JF :: Brain Farts :: Archive of January, 2002

Archive of January, 2002

Perfect Timing

January 31, 2002:

After the Steelers lost to the Patriots, I thought about what the morning shows the next day (Monday) would be like. WBZZ (B94) had the best reaction, and it wasn't even intentional.

When my clock radio went off the first thing I heard was Linkin Park: "I tried so hard / And got so far / And in the end / It didn't even matter."

Perfect :)

Do They Intend to Sell Anything?

January 30, 2002:

This commercial's just plain gross: Y'know the one with the kid standing outside the convenience store who's gargling? And it turns out he's "mixing" his own chocolate milk?

Mm-mmm. Just what I want. A heapin' helpin' of chocolate phlegm.

%^#$ Tanked Tech Economy...

January 29, 2002:

Still looking for a job. Still coming up empty.

Goddamnit.

Pet Peeves 'R' Us

January 28, 2002:

A couple weeks ago, the NFL began airing commercials for the playoffs. One of them featured Shannon Sharpe of the Baltimore Ravens. Shannon's a pretty smart guy -- he likes to drop a few five-dollar words into his trash talking -- and that makes this instance of one of my pet peeves even worse, because I know he knows better than to do this.

He says: "There are 31 teams in the NFL. Only 12 get a chance to make the playoffs. So you [sic] special."

Is it too much to ask for college-educated people, even jocks, to use verbs in their sentences?

Wait a Minute, We Don't Suck

January 26, 2002:

The Penguins are riding a five-game winning streak going into Saturday's game. (Update: They won, now it's a six-game streak.) This after being four spots out of the playoffs a week and a half ago. It's like the Penguins suddenly realized, "Hey, we've got that Lemeiux guy. He's pretty good."

Of course, nobody in the city knows about it; the Penguins' season doesn't begin here until the Steelers' season ends.

My Poor Underpowered Car

January 25, 2002:

I just saw a commercial for Honda motorcycles. One in particular that I saw was the Gold Wing 1800. If the 1800 refers to the displacement in cubic centimeters, the engine on that bike is 0.3 liters bigger than my car's engine.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

January 24, 2002:

We're adding a new spokes-person to one of the client sites. A NASCAR driver named Hank Parker Jr. The designer who was in charge of making the layout changes told me he kept thinking of Ray Parker Jr. In fact, he went as far as to mistakenly put the name Ray in one of the graphics.

And I've had the Ghostbusters theme running through my head for the last two days.

Sports an'at

January 23, 2002:

· Well, I have to admit, the Steelers played one of the best games I've seen all season. They completely dismantled the Ravens on Sunday. Granted I liked seeing Modell's team get a new one ripped, but this town's going to be unberable if the Steelers win the Super Bowl.

· Scenario: The 11th-place team in the (NHL) Eastern Conference, with a power play conversion of about 6%, plays the first-place team who's also riding an eight-game winning streak. Number 11's gonna get pasted, right? That's what I thought. But the Pens went 2-for-3 on the power play and beat the first-place Flyers 5-2. There just might be hope for these guys yet...

Weird Dreams Are Made of This ...

January 22, 2002:

In this dream I had last night, a bunch of coworkers and I were out having lunch. We weren't downtown; we were in Shadayside (4 miles away). But since it was a dream, that made sense. Anyway a car pulls over to the side of Walnut St. a hundred feet or so from us, and one of my coworkers says rather nonchalantly, "that guy's selling pot."

Me and two of my coworkers decide what the hell (in real life, none of us has ever tried the stuff) and walk over. We each buy a little baggie's worth and start to walk back to the group. Then two of the account managers walk up to us. "Hey, what are you guys doing?"

"Uh, nothing."

"Good. Neither are we." Then they talk to the guy in the car, pass in some money and walk away with two big baggies' worth.

Then my alarm went off. I'm kinda curious as to where this one would've gone...

Oh Yeah, the DVD Player

January 21, 2002:

Just rediscovered my home-theater system. Since I didn't have a lot going on this weekend, I started watching the DVDs I got for Christmas.

Passes the time much more effectively than Emeril Live reruns.

All Programmers Have Problems

January 19, 2002:

I was geeking out, watching some Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the episode, the Romulans kidnap Geordi, and "program" him to do their bidding. In a simulation, Geordi enters a mockup of the Enterprise's bar, walks up to Chief O'Brien, levels a phaser at him, and cooks him. Then he sits down and has a drink.

Fast forward. Geordi returns to Enterprise and after saying hello to his shipmates, heads for the bar. He enters, and there's Chief O'Brien having a drink. He calmly walks over and ... dumps his drink on the Chief.

Isn't that always the way, though? You program something to do one thing, it does another. You ask for all the records in the database, it gives you one. You brainwash somebody to kill a man, and he just dumps a drink on him.

The Romulans need some better beta-testing.

Lose Navigator, and Lose IE4 for Free!

January 18, 2002:

The Web site I get my statistics from regarding browser usage showed Netscape 4.x getting 4% of about a billion hits in the month of December. A few of us here decided that if/when it stays below 5% for a second consecutive month, we'll have the meeting about officially ceasing support for it.

I checked yesterday to make sure N4 was still flatlining, and saw that Explorer 4.x was sitting at 4% as well. So if we wait until March 1st, we may get to ditch all of our Netscape- and Explorer-proprietary code and only use the W3C's offical specs.

Excellent.

Jason's TV Reviews: The Chamber

January 17, 2002:

Saw Fox's new "game show" the other night. Two people answer questions back and forth to see who gets to put up with The Chamber. It's set on either hot or cold; on hot the internal temperature gets up to about 150°F and cold goes down below zero. And the contestants have to answer questions for $1000 a question. When they get two in a row wrong or give up, they lose half their earnings. But if they finish seven minutes and answer 25 questions they get triple the money.

So there's the big-money motivation. The top prize is about $100,000. On the average they got $9167. For putting up with Regis you're practically guaranteed $32,000. Not quite sure this would be worth it, in my never-humble opinion.

Both participating and watching.

Coincedences On Top of Coincedences

January 16, 2002:

I was out of cash this Tuesday morning so I had to park in the Stanwix garage -- it's pay as you leave. A friend of mine had a similar problem. He parked a level above me. As I was leaving, I thought for a second about backing up to the exit and leaving, but instead decided to play it on the up-and-up and go upward to the next exit.

Turns out my friend needed a jump; he'd left his lights on. OK, it's not like Steven King's gonna make a novel out of this, but it's still a little bizarre.

Great Googaly Moogaly!

January 15, 2002:

Just got my car estimated for the fender bender I was in before Christmas. Replacing the part isn't bad, a couple hundred bucks, but the labor invloved is something like 600 dollars!

Damn.

Another Public Service Announcement

January 14, 2002:

For all the newbies out there: When you get an e-mail that has a title like "Animal Lovers," there's a good chance that it isn't about saving the whales.

Sorry Officer, I Didn't See the Huge Frickin' Bus In Front

January 12, 2002:

As I was walking across the Fort Duquesne bridge to go to work this morning, I saw a traffic accident had happened. This isn't unusual; the Fort Duquesne bridge and the Fort Pitt bridge are two of the worst-laid-out stretches of expressway I've ever seen. No matter what direction you're coming from, staying on I-279 requires you to change lanes, and this causes a lot of fender-benders.

So anyway, I see the "blinking arrow truck" diverting people around the affected lane, then a cop car with its light bar on, then a minivan and a bus, each with their four-ways on. As I walk past I take a look: The bus is fine.

The minivan, however, will never be driven again. The van was going so fast that it actually sheared when it hit the bus -- some of it going under, the rest getting compacted about a foot. Then it apparently bounced back the half-car-length that I saw it sitting from the bus.

I'm no expert, but he had to have been moving at a pretty high speed relative to the bus to do somethihng like that. What I want to know is, how can you possibly fail to notice something the size of a bus right in front of you?

Video Games

January 11, 2002:

I just saw a commercial for Final Fantasy X. As always, they show a lot of the cut-scenes from the game -- the mini-movies they show between stages. Over the years these have gone from a series of 256-color stills to full-color high-resolution movies. About a year and a half ago, a friend of mine commented that he was waiting for someone to make a movie just from the cut-scenes.

Then they made Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It still had a very computer-animated look to it, but I think that by the end of 2005 the movies will be so photo-realistic it'll be difficult for the average movie-goer to tell.

Dammit

January 10, 2002:

I've got nothing here. I want to keep this thing up and running, but I don't want to dilute my barely-average writing with entries like this. So if you see a non-Sunday with no entry, that's why.

Side Streets Suck

January 09, 2002:

The middle of the street I live on has been plowed. The sides, where everyone parks, are still covered in snow. So when I got home from work tonight, I tried to guide my car into the small snowdrift that would be its home for the night, yelling at the tires like they were some kind of errant golf ball -- "c'mon, bite!"

Only three months till the thaw.

Move to Recess

January 08, 2002:

Sorry, can't think of anything today. Try again tomorrow.

It's All In My Head

January 07, 2002:

Warning: This brain fart contains important plot information for the movie A Beautiful Mind. If you don't want me to wreck it for you, go away and come back tomorrow. Oh, I'm also going to say something that's probably offensive, too. But you're expecting that, right?

Still here? Don't say I didn't warn you.

Anyway, as the basic crux of the movie was revealing itself I thought, Y'know, if I had to see people who aren't there, I'd like to think I could do much better than Ed Harris and a lanky British dude...

Good! No, Wait! Bad! No, Wait! ...

January 05, 2002:

America's Most Wanted did a special show a few days ago for the most heroic cop (or something like that). One of the people up for consideration was a cop who was on a stakeout and saw a black guy in a minivan acting suspiciously. He pulled away from his stakeout and requested that a marked unit make a traffic stop so they could look inside the car (you don't need probable cause to look in the windows).

Now wait right there, you're probably saying. All they had to go on was a black male acting suspiciously? That's profiling!

Except that the original cop was also black. And he was right -- a woman had been carjacked and was being held at gunpoint in the back of the van. The cop deciding to blow off the stakeout and follow the van might have saved that woman's life.

He's (quite rightly) regarded as a hero. But it brings up a few questions.

What would the reaction have been if he'd been wrong? It obviously wouldn't have received national attention, but what would have become of the cop? Would he have been disciplined for leaving his post? I'd personally find it difficult to reprimand an officer for following his gut when he thinks something might have been wrong, but I may not think like his supervisor.

What if the officer been white? Would the carjacker have been able to claim that even though he had in fact committed a crime, the only thing the police originally had to go on was DWB (Driving While Black)? Even though he was in fact guilty, would the carjacker have won in the "court of public opinion"? Would he even have been found guilty, or would some judge have decided that the traffic stop was a violation of the Fourth Amendment?

On a related note, what exactly is profiling? There seems to be a fine line at best between racist behavior and trusting one's gut. And I think that we, in general, do both the police and the victims of real profiling injustice when we lump any white-cop-pulls-over-black-motorist incident under the header of "Racial Profiling" -- real life has a lot more gray area than that, as I hope the last two questions have illustrated.

To widen the point, what if the motorist had been another minority? With the newfound interest surrounding air travel security, we now have something similar: FWA (Flying While Arabic). In fact, racially-based occurances regarding Arabs seem to be on the rise in this country. Or maybe they're just being reported now. But it seems that a lot of the people who think that the older DWB type of profiling is horrible are willing to allow this newer FWA type. Isn't it all the same? Or is it different since you think you're more likely to be affected by an airline bombimg than a misguided traffic stop?

Not so clean-cut any more, is it? Good. It shouldn't be. Each situation needs to be addressed individually. People aren't robots -- given the same circumstances, they won't always react the same way. Chaos theory abounds in the gray matter of all 6 billion of us. And the little five-paragraph nugget the news gives us doesn't even siginificantly scratch the surface. Which means we shouldn't be so quick to judge.

Warmth Update

January 04, 2002:

The apartment's slowly coming back up to temperature -- it's sitting at 63° right now -- and I can almost walk around barefoot in here again.

I think one more night in the sleeping bag is in order though.

Know Where I Can Find Non-Wussy Fuzzy Slippers?

January 03, 2002:

My apartment isn't much warmer than a meat locker right now. It was fine when I left; something's gone wrong with either the furnace, the thermostat or both. It's currently 59 degrees in the heated portion of the house. The unheated bathroom (an addition) is even colder. It's not so bad except my fingers start to get stiff as I type and my toes are cold. (Hence the slippers comment.)

The landlord says the furnace guy is coming in tomorrow. "It'll be fixed by the time you get home from work," he says. I'm sure that thought will keep me warm as I crawl into my winter sleeping bag tonight.

Nope, Prob'ly Just Me

January 02, 2002:

Ever notice that when you're driving in a snowstorm with your headlights on that the snowflakes flying past your windshield kinda look like the stars when a Star Trek ship is at warp speed?

Or am I just an incurable geek?

New Year's Resolutions for the World

January 01, 2002:

I've never been good at keeping my New Year's resolutions, so I've decided to just be happy with who I am and try to make improvements as they come along. But I should still do something for the beginning of the new year, so here are my resolutions for everyone else. After all, why should I be the only one who doesn't live up tp my expectations? Anyway, some of these are serious, some aren't.

People should learn how to drive. This one came to a head while I was driving on US-30 the other day. Someone who was afraid of their car was going along at 35 mph. Took me an hour and 15 minutes to get out of Pennsylvania when it should only take me 50 minutes. If you don't think you can handle road conditions, either call a taxi or stay home.

People should learn that their religion is just as full of shit as everyone else's. The Jews beat up on the Muslims, the Christians beat up on the Jews, the Hindus beat up on the Buddhists, and the list goes on and on. Give it a rest, people. Religions all serve the same purpose: They try to tell people how they fit into the grand scheme of the universe and how they should behave towards one another.

Almost all the holy books out there have some history of conquest and great triumphs over the enemy, usually in the beginnings when the records aren't clear. That's because they were written well after the fact by a priest or a king to give the people a boost. After all, god's people can't get their asses kicked by the new invaders, can they? "We did it once and we can do it again" and all that jazz. So it's all made up, and they all say to treat people with respect (and thus, don't kill them), and it says not to commit evils against each other. Doesn't seem that difficult, does it?

But everyone's got the One and True Answer to Everything, and can't stand the possibility that someone else's take can be just as valid.

On a related note, people need to learn how to listen. And I'll lump myself in with the rest of humanity here. Some people are more knowledgeable in certain fields than others. These people should be treated with respect and not belittled. There's nothing more infuriating than having someone else tell you how to do your job or your chosen hobby. Especially if they don't know what the hell they're talking about.

So, ask questions, ask to have some reasoning explained, but don't puff yourself up at the expense of the people who know what they're doing. It'll bite you in the ass later, I guarantee it.

People need to stop trying to please everybody. 'Cause it can never happen. Do what you're there to do and do it the best way you know how. If someone in authority gives you specific instructions, follow them; if someone who knows more that you offers advice, hear them out (see above). But go forward the way you think is best. People may not like the way you went about it, but they won't be able to argue with the results.

People need to stop being afraid to point out bad behavior. Again, I'm guilty of sitting idly by and letting things happen too. Someone doing nothing and taking the credit? Call them on it. Someone propping themself up by tearing others down? Tell the asshole to stop. Someone trying to get you to do their job for them? Tell them you want their salary to go along with it. People like that only get away with these things if people like us let them. And we should stop letting them.

People need to stop confusing patriotism with blind faith. Especially now, the voice of dissent is invaluable. If we go along with every edict from Washington like so many sheep, we'll eventually wind up the the same results as the sheep. Always ask yourself: Who's agenda is being promoted here; who stands to benefit; are the effects they say they're looking for likely to happen; and what's probably going to happen that they're not telling us about? You'd be amazed how horrible some of this stuff is when you begin thinking about it.

And you just might become one of The Few, The Proud, The Libertarians.

People just need to calm the fuck down. We're all stressing over something. Biting people's heads off won't fix it. Contrary to popular belief, not everything is an emergency, or an affront to national well-being, or an imminent threat to The Children. Take a deep breath, try the decaf, and look at things rationally. Does the other side have a valid point, even if the beliefs affecting their decisions are different? If so, just let them be. Odds are that both of you are wrong anyway and the person who's got it figured out is in an asylum somewhere.

And finally, people need to realize that I'm always right. 'Nuff said.

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This page last updated Mar 19, 2011 6:53:22 PM.