgman. If you can catch a reading, by all means, get yourself there.

Twas definitely a good time and made me glad I lived 4 metro stops away rather than an hour's drive away from the city.

We stayed and got our books signed and chatted briefly with him. Seems like a really nice guy, very funy, and very down to earth. He is an expert on all hobo matters indeed.

Brian was there and took a bunch of photos, you can swim over to flickr and take a look.

Update: Just posted some video of the evening (intro and theme song) as well.

The Art of the Hang Out

2006-10-11T22:45:00.000-04:00

"Do you want to come over and play?"

"Me? What would we do?"

"Yeah. I dunno, we could play with LEGOs, or maybe you can bring your Transformers over. If its nice, we can take our bikes out."

"Ok, sure."

And that was it. It was simple. What happened to those days? I used to have what I thought was a small (read 2) close knit group of friends that we vowed to keep that tone even as we grew up. We graduated college, got jobs, and we still said that ambiance wouldn't be corrupted. We went out of our way to preserve it. One of my friends came up with the idea of "Friends Night Out." Which I thought was the dorkiest thing ever.

"Here me out," he said, "I'm trying to carve out a little time where we can keep things like how they were. We can get together, hang out, shoot the shit. It'll be great."

Of course, great ideas are usually only great in theory.

We had scheduled it on thursday night to 1) Not interfere with any potential plans for the weekend and 2) because we'd like to pretend like we started the weekend early.

The first few "FNOs" were chill, but somehow we started scheduling them at fancier and fancier restaurants much to the chagrin of one my friends girlfriend, since she was pissed he wasn't saving his money and spending it on her. Also, scheduling them after work was not conducive to hanging out. Everyone is just reeling from the stress of the week and none of us got our dream jobs out of college, so there was a lot of "welcome to the real world" angst/rage. Things started to begin to unravel after that.

First, they wanted to bring their girlfriends, which I was fine with, except, one of them could give a rats ass she was there. The only reason she was there was because she was completely dependant and couldn't have my friend out of her sight. The other, she couldn't even be bothered to hang out with us because it was Thursday NIGHT! MUST SEE TV! She was a big Friends fan, so yes, she'd rather stay at home and watch a group of actors on tv pretend to be friends rather than go out and make friends.

Thinking back now, why the hell were the girlfriends even there? Both my friends had girlfriends that had nothing more than superficial relationship with their friends. They didn't respect what we were trying to preserve and all they saw was just more reasons to piss away time and money.

I realized though, we were trying to preserve something that passed its expiration date. Hanging out required NO schedules, and here we were trying to fit it into our workdays and responsibilities that have suddenly sprouted now that we had fend for ourselves. Hanging out also didn't require a happy hour, it didn't require a cute girl asking if you would be needing a table for dinner, and it didn't require to leave tip after all was said and done.

I saw this line whilst blog surfing yesterday:

I had one of my first real "grown up" moments the day I realized that there really are only 24 hours in a day, and I had to choose very carefully how I wanted to spend them. - Wil Wheaton

And he's right. We didn't realize it at the time but we were trying to have our cakes and eat it too. You can't be a kid when you're grown up because that just essentially makes you a bum. But we wanted to be kids and still be adults too.

So life was kicking me in the ass to tell me we were growing out of having all the time the world and we were growing out of each other. We had became different people, with different goals, and yet we still clung to the past. It was something we thought was real and not muddled like our lives were at the time. But with every "FNO," was another nail in the coffin with our friendship. For some reason, it accelerated the death of my childhood friendships. We were grasping at sand, and we knew it was a matter of time that it would all slip away.

I don't have a close knit circle of friends these days, I guess they fall by the wayside once you grow up and have too many responsibilities to attend to.

Hanging out has become a rarity to me these days. Sure there are dinner parties, dinners out, happy hours, but that's the thing. Hanging out is based on not having anything to do at all and enjoying it. Having to create an activity to facilitate it, somewhat kills the purity of it. At the same time, trying to enjoy boredom now is like trying to watch old school Transformer cartoons now and thinking it that it does have an incredible story arch and amazing special effects. I guess I grew out of it.

I'm lucky though, because I am able to still experience it sometimes with the few friends I have that get it, with my wife, and sometimes with my family when we're not driving each other nuts.

Failure is a Good Thing

2006-10-09T14:38:00.000-04:00

So I'm not ready to write my essay to NPR for their "This I Believe" series, but today's essay was a good one. Written in the idea that you should fail to learn and grow, because really, what do you learn if you succeed at everything?

“Success is boring. Success is proving that you can do something that you already know you can do… Failure is how we learn.”

Its strange to think back though and realize that most of my failures frustrated the hell out of me. If its true that failures are a good thing why do they have to be like vegetables? You know, they're good for me but given the choice, I'm sure I'd rather just have big bowl of ice cream.

Also, what about successes where you're not sure you can do it? I mean, after failing a million times at not doing something correctly and then finally getting it. Think about the gratification you would get afterwards? Then again, maybe all those preceding trials only making success that much sweeter afterwards and that's what he's talking about.

Jon Carroll wrote the essay and from his picture on NPR's website, he looks like a pretty old dude. Maybe that's why I believe him more because he's probably had a lot more failures than I have had.

Naturally flavored with artificial flavors

2006-10-06T15:28:00.000-04:00

So lately I've been becoming a little paranoid about eating junk food/processed food/fast food. I mean my parents for year have been telling me that its not good to eat such filth but I didn't listen. But now as I scrutinize the package labels these days, what the hell am I putting in my body? I picked up a bottle of Nestea "Peach-flavored" Green Tea with my lunch today because we all know Green Tea is good for you. But what's this? Potassium sorbate? Sodium Benzoate? And EDTA (to preserve that artificial peach taste) along with phosphoric acid?! So along with the phosphoric acid providing me that tangy taste, it can also remove any rust that seems to be lying around my stomach and maybe make my bones a little brittle.

I still drank it though, because I am a pawn in the consumer game of life and I like my junk food, but then the whole mortality question comes into play. I wonder how many chemicals are being pumped through my body right now with all the artificial colors/flavors and preservatives that were added to my tasty but somewhat toxic food?

I've also been thinking about this because we just got into season 4 of Northern Exposure on DVD. There's a character named Mike Monroe, which is played by Anthony Edwards of ER and Top Gun fame, where his body has completely gone haywire due to all the chemicals that we have introduced into the environment. It makes me wonder if one day that I too could start just breaking out and vomiting from OD-ing on "natural tea essence?"

Memories

2006-09-26T13:59:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, because I'm realizing I am getting old and I'm wanting to reflect on my past. When I talk to my parents about the past and I want to know what grandma or grandpa looked like when they were young, all they had to do was pull out the trusty photo album and voila. Or what was that funny thing sis did when she was 3 years old? Bust out the VHS tape for the instant replay.

But now I'm storing all my memories digitally. All my photos for the past 6 years have been either taken with a digital camera or scanned from a photo and stored on a hard drive while I've lost track of the original print. 65% of the video I've shot are on miniDV tapes and the other part are stored on analog 8mm tapes which only have a shelf life between 10 and 20 years. Which I need to store digitally before the tapes go bad. But where am I storing them? All on a hard drive of course. Along with little text clips from my past, memorable emails, college papers, and other intangible bits that I want to keep around to reflect on.

And what if this hard drive fails? Or, just like that photo album, what if it, god forbid, gets consumed in a fiery death? What are my back up options? How will I be able to safeguard my invaluable intangible digital copies of my memories?

I was reading this very nerdy but needed blog post on storing data and I'm getting paranoid. No one thinks about this until its too late and all they can do is sit there and cry about how they've lost everything. Prevention is key, but with no clear solutions on how to protect myself from this event, what the hell can I do?

Even if I stockpile cheap hard drives to back up these precious bits and bytes, there's no guarantee they'll last. Even worse is that the amount of things I need to safeguard is growing exponentially with the evolution of megapixels and high-def video. Which means, while I might have say hypothetically 20 gigs or even 80 gigs of stuff that I don't want to part with, it'll probably grow in terms of resolution as well as volume with every passing day that I want to document my memories with newer technology. No one has a good answer, and well, even if they did, there's no way to trust it.

Arrogance

2006-09-20T21:57:00.000-04:00

There's a guy I know. He's young, a decade younger than me, and he thinks he knows more than I do. He called me arrogant. Its funny, because he treats me like I'm completely naive. Like my experience has blinded me to what his idealism makes him see so clearly. Unfortunately idealism is just another prism itself. He remind me of myself when I was his age. I was so ignorant to believe that I didn't need any type of experience to enrich me. I knew all there was to the world and what could experience do but cloud things up. I was invincible. Man was I full of myself. And here is this guy, under the same notion I was under. And he thinks that I'm the fool now. I guess he'll live and learn. I just don't like it when he talks shit about me like he's better than me when he hasn't even lived yet. I mean, when I was in my twenties, he was still in elementary school learning about fractions.

I sound like a crotchety old man. Maybe with age, I've gained some humility to admit to myself that yes, maybe I am arrogant at times. Although I wasn't trying to be arrogant when I dealt with him. And if I was, I'd rather be called on it than be talked about behind my back.

In memory

2006-09-18T12:59:00.000-04:00

On saturday we took a drive to visit Donny's, my childhood friend, grave site. He died today, the 18th. Its been seven years since the car accident. My life is so different now compared to who and what I was back then. I went to visit him because well, as much as it was to pay respect to him, it was also for me and my memories of him and myself growing up.

He used to live just down the street from me for most of my childhood in our little quaint suburban neighborhood. Reston was a much more sleepy planned community back in the 80s and 90s before the huge tech boom. In the mornings, starting from 6th grade til we stopped taking the bus in high school, he'd walk up the street, knock on my door, I'd stumble out of bed, throw some clothes on and run and catch up with him. If I ever wanted to hang out with him, I'd jump on my bike, coast out of my driveway, down the slope of our street that bended towards the left and I'd be in front of his house. When we got older, he'd drive by my house and always give two honks from his pickup to let us know he was passing by.

Now, he lives up the street from me. I get in the car, drive a block over to Georgia Ave. and drive north for a few miles and cross into Maryland, and drive til we hit the cemetary on the right hand side. Its weird to think that fate somehow put me relatively close to him after all these years. I'm the closest one living to him. His parents have moved to North Carolina, his sister is in the Virgin Islands.

We had grown apart towards the end of his life. We had a falling out during college that never healed all the way. We just became different people and had different lives. After college, we kept in touch and would get together every few weeks or when our schedules weren't too hectic. We were probably on track to becoming good friends again. Then the accident happened.

I had tried to go and visit him 2 years ago around this time and while we did find the cemetary ok, I couldn't for the life of me find his burial site. We roamed around for a good hour looking at every name on each grave site trying to find him. We couldn't even inquire at the front office since it was closed on account that it was sunday. It was a fruitless day, and I felt defeated that I was letting him down because I couldn't even find his burial site.

This time, we got there, and roamed for 10 minutes til I decided that I'd go to the front office since it was open. I didn't know what I'd feel like when we finally found the spot but when we did, I was just overcome with emotion. I guess I'm not good at dealing with grief and loss because I just started welling up. We just stood there for a good 5 or 10 minutes and just a flood of memories came coming back.

I remembered with great clarity the time around funeral. It was a testement to what kinda guy he was by the overflowing amount of people that showed up. I don't know if I'd be able to fill half of a room he had at his services. I remember seeing his body at the wake, and how lifeless he seemed. I had gone up with a couple of my friends. We kneeled next to the coffin and I told him, "Good bye Don. I always remember telling you "see ya later" everytime you left but now this will truly be the last time, so good bye." After that I broke down. I don't recall what happened to my friends, but I couldn't take it and had to leave the room.

What made me sad that most of my childhood/adolescent memories and Donny's were quite intertwined and I'd never be able to reminisce with him and talk about the old times and have that understanding of what we went through and the things we experienced. I miss my childhood friend, and I am sad that he would never have the opportunity to grow up and enjoy all the things that he should've been able to have. I miss the fact that we'll never be able to reconcile some of our issues and be the great friends we once were. He was a kind soul and good person, and willl continually be missed. Rest in peace Don.

Imitation can get you only so far, and you sir, are no Black Dahlia

2006-09-15T22:26:00.000-04:00

Dear Brian DePalma,

We get it, you like Hitchcock. You like him so much you want to make films that you hope people will say, "yes, that was a very Hitchcockian film." Which someone will giggle because the non-word "cockian" was uttered. But guess what Mr. DePalma, you're not Hitch. It doesn't matter how many foreshadowing elements you put into your film so you can flash back a la M. Night all throughout the third act doesn't make you a brilliant filmmaker. You tried it in Mission Impossibe 1 and you left most of the country uttering WTF? And now, in the Black Dahlia, you just tried to turn up the volume with even more convoluted flashbacks and pushing Josh Hartnett's limited acting envelope to the point where all he can do is scrunch up his forehead to look more angsty.

Speaking of M. Night, he ran right by and grabbed that title you've been striving for all along. "This generation's Hitchcock." So yeah, sorry man, its time to stop trying to be something your not. Just be happy that you're making movies and not like the rest of us stuck in cubicle jobs writing entries in our blogs about how we wasted 2 hours of our life wishing the studios would stop blowing smoke up our ass about how a movie "directed by Brian DePalma who brought us great films as Scarface and Carrie" is coming to a theater near us. Yes, you made a few great films that were good because maybe you weren't trying to be Hitch so hard. So maybe, just maybe you can go back to doing that and stop surrounding yourself with guys that say, "yes Mr. DePalma, if you insert a 10 minute dollying roving shot, it will add a lot intensity to this act!" By the way, the long scene at the beginning of Snake Eyes, was interesting, but really, sometimes those scenes are the same scenes that my parents used to call my home movies "drawing out time to waste it." There is something to say about straightforward exposition rather than the lackadasical head scratching ones you seem to come up with.

I say this because I care, and so I can feel like I've spent my somewhat hard-earned cash on something I can feel satisfied with. Thanks.

A wannabe filmmaker,
me.

Projection

2006-09-13T18:06:00.000-04:00

"You know what problem with most people are?" Chris asked me.

"No," I answered.

"They like to blame others for what they're actually guilty of."

He said it with such a holier than thou quality that I didn't take with any offense, because realistically, we've both gotten on that soapbox before. What I didn't realize that he would eventually become the person that he complained to me about. Or maybe he was just really identifying it with in himself. Its not like he ever did anything about it.

Its funny that we live in a day and age where people give you credit if you can identify your own problems. You know, G.I. Joe style, because, "knowing is half the battle." But really, just because I'm aware of a flaw in myself, can I really fix it? The pessimist in me says maybe its a losing battle, but who knows, I could be wrong.

Me stalking the stalkers

2006-09-12T22:40:00.000-04:00

Am I to surmise that the Creative Artists Agency is randomly clicking through the dcblogs.com index to find talent? Ok, maybe that's the optimist in me talking, maybe its just some random intern bored outta their mind at work waiting for that big break from their 10 page treatment about the next big coming of age story. Or perhaps daddy's little girl is visiting Beverly Hills before she flies back to her posh apartment in Georgetown and was waiting to see him and decided to visit dcblogs. Oh, the possibilities are endless.

Notes on hard lessons

2006-09-12T22:04:00.000-04:00

A few things I wanted to jot down for my own reference:

People always change after high school, most people were idealistic one time or another with romantic relationships, I had them for friendships. This was based on the arrogance and narcissistic notion that I was a good judge of character and well, I deserved good friends. Man, that was a rude awakening that I'm still reeling from.
Whatever idealstic life philosophies I've formed without empirical evidence to back up would eventually come back to bite me in the ass. I guess that's just human nature though, we fill in the blanks of what "right" should be with things we've learned. Reality is there to remind me that I don't know much of anything, and life experience might help me shed more light, but in the end, humility and wonderment should be a driving force.
People do change, as per #1, but they sure as hell don't need my meddling to change, especially when they don't ask for it. Its a hard concept to swallow and grasp because I always feel the need to tell people what they're doing wrong in their lives when really, I should just be telling myself what I'm doing wrong in my own life. Lady D once said to me, "I do my best to focus on my own little garden and not others." She's right. Simple to say, hard to do.
Love in its purest form isn't one for the fairy tale books. Its a complex beast that has a million nuances both good and bad. I guess that's part of the idealism thing again. Damn all those romantic comedies for screwing with me. Damn you Nora Ephron!

Someone has commented to me that my writing is too heavy and depressing. Maybe she's right, perhaps I should stop being such a stick in the mud...nah.

Think Writings

2006-09-11T08:18:00.000-04:00

There was a time where I did not like writing. I'm touching on this because I actually had another highschool (one in an unlimited series) dream last night. In fact, I remember distinctly throughout most of my educational career, I hated it. It required looking up facts to regurgitate something I supposedly learned. There was an exception to this though. I had a class called "American Civ" which basically was a combination of english and history during eleventh grade and it was taught by two teachers that I thought were pretty innovative for their time and I respect very much to this day. They had a daily exercise of giving us fifteen minutes out of our 2 hour class to just write. What about? Basically whatever was on our minds. Sometimes they'd give us a subject and just say go, but what was refreshing was they wanted us to come up with something original and unique. They called them "think writings."

I didn't get it initially. I was used to the hard and fast rules of what you need to do when writing. What do you mean I don't have to have an opening paragraph followed by supportive ones and concluding with a summary? It was too much. I was used to journaling but looking at my old journals, that basically boiled down to a recount of what happened that day or stupid friend drama. Never was it about what kind of opinion I had on a situation, event, or a person. But I slowly got it, and I guess that's why I felt motivated later in life to jot down what's on my mind. So thanks Mr. Mack & Ms. Barber, you definitely made an impression.

Back from Boston

2006-09-05T14:39:00.000-04:00

We took the weekend driving up to Boston and after spending a little time there, there are a few things I need to hunt down in DC.

1) Ramen. No, not the cheap kind most college students lived on but authentic Japanese ramen. We went to eat at Ken's Ramen Noodle House in Boston and I am hooked. After looking up on yelp.com and chowhound.com I've come across a few leads that I'll have to investigate further upon.

2) A place that serves moderately priced lobster rolls. This might be a pipe dream since we're not that abundant on the lobsters like they are up in New England, and I know Legal Seafoods has one since I had one of those at their Test Kitchen in S. Boston.

I realized though that these goals are too food-centric, and well, maybe its also time to start expanding the list of hobbies because most of the time we spent not eating was walking off what we ate. Which isn't a bad thing because we got to take in a lot of the city sights and walk & talk with friends but it made me also realize that I don't have a lot of concrete go-to things I want/need to do on a regular basis besides veg out on the net and do house chores. Some people travel to golf or visit museums and most of the time, we travel to eat. Which I guess is a good component, but I think I'm slowly turning into my parents because they plan their vacations around what and where they can eat and I'm not comfortable with that.

What is contradictory is I also want to start visiting more Bed & Breakfast places since we had a enjoyable time stopping by Gettybsurg for an evening and we stayed at the Brick House Inn. No we were not there for the KKK event, but just to take in the local flavor (yes, more eating) and also to just relax and hang out. It was fun, and I wouldn't mind doing that again. Makes me think of the movie, Flirting with Disaster, where they stayed at the B&B that were accused of not being "B&B people!"

This must be the slippery slope of becoming an old fart when I actually seek out and enjoy just going to a place for some peace and quiet.

Yousendit becomes yousuckit

2006-08-20T19:25:00.000-04:00

My brother-in-law had requested all the photos we had taken at the wedding we attended last weekend and I was glad to oblige him. Seeing how the combination of photos and videos were almost 500 megabytes of data, I fired up my trust browser and navigated to yousendit.com only to find out they've bamboozled me. I had come to love and use the yousendit since anytime I needed to send a file attachment out that is larger than 10 megabytes and smaller than one gigabyte. It was the best go-to solution. But now, they've suddenly scaled their ceiling back from one gig to just a hundred megabytes! So now, I have to pay for the use of something that was once free. I understand that when you start up a business, you have to sustain it by selling services, but they're pulling a classic textamerica.

Ok, so its not as bad as TA but I am annoyed that what I once got free, I only get a tenth free what I was once getting. I'm hoping box.net can come to the rescue.

Update: Box.net isn't much better, I keep getting errors thrown using their drag and drop java tool. I've found http://www.mailbigfile.com/ and hope that it will be a stop-gap solution. Seeing how they used to offer 1 gigabyte uploads before and now have scaled back to 512MB emails, I'm not counting for them to keep the ceiling that high for long either. At least they haven't completely punked out like yousendit.com.

New look

2006-08-16T15:05:00.000-04:00

I switched the template and gave my site a redesign. Ok, basically its still laid out the same but it looks different. We just got back from a mini-vacation and I'm ready for another one. I'm not dreading coming to work, but I'm starting to contemplate whether this is the best way to spend my time by sitting at a desk trying to figure what the hell I'm doing here.

I keep having flashes of this scene from the movie Chasing Amy and how one of the characters gets into this huge argument about his station in life. I never had a clear vision of my station in life, and well, if you don't stand up make your own choices, someone in life makes that choice for you. I guess I'm learning that the hard way. My parents always extolled the virtues of having a solid/safe job to fall back on. But what do you do when you are sick of the fallback job? I have to preface that I am not vomiting up bile because I have to come to work everyday and get paid a nice salary to do a pretty dull and yet not too complex job. No, that would be a spoiled thing to say, but I guess I'm saying after working 8+ years in a job that I never really intended to keep in the first place, I have to ask myself, what the hell am I doing? I keep telling myself that I need to re-evaluate things, but really, its difficult to be creative when you've been told what to do all your life. This is my current and ongoing personal obstacle among many others that I'm not sure how to deal with.

Airport mania and Central Time

2006-08-11T10:11:00.000-04:00

What a difference an hour makes. We're on CST right now after wading through that was a mess yesterday at the airport. Apparently this was only the case in Reagan National Airport. My sister in law apparently took about 2 whole minutes to get through DFW's security on the way to her vacation in Mexico. I got to see her about 2 whole minutes in the terminal while we were swapping stories and to pick up the car to get out of DFW.

Our story to get through DCA was not as nice and clean. We got up at 6:30am to Alison Starling and her serious news anchor voice of breaking news. Stupid UK bomb plot made us repack, and also leave an extra 30 minutes early to the airport. Once we got there, it was like being at the DMV all over again. There's that line in Seinfeld about 98% of the people out in the world being un-datable, he's right. And the other 98%? They're complete retards as well. I'm usually tolerant of situations like that but I guess combined with waking up early, TSA screaming at us every 2 minutes while we waited in snaking lines, it all just got to me. On top of which some really pot-bellied tall guy was crowding me at the bagel stand after we got through an hour or so waiting in security and he kept brushing his fat tummy up against my arm.

I was glad once we got to Texas. No more mass hysteria, no crowded masses.

When you're still tied to Eastern Standard Time, and you wake up in Central Time, its kinda refreshing. I don't feel like a slacker waking up at 7:30am EST thinking I missed work, because really, its still damn early here! Too bad its only a temporary thing and if I stayed here for more than a week, everything gets reset and I'm back to square one. I guess I'll have to just enjoy my temporary newfound lease on life for the next few days.

Mario doesn't change

2006-08-09T12:13:00.000-04:00

There's an article in the post today about them trying to quantify the Super Mario phenomenon. It makes me realize that I've been playing those games since I was 13 and well, Mario has been there for a big chunk of my life. He's sorta like Mickey Mouse where he never ages, he never changes. Basically the opposite of what the buddhist mantra is: "The only permanence in the world is impermanence."

I've been thinking about this on and off the past year or so, about how easily I bought into our cultural institutions. Its sorta like going to a diner and finding your necessary ketchup/catsup, salt & pepper shakers, and your 3 or 4 varieties of sweetners on the table. Its there, it should always be there. Lately there's thought of the production of all said condiments coming from multiple factories to the delivery men and the waiters/waitresses that have to set it all up. There's a lot of unseen effort to keep that idea alive. An idea I guess I've always sorta taken for granted. And if there isn't any Equal or Splenda at the table, I'm like WTF? Where's my quasi-sugar?

Speaking of which, there's a lot of change going on this past week that has gone undetected on my radar. We had decided to take a walk around the Columbia Heights neighborhood (detailed in the wife's blog) and I can see how some of the longtime residents are resistant to the idea of change. After all, change might be good to some, but not to those with low property taxes, low rent bills, or someone that had a nice view of the blue sky only to have it blocked off by a hulking big box department store in the works. I for one am not one of them when it comes to city living but I am like that with my job at the moment.

I'm being forced to learn a lot of new things on the job lately, more so at a rapid rate and its requiring me to adjust and change a lot mentally. To the point that I'm being very resistant to it and I'm questioning why I am being resistant towards it? Maybe that's my sub-conscious self telling me either a) I'm a lazy son of a bitch or b) its time for a career re-evalutaion with possible plans for a shift. Either way, I guess I'm going to have to face the change with both eyes open.

Read More on Mario

iPod my hybrid

2006-08-04T13:43:00.000-04:00

So I didn't do a fancy schmancy job of ipodding our civic, but after reading these instructions, I was able to hook our car up to have an auxillary audio jack. It took 2 trips to RadioShack this morning and a few tools but its done. So now, any ipod or mp3 player can be used to blast tunes through our car speaker system. I actually hooked up my walkman sony ericsson cellphone for the maiden test and it sounded sweet! It only took about 30 minutes to do too, so even better. I feel so elite.

WAMU and the Dentist office.

2006-08-04T11:48:00.000-04:00

Listening to WAMU in the mornings, I usually enjoy the NPR created content alongside WAMU's news reporting except one thing that really gets on my nerves. The smooth jazz. Don't get me wrong, I love the hot jazz from the 20s and 30s but if I wanted to listen to smooth jazz, I'd switch to 105.9. Everytime Bill Redlin segues into traffic reports with Joyce Nielson (another gripe of mine I'll get to later) or back into NPR content, there's the smooth jazz. Its the horrible type of smooth jazz that you only hear on the muzak systems when you're in the waiting rooms of most dental offices. Just before you get a bunch of really sharp instruments poking into your gums and flesh. So please WAMU, no more cheesy musical segues.

Speaking of WAMU related topics, I also find it a bit annoying that they're trying to push their traffic person onto us like she's going to be the next Lisa Baden. There can be only one! To top it off, Joyce Nielson is not as bubbly as Ms. Baden. I'm not saying she's a bad traffic announcer but don't try to hype something she's not. Ok, we get it, she's going to be doing the traffic everyday. Yes, we can count on her to deliver the traffic like back in the good old days of Walt Starling on WTOP, but we don't have to get so overly excited about it. I kinda miss Gerry whatshisname from NBC4 on WAMU because the way he signed off always made my wife think he was calling himself a geriatric.

social network websites 2.0

2006-08-02T13:04:00.000-04:00

Back in 2003, I got an invite from a friend to join friendster. I joined and found the site while interesting, completely slow and unusable. Still, somehow, everyone I knew had joined and I thought it would be fun to see the six degrees of seperation. At the time Friendster was running at "beta" which meant most of their code sucked and their servers were running at molasses. By the time they figured out that they had to dump their horrible JSP written code for a more efficient PHP design, in the process firing one of their employees for saying the old code was crap, it was too late. Everyone had jump shipped to one of the Friendster clones. Most made the transition to myspace.

Now, I'm on myspace, poking around and I'm having deja vu all over again. Its like the internet got re-introduced again, but to all the non-tech savvy people. Before, you had to know HTML, figure out how to host your "home page" but now its all done for you. Its internet for dummies that lets them carve out a little chunk of the net to call, uh...my space. However, the site is CRAP! Its like a massive mobile trailer park. Meanwhile, friendster got their crap together and built out their neighborhood to be like a nice little fenced in suburban community, albeit a deserted one.

There was one big difference between Friendster and MySpace. Rupert Murdoch. He paid 580 million bucks to buy MySpace and now MySpace is ranked in the same league as Yahoo and Google when it comes to net traffic. And yet, their code is horrible. I get an error page 25% of the time I do something on the site. And their server load-balancing is also horrible. It takes 20 seconds to minutes (eternity in net time) to load a page on a broadband connection. I heard rumblings months ago about how they were migrating the site code to something like ASP.NET.

And yet, it still sucks. I wonder who will eventually overtake myspace? Or maybe its here to stay since it has so much "old media" money backing it. Some had said that they're basically trying to set myspace up to be the new MTV of the net generation. Seeing how we're in the middle of Internet Bubble 2.0, I guess we'll have to wait and see. And I'll have to suffer through using myspace if I want to keep in touch with most people that have decided to set up home there.

5 years ago, pictures and some reflection.

2006-08-01T15:41:00.000-04:00

Photos from 5 years ago. Circa July 2001 to September 2001.

Its amazing. I am going through some of my photos from 5 years ago and so much has changed. Not just externally and but internally. I was talking to an old net-geek friend about how we've both become different people than who we were. I think back when I was 26 and I was amazed how unhappy I was. I was searching the ground for something that was never going to be found. It makes me think of some obscure Electronic song lyrics:

"It happens all the time
but not when you're around
why do some people shine
while others search the ground
it's like walking in the snow
it's happening right now
it's got to be somehow"

I would have to think that it was at the height of my realization that I wasn't happy with my life. I had spent probably a good portion of my 20's agonizing over why shit wasn't popping off like it should. (I know I know, I've been listening to too much Kanye West lately.) But things weren't popping off like they should, but I was walking around with a huge heap of entitlement issues. Why wasn't I living the life that I was destined for? It sounds so much like horseshit now, but I realized slowly the only person I could blame myself. Had someone asked me 5 years ago what my 5 year plan was, I would've shrugged and said, "I dunno." But at the same token, I knew I didn't want to keep feeling like complete crap anymore and blaming others for my existence. Not my parents, not other people that let me down. Its funny that my talks with Ms. Lady D have sorta put that in perspective because she's right. I'm not a passive participant in the game called MY life. I shouldn't have been looking at the ground, at others, or even around. I should've been looking within and proactively asking why am I hurting? After all, its MY life, so its up to ME to adjust accordingly. Of course to do that would mean owning up to things. Taking responsibility.

Its funny because the word "responsibility" to me used to only mean one thing: homework. It meant you did your homework, and if anyone that knows me or has kept up with my writings will know that I hate homework. Of course, responsibility now means something completely different. It means ownership, it means its up to you to continue digging up or down in your life and knowing full well you're the one holding the shovel.

I think that epiphany for me didn't happen til I turned 26, and even then, probably a year after for it to sink in and for me to take some control of my situation and move beyond that. And I'm still moving beyond it, and while I can still see it in the rearview mirror, its slowly getting smaller. Life didn't turn out how what I thought I was entitled too, and for that I'm grateful. Otherwise, how would I ever have learned to appreciate the life that I have now? Who knows, maybe I am still blindly fumbling in the dark, but hopefully I'm a little less blind than I was 5 years ago. I hope I am.

iphoto hodgepodge

2006-07-31T23:29:00.000-04:00

snapshots of my life

random photos i picked outta my library to upload and share.

flickd

2006-07-27T22:24:00.000-04:00

I just saw this on the flickr home page:
The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness. - Friedrich Nietzsche

And yet, we live in the land of excess. Life in America is all about more. More servings, more calories, more fat, more money, more land, more power, more sex, more toys, more drama, more drugs, more politics, more drinks, more control, more girls gone wild, more of everything! And yet, we're no where near happy than we could be with the more.

My grandmother turned 90 last week, and she's probably the happiest she's been in probably most of her life. Is it because she's been through much and scaled her personal mountains and declared her personal triumphs? I hope it is, or maybe she's come to a point in her life when she realizes, that yes, the time is ticking down, and the only thing you should do is enjoy the ride.

I remember as a kid that when we went on family vacations, as the time drew near the end of the vacation, I started trying to savor every moment more, because I knew, come next week, all I could do was daydream about last week.

This also seems to be a problem with the present though, because I realized if I try to be cognizant of trying to savor any moment, I lose that zen moment of actually enjoying myself. Perhaps happiness is nothing more the ability to reflect back and say, "yeah...good times."

My wife had a book that I thumbed through when we first met titled, "Happiness is a Serious Problem" where it postulated that people always go out of their way to seek fun rather than happiness. I'm not sure, doesn't fun memories basically eventually distill into happy memories? I guess I'm confused coming from an asian background where "the pursuit of happiness" is nowhere on the list of priorities, its more like be a dutiful child, keep the face/reputation intact and do things that gain you more respect and prestige. Or that's the yellow brick road you're supposed to walk to find out at the end that maybe, just maybe, there is an all powerful wizard of oz that will whisk you back to Kansas.

The idea of freedom in this country combined with the "pursuit of happiness" has more or less confused me, and completely effed me up. Which brings me back to my conversation over the campfire, and perhaps, the whole point is to pepper your life with fun times while you're pushing yourself through the shit/meat of life to clear your own path, so when you're at 90, you can look back and say, I made that, and no one else could have, and no one can ever take that away from me.

Wentworth in the big D

2006-07-26T13:08:00.000-04:00

So we're going to Dallas next month for a wedding, what a surprise to find out that they will be shooting one of my favorite new TV shows from last season right in and around North Texas! Prison Break apparently has set up shop around the Dallas/Ft. Worth area to start shooting scenes for the upcoming August 21st season premiere. Sweet! I wonder if we'll happen to run into some of the shady cast members. The Dallas Morning News has a whole PR article about it.

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Want vs Need

2006-07-25T15:11:00.000-04:00

Last night around dinner with Lady Danger, we all talked about life and how we wanted things to be like, and how effed up things are.

How apt that on the way home after dropping her off, they started playing this Rolling Stones song on the radio:

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need, ah yes...

Ah yes, yes indeed.

Sometimes dinner with people you care about is all you really do need, even if the world is pretty messed up.

Work Ethic

2006-07-24T12:05:00.000-04:00

There was a really interesting segment on Bob Edwards Weekend over the weekend about slacker-dom and the people that have embraced it. They were talking about Thoreau, Whitman, even Jeff Spicoli and Dante from Clerks. I wish they had a copy of the audio online since I didn't get to listen to the whole thing but I can't seem to find it.

So maybe I wasn't raised with the puritan work ethic ingrained into me. It dawned on me at a very young age that most of the homework they were doling out to us was busy work. To the detriment of my grades, I should've not had this realization since most of the classes I had that based 50% of my grades on homework, I did poorly in. There were a few classes that I aced, all because our grades were completely based on tests and quizzes.

We were watching 60 minutes last night and they had rebroadcasted a story I had seen a few months ago about how the whole country is working their asses off. (You can also watch it here.) We're commuting earlier, staying at the office later, and we've got IMs, crackberries, round the clock teleconferencing, etc.

"Oh, I have the absolute bare minimum, I think. I have two cell phones, a personal and …," Christina explained.

"That's the bare minimum, America. Two cell phones," Joe interrupted.

Its funny because I was thinking, these people, they would be working their asses off regardless of how much technology has invaded our life or not. I guess its easy to blame technology either way, seeing how most of the gadgets I own are basically to facilitate my slacker-dom. I can become more of a couch potato and lump by sitting on the couch to watch my sleek TV, surf the net on my shiny powerbook, or play hours of Tetris on my Nintendo DS.

"The downside, however, is that oftentimes we really don't have substantive conversations when we come home. We will be sitting on our couch, each doing work," his wife says.

It turns out Joe and Christina e-mail and instant-message each other, even if they are at home.

So take away all that tech, I'd probably be lounging by the pond while everyone else is toiling away in the woods. At the same time though, since I'm not married to my job, I'm glad I'm married to my wife. We get to see each other usually by 5pm and spend time together rather than with our work.

"Well, that’s what I mean, that's the downside. It would be nice to have a conversation even once a week and not be, I mean, really be concentrating and listening to each other. But we've got one eye on our computers," Christina replied.

Once a week? Are you kidding me? Maybe its good that I came to the realization that work is not the end-all be-all of my life at such a young age. What are we going to do after work today? We're going to enjoy some half-off pasta in Dupont Circle!

DC Crime emergency

2006-07-21T09:07:00.000-04:00

Its good to see that the Po-Po is doing things to make me feel like they've got my back. I got a call from the 4th district yesterday from a detective following up on my stolen bikes. Which I guess is something new to me, seeing how when we first moved in 2 years ago, and someone broke into our Jeep and stole the radio, it took the cops 3 hours before they even showed up at the house to take a report. There was also no follow up. I guess that's because there was no "crime emergency" back then.

Of course the detective also told me that I should probably not be expecting them to find my bikes, so yeah, I think this was just to complete that extra form they all get to say, "yes, I put in a little more effort because the Chief wants the citizens feeling that we're on the case."

NBC4's breaking headline, "Adult ATVs"

2006-07-20T09:46:00.000-04:00

NBC4 was running probably one of the most bonehead news pieces yesterday that they were promoting the hell out of. The dangers of children riding on ATVs! I mean, really, if you're that evolutionarly stunted to think its a good idea to let your 6 year old get on an ATV, well, then probably its best that your genes don't get reintroduced into the gene pool. Liz Crenshaw must've been having a slow newsday to think up that piece, or her producer. I usually prefer it when she does the "does it really do that?" pieces that test out those "As Seen on TV!" products. Like, does the Sweep N Mop really work? And do we really get a free lifetime supply of replacement heads?

What cracked the wife up though on what happened last night on the eleven o'clock news. She also made it a point for me to point out in my blog since it involved her favorite love-to-hate local weatherman, Bob Ryan. They were going to commercial with lead-out of the "Adult ATV" story coming right up, and Bob, how's the weather coming along? "Talk about Adult! We've got some adult weather coming to you too!" Flash to George Michael about to go into his "coming up in sports" but then instead, we got a confused and I'm paraphrasing, "what the hell are you talking about Bob?" To which Bob Ryan tried to salvage by fumbling around and saying, "Uh, well I was trying to keep with the theme!" Cue the wife's schadenfreude.

anhedonia

2006-07-19T14:19:00.000-04:00

I just learned a new word today. (definition somewhere linked on the sidebar daily clicks) Its an interesting word, almost as good as schadenfreude. Thinking about it, growing up is a mild form of anhedonia because really, the things I've grown to enjoy as a kid, well, they just don't do it for me these days. I remember I'd spend hours just sprawled out on the living room carpet or kitchen floor zooming my little HotWheels cars around. Those were simple times, and I guess it was a simple pleasure. These days, its been hard to experience simple pleasures. Its all about setup, before we can experience these pleasures. I have to be at a specific place, at a specific time with specific people to be able to enjoy a "simple pleasure."

Then again, in the process, I've also created new simple pleasures. Like this morning after we got into the car and my wife and I started reiterating lines from the SNL sketch "Two A-Holes at a Travel Agency."

The only reason I found out about this word is because I was googling around for the word "islomane." After seeing it on boingboing.net, and realizing one of their bloggers basically left the U.S. to live in Rarotongo and then became completely disillusioned with living on a tropical island. Which is ironic since he was supposedly someone completely in love with the idea of islands. Probably best that he did it, and not me. I was becoming pretty bored in the Bahamas after awhile even though I was somewhat of an islomane before I ever stepped foot on an island. I guess the dreamy idea of something is always better than the gritty reality of it. There's only so many times I could go to the beach and lounge by the pool. Which is the spoiled side of things, I also saw the people that actually had to make a living and work there, and it was kinda depressing. I thought it would be paradise, but like our driver said on the way to the airport, "once it becomes your backyard, you don't really notice it." Which can probably be said for living in DC and all the monuments and attractions around that I rarely take advantage of. Reminds me of a New Order lyric, "it was always special, it was like water down the drain."

So perhaps its good that there are lulls in between the good stuff in life, otherwise, I'd probably become completely anhedonic.

Foresight

2006-07-14T10:53:00.000-04:00

I watched Syriana for the first time last night. It was quite epic inn scope and it did make me feel like some of the problems in my life are quite petty in comparison. It also did a good job of dishing a lot of guilt onto me. Guilt in the sense that the comfortable life we have in this country is built on the backs of other people's suffering and violence in the world. It also made me think that we as a society don't have the ability to see the consequences of our actions until its to a point of crisis. I haven't seen "An Inconvenient Truth" yet, but M told me that there's this bit...

M (1:25:34 PM): anyways, theres a bit on there about a frog in hot water.
M (1:25:48 PM): if you put a frog in a pot of hot water, the frog will leap out.
M (1:26:11 PM): but if you put him in the water before it's hot, and then slowly raise the temperature.. he'll get cooked.

And I guess that's the human condition too. We don't do anything until there's impending doom. I don't really know what to make of the situation in the Middle East right now. I guess its because I don't have enough diverse friends to share with me their perspectives, so all I know is what I get from the news. Its strange that just when things seem to be looking for the area that shit gets thrown down and then suddenly everything is thrown back into turmoil. Dr. P and I were talking about it this morning and while he points to religion, I really just think its more basic than that. Its selfishness. When I look around, selfishness seems to be the main motivator of people, but at least most know their limits. They don't go overboard to the detriment of others. And if they do? I guess that's what we're seeing play out in large parts of the world.

Meanwhile I get to enjoy our supposed calm that most don't realize is really borrowed time, I guess. I realize I'm lucky and I'm trying to appreciate the fact that I'm afforded the opportunity to look inward and don't have to struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over my head. I mean, I do have to keep a pretty dull job to do that but its nowhere the level of the strife and struggle my parents went through when they were kids in the motherland which was a third-world or undeveloped country.

I find its strange that I'm living in the world's superpower capital and yet, I trudge along with my little life and really having no effect on the grand scheme of things. Sure I guess I know people that are but I guess I'm feeling a bit insignificant and also lacking a lot of foresight. The only thing I can think of that has shown some foresight is my wife's push to get a hybrid car 2 years ago. With a barrel of oil today pushing another new high at 78 bucks and all the new turmoil in the middle east, at least we're doing something to 1)emit less carbon dioxide and 2)fill up less on dino-juice.

I guess this isn't a happy return to the blog, but at least I felt like writing something.

Blog Hiatus

2006-07-06T12:48:00.000-04:00

I think I'm going to go on a hiatus for a bit. No motivation to write, and very little to write about. Its the summer, so sue me. Hopefully I'll pick it up again in a few days or weeks. Whichever I feel like it.

Too much damn rain.

2006-06-28T10:50:00.000-04:00

B had asked me if it was really raining or if it was just another liberal media bias hyping up a non-story. Well, safe to say, the rain and flooding the last few days apparently is one for the record books. So, yes, its been effin' wet. This was light rain I captured yesterday with the trusty camera phone.

Friends, the Internet, and how things have changed.

2006-06-24T17:46:00.000-04:00

So the slashdot comments got to me on the post about Internet to Blame for Lack of Close Friends

This comment was something that I wanted to save for reference, because it does feel and sound so true.

I find that the hollowness of American social life is not only due to the Internet, but to a growing American utilitarianism and sense of entitlement that stretches into personal relationships.

Friends and would-be lovers alike are more and more forming and maintaining friendships on the basis of "What is this person doing for me right now?"

If someone isn't making them a profit, or is (gasp) taking their time or effort without a mechanically measurable payoff of some kind, people are only too ready these days to "kick them to the curb" and look for friends who are profitable or represent a measurable gain of some kind, whether in prestige or job prospects or exclusive memberships or exploitable expertise/skills.

This mentality of "everything has a price and can be calculated as a cost-benefit" has already ruled American material life for years and led to a kind of spiritual bankruptcy that leads to cults, sappy new-ageism, under/overeducation, and other strange social pathologies and now it is polluting our social lives as well.

When everyone is busy being a self-interested climber in their relationships, is is any wonder that nobody seems to be able to find non-selfish-climber friends? When everyone is busy sensing that they are entitled to their opinion, their time, their wishes, their preferences without the need for discussion or compromise, is it any wonder that people suddenly find that no-one is willing to compromise or have patience with them?

It gets to the point that you socialize on the Internet merely because the stakes are lower. You're less likely to get screwed or hurt or exploited and at the same time you can justify the time expenditure to others because "spending time online" appeals more to the protestant ethic of endless "useful" labor than does a phrase like "hanging out with some friends at the bar."

People are working all the time, their social relations have now become part of work too, calculated like work, and so they are finding that relationships feel like work and are subject to all of the risks and pitfalls that occur in the workplace.

The solutions? Stop bringing work home, set aside time to be "home," don't try to measure what other people are doing for you, only what you are doing for other people, and try not to take it personally when people "kick you to the curb" for not being productive enough or razz you for being a "slacker" and not leaving work at 8:30 PM to bring it home and pound on it with some climber friends from the office until 1:30 AM while calling it a "social life."

Robbed or as the cop put it, "Theft 1"

2006-06-23T09:37:00.000-04:00

Ok, so, yes we got robbed by the same guy just 10 hours after I saw him trying to break-in and let him go. He stole 2 bikes that I had chained to our back deck. 2 Trek Mountain bikes that totaled to be more than 1700 bucks. Yes, I called the cops and they gave me the "you shoulda known better and we're probably not going to catch the guy" lecture. And yes I have homeowners insurance. What pissed me off was that I felt violated twice. What also made me grateful is no one got hurt and I have such an awesome neighbor. He was the one that alerted me, he was also the one that called me and tried to chase the guy down. He's the same guy that caught some dude trying to breaking into my former sports car (I sold it when I realized that when you grow up, you can't play with big toys unless your income is 10 times the amount of the toy itself), beat the crap out of the guy, then called the cops. He also took out 2 hours of his day yesterday in 90 degree humid heat to help me fix and fortify my fence.

I spent the rest of the day running back and forth to Home Depot and fixing the rest of the fence up in our bug-infested backyard (even with that stupid fly trap) since the deadbolt I bought didn't come with keys (back to Home Depot!). I guess I was just having a bad luck day, which also solidified it when I went to go pick up the wife and got stuck in hourlong traffic. Why does Alexandria become a parking lot after 5pm? I mean seriously, cars inch forward. I drove through DC in less time and there was pretty heavy traffic there too.

All of this on just 2 bowls of Raisin Bran Crunch. I deserve some relaxation time and a cheap massage (time to go to Brookstone or Sharper Image and sit in one of those chairs again). My neighbors also deserves a nice gift from me, along with their dog that alerted us both times.

Elevation Burger

2006-06-23T09:12:00.000-04:00

For those who don't know, I frequent Elevation Burger at least once a week, and this struck a nerve.

wash, DC Donslist > missed connections > you used to be Phat but now you're just Fat

Decent Burger in Falls Church - Where Did You Go?
Reply to: forlorn-171129225@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-06-13, 3:09 PM EDT

Elevation -- it was great seeing you a couple times earlier this year, when your burger was adequate (fresh ingredients, good sauce, but the meat lacking in texture and flavor) and your fries nearly put tears in my eyes with their fragrant, citrusy olive oil flavor and ideal outer-crunch-to-inner-squish ratio.

Lately I've been looking all over for you, but all I can find is some place pretending to be you. This "Elevation Burger" charges over a dollar more ($3.35 instead of $2.29) for the same cheeseburger you once made, and no, it isn't any better. Their fries perform poorly in the texture department, and lack that trademark kick from the olive oil that yours had. And they're charging more for them, too. The only thing they do the same is the cookie, but you know that isn't enough for someone unable to go more than 72 hours without a good burger. Call me. Please. And I'm sorry I called you fat.

* this is in or around Falls Church
* no -- it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or gripes about grammar

Better – here’s the reply:

Hey Capital Icebox,

Thanks for posting your grievances in a somewhat humorous form. For someone like me who obsesses over the quality of the meat and fries and literally loses sleep over them, it helps to hear it from someone who obviously cares. I hear complaints, some small and some large, every week. Often times, because of the nature of the business, I’m not at liberty to give a very detailed response to those expressing some of their "fatter" concerncs. So I’m taking the opportunity here. I’ve never responded to a post before, but your kind and thoughtful approach inspired me to put off sleeping so that I might try to explain the other side of the story.

Doing what we’re trying to do - serve an organic Wagyu burger and fries cooked in olive oil isn’t a straight-forward task. There’s a reason (in fact lots of reasons) that no one has done it before. Most people thought I was crazy to try to do what we’ve done, but we’ve given over three years of our lives (including planning, researching, etc) to doing it, we're doing it successfully, and we’re not about to give up now.

Elevation Burger uses organic Wagyu beef which is almost impossible to come by. Sunnyside is out of the market and we buy from their supplier now. (All Sunnyside was doing, was getting almost mature cattle shipped to them from another rancher, feeding them for a few months and slaughtering them.) Getting consistency with this beef is extremely difficult. There are times (evidently you haven’t experienced them) when the burger has optimal juiciness, and then there times when it doesn’t. This is mostly a function of how the cows are raised, how long they're kept before slaughter and what they’ve had to eat in the last few months before being slaughtered. Unfortunately, I don’t have any control over this. If I had another half million to invest though, I would gladly try to take control of it. But even with all of these uncontrollable factors, what is the result? You get a burger that is the same size, and (usually) better in taste to what the “other guys” are selling, while at the same time nutritionally superior, and comparable in price (I believe the other guys are 14 cents cheaper for a single cheeseburger and we are 3 cents less for a double cheeseburger.) I don’t think you’ll find a better deal out there.

Add to what I’ve just said the fact that the meat we buy is twice as expensive as normal ground beef and that fuel costs (note that farming, cattle ranching and olive growing are energy intensive endeavors) are rising rapidly (and getting passed through to us through every single product we sell) and I think you’ll see that Elevation Burger, even with some of the inconsistencies you point out, is still an outstanding value.

I’ve talked about the beef, now let’s drill down into the fries for a moment: We’ve gone through hoops too numerous to mention and too convoluted to explain in order to make the fries that we make. (We're actually patenting the process). Are they always perfect? No. Are they pretty good? 98% of the time they are. Are they better than 92% of what’s out there? I think so. We have recently been at the mercy of the world Olive Oil market. Because of rapid reduction in world supply, the particular brand that we used, and that you used to find so appealing, unfortunately ran out of stock. What they are now making in their place is, I agree, not quite as nice as the old stuff. So what I do I do? Usually, after everyone is asleep and I’ve put in a 10 hour day, I surf the web and track down alternate sources. What follows is an elaborate and sometimes frustrating effort of obtaining samples, testing them, and trying to find something comparable. So far, I'm finding nothing that is as good as the stuff we are getting. And olive oil is just one half of the problem. Come August, the market will run out of the kind of potato we use, and then we will be compelled to switch to its red headed stepchild, the Norkotah. This will, again, change the experience slightly and will inspire many comments to me and to Don Rockwell I'm sure.

Over the last nine months I’ve given a lot of thought to the main issue that you’re raising, and I think it’s this: People want conflicting things. They want the uniformity and speed of McDonalds, but they also expect a fresh and 100% consistent product. Unfortunately, that isn’t going to occur unless you go to one of two extremes: 1. You become a monster chain with thousands of stores that has the ability to dictate to suppliers exactly what it wants or 2. You become a sit down restaurant that charges extremely high prices. This second option allows you to be ultra picky and pay premiums for whatever you want to buy, and still be profitable. But if you’re running a single-location, high volume restaurant and charging relatively low prices, the reality is that there is a tradeoff. If you want fresh and un-homogenized, un-McDondaldized product, you have to deal with the variation, the seasonal differences, and the perturbations of nature that manifest themselves in the food you buy and serve. Will we be able to strike a better balance between these two poles (i.e. fresh/juicy and consistent) in the future? I think so, but we still have some things to learn about buying, sourcing and controlling the production of the products we buy for use in our restaurant. We also will probably have to get bigger so that we have more leverage in the market place (but of course when we do that, someone will complain that we're too big, not realizing that bigness sometimes allows you certain prerogatives, that directly influence your food, that are not possessed by the little guy!)

Anyway, thanks for listening, and I hope that when you come to Elevation Burger, you’ll realize that the best way to enable us to achieve these goals is by continuing to support us.

Sincerely,
Hans Hess
Owner
Elevation Burger

PS. Introduce yourself to me in the store. I'll buy you lunch and we can chat face to face!

effing city

2006-06-21T22:41:00.000-04:00

My neighbor just knocked on my door and told me some random guy was in my backyard. I thought initially it was the girl renting out our basement's boyfriend, but no, it was really some random dude. Looks like he was trying to access the house through my basement door. Of course when I confront him, he's like, "does novella live here?" Yeah, right, you were looking for her house. He knew he was in deep shit because he bolted for the fence door after I asked him to leave only to have it lock on him and he started jiggling it really fast because I started heading towards him. All this was going on while my tough as nails neighbor looked on. (who had alerted me in the first place by startling me from my Lost rerun)

Sometimes I'm reminded that I still live in a somewhat sketchy part of town and I'm glad my neighbor likes me.

Lifestyles of the Trustfund babies

2006-06-21T15:31:00.000-04:00

I know I'm behind the curve, seeing how this all transpired like two months ago, but that's what happens when you stop trying to keep your finger on the pulse and have real life things to deal with...

The dude ranting is Brandon Davis and his grand-daddy was an oil tycoon billionaire. Which gives him the ability to do zero work for the rest of his life. It apparently also gives him the ability to get so high and go off and call some actress a "fire crotch" to a bunch of paparrazi.

When I was a teen, I wished I was a trust-fund baby. Or that I was heir to a great fortune. It would've been so sweet. If you're a trust-fund baby, you'd never have to grow up, you wouldn't have to deal with responsibilities, you probably wouldn't even have to clean up after yourself. You could do and buy whatever you wanted and probably get away with breaking a law or two while you were at it. Of course you probably would turn into this guy or Paris Hilton, where you get to turn into a big fat prick of a human being with very little regard to the rest of the world. Its hard to understand how these people came to be such callous individuals and I wonder if I were given the same opportunties to squander my life away like they did, would I have became the same? Which is to say, I'm somewhat grateful I did grow up a bit, and I do have a little humility. Although I wouldn't turn away a windfall now if I got one.

Retail Therapy & Materialistic Geek Lust

2006-06-19T16:45:00.000-04:00

We went for a full day of shopping yesterday since I was in terrible need of a new pair of shoes. I'm quite picky about my shoes since this is a throwback of my former self from highschool. I could be wearing the rattiest of clothes, but my sneaks had to be awesome. It was a strange mindset that I guess never left me. We went to several stores over the weekend, but the City Sports store in Gallery place had zero stock on any of the shoes I thought looked decent. We ended up treking out to Tyson's Corner to the Puma store since I knew I wanted to buy my first pair of Pumas (to blend in with my hipster peers) and I also didn't want to battle with Georgetown traffic & parking (which was the only other Puma store that I knew of).

Once we got to Tyson's though, I fell in love. We went to the Apple Store to pick up Ms. LD's new iPod, and I got to see a MacBook for the first time. I know the MacBook Pros are the sweeter ones inside, but I am a sucker for the way the MacBook itself is designed. Of course the wife asked me what the hell was wrong with my powerbook right now? I could come up with a million geek reasons, but none would satiate a real justification to drop a thou for the sole reason of techno lust. So I'm posting up a paypal donate button to my nonexistent readers and pleading them to donate to my retail therapy fund. Or you could just click an ad that you might fancy somewhere on the site. I've made a whopping 41 cents on this blog's advertising since its inception, I'm so much closer to the bottomless hole I call tech-happiness. If I ever get one, I swear the content on this site will just zing with life, unlike half the posts I've made in the past month.

You wanna go where everybody knows your name

2006-06-14T15:36:00.000-04:00

I could really care less about soccer, but when you take your co-worker out to lunch because he's about to change jobs, and he chooses to eat lunch at his favorite middle eastern strip mall so he can enjoy 3 things: The comradarie of his Tunisian friends, good food, and Tunisia vs. Saudi Arabia, you tend to get wrapped up in the game after the whole restaurant erupts into hysteria when Tunisia scores its first goal. Its also strange to kind of visit an authentic middle eastern restaurant. I guess this is what white folks sorta feel like when they venture out to Eden in Falls Church to sample the Vietnamese cuisine. Its also strange to walk into a restaurant with a guy that knows everyone. Its like I was walking into Cheers with Norm or something. Along with long conversations in Arabic, the grown men kissing on the cheeks was a bit of a foreign thing again to someone that grew up entirely in America where personal space is such a big deal. I guess my co-worker is lucky that he has a place to go where everybody knows his name.

Past lives

2006-06-14T10:26:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, it was easy not to have my thoughts fettered with "who am I?" Then I hit adolescence, and it became the main motivation of how I thought and acted. I used to identify myself with the music I listened to and what movies I thought were worth watching. I slowly realized though that even while I still do think I'm cool because I own a 12" copy of New Order's "Run2" it really doesn't say who I am. So what that I think Rear Window is probably the best film ever made? I guess it wasn't enough to just be that.

I'm trying to remember what kind of person I was during high school, and besides the things I liked to do, I really don't know what kind of person I was back then. I can't really ask any of my friends from back then, well, because who knows if they even knew. We were all friends of convenience, neighborhood pals that figured out that we really didn't want to be friends for the long haul once we did figure out who we each were.

I got another one of those classmate spam emails that I still open in my email. They sucker me everytime to go back to that site to peruse the names and remember the faces that pepper my memories of walking the halls of school. Its funny, Dr. P asks me what highschool was like since it seems like such a foreign concept to him since he grew up in Italy. The idea of cool kids, cliques, and a caste system created by a bunch of teens just seemed weird.

I thought about how I all knew of the cool kids, but really, none of them interacted with me unless they had to. It was like they were celebrities. I know now I probably elevated them way too much in my mind, and they were just kids like me with no clue. No one had an agenda more than to figure out what the hell they were doing with their lives.

Its funny that my friends all wanted to be friends with the cool kids, but they had no idea how to break into that crowd. I guess I figured if those people didn't want to be friends with me, fuck them. I remember back in junior high, there was a guy that just moved to the neighborhood and at first, he was open to making friends with everyone, including me. Then he realized quickly that if he wanted to establish himself as a cool kid, he needed to not be friends with everyone. That meant me. Some people enjoy being accepted by people that treat them like badly but I guess I didn't want to be part of that. And now?

It means nothing, yet all of it still weighs on me. I didn't even go to my 10 year reunion a few years back. I didn't go for 2 reasons, whoever I still kept in contact with from highschool I made a conscious choice to, and because of that why would I choose to go revisit with people that really could care less to even talk to me? I guess that's what the irony is, since I'm sitting here going through classmates.com looking at the names. I guess its more like revisiting a feeling that is bittersweet. I fondly look back to most of my past, because well, it brought me where to I am today, and yet I also remember all misery that accompanied it. And yes, Ms. LD, will tell me that the misery was a necessary medicine of life, but I guess its hard to not become bitter or cynical about things. I guess nostalgia eventually takes care of that and washes most of that away. Hopefully.

Good reference and a good listen -> This American Life: Allure of the Mean Friend

3 little words to not be a loser anymore

2006-06-12T13:16:00.000-04:00

Anyone who knows me, knows I made a spoof of Tom Vu's "Get Rich & Wealthy" informercial back in highschool. While I've never seen Tom Vu's informercials til now, and yet, our spoof is so spot-on, its crazy. I will NOT be posting my parody from 11th grade though, as I felt like a complete idiot starring as Tom Vu and hacking up my english for an "A." Rewatching it years later, I found that we really didn't know what the hell we were doing, and it looked quite amatuer-ish. But after seeing M. Night Shyamalan's first scary home movie that was included on the extras of the Sixth Sense DVD, I can say our video was Oscar quality compared to his, and if I had stayed on the same trajectory as M. Night, I'd be making American Express Card commercials! I can't seem to remember where I left that VHS tape though. Probably a good thing.

Keanu grows up

2006-06-08T09:20:00.000-04:00

Driving home on Rock Creek Parkway yesterday, my wife mentions to me that she read an article on MSN about Keanu Reeves. Its funny that while most guys I know ridicule him, most women I know swoon over the guy.

What's also interesting to note is that while the man is one of Hollywood's darlings because of The Matrix, he's had a rough personal life the last few years. I recall seeing the in the Tabloids while standing in the supermarket, about how the poor guy had a stillborn daughter and then shortly after that the mother of that stillborn baby dying horribly in a car accident. Man, talk about rough times. All the money in the world (I heard he got 30 million for the Matrix sequels that were complete crap) was never going to bring the happiness that he lost. Apparently after that, he stopped showering for months on end, and walked around in clothes that he never changed and the same sole-less shoe for more than a year. If there was ever a posterboy for money and fame can't buy you happiness, he was your man.

The irony is he was always being cast in these movies where he was either a) enlightened b) the chosen one or c) clarivoyant. I guess if I was going through my dark phase and was contractually obligated to act, the acting ability Keanu's shown in his movies should probably deserve some type of oscar. Ok, maybe not.

My wife noted though that in this article that he's turned a corner and now that he's hit 40, he's adjusting to being a grown-up just like me. Welcome to the club dude, even if you do have it a bit easier with the millions in your bank to adjust to the bleak truths of reality.

Read the MSN article

Routine Maintenance

2006-06-07T15:51:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, I remember distinctly laying in my bunkbed that I had to share with my older sister, I think I was about 8 and I thought, wow time is going by, how am I going to remember all of this? Of course me being eight also meant it didn't occur to me to try to write things down, and even if I did I wasn't able to articulate what I was feeling at the time. Now that I am able to articulate, I'm not sure if there's much to write about. When you're a kid, I guess every day is a day of discovery and the idea of a "routine" hasn't settled in yet. Of course by the time I got to highschool and found out lots of things were based on routines, it was kinda depressing. These days though, I actually relish the same routines I used to despise. Its funny how that works. I guess its because these routines are more based on me creating some semblance of stability and structure in what otherwise would be a pretty chaotic life because I'm more or less lazy and irresponsible by default. Its not something I'm proud of but its just who I am.

During college, I drove the family pickup truck. It was a barebones Toyota pickup and although it had air conditioning, it lacked basic stuff like a passenger side mirror. My dad was always getting on my case about not taking care it and getting the oil changed. I was lucky though, Toyota builds some really reliable engines that even if you don't take care of them and forget to change the oil for 5000 miles, the truck will still run. In fact, we had that pickup running up to the 200 thousand mark. The only reason we got rid of it was because the transmission went bad.

Anyway, I'm starting to realize that I don't want to treat myself the same way I've treated that truck. And while I'm young and can bounce back from not taking care of myself some of the time but not all the time. This is where the dreaded routines actually help I guess. We've been heading to the gym on a regular basis because I have a job that requires me to exert zero physical effort and if I wasn't blessed with lightning fast metabolism, I'd be a blob fatter than Jabba the Hut by now. However, inactivity and laziness still affect non-fat people like me. I didn't do a lick of physical activity during my college days and by the time I graduated, I was having all this back pain. It was quite embarrassing to go to the doctor and have them tell you due to such a sedentary life, my back muscles had actually started to atrophy. Basically I was sitting on my ass all day watching TV, playing video games, and surfing the net that I was slowly melting into my recliner. Not a good mental picture.

I started having to view and treat my body like any other machine. One that required maintenance and premium gas. Of course I'll still occasionally indulge in really crappy fast food sometimes, I try to make a conscientious choice about what I do with my body these days. Which basically means I try to eat food that also provide me with some nutrition and also keep myself active. Its hard to remind myself sometimes though, since I am inherently lazy.

It is also a bit daunting to go to the gym since the wife and I signed up to Results, which seems to be quite popular with the gay crowd in DC. Its not daunting because the dudes are gay though, but most of them are super BUFF. I mean, protein shakes, egg whites diets, hardcore ripped muscles. I guess most gyms have their fair share of those guys, but I guess it just feels like there's a disproportionate amount of these guys at my gym. I feel like the scrawny kid all over again that is out of place there. There's also a lot of socializing that well, I could care less of since I'm not that social by nature and I'm not there to make friends. But, I'm trying hard to make it our routine to go there and take care of ourselves. One step in the whole balance of mind, body and soul thing I guess.

Photo essay of an 8 year old

2006-06-05T11:18:00.000-04:00

I gave Paulina my camera last week to take pictures while we were at my parents house for a party. She just turned eight that day and I think she has a career in photography since I first let her use my camera when she was 6 years old. She even got her little sister to strike a pose, but I didn't think it would be right to post it up since I want to respect everyone's privacy.

Spelling Bee in HD

2006-06-02T09:41:00.000-04:00

After going to CostCo and the gym last night, we got home, made dinner and then turned on what I wouldn't realize to be the most absorbing night of television of this week. For the record, I refuse to pay the cable cartels any money to watch 500 channels worth of crap. So we swing it old school and only watch what we can get over the air. Since its June now, sweeps month is over and now all the TV networks feel its ok to just dump crap onto the air.

Which is why I guess they allowed the National Spelling Bee to be broadcasted on primetime network television. Which turned out to be quite compelling television. What was more amazing is that they actually hauled out the High Def cameras into the Hyatt/Hilton to have all the dorky/geekiness of these awkward kids and their parents reactions to their spellings to be beamed directly into my home in crystal clear 1080i resolution.

First realization of the night, my vocabulary and spelling skills are subpar. Where do half of these words even come from? I also figured out its good to use words that only medical doctors would know although probably not know how to spell. How many different medical conditions are completely unspellable? Also, german rooted, latin rooted, greek rooted, and persian rooted words are the best ones to stump 'em. Especially greek. Those tricky bastards!

"Can I have the etymology of the word?" I love how the kids completely try to kill time while their little gears are grinding in their small little skulls. I'm not even sure half the time they are listening to the guy giving out the answers. They keep rattling off more monotoned questions even before the mediator is done telling them the answers.
"Are there any alternate pronunciations to the words?"
"Are there any alternate definitions to the words?"
"Can you please use it in a sentence?"
"Does it have the greek root coli-"
"Can you say the word again?"

What's even funnier is the parents reaction to all of this if the kid spelled the word wrong. Everytime we saw a non-white family's reaction, MM would scream out, "You've brought dishonor to our family name!" Which I would have to say is somewhat true. I felt bad for Theodore Yuan since he sorta reminded me of how I felt when I was his age. Bad haircut, awkwardness, deep pubescent voice that didn't seem to match the baby asian face. What was hilarious was when he mispelled and they flashed over to his parents, most parents would've just felt bad for their kid, but not Theo's mom, she looked pissed that he got it wrong. Her son is number one! What was he thinking?! heh. He did bring dishonor to the family and they can never show their face again! Its funny because it might be true.

In any case, I found this article kinda funny because there is a twinge of disapointment that an indian kid didn't win. Or should I saw "South-east Asian" which is so ridiculous that why don't we subdivide and segrate and compartmentalize races more?

Also, a great headline from this Canadian paper about Canada's own entry into the Bee. "Word whiz Finola Hackett, 14, learns the true meaning of weltschmerz when she can't spell it."

Who knew spelling would be televised like Dodgeball on the ocho?

W.T.F.

2006-06-01T16:15:00.000-04:00

Such a funnily disturbing and annoying video that I had to post it.

evening of 2

2006-06-01T09:59:00.000-04:00

So I took a tour of the area last night in the muggy evening tracking down 2 things. Free donuts at Krispy Kreme(courtesy of my sister's gift card that she passed on to me) and a Nintendo DS Lite because there were reports online that Walmart & Target had broke the selling street date (June 11) across the U.S. of A.

First stop was in Dupont Circle since that was the closest Krispy Kreme in the area. Driving around Dupont, there are 2 apparent things that always grate on me when I drive in the city. Taxi drivers have no regard for the road rules or the people they supposedly are sharing the road with. I don't know how half of these jokesters got their licenses. The other thing is the amount of clueless drivers on the road. Do they have a route planned out? Do they not care that their careless driving impact other drivers around them? I used to think that Maryland drivers were the worse in the area (which they still are) but now I've amended that thought with that most drivers in this area just don't care and are completely self-absorbed. The idea of sharing the road is completely lost on them.

Getting to Krispy Kreme was relatively painless otherwise, parking was found a scant block away. After trying to figure out how much was on the card and if it was going to expire which was much more involved due to the woman behind the counter telling me to call the automated 800 number because they couldn't check my balance, only to stop me mid button pressing of menu selections to tell me that they could check the card. I planned on draining the whole 10 bucks on the account by getting a dozen assorted donuts and a frozen Kreme with coffee but found out that they didn't have any cold drinks although no explaination was offered up. So I had to be satisfied with 4 glazed, 4 crullers, 2 apple filled, and 2 custard filled chocolate glazed donuts.

After that, I had to head to Potomac Yard out in Virginia since that was the closest and only other Target I hadn't checked that was close to me. I had checked the 2, one in Falls Church and one in Bailey's Crossroads with little luck. The two that I've been to were your regular Targets that seemed to be kept up well. The one in Potomac Yard was a bit different, I don't know why but the whole place just felt a little ghetto. Its like store management weren't on top of their game, on top of which it looked like people from the city and Alexandria were flooding the stores so it was truly not a good shopping experience. Ultimately, my hunt for a DS Lite was fruitless. The only thing that I thought of was the Target that was getting built in the city in Columbia Heights, and I hope to god that they know how to keep that place up to par of all the suburbian Targets, otherwise, it'll be just like the one in Potomac Yard.

After all this driving around, I stopped by Gallery Place to pick up some dinner since MM was already asleep from her long day that I only needed to worry about feeding myself. I felt like some Chipotle and decided that was the closest one on the way home. Why do they even try to keep Gallery Place like its Chinatown? I don't think any chinese people even live there anymore. At least not at the volume of chinese folks are like in New York City. 97% of the shops in the area are non-chinese even though they have chinese characters strewn all over their awnings and windows. Add in the fact that whoever decided to try to dress the place up like its Time Square. There's just one problem, the roads are too small to justify it being like Time Square. I'm starting to avoid driving down 7th on weekends unless its absolutely necessary. Way too much traffic.

However, street parking on a wednesday evening was relatively painless as opposed to the usual times. I parked only a block away near the Coyote Ugly and walked to the Chipotle pretty easily. I realize why I don't eat there that often after I got home though, they use way too much onion and cilantro to give their food their flavor. My mouth and stomach are usually paying for it later by heinous breath and my old-man stomach gurgling and telling me its going to be paying me back in lots of gas.

I liked the fact that I got to drive around and see a lot of the area in a relatively short amount of time, but I was also just glad to get home and enjoy my overly oniony and cilantro-y dinner.

Time: being grownsup vs being a kid

2006-05-31T14:02:00.000-04:00

I have a friend which is a few years older (M, that would be you) than me that used to tell me that time was running out and that I better make the most of it. I shrugged it off and told him he was crazy since we're not even out of the first third of our lives. Of course now that's changed with me passing the thirtieth mark more than a year ago. We all know that time is supposed to be constant and unchanging, but I'm taking a different approach, time is quite subjective to me. The last few years have been blowing by at break neck speeds with me wondering where did it all go? (much to the chagrin of those close to me constantly asking "what the hell happened to the time?) I'm sure there were days interspersed in there where I had a few "longest day ev-ar" days but on the whole the seasons are changing faster than I can keep track of. I used to be quite aware of my circadium rhythm but now, it barely registers.

Which brings me back to my day-to-day. I used to have gobs of time, even during my 20s. I didn't crawl out of bed until 9am back then, leave work at 6pm and I'd still felt like I had so much free time to kill. Now, I don't think I do, which doesn't mean its a bad thing, but its just a drastic change from my youth. I could play hours upon hours of video games, and I wouldn't care that I wasted all that time. Now, I have that twitching feeling that I should be doing something productive, and although most would call that responsibility, I think I just know there are consequences if I don't pay the bills on time, make dinner, clean up the house, do adult chores and errands. Its because without the shelter of parents, I'm now working without a saftey net and I know that. I try my best to devote most of my free time to spending some quality time with my wife.

Which leads to Memorial Day weekend. MM wanted to paint the front of the house, and we set out doing it with the naivete of thinking it would be as simple as painting the living room walls (which also weren't as simple as they looked). First off, the front is made up of old concrete pressed bricks that have the same porous roughness as a thousand grit sandpaper which meant if you rolled paint roller over it or tried to brush it with a paint brush, only 30% of the surface was going to be coated.

I tried to counter that by grunting and forcefully pushing hard on the roller to the wall to squeegee the paint into the pores of the bricks. I did this for most of the morning and afternoon of Saturday with little success. After that I was wiped. I'm still recovering now. My chest felt like I was having a fat ballerina dance on top of it for the last few days and I've basically laid on the couch for most of the holiday weekend while my dedicated wife soldiered on outside by meticulously painting each brick. I guess getting back to the gym the last month wasn't enough prep for trying to tackle such a project.

I guess if you don't make time to just relax, your body is going to force you to do it whether you like it or not.

I'm not sure this all ties together somehow, then again, I'm not writing an essay I need to turn into the teacher either. So be it, summer starts, and the reality is that it won't make a difference to my schedule now, where as before, I'd be looking forward to months of endless time to kill at the pool, with my neighborhood/school friends, in front of the TV, or at a mindless summer job. Now, my life chugs on, and the summer of 2006 will be filled with lots of different memories that will be in my mind within a blink of an eye. My first year of marriage to an awesome person, home ownership, good times with good friends, and lots and lots of chores.

A burger, then Barbara Harrison

2006-05-26T13:04:00.000-04:00

First and foremost, I just came back from lunch at my beloved Elevation Burger only to find out they had raised the prices on the menu and dropped their combo menu! Now everything in the place has gone up 30%. I used to pay six fiddy for a number two and now its over eight bucks. I'll grumble, but I'll pay because their burgers are probably the best in town. Damn them and their heavenly burgers!

We went out to dinner last night with SS at Bangkok Joe's in Georgetown. What was interesting is that I found out over dinner that SS and her friends have a newfound hate for NBC4/WRC-TV's Barbara Harrison! You know, when ever someone goes on a diatribe about any local news anchor here that has been in this market for more than 10+ years, I have to question it. I mean, most of the people that work at WRC-TV are sort of DC institutions (which my wife hates me calling them that). I don't really have an opinion about Barbara Harrison since I don't wake up early enough to watch NBC4's news coverage and even if I did, I'd rather be tuning into channel 7 / WJLA's hottness Alison Starling and the awkward comradery between her and Doug McKelway with added geekiness from weatherman Brian van de Graaff. My little sister seems to think Ms. Harrison seems to be a nice lady since Barbara came and visited her elementary school when she was a kid. (Which leads to the wife ridiculing me for giving these people angel points for just coming to visit kids at local elementary schools.)

What was shocking to hear was that Barbara Harrison has been flubbing up her news delivery as of late. She told me that she would trip over words, seem in an altered state of mind, or just genuinely screwing up all over the place on live tv. SS and her friends have apparently attributed Barbara's antics to a bad train wreck. So bad that its good to watch every morning just to see how far she can take it, as well as see the tortured look in Joe Kreb's eyes. They even were thinking about developing T-shirts that say "Free Barbara" and "Save Joe Krebs." Hilarious.

I was still not convinced that such antics would be allowed on such a large market local news channel so I did some searching. Apparently a search of DCRTV's mail bag brought many hits back. One particular week of the beginning of March elicited numerous anger, concern, and heckling from viewers in the area. I even found another blog entry about the whole incident that was geniuinely concerned for Barbara's health. (What about Barbara?). Meanwhile digging deep into the blogosphere turns up the fact that this is not the first incident that has shown Barbara slowly loosing her marbles (Barbara made a funny). With all these incidents and just local news anchors gritting on some people's nerves, I found a site that just dishes out the hate on several local news anchors including Barbara Harrison.

I'm just confused that if Ms. Harrison isn't in the perfect state of mind, how in the hell did she score a fluff interview with Condi?! SS has several conspiracy theories which I can't get into since it does involve some slanderous/libelous suggestions. What's even funnier is that Katie Couric seems to wish her know-it-all self had beaten Barbara to the punch! Anyway, this entry is for you SS, you're right, somehow the DC news anchor "institutions" are seemingly breaking their own legacies down before my very eyes.

del.icio.us daily links

2006-05-25T10:46:00.000-04:00

So I added a new feature amongst all the obtrusive ads on my blog on the sidebar, and its the daily links. Basically things I see online that seem interesting to me, I'll tag and post and it'll get refreshed on the side, at the top.

Destination Expectation

2006-05-24T10:19:00.000-04:00

So now that I've somewhat recovered from the camping trip over the weekend up on Rocky Gap National State park in Western Maryland (WAYYY Western), I can actually try to post something here. Things I've learned on this trip:

Apparently I'm a 80 year old man named Mortimer trapped in a 30 year old body. I told my wife that if she didn't bring lunch to work she should go to the Whole Foods to get "a scoop of something" to which I will never live down now.

I should also not open my mouth and say what is was just triggered off by a neuron in my mind, which lead to me spouting off about how someone could get an STD in their eye.

If something so vulgar is said enough times and modified, it becomes less taboo and just something to giggle about. See if you can find our word of the weekend in the scrabble board.

You can't rent a boat on the lake if there's an adventure race, because the racers hog all the boats.

Beehive Mullets still exists out in the wild at places like Super Walmarts. Walmart has also become a piazza of sorts for the towns in the middle of nowhere to go and mix and mingle since there is a McDonald's inside.

Staring at dancing fire for hours never seems to bore me.

Coleman makes the most snuggly sleeping bags, but come with no directions on how you're going to squeeze it back into its tiny little carrying case

"Fuck off with your sofa units and serine green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may." -Tyler Durden

I also had a very interesting conversation with H. aka Lady Danger about growing up (which is the loose theme of this blog) while we hung out and gathered wood for the campfire. From what LD deduced, life's journey itself is what we should be revelling in, but I find myself more focused on a destination, a goal. If I get there, it'll be better. That was I guess the jist of my old daily mantra, one that I'm trying to unglue myself from. All the pain, suffering, trials, tribulations, that's what life's about. Not the end result but the day to day crap. I guess I'm in this transitional phase where I'm trying to realign my outlook on life from one of expectations to just a life that I should just enjoy each day. What the big conundrum is for me is that the whole point of life is what me and most of my peers that grew up in suburbia have been trying to shy away from.

Which sort of is thrown into great conflict with how my parents did a lot to try to shelter me from all the pains of the world, which in turn brought on all these expectations and entitlement issues that I've been trying to come to terms with. I guess that's why getting thrown out into the real world was sort of a shock to me. I used to have a friend back in highschool that always said that I was priviledged and didn't know how good I had it. He was right, its because he's been through a lot, and he learned from it, while I did very little to attain the comfort I had. In the end, it really is sweeter if you get it yourself. What I don't get is, all this stuff we're hoping for, working towards, its to relieve ourselves from the same discomfort, pain, suffering we should be seeking, seeing how humanity itself is based on just that. This also seems to conflict with me wanting to win the lottery. Make no mistake, I still want to win the lottery. I guess its just a human condition and it confuses me to no end.

Other than that, there were lots of just relaxing and good times. And even though it looks like I spent most of my time there trying to film a dangly worm, I swear, it was just quality time with the people I care about, which for me and has always been a constant belief is really what life is about.

Koons Postscript

2006-05-23T10:26:00.000-04:00

Googling "Krystal Koons" turned up some interesting facts. Apparently Krystal Koons is in fact not an android, she's just a high falootin' Georgetown prep graduate and some people are unhappy with the repair service they perform. Hopefully this is the last post I post about her. I swear I'll try to blog about something else.

Koons Cartel

2006-05-19T10:03:00.000-04:00

I think its been an ongoing joke in my life everytime I drive by the Koons dealership in Tysons. Obvious snickers ensue for such a horrible name for a car dealership. But now they're having the last laugh, they're invading almost every facet of my multimedia life. This was covered in whyihatedc's blogspot but I think its worth recounting. Every morning I turn on the TV, it doesn't matter what channel I turn to, Krystal Koons is on the freaking TV shilling her family's empire of cars. When I turn to WTOP, aka my old man radio station according to the wife, to get the local traffic report (traffic and weather on the eights!) she's there telling me she's going to wow me.

And when I say Koons empire, I mean it. They must have a deathstar somewhere constructed out of every possible car model possible. Surfing over to their website, you'll see they sell them ALL. Toyota, Ford, Chevy's, Mazda, Dodge, Volvo, etc. You want them, they got them. I remember a time back in the 80s when the Koons brand was just one among many. They only sold Chevrolets but then they gobbled up Jimmy Kline's Toyota (and his equally annoying commercials), and from then, I guess they just started acquiring every small dealership.

I used to hate those Eastern Motors commercials, but they've been overtaken with Koons's massive advertising budget. Apparently there's a shared sentiment on the washington post discussion from a few weeks ago and someone has reported she's showing up before movie previews?! They must be stopped.

Most people hate Krystal with the lingering thought of neopotism that has led her to the opportunity to be a local (hated) celebrity and to line the Koons family deep pockets even deeper by supposedly "wowwing" them. However, I think there's something more sinister afoot.

I personally think Krystal Koons is an android and the Koons mad scientists thought it would be cute to give her a non-removable blue sweater vest abdomen. I mean how else can you explain that she's always wearing the same outfit in all of the commercials and that she moves and talks like the animatronics at the local Chuck E. Cheeses? If you look at all the ads, she's always planted in one place, she never walks, and her arms always flail around in the same way in a robotic fashion. I think its funny that this post article from last year says she's "seems like a Shakespearean actress" when they're comparing her to other local ads. Take a look at the photo below of Koons founder.

Its obvious they just took a mold of his cryogenically frozen head and recreated Krystal's facial mold from it. Also, look at the following photos, never is she photographed below the stomach. Its because there's a huge Cray supercomputer underneath powering the "We're gonna wow ya!" propoganda. What is the Koons evil end game? Only they seem to know.

What I find even more amazing is they're offering all these commercials online! In all print, video, and audio formats! Why on earth would I subject myself to her shrill voice of telling me she's going to wow me over and over again? Whoever goes to that site for fun is masochistic.

All in all, if the Koons marketing department is reading this, its time to fire and deport this person that came up with this campaign. I'd also like to personally flog him or her, but I want think locking them in a room for a month with these commercials playing 24/7 might be a good start.

The WaPo Express pings me.

2006-05-18T09:02:00.000-04:00

I hope this isn't my only fifteen seconds of fame but maybe its my blog's fifteen seconds of fame but I got cited in the Washington Post Express!. Its even in hard copy that I'm a freakshow because I dig the local celebrities, page 32. I feel like Homer Simpson when he started his Muck Raking blog and got all high off the exposure. Now my counter is gonna be like and I'll feel obligated to start making stuff up to seem interesting. Ok, maybe not.

piaggio mp3 scooter

2006-05-17T15:00:00.000-04:00

So now with the umpteenth article on the net about scooters being really popular with the soaring price of gas, Piaggo, the makers of the original Vespa, have introduced the mp3. Not an audio player but a 3-wheeled scooter. I guess its easier to ride and you're not guaranteed to lose all of your limbs if you happen to hit a pothole or hit by careless drivers yapping on their cellphones (even though its supposedly illegal in DC unless you're using a handsfree earpiece). I know this because I've almost been hit twice on our Vespa ET4.

Read more

[via gizmodo]

Anchormen/women. You stay classy DC.

2006-05-17T13:33:00.000-04:00

These days I've been splitting my news watching between WRC-TV aka channel 4 and WJLA aka channel 7. I used to watch 4 religiously because I just liked their style of news, and most of their reporters are DC institutions and I had no life. This resulted in some sheer geekdom excitement everytime I spot a local report out on the town. Here are the ones I remember:

I spotted Bob Ryan a few years back out when he was doing the weather report among the cherry blossoms and was going around telling everyone how cool it was. This was deflated by the wife after she told me he acted like a complete jerk to her back in her restaurant hosting days because she didn't recognize him. Apparently he was all like, "I'm BOB RYAN, don't you know who I AM?!" attitude, which I find completely atypical since I've been brainwashed into believing he's the most affable guy in the world.

I sat behind Arch Campbell at a movie preview a few years ago too when my sis scored some free preview tickets to some forgettable Jet Li movie. I immediately called up one of my friends just to tell him that I was in the presence of a local celebrity.

I drove by Eun Yang last month as she was powdering her nose in the news van after they had just finished a report on Pennsylvania Ave. I immediately pulled off to the curb and texted Brian that I just saw his favorite girl.

We were driving in Capitol Hill a few months back and I saw Elliot Francis step off the curb and screamed to my wife, "Hey, its that dude! um from the TV!" That dude is larger than life, and was all decked out in a full anchorman dapper suit. Yeah, I'm a big dork.

Last but not least, a few months ago I saw channel 7 hottie Alison Starling doing a report outside in front of the WJLA building in the morning while dropping off MM at her old job and started hootin' and hollering like usual.

I'm liking how WJLA is trying to be hipper now that they've set up shop in the heavily trafficked Rosslyn area and their big ass Time Square TV screen hanging off their building. Its sad that channel 9 is first in HD and their newscasts are amazing to look at in widescreen highdef crispness, the same can't be said about their news delivery nor their reporters. Maybe its just me.

Anyway, NBC4 is profiling the blogging scene here in DC since it appears to be a flourishing community of bloggers that are getting online in the DC metro area. The DCblogs guy was first profiled, and what he says about blogs towards the end of the extended interview online is so true about this city, and also could've been applied to the big deal about chatrooms and homepages back in the 90s. I guess with blogs its just easier to get your voice out there and be heard and not have to worry so much about the technical jargon (thanks yahoo, google, sixapart, myspace, friendster, livejournal, etc!)

Go here if you want to see the video and transcript.

Camping

2006-05-16T13:34:00.000-04:00

I haven't been camping that often in my life, in fact I think I can count the number of times on one hand, but last week, I can say that I've been camping twice in the last 2 years. We took a leisurely drive out to the Shenandoah National Park on Saturday and got there in the early evening. I learned a few things last time that we prepared for this trip. Bring some padding unless you're ready to sleep on a bunch of rocks. Last time, we didn't know and I got about a few hours of rested sleep until I realized there were a million jagged stones underneath the tent and they were digging into me whichever way I rolled. This time, we learned the hardway, bring shitloads of blankets if you don't have a decent sleeping bag. Weather.com had told me that the weather in the mountains were going to be in the 60s and 70s during the day. What I failed to notice was that it was going to be 10 degrees cooler in the mountains, and that it drops below 30 at night. So we all woke up shivering our asses off around 4 in the morning. Also, if you bring an air mattress, you need to have something lining your ass, or you will be literally freezing your ass off since all the heat will escape under you even if you're bundled up with blankets on top of you.

We also brought some wood up since last time we were ill prepared to make a fire, but I realized that if you want bonfire quality campfires, you gotta either drop the cash on bundles of wood from the sundries camp market, or you go foraging into the woods. The only drawback of foraging is most of the wood is too wet to burn, so the fire will smoke and well, by the time we got back to DC, we smelled like we were hung upsidedown in a smokehouse for 48 hours. We also had 2 little charcoal bags that we got from the Columbia Heights Giant, but I've since found out that they're a complete rip off. 3 bucks for a little burnable bag of coals? I bought 2 family size ones from CostCo just yesterday for 14 bucks.

Thanks to my wife, we were well fed with lots of campfire foodstuff, and junkfood to pass the time away between playing cards, poking our bonfire and talking about life philosophies. I've also found out that Coke from a bottle tastes about 10 times better than when its from a can or the fountain. I wish they came in the bigger sizes, and yes, I try to recycle all my glass bottles.

On the way back, we stopped in Sperryville to find some apple butter, another thing that I'm fascinated with but I don't seem to stock up on. Sperryville is also apparently right next to Washington, VA aka home of the famous Inn at Little Washington. While stopping off, we saw a huge biker/hog meetup. Its funny though cuz none of these guys seemed very authentic, more weekend warriors than anything. It was neat to see though. We also stopped by this pretty neat place that was a nursery/restaurant/fancy grocery store called The Epicurious Cow, sorta felt like something that would existed in Cicely, Alaska if Northern Exposure was based in a real town.

By the time we got home, we stopped for a quick bite to eat in Clarendon and then got home and passed out around 5pm and more or less slept til we had to get up to work the next day. It was fun and we're going again this weekend, but this time, I'm gonna try to be more prepared.

Tech Tuesday

2006-05-16T09:38:00.000-04:00

Tech toys are basically that, toys for the adult kids in us. And there are a slew of announcements today that have me stoked.

Apple Macbook

Apple releases the Macbook and kills the iBook line.

Sony VAIO UX Micro PC

Sony releases its fancy little Micro PC. Should be out in June for 1800 bucks. Too rich for my blood.

Google and Nokia Internet Tablet

Google and Nokia Team up to update their internet tablet to support voice over IP with Google Talk and an integrated gTalk client. This excites me because I already own the tablet.

The NEW Super Mario Bros.

The NEW Super Mario gets released today on the Nintendo DS. I don't even have one yet, and I'm excited!

Cooking...or not

2006-05-12T15:44:00.000-04:00

I eat enough fast food to make me feel guilty bout it and there has been a line I saw on Chef's A'field on WETA I saw few weeks ago. Of course its a cooking show and one of the featured chef's said how she couldn't understand how so many americans ate processed food since the whole point of food was to nourish you. So I was at the walmart of organic foods a few weeks ago, Whole Foods, and decided to pick up a fancy cut of meat to pretend I could be on pbs as one of those chef's. I don't think I did that great of a job though. I used way too much dijon mustard, and my side items were kinda weak. And presentation was weak too.
Then again, I didn't really do that much cooking, it was a pretty simple recipe that involved popping it into the oven. But hey, it was different from my usual repetoire of dinner foods when its my turn to cook, so it was a nice change of pace.

I am not the "Life of Red" & Renewable Energy

2006-05-11T14:52:00.000-04:00

I joined the blogroll on dcblogs.com and for some odd reason, I've been mis-listed as "The Life of Red." I feel like Morgan Freeman in the Shawshank Redemption. "Maybe it's 'cause I'm Irish." I'm just as Irish as Morgan Freeman was in that movie. But I digress...

So with most of the country and the area bitching about the cost of gas and someone I know whispering global conspiracy and aliens on IM to me, it got me wondering. I actually brought it up with MM (the wife) about what would the world and political landscape be like if there was some technological breakthrough like in that horrible movie I never saw with Keanu, Chain Reaction. What if there was something that turned water into energy, or like Doc Brown's Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future 2?

Russia's attempts to use energy as a way to have more clout with Europe and the US would dissipate, and would we even care about the instability in the Middle East? Of course MM pointed out to me that it wouldn't happen. Entire global industries would be rendered obsolete, and billions upon billions of potential revenue would be wiped out.

Its amazing that big corporations act exactly like people. They're completely afraid of change. e.g. Witness the RIAA and the MPAA grasping to try to force consumers to comply with their business models instead of embracing new technologies to create new revenue streams. Didn't they learn anything from the cassette tape and VCR? I guess not.

So then there's the conspiracies that we could have renewable energy sources much sooner if it wasn't for the lobbiest out there. I'm amazed how much K Street has fucked over society and the world looking out for their special interests. I know, its not as clean cut and pat like that, but there's got to be a better way. I'll save that for another post though.

I would be curious to live in a world where some type or renewable fuel was abundant as the water on this earth, then what would we be doing? I guess if you took an optimistic approach, it would be like the world winning the lottery. One less thing to worry about, and with that, a step above savagery and a closer step towards the betterment of society. Of course the pessimistic point might be we would just be figuring out easier ways to blow each other up with it. I am still curious though what that world would be like. It would be cool to have a hoverboard.

Addictive Game

2006-05-11T12:48:00.000-04:00

http://www.yarukinoki.net/flash/pendulumeca/
This game is surprisingly addictive. I've gotten 892m as my highest score right not.

Day off

2006-05-02T16:13:00.000-04:00

I took the day off to roam around DC with the wife since she starts a new job tomorrow. Walking around DC during a workday is a different experience than when I'm out during the weekends. Downtown in the morning near the DMV, while it is overly crowded on the road, its not too bad on the sidewalks.

There are 2 things that usually strike me when I'm not at work on a weekday, who are all these people that also out and about? They seem to all not have jobs but yet they can shop, eat at fancy places, and not seem to have a care in the world. Which ultimately makes me feel like a chump for sitting my ass at work for 40 hours a week in a cubicle while these guys get to hang out in starbucks. Then again, I do realize approximately 90% of these people are tourists, but still, I don't think all of them are.

I also think I should just start working weekends and taking weekdays off. The city is so much more peaceful and quiet. I really liked it. Its like having the whole city to myself and not having to wait in line for anything. Although parking is always atrocious either way.

Another thing that I always get from being out in Georgetown during a nice day is that I wish I had gobs of money like Paris Hilton or someone so I could live in one of those really fancy houses or ornate rowhouses right near Dumbarton House and be neighbors with Senators and Moguls. That'd be sweet.

But what was sweet about the day was I was able to pretend that I didn't have a job for a day, and that was worth its while.

Super Mario Geekfest

2006-04-27T15:01:00.000-04:00

A Cappella

Xylophone stylings

Live recreation

Techno Lust and Games, don't look at me while I'm geeking out.

2006-04-25T15:08:00.000-04:00

I keep buying more crap. I know I shouldn't but I want a Nintendo DS lite so badly. I've basically stopped playing video games since college. I've always always wondered if it was because I was getting to old for video games, or were the games that were coming out were complete rubbish. I think I have my answer, the Sony PSP. My wife got me one last year right when it came out. It was great, she even got me 3 games for it. And after a month's playing. I realized most of the games for it were completely bland and I found out I could load old nintendo games on them. I rediscovered why I loved video games so much when I was a kid. They were actually fun! These days, they're really glitzy with 3-dimensional realism, but they blow hard chunks in terms of keeping me entertained. Its just a lot of repetitive crap dressed up in a nice outfit.

After reading about the games that Nintendo is cranking out for their relatively new handheld, I wanted one, then I found out they redesigned the system and its actually smaller, more svelte, and with a brighter screen, I really wanted one. Today, I saw the 3rd installment of the Cabel's funny review of his DS Lite and I am having to refrain myself from dropping 200 bucks on an imported version knowing full well that the US is going to get theirs soon enough and I'll feel like a complete ass for paying a 60+ dollar markup just because I can't be patient.

This could be the kid in me wanting to relive my nostalgia and simplicity of having some fun, or this could be the adult in me buying stuff to fill the unavoidable void we all have when we realize that life as an adult is nothing like it was when we were kids. I don't know, the optimist in me hopes its the former, the realist in me thinks its the latter.

Minaturization

2006-04-25T14:17:00.000-04:00

Ever since I was a kid, I was fascinated by small things. These photos make me think of Mister Rogers with one exception, they're actual real life scenes. Its a photo trick to make it look like its a toy model. Full explaination and flickr set here.

[via digg]

Mouse Trap

2006-04-24T13:37:00.000-04:00

Ok, this stuff reminds me of the old school board game Mouse Trap. There's also a video out there floating around with the Honda car parts system. I don't know what the hell it is that makes me mesmerized by this dinky 50s-ish machined systems.

[via Luca's email]

YouTube test

2006-04-21T14:11:00.000-04:00

This video always makes me want to 2 things. Buy another BMW and visit Italy again. Ok, 3 things, gawk at the hot women.

If you won 10 million dollars

2006-04-20T16:01:00.000-04:00

I'm realizing how messed up the currency system we have in this day and age. I'm starting to become one of those old farts that say, "back when I was a kid, we could buy a cone from McDonald's for only a quarter!" Also when I was a kid, I'd always ask myself what I'd do if I won a million dollars. Now? I'm realizing winning a million dollars would still require me to work for my retirement. Funny how currency/money works.

So I've been posing to people the Office Space question now though to anyone I'm having a conversation with. What would you do if you won 10 million dollars? I mean, after all, 10 million is enough for a person to quit their job if they wanted to. This also tells me if a person actually loves what they're doing or are they just doing it to pay the bills. I know that's not the point of the Office Space question though, I mean, usually they ask you this crap in a job interview or at a career counseling to get a better understanding of what your passions are.

I think I'd want to travel for a bit. I realize that while I've had a lot of schooling in classrooms, but very little of the world itself and I feel like traveling would open my eyes up a little more. I'd also probably indulge myself in a business venture of some sorts, be it in music or film, but I've always been drawn to the line where the arts and business meet. Other than that, I don't really know what my aspirations are. I spent too much of my 20s being complacent or distracted and I guess I'm paying for it now, I'm just stuck in "paying the bills" mode. Its not a detrimental routine, at least not in the short term, but I guess I'm starting to ask myself what kind of goals I need to start setting and where I want to be at the end of my 30s while I'm just at the beginning of it.

Time

2006-04-17T12:51:00.000-04:00

Its starting to escape me. Everyone says Time is a constant, but I keep seeing it as something flexible and non-linear. The older I get, the less time I seem to have. I blink and half a month has blew by, I blink again, and its a new season. The funny thing is, I actually try to structure my time better now, I try to categorize and manage it, and then life somehow flips around and does the opposite thing. Its almost like I'm being mocked.

You wanna try to manage time better? Well its just going to slip away quicker if you do. I still remember the days of being a kid where afternoons would stretch out and feel like there was no end. I could lay on my parents bed, stare at the clock and wonder when would the day end, it was moving so slow! And now? Friday comes, and next thing I know, its Monday and I'm trying to recount what the hell happened over the weekend. Such is life I guess, the more you're cognizant of something, the more it slips away faster. Or at least that's how it feels like.

I remember a time during elementary school where time was compartmentalize for us. There would be holidays, and of course the school was always be dressed up in the appropriate theme. Then when you hit highschool and college, milestones were set up in terms of friendships, relationships, accomplishments. But now that I'm living an adult life, and its up to me to set up markers and terms on what changes and what stays in the same in my mind, its more difficult to grasp onto a routine concept to say, "yes, this time has passed." Its harder to say to myself, "you used your time wisely." And its easy to buy into the hollywood cliche of "seizing the day" but really, you can't say that in the moment. I can prepare to create those moments, but the reality is I can't really do that until its passed and look at it in retrospect. And well, its just difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that even if I try to resist change and time, it will always be flowing and if I don't drink from it, I will squander it.

Lost

2006-04-13T13:31:00.000-04:00

The only good things on Wednesday night Television is Lost. That's if its not the umpteenth repeat of the season. But I'm starting to figure things out after reading a million geeky posts from http://dharmasecrets.com and piecing things together.

From what I gather, all the people that are on the island are not there by chance, but everything has been manipulated up to this point to get them there. Everything is too neatly packaged and things can't be that coincidental.

Also, the island is surrounded by some huge EMP/Magnetic force. This gives the "others" their heightened abilities, what drove the french woman's team mad, and is what healed Locke and Rose. This also is driving a lot of the plots and subplots up to this point, minus all the relationship melodrama.

I got all of this just recently, and I didn't actually start avidly watching the show until the second season. Hopefully the show won't jump the shark prematurely, although it could. Alias, produced by the same guy, used to be a razor sharp show, and now its going out this year on pretty much a whimper.

Birthday photos

2006-04-11T09:52:00.000-04:00

Took the day off, spent the day with the one I love. Pictures are from Old Town Alexandria, Virginia.

kiddy names

2006-04-06T09:24:00.000-04:00

The big news in the news/entertainment world is that Katie Couric is giving up her morning job for the bigtime evening news. What got me wondering is how is it for some people can grow up and keep their "kiddie" names and not get made fun of and some can't? Or is Katie going to be known as "Kate Couric" now that she's a hard hitting journalist again? I don't think that's possible, her name is ingrained into the american pop culture lexicon. You can't just change something like that.

Meanwhile, I've met tons of guys that should have made the transition years ago but they're now in their 30s and 40s and they're being called names that only boys should have. Jonny, Tommy, Joey, etc... I mean, I had a friend once named Donny and he had the sense to shorten it to Don after we got to college. Maybe it seems more infantile with guy names rather than girl names. Or perhaps its just me being fixated on what should be adult-like and what shouldn't be.

First post

2006-04-05T22:51:00.000-04:00

So this is like my umpteenth blog creation. I guess this one will stick, along with my livejournal since I don't have to pay for domain hostings nor do I have to maintain anything besides the content. So, right, why I'm starting another blog.

I'm turning 31 next week and I think I'm slowly crossing the midpoint gap of adjusting to being adult. Mind you, I said "midpoint gap" which means, I still have tendencies to act like a kid. I guess I'll have to straddle that mindset until I'm ready to give something up to grow up a little more.

So why have I crossed the midpoint? I guess I realize that I'm married now, I live in the city, I own my own house, and I have a steady paying job are some of the points. I also worry about having health care, not having to live paycheck to paycheck and also planning for my "future." And when I say future, I guess I'm just saying I don't wanna cry and file for bankruptcy if something bad happens in my life. What kind of bad things? Well, loss of job, lose of limb, or loss of something else. Robert Kiyosaki, aka Rich Dad/Poor Dad guy, is right, there are only really 2 things that motivate people in this world, fear and greed/desire. I'm trying to rise above that but then again, it is hard to break habits. I guess that's part of growing up.