Happy Friday Everyone!

So this d-bag thinks he can set off a bomb in a restaurant lavatory. A bomb designed to send shards of glass, nails and caustic chemicals flying through the air towards innocent bystanders. Fortunately for everyone but him, the bomb went off prematurely, damaging his face, as well as his reputation with his terrorist friends.
Apparently the man has some sort of disorder that sticks him with the mental capacity of a ten-year old. In my opinion, any ten-year old child who commits such an act, whether on their own or with the encouragement of others, should immediately be purged from the gene pool. So I believe that this disorder warrants the man absolutely no sympathy. Apparently the judge and jury agreed, because he was given a life sentence with an 18-year minimum. I believe this is a waste of money and they should just kill this man.
The judge said that the defendant was "seduced" by a cause he would never understand. So it wasn't his fault? He was persuaded by a band of conniving long-term planners bent on civil unrest and total public mayhem? If this man has the mind of a ten-year old boy, why is he allowed to go out and fraternize with these terrible people? Would you not keep a closer eye on this man, as his family or legal guardian? Wouldn't you treat him with the same level of care as the ten-year old boy living in his cranium?
Oh, and he left a suicide note stating that he was not brainwashed. Great job.

sorry t-mobile

Once again, impatience gets the best of me. my usual method of tackling software- or network-related phone problems is to remove the battery, let the phone reset, and reassemble the phone with positive results.
for network problems with the cellular towers, apparently i should wait longer than my usual 14.73 milliseconds before replacing the battery to actually allow the proper resetting to take place.
fortunately the t-mobile representative i talked with was very helpful and patient.
i am glad she did not point out the sharp contrast between the infuriatingly enigmatic problem and the childish simplicity of the solution.
but i still feel like a damn moron.
you know when bugs bunny's head turns into a donkey? yea...

now do you see why fast-moving vehicles should never be autonomous? imagine this sort of problem occurring while hurtling down a highway at 100 km/hr. your gps, traffic and navigation systems go out, and you have to conduct some sort of hardware reset to avoid becoming part of a metal/plastic/flesh accordion.
now quadruple this speed and take yourself 12 kilometers into the clouds, and imagine your airplane's autopilot dying mid-descent. will you have the nerves to break into the sealed cockpit and figure out how to restart the computer systems before you end up part of a real-life lord of the flies?
complete with piggy and john locke, of course.

egregiously pinheaded association

the environmental protection agency seems to think that coal ash poses no environmental risk. this is after the second catastrophic spill of such ash in sixty years.
last time this happened, in the same american state of course, the ph level of the river shot up from 8.5 to 12.7. keep in mind, the ph scale only goes from 0 to 14. the river is naturally alkaline, with it's average hovering around 7.8 to 8.5. the 1967 toxic spill gave the river water a ph level similar to household bleach, which you can imagine is not so great for wildlife. it did make catching fish a lot easier, but those fish tended to be horribly deformed and dead.
now only 51 years later, a river in tennesee is saturated with toxic coal ash, which you will be relieved to know is only used in products such as paint, kitchen countertops and mulch. nothing you would have any contact with.
so will the e.p.a. decide to start regulating coal ash? i sure hope so. for now, i'll try to avoid eating catfish, and see if we can organize some sort of environmental petition version of those eyelid holders from a clockwork orange.
look at what is happening! save us obama!

Email Alerts

Mobile email alerts are great. I can immediately correspond, but at my leisure. I am able to delete an email from Boyds about shirts i can't afford, archive a bank statement proving i can't afford the shirts, and then read an email about a happy hour special I'll miss because I'll still be at work.
Cynical example aside, my blackberry gmail application is great for real emails, providing I can check the emails in a timely fashion. So this past week, my Edge network has decided to take a vacation, leaving me in a desolate world of internet darkness, without benefit of my daily weather forecasts, emails, news feeds, and occasional sports updates.
If you are wondering why I don't use my home internet for such things, the answer is simple. I don't pay for home internet. My blackberry is fine for the my digital information needs. Anything that can't be accomplished or read on my blackberry from the comfort of my apartment is not necessary or imperative enough to require the immediacy that the blackberry affords me.
This weekend proved that I need to have a serious talk with my phone provider regarding the lapse in service. This morning I read an exciting email, and immediately began telling a friend about it. I was considered as a competitor in a well-known global motion design competition, Cut&Paste, which is being held in my hometown this year. I was very excited to take a chinatown bus up to NYC and attend the test round to see if i qualify for the actual nerve-wracking, live, timed competition. My binary heart sunk, however, upon learning that the test rounds were held this past weekend, January 24th and 25th of 2009. I received the email Friday night, a few hours after I left work, and only found out about it at 9:30 this morning. The information in that email would have been significantly more useful if I had read about the opportunity before it had passed.
F*ck t-mobile.

framsite 2.0

redesigned and ready for 2009.

coding courtesy of allison rose wagner.

while i'm updating this shiz...
i should probably pick a different photo of my face.
look at that thing! who has a side profile of themselves?
this isn't prison.
ok that's next on my list, i promise.

thanks L. P. Brand

we can argue all day about the existence of higher beings and their influence on our actions, versus the notions of free will and choice or alternate realities and parallel universes.
you can wax romantic on your theory that our universe is an enormous cosmic game of life, or simlife if you're a complete loser.
or maybe you think the end of Men in Black is accurate, and the milky way galaxy is simply the design within the toy marble of some unfathomably immense creature gambling in its school playground.
or you can shut your mouth and gaze upon the following 1000 words.

ignore the misspelling, because it's a CAPTCHA, and if the character sequence is only slightly distorted like it is here, it is rarely an actual word.
i especially like the little wheelchair, but if you didn't already notice that before i mentioned it, i can only shake my head slowly.

thoughtful but ultimately foolish

in a local chain pharmacy, tethered to a shelving unit, there hangs a handheld magnifying glass. well, it's more of a plastic magnifying strip, but you get the idea; assist those with visual difficulties. a woman with cataracts probably wants to know what the fine print on her medication says.
printed along the side of the polyurethane zoom-in rectangle is a six-inch ruler divided into 1/16th inch increments. theoretically a good idea, but when you magnify something, it tends to look larger, which makes the measurement scale rather useless. totally useless. unnecessarily confusing. stupid. just plain stupid.

come on walgreens! you can do better than that.

automated vending machines

an email sent to my dad this morning:

"so after my third attempt at refilling my patco card (like a metrocard) i tossed it in the trash and tried to buy a new one. after my third rejection of that, and a few loud x-rated grumblings, i concluded that the machine was probable just out of cards, but could not tell me something so important because that would actually be helpful. instead it kept making me wait a full minute before spitting out a recipt that said "denied" in so many words. so i scrounged up $3 from my coat and bought a regular paper ticket, which are supposed to have been useless for months now, and made it onto our morning train with only a slight bump from the closing doors.

now i look at my bank account and one of the transactions that did not go through, went through. so i have a $35 patco card that does not exist.

how do i get that money back without taking a sledgehammer to the vending machine in the station?

please help thank you love you"

see what happens when computers control everything?
i hate computers

current events

less than an ten minutes ago, a friend working at Nickelodeon in midtown told me he saw a plane make an emergency landing in the Hudson. my blood went cold.

slight side note...
i was sitting in physics class sophomore year of highschool in nyc when the loudspeakers crackled to life and announced that an airplane had just crashed into one of the twin towers, so i've had a few too many plane crashes in my life.
back to the story...

at almost the same time, a co-worker at my company in south jersey alerted me to the cnn coverage of the story. apparently an airbus a320 headed from laguardia airport to north carolina failed miserably at its takeoff, and had to make an emergency landing in the river. an expert witness made a startling observation about the aquatic landing, saying the aircraft "made a big splash."
thankfully, a few humans on board a nearby ferry were not so dense, and managed to toss life jackets into the frigid water for the 140+ people now sinking slowly into nyc's most infamous body of water.
ok update.
it seems that everyone was able to exit the sinking craft safely.
the commercial aircraft experienced what is known as a "bird strike", which is a finely crafted euphemism for "playing chicken with a flock of innocent birds and winning." the plane was in the air for all of 180 seconds before violently sucking at least one bird into the aluminum vortex of one of the engine turbines, immediately decimating the engine in a firey blaze, and hopefully killing the avian creature somewhat quickly and painlessly.
another interesting bit of information is that cnn, upon updating their site with the latest news on the catastrophe, realized the idiocy of half the witness's comment and chose to omit the part i have quoted above. ah, the internet.

Misleading Summaries and Prissy Talent

Many people find the phrase 'sci-fi' distasteful, so film critics should be careful with their use of said phrase. Upon reading the Netflix review of The Fountain, some movie watchers immediately skip to films of a different nature. In this way, the movie is overlooked by hundreds of possible fans who are confused by the gross generalization that the content probably includes spaceships, tentacles and ray guns.
This, of course, is slightly incorrect, and please forgive any spoilers ahead, because too many people missed this movie in theaters.
In the traditional sense, yes, this film is science fiction, because it is a fictional story that involves science. I can assure you, George Lucas had nothing to do with this film. although if he did, the movie would probably include a lengthy monologue by some grotesquely racist computer-generated alien. Did you know that ol' georgie boy didn't even direct empire strikes back and return of the jedi? he directed episode iv, and then he decided to just sit back and pay other people to direct his next two movies. then he decided to sit back even further, enjoy his immense cult following, wait twenty years, and piss all over his loyal fans by directing three disgusting cinematic atrocities. there are three star wars films, period. any star wars material created after 1983 just does not exist in my world.
let me be clear. i have been a fan of episodes iv, v, and vi since my first viewings as a young humanoid. the indiana jones films of last century were also classics.
and yes, there are only three of those movies.
The Fountain is a fantastic motion picture, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good, solid 100-minute brain explosion of sights, sounds and emotions. After multiple viewings, I like to believe that the film's stories are parallel universes. coin-lands-on-both-sides kind of thing.
i will say no more, other than watch this movie in high definition if possible. it is truly a gourmet meal for the synapses.
i have noticed a pattern with actors recently, and it has plunged me into a semi-frenzy of quasi-research on the subject. rachel weisz listened to her ipod while in costume and full makeup, on set for a scene of the fountain. reading up on the incredible visual effects for benjamin button, i noticed that brad pitt listened to his ipod during facial motion capture sessions. this pattern begs the question: what do actors listen to while working on a movie?
perhaps they calm their nerves with some tchaikovsky or other classical music, like willem dafoe's character in boondock saints. maybe they rock out with some rush, to heighten their sense of awareness. maybe they listen to a recording of script readings, to solidify their comprehension of the story's flow and their own contributions. maybe they listen to a recording of themselves reading their lines, which would be very creepy and self-absorbed, but with million dollar contracts, these actors certainly can afford a few personality faux pas.
there needs to be a new occupation on film sets. something like actor wrangling. someone to tell actors to cut the bull and do their jobs. someone needed to tell rachel to turn off her ipod and pay attention during camera setup so she would know not to look at her facial reflection in the camera lens glass, but to instead look into the lens hole itself. yes, rachel it's weird to stare at yourself in the camera lens. so don't do it. look into the camera correctly and let the director of photography get the simple closeup and have an enjoyable lunch instead of sweating profusely and feeling frustrated by your incompetence. someone needed to tell brad pitt to turn off the hannah montana songs and sit still during the facial motion capture. ok fine brad you can keep the ipod on. you need to act during this capture session anyway so let's get some of that actor goodness. but would it kill you to shave? i know it's early and the olsen twins are still polishing off the white mountain from last night's "half birthday" blow-out, but give the visual effects team a slight break. your real face isn't even in the first 50 minutes of the film, so give them some 3d facial expression data without benefit of your man gristle.

free time

a little something i came up with during my introspective restroom alone-time business, aka dropping the kids off at the pool:

facebook, sexist version.

features for boys:

• random hot girl. (poke, message or discreetly stalk)
• party reconstruction for photo albums (so you did kiss that slut)
  
• emotionally damaged, drug-addled, barely-legal celebrity of the day
• the newest foreign automobile you can't afford
• job of the month, and how much more school you have to endure to achieve that job
  

features for girls:

• weekly hollywood badboy that you might have a chance with
• group wall-to-wall (spy on your man and the stupid whores he talks to)
• mobile relationship updates (john is 'complicated', huh? juicy!)
• integrated shoe shopping
• just the cutest smiley faces ever
  

the venerable public

waiting for my eggplant slice in nypd pizza, in philly of course, i was witness to a venting of frustrations. a conservatively dressed businessman flamboyantly waving his brand-old blackberry expressed anger in regards to refurbished phones, monthly charges and the overall monetary tomfoolery of cellphone companies. the man maintained that paying $5 per month as phone insurance was a ripoff and he vowed to never again fall for such contractual trickery. the pizza twirling quasi-european seemed to agree on this subject, saying that refurbished phones were "pieces of crap" and not worth the money. "why would you pay all that money for a used phone? they're refurbished for a reason", he laughed. both men seemed content in their decision to stick it to the proverbial man. i was disappointed that these men, as wise as they were in their years of air-breathing and bill-paying, completely missed the point of phone insurance.

these little devices are so vast in their capabilities that few people are able to fully comprehend their diverse usefulness. many of us willingly shell out a fair chunk of our paycheck to have a fancy new digital toy. it's astounding how much some of these phones cost, the damage of which is sometimes heavily subsidized by cellphone service carriers. this is how i was able to obtain a svelte little blackberry curve 8320 for less than $100. this still seems like a large sum of money, but the actual cost of the phone is closer to $500. why would you pay $500 for a stupid phone?! you are no doubt exclaiming inside your head. the answer is, you should not and you absolutely do not have to. companies love to reward customers for their loyalty, because it means steady business, predictable profits and free publicity when you run to your friends, virtually frothing with excitement, screaming verizon just hooked me up! this thing has tv! let's watch family guy while standing in the middle of the sidewalk just because we can!
these handheld computers cost a lot because they do a lot, and i am pretty sure you would rather not pay out of your own pocket if the device breaks for any reason. some simple math will assure you that phone insurance is a sensible investment.

for argument's sake, we will use my phone as an example. i paid $100 for my phone after my mail-in rebate finally came back. the store price of the phone is $450, which is how much i would need to pay to replace the phone within my two-year contract. i currently pay $5 per month for phone insurance, which covers me in the event of theft, loss, general defects and plain old-fashioned carelessness. if i accidentally throw my phone at a brick wall after six months, it will cost me $30 plus a $50 deductible to get a replacement phone. this refurbished replacement will not have the rich new phone smell of my original, but it will cost roughly one fifth of full price and enable me to quickly resume my hyper-connected lifestyle.
perhaps my phone survives the grueling two year contract. that means i spend $120 on insurance that was never used.
is that not the purpose of insurance?
security? peace of mind?
that is why i pay each month, because if my front teeth are struck by lightning while talking on my phone at the edge of a slippery cliff overlooking a deep, murky river inhabited by malnourished crocodiles, i know my dental, heath and phone insurance plans will cover me.

unwanted electronic correspondence

i have officially received my very first real spam email in my regular inbox. somehow it managed to bypass my alcatraz-like security measures. i was always under the impression that spam was most effective when it tricks the reader into divulging a sliver of personal information, or downloading a file, or clicking a link, or even just opening the message at all. this email message has failed at the most basic level of spamming, although it succeeds in provoking explosive bouts of laughter.

the email showed its ugly mug at approximately 4:52pm eastern standard time. it was sent by a kind and gently soul with a west asian name i can neither pronounce outloud nor reproduce using my american keyboard. this was the first sign of trouble.

usually an email begins with a coherent subject, but the phrase "especialy any kind of roleplay :))" immediately betrays my trust in several ways.
besides the fact that this email subject is less than half of a typical english sentence, spelling errors are a big hint that i should discard a message without reading it. normally when one sees the word roleplay followed by a freakishly deformed smiley face, one can assume it is a message from a close friend or lover, but i'm not really into that kind of thing.
keep your costumes, toys and odd voices to yourself.

next on the list of internet blunders is the beginning of the message body, which gmail was kind enough to preview for me. it reads "all i can say im a 51% angel anf 49% bitch but 100% shemale" and i am grateful that google's preview of the email coincided perfectly with where i was ready to stop reading. again with the spelling and grammar problems.
there seems to be some sort of communication barrier here, which is perfectly fine with me, thank you.

amazon nation

we are sailing steadily towards a bleak future, and we have recently passed the amazon prime reef and the fresh direct archipelago.
we will all look back on 2008 from our hoverchairs and think damn you pixar you were right.

i ordered a remote control for my ps3 and it's usually $25.
on amazon it was $19.
i paid $4 extra to ensure next-day delivery and it's still cheaper than going to a physical store.

no wonder america is fat.

and yes, i'm aware of the irony in this scenario. complaining that americans are obese while i order a device that controls a machine from 5 feet away.

this problem is equivalent to itching your neck because your throat is sore. your esophagus or trachea is the inflamed/scratched area and poking at your skin is a fruitlessly valiant attempt to correct a problem that can only be solved internally.
america needs to take some metaphorical cough drops or drink some soothing figurative herbal tea.
at the very least, cut down on yelling and drinking heavily.
attention whore!

Do not label yourself

So this genius richard thinks his technological competency rates as somewhat high.
i think he misread "tech level" as "percentage of braincells missing".

I don't know what is a harsher blow to the credibility of virtual customers, the fact that he can't judge scale based on widely known visual criteria (the usb port), or the accidental admission that he has absolutely no knowledge of chaining usb devices together (hence the term daisy-chaining).
Any person sprung from their mother's womb between 1950 and 1995 probably knows what a usb port looks like, and can readily identify one as such. This prodigy richard apparently suffered some sort of traumatic head injury between those years, or perhaps his mother was unaware of the effects of mixing pregnancy with glue huffing. In either case, richard here has decided to declare himself a full nerd, which is evidenced by his frequent shopping on newegg, even though he clearly does not understand the fundamentals of universal serial bus technology.
please do not think that i am raining insults down upon a helpless nerd. i found this review while shopping on newegg for a large capacity hard drive to install in my ps3. clearly, i would choose "complete nerd" if it were a choice.

but i do give him credit for not using "dick" as his username.