Cars and more cars
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With my brother and my cousin both looking to get a car soon (OK, not that soon, but they’re full of ideas as to what cars they’ll want), Ethan having gotten a car this year, and my friend Loren getting himself a new Prius, it made me want to look around the internet to see what cars all cost these days.
Turns out they’re expensive.
The thing that really bugs me though is that I definitely want a hybrid for my next car, and hybrids are missing a lot of the features that I really really want in my next car. Here’s the list of essentials, as far as I’m concerned:
- Hybrid engine (or possibly bio-diesel, but I’m not convinced yet)
- All 4 windows have the auto-roll-down/auto-roll-up thing
- The car has a line-in jack for my iPod
- A power outlet instead of those stupid cigarette lighter thingies that everyone uses for power
- A sunroof
- A sweet-looking screen that has that hybrid colorful-arrows display
- airbags
That’s pretty much it. I don’t even care that much what it looks like on the outside. You could sell me a seatbeltless, cardboard piece of shit if it had everything else up there.
Sadly the only car that fits everything else is, unsurprisingly, not a hybrid. It’s the VW Passat. Someone go tell VW to put a hyrbid engine in that car and I’ll buy it.
Folklife 2007
This last Monday I went to Folklife in Seattle, mostly to watch my brother Conrad perform in two different Hungarian Folk Dancing groups. As usual Seattle Center was packed with people and the food was pretty delicious.
I also to a picture of Conrad up on stage. He’s the one on the left:
Leopard Tamer
Did you see the story today about a man in Jerusalem who wrestled a leopard to the ground in his underwear?
Man subdues leaping leopard
He was in bed in the middle of the night with his cat and his little daughter (frightened, apparently, by a mosquito), when a leopard decided it was a good time to leap through his open bedroom window.
If I were his daughter, I’d settle for the mosquito.
But my favorite part of the story is that this man, Arthur Du Mosch, is actually a full-time nature guide. This smells like a publicity stunt to me.
I mean, let’s look at all the different things that had to line up:
- his daughter must be in the bedroom with him, so he can save a small child
- his cat must be in the room, to show he knows cats
- his window must be open
- a leopard must LEAP THROUGH THE OPEN WINDOW for no apparent reason
- he must be able to wrestle it to the ground. I think for a human to do this the leopard must first agree to cooperate.
I’ve never actually hired a nature guide, but in my head I imagine it works something like picking up a taxi, where a bunch of them line up and try to get you to pick them first. Imagine going through the line-up to find your nature guide:
First guide: Buddy! I can show you the rare pigmy swallows, I know just where they nest!
Second guide: I wrestled a leopard to the ground with my bare hands in the middle of the night.
I know which guide I’d pick.
Thank you journalism class: now I’m a snob
I credit my journalism class for my newfound journalism snobbery. In the few days that I’ve been back to Seattle, I’ve decided that most of the journalism in the Seattle Times isn’t anywhere near as good as most of the journalism in the LA Times.
This is particularly annoying to me because I used to like the Seattle Times, and I never really cared much for the LA Times. But after reading the LA Times for a semester, it’s hard not to notice the difference in the writing between the two papers.
That reminds me, I need to make myself write some more journalism-type stuff, because I want to get better at it.
What have I got in my pocketses?
Now that I’m home again and, more importantly, no longer going to spending all day walking around a college campus in shady areas of LA, I’ve decided to re-arrange the contents of my pockets so that I can seem cooler than I actually am.
I’ve been paying careful attention to what cool people have in their pockets, and I’m going to emulate it. Number one on the list is some kind of money clip. Cool people always carry money outside of their wallets. I don’t know why, but my guess is so that if they get robbed, they can decide whether they’d rather lose their cash or their cards.
I’m also going to have to start carrying a pocket knife around with me. I’ve got a really sweet one that used to belong to my grandfather, so I’m going to try to keep that one with me (and not lose it). Cool people carry knives so that they can re-create scenes from Crocodile Dundee.
I’m also going to keep carrying my wallet and my cell phone, which means my pockets are getting pretty busy. In an ideal world I’d have only one item per pocket. But that wouldn’t be cool enough.
Now that’s entertainment
It’s amusing to me that most people think that something has to have value or meaning before they can appreciate it. I hear it all the time: “I thought Bad Boys II had cool explosions, but I couldn’t really find any deeper message. I probably won’t see it again.”
People are obsessed with meaning. But I love to be entertained. I can name literally hundreds of things that have neither value nor meaning, but that I find perfectly entertaining. Here’s five just to get you started:
- Couch forts
- Watching someone with sea legs on dry land
- Bad Boys II
- Shiny objects
- Jeff Goldblum
The point is that art and entertainment doesn’t NEED to have some sort of social agenda or political message in order to be worth my time.
I can watch Jackie Chan’s Legend of Drunken Master a bazillion times and it will be just as great. Hell, I’d watch The Fast and the Furious if I Paul Walker wasn’t such a horrible actor.
And besides, entertainment is so much more entertaining if you just sit back and allow yourself to be entertained. More people should try it.
Occidental Class of 2007
In a moment of rare complete self-congratulation: congratulations to myself, and everyone else in the Occidental class of 2007, for graduating yesterday. We now (or most of us anyways) have our diplomas, and our lives to look forward to.
Almost my entire extended family made it down here to sit through the ceremony (which Smokey Robinson attended) and watch me graduate. It was great to see them all for a few days, and I’m sure they had a good time hanging out in Pasadena when they weren’t haunting the college campus.
I also got a great new camera as a graduation gift, which means that you’ll get to see plenty of pointless pictures, like this one:
The Dead Baby Experiment
Have you ever thought about how disturbing some of our science experiments must be? Everyone’s heard the “fun fact” that babies need attention to survive.
We know this because at some point a bunch of scientists hooked some newborn babies up to the right kind of machines, and made sure they had all their nutrients and their other basic needs filled, but that they couldn’t see or touch any people. The idea was to isolate companionship and see what happened if you took it away.
The babies died.
I think there are more important questions. Like, whose babies were those? And who consents to that kind of a study? I can just imagine the conversation:
Scientist: Miss, we need to use your baby in an experiment to further human knowledge.
Mother: What kind of experiment?
Scientist: We’re going to cut your baby off from human contact for a while. We think this might be the reason for American Idol.
Mother: Well, you are wearing a white coat…
I’m not buying an Xbox 360 because my HD-DVD repair experience has been crap
I think I’ve decided that if I can avoid it, I’m going to skip the 360. Looking back over my posts about how thoroughly Sony has screwed up the PS3, and how I’d recommend the 360 in almost any case a consumer has a choice, this is a big change.
Why?
Because my experience with Xbox support has been so damned horrible. Horrible. Did I say horrible yet?
I’ve been treated like crap, and the people at the call center seem more interested in mispronouncing my name and “apologizing” than in getting anything accomplished.
Since I’ve been through this giganitc mess, I want a replacement drive shipped to me ASAP. But they won’t do it. The ONLY thing they claim they are capable of doing is shunting me back in to the “repair” process that took over a month to not work in the first place, not to mention they’re asking me to pay to ship it to them…AGAIN.
That is completely unacceptable.
Today I had a support service person tell me that he was the top of the pyramid for MS support. That’s bullshit. Nobody in India is in charge of US support at Microsoft. Not only that, but he told me he didn’t have the power to deviate from protocol.
If I call support, and they can’t help me, and they refuse to transfer me to someone who can, what’s the point?
It makes me mad, because I like the 360. I’m going to want one when I move to a new place (I’m using my roommate’s now). I’m going to want to play games on the 360. But I’m going to try very hard not to buy one, because the xbox division of MS does not deserve my money.
I’m not very good at being a bitchy customer, because normally I get good support. I don’t really know what else to do at this point. I guess I give up and I’m out $200 and I have a broken HD-DVD drive. What a shitty way to treat a customer, especially one who has enthusiastically recommended your products for about six years.
Catching up on my Fred Wilson
One of the reasons I love to read A VC is that Fred frequently inspires some really interesting debates. A few days ago he made a post about Twitter and Journalism.
Fred says that “Just because it’s said in 140 characters or less doesn’t mean it’s not journalism. To think otherwise is patronizing and wrong.”
I disagree with that. I’d explain why except that Fred also published an e-mail from John Heilemann which says, succinctly and elegantly, exactly what I think:
i’m not sure i think that journalism is an outdated concept. i think what you say is true about “conversation” becoming a key metaph for a more participatory and conversational information sphere. but to me journalism is all about reporting - the gathering and analysis of information, not merely the purveying of opinion. in my view, most blogging doesn’t constitute journalism. neither does most twittering. that doesn’t mean they’re not important and valuable. just means they’re another part of a more complex info ecosystem. but journalism/reporting will always be a crucial - indeed, irreplaceable, part of that ecosystem, too.
Go Blu-Ray
I’m thoroughly turned off to HD-DVD. My “fixed” drive showed up in the mail today and…guess what? It doesn’t work.
I’ve now spent a month and a bazillion phone calls going through a painful “support” and “repair” experience to get back a broken piece of shit.
Right now, I don’t even want a new HD-DVD drive. I want $200 from Microsoft, $30 for the HD-DVD I bought that I can no longer return to the store, since their repair process took me past the return date, and I want them to buy me a Blu-Ray player so I can watch HD movies like I wanted to do a month ago.
Does anyone work for MS? Can someone hook me up? I don’t think I’m asking much.
Pay parking tickets online? Duh.
I just paid my Santa Monica parking ticket through their online system. It was pretty simple, straightforward, and a hell of a lot more convenient than writing a check and mailing it to them, especially since I saved on postage.
More places should, if they don’t already, provide this option.
That said, I totally did not deserve the ticket.
Tracking the HD-DVD Drive
As much as I love UPS, it’s little things like 6-day 3-day delivery that allows me to give them shit. By now I’m pretty sure that the HD drive I get back is probably still not going to work. *G*
Waiting for Wednesday…
Best iCal Add-on ever: set a default alarm with iCalFix
The whole point of putting appointments in to a computer calendar is that when I’m sitting in front of it wasting my life away, a little window will pop up fifteen minutes before I have to be somewhere important, like heart surgery, and I can zip over in time to say I’m just fashionably late.
iCal, despite being awesome in many ways, doesn’t seem to understand this. I can put events in all I want, but unless I remember to set an alarm each and every time, it will happily sit there quietly, laughing at me as I miss appointment after appointment. There’s no way to set a default alarm.
…without iCalFix. Which is the best thing ever. This links to an archive page, so it would be good to check to see if there are newer versions of the program when you follow the link.
Thank you Robert Blum. You’ve made it possible for me to use iCal. You rock.
Back from Vegas
I’ll have a longer post on Vegas later - I’m planning on writing up some sort of short-form nonfiction about the experience. It was a lot of fun. I came back having only spent $250 - that’s hotel, drinks, food, and gambling. Not too shabby.
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