the rule of thinkers

i think i'm very smart. which is not the same as actually being very smart.

now, i score high on standardized tests, graduated from the last, great hope for public school education, etc., so i'm not a dummy. that said, a curiously large number of friends happen to be a bit smarter.

i see two possible ways to look at this. the half-glass full way of looking at things is that smart people surround themselves with other smart people. this makes sense and has some truth to it. i hate dumb people. if i am guilty of prejudice, it is against dumb people. they annoy me. they bewilder me. deep down, i strongly feel they should be prohibited from procreating. thus, i gravitate toward people with brains.

i like this explanation. it reaffirms that i really am a genius. here's the flipside though and ultimately what is more accurate. the more friends you have smarter than you, the more inflated your view on how intelligent you really are. you associate with people who are similar, not to how you actually are, but how you perceive yourself to be.

the upshot: if all your friends are brilliant, you consider yourself brilliant. now start counting. if there's a "surprising" number of people just a touch more brilliant than you, bad news: you're not nearly as smart as you think.

a special offer from nike

what a deal!!!

inside my head

recently, i've been feeling a bit reflective (i.e. sad) and i've found myself pondering those things in life that truly suck.

disappointment in someone who you previously held in very high regard. that's got to be up there.

the naming of things

i used to be a real microsoft-hater. their products kinda sucked and they had those not-so-friendly predatory business practices. i've since softened in my disdain for them, especially now that bill gates, the former stone-faced evil master of the corporation now looks to be a pretty good guy. i don't necessarily agree with all his philanthropy campaigns -- anti-smoking, for one -- but he's not starting a new, even-more, right-wing, gay and abortion bashing, sect of the evangelical christian church either. i say win for bill.

which is why it gives me no pleasure to bash their products. really, it's not even their products, it's how they name them. windows 98, windows 2000, office 2003, office 2007. stop naming them after the year they were released. do you know how dated that makes your products look as soon as the calendar turns? i go to the store and see something that was made last year or even a couple years back and it certainly does not inspire me to spend my limited supply of cash. and it mildly irks me if something two years old doesn't carry some significant discount either.

it reminds me of going to a sporting events and seeing fans wearing jerseys of players who've already changed franchises twice since then. like c-web jerseys at warriors games or primetime jerseys at 49ers games. you just look stupid. all i can think about is, how long have you owned that thing and please retire it immediately. if you want to support your team, go ahead and pick someone who actually plays for them, not someone who visits a couple times a year and tries to put a mark in the l column for your beloved squad.

a childhood slogan

i recall the days when mean kids would say to unpopular kids stuff like 'roses are red, violets are blue, my mom smells like sunshine, your mom smells like poo.' technically, you could finish the invective with anything that rhymed with blue, but in reality approximately 98% of insults delivered using this framework finished with 'poo'. 'your dad forgot to shower, now he smells like poo', 'when i look at your face, it makes me think of poo'. you get the picture.

but violets aren't blue, they're, well, violet right?

it is what it is

feeling a bit reflective a few days back, i decided to walk home one evening in lieu of a $10 cab ride. i strolled up the street, earbuds in, aurally isolated from the world. but i did notice a display for grape nuts.

and it was complex. nuanced. or maybe just dumb.

on the poster, it had two phrases. oatmeal stout. pale ale. both of them with strikethroughs. then some whitespace and the words grape nuts. followed by "it is what it is".

which i find odd. because. i don't what grape nuts "is". they're not grapes. they're not nuts. and they're certainly not nuts that come from grapes. in fact, as a child, after seeing one of their tv commercials, what exactly grape nuts were and how in the hell they got the name grape nuts.

further, being plural, shouldn't it be "they are what they are". now i'm pretty sure what they mean is grape nuts are healthy -- no sugar, food coloring, etc. added. and i'm pretty sure the people who were working on the campaign knew exactly what they were, but for the rest of us we're pretty much in the dark on this.

here's an idea instead of giving us the existential explanation of what grape nuts are, why not just tell us straight away. i guarantee if they had done that, i'd have had several conversations the next day that started with, "hey, you know grape nuts actually are..."

Decree II: Regarding Work on Your Birthday

Decree II: All employers will be mandated by law to provide a paid holiday to be taken on the day of an employee's birthday.

Americans work too hard. Or at least they show up to the office too much. I remember my first job out of college had a month vacation -- plus five sick days. I had never heard of such a thing. Two weeks, normal. Three weeks, extravagant. But a month, unthinkable. At least for those in the 50 states (Puerto Rico? I don't know the norms there).

I later found out that our generous vacation policy was not generous at all. The company I worked for -- Barclays Global Investors -- was a subsidiary of Barclays Bank, an English-based company. And while four weeks sounds good there, it doesn't ring quite as true across the pond, where 6 weeks, and even 8 weeks, won't raise an eyebrow.

All of this amounts to me saying, companies can afford to give their employees one more day off a year. Let's be frank. Past the age of 21, and especially past the age of 30, birthdays really aren't that great. We celebrate not because of the thrill of getting older but to remind us we can still have fun, despite knees getting a little creakier, backs locking up more often, and everything slouching just a fraction closer to the floor. Have a heart, corporate America..

Decree I

hoping to spur my writing frequency, i've decided to start a new standing feature for my blog. i call it "If I Were World Czar".

the title explains it all. there are certain things that would cease to exist -- punishable by death by strangulation.

first order or business: websites are expressly forbidden from auto-playing music.

let's be honest, there are few things worse than visiting a site only to be bombarded by unexpected cacophony. speaking nothing of those times, when you are enjoying a nice track from a favored artist only to have it overlayed with some crap a web designer thought was cool two years ago when he put the site together.

the near genius of death cab

has nothing to do with their music, which unabashedly sucks*.

*unless you're a 14-year-old girl. i once attended a death cab concert. this was early in my switch from listening to nerdy hip hop to indie. a friend (a girl, not 14 years old though. she's gotten shit for it post-facto) asked me. i accepted. mostly because i wanted to see the opener, stars, who ended up sucking also. however, the show had one saving grace: the bar, specifically, the lack of line. i ordered several drinks to dull the pain and not once did i wait one second in line. which makes sense since there were two bars and i was one of two people of age. seriously, police should stakeout death cab shows for pedophiles.

i'm currently on the search for a couple of ironic gifts, and death cab t-shirts would be perfect. since i have two friends who now assert their love for death cab has died, it would be a great way to remind them of their former taste suckitude. in my attempt to navigate to the t-shirt section, i clicked on the gear link. but instead of taking me to their merch, it took me to a page listing all the equipment the band uses.

now that's smart.

certainly, throngs of 13-year-olds are out there getting no chicks. and upon visiting this page, he thinks to himself, i could play like death cab and get chicks too. they're ugly and kind of doughy just like me and they get laid. a lot. and with freshman girls too (kidding. maybe.). preying on this sort of thinking, i guarantee they could sell a lot of overpriced guitars and amps.

as could be expected though, they fall short of doing it right. it's just a list. no links to some seller where they get to make money off of people coming through their site.

i know indie rockers aren't renowned for their website skills, but seriously why wouldn't every band do this? especially knowing a little about how little they make before signing with a major label.

the state of journalism today

a couple years back, i flew out to syracuse for final round interviews of the newhouse fellowship. all six finalists received full rides to the j-school, but the two fellowship winners would also get their choice of which newhouse paper to be staffed at post-graduation.

the interview ran the weekend. and after the three days, it became starkly clear i was the second best candidate. hemmy, a korean girl from nyc via houston, was the best. funny thing, neither of us was chosen.

not that it mattered to her, since she landed a spot in la times METPRO program -- a year interning as a general assignment reporter at the times followed by a year on staff of another tribune newspaper (the south florida sun-sentinel in her case).

sometime between her time in la and fort lauderdale we drifted apart. the one time we did speak to her during the florida exile, she told me that she hated it there, at least partly because she was doing the long-distance thing with someone back in la. as soon as she finished her second year, she wanted to return to california.

now she's back. only not as a journalist, but as a lawyer at a boutique law firm.

i don't have her cv handy, but here are some of her highlights. undergrad at rice. nyu law school. couple years at a fancy nyc firm. a year at the poughkeepsie journal. a year at the la times. a year at the sun-sentinel. just published an essay in a book of blind-date horror stories. terrific storyteller. conversant in korean.

i often say journalism sucks. i say this because the only jobs within reach for me require a move to some piece of shit, redneck town in the midwest for 18k a year. i'd love work as a full-time journalist. but the love isn't strong enough to make that sacrifice. not when i can do interesting things in sf for a lot more money.

but if she can't get a job back in la, then journalism doesn't just suck -- it's fucked. this is a girl who had the wherewithal to leave a lucrative gig in nyc to move to poughkeepsie so she could make 10% as much and write. and now with three years as a full-time reporter, she can't find a single reporting job in la. as a korean, no less, in a town with a whole bunch of koreans. for any number of publications that are starving for diversity. yes, i know the state of the industry. but driving young talent away certainly won't turn the balance sheets upside-down.

i'm happy she's back in la. it gives me someone to go see a show in la with when i'm down there. and she's got a great job paying good money.

but i'm sad she's not back as a writer.

it's official

i'm up-to-date on the posnanski blog.

my hangover just got worse. the sun disappeared behind the clouds. a frigid wind started blowing off the water. blah, blah, blah. this sucks.

now what, work?

the end is near

approaching the fifth and final season of the wire, i experienced a peculiar mixture of excitement and dread. excitement, obviously, because the greatest thing to ever grace the small screen was set to return and fill that huge void. dread because each episode meant one less new episode in this world.

now i am experiencing something similar again. baseball is an odd animal for me. while i enjoy the occasional game, i enjoy reading about it much more. and no baseball writer do i enjoy more than joe posnanski. i've known about joe for some time. i've loyally read rob neyer for some time and he periodically would mention joe along with the moniker 'best sports writer out there'.

but it's only been more recently, that i've become a devoted reader. for a while, i would read whenever he posted something new on his blog. but after reading great take after great take, i decided i needed to cull through the archives. essentially, it's been my work day for the past week or so.

the archives date back to october of last year, but now i'm just about caught up to april. and since i started regularly reading the blog in april, i know the stockpile of new material nears complete depletion.

good news for my employers. but, oh the dread for me...

more evidence time flies

every so often, i head back to blogger, type a few words, and hit submit. voila. a blog entry. it's not regular, so before seeing the date of my last post, i really have no idea how much time has passed since i last wrote.

the only consistent thing: it's always a lot longer than i thought.

apparently, it's been three weeks since i last made a contribution. yet to me, it seems like yesterday. if i were explaining this phenomenon to a strange girl, i'd say it like this (sarcastically, perhaps).

'writing is personal. every word you put down stays with you.'

and like most things men say to strange girls, they're not really true. it's not a lie either, but you being clever gets more priority than you being accurate. after all, if she's a girl, and she's strange -- and you're talking to her -- you're likely considering the possibility of taking her home. given this, witty plays much better than knowledgeable. much, much, better.

in reality, writing is hard. i suspect hard for everybody. and certainly hard for me. humans have an unlimited capacity for easy. that's why places like cheesecake factory and walmart proliferate like adolescent bunnies despite sucking. hard, on the other hand, happens far less often. yet understandably, they stay with you longer. we humans like the idea we conquer great challenges constantly. hence, three weeks between blog postings feeling like three hours.

chicken and the egg

follow-up to yesterday's deep thought of the day:

which came first the blue contacts or the fake tits?

blue contacts, fake tits, and asian girls

i don't know much about the following: optometry and cosmetic surgery. but i do know this. if i were to own a practice in either of the aforementioned, i would put in place some cross-marketing for the other.

let's do some math.

boob jobs run anywhere from 3k to 15k depending on the reputation of the surgeon/artist. if you just split it down the middle, you get 9k. but let's be realistic. asian girls who wear blue contacts aren't exactly rolling top shelf. sure, it could be a rich korean girl with low self-esteem (redudnant?) who forewent enough lv leather goods saved to channel their allowance to get the work done. more than likely though, it's some low-rent asian skank who thinks real modeling takes place on showroom floors alongside shiny cars whose doors open upward.

let's say the latter outweighs the former 2-1. so weighted average: 7k. my referral fee as the optometrist for sending over the girl i just fitted for some tinted lenses, 10%. that's an extra $700 in my pocket. shit, that's like ten eye exams for giving them a business card!

seriously though (at least a little bit). i live in san francisco. we have plenty of asian girls. and among the plenty, there's a small percentage of those who feel blue contacts "enhance" their appearance (it looks awful by the way). and of that small percentage, 100% of them "needed" breast enhancement to complete their look into the illegitimate child conceived in a new york minute between fembot #1 and carlo from hoboken.

it's a weird world.

in dreams

as i opened my eyes this morning, i recalled my dreams as clearly as when i was having them. three days in a row this has been the case. in of itself, this is an oddity. i suck at remembering things i do while awake, and it goes the same way for those things when i am sleeping.

but the real peculiarity is something altogether different. the same person has starred three consecutive nights. once chance, twice coincidence, three times a pattern.

this strikes me as not particularly healthy. well unless, that same person has dreamt about you for those same three days. in that case, it's more than healthy. it's great.

thursday's the new saturday (in sf too)

without doubt, thursdays have brought me the most joy of any day. at least the past year. it's what happens when you harness the synergy of the holy cow, 1984, and bob's donuts.

yesterday was a special one. my quasi-regular thursday gang were celebrating a birthday. a thirtieth one at that. which means in addition to the regular round, r bar, amelie, and most importantly, the house of prime rib were part of the festivities.

never before, and perhaps never again, will someone have bottle service at the holy cow. anyone who lives in sf will understand. if that doesn't describe you, replace with the sweatiest, sleaziest, post-junior-college discotheque in your town, and you'll get the idea.

willing to overpay

like everybody else, i despise finding out i've overpaid for something. like bedding a hot chick who you swept off to a fancy restaurant with white tablecloths and ordered the sommelier's recommended bottle of wine (instead of scanning the list for the smallest number), only to find out the next morning she went double fisted on two of your friends in the bathroom at harlot (substitute any club with velvet ropes) .

but exceptions to all rules. and here is one.

WANTED: Black "Allergic to Broke" t-shirt; as worn by Savino Bratton in Season 5, Episode 1 of The Wire.

google finds many things. but not this.

giving versus receiving

gchat, gmail's built-in im program, has a twitter-like feature where you can show a quote, status, or other short message next to your name when it shows up in friend's contact lists.*

by typing this first sentence -- which uses a twitter reference voluntarily in a non-business related endeavor -- i know i give away the fact i have devolved into a web 2.0 geek. while i accept this, i also disclose my feelings that twitter to be retarded. paradoxically, i like the twitter -like feature of gchat. us humans, we are oh so complex.

today, i updated my message so to include this mel brooks quote -- via a joe posnanski blog entry -- about the difference between comedy and tragedy:

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. That’s a tragedy. It hurts, it’s bleeding, I don’t like it, tragedy. Comedy is you falling in a manhole, what do I care?

i love it. certainly, i'm not alone in that fact. after all, it's hilarious. but i love it more than most. and i say that not because i'm better than most, but because i am more self-centered than most. and by most, i mean, well, just about everybody.

now all of us know the cliche, it's better to give than to receive. but let's be realistic about this. it's not true. well not generally at least. sure, there have been instances where something i gave brought me more joy than something i received. in that sense, yes it's true. of course, this also had a lot to do with what i received being crap, and what i gave having ruled. i suspect this explains how this specious phrase arose. let me reinforce with an example.

some sap, while on one knee, having just exchanged six-months salary for a small gem, offers the alleged woman of his dreams the rest of his life. she accepts; merriment ensues. he, being of moderate intellect, ponders the following: this is way better than that time my grandma gave me that ugly red sweater with the brown reindeer on it. really is something to this giving stuff.

i do not expound with the intention of sounding bitter or cynical -- such is consequence -- but the truth often does ring unpleasant. but i'll concede this. giving great gifts does feel nice, even if not quite so nice as receiving a great one. of course, the former you control.

all of this is a round-about way of my saying that i've found something to give. and yes it is a great gift. 1) it's random. obligation never enhances a present. 2) it's by the aforementioned posnanski, who despite by trade a sportswriter, writes beautifully. 3) it's about baseball. my friend loves baseball. 4) $16.47. an amazing greatness-to-dollar ratio.

google docs and gmail don't like each other

one arm of google's many-pronged assault on microsoft dominance is their online word-processing suite, google docs. let me start by saying, i like it. i recall the old days -- like a month ago -- when i emailed a doc to myself to get something from my work computer to my home laptop. that system works. it's lame though.

now with google docs, i simply upload it and then access it from any computer i damn well like. beauty-full.

but before they fell microsoft office, they should probably get their programs to at least work together.

i wrote a couple stories and wanted to give them a quick, final read at work before i sent them off to my editor. so i uploaded them to google docs, read them over, made a few small improvements, and hit ctrl-s. then i went to email them and wondered how exactly to attach something on google docs to my gmail message. and i had no idea.

there may be a way, and if so, feel free to enlighten, but if there is, it's neither intuitive, nor obvious. so, vexed, i saved them on to my desktop, then attached them to my mail message.

lame indeed.

my month of stupid

1) got a call this morning from a friend of mine around ten thirty. though the number wasn't programmed i recognized it as her office line. odd, i thought that she'd be at the office on a saturday. so i asked what she was doing there. and she asked right back, why wouldn't she be there? because silly, people don't normally work on the weekends -- of course it was friday.

2) opened a tab at this hermosa beach bar called union cattle this past saturday night. unfortunately, they require you to leave an id. so i handed them my passport. and then left 3 hours later without my credit card or passport. which left me with no way to get through security at lax for my flight the next day. so instead of dumplings at the world-famous din-tai-fung i sat outside the bar, hoping someone would show up early enough for me to not miss my flight home.

3) why was i carrying my passport? good question. because i lost my wallet in a cab. this i blame on the funny pocket design on my jacket that go all the way through. this means you can miss the pocket entirely when trying to put something in by reaching past it. of course, ten minutes later i made the same mistake with my mobile. this i blame on myself.

4) feeling a little under the weather, i purchased a sandwich on my way home from work one evening. i walked up to the counter paid for it, and then left it on the counter. awesome. special thanks to the bitch at the register who decided to let me walk out with my purchase so she had a free dinner. she could've got it free too, i bet.

5) i take the train to work everyday. well after 365+ days of practice, i still struggle with finding the right one. well at least i have twice this month.

fucking leap year. like i needed an extra day.

interesting on so many levels

well actually just two.

from the truehoop blog:

Kansas City Chiefs' tight end Tony Gonzalez has a record-setting season after becoming a vegan with the help of a former Clippers strength coach Jon Hinds. Hinds had some solid advice about bread: "After a preseason practice, he accompanied Mr. Hinds to learn a skill he believed as important as blocking techniques: how to shop for groceries. Mr. Hinds showed him nutritious fish oils and how to pick out breads dense with whole grains, nuts and seeds. 'The best bread for you,' says Mr. Hinds, 'is if I hit you with it, it hurts.'"

1) one of the best football players of all time went vegan. when i think of vegans, i think of idiots. probably living in the mission (or the equivalently hipster neighborhood of respective city), with a house full of woody incense and obscure homeopathic remedies that they think make them healthier -- and let's face it, better -- than everybody else. but if this can actually make an nfl guy even fitter and stronger than he was before, i might have to soften my characterization. slightly.

2) is fish oil really vegan? i mean, it comes from fish, right?

the last week, yesterday

they've both sucked. nothing has really gone right, work, personal life, and everything in between.

after seven months in the black, the company i report to each morning will take a serious plunge into the red next month. in the online gaming world, the various software solutions are more or less commodities. software is widely shared and even when a company uses their own propreitary solution, it's only marginally different -- whether better or worse.

as it turns out, a company using an almost identical software solution to us has decided to discount the product so severely that we are now guaranteed to lose money. essentially, for every dollar we now take in, we will now be giving away $1.10. that's not good. also not good for me. it means less flexibility and more micro-management. that combination ruins everything.

but all that was just prelude to yesterday. for the second straight day (today is #3, yippee!!) i've tried to diagnose why my rails application won't work with the newly released update of the language. whether you know what rails is or not matters not at all. what you need to know is i've made no progress whatsoever. 11 hours yesterday, and the only action was me stomping my feet and banging my fist against the desk. oh, and some expletive-laden rants that surely made the custodial staff think i'd acquired tourette's. and then to top it all of, i wasted another four hours at my second job by dumping a nickel at the poker table to a bunch of chumps. needless to say, i went to sleep in a foul mood.

so summary. work sucks. personal life sucks. second job playing cards sucks. web startup project sucks. and the coffee machine at work -- the one that was supposed to kick my day off right after i ate the $10 parking fee so i could make a special trip to buy the best beans in sf (blue bottle ) but spit out something that would be mistaken for tea by the naked eye -- yes, you guessed it, sucks.

can you say tequila shots later?

resolution #2, 2008

no more sudoku. that game is fucking addictive.

go red

while the rest of the world has settled on the importance of energy conservation, my office has taken the bush-ian stance that global warming is faggy, liberal, poppycock.

fog shrouds san francisco and the temperature barely climbs t0 50, but that doesn't mean the ac shouldn't be going full bore inside. hey, we all lugged heavy winter coats to work. why not get a full day's use out of them.

say yes, say no

i'm already behind on new year's resolutions but here's my first:

replace the following: i guess, i think so, i believe, and it seems, it appears with yes and their negative counterparts with no. ditto for not really.

economy of words means tighter writing. why not the same for speaking.

email is backwards

eventually, email will go the way of threads (a la gmail). but email has been in the mainstream for well over a decade and yet still no one has figured out that new email should be sorted in reverse chronological order.

life for 99% of the white collar world begins something like this. power on your computer, walk to the kitchenette for a cup of coffee, sit down in your herman miller aeron chair and gently blow on your steaming beverage while you scroll through the mountain of email that has accumulated in the last 16 hours.

and herein lies the problem. often there's a series of emails that you need to read from the beginning in order to understand the discussion. that means you begin with the oldest one first. and everytime you delete a message you've read the cursor moves to the next oldest email meaning you need to scroll upwards to get to the next message to be read.

here are my two proposals:

1) keep sorting messages from newest to oldest, but make the default starting point for the cursor the oldest unread email. then, when deleting a message the cursor scrolls upward by one.

2) sort messages from oldest to newest and make the default starting point for the cursor the oldest unread email and cursor still moves downward by one when a message is deleted.

voila, a whole lot less arrow key clicking each morning.

clever

two accidental pregnancy comedies in one year (knocked up, juno). topic has hit the mainstream.

in honor of this, an excerpt from the drunkjaysfans blog about troubled, baby machine and part-time baseball player, elijah dukes.

The 22 year old ballplayer currently has five children by four different women.

As part of a previous commitment with the Tampa Bay Rays, Dukes was supposed to speak at a family planning event to raise awareness on the availability of contraceptives. However, he decided it would be better to pull out at the last possible second.

get it?

google ads

despite having a regular readership of one (me), i felt compelled to add advertisements to my blog -- as if that were the missing link between a devout following and myself.

as a courteous publisher though, i picked the least intrusive spot for them to reside -- the bottom of the page, thus insuring i would see them infrequently. but after my three month hiatus, i felt the need to scroll back through the work.

and what do i find awaiting me at the bottom? an ad for alcohol treatment.

a quick scan of my work reveals this clearly: i don't write often, but when i do it's probably about drinking.

something to ponder.

blogging is hard

2007 has ended. i completed 65 posts. a far cry from the 365 goal i had set for myself.

by the calendar, 2007 marked my third year of blogging. yet not once have i reached the end of the year still active. somewhere in those final winter months, motivation seeps out of me.

but now we look to 2008. and that means renewed, albeit misplaced, hope for a prolific 2007.