Damn it.
Thursday, December 8th, 2005From the guess-which-airline-I’m-flying-to-Chicago departmant.
Archive for the ‘non-sequitur’ Category
Reggie Bush High School Highlights
Tuesday, November 29th, 2005A friend on a mailing list described it best:
It’s like watching that old SNL sketch where Michael Jordan becomes the
first black player for the Harlem Globetrotters.
There’s a link to the video of his high school video highlights in this NYT Times article.
Skin: A Mortal Work of Art
Sunday, November 27th, 2005An artist, Shelley Jackson has put together a fairly novel project, Skin.
Skin is a short story of 2,095 words that will not be printed or produced anywhere but as tattoos on participants in the project. Each participant gets one word (they can pick where the tattoo goes on their body, but not the word) and only they will know the complete story.
I have to admit, I’m fairly curious what the story is. I don’t think I’ll get a tattoo just to find out, but maybe I can talk one of my tattooed friends into doing it. I think I know at least three good candidates. In the meantime, I’ll be limited to trying to piece it together with the help of flickr and Yahoo! Image Search.
Freedom isn’t Free… It Costs $330 (+ a $70 “Biometrics” Fee)
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005After 41 years of permant residency in the United States, my mom’s getting started on applying for citizenship. In filling out the forms, we found out that Freedom isn’t Free: it costs $330 + a $70 biometrics free.
Ted Koppel’s Last Night
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005Tonight is Ted Koppel’s last night on Nightline.
Nightline was the first news show I watched with any regularity. He did a great job digging in with guests, always being respectful, but not afraid to ask hard questions or point out they’re not answering them. Their coverage of Katrina was unparalleled, Koppel taking Brown to task on his various claims of ignorance as New Orleans was in the throes of disaster. Having podcasts of the show was pretty terrific too.
Thanks to Audible.com, I listened to a recent interview of him by Terry Gross. Apparently they’ll be changing the format of Nightline (expanding the time & going multi-segment), neither of which Ted seems particularly thrilled about. Understandable, as it basically makes it another Dateline. He wouldn’t say he was doing after the end of the show, but hopefully that means he does have something else planned.
Best of luck, Ted. You’ll have a sizable audience waiting for you when you return.
YPN Ads in RSS
Thursday, November 17th, 2005Back from Webmaster World. Lost $200 at various blackjack tables, but, hey, we all have to do our part to keep the lights on in Vegas. Sang recommended the “double your bet everytime you lose” approach, which is fine in general, except if you’re at a $10 minimum table, it only takes 3 bad hands to get $80 on the table… and, of course, that when’s you get two aces (that you have to split, bringing it up to $160, and an A,2 and A,3 just don’t hold up to a dealers 19…).
On the YPN panel, Willian announced the launch of our baby, Ads in RSS. Along withKevin, Marc, and a few others who remain blogless, it’s great to see our little guy reach the light of the day and let people start playing with it.
Hopefully they like it. :-)
Hello Moto (and Goodbye Riddance Sprint)
Sunday, November 13th, 2005 |
I finally got around to getting a new phone and picked up the Razr. Two reasons for selecting this model:
The best thing is that I’m absolutely free of Sprint and it’s Pretty Crappy Service (PCS). I missed several calls, wouldn’t get voicemail notifications until the next day, etc. A lot of that could have been my phone, but what finally pushed me away from them was their horrible customer service:
But here was the kicker. Actually, the kickers, as there were two of them, both on the same call: Kick 1 Grah. I tried back multiple times, and finally decided to call them. I spent over one hour and sixteen minutes on the phone, talked to seven sprint representatives, along the way being told:
None of these ended up being correct, as the last person I spoke with (the 7th) said it was an affiliated dealer’s site, not Sprint’s, so they couldn’t do anything. Fair enough, but couldn’t the prior six agents have told me that an hour ago? Kick 2 She offered me a line that I was a very valued customer for having been a customer for six years and in appreciation of that, I could get a new phone with a $150 discount. This was the same line another agent had feed me before. And having been fed it before I knew it wasn’t true. You don’t get the discount for being a valued customer, you get it for signing a two-year contract. It’s the same @*$% deal they offer to someone walking in off the street. (I discovered this the hard way, wasting a half-hour of my time, thinking I could get the Treo 650 for $300 off at the local Sprint store.) So I confronted her on this: Bill: The $150 is for signing a two-year contract, isn’t it? I almost hung up the phone at that point. After some more back & forth, the woman eventually offered 10% off the monthly rate & $100 credit, but by then I was sick of them. The deal I’d get switching to a different provider would better. The final tip-off to how much Sprint sucks is the 2 year service contract they’re really pushing now. T-Mobile still only requires a one year. It’s pretty obvious that Sprint is find a lot of their customers want to leave as soon as their one year contracts are off. A shame their solution is to strong-arm people into staying instead of offering a more compelling service so that people decide on their own accord. Either way, good riddance Sprint. |
A Good Day to be Catholic
Monday, November 7th, 2005Evolution in the bible, says Vatican
We’ve come a long way since the whole Galileo thing.
Ignorant
Monday, November 7th, 2005Growing up, I used to think that ignorant meant what rude does. That was how my mom used it. If we were being rude, misbehaving, etc. she’d tell us to stop being ignorant. It wasn’t until high school or college that I found out what it really meant.
I used to chalk this up to my mom’s atypical Greek/African upbringing. It’s not that hard to see how rude & ignorant could become mixed up, as I’m sure someone being rude often is the result of ignorance. However, watching a recent episode of My Fair Brady, Christopher Knight (a.k.a. Peter Brady) says something rude to Adrianne’s mom while visiting Joliet, to which the mom replies “You know, that’s very ignorant.”
I think I just unearthed a piece of etymology of my mom’s vocabulary.
Monday, October 31st, 2005
Catching up on blogs, I loved this post from the Freakonomics guys. For those to lazy to click, it’s the following paragraph; the gem being the last sentence:
The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance. “Should our goal be to select a student body with the highest possible proportions of high-ranking students, or should it be to select, within a reasonably high range of academic ability, a student body with a certain variety of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds?” Wilbur Bender asked. To him, the answer was obvious. If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered).
The icing on the cake is Tucker Max declaring his uniqueness in the comments.
