I had a good time in the city yesterday. I’m totally exhausted today. I didn’t sleep a whole lot or all that well last night, but it’s worth a little pain to go out there for a change. The weather was good too, tho it did get cold during the night.

A friend from school is part owner of a new bar in the lower east side called Revolver NYC. It was their official grand opening last night, and I think they have a few kinks to work out still even though they’ve been open 3 weeks already. I’m testing writing on my blackberry, so I’ll write more another time.

I’m writing to bitch about spilling sauce onto my pants. I didn’t mess at all yesterday, but gd does it drive me nuts. I guess I’ll never grow out of being messy.

L8

New Years is the next holiday coming up that I enjoy. I haven’t spent a New Years in Connecticut since 1999 and I don’t want to be here for that. I don’t know when I last was around for Halloween, probably ten years ago.

I dressed up on Wednesday night as a South African rugby team player from 1999. Fortunately I didn’t feel too cold outside, despite the excessively short shorts.

The first stop of the night was a house party in town. The thought was to pregame there before heading into New Haven for some bar hopping. The folks were dressed up there, but it wasn’t really good times. The crowd was way young, they were all around twenty one years old. Anyway, we didn’t stay long.

So now we were in New Haven earlier than planned. I realised when I saw the first hot she-devil of the night that this is probably the last time I’ll see sluttily dressed girls out and about until I get back to Los Angeles or until Spring comes. Halloween is a great holiday.

I saw a bunch of the same costumes everywhere I went. Little Bo Peep, stripper girls, she-devils, and way more hot referees than I’ve ever seen before. Now I know what happens to these girls after they work one night as a “Miller Girl”. I wonder who makes these referee outfits, they had different liquor brands on them (some had no brands) but they all were well formed and tight. Fewer guys were dressed up, and I only saw a couple of common outfits. Besides the ever common dress wearing dudes, dressing up as folks from Life Aquatic and Royal Tenenbaums seemed to be the thing this year. And also the ever lame generic “Fed” getup. Secret service mostly, but a few FBI lookin’ schmucks too.

I love the psychology behind costume wearing. Really though I love how girls get to act as slutty as they want on Halloween without any flack from it. That’s what Las Vegas is like year ’round, and the Sunset Strip in Hollywood too. Any good tourist getaway has that sorta freedom, and that’s where I want to live.

All in all though, CT people are quite prudish. The grindin’ action on club dance floors here is very different to what I’m used to from college, LA, and Vegas. New Haven is a college town, but the Yale crowd isn’t all that fun really. A lot of the same type of folks around, it’s weird.

Anyway, I’m heading into Manhattan this afternoon which should be fun.

I think when caught getting a blow job, the only thing you can do is give a thumbs up. It sorta diffuses the situation, which is necessary.

I went to Dunkin Donuts this morning. When I was on antibiotics (for three weeks), I was going pretty much every morning to get breakfast. Now that I’m off the antibiotics, I don’t go as often and I only want coffee. Typically a double espresso. I’ve made the mistake of not specifying ‘black’ already (who the fuck puts milk and sugar in shots of espresso?). But they are typically so baffled by the fact I’m just ordering espresso… no donuts or other coffee drinks, and just black. I get comments like “Are you sure?”, for fucks sake.

Anyway, this is at the drive-thru, a concept I’d rather go back to ignoring. This morning I told them I was very sure and drove up to the window and heard them yelling around for espresso. I paid my $2.10 (overpriced at that) and waited. I fire up my blackberry and read some emails. I had fifteen new messages, and deleted the four spams. The dude at the window (he happens to also be the manager) came back and asked for $4.27 from me a minute later, then realised that I was the same customer as before. He freaks out, yells for a black double espresso. A few more minutes pass, and he asks me to pull into the parking lot and someone will bring out my coffee.

So I back into a spot, and go through the rest of my emails. I fiddle with the radio, trying to find a station playing music in the morning. God, the radio sucks in Connecticut. I get more annoyed by the radio than anything, but eventually I notice a lot of time has passed. So I turn off the car and get out to walk in and find out what the hell is going on. Good timing I guess because the girl is coming out to hand off my coffee just then.

This whole process took more than fifteen minutes. Bleh.

I don’t get the northeastern attitude. I guess it can only be the weather that makes everyone so unpleasant. all the time. I’m tired of being here, I miss the west coast.

I had to take my car in this morning for some additional coolant as it is reporting the level being too low when I start the car in colder weather. Also, out of the blue, my car stopped communicating with my cell phones via bluetooth. Anyway, so off I go to one of the worst dealerships I’ve ever been to. I’ve known this for years, but since I can’t go to Pacific BMW in Glendale when I’m on the east coast, I have no other options. I had an appointment made, but of course when I arrive they couldn’t find a note of it and I get randomly assigned to a very typically unpleasant mother fucker. Every other visit to a service department in California, everyone is super pleasant, and the hot girls that work at the dealership come around offering coffee, tea, water, etc. In Connecticut, all you have is a drinking fountain and bad coffee.

I need to get some rubber floor mats for the upcoming foul weather this autumn, so I’m going to order them from Cali and have them shipped to me in CT rather than just picking them up in North Haven.

Anyway, over two hours later I was on my way, after watching the service agent (not the mechanic/technician) nearly crash my car backing out of the service bay and mumbling curses at other folks in the lot.

Then I stop at Starbucks, a place normally filled with overly chirpy folks. Not today. The customers weren’t typical.. no laptops in use, and a lot of cell phone usage. I don’t go into Starbucks much outside of NYC and Los Angeles and other tourist spots, so this was fairly shocking to me to see.

People avoid eye contact when walking around here. My brother is probably going to South Korea to teach English for a year, and Koreans are hardcore about avoiding eye contact, so it won’t be a shock to him when he gets there.

If your car breaks down on the side of the road, people slow down to gawk at you here. In Cali, you won’t necessarily have folks stopping to help you out like the midwest, but at least you’ll get some folks yelling offering to help if you need it. Unless you’re blocking the road, then you’ll get plenty of help and yelling in Cali. In CT, it’s slow down and gawk only.

If you get into an accident in CT, even if you’re blocking two thirds of the freeway, you get out of your car and call the police and star back at the traffic that is slowly moving around you, gawking. If you get into an accident in CA, it’s the law that you must move your car onto the shoulder unless the car is absolutely unable (even then, you’ll find someone with a truck willing to push your wreck).

Anyway, good to vent.

Warning: The opinions expressed here represent the opinions of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of those who hold other opinions.

I was just reading old insult posts, and I never really realised how much fucking baseball was discussed over the years.

It’s especially funny reading my own junk like this quote:
“I just want to remark first, that baseball is a dorky sport. Its a bunch of weird dudes in tight pants who somehow inspire many thousands of people to talk about these weird dudes in tight pants that like to touch eachother.” – Pappy May 18, 2001 @ 1:50am EST

Since moving to Los Angeles in 2002, I have discovered baseball and enjoy going to games and watching it on TV even. I understand it more. Plus, they have updated the style of pants to not be so oddly tight.

I wish I had the old Insult database still… I think only Spo and Stone were discussing baseball, and I’m sure there are well beyond 100 rants about it from just the two of them.

Well, I am caving. Insult.org is back and pointing to this site. When the server crashed a few years ago, and the database was lost, I had nearly completed a new version of the site and was too pissed off to release it. It’s one of my few regrets. Part of the new code required the old database content, which really is rebuild-able using archive.org. We did break the 5000 post mark before losing the server.

Anyway, I did create several revisions of the new site, and one of these days I will get to putting that code online cuz it’s just fucking plain awesome shit. Those new features that I refused to talk about publicly still haven’t been seen on the intarweb as far as I know. Perhaps in 2009 for insult’s 10-year anniversary? Perhaps that’s a deadline I can meet.

BTW, one important feature that the original Insult had made Insult more safe for work: Summary View. By default it showed just a line of each post with all of the images parsed out, but if you hacked the URL you could get it to load the entire site without images (not just a sentence). I have a list of good regular expressions if you want to parse out all of the god damn fucking swear words.

I was just thinking about a few things, and while there is a lot going in my life that I love and I am very fortunate regarding many things.. there are always things missing. Part of my complaining is probably rooted in the fact that I am single. Now, it happens to be Valentines Day (or Valentines Weekend I'm told it was this year), and so assume what you want there, but it really is coincidental because it's definitely not in the front of my mind at the moment since it's something I am not seeking just yet since there are a few things I want to straighten out with myself first. Increasing my financial stability being the biggest priority, and getting in better shape physically is another. For the latter, I definitely feel a crunch there because part of me feels that if I don't get my body in better shape before my late 20s or early 30s I will never be able to. Not because I fear my health is in jeopardy due to my lack of exercise yet, but as people age it's harder to improve your body and you have less drive to do it too.

Anyway, regarding what I originally came to rant about. Stone actually sparked the following thought, which he can explain himself if he likes.

I went to school and got my bachelors degree. I attended from fall 1998 until graduation in spring 2002. I don't exactly feel proud about it, mainly because when it comes down to it, I really put in very little effort. I had a few hard classes that kept me up through the night a bunch of times, and pretty much always did what was necessary. But that is where I stopped. I did just what was necessary. I gave far less than 100%, and in some classes I don't think I gave much above 0% and still managed to not fail a single course (although I nearly managed to fail the HTML class I took senior year because I did zero homework during the semester and did every assignment for the semester in one night including the final project and handed it in all at once, fortunately they let me by with a C or a CD or maybe even a D.. I can't remember).

Anyway, I have been out of school for nearly 3 years.. and in many respects more than that. See, my final semester I usually took 6 day weekends. The only thing I never skipped was my physics lab which was big on attendance and required for graduation.

Being out, there are things I miss about school. The student life and being in the mix with so many other people that I automatically had things in common with being at the same school. I even miss some of the class work. See, a lot of what I did take was somewhat interesting.. but the presentation of the material caused me to shut down. Being a lowly undergrad means you are learning subjects from the ground up, and within the CS program I already had much real world experience (not that I already knew the theories and real info behind a lot of it) so that caused me to lose some interest too.

At some point I do want to go back to school and actually learn things to actually learn them. Not just to pass the next test, but to actually gain real knowledge. I can do that on my own to some extent by simply reading, but it lacks the feedback system in schools... you get to bounce ideas around at a school.

I guess my point is that it sucks to actually feel the desire to learn now that I've completed all the schooling I really need to have taken in my life. I don't think I wasted my time, and if I went back in time I probably couldnt talk myself into doing it any differently. It's also one of those things that you hear about freshman year.. parents and other older folks saying similar things that most people just brush off because it's a total buzzkill attitude to try to force on a kid.

Anyway, I'll stop here since this post is fairly pointless and is starting to sound preachy like I want people to put their heads into their book. I am not trying to say that since like I said, I don't believe I could convince myself if given the chance. It's just ironic I guess.

Well, again I am starting a post by pointing out it's been a while.. yadda yadda. I do miss putting my thoughts online, which is why I still intend on doing it more.... eventually. Probably not until summer, which is a likely target at this point for a site re-launch. I still haven't really told anyone what the new features are. My reason is somewhat dumb - someone else might take the ideas and implement them first. Now, that really should be fine considering it's been three years or something since the ideas came up. Some of the features have already appeared elsewhere, but I still feel my set of ideas is still fairly unique (for now) as a whole. Call me selfish, but I want to do it myself.

Stone has mentioned this being the year of the big two five for him, and it's also true for a number of us including myself. Yay for the insurance break and all that.

The number also sort of hits you in other ways. I turn 25 this month (on the 25th) and it's not something I'm exactly fretting over. I can't say I particularly enjoy any birthday, except 18 and 21. It's an excuse to break out sweet treats (cake) and liquor, but that brings me to my point. I don't need an excuse. I will sometimes celebrate a sunny Tuesday, and in California that happens practically 52 times a year (give or take). Don't get me wrong, I don't celebrate every tuesday.

When it comes down to it, in many ways I prefer the random celebration. Perhaps a good steak dinner, some nice belgian ale (Chimay) and friends.

Now, turning 25 really means little (besides car rentals and insurance) except you're half way through your twenties. Half way to 30, which to someone in their early 20s could look like the end of the world (settled down, family, whatever). I'm not at all woried about my body continuing to age (not yet at least.. incontinence is a long way away). Really it becomes about expectations. Acting your age.

Now, for years I've acted older than my age in many ways, and now I feel things reversing. I type this at nearly 2am on a Wednesday night. I'm out of school, I'm in the "real world". People in the real world go to bed early and go to work quite early. At least most working stiffs do. It's the responsible thing to do, right?. I just can't seem to get myself to do that just yet.

I'm sure eventually I'll slow down, it's only natural. I think my plan is to fight it off as best as I can. Does that then make me afraid of getting old? Some might see it that way, but I don't. When I see older people (even as young as 30) who have just given up on living a good life... well, I don't know, it sucks.

Well, every time I post I realise how much time goes by between posts. I keep saying I am going to post more, but I don't. A lot of the time I have little to say really. I waste my time more on TV these days than computing pleasures. I actually don't hav really any computing pleasures anymore. I want to build a gaming box, but that's probably going to be next fall... I have other plans for my income.

I took the plunge and finally purchased a 7" widescreen touchscreen LCD. When it arrives, I am going to build a double-din frame for it (fibre glass + bondo + time = goodness). I haven't worked out the rest of the details for my automobile workings, but it's going to involve a retail license to buy wholesale. I am probably going to have to get a new amp, rewire all of my speakers with passive crossovers (or replace the speakers too), and a few other more minor things to get this project off the ground. $$$

I keep wanting to go out and buy a motorcycle using my credit card. My 8 mile commute takes 40-80 minutes in the evenings, and with a bike I can split lanes and stop driving at Old-Lady-Walking pace. In the last two years that I've lived in Los Angeles, I have watched the traffic get steadily worse. I have also moved out of downtown, which makes it more noticible because I used to drive against traffic.

Traffic is bad going both directions though. It's crazy. Everybody needs to rethink their living situation and swap around. Too many people commute too far (Calliander is one of these fools).

On my drive home last night, I drove under a couple of bridges going under 5mph. There were tourists up on the bridges taking photos of the freeway. It's fucking crazy.

I went to brookstone last night to get a new alarm clock (I want one with 24-hour time). The closest Brookstone to me is up in Hollywood&Highland, near Mann's Chinese Theatre. It's a 10 minute walk there from my apartment, and all I wanted was an alarm clock. But it took me a while to wade through the sea of people trying to catch a glimpse of Brad Pitt and the rest of the cast of Oceans Twelve. It's amusing to me... living in this place where thousands and thousands of people come to visit. For many of the people last night, that was a true highlight of their trip, whether or not they saw an actual celebrity.

I went shopping this morning. I bought a few things I had been putting off buying (sneakers) and bought something I didn't think I'd be buying in Cali - a winter coat. Specifically a ski parka/jacket. I bought the whole ski kit basically... the jacket, the pants (not exactly a matched pair), hat, goggles, gloves, and a headband for my ears. Hopefully this will be the last jacket I buy for a while.. at least until it feels too out of style. It is snazzy with all of the pockets and stuff.

I also had a haircut this morning. Since summer I've been going to the same particular hairdresser chick. It's the first time I've actually not dreaded getting a haircut. She washes my hair after she cuts it, which I definitely enjoy. Nothing like a good scalp rub. We have a bit of a connection going too... she's cute for sure. Not without baggage, and in some ways it's the worst kind (single mom). Ah well.

While on the freeway today, I managed to piss off the King-Of-All-Femme-Asians by speeding up just in time to prevent him from maneuvering his BMW 6-series convertible around the slower traffic. Like usual, the 101 traffic was somewhat thick. I was in the far left lane with several cars closely packed in front of me. The other lanes had the occasional gap, but a lot of the drivers were going well below 70mph. Now, going around corners, the inside lane generally appears to advance more because the cars have to travel less distance. Knowing this, it is easy to know what to expect when you have half a dozenn fairly tight curves up ahead. The number of times I saw this guy slam on brakes as he put him self behind someone going a good 25mph less than him (or myself). Anyway, it definitely made my drive a bit more fun.

I need to upload photos... I have several weeks worth of photos on my Vaio and I keep forgetting to upload them while at work (too slow to do from home).

I love the Disco Biscuits a lot... the worst part of this situation is that I am particularly fond of a jam they did more than four years ago that isn't actually part of a real song.

When changing the volume in OSX using the function key button, the machine makes a little noise like a weird droplet or something. Very annoying.

I was surprised to hear about O.D.B.'s death. I thought he died earlier this year.

Well, I'm tired. G'night.