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.